And in the distance, came the first sign: a little wet orb bobbled up in the waves.
Isme stared, eagerness stretching her taut. The orb stared back. Set into its roundness were two circles that shimmered in the light of moon and sea. A pair of eyes.
They regarded each other, Isme gazing at the sea and the sea gazing back. Isme held still as she could, for if she moved too much then the sea would remain only water. After a time the sea seemed to decide she was safe and there were more, little round pebbles bobbing up in the foam, blowing bubbles out nostrils, reaching the sand with the sounds of flesh slapping, the scrape of shells against sand, waterlogged and squelching under the weight, grains disturbed into eddies smoothed out by the next wave.
Such noises were incidental. For the creatures themselves were silent; in silence they reached the land, in silence they threw their swollen bodies onto the grit and grime. They birthed themselves and crawled, heaved, struggled with such effort that Isme would have felt pity, if her mind had room, if she was not consumed by wonder.
Gone were the jitters that had kept her awake for the last few nights, the misery that had clouded her chores when her father had announced his trip that morning and she realized he would be gone for the first full moon. She knew then that she would be back the next day, and the next, until her father came home and caught her.
If the world did not end on any of those sunsets, of course.
In her stillness Isme let them come, approaching slowly, heaving big bulbous forms up the beach to the sand that was not burdened with waves, the place where sand only came because of the great storms. All around her now, huffing with effort, the turtles made their way, pausing in confusion when they encountered her shins, snuffing and tonguing her knees and lifting their heads and blinking their moonbeam eyes to try to see her clearly. They seemed most puzzled by her torch, which still glowed with embers where she had stabbed the handle end into the sand.
Only when the turtles had surrounded her did Isme feel the song rising inside, the turtles summoning the words from that place deep within where fire had lurked, earlier:
Little turtle, little turtle
Where do you come from?
You bob up from the depths
And I wonder if you belong there, not here
Where your bodies struggle in the sand.
What do you see down there
In the deep, in the dark
Where no men are
Save the dead?
Are there turtle gods you worship
Who call to you in waters below?
Do they whisper the secrets of the world
In your ears?
Little turtle, little turtle
If you tell me
I promise not to tell the living men.
She let the notes fade from the crisp air. The music would carry over the sea and be heard by more turtles, who would know to come to land, that it was safe now. Isme was less a creator than a conduit through which the music, the universe, expressed itself. Isme never felt as though she was inventing a song; the song was inventing her.
Only in her relaxed state did she see what she had missed—
Out on the water there was a light on what would have been the horizon. That should have been impossible. Isme’s dreamy mind first thought it was a fallen star. Yet as she stared, Isme saw the light bob up and down, like carried by a turtle. But turtles did not have fire. Only men and gods did.
All of her father’s admonitions came to her again, all his commands: no fire during the day, when smoke could be seen on the sea; no fire on the beach at night, where passing ships could spot the glow; no singing outside careful times, when the ears of men could not even chance to hear by accident.
Isme had broken the rules before. But this time was different.
This time, she could have been found.
Turning, she fled through the dunes and back toward the hill, hoping to reach the crest before whatever was on the water arrived, if they did. In her haste she left the smoking torch behind. Dumbfounded, the turtles stared after her, heaved their swollen bodies forward, stretching out necks with wet mouths as if to say:
Wait, come back.
~
For a long time Isme sat in her father’s cave, with the sealskin hide pulled over the entrance, having doused the night fire outside. She was cold. But she had a suspicion that her trembling was due to fear more than anything else.
They can’t come here, she told herself. My father ringed the cave with watcher stones, and people who don’t know the cave is here can’t see it. Unless I invite them.
Isme was not stupid enough to invite men in.
She thought about her father’s stories. Tantalus, who served up his own son as stew. Tereus, who raped his sister-in-law and ate his child. And then Thyestes... Come to think of it, Isme thought, a lot of the stories involved people eating each other.
A clear lesson: men were savages.
Her father said that one winter after she was born, a thousand ships had sailed over the sea to a far different land with great terrible walls, and begun war there, over a woman. The first time her father had left the island since Isme’s womanhood, he had come back with news about this war. The men were still killing each other. It had been ten years.
I’m going to spend all night awake worrying, realized Isme.
This was not entirely accurate. Sometime in the middle of the night, when the moon was beginning her descent, Isme felt the odd sensation between wakefulness and sleep. She sat in the complete dark, shivering, aware that she was asleep and dreaming her reality. But if this was a
