Kathakali (Kitsune)

There is a sacred place where the desert meets the sea. And it holds the strangest of dualities: the meeting of two opposites. How one shall suddenly rush upon the other link a bird upon a beetle.

From the edge of the dunes to the clouded depths was a good five miles -- between them, the old flatland of the tide -- where the sand absorbed the risen water and became an evil, foul-smelling sludge polluted by oil slicks and millennia of burning decay. There were signs of life -- people have lived there once, before the sea rose. Now the stagnant mire made fishing all but impossible, and the delta of fresh water was municipal and salty.

People were never meant to live here. At least: never to survive. It rains one every four months, both fast and furiously hard -- the parched land sucking at the rain through chapped lips. One stretched surge and the water is gone -- either underground, or out to the lurid sea, or evaporated back into the air. People cannot naturally survive here.

But if humans obeyed the laws of fair selection, they'd be much less interesting.

It's not quite slavery. Asha could see in their clothes and in the food they ate that they were paid at least something, probably just enough to live in this wasteland. Enough maybe to give them a selection of grain out of the company supplies cart, but never enough. Never enough to give them a choice. You'd need to be well-provisioned to cross the desert, and for generations 'well' had featured nowhere in these people's lives.

A dissonant chord rang out over the landscape.

It didn't even have the nobility or insight of a real desert: It looked more a kind of silty scraggly excuse for the most overbaked plain ever.

Asha knew full well where she'd landed, she inflected -- trying the chord again. She gave the tuning crank one more tug

The Al-Khapur wrecking coast was infamous as being one of the suckyest places to live. Unsafe to travel to, not that you'd want to -- what with the highest shipwreck rate and the fact that those born of amorality know nothing of morales.

One last listen, one last string -- and she knelt, ready to play.

She'd seen them at work on her first day here. The people would strip: every broken man and hostile woman, and drag filthy ropes out to tether to and tear from the ships wrecked fast in the stinking mud, and then drag it back. It was terribly slow work: Maybe each party would recover a bough a day. Some of them were third-generation Khalpurians, some had come on the ships and been stranded.

And, of course, the carts would come and take the parts away two a penny to be burned or carved into furniture or clocks. The single company venturing out here with a couple of sacks of rice and plenty of space for wood and none at all for passengers.

That is, until this day.

As the tune unfurled from the shrivelled klavier, vibrations flaked the salt away. It was amazing what you'd find on a ship. Asha played around the missing keys and snapped hammers: It sounded infantile, almost like a musicbox. Music and stories were very, very much connected: as the minutes unwound the notes took on meaning, characteristics -- to her gentle ear they moved and dipped and interrupted just like people.

Some people tapped in time but -- of course -- all of the drumskins had been stitched together to form the canopy overhead. It was musty under the silt, but a little sunlight warmed the mud above and the whole place glowed with an amazingly ethereal light, before the light was blocked -- snatched away by one of the increasingly common clouds.

Asha smiled, her shoulders hunched as the sounds flowed through her. Behind her -- wood creaked as the warmth of the ersatz cave stroked their creation. She felt it over her shoulder, daunting -- immense. Momentous. It seemed to bend teh space within their shelter so it was always the focal point: Dark and powerful, like a weight on a rubber sheet.
She'd only been here for one of the many months that went into this effort -- but she felt for it with all her passion and empathy and fury.

She shrugged off her overshirt as the muggy cave -- her only relief from the all-seeing sun -- made her sweat, and then shivered as she caught one of the cold gusts of air from the sea.

She glanced behind her -- with the flap open she could see right out to sea between the rocks of the shore -- and slowly concluded her tune. There was no rush -- never any rush here. What passed passed with a momentous, unstoppable certainty.

A ship was toppling onto its side out in the silt. As she stood and walked out, she saw a flag of the new world sullied with the mud, like all the others. The crew leapt out, their brightly coloured clothes clearly visible. Asha kicked off her sandals and strode to the edge of the beach to wait for them.

They were all beyond borders now.