Song of the Sea Spirit: An epic fantasy novel (The Mindstream Chronicles) (9 page)

“The back row. The fire?” Osha waved one bony, spotted hand. “It might’ve been before you were born. We had a fire. The entire back row of books and part of the next were burned to a crisp.” She waved Jora ahead of her and started back to the front desk. “Lost quite a few books, but some we did save.”

“So the book was destroyed?”

“’Fraid so, dear. Can I help you find something else?”

Jora’s shoulders slumped with her hard exhale. She’d so wanted to read that book, hoping for a hint about why Sundancer responded to the flute and
Song of the Sea Spirit
. “Do you have anything like it?” she asked. “Something that describes the dolphins’ affinity for flute music? Or anything about the Islands of Azaria or the people who lived there?”

Osha pursed her wrinkled lips and gazed up at the ceiling. “The only thing we have like that is an old tome about the language that was supposedly spoken there. It’s a somewhat dry text, and the binding is coming apart, but if you’re interested in old languages, it might tickle your fancy.”

Could it be this Azarian had something to do with the magic that Nuri mentioned? If it was based on song, then perhaps there was a connection. It was worth looking into. “Sure, I’d love to have a look at it.”

A half hour later, Jora left the library carrying an old book with a fragile black cover. It was roughly eighteen inches tall, twelve inches wide, and three inches thick, not something she could hide under her shirt or in a knapsack. And it was heavy, not something she wanted to carry around with her all day. At this size, it attracted a lot of attention, and people stopped her on the way to her room at the dormitory to ask what book she was reading.

She left it behind when she went to the dining hall for supper, and later when she returned to the shoal to play her flute. Unfortunately, Sundancer didn’t return that night, but Jora made good progress with her command of the instrument.

She read well into the night, only blowing out the lamp when her eyes could discern the letters no longer. That night, she dreamed of odd symbols and notes and the strong, clear voice of a lone dolphin in the dark water, telling her secrets no one had heard for hundreds of years.

“Tell me again about
The Whispering Sea,
” she said to Nuri the next morning when she arrived at the leather shop for work.

“Good morning to you too,” her mentor said with a wry grin. “Did you look for it in the library?”

Jora nodded sadly as she set the flute on her workbench and sat on her stool. “Osha believes the book perished in a fire twenty-some years ago.”

Nuri’s eyes widened and brimmed with tears. “Oh. Oh, that’s awful. My favorite book. That saddens me. Books from one’s childhood are like dear friends.”

“I know. I’m particularly fond of a few, myself. I’m sorry about your book.”

Nuri dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her shirt. “Ah well, nothing to do about it now but hope we can buy another copy of it the next time the bookseller comes to town.”

“When the people of the story talked with the dolphins, did they use a single flute like mine?”

Nuri rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I think they used three or four flutes. Maybe five. Anyway, there were five—yes, five faithful flutists who played for them, and one who wrote down what the dolphin responded so it could be played back later. I wish you could’ve read it. It was a wonderful story.”

Jora wished, too. She was certain she’d have enjoyed it.

Every evening, Jora sat cross-legged on her bed with a lamp hanging on the wall above her head. The borrowed tome lay open in her lap as she read and absorbed, trying to make sense of it. As far as she could tell, the book described an ancient language spoken on the Islands of Azaria whose written form consisted of a series of lines and curves. They hadn’t an alphabet like the common languages of Serocia and its nearest neighbors Arynd-ban, Barad Selegal, and Mangend, but rather a sophisticated series of patterns that, combined with other patterns, represented words. There were one hundred eighty distinct patterns, which the book referred to as radicals, patterns that also represented concepts, such as big or dry, or man or woman. Written words used anywhere from one to five radicals. The word for woman was also the radical for woman, but the word for good was comprised of the radical for woman and the radical for child. She supposed that from a man’s perspective, having a woman and a child was good.

At first, Jora didn’t see the point of studying all this, but the fact that Nuri’s favorite book,
The Whispering Sea
, described the Azarian people as having great magical power and a relationship with dolphins kept her reading, hoping to discover something. Some key to the secret language of the sea spirits.

Every morning, she rose early and took her flute to the shoal to practice. Sundancer came nearly every day, and together they whistled and played
Song of the Sea Spirit.
Sometimes, they played a song Sundancer tried to teach her. It was always the same song, one that had a rather bizarre melody that sounded less like a song and more like a series of random notes strung together.

During the day when she worked at the leather shop, she let her mind wander back to the book and the dolphin.

She wondered why five flutes were needed and pondered a bit, comparing the dozen notes in an octave. Her flute could play three octaves, which was thirty-six notes. Five flutes could play... one hundred eighty notes. The number of radicals in Azarian.

Could there be a connection between the radicals in the written language and the notes in
Song of the Sea Spirit
?

Her jaw dropped open. “Retar the Challenger!” she muttered when the notion came to her.

Each radical was represented by a specific note, and each word was made up of one to five radicals.
Song of the Sea Spirit
wasn’t a song at all. It was a speech.

Her mind raced, excited by the epiphany. If she could learn the note for each radical and then learn to put the radicals together to form words, she could understand Sundancer and speak to her as well.

“What’s wrong with you?” Shiri said as she walked past to her own workbench.

“What is it, girl?” Nuri asked, genuine interest in her features.

“It’s... nothing,” Jora said breathlessly. But it wasn’t nothing. What if each musical note represented a concept, and a combination of musical notes made up words? What if the first five notes of the
Song of the Sea Spirit
melody was a greeting?

Nuri chuckled. “I think perhaps you’re not getting enough sleep, girl.”

The day dragged slowly by, much more slowly than the days before it had. As soon as Nuri waved her off for the evening, she returned to her room and continued reading, ignoring her growling stomach. The book didn’t specifically point her in the direction of associating notes with radicals, but if she had a simple starting point, she might be able to figure it out. She scanned the text in the tome for a greeting, perhaps the Azarian word for hail. After a few minutes of searching, she found a greeting that translated roughly as “ahoy.” And it was made up of five radicals.

Five notes.

Her heart raced, and her hands trembled with excitement. This was it. She knew it. She was on the right track. And if those five notes corresponded to the radicals that made up the word “ahoy,” then she might be able to figure out more.

She worked well into the night, assuring her friends who came calling that she wasn’t ill, just busy reading and making notes. Briana brought her a plate of cheese and bread and a cup of water, which Jora accepted with her thanks.

“What are you working on so intently?” Briana asked.

“Oh, nothing important, just a little diversion. Trying to learn to play something on my flute.” She’d never learned conventional musical notation used by Kaild’s musicians, and so she had an idea for how to write the notes in her journal. She scribbled her idea before she lost the thought of it.

“Well,” Briana said, standing. “Holler if you need anything, dove.” She shut the door behind her.

Jora looked up, stunned. “Oh, dear. Sorry, Bri,” she called. It was unlike her to be so rude, but she would make up for it later. She bent her head and continued working.

Each note required her fingers to cover at least one hole on the flute, usually more. She designated the fingers of her left hand as A, E, I, and O, and the fingers of her right hand as B, C, D, and F. For the notes requiring fingers A, I, and C, she wrote down the seemingly nonsensical word cia, pronouncing it
see-ya
in her head. The note she thought of as
cia
stood for the radical in Azarian meaning
rain
. Writing down the fingerings in a way she could pronounce them made them easier to remember than her initial notation of dots on a line.

The next morning, after a scant three hours of sleep, Jora hurried to the shoal and began to play, hoping she wasn’t simply seeing what she wanted to see in the Book of Azarian’s lines and curves. She took with her a paper on which she’d written her message, along with instructions to herself on which notes to play to communicate it. She started by playing the five notes of the
Song of the Sea Spirit
’s melody, the notes that had attracted Sundancer in the first place.

The dolphin’s smiling face rose out of the water at her feet, and Sundancer whistled that same five-note sequence.

“Ahoy.”

With a deep breath, Jora lifted the flute to her lips and played a series of notes that, if her conclusions and calculations were right, would translate to
“My name is Autumn Rain.”

Sundancer’s dark eye widened, and she began madly twittering. She dove into the water and began leaping happily, turning and twisting in the air as if her joy couldn’t be contained. Jora laughed along with her. After a minute or so, she returned and repeated the last part of the sequence.

“Autumn Rain. Autumn Rain. Autumn Rain.”

Jora felt her eyes burn and tears blurred her vision before trickling down her face. She’d done it. She’d communicated with a dolphin. “Yes, that’s my name. My people actually call me Jora, but it means autumn rain in the old tongue. I’m so happy to meet you. So very happy.” The words choked her, and she wept tears of happiness.

“Autumn Rain,”
Sundancer whistled
.
She swam a short distance away and twittered.

“Are you inviting me for a swim?” When Jora hesitated, Sundancer spat water at her and twittered some more. She set her flute down away from the edge of the rock so it wouldn’t roll into the water, pulled off her shoes, and dove into the sea fully clothed. She came up gasping from the shock of the cold water.

Sundancer swam to her and clicked beneath the surface. Jora, treading water, reached out and stroked the dolphin’s skin. It was amazingly soft and smooth, unlike anything she’d touched before. She cupped the dorsal fin in her hand, and Sundancer pulled her through the water, not so fast that she couldn’t get a breath, but fast enough for the ride to be thrilling. She laughed and whooped, too excited to restrain her joy. After a few minutes, Sundancer returned her to the shoal, and she clambered out, heavy from her sopping clothes.

“That was fun,” she said, sitting back on the rock. She wiped the hair back from her face and shook the extra water from her hands. “I think maybe I can learn a little more of your language. Be patient with me, though. I don’t have as much time to devote to studying as I wish I had.”

“Autumn Rain,”
Sundancer whistled. She followed with another series of whistles, which Jora played back on her flute. If only she’d thought to bring a lead pen to write the notes down, she could look them up in the book when she returned.

With that, Sundancer leapt high into the air and swam off.

Jora pulled on her shoes and ran back to town, back to her room to dry off and change her clothes. When her hair was sufficiently blotted and she’d braided it behind her head, giving it no chance to drip onto the book, she played the notes Sundancer had whistled to remind herself of the sequence, and wrote them down. Then, she set about looking up the radicals they might represent and the words they might form. What she discovered made her heart soar.

“Autumn Rain is Sun Dancer friend.”

Chapter 6