Rising Seas

Iron Age Village, Orkney, Scotland

Ocean waves crash to my left against ragged cliffs of stacked sedimentary rock only a few feet tall. Speckles of salty foam breach the too-tall berms and shower the yellowing marram grasses. Short blades fade into moss and then lichen along the rocky shore, stone and sand mixing in a gradient along the inshore berm. The lapping of waves on the beach melds with the whistling of wind across the island. Green hills tinged with fragmented yellow stretch out before me. They look flatter than I thought they were. A low wall stands to my right, sweeping through the grass in a rounded square, almost a circle. It’s rough and worn and doesn’t come up past my knees. I pivot and lean down over it, looking into the central indentation and the stone structures within. Small rectangles of packed earth bordered with thin stones line two walls and a doorway stands in the third, topped with the earth and grass that surrounds me. Dew gathers at the upper edges of the walls, teasing its droplets between the stiff grass and cold stone. There’s a half-open structure built into the wall farthest from me, and a hearth, empty and void of ashes, sits squarely in the middle of the room.

“Wait, is this my house?” I exclaim suddenly. “I mean, there’s no roof,” or food or bedding, I guess, “and Tato needs to do some repairs, but I think this is my house.” Conjuring a mental image, I nod a few times, slowly, and a small smile breaks across my face as I feel the memory of roasting rabbit on the fire wash over me. I look further to my right and see a woman crouching by the inside of the wall. She is taller than me by almost a full head, or I assume she would be if she were standing, and wearing strange hides. They’re smooth and layered, the outer one far bulkier than the inner one, with no fastenings that I can see. She’s also standing in my kitchen.

Scowling, I straighten to my fullest height. “What are you doing in there? Who are you?” I demand, hopping lightly over the low wall as I move towards her. I brace my knees, expecting to land heavily on the packed earth, but I don’t. I look down, past my feet, and see the ground. Two feet away. On instinct, I back up two, then three, steps, eyes still trained downward. I watch my feet pass painlessly through the wall behind me on the second step. My mouth goes dry.

“That…no.” I shake my head at increasing velocity. “That shouldn’t happen. Did anyone else see that?” I raise my voice and look around in a panic. “Nobody saw that?!”

Nobody even reacts.

“Okay, okay.” I force myself to slow down. “Okay.” I breathe in, then exhale sharply. “Okay, okay, okay. What in the name of Teutates is going on here?!” I bark his name, louder than the rest of the question. “What is—” I stop with my mouth still open. “Wasn’t I—” My voice quiets. “I was… Didn’t I—” I furrow my brows and close my eyes, shaking my head as I try to think. “But I thought—”

“Alan, how’s that midden heap looking?” someone yells, gravelly voice almost carried away by the wind. “Find anything good?”

“Mostly just animal bones and tufts of wool. I think I just found some human remains, though. Can you come take a look?” someone else replies, also shouting. I spin on my heels and see a man with white and thinning hair kneeling on the ground not six inches behind my calves, one hand resting beside partly exposed ash and small, muddied bones. I jump away from him, startled from my spinning thoughts.

“Sure, be right there,” the first man shouts back, wiping his hands on his thighs and starting to walk over this way. His brown hair twists into uneven peaks and his thin outer hide flaps and snaps in the fickle wind.

“Who are you people?” I clamor. “Get out of my house! What is going on?” My voice threatens to crack. Tears well in my eyes and I blink them away. “Where are my matir and tato? Where are Cynbel and Feidlimid?” I almost shout. My gaze flashes between the two men who spoke, eyes not focusing on either as my vison blurs. My feet tap, panicked, as I try and keep my balance, neither moving forward nor stepping back. I don’t leave any footprints on the dew-soaked grass.

“Where are—” My breath catches in my throat as I remember, and my voice reaches a new crescendo. “Where is Drustan? Where is my baby?” I start to pace along the wall. “Why is nobody answering me?!” I rage. The man with the rough voice is almost to me but he doesn’t respond at all. Then he walks right through me.

My breath stops. I stare down at my chest, then back up to where the man just was. The edges of myself, of where he walked through me, shift like smoke before settling. I can’t breathe. I turn my head, craning my neck and rotating my shoulders, and watch him walk. I come back to center and just stand there for a long moment, eyes loosely trained on the horizon. I blink slowly.

“I must be in Tír nAill.” I nod almost imperceptibly, my words falling from me like slow and spitting rain. “I have to be. Yes, of course. That makes sense.” I look up at the sun high above me, then follow the shadows it casts along the northern cliff. “It’s Ostara, it’s the spring solstice. I must have slipped through. Yeah.” The sound of the wind and waves fills my ears, drowning out all other sound, even my own feeble attempts to convince myself of my words. “Wait,” my voice jumps an octave. “If this is Tír nAill, where are the ancestors? They should be here.” I start to move, slowly at first. Then I’m running. Feet pounding silently across the hill, I yell, “Seno-tato! Seno-mater! It’s your granddaughter, Luigsecha! Can anyone hear me?” I shout, voice almost hoarse, hands cupped around my mouth. As I reach our back field, not even two hundred meters from my house, its fence nowhere to be seen, I’m stopped. My legs are still running, still frantically moving, but I’m not. I slow and then stop trying to go any farther. “Why,” I implore breathlessly. “Please, let me keep going,” I weep. “Let me look for them. I don’t want to be alone here.”

I turn and plod back to my house and the people overtaking it, robbing it. My head drops into my hands; I heave a deep sigh as the grass beneath my feet blurs. The waves paw gently at the sand and smoothed rocks ahead of me and their melody matches my breath.

I whisper, talking to myself, my voice barely audible above the sound of the receding tide, “I don’t think this is Tír nAill. I think—” The words catch in my throat, choking me. I think I died. I guess having Drustan was too much for me. I can’t bring myself to say it out loud. I raise my eyes to the horizon, painted with washed out blues. “I think I’ve been gone a long time, haven’t I?” A first sob escapes my chest. So why isn’t anyone else here with me?

I fall to my knees as my body is wracked with sobs. The grass should itch and prick at the skin of my knees, but it doesn’t. My weight shifts back as I let myself fall onto my heels and I bend double over my thighs, arms almost hurting as I hug them across my chest. I stay there, like that, until the sky saturates in ruddy purples and pale pinks and the people in my home begin to leave.

They pack up their satchels, all made of thin and unnaturally-colored hides, and lay a blue cloth over my home. Bags of sand weigh down its corners but wind snakes beneath it, making the cloth ripple and heave with every gust. And then they just leave. The sun sets the sky aflame and I’m alone, kneeling beside my home, without even a shadow.

I stand. I push myself up off the ground and stand. I’ve run out of tears. I look behind me at the blue cloth shrouding my home, flapping irregularly, and take a deep breath. My fingers fumble slightly as I unpin my brooch from the front of my fur hide. Slowly I walk towards the waves, each step exactly even. I turn the brooch over in my fingers as I feel its hammered-iron edges and rough-hewn engraved designs. The sand doesn’t give way beneath my feet the way it always used to as I get closer and closer to the water’s edge. I crouch down just in front of the seaweed line and stare at the brooch in my open hands. Not even a grain of sand moves when I place it, reverently, on the beach in front of me.

There’s a lump in my throat as I struggle to speak. “Beannachd leibh,” I choke out. Goodbye. “Matir, Tato, bratir, swesor,” my voice starts to fail me. “Makko,” I finish, almost inaudibly. Mother, Father, brother, sister, son. I sway on the balls of my feet, forcing my breath to even and slow. Then I stand. My hands go to my knees to wipe away the sand, but there’s nothing there.

I don’t leave yet; I simply stare at the brooch in the sand. The waves grow closer, their white foam edges sneaking up the beach towards me. I watch the translucent edges of a wave brush past my brooch, my offering, and then retreat. Then I watch my offering fade away.

“No,” I croak. “No, no, no.” My voice rises in pitch with each repetition. I drop to my knees and scrabble at the place where my brooch just was, fingers uselessly slipping in and out of the sand. But it’s gone. It’s disappeared, faded into transparency; the touch of the ocean turned it back to nothing. I kneel there, as before, for another long moment before standing and walking back towards my house. But after three steps, I stop. I look back over my shoulder at the still-rising tide, then forward at my house’s walls just past the berm.

“The ocean—,” my voice cuts out, “—shouldn’t be there.” I pause and repeat the same motion again: ocean then house then ocean again. Home isn’t this close to shore. It can’t be. It can’t be. I repeat this like a mantra as I look back and forth faster and faster. I walk, jog, towards my house, stopping level with my front door. I turn and look back at the shore and lapping waves. Their sound pulses through my body like a funeral drum.

“No, we would never have built it here. Look how close the sand is!” I reason to the open air, movements jerking as I continue to look back and forth between my home and the ocean. “No, this is wrong.” Remember, I urge. Eyes closed, I piece together a mental map of what my village used to look like. “Since my house is over here,” I point to it just beside me, arm no higher than my waist, “and the storage shed is over there,” I rotate thirty degrees and point at a smaller building, also covered in blue cloth, “then…” My voice trails off. “Where are the rest of the buildings? We had nearly thirty people living here. This can’t be right.” Panic and fear creep into my voice. They tease and slither at the edges of my mind, unravelling themselves from the dark. My thoughts start to race and spin.

“There was our communal shed over here.” I jog, almost running, away from my house and towards the shore on a diagonal. My eyes frantically scan the ground as I sweep over the short grass. My feet barely touch it. “And Morcant and Nechtna were over here.” I cross back onto the beach, ignoring the extra moment it takes for my feet to hit the sand as I stride down off the high berm. “And there was…” I pull up short and come to a stop along the seaweed line, its broken fringe meandering parallel to the berm. “There was another house here, I know there was. This was where my matrika and awontir lived. I know it is.”

I look around at where we used to live, at the broken pieces of my home. The beach, the ocean, is too close; Tato never would have built so close to the sand. The berm edging the inshore side of the beach cuts right through Matrika Ailidh and Awontir Iudicael’s house. I start to hyperventilate. Everything about this is wrong. My vision starts to spot with black; I can’t get enough air. I can’t breathe.

A hand comes down on my shoulder from behind. “Hey, hey, hey. Breathe.”

I jump. Without landing, still floating at the apex of my jump, I spin around. “What—Who—How—Huh—?” I’m nowhere near coherent, barely able to manage a single syllable between panting breaths.

“Okay.” He floats up to meet me. “Calm down, it’s okay.” His hair hangs in brown almost-dreads to just below his shoulders, fanning out around his neck. Eyes like mine look back at me, set in a face tanned and wind-beaten like my own.

“Awontir?” I mutter, not quite to him.

“Me? I…don’t think so,” he replies.

“Awontir Iudicael, is that you?”

He cocks his head like my dog used to when he didn’t understand a command.

“It’s me, it’s Luigsecha.”

“But she’s— she’s little. She’s—”

“Four,” I finish for him.

“Four,” he nods slowly. He brings one hand up to my cheek, not quite touching it, then rests it on my shoulder, then my arm. “You’ve grown.”

I smirk and a chuckles escapes me. “It’s been years, after all.”

“It seems so.” He smiles sadly. “How old—”

“I’m almost seventeen.” I smile. “Or, I suppose, I was,” I finish quietly.

“Who did you—” he starts to ask.

“Gwri, I married Gwri.”

“He’s a good boy,” my uncle affirms, nodding again. He takes his hand from my shoulder and floats back down to earth. I follow with a little more difficulty.

“How long have you— How are you here?” I ask.

“I woke up when they found my bones.” He smiles slightly and looks down at me. “Just like you did.”

“That’s—” Makes sense, I did hear someone mention human remains, I realize. I nod, eyebrows half furrowed. “When was that?”

“Last Litha,” he answers, his voice somewhat strained.

“But that’s almost a year; you’ve been here for a year?!” My voice crescendos.

He just nods, eyes closed.

“What have you been doing for all that time?”

“Just watching. I can’t do really anything else. We can’t do anything else. They,” he gestures vaguely towards where the people from earlier today left, “can’t see us, can’t touch us.” He pauses. “They’re studying, you know.”

“Studying?”

“Our houses. They’re studying them. They get a lot of things wrong, but it’s interesting to watch,” he chuckles. He pauses again, this time looking intently at me. His eyes look at every inch of my face, at my hides, at my hands. “You’ve grown so much.”

Embarrassed, I blush and curl into myself.

“How are your parents, how are Edana and Kunagnos? How is Feidlimid?”

“They’re well, everyone is well. Or, they were well the last time I saw them. I have another brother since you…” I trail off, unsure of what to say. My uncle motions for me to continue; he understands. “His name is Cynbel, he just turned nine.”

“Cynbel,” Iudicael repeats. “It’s a good name.”

“Tato thought so too.”

“Do you have any…” He decrescendos when he sees my face start to fall.

The corners of my mouth twitch into a sad momentary smile. “I do.”

He waits for me to continue.

“His name is Drustan, after Seno-tato,” I finish after a long moment.

My uncle smiles broadly. “He would be so proud.”

“I know.” We lapse into an uncomfortable silence as the wind whistles past our ears and the tide begins to fall back.

I break the silence. “What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“Here, to our home, to your home.” I gesture at his and Ailidh’s house half in the sand, its walls collapsing and buried. “What happened? Why is it all so different?”

“It’s been a long time,” he states plainly. “I think the world has changed.”

“But the ocean—”

“Is different. Closer. I know.” He sounds profoundly sad.

- - -

They’re here again, working, studying. It’s been almost a week and still these people are coming to my house, every day, almost regardless of the weather. They’re always so busy.

“Are they always like this?” I finally ask.

Amused, my uncle just nods. “Every day.”

They knock patches of dried dirt from what remains of the walls of my kitchen; they measure where I slept and the fire pit and the width of the front door; they flash lights at the storage shed from every angle. I look back at the horizon, at the encroaching sea, at the beach. Nobody else seems to care about high tide. Today there’s a woman crouching where Tato used to sit and skin our dinner.

“I miss boar,” I comment aloud.

“What?”

I laugh. “I miss eating boar. Do you remember how Tato used to roast them?” I can almost smell the fat dripping into our charcoal fire.

“With lard on top? I remember. And your mother’s fruit wine.” He almost swoons from the nostalgia. “How could I possibly forget the best cook in the village?” He laughs, leaning back on the wall as he does.

I shake my head slightly, smiling. I miss eating.

The woman in front of us finishes what she had been doing and now peers intently at a small cubic stone held between two fingers.

“What is that?” I ponder, drifting down off the wall and ending up almost parallel to the ground, my face beside her hands and nose close enough to almost intersect her knuckles. I’ve gotten very good at ignoring gravity.

“Cynbel’s die!” I exclaim loudly, looking up and shouting directly into the woman’s ear. She can’t hear me, but my uncle comes down beside me to get a better look too. The woman sets down the screen she had been using on the ground to one side and calls to Alan, standing a few feet away. He comes over, the edges of his fading white hair slick with sweat, and crouches down beside her, walking through both my uncle and me.

“Nice find, Sam,” he compliments. “Let’s bag it and set it aside for tomorrow. We need to get packed up before this storm arrives. Can you help me corral everyone?” he instructs, looking up at the sky as he pushes himself to his feet.

Clouds build in the sky above us, darkening the light with each passing hour, and before the waves reach their farthest-away point, the visitors pack up their tools and filter back down the hill. My uncle and I follow them for a ways, bidding them joking farewell as we walk alongside their group. They leave in their ‘cars’—my uncle tells me that’s what they call them—and we go back up to our houses. I settle myself where I used to sleep, but upright with my back against the wall. I miss the feeling of cold stone, of how soft the moss used to feel. Awontir Iudicael has always loved storms, so he sits above me on the ground beside my house.

A few hours later, the storm finally breaks. I jump involuntarily as lightning splits the pounding rain. Thunder follows, cracking across the clouds.

“Caillech and Torano must be angry,” I call to my uncle behind me, struggling to be heard over the storm. I look up at him; his gaze darts periodically between the clouds, the sea, and his house. I float up through the raindrops and sit beside him. Waves, like frenzied lynx, dash themselves against the beach and shatter on the sand. Rivers of freshwater run, ever faster and ever stronger, past me as I sit, cross-legged, in the grass. My uncle stands and walks a few steps toward the beach, perched on the edge of the berm. The tide rises higher each time Torano hurls his thunderbolt. It rises past the seaweed line, washing out its already interrupted boundary and soaking the sand in salt. I watch my uncle in his utter stillness, then follow his line of sight.

“Your house!” I bellow, vaulting to my feet and running towards it along the beach. I stop myself abruptly as waves erupt in my path. I stand a few feet in front of my uncle and stare at his home in the storm. Pools of saltwater gather in two corners, jagged ripples patterning their surfaces. Waves crash against its walls, froth spraying upward as the water invades their kitchen. With each ebb and flow, more water gathers in their home.

“We have to do something,” I splutter, glancing at my uncle behind me. He’s just standing on the beach, just standing, not reacting. I jolt into motion, moving entirely on instinct. I run towards the berm, still ten feet from my uncle’s house, and reach out for one of the larger stones that line its inshore side. My hands go right through it.

I try again, screaming. No words come out, just a primal, guttural cry. I can’t think. My throat is hoarse as I yell again and again, trying in vain to pick up a stone. Any stone. “Help me!” I shout at my uncle. His silhouette is outlined by the rain, not reacting, not moving, not helping. “I need to build a wall,” I wail. “I need to—” The torrential rain pours through me and washes away the sand beneath my knees. “I need to do something. We,” I spin to look at my uncle, imploring, “need to do something!” I can see the cliffs behind him, through him. I turn back to look at his house, the sheets of rain almost obscuring it completely. “It’ll be gone. Ægir will take it away, take you away. I don’t want to be the only one here, please,” I beg. “Why won’t anybody save you? Why won’t you save you?” I can’t even hear my own voice over the thrashing waves as I sob my final question. My body flinches as a ferocious clap of thunder shakes the sky. A violent crash of waves follows on its heels and the berm gives way.

I watch, helpless, from the sidelines, as the earth behind my awontir’s home gives way, slumping towards the beach and burying the wall closest to me, burying his midden heap. Slowly, I turn to face him, to look at my uncle still standing on the beach behind me. I catch a glimpse of him, like smoke, then he’s gone. I stumble upwards, never quite making it to my feet, and scramble across the beach, hands clawing at the sand as I speed up. Finally I right myself as I reach my uncle’s home only to sink to my knees where the land crumples onto the beach.

“You can’t be gone,” I whimper. I reach out with both hands and push against the caved-in grass and sod. My fingers go right through it. I start to sob. I try again, and again, and again, because what else can I do. My arms slow until eventually they fall to my sides, the backs of my hands almost grazing the sand.

I weep, turning my head until the place my uncle stood is barely in the periphery of my vision. “I don’t— Why won’t anybody help me? I don’t want to be alone.”

- - -

I squint, not moving from my place on the sand, as I peer towards the bottom of the path, pockmarked with newly eroded holes from last night’s storm cracking and frosting as the temperature drops. “Those are—” My thought trails off. It doesn’t matter who they are. Out of the corner of my eye, I see these new people turn off the path a full ten meters before my house and walk instead towards me, towards the shore. I look over at them. Nobody else has done that before. They set down their bags in a pile twenty feet from me, all of their tools different from ones I’ve seen before. Most of these people are younger, my age or maybe Feidlimid’s. They start to filter out across the beach. One of the older men starts towards me, eyes focused on the ground at his feet. He pauses, taps his thighs, and stands up straight.

“Hey, Dinah! Can you grab me a tape measure?” He glances back at the pile of bags and the few people still standing nearby them. “I left it in the front pocket of my bag,” he shouts, mouth outlined by a close-shaven beard flecked with snow. He keeps walking, going past me, and crouches in the sand by the berm, knees covered in coarse grains, with one hand maintaining his balance and the other vaguely measuring the height of the wall before him. Awontir Iudicael’s wall. I start to stand.

“For sure, Professor,” a spindly woman with dark skin and darker hair calls back.

“What are you trying to measure?” I puzzle aloud. “You do know the ocean is over there, right?” I hint, pointing in front of me at the now-calm waves. Raising my voice slightly, I ask, “Awontir, do you—” I stop, catch myself.

“Nathan!” someone shouts from down the beach. I look up at where the voice came from and see a young man, my age, blond hair pulled back with a tie away from his face.

The bearded man doesn’t hear him.

“Nathan! Quick question,” the boy repeats.

“Yeah, Michael? What’s up?” Nathan stands as he responds, bending over to swipe the sand from his knees the way I do.

“How did you want us to measure the distance from the site to the water again? Roman and I disagree,” Michael jabs playfully, bumping shoulders with the boy beside him. They both start laughing.

“Site to the water?” I repeat in quiet, muted confusion. I pause. “Site to water,” I say again. I feel a welling in my chest, a pressure against my sternum. These might be the first people to care about high tide. The sound of the wind fills my ears, threatening to drown them out.

“I’m not sure I’m supposed to just give you these answers,” Nathan’s smile enters his voice as he points this out. He talks to these boys the same way that the druids explained the harvest and weather to me and my siblings. “First off, what is it that we’re measuring?”

“We’re looking at the change in water height over time to see how much the changing sea level is affecting these sites, right?” Michael offers. He points to the walls of our village’s buildings and then to the foamed edge of the falling tide. “Seeing how high on the beach the ocean comes.”

“You’re talking about the seaweed line. About how high the ocean comes.” I start to hope. “You’re talking about high tide.” A slow almost tingling sneaks into my mind, teasing me with feelings of relief. I sit a little straighter, pay more attention.

“Yes, that’s exactly correct.” Nathan looks between both boys’ faces.

So many of the words these people use confuse me, but they’re talking about the missing buildings and the ocean being closer than it should. About the ocean moving. A small joy expands within my chest and threatens to overflow, casting my sadness into shadow.

Nathan continues, asking another question. “And when should we take these measurements?”

“High tide, right?” Roman suggests. Looking between his friend and the professor, he continues, “Because there’s no way to consistently measure low tide.” He looks to Nathan for approval.

He smiles, nodding to his student.

“So, where’s the high tide mark then?” Michael puzzles.

“Right here!” I almost shout, voice more shrill than usual. I rush to the seaweed line, my finger pointing down towards it. My toes hang just above the line of dried and drying seaweed on the sand. Small shells dot the crust of deposited algae and sediment.

“It’s over here,” interjects Roman before Nathan can answer as he kneels down beside it and snaps a few pieces of long-dry seaweed in half. He sweeps his arm back and forth to point out the entire length of the high tide line with one finger. I follow it with my eyes, but stop short as my gaze passes over the remains of my uncle’s house. My eyes start to sting with tears and I could swear I hear my uncle’s laugh on the wind.

“It wasn’t that high before,” I gasp. “No, no, no, no.” My eyes are trained on the line of seaweed encrusting the worn stone wall. It crosses squarely through my aunt’s hearth.

“Correct again, that’s exactly where it is,” praises Nathan.

“Um, so how are we meant to measure this bit?” Michael asks, stepping carefully over the low wall and into my uncle’s kitchen. “Cause, we measure from the front wall to the high tide line, right? How do we measure it when they overlap?”

Roman walks up to Iudicael’s front door, questioning, “Do we make the numbers negative?”

“This can’t be happening,” I insist breathlessly. “It just can’t be.” As though it will change what I’m seeing, I circle back around the coastal wall of the house, shaky and uncoordinated. The high tide line didn’t used to split their house in two. It wasn’t like this before. I stop and look to my left, to the midden heap where I first woke up barely a foot from the edge of the berm, its upper edge already starting to furl and collapse onto the beach. Unbidden, the image of my brooch fading in the face of the waves billows up in my mind’s eye and, suddenly, I can’t breathe. All I can see is my uncle disappearing into the wind.

“No,” Nathan explains, face falling. “We record that as null data.”

“Please,” I plead, crying. “I don’t want to go.