The Salt and the Silence

Tom Pell woke with sand in his teeth and the taste of copper on his tongue. The tide had carried him farther up the beach than he'd any right to expect, his torn coat tangled in a snarl of bladderwrack, his left boot gone, his cutlass — Captain Marrow's gift, the only thing in the world he'd ever owned outright — still lashed to his belt by its leather thong. That, at least, the sea had let him keep.

Everything else, the sea had taken.

He pushed himself upright on hands that would not stop shaking. Behind him, the surf rolled in long grey lines under a sky the color of old pewter. No mast broke the horizon. No sail. No splintered hull rocking in the shallows. The Black Wren was gone — and with her Marrow, and Old Iberra, and red-haired Finn who had taught Tom to splice a line his first night aboard. The Spanish galleon's chain-shot had taken the foremast at the third broadside. After that, Tom remembered only smoke, and screaming, and the cold green hush of going under.

He turned slowly, taking stock. The beach curved away in both directions into mist. Inland, a wall of jungle climbed a low ridge, dark and dripping and loud with birds he did not recognize. Somewhere within it, a single deeper sound — a low, rhythmic thump, like a great drum struck once and allowed to fade.

Tom swallowed. He had been a deckhand for two years. He had never, in all that time, set foot on land that did not have a tavern on it.

To the south, half-buried in the sand, something glinted. Metal. Worked metal, not driftwood. To the north, a thin grey thread of woodsmoke rose above the trees.

He was not alone on this island.

Image Scene: A young, ragged deckhand kneels on a misty grey beach at dawn, torn coat and one boot, cutlass at his hip, staring inland toward a dark dripping jungle; a thin column of woodsmoke rises in the distance to his right and a glint of half-buried metal catches the light to his left.