Allamu found himself in a strange village, surrounded by strange people. They dressed in sturdy working clothes woven from grass and pounded from tree bark. The ocean was nearby, he could hear it and smell it. There was no sign of Sabit. One of the villagers, a young woman whose brown eyes were filled with concern, attempted to soothe Allamu’s panicked reaction.
After some few attempts, Allamu came to realize their their speech was a heavily-accented dialect of the tongue used in the port of Kelmaars. Allamu had not expected to hear that tongue so far from its home.
Regardless of the people’s origins, once Allamu could make himself understood, he marveled at the tale of how he had been borne up from the watery depths on the back of a sacred dolphin. He related his last memories of the slave ship tossed in the storm. The fisher folk thrilled to his description of Sabit shattering her bonds and setting Allamu and the other captives free before facing down the cruel captain. He spoke of the terror of the ship being torn asunder by the storm, and wept when he learned that the fisher folk had found no other survivors.
The physician explained to Allamu that his ship must have faced the fury of the sea god because of the evil work the other outsiders on the island had done. In words Allamu could mostly piece together, the physician spoke of how the outsiders had recently arrived at the far side of the island in a large ship like the one Allamu had described. They had set to work in some place called “the Wicked Rocks” and rarely ventured from it. The physician and several villagers had attempted to warn the outsiders that the Wicked Rocks were dangerous and forbidden, but the tall, thin people clad in long, smooth robes took no heed. They threatened the emissaries, who withdrew—the arts of warfare being unneeded and long since forgotten among the fisher folk.
Allamu thanked the man for his tale, and knew that the outsiders’ ship was his only hope of returning to the lands of his birth. Despite the cold reception the fisher folk had received at the outsiders’ hands, Allamu set off into the thick forest to find the travelers himself.
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Wayfarings of Sabit: Isle of the Wicked is copyright (c) 2016 by Michael S. Miller. All rights reserved. New chapters post every weekday. You can support this and other stories on Patreon: https://patreon.com/michaelsmiller