Freediving for Flowers

The ocean was still and silent that morning. As Dan'la descended into the Old World, she peered through the endless blue around her. Decades or centuries ago, other freedivers had already plundered ruins along the coasts, and whatever they'd left behind had been plundered again by those who came after them. Nowadays, the only treasure that was left was in deeper waters.

Craning her neck up, Dan'la spotted a yellow-bellied mahi passing overhead, flickering in and out of sight against the shadows of her clan's flotilla. The five boats' hulls shrunk as she sunk further into the abyss, the weighted rope around her waist acting as her only lifeline to them. In the past, they'd had other freedivers, but recently the coastright had been cracking down on smugglers, and Dan'la was one of the few remaining survivors of the raids. Her clan was depending on her to find something that would make this trip worth the risk.

A vast field of angular structures approached from below as she entered the Old World. No one knew how long its buildings had been submerged, but even after years of decaying underwater, they still retained sharp corners and straight lines beneath their growing coral crusts. Dan'la reached out as she sank and let her fingertips trail against the side of a cold metal beam. The ancients were a race of architects, but all their creations had been swallowed up by the sea. Every time Dan'la beheld the graveyard of homes, her heart tightened, as though the loss was her own.

At last, she reached the bottom. Looking around, all she saw were a few fish and a speckle-faced eel lurking inside a rusted green container. So far, so good.

Releasing one of the weights from her belt, she allowed herself enough buoyancy to swim around. Picking a building at random, she darted through its open front door and entered into a familiar scene of abandoned furniture. She did not waste time exploring the first room. In her experience, the ancients usually hid their treasures in smaller, more concealed quarters.

Swimming to one of the interior doorways, she peeked in to find the family's sleeping chamber. Remains of a platform sat in the middle of the room, and off to the side was a large wooden chest with a smaller box atop it. Dan'la went to pick it up and saw that the clasp holding it shut was still intact. That meant there was a chance that its contents had not yet been damaged, though she wouldn't know for sure unless she opened it.

Dan'la didn't get the time to think on it, however, as she suddenly felt a sharp tug at her rope belt. The signal that she needed to resurface. Her heart dropped, and she immediately backed out of the room, kicking off from the walls to propel herself back through the entryway.

Was it a leviathan? Panic swelled in her chest as she pulled herself through the water one-handed, other hand still clasping the wooden box. Once she was back out of the building, she released the rest of the weights on her belt and tugged twice on the rope, signaling that she could be safely hauled upward. As she ascended, she swiveled her head around, searching for signs of what had spooked her comrades.

Only once she was clear of the buildings did she see it: not a cluster of sea monsters, but the approaching hulls of coastright ships. Dan'la pressed her pilfered treasure so close to her chest that it cut into her ribs. Was it worth it to be arrested, for the sake of a wooden box? She wanted to cry, or shout for her family to hurry up, but her voice would do her little good underwater.

At last she broke the surface, coughing and sputtering while her clansmen pulled her onto the boat. As they did, she heard Chonathan, the flotilla's captain, shout, "Go!"

Practiced hands repositioned the boats' crab-claw sails, and they shunted away from the leviathans, though not nearly fast enough to steady Dan'la's racing heart.

Her cousin and closest friend, Otto, draped an itchy blanket over her and asked, "Did'em ye saw?"

"Aye!" She spluttered between gasps of air, "Too close were'et!"

Even with the blanket, her entire frame shuddered until they'd put a league between themselves and the coastright. Only when they saw the shores of Kali did they stop to finally inspect the treasure they'd risked everything to obtain. Dan'la drew out the box from under her blanket, and passed it over to Chonathan. As the clan collectively held their breath, he smashed the crusty clasp against the side of the boat to break it, then pried it open.

Right away, his weathered face broke into a wide grin, "Ye well-work did, Dan'la. Look ye t'what in had'get."

Turning the box toward her, he displayed its contents like a proud hook-monger. She peered inside and slapped a palm to the side of her face, "Praise day!"

Rather than trust the box's seal to keep the water out, its original owner had packaged its contents in bags of fabric-glass. Fabric-glass production was an art lost to the ages, but many objects made from it were preserved in the Old World, as they didn't rot in saltwater.

The clansmen began passing around the bags and marveling at their contents. There were whole fistfuls of jewelry made from precious metals and studded with gems. They'd sell well at the market.

While her comrades celebrated the find, Dan'la was drawn instead to a bag at the bottom of the box, buried beneath the jewelry. Pulling it out, she opened it and saw that it contained a flat, black, rectangular object. Fearing that the thing might be fragile, she pinched it tenderly between her forefinger and thumb and drew it out. To her surprise, it opened into a booklet of razor-thin, creamy white skins that had been dried and bound together. Rifling through them, Dan'la saw that someone had covered them with lines of symbols, and a few of the skins held pressed flowers, secured to the booklet with some clear binding material.

A loose skin fell from the collection and fluttered to the deck, resting in the space between her feet. Leaning over, Dan'la picked it up to see that it was smaller than the other skins and dyed light blue. On it were lines of perfectly-formed symbols, and others that were looser and more flowing. She squinted at one set of the symbols, drawn inside of a box apart from the others.

$ 2 0 , 0 0 0

She couldn't fathom what it meant, or what the significance of the blue-dyed skin was.

"What'et be?" A voice asked from over her shoulder, making her flinch.

Dan'la turned to see that Chonathan was watching her, and she showed him the booklet, "Dun-know. Some ancient drawin's?"

Taking it, he flipped it over once or twice and passed it back to her, "No worth for the market. Ye best to th'water be tossin'et, 'less the coastright ye find."

"Aye," she murmured, knowing he was right. The tattoos on her palms marked her as a smuggler twice-caught. If she was found with Old World items again, there would be no third tattoo. She didn't want to risk hanging for a collection of skins with no value.

When she leaned over the edge of the boat and dangled the black booklet over the water, however, it seemed to burn in her hands. The mystery of its contents made her falter, and she couldn't bring herself to drop it. Lips pressed tightly, she peered over her shoulder to make sure the others were distracted before stuffing the booklet between the folds of a spare sail.

She didn't dare procure it again from its hiding spot until they were back in Kali, and she was able to spirit her contraband away to the houseboat she shared with Otto. Whenever she had a free moment, she huddled over the booklet in her cabin, staring at the skins and struggling to make sense of their markings.

In short time, she determined that it had to be a language of some sort. After spending hours looking from the blue skin to the booklet and back again, she found that the "$ 2 0 , 0 0 0" and the other neatly-printed markings on the blue skin appeared nowhere else in the booklet. So they were special, somehow. As for the rest of the writing, it was broken up into clusters that began with a big symbol and ended with little dots and hooks. So she guessed these must be the start and end points of sentences.

The way the characters were meant to be read, however, was indecipherable to her. Not including the large sentence-starting symbols, she counted 26 distinct letters in all. Beyond that, she couldn't puzzle out what they meant. She stared at them until her eyes watered, but they simply made no sense.

One day, Otto caught her mid-decoding and treated her to a fierce rebuke for keeping the smuggled artifact.

"Ye be with danger playin'," he warned her, "Chonathan won't'et like."

"Please don't'em tell," she begged, "Et well be hiddin', I promise!"

After much arguing, he eventually threw up his hands and turned to leave her. Before he did, though, she tugged at his sleeve and pointed to one of the flowers in the booklet.

"What'et be? I've someplace et seen, but the name for'et I know not."

Otto took one look and grunted, "That? A popcorn flower, et is."

"What'en 'popcorn' be?"

"Dun-know," he said, "Nothin' what's worth for'ye dyin', though."

In spite of Otto's fears and frustrations, Dan'la couldn't let go of the booklet or the secret story it told. Who was its owner? Who was the ancient who recorded their thoughts, only to have them end up in the hands of a woman who couldn't read? The more time she spent with the booklet, the more she felt like she was failing a dear friend, and the thought brought her to despair and obsession.

Finally, one night while huddling close to the stub of a candle, she traced a finger along the label underneath the popcorn flower. One of the symbols, shaped like a circle, was repeated three times in the label. Another, a circle with a line extending down from its left side, was repeated twice at the beginning.

"Popcorn flower," she said out loud, "Popcorn… Pop."

She blinked, and stared. She ran her finger back over the label again. She said the word aloud one more time. And then, she understood: the symbols represented sounds. The sounds that words made when spoken aloud.

Jittery with excitement, she started pouring over the letters in "popcorn flower," matching them with other words in the booklet. She could learn the other flowers, too, she'd find someone who knew all their names, and then use them as a guide to deciphering the rest of the…

A commotion outside halted her thoughts. She almost dropped the precious booklet as shouting from the other houseboats made her jerk her head up. A familiar voice, Chonathan's, broke through the pandemonium, calling out a warning.

"Raid! Coastright raid!"

She went numb. There was a burning again, in her palms—this time from the tattoos that marked her repeated offenses. Scrambling out to the houseboat's deck, she prepared to lob the smuggled booklet into the water, and destroy the evidence of her crime. But as her arm moved forward, she faltered. The last words of a lost person were in her grasp, and she was about to let them be swallowed up by the ocean, like the rest of the Old World. Was she prepared to do that?

Tears welled in her eyes as she lowered her arm, just as rough hands grabbed her from behind. She dropped the booklet.