Once again, it's November, and for me that means Nanowrimo. For a full explanation, try nanowrimo.org, but in short, Nanowrimo is an international online event in which writers and would-be writers dedicate the month of November to completing a novel (or novella) of 50,000 words or more. It doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't even have to be good - it just has to be WRITTEN, which is a goal too many people never meet.
Nanowrimo is "30 days and nights of literary abandon" and the idea is to write with no filter, and to abandon the need to self-edit instead of writing. (You can dedicate a whole month to editing later.) November is for WRITING, and the joyous momentum of writing and writing and writing.
So, in that spirit, I present Chapter One of my Nano novel for this year.
It's called "South", which may or my not be a working title, and yes, it's rough. Rough, rough, rough. I'm thinking vaguely young adult in genre, aimed at older teenagers. Would love your opinions on whether it would resonate with that market, or whether some of the subject matter might be too raw for them.
Enjoy!
South
By Jacqueline Nunan. (All rights reserved.)
Chapter One
The sea is pulling at their toes. Yi has always hated the sea, known it was hungry for her, but tonight, the old fear barely registers. Nothing registers, but the taste of ash in her mouth and the need to escape. She can feel shudders racing through Koro's bony frame – he is trying to burrow into her, his head nestling into her armpit, arms locked tightly around her . “No,” he is saying. “No!”
She wants to tell him “no” won't bring them back, and “no” never stopped anyone. But he is a boy, this almost-brother, and she is almost a woman. She owes him some kindness on this terrible night. His world had never been cruel before, but then the enemy came, and the men and boys had died, and the women and girls were taken. Now, the camp is drenched in blood and ashes, and they stand on the shore, waiting for the gods to claim them too.
A desultory squawk splits the air, and she knows the vultures have followed them here. Glutted, but not yet satisfied, Yi realises absently. Perhaps they know more of death than I do, she thinks. Perhaps we might die of fright, or sorrow. She remembers the dull thunk of the stone blade as it bit into her father's skull, and her mother's scream as he fell forwards, into the fire. She remembers cruel hands, and monstrous, painted faces, and a blow so hard it stole away reality for a while.
They had left her facedown in her father's blood, next to the firepit. So much blood, they thought her dead as well, and abandoned her with the rest of the corpses. She had stayed there, drowsing with their ghosts, until the vultures came. One old bird had watched her as he pecked at her grandfather's eyes, and then seemed to speak.
“Out, girl. Out. Away. The beach.”
It had spoken in her grandfather's voice, so she nodded, pushed herself to her knees, and crawled from their hearth. She had never understood her grandfather's obsession with the sea, but she had sat with him as he wove the lattice, and shaped the logs, and talked of birds and fish and the demons that lived beneath the waves.
She had watched him, riding the waves on this thing he called a raft. “We will conquer it yet, my girl, we will!” he had yelled when it had floated the first time, bobbing to the surface even as he was knocked clear by a wave. He had clung to it all the way into the shore, and the entire tribe had raced down to see him emerge, whole, from the clutches of the sea.
She had been terrified, and she shuddered still, but after today? A slow, wet, salty death seemed kind.
Yi shoves at the raft with foot, and it shifts a little on the sand. A wave creeps up, and it splashes over her toes, and the raft lurches, momentarily freed from the sand. She glances back at the camp beyond the dunes, and at Koro, who has leapt back in fear.
He baulks, terrified of the hungry depths. Still a boy, she thinks, sad for him. He will die a boy, here. She digs her heels into the sand and pushes, anyway. Feels it lurch underneath her as the water surges forward and holds out her hand, beckoning.
"Come! Now."
He looks back, but she refuses, turning her head away, towards the sea. Her jaw is set, decided. This way, at least, they choose the ending.
He leaps.
*
They drift. At first, they sit frozen in the centre of the raft, desperately trying not to name the water demons the grandmothers had warned them about since birth. They had pushed off three times before the water seized them properly, and then a great force had seized them and sucked them beyond the whitecaps, behind the waves. Her fingers were cut and bleeding from the clinging to the lattice, and Koro was crying softly by the time the emerged into the quiet, the moon seeming to smile upon them in sudden peace.
“Yi? What are we going to eat?”
She blinked in surprise. It was his first real sentence since he had stumbled onto the beach and collapsed into her arms, still clutching his small spear and two scrawny waterbirds.
The hares were too quick, he had said, and he hadn't wanted to return to the camp empty-handed. His mama … he had begun to shake, then, and hadn't said another word. She remembered why, now. She remembered seeing her tall, strong auntie, as she crawled through the debris of the camp. Her head was turned away, and she looked as if she was simply sleeping, until you saw the rock that had killed her, still stained red and flecked with gobs of white and grey. She had stared for a moment, and then looked away, focusing beyond the dunes.
“Out, girl, away. To the beach,” grandfather vulture had said.
She blinked, bringing herself back to the present. The raft. The hungry sea.
The hungry boy, it seemed.
“We have your birds. They will be enough for days,” she told him, smiling gently. More than enough, she thought. We have no water.
“But … how will we cook them? There's no fire pit!”
Yi resisted the urge to snap. He was barely six summers old. He had never needed to eat meat raw before, choking it down quickly for fear of someone else grabbing it away. He had never hoarded every last scrap, knowing that tomorrow could be the day they were chased away from their camp, pushed out of their lands, left to starve while another band cooked at their hearth. Once, they had lived far inland, moving from rock shelter to rock shelter and feasting on duiker and eland and zebra. But the strangers had come, and pushed them east, and pushed them east, and pushed them east until home became the dunes, the sand country. Hares and rats and lizards and the hungry, hungry sea threatening to make a meal of them for daring to live so close.
Grandfather had been obsessed with the sea. Had he seen this, in a dream or vision? Or had he simply known that one day, they'd have to flee eastwards once more?
Onto the sea, she thought, as the raft bobbed beneath her. They were riding the sea. Surviving.
“We take the feathers off and eat the meat. They will keep us alive,” she explained. She grabbed a bird and began to wrench handfuls of feathers out, hunger finally acknowledged. The bird was only half plucked when she sank her teeth into its bloody flesh, pulling the hot liquid into her mouth. It would sustain her, she thought, and the feathers could be used to make a bag. They needed something to pierce the skins with, though, and her toolkit was lost to the dunes behind them.
She had seen her mother shape needles from the bones of a bird often enough, she thought. She would keep the long bones, which were the strongest. And tomorrow, they would find land, and water, and stone to work them with.
“I choose to live,” Yi told the moon and the stars. “I choose to live!” she screamed at the sea.
Koro looked at her askance, but he was just a boy, and his mind was on his stomach. “Can I have the rest of that, then?” he asked doubtfully, pointing to the half plucked leg.
She plucked it for him, and told him to be careful of the bones.
***
(Copyright 2011 Jacqueline Nunan)
