For Want of Safe Harbor

A fisherman must make hard choices in order to live through merciless times.

In the years before the Great Hunger, there were the storms. Winds came from beyond the waters with fury unmatched in living memory. The skies darkened. The sea spat up her innards. The people of the Syrchoed Isles did their best to weather these storms, but each year the tempests were more frequent—and more deadly.

“We need not turn back, Father,” Fjómar declared from the bow of the fishing boat. His boyish eyes were locked on the distant horizon, where the heavens were gathering a fury; the sea was deepening to a bruising black, broken by the spots of white-capped waves. “If we are quick, we can recover our traps.”

His father made his way to the prow. He looked at his son and then at the clouds circling over the horizon.

Fjómar spoke again: “I am not afraid, Father.”

The blow caught the boy on the side of his face, and it came with such force that Fjómar fell onto the deck of their tiny vessel. He looked up to find his father’s visage bearing down on him. The man’s wild expression was made more terrifying by the stars and swirling bulges that clouded Fjómar’s vision.

“Fear is a gift, boy,” said a voice like gravel. “It’ll keep you alive. We go home to your mother. Disobey me again, and you’ll see a real beating, storm or no storm. Now hurry!”

The storms forewarned the Great Hunger, but even the Hunger was only a prelude to yet greater evils.

☙──❧

Slaughter, screaming, and raging fire. Flames lit the moonless night and kindled terror in the hearts of the hapless villagers. Their homes—dwellings of timber and thatch, maintained for generations against decay and the advance of time—became funeral pyres within seconds, consuming all those who were too slow or too unlucky to scramble out. Though “lucky” could hardly describe the souls who found themselves in the midst of the chaos outside.

Fjómar, the strongest man in the hall, used all his might to push through the burning door. He fell to the ground outside as the others rushed over him, nearly trampling the man. He coughed the scorching smoke from his lungs.

He tried to think through the fear, but his instincts fought back. You are not yet safe, his fear told him. Something is wrong. Thoughts of safety evaporated when he realized what it was: the screaming out here was louder than the screaming inside.

Fjómar looked up through stinging eyes. The monumental torches which had once been houses revealed horrors better left unseen. An ogre was in the crowd and it smashed a woman’s head into a pulp. There were goblins everywhere, crying out in blood-lust. Amid all the chaos, flying every which way, were fiends the likes of which Fjómar had never seen nor imagined: these were unworldly beasts, blurred shadows that the eye could not fully perceive, even in this red firelight brighter than the noonday sun. They were things of claw and shrieking malice; they smelled blood in the air and they pounced upon the living.

Fear took over. Fjómar ran.

He collided with someone, saw white-eyed terror, a grimace of pain, a claw ripping at the other man’s throat, then blood blooming in the firelight. The fiend that had caught this man appeared like a shadow and from that shadow came teeth like a bear’s. The jaw clamped down on the man’s shoulder and tore flesh away from bone as easily as if it was an overcooked fish.

It all happened in an instant—Fjómar was already past. He ran into the darkness. He flew heedlessly through the sacred grove and over the graves of his mother and sister. Every footfall brought fresh fear. There were always red eyes at the edge of his vision, but whenever he wheeled about, they were never there.

He ran to the beach, to the boat he’d inherited from his father, and found another man trying to push it into the water. Without a word, he joined in the effort.

The two of them had the vessel floating in the shallows when a cry of terror erupted behind them. Fjómar turned and saw a figure of a woman, indistinct in the darkness, fleeing as a smaller shadow pursued her. A blade glinted with distant firelight: a goblin.

Fjómar reached into the boat, grabbed an oar, and flew towards the woman.

“Get in!” he told her as she passed him. Fjómar summoned his strength again. He swung the oar like an ax in both hands. The blade of it cracked against the goblin’s raised weapon, but the weight of it carried on and struck the beast’s head with a grisly sound. The goblin cowered, trying to cover itself and scramble away. Fjómar was already running back to the boat.

The two others were inside. He tossed in the oar, gave a final shove against the keel, and scrambled over the sideboard.

They paddled into the dark of night and watched as their home burned on the horizon, a sunrise of blood.

☙──❧

The storms did more than harry the sea: they destroyed years’ worth of healthy crops. Spring after spring and autumn after autumn, fields of nearly-ripe grains were cut down by gales and pummeled by hail.

Each harvest was worse than the last. By the time Fjómar was a young man, the Great Hunger had set in all across the Syrchoed Isles.

“You shouldn’t have given away that fish,” he scolded his sister. “Father will be furious with you.”

“Only if you tell him,” the girl shot back.

“But look at you, you’re pale enough already, and I know you’re hungry. I saw it in your eyes when I brought it to you. You were practically drooling, Svanda.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Listen,” Fjómar put his hands on the girl’s narrow shoulders. He could feel her bones under his fingers. “We must do whatever it takes to survive. Whatever it takes. We cannot afford kindness. You must eat when you can. The priests say these are the final days … We must survive ’till the gods win this battle.”

“The gods favor the brave,” Svanda said. “That’s what Gorm told me.”

“That old warrior? Why are you listening to him?”

“He knows what the gods want too. And you know what else he said? ‘He who lives well, dies well, and he who dies well, lives well.’ I want to live well, Fjómar, and today that meant giving Vangura my fish.”

Fjómar looked at his sister. Behind her hollow cheeks, her jaw was set with the stubborn determination he’d always loved her for.

“Fine,” he said. “I won’t tell father. But stop doing this, alright?”

Svanda didn’t reply, but she smiled and walked away.

Two months later, Fjómar and his father dug Svanda’s grave.

☙──❧

There were four people in the boat, not three. Olgetha, the woman, had been carrying her infant.

Fjómar recognized his passengers but did not know them. Both had been newcomers to the village, refugees. He now joined them in exile. Olgetha surely had a husband, but she did not ask Fjómar to go ashore, nor did she speak of him; his fate, Fjómar guessed, was known to her. Lækin, the other passenger, earned a bread-wage by tending a flock. He slept in the pasture. During the attack, he had heard the watchdog bark warning, and he had run.

Morning brought no comfort out on the water. They could see their hamlet: a husk of burnt timbers and scattered corpses. Fjómar was grateful that the sun was shielded behind clouds, for the shade hid the carnage that would have surely been a bright and horrid crimson. They did notice, however, the swarm of monsters that still idly picked at the wreckage. 

There was no safety in landing here. But there were other harbors, other Isles.

Fjómar set the vessel’s mast up in its fittings, hauled the sail, and took the helm.

He made for the horizon. The wind carried them away from the beasts and fiends, but man’s ingenuity had yet to craft a boat swift enough to outrun hunger.

The child began to cry. The mother did her best.

☙──❧

Fjómar trudged through the ice and snow and found his mother in the dark of night. She was barefoot and bareheaded, with her sleeping tunic the only guard against this deep winter. Her son unwrapped the furs he had brought—he had noticed she was gone, had known where she’d be—and put them over her. The woman shivered, noticing the cold for the first time.

“I should have been there when you buried her,” she sniffed. “I regret that you had to face that alone. But I was so afraid!” That last word was nearly a wail.

Fjómar didn’t speak. He never knew what to say.

His mother knelt on iron-hard earth, placed a palm on the icy grave, and said: “I thought I couldn’t bear to see her lowered down. But this…”

Now the tears came. The son held his mother, to give warmth of body as much as warmth of heart. “Come,” he offered gently, “let’s go back home.”

“…but this is worse,” his mother continued. “I have had no home since then. No peace. No ending. This place feels more home than anywhere else. Here. With her.”

“Come back inside. Please.”

☙──❧

Lækin shook Fjómar awake. “There’s smoke from inland. Maybe it’s a village.”

Fjómar didn’t even look over the sideboard this time. “I told you: we’re not landing here.”

“But we need food,” the goatherd whispered.

“If we land, we die.” Fjómar rolled back over and tried to sleep.

☙──❧

After Fjómar’s mother died, his father went out to sea more and more often, always alone. He seldom returned with any catch, but didn’t seem to care.

One morning, his father’s vessel drifted to shore without its pilot. The keel scratched softly on the sand. The oar clunked inside as the waves wobbled the boat.

And Fjómar knew.

Neighbors said it had been a storm. But the inner bilge was dry. Others guessed monsters, for there were more and more of them in those days.

But Fjómar knew.

☙──❧

“There’s no smoke,” said Fjómar.

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Lækin retorted. “That means this island hasn't been raided. They can help! We can eat!”

The fisherman, from the helm, looked over the waves again, to the roofs poking over the seaside cliffs. Olgetha was still huddled near the stern, silent as ever.

“No smoke means no one’s cooking,” Fjómar countered. “That place is abandoned. If anyone’s there it’s only goblins, ogres, and those… fiends.”

“You don’t know that.”

“If we land, we die.”

“Stop saying that! Are you so afraid?”

“Fear is a gift.” Fjómar declared. “It’s kept us alive.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Lækin.

“You ran to my boat at the first sign of fire!” Fjómar snapped. “Yet you lecture me? You didn’t even see them! You saw shadows, heard screams. I saw them eat!”

The vessel lurched with a sudden gust of wind; the passenger staggered, grabbing the sideboard. Fjómar didn’t sway.

The wind lessened. The sail’s spar clanked against the upper mast.

Out of options, Lækin appealed to the woman: “What do you say?”

“...I want to bury my child.”

Her first words in two days. Everything had been too silent ever since the wrapped bundle in her arms had stopped crying.

As the frigid wind whipped through Fjomar’s meager clothes, the mother’s words tore through his every pretense and laid bare his wounds. The past crashed against the present; the grief that had ever trickled over his heart now came in a torrent; memories came in waves, drowning his resilience.

This was the last island before the endless ocean. What else was he to do? If I should die for this, he thought, then I shall die well. I can offer this one moment of peace at the end of the world. 

Fjómar shifted the steering-oar towards the sandy beach.

From the cliffs above, unseen, hungry eyes watched the boat drift in. A helmsman’s oar became a shovel; there was a burial. The watchers understood none of this. But they understood it was too late for their prey to escape.

☙──❧

I originally wrote and published this story as a part of the Gibberish Writing Competition 2024. (I’ve made a few minor changes since then.) The specific challenge was to write a story of about 2,000 words over the course of five days, specifically using the 250-word micro-fiction that we each created when applying for entry into the competition.

It read:

Take your 250 word application story, and expand it to the 2,000(+/-) word threshold! Your 250 word applications were asked to showcase an argument. Now—put that argument in context. Expand the world, give us what comes before, or what comes next. [..] You may choose to rewrite the scene; you may choose to include it, unchanged, in its entirety; you may choose to cut it into parts. It must be the same characters grappling with the same conflict, and as with any complete story this conflict must be brought to some kind of resolution.

Now, the prompt has also asked us competitors to include the original 250-word microfiction in this same post. That’s below. The other challenges included…

… a “chase” scene, for which I wrote “One Head as Tribute.” 

… and a “bottle episode,” with one character, for which I wrote “The Encircling Cells” (and won the highest score for that round).

If you’d like to read a bit more about my process for these stories and my thoughts on the competition, you can read The Story Behind the Stories: Takeaways and Lessons Learned from GWC’24.

Now, for comparison’s sake (and the indefatigable among you) here’s the original version of “For Want of Safe Harbor”:

☙──❧

“There’s no smoke,” said the fisherman

“Isn’t that a good thing?” the goatherd retorted. “That means they haven’t been raided. They can help! We can eat!”

The fisherman, from the helm, looked over the waves again, to the roofs poking over cliffs on the shore. The woman, still huddled in the bow, remained silent as ever.

“No smoke means no one’s cooking,” the fisherman countered. “That place is abandoned. If anyone’s there it’s only goblins, ogres, and those… fiends.”

“You don’t know that.”

“If we land, we die.”

“Are you so afraid? We can’t sail forever; it’s been a week at least!”

“You didn’t see them!” the fisherman snapped. “You were in my boat at the first sign of fire. You saw shadows, heard screams. I saw them eat!”

The tiny vessel lurched with a sudden gust of wind; the passenger staggered, grabbing the side-board. The fisherman didn’t sway.

The wind lessened. The sail’s spar clanked against the upper mast.

“What do you say?” the goatherd appealed to the woman.

“...I want to bury my child.” 

Her first words in two days. Everything had been too silent ever since the wrapped bundle in her arms had stopped crying. 

How could they refuse her?

The fisherman’s heart tore open to waves of dread, but he felt himself shift the steering-oar towards the sandy beach.

From the cliffs above, unseen, hungry eyes watched the boat drift in; the watchers kept hidden until it was too late for their prey to escape.

☙──❧