#tsv 1

Bobbing absurdly on the surface of the water, upon their sides. Their black rolling eyes staring upwards towards me. Shiny and still. Like five hallowed corpses floating in sealed cells.

And an inexplicable, smooth tide rolled out from the water’s heart, slopping over the sill of the pond and soaking my trainers.

The Silt Verses teach us that all rivers are one river. And all currents, sooner or later, find their way to the same silent garden beneath the waves.

This was the first miracle my god showed me. There have been more since, over the years.

But that moment…alone, in the grey dawn, before a pondful of dead fish, knowing that I was seen, and understanding that all things in this world were connected?

That was the first time in my life I knew what terror really was. The first time I truly believed in you, my river.

I simply strolled into the communal dining area of the reform house early one morning to see my fellow orphans already dressed, and clustered excitedly around the television which was brightly announcing the deaths of five dangerous religious fanatics within the walls of Fenford Maximum Security Confinement.

At that moment, I knew which name the newscaster was going to read next. I knew it, with a certainty that I cannot explain.

And as my brother’s name was read, and his sullen mugshot appeared upon before me the screen, that was when the other children glanced incuriously around to look at me, their smiles glib and uncomprehending, as if they were waiting for me to smile in turn.

‘Aren’t we all glad to hear this news? Won’t Teacher be glad to know that such aberrations of humanity have been wiped away?’

I turned and ran.

I ran out through the kitchens, into the fresh and freezing dew of the reform home’s garden, out into the world and towards nothing in particular, and all I could think through hot and angry tears was that Em had been struck down for my disloyalty; that the Trawler-Man had seen my faith’s collapse and had taken my brother to punish me.

A god must be fed.

He was too old for his own good; he was, the courtroom concluded, an accessory to the multiple crimes of Nana and quite likely a co-conspirator, while I, a genuine innocent, had simply been under both of their spells.

They say he was a model prisoner, within the dusty walls of Fenford Maximum Security Confinement. He took writing classes, which must have been how he stole the chalk. He laboured in the compound kitchen on Tuesdays and Fridays, which would have been how he secured the knife.

And the guards came to trust his polite, country-boy manners, which I can only imagine was why they weren’t paying close attention to him as he stood up in the exercise yard one sunlit morning, strode across to a fellow prisoner by the name of Cook who was sweatily attempting a deadlift, and jammed the stolen blade into the man’s throat, and yanked it free to unleash a torrent of blood as Cook swayed and staggered and tried to stem the flow and finally fell and kicked and expired there upon the sand.

‘Hence the flood,’ was all Em said.

The authorities aren’t stupid. They keep a security camera trained on any prisoner thrown into the sealed and soundproof solitary confinement cells, no matter how much that prisoner has been bullied or beaten raw.

But they are money-strapped, which is why there was only a single camera peering down at the uppermost corner of Em’s cramped cell. And it’s why nobody bothered to come and check in on him. This left him one wall to work on, unobserved, over the next week.

When the flood came, it broke open the taps in the prison kitchen, and it drenched the floor of the warden’s private bathroom from an overflowing toilet, and it made the general population cry out in laughter and irritation combined as the sprinklers opened up over their heads.

The guards ran back and forth with buckets; and once the warden’s toilet had been rescued - and then later, once they’d got to everything else - it was hours afterwards before anyone thought to check the security cameras and realised that the sprinklers had also activated in the tiny, sealed solitary confinement cells that stood deep in the bowels of the prison.

There were five bodies bobbing in the water, their horrified, hallowed faces bouncing gently against the camera before floating away. Em was only one of them.

Once the cells had been drained and the grotesque corpses cleared away, the guards realised what he had done, although the scratches on the wall were now faint and smeared and impossible to read.

My brother had covered the wall in prayer-marks. The Second Circle of Silt. The Rime Submerged, The Lock-Keeper’s Canticle. The secret marks of our faith that signified invitation, and sacrifice.

I don’t know why or how our god responded, when the river was so very far away and there are a thousand comrades still locked down in prisons across the peninsula, scratching marks into walls with no hope of ever being answered. Perhaps Em’s faith was particularly strong, or his prayers had been written in exactly the fashion that was required of him, or perhaps the Trawler-man only intervenes when it makes him laugh.

But whatever the reason, Em’s faith had been rewarded. He’d summoned the flood in to join him, and the flood had answered.

And the people born to the land (who were grasping, controlling; clinging to life and wealth as a sapling clings to the dead soil) would never understand what it meant to belong, as Nana and I did, body and spirit...to the water.