The sleek wooden gondola rocked with the gentle sway of the Yenngdyr lake like a child's swing on a calm day. Ukeo's Mother had always called it a gondola, and that was the name put forward by the seller all those decades ago, but Ukeo herself had repeatedly postulated that it was too wide to be a gondola. It was more a long, battered, flat-bottomed rowboat that had been re-constituted for fishing purposes. She was laying under the cone-shaped wicker bimini at the stern, hiding from the mid-day sun. It was her favourite time of day: Anchored at lunchtime, coaxed into harmony by the softest of waves, catnapping, and listening for the occasional chatter or calls from the other, far-off, fishing vessels.
It was nearing the end of her self-governed breaktime though, and work was still to be done. She sat up, rubbing her eyes, adjusting once more to the piercing shimmer of sunlight on water. The air smelled beautifully today. Sometimes, a moist stench from the marshland to the south west, near the Haemonine sector of the Triskellion, would be carried over by the Sciotta Wind, but today Ukeo could only sense the sweet pervading aroma of wildflowers from the eastern bank.
She took up her aquatic spectacles and pressed the rubber rims to the brow and cheekbones of her thin face, and swiftly pulled the white rubber strap over the back of her head, letting it sink into her short hair. It was an act she'd done a thousand times now, and yet it always pulled at a few of the hairs. Every time. Next, she secured her shorts just below her belly button with the waist string, and rolled up the sleeves of her thin overshirt. It helped having the sleeves out the way, provided a sense of mobility. Ukeo used to keep them pulled down in her youth, as rolled sleeves always resulted in the most pronounced of tan lines on her forearms - freckled brown pigment and then an immediate, straight barrier to lighter skin. She cared little nowadays though. After turning twenty three, Ukeo grew beyond the desperate human need to be seen favourably in the eyes of her peers, and discovered a tremendous sense of tranquillity from doing so.
She propped a foot upon the flanking portside, wrapping her toes in bracing position over the worn gunwale. But, before jumping, she gazed, as she always did, upon the Triskellion Valley. Up ahead were the Collosean Mountains, and behind her, to the right, the Haemonine realm, and turning northwards to her left, she saw her home, the noble lands of Ruskel. On this clear day she could just about see the rear border of the City of Corfan, 'The Necklace', and behind it the imperious boulderfield that had protected her people for centuries, with the Cliffs of the Ancients flanking it, and behind that still, deeper into the mountainscape, the towering black peak of Qollardine, The Cathedral Mountain, watching over the mortal subjects below.
She'd fished the waters of the valley all her life, but each time she looked around she saw something new, some unique detail, like a cleft in the stone or a small patch of heather on the valley sides, that her eyes hadn't caught before. She found the diving spectacles helped clarify things as well. Perhaps her eyesight was faltering and she needed glasses. It was time to work now though. Those glasses wouldn't pay for themselves. Ukeo took in a deep breath, then out again, then in, quickening the pace by deci-seconds each time, before pushing forward with her left leg and diving into the cold lake water.
She saw immediately the large brinicles - the underwater stalagmites that grew upwards from the lake wall in a helical pattern. They dominated the view, imposing themselves, reaching out like skeletal fingers. They grew from the sheer wall of the lake, itself a wide, neat circular tunnel that travelled deep to pressures far beyond the capabilities of human lungs. Legend said that the Godess, Ruskel, created the Yenngdyr and Hendyr lakes with a great iron drill, carving deep into the land, before granting its waters with bounties of fish and plantlife. It was the only theory thus far which explained their almost perfectly cylindrical shapes and, after all, she was the Godess of the Lakes as well as the Godess of Conflict, Peace, and Language. The third Ruskelite lake, Aldyr, The Sea of Silver, which lay closer to the Ruskel Mountains to the far North of the Valley, differed from the other lakes though, in that Aldyr held a standard, flatter form.
Ukeo swam to the brinicle closest to the bottom of her boat. Throughout the month she'd slowly made her way around the lake, stopping at a new spot each day, to ensure she didn't overfish each stalactite. This was the lawful practice, heavily regulated by the Ruskel Government. Sustainability was seen with utmost reverence by Ruskelites, such was the perceived connection between creatures and the Gods. Lakelife was housed in pastures, and any edible part of a catch was consumed in its entirety.
After a minute of diving, Ukeo reached the slick, bone-white mineral surface of the brinicle. A whole world of organisms were growing upon its surface. Seacentipedes reared their heads up like cobras and tasted at the water, prism fish darted in and out of the corals, red sponges waved languidly in the underwater current. She carefully avoided the prang heather as she searched the surfaces diligently; despite their tough shell exteriors, the lake scallops still preferred to nestle themselves in the grooves of the underwater plants.
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She spied her first one, a large catch. Its alluring peach and purple fan-shaped shell was peaking out from underneath a crop of freshwater kelp, given away to predators by size and age. Ukeo swam downwards, using a protrusion from the brinicle as leverage, and snatched the scallop from its hiding place. As she pocketed it in her side pouch, she thought the words uttered by Ruskelite hunters and fishers alike:
'By grace of your atoms to mine, your path ends here but will continue anew.'
It was a touch sentimental, perhaps, but traditions were traditions. Ukeo found another, smaller scallop before it was time to surface. She'd been down four minutes now, and was starting to feel the uncomfortable effects of oxygen starvation. Already her eyes gave the sense of swelling in their sockets, and her lungs began hiccupping in feint desperation from the build-up of carbon dioxide. She made way to the surface with strong kicks, swimming with one free arm and clutching the net pouch at her side with the other, before breaching into the ethereal sunshine. She took a few hefty gulps of air as she steadied herself at the surface. It didn't take long to recalibrate though; she'd always possessed a remarkable talent for holding her breath. She often thought fondly of the days in the local playground, where she would challenge kids who hailed from surface fishing families to a breath-holding contest, and watched while they almost passed out, purple-faced, as she stood hands on hips with a bored expression.
The boat was about twenty metres to the left, sitting there peacefully on the lake, its high-pointed snout thrusting cheerfully into the air at the bow. As she neared it, she could start to make out the small carving of a man o' war etched into the side, and the name written in calligraphy on the wooden flank - the 'Ruby Slinger'.
There would need to be at least 10 more dives that day, before her rest day tomorrow, the first for a long while. She ached each night as she shuffled into her bed, but the longer hours weren't up for debate. Recently, costs of all wares had been skyrocketing. Talk of unrest between the three Realms had moved from unsubstantiated hearsay to common knowledge, and with it, trade had hit a deep pothole. She needed to work herself to keep up, to keep her Mother fed and looked after, as her Mother had done for Ukeo in her youth.
She made it to eleven dives before the sun started to dim and the clarity of the water, while crystal in the midday, was growing shadowy. Ukeo was practically by herself on the water now anyway, all her fellow fishers having returned home to store their day's catch and head to their houses to feel the embrace of their kin. She took an oar in each hand and made the ambling journey to the east bank of lake. The air was still warm from the mid-summer sun, the lake a darkening turquoise.
Ukeo jumped into the shallow lakeshore and pulled the gondola across the soft pebble sand, and then up between two smoothed wooden planks, before securing it in the Nasz Family berth. Hunger was taking hold now. She'd made the mistake of packing only a slim lunch of bread and olives and pickled trout. Thus, it was a quiet but brisk walk of five minutes from the lakefront to her home. It was about two minutes from the door that Ukeo smelled her Mother's cooking. Even during periods of thrift, when options were limited, Catrin Nasz could conjure dishes of pure culinary brilliance. Ukeo had always tried to push her to pursue it professionally, but her mother always responded with the same line, ad verbatim:
'If I were to do this for a living, I would lose all love for it, and then what would be the point, Hmm?'
These words had always stuck deep, and struck Ukeo with a tenable form of anxiety, for these difficult times had inflicted a sort of disenchantment in her own work, a yearning to explore the far reaches of the valley and the mountains beyond. Ukeo deposited the Scallops in the buried cool box and locked it ready for the next day's market. The stairs always seemed steeper on these longer days, but they were necessary. Most all of the simple houses built around the lakes were set on stilts - a countermeasure in the occasional but debilitating event of a lake overflow from heavy rain. There was always the option of the gentle zig-zagging ramp built by her best friend and neighbour, Qalun, a few summers ago. Her Mother's arthritis had gotten particularly bad that year, and it hadn't let up much since. But Ukeo was requiring the quickest route to the dinner table at present, and so took the stairs.
But, as she took the final step onto the narrow wraparound porch that lay as the forecourt to the Nasz home, she suddenly heard an uproarious laugh from below, followed by the unmistakable sound of shushing and a few murmurings from multiple sources. The first thought was to ignore it, her rumbling stomach in particular was pleading the case, but something inside, something instinctual, was persuading her to investigate. There was a disturbing nature to the sound, as if sinister in some way. Ukeo crept to the right hand corner of the porch and knelt to peer down between the twisted driftwood slats of the banister. Through them, she made out in the late evening light a skulking group of five young strangers, all wearing the blue-green copper flame Uniform of the Collosean Lake Navy.
