Chapter 1: From and For the Coast
Few survive on the coast. The coast is a wet temptress, drawing and pulling on every muscle of your body, leaving you cold, yet comforted. The shores here cling like to the land like wrought hands; there is no warm clasp of sandy beaches. There is no easy pass, no lasting seasonal sun to cheer weak hearts. Wind is the crucible that forges survival and rolling erosion is the only constant. The tide will pull away at you, bit by bit, until nothing remains but the stony resilience that allowed you to survive in the first place. Only the strong-willed and those who grasp the mythical can survive in this climate. It is unemotional, damp, and always in a state of unrest.
Bastion had crawled up the slick mud banks many, many years ago after a quarrel with her father and the desire for a life of her own. Now the coast was her home. She was not a traditionally beautiful woman. She had wide hips but her breasts were small and her face was more flat and wide than the slim and symmetrical faces that are so desired in many parts of the world. Her legs were disproportionately short in relation to her torso and she walked with long, confident strides, or in hushed tiptoe, but never in the seductive hip-swaying manner that stole away the passions of sailors. Bastion was a woman from another time but built for all times. Most of the time, she seemed to be a woman with some other purpose than the one desired of her by others. This is the way Bastion liked it.
The coast is a place for migrants but Bastion was like those who were born and bred. She had tumbled and suckled from the coastline, albeit a different one. Now in her late twenties, she harboured no desire to leave. She had come to this particular coast from another, a town on a small seaside port. At sixteen she had run away and tucked herself into this landscape. She picked up a flower and held it a minute. It was hardly an extraordinary flower but the kind of thing those with eyes that pierce below the surface notice. Bastion twirled it in her fingers and let it fall to the ground. As she bent down to pick it up again she stretched out her calves and felt her nerves and sinews ache. She was short and awkwardly shaped but her legs were lean and strong. She held the flower again in her hand and spoke, to no one in particular:
Such a strange thing I’ve come to want. It all amounts to nothing and yet I’ve felt its pull forever. Here I am, sitting on the same beach I always have, daydreaming, pining for something. And all I have is pretty little somethings. What could I want after? I have food enough for filling. I have shelter, when I seek it. I have charges from whatever source they come and I have pleasure and a great many at that.
She stood for some time, her back to the ocean with her eyes held on the small flower.
She breathed in every inch of the land and in turn it held her firmly in place. Which isn’t to say this was a place that one could be stuck in; rather the land lent itself to those who could survive here. It provided, so long as one was capable of providing for themselves. Under crooked limbs of arbutus trees Bastion and all of the other inhabitants that roamed the shoreline were more or well looked after so long as they did not easily give up the secrets of such a foreboding place.
Bastion would often come down to the shoreline to sit and listen. The smallest of rustles in the underbrush could be heard if one strained their ears enough despite the steady, low roar of the ocean surf. She was alone most of the time and liked it this way. Bastion preferred the silence of her thoughts or the nagging presence of the shoreline. The conversations she did have were with the wild, the things that lived out here with her. Those that could make it in this cold and unforgiving place were strong: the ones who could survive. And these were the ones Bastion chose to spend the stages of her day with.
Alone and along, Bastion carried her small body back across the rounded rocks to where the trees slung themselves over the beach. The trees jutted out at odd angles but all of them seemed to lean into the sea air, propping up the sky. Bastion shivered a little as she entered the dense brush of the forest and the air cooled to quiet, heavy dew. Making her way down a small and well-worn footpath, Bastion hummed a tune without a rhythm or arrangement. She listened keenly but heard little. Slight birds spoke to one another in diminutive, shrill blasts that seemed to come from nowhere but bounced all around.
Bastion was short and stocky, hardly the picture of feminine beauty her mother had been. Bastion’s mother had been a tall fortress of a woman, delicate but strong. Her black hair had always been worn up in a bun and she used to hum when she worked in their tiny home. Bastion could remember how her mother had always smelled so soothing, like pine and wildflowers. Bastion now always wore a small wildflower in her hair as remembrance; perhaps even try to embody some of her mother’s ways. In reality however, Bastion knew she was different in just about every regard as was possible. Her and her mother were opposite poles spinning on a razor thin axis. What little she remembered of her mother before arriving on this shore was of numerous scoldings. Bastion’s mother used to chide her for always running around with the boys in the neighborhood of the small town she grew up in.
“Bastion, you bad girl, if you go around with those boys, getting all muddy, you will never be a lady,” her mother had scolded.
“So?” Bastion remembered answering impudently.
“So, later those boys will tire of you and want you as a wife but they will never marry you while your hair is caked with dirt and you insist on pulling your skirts down everywhere you go.”
It had taken Bastion a long time to get used to the skirts. Now she wore one she had made herself. It was shorter than she ever would have dared to wear around her mother. Its rough edges held themselves, pressing their hem to her thick thighs. The skirt was adorned with bits of what she deemed interested. Small shells with holes through the middle were tied on with lengths of tangled twine that had washed ashore. Strange pieces of wood, wrapped up in twine also, hanging like sinister ornaments. Dried moss and wildflowers tucked into matted fabric. Bastion now loved her skirt, though she had not learned to pull it down any less.
She could hardly remember the shipwreck that brought her to this particular stretch of coastline anymore. Her father had long since stolen away to a corner of a peninsula to reside over what he dubbed his “dukedom.” Lost and forlorn, her father had gone made aboard the ship: an exile twice-over as his insane nattering of being “cheated” had driven away Bastion before long. He had acquired a slave creature who did nothing but stare at Bastion as soon as they set foot on the new, forbidden coast. He salivated as the young and ever precocious girl slunk around their makeshift camp. At night, Bastion would sometimes be awakened by the haunting, slimy rasp of the creature—its eyes fixed on her. Bastion had fled as soon as possible. Her father had become so inward looking he offered up little search for her, giving up after two short nights of pursuing her into the woods.
Bastion was resourceful and had made her way deep into the forest, fending quite well for herself. She was determined, though still very young, to find her own way, to make some semblance of a life. Her situation was improved upon greatly when she discovered that many of the other inhabitants of the coastline (for though they were hidden, they were many) where just as keen as her to stay hidden and to live lives in freedom and the solace of being alone. Bastion rarely stayed in one place for long but moved about, from one hole or cave to another hiding spot. Gradually, she learned to relax, hearing through the chirps and undercover breaths of the forest that her father had taken up residence far away. He had also taken up “conjuring,” and had gone mad from days spent relentlessly shouting at the waves that broke against the cliffs of the coast. The only presences that made themselves known were the various spirits that skulked down from the tall trees to play and bother unwitting creatures.
Nick Thornton 