The Girl who Loved Another Man's Country

An epic saga. In several parts. Paperwork based on a sadly true story.

Part the First

Prologue.

To love one's country, tis a noble thing, worthy of countless poems of interminable length and the tireless use of adjectives longer than three syllables. To love another man's country, tis nought but a thing of paperwork and tears.

***-***

Long long ago, in a land that has now been forgotten under the waves, there lived a girl. Not a particularly interesting girl in most respects, not the girl who would find herself recognized on the street by her contemporaries, nor in history books by generations to come, nor in fact anyone at all who had not already met her before in person. She lived in a little driftwood shack by the shores of a vast ocean, or at least one that was generally assumed to be vast in the absence of any more precise and scientific estimations. The fishermen went out to fish at dawn in their little fishing boats, and came back at dusk in their little fishing boats, and not a soul of them had ever seen the other side of this sea. Not even on the clearest longest summer day could the other side be seen. And this girl wasn't even a fisherman. She was only a little net-repairer in a driftwood shack, knotting ropes day in and day out until her very eyes swam with knots when she closed them. She herself had been on a boat only a handful of times; it was hard to see the point of it really, when you weren't intending to fish. There wasn't anywhere to go in them but back to shore again. It was the mountains that fascinated her. Far in the distance they stood, tall and white against the gray shore and the blue sky and the forests between. In her free time, when she wasn't lying in the sun dreaming of knots, she would stare at them and make up stories about the creatures that lived in them. The snow that fell on her shack melted almost as quickly as it fell, but here was a place where it was always white, even on the clearest longest hottest summer day when the fishermen drowned in the heat on their boats and longed to dive in after their fish into the deepest depths of the water where no sun could reach them.

Unhealthy obsession, her parents had said when they were still there to tell her. The shore was their home, but the mountains could be owned by anyone as far as they knew. If she wanted to build boats, it was logical enough to look beyond the shores to the forests; if she wanted to dry and sell fish, it was perfectly reasonable to look beyond the forests to the villages on the other side. But no good had ever been known to come from the mountains. Nothing ever came from the mountains.

Nothing, that is, until one fine spring day, when the sky was blue and the waves were even bluer and the fishermen were in their boats talking of cod stocks and the price of salt. That was the day when the Other Man came. He was dressed reasonably enough, and his beard was of the usual proportions, seemed neither exceptionally rich nor exceptionally poor, but none of this could make up for the fact that not a single shore-dweller could make out a word he said.

There was little in the way of strangers in those parts; less then half a dozen as far back as the girl could remember and no more than twenty by her grandmother's count, which went back much farther. And having nothing really productive to do that night, after the fish had been gutted and salted down in barrels or hung up to dry on the racks on the hill, they built a fire by the water and fed him and their own curiosities. Everyone's appetite was good that night, but it was only the man's that was sated; he seemed determined not to understand their language. But through the creative use of hand signals they managed to discover that he was not from the other side of the sea, nor did he know much of sailing at all, and he wasn't particularly interested in buying their fish.