Chapter 10: Seaways
Now the hours of darkness were as many as the hours of daylight; the sun passed through the constellation of the scales; and September’s moon waned to a thin ghost of itself.
What a storyteller. What a scene. This could introduce a gothic novel.
So there came a night when the flood tide stirred in the young mackerel Scomber a strange uneasiness, and on that night the ebb tide, running to the sea, drew him with it. With him went many of the young mackerel who had spent the late summer in the harbor, a school of several hundred cleanly molded young fish each longer than a man’s hand. Now they had left behind the pleasant life of the harbor; until death should claim them their world would be open sea.
Or perhaps it’s a war novel like All Quiet on the Western Front, wherein all the young men of a certain age leave the village on a journey of no return. We know this: Scomber has entered a new world of danger and wonder. The one who wrote him into being will share his physical joys and his near-misses with readers. She sees almost everything.
Quotations taken from page 90.