The Girl Who Saw Fate

Fate walked among them. It breathed the same air, followed the same paths, watched the same sunsets, and was as real and present as the sand and the sea, yet only Banni knew It for what It was. Only Banni saw.

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Born without feet, Banni could only sit and watch the lives that were lived around her, unable to participate in them, for she was admonished if she tried to crawl along the sand. “You are human, Banni, not animal,” her parents told her. “You have a soul. Don’t behave as the soulless do.” Sometimes the other children would sit with her, but they quickly became bored of the kinds of games she could play and left to go run and jump and climb and swim, and the echoes of their laughter stayed in Banni’s ears until someone came to fill them with a new sound. Not many people had the time to spend with Banni.

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Because she spent so much time alone, watching, she began to notice the patterns of life in the village, how the others moved around each other and how they moved through the world. Then she saw the patterns of the world itself. Some everyone knew, of course: the changing of the seasons, the moods of the tides, the faces of the moon. But Banni had more time to see and to think than anyone else, and she began to realize that she saw something that no one else did. For sometimes the village was alive, and sometimes it was not.

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Oh, the people always went about their lives, working and playing or resting and learning as the seasons dictated. Food had to be harvested, prepared, stored away; homes had to be built, repaired, or torn down; children grew and elders withered. The wind blew in the trees and the waves lapped against the shore. The world went on. But there was no life to it. Something was missing.

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Banni could hardly explain it even to herself, so it was of little surprise when no one seemed to understand what she was telling them. Elder Laito, one of those who had the most patience to spare Banni, told her, “Life ebbs and flows, like the sea. Sometimes it is still, or seems to be, but life is always happening. It only stops when we die.”

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Banni’s mother thought she was complaining of boredom and gave her a stern lecture. “Your life is hard, my child, but it is also easy, for you may rest while we all must labor. Don’t let your imagination run with the tides. Ground yourself in what you have and what you can do. Life will satisfy you if you don’t ask for more than you are allotted.”

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What she did not understand, the girl thought, was that watching was what Banni could do. It never occurred to her to think that what she saw might only be her imagination. No, Banni was certain that it was real, and that it was somehow important. She decided that she needed to know more before she shared her thoughts again.

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With a sense of purpose, she resumed her observations of life in the village. She searched for some pattern to when there was and was not life in the village—a season or a phase of the moon, perhaps—but she could find none. Sometimes the village had life for many months uninterrupted, and other times it went weeks on end with that sense of emptiness, with no predictability that Banni could recognize. It was only when she stopped looking for a pattern that she first saw Fate.

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It moved through the village like mist, trailing the villagers everywhere they went no matter what they were doing, whether by day or by night. It clung to them, and Its presence filled their every word and gesture with meaning. They were alive.

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Banni watched carefully, struck by what she wasn’t sure she was truly seeing. Then one day Fate left, and the life of the village with it, leaving the villagers slow and heavy, their eyes dull, their words empty. Banni’s heart quickened, for it seemed that she had seen the truth after all. And when Fate returned and the villagers awakened again, she was sure: somehow, Fate brought life to the village, and took it away again when It pleased.

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Her discovery only gave her more questions, and still she had no one to ask them to, for what could she say to anyone about this unseen thing that seemed to have such sway over their lives? No one would believe her unless she could prove to them that what she saw was real. But how could she make them see the world the way she did?

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She did try. Elder Laito listened, but he could not see, and from the wrinkle between his brows Banni knew she should not speak of It to him again. She told some of the younger, more impressionable children about It, but then realized that they, with their untamed imaginations, would not make good witnesses to her claim. Indeed, they soon made play of her tale, and were then warned by their parents not to indulge Banni and her stories.

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After this, Banni was given more work to do by her mother, who felt that her idleness was no longer excusable. “If you have time to make up tales, you have time to weave and to mend.”

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In truth, though Banni was frustrated at the village’s response, she was glad for the extra work, for life had only gotten lonelier as she and her peers aged and they had less time for a girl who could not keep up with them. Her days soon filled with the tedious chores everyone else was glad to pass off to her: making reed baskets, repairing torn clothing, cracking oyster shells, mashing aloe paste, and other such things. The tasks were not enjoyable, but they helped to fill her days.

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Yet they did not distract her from the task she had taken on herself. She soon found patterns even in the work she did, and it occurred to her to wonder if she herself felt less alive when Fate was not in the village. It seemed to Banni that she already had less life than anyone else. She was not woven into the fabric of her people, but placed on the edge of it, an observer, nothing more. Could the presence or absence of Fate affect her as it did the others—and if it did, how could she ever know?

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She pondered this through long days and tried to find some way to tell if she felt less alive when Fate wasn’t there. She took careful measure of the time it took her to do her tasks and the quality of her work, thinking to compare the results against a time when Fate was gone, but she found no difference. She knew she shouldn’t have been surprised. What went missing from the village was not the ability to do things, or even the ability to do them well; it was the heart of it all, the sense that there was a purpose in doing things. And for Banni, there was no test she could give herself to look for that sense of purpose, for she had no purpose among her people. Her life was mere existence. And perhaps that meant that she could never tell for herself if Fate affected her as It did the others.

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The thought threatened despair in her. If it was so, then she was truly an outsider to her people and could never find a place among them, condemned to remain on the fringes of their lives, hardly accounted for but for her usefulness at doing all the mundane and repetitive tasks they didn’t want for themselves. She would be but a shadow, hardly regarded, and when her empty and meaningless life ended they would say it was a pity before forgetting her forever.

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Banni could not bear these dark thoughts. Surely they couldn’t be true. If her life was without purpose, why was she the only one who could see Fate coming and going from the village? She knew It was real and knew that It must mean something, for her people if not for her. She wouldn’t give up trying to understand.

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So she kept watching. She kept finding the patterns in life, and she spent her days pondering their meaning. And one day, Banni realized that something had changed.

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 Unsure of what was different, she watched more closely than ever to see if the patterns of the village had changed. But the people were as ever, moving and speaking as they always had, and all the while Fate shadowed them, still unseen by anyone but Banni. For a moment she doubted herself, and that was when Fate turned Its gaze upon her.

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After that, it seemed to Banni that Fate always watched her. No matter where It was in the village, no matter who It followed, It was looking at her—never anyone else. She didn’t understand why that should be. What interest could this mysterious, life-bringing force have in her, a girl who would never accomplish anything? Yet it couldn’t be denied. Fate did not seem to care for the sailors who braved the ocean swells, or for hunters who kept the island’s predators at bay; no, the eye of Fate was set on Banni.

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More than ever, she longed to share what she knew with someone and be believed. If only one person could understand, they could help her to learn what Fate wanted from her. For as the slow years passed, Fate began to linger near her, and though It had no mouth that she could see and no hands with which to gesture, it seemed to her that It wanted to speak with her and only lacked the means to do so.

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Knowing that she could not seek help from anyone in the village, Banni began to think about the ways she might try to communicate with Fate. Speaking aloud would seem the most obvious first step, but she feared to be seen talking to herself lest the village think she’d grown addled by sun or loneliness. A subtler way was needed.

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It was as she sat on the beach one day, arranging shells for necklaces and other adornments, that the answer struck her. She had first noticed Fate because of the presence of patterns in the world—perhaps she could speak to It through patterns.

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With renewed passion, she began exploring the different ways she could use patterns to try to speak with Fate. Would It respond to the patterns of sewing or weaving, or to those found in the scaling of fish? How would she even know if It did? Banni was uncertain, but determined, and so with each task she was given she sought the patterns to see if they told her anything. She was fascinated to learn that she could find a pattern in anything, and though Fate still did not speak to her, It drew nearer.

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Banni was so absorbed with her goal that she became the best in the village at almost any work she was given, and though she did not know it—being too intent in her quest to mind the talk of others—she was praised around the village for the excellence of her work.

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There were some who worried at the fervor with which she worked, for she was at it day and night and rarely spoke to anyone. Elder Laito sat with her once and had to take her hands in his own to stop her. “Banni, even you must rest. Life must have more to it than endless work. You know you don’t need to prove anything to anyone?”

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But Banni, who now saw patterns in everything, grasped his hands and traced the many lines of his wrinkled palms, a light of wonder in her eyes. “Your life is written in your hands.” She gazed at the whorls of his fingertips, and they were to her like a swirling galaxy of the heavens. “The very pattern of your being has been there since the moment you were born. Look at your hands, Elder Laito.”

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And he did, but he could not see what Banni saw.

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Concerned that she was being worked too much and spent too many days alone, he petitioned to the village to ease her workload. But it was harder to convince anyone to sit with her, and even he could only spare so much of his time.

Yet Banni no longer cared if she had companionship. If anyone sat with her to help her or give her company, she told them about the patterns in their speech or corrected their work to follow designs that only she could see. Fearing that she was becoming crazed, the villagers lessened her duties further, but this did not stop her.

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With fewer tasks to fill her time, she began to seek patterns in the stars. She sketched them out in the sand or on palm leaves and eventually carved them into seashells, and they were beautiful artworks, brilliant depictions of the constellations above. But the villagers only saw a maddened girl filling her empty days with pointless activities.

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Banni did not care what the village thought of her, for her mind was filled with the need to reach Fate. It sat with her now, a silent figure at her side, waiting patiently for the day she would find a language It could speak.

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When she had charted all the stars she could see in the sky, she sought for a new pattern, and found it within her own mind. She took to drawing again, designs that started simple, then became more complex; sketches that twisted upon themselves and layered patterns over patterns into images that seemed chaotic until a closer look revealed delicate lines and a deep intricacy that captured the eye and carried it along until the whole of the shape could be seen for what it was, something beautiful and utterly inexplicable.

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Yet still Fate was unable to speak.

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The fervor of Banni’s mind, overwhelmed by the complicated patterns she’d seen, at last began to slow. Her drawings became simple things again, yet they seemed no less profound to her. Each stroke was carefully considered, the shapes formed not out of frantic need but instead with quiet purpose. A language emerged from the marks she drew, and when they were complete, Banni knew she had at last achieved her goal.

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Fate lay a light hand on the symbols Banni had carved into the shells. “These are beautiful,” Fate said.

A long sigh escaped Banni. “What do they mean?”

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“Many things.”

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Was that it, after so many years searching the patterns for answers and striving to speak with this mysterious being? Banni looked sidelong at Fate—and to her surprise, Fate laughed.

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“You’ve worked so hard to find these marks. Do you really want to take the easy tide now?”

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“I suppose not.” Banni bit her lip.

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Fate seemed to know her mind. “There are other questions I will answer for you, however.”

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Banni, who had spent her whole life asking questions, was now so full of them that she didn’t know where to start. But there was the one, the question that had begun her whole quest. “Is the village less alive when you’re not here?”

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It sounded silly when at last spoken aloud, but Fate did not jest. “Yes. That’s one way to put it.”

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“Then why do you leave?”

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Fate frowned and swept an arm out towards the sea. “Your people are not the only ones deserving of full lives. There are hundreds of islands and many thousands of souls who also crave life.”

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That silenced Banni for a moment. She knew of other villages on this island and on some of those nearby, for her people sometimes traded with them, but she’d never thought that they might experience this same phenomenon. It seemed silly now to assume they did not.

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“Why can’t we all live together?” she asked. “Then you wouldn’t have to travel so much, and everyone would always be alive.”

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Fate smiled wryly. “There is no place large enough for you all, not here on these islands. And to put you all in one place would hinder your growth as people, as nations. You all have similarities and always will, but you have differences too, and you’ll need those differences in times to come.”

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“So we will always be only half-alive?” It would not bother the others, but now that Banni knew what she did, she supposed she’d never be able to see the village in the same way again.

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But Fate shook Its head. “Not always. You would never thrive. No, I have other plans for you.”

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“Even me?”

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“Why should my plans not include you?”

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Banni twisted a carved shell in her hands. How could she explain to this otherworldly being that she did not and had never belonged among her people, that she was an outsider because she could not live as they did? Her people might sometimes be only half-alive, but Banni was always half-dead.

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A gentle hand lifted Banni’s chin, and she looked into the oceans that were the eyes of Fate. She gasped at the depth of them and felt herself dragged in as if by a relentless current. She saw lives begin and end, watched nations rise and fall, witnessed the birth and death of ages, and when it was done she felt a thousand years old and like a babe new born, seeing the world for the very first time.

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Fate released her and she sat back, breathing in the salt brine of the sea, and the taste of it on her tongue was sharp and fresh. An ocean breeze blew over her, and her back straightened and her eyes turned upward to the skies, not to assess the stars for their meaning, but simply to see them blazing in their distant glory.

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“Look to the symbols you have created,” said Fate.

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Banni looked down at the shells she had carved and saw the markings anew. She traced them with her fingertips and whispered, “What do they mean?” But it was not Fate she asked.

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“You see what others do not, Banni. That is your gift. And your gift will lead you to your Destiny.”

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“What is Destiny?”

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“It is your companion through this life, and your guide. There is a Destiny for each of my children, and your purpose in life is to complete this Destiny, for it will make you whole. Not in body—but in soul.”

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Once Banni would have been disappointed, but she saw differently now. “What then?”

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“Then the Destiny of Fate will be fulfilled. And even I cannot say what that will mean.” Fate stood, and Banni’s eyes rose with It. It seemed to her less solid than before, and Its eyes were raised, gazing beyond the horizon. “My time to walk the earth is done. You will not see me again after this night, my child, not until your Destiny is fulfilled and your soul leaves this world. Do not despair. Fate is always with you and always moves within you. Even you. You are as alive as anyone else, Banni. Do not be afraid to live.”

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Tears filled Banni’s eyes, and she could only nod to show that she understood. Fate, thin as a morning mist fading under the rising sun, bent to her. She felt a pressure on her arm and looked to see a strange symbol there—not one of her own creation, yet nestled within it was one of her marks. She looked to Fate to ask what the symbol meant, but Fate was gone.

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No, not gone. She touched the mark on her arm again and remembered Fate’s promise. She held her hand over her heart and felt it beating beneath her fingers, as sure a sign of any that she was alive.