The Tidewalkers are the human people of the Aikon Tidal Islands, and their whole way of living is set by water that comes and goes twice a day. They keep permanent homes only on the peak islands, the few points of rock high enough to stay dry when the sea is full. Almost everything else they own is portable or expendable, because almost everything else spends half of each day underwater. They are a people of the human, wholly shaped by the Aikon tidal rhythms, not a separate biological lineage.
When the tide pulls back, the Tidewalkers go down onto the drained seabed. They cross it on memorized paths to work the wet sand, lift shellfish from exposed beds, and gather whatever the water has left behind, then climb back to the peaks before the sea returns. Children learn the rhythm before they can walk. A Tidewalker reads the state of the tide the way a farmer elsewhere reads weather, and the question that orders the day is never the hour but how long until the water turns.
Low tide at the largest peak. The drained flat runs almost to the horizon in firm wet sand, dotted with stooped figures pulling shellfish and cutting fast crops, every one of them glancing east at intervals toward the gray line where the sea waits. A horn sounds from the rocks. The whole plain straightens, turns, and begins walking back at once.
That horn answers to the Tide-Counters, a trained class who track the moons, predict the extreme tides, and call the safe windows for crossing and working. A Tide-Counter who calls a window wrong drowns the people who believed the call, so the training is long and the standing is high. The same knowledge makes Tidewalkers the only dependable pilots through the islands' shifting channels, work they sell to outside ships for a fair fee. The alternative, as they will tell a captain without much sympathy, is the seabed.
Aspects
- The water sets the day
- Home is only where the sea cannot reach