[fiction] Guess What Book I Just Finished

When someone who is old enough to drink asks you for a bedtime story, tell her this story.


This story is about a castle made of sand.  It appeared on the beach one week in June.  There was nothing particularly special about this beach.  It faced southwest.  There were to volleyball courts some distance from the water.  There was a two-story motel nearby, the kind where all the rooms had tiled floors to make the sand wash away easily.  And there was a small bar with straw umbrellas and fake tiki torches.

The only notable thing about it was the sand castle.  A man showed up one day, standing on the side of the beach, hands in the pockets of his baggy white shorts, starring off into the ocean and letting the wind whip is clothes about like a character in a movie.  He did this for a good twenty minutes before his legs got tired and he plopped a seat in the sand.  Oh shit I really should have done my laundry today.  Like I'm out of shirts.  Anyway.

The man got bored and started playing with the sand idly.  He looked around the beach often, as if expecting to see someone.  After an hour he realized he'd made a small mound in the sand.  He put a couple walls on it, and in that moment created the simplest of castles:  a mott.  Just a tiny little affair on a hill.  Whoever he was looking for never showed up and he kept building.  Soon there was a baily stretching out from the mott:  a shorter wall that covered more space than the mott.  Then buildings were made for the bailey to keep safe.  Then the mott turned into a stone keep.  Then the baily was destroyed and remade into simple stone walls joined by square towers.

This entire time the sun had been sinking.  The sunset happened while the man attacked the square towers and rounded the corners, leaving no place for the attackers to hide from the defender's arrows.  Then the sun was gone but the man stayed, improving his castle by the moonlight.  The castle was given a proper gatehouse.  The keep was expanded.  The walls were moved, made higher, and then moved again, growing to give room to an ever increasing number of buildings.

The man slept some but it was cool and building kept him warm.  The keep and stable were previously the only buildings, but soon a barracks appeared, with its own ramparts.  Then vast grain storehouses so tall they could be seen above the battlements.  Watchtowers were added, and a dungeon, and then merchant stalls, and houses for people to live after the keep fulled up.  The original walls could be moved no farther, and another ring was added instead.  Then another, and another, until the concentric rings rivaled even Gondor of legend.  Then the trebuchets were added, two or three behind every wall, pointed outwards.  Catapults on the keep and mid levels, and ballistas on the outermost wall.  Each wall was given its own gatehouse, aye, and then a moat, which grew to a lake with the only means of entrace a long causeway that connected to the first gatehouse via a drawbridge.

By this time days had gone by.  Still the castle was not complete.  A secondary castle had to be added to protect the causeway.  Then more walls, more towers, more battlements, more storehouses, blacksmiths, and garrisons for thousands of soldiers.  Then the man left.

Pictures were taken.  Rumours spread and became stories, and stories became marketing, and the castle became famous.  But none of the marketing was right.

The castle was built above the high water line, and lasted for days until various children tore it about.

Children!  For that is where this tale begins.

Two children had once stood on that beach, hand in hand, each daring the other to jump in the cold water, and each only doing it because the other was there.

They played there, sometimes with other children.  Their favorite game was to built forts to protect them from the wolves.  The wolves are coming, they said.  Beaches don't offer much in the way of fortress construction, but a downed palm tree, two plankets and the imagination can take you pretty far.

When they were a tad bit older she kissed him, but he still thought girls were gross so he pushed her head in the sand.

But the wolves were coming, so they played together anyway.

When they were both a bit older, she told him the wolves were coming.  She wasn't talking about the game, though.  He never knew what she meant until he walked by her house one night and saw one fewer parent at her table.  She never talked about it.

When they were older still he kissed, her.  Right there between the two volleyball nets.  He was too nervous to think but he did it anyway.  Something was wrong, though.  The wolves are coming, was all she'd say.

He promised that he would protect her from the wolves.  She said she had some things to take care of.  They agreed to meet back at that very spot in exactly a year.  One year from that date is the day the castle appeared on the beach.

It was a real nice castle though.