Beneath Ceaseless Skies #222

  Issue #222 • Mar. 30, 2017

  “The Shark God’s Child,” by Jonathan Edelstein

  “Nightshade,” by J.W. Halicks

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE SHARK GOD’S CHILD

  by Jonathan Edelstein

  When Mei was six, the island of Dakuwanga awoke and was no more.

  She was on the beach collecting driftwood when it happened. One minute there was sand under her feet; the next, there was flesh, moist and slick. It moved, and the land above her also moved, shaking off rocks and trees, fern-leaf houses, boats, people.

  There was screaming: it took a moment, but there was screaming, and Mei realized that one of the voices crying out was her own. She was running, too; she didn’t remember starting to run, but she was in full flight.

  Her village was a quarter-mile further along the shore; her parents were there, and she saw boats putting out to sea. For a brief moment, she thought she should run there. But what had been the island was moving faster, and all the dirt and trees and stones that had stood on higher ground were bearing down on her. She ran in the only direction that offered hope of escape, and when she reached the water, she swam for her life.

  There were others in the water, and a noise that sounded like the world ending, but Mei only looked back once. The island was all flesh now; the jagged outcropping that rose from its highest point was a great shark-fin, and the promontory on the far shore had become a narrow head with inset eyes and rows of teeth. And then it jumped.

  Dakuwanga’s roots had reached deep under the ocean to the fires beneath, but now they rose from the water and made a great arc above it. The shark-god that had been stone for so many years hung hundreds of feet overhead, shaking off the few clumps of earth that remained, and plunged into the depths.

  It entered the water the opposite direction from the one in which Mei had fled, and for a second she knew relief as the bow-wave sped away from her. But the wave that came toward her, though not as high, was still immense, and it carried the remains of forests and villages. She wanted to pray for her life, but her god was the one that had visited this on her, so she cried out once to whoever might hear and dove as deep as she could.

  The rushing water surrounded her, and she was stung by branches and battered by stones. Her vision came in flashes, and twice she saw bodies in the tangle, already beginning to bloat with death. The branch of a breadfruit tree was in her hand and she clung to it for dear life, waiting for the tree-trunk or roof-beam that would end her life.

  But it never came, and the wave was past her as suddenly as it had come, leaving her afloat in calm waters. Behind her, Dakuwanga was gone as if it—he—had never been.

  There were a few other people in the sea, and a few outriggers that had somehow survived the wave. Mei knew she should make for one of the boats, but she felt paralyzed, and besides, she would never be able to catch them. One did come close enough for her to hear a man ask the cause of the catastrophe and a woman’s anguished voice answer, “Deleur, Deleur.” That was a name she had heard once before, whispered in fear by her mother, but she didn’t know if it was place, person, or god, and the boat was past before she could hear anything more.

  She drifted for a time as the sun rose toward zenith, and the shark came.

  It was a great white, as Dakuwanga had been, and Mei cried out against the unfairness of it all: why had she survived the shark-god’s awakening if her fate was only to be eaten by one of his children? But the shark didn’t bite. It swam under her and then leaped out of the water, and did the same again. At the edge of her vision, she saw that other sharks had come to the swimmers and the people in the boats, jumping and playing like porpoises, almost as if they wanted to lead the people away. No, they were leading the people away.

  Mei, still clinging to the branch, followed after her shark, and as she did, she saw that the others were being led in different directions. The shark-god was showing mercy to those he had spared, but the people of Dakuwanga would exist no more except in memory. She wondered if her parents had survived, but knew she would never learn.

  For eleven days the currents carried her. The shark brought fish, and she opened her mouth to catch the warm rain. By day she looked for signs of land, and at night she saw that there was a new constellation in the southern sky; the shark-lord had returned to the stars.

  On the twelfth day, Mei came to shore.

  * * *

  “Wake up, Driftwood Child,” called Maora.

  Mei was sleeping, but she stirred at the sound of her foster-mother’s voice. She became conscious of the palm-leaf matting on the floor, the smell of the sea on the morning breeze, the warmth of the sun.

  “Wake up, Driftwood Child.” This time the voice belonged to Antsolaoka, her foster-father. “This is your naming day.”

  She came fully awake, and realized all at once how high the sun was. A wave of shame washed through her for sleeping so late, on this of all days. But neither Antsolaoka nor Maora looked displeased, and the feeling left her as soon as it had come.

  “Go to the beach and bathe,” her foster-father said. “The hiragasy isn’t until sunset.”

  “What name will you choose?” Maora asked.

  “It’s bad luck to say before the gathering,” said Mei. In truth, she didn’t know. Nothing had come to her during the years she’d worked on the family fishing boat. Nothing had come in dreams; nothing had come when she stood at the edge of Vohitra village and gazed up at the stone face of Antriatonony the Noble Poet, the god who was this island. There were ways that children chose their names, and none of them had found her.

  She pulled a plain cotton smock over her head and let Maora give her a strip of dried fish as she walked outside. This late in the morning, the village was alive with activity: pigs and golden chickens rooted between the houses, and people in conical hats and patterned cotton robes went about their business.

  The people were golden brown, not black as Mei was, and their eyes were brown where hers were the color of the sea; somehow, in the past six years, she had stopped looking on them as strange. Their clothing was also no longer strange to Mei, but she still remembered that it once had been. Few on Dakuwanga had been able to afford to buy cotton from the traders, let alone cloth so richly dyed, and few had owned the cowrie-shell necklaces and greenstones that the villagers in Vohitra had. But this island had Andriatonony’s flute—the iron deposits that men dug from under the mountain—and it had made them rich.

  The beach wasn’t far away. The family lakana was there amid a row of other fishing boats, and at a distance from them, a merchant outrigger from Deleur moored with an iron chain. It looked like an ordinary chain to Mei, but the stories said that Deleur chains could bind gods.

  As it always did, the word “Deleur” came to Mei in the anguished voice she’d heard on the day her homeland was destroyed. She knew now what Deleur was and where: it was an island like any other, the stone shape of a god. But it had caused Dakuwanga’s downfall somehow, and she feared what its people might do.

  She wasn’t the only one who feared. Others on Andriatonony lowered their voices when they spoke of Deleur, or spoke of it not at all. But it was one of the few islands that knew the secret of working iron, and its merchants paid well for the metal their smiths desired. Their fleet was strong, too, and its boats carried many feather-clad warriors. So they were suffered to come, even when they swaggered through Vohitra like conquerors, even when they claimed that the gods deserved no offerings.

  The gods... The thought made Mei gaze upward to where Andriatonony’s face looked out from the st
one. He was the noble poet, and he had become this island in the distant past as the shark-god had become her birthplace. There were hundreds of stories of the far travels and heroic deeds he had done before he became stone, of the enemies and demons and even gods he had charmed with his vyantsohy, his iron flute.

  She looked to one side where trees grew from the poet’s shoulders and up to where smoke rose from the mountain, the smoke of the furnace where his flute had melted. She would have to add to his songs today. Andriatonony’s name meant “noble words,” and words were the offering that pleased him. At the end of the song, she would choose her name, and she looked back to his face, willing both to come.

  But neither song nor name came to her.

  At length she laid her smock down on her family’s lakana and went into the sea to bathe. Maybe, she thought, she wouldn’t choose a name at all. Some people kept their childhood names: her foster-father had been named Antsolaoka, Fish-Caller, at three, and it had suited him so well that he still bore it. But who would want to go through life as Driftwood Child? She dove, letting the water cleanse her; she broke the surface and shook it off, and then dove again. She was ten feet down, twenty, thirty; the sea surrounded her, and it seemed that the land was far away.

  The great white shark came to her then.

  Mei knew she should be afraid, but something told her that she had nothing to fear, even as it swam closer. It might have been the shark that guided her to this island or it might have been some other, but she somehow knew it wouldn’t devour her, and suddenly it was carrying her.

  When she broke the surface again, she was clinging to the shark’s back, and it was moving faster than any shark should go. She rode through waters she had come to know in six years of working on her foster-father’s lakana; she passed islets that had been fish, great ancestors, legendary boats, minor gods. In the distance was the eel-demon that Andriatonony had silenced forever; beyond it was Ambiko, the crab-god where seabirds roosted. She had been there many times with her father and left offerings of fish in exchange for guano to nourish her mother’s garden.

  The shark said nothing as it brought Mei once around Andriatonony’s stone body, and it said nothing when it left her where she began, but she felt that something had passed between them, and when it left a tooth behind, she knew it was a gift. She swam down and down, catching it in her hand just before she reached the bottom—and suddenly, she was sure of what name she wanted.

  When she returned to the house, it was nearly time to go to the hiragasy. She donned a robe of blue and black, a hat of woven straw, and a necklace of worked copper wrapped around obsidian from far Maiana; she walked with her foster-parents up the mountain trail, and others sang of Andriatonony as they joined the procession.

  Not everyone did. There were young men who listened to the merchants from Deleur and praised no one but themselves; they looked on and whispered darkly. But they did nothing, and the gathering left them behind.

  Mei reached the top of the mountain as dusk fell. The islanders had brought torches, but they had no more need of them: the fires within the mountain bathed the scene in an eerie light. The sound of wooden flutes began, and then drums, but there were no more voices; it was an androanara, a naming-day, and there could be no words tonight before hers.

  As the first star came out, the mpandaro, the maker of days, brought her to the very edge and called to her to begin. The song came naturally now. Mei sang a navigation-chant such as merchants or fishermen used, but instead of naming the stars that guided journeys across the sea, she sang of how Andriatonony used landmarks in the ocean to guide him as he traveled among the stars. In the song, the poet circled the zodiac and faced its perils in turn, and finally, wounded near to death, looked down on the place in the sea where he would come to rest. “And there,” she sang, finishing as all naming-songs did, “is the island of Mei.”

  “Mandihy!” cried the maker of days, and the others broke into song and dance. They thought nothing of the name Mei: it was foreign, but so was she, and even her foster-parents had known her only as Driftwood Child. Only she knew she was reclaiming the name she’d been given at birth.

  Even that morning, she would never have dared. When an island returned to the stars, when a god spurned his people in anger, their names and their history were to be abandoned. But today, the shark-god had told Mei that she was still one of his children, and her birth-name still had a purpose.

  “Deleur,” she heard again, and she clutched the shark-tooth in her hand. But the word faded, and Mei danced down the mountain trail that Driftwood Child had climbed.

  * * *

  Mei rode into Nanao the Bird-Dragon on the back of a great white. Behind her were the three outriggers of the Saudagar Fleet: eighty feet long with carved dragons on their prows and red stars painted on their sails, laden with iron and gold and spices and dyed cloth. And around them were others mounted on porpoises and smaller sharks and dwarf whales, armed as Mei was with blowguns and bone javelins and iron-tipped spears.

  Her skin was weathered from the sea-spray, and she sat well on her mount. The floating caravans hadn’t been her ambition when she was young, but soon after her naming-day, she’d learned that she could call sharks as well as ride them. Shark-callers were rare, and those trained to oratory on Andriatonony even rarer, and the fleets always needed guards. The Saudagars had come the year after her naming and they’d offered apprenticeship and good pay; Antsolaoka told her she could go, so she had gone.

  And she had learned. She’d learned to dive when pirates fired their arrows and leap above the water to attack them with javelins. She’d learned to smear poison on her spear and strike at sea-serpents before they could close around the outriggers and crush them. She’d learned to ride through the fierce seasonal storms and navigate the open ocean; she’d learned to buy and sell. And most of all, she’d learned the sea-roads.

  The fleet had taken her to Heiau Hiva where Lele’s Necklace—gold—was taken from the ground. She’d gone to Leho for copper, and to far Pasik where the upland tribes brought hides to trade for fish and shells. She’d guarded the fleet when it traded for copra among the atolls of the south: low-lying islands that wound around lagoons, made by eel-gods or sea snakes or the arms of ancient heroes. Some of them, unlike the mountainous islands, still stirred; on Anumea, her fellow guard Kulu had shown her the cave from which a forked tongue, gray as stone but warm to the touch, felt the air. They’d given it a slaughtered pig as a trade-offering; the natives of the island, so they said, offered it their enemies.

  The next year, Anumea wasn’t there.

  “They say that an island wakes once in a hundred years,” Kulu said. “Always, more islands have been made than have vanished. But now, in twelve years, nine of them have gone.”

  “Why are they so angry?” Mei asked, but Kulu had no answer. It was a refugee on the next island, Niatupu, who told them: “The sorcerers learned a spell from Deleur, and they thought they could bind the god, but he woke before they were finished.”

  The year after, Niatupu too had returned to the stars. Since then, news of islands vanishing had come to the fleets almost constantly; most had disappeared in the wrath of spurned gods, and a few had joined Deleur’s growing empire and vanished just as surely. The spirit of Dakuwanga, her lost god and homeland, seemed always to be in front of Mei now as she traveled, and it accompanied her even to Nanao Port.

  Nanao seemed like it could never vanish. It was the largest island Mei had ever seen, and the harbor beyond the fringing reef guarded a walled city rather than a village. The breeze carried the acrid smell of smithies and tanneries, and hundreds of longhouses stood among taro fields and rice paddies on the lower slopes of the Bird-Dragon’s wings. Above them, under the sandstone beak and plumes, the houses of the dead rose on stilts and the heads of enemy warriors on tall poles. The stories said that the Bird-Dragon was the first of the gods to make a home in the ocean, that her people were the ancestors of all others; the carved wooden
chronicles that hung outside the longhouses went back thousands of years. If anyplace in the world was permanent, Nanao was.

  And yet, when the fleet made landfall, the vanishings were all that anyone talked about. The black city people with white hair and red-stained teeth; the red-brown, scarred highlanders; foreigners of a hundred shades and shapes—all of them spoke of nothing but gods waking and islands drowning and the boats from Deleur that brought warriors and magicians. “The gods have all tired of us,” said a bearded ancient who sat by a rattan door; inside, others chewed betel nut for mindfulness and warmth. “They’re all waking up, and when the sea is empty again, they’ll start over. They told me this in a dream.”

  “Nonsense,” said another voice, and Mei turned to see another of the caravan guards. He’d joined them at the last island and she hadn’t yet learned his name. He carried his weapons as if born to them but was of no nation she knew. His hair was black as hers and his eyes as blue; his skin was lighter than the city-dwellers’ but darker than the people of Andriatonony or the atolls; the scar patterns on his back and face were more intricate than even a highland sorcerer’s. The swirling scars seemed familiar somehow, but she had never seen a person who bore them.

  “Why is it nonsense?” Mei’s voice was light, but there was an edge of fear in it. “So many islands have returned to the stars—why not all of them?”

  “Because each one had a reason. People didn’t want to submit to their gods, but were too weak to overthrow them.”

  “Is anyone strong enough for that?”

  “Some are. Some wish they were, and don’t have the patience to wait.”

  She looked at his patterns again, and suddenly realized where she’d seen them—one of the young men on Andriatonony had carved them on a whalebone necklace. “You are from...”

  “I am Nan Sapwe, of Deleur.”

  Something in the name sounded like gods casting off their worshipers, and Mei wanted to recoil from the black magic within it. But she couldn’t. No one from Deleur traveled alone, and no one from Deleur served on foreign fleets; what was different about this one, and what secrets might he tell?