Beneath Ceaseless Skies #222 Read online

  They were at the door of a kava-house, and on impulse, she took Nan Sapwe’s hand and led him in. There was a smoke inside that made her feel like she was swimming deep underwater, and she felt a numbness on her lips as they drank the kava. She knew these pleasures often led to others.

  “They say that you’ve bound your god,” she said, “and that you do things to people’s minds so they want to bind theirs. Are you doing that to me?”

  “If I were, would you be able to ask?” Nan Sapwe smiled through the smoke, and the patterns of his facial scars stretched and moved. “But we have bound the Turtle-Mother, yes. And we’ve shared the spell, yes. And some people were impatient, or didn’t want to pay our price.”

  There were many things Mei wanted to say, but her mouth would only form one. “Why?”

  “That is how we conquer. And why should we live at the gods’ whim? Many of the islands were heroes once, so we all have it in us to be gods. My own family counts a god among its ancestors—I have stone in my blood, so why should I bow to stone?”

  “So people should bow to you instead—or destroy themselves.”

  Nan Sapwe said nothing, and the silence hung in the air for a long moment. “Maybe,” he said at last, “that’s why I didn’t sail with the Deleur fleet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Our sorcerers don’t care if other islands destroy themselves—that’s more power for them to drink. Weak people are fuel for them, or slaves.”

  “And you?”

  “I want to make people strong—strong as the gods.” He met her eyes. “Do you want a child with a god’s blood?”

  Her face moved through the smoke toward his, and she was no more afraid of him than she’d been of the shark. The words of his question echoed in the room, and she willed an answer; even through kava and smoke, she knew the will was hers. Her lips were still numb when they met his, and Mei felt as if she were in another body; what followed passed as in a dream.

  The next morning, business done, the Saudagar Fleet sailed from Nanao, Mei among the guards on its left and Nan Sapwe on the right. She wasn’t sure what had happened, or if anything had; it seemed to have been long ago in another place. It had vanished almost as her homeland had.

  That day they met pirates. These came in four long, single-trunk canoes, and they attacked the caravan from two sides, shooting flaming arrows at its sails. Mei had been in a hundred such battles, and her response came on a level below the conscious. She guided her shark down and down, where the pirates’ missiles couldn’t reach her, and then, as it leaped up and over their boats, she rained javelins on them from above. She and the other guards attacked again and again; if the pirates kept shooting at the men on the fleet, they were defenseless against her, and if they cast aside their bows to deal with the mounted guards, the outrigger crews rained arrows and stones on them. If the pirates could close, they could storm the trading ships, but they couldn’t close quickly enough, and they fled.

  But that night, the fleet stopped at Sitang-Sitang, where it would trade for feathers on the morrow, and that night the pirates attacked again. Mei awakened to torchlight and shouting and the clash of weapons, and on land she was no warrior. She parried a blow with her spear, but then a pirate knocked it out of her hand and she felt something heavy hit her on the head. Another pirate stabbed down with a sword, and Mei—who hadn’t realized she had fallen—twisted desperately to avoid it. The pirate stabbed again, and this time he would have killed her had not someone taken the blow. He fell on her heavily, dead as he hit the ground, and with the little capacity for surprise that was left in her, she realized that he was Nan Sapwe.

  “More men are coming from the village,” said a voice.

  “Take the prisoners we have,” said another. “The Deleur will pay for them.”

  And so, in her nineteenth year, Mei came as a captive to Deleur, and so—although she didn’t yet know it—did the daughter she carried.

  * * *

  From where Mei stood on the peninsula called the Turtle-Mother’s Head, she could see all of Temwen. In the distance, the Sentinels—the line of standing stones that bore the shapes of the warriors they had been—rose from the sea. Just inside them was the fringing reef, and inside that, the stone islets of the city.

  There had been seventy islets when Mei came to Deleur six years ago. There were more than eighty now. The aliki, the nobles of Deleur, would never be done building their city: they always wanted more platforms for their palaces, more storehouses for tribute, more training grounds for the feathered warriors, more stone pyramids to house their dead. And that meant they would always want more slaves.

  “Get moving, get moving!” shouted an overseer; he wore the turtle-shell badge of his rank, but like all taskmasters, he was nameless. He spoke in Yalam, the trading language, which was the only one the slaves had in common. “You’ve had long enough to eat. Get down there!”

  The voice brought Mei out of her contemplation, and she went to join the line of workers walking down to the shore. Kelek, her daughter, ran to her side. At five, Kelek had eyes the color of basalt and subtle patterns on her skin that might almost have been marble; she sang at odd moments, and she noticed everything.

  At the beach, there was stone to be placed, stone to be cut. Mei joined the gang that would float the stones on logs to the foundations where they would rest. Kelek went to help the stone-shapers. It was still a game to her, but she did the work of someone three times her age; she had an instinct for where the stone would fracture and how the cuts should be made. “She has stone in her blood,” the ghost of Nan Sapwe seemed to say.

  Mei could dive deep and stay under the sea long: that was what made her a valued slave. The log raft reached its destination, and the gang took away some of the logs so the stone would sink; she swam underneath and guided it so that when the other logs were untied, it would fit in its underwater place precisely. She stayed a moment among the colorful fish and the innermost bunches of coral, but only a moment; there would be many more stones to place before the platform was finished.

  When she came up, her eyes fell on the Sentinels. She had learned early that they were more than what they seemed. In her first month on Deleur, she had called a shark and tried to ride it away, but the Sentinels had stirred and the stone and reef moved to bar her way. “They have the Turtle-Mother’s power,” an old slave had told her that night. “When the sorcerers bound the god, they bound the Sentinels too—they took the fire that fed the Turtle-Mother and gave it to them.”

  “They made the Sentinels into gods?”

  “No. They made them slaves, as we are. The Sentinels serve the aliki as the soldiers and war-dogs do.”

  Mei remembered as she went to guide another piece of shaped stone, and another after that.

  That afternoon, there was a new man in the gang. He’d built a maneaba, a gathering-house, on one of the platforms, but it was finished and he wasn’t needed there anymore.

  “Do you have a name?” the foreman asked.

  “Rakotomalala.”

  Mei’s heart skipped a beat, because that was a name from Andriatonony. When she could, she whispered to him in that language, and when he answered, she asked “how are you a slave?”

  “I was part of the sorcerers’ price for their spell. Fifty men.”

  “Did the young ones cast the spell? Did the poet wake?”

  “No. There was a great hiragasy, and some sang against the poet and others sang in his praise. The rebels were outnumbered, even among the youth, and when the hiragasy became a battle, they were beaten. The sorcerers took them too.”

  “All of them are slaves?”

  “That’s what the lords of Deleur do. They make slaves—what they do to gods, they do to people. It’s as the maker of days said in his song: others’ sacrifice is their power.”

  Others’ sacrifice. Suddenly, what Mei had always felt about Temwen became clear. The gods, the beasts, the heroes that had made themselves into islands had all made a
sacrifice; in return for their power and the offerings they were given, they had to accept the form of stone. All the homelands were made of sacrifice. All except Temwen, which had never been god or hero. The Deleur made no offerings for their homeland and gave nothing of themselves for it; instead, they wrung it from enslaved people and chained gods.

  “Maybe the old man on Nanao was right,” she thought. “Maybe the gods will tire of us, if this is what we do.”

  The thought carried her to the day’s ending, as the dying sun’s light shone through the rippling water and the last stone was set in place. She let go of the log and swam to the beach, to collect Kelek and go up to where the communal meal was waiting. But Kelek wasn’t with the stonemasons, and no one knew where she’d gone. Mei shouted her name and, when there was no answer, began to search. With growing anxiety, she looked around the yards and houses and the clumps of bush around the shoreline, and finally the water.

  No sooner had Mei dove into the lagoon than she saw Kelek in the distance. A great white shark was with her, and it was playing around her as another of its kind had done with Mei long ago.

  Mei swam to her daughter and pulled her to the surface. “Have you seen the shark before?” she asked.

  “He comes to play with me sometimes.”

  “Have you told anyone?” But even as Mei asked the question, she realized how little it mattered. The sorcerers would find out soon enough, and when they learned that Kelek was a shark-caller as well as a stoneblood, they would kill her. There were valuable slaves, and then there were dangerous ones.

  She had no thought other than that she must protect her daughter. She took Kelek in her arms, set her eyes on the Turtle-Mother’s mountain, and ran.

  * * *

  Mei ran through taro fields. Nohnowei, the Turtle-Mother’s shell, rose before her. No Sentinels stood in her way; they guarded the sea, not the land. The Deleur hadn’t thought that any of their slaves might escape by land. The warriors and the dogs would chase them, and where would they go?

  The peasants in the fields watched her pass, but they also did nothing. They weren’t slaves, but their lot was little better, and the tribute-houses in Temwen groaned with their produce. And no one, except one cursed, would run as Mei did, and a fugitive under a curse was beyond the reach of the taro farmers. She belonged to the aliki and the sorcerers, and they wouldn’t be far behind. The farmers feared the summit of the Nohnowei—even with the god bound, they feared it—so she might find sanctuary there, but first she would have to reach it.

  The fields were gone and the rainforest enclosed her. The light that filtered through the canopy was a lush green, softening the sharper green of the leaves and undergrowth. There were no paths, and the way was impassable; only the fast-moving streams provided a way onward. The stones of the streambeds cut her feet, and she feared with every step that she would fall, but maybe the water would mask her scent from the war-dogs and maybe the bird-calls would cover her cries.

  Nan Sapwe had told her of this country, and it was as beautiful and fearful as he had related; the forest seemed ethereal, but it was filled with the terror that followed wherever slavery went, the fear of the hunted. She wondered which of the aliki would lead the pursuit. There were seven in the stone city, and no doubt they were donning their turtle-shell armor and feather plumes. They were rivals for glory, and that might delay the chase, but what glory was there in recapturing a runaway slave?

  She climbed higher, and her head was light with exhaustion, but then she heard the war-dogs’ barking. The living ounmatakai, the watchmen of the land, and they had found her scent. There was more barking, and the sounds of pursuit, and now human voices had joined them.

  Mei was frozen for an instant, but she looked at her daughter and saw Nan Sapwe’s face in hers. “Run,” he seemed to say, so she scooped Kelek in her arms and ran.

  The gullies were steep and the footing treacherous, and her breath came heavy as she fled uphill with her daughter’s weight on her shoulders, but she knew that if she stopped for an instant, she would fall. The dogs were barking behind her, their voices closer and closer; they were surer-footed on the mountains than she, and the sorcerer had cast his spells over them.

  She tripped. There was an outcropping in the rock that she hadn’t seen, and she fell and tumbled. She felt the rock cut her, but it hardly mattered. She would never get up before the dogs were on her. She cradled Kelek, protecting her from the fall. “Run!” she whispered, pointing up the mountain, but her daughter stood rooted, refusing to leave her.

  She rolled onto her side to place herself between the oncoming hounds and Kelek and saw the first of the dogs, his coat gleaming and his eyes intent. Out of nowhere, she remembered a song that the farmers had sung when they brought food to the slaves’ camp, a song about the Turtle-Mother’s dogs who had protected their people. With no weapon left other than her voice, she sang, and waited for the dog to spring and bite.

  But he didn’t. He listened to the song, and he keened strangely.

  The other dogs were there too, though she hadn’t seen them come, and they were ranged in silence about the first one. Maybe he was their king: the Sopukidi, the Lord of Dogs! The farmers’ song said that the dogs had a king, as humans did; could she hope that he had become the sorcerers’ enemy?

  She heard voices below, human voices, full of consternation over the sudden silence. “Go north, Sopukidi,” she said. “Lead them north, away from me. The sorcerers will never know.”

  The dog looked at her. Its jaws hung open, and its teeth were inches from her face. It would bite her now, surely, and she closed her eyes. But then the hot breath on her face was gone. She opened her eyes and the dogs were gone too. She could hear them running and barking, headed down the mountain.

  She and Kelek stayed the night where they lay, where the warriors could not see, and the next morning, they reached the summit.

  How like a turtle the island looked from these heights: even the forests and fields were like the patches on its shell. Mei tried to remember the peasants’ stories of the Turtle-Mother; there were tales of others who had found sanctuary on the peak, and they were said to have spoken to the god and become prophets.

  But what the stories hadn’t said was how those heroes had survived their journey. There was water up here, but Mei had no wood-lore; she was a child of the sea, and she didn’t know how to hunt or what plants might poison her. Surely she and Kelek hadn’t survived the chase only to be forced back down by starvation.

  “Can you ask her?” Mei said to Kelek on the third day.

  “She is bound.”

  “But she lives. You have stone in your blood—maybe she’ll listen if you talk to her.”

  “What should I ask?”

  Mei remembered that Kelek was only five years old, but maybe the best question was one that might come from a child. “Ask how we can be free.”

  Kelek walked to a spring that emerged from the mountainside and murmured something to it as she sat. A few minutes later, she returned.

  “Did the Turtle-Mother say anything?”

  “She said we can be free, if everyone is.” Kelek looked back at the spring, as if she’d expected the god to say more. “What does that mean?”

  Something came together in Mei at her daughter’s words—not realization but the feeling that she’d known this all along. They could only be free if everyone was freed—the slaves, the Turtle-Mother, the Deleur. And if that were to happen, she would have to return to Temwen. There would have to be a great hiragasy, as there had been on Andriatonony, and there would be a war.

  Mei looked down again to where the Turtle-Mother’s head faced the harbor, and it held no more fear for her. Nan Sapwe’s face came to her again. I want to make people strong, she remembered him saying, strong as the gods. He could have sailed with the Deleur fleets and been a great warrior, but he’d fought for something else instead: for people who would be slaves of neither gods nor men. He had died for that—he’d died for h
er—and if need be, she could die for the slaves and for her stone-blooded daughter.

  The summit hadn’t made her a prophet, but maybe it had given her the courage to do what she’d always known she must. As she made the first steps down, she was already composing her song.

  She returned at nightfall, slipping into the village easily. There were guards, but they were keeping watch against escape and not return, and a gathering storm in the west drew their attention and their fear. She appeared by the fire as if she were a ghost, and she sang as Driftwood Child had been trained to do. She sang of sacrifices made and gifts returned, and of the sorcerers who made no sacrifice of their own but stole that of others. She sang of reparation for the theft, and of the heroes they would be if they seized that reparation—heroes who would have the strength of the gods, as heroes had since time immemorial.

  One by one, the slaves came to hear, and because any who returned from Nohnowei were prophets, they listened. And as the hiragasy ended, and as lightning flashed in the western sky, there was war.

  They were slaves, but some of them had been soldiers, and there were things they could use as weapons: stone chisels, hammers, knives. There were also many more of them than there were guards. The men standing watch over the village were dispatched without a word.

  “Go now!” Mei urged, pointing down the slope to the water. “We must be like pirates. We have to be quick, or the warriors will slaughter us.” As she spoke, she ran. She looked back just once to where Kelek stood holding an old woman’s hand, and she plunged into the lagoon to join the assault on the city.

  She swam, heedless of rain and lightning, and willed a shark to come. Suddenly, one was underneath, and she seized it and leaped over the nearest of the stone platforms. There were two feathered warriors standing there, and though she had no javelins, she had sharpened sticks which had been hardened in the fire. She threw one and then two, and as she entered the water again, other slaves scrambled up to take the islet.