He finally pulled a fish impatiently from the skewer. It was agony to chew slowly and carefully, locating the many spines with his tongue and spitting them into the fire, when what he really wanted to do was wolf the flesh down as fast as he could. He managed to curb his hunger, finishing off just three of the fish. Those that remained, he wrapped in a large leaf to save for the next day. Sea-nomad-becoming required continual exertion. He had only the potion prepared by his mother and food he had time to gather. He needed to ration himself.
Then, huddling close to the little fire in its hearth of sand, he stared into the flames, clearing his mind to begin the exercises. His eyes searched through the embers, seeking the different colors he could find there, relaxing, tuning his concentration, emptying his mind of thought. The flames absorbed his complete attention. Little by little he began to see beyond…
The shahiroh appeared with no warning, but not suddenly. She seemed to materialize out of the firelight on the far side of the fire. When he became aware of her, Kreh-ursh was unsure how long she had been standing there. She gave the impression of having existed since the birth of time, growing from the sand like an ancient, black-rooted loman tree. Her dark robes merged with the darkness behind her, the ceremonial mask could be a gray-silver billow of smoke frozen perversely in its horrible grimace, and her power enwrapped her like an invisible cloak. Behind the carved wood only the shining points of her eyes—glittering jewels that anchored her in time and space—and the harsh rasp of her breath through the breathing hole showed she was alive.
Immersed as he was in trance, he did not jump up or make any outward movement. Yet his mind tensed, on guard. The shahiroh, more knowledgeable in lore and craft than the other villagers, were unpredictable and dangerous. They observed each other for long moments. He felt her probing subtly at his mind. Then she mind-spoke:
Kreh-ursh, I am glad to be your mentor for sea-nomad-becoming.
So articulate was her mind speech, so accurate, it was almost as if she were speaking directly to him in words. And her friendly tone disarmed him.
Hoh-ee, Taashou.
He recognized her despite her mask, this lean, haughty woman he had known all his life. They said she undertook sea-nomad-becoming at twelve years old, the youngest candidate the village had ever known. Her name meant “waving grass spear.”
She now reached under her robes, brought forth her clenched fist. In a scattering movement, she tossed fine green powder into the fire. It erupted. Flames leaped. Thick green-gray smoke seethed out, the fumes clogging his throat. Heat singed his cheeks. His eyes watered. He coughed, but the smoke was already swirling thickly inside his head. His inner sight bucked and rolled, wild and unstable. Taashou’s presence was there, before him, demanding. Her eyes, two obsidian chunks, locked onto his own. All he could see were those points burrowing deep, forcing him to hold her gaze. He stared through the flames. Beyond the shining came the visions…
Tell me. Describe what you see.
There’s a jungle… rainforest… I’m walking… thick forest…
Vines and creepers fell around him, hung above. The sun’s rays reached down through high trunks, but they produced a green, underwater light.
…looking for…
He examined the trees. He was searching for something. Here were trees as wide as two or three men lying end to end, as tall as the great canoe placed upright, even taller. Yet he was not looking for these. He had to find a single trunk, the one right for him, the one that would be his own. He walked through trees, trees and trees, vaguely tracing a large circle, keeping the upslope of the volcano on his right—for he was in the forest on Zjhuud-geh. Suddenly he saw it—his tree—a taat-eh trunk about his own age. It was slim and straight, its branches not spreading from the trunk until high above his head, possibly two, three times his own height. He knew it was the one he should select. Mentally, he tried to mark its position.
Explain.
I have found my tree.
Continue.
The scene shifted, and he was skimming across ocean waves, clipping white tops in a brisk breeze. Then he dived into the depths:
Underwater… Shah, the sea…
Green sunlight slanted through the waves in sharp bars. Then all kinds of sea life was writhing nearby: shoals of the ever-present kree-eh refracting every rainbow color through the translucent water; groups of lilac rruush-oh billowing dreamily; a sinuous Shah-skur rolling its beige and cream coils along the sandy bottom; even a majestic taa-zjhur gliding along, its purple and gold hide flashing in the sunlight. He showed all this to Taashou.
All at once the marine life disappeared. Cloud covered the scene, and he was again on the surface, but now it was calm. The water felt hard and heavy like molten metal.
Describe.
It is… No… It can’t be...
Describe.
He was looking down into the water. It was not possible. Trance during initiation gifted visions of possible future pathways, yet this was unreal. If he was seeing what he thought he saw, it could no longer be a glimpse into his own future or any other reality, but a creature from the realm of pure myth.
11. Playing the Hero?
Jade was feeling fragile despite Dr. Bilges having given her the all-clear. She must have been out for a bare few minutes, because when she came to—vomiting over the gunwale—even though the pot-bellied old fisherman in the stern was nearly shaking his tiny outboard off its mountings, they were still a good five hundred yards from the beach. Her mother had her arms tightly around her waist, squeezing her, making her vomit up all the water she had swallowed. She spent the rest of the journey to the beach coughing herself stupid and puking over the side while Joan went and held Kyle. Her brother had barely been conscious when they pulled him into the boat. Face, limbs, and body were plastered with the dark sludge, the color of a bruise. Added to that, the smell of it was revolting: a strange blend of rotting things and vinegar… and something else, like turpentine. Kyle was trembling and shaking, seeming to get continuously weaker in Joan’s arms.
Jade saw all this in glimpses every time she raised her head. Her nausea was back in force. She felt as if she were reliving her dream. Blotches of red, blue, orange, yellow, pink, and white exploded before her eyes, and a black mist hovered at the edges of her vision, threatening to drag her down again into unconsciousness. Through the haze, she noticed her mother’s cell phone lying in a puddle of water in the bottom of the boat, as if she had dropped it in the middle of a conversation to do something else. Jade picked it up, but the screen was dead.
As they neared the shore, the old fisherman aimed his boat straight at the beach. Through luck, or experience, he managed to catch a perfect wave, and they surfed in with a speed and skill that Jade had to admire. As the aluminum hull rasped onto the concrete boat ramp, Patrick—Jade and Kyle’s stepfather—was there, reaching over the side. He scooped Kyle up in one swift movement and began running up the beach, yelling over his shoulder at Joan to help Jade. A small crowd had gathered and were staring at them as if they were aliens come down from a distant planet. Rena and her mates, Screwdriver and the Head, were standing off to one side.
“What happened, Weasel? Go out over your depth? Oughta remember to wear your water-wings next time.”
Jerks! Jade thought, but she needed all her strength to keep walking, supported by her mother and the fisherman.
Joan paused, however, and said, “What’s your problem? My daughter has just saved her brother’s life. While you, when it came to the crunch, for all your puff and big words, were about as much use as an origami manual on a building site.”
Rena stopped smiling. She turned and stomped off down the beach, her two cronies in tow.
Patrick’s car was parked, or rather ploughed into the soft sand, beside the boat ramp. For one long moment she doubted they would get free. The wheels spun and spat sand before they gripped and revved back onto firm tarmac. It took them less than five minutes to reach Dr. Bilges’
surgery, just a couple of rooms built onto the side of his house near the village center. Jade and Kyle had been coming here since they were tiny, so the flagstone path down past the rose garden brought back every childhood misadventure. Mrs. Cotild, the nurse—generously built, generous with sweets when they were good, but with her tongue when they were not—opened the door.
“Lordy! What happened to the poor laddie? Get him in here quick. Come on, bring him straight through.”
Patrick laid Kyle onto the examination table in the surgery.
Jade was shunted onto a chair in the corner. Bilges blew his metallic, disinfectant breath across her.
“Let’s have a look. Been playing the heroine again, have you?”
“No, I just…”
“Drink this down—in one. That’s it.”
The milky liquid tasted of chalk. Mrs. Cotild laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Right, come along with me, lassie. We haven’t finished with you yet.”
She followed the nurse through a door into the doctor’s house, along a hall to his bathroom.
“Don’t go scraping any of that goo onto the doctor’s walls, hear me? Okay, kit off and under that shower.”
Jade scrubbed at her body, using a vomit-smelling soap Mrs. Cotild had left her. The sludge stained her arms, legs, even her neck. Even after she managed to scrape off the rubbery substance, which coagulated in the plughole, her skin was left discolored by a repugnant tinge. When she returned, dressed in shorts and a sweater of the doctor’s, Mrs. Cotild thrust a cup of hot soup into her hands and wrapped her in a blanket.
“Get that down you and see if you can’t get a bit of rest, lass, until we finish with your brother.”
Bilges had some sort of tube sticking in Kyle’s nose while he lay on his side on the examination table. Joan and Patrick stood woodenly in the center of the small room, each peering over one of the doctor’s shoulders. Mrs. Cotild had squeezed her bulk between the filing cabinet and the examination table, and was wiping Kyle’s tears away. It felt like a scene from Emergency except Jade had no idea it all felt quite so horrible when it actually happened. Deep down in her gut she felt hideous. Everyone looked pale and worried. For the first time, she had to accept, to realize the consequences of what she was responsible for: This was her doing. It was all her fault for leaving her brother alone in the water.
No, Kyle would be okay as long as he could throw up everything he swallowed in the sea. He would recover. Any minute now, it would be over. They could go back home and have dinner, watch television, do everything they always did in the evenings. Tomorrow they could go to the beach again. She would look after him better this time, not go and lie on her towel while he was out there, not even if their mom was watching, too. If she had stayed in the water with Kyle, she might have kept him from heading so far out. The weird thing was that Dr. Bilges, Mrs. Cotild, everybody kept calling her a heroine—even Patrick had said it—yet it was her fault that Kyle was lying here crying with a tube sticking up his nose.
She closed her eyes, tried to relax.
“Jade! Are you okay? Feeling all right?”
Her eyes snapped open at Patrick’s voice. She had drifted off. Patrick put his arm around her. “Time for us to hit the road.”
They thanked the doctor and trailed out to the car. As they drove home, Jade thought about the slick. It was still floating around out there, but where had it come from?
After leaving town by the motorway that ran down the coast, just over the bridge from the turnoff to their beach, they drove by a place where the countryside was scarred by a wide swath of graded earth. This was the site of Jade’s troubles with Rena. The Synengine research facility: a squat, white concrete block, harsh against the green fields and darker forest across the river. Two aluminum chimneys rose ten yards high, gleaming in late sunlight. From the right-hand funnel a wisp of pale smoke or steam drifted, but otherwise there was no movement. In the car park, a dozen or so workers’ cars sat beside a flash, lead-colored BMW belonging to the Synengine CEO, Dr. Hagues.
“That place is so ugly!”
From the front seat, Joan raised her head from nursing Kyle: “It’s for a good cause. Sometimes we have to accept a little ugliness in life to help improve the world.”
“I’ll never accept an ugly life.”
They skirted the perimeter and turned onto Point Mauri Road, leaving the looming monstrosity behind. Then they were traveling between fields on the right and the Mauri River on their left. On the far shore, gloomy in twilight, rose the native forest reserve, a dark, closed mass of vegetation. The road curved, and dunes came between them and the river mouth, hiding the sea, which lay east. Finally, they turned right, into their own road, and roared up their driveway.
Later, lying in bed—after having eaten some hot stew Patrick had cooked up—Jade’s queasiness returned. This time it didn’t strike as strongly as before, yet seemed to creep into her consciousness quietly—as a sort of waking dream. All those competing colors whirled about in her head, and sounds of the sea seemed to follow her heartbeat softly, insistently. Something wanted to be acknowledged. She could hear a mocking voice, the boy’s, and a trace of his laugh. He seemed to be forming words, yet she felt weak, could not understand the sounds… hursshh… faa… daw… oh... Little by little her concentration frayed, drifting away into the wide night. She slipped down into a silky, dreamless sleep.
12. Death
A lake… so large… it is Bhaanj-krraash-oh-bhaan…
Kreh-ursh felt bewildered. It must be… Dragon-Belly Lake… but why was this mythical place appearing in his vision? Purple-brown peaks rose jaggedly all around the broken sides of an ancient crater that formed the lakeshore. Sunlight flashed into his eyes off the water’s flat surface. His disembodied awareness hovered above, staring down into the still depths.
Describe…
Nothing. Dead. Still…
Then he saw it, could hardly believe his eyes: a creature he had only ever heard of in stories…
Here… it can’t be…
Why was it entering his vision? His eyes were dazzled by the bright, changing colors. He had to be mistaken, but no underwater creature could come close to this for such awe-inspiring beauty. It really was...
Describe.
Ee… ee-kawg-zjhur!
Ee-kawg-zjhur… the mythical jewel fish. Almost as soon as he spied it, the fish flipped out of his sight. With that, the vision dissolved, giving him no time to react or reflect on what he had seen.
Smoke swirled, wafting him deeper into its billows. As it cleared, in the fire’s heart, a scene was forming: He was standing inside a bright, white-lit building. A young boy lay on a high bed, such as the Rraawuu city dwellers used inland. He was pale with sickness. People—probably the boy’s family—stood around, dressed in peculiar, clinging garments.
Then that scene dissolved. He was carried across plains. Cloud shadows chased each other over waves of grass forever rippling like a wind-blown sea. A silver mist approached from the horizon. He was intrigued, the way it undulated, changing and flowing… Then the silver took substance, the earth trembled underfoot. He realized he was watching a huge herd of white and gray beasts thundering wildly through the knee-high grasses. They galloped closer, and he identified flying manes, tails, snorting nostrils, and pounding hooves… He saw horns: thin, straight, gleaming ivory sprouting from each beast’s forehead. Then they were upon him. The dust of their passing rose up, obscuring their forms. The blowing grass melded into the fire’s green-gray smoke, and the vision flowed onwards, carrying him toward…
Kaa-meer-geh…
Why?
A… ritual… don’t understand…
The secret island of the shahiroh. What did it mean? To see this, he must have to go there… but only the shahiroh, the sea callers, came onto this island. Yet it could be no other: Everything was red rock and dust, and that smoldering crater dominated the skyline. There was a wide, sandy space, surrounded by a ring of
wooden stakes driven into the ground. Beyond, he saw huts similar to his own but somehow more brooding, more mysterious, and farther off, the mouths of caves. Groups of shahiroh stood in the central area, identified by their blue robes. They appeared to be chanting, but he heard nothing. One of the shahiroh approached a kneeling figure, hooded, in green, holding a clay cup of some liquid. And he knew that person…
But the scene had changed once more, and now he was flying high in the air. He glided up a steep green valley over which two volcano-like peaks towered. They gleamed silver in the sunlight.
Gehg… Mountains!
His thoughts were now flowing fluidly to Taashou, verbalized mentally even as he formulated them. The vision dragged him back:
…sun shining… freezing wind…
A wind that roared down the valley. The air was colder than he had ever felt in his life, and that chill whiteness covering them, which he had heard about but never seen before, that must be snow. That was why it was cold. One of the peaks was slightly higher than the other. Could they be Geh-urbh-geh-ot?
Heh,Taashou confirmed. Geh-urbh-geh-ot.
Big-brother-little-sister, the twin peaks at the center of the mainland, from which they say all creation sprang.
…high up, valley between two peaks… building… a building made of the sea!
At the top of the valley was a construction surrounded by more snow. As shiny and translucent as the sea, yet it looked as hard as mountain stone, as if it were obsidian from the volcanoes, but clear not dark. Those parapets and turrets could not be real. It would be impossible to build such a palace. He drifted closer, distinguishing two frail figures standing before the building. They appeared old and stooped, a man and a woman. Then mist swirled again.