Unease crept into Keani. Not because the reaction was unfamiliar: those she visited were always conquered by the parasite’s glamour. But nobody ever confessed it with such candor; never did anybody tell Keani how readily they were disarmed, and never would she expect that person to be a clam woman who dared to say it while looking into her eyes.
“I’ve come on the behalf of the Ialan trade company.” Keani gestured toward her sack. “May I present these gifts to show our gratitude for the opportunity to know your people?”
It was a familiar speech.
The reply, however, was not. “For the opportunity to know our pearls, you mean,” the clammer said. “We have had Volca traders visit us before with many trinkets like the ones you bring. Nothing we’ve been shown yet convinced us to bother with the ways of above.”
A droplet wriggled beneath Keani’s collar. The parasite twitched. It annoyed her, and she felt tired, and for a moment, she let courtesy go. “Yet your tribe sent you here,” she said. “How curious.”
The clammer shrugged. “Maybe they just want to meet the girl with the glamour. Maybe they wish to see if you turn into a great big clam in their eyes. I don’t know the minds of the elders. I was just sent up here to fetch you.”
The woman gestured toward the steps that plunged down into the dark. The clam caves lay below where the ocean swept into the volcano. It was an unwelcoming place, cold and salty and acrid, but the clam tribe had chosen tradition over comfort for hundreds of years to hunt the clusters of clams that clung in the watery tunnels.
“I’m Nahoa,” the woman said. “I’ll show you below.”
“Keani.” She picked up her sack.
“Can you carry that?” Nahoa said. “You’re such a little thing, with those squidlet arms of yours.”
The little strength Keani had left abandoned her, sucked away by the glamour’s reaction to Nahoa’s words—any hint of specificity, any opportunity at becoming more pleasing, and the parasite took it. Keani felt herself altering, shrinking, narrowing. Her frame thinned out. Her hands weakened and her fingers slimmed. The sack became too heavy and she dropped it onto the cave floor.
She tried to not show her frustration. “You say I don’t look like I can carry a sack, and you make it happen.”
Nahoa appeared startled. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I’ll carry it, then.”
Nahoa picked up the sack and together they walked down into the belly of the volcano. Keani felt Nahoa’s glances in the dim and the glamour feeding on the attention. By the time they reached the bottom of the steps, the glamour had completed its bond with the strange woman, and whatever reservations she’d had toward Keani were gone, leaving only admiration in its wake. The parasite settled, content, and the ache in Keani’s back dissipated.
They emerged into the mouth of a cave where stalactites drooped from the ceiling like looming teeth. A cavernous opening gaped to the raging ocean outside, and a mass of people approached from a gathering of huts that were built on the slivery beach. As they approached, Keani felt herself splitting again, the glamour doubling, tripling, quadrupling its efforts: ten-fold, twenty-fold. Her soul groaned.
When she’d greeted the crowd, been bowed to and the countless versions of her caressed by admiring gazes, Nahoa took her to a small shack.
“The elders will review your offerings tonight,” Nahoa said. “I apologize that you cannot be present, but the council lets in no women, even less an abover.”
“I understand.”
“They should know by morning if you have anything of value to trade.”
“I would like to see the pearls in the meantime.”
“I can show you to the shucking cave in the morning.”
“Please.”
Nahoa nodded and left Keani alone in the small shack. She prepared for bed. The rough-woven blankets smelled dank and were salted with tiny grains of black sand, but Keani didn’t mind. The hut itself felt dry and warm, and the parasite in her back was still.
Moments like those, when that thing inside of her silenced, Keani would close her eyes and try to remember herself. She’d imagine her own face: not the projection of someone else’s comforts; not the lost husband of a widower; not the mother of a once abandoned child; but herself, Keani, a girl of fifteen. Her father claimed that she looked just like her mother: brown hair, black eyes, a heart-shaped face with a tease of freckles. Her father could still see Keani—the real her—through the glamour, as she had been before. But Keani couldn’t.
Where she lay on the blankets, she lifted her hands up and opened her eyes. She had hoped to see the slim fingers of a fifteen-year old, but she just found a flash of hands, dozens of shapes and hues, too many to count and too unfamiliar to call her own, as the glamour still entertained the fantasies of the clammers outside.
As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered if she’d dream, and if she did, she questioned if the dreams would even be hers.
The council, Nahoa apologized, hadn’t gotten to the matter of the trade agreement.
“They’re old men, traditional men,” she explained to Keani. “They care more about the tides and the color of the waters than they do about abovers. They should decide tonight if they wish to discuss it further, but I warn you—nobody ever understands our needs enough to tempt us to trade with them.”
“I can wait,” Keani said. “My father would not expect me to give up so easily.”
Nahoa nodded. “Then I shall try my best to entertain you in the meantime.”
She took Keani to the shucking cave as promised. It had an underground beach covered with shell fragments, the slivers shining in a sparse light from clay oil urns. A group of women and children hunched over piles of newly harvested clams. The water beyond the beach was black and deep, and every now and then clam divers emerged from the water, bodies shimmering wet and their nets full of blue-shimmery clams. Some were as large as a man’s fist.
Nahoa picked up one of the clams, and shoved her crude stone knife into the slit between the slippery shells. She wrestled with the clam and wrenched it open. In her palm, hugged by the frothy innard of the clam, lay the largest pearl Keani had ever seen.
“That can buy someone a week’s worth of food,” Keani said. “It’s a great treasure.”
Nahoa shook her head. “It’s a curse. The sands swept into the clams here decades ago, and now many of them come up with these defects. The giant clams are our food source, and they give less meat because of the pearls. I don’t understand how these useless things help anyone.”
“It matters to some. To those who already have been fed for a week. People wear them on necklaces, or to decorate their clothes.”
“I don’t understand such obsessions.”
“You don’t live above. It’s very different.”
“I can imagine. Must be terribly bright and windy.”
“And wet.” The parasite squirmed a little at the mere words, and Keani gritted her teeth at the dull pain.
Nahoa noticed. “It must be even more difficult for someone like you, with a parasite. Must be hard to never be seen as yourself. To just be what the fantasies of others make you into.”
“It is.”
“Was it on purpose?”
Keani shuddered at the idea. Why would anybody willingly give up themselves to become a fractured mirror whose shards were made up of the faces of others, she wondered. “My parents and I were in the jungle to trade animal skins from the deep-tribe, and a rope bridge snapped beneath us. We lay in the precipice for days. A shaman found us and tried to help, the best she knew how, but it went awry.”
Keani had lost her memory of the incident and everything that had come before, so all she knew was from her father’s feverish dreams when he cursed the shaman’s spells and conjurings. He had accepted grotesquely healed bones from the
poor splinters, and he had accepted leaving behind the body of his wife after she’d died from her skull cracking like a coconut. But he had not accepted his only daughter remaining infected with parasites and blood leeches to, as the shaman said, “suck her soul back from the beyond.” Her father had paid dearly to have her healed by the best physicians for as long as they would extend credit. It had left her with one sole parasite and her father with countless debts.
“Physicians have told me it can be removed,” Keani said. “But I won’t do it until I know my father’s debts are paid. We need the glamour to help us trade.”
“I see the pain it causes you,” Nahoa said. “I say, you sacrifice too much.”
“My father is the one who sacrificed the most. He walks on twisted legs. He lost my mother.”
“But he knows who he is. He knows his own face. Will you ever get to know yours, Keani?”
“Soon, I can get rid of it.” Keani tried to sound hopeful. “Just one more agreement, that’s all I need to afford to have it cut out.”
Nahoa gazed at her with compassion. “Knives,” she said, touching Keani’s hand gently. “Tell your father we need knives.”
When Keani returned from the volcanic caves, emerging out into the moist light of the city above, rain pounced her like a jungle cat. The parasite immediately shook and shivered, and as agony cracked along the muscles in her back, she hurried through the winding streets to her home. She knew that the pain came from the rain, but some part of her wanted to believe the parasite was angry at the prospect of being cut out. And cut out, it would be: in her pocket, she had one of the pearls, and she knew her father had agreements with a smith on the outskirts of Volca. Knives would be easy to get.
At home her father leaned on his crutches on the open balcony, gazing out over the city, the bamboo roofs slick with rain beneath the sky. He appeared frail in the waning light. When he embraced her, he shivered as much as she.
“I had nightmares while you were away,” he whispered. “I dreamed of your mother again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I shouldn’t have sent you down there. The clammers are inhospitable. I should have known they’d want nothing to do with us.”
“Knives,” Keani said. “That’s what they want.”
She withdrew the pearl and handed it to her father, closing his shaking fingers over it. He stared at it with eyes as dark as the sky outside.
“They agreed?” His jaw dropped in surprise.
“They did.”
“Your glamour. Curse as it is, it works miracles.”
Keani wanted to say that it wasn’t because of the glamour—that the success was hers: that she, Keani, had earned the respect of someone not because of the glamour but in spite of it. But as much as she wished it, the glamour created so much falseness she couldn’t know for sure if it was true.
“Tell me about me, father,” she said. “Tell me again, please.”
He touched her face. “You’re Keani. You’re fifteen years old. Your skin is like bronze, with a spray of freckles across your cheeks. Your hair is brown and thick and lustrous. You’re a beautiful girl.”
“When the knives are delivered, the debt to the doctors will be paid,” Keani said, taking her father’s hand.
“Yes.”
“You will not hold it against me if I seek a surgeon? If I go to the mainland?”
Her father’s face darkened. “It’s dangerous,” he said. “What the shaman did, all her esoteric magic . . . there is no guarantee you’ll come away unharmed if you try to remove it.”
Keani wanted to tell him that she was already harmed—that she didn’t know who she was, that she had a million faces and she didn’t recognize a single one as her own, and each time someone looked at her she felt like a jungle being flooded away by torrential rain: little pieces of her were torn from her soul to be lost forever.
But she didn’t tell him. She just kissed his forehead and went to bed, leaving him clutching the pearl in his hand.
The smith lived in a cramped hut on a muddy trail at the base of the volcano. He was elderly and his hands were scarred from flying embers from the fire pits, but he was skilled and his blades were as thin as banana leaves.
Keani took the knife samples back to the clammers. This time, she wasn’t greeted just by Nahoa, but by a group of the clammer elders. They were pale, like the underbellies of fish, and their skin hung in tired, moist folds down hairless chests. Most of them were blind, so they examined Keani’s knives with their hands, hissing in delight as the sharp blades cut their bloated fingers.
The elders agreed to her knives. In turn she was given a basket filled to the brim with black pearls. Nahoa offered to help her carry it back up the steps to Volca.
“If you walk away, the glamour will fade and I won’t be the weak girl you see,” Keani said. “You don’t have to come along.”
“I would like to. And I don’t think you’re weak.” Nahoa took the basket gently out of her hands, and they started to walk back toward the stairs, and above.
“You’ll be the last person to see the glamour,” Keani said cheerfully. “Maybe one day you can tell legends of it.”
“I’d rather tell stories about the girl who bore many beautiful faces and was loved by all and still fought to get her own back.”
“Whatever that face may look like,” Keani said. “I don’t remember what came before. I don’t know what people will think of me.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that.” Nahoa’s hand brushed up against hers. “They will like you just fine.”
When they emerged from the caverns and had to part, Keani’s heart twinged. “I suppose I won’t be able to come back,” she said. “Your tribe won’t let anybody in who can’t fool them with a glamour.”
“Don’t think that,” Nahoa said. “You’re always welcome. You brought us blades. We will always be grateful.”
They parted. It was the first time that a glamour bond snapped off and Keani didn’t feel relief. She just felt empty.
She walked through Volca, rain fizzling in the torches that lit the wet streets. As she passed people and saw their smiles at her glamour’s projections, Keani accepted the flare of pain in her back. After all, the parasite was in its death throes—and who knew how people would look at her once the parasite was gone. Perhaps these were the last looks of interest, the last glances of attraction. Maybe soon, there would be nothing left to love at all.
When she arrived home, Keani carried the basket through the darkened halls toward her father’s chambers. She wasn’t involved in the administrative part of the business and she told herself that’s why her father didn’t allow her entrance into his chamber. She suspected he was trying to protect her from the guilt of seeing him working into the early hours, bent over debt notices, worry swirling in his black eyes. But in possession of a basket that would finally end their troubles, Keani strode to the locked chamber. If her father was in there, she wanted to tell him they were free and see that weight fall from his shoulders.
She heard the clacking of her father’s crutches against the floorboards, and when she reached his chamber she found the door cracked open.
“Father?”
She entered.
And gasped.
What met her was not a sad sight of her father surrounded by empty shelves or hunched over stacks of debtor’s letters. Instead, she found him at a desk flanked by boxes of riches stacked on top of each other. There were silver clusters from the mountain tribes she’d visited the month before, and bolts of silks from the weavers she’d helped to convince last year. There were piles of bamboo weave mats in a corner, flanked by urns with incenses and blue-spice. At the desk, her father was not twisting his hands over bills, but instead counting shiny gold coins.
There were no bills, and there were no debts. There were only riches.
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Her father’s head snapped up. “Keani,” he said. ”Why are you in here? You shouldn’t be here.”
“You’ve lied,” she whispered. “All this time? All this time, we were rich?”
“No,” her father said, struggling to his twisted feet. “You don’t understand.”
Betrayal roiled up Keani’s throat, and as she turned to flee, the basket slipped out of her hand. The pearls spilled all over the floor, crackling like fireworks as they dimpled the wooden boards. Or maybe that was the sound of her heart breaking, Keani didn’t know.
Nahoa was alone in the shucking cave when Keani came upon her. The pale girl hunched over a heap of clams, wet ringlets of her hair plastered to her cheeks. Her face flooded with first joy, then concern when she saw Keani’s tears.
“What’s the matter?” Nahoa said, standing up, dropping the clams to the ground.
“He lied, Nahoa!” Keani sobbed. “My father lied to me all this time.”
Nahoa took her into her arms. She smelled of salt and sand, and in the cool cave, her skin felt warm, like home. Keani burrowed deeper in her embrace.
“He has become a rich man, Nahoa,” she wept. “All the while, I’ve suffered, and he’s become rich! All that mattered was this thing inside me, and the fortune it would bring. It was never about protecting me, or keeping me healthy. It was just about keeping this cursed creature alive!”
Nahoa fell quiet for a while, holding Keani close. When Keani’s sobs lessened, Nahoa let her go and picked up one of the clams. Wrestling it open was easier this time, with the thin bladed knife Keani had brought her. Another pearl lay inside, gleaming and lustrous. They both looked at it, and Keani felt angry she still marveled at its beauty.
Then, in one swift motion, Nahoa threw the pearl into the water, and the blackness swallowed it with a greedy gulp.
Keani didn’t understand. “Why did you do that?”
“Some people may care about the pearls,” Nahoa said. “But others know the clams are what matters: the good, nourishing parts, not those flashy jewels.” She grasped Keani’s shoulders gently. “Keani, I don’t know whose face I am looking into when I look at you. But I know there is a soul behind that face that I want to know.”