Islands of Fire Page 2

  For several long minutes she pauses, listening for Motua. She hears nothing. He is gone.

  She can’t wait any longer. Kina tosses the pahi back into the canoe and shoves it back into the depths, climbing aboard. She tugs open the sail and steers for open water.

  “Hey!” comes a shout behind her. It is Motua. In his hands are several coconuts and a dead shorebird.

  Kina points toward the horizon. Motua gazes that direction, then ducks down behind the rocks.

  She swings the canoe back around and returns for Motua, who quickly tosses the supplies into the canoe and leaps aboard.

  “How long do you think it will be until they get here?” Kina asks.

  “Not long enough. You steer, I’ll paddle.”

  “Right.”

  Taking up the single oar, Motua begins to guide the canoe back out of the little rocky inlet. For a moment, they wonder if they will be too hard to see at this distance and against the camouflage of the rocks, but a few minutes later the fleet turns their direction and the drumming grows more frantic.

  “What do we do?” Motua asks. “Should we beach this thing and head into the jungle?”

  “They’ll spot it, and give chase. We can’t stay here. If we’re quick, they might not see us slip out to sea. And if they do, maybe they won’t chase us across open ocean.”

  “You’re crazy. We have their pahi. They won’t let us just escape,” Motua replies, but after a moment of thought, he changes course and points the little canoe toward the empty horizon. “If we’re going to do this, we’ll need to do it smart. We have the tapa cloth—we’ll use it for shade during the day, then catch dew with it overnight for water. Can you fish?”

  Kina nods. “I can manage. Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know. We’re headed the opposite direction from my home, but I don’t see we have any choice. Somewhere this direction lies the Shallow Sea and Lohoke`a. It might take many days to reach it, maybe even weeks.”

  “We won’t survive that long.”

  Motua looks at her with a grave expression.

  No more is said, though it is clear the two of them have agreed to risk the voyage to Lohoke`a, as Motua maintains his course. Before long, they once more have to face the reef and its dangerous walls of waves. “Hold on to something,” Motua says, and clutches the paddle tightly as the prow of the canoe digs into the first waves. Kina watches behind them, gripping a sennit rope for stability. The fleet is faster than the little canoe, a fact that she doesn’t yet want to share with Motua. Perhaps once they hit the open waters things will change.

  As soon as they are away from the shore, they hear long and loud blasts from a conch echo across the water. “They’ve spotted us,” Motua says.

  Passage through the reef is difficult, and more than once the waves threaten to swamp them. By the time they break through to the other side, both Motua and Kina are drenched and shivering in a stiff wind that whips up the chop.

  The fleet pauses on the inside of the reef, then begins to tack along it, looking for a safe place to risk the passage. Some of the lighter, more fleet vanguard canoes push through and continue after Kina and Motua.

  “How far back are they?” Motua asks. “Can you guess?”

  “I’d say half an hour or so. They’re faster than us.”

  Motua grunts. “Then we’ll have to make a stand here, I guess.”

  Kina looks up at the sky. Though it is a bright day, islands of white clouds scud across the blue sky. Toward the northeast, they bunch up into a thicker mass that casts a shadow over the far-off water.

  “Steer us that way,” Kina says. Motua looks at her, perplexed, but at her insistence he turns the canoe toward the northeast. There is little else to do.

  Kina drops to her knees and takes up one of the coconuts and the dead bird. They will need these things for their voyage, but there won’t be a voyage at all unless she can do something to change their odds. Perhaps Father Sky can be persuaded to help.

  Sliding the pahi free of the tapa cloth, she brings it down on one of the coconuts, shocked at how easily it slices through the tough green outer shell and even the fibrous brown interior. With one clean slice, the coconut is split open and exposed. The clear liquid inside seeps out.

  Kina raises the coconut. “O, Father Sky,” she begins, raising her gaze to the sky, “Master of the light and the wind, Creator of life, Giver of heat, from whose loins sprung all life, your daughter entreats you for aid at this hour. To thee I offer up this bounty of food and meat. Please guide us from our enemies and fill our sail with wind. I sing they name.”

  When she is finished with the prayer, Kina tips the coconut so that the coconut water dribbles out. It is caught by the wind. She pitches the drained coconut into the sea and then holds the bird’s carcass aloft with her eyes closed. Moments later, the bird follows the coconut.

  “You’ve sacrificed half our food,” Motua says with a grumble. “I hope you are a priest.”

  “I wasn’t raised as a kupuna,” Kina replies, “though I know their ways.”

  Motua looks at her sideways. “Do you have any more surprises?”

  But there is no response. The wind stays even, though it shifts direction and Kina is forced to rotate the sail to maintain speed.

  “It looks like your standing with Father Sky is not as solid as you thought.”

  “Perhaps not, but look there,” Kina says, pointing in the direction of their travel. Under the denser clouds it has begun to rain.

  “Get the cloth ready,” Motua says, but Kina is already on it. She ties all four ends of the tapa to pegs on either side of the canoe. Before long, they have reached the edge of the rain, and the fat drops begin to fill the tapa.

  Motua is still paddling, though he is visibly tiring. “I thank Father Sky for the water, but something to drink is the least of our problems right now.”

  Kina agrees, though after a few minutes she notices the rain increasing in strength. “It’s becoming a squall,” she says to Motua. He continues paddling into the thick rain. “Perhaps Father Sky means to conceal us in the rain.”

  “It’s a mixed blessing, then,” Motua replies, leaning into the canoe as heavy chop begins to toss the canoe. “The winds are picking up, and so, too, are the waves. Take down the sail.”

  Kina does so, and soon after the wind becomes so strong that it would have torn the fragile sail. The gale rips the tops off the waves and sprays them sideways against Kina and Motua. It becomes too strong even for Motua, who pulls in the paddle and drops down beside Kina behind the gunwales of the canoe for protection.

  The rain is joined by a dense mist, and before long the little canoe is bobbing in a full storm and they can see nothing other than the waves rising and falling around them. The canoe is hoisted high over the crest of one wave, races down into a trough, then is lifted up the next wave. Though Kina is no stranger to sea travel, this extreme motion makes her ill. She curls up and focuses on her heartbeat.

  The storm continues for hours. When at last the winds and rain begin to die down, Kina and Motua sit up to assess their situation. All they can see around them is the ocean, though Kina fears what they might see when the sky clears. Will they still be near the island? Where is the fleet?

  She shivers and waits, and eventually the clouds break and the warm sun washes over them. Keli`anu is no more than a barely-visible smudge against the far horizon, and there is no sign of the enemy canoes.

  “Thank you, Father Sky,” Kina says.

  With Motua at the helm, the canoe presses on toward the distant horizon.

  Chapter 3: The Shallow Sea

  For three days they travel, guided eastward by winds and currents. There is nothing but sea and sky around them. Motua rations the remaining coconuts but such meager food doesn’t last long, and eventually they have scraped each one clean. Kina saves their hollowed-out shells and fills them each morning with the water that forms on the tapa cloth o
vernight, water which is barely enough to last them through the hot days. During the morning hours, the tapa serves as a poor net which Kina drags behind the canoe, trying not to let go of it in her weakness. Rarely does it catch anything. Most of the time she must pick out debris—sticks, bark, floating jellyfish—and return the net to the water, though occasionally some smaller fish get drawn in and Kina pulls them from the water by hand. Kina and Motua eat them raw and cast their carcasses into the sea.

  Before long, a shark begins to trail behind them. Kina watches it carefully, but it loses interest and disappears when they start leaving the dead fish inside the boat instead, sloshing around in the sea water in the canoe bottom.

  Days turn into nights, then nights to days, and when it doesn’t seem they can handle much more, Kina wakes from dozing on a hot afternoon to find the water around them has turned from deep blue to a bright turquoise hue.

  “Motua,” she says, nudging him awake. Both of them are curled under the tapa for shade, though days of sunlight has burned their skin. Kina can barely speak through her parched mouth.

  Motua lifts his head to look.

  All around the sea has completely changed color. There is no sign of the deeper water.

  Kina climbs to the prow of the canoe and looks down. Not far under them, perhaps two fathoms, the sandy sea floor drifts past. She sees no distinguishing marks—no rocks, no reefs. There is only sand.

  Motua is also looking below. “It’s like a desert,” he says, and Kina sees what he means: The sea floor is sculpted by waves just as dunes by wind. Were the ocean to lower itself by twenty feet, this sea would become nothing more than an endless rolling expanse of sand.

  The only life she sees are the occasional skate or ray, drifting along the sandy bottom, or a patch of turtle grass waving in the current.

  “Our situation hasn’t improved,” Motua says, and he is right. Though they are in shallower water, they are still as lost and in need of food and water as they were in deeper waters.

  They spend the day under the tapa, sweating out the last of their water as the brackish swill on the bottom of the canoe pools around them. Kina can hardly think, she is so hungry.

  “Apparently we are destined to die together,” Motua says, “Back in the pits in Toko-Mua you said you were from Kotuhiwa. How did you come to be so far from home?”

  Kina looks at Motua. The warrior’s eyes are partially closed and his lips are just as cracked as her own. “I was born in the city of Huka`i. Have you been there?”

  Motua shakes his head.

  “It’s a place unlike any other. Everything you’ve heard about it is true. Imagine a village, a large one. So large, in fact, that where a normal village would end this one keeps going. It’s like ten villages—no, fifty villages—all together. We don’t live in huts there, like everyone else. We build our huts of wood planks and they are very close together, and the paths between them are sometimes so muddy that we have to lay down boards to walk on, and the paths near where the ali`i and the kahuna live are lined with stones. It is very crowded and it is hard to live. My parents died when I was young, and I was forced to do whatever I could to survive.”

  “You had no other family? No extended `ohana?”

  “It’s a long story,” Kina says, and decides she doesn’t have the energy. “Anyway, I left there a couple of years ago and sailed around Mokukai for a while, helping on the voyaging canoes. We went from island to island trading whatever goods might be valuable. In Heka, we were overcome in the night by silent warriors wearing helmets. They dragged us all off the beach and set fire to our canoe. The fire was huge. Anyone who resisted was butchered, though the burning warriors brought the bodies with them. We were bound and placed on one of their swift raiding canoes and transported to a larger slave canoe far out at sea.”

  As she talks, Kina can remember the sounds, the smells. She can recall the terror of being lifted up by lassos onto the deck of the huge slave canoe just as the sun was setting. In the center of the canoe was a low wooden stockade building constructed of bamboo into which she, and the other surviving members of her trading party, were unceremoniously thrown. The stockade was already filled with dozens of sobbing, terrified people stolen in raids around the island. Men, women, and children alike were soaked and shivering, unwashed for days by anything other than cold rain. The stockade reeked of filth and waste and it was so cramped Kina couldn’t find a place to stretch out where she wasn’t touching several other people.

  The slave canoe made the long voyage back to Keli`anu, a trip that took over a week of hard travel. The burning warriors tossed fish, rotting fruits, and meal scraps into the stockade only once a day and were stingy with the water held in log barrels. When potential slaves died, their bodies were hauled out and dragged into another small building in back from which an unearthly stench of decay hovered over the deck night and day.

  Once they arrived at the village of Toko-Mua, in a broad inlet on the western side of the island of Keli`anu, Kina and the other slaves were brought out of the stockade, too weak to resist, and dropped into one of many pits dug into the ground around the temple. Kina had only the briefest of glances at the temple structure. It was tall, slender pyramid made of round stones held together with hardened mud. A huge archway in the front revealed a single tall chamber within which was perpetually lit by flaming troughs.

  As she recounts the story, she sees Motua reacting as though remembering similar treatment.

  “And you,” Kina asks. “How did they catch a man of the wilderness, like yourself?”

  “It is easy to catch anyone when they are sleeping.”

  Kina asks, “You were by the shore?”

  “No,” Motua replies. “I was in Aiuna, a village on the southern shore of Ku`ano`ano.”

  “Not in the uplands?”

  Motua closes his eyes. “Not at that time. I was with Luana.”

  “Who is that?” Kina asks, though she thinks she already knows.

  Motua is quiet for a while. Then, he says, “Luana was a girl from the village. She and I were going to get married, though I hadn’t yet received a blessing from her father. I took Luana along the shore, and we fell asleep together in an area where there is sand between high rocks. It’s a nice, secluded area where we often liked to go. We ate and fell asleep in the afternoon, and when I woke there were warriors around me. I tried to fight but was outnumbered.”

  He trails off, not finishing his story, though Kina is sure she knows how it ended. She decides to change the subject.

  “It looks like we both want revenge.”

  “Impossible.”

  She sighs. “Probably, but I can still dream.” She pulls aside enough of the tapa to peer at the sky. It is blue and cloudless. A stiff wind rushes over the canoe, filling the untended sail. Neither of them care any longer about navigation. At this point, Kina figures, Mother Ocean and Father Sky will take them where they want them to go, even if that means to the Land Beyond.

  There is a bump, and Kina realizes she has fallen asleep. Her eyes come open to the same sight—endless open sky—but something seems different.

  She sits up with much exertion and looks over the gunwales of the canoe. There is still the endless horizon, though now the water has grown so shallow that the canoe has ground to a halt.

  “We’re beached,” she says to Motua. He stirs just enough that she knows he is still alive.

  Kina gets up and steps out over the gunwale into the water. It is very warm, much more so than any water she has ever felt in the wilds. She sinks only to her shin before landing in the soft coral sand.

  All around her is nothing but shallow sea. Some ways off she can see where the water dwindles to a low sandbar. Over the slight rise of the sandbar she can see more water. And beyond it…

  “Motua!” she gasps. “There’s land!”

  Motua sits up. He looks weakened and Kina is suddenly afraid that he won’t make it there.

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p; He gazes in the direction she is pointing until he sees it, too. A set of spires, barely visible through the ocean haze, rising like pillars from the sea.

  “It’s a trick,” Motua says. “There are kepolo trying to fool us.”

  “No devils,” Kina says. “Those are the Teeth.”

  “The Teeth?”

  “It’s what the navigators call the islands in the middle of the Shallow Sea.”

  “You mean Lohoke`a?”

  “Yes, that’s the place,” she says. Seeing these distant columns of rock has given her a spurt of energy. “Motua, maybe we can find fresh water and birds to eat there.” Kina shoves the canoe back into the deeper water, her feet digging into loose sand. “Help me!”

  Motua manages to climb out of the canoe and lean into it with her. Soon they are adrift again, and Kina helps Motua back in. He leans against the mast and guides the sail with what little strength remains while Kina uses the paddle to push at the sandy sea floor only inches beneath the canoe.

  It is hours, but they make it around the sandbar and let the wind push them toward the Teeth.

  “I can see why they call it that,” Motua says as they grow closer. Kina is watching the tall columns grow more distinct, and is amazed at what she sees. Each is like a stack of rock upon which is a small crown of plants and palm trees. Some of the vegetations stretches down nearly to the water. A cloud of birds orbits the top of one of them. Taller than any tree, the Teeth are like pillars raised by the gods themselves. Erosion from the water has cut them in dramatically at the base, making them look like they float.

  Kina wonders idly if the name comes only from their appearance, or if they might be the actual teeth of some colossal creature sunk in the sands beneath the Shallow Sea.

  The sun is dropping toward the western horizon when they finally arrive at the base of the nearest column. Kina has to crane her neck back to take it in. Great masses of creepers and ferns cling to the sides, dripping with water. Near the rock wall it is cooler. The low waves of the Shallow Sea slap against the side. Kina reaches out and runs her hand along the stones.