Daughter of the Reef (2 page)

Instead the storm grew fitful, blowing harshly from one quarter then quickly shifting to another. The boat slowed as it lost direction and headway; men went to sit in the hulls, feverishly stroking with long paddles.
 

Beyond the forward sail she saw the boat's master and the priest conferring once again. They spoke rapidly, with worried grimaces and a glance in her direction. A crewman hurried forward, carrying an armload of young coconuts. He skidded on the wet matting, dropped one. It rolled into the waves.
 

Tepua saw the priest shake his head. Not a good omen. The sea was hungry and unwilling to wait.

The youth managed to deliver the rest of his burden to the master and the priest. The priest went to the bow of the right hull. Tepua saw him kneel, his robe and feathered headdress fluttering in the wind. One by one he lifted the young coconuts in offering to the storm, pierced each with a sharpened bamboo cane, and poured the milk into the sea.
 

Again the wind turned, now wilder than ever. It struck the sails like a fist, bending the masts, driving the left hull so deep that it threatened to fill. A crewman rushed aft toward Tepua, carrying a length of sennit, coconut fiber cord. She could scarcely see him through the curtain of heavy rain shrouding the canoe. “Bind yourself.” he shouted through the sound of the storm. He thrust the cord at her. Numb with cold and fright, she took it.
 

She glanced down, saw people huddling under their mats and wraps about the base of her platform. Eyes looked up to her in appeal or reproach. Except for Bone-needle, these people were from her new husband's family. She had known them only for the few days they had stayed on her father's island.
 

Now she saw that she could not leave her place. Apart from the lack of faith it would show, the space around her was completely covered by bodies.
 

She reached down, threaded the cord around several pieces of bamboo in the platform beneath her, then about her body, drawing it tight so that it crumpled her bark-cloth robe and bound her to the seat. After she had knotted the sennit, she let one end, about twice the length of her arm, hang free. She had another use for this piece. It might help her find guidance that no human wisdom could supply.
 

Quickly she coiled the cord in her hands, preparing herself for the difficult art of
fai
, making string figures. Fai was well-known throughout her islands, but to most people it served only for amusement. Tepua had become unusually adept at it, able to make patterns on her fingers without conscious effort, until a final figure emerged.
 

The results often surprised her. At times she was certain that the spirits guided her, allowing her to see in the strings the answer to a baffling question. Now, the sea gods were angry. She needed to know what they wanted of her.
 

“No!” rasped Bone-needle, who had long known of Tepua's rare gift. “It is the priest's duty, not yours, to deal with the spirits that trouble us. Put that aside.”
 

Tepua hesitated as she peered ahead, listening to the sails creak and bang. She could see almost nothing through the heavy rain. What had happened to the priest and the master? The rain curtained them from her, silenced their voices. Despite his offerings and his sacred red feathers, the priest clearly had failed. Her fingers tightened about the coil of fiber cord in her hand.
 

Another sailor hurried by, appearing out of the rain like a ghost. Scowling at Tepua, he defied wind and spray to climb the ladder along the mast. She caught her breath when she saw him starting to pull down the sail. When he was done, they would have only the paddlers' strength to drive the canoe.
 

Again she prayed to Tapahi-roro-ariki, begging her ancestress to intercede. Then, as she began to tie the cord into a loop, she heard a crash that made the boat shudder. Mixed with screams, cries, and the beat of rain came a terrible splintering. She saw the outline of the forward mast as it broke and toppled, the falling boom sweeping across the deck, dragging mats and men into the sea.
 

Beneath her, voices mixed in a babble of frenzied prayers. The canoe bucked and dived, caught in the roiling storm. She saw the deck timbers shift as strain twisted one hull out of line with the other. The tension broke a lashing that held her platform to the deck. She glanced down and saw another fraying. Sweating with fear under her bark-cloth robe, Tepua fumbled to untie herself.
 

The people around her groaned, and tried to hold her seat fast as another binding broke. The stool began to shift with every lurch of the canoe. Above her head she heard a stream of angry words while the man aloft wrestled with a sail that would not come down.
 

Tepua was thrown violently from side to side. The platform beneath her began to break apart as people screamed with anguish and reached up to keep her from falling. Then the boat pitched so sharply that she was torn from their hands, tossed sideways, tumbled into a swirling madness of rain and spray and sea.
 

For a few instants Tepua felt stunned, but the shock of hitting the water brought her back to awareness. A good swimmer, she kicked herself to the surface. Now she was free of the bridal seat, though she felt trailing bits of cord and bamboo. She spat brine and managed to suck in a short breath before another wave spilled over her.
 

Again she came up, rising with a swell, and searched for the canoe. When she finally spotted it, she groaned in despair. Surf poured over what remained of the deck while paddlers stroked frantically. Every wave pushed the hapless craft farther from her.
 

The sea pulled her down again. When she surfaced this time and glanced out, the mast looked like a tiny stick and the canoe itself a battered leaf that was rapidly growing smaller. It would not be coming back for her. The people still on board would be lucky to save themselves.
 

What of the other boats in her party? They had been sailing close behind and might have been blown this way. Each time the sea lifted her, she searched the horizon but found nothing.
 

Alone in the water, she wondered how long she could survive. Tepua had seen death often, had mourned for the loss of kin both young and old, but never had her own death seemed so near. Now as she felt its approaching embrace she cried in outrage and anger. She wept and prayed, hoping that the gods who had doomed her might relent.
 

But the waves kept washing over her, filling her nose and mouth with brine. Each time she kicked her way back up, she lost more strength. She knew a way of staying in the water—at least in calm seas—without tiring. As a young child, Tepua had found that she could let herself hang below the surface, her legs and arms loose, her head down except when she needed a breath. Now, though her temples throbbed and her lips trembled with chill, she tried to enter that slow rhythm: kick, lift the head, breathe, relax, and sink under. Kick, lift, breathe, relax. No. To relax was impossible now.
 

Rain pattered down, a rain colder than the sea. She thought about the fate of the doomed. As a noblewoman it was her right to enter the paradise of Paparangi and dwell with the other favored souls. But what if the gods had found her impious? They might send her to the place of darkness and suffering instead. No, that was not possible, she told herself. She, who had served as ceremonial maiden-to-the-gods, would surely be accepted in Paparangi. Thinking so, she lost her will to keep struggling.
 

When the sea lifted her, she rarely bothered to open her eyes. The coming paradise seemed to surround her. Yet once in a while, as she rose to the surface, she noticed the water growing calmer. She saw clouds starting to disperse, the sky brightening. And something unexpected—long and dark—was bobbing on the swells.
A canoe
?
 

Hastily she spoke a prayer to her guardian spirit, and then she began to swim. She lost sight of her target, halted in panic, turned to scan the waves. “Tapahi-roro-ariki,” she called again. Still she saw nothing but churning water.
 

Then suddenly, a short way off, she spotted what appeared to be a drifting wreck. She threw herself after it. Her hand reached out and she felt something solid.
 

She clawed at the wood, dug in with her nails as this new hope revived her. She pulled the wet hair from her eyes and tipped her head back to get a better view of what she had found. The single-hull craft was empty. Capsized. She flung one arm over the upturned bottom, tried to heave herself atop it. The craft only rocked, dumping her back in the sea. Frantically she grabbed on again and clung with both hands, determined not to let the wreck get away.
 

When she had caught her breath, she inspected the boat, moving hand over hand along its side. She found no obvious damage to the single hull, which was made of small planks sewn tightly together. The long outrigger float, attached by flexible poles, also appeared sound. If she could right the craft and bail it, Tepua thought, she might survive. If a paddle remained lashed inside, she would have some hope of reaching land.
 

But how to turn the boat over? Watching from shore, she had seen vessels capsized by sudden winds. What the boatmen often did was stand on the outrigger of an overturned canoe, shoving it down and under. Then, once the craft righted, they would rock it violently, slopping enough water out so that they could climb in and bail.
 

Tepua had never done this, but saw how it might work. Balancing on the outrigger, she curled up with her knees beneath her chest. Taking a deep breath, she straightened her legs. The outrigger went down, but it came right back up again, pitching her off. The second time, her feet slipped off too soon. The outrigger surged up, smacking her on the rump. She rubbed the bruise and kept trying.
 

The rain had stopped. An edge of sun peeked from behind the clouds. But the canoe remained upside down. She began to think that the canoe was just too big for her to right by herself, the outrigger too buoyant to go under. She thought about breaking or cutting the outrigger loose, but she had no knife, and she doubted that the water-filled hull would float without its outrigger.
 

With anger fueling her effort, she made one more try, kicking down as hard as she could to sink the outrigger. She went down with it, gave it one more shove with the soles of her feet, then surfaced, gasping. She was sure she had lost once again when she saw the water frothing and the hull still spinning. Then the outrigger shot up on the side away from her. The canoe wallowed in the swells, its bare, wet mast pointed at the sky!
 

Crying and laughing at the same time, Tepua laid her arms over the sunken splashboard. She looked within the flooded hull to see if any supplies remained. A sack of netting lashed to a thwart held large gourds—water bottles—though by now salt water had probably seeped into them. Beneath the gourds lay a pile of coconuts. All the paddles were gone.
 

Tepua's grief welled up again as she realized that this craft had belonged to her wedding party. How many people had been lost to the storm? She could only hope that some larger canoes had rescued the passengers from this one.
 

For now she had to put aside her worries about kin and friends. Her throat burned with salt and thirst. She glanced again at the large gourds, and prayed that one still held fresh water.
 

With trepidation she began to rock the canoe, fearing she would accidentally overturn it once again. But now that the canoe floated upright, the outrigger made it steady. In fact the whole craft was so stable that she found it difficult to rock. After spending a short time fighting with the swamped boat, Tepua finally pulled herself in over the side and sat in the water that remained.
 

Under her weight, the canoe tipped away from the outrigger, its splashboard almost level with the sea. She tried bailing with cupped hands, but for every handful of brine she tossed out, the waves slopped another in.
 

Frustrated and weary, she stopped. A scrape on her arm stung, leaking blood into the water. She looked at it, alarmed. Blood in the sea would soon bring sharks. To remain long like this could only bring death.
 

But how was she to get the boat bailed? Again she eyed the gourds. If the water inside wasn't drinkable, then she could break one open and use it as a scoop. With stiff fingers she undid the netting and selected a gourd that felt half-empty when she shook it. She pulled out the sticky plug and tipped the gourd, letting a few drops onto her tongue.
 

She tasted salt, but perhaps that was just from her skin. She let a bit more dribble into her mouth, and then drank the rest greedily. Slightly brackish, perhaps, but it would sustain her.
 

Then she smashed the end of the empty container against a hard edge of the splashboard until she opened a hole in the gourd. With a few more blows she was able to fashion it into a crude bailing scoop.
 

The sun brightened, giving a blue tinge to the water. The sea, calmed now, lapped gently at the sides of the boat. Only an occasional wave splashed in. Working with the gourd, Tepua began to feel that she might actually be throwing more water out than was coming in. Wiping her brow, she kept going, even though her arm ached and weariness made her dizzy.
 

Gradually the canoe began to rise as Tepua gained more freeboard. Finally the flood within dwindled to a few annoying puddles. With a huge sigh, she fell back in the canoe.
 

Only then, when she felt something sharp against her back, did she remember the tangle of cord about her waist. She reached back to find a few sticks of broken bamboo, the remnants of the bridal platform, still tied to her. Tossing these aside, she lay down with her head pillowed on the remaining gourds, her torn bark-cloth robe spread over her. She told herself she would rest for only a few moments.