Through the Whirlpool (12 page)

Slow, ponderous, the serpent from the lightless deep
looped its body back downward. Length upon length of its dripping coils slid below the waves until just the tiny head—slightly larger than Duu-feen’s cabin—was hovering a few paces above the deck. Never had Duu-feen seen such an ugly sight: wrinkled skin, seaweed and barnacles growing from its scaly hide; pale eyes set wide on either side of the craggy skull, and a beardlike fringe of tentacles surrounding a cavernous mouth lined with con
centric rings of serrated teeth.

Then two flaps of heavy skin on its forehead trembled and separated. A puffy white orb was pushed forth—a blind, third eye opening. It plopped out, bouncing onto the deck and was revealed as an inflated fleh-aak-zjhur bladder.
Out of the same crease squeezed a man. Climbing down the creature’s face, he jumped free. On his shrill whistle, the huge creature slithered away into the lagoon, its passage sending another huge wash across the raft. The ocean returned to its rolling calm—yet not a sound came from the gathered crowd. Taashou stepped forward.

“
Thank you, Daakohn, for answering my call.”

Duu-feen had seen this
man a few times, but never the creature he called his “boy” before. Always he had appeared from the sea, swimming. Now she knew why she had never spied his canoe. Though older than Taashou, still he stood with a youthful vigor, accentuated by his body-hugging suit of kelp. A flickering smile—he seemed childishly proud of his dramatic entrance—played about his eyes, revealing intelligence, though there was also bitterness carved into his face. He picked up the fleh-aak-zjhur bladder from the deck and methodically squeezed out the air until it was small and compact enough to attach to his belt.

“
Where do you want me?”

Taashou pointed to a seat at her right hand.

Little by little people found their voices, and a hostile growl rose among the crowd as Daakohn-bhah-ehl-bhah-her walked to the spot Taashou had indicated. The mood was not pleasant: None of the land people were relaxed, not with three huge bhaanj clinging to the mainmast and a giant sea serpent cruising the depths below.

Around a hundred people sat in four main groups:
Gathered around Taashou were the Shahee, the sea nomads, with Daakohn seated directly on her right; Kehl-grehnaa and her dragon riders were to her left; Gordonor and the other Rraawuu from the city occupied the space directly facing her; and on Taashou’s far left and Gordonor’s right were Raa-geh-ur and his Taagaag-ee, the horse nomads of the plains; opposite them, to Taashou’s right and Gordonor’s left, were Eloh-inderash and his herders from the lower slopes of Geh-urbh-Geh-ot. They stabbed unfriendly looks toward Kehl-grehnaa and her companions. Cattle were one of the favorite meals of wild mountain bhaanj. Taashou stood.

“
I wish to thank you, Taagaag-ee, Geyg-ee, Rraawuu, and Shahee, peoples of the land and sea, for heeding my call and agreeing to a meeting of the Great Council…”

“
A call of spite... to bring us onto such a flimsy raft in this treacherous weather!” grumbled Gordonor.

She ignored him.

“I called you because of a problem that is threatening Shah, yet one that will be a danger for the whole world, should we allow it to grow. I’m talking about the rift. It has returned, yet in an evil configuration. We...”

“
Taashou.” It was Raa-gehd-ur. “I and my tribe are nomads like the Shahee, but nomads of the land. I have heard of this rift only in a fire myth we sing to our children but know nothing about it that I would trust as fact. Explain what you mean.”

“
The rift is a phenomenon that returns at irregular times, maybe once every generation or two. It is years since the last time... and I was young, just a girl… Daakohn, you should explain.”

The slim, kelp-suited man stood
.

“
You know of me, Raa-gehd, but maybe very little. For though, like you, I grew up among the grassy plains and rode with the Taagaag-ee, I have not slept more than a night on land for over sixty years. Your father was a baby when I left, too young to remember his older brother, and the Taagaag-ee now know me simply as the Lost One.”

“
This family reunion is touching,” snapped Gordonor, “but can we get on? I have to be back on land before nightfall. I’ve got a city to run!”

Daakohn laughed
. “For you, Gordonor, I will keep it brief. For several generations we have known that our world and everything it contains—vast though we may see it—is like a simple bubble of sea foam born on the waves compared to the universe that surrounds it. Within this universe are many other worlds, as numerous as bubbles of sea foam…”

Duu-feen
listened to Daakohn speak, but the atmosphere of the council was not the cooperative one which Taashou had hoped for. Soon Gordonor had hijacked the discussion, and was demanding to know how much payment he could expect for helping to save Shah. His mood seemed to influence the other land people.

“You, the Shahee, spend your days lazing and fishing. Now you say you need our help. Well, if you want
Rraawuu aid, we might come to some more satisfying agreement on Solgom’s fish supply…”

He would have continued, but a wash of wind seemed to sweep across the raft, almost as if a shadow had darkened the sky.
It was no physical phenomenon but a mental one. Every person gathered on that raft who knew even the most rudimentary mind speech felt the panic in the distant mind call. It was Bel-geer, normally the calmest of shahiroh:

A black storm has been unleashed!
Poison is spilling from the passage of the whirlpool, greater than before! Shah is dying…

Taashou
turned to Kehl-grehnaa: “You and your bhaanj are the fleetest among us. Go, find out what has happened. I will follow as fast as I am able.”

The circling
bhaanj seemed to sense their riders’ urgency and swooped down onto the deck. Panic erupted among the townspeople and herders, but before they could react, before a single archer could string his bow, the riders had mounted and were being lifted back up into the clouds, gliding around in an arc, and winging their way southeast. Taashou turned to the other leaders:

“
Eloh-inderash, Raa-gehd-ur… Gordonor, the time has come for action yet we still have no plan. Forgive me for disrupting the council, but I must go and face this threat. If you can await my return, we will talk then. If not, I will come to each of you on land, as circumstances allow.”

She
turned, seeking out Duu-feen with her eyes before coming across to her.

“
Wait here in Seatown.” She spoke in words to avoid her thoughts being caught by others. “I must go. Organize the Shahee to support the shahiroh
.
Get the land people back to the mainland and return here with every canoe you can muster. Soon we will need every able-bodied person who can handle a canoe to protect Shah.”

She turned and strode off in the direction of the dock, leaving Duu-feen to deal with an apoplectic Gordonor
and the irate land people.

K
reh-ursh opened his eyes into a bright shaft of sunlight, head throbbing. Around him the jungle steamed as heat evaporated the previous evening’s rain. Every muscle and limb complained when he rolled over and sat up. The jungle now looked innocent, clothed in bright yellow and green, no sign of ghosts, or Kaar-oh—if that had been him, the specter that had chased him in the night.

Getting to his feet, he looked around. Lost. Above, the slope
climbed toward the volcano, below it dropped away to the shore. Which way was camp? He tried to remember whether he had run uphill or down, with the cone on his left or right. It was all a blank. Studying the ground for signs of his progress, he saw the place where he had slipped. That trunk there would be where he hit his head, knocked himself out. He struggled uphill, retracing his route. But then he couldn’t see any more clues, his footprints were hidden by the thick humus. A short distance off, he noticed a broken branch—maybe he had passed through there. He headed in that direction.

It was late in the morning by the time he stumbled into camp
, after searching and going back on his own tracks countless times. He felt more relieved than he would admit—the fear of being lost on this island with no tools, not even a knife, had gnawed at him. Flopping down on the ground in the clearing, he rested, relishing the pleasure of being surrounded by his own things: the remains of the felled tree, rough-cut timber, his bivouac, blankets, flasks, and provisions. In a short time this clearing had come to mean home. Yet the island was beginning to fray his nerves.

T
he only way out was to complete his task. After a while, he rose and went on with the job of planing and smoothing planks using his blades and sanding stones. Polishing and polishing until the timber began to shine, took on a mellow, burnished sheen. Throughout the long day he labored, a day of physical exercise to tire his mind. By nightfall his muscles were screaming, wracked by cramps, joints aching. Nevertheless, after dinner, even though darkness had fallen, he kept working to the light of a fire in the middle of the clearing. Only when he could no longer remain on his feet did he collapse in his bivouac, exhausted yet content with the progress made. For once, he slept soundly. If Kaar-oh reappeared, Kreh-ursh remained unaware.

The following days were spent working, taking time out just to hunt and gather
the necessary food. In the middle of the clearing, a fire burned continuously. Beside it he built a tiny, tightly woven hut. He heated stones, pushed them inside, and sprinkled water over them until the hut filled with steam. He repeated this process hour after hour, passing the planks, section by section, through the steam-filled hut. In this way, he softened them. To shape them he bound them into position using strong cords, then twisted the cords tighter and tighter using a branch for a tourniquet. He rubbed juice from the acidic aank berries into the wet grain to soften the fibers further, gain more working time, so he could stretch the planks exactly how he wanted. Once the juice dried, it set the wood grain into position, harder, more resilient than before.

All this time
, he refused to acknowledge Kaar-oh, though little by little the spirit had crept back into his consciousness. He was aware of him as a constant presence around the camp. It got so that when Kreh-ursh awoke, he knew Kaar-oh—his head wound constantly dripping red—would be standing at the entrance to his bivouac. If he went to check his snares, his dead friend walked beside him. While he was eating, the other boy squatted on the far side of the flames, staring, waiting for him to speak—waiting, always waiting.

“
I won’t leave you, you know. Even if you leave this island, I’ll travel with you. I’ll be part of you, Kreh-ursh, until you finally choose to see me.”

Kreh-ursh was
sanding the hull, Kaar-oh standing beside the bows. Almost half a moon after leaving his home, the vessel was taking shape. Kreh-ursh refused to meet his friend’s eyes, keeping his own fixed on his craft. It was a very simple design: one long, straight beam was the one he chose to split, splice, and bind into the curve of a keel, which rose high at the stern into a carved post with a notch for the steering paddle. On either side of the keel, gently curved at both ends, two planks formed the lower hull, bound to the keel and to each other. Other planks, also curved, rose into the upper sides. The whole craft was bound together with tough, fibrous creepers from the jungle and wooden pins that held the planks tight. He had worked sap drawn from the shee-ou tree into the cracks. Less than a day after being tapped from the trunk, this gum set into a hard resin. By coating the boat’s hull with the shee-ou sap and sanding it down when dry, using a stone wrapped in a tough piece of skur hide, the boy gave his canoe a sheen that acted like caulking and waterproofing but let it fly through the water.

All at once he decided. He met Kaar-oh
’s eyes:

“
No, Kaar-oh, you’re dead. It’s over. Whatever happens, when I leave this island, you won’t come.”

Then he left his canoe,
walked in among the trees. He didn’t look back to see whether the other was following, just knew that he would. He headed up the slope. The going was tough. Both he and Kaar-oh, climbing beside him, were soon panting from the exertion. At one point, trying to pull himself up onto a log, his friend was there, reaching down a helping hand. He almost took it. Almost. Not quite. He brushed through the shade and kept climbing, climbing, climbing through the jungle.

After a sixth of a tide cycle, he began to feel thirsty
and realized his water was back at camp. He had not thought to bring any provisions, and no weapon except the knife at his belt. As he rose higher up the volcano, trees closed in. Tendrils of mist curled around their trunks. It felt chilly; though he was sweating from his climb, he barely noticed.

He had been climbing for maybe half a tide cycle—parched but relentless
—when he broke through the tree line. It was sudden, with virtually no transition. For a while he had noticed the vegetation was lower, scrubbier; then he was climbing around boulders and bushes. Finally, he came out onto a large, flat rock. Before him, the bare cone rose and was lost in the amethyst twilight.