Through the Whirlpool (13 page)

H
e could not continue without water, and a great height of rock still stretched above. Kaar-oh sat facing him, resting against a stone. Blood dripped from the boy’s wound onto the path that Kreh-ursh must take. So close, but he knew he could not go on.

K
reh-ursh had to rest. He collapsed on the rocky slope and gazed at Kaar-oh sitting opposite him. His dead friend appeared as solid as a living being. He pondered each detail. The image was horrific. On the side of his head that the keen-skur had bitten clean away, shards of bone stuck out of the hole in his skull. Blood and brain were perpetually dripping down onto his shoulder. Kaar-oh continued to stare back until Kreh-ursh was forced to avert his eyes.

He listened hard to their surroundings.
Water, he must have it… or he would faint.

“
Is there any water around here, Kaar-oh?”

“
Why should I tell you? You want to kill me. You killed me once, and now you want to kill me again.”

“
It’s nature, Kaar-oh. You’re dead by nature. You’ve got to stop, give up this world, go wherever the other spirits go… It’s probably better there, anyway.”

Kaar-oh looked out into the mist. Kreh-u
rsh followed his gaze and realized that he could see through the dense haze. He was looking out over the sea of Shah. Islands dotted the vast expanse. Beyond, he saw Kaa-meer-geh nestled close to the bay of Rrurd and the mainland. Yet it should be impossible to see so far. He could see Gaa-shuudot River toward the south, and even the place where they had moored the canoe, where Kaar-oh had died. Kreh-ursh looked even farther, across the mainland, saw the flats, forest, desert, hills, and, far away on the horizon, two tiny mountains—one a little higher than the other: Geh-urbh-Geh-ot, where it was said all creation had begun.

Kaar-oh sighed
. “I’ll never let go of life, Kreh-ursh. I love it too much. It’s… This world is so much a part of me…” He was silent for a good while, then: “I wanted to be a Shahee… It’s not fair that you are completing sea-nomad-becoming and I cannot… The keen-skur’s fang was your idea!”

Kreh-ursh did
not know what to say. How could he destroy Kaar-oh’s talisman now? That was what he had decided to do, and Kaar-oh knew. To take the bag with his amulet up to the volcano’s crater and throw it in, watch it burn. Surely Kaar-oh would be forced to move on then, to go wherever he had to go?

Kaar-oh nodded downhill a short way to the right.

“There’s a stream just there. You can drink.”

And there was. Kreh-ursh could now hear it trickling. Why hadn
’t he heard it before? He walked tiredly downhill and quenched his thirst. Night had almost fallen by the time they arrived back at camp.
 

*
* *

I
t took Kreh-ursh several days to carve his protection symbols onto the stern post and gouge out two eyes on either side of the prow so his vessel could “see” where she was going. Over the following days, he shaped the largest branches cast aside from the crown. Of two long, curving boughs, he fashioned outrigger arms. With three thin, straight limbs, he prepared a tripod-style mast for the gaff. He did not attach those but placed them inside the canoe for his journey down to the sea. He also carved himself a paddle from a piece of wide, flat wood.

That night, maybe because he was feeling exhilarated as his vessel neared completion, he fell asleep quickly. No dreams.

The next morning, as he was scouting down the slope for the easiest passage to the stream, he made a decision. He was studying a shallow channel, hardly more than a depression, leading down and slightly to the right and Kaar-oh was speaking, as if in the back of his mind, giving his opinion on which route Kreh-ursh should choose. Kreh-ursh was on the point of answering him angrily, telling him to shut up—this was his sea-nomad-becoming. Then he remembered that Kaar-oh was dead. Was he going mad? How was it that he had assimilated Kaar-oh so far into himself? With a wrench, he ripped the other’s talisman from his breast and threw it behind him, not looking to see where it landed.

Then he hurled himself into the job of moving his canoe.
He placed chopped-up branches as rollers, chose his route, and began to drag the craft downhill. A third of a tide-cycle, at least, it took him, to reach the stream; then he left the boat on the bank and walked back up to his campsite to gather his belongings and supplies.

Kaar-oh stood there, half
hidden in the trees.

“
You’ve chosen wrongly, Kreh-ursh. That won’t help you. Why do you hate me so much?”

Blocking out
Kaar-oh’s presence, Kreh-ursh began to gather his gear, taking a hurried look around the clearing. So long, so many days that this had been home, and here he was running like a coward, but he had to get out of this forest. It was driving him crazy. He needed the ocean about him; it was his blood. Maybe that was why Kaar-oh had found it so easy to take hold. Besides, all the time he’d been here, he’d been hungry, to the point that he no longer really noticed hunger except as a stronger or weaker sensation of pain in his belly. True, the island boasted abundant resources, but his energy had been focused only on completing sea-nomad-becoming, so he had spent little time hunting and gathering.

He
noticed how scarce liquid remained in his flask. He must save the rest for the return journey. He would fill the flask with water from the stream, diluting the potion but eking out its power over several more days. Kaar-oh made a move toward him. Kreh-ursh turned away, but not before he’d caught the flash of anger on the boy’s face. He would not look, would not acknowledge him. He walked away downhill, leaving his friend’s ghost abandoned among the trees.

K
reh-ursh heaved his canoe down the muddy bank and into the stream. Seeming still to feel Kaar-oh’s presence at his shoulders, nevertheless he would not turn back. Though glad to be rid of the amulet—it had been a source of torment since first he came onto the island—the stream blurred in his eyesight. He relived that terrible moment afresh: The keen-skur had set up a violent rocking, writhing its coiled body in the water under the canoe. Kaar-oh should not have stood up, but he was trying to raise the sail to blow them to safety. Then the keen-skur leapt—even as Kaar-oh fell backward out of the canoe—up it flew, closing its jaws around his skull, crushing the bone like eggshell, bursting Kaar-oh’s short life from him in an instant. Kreh-ursh stretched out to grab him, but his scarlet amulet pouch was the only thing that came away in his hand, that talisman bag with the broken cord. A hideous shower of blood drenched the canoe, staining the water scarlet, drawing in predators. And Kreh-ursh was spinning the vessel on its course, away from the keen-skur’s lair—the water churned red, chunks of flesh floating on the surface, snapped up quickly by unseen creatures. The sail tripod rested lopsidedly across the outrigger, just a half-hearted flap catching the breeze—nothing else to contact the elements, both paddles having been wrenched from their hands, crunched and broken in the gnashing teeth. Yet a chant was coursing from Kreh-ursh’s throat—hardly was he aware of knowing the forms so intuitively—and the canoe was flying across the waves, back toward Rrurd and safety, Rrurd and his family.

All this flashed through Kreh-ursh
’s mind as he stumbled along beside his canoe. The water, knee deep, splashed him, and he again seemed to feel the stickiness of that blood-splattered canoe under his touch as he fled the site of his friend’s death.

Kaar-oh
’s figure floated along the bank, not approaching, but never leaving. He seemed to be asking, wanting something. Kreh-ursh kept his head down, trying to focus only on the splashing water around his legs. Yet still he heard the thought:

You can
’t run from me, you know, you’ll have to return. I could have helped you... have helped you... I can go where you can’t. Remember me... where you are going... Remember the one of far touch.

The next time
Kreh-ursh raised his head, the bloody vision of his former friend had drifted or faded back into the jungle. Kreh-ursh felt suddenly alone. He realized he was trembling, his body soaked in sweat while a chill washed over him. Kaar-oh must have turned back to stay near his amulet. Kreh-ursh continued downstream, pushing his canoe.

The journey was both easy and difficult. Using a moving chant—one created for dragging fishnets or paddling over long distances, he eased his vessel forward. At stages
they traveled quickly, the canoe half floating, half slithering over muddy banks. At other times, the vessel snagged on underwater roots, weeds, and uneven hollows in the streambed. Or else the torrent fell steeply between sheer banks. He had to maneuver carefully over many waterfalls or pull the canoe from the water and heave it overland. Sometimes sharp bends appeared, where he had to be careful not to jam the craft in the narrow channel or capsize it and see his few possessions slip away downstream.

Finally
, however, they hit the flat shores of the island where the stream widened and meandered down into a small lagoon. This was a different beach from where Kreh-ursh had set off. He calculated that he had journeyed almost a quarter of the way around the volcano’s cone in his search for his tree. As he waded through the shallows, guiding his craft beside him, he studied the beach cautiously, wary of who, or what, he might meet. Yet it looked empty. He made camp beside the lagoon.

That afternoon and the next day he spent on the final preparations for his journey. Binding the outrigger firmly in place so the craft was properly balanced took some time.
He dove around the reef for lee-aandeh seaweed strings and used them as rigging for the tripod mast and the gaff of the sail, so he could raise and lower it quickly when needed. It took him a full day to repair, tighten, and strengthen the cheg-muug sail—the traditional triangular sail of his people—after the battering it had taken serving as his bivouac roof. Now, though, the
kaank
leaves were dry and light. It would work well.

Finally came that moment of bursting pride:
His craft was ready but for a last significant act. The ceremony was simple, as simple as carving the traditional letters into the hull behind the boat’s eyes. In naming her, he chose Kreh-otchaw-oh, which meant “wavecrafter,” wavecrafting being one of the five skills a full Shahee must master. She seemed to sit on the beach smiling at him, her fine, polished wood glowing golden in the relaxed rays of the early evening sun.

The following dawn, Kreh-ursh took a carefully prepared bhayd stake from his gear, along with some keerr heather bark he
’d been drying for days. In a sheltered lee of the lagoon, he produced fire using the traditional method. This was the final rite, bringing fire home to his hearth at Rrurd. He opened a small earthenware pot given him by his father. Lined with charcoal and containing downward-facing air vents, if carefully protected during an ocean voyage, this pot could keep embers smoldering for days on the return journey. He waited until he had a strongly glowing bed of embers, and then shovelled some into the pot, replaced the lid, and stored it carefully in the canoe.

Then, the best part of a silver moon since he had set out from home, Kreh-ursh dragged
Kreh-otchaw-oh down the beach and out into the waters of the lagoon to begin the final leg of sea-nomad-becoming—sailing home.

T
hey crossed the reef. Kreh-otchaw-oh shuddered as she crashed into, and through, the foam curtain, bracing her fresh timbers against the first ocean swells of her brief lifetime. Kreh-ursh held his breath. Would she hold up, or be smashed into driftwood? The job of paddling this tiny vessel, so small compared to the great canoe, alone into the majesty and savagery of the open sea, had been too scary to think about while he sat on the beach earlier, gazing out at that palisade of crashing spray. Yet as he trickled sand, grain by grain, through his fingers—thoughts skipping out over the lagoon toward the reef, then westward across the ocean—the solution, like a seabird alighting on the waves, settled into his mind:

You hold the answer inside yoursel
f.

He slipped down into trance,
the state used for memorizing information in class. The long days, the tiresome repetition returned, and he felt knowledge touch his mind as lightly as the sand slid off his fingertips. Kaar-oh, Geh-meer, and the others sat together; enduring the monotony of training before embarking on sea-nomad-becoming; going over and over the same chants, codes, and thought techniques, the repetitively drilled focus points. He recalled wave forms—fish-scale pattern, feather effect, choppy wave-tops against wind. Every aspect of the constantly changing sea meant something, could be interpreted if you knew how to read it. Deer-ot, their teacher, seemingly grudging with even the simplest information, would sometimes make an enigmatic statement they might not quite understand concerning the shape of a cloud, or suddenly give emphatic instructions that would make no sense at all until one day, out on the ocean, they could see and feel it, as clearly as the wind ruffles your skin. It was like learning to breathe all over again. You had to breathe the sea, know Shah like you knew your own canoe. But she was changeable, unforgiving. Learn the lesson well the first time around. You might not get another chance.