Through the Whirlpool (9 page)

“
Kaar-oh!”

His friend was reaching out… that look of shock a
nd fear in his eyes as he realized he could not regain the safety of the canoe...

Kreh-ursh
blocked the vision, aware once more of his friend’s absence. He slid the boy’s talisman back under his tunic as he felt that ache knotting his guts again. Why were things like this! Why wasn’t Kaar-oh here now, attempting sea-nomad-becoming? Yet his friend had gone for good. These memories… were just memories… but they were all that now remained.

Wiping his sight clear, he slid his own carving out into his hands. The delicate wooden shape brought his concentration back
, and he cleared his mind of everything except that first image he’d seen with Taashou—he slipped into trance. Little by little, the figure in his hands began to feel warm. Soon it was firmly drawing him, a hot weight in his palms pulling, pulling, as if it wanted to escape from his hands, dropping to the left. He turned that way... Yes, it was pulling him to the left. He half-opened his eyes, searching for a path leading in that direction. There was nothing off the track but a wall of lush ferns and, lower down in a slight valley, a stand of taller trees that poked above the surrounding growth. They attracted him, for no reason other than a vague intuition. Returning his amulet to its pouch, he pushed off the track and moved down the slope toward them.

At first it was difficult to make progress. Ferns and undergrowth formed a barrier that stopped him advancing, but gradually he entered a different type of jungle. Here the trees reached higher and wider than they did on the ridge, with more space between the trunks. There were fewer plants growing on the bush floor. These were bhaa-shot trees—their fat, spherical boles curving up into three or four thick boughs that held clusters of limp, purplish fronds. The large, yellowish fruit they produced, once cooked, was succulent and nourishing. Kreh-ursh for
ced himself to conquer his fear again—though the bhaa-shot weren’t quite as tall as the trees he had climbed on the coast—and shimmy up, carefully avoiding the bark’s knifelike spines. He knocked down three fruit. Back on the ground he stowed them in a net bag he had tucked in his belt. He continued on his way. The much sparser undergrowth at ground level made progress easier, but the fallen, rotting fronds could be slippery underfoot.

He walked through the jungle, keeping the upslope leading to the volcano on his right. The terrain and plant life continued to change subtly, the bhaa-shot grove giving way to stands of bheem-aa
, straight, rough-barked trees with small needle-shaped leaves, and lohn-goh, a strong-wooded variety with flaky bark scales and small rhomboid-shaped leaves. Clusters of pale yellow and red rree-taa flowers hung from tree forks or curled around the snaking vines, providing bright spots of color against the green and brown forest. Bird life was prolific. Wide-tailed lehk and acrobatic, blue-breasted keh-moh flitted through the bush space hunting for insects. Once he disturbed a large mehrr-koh, which blundered screeching from tree to tree before flapping heavily away, the scarlet and purple of its back and wing feathers contrasting sharply with the rich yellow hues on its breast.

A
fter walking for a long time, up ahead to his right, Kreh-ursh spied one: a taat-eh tree, a single one. His tree, the kind he was looking for! He climbed toward it. It was a mature specimen, possibly over a hundred years old. The solid, fast-growing trunk, wider than he was high, soared straight out of the ground into the highest treetops. He placed a hand on the smooth, waxy bark and knew he was getting close. He pushed on ahead. Soon he saw others, and before long, the taat-eh were the only kind of tree surrounding him. He stopped for a while and, closing his eyes, summoned again the visionary picture of his own tree strongly into his mind.

Opening his eyes, he
knew it was there. He couldn’t actually see it yet, but he sensed it was close by. He took two steps forward, looked around, and this time he did see it. Partly hidden by two thick trunks on his left, it was growing a short distance farther down the slope, close to the edge of a small clearing. He laughed. It seemed so easy just to have stumbled on it like this, exactly as he saw it in his vision. Even though he had spent weeks in training classes in his village preparing for this part of the test, he had doubted it would ever work exactly as it was meant to. He half ran, half bounded down the slope and slapped his hands against the trunk, the trunk of his tree! He imagined he could feel an answering vibration through the wood, a kind of affirmation, saying, “That’s right, I’m yours. Let’s get to work!” He stood beside his trunk feeling awed, almost frightened. The first part of his ritual—of Shahee-faadaw, the sea-nomad-becoming—was a success.

L
ilac and tangerine clouds hung above the indigo sea. Taashou stood on a low promontory of rocks that extended westward into the lagoon, scanning the flashing breakers striking the reef, just visible in the fading light. She waited, noting the first, bright evening stars shining in the twilit canopy. Swarms of hazy constellations had begun to light the dark when her attention was grabbed by a massive shape moving beyond the surf.

I await you.

To show her position, she opened a tiny clay fire pot she had held concealed under her cloak. Before long, she discerned a figure swimming in through the lagoon. She turned and walked back along the rocks onto the beach, holding the lantern up to guide the swimmer in. Then she stood before the whispering tide, amid wrack and driftwood. The swimmer waded from the waves.

Daako
hn, at last we can talk!

Taashou
, it is good to see you again.

I have a fire above.

They walked up the sand arm in arm. While Taashou was wrapped tightly in her blue shahiroh’s cloak against the evening chill, Daakohn was dressed as before, in his close-fitting suit of what looked like kelp but hugged his body like supple leather. He did not seem to notice the cold, though when they came to the low fire laid in a sheltered lee of the beach, he squatted close and warmed himself as if he had spent an age exposed to the harshest elements.

One can
adjust and adapt to life in the depths, but nothing replaces a healthy blaze!

I was thinking of you when I built it up.

When alone, they always spoke in mind speech, swifter for communicating both thoughts and feelings though tricky to shield from prying attention.

H
ow are the candidates faring?

They have just begun. Two are highly promising yet both troublesome in their way. I cannot work it out. I have decided to monitor them closely.

No hurzjh-faadaw-oh among them?

Do we need a hurzjh-faadaw-oh
?

The imbalance in the rift will not heal itself. Since we last spoke
, it has become worse. Now all the Shahee feel it. It affects the kree-eh the most. And when the kree-eh die, so does the ocean. Something must be done.

Yet how
can we know what? I will go myself. I have a better chance…

You cannot, Taashou. You are old and have been too long a part of this world. You would not be able to cross.

Then we will close it… if we can. I refuse to send an innocent into the twilight crossing, to exile them from everything they have known, their sense of belonging—forever—and even if they return, to spend what remains of their days like some cast-off piece, disconnected from tribe and culture…

Like me? Knowledge has its own price, Taashou. I chose my destiny
.

You were
seventeen. Yours was by accident, not design—you have said so yourself.

Daakohn drew a burning stick from the fire and began to play with it in the night air, drawing patterns as if it were a wand.

Still, we all choose, perhaps not our pasts but certainly our futures. The memories I love best from my former life… riding my mount like the wind across the plains, traveling with my people, the Taagaag-ee, to our summer camp, the celebrations… I will never have them back.

You could, Daakohn!
Talk to Raa-gehd; go back to your people…

You know I cannot. My mount, my companion, is another now, and he is not suited to the grassy plains. So
I wander, a nomad among nomads. We are all alone—the way we are born, the way we die—but for the twilight crosser, doubly so, because I lack that part of me that stayed in his world.

He
threw the stick into the fire:

It is always thus,
but I would not have had it any other way. In a sense I still chose my life. Yet you, Taashou, do not have any choice in this. An older person cannot go. It must be somebody young enough to shed the trappings of this world with no remorse, one who has not grown roots deep enough to bind.

Taashou frowned
.
Like the tree in the myth, uprooted from the valley and sent to grow forever alone on the mountain to stop the sky from falling in?

You can mock
, Daakohn smiled,
but that is how it is. You cannot rip somebody from their universe, throw them into another to breathe alien air or gas or whatever and then transplant them back again without some damage occurring.

They were both silent, studying the fire as if waiting for it to speak and offer answers. Then Taashou turned and looked at the older man
.
Why?

Why
? In what sense, why?

You became hurzjh-faadaw-oh by accident. The rift heal
ed itself that time. How do we know the same will not happen? What is different this time?

Some force is pulling the kree-eh from our seas
. It is not the same, not the same at all.

So
, the hurzjh-faadaw-oh.

T
he twilight crosser must be absolutely without hesitation.
Remembering, Daakohn shuddered.
The very knowledge of this thing induces a fear so strong that most grown Shahee could not overcome their instinct for survival to chance it.
He looked at Taashou.
You will have to find someone young… young yet … ruthless, brave… talented yet foolhardy.

I will search out a volunteer. But I will not sacrifice an innocent, Daakohn. That would be an abomination. It must be somebody who fully knows where they are goin
g and the slim chance of any return.

I went
without knowing. That was what, in a strange way, saved me.

As you say, this time it is
different.

T
hey sat in silence after that. The fire gradually died.

L
ooking up at the trunk, Kreh-ursh should have been happy; he had his tree. His success at locating it had renewed his faith in himself, in his training. There ought to be no doubts now. Yet there was something… Geh-meer being there down at the coast… that sick dragon... and something, or someone else… This island… it made him nervous; it felt creepy.

The trunk, slightly wider than his shoulders,
as in his vision, stretched up above him, perfectly straight, for two or three lengths of his own body. It was perfect. Its crown spread into a dense tangle of smaller branches and tiny spade-shaped leaves. He only had to place his hand on the bark to feel immediate empathy with the thing growing beside him, the joy of its living sap flowing beneath his fingertips. Yet thinking about the practical problems to overcome, he felt unsure. They were high above the water. It was impossible to move the tree down to the shore. So he would have to work up here.

He took
a swallow of his potion and looked around. Since he had left home, he had drunk a lot of the liquid. He must start hunting and gathering food. To one side of the small clearing an old root system thrust up new shoots from a hewn stump. It looked as if some other candidate had performed sea-nomad-becoming here. A brook slapped and rattled its pebbled bed beyond. When he went to investigate, he found the stream ran swift, free of debris, a clean roadway back to the sea. It was perfect, yet… something about this clearing stirred memories. Crazy—it was the first time he had ever walked these slopes.

Placing gourd, sleeping mat
, and his bag of tools to one side of the clearing, he went back into the jungle with just his knife. A cautious search around his campsite showed that the area was safe enough: no recent signs of any large beasts. He set bird snares and gathered a small supply of roots, berries, and fruit, hanging them away from predators on low tree boughs back at his new camp.

The next job was building a rudimentary
bivouac from sticks and vines. After harvesting several armfuls of kaank leaves—long, flat, and fibrous—he sat in the clearing and wove until sunset. This large triangular matting would not only roof his bivouac while he stayed here—once it had dried fully, it would also have another use. The bivouac, shaded by trees on one side of the clearing, was hardly permanent, but should hold up well enough as a shelter and somewhere to store his gear. Enough for the days he would be here. After a simple meal of berries and fruit, he crawled into his bivouac and collapsed as darkness fell.