Through the Whirlpool - Book I in the Jewel Fish Chronicles Read online

  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.

  25. The Volcano

  Kreh-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.

  The 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.

  He 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.

  26. Trying to See

  Kreh-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-ursh 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.

  It 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.

  27. The Birth of Kreh-otchaw-oh

  Kreh-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.