Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander Read online

  PORTRAIT OF A WIDE SEAS ISLANDER

  VICTORIA GODDARD

  Copyright © 2022 by Victoria Goddard

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Author’s Note

  1

  Tovo spent his ninetieth year walking the Ring.

  He started, as the old tradition had it, where he was when the idea came to him: the Mdang family house in Gorjo City, which his older sister had built when she decided to move with her new husband to the city and raise her family there.

  It had been a large family by any standard, sixteen children by the time they had decided they were done. His sister had said they had sixteen because they had promised the gods to extend their garden as thanks for saving Kivor’s life when he was caught in a hurricane at sea, but Tovo had always thought it was just because she had been told by an Astandalan physician that she did not have the right sort of hips for childbearing.

  The Mdangs had always had that contrary streak running through them.

  Tovo was no different, really. He took his old vaha, the outrigger canoe that had served him well for well over seventy years now, and sailed off along the old, familiar ke’ea.

  East first and then west, always the pattern for an Islander.

  Instead of heading across the middle of the Bay of the Waters as he would if he were going straight home to his own island, he turned east and sailed the complicated currents between Gorjo City and the Gate of the Sea.

  The channel out was marked by tall coral pillars, pale white with guano from the cormorants who perched on them. The coral looked like natural formations along the edges of the winding deepwater channels.

  Shark roads, the city folk called them.

  Roads was the Shaian translation for ke’ea. Tovo wasn’t sure if it held all the weight ke’ea did. A ke’ea was the way you were guided by the stars in the night, the way from one island to the next when the next was far, far out of sight. You sang a chant of stars, from your island to wherever you were going, anchoring you into the greater shape of the Wide Seas, the greater pattern of the Lays.

  A road, well, what was a road to a seafaring people? The current of other men's travels, Tovo guessed.

  Tovo held his boat there in the middle of a rocking wave, just where several currents met and held back the tide. He handled the vaha easily, knowing these waters with the whole of his body. The air was salt and thick with guano. Seabirds were crying as they wheeled over the heights on either side of the Gate of the Sea.

  He looked out, east, at the sun just rising. The spray glittered, as brilliant as sparks from a new fire, cast up by the waves breaking over the coral in a constant rumble and thunder. The boat quivered under his hand, the sail taut in the wind, the outrigger steady, the rudder firm.

  The sun, the cool morning air, the seabirds, the ke’ea of the Sun. He had followed it once.

  This morning he took a breath, spat over the edge of the canoe as an offering to those who held that channel open, and made the small constellation of movements that caused the boat to leap eagerly to the south and west, away from the Gate of the Sea and back into the embrace of the Ring.

  There were a dozen uninhabited islands between the Gate of the Sea and the first of the Pirimiris. The most significant of these, and arguably not entirely uninhabited, was Pau’lo’en’lai, or Pau’en’lo’ai, or any of a number of related names. Under any name, the Isle of the Dead.

  Tovo was not a superstitious man, but you did not have to be ninety to think about why such a journey, such a time to be Walking the Islands, would begin with the Gate of the Sea and continue on with the Isle of the Dead.

  He drew his canoe up on the beach, tethering it to the stone post set there. He considered the supplies he had laid in for the first part of the circuit, and eventually selected his favourite obsidian knife. He considered the blade, the grey-black stone, somehow waxy looking, translucent if he held it up to the sun. The hilt, clay and plant fibre wound about the haft. The clay had been red to begin with, the same kind the people of Viluoa used to make cooking pots, but over the years the oils of his hand had darkened it to a definite brown, polished with use.

  Pau’lo’en’lai was a high island, volcanic like most of those in this part of the Ring: the stone was black basalt and the rough kind of lava they called ai-ai. The beach was a narrow inlet of white sand leading up to the grassy headland between the foreshore and the jungle cladding the steep inland heights.

  At the head of the beach was a tall stone ngali staff. Tovo walked up to it, examining the carved stone. It was maybe twenty feet high, and eight across. Twelve bands spiralled around a hollow centre from a stone pedestal to a crown of broad-petalled tui flowers. Tui flowers for the trees that Islanders had always planted to mark their dwelling-places. Twelve spiralling bands for each of the twelve great lineages, the ships that had borne the first wayfinders to the Vangavaye-ve.

  He found the band that was decorated with the Mdang family patterns, curved lines in a not-quite-regular pattern.

  The Mdangs Held the Fire, and the fire was both always the same and always different.

  Always that streak of the contrary in them, that moment between strike and spark where the world held its breath to see what flame would catch.

  Most often Tovo lit a flame with a hibiscus-wood tinder-bed and a length of palm, or a bow drill: once you knew what you were doing, it was quick, almost easy. He had shown hundreds of people, old and young, how to do the same.

  Tovo knew other ways to light a fire, of course, some modern and some very, very old. He could light a fire with one of the glass lenses the Astandalans had brought with them, and with their magic charms and their metal strikers.

  There was a kind of stone that could make sparks. Or rather two—Tovo had a pair of them, at home on Loaloa. One, the tovo for which he had been named, was very common along the Ring, found on practically every beach. The other, which the Mdangs called tanaea—a word that also meant hearth, and the fire that goes in the hearth—had always been brought in from the other side of the world, even years and years ago before the coming of the Empire.

  There was one source for the tanaea, one island known to the ancestors. It was far away in the west and north of the Wide Seas. It was mentioned in the Lays as one of the ancient secrets of the ancestors, long since lost.

  Tovo knew the ke’ea for reaching it was deliberately incomplete.

  The secret knowledge of the Lays held by the Mdangs told how in the long ago the one who would be tana-tai, the one who sought to hold the fire for the next generation, would undertake a solitary voyage to find that island and retrieve one of the sacred fire-starting stones.

  They would build a new fire with a spark struck from it, one stone from their own island, one stone from the other side of the world, to show their community that they knew both old and new, far and near, the ways of the sea and the needs of the hearth.

  The other lore-keepers laughed sometimes at the small store of practical knowledge held by the tanà: what one needed to know in order to build a fire was hardly the same as being able to name every star in the sky, or every wind of the year, or how to make every kind of rope and twine and cloth anyone needed.

  The tanà had another role, whose study was lifelong; and no one thought that holding the fire of the heart of t
he community was a task without skill or honour.

  Tovo had gone looking for the island where the tanaea were to be found when he was a young man. He had already been acclaimed as tanà, given the efetana of fire coral by his great-uncle, and he had thought, rightly in the end, that he might become tana-tai. No one else had gone since.

  Pau’lo’en’lai was a quiet place. The wind was still here, in the space around the ngali staff stele. The seabirds’ cries seemed a long way away. The grass rippled in a wind he could not feel. The jungle in the distance was green and lush, full of birds that had barely seen human beings. Only those who were ready to join the Ancestors crossed the boundary marked by the stele; even those who were called to tend the dead stayed in the cleared area between beach and jungle.

  The twelve stone houses of the dead stood with their backs to him, their faces to the mountain. Each of the primary lineages, the great ships that had brought the first families to the Vangavaye-ve, had their own house. Thousands of years of the bones of the Ancestors rested here, on this one island, given to the jungle. The lore-keepers of each lineage were those laid in the stone houses.

  Tovo laid the obsidian knife on the offering-stone and spoke a prayer to the dead.

  One day he would pass the boundary marked by the stele and prepare himself to join the Ancestors.

  He was ninety, after all, and he could feel himself slowing down. This would likely be the last journey he took in his own canoe, certainly the last one by himself.

  One day he would fall asleep at the edge of that unknown jungle and not wake up. One day his flesh would be stripped by the birds and insects of the island. One day his bones would be collected by those who served the dead and brought to lie in the stone house far to the right, last named in the Lays, the stone ship of Ouvaye-ve. One day he would be one of the Ancestors named in the prayers.

  But not today.

  He left the Isle of the Dead and followed the channels through the reefs, south and west in a great arc.

  There were places on each of the named islands of the Ring where someone could bring a small vaha up to the land. You could not beach a canoe on each of them, of course—some were sheer pinnacles, where the seabirds peered down at him with wild, curious eyes. Yet even for those you could come close enough to touch.

  No one lived on these islands, this far east. They were too close to the Gate of the Sea and the Island of the Dead. They were not exactly sacred, or not any more so than the rest of the islands, but there was a certain sense of trespass that many felt. And of course it would be hard living here, with the surging tides and currents through the maze of reefs and pinnacles: there were few trees, few lagoons, few protected harbours, nowhere really to build a village that would not find itself stripped by the southeast tradewinds.

  Tovo touched each island, naming them. Pauo and Paua; the chain of fifteen small islets called the Eastern Efela; Tepekarua where the shell-divers came for the purple-and-green warokainë shells; Tepekanui where there was a single, ancient ti palm, leaning far aslant and yet never quite falling.

  Ti were sacred: they marked land, and held spirits, and were useful in all sorts of ritual, ceremonial, and practical activities. Elsewhere in the Ring people had selected ones with red leaves, or green, and there were many, many stories held by the Poyë lore-holders and old aunties alike about them.

  Tepekanui sloped up towards the outside of the Ring, black stone rising up out of the soft white coral sand until the skyline of the island looked like a giant’s teeth. Tovo beached his vaha and made his way up to the palm.

  The ti was still leaning out at its mad angle. It had fallen down and then twisted up, so the trunk curved like a cupped hand holding a tufted bouquet of leaves. These were mottled green and gold, strikingly beautiful. Tovo had sometimes wondered why none of the Poyë or anyone else who liked gardening had come to take a cutting, but then again, ti trees were sacred, and to find one like this, solitary, contorted, old—and yet so beautiful—well, he was probably not the only one who had encountered the gods here.

  Tovo had come here first when he was a mere stripling, sent by his own great-uncle to visit the tree and collect a kind of barnacle that clung to the rocks inside a cave below the ti palm.

  The sea-cave was accessible only at a very low tide, when the ocean receded just enough that a daring person might be able to climb down the cliff and safely pass through the low tunnel leading to the cavern. The barnacles were to be found nowhere else, and Tovo had always wondered just who had discovered them.

  A Walea youth studying to Hold the Eefela, looking to find a new shell to add to their store of knowledge? A Varga hunter, following the lure of danger and adventure? Someone fleeing a crime, or fleeing a criminal? Someone led by a spirit in the ti palm, a dream or a vision or a god?

  Tovo touched his efela ko, fingers lingering on the two beads that were a deep, lustrous blue, the colour of the sky after sunset, with a shimmer like a birthing star.

  His great-uncle had given him a riddle: Tovo had had to know the Lays well enough to determine which island he needed; he had needed to examine every inch of Tepekanui to find a shell he did not know; and he had needed to ask for assistance from the Walea lore-holder to learn how to turn the barnacles into the blue beads.

  There had been no challenge for him in diving for the golden pearls. Even searching out the flame pearls at the edge of the deep ocean was something joyous and bright, a challenge to his strength and his knowledge and his skill.

  But the barnacles, oh, they had been hard.

  He had come back often to this place, to meet himself again and again, and thus, once or twice had he also met the god of mysteries here.

  On this occasion he sat at the foot of the ti palm and looked at the waters foaming about the rocks far below.

  The ti was on the eastern side of the island, looking out over the Wide Seas. Far, far away in that direction (and a little north) was where Kip lived.

  Kip was his great-nephew and student of the lore, the one he had always intended and expected to follow him as tana-tai.

  He had not sent Kip for the barnacles. Kip had found challenge enough in the pearls.

  Kip who had hated pearl-hunting on the first dive, which Tovo had thought would be an easy entry into the study.

  Kip who had refused to let his hatred and his fear stop him.

  Kip who had sat at his feet and refused ever to give up.

  Oh, Kip was a long way away, and had been gone a long time.

  Tovo walked the Ring that year: he touched every named island and islet, walked upon each inhabited island and those which bore special memories for him.

  This might be his last time Walking the Ring, his last time sailing the Ring on his own, in his old vaha. He could only hold the hope, one more ember in his fire-pot, that Kip would come with him next time, would be at his elbow, would be the one speaking truth, seeing clearly, holding the fire in his hands.

  Tovo visited the people in villages who rarely had strangers come to their islands. He drank kava and coffee and coconut water and fruit juices and palm wine, ate what they offered him—fish and taro, octopus and chicken, breadfruit and tree fern and all the rest of the traditional foods.

  There had never been many tanà around the Ring. For all the size of the Mdang family in recent generations, their traditional knowledge was a heavier burden than most of the lore keepers held. There were a dozen or more amongst the Kindraa who Knew the Wind and were great navigators, or Walea who Held the Efela, or Nevans who Tied the Sails and knew all the secrets for making the different kinds of ropes and twine and fabric a community might need.

  There were three people who Held the Fire.

  Tovo was the most senior, and the one to whom everyone came for serious problems around the Ring. His nephew Lazo in Gorjo City was always there with a listening ear and a helpful word for any of the problems the people in the city brought to him. And there was Kip.

  Oh, there were chiefs and headmen, ther
e were informal leaders and village Speakers, there were shamans and sacred fools, there were wise women and powerful matriarchs. All the people who guided their communities, who led their people—their families, their villages, their islands—who made the decisions that needed to be made to survive and thrive.

  The tanà was not the chief or the paramount chief. Lazo was a barber; Tovo had been a pearl diver; Kip was … whatever he was. They did not live in the big houses, were not the big men. No one pointed them out when visitors came.

  They Held the Fire. They knew every Lay: not simply the public Lays, in Shaian and in language, but the full cycle that was sung over the twelve days of the Singing of the Waters.

  Others knew the Lays, of course. It was part of the knowledge held by each of the lore-holders, their responsibility to ensure that the histories and legends and collective knowledge of their people was not lost. Each of the lore-holders held also the extra knowledge relating to their family’s specialization.

  The Mdangs knew how to build a fire and tend it.

  More: the tanà knew how to build the fire of community and tend it.

  They shared their gifts freely, holding that the greatest gift they could give their people, the greatest knowledge they held, was to give the coal that could light another fire.

  Tovo had never turned anyone away, Mdang or not, who came to him to ask how to light a fire.

  There had been dozens over the years who had sat at his feet, his and Lazo’s too.

  There were a dozen, perhaps, who had successfully finished the first year of their apprenticeship, had made the efela ko by facing their fears and their weaknesses; learned the cycle of the Lays, perhaps even the first and easiest steps of the fire dance.

  There were half a dozen who had gone on to hold the fire in their islands, villages, families. They had begun to take the Lays and reflect them back to the Islanders, teach them what the lore meant now.