Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander Read online

  There was one who had learned all Tovo could teach, and then sailed off, because someone always left.

  Tovo still waited for his sail to come back over the horizon.

  Tovo walked the Ring that year.

  He knew people in most villages, every island. He had walked the Ring many times before, listening and looking, asking questions as necessary, learning the heart of the people, reflecting them back to themselves.

  The tanà held the heart of the Islands, it was said.

  They had the fire in their hands, and they held it out to those who needed it, and those who did not know they needed it.

  He lit fire after fire, showing children and shy youths and shyer adults any of half a dozen ways to do so. He ate the food he was given, talked over the affairs of the Outer Ring islands with the elders in each community.

  The elders of the Outer Ring knew the old traditions. They knew why Lazo was not accompanying him, for Lazo was the tanà but had never been the one to be called tana-tai.

  Lazo had never sailed off to bring back a tanaea, a striking rock from the island on the other side of the world, with which he might light a new tanaea, a new hearth-fire.

  There were a hundred good reasons why he hadn’t, but the fact remained that the reasons did not matter. He who would be tana-tai sailed across the Wide Seas in a boat of his own building to find a striking rock on the other side of the world. That was what he was. Lazo had not, and so he could be a most excellent tanà, but was not tana-tai.

  The elders of the Outer Ring knew why Lazo did not sail with him, but they knew as well as Tovo did that there should have been a younger man to stand at his elbow.

  Some of them merely looked meaningfully at the empty space beside him. Others asked.

  “And where is the one who comes after you?” Kuaso of Iruzayë asked him.

  “Someone always leaves,” Tovo replied evenly. “He will come back when it is time.”

  Iruzayë was far to the west of the Ring, one of the Tirigilis. It was famous in the Lays for being the home of Elonoa’a, last of the Paramount Chiefs. Elonoa'a had discovered the Isolates, and for that alone he would have been named in the Lays, but he had also been the one who had brought the Islands into alliance with the Empire of Astandalas.

  Elonoa'a had been famous for leaving.

  More: for leaving in the company of an Emperor of Astandalas.

  Kuaso grunted. He and Tovo had been lovers for a time, when they were both young and hot-blooded. Kuaso had been the big man in his village for many years, and was greatly honoured as an elder. The food he offered Tovo was delicious and included coffee from the high islands on the other side of the Ring, as well as a cake that must have been made with flour imported from somewhere else. Quiet shows of wealth and prestige. And honour to Tovo, of course; but mostly showing off Kuaso’s success.

  Kuaso had never quite forgiven Tovo for breaking it off when he had decided it was time to sail out of the Ring.

  “They come back,” Kuaso said, “or else they are lost.”

  “True,” said Tovo, for it was.

  Kuaso sagged and to Tovo’s eyes suddenly looked old.

  “What does it mean, Tovo,” he whispered, “if the tana-tai is lost? What does it mean if no one is willing to hold the fire, pass it on? Two generations have grown up without ever seeing the tanà dance Aōteketētana. Nearly three.”

  Tovo had taught all who had come to sit at his feet as much as they could learn. The empty dancing-place on the twelfth day of the Singing of the Waters was a shame on his shoulders. He knew this.

  He was as stubborn and as contrary as any Mdang born. “He will be back when it’s time,” he repeated, for Kuaso was an old friend but Tovo was the tanà, and he held the fire.

  “I hope I live to see it,” said Kuaso.

  On Loaloa, his own island, he slept in his own house.

  Here the questions were much more personal, though they circled on the same topic. His nieces and nephews and great-nieces and nephews asked after all their kinsmen in Gorjo City.

  Kip Mdang, the one who left, was not forgotten.

  “I heard he came home three times last year,” someone said.

  Tovo nodded, listening as his wide extended family talked over the three visits of Kip from the other side of the world.

  “He didn’t come out here,” someone murmured.

  “He hasn’t been out here for years,” someone else replied. Tovo watched the resignation ripple around the faces before him. “Forgotten how to speak language, no doubt.”

  He listened to what they did not say. Forgotten how to speak language: forgotten the Lays; forgotten the lore; forgotten what it means to be an Islander.

  He did not say anything. He never did, unless they asked directly, and the family had long since lost patience with his stubborn repetition that someone always leaves.

  There was no one, bar a few elders like Kuaso, to remember when Tovo had been full of fire and ambition and the desire to see the other side of the horizon.

  He knew the Lays with every beat of his heart, every breath of his lungs, every move of his feet in the dance. He knew that being an Islander had once meant being a sailor who thought nothing of taking a vaha across the horizon just to see what was there. They had been the great navigators, taking breadfruit and coconut and pandanus and plantains and planting them across the Wide Seas so that later voyagers would have food to eat and know that they were not the first to land there.

  The Nga still Named the Stars. The Kindraa still Knew the Wind. The Nevans still Tied the Sails. The Poyë still Held the Seeds.

  The Mdangs still Held the Fire.

  And every time someone looked at the empty space beside him, where Kip should have been standing, Tovo smiled and said, “Someone always leaves. He’ll be back when it’s time.”

  He walked the Ring.

  He touched every islet and island. He sat with elders and children, he lit fires and showed others how to light them. He sang the Lays and argued amicably about interpretations with those who wanted to argue. He undid the knots that were tangling up communities and helped tighten others that were loosening.

  And on every island, in every village, whenever someone looked at the empty space, he smiled and said, “Someone always leaves. He’ll be back when it’s time.”

  The northern islands were generally larger, higher, more populous. Tovo walked slowly up to the heights of Orukiana, the northernmost island, climbing into the jungle where the air was cool even at noon. He listened for birds of paradise, each valley holding a different plumage, and watched warily for cassowary and the giant eagles that haunted some of the wilder peaks.

  He arrived at the northern cape of the Ring at sunset and made a small camp there. He built a fire in the scorched ring of stones used by generations upon generations before him. He made it with his tovo and tanaea, which he had collected from his house on Loaloa.

  The Leaping-Place for spirits going to the Ancestors was west of Loaloa, exactly opposite the Isle of the Dead following the arc of the Wake overhead. The south was the quiet realms of the gods. It was here, in the north, that the spirits of the yet-to-be-born entered the Ring.

  There were others whose knowledge held secret and sacred practices to do with those young spirits coming to be born, but it had always been the practice of the tana-tai that when they walked the Ring, they spent time at Orukiana, singing the Lays to welcome the spirits home.

  He began at the beginning, and sang through the first three of the Lays before dawn began to lighten the sky. It was said the spirits travelled at night, falling from the star-islands in Sky Ocean to the islands in the Wide Seas that mirrored their celestial homes.

  Four nights he spent singing there, his tiny fire a bright star in the darkness, his eyes on the night sky, the shooting stars and the familiar constellations and the stars whose names he knew.

  Twelve Lays, the twelfth so long there was talk of splitting it into a thirteenth.

&nbs
p; They had been talking of splitting it since the Fall of Astandalas. Let the twelfth conclude with the end of the Empire, people said, and the thirteenth begin with the new order afterwards.

  Such a decision could only be made by the entire conclave of the people at the Greater Singing of the Waters, when each of the lore-keepers performed their dances on the twelve successive nights of the festival.

  There had not been a Greater Singing of the Waters since the Fall of Astandalas, for the tanà had not been there to dance the fire.

  Lazo could not dance the fire, though he knew Aōteketētana, for he had a bad knee. Tovo did not have the stamina any longer for the whole dance in the full festival, when the tanà had to sing over the fire.

  And Kip had not come home for the festival since he left.

  It was easier to hold firm to his knowledge of Kip's stubbornness and determination when people doubted him. Up here, alone, it was harder.

  Tovo sat in the cool night air, high on the cliff, looking out at the endless emptiness of the northern Wide Seas. He sang the histories of the Islanders, the familiar words friendly in his mouth, his mind, his heart, his soul.

  He was not lonely. The god of mysteries was all around him, in the dark and the wind, the stars and the jungle behind him. But oh, he wished that he was not singing alone.

  He remembered the boy, so angry and sharp, refusing to give in to his fear of drowning, his hatred of diving.

  Tovo had seen potential in him, but he saw potential in everyone. He had thought that first dive would be the end of it: but every time Kip had cried, I hate this! Tovo had asked him, Is this where you stop?

  And Kip had glared at him, so fierce and so angry and so very, very sharp, and said: No.

  He never shouted it. He simply said No through gritted teeth and readied himself to dive again.

  He was so brilliant. That was what Tovo always remembered: how the boy learned Islander in bare weeks, learned the Lays in six months, asked question after question until Tovo wanted to shake him into silence.

  Look first! Listen first! Questions later! Tovo had cried, over and over again, remembering his own great-uncle saying the same to him, trying not to laugh at how much Kip was like him.

  He had not been surprised when Kip left. Only that Kip had gone in a trading ship to Astandalas of the Emperors, and not in a vaha of his own hands' building to find a new island.

  He walked the Ring.

  He descended down through the ever-more thickly populated islands of the Eastern Ring, coming south on the arc that led back to Gorjo City. These were larger islands, higher and verdant, full of gardens and villages, some communities big enough to be called towns.

  Fewer and fewer people spoke Islander as their customary speech, though even on the Epalos or Looenna there were villages where the children were knew it as their first language. Tovo drank rum and wine, foreign drinks that the people here had learned how to make, and wondered if they would understand Kip better than the people in the west.

  The tana-tai was the tanà for all the Ring, east and west, Gorjo City and remotest village alike. And if the people of Loaloa, Kip’s own island, did not understand him, what would it matter if the people of South Epalo did?

  The elders still asked after the person who was not there, though fewer of them knew his name. Tovo told them the same answer, always the same answer.

  Someone always leaves. He will come back when he’s ready.

  Tovo had been holding that ember for a long, long time.

  Lesuia was almost the last island before he returned to Gorjo City. As he crossed the reef into the lagoon, Tovo could see the city across the bay. There were a few further uninhabited islands to visit, perhaps another three or four days of sailing, before he returned to the room he had in Lazo’s house.

  He was getting tired.

  Not from the sailing, though he could feel that he was not as strong or as reflexive as he was. He had had good weather for his whole journey, bar a few storms he had sat out on various islands, but if an unexpected squall had blown up he might well have found it difficult to respond.

  It was, of a certainty, the last time he would sail his vaha alone around the Ring.

  Lesuia was a medium-sized island for this part of the Ring, with five or six villages. Tovo made his way to Ikiano, where his second sister’s granddaughter had married a local man and now lived.

  Aya welcomed him warmly, taking him into her house, introducing her children and giving him a comfortable seat on her porch. He accepted the coffee and city-style sweet pastries she offered him, and talked to her children about how to light and tend a fire.

  Her husband was off fishing, Aya told him, and in due course sent her children off to play with their cousins.

  Tovo set down his bowl of coffee and waited patiently for the inevitable question.

  Aya was young—hardly past thirty—and had been one of those who had sat at Tovo’s feet for a time.

  She had had the talent, but not the drive, to be the tanà. She had not learned the whole of the fire dance, though she knew the Lays, and she held the fire here on this side of the Ring. Tovo rather thought that over the decades, as she grew in knowledge and wisdom, she would end up in a position similar to Lazo’s in Gorjo City.

  If Kip were truly lost, Lazo would likely ask Aya to hold the full dances and pass them on. It had been known to happen before, when a family narrowed down and the knowledge was in danger of being forgotten. Tovo's great-niece Vinyë had held the dances of her husband’s family in trust for her children, because he had been the last of his maternal line.

  There were so many Mdangs in the younger generations: Kuaso’s questions about what it meant for the Islands as a whole if none of them felt able to Hold the Fire hit hard.

  Tovo sat there with Aya’s coffee. He was not disappointed in her. There had never been many called to being the tanà: for there to be three in five generations was not unusual.

  If there were still the third.

  Aya poured Tovo more coffee. They sat together on the mats she had placed on the platform in front of her house. They faced not the centre of the village, but instead through a thin screen of trees the clear water of the lagoon. Far out near the barrier reef was Aya’s husband on a small outrigger canoe. He cut a fine traditional figure, with the claw-shaped sail of the Eastern Ring silhouetted against the sky, his net casting glittering droplets of water as he raised and cast it out again.

  “I do not remember Kip coming to Loaloa,” Aya said presently. “I was too young. He had gone to Astandalas before I paid any attention.”

  Tovo nodded silently, listening. Of course Aya would begin with the missing Kip. She was very close to being the tanà of the northern Ring, as Lazo was in Gorjo City. Perhaps she was ready to learn a few more of the dances, another layer or two of the lore. It had not been for her when she was in her teens, but that did not mean it would never be for her.

  “There were many stories of him on Loaloa.”

  Aya looked sidelong at him, and her sober expression puckered into a bright grin. Tovo smiled back. There were many stories about Kip on Loaloa. He had thrown himself into everything whole-heartedly.

  Everything. Everything.

  “When I met Cliopher Mdang here with his Shaian lord,” she said, “I did not realize it was the same man. I thought it was another one of the cousins. He did not seem much like the stories.”

  “Mmm.”

  Aya offered him the plate of tarts. When he declined, she set the plate down beside her, her expression a curious one.

  “Something happened when he was here,” she said. “I have not known what to think of it. Then we went to Solaara, Jiano and I, to talk to the Lord Emperor about the fish farm.”

  Tovo nodded to show he knew of this journey.

  “Someone always leaves,” Aya said, her eyes on her husband out on the reef. “We all want to be Elonoa’a, don’t we? If only the emperors were ever Aurelius Magnus, and worth sailing out of the
world to find … Oh, Buru Tovo, I had never understood that passage in the Lays before.”

  He looked at her. Listen first.

  She glanced quickly at him and then down again, cheeks flushing. “I have often wondered what Elonoa’a’s family thought. Someone always leaves … and it is always the best, the brightest, the star we all want to see shine, isn’t it? They could not have been happy when Elonoa’a took ship after the emperor. I have often thought of it.”

  Tovo nodded. He too had often thought of that passage of the Lays. Kip had been fascinated by the story, had asked everyone he could find for every version of the stories, every snippet caught in another tale, every rumour passed down in a family.

  “When we went to Solaara, we found that the Lord Emperor is the fire at the centre of the court. Everyone circling around him, everyone dancing around that fire, the hearth at the centre of the world.”

  She dropped her hand to fiddle with the fringe on the hem of her sarong. “Cliopher didn’t dance around the centre. He stood beside him.”

  Tovo hummed acknowledgement, placing this into his knowledge of Kip.

  “When I saw him, I thought he was the tanà for the whole world.”

  Tovo felt his breath stop, just for a moment, at that soft statement. Aya had studied the Lays; she was a wise woman for her age, shining brilliant. She would be a great elder when her time came.

  Look first. Listen first.

  There was a time for questions; that was where Kip had always fallen down. Either he asked too many or not enough.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked, neither eager nor angry, simply questioning.

  Aya leaned back against the post holding up the palm-frond roof. She closed her eyes. “There was a market in Ikiava when he was here, Cliopher and his lord and the others. I liked his friends,” she added. “I thought his lord was Fitzroy Angursell.” She paused. “I still think he’s Fitzroy Angursell.”