Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander Read online

  The name was foreign and unfamiliar. “Who is he, then?”

  Aya grinned, her eyes laughing. “A rather infamous poet from just before Artorin Damara took the throne.”

  “What kind of poet?”

  “A very good one. Funny, sharp, political, sometimes very beautiful.”

  “Kip would like that.”

  Aya held still for a moment. “Would he?”

  He remembered that boy, so sharp, so brilliant, so angry, sometimes feeling so strongly he cried with his passion. “Yes.”

  “I think I’m right,” she murmured. “He didn’t exactly deny it.”

  Tovo waited for her to circle back to her main point. He had nowhere to be, nothing to do, but sit here and listen to her talk.

  It was easy listening to her when she spoke to the deepest desires of his own heart. He would not pretend otherwise. He was the tana-tai, who showed the people what it meant to be them. He would not lie to himself.

  “There was a market,” she repeated. “We—Jiano and I—we invited Cliopher and his lord and their friends to come with us. Cliopher wore city clothes, not proper finery, and I remembered some of the things people say, that he’s forgotten what it is to be an Islander.”

  And if the tanà—the one everyone expected to be the next tana-tai—had forgotten that, what did it mean, what could it mean, for the rest of them?

  “I have lived here for a few years now, but there are still people who live on the outlying islands I do not know. There was an old man who came selling shells. He had splendid efela.” She touched one of her own efela, a beautiful piece of green coral set on a simple braided line. “I traded one of my books—I write stories—for this one.”

  “A good trade,” Tovo said, leaning forward to examine the efela more carefully. It was a beautiful piece, the green coral threaded with blue and something nearly silver. He’d never seen the coloration before, and admired it.

  “I thought so.” Aya hesitated, then laughed haltingly, as if her thoughts were stealing the breath from her. “I went on, around the corner, but I was within sight when Cliopher—Kip—came to the seller. I looked back when he stopped, wondering what he would choose, what he would trade.”

  Tovo held still. Choosing an efela was a matter of great import; what one traded for it even more so.

  “Kip lifted up a long chain of golden shells I am sure was not there when I’d looked. They caught the sun: they were so beautiful. And such a long strand. I would have seen the shells if they’d been there when I’d been looking. The efelauni didn’t have so many as all that.”

  “I understand,” he murmured. There were stories in the Lays—and even more stories of the sort aunties told the children—about magical or mystical purveyors of efela. Efelauni, as they said in the Western Ring, the word Aya was using. An ordinary trader in shells and efela would be called a posao, after the posà of the Walea, those who Held the Efela. Any posao was on the edge of mystery. The efelauni were mysteries.

  Tovo had seen and heard many things in his life. He did not discount possibilities no matter how far-fetched they seemed. He had met the gods walking the islands.

  “The efelauni said—oh, it was all out of the Lays, Buru Tovo. He said, ‘Your hands know what your eyes are seeing.’ And Cliopher said, ‘You know how it is, I was taught by my great-uncle.’” Something like that … his words are not so clear in my mind.”

  “I understand,” he said again. No, they wouldn’t be. Not if this was what he suspected it was.

  Oh, what a thing to imagine, if it was what he suspected it was!

  “He asked, the efelauni asked Cliopher the questions out of the Lays: ‘What is your name? Your island? Your dances?’ And Cliopher looked like—he looked as if he had stepped out of one of the Lays himself. He lifted his chin and he said, ‘I am Cliopher Mdang of Tahivoa. My island is Loaloa. My dances are Aōteketētana.’”

  Aōteketētana. Not Aōtetana. Not simply the fire dances, but the Fire Dance.

  Aya opened her eyes to smile at him. Her eyes were shining with tears. “I always wanted someone to ask me that,” she whispered. “Jiano did, when I was sailing around the Ring and I came to the reef here …” She waved out at her husband, who was moving along the inner line of the reef, a fishing spear in his hand, his nets once more in the water. “He was there on the inside in his canoe, and I on the outside in mine, and we looked at each other across the coral—and he asked me those questions, and I knew he was mine.”

  Tovo had wanted to be asked those questions, too. Even in his youth they had not been common. You asked them when the answer was meaningful: when you wanted to enter yourself and the person in front of you into legend, into the world of the Lays.

  “I don't think Cliopher knew he had switched into language, he was so focused on the efelauni. No hesitation in him, his voice, his body. And then the efelauni said, ‘I have heard of three sons of Vonou’a.’”

  Tovo’s attention sharpened, though he kept his body loose. Anyone who remembered Kip as a youth remembered how he had either sought every possible story about Elonoa’a and Aurelius Magnus, or about the three sons of Vonou’a.

  Aya’s voice dropped. “Cliopher said, ‘I went to sit at the feet of the Sun.’” There was no hesitation now as she recounted Kip’s words: these were writ on her mind as sharply as the words of the efelauni out of the stories.

  Her voice dropped again, with wonder and a certain shivering awe. “And the efelauni asked him, ‘What will you bring home to the Islands?’”

  Only one efelauni would dare ask that. Tovo caught his breath, unashamed to admit his interest, his intense desire to hear the answer.

  “It was out of the Lays,” Aya said again. “It should be in the Lays, Buru Tovo. It was a market like any other market, nothing of note except for the velioi guests … and yet it was then, there, here, now, that the gods asked a question.”

  “And what did he answer?”

  Aya swallowed. Her eyes were even brighter, and her hands were trembling. Tovo leaned forward and captured her hands with his. Her fingers were very cold, and curved in his gentle grip.

  “Buru Tovo,” she said, “he said, 'I will bring home the hearthfire of a new life for the world.' Just—just like that."

  Tovo thought of those words, the valence of them in the Islander language. To bring home a tanaea—oh, not too many knew of the striking rock's proper name.

  But ta, life, everyone knew that was related to tana, fire. And what word could the Islanders use for 'the world' bar 'the horizon around my island’?

  The hearthfire of a new life. The spark of a new fire. The fire of a new life to the horizon around my island.

  Aya spoke again, her voice low, certain, awed. "He looked straight at the efelauni and he said that, as if he had never doubted, never wavered, never once stepped aside from the ke’ea. ‘I will bring a new fire to the hearth of the world.’ As if …”

  As if Kip had decided at the age of twelve to be tanà, and followed that calling wherever it led him, refusing to take the ke'ea that others claimed was the true one unless he had decided it was also his.

  The tanà knew the Lays, all the cycle and stories of them. Knew the interpretations that had been given in the past, the knowledge of those who went before. Could hold the heart of the community, light the fire and tend it.

  The tana-tai took the Lays and said: here we are, here is where we have been, here is where we can go.

  “I will bring a new fire to the hearth of the world,” she murmured. Jiano turned, dove down, sleek as a dolphin, his spear a line of silver. Aya sighed. “I couldn’t help but stare. The efelauni looked up and he caught my eyes and he laughed—laughed like a kookaburra—laughed like—”

  Like Vou’a, Tovo finished, naming the Son of Laughter, the god of mysteries, the trickster. Once he himself had met that god, been asked those questions from out of the Lays.

  Oh, that was long ago now, and Tovo had traded a different promise—not for an efela of shining golden shells but a mystery he had never finished plumbing.

  “And Cliopher looked so embarrassed I could not say anything,” Aya said. “That is the moment you skip in a story … the Lays do not describe the arguments Elonoa’a must have had with his family when he set off to sail out of the world for Aurelius Magnus."

  2

  Tovo returned to Gorjo City at dusk, sliding into the city as the lights rose wavering over the waters of canals and lagoons.

  At the edge of the city he crossed the row of buoys marking the route the sea train took when it arrived. They were lit, burning with a fierce green magic, showing that the sea train was coming in. He moved his canoe out of the way, anchoring it at the lighthouse at the end of the breakwater that formed the quay where the sea train would stop.

  He had seen the velioi marvel from a distance, but never close to. He waited as the night fell, the blue dusk shimmering around him, the air full of flowers and the scents of the city. Food and people and stone and seaweed and all the other familiar crush of things.

  The train was illuminated with golden lanterns. Tovo watched the water spray up in two fine spumes, catching the lights and falling back down in white and golden glitter against the dark water.

  It was quietly musical, humming deep-down at a level that thrummed in the stone of the breakwater. Tovo sat on the bench at the lighthouse, watching the train's lights resolve into little chains of illuminated balls, windows bright with magic, people standing, gathering their things, peering out at the city coming to meet them.

  He waved at a small child peering out as the train slowed and went past him. The child waved back, face thrown back with joy, just a moment before they were gone and past.

  There were six compartments, each of them like the b
elly of a ship. No sail, but a sense of magic rushing past him. The wake washed up against the stones and made his vaha rock.

  Tovo waited until the train came to a stop, and then he went down and untied his vaha and sailed slowly down the other side of the breakwater, watching people get off with their families and belongings, watching them meet those who had come surging out of the city to greet them.

  Aya had said it was a way to cross the world if one wasn’t prepared to sail the old way and didn’t want to go with the traders.

  Tovo had not thought he would leave the circle of the Ring again, not before he went to the Isle of the Dead and then followed the Wake to the jumping-off place of the spirits. He had thought he would hold his small ember of hope that Kip would come back when it was time, until it was his own time to go.

  He had, at some level, given up.

  Tovo looked at the train, this new and grand thing, which Aya said Kip had caused to happen.

  Someone always left. Sometimes they were lost, and did not come back. Other times they came back with a striking rock, and started a new fire.

  He could keep waiting, as he had been waiting for years, for Kip's sail to come back over the horizon.

  He was getting old. It would be good to know.

  And, if he were honest with himself, he wanted to see the other side of the horizon again.

  Aya had said there would be two days before the train turned to go back across the Wide Seas to the velioi lands.

  Tovo had been known to go voyaging with less notice.

  It was easy.

  He went first to one of the government offices he’d never felt much need to visit before, where for the first time in his life he handled money.

  That was Kip’s doing too, Aya had said. He’d made it so anyone who needed money could have some.

  Tovo had never bothered to learn all the nuances of money, but he knew that was a new thing, and he was proud that it was because of Kip that he would be able to go so quietly, as easily as if he were using his own skills and knowledge to ready his canoe. He had sailed the Ring in his ninetieth year; he had nothing to prove now.

  He took the money to the office at the head of the train, where he bought a berth—just like a Shaian ship, so strict and orderly, but never mind that—for the journey east.

  “I want to go to Solaara,” he said.

  The officer nodded. “When you get to Csiven you can ask the officials there how to get the rest of the way.”

  He accepted this, and on their recommendation collected his dominoes, a bag of his favourite foods, and a blanket for cool evenings. He took his vaha to a quiet covered berth he knew would be out of the way, for he did not like to leave his vaha so long in the sun as it would be outside Lazo's, and after he gathered all of his necessities together in his bilum, not forgetting his tovo and tanaea, he returned with his ticket to the train.

  The official's expressions were amusing when he arrived, still in his traditional skirt because why did he need to change? He was going to see his apprentice, his kinsman, his great-nephew who had sat at his feet until he knew the entire cycle of the Lays backwards and forwards in Shaian and in language.

  His apprentice who had never claimed anything in the hearing of anyone in the Ring, except when he was asked who he was by one of the gods.

  Well, that was a pattern in the Lays, too, even if not the one anyone would expect of the outspoken Kip.

  Tovo knew what the air felt like across the entirety of the Wide Seas. In his youth he had sailed the Sociable Isles, all the archipelagoes named in the Lays.

  The train’s route went that way, they said. He knew the names they mentioned, and was eager to see those islands again. He had not thought he would.

  So: dominoes, a blanket, a bag of food that would keep. There was food to be bought on the train, they told him, even on the long stretch between Gorjo City and Isiguro, the next inhabited island out.

  Tovo remembered when there had been other villages between the Vangavaye-ve and Isiguro, but they had faded in the last years of the Empire, and disappeared completely in the terrible years after the Empire had gone away again. There had been storms across the Wide Seas, flooding islands that had always been precarious.

  He settled into his berth, which consisted of a kind of bed that folded down from the wall, a table and a stool that tucked under the bed when it was down or were usable during the day when it was up, and a window out the side to watch the world go by.

  At the end of each compartment was a little bath-house and a privy, one at each end. There was a sign informing them of the rules—don’t take too long in the bathhouse, bear in mind the others in your compartment, clean up after yourself. The attendant in charge of the train read them out to him in slow, loud tones.

  Tovo nodded, grinning amicably at him. He could read Shaian but did not find much call to do so. And of course there would be rules, that was a Shaian thing. They always wanted rules, strict and strict.

  A small child was watching carefully as the attendant showed him the facilities and pointed to the last compartment on the train as being the one with food and water. Tovo thanked the attendant politely enough; he was a velioi and clearly didn’t know what to make of Tovo, but that was fine. He had the taste of magic around him, related to the magic of the train; probably he helped with it.

  “They told me the same thing,” the child said once the attendant had reiterated the fact that the roof was open but safety was their own concern. Tovo thought this perhaps a little exaggerated, as there were rails all around, and a movable wind-and-sun screen. “If I fall off, it’s my own fault and they won’t come get me.”

  Tovo smiled down at the child, who was half-velioi by her features. She had one blue eye and one brown, and her Islander-gold skin had paler patches around her mouth and eyes, white flashes in her hair. On her hands the patches looked rather like the reflection of ripples on leaves overhanging water.

  Tovo liked how she grinned up at him, and nodded seriously back at her. “You’ll have to make sure not to fall off, then.”

  She wrinkled her nose thoughtfully. “Or make sure I fall off with a boat.”

  “You’d want more than a boat, to sail the middle of the Wide Seas.”

  “Leave the gentleman alone,” a harassed woman said, hastening up with a wild look in her eyes to grab the child’s arm. “I’m sorry, sir, she’s—”

  “Oh, not doing any harm. Tovo inDaino of Loaloa,” he said, smiling at the child and then at her mother.

  “I’m Tanaea,” the child informed him, and with the child’s unerring instinct for saying a true thing at precisely the wrong moment, added, “because mum says I am her little hearth-fire. Not because we’re Mdangs!” She laughed heartily at her own joke.

  “Oh, Tanaea,” her mother said, her eyes flicking to Tovo’s efetana. "I'm Guite ke'e Nuarafo, sir."

  “Well, I am a Mdang,” Tovo replied, grinning down at the girl, who must have been eight or so. “In fact, I am the tanà of the Mdangs, which means I Hold the Fire, so I think we shall get along famously. Tanaea means hearthfire, but it has another meaning too. When you make a fire, you know, you can use a tovo—that’s me—and a tanaea—that’s you—to light the spark.”

  Tanaea stared up at him, mouth open a little with delight. “Are they rocks? Like flint and steel?”

  Smart girl. “Yes,” Tovo said.

  “Do you have some?”

  Tovo grinned. “I do.”

  He nodded at her mother, who was regarding him with surprise and as if she were trying to remember something she’d once heard.

  “The tanà holds the fire,” he said. “Your daughter is safe with me. Are you in this compartment? We’ll be together at least as far as Isiguro, then.”

  “We’re going to Epapapapalona,” Tanaea informed him. “Mum says it’s weeks and weeks away. Are you going that far?”

  “I am going all the way to Solaara.”

  “To see the Emperor?”

  Tovo grinned, thinking of what Aya had said, that Kip had gone as Elonoa'a had gone, to stand beside his emperor. “I expect so.”

  Tanaea was a splendid apprentice. She asked questions—so many questions—but she listened reasonably well to the answers, which was more than Tovo could say of certain other people.