Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander Page 4

  The roof had a splendid view. It was higher than he was accustomed to from the deck of a vaha but not so high as from one of the Shaian-style trading ships. Nor, of course, the flying ships that they saw in the distance once or twice.

  He spent most of his time up there, with the wind in his face and the sea to the horizon and the sun on his back. It was, he thought, good.

  Tanaea joined him for most of it, forever chased by her mother with hat and some sort of ointment to block the sun.

  “It’s my spots,” she told Tovo the first day, with a long-suffering air, tying the hat under her chin so the wind wouldn’t steal it. Guite hovered until Tovo waved her off. Tanaea's mother did not like being on the roof, not at all. “They burn really fast. They’re called vitiligo.”

  “Are they?”

  “Mum says the gods touched me in the womb, but dad said that his auntie had them too. And besides, it didn’t show up until I was five.”

  “What do you think?”

  Tanaea spread out her fingers and pondered the patterns there. “I think the gods probably have better things to do than go round poking babies, don’t you?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Tovo murmured, and then had to tell Tanaea story after story of the gods. She told him some back, some she'd heard in other places, and some she'd made up. Her father was a writer, a maker of stories in the same way Aya was, and Tanaea was already starting to imitate him. A good apprentice, indeed.

  She was particularly interested in how the sea train worked, and kept asking the attendants for more details.

  Tovo gave her some advice on talking to people and was delighted when she came back with the revelation she’d managed to get an invitation to the pilot’s cabin.

  “The train has a special magic fire in its belly,” she told him after her visit there.

  "Does it?"

  “Yes, and Captain Kuuli says that it takes in the sea-water and turns it into fresh water and steam by the magic fire, and that’s what makes it go. But it needs to follow the line of the tracks, otherwise it loses the connection to the magic of the Lights.”

  “How interesting.”

  “Yes. The magic is all sparkly.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, it tastes like books.”

  “How do you mean? I don’t have any magic,” he said seriously, “so you shall have to explain to me.”

  “My daddy writes books, about people and places where we go. We travel a lot, you see. He’s in Epapapapalona, but it’s very very small, and mum said that since he wanted to be there all through the rainy season because they do something special there, the people, that meant we could go on the train to visit Grandmum and Grandpapa and all my cousins.”

  “A capital idea,” Buru acknowledged.

  “My daddy says all books are special and have magic in them, because words can do all sorts of things, but I think some books are more special than others. Some books are magic. They fizz. Like the train.”

  Tovo considered this. There was magic, of course. The kind the Astandalans had used was as common a skill amongst the Islanders as it was with anyone else: about as common as a gift for any other art, and with as much a range of talent and skill.

  And then there was old magic. That had always been rare.

  But there were stories. Most of them involved someone with eyes that were noticeably a bit different. He had always thought that had more to do with what such mages saw, or at least what they looked at, but perhaps the Lays were a touch more literal than that.

  Tovo smiled down at Tanaea, with her one blue eye and her one brown one, and began telling her some of the old tales of people who could speak to the winds or understand the whales or call up fish or fire.

  He was the tanà. When he saw a spark of something good, it was his duty to nourish it.

  The weeks passed, quietly and pleasantly. Tanaea had started to ask for Islander words by their second or third day, and by the end of the two months they spent together she had a solid grasp of language and was well on her way to knowing the central Lays by heart.

  Even though he did not have the usual constellations of signs to orient him—on the train he could not feel the deep currents and changes in the swell, nor taste the saltiness of the water, and even the wind was less informative without a sail to help him touch it—he was nonetheless able to hold his island in his mind and keep a rough sense of where in the Wide Seas they were.

  One night he realized they were crossing that mysterious central space beloved of Vou'a, where the viau would run.

  He told Tanaea and her mother Guite, and the other passengers in their compartment, who by this point had all come to realize he might be very much an Outer Ring Islander but that merely meant he knew the Wide Seas better than any of them. After taking a sunset meal with Tanaea and Guite he led them up to the roof.

  The indigo sky was velvety. The sea was a deep, lustrous blue, green phosphorescence in the wake of the train, rolling back on either side of its bow carriage, very still and steady and reflecting the stars and viau in their magnificence.

  "What are they?" Guite asked, as the flashes of brilliance streaked through the sky above them. "Shooting stars?"

  "Viau," Tovo answered. "Maybe. They belong here."

  The viau were at their finest; they always were, he thought, when someone was seeing them for the first time. They could be seen from land, but never so well as in the open.

  He’d heard that they were not visible away from the Wide Seas, that people elsewhere could only see a handful of shooting stars, not the actual, proper viau, the great schools of white-and-gold streaks and sparks that lit the sky once or twice a decade across the whole breadth of the ocean, and more often than that if you were in the right part of the sea.

  It was a sight Tovo had seen many times, and never found tiresome. He had first come across it on his way home from his great journey, when he'd been pushed far to the east of his homeward course by a storm, and ended up in the northern part of this sea, where no one ever went on purpose.

  If you chased the viau, as the saying went, you were a fool, heading into the uninhabited parts of the ocean.

  If you followed the viau, on the other hand, you might find the island in the centre of the Wide Seas where Vou'a was known to dwell.

  It was like a sardine run following the line of the Wake across the sky. There was an old, old story that the viau were the fish the Ancestors sought, their nets splashing down and scattering their prey so they flashed through the living world.

  Tanaea was entranced, laying beside him for hours after everyone else had gone back to their berths. “This is magic,” she whispered, almost rigid with her own intensity. “This is what magic is like. This is—it is—and surely, surely I can find it again, can’t I, Buru Tovo?”

  Tovo stared up at the sky, the stars and the Wake and the viau in their masses, evanescent as a fountain of sparks when you thrust a log onto a fire.

  “You can,” he said quietly, “if you are willing to run after it.”

  “I am,” Tanaea said. Her voice sounded thick with tears, but she was staring open-eyed and fiercely at the sky. “I am.”

  “People say chasing a viau when they mean someone is being foolish, silly,” he warned her.

  He had been telling her stories from the Lays these past weeks, story after story of those who heard a rumour from the sea of a new island, or a message from a bird of a new food, or a chorus from the coral itself singing of its beauty.

  “It can’t be silly to follow something that beautiful, can it?” she said.

  “No,” he replied quietly, feeling her small hand steal into his. “No.”

  "I'm not sure I can ever thank you enough," Tanaea's mother said to him, the night after the viau.

  “For what?”

  “For … everything.” Guite rubbed her face with her hands. She looked much calmer and happier than she had when they’d first embarked, her eyes brighter, her skin clearer, her smile easier. “Tanaea adores talking with you so much.”

  “She’s a splendid apprentice for a season.”

  “We’re not Mdang, for you to teach her.”

  “With a name like that?” He laughed. “It doesn’t matter. I give the fire to all who need it or want it.”

  “She’s so smart,” her mother said, sighing. “Oh, I shouldn’t say this, but I needed the break so much. To know that she’s safe with you—not just safe but learning so much—she comes back telling me about the wind and the waves and the names of all the things we can see, and the Lays … My granny used to sing them to me, but I didn’t remember them enough to teach to her. Thank you.”

  “You’ve raised a splendid daughter,” he said. “Anyone would be proud to teach her—and to learn from her.”

  “She does like to share,” her mother said, laughing weakly. “You've had ... a son, maybe, like that? A grandson?”

  “A great-nephew,” Tovo answered.

  And then, because Tanaea was off reading a book, something she enjoyed when the afternoon sun was too strong for her, Tovo sat down with her mother and told her stories of Kip and the splendid man he had become.

  They reached Epapalona—Tovo rather preferred Tanaea’s version—and parted ways.

  Tovo had taught Tanaea the words for a farewell, and the words too for a greeting after a long absence: Tē ke’e’vina-tē zēnava parahë’ala, which meant something like ‘How splendid that the star-paths of our voyages meet here!’

  The response was: Tō mo’ea-tō avivayë o rai’ivayë: ‘New islands and old islands are ours to discover now we are together again.’

  Tanaea murmured the words over to herself as they watched the dock at Epapalona come closer. “Will we meet again, Buru Tovo?” she asked.

  “No one can answer that,” he replied gently. “If not in this world, our spirits may meet as we sail Sky Ocean in the next.”

  “Can I write to you?”

  Tovo’s only correspondent was Kip, who wrote to everybody. He was rather tickled at the idea that his chance-met apprentice might be the second. “You can,” he said, and met Guite's startled glance with a grin. “Send it to Lazo Mdang in Gorjo City, I’’ll get it from him eventually. Probably be pretty slow writing back, I don't do it much.”

  “We move around a lot so letters are always slow,” Guite said, though her eyes were on the velioi man standing on the platform, his pale skin shaded by a wide-brimmed straw hat very like Tanaea’s.

  “Kip will know how to reach you, wherever you are,” Tovo said, nodding. “That’s the sort of thing he’s good at. You write, Tanaea, and I’ll write back. We’ll see what sparks we can make together.”

  “Good fires,” she said, firmly, as firmly as a promise to the gods.

  “They’re the best kind,” he agreed.

  The train slowed to a halt, and those who were leaving gathered up their things. Tanaea gave him a hug around the middle and grinned through her tears as she caught sight of her father, who was waving madly at them.

  Tovo smiled and waved good-bye as the train started off again. He might see Tanaea again, or then again he might not. He hoped so: she had been a delight, and her name was a good omen, surely. A bit of a joke from the Son of Laughter, but that was a gift, too.

  He settled back in his berth after greeting the newcomers to the train. One or other of them might be interested in playing dominoes, telling over some new stories, perhaps a variant of the Lays from this part of the Wide Seas.

  Plenty to think about. Albeit Tovo’s thoughts were turning evermore to the east, and the emperor who had been great enough to keep a Mdang at his side for all these years.

  Csiven was a large city, full of bustle and noise.

  It was a city of merchants and traders, busy as a market-day in the trading season. After so long in the narrow confines of the sea train, Tovo rather enjoyed his few nights in the city. He had talked to the people who got on the sea train closer to its end point—it was much more used as a means of local transport, the eastern side of Jilkano—and had determined the location of a couple of wontok, the cousins of a man from the train.

  The cousins were from one of the Sociable Isles and had long since forgotten any Islander they knew, but Tovo had met their grandfather in his own youthful travels, and could tell them stories in return for their hospitality. They put him onto the barge that went up a long series of canals and locks into and then through the mountains to the plains on the other side.

  It was a strange sort of boat, the barge, flat-bottomed and blunt-nosed, and it was drawn by teams of animals on shore. Mules, he learned when he asked what they were. He stared at them openly. For all his travels upon the Wide Seas he had never gone farther than a day or two’s walk from the shore before. The animals of the large continents were strange marvels to him.

  The canal, a human-made river, was made to be flat. When it came to the mountains it was lifted up in an ingenious arrangement of levers and doors that Tovo thought Tanaea would have enjoyed learning about very much. Kip too; but he probably did know about them.

  There were a lot of people talking about Cliopher Mdang out here in the wide world, that was for sure.

  Tovo sat on the deck and watched the water fill the basin and lift the barge up, step by step as they went lock by lock, until they could go straight through a pass in the mountains and start descending the other side.

  It was, he supposed, faster than going all the way around the southern tip of Southern Dair, with all the storms and sudden fogs and dangerous magic and monsters of the southern ocean.

  And it was not entirely boring. It stopped to load and unload cargo frequently, and there were always people clustered close with trade-goods. He ignored most of these, although he did buy a brightly coloured cape—a poncho, he was told it was called—of finely woven wool, because high up in the mountains it was cold at night.

  These mountains were not like a high island’s peak, green with jungle, but were grey and rocky. Their deep valleys had jungle, mist rising; from rivers far, far down under the canopy. There were rope bridges extending from peak to peak, joining them together. Tovo looked at people crossing the bridges, sometimes with strange animals bearing burdens led behind them, and marvelled at how wide the world was.

  The stars were clear, and he looked up, often, at the great arc of the Wake. His destination lay along that line, even if the barge necessarily cut counter to the exact arc. Often enough one had to tack back and forth to reach one’s goal. Any sailor knew that; not all of them remembered to apply it to other parts of their lives.

  There were jungles on the eastern side, full of huge and colourful relatives of the familiar parrots and cockatoos of home. Tovo enjoyed watching them, blue-and-yellow and green-and-red and some splendid and truly enormous black ones. There were any number of smaller birds, and trees and vines and shrubs and flowers beyond counting.

  The canal took him eventually to a river, where the barge-master told him to transfer to another vessel, a riverboat, which would take him to the coast—the Eastern ocean, the far side of the world indeed!—and another sea train north.

  Tovo considered how often Kip had made this trip, in the days before he could come on the fancy flying ships, and was privately impressed.

  Though of course it always mattered most why anyone did what they did. What stories did Kip tell of his journeys? That was what Tovo had come to hear.

  Look first, listen first … and questions later, too.

  Down the river, the Orcholon, where huge grey beasts with snake-like noses and sail-like ears stood washing themselves in the shallows. All the animals seemed larger-than-life: the parrots, the elephants, the river-monsters who lay with only their eyes and nostrils above the surface, floating plants disguising their bodies, watching the boat as it went past with hungry eyes.

  Jilkano was said to have crocodiles, big ones, on its northern coasts, but Tovo had not seen them. He saw the ones on the Orcholon, however. The ship went down another lock and then sailed ponderously down the wide, slow, murky river, full of islands that were themselves full of birds in their trees and crocodiles on the banks.

  These crocodiles were white like bleached coral. At first Tovo thought they were dead as white coral, but they were not; they were simply white.

  He did not go swimming in this river. He had not reached his ninetieth year and travelled more than halfway around the world to be eaten by a crocodile!

  They went past a great city, with terraced towers and elephants seemingly everywhere. There were many monkeys, too, as he was told they were called: disquietingly like human children, but furred and with long grasping tails and faces that showed cunning but no true intelligence.

  They must be sacred to the gods here, along with those striking white crocodiles, Tovo thought, and made a small offering to his own god Vou’a, god of mysteries.

  After restocking in the city the river-boat continued down through swamps full of trees with aerial roots reaching down. Tovo watched the many creatures in the trees—the mangroves, he learned—birds, monkeys, crocodiles, and strange fish that jumped up and sunned themselves on the branches from time to time.

  And then there was fresh salt air, and a new ocean Tovo had never seen from this side: the Eastern Sea of Zunidh according to the emperors, the Other Side of the Horizon for the Islanders. He was well pleased to touch its water, taste its salt, feel its rhythms and currents.

  North on another train, chugging along close to the shore, stopping at many small villages and towns along the coast. There were islands out to sea, cloud-wreathed high islands. One was black and bare, disturbing at even this remove. An island cursed, clearly. Tovo saw how the others on the train averted their eyes from the burned island, or made some sign or other if they happened to catch sight of it, and instead of asking anyone about it he made another prayer to Vou’a to ease whatever shadow that place still cast.