Gods of the Greataway (8 page)

A ripple
appeared in the calm crimson of the sea. A faint melody carried across the waters, a sound like the most beautiful choir of women’s voices, yet without words. The sounds soothed Peli’s troubled thoughts and he felt peace and a quiet joy. It seemed suddenly that he’d led a good life; he’d been respected in his craft, and now he was taking a rest that he’d earned many times over.

And the outline of a girl sat there in the water.

He blinked, peering, thinking his eyes were playing their tricks again.

The music stopped. The girl raised her hand.

Peli stood. She was close, now, riding the water to the very edge of the grass. She clutched at the shore, but the grass broke off in her hands. She uttered a funny little whimpering noise, and Peli realized she was in trouble. He bent down, took her hand, and swung her up beside him.

As he did, he caught a brief glimpse of a great swirling back that glowed indigo in the sun’s last rays, rolling past and down, heaving the shore with the wash of its passing, so that he had to sit down quickly. Then it was gone, but the grass rippled for a long time afterward.

He turned to the girl. She sat beside him, looking out to sea while her hands ran over the grass, feeling it, allowing its tough coarseness to enter her senses and awaken memories. Tears ran down her face, but her eyes were blank.

He asked her, “What’s your name?” but she didn’t reply.

She only spoke once from that day until the day, not so long afterward, when she died.

*

She wore tattered sealskin clothing, so he knew she was of the islands. The only other clue to her identity was a pendant that hung on a silver chain around her neck. And this was a great wonder to him because he’d never seen silver before — or any other metal, for that matter — neither had he seen a stone like the one at the end of the chain. It flashed like a star when the sun caught it in a certain way, so brightlv that even Peli blinked.

She stayed
with him. She slept in a room that he built for her, on the sunny side of his dwelling because she reminded him of the sun, with her pale face and golden hair and the sparkling thing she wore around her neck.

He showed her the ways of the sun oven, and some of the light came back into her eyes as she played with the hemitrexes, arranging them at sunset so that the shoreline blazed with winking red stars and the inside of the dwelling glowed pink. Soon he took her with him when he visited his few remaining customers.

It was quite by chance that he discovered a wonderful thing.

He was sitting inside a sun oven, sweating while the lights danced in his brain and fogged his eyes, so that adjustment of the hemitrexes was well-nigh impossible. A few villagers watched. The youths were eyeing the girl but were unwilling to make approaches because of the remoteness in her manner and her silence. She leaned over the edge of the basket, dribbling water onto his head from a sealskin gourd.

Something flashed. He blinked. The flash was so bright that it cut through the fog. He looked up, wiping the sweat from his eyes. A couple of youths stood there, watching the girl’s breasts as she bent forward. Peli shook his head, trying to clear the mists from his eyes.

Again the flash. It came from the girl’s breasts. No, not the breasts — it came from the pendant that hung low as she leaned over the rim of the basket. It had caught the light of a focused hemitrex …

From that moment to Peli’s great invention was a short step. He experimented at his dwelling, away from curious eyes, assisted by the girl. She helped him build a basket. Over the basket they erected a driftwood tripod and hung a thong from it. On the end of the thong they tied the pendant, so that the bright stone was suspended at the focal point of the basket. Then they plastered the inside of the basket with glue, and they stuck the hemitrexes in there, roughly, with no careful regard for alignment. Then they climbed out of the basket.

Now Peli took a long stick and, reaching into the basket, adjusted a hemitrex until the stone flashed as the light was focused on it. Then he moved the tripod a fraction, and focused another hemitrex. And so on — the whole task could now be carried out from outside the oven. In time he devised refinements: an attachment on the tripod so that the stone traveled on a regular path, a more open weave to the basket so that the hemitrexes could be focused with the fingers through the mesh instead of with the clumsy stick.

He
was a craftsman again, and it was all due to the girl. He recognized this, and worked on her room until it was as luxurious as his own and did everything he could to keep her happy. He knew that if she left him he would feel bound to return the pendant to her, and his days as a craftsman would truly be over. Maybe she understood this too, because she stayed. But she never spoke.

*

One day the Riders came. The girl saw the commotion from a distance, a confusion of disturbed water down the coast that resolved itself into a group of Riders and their attendants, traveling fast. She ran to Peli and he hurried from his shack, peering north. Riders, all together and heading this way. No good would come of it.

Then they were close, thirty in all, with a number of spare orcas in tow. One drove alongside the shore and climbed onto the grass. Peli recognized Or Kala, who owned lands hereabouts, including the land on which Peli’s dwelling sat. He greeted the Rider respectfully.

“I’m sorry, Peli. I have to commandeer your orca,” Or Kala said.

“What? But the orca is mine! How else can I travel to my work?”

“You’ll have to walk, I’m afraid.” The Rider was sympathetic but firm. “It’s war, and we need all the orcas we can round up.” His eyes dwelt on the girl several times, in puzzled fashion. Obviously he couldn’t quite see where she fitted in.

“War? With whom?”

“We ride against King Awamia of Uami. It seems he’s acting in contravention of the Code, and we must annex his island.”

“I’ve heard of King Awamia. I always understood he was a devout man.”

Or
Kala began to get annoyed. A reasoned discussion with his subject was permissible, but this craftsman was contradicting him. “It is for the good of the grass that Uami be joined to Malaloa — linking of islands has always been our policy; it makes for better management and reduces drift — only last season Awamia lost a section of his land in a storm. Small islands are always vulnerable. Recently Uami drifted near, and in accordance with our policy, we told Awamia that the gods obviously wished a merger. Not only did he refuse, but he enlisted the help of four evil giants to increase the distance between our lands. We have no option but to fight!”

So saying, Or Kala rode off, taking Peli’s orca with him.

That night Peli prayed, repeating the Vow and reaffirming his devotion, in puzzlement and some fear …

He went to sleep eventually, and he dreamed of the four giants, who were truly monstrous and ate islands for breakfast.

*

Two days later rumors reached him from a nearby village. It seemed the four giants of Uami were not huge at all. Indeed, they were almost human — and clever too, because they had arrived on an island small and fast-moving, yet stronger for its size than any known, and they had fashioned this island themselves. Then they had instructed King Awamia in the building of vast flat towers with no rooms, which in some mysterious way farmed the wind and sped the island of Uami away from Malaloa.

Then,
the very next day, disaster struck Peli.

Or Kala arrived with a handful of armed Riders. He stepped ashore.

“Peli, where is the girl?”

“In her dwelling.”

“Bring her here.”

Peli, full of forebodings, fetched the girl. She had been brushing her hair with a sea urchin and it shone like the sun. Her eyes were the color of the ocean, and Peli, peering dimly in his blindness, realized she was very beautiful. He said unhappily, “She can’t talk.”

Or Kala regarded the girl carefully. “Where does she come from?”

“The sea …” he waved a hand.

“How long has she been with you?”

“Many days, now … A long time.” The fear was within him.

“Peli … I know who this girl is. There is no doubt in my mind — she is the lost daughter of King Awamia. Her name is Kelina. Here, Kelina!” He spoke sharply at the girl, but she gave no sign of recognizing the name. “No matter. It is she. She must come with me. She will be a very useful bargaining point in our next talk with King Awamia.”

So they took the girl who may have been the lost daughter of King Awamia, and they mounted her on an orca behind Or Kala, and they rode away, fast, throwing high bow waves.

Peli watched them go and they soon became a blur in his eyes, whether from tears or blindness he couldn’t tell. He blinked, but he couldn’t see them any more, and after a while he turned and stumbled back to his dwelling.

He is never mentioned again in the legends of Polysitia.

I
n
Polysitia the minstrels tell of the Great Blue, the huge whale that, over the centuries, has appeared in times of need. They say the whale is over two hundred meters long, and that he sings a song more beautiful than any minstrel’s as he cruises the oceans of Earth. Stories of the Great Blue are uplifting stories — of islands saved from destruction during hurricanes, of children saved from drowning while at play, of fish herded to desolate shores during times of starvation. All the islands have stories that tell of the Great Blue, and students of later years have remarked often on the one common factor: that the Whale seemed to have the power of sensing human distress from afar. Where he came from nobody ever knew; but he came, and he helped people in need, and he went away.

*

Kelina was back. In his mysterious way — so the minstrels say — the Great Blue had found Kelina, where the emissaries of King Awamia had failed, and had delivered her to the island of Malaloa. Now, the Great Blue was good and acted only in the interests of man, and could not have known that Malaloa had recently declared war on King Awamia’s island of Uami. War was unthinkable to the Great Blue.

So
the soldiers of King Usalo of Malaloa took Kelina, and held her in a small coastal village that was the nearest point to Uami at that time. And they sent word to King Awamia, telling him that they held his daughter captive and that he must surrender his lands if he wanted to see her again.

Now, King Awamia had enlisted the help of four strangers in the war against Malaloa, and these strangers had shown him how to build huge sails to propel his island farther away from his foe. If they had but known it, this practice would eventually have wrecked the island upon the barren shores of Dry Land, but at the time King Awamia was interested only in flight. The strangers were evil, so the minstrels tell, and of peculiar shape. One of them had a chest as big as an orca but with normal legs, and another, a female, had breasts like two huge puffer fish. The third stranger was incredibly old and wrinkled, and the fourth was like a giant baby.

The soldiers of Malaloa stood at the shore, waiting for King Awamia’s response, and in due course they saw a Rider approaching. He pulled up and stepped ashore, while his mount cruised away to join fifty other orcas, all ready to carry soldiers against King Awamia if his reply was not satisfactory.

The Rider’s name was Or Kala and he bowed before the king. “I took the message,” he said, “and King Awamia gave me audience. When I told him we had his daughter, he cried and embraced me. He had his servants prepare a vast meal, and we celebrated long into the night.”

“Wait a moment.” King Usalo frowned. “We are at war with these people, in the name of the Code. We don’t celebrate with them. The girl Kelina is a hostage. Did Awamia understand that?”

“He couldn’t think about war. All he could think of was his daughter. If we’d asked him to surrender the whole world, he’d have done it gladly. So far as he’s concerned, the war’s over.”

“Oh.” King Usalo was somewhat disappointed. “So what happens next? You gave him the full message — that his daughter would not be returned to him until the gap between our two islands was narrow enough for her to step across?” His voice was a little pompous. He was rather proud of this stipulation, which killed two fish, as it were, with one spear.

“I
told him. It didn’t bother him. He sent his Riders to round up the guidewhales, and he set his villagers to tearing down the sails that the strangers had built.”

“The strangers … Are they as ugly as we hear?”

“Yes, although the older woman has a certain charm.”

“How did they react when Awamia gave orders to destroy their invention?”

Now Or Kala looked puzzled, remembering. “Oddly enough, they didn’t mind. In fact they were as happy as the king, particularly the young one shaped like a sunfish.”

“You don’t suspect a trick?”

“I don’t see what tricks they could pull.”

“Strangers often have unusual powers.”

“Not these strangers. They are just ordinary people from a culture that differs from ours. I think they come from Dry Land.”

“Oh, that explains it.” Satisfied, the King went to check on Kelina. He could hardly believe his good fortune. Indeed, it was something of an anticlimax.

*

Seven days later the towers of Uami could be seen on the horizon, and within another day the shoreline could be discerned. Slowly the islands moved closer, and soon the seabirds began to fly between them. Two days later again, figures could be made out on the Uami shore.