Ivory and Bone (20 page)

As my mother helps Roon hobble into
the kitchen, I turn and race to the shore.

As I get closer, sobs and groans reach me and my legs grow strangely heavy. I slow my steps, listening. Has someone died? The last time I heard people cry together like this was at my grandfather’s burial, when I was just a little boy.

But as the line of people at the edge of the sand comes into view, I see that no one has died—at least not yet. These
aren’t cries of mourning; they’re cries of pain.

Lying across the rocky soil of the beach are a half-dozen members of my clan: my twin cousins, only eleven years old, two women who are close friends of my mother, and my brothers Kesh and Pek. All of them have at least one limb exposed, some two or three—arms and legs cut free of their garments, lying bare against the dark sand like recently caught
fish. But each body part, sticking out at odd angles to be examined by the healer, is mottled by bright red burns. Each face is gray and tight with pain. My aunt and uncle and a third person—the daughter of one of the burned women—help tend to the injured. They hurry back and forth as Urar calls out instructions.

Pek calls to me through clenched teeth. Urar, leaning over Pek’s blistered arm,
lifts his eyes for only a moment, just long enough to point to an empty bowl and order me to fill it from the sea. I hurry to do as I’m told, returning quickly to Pek’s side. “The Bosha clan. They were searching
for Chev,” Pek says. He pauses, sucking in a quick gasp of breath. “They thought we were hiding him, so they set fire to the huts.”

He gasps again, takes two quick breaths. “A boy lit
a torch from the hearth. He hesitated at first, only lighting our own family’s hut. Then the kitchen. He demanded we offer up Chev and his sisters to save the camp. When he realized they had gone, he set more and more huts on fire, threatening anyone who came close.

“Then, when everything was ablaze, Lo came.”

My heart sputters at the sound of her name. Lo? She couldn’t have been here. I’d left
her in her own camp when I came back.

They must’ve left her a kayak. She must’ve followed her people over the bay when I was safely out of the way, running the land route.

“When she learned that Chev wasn’t here, she flew into a rage. She went around the camp ignoring the flames, peering into burning huts, screaming Chev’s and Mya’s names.

“Then, calling for the Divine to curse our clan, she
ran to the shore. She called them all to the boats and they left.”

“To go south,” I say, more to myself than to my brother.

The healer leans over Pek and drips a steady stream of cold water onto his arm from the shell of a long, thin clam. Pek flinches and squeezes my hand. The healer refills the shell and repeats the process farther down his arm. My
brother’s eyes bulge over sunken cheeks,
yet through it all he stares into my eyes.

“Go to them,” he grunts. “To Seeri and her family. To Mya.” The healer drapes a soaking hide across Pek’s burned arm and a high, bright cry bursts through his lips.

I clasp his other arm—the whole and unharmed arm that appears to belong to a different man—and lean down to speak directly into his ear.

“Rest now,” I whisper. “And don’t worry. I can stop
Lo, and I will.”

A
ll at once the beach goes dark as if the sun has set, though it’s not even midday. The storm clouds I’d seen from the ridge—storm clouds that had seemed so far off—have already arrived. With the loss of the sun, the air chills rapidly; the summer morning has been chased away by something that feels more like an autumn afternoon. Wind blows down from the north, sending burned scraps
and cinders billowing through the air like snow.

But it’s not snow that is coming. It’s rain.

I hear it before I feel it—the thrumming of huge drops against the parched ground. The skies above the beach open abruptly, and cold, hard rain falls with the power of a wave on the sea.

Two of the injured are well enough to stand—one of my cousins and one of the women. They climb to their feet and
are helped to a sheltering spot among the brush that grows
beyond the dune grass. Urar calls out for help in carrying the others to cover.

I try to help, responding to the healer’s shouted instructions from behind me, but in front of me, still lying at my feet, Pek screams at me, too. At first I think he’s screaming in pain, his open wounds exposed to the cold hard slap of water. But it’s not
that. He is surely in pain, but he is screaming at me out of anger. Anger at me for not heading south as fast as I can.

“Leave us!” he seethes, his body twisting on the ground. Watching him, every instinct in me screams with a voice as loud as Pek’s to stay. “There are plenty who can help us.” He stretches and straightens his body, reaching for me, fighting the pain in order to look me in the
face. “There is no one else who can warn them.”

No one else who can warn them
. . . No one else who can warn
you
.

He’s right—I know he’s right.

I close my eyes tight and think back on everything my clan has suffered at Lo’s hands—the fire, the panic, the pain. I imagine the same scene playing out at your camp.

Pek’s right—I have to stop it.

It’s almost suicide to take a kayak out in a storm
this strong—I know it; Pek knows it. But I can’t worry about the risks now. I just need to leave quickly.

I nod at Pek, whose hands have wrapped around my
ankles. He releases me. Without another word—without a mention of the dangers I’m running into—I turn and run down the waterfront to the spot where my clan’s kayaks are stored. The assault of the pounding rain slows me slightly, as I struggle
to keep the inside of the kayak dry while climbing in, pulling the straps over each shoulder, and tying the sash securely around my waist. Once I am in, though, I get away surprisingly easily. No one is watching the sea. No one is looking for me. There is damage to repair and injured to tend to.

I have no time to dwell on the guilt of leaving them. The sea demands all my attention. Waves swell
on either side of this tiny kayak—a boat whose size seems to shrink as the power of the storm seems to grow. Paddling is all but futile. The water swirls all around me.

If there is any benefit at all to the power of the waves, it is the speed it gives me. Almost like the current on a river, there is a current on the sea, and for now it takes me in the direction I want to go—out to sea, away from
land, south to the rocky point that borders our bay.

Just stay upright, I tell myself. A capsize now could kill me. Managing a roll in waves like these may prove impossible. I’ve never tried it, and I don’t want to try it today.

Water hits me from every angle—from left and right, from above and below. Sheets of rain mingle with rising waves until I feel that I am drowning in a mix of rain and
seawater. I taste brine in the sheets of water that streak down my face from my hair. Water is everywhere. I whip my head around sharply, trying to clear my face enough to search the shoreline for landmarks, not daring to take a hand from my paddle for even the time it would take to wipe the hair from my eyes. The paddle may be all but useless, but without it I would have no hope at all.

The shoreline
offers me no help either. Where is the point? I seem to have been carried by the waves to another coast entirely, as if the Divine has carried me away and dropped me into a world of water that has no boundaries. I search to my left frantically, seeing nothing but sea to the horizon. My heart burns with panic.
Where is the shore?

This is my last thought as a wave hits me hard from behind, scooping
under me and lifting me high into the air. When the wave drops me, I roll hard to my left and plunge headfirst into the sea.

Under the water or over the water, you have to stay calm
. The terror of drowning out here all alone, of my lifeless body strapped into this kayak as it floats out to sea—these thoughts threaten to crowd out all others. But I push them away. I let in the voice of my father
instead, teaching me how to right myself in a capsized kayak.
You have to stay calm.

I remember that the kayak is like a garment I am wearing, not a boat I am sitting in. I move my body and the kayak moves with me. With all the strength in me, I strike
at the water with my arms, my cupped hands churning the sea into a cloud of bubbles all around me.
You’ve capsized so many times before
, I remind
myself.
This time is no different.
I shift my legs as far to one side as they will go and twist my hips sharply inside the boat. All at once the edge of the boat flips and my head breaks the surface of the water.

I’m upright. The rain still falls in cold sheets and the waves still slam into me from all sides, but I can breathe.

My paddle has drifted away, but I spot it. It’s not far off—carried
by the current away to my left.

My left
—the direction I
thought
was east—the direction I thought was the shore side of the boat. No wonder I couldn’t see the point before I rolled! I wasn’t lost; I was looking the wrong way. The boat must have turned full circle; I was so completely confounded by the storm.

I beat against the water with my hands until I finally reach the paddle. I know I’m lucky
to have retrieved it, I know I’m lucky to have righted the kayak fairly easily and to have had my sense of direction restored, but I cannot keep a creeping dread from taking hold. I am drenched—the apron of the kayak that wraps around my torso, my parka underneath—every part of me above my waist is soaked through with freezing water. I know what can happen if I get too cold. Disorientation. Confusion.
Slowed movement and slowed thoughts. I could even lose consciousness.

The fear taunts me, provokes me to search the shoreline
for a sheltered place where I could pull in and wait out the storm. I imagine quitting—abandoning my purpose for coming out here, giving up on the idea of warning your clan—and just saving my own life by getting warm and dry. I can’t believe how strong the pull is.

I
paddle until my arms grow stiff. Even then, even after the muscles burn and strain with every move, I paddle still. I rest when I can, but as soon as I stop moving a shot of cold runs through me and my whole body shudders. And so I press on, still scanning the shore for a place to rest, still dreaming of abandoning my goal, yet knowing all along that I cannot stop as long as my mind stays alert. As
long as I remember that I am doing this for you.

You.

Water surrounds me, so much that it blends into nothingness. My mind’s eye takes over, and I remember the sight of your face the first time I saw you. I remember the power of your features—so determined, so resolute. I hold that image in my mind—the thought of your sharp eyes and soft mouth, a contradiction on the face of a girl who is a
study in contradictions. I think I will tell you that when I reach you. Yes, when I finally arrive at your camp, I think, I will tell you that you are a study in contradictions.

The image of your face that first time I saw you slips away, as my mind sifts through all the different memories I have of you. Unbidden, it stalls on the moment after you
killed the cat—the moment you looked at me with
so much condemnation in your eyes. How you must have hated me—a Manu hunter raising his spear, a perfect echo of the Manu hunter who took your mother’s life.

From that moment forward, every time I’ve seen you, I’ve noticed something guarded in your eyes, a darkness that wraps around you like a shadow. And now I understand it. . . . I understand that you were guarding your heart, making sure that
no member of the Manu ever caused you pain again.

Out here in this kayak, hurrying to your camp, my heart aches at the thought of the day your mother died and your own clan rushed into kayaks and fled our shores. If only I could go back, if only I could stop the hand of Tram’s father, if only I could protect your mother and change the violent history between our clans.

But I can’t. I can’t change
the pain you suffered in the past, but I can do everything possible to prevent the pain you might suffer in the future.

And so I press on. My arms ache and my shoulders burn with pain, but I press on. I have no other choice. If I stop, I could die.

If I stop,
you
could die.

The starkness of this truth startles me, illuminates an awareness in me of something I could not—or would not—acknowledge
before.

I cannot let you die, because I cannot face a future without you.

Against a background of blurred pain and fear, this truth stands out so plain, and now that I see it, I cannot divert from the path that leads to you.

A steady beat taps against my shoulders, my back, the top of my head. Drops of rain have changed to drops of ice. I remember the summer sun just yesterday, the bees I spotted
a few days ago. But winter isn’t ready to give in completely, and this ice storm is her way of making that known.

Focus on warmth
, I tell myself. I think of the soft glow inside my family’s hut, the warm look in your eyes as you offered me a gift of your own honey.

Your honey—I try to remember the texture, the crisp sweetness, the way I could almost taste the heat of the sun in my mouth. My
clenched hands ache with cold and blisters burn on my palms, but I push those sensations away and fill my mind with the memory of that taste—the flavor of sunshine and warmth.

As I let this memory spread through me from the inside out, I notice them for the first time. At first I’m not sure, but then I see movement, splashing, the shape of a raised paddle, the outline of a man’s arm.

Lo and
her people. There they are! Huddled against the shoreline, tucked under overhanging ledges of ice.

I’ve caught up to them.

Like me, they searched the shore for a spot to rest. Unlike me, they have nothing to propel them forward, no memory of your face to keep them moving through the worst of circumstances.

And they are novice kayakers, their clan having shunned the water in favor of hunting
on land for the last five years. Many of them may never have kayaked before. I watched their silhouettes glide under clear skies across our calm bay, as they headed from Lo’s camp to mine. The open sea is different, and their newly made kayaks may not be perfectly sound and seaworthy. They may even be taking on water.

Paddling through the worst of this storm is difficult for me, a seasoned kayaker.
How much more difficult must it be for the Bosha? No wonder I caught up to them.

And now I will pass them. With the memory of your face held in my mind, drawing me ever forward like a signal guard on a cliff with a torch raised high, I will reach you in time to warn you.

The effort becomes strikingly easy after I pass Lo and her group. Just beyond the icy cliffs where they’ve stopped the coastline
changes—the rocky bluffs and overhangs smooth out and flatten as the shoreline bends east and the southern faces of the mountains begin their descent to lower ground.

Here, the storm abruptly stops. Streaks of sun break through the clouds ahead of me to the south and the wind shifts. Cold gusts still push from behind me, but a warm
breeze blows out from shore.

I allow myself the indulgence of
looking over my shoulder, but only for a moment. Checking the sky, I see the reason for the rapid change in weather—the storm has become caught behind the mountains. Dark clouds still haunt the sky just north of my tiny boat, but they are caught—temporarily, I’m sure—behind the peaks that form a gate to the south.

I revel in the smallest benefits of the break from the storm—my face dries in the
breeze, my hands warm enough to get a more comfortable grip on the paddle. Other things are just as awful as ever—my soaked clothes still cling to my soaked skin—but I focus on the small things.

Now is the time to make progress. I paddle hard, scanning the shore to the east. With the sun’s light, I can see well—better than I have all day. I remember these features. They form the shoreline just
north of your camp.

I am almost there.

I paddle on
.
I will myself to move faster, but my arms slow as if I’ve grown old in one day. I watch the coastline—an inlet, a rocky bluff, another inlet . . . Could it be that I wasn’t as close as I’d thought? The sun still breaks through clouds to the south, but the rays are slanting sharply from the west. How long have I been out on the sea? If the sun
were to set as the rain caught up with me again, I would be swallowed up by darkness.

Clouds roll over me, shadowing the water and shadowing my thoughts. Ideas toss around in my head like tiny boats on the waves.

I have to get to you—to get out of the water, out of the rain, out of the cold. It seems like it should be easy, but despite the fact that I can understand the goal, I can’t think of
how to accomplish it.

Paddle
, I tell myself.
Paddle.

I dig deep into the waves, but my muscles won’t cooperate. I dig again and again, but with each stroke, the thought of you slips further and further away.

Darkness closes in at the corners of my vision. The dark calls to me, promising warmth. For a moment, I’m tempted. It would be so easy to stop trying.

I close my eyes and darkness falls
fast and heavy, cutting me off from the water, the cold, the waves.