Landfalls (42 page)

Vo looked around at the villagers. “I need a fire,” he said, “a big one. Maybe they'll see the smoke.”

Alu understood first and sprinted into the woods. The other boys followed, hollering in excitement, spreading the news to the rest of the village, that a
vaso
had come for Vo. They returned with armloads of sticks and leaves, friends who wanted to join the fun, and an old woman who brought a white-hot coal from her underground oven. In an instant the fire blazed skyward, the air around it watery with heat and acrid with the smell of burned pandan and banana leaves, the white smoke calling to the
vaso
to come back.

The bustle around the fire separated Oriela from Vo, and then she found herself driven farther away by the heat. The baby, hungry and tired, began to fuss against her, so she retreated to the shade of a young palm and drew the baby around to her front. She nursed the child and watched Vo, struck by the way he expected the others to tend the fire while he stared out at the escaping
vaso.
He was used to giving commands and being obeyed. Had he always been like this, she wondered, or was it a habit he had grown into here? She knew he had not been a chief to his people. He had said so. But it had been obvious enough: here he remained, after the others sailed off in that shabby canoe.

The baby's suckling slowed, then stopped. Oriela tried gently to shake her awake, but the child's mouth went slack, and she popped off the nipple like a sated starfish. Oriela frowned.
Meh-du
, she thought. She disliked the lopsidedness of having one breast empty and the other full, and had meant to switch sides before the baby fell asleep. She brushed a fly from the baby's head and ran her fingers through her hair, soft brown ringlets tipped with sun-yellow. No one could resist touching it—not Oriela, not Vo, not the villagers. With that magical hair, her light brown skin, and dolphin-colored eyes, the child looked like neither Oriela nor Vo, but like something entirely her own, as if she belonged to no one.

A cry came from the other side of the fire, and Oriela looked up to find Vo running along the beach, shouting words she did not know, calling out to the
vaso
as it floated away. He ran into the water, and for a terrible moment Oriela thought he might try to swim out to the
On-lay
, the sometime friends of his people. But he got in only to midcalf before falling to his knees, then sank back onto his heels. He struck at the water swirling around him and howled in grief, and Oriela could hear an answering cry leave her own lips. The baby's eyes stayed shut, but her body started at the sound, short arms flying up as if to protect her own head.

The villagers stopped tending the fire and looked at Vo. They were not used to seeing outbursts like this, not from grown men, not unless someone had died. They began to scatter, looking for a return to the ordinary—the head elder to his favorite shady spot, the few young men to the repair of fishing nets or traps, the women back to babies and vegetable gardens, with just a few children staying to poke at the shrinking fire. Waves broke over Vo's bent and whimpering figure, buffeting his sorrow, wearing it down. By the time the last fingers of smoke drifted up from the blackened heap of sticks and leaves, he was silent. He lay down in the surf, looking nearly as he had when he first arrived, washed up on the beach after his
vaso
had destroyed itself on the reef. Not that Oriela remembered him from that day. They had all looked the same then, like beached jellyfish—monstrous, howling, storm-bringing jellyfish. It was not till later that she began to recognize Vo. He was one of the few survivors who ventured outside the enclosure they built for themselves from pieces of the wrecked
vaso
. He was the only one who tried to learn their language. And he was the only one she saw up close who did not repel her with his ugliness.

The shrill rattle of a kingfisher overhead woke the baby. Oriela entertained her with a string of seashells and watched the tide start to draw in around Vo. With the
vaso
gone, the world seemed to spread itself back out, the deep blue of the ocean beyond the reef disappearing once more into the unseeable distance. Even the space between her and Vo—it could not have been more than twenty paces—seemed great and impassable. It was not until she saw the men's canoes returning, threading their way through the openings in the reef, that she gathered up the baby and went to collect Vo.

“Come, Vo,” she said. The canoes drew closer to the beach, and in a terrible flash she imagined the men coming ashore and finding him there, another great jellyfish spit out by the sea, and falling on him with their oars. She could still remember the terrible thudding of clubs against skulls and the doomed men's screams. “Quick, get up,” she said now, jabbing Vo's side with her foot.

He looked up, his face swollen with sadness, his eyes pinched with aggrieved surprise that she had kicked him. Nevertheless he obeyed, getting up without a word and walking home after her like a tired child.

There was no time for baking yam or grilling fish, so she split a small coconut, mashed some of its flesh for the baby, and arranged larger pieces of the fruit on a few broad leaves alongside pieces of banana and mango. She placed the leaves before her fishing spirit, a kauri-wood carving she kept on an altar against the back wall. Above the carving was a pair of sticks Vo had tied together with strips of bark and insisted on fixing to the wall over her altar. He had told her that it was a spirit more powerful than hers, but she did not believe it. Two sticks tied together, something the smallest child might manage—how could it have any power over her fishing spirit with his shell ornaments and headdress made of real hair? She bent her head and thanked the fishing spirit for their meal, then added: “Please keep the
vaso
away.” She hoped the fishing spirit heard her. He had thornlike hooks from his wrists and ankles, hooks that meant he was a skilled fisherman. “Take good care of him,” Old Talimba had said when she gave Oriela the carving, “and he will catch for you whatever you need.”

Oriela called to Vo, then put the baby on her lap and tried to entice her with the mashed coconut. The baby opened her mouth eagerly for every morsel, but ended up pushing most of it back out with her tongue. Vo watched the baby and smiled at her efforts, but said nothing. Eventually Oriela wiped away the white mash that had collected on the baby's chin and chest, set her down on the reed mat, and brought Vo the food from the altar. He shook his head and motioned for her to have it. Usually he left exactly half of his meal for her, a habit their neighbors found funny. “He spoils you,” they told her. “You get fat while Vo gets skinny.” It was true, she thought, eating up first all of the mango, then the bananas, and finally the coconut. She had been sticklike when she moved in with Vo, but now her arms and legs were fleshy and strong, and she had grown round and solid, like a young tree.

The baby was trying to pull herself across the mat toward Vo. He leaned over and patted her head, bouncing the ringlets of hair against his palm, then said something to her in his language. Oriela did not know what he called the baby. There was no word he always used, at least not one Oriela recognized. It was strange that they had never talked about a name. She knew Vo's people loved names. He sometimes amused her by saying the names of people he had known, and then she would make him laugh by trying to repeat them. The only one she could really say was
Jah-lafo
, a man who had sickened and died during their journey. Vo was still sad about him even though the man had just been his slave. He had explained to her that people of higher rank had longer names. Vo himself had a long and unsayable name, or so he claimed. “Vo” was the only part of it any of them could manage.

Maybe his people did not name children until they survived infancy or did something nameable. Or maybe the
mothers
named the children. Oriela liked that idea—her own choice for a name would have been Iri. But that was not the way here, and without Vo's announcement of a name for the baby, the villagers had settled on one for themselves. Someone called her “Half-Child” after she was born, and to Oriela's dismay, the name had stuck. Every time she heard it she remembered a baby born on the island a long time ago, a sad creature with no arms and legs.
That
was the half-child, she thought. But that baby had never been called anything. It had simply disappeared—thrown to sharks, perhaps, or abandoned on the mountain, or smothered by its father and buried under the house. No one spoke of it.

She stepped outside to toss the scraps from their meal, then lingered in the doorway to admire the sunset. It looked as if a giant parrot had spread its many-colored feathers across the sky, filling her with both joy and sadness. Behind her she could still hear Vo talking. When she had first heard his language spoken among the survivors of the wreck, she had thought it the worst collection of sounds, all snorting and swallowed, as if they had something to hide. But now she could not imagine the sound gone from her life. She ran one heel across the rough surface of the round stone where Vo liked to sit when he was outside. He had told her the stone was used to grind food on their
vaso
. Reaching up, she gently tapped a hollow bowl-like thing, an object from the
vaso
that Vo had hung upside down from the roof beams of their hut. It made a lovely
teen-teen
sound against her fingernail, and was the perfect accompaniment to the shifting colors of the sky and the lilting murmur of Vo's voice as he told his secrets to their daughter.

By the time Oriela stepped back inside, the hut was silent and growing dark. She lay down between the baby and Vo, eager to claim sleep at the end of such a strange day. But Vo turned to her, his narrow face filled with longing, though not, she saw, longing for her.

“Perhaps it's good,” she said. “Perhaps your people are now at war with their people.”

“I would gladly have gone as their captive,” Vo said.

Oriela shut her eyes tight. It was not dark enough to hear this. She did not need to ask,
What about me? What about our child?
He would have left them behind, and she would not have asked to go with him. She was curious about his part of the world, a place where everyone was pale like him and where they were forever making new and larger and more complicated things. But curiosity was different from desire. She did not wish to leave the island. Little good had ever come of people leaving the island. Still, she wished to be wanted. And finding herself unwanted, she wished to injure him.

“The
vaso
was not looking for you,” she said.

“You don't know that,” he said.

“My poor Vo.” The pity in her voice was not false. If someone were looking for him, it would mean the other survivors had made it home. But that was impossible. “Your friends—”

“Yes?”

“You
saw
the canoe.”

“I helped make it.”

When she said nothing, his brow creased in anger and he turned away. Vo and the other survivors had built the canoe out of wood and parts culled from their broken
vaso
. They had worked for days and days, but when they dismantled their enclosure and dragged their creation to the water, the islanders had stared in horror. One of the village men had said, “We might as well have killed them all if they're going to kill themselves.” The others shushed him, but they had all been thinking something like it, for a sadder canoe it was difficult to imagine—unstable, cramped, open to the sky.

Two men had had to be left behind because there was no room for them—Vo and another, younger man. The head elder had taken a liking to Vo and offered him protection, the house, and then Oriela. The younger man had foolishly attached himself to an unlucky rival elder who was later driven to the other side of the island. Oriela assumed the young man had gone with him, but for all she knew he was dead. Perhaps his blood had been exacted to spare the life of the rival elder.

Vo said nothing more, and Oriela began to ease toward sleep. There was no happiness in learning that one's husband would leave if given the chance, but how likely was that chance to come again? The other survivors must have perished of thirst or, if they were lucky, drowned, taking with them the news of Vo's whereabouts. The
On-lay
who skimmed their horizon that morning were far away by now, no doubt satisfying their curiosity about the world, as Vo and his friends once had. She and Vo should not have spoken of it. From now on, she told herself, she must let Vo believe that his friends had found their way home. It was not such a hard thing to do.

Then Vo, his voice loud in the darkness, asked, “Oriela, who do you belong to here?”

She came fully awake, her stomach flipping like a trapped fish. The baby stirred, and Oriela turned toward her. But Vo held her by the shoulder, his thumb pressing into her upper arm. It hurt, and she knew the baby's snuffling would soon turn into real crying if ignored.

“I'll tell you if you let go,” she said.

He released her and she rolled over, taking the baby to her just as the child opened her mouth to wail. Oriela tried to lose herself in the baby's fierce suckling and its strange mix of pain and pleasure, but Vo pressed a finger against her back to prod her.

“I don't belong to anyone…” she said. The words felt like swallowed fish bones in her throat. “I don't know. There are just stories.”

“Stories?”

She drew in a long breath, the way the island boys did before diving off a high cliff. “My mother may have been the head elder's wife.”

“Head elder?” Vo said. “The same head elder you have now?”

“I don't know,” Oriela said, although she was pretty sure she did know. She knew from the way the elder so carefully ignored her. The only time he had spoken to her was when he brought her to live with Vo, and then he had been too cheerful, too loud, giddy with the relief of solving an old problem.