The Stars Down Under (23 page)

His dilly bag was gone.

He patted the coverlet, searched the bed of rock, scanned the floor. No sign of it. Silly to be sentimental about a cloth sack, but the loss cut him anyway.

You've got bigger problems,
he told himself.

He staggered upright, paused to let his spinning head settle down, and limped stiffly toward a low archway of rock. A large crocodile in the doorway snapped at him with teeth like knives.

Myell jerked back several frightened steps. The crocodile's tail twitched, long and heavy, but it made no moves toward him. He glanced around for some kind of club or stick, anything that could be used as a weapon. The sea cave gave him nothing.

“She won't eat you,” a woman's voice said.

Myell turned back to see a young woman standing beside the crocodile. The woman had dark hair that curled in luxurious waves to her hips, and a silvery-white face that seemed familiar. She wore a scrap of fabric around her waist. A string of fish bones and palm fronds hung around her neck.

“She's just curious,” the woman continued. “She thinks Nogomain who pretend they are birds must have spent too much time in the sun.”

All the questions Myell wanted to ask jammed up in his throat. The woman stepped farther into the chamber, her dainty feet pale against the wet rock. Her lips were blue in the glowing light.

“I don't think you're Nogomain yet, and you would make a terrible bird.” She advanced on him with delicate steps. The tip of her head reached only to his shoulders. “Still, you're welcome here. At least until you tire of fish and salt and the sharks who circle you even now.”

She put one hand on his chest. Her fingers were short and stubby, her nails green. Her bare, firm breasts were covered with translucent scales, and the nipples were black. She gazed at him steadily, her eyes betraying nothing.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Names are secrets,” she said. “You can call me Free-not-chained.”

“Are you … human?”

She laughed. “Are you?”

Free-not-chained turned away before he could answer. She glided from the cave as if the rocky wet floor were made of ice. Myell followed very carefully, eyes on the crocodile. It let him pass unmolested. Free-not-chained led him through more narrow, low caves. In some the luminescent walls faded to faint glows, leaving him stumbling. In others, open pools of seawater lapped at rock, and silvery fish splashed at their surfaces.

Free-not-chained's destination was a wide, high chamber where sunlight broke through large gaps in the ceiling and walls. He could hear birds cawing and the wind whistling, and see chunks of the distant blue sky. The cavern floor was littered with birdshit-stained rocks and women like Free-not-chained basking in pools of sunlight. Crocodiles slept among the women, curled up like pets.

“He lives,” one of the women murmured, opening her eyes at Myell's arrival.

“He's only a man,” another said, arching her spine and licking at her fingers.

Free-not-chained showed him a flat expanse of damp sand and bade him to sit down. “He's Jungali,” she said, which made goosebumps run down his spine.

“Where did you hear that name?” Myell demanded. His mother had given him that secret nickname. The Rainbow Serpent had called him by it. But no one else, not even Jodenny, knew it.

“Whispered by the gods,” Free-not-chained said. “Murmured in awe and fear.”

She gave him a cup of fresh water. Though he didn't expect to be thirsty after inhaling half an ocean, he finished all of it with slow, even swallows. When she offered him bits of raw fish, he shook his head.

“What about the Bunyip?” he asked. “The creature that dived into the sea when I did.”

“Stranger,” said one woman.

“Interloper!” said another.

Free-not-chained leaned against an old, scarred crocodile. She stroked its tail with one hand and gave Myell a long look from under her black eyelashes. “He swam to shore. They took him. They celebrate him as the Lightning God, in error. We kept you.”

Myell pulled the seagull feathers tighter. “Why?”

“So curious,” said one of the others, and rubbed her legs languidly against each other.

To Free-not-chained he said, “I am thankful that you saved my life. But I need to get back to my friends. Will you take me?”

She licked her lips. “Not curious. Denying. But your friends, they will come soon to take you to the Nogomain.”

“Who are the Nogomain?” he asked. “I don't know that word. Are they gods? Like the Rainbow Serpent?”

None of the women answered. Free-not-chained continued to stroke her crocodile. Sea spray shot over the rocks above them, sending down water drops that chilled Myell's skin.

“I have a wife,” he said. “I have to go home to her.”

Free-not-chained closed her eyes. The other women also seemed to doze. Some of the crocodiles stayed awake, their eyes flat and watchful. Myell edged to his feet, tiptoed past tails and claws, and tried to avoid the clamp of jaws around his ankles. Sweat trickled down his neck and made the feather coverlet stick to his skin. It wouldn't be so funny to survive a cliff dive only to be devoured by wild reptiles, but he was their Jungali, whatever that meant, so maybe they wouldn't rip his limbs apart, wouldn't snap his bones and chew up his organs.

At the far end of the chamber was a jumble of boulders that twisted up to the sky. He'd never been much for rock climbing, had never even attempted it beyond a few tries in shipboard gyms, but he could see footholds and handholds. The rocks were rough and sharp, and sliced into his palms and bare feet as he ascended.

Blood,
he thought. A great way to attract a crocodile's attention.

He did his best not to look down and instead focused on each purchase and heft upward. The coverlet fluttered around his ankles and feathers clung to his knees. He abandoned it for expediency's sake. Bare-assed was not his favorite way to brave an incline of mercilessly sharp rock, but it wouldn't matter one way or the other if he fell to his death.

Despite the cool air he was soon sweating. He couldn't climb steadily upward but instead had to zigzag and double back at times when the rock proved too steep. He imagined that at the top of the climb he'd find Jodenny, warm clothes, a hot meal, and an ouroboros, in that exact order, but the list was depressing because of its improbability, and so he concentrated instead on not slipping and crashing to the ground below.

He did look down, at one point, and was startled to see that all the women had vanished, and in their places were more crocodiles: crocodiles with red eyes and green nails, crocodiles lolling with their tummies turned to the sun.

Myell climbed higher.

The surface finally came within reach, and he hauled himself into a dazzling, overwhelming jumble of rock and sky and clouds. For a moment all he could do was sit and shake and tremble. Impossible task number one, accomplished. Then he lifted his head and saw ocean in every direction. The caves were part of an underwater reef and islands whose jagged tips rose above the tide and currents. He couldn't see the mainland. Even if he dared swim, he didn't know which direction to swim in, which way to safety and shore.

He sat back, already feeling the sun burning his skin, unable to contemplate a climb back down into the crocodile pit. He had no fresh water, no food, and no hope to cling to.

No clothes, either.

If only Jodenny could see him now.

He was still sitting there when a long wooden canoe curved into view with two women inside it. The first had dark skin and white hair, her face marked with scars. The second was a young woman of Asian descent whom Myell had last seen on the
Aral Sea
several months earlier, and who he'd presumed was dead.

“Hi there,” Able Technician Ishikawa said with a smile. “Can we give you a lift, Sergeant?”

“Chief,” he said dumbly. “I'm a chief now.”

Ishikawa gave a mock salute. “Chief. I'm glad they promoted you.”

Myell considered several responses to that, but went with the one most obvious. “You're not real. Neither of you.”

Ishikawa's smile grew wider. “Real or not, maybe you'd like a ride to somewhere with a few more amenities?”

He considered the boat, the waves, the sea. His legs were still shaky from the climb. He tipped his head back and let the sun warm his face. “Nope.”

“He's crazy.” That was the second woman in the canoe, the woman he didn't know, speaking with an accent that he couldn't quite place.

“I'm not kidding. We've got a nice place for you to sleep, good food, tree houses, gods…” Ishikawa said.

Myell cracked an eyelid at them but didn't commit.

Ishikawa added, “Or you can stay here until the tide comes in,” and that did the trick.

He'd been in a few situations more humiliating than climbing naked down the rocks and into their canoe, but at the moment he couldn't think of any. Ishikawa handed him a red-and-blue woven blanket. He pulled it over his shoulders and tucked it under his ass, but still felt exposed. The boat rose and fell with the waves, twisting from side to side. He tried not to look at all the water.

“I should ask you the normal questions,” he said to Ishikawa. “Who, what, everything.”

“All good things in good time,” she replied. “This is my sister Silrys.”

Silrys began paddling. “You're Jungali,” she said over her shoulder, and she didn't sound like she approved.

Myell pulled the blanket tighter. “I wish people would stop calling me that.”

The women exchanged looks he couldn't read, which annoyed him more than anything else had that day. But he lost his grip on his irritation as the canoe started across the water. Oddly enough, plunging into the ocean from a terrifying height hadn't cured his phobia. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe steadily, an exercise that was supposed to calm him, but the back of his throat began to burn and he knew, with certainty, that he was about to vomit.

“Chief, here.” Ishikawa pushed a jug into his hands. “Drink. It helps me. I always get seasick.”

The liquid was thick wine that tasted like honey. He slit his eyes open and saw that they were still surrounded by water, by the treacherous and merciless sea, but they were headed for a large, sloping island not too far away. He nursed Ishikawa's brew and ignored the dizzying motion of the canoe.

“Sharks,” Silrys said, sounding very casual about it.

Fins sliced through the water off their starboard bow.

“No worries,” Ishikawa said, and patted Myell's back.

They reached the hilly island without being besieged by sharks, dolphins, whales, or other monsters of the deep. Ishikawa helped Myell from the canoe and past salt-crusted rocks. The alcohol had left him a little tipsy. The shoreline was rough. No scenic beaches here, no curving ribbons of sand.

“Nice place you've got,” Myell said, keeping a tight grasp on Ishikawa's wine jug.

The rocks quickly gave way to sea grass, then to a forest where a canopy of green leaves tinted the sunlight. There were no houses or other shelters immediately visible, but as the two women took him farther from shore he began to see rope bridges up in the trees, platforms made from hewn logs, thatched huts nestled in branches. Colorful birds flitted from tree to tree and women's faces peeked down at him—sunburned faces, dark-skinned faces, young faces, faces of old women.

“This is our village,” Ishikawa said.

Myell tilted his head back. “You live up there?”

Ishikawa said, “Mostly.”

The tree houses grew more numerous and complex. Most were clustered in concentric rings around a Child Sphere sitting by itself in a dirt clearing. Unlike other Spheres that Myell had seen, this one was covered with Aboriginal paintings that mirrored the ones they'd discovered in the cave. Crocodiles and birds, animals and reptiles of all kinds, and one lone, large figure that looked like a man or a god holding arrows in his hand.

Flower offerings, bits of food, and carved wooden totems surrounded the Painted Child, whose dark archway called to Myell like no other Sphere had ever done.

“Up here, Chief,” Ishikawa said, steering him toward a ladder fastened to one of the trees. “I know you're not afraid of heights.”

Not normally, no. But as Myell tipped his gaze up the tree, he thought about spiders and stinging fronds.

“I think I'll stay here,” he said. He slid to the base of the tree with the jug and blanket for company.

Silrys glowered down at him. “He's drunk.”

“Am not,” Myell protested, and swallowed more wine.

More women appeared around him, some of them barely clothed, a few of them muttering disapprovingly. Some of them giggled. Small boys and girls poked at his arms or hung seashell strands around his neck. The sunlight through the trees dazzled his eyes. The blanket scratched his skin. He began telling Ishikawa, with earnestness and great detail, how he'd been promoted to chief and then turned down initiation and now some other chiefs hated him, and officers too, and Commander Nam. But halfway through the story he fell asleep, and when he next woke up he was in one of the tree houses. Green leaves and colorful birds and brown rope bridges surrounded him. The sun had fallen far in the sky, and someone nearby was roasting spiced meat.

“There you are,” Ishikawa said as he stirred.

Myell sat up groggily. The tree house was a single room outfitted with weavings and sea treasures and wooden carvings. His bladder was close to bursting. Ishikawa handed over a clay pot and turned her back until he was done.

“There's water in that jug over there,” she said. “No more hooch for you. Dinner should be ready soon.”

Myell peered at the tree huts and bridges and platforms. “What is this place?”

“Island of the Amazons,” she said.

“You're kidding.”