Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (4 page)

Her greatest joy lay in seeing them grow
into his image (though she always thought that Keawe resembled her father more
than his own), and come to their full strength and beauty in a kind of
innocence that kept them free of any vanity. Being twins, they understood each
other in a wordless way that even Mirali could not share. This pleased her, for
she thought, watching them playing silently together,
they will still have
one another when I am gone
.

The Shark God saw the children when he
came every year for his tribute, but only while they were asleep. In human form
he would stand silently between their floor mats, studying them out of his
black, expressionless eyes for a long time, before he finally turned away. Once
he said quietly to Mirali, “It is good that I see them no more often than this.
A good thing.” Another time she heard him murmur to himself, “
Simpler for
sharks
...”

As for Mirali herself, the love of the
Shark God warded off the cruelty of the passing years, so that she continued to
appear little older than her own children. They teased her about this, saying
that she embarrassed them, but they were proud, and likewise aware that their
mother remained attractive to the men of the village. A number of those came
shyly courting, but all were turned away with such civility that they hardly
knew they had been rejected; and certainly not by a married woman who saw her
husband only once in a twelvemonth.

When Keawe and Kokinja were little younger
than she had been when she heard a youth singing in the marketplace, she called
them from the lagoon, where they spent most of their playtime, and told them
simply, “Your father is the Shark God himself. It is time you knew this.”

In all the years that she had imagined
this moment, she had guessed—so she thought—every possible reaction
that her children might have to these words. Wonder... awe... pride... fear
(there are many tales of gods eating their children)... even laughing
disbelief—she was long prepared for each of these. But it had never
occurred to her that both Keawe and Kokinja might be immediately furious at
their father for—as they saw it—abandoning his family and
graciously condescending to spare a glance over them while passing through the
lagoon to gobble his annual goat. Keawe shouted into the wind, “I would rather
the lowest palm-wine drunkard on the island had sired us than this...this
god
who cannot be bothered with his wife and children but once a year. Yes, I would
prefer that by far!”

“That one day has always lighted my way to
the next,” his mother said quietly. She turned to Kokinja. “And as for you,
child—”

But Kokinja interrupted her, saying
firmly, “The Shark God may have a daughter, but I have no more father today
than I had yesterday. But if I
am
the Shark God’s daughter, then I will
set out tomorrow and swim the sea until I find him. And when I find him, I will
ask questions—oh, indeed, I will ask him questions. And he
will
answer me.” She tossed her black hair, which was the image of Mirali’s hair, as
her eyes were those of her father’s people. Mirali’s own eyes filled with tears
as she looked at her nearly grown daughter, remembering a small girl stamping
one tiny foot and shouting, “Yes, I will! Yes, I will!”
Oh, there is this
much truth in what they say,
she thought to her husband.
You have truly
no idea what you have sired
.

In the morning, as she had sworn, Kokinja kissed
Mirali and Keawe farewell and set forth into the sea to find the Shark God. Her
brother,
being
her brother, was astonished to realize that she meant to
keep her vow, and actually begged her to reconsider, when he was not ordering
her to do so. But Mirali knew that Kokinja was as much at home in the deep as
anything with gills and a tail; and she further knew that no harm would come to
Kokinja from any sea creature, because of their promise on her own wedding day.
So she said nothing to her daughter, except to remind her, “If any creature can
tell you exactly where the Shark God will be at any given moment, it will be
the great Paikea, who came to our wedding. Go well, then, and keep warm.”

Kokinja had swum out many a time beyond
the curving coral reef that had created the lagoon a thousand or more years
before, and she had no more fear of the open sea than of the stream where she
had drawn water all her life. But this time, when she paused among the little
scarlet-and-black fish that swarmed about a gap in the reef, and turned to see
her brother Keawe waving after her, then a hand seemed to close on her heart,
and she could not see anything clearly for a while. All the same, the moment
her vision cleared, she waved once to Keawe and plunged on past the reef out to
sea. The next time she looked back, both reef and island were long lost to her
sight.

Now it must be understood that Kokinja did
not swim as humans do, being who she was. From her first day splashing in the
shallows of the lagoon, she had truly swum like a fish, or perhaps a dolphin.
Swimming in this manner she outsped sailfish, marlin, tunny and tuna alike;
even had the barracuda not been bound by his oath to the Shark God, he could
never have come within snapping distance of the Shark God’s daughter. Only the
seagull and the great white wandering albatross, borne on the wind, kept even
with the small figure far below, utterly alone between horizon and horizon,
racing on and on under the darkening sky.

The favor of the waters applied to Kokinja
in other ways. The fish themselves always seemed to know when she grew hungry,
for then schools of salmon or mackerel would materialize out of the depths to
accompany her, and she would express proper gratitude and devour one or another
as she swam, as a shark would do. When she tired, she either curled up in a
slow-rocking swell and slept, like a seal, or clung to the first sea turtle she
encountered and drowsed peacefully on its shell—the leatherbacks were the
most comfortable—while it courteously paddled along on the surface, so
that she could breathe. Should she arrive at an island, she would haul out on
the beach—again, like a seal—and sleep fully for a day; then bathe
as she might, and be on her way once more.

Only a storm could overtake her, and those
did frighten her at first, striking from the east or the north to tear fiercely
at the sea. Not being a fish herself, she could not stay below the vast waves
that played with her, Shark God’s daughter or no, tossing her back and forth as
an orca will toss its prey, then suddenly dropping out from under her, so that
she floundered in their hollows, choking and gasping desperately, aware as she
so rarely was of her own human weakness and fragility. But she was determined
that she would not die without letting her father know what she thought of him;
and by and by she learned to laugh at the lightning overhead, even when it
struck the water on every side of her, as though
something
knew she was
near and alone. She would laugh, and she would call out, not caring that her
voice was lost in wind and thunder, “Missed me again—so sorry, you missed
me again!” For if she was the Shark God’s daughter, who could swim the sea, she
was Mirali’s stubborn little girl too.

Keawe, Mirali’s son, was of a different
nature than his sister. While he shared her anger at the Shark God’s neglect,
he simply decided to go on living as though he had no father, which was, after
all, what he had always believed. And while he feared for Kokinja in the deep
sea, and sometimes yearned to follow her, he was even more concerned about
their mother. Like most grown children, he believed, despite the evidence of
his eyes, that Mirali would dwindle away, starve, pine and die should both he
and Kokinja be gone. Therefore he stayed at home and apprenticed himself to
Uhila, the master builder of outrigger canoes, telling his mother that he would
build the finest boat ever made, and in it he would one day bring Kokinja home.
Mirali smiled gently and said nothing.

Uhila was known as a hard, impatient master,
but Keawe studied well and swiftly learned everything the old man could teach
him, which was not merely about the choosing of woods, nor about the weaving of
all manner of sails and ropes, nor about the designing of different boats for
different uses; nor how to warp the bamboo float, the
ama
,
just
so, and bind the long spars, the
iaka
, so that the connection to the
hull would hold even in the worst storms. Uhila taught him, more importantly,
the understanding of wood, and of water, and of the ancient relationship
between them: half alliance, half war. At the end of Keawe’s apprenticeship,
gruff Uhila blessed him and gave him his own set of tools, which he had never
done before in the memory of even the oldest villagers.

But he said also to the boy, “You do not
love the boats as I do, for their own sake, for the joy of the making. I could
tell that the first day you came to me. You are bound by a purpose—you
need a certain boat, and in order to achieve it you needed to achieve every
other boat. Tell me, have I spoken truly?”

Then Keawe bowed his head and answered, “I
never meant to deceive you, wise Uhila. But my sister is far away, gone farther
than an ordinary sailing canoe could find her, and it was on me to build the
one boat that could bring her back. For that I needed all your knowledge, and
all your wisdom. Forgive me if I have done wrong.”

But Uhila looked out at the lagoon, where
a new sailing canoe, more beautiful and splendid than any other in the harbor
danced like a butterfly at anchor, and he said, “It is too big for any one
person to paddle, too big to sail. What will you do for a crew?”

“He will have a crew,” a calm voice
answered. Both men turned to see Mirali smiling at them. She said to Keawe,
“You will not want anyone else. You know that.”

And Keawe did know, which was why he had
never considered setting out with a crew at all. So he said only, “There is a
comfortable seat near the bow for you, and you will be our lookout as you
paddle. But I must sit in the rear and take charge of the tiller and the
sails.”

“For now,” replied Mirali gravely, and she
winked just a little at Uhila, who was deeply shocked by the notion of a woman
steering any boat at all, let alone winking at him.

So Keawe and his mother went searching for
Kokinja, and thus—though neither of them spoke of it—for the Shark
God. They were, as they had been from Keawe’s birth, pleasant company for one
another: Keawe often sang the songs Mirali had taught him and his sister as
children, and she herself would in turn tell old tales from older times, when
all the gods were young, and all was possible. At other times, with a following
sea and the handsome yellow sail up, they gave the canoe its head and sat in
perfectly companionable silence, thinking thoughts that neither of them ever
asked about. When they were hungry, Keawe plunged into the sea and returned
swiftly with as much fish as they could eat; when it rained, although they had
brought more water than food with them, still they caught the rain in the sail,
since one can never have too much fresh water at sea. They slept by turns,
warmly, guiding themselves by the stars and the turning of the earth, in the
manner of birds, though their only real concern was to keep on straight toward
the sunset, as Kokinja had done.

At times, watching his mother regard a
couple of flying fish barely missing the sail, or turn her head to laugh at the
dolphins accompanying the boat, with her still-black hair blowing across her
cheek, Keawe would think,
god or no god, my father was a fool.
But unlike
Kokinja, he thought it in pity more than anger. And if a shark should escort
them for a little, cruising lazily along with the boat, he would joke with it
in his mind—
Are you my aunt? Are you my cousin?
—for he had
always had more humor than his sister. Once, when a great blue mako traveled
with them for a full day, dawn to dark, now and then circling or sounding, but
always near, rolling one black eye back to study them, he whispered, “Father?
Is it you?” But it was only once, and the mako vanished at sunset anyway.

On her journey Kokinja met no one who
could—or would—tell her where the Shark God might be found. She
asked every shark she came upon, sensibly enough; but sharks are a
close-mouthed lot, and not one hammerhead, not one whitetip, not one mako or
tiger or reef shark ever offered her so much as a hint as to her father’s
whereabouts. Manta rays and sawfishes were more forthcoming; but mantas, while
beautiful, are extremely stupid, and taking a sawfish’s advice is always risky:
ugly as they know themselves to be, they will say anything to appear wise. As
for cod, they travel in great schools and shoals, and think as one, so that to
ask a single cod a question is to receive an answer—right or wrong—from
a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Kokinja found this unnerving.

So she swam on, day after day: a little
weary, a little lonely, a good deal older, but as determined as ever not to
turn back without confronting the Shark God and demanding the truth of him.
Who
are you, that my mother should have accepted you under such terms as you
offered? How could you yourself have endured to see her—to see us, your
children—only once in every year? Is that a god’s idea of love?

One night, the water having turned warm
and silkily calm, she was drifting in a half-dream of her own lagoon when she
woke with a soft bump against what she at first thought an island. It loomed
darkly over her, hiding the moon and half the stars, yet she saw no trees, even
in silhouette, nor did she hear any birds or smell any sort of vegetation. What
she did smell awakened her completely and set her scrambling backward into
deeper water, like a frightened crab. It was a fish smell, in part, cold and
clear and salty, but there was something of the reptilian about it: equally
cold, but dry as well, for all that it emanated from an island—or
not
an island?—sitting in the middle of the sea. It was not a smell she knew,
and yet somehow she felt that she should.