Racing the Dark

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  The water was lukewarm and the pump squeaked in a way that made the space between her shoulder blades shiver, but she spent more than half an hour scrubbing herself before she felt clean. After she had dumped the last bucket over her head, she sat silently on the rough wooden floor of the bathing room. Water dripped between the slats of the fresh timber and disappeared into the ground below. Nearby, a monkey let out a great bellow and birds shrieked in response. It was hard to forget how much closer-and how much stronger-the forest was than this spare enclave.

  The whole time she had been evading the death, she had hardly even thought of bathing, so how could something so simple and mundane make her feel so bereft? It was as though all of the strain and weariness of the past two months-months when she'd had no time to think of anything but how to survive till the next morning-had finally caught up to her. And if two months had taken her so close to her limit, she didn't know how she could even survive the year. She felt her eyes well with tears. She didn't regret her decision to save her mother, but she had never felt so desperately helpless before. She couldn't stay alive on her own much longer, and she hated how useless that made her feel. The wind spirit had to help her. If it didn't ...

  Lana shook her head firmly and drew another bucket of water. She splashed her face and then dumped the rest of it over her head. When she was sure that the tears had stopped, she opened the door. Next to a towel, the woman had replaced Lana's mud-caked clothes with clean ones. The sober gray pants were too long and the shirt came all the way down to her mid-calves, but she had never appreciated such soft, clean cloth more in her life. She had nearly forgotten what it felt like not to be wet.

  When she walked back inside the house, the woman clapped her hands in approval. "What an improvement!" she said. "Still too thin, but at least not as desperate as when you staggered in. I can't imagine what you were thinking, tramping off into the forest to see the wind temple. We all thought you must have died. Here, sit down."

  She ushered Lana to a table like the one her family had used back on her island-low to the ground, surrounded by legless chairs with cushions. The woman had set out what looked like leftovers from the previous day's meal-cold tea and fermented disks of pan bread with a spicy, thick bean soup. Lana practically fell on the food, with only a last shred of manners preventing her from stuffing most of the bread in her mouth at once.

  "Thank you so much," Lana said, when she had finished everything. "I don't deserve your kindness, but thank you."

  The woman smiled, which made her look younger. "I have a daughter about your age. I don't get to see her much ... not since Tapamahe moved out here to make his fortune. It's nice to have someone else to feed in the house. Especially since it looks like you need it."

  Lana leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling. The pale beams reflected light from the open window.

  "How long have you been here?" Lana asked. "The house looks new.

  "We moved here from Essel about five years ago, but we've had to rebuild the house twice since then."

  Lana stared at her, shocked. "Twice? What on earth happened? Fire?"

  She shook her head. "It's the winds. The old timers say that the Kalakoas have been plagued by them ever since the wind spirit broke free. I don't know about that, but every rainy season the sea starts to swell and huge storms rip right through here. You've never felt anything like it-a wind that can just destroy everything in its path. I wept so hard the first time it tore down my house. But you just learn to clear out quickly and be grateful for your life. The first year we came here, the winds were so horrible that we actually sent ... well, I mean ..."

  The woman, who had seemed lost in her story, looked abruptly embarrassed.

  "You actually sent what?"

  The woman looked around and then leaned forward over the table. "Well, I suppose it won't hurt to tell you. You're leaving in a few days, after all." She spoke in an almost-whisper, like she was afraid of someone overhearing. "We sent the spirit a sacrifice. It was horrible ... everyone over sixteen had to put their name in the lottery. We picked this other trader's wife, she had just recovered from the forest sickness. They tied her up and took her into the forest and came back twenty days later without her. They said they had given her to the spider crone up in the wind temple. I really wanted to leave after that, but Tapamahe said we should stay. The storms got better for the next few years, but her husband ... I swear he died of a broken heart. He stopped eating, sleeping, talking ... and one day he just wandered off into the forest and never came back. It's this place, you know." She looked through the window briefly and held her shoulders as though she was cold. "It sucks everything out of you if you stay too long. It sucks away your life."

  Lana felt sick to her stomach. That poor woman ... she couldn't have been a willing sacrifice. Did these people know how cheaply they had sold one of their own? For a few paltry seasons of mildly better weather? But maybe in this hard place they felt it was worth it.

  "Anyway," the woman said, "that's why we were so surprised when you came back. They said the last time someone came back alive from visiting the spider crone was about a hundred years ago."

  Lana's throat suddenly felt very dry. She poured herself another glass of tea and drank it in one pull. Outside the window, Lana thought she heard the telltale click of a bird-eating spider. But when she looked, it was only the death.

  The wind shrine lay on the outermost western edge of the islands-at least three weeks away from the Kalakoas by a fast boat with a favorable wind, making no stops. Of course, there had been no such boat for nearly five hundred years, and Lana was forced to make her painfully slow way by hopping from one successively small harbor to the next. Since people always greeted mention of the wind spirit with a kind of distant reserve, Lana avoided telling anyone her destination. Nearly a month after she left the Kalakoas, she arrived at the last island with a half-decent harbor on the western rim. Though it was technically part of the rice islands, the residents mostly fished and farmed sugar cane. After the boat docked, she wandered a few miles up the coast until she found the fishing harbor.

  Since it was midday, all of the boats were still out except one. A small man about her father's age had hauled a boat halfway out of the water and was patching a hole in its rudder. The small sailboat looked old but sturdy and Lana couldn't help but compare this man's diligence with her father's. Back on their island, Kapa probably would have used the breached rudder as an excuse to stay at home and work on his instruments. She hadn't realized it as much as a child, but now she understood how ill-suited her father had been for the life of a fisherman. The man looked up when she approached. She answered his slight frown with a smile, grateful again to the woman on the Kalakoas for letting her keep the clean clothes. Her own had been ruined in the forest, and Lana had learned that half the trick of getting passage to unusual places was looking respectable. That and having money. Unfortunately, she had only about two hundred kala left. She hoped that would be enough.

  "Having trouble with your boat?" she said, when she was close enough to be heard without yelling.

  The man shrugged. "A bit. My fool of a nephew wasn't careful at low tide and ran aground. Took a hefty chunk out of the rudder, so I've had to miss a full day and a half's catch fixing it."

  "That must be a hardship. How much money have you lost, then?"

  "Oh, about thirty or forty kala, I'd say. What's it to you?" Sensing a deal, he had put down his hammer and was looking at her intently.

  "How would you like to make up that money plus some once you fix that rudder? I need a boat to take me to the wind island." Lana said it matter-of-factly, knowing that her own confidence would help convince him to make the treacherous journey.

  He sucked in air and it whistled through a gap in his front teeth. "What business do you have in that miserable place? The wind tribes ... they're barbarians. They eat animal flesh, you know-the hearts, even, while they're still beating. And they don't speak any decent tongue. I'v
e heard that the wind whistling through the ruins can drive a man mad. It's not a safe place, let alone for a woman traveling by herself."

  Lana tried to keep her voice confident. "Be that as it may, I'm determined to go, and I will pay you well for your trouble."

  "Well, if it's like that ... how much will you pay? It's a two-day journey and I would need the money for the missing catch on my return. Oh, and I won't dock my boat-they say that the wind tribes claim ownership of anything that touches on their land. They're not human, I tell you. They'll send winds that can drown you if you anger them."

  Lana bit her lip. She didn't know what she would do if he wanted more money than she had. "A hundred and sixty kala," Lana said finally.

  The man let out a bark of laughter. "You're crazy. I need at least two hundred to cover my losses."

  Lana hesitated. "How about a hundred and eighty?"

  He looked at her hard. "You look like you're at the end of your tether, honey. Your clothes aren't too shabby, but your eyes still look desperate. I don't know what you're planning to do on that wind island, but I have a feeling I'd be better off not getting involved with it. Still, I'd hate to turn away someone in need. Two hundred kala. No less."

  Lana nodded.

  She waited a few feet away from him on the dock when he put the final touches to his patched rudder. He said they would set sail first thing tomorrow morning at high tide. Lana lied and told him she would stay the night in town at the inn and left before the first boats returned from their day at sea. She didn't want to be responsible for any fatal accidents. The death floated beside her as she walked further up the coastline. She stopped when she reached a deserted beach, a stretch of white sand covered with decaying brown lines of washed-up seaweed. She stared at the encroaching waves as the sun went down over the ocean. The death was silent beside her. Was it just her loneliness that made its presence something she occasionally even enjoyed? Or was it some more fundamental affinity? You ease death ...

  "Tell me," she said when the pink sky had deepened to purple, "what happens after we die? Where do we go?"

  The death looked at her, its mouth hole in a neutral line. Still, Lana sensed some surprise.

  "Why do you ask? Have you decided to give up, so close to the wind?"

  Lana shook her head. "No, of course not. You know me better than that."

  The corners of its mouth turned up slightly. "Perhaps I do, after all."

  "I was just wondering, I guess. Everyone's so afraid of death, but just because no one really knows what happens. Is it good? Is it horrible?"

  The death turned its mask away from her. "I cannot say."

  Like all spirits, it was bound to total honesty and something in its wording struck her as strange. "Why won't you tell me?" she asked. "You'll still get me in the end, either way. Why the secrecy?"

  "It's simply the way it is. Those of the living cannot see beyond the gate."

  Lana shrugged and looked back out at the ocean. "What's behind your mask, then?" she asked, after a few silent minutes.

  "My, you're full of questions tonight, aren't you? Do you really want to see?"

  Its mocking tone made her wary, but she nodded her head. "Sure," she said.

  With taunting slowness, the death revealed its long segmented fingers and pulled off the mask.

  Lana had a brief, sickening impression of a face made up entirely of a grinning maw filled with shiny oversized teeth. Then its face seemed to morph in a few nauseating lurches into that of a young girl. Lana gasped. She knew that diffident smile and long, auburn hair. It was Kali. It morphed again, still Kali, but dead, just as she had looked after Lana pulled her out of the wreckage of her house. Even though there was no light at all on the beach, somehow the death had mimicked the red hue of her hair with the sun hitting it perfectly.

  "Have you forgotten about me, Lana?" It wasn't her voice, it was the death's hideously accurate parody of it.

  "Stop! Stop it now!" Lana screamed, squeezing her eyes shut.

  "But I thought you wanted to see me, Lana."

  Angrily, frantically, she reached inside her pocket and pulled out the flute. Almost without thinking, she funneled her anger and sadness into calling a wind. Far more quickly than the last time, it ripped in from the ocean, howling with the strength of Lana's fury and slamming into the death. Though she had never seen it affected by the weather before, the death was pushed backwards, and Lana vaguely saw a hand-shaped depression of air wrap around its throat.

  "She is mine for now, Death. Do not torment her." The mournful voice was the wind, howling in her ears.

  "She asked," the death said in a strangled shout. Its face looked different yet again-now gray and sagging like a cadaver.

  "Do not torment her," it said again. "Remember your place."

  After a moment, the death nodded and then replaced its mask. The wind spirit's insubstantial body suddenly appeared before Lana. She felt a hand caress her cheek.

  "I await you, pilgrim."

  With a howl that sent shivers through her marrow, the wind whipped back out to sea.

  After a few moments of disbelieving silence, the death appeared barely two inches from her face.

  "You can go running to the wind, for now, but you will be mine again soon. And when you are, don't think I'll forget this. Don't think you'll find avoiding me as easy as before."

  Lana turned her head away from it and curled into the sand and algae, trying as hard as she could not to think at all.

  They made good time to the island in the little fishing boat, despite the fact that the fisherman insisted on stopping twice to lay out nets and see what he could catch. Lana suspected that the favorable winds were no accident, but she of course said nothing. She tried to ignore the death's silent, brooding presence during their journey, but she felt scared when she thought of what might happen when she no longer had the wind spirit's protection.

  The man laid anchor about fifteen feet away from the ruined harbor, where the water was still too deep for her to stand.

  "This is as far as I go," he said.

  Lana nodded absently and turned back to look at the island before her. The wind island looked huge-perhaps even bigger than Okika. The fisherman had told her that the wind island used to be part of a much larger landmass, but most of it had been flooded two thousand years ago, before the water spirit had been bound. Seeing the utterly foreign landscape before her now, she could believe his tale-she had never seen anything like it before in her life. Impossibly tall, craggy red rocks with flat tops jutted from the earth as though they had been punched out with a fist. The entire island appeared to be covered in red-brown dust, and the only plants she could see were a few short, stunted bushes more prickle than green. The sun's heat felt like a kiln, without any of the comforting wet humidity that she was used to. The harbor looked completely deserted, but she thought she saw a few plumes of smoke off in the distance. She would have to talk to one of those wind tribes soon-hope that they would lead her to the ruins and not simply murder her on the spot.

  "You leaving or coming back with me? I'm not staying here any longer." The fisherman had settled himself against the mast, crossing his arms.

  Lana shook her head. "I'm sorry. Here, take this." She reached into her purse and pulled out the second of her large, pink-veined hundred-kala coins. He practically snatched it from her hand and then held it up to the light. Apparently satisfied, he pocketed the money.

  "Well then, get going. You should have no problem getting to the harbor. I can't say I'll be sorry to see you go. You've got a damn weird feeling about you, girl ... like the worst kind of bad luck. The wind was perfect the whole way here and I kept expecting it to turn."

  Lana could find nothing to say. She knew his words, however inhospitable, were justified-far more than he even suspected. Without saying another word, Lana put her bag on her head and then lowered herself into the water with her other hand. The death floated above her, avoiding the touch of the crystal-clear water
. She paddled the fifteen feet to the harbor, careful to keep her pack dry. She couldn't afford to get her food wet. She climbed out of the water on a crumbling stone staircase and looked back. The man had already turned his boat around.

  Lana slung the bag over her shoulder again and shielded her eyes from the glaring sun. She could barely make out a wisp of smoke coming from behind a series of sharply jutting rocks a few miles away. Find the wind tribes and get them to take you to the ruins on the mesa: those had been the spider crone's instructions. She just hoped they would listen to her.

  Many hours later, when the sun was just beginning its final descent below the horizon, Lana managed to clamber to the top of the dusty crag of rock separating her from the plume of smoke. She swept what looked like the remainders of a very large nest from a tiny crevice and sat down inside it. The rock felt cool against her wet cheek and her breathing began to return slowly to normal. She had nearly finished the contents of her water skin, and she knew that she wouldn't be able to last another day in the baking sun without finding some freshwater source. Unfortunately, even from this vantage point she saw only an endless expanse of dusty red stone. How was it possible for any place in the islands to be so devoid of water? Lana couldn't remember ever being so thirsty. Far below her was an encampment of a wind tribe, their squat lodgings nestled against the rocks and spreading perhaps forty yards beyond them. Lana guessed that it probably housed about three hundred people. It looked semi-permanent, with a convenient rock outcropping serving as a stable for their oversized horses and burros. The houses themselves looked like tents, but instead of cloth they used painted hide. She couldn't make out people's faces from so far away, but she could see their fires-increasing with the sinking sun-and people laughing and sharing food around them. Children ran half-naked by the horses, and shrieked as they wrestled slobbering, furry creatures with long snouts and frighteningly large teeth. She thought they might be wolves, although they bore only a distant resemblance to the illustrations that she had seen so long ago in Kohaku's books.