by CJ Brightley
You asked if I believed in the Seafather. I was thinking about it all day, and about your dream. I never had a dream like you had. I haven’t ever seen any of the merpeople or heard the Seafather talk in words, at least, not words that people use. But I believe in the sea. I couldn’t not believe in the sea. Nobody could. It’s all around us. And I can feel it noticing us, and it can’t be just water and silt and gulfweed and fish that notice us, can it? So that must be the Seafather. Who else could send seagifts, or hurricanes?
Yesterday we had a dawn of seagifts. The Seafather sends them once a year, always in the summer, before hurricane season. All kinds of fish come swimming right up to Mermaids Hands, right up to shore, even, so many of them, so thick, that if you kneel down in the water, they press all around you, bumping your legs, sliding past each other. They come in on a dawn tide and go out before the tide is high. The dry-land people come to collect them too, but we always get more because we’re here to meet them. We have a game we play when it’s a dawn of seagifts, me, and Small Bill and my sister Tammy and Clara Tiptoe and Skinnylegs and Wade. We swim around, and half of us are fish and the other half are catchers. When I’m a fish, no one can catch me except Small Bill, and when I’m a catcher, I can catch everyone but him and sometimes Skinnylegs. Everyone can catch Tammy, so she always asks to play dolphins instead. That’s okay; it’s fun to play dolphins, too. We do dolphin dives and try to catch fish in our mouths.
It smelled good all that afternoon because everyone was cooking stew on the mudflats after the tide went out. Today they canned some of it, and some of the dads are going to sell it to some of the restaurants inland a bit.
Ma said we should thank God for the bounty of the sea, but Mrs. Ovey said we should thank the Seafather. Ma said, the Seafather won’t protect you when it comes hurricane season, and Mrs. Ovey said, nor God neither, and the Seafather at least don’t make promises. The sea makes no promises and tells no lies. The sea is always true.
I think the Lady of the Ruby Lake must love you the way the Seafather loves us. It’s not a very gentle kind of love. The sea is always true but not very gentle. And how could the Lady of the Ruby Lake be gentle if she lives in a volcano? But you said her sparks call the rain and make the plants grow for you—like the Seafather sending fish, for us. Maybe she felt lonely and ignored for a while, but now that you’ve cheered her up with the fire festival, maybe she’ll find a way to help you.
Your friend,
Em
5
A Festival for the Lady
(From the W— State Security Service’s files on the insurgency: August 20 editorial in the online English-language edition of the Palem Courier)
More Trouble from the Mountains?
Back in January, we watched uneasily as the agitators in the mountains staged an illegal demonstration, fanning old cultural resentments in an apparent attempt to resurrect a defunct separatist movement. We applauded the government’s handling of the situation: there were no mass arrests, no crackdowns on general rights. Only the ringleaders were detained, and special efforts were made to acknowledge and respect the mountain minority’s religious sensibilities, with honors being paid to the apparent leader of the mountain minority’s volcano worshipers. But despite initial signs that the disturbances had settled down, unrest in the mountain region now appears to be gaining momentum once again.
Trem Gana, member of Parliament for the western mountain district, insists that the activists do not speak for the majority of mountain dwellers. “It’s just a few troublemakers. The vast majority of the mountain people are as patriotic and as dedicated to the well-being of the nation as any lowlander. People here have complaints—as do people on the coast, as do people anywhere—but they don’t try to solve their problems by undermining the country.”
“It’s a concern,” says Resh Woor, chief of operations at Emerald Diversified Casting Foundry, a coastal company that is known for its willingness to hire migrants from the mountains. “It took a while to get local people to warm up to the idea of working side by side with the mountain folk. It can be difficult to understand their accent, and some people feel uncomfortable because—well, it can be hard getting used to people who are so different from the the ones you’ve grown up with. But the mountain folk I’ve known have all been very cooperative and hard-working. People just need to get over their prejudices.
“These threats of violence, though, they’re another matter. It’s hard enough for our country to make a go of it when we live in the shadow of powerhouses like Indonesia and Malaysia. We can’t let ourselves be undermined from within. If the trouble keeps up, people are going to start to look at the migrants as potential enemies. I can’t understand why some of the folks up in the mountains want to ruin things for everyone else. It’s not just lowlanders, it’s their own people they’re hurting, too.”
It is a question we are all asking. Can mountain dwellers be persuaded that it is better for all of us, whether on the coast, the lowland interior, or the mountains, to support the national polity? If not, it may be in the best interests of the state to act quickly and firmly rather than to continue to try to engage with those who, far from working for the good of nation, wish to separate from it.
* * *
Comments
1. You won’t find a paved road anywhere in the mountain districts, and half the schools are open-air affairs. And they want to go it alone? I’d like to see them try.
2. What do you expect they are all backward up there.
3. @1 @2 The best way to integrate our society is to spend money in the mountain region. If the schools and infrastructure there are substandard, they should be improved. Prosperity = loyalty.
4. @3 That would just be throwing money away. The mountain districts will never amount to anything. Better investments would be to reorganize the shipping lanes in Palem Bay and improve the rail line to Gapsin, Manah, and Rai.
5. @4 Too right. It takes far too long to get from Rai to Palem.
6. @3 You want to reward agitators and rebels by building them roads and schools? Every region will rebel then.
August 23 (Kaya’s memoir)
Just finished rereading Em’s most recent letter. What a comfort her letters are, especially when Mother has only bad news about things at home, and no news at all of Ramiratam and the others. Em is outraged on my behalf. Is it wrong to find that heartwarming? And yet when I think about my situation, and about Mother left on her own, and even more when I think about Ramiratam and the rest, I feel only self-doubt and remorse. Was there any way I could have kept my promise to the Lady without causing all this?
But isn’t the government to blame, too? Hasn’t it been wrong all along, the way we in the mountains have been treated?
But that’s politics. So am I lying to myself, then, and to the State Security Service, when I say there were no political motives in what we did?
I don’t know. I just don’t know.
I am sure my intentions were innocent when I first suggested the festival to Dinasha, and when she said I should speak to Rami, my reservations had nothing to do with politics.
“But you have to talk to him,” she argued. “Why wouldn’t you? You two always with your heads together, all through primary school. I thought for sure when you got back from America he’d be the first person you’d get in touch with—after me, of course! You mean you haven’t spoken with him at all?” Lines of concern made a rift between her eyebrows.
”He never answered any of the letters I sent from St. Margaret’s, so I thought maybe … I didn’t want to make a pest of myself. And then later, while I was in America, I thought he might even have married. You did. It seems like everyone has. What’s he doing now? Did I see him at the primary school? Does he teach there now?”
“Only just filling in, if one of the teachers is ill. He’s not on staff there. He hired on to help with the construction of the generating plant at the falls, when they were building that, last year and the year before, and
since then he’s been helping Mr. Tirabran keep his buses running.”
Construction work? Bus maintenance?
“But those are—but he was top of the class. He should be …” I couldn’t finish. He should be teaching. Or he should be an engineer, designing the generating plant, not pouring the concrete. That’s what I was thinking.
“He’s the same Rami he ever was, regardless of his job,” Dinasha said. “You’re not too high and mighty to meet with him, I hope, now that your colleagues are all lowlanders.” She softened her words with a smile, as if to say she was merely teasing, but they still stung.
“Of course not! I’m still the same me, too, you know! It’s not about prestige or, or social standing. It just doesn’t seem right, that’s all. He always had such a knack for schoolwork. Remember the song he made up about the articles of the constitution? I can still remember Mr. Apar’s glowering face—he couldn’t figure out why we were all humming when he tested us on it. Really Rami should have had a scholarship to Palem Boys, like Nawalam.”
Old hesitance kept me from saying more on that topic, and suddenly a terrible thought struck me. What if Rami hadn’t received any scholarship at all, not even to one of the mountain district secondary schools? What if he hadn’t been able to continue his education past primary school?
“He did go on to secondary school, didn’t he?” I asked, feeling faint.
“He did, but … Oh Kaya, you’ve been away a long time. Rami’s situation is complicated. It might be hard for you to understand. But talk to him. I think he’ll love the idea of the festival.”
How alone I felt then. I could bear feeling that way at St. Margaret’s; I knew I was an outsider there. And the same during my first months in America. But to come home and be an outsider? To be told I don’t understand my childhood friend’s situation?
I could feel my jaw tighten. There was no point in being aggrieved: The only solution was to get to know my home and friends again. If I cared about Rami, I could take the time to learn how things were for him, and why. Sharing my idea with him could be a first step.
I found him at Mr. Tirabran’s, his head at the level of my feet as he worked on the underside of one of the old buses from within some kind of trench dug for that purpose. Two little boys were crouched down on the damp earth beside him. I thought at first he must be giving them a lesson in bus anatomy, but then I heard his voice over the drum of the rain on the steel roof.
“—easier than some of the lower tables actually, because look, as the number on the left goes up, the number on the right goes down, and they always add up to nine. Two nines are eighteen, three nines are twenty-seven, four nines are thirty-six. See the pattern? A one and an eight becomes a two and a seven and then a three and a six. So what comes next? What are five nines?”
“One and eight … two and seven … three and six … four and five. Forty-five! Five nines are forty-five!” said one of the boys.
“You’re lucky,” I said to them, closing my umbrella. “Getting private lessons from the best teacher in the mountains.”
The two boys jumped up in surprise, one nearly falling backward into the trench, but Rami steadied him, then looked up at me—and smiled.
“Kayamanira. I heard you were back. Dinasha said you might stop by.” He hopped up out of the trench. Flew out, it seemed like. He was taller than I remembered him, and he’d filled out a bit, though he was still slight compared to Nawalam.
“How have you been? And who’s this fine creature?”
Such warmth in his voice! So he didn’t resent or despise me for going to the capital for high school? And then on to America? But then why no word from him during those years?
Sumi was perched on my shoulder, giving him her sideways glance. I stroked her head, keeping my eyes on her glossy feathers rather than Ramiratam’s face.
“It’s Sumi.”
“Crows are the Lady’s birds. Dinasha said you had a dream about the Lady. And now, with Sumi—” he paused, and each part of me grew warm by turns as his gaze traveled “—well, you look the part.”
“Dinasha told you about the dream?”
“Just that you had one, and that it put an idea in your head, something about a celebration.”
“She told you practically everything!”
“She seemed to think you might not come and tell me yourself,” Rami said.
The taller of the two boys Rami was tutoring extended a tentative hand, and Sumi hopped from my shoulder to his wrist. The boy grinned and held up his arm.
“I’m sending, sending, sending the Lady’s birds
To find, find, find what you have hid
They’ll seize, seize, seize your every secret
And pierce, pierce, pierce your many lies.
They’ll leave, leave, leave a burning ember
In the place, place, place of your coward heart
And fan, fan, fan the Lady’s fires
To flame, flame, flame in your fevered eyes,” he sang, and his friend joined in.
“Children still sing that song?” I asked, and the boy holding Sumi nodded.
“When we play hunters or hide-and-seek,” said the smaller one.
I laughed.
“When I was your size, the big sisters and brothers used to sing it if they thought their sweetheart was losing interest in them,” I said.
“Sweetheart,” snickered the little one, hiding his face against his friend’s shoulder. That one stifled a laugh but permitted himself a grin. Sumi hopped back to my shoulder.
“Do you know other songs about the Lady and the Ruby Lake? Do you know ‘Ruby waters, ruby waters, make the corn grow high’?”
The taller boy nodded. “But mama sings it ‘make the coffee ripen.’” The little one whispered something in his ear.
“He says he likes the one about hunting the moon, the one where the Lady gives the hunter a spear with a flaming spearhead.”
“My granddad has a spear,” the little one piped up. “From the olden days. It’s hanging on a wall in our house.”
“Have your parents or grandparents ever told you about the fire festival that we used to have? At the beginning of the rainy season? We’d call the rains with fire, and parents would use brooms and spears to carry the fire back home—flaming spears, just like in the song, and flaming brooms. Those fiery brooms were to sweep away small evils, and the flaming spears were to drive off bigger ones.
“That was the first time I ever saw you—do you remember?” I added, glancing at Rami. “You were riding on someone’s shoulders, at the front of the procession. There were so many flaming spears! It was a river of fire, and bobbing along in that river, with his head among the stars, a little boy no bigger than I was.”
“My father’s shoulders,” Rami said, nodding. “There was so much noise all around, everyone chanting and singing, but I could hear someone small, someone my size, calling ‘sweep the sky, sweep the sky!’ I looked down and saw you holding up a tiny broom torch.”
“Did you go down to the Ruby Lake to get the fire?” asked the smaller boy, interrupting our reminiscences.
“Oh no—you can’t go into the crater. The descent is too steep, and you’d be roasted alive before you got near enough to the lake to take fire from it. No, we’d just light bonfires all along the rim of the crater, so it danced with flames. Then we’d dip the spears and brooms into those fires.”
“The crater dancing with flames … I’d like to see that,” breathed the bigger boy.
“Would you? Would you like to coat a spear in salu pitch, so it takes a flame, and then carry it through the cornfields and past the papaya trees? Do you think your friends would like to sing some of those old songs, and get dressed up, and dance? Right up at the edge of the crater, one of these nights?”
“Yes!” the little one said, and “Can we?” the bigger one asked.
“So this is your idea? To hold the fire festival?” Rami asked.
I nodded, and told him what the Lady had sa
id, in my dream.
“It’s illegal, you know,” he said. “And it’s a little late to welcome in the rainy season.”
“But the constitution promises freedom of religion. And they only made the festival illegal because of the separatists. If it’s just a religious celebration, a cultural celebration, with no politics mixed in…”
I didn’t finish the sentence. The cloudburst was trailing off too, just individual metallic notes on the roof now, and I could sense, rather than see, the two boys shifting from foot to foot, trying to decide whether they should stay or go. Rami’s face was hard to read.
“You don’t think they’ll be suspicious if you hold it in the middle of the rainy season instead of at the beginning?”
Mist was rising up from the puddles in the ruts in the road now, as the sun came out, and I could see her again so vividly in my memory, the Lady, a old woman with thin white hair escaping from a knot at the back of her head and a red and black checked shawl pulled tight around narrow shoulders. I could hear again the reproach in her voice, just before she turned and walked away into drifts of white, like those wreathing the mountainside just then.
“I know it should happen before the rains come, but it can’t be helped. I had the dream now. And I promised.”
“So … we’d do it for the Lady’s sake,” Rami said. “Not for politics. Not for an autonomous state. Not even to summon rain or to drive away bad spirits. Just for the Lady.”
“That’s right. As a true celebration, to show her we remember her.”
Rami was silent.
“It-it would also be for us, though,” I added, struggling to make my idea of the festival blossom in his mind. “It would be a joyful thing. It would give everyone a chance to put down work for a few hours and be part of the world of old stories and legends. These children should have that chance, the way we did, and the way people always used to. And they’ll enjoy it just as much now as they would if we held it in October—right?” I appealed to the boys. The smaller one nodded vigorously, and the bigger one started to, but then stopped and looked up at Rami, as if for permission.