So, as the ship left Hiu, and sailed through calm blue waters where dolphins would have glided gracefully had anyone thought of bringing some along from Earth, which they hadn’t: Kal thought.
He thought about his world, with its vast ocean and tiny islands, its mysterious clouds that dominated the skies like shaggy guard-dogs, ghosts or dragons, depending on your perspective and your preference in poetry. He thought about the tower, which Bani had said was a space-elevator and not a tower at all, really. Did the Guardians know where the tower was? Or was the knowledge held only by the sea-dwelling Other, saved like a precious slice of cake for his only visitors? Would the Guardians pursue them?
They would. They did.
The Sanigodaon sailed due north, away from the Tusk, which lay behind them in the distance like a grin carved into the bark of an elderly tree. It sailed towards the last islands of the archipelago, towards the outposts of what Kal was beginning to realise—the feeling growing on him in stages, source unknown—was the tiny, frail human civilization on Heven.
The first month of their journey passed in peace. They fished off the ship, as their catch changed gradually from familiar stock of tuna and cod to stranger, native sea-dwelling life only some of which they could eat. The water became warmer, and with it came a strange sight: one day the surface of the sea was covered in what at first seemed to be giant water-lilies. As they approached one, Kal was startled when the green-blue petals of the thing shuddered and then rose like an enfolding net out of the water, almost trapping the Sanigodaon. Captain Desmon calmly took out a giant harpoon gun and shot the centre of the net. Dark ink came rising to the surface then like an oil stain, and the petals fell limply back into the water and drifted. It was a kind of squid, the Captain said. ‘Yu no save wori,’ he said cheerfully, putting the gun away and throwing down a rope which hooked into the petals. The Captain started pulling, the flower, colour fading fast, rising onto the deck. ‘Oli kakai pijin nomo.’
When it was done, the thing lay on the deck half-rolled, like wet strands of tobacco. Don’t worry, the Captain had said, they only eat birds. And Bani, examining the petals carefully, said, ‘Photo-synthesis?’ and the Captain shrugged and said, ‘Gud kakai,’ as if to say, that was enough for him, and thank you very much.
They were good to eat. They caught two more of the things that day, and roasted the petals, thick and fleshy and full of tangy ink, while Captain Desmon cut off the heads that hid in the centres, their eyes bulging mournfully, and threw them overboard, where other lilies drifted close and fought for them lethargically.
There were other things in the water. Sailing in open water, away from land, the water was clear and they could see down for what seemed like forever. But sometimes a shadow would pass under the ship, as large, or so it seemed, as an island, and yet when Kal looked down that was all he could see, a shadow, and the Captain would shrug again, but cautiously, and say that whatever lived down there had better not be disturbed. And one night, as they were approaching the last few islands that they still knew—small, hardy places, with names like Ewose and Makura and Ulveah, where the population of an island might not have exceeded a few hundred—they saw seawraiths, drifting on the calm surface of the ocean like mist or steam, but taking shapes as they approached and seeming to dance around the ship. Some of the shapes were fantastical, some abstractions, and some … some took on the faces of the dead, drawing the images from the past, from Kal’s mind—he didn’t know. For a brief moment he looked across (the moon was high up in the sky, bright as a streetlamp back in John Frum Town) and saw Vira’s face looking back at him, as white and smoky and expressionless as a cloud’s.
They stopped on an island that had no name and filled up with water and a store of coconuts and wild banana. Here, too, the trees were different, most of them unknown to Kal. One bore fruits that looked like shrunken human heads. Another had great bulbous fruit hanging low from its branches, and as he came closer he saw that the fruits, red and fleshy, pulsated as if a hidden heart was pumping blood through them. They did not pick any.
His world, Kal began to realise, had been small indeed. He had travelled, from his distant home of Epi, through floating Tanna’s trade routes and onto the Sanigodaon, through almost the entire sphere of humanity on Heven. Beyond it lay—what? Ocean, Mr. Henri had taught them. Nothing but empty ocean and endless skies.
Yet the ocean was not remotely empty—and neither was the sky.
— Chapter 16 —
WAN BIGFALA WUD
THE WILD HUMANS CAME gliding out of the air like a thing out of story. They came low and dark over the horizon. They were a fall of leaves.
It was night. There was a new moon, a thin sliver in the sky cutting a line of light on the ocean. Dark leaves seemed to float on the wind from the north-west, crossed the line of the moon, and descended on the Sanigodaon.
Kal watched them do it. He stood at the prow, watching the dark water part before the ship as it sailed. Nearly two months on board: his skin had turned a deep shade of black, his eyes assumed a habitual squint against the sun and the spray. Bani’s white skin, in contrast, had developed numerous dark freckles that clumped together in unsightly fashion on his arms and legs. Two months, and for the past few weeks there had been no island in sight, no land, and all they had to drink was rain-water, when the clouds came, and the water brought back Kal’s old familiar nightmares. Every night he rose with the kite, Vira behind him, and every night he fell as she fell, the kite breaking, the winds snapping it like the fingers of a hungry boy holding the neck of a chicken. When he woke he could hear Bani still sleeping, breathing hard, speaking into the night in a language Kal didn’t understand. Only Desmon seemed unaffected. He had grown up on rain-water, he had said. There were not too many springs or wells in the Tusk. He was half-cloud himself, Bani had whispered. After a while Kal began to believe it.
He was awake when the leaves came drifting in the wind and settled on the ship. He watched their approach warily, for he had seen too many strange things come out of the sea and the sky in the time since they had left the archipelago behind. Everything they encountered hunted something else. It was a world of food, food hunting food, onwards and upwards all the way to Man, who ate most of them when he could. And they would eat us too, he thought, sleepless and unrested, as he stood watching the ocean and the sky. They are food, we are food, and it’s just a matter of seeing who eats who first. ‘Fres kakai,’ he remembered Mr. Henri saying once, praising the wonders of Heven once again for his students. ‘Caught today, cooked today, eaten today. Fres kakai.’ For a while after that the children all made fun of him, saying, ‘Fres kakai! Fres kakai!’, repeating Mr. Henri’s sermon to each other as they sat on the beach and boiled sand crabs or roasted bananas. ‘Fres kakai!’
It was a world of gluttony, Kal thought, where even the fish could think only of their next meal, and their next meal might just turn out to be us.
But when the leaves came he mistook them for what they seemed, leaves drifting in the wind, and he merely watched as they drifted closer, before he realised their size—that each leaf was the size of a boat, almost, and that underneath each one a small dark figure was strapped, head pointing forward. He could see the glint of eyes.
By then the wild humans were already on the ship and unstrapping from their flying crafts, and when two of them grabbed him—young boys, he realised, almost half his size but each with a hard, detached expression and a knife made of volcanic stone—he didn’t resist.
The Sanigodaon was captured without a fight, with no sound, and with no undue haste. When Captain Desmon was hauled on deck he seemed almost relieved. ‘At least we’ll get a night’s sleep on land, boys,’ he said, and massaged his scalp, bald but for a ring of hair at the extremities. ‘Yumitri nidim spel smol.’
The three of us need a short rest. As a joke, Kal thought, it didn’t quite meet the requirements. Their captors took charge of the ship. They folded their—parachutes? Gliders? They were le
aves, he saw, but what tree could possibly produce such a giant foliage?—and threw them overboard. Kal watched them drift at first, then sink slowly, and felt jealousy. Not fear—that was what he remembered later, that he wasn’t afraid, but jealous. They could fly.
The ship changed course. Kal’s hands were bound behind his back. So were Bani’s. Desmon, however, was allowed to release one arm, and he sat quite contented on a coil of rope and smoked a pipe. That was the other thing Kal remembered about that night—the seemingly endless journey into the unknown, no light but the moon describing an arc above, and the foul lif tabak smoke rising from Desmon’s pipe like the emissions of a dormant volcano.
Their captors didn’t speak once. They were boys, Kal thought again. Small ones, at that. To be captured by a group of pikininis was … embarrassing.
He tried to speak to them. He tried Bislama first, saying ‘Olsem wanem?’, saying, ‘Nem blong me Kal, wanem nem blong yu?’, saying
‘Yu no save toktok Bislama?’
Nothing. How are you? Stare. What’s your name? Go ask the stars. Ask the clouds. You don’t understand Bislama? Maybe we do, maybe we don’t, but you won’t get an answer out of us.
Pikininis. They were as old as he was the day the kite crashed. Again, he was jealous, with a bitterness that surprised him.
He tried the language of Epi. Nothing. He tried Tanna. No response. He tried a little bit of a Malekulah dialect, and Efate, and North Pentecost. Desmon watched him through the pipe smoke, with a face that seemed to know more than it was telling. Bani was asleep, curled up on the deck like a baby.
Kal gave up talking. The ship sailed on, through water so calm it was like being on land. There were no clouds but for the Captain’s.
He woke up with a sore head and didn’t know where he was. He had dreamed, though recollection was evaporating fast: a sense of running away, of being pursued through a white and grey landscape by unseen enemies, at last of falling—
He opened his eyes. The ship had stopped moving and was rocking gently. Early morning sun came through a clear sky turning from dark to light blue.
Captain Desmon was still sitting on the coil of rope, the pipe stuck between his teeth, though thankfully it was no longer lit. His eyes were bright, and he smiled through the pipe when he saw Kal was awake, and motioned with his head, a silent gesture that said, would you look at that.
‘Bani?’
‘You were on the deck!’ The voice was close-up to Kal’s ear, and he cringed. He turned his body with difficulty, muscles stiff, and found himself face to face with a bound Bani, face paler than usual.
‘Couldn’t you singaot?’
‘What was I supposed to do?’ Kal said. He was thirsty, and his voice was raw. ‘Shoot those kids with a catapult?’
‘It wouldn’t have been a bad idea!’
‘I didn’t see you putting up much of a fight!’
They stopped arguing to the sound of laughing. Captain Desmon, his shoulders shaking, while a group of small boys—their captors— stared at them from above with closed faces.
‘Get up,’ the Captain said. ‘You’re embarrassing me.’ He motioned for the boys who—miraculously, Kal thought—went over to Kal and Bani and helped them to their feet. Desmon motioned again with his head. This time, Kal turned around to look.
There was never sun under that tree. Leaves billowed high above, in the high winds not felt below. Leaves as large as houses, as large as boats, larger than islands. Their shadows were lakes.
The branches of the tree twisted and spiralled, upwards and upwards, dipping into majestic high clouds, like an upturned reflection, like roots growing out of a foamy sea. As they rose they multiplied, and multiplied again, growing upwards in powers of two. It was a tree as big as a monster. Which is not to say it was monstrous.
There was a beauty to this land—was it land? Or was it all tree?— and there was a strange calm to it, too, a cool dark peace that hung underneath the awnings. The Sanigodaon was moored between two roots that formed a comfortable bay. The water was muddy, yet shallow enough for Kal to look down and see the bottom. An island, then?
He looked up. He couldn’t help himself. Here, in this presence, there was no other direction to look but up. He craned his neck (it was still sore from sleeping on the deck with his hands bound) and tried to discover the top of the tree, but couldn’t.
He began to discern houses. Not just houses, he thought—clumps of houses, gathered together—villages. On different levels of the tree there were different houses, built with the wood of the tree, almost invisible against its protective background. There were ropes, he saw—or were they vines? creepers?—linking the different levels, each branch the stretch of a sand beach. And ropes for swinging from, and ropes for—
He sucked in his breath between closed teeth. There were ledges, leaning over open chasms unhampered by root or branch. As he watched a boy high above came to the ledge. He was strapped to a leaf. He was alone. Kal looked up and the boy looked down, but their eyes never met.
The boy jumped.
He fell off the ledge like a leaf. The wind snatched him, shook him this way, that. For a moment he tunnelled down, fast, too fast, and Kal held in the breath he had taken, keeping it inside as if it were his last. Then the boy—the leaf—moved this side, and back, and straightened, and—
Suddenly he was gliding. The boy dipped, rose on an unseen current of air, fell gracefully back again. He was like a seagull, like a spaceship, like a dove. He sailed above their heads, but always in the shadow of the great tree. For a moment he passed directly above the ship and now Kal could clearly see his face.
The boy’s eyes were closed, and he was smiling.
— Chapter 17 —
WAN GEL BLONG BIGFALA WUD
THERE WERE NONE of the quiet, serious boys here. There were no leaves, none of the rope ladders he had been forced to climb for what seemed like hours, until he was sweaty and bad-tempered and hot. But at least they had unbound his hands for the purpose. He almost fell, once. And he thought—where can you possibly escape to? The only way out is—down. And the only quick way down was to jump.
Kal didn’t fancy his chances. The ground was a long way away.
Here, however … here there were almost no signs that one lived in a tree. There was a room, palatial, with gold masks wearing wild faces, some grinning in a skull-like fashion, others morose, others still inhuman altogether, the faces of fantastical creatures: though here and there, scattered around this room, this throne room, he could discern the beaked mask of a life-sized Olfala Bigwan, and even, with a nervous tenseness in his arms, the faces of the ghosts he had hallucinated seeing in the tunnels under that tabu island, the faces of what could have been the Narawan.
There was nothing tree-like about the room. The walls were stone and metal, set with glowing precious stones as large as fists. Against one wall the heads of dead beings stared down, giant fish and squid-like things and birds with heads the size of dolphins. In a corner stood a statue—was it a mask, a body, a face—a thing made of the grey-brown bark of driftwood, like a petrified god with two crude holes resembling eyes that watched and watched, their stare as cold and empty as the space between two clouds.
In the midst of this barbaric opulence, on a chair made of white bone and embedded with vulgar red rubies, sat a woman.
The woman wore a robe of gold threads; her bare arms were muscled. She had almond eyes set in a round face, a halo of thick dark hair all around her head like a cloud, and a mouth that begged—so Kal thought, with an intensity he found surprising—to be kissed. Though it was currently engaged in delivering a volatile and acidic volley of abuse against the three of them.
‘—and just what were you thinking? Just how stupid are you? And you, Captain—’ she said, singling out the abashed Desmon for a moment (he sat with his cap in his lap, one hand massaging the bald spot on his head)—’I’d have expected more from you. To sail to the Forbidden Tower? For what purpose? Did you thi
nk no one would know? Did you think the clouds would watch you from above and remain ignorant? There are five ships sailing after you, like sharks after fresh and stupid meat—ah, you are paying attention now? Good, so you should—five ships, like whalers after a big white whale.’ Her eyes were violet and intense and were examining Kal and Bani in turn. Her mouth was upturned—a grimace, or was she trying to hide a smile? ‘Did you think no one would know? For a month now I have felt your coming. It is in the leaves, in the way the flowers on the upper levels grow, it is in the roots and in the water and the dew. The Forb—’
‘What is it with you people?’ Bani, voice languid and superior, his designed-to-irritate voice. ‘Guardians this, Forbidden that, did you all get stuck on the same textbook back at school? Could you not at least be imaginative?’
‘We reserve our imagination for coming up with new methods of torture,’ the woman said, equally languid. ‘Would you like to try some of them?’
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