Na Akua

by Clayton Smith

  “No tellin’, cuz. We’ve crossed over.”

  Gray halted, and Polunu slammed into him from behind. Gray cried out and tumbled down six steps, hands first, narrowly avoiding eighth-degree burns and a plunge over the edge into darkness. “Hey!”

  “Whoops…sorry,” Polunu said. He peered into the darkness. “You still alive down there?”

  “Barely.” Gray lifted himself carefully to his feet, balancing uneasily on the precarious step. “What do you mean, we’ve ‘crossed over?’”

  “Into the realm of the gods, you know? Time don’t work for them like it works for us. Maybe we been down here a long time; maybe we hardly been down here at all.” He eased himself down closer to Gray’s step and gave him a little nudge. “Best not to think about it. And just keep going.”

  “Sure,” Gray murmured, taking a breath and resuming his descent. “Don’t think about it, and just keep going. What could go wrong?”

  But soon Gray’s foot hit the bottom step. A new walkway opened up, and the lava outline spread far ahead of him, illuminating a wide, circular platform. It butted up against another rock wall, which was solid except for a rough rectangular hole that opened to the other side. Flames flickered within the next room, throwing long, wicked shadows across the platform that licked hungrily at the men’s feet.

  Gray looked at Polunu. Polunu looked at Gray.

  “You go first,” they said at the same time.

  “No way, brah,” Polunu said, raising his hands defensively and backing up toward the steps. “This is your quest.”

  “But you’re the expert!” Gray hissed.

  “And the expert says that you should go first.”

  “That is so unfair!”

  “I won’t even fit through that hole!”

  “Let’s find out!”

  “No way!”

  “Did you come this far to bicker over who gets incinerated first?”

  Both men froze as a third voice rang through the vast cavern, resounding across the rocks. It was a woman’s voice, more authoritative and rich than any Gray had ever heard before. It blazed with annoyance and set the air crackling with impatience.

  “Ooooh…you made her mad,” Polunu whispered, giving Gray a hard shove toward the door. “Go now. Or we’re both dead.”

  Under the circumstances, it was pretty hard to argue.

  Gray stepped through the opening, his whole body trembling with fear. He gripped the far end of the shallow tunnel and slowly pulled himself through, peeking around the edge at the wide room beyond.

  The chamber was circular, with a pit of roiling, sputtering lava spilling up onto the ledge of the floor. Parts of the stone underfoot were little more than a fragile, crackling black skin that floated atop the tremulous magma, breaking here and oozing there, sinking beneath the pool only to rise again with glowing orange fingers spreading lazily across the surface. The air was a boiling mist; after only a few seconds, Gray had soaked through his t-shirt. Streams of sweat poured down his cheeks, and a small puddle began to spread around his feet. The light of the lava flow was brilliant, and Gray raised a hand to shield his eyes, but there were already blue-yellow streaks slashing across his vision when he closed his eyes.

  And each time he dared to open them, he saw the woman standing in the center of the cauldron, tall and proud and ankle-deep in the viscous, boiling flames.

  She towered over him, leering down from the ceiling of the conical chamber. She was striking, beautiful even, and unlike anything else on earth. Her long hair was the shimmering black of polished rock at the roots, but as it cascaded across her shoulders and down her chest and back, it gradually brightened to a brilliant orange-white, and the tips dripped teardrops of fire down into the lava pit in which she stood. Her skin was dark, almost black, and like the cooling skin of the magma, it was split with thin fingers of reddish-orange light, where the lava churned beneath the surface and threatened to burst through and dribble down her arms, her legs, her shoulders, and her chest. She wore a close-fitting shift like dark ash smeared across her body, with tiny cinder-flakes smoldering and smoking in the heat.

  “What business have you here?” she asked angrily. The lava bubbled higher, boiling up to her knees before calming back down into the pit.

  Gray opened his mouth to speak, but his voice refused to cooperate. So he stood there, open-mouthed and silent, staring at the enormous woman made of liquid fire, until Polunu squirmed through the opening and prodded him to the side.

  The big man gasped. “Pele,” he breathed, stunned by her presence. He fell clumsily to his knees despite the oppressive heat and lowered his chest to the floor of the cavern, lying prostrate before the churning lava.

  Gray only stood and gaped.

  “Psst,” Polunu said, tilting his head and eyeing Gray from the side. He waved his hand frantically.

  “What?” Gray whispered.

  Polunu waved even harder.

  The meaning was completely lost on the mainlander. “What?!” he whispered again, more harshly.

  “Get on the ground!” Polunu hissed back.

  “There’s lava down there!”

  “There’s a goddess up there!”

  “So?!”

  “So? So show her respect, you dumb haole!”

  Grayson gasped. “I knew you thought I was dumb!”

  “Enough.” The woman’s voice singed the air. Her breath smelled of ozone and sulfur. “Say what you have come to say.” Her eyes were pools of burning oil, and they flared with anger.

  “You...you’re Pele?” Gray asked.

  “You’ve come a long way to ask insufferable questions,” the woman spat. The temperature of the room increased by an easy five degrees, and Gray could feel the moisture evaporating from his skin.

  “I’m sorry,” he cried, shrinking back against the tunnel as his thoughts mashed together in his brain like a heat fever. “I don’t mean to be insufferable. I’m from St. Louis.”

  Polunu swatted back with his hand and smacked Gray’s ankle.

  Gray screeched in pain. “I’m sorry!” he wailed. “I just can’t—it’s not—I’m just so hot!”

  The crackling light beneath Pele’s skin softened, and she drew back from the edge of the cauldron. The heat faded with her, and Gray felt the burn on his skin die down to a low, throbbing pulse. “I’m sorry,” he said again, his chest heaving, his lungs pulling in hot, stifling breaths. “I just...I have a message for you. From...Hi’iaka.”

  Pele grew still in her fiery pool. Her fingers tensed, and her back stiffened. “What does my sister say?” she asked, her voice trembling with a boiling undercurrent.

  “What does she say? Um, well, basically, she—”

  “What exactly does she say?” Pele hissed. The lava seemed to push her up, make her even taller, until the crown of her head scraped the top of the cavern.

  Gray trembled so hard, his teeth rattled in his skull. “Exactly? Oh. Okay. Um. She said…she said…” He closed his eyes and tried to picture the crabs’ cursive words in the sand, but the heat and the sweat and the threat of divine incineration seemed to muddle the image.

  Polunu heaved himself to his feet and edged backward, closer to Gray. He whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Tell her what she said, cuz.”

  “I’m thinking!” he hissed back. “Okay. She said...‘Captured by the man in black.’ Wait, no. ‘Captured by the man...in the black hood. Help me, Grayson. Find Pele.’”

  The volcano goddess melted into herself, becoming a woman-shaped glob of lava. She sank slowly into the cauldron, and the level of the magma rose. Gray and Polunu both retreated, pressing themselves as flat against the wall as they could, and the lava washed up within inches of their toes. The rubber on Gray’s flip-flops began to smoke. “Please! I’m telling the truth,
that’s what she said!” he screamed.

  The lava began to reform itself, and Pele reemerged smaller, standing at eye level. She stepped out of the fiery pool and approached the pair, addressing Gray directly. “Who are you, mainlander?” she demanded. Her tongue was a porous stone that danced with flame. “Why did you let her be taken?”

  “I’m nobody,” he insisted. “I’m a tourist.” His heart beat so rapidly, he clutched his chest. I’m having a heart attack, he thought. Pele’s eyes flared, but she did not interrupt. “I—I didn’t let her be taken…I promise. I don’t even know her, not really. We met last night, and she left, and then she sent me a message, with the crabs, and the sand, and…please, oh god...please, please don’t melt me.”

  “Why would Hi’iaka present herself to you?” Pele seethed.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know, I don’t know!” He wailed “I don’t want to be a volcano!”

  Polunu took a small step forward and cleared his throat. “Tūtū Pele,” he said, finding his voice, and spreading his hands wide in a show of surrender, “we are blessed by your presence. This haole does not know the old ways. Hi’iaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele surely chose him to deliver her message for good reason, and I think his heart is pure. He’s not so smart about some things, but look into his eyes. I think you’ll see goodness there.” Polunu gave Gray a sideways glance. “Behind all the tears. He doesn’t usually cry so much.”

  “I don’t!” Gray insisted.

  Pele stepped even closer, and Gray fought with every fiber of his being to not shrink away from her blazing stare. He locked eyes with the fire goddess, and he was only semi-conscious of the feeling of wet warmth spreading across the front of his shorts.

  But the great Polynesian deity was sated by what she saw behind Gray’s tears, and she stepped back to her lava pool, clasping her hands behind her back. “Did my sweet sister say nothing more?” she asked, her voice softer.

  “She—she said the man in the black veil was chasing her in her dreams, and she was running from him…”

  “Tell her about the moon,” Polunu whispered.

  “Oh! The moon! She was running toward the moon. She thought he would stop chasing her when the moon was full.”

  “The full moon…” Pele said, mostly to herself.

  “La luna,” Gray added weakly. He closed his eyes and shook his head and cursed himself for saying so many dumb, senseless things in such a short amount of time.

  Pele floated in her bubbling lake, bobbing thoughtfully along the surface. “The moon comes full tomorrow night,” she said at last, her hand trailing in the lava as it swirled around her feet. “You must find her before then.”

  Gray gasped and inhaled a breath of sulfur and hot ash. He choked and gagged, coughing himself inside out. “I must find her before then?!”

  “The both of you.”

  “But—” Gray looked at Polunu. The big man’s eyes were wide with fear. He gave his great head a shake that made his cheeks wobble. Gray turned back to the goddess. “I don’t...we thought...I’m not...”

  “Say what you will say,” Pele commanded.

  “It’s just...we thought maybe...we would just deliver the message, and...you would find her?”

  Polunu nodded his agreement.

  Pele continued to swirl the fire. “My sister revealed herself to you because she knows I cannot interfere; it falls on you to come to her aid.”

  “Tūtū Pele,” Polunu said, shooting a nervous glance at Gray, “we are not really equipped for that sort of task, you know?”

  “You are not,” Pele agreed. She brought her other hand down into the lava and began turning complex patterns in the orange goo. “But I cannot leave this place. My wicked sister, the wild and vengeful goddess Nāmaka, has extinguished all of my volcanoes, save this one. Were I to leave it unattended, she would surely douse its fires, and thereby my own flame as well. I cannot allow this...there is so much work yet to be done.” She reached her hands down into the lava and pulled up a large formation of black rock. “Even now, I am creating a new island for my Hawai’i,” she said softly, running her fingertips tenderly along the cliffs and valleys. “Lō’ihi will nurture my people for eons to come. It will be fierce and beautiful, and it will remind my Hawai’ians of their raw and wild history.” She set the miniature island on the surface of the lava carefully, and it slowly melted away, becoming one with the burning pool. “I cannot go to save my sweet sister, for the evil one will seize her opportunity when it comes. I must stay, not only for my own survival, but for the survival of my people, of my beloved Hawai’i.” She gazed down at little Lō’ihi until it sank fully beneath the surface. She wept a tear of fire that sizzled against her skin as she wiped it from her cheek with a blackened, burning hand. She looked up at her guests, blinking at them in wonder, as if she’d forgotten they existed altogether. Then the hardness returned to her voice, and the flame rekindled in her eyes. “You must find her. You must set her free before midnight tomorrow. If you fail, your agony will be beyond measure.”

  Grayson bit his bottom lip. “Miss Pele, ma’am, I’m just really not sure—”

  She moved like an explosion, and the air thundered with the wavering heat of steam and ash. She swooped up against the lip of the cauldron, splashing lava onto the floor once again. A small wave crashed at Gray’s feet, and a bubble of magma burst as the wave fell. It flung fiery droplets against Gray’s shoulder, and he screamed in pain. The lava seared through his shirt and into his flesh, bubbling his skin. Then Pele blew a cold wind across the cavern, and the lava immediately cooled to pellets of rock. The bits dropped out of Gray’s shoulder, and the pain faded to a cool numbness. He clutched his shoulder, whimpering and drawing deep, stuttering breaths of shock and fear. “You…burned me,” he gasped.

  Polunu clapped a hand over his own mouth. He ran out of the room so he wouldn’t throw up in the presence of a goddess.

  “Do not fail,” Pele repeated. “I will not tolerate losing my sweet sister because of your weakness.”

  “We’ll…try,” Gray said, wiping the tears and sweat from his face as he backed toward the door. “Okay? We’ll...we’ll try.”

  Pele was unmoved by his fear. “Then try very, very hard, mainlander.”

  Gray eased around the cavern wall, feeling his way until his fingers found the edge of the rough doorway. “I do have one question...” he said.

  Pele’s fire roared, and her hair flared around her like an inferno.

  “Please don’t burn me! Please don’t burn me! I mean this with total respect, please, but...how do we find her?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for another wave of fire. But Pele’s eyes cooled instead, hardening into stone. “Kamapua’a is the only creature in all of the world who is both bold enough to attack my sister and cowardly enough to hide his face while doing it. Find Kamapua’a, and you will find my Hi’iaka, my sweet and fragile egg. I suggest you try the upcountry. You will likely find him with the rest of the pigs.”

  “Kamapua’a,” Gray said, stumbling back into the doorway. “In the upcountry. Got it. I’ll just...Google him, I guess.”

  Polunu poked his head through the opening, pushing his face over Gray’s shoulder. “Tūtū Pele, how can we make a stand against a terrible demigod like Kamapua’a?”

  “Sorry, a demigod?” Gray squeaked.

  “Seek Maui,” Pele said, ignoring Gray’s concern and sinking into the fire. “His ancient hook has the power to destroy a creature like Kamapua’a. Convince Maui to grant you the help of his hook, and you may yet survive the day.”

  “And if we can’t?” Polunu asked.

  “Then I expect you will die,” Pele hissed. Her black hair spread like a stain across the glowing molten stone as her face submerged. Then she sank beneath the surface and was gone in a hiss of smoke and embers.

&n
bsp; Chapter 8

  Hi’iaka shivered. Gooseflesh had bubbled to life all along her skin.

  But she wasn’t cold. And she wasn’t scared.

  She was furious.

  “Show me your face!” she screamed into the forest that lay beyond the fallen wall of the dilapidated shed. But the vicious grunting of wild pigs was her only response.

  She knew what that meant.

  She knew exactly what that meant.

  It was raining outside, a brief, hard mountain storm that would pass before long. In the meantime, it dripped its cold fingers of water down on her from the rusted holes in the shack’s tin ceiling. She welcomed the rain and turned her face up toward the drops, catching them on her tongue and drinking hungrily. The hard patter of the rain on the roof above and on the leaves outside calmed her, gave her something else to focus on beyond her own thoughts, and that was good.

  Her own thoughts could be dangerous.

  The rain beat down harder, and Hi’iaka smiled. She prayed that a flood might rise and wash her captor away. She could hear the dull roar of a river not far into the forest. She willed it to swell.

  She should have fled to Moloka’i. She should have kept outrunning her dreams. But there was something about the mainlander. She wanted to see him again, and she sensed that if she had left Maui that night, their paths would not cross a second time. And she had thought that perhaps he had been right about her dreams. Maybe they had been harmless imaginings, borne of a tired heart and a complacent mind. And so she remained on Maui, her heart senselessly aflutter at the thought of her midnight rendezvous with the strange and charming Grayson Park. She combed her hair. She wore a fine blue silk. She brushed herself with lavender. She pinned a plumeria blossom in her hair. She took a deep breath and headed for the lobby.