Na Akua

by Clayton Smith

  But magic was in short supply these days. The old ways were all but extinct. The signs were everywhere. The powerful hula of Hawai’i’s past had been whittled down to luau shows for tourists; the tales of nā akua were fading from the memories of the aged and dying; ancient medicines were being replaced with modern pharmaceuticals; magic had withered and dried like lilikoi left in the sun. So she was not surprised when she felt no sorcerers on the mountain; her range was small, the circle kept her spirit weak, and magicians were not nearly as plentiful as they had once been.

  She tried casting spells on the pigs, though she knew that they were imbued with Kamapua’a’s own brand of magic. They belonged to him, and it would take great strength to peel away their loyalty to their demigod. She tried anyway. She bore into them with her eyes, searching, trying to penetrate their minds. She whispered the chants taught to her by the elder gods so many eons ago. The words flowed easily from her lips, and the air around her sparked with their power.

  But the pigs did not succumb.

  Hi’iaka sighed. She rubbed her wrists together slowly, an old habit that took her when she was lost in deep thought. She hardly noticed the dirt that swirled up around her feet when she did, matching the rotations of her wrists. If she could cast her spell on the dirt outside the ring, she could wipe away the line...but of course Kamapua’a knew that, and her bond with the land was of no use against his entrapments.

  She closed her eyes and remembered with perfect clarity a time when all of Hawai’i would have risen to her call. When the tribes of man and even the land itself, the very sands of the beach and the birds in the trees, would have rallied themselves to her side. The ancient people knew how to pay homage to their akua. Kamapua’a would never have held her captive in the time of the Hawai’ian kings, he could not have. He would have been driven out with the united force of all the islands, great and small, and he would have drowned under the strength of her will.

  But patron gods were for storybooks now. No one sought her favor anymore. No faithful believer laid ho‘okupu at her feet. All of Hawai’i would have risen up to protect her once; now, a small bit of dust was all that could be bothered.

  There was only one other trick for her to try. With her powers restrained, it was hardly worth the effort, but she could think of no other option: she would call the lightning, or she would fall to Kamapua’a’s whim. Even with her full strength, the lightning was difficult to control. It was a wild, ferocious thing, and it tended to crackle and split where it would. The whole sky was the open domain of the lightning’s electric fingers, and even at her full strength, she could not always ensure its direction. But she would do what she could to channel the raw power regardless and summon it to her aid.

  She needed lightning born of a tempest. She closed her eyes and began to send what spirit she could through the invisible membrane of her circular cell. Her powers were weakened, but they had not been destroyed. Not yet.

  She pushed her intention into the sky, and the clouds began to gather.

  First, she would bring the rain.

  And then, if she had any strength left, she would bring the storm.

  Chapter 16

  “Great. And now it’s starting to rain.” Gray held out his hand. Little raindrops spattered his palm.

  “The rain is good!” Polunu said. “Rain makes—”

  “I know, I know. It makes the taro grow.”

  They had resumed their trek up the pig trail, Gray yielding to the greater wisdom of following a path already laid out for them. But even with the grass trampled down, the terrain was getting harder to push through. A few times, Polunu had to wield Maui’s hook like a scythe, cutting down wild ferns and knocking their way clear. “E kala mai ia’u,” he whispered as the hook sliced through the bushes, cutting down their stalks. “E kala mai ia’u.”

  “What’s that mean?” Gray asked, wheezing up the hill.

  “I’m asking the plants for forgiveness.”

  Gray stopped. He raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

  “Sure. It’s not the plants’ fault we need to pass through and cut them down. It’s our fault. It’s okay, you know, they’ll grow back, but it’s good for them to know I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t think they can hear you.”

  “The earth can always hear. We just do not always speak.”

  “Hmpf. Maybe the plants should speak to the pigs and ask them why they didn’t trample a better path so we wouldn’t have to cut down so many of their friends.” Polunu let go of a branch he was holding back, and it swatted Gray in the face. “Hey!”

  “Whoops.” Polunu shrugged. “Sorry.”

  The leafy canopy overhead protected them from most of the rain, which began to fall harder. The sound of the droplets splashing against the leaves was soothing in its gentle, arrhythmic patter. The constant crush of the river began to grow louder over the din of rain, and after climbing for a few more minutes in silence, Polunu held up his hand for Gray to stop.

  “What?” Gray asked, struggling up alongside the Hawai’ian. His breath was labored; he was still sort of choking on dirt that just wouldn’t clear from his lungs.

  But mostly, he was out of shape.

  Polunu pointed through the branches. Gray craned his neck, but the growth was too thick. “I don’t see anything,” he said. He took a step forward and pushed through the trees. “What are you—?” Suddenly, the forest floor crumbled away from beneath his feet, and he was spinning over the edge of a two hundred foot drop into the basin of the river. He screamed and tried to scramble back from the edge, but his hiking shoes slipped in the wet earth and skidded out from under him. He pitched forward over the cliff.

  Polunu snagged his arm just as he fell and yanked him back to safety.

  “Holy hell!” Gray screamed. “I almost just died!” He thought for a second, and then added, “Again!”

  “You making a habit of it today, haole.”

  Gray shook his head, his eyes wide and disbelieving. He gestured out over the valley and the long, powerful waterfall that spilled the river down the side of the mountain. “I mean, that just came out of nowhere!”

  “It’s dangerous to climb where there’s no good trail. You never know what you gonna find in the woods.” Polunu turned to head back to a safer part of the hill, but he paused before they moved on. “Next time, when I say to stop, you should probably stop. You know?”

  “You didn’t say stop,” Gray pointed out. “You just waved your hand. That could have meant anything.”

  “But it didn’t mean anything. It meant ‘stop.’”

  “Duly noted. Thank you.”

  “He mea ‘ole.”

  Gray pushed back through the forest, following Polunu’s steps. They climbed higher, keeping the roar of the waterfall far to their right as the vegetation began to change. Gray kept his eyes aimed intently down at his feet, determined not to take another wrong step, but when he noticed Manaiakalani making a new, almost hollow thunk against the brush, he looked up to see what Polunu was hacking away at. He lifted his eyes, and he gasped.

  They had stumbled into a sprawling grove of bamboo.

  “Whoa. This is crazy,” Gray murmured in awe. The thick green stalks rose high into the sky, swaying in the breeze. The rain almost seemed to pop as it fell against the trunks of the ancient grass, some of which were thicker than his arm. A different type of plant, a small, creeping thing with heart-shaped leaves, clung close to the ground and carpeted the earth like a blanket, but the larger trees had all fallen away, and there was only bamboo stretching into the sky in every direction, as far as the eye could see, tall and thin and graceful. Gray reached out and ran his hand along the smooth joints of a particularly wide bamboo plant. “It’s like walking through a Crate and Barrel,” he whispered.

  The bamboo provided less cover from
the rain than the trees had; soon water was dripping from Gray’s hair. The wetness of the earth burned to a haze in the upcountry heat, and a low mist covered the ground, wrapping its gauzy web around the bases of the bamboo plants. The entire grove took on a distinctly otherworldly appearance.

  Polunu lowered Manaiakalani and began to sidestep through the bamboo instead of batting it away. His big belly pushed the green stalks to the side; when he passed through, they swayed back, knocking into their neighbors and sounding out a crisp, hollow tone and playing a strange, serene, tribal tattoo high above their heads.

  “I can’t see the pig trail,” Gray realized, searching the bamboo forest with his eyes. “Where’d they go?”

  “Even the wild animals know this is a sacred and special place,” Polunu said, wedging his way through the trees. “You can see the hoof prints in the mud, though, yeah? They came through, but they went slow. They don’t wanna disturb the bamboo.”

  “It’s incredible,” Gray murmured.

  Polunu smiled. “It’s home,” he said proudly.

  Then something in the jungle went crunch, and both men dropped into a crouch.

  “What was that?”

  “Don’t know,” Polunu whispered. “Sounded like someone coming this way.”

  “Stab it!” Gray hissed.

  Polunu tightened his grip on Manaiakalani and held it up at his side. Gray tried to flatten himself against a stalk of bamboo, which was absurd, since he was wider than a broomstick. He pushed the rain-soaked hair out of his eyes and held his breath, while Polunu wielded the hook. The footsteps crunched closer.

  And then the intruder was upon them.

  “Oh,” Polunu said, straightening up and blushing a little from embarrassment when the stranger came into view among the bamboo stalks. “Aloha.”

  It was an old man, feeble and frail, with long, ropy muscles straining against his tautly drawn skin. His white hair clung to his skull in thin wisps; his squinting eyes were sunken above a small, squarish nose. He wore simple, rough-spun clothing; his pant legs were stained red with Maui dirt, and his shirt had been woven for a much larger man. He wore a rag tied around his neck, damp with rain and sweat. Each hand held a big wooden bucket, filled nearly to the brim with water from the river. His hands shook as he wove his way through the bamboo, and water sloshed over the rims of the buckets, splashing to the ground.

  “Aloha,” the old man replied, his voice creaking like a weathervane. It didn’t sound like he used it very often. He eyed the pair of men mistrustfully and adjusted his route, veering further away from them as he passed.

  “Can we help you, uncle?” Polunu asked.

  “Polunu,” Gray whispered. There was something unnerving about coming across another soul in this misty bamboo grove, even if it was a frail, elderly man. Gray was about to raise an objection, but Polunu waved him off.

  The old man grunted as he eased his buckets down to the ground. He straightened up and untied the rag from around his neck. He mopped it against his forehead, then rolled it up and tied it once more around his throat. “Not going far,” he finally answered. He dipped his hand into one of the buckets and lifted a palm full of water to his lips. “Mahalo, Lono; mahalo, Nāmaka,” he murmured, shaking the water from his fingers.

  Polunu tucked Manaiakalani under his arm and strode up to the old man. “If it ain’t far to go, then we ain’t got far to help,” he said cheerfully. “Come on, haole,” he said, nodding toward the other bucket. “Help our uncle.”

  Gray stepped forward uneasily, making a wide berth around the old man, who watched him sharply from behind his heavy, wrinkled lids. They didn’t break eye contact, even when Gray plowed into a thick piece of bamboo and smashed his nose on the hard stalk.

  “Don’t be so weird,” Polunu said, shaking his head. He hefted his water bucket easily and began walking in the direction the old man had been heading. “This way, uncle?” he called.

  The old man nodded slowly, not taking his eyes off of Gray. “Not far,” he said again through thin, unsmiling lips. His face streamed with thin trails of falling rain, but he did not flinch from the feel of it. “Not very far.”

  Gray reached down and fumbled for the handle of the bucket. He finally had to take his eyes off the old man so he could see where he was grabbing. He only looked down for one breath, but when he raised his head again, the old man had moved ten feet closer, standing just at Gray’s elbow. Gray yelped in surprise, and a small tidal wave of water sloshed out over the edge of the bucket.

  “Careful!” Polunu chided, clucking his tongue.

  “Sorry,” Gray replied. The old man didn’t say a word; he simply stared at the mainlander with narrow, unblinking eyes. “Sorry,” Gray said again, this time to the old man.

  He gestured after Polunu. “Not far,” he repeated.

  “Yeah, I got it,” Gray muttered, carefully turning his back on the old man and following after his friend. “Not far, not far, we’re not going far.”

  They hauled the water up the hill, balancing the buckets carefully and trying not to spill it all. The rain fell harder, creating hundreds of little ripples in the buckets and adding to the volume, which made Gray feel a little less bad about the water he’d already spilled.

  As they continued up through the bamboo forest, the ground became wetter, more slippery, and Gray’s hiking shoes had a hard time finding purchase in the mud. He nearly fell more than once, only barely catching himself on the bamboo before falling to his knees. Polunu didn’t seem to be having much better luck; he stopped every few yards to adjust his feet inside his old flip-flops and investigate the ground for the best footing forward.

  And Gray didn’t know if it was the terrain or the rain or the altitude, but the bucket felt like it was getting heavier with every step. When he’d first picked it up, it weighed maybe ten pounds, but as he struggled up the hill, it had grown to thirty pounds now, at least, and it was getting heavier. He had to grab the handle with two hands, and even then, he wasn’t able to hold the bucket above the mud. Soon he had no choice but to drag the bucket along the ground, tilted up at an incline so he wouldn’t spill too much of its contents.

  And he was so tired—not just exhausted from the strain of carrying the bucket, but a sleepy sort of tired that he just couldn’t shake. He could barely keep his eyes open. He’d only had one cup of coffee before leaving the hotel instead of his usual three or four, and that had been an obvious mistake, but still. He shouldn’t have been this tired. His eyes were as dry as cotton, and his head kept drooping low. The fight to stay awake was suddenly all-consuming. “I can’t…I need…a break,” he whispered, letting the bucket fall from his hands. It crashed onto the ground and toppled onto its side, rolling back down the hill and spilling water everywhere. Gray’s vision went soft as his lids lowered themselves over his eyes. He sank to his knees, and he looked up through the bamboo, wanting to call out to Polunu, but he was too tired to speak…and besides, Polunu was already lying down in the mud, snoring softly against a cluster of bamboo. Gray rolled over onto his back and began to breathe deeply, letting sleep take him.

  The last thing he saw was the old man standing over him, staring down through the rain and licking his lips with a thin, forked tongue.

  Chapter 17

  When Gray came to, the rain was still falling, and his hands were tied behind his back.

  “No,” he moaned, shaking the sleep from his head and twisting his wrists, straining at the rope that bound him to a strong bamboo plant. “No, no, no!”

  “I’m sorry, cuz,” Polunu said. He was propped up against an especially thick stalk of bamboo, his hands tied similarly. Tears streamed down his face, mixing with the rain that soaked his shirt. There was no sign of Manaiakalani. “This one’s on me.”

  Gray smelled smoke. He sniffed at the air; the scent was unmistakable. He turned hi
s head, trying to find the source of it, but all he could see was bamboo in every direction, towering over the lower leafy plants. He twisted awkwardly onto his side and craned his head backward over his shoulder. From that uncomfortable angle, he could see the old man standing in a clearing, crouched low over a small pile of damp wood, blowing onto the ghostly flames that flickered against the drying grass beneath the sticks. Maui’s hook lay in the mud on the far side of the logs. “What’s he doing?” Gray whispered, trying not to draw the attention of the old man.

  “I think he’s starting a fire,” Polunu moaned.

  Gray rolled his eyes. “No kidding. Why is he starting a fire?”

  “Only two reasons to start a fire in the woods; heat yourself, or heat your food.”

  “But it’s, like, 80 degrees out here,” Gray said. He stopped. He thought. “Wait, you think he wants to eat us?!” he hissed. Polunu shrugged sadly. “What about a third option? There’s got to be a third option! Right? Keeping animals away! People start fires to keep animals away! Right?”

  “We got no predators in Hawai’i,” Polunu reminded him.

  “Oh yeah,” Gray said. He blinked. “Well, shit.”

  The old man’s fire grew as the wood began to smoke. Soon, flames danced along the branches, and the man threw more logs on the fire.

  “What do we do?” Gray whispered, struggling against his bonds. The rope was tied with a thick knot, and there was no chance of pulling it loose.

  Polunu was struggling with his ropes, too.

  “Don’t be big for nothing,” Gray pleaded. “Please, please, please tear through that rope.”

  Polunu didn’t reply. He simply nodded through his grunts.

  The fire at their backs continued to grow in size and intensity. Soon, the mist of the rain paled in comparison to the heavy white smoke that drifted through the bamboo. It stung Gray’s eyes and tickled his lungs. He began to cough, and after vomiting twice, choking on dirt, and now inhaling huge plumes of wood smoke, his raw throat was burning with its own fire.