Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369)

by Brennan, Marie

  Heali’i sighed in relief. “Good. You already behave as you should, for the most part. You dress and act as a man. Even your hair is short, like a man’s.” I put one hand self-consciously to my cropped head, which had been revealed when I laid my hat aside in the shade of Heali’i’s house. “There is only one thing lacking,” she said. “You need a wife.”

  Jake laughed uproariously at this. Perhaps it was the release of the previous tension; perhaps it was merely the thought of his mother playing gruff husband to some blushing bride that made him so mirthful. The blush, however, was on my cheeks. “Don’t be absurd.”

  All amusement faded from Heali’i. “You must be married,” she said. “And not to a man. If you are not … I don’t know what they’ll do.”

  The Keongans. They believed I was a reborn spirit from Rahuahane—a reborn monster. I had defused their concerns by coming to Heali’i, but that did not mean the concerns had gone away entirely. Fear made my skin prickle, even in the tropical warmth. “Heali’i, I cannot. I am not of your people! I do not follow your gods, know your ways—do you expect me to live here for the rest of my life? Or take some poor girl with me when I leave?”

  She dismissed this with a snort. “I have heard what your home is like; it sounds much too cold. No Keongan girl would be foolish enough to sail there with you. No, you will divorce her before you go. If the gods take offense, that will be your leader’s problem, not ours.”

  “What a charmingly pragmatic attitude,” I muttered in Scirling, not at all charmed. Forcing my half-stunned brain back into Keongan, I said, “It is still impossible. My interest is in men, Heali’i. I cannot be a husband to a woman, not in—in the physical sense. I would not even know how.” Many people over the years have accused me of having no shame, but had they been on the slopes of Homa’apia that day, they would know it to be false. There were some things I could not bring myself to do, not even for dragons.

  Heali’i began laughing once more. For a moment I hoped this had all been some great joke—but no. “Do you think I lie with my husband? Of course not.”

  I stopped my tongue before it could point out that there were societies where such things were common. We were not here to debate the sexual mores and behaviours of all peoples; only of hers and my own. “But this would not be fair to the girl. Whoever she might be. To marry her in some kind of sham, and then cast her off when I leave … I cannot imagine anyone agreeing to it.”

  “That,” Heali’i said, “is because you have not met her yet.”

  * * *

  Messages can travel quite quickly in the islands, so long as there is someone willing to hop in a canoe and paddle over to the recipient’s village. My prospective wife arrived at our camp the following afternoon.

  I had said nothing of the situation to my companions, and had forbidden Jake to breathe so much as a word of it. Every time I tried to envision explaining this to Tom, my imagination failed me utterly. I kept expecting it to be some kind of grand jest, which I could forget as soon as the joke ended. But when Heali’i showed up with two people in tow, I knew she was serious.

  They were both young: a boy and a girl, likely no more than sixteen. Heali’i introduced them as Kapo’ono and Liluakame, both from the neighbouring island of Lahana; I greeted them in my awkward Keongan, wondering if he was her brother, or perhaps a cousin. I saw little resemblance between them, if so.

  When the formalities were done, Heali’i said, “Liluakame is perfect for you. She will be your wife until you leave.”

  I was too flummoxed by the entire situation to be polite. With the sort of bluntness one can only muster in a foreign language one speaks very poorly, I said to the girl, “Do you have any idea what is going on here?”

  Liluakame glanced shyly at Kapo’ono. Not quite meeting my eye, she said, “You would be doing us a favour. I want to marry Kapo’ono, you see.”

  She had to repeat this twice before I was certain I had heard her right the first time. “How on earth could me marrying you help you marry him?”

  “I’m not worthy of her yet,” Kapo’ono said. It came out stiffly, and I realized he was at least as embarrassed as I was. “My uncle is going to take me on a trading expedition to Toahanae, and I will make my fortune there. But until then, Liluakame’s family will not let me marry her.”

  “And while he’s gone, I fear they’ll make me wed someone else,” Liluakame added. “There is a man on ‘Opawai—he wouldn’t be a shark, but I do not want to marry him. I want Kapo’ono.”

  A shark, I presumed, was a term of opprobrium for a bad husband. “But if you were married to me … then you would be safe until Kapo’ono returns.”

  She nodded. I resisted the urge to bury my face in my hands. “You know that Heali’i believes me to be ke’anaka’i, yes?”

  “That’s what you are,” Liluakame said, as if confirming that the sky was blue. “Everyone knows it.”

  I was in no mood to argue about the concept; only about its implications. “Which means my spirit is some kind of inhuman creature from Rahuahane. And you want to be married to that?”

  “I’m not afraid,” she said stoutly. And Kapo’ono, when I looked to him, assured us both—Liluakame more than me—that he did not mind marrying someone who had previously been the wife of a dragon-spirited person. All the while, Heali’i beamed from ear to ear, as if she had just performed a miracle. Now I understood her eagerness: she had found someone who appeared to suit my needs as perfectly as possible.

  That was not, however, the same thing as being a perfect match. “What of your parents?” I asked. “We are guests here on Keonga. I cannot afford to risk angering anyone, even if it would help both of us.”

  You may notice a shift in my speech. Previously I had been pointing out all the factors that made Heali’i’s notion impossible … but somewhere in the course of things I had instead begun pointing out all the obstacles between us and success. It was my deranged practicality coming to the fore: it might be absurd for me to temporarily contract a marriage with another woman, but if I was going to do such a thing, I would do it right.

  “I can talk them around,” Liluakame said, which did not reassure me.

  Between the three of them, however, they persuaded me to at least meet with her parents. I received a flurry of etiquette instruction, so that I might not give offense; I accordingly met them outside the enclosure where our party had originally been greeted, with a bottle of Tom’s brandy as a gift and the proper words of respectful greeting on my tongue. This was successful enough that Liluakame’s parents regarded me with bemused hilarity—rather the way I might have regarded a spaniel who arrived on my doorstep wearing a top hat and begging my pardon for the disturbance.

  It transpired that their reason for marrying Liluakame to the fellow on ‘Opawai was that they did not want their daughter to bear the scandal of being a spinster—especially since Kapo’ono’s trading expedition was likely to be a lengthy one, which meant Liluakame would be waiting for quite a while. (She assured everyone most vehemently that she did not mind waiting in the slightest.)

  “Will there not be any scandal if she marries me?” I asked—not quite believing that living in pseudo-wedlock with a half-human foreign transvestite was any improvement over spinsterhood.

  The mother cast a dubious eye on Liluakame. “It is not what I would choose for her,” she said. “But she would earn great mana by taming you.”

  I can only guess at the translation of that last verb; I did not recognize the word at the time, and did not remember it well enough later to confirm what she had said. The general sense of it, however, was clear enough. Ke’anaka’i were dangerous unless constrained by the civilizing institution of human marriage; the challenge of so constraining one was therefore a marker of great courage and strength.

  It seemed that everyone was in favour, then—except for myself.

  You may think the reason for my reticence was the sheer absurdity of what I was being asked to do. It goes very mu
ch against the grain to wed someone knowing it is merely an arrangement of convenience, to be discarded as soon as circumstances allow; that is not what marriage is supposed to be. Furthermore, for me to wed a woman was unthinkable in my own society, and scarcely more thinkable while I was temporarily resident in someone else’s. Both of these were solid grounds upon which to doubt the wisdom of this course.

  Neither of them, however, weighed nearly so heavily in my mind as the personal element. I had envied the two tê lêng mating in the mountains of Yelang; I envied the two young Keongans standing before me now. My own husband was dead; I must disavow my son lest we be done in by the islanders; and now, for my own safety as well as that of my companions, I was being told I must undergo a sham reprise of my first marriage, to someone I hardly knew at all.

  “I will need time to consider this,” I told them, and fled back to camp.

  * * *

  When I told Tom—after first taking the precaution of walking well away from camp with him—he buried his face in his hands.

  I alternately watched him and looked away in embarrassment. His shoulders kept shaking with something I thought might be suppressed laughter, probably of a hysterical sort. Finally, when I could bear the silence no longer, I said, “I know it is strange.”

  “Strange,” Tom said, still muffled by his hands, “is flinging yourself off a cliff for the sake of dragons. Strange is what you have done up until now. This … is something else.”

  “Very well—I know it is absurd.”

  “That comes closer to the mark.” He took his hands down, shaking his head. “I needled you in Eriga about attracting marital interest wherever you go, but I admit, I never expected this. Must you do it?”

  The question dragged at me like the anchor of the Basilisk. “I think I must. Otherwise the islanders will think there is nothing binding me to human society.”

  Tom nodded. A blind man could not have missed the way the Keongans were treating me. Since I climbed the mountain to visit Heali’i, the worst of it had subsided, but it had not gone away; they watched me as if I were a dancing spark that might set a whole village ablaze. I was ke’anaka’i; I was unbound by human custom. If I stayed quietly in my hut, they might let the matter pass with a mere shunning. But if I tried to pursue my research, I might frighten them into outright violence.

  Laid against that, a sham marriage seemed a small price to pay.

  Tom’s thoughts trended in a similar direction. “It seems much less hazardous to life and limb than some of the other things you’ve done.”

  And less hazardous than remaining in my current state. “Please do not tell anyone,” I said, not without a piteous note.

  He snorted. “Who would believe me?”

  I weighed the matter in my mind: the fear of the islanders, my own fear of following so strange a course. The path before me was peculiar beyond my ability to even imagine, and would drag up any number of memories I was not eager to face … but dragons lay at the end of it.

  “Then I will speak to Heali’i,” I said.

  THIRTEEN

  My wife—Suhail’s concern—Life with Liluakame—Spotting serpents—Into the bell—The underwater world—A ruptured line—To the surface

  I have never attempted to hide that I have had two husbands in my life.

  I have, however, neglected to mention that in between them, I had a wife.

  Liluakame and I wed in a simple ceremony that hardly merited the name. I was grateful for its simplicity and foreignness, which helped to separate my current actions from those which had bound me to Jacob Camherst. My son was not present—not because he disapproved, but because we were pretending he was Abby’s son. Indeed, he found the entire thing more amusing than upsetting; it is remarkable what children will accept as normal, especially when their experiences have been sufficiently broad. Tom knew of it, as did the captain and Abby. (She, I suspect, mentally wrote me down as the sort of woman who enjoys the company of other women in more than merely social ways. While not true, it was an understandable conclusion to draw.)

  My attempts to keep the entire thing secret from the crew of the Basilisk, however, failed to an astounding degree.

  It was futile to even try. I could not keep them from knowing that I had temporarily disavowed Jake as my son, for we needed them to perpetuate that façade. Nor could I keep them from knowing that Liluakame was about, for it was her duty as my wife—however nominal that status—to keep house for me. Her father and brother built a more substantial hut for the two of us to reside in, along with Jake and Abby, which drew attention; before long, any number of rumours began to circulate about our precise arrangement. At first I tried to squelch these, but of course the harder I tried, the more I persuaded everyone that something was indeed going on. Jake’s approach was much more successful: he began to make up stories about me, each one wilder than the last, burying the truth under a mountain of flamboyant nonsense.

  And that, dear reader, is why the tales of my life in Keonga are even more absurd than the normal run of story about me. Under no circumstances was I going to report the truth to the Winfield Courier, let alone to my family. In the end I chose to embrace Jake’s tactic, inventing outrageous variations when speaking of the matter in person, but glossing over it entirely in print. The result has been a breathtaking mélange of untruths, and as I have already decided that this shall be a volume in which I reveal one secret, I may as well reveal another. (After all, it has been so very long since there was any satisfying scandal about me. I find that respectability grows wearisome after a time, when one is accustomed to being a disgrace.)

  The only part which troubled me, once I settled upon Jake’s method of dealing with the rumours, was Suhail’s reaction.

  He had been busy in his own right, diving in the warm, shallow waters of the lagoons that lay between the shore and the surrounding reef. He was, of course, looking for any sign of submerged Draconean ruins. The hunt for these had taken him around the island, a journey of several days—these being the days in which I discovered Heali’i’s nature and found myself supplied with a wife. When he returned, he sank neck-deep in the morass of rumours that now filled our camp. Understandably, he came to me for explanation.

  To him I told the truth, in as straightforward a fashion as I could. When I was done, he stared at me with an expression I could not read. “Do you think this is right?” he asked.

  “It hurts no one that I can see,” I said. “Liluakame benefits, along with Kapo’ono. It allows me to conduct my research without offending the local customs. And it is not as if I am going to damage my own future marriage prospects, for I have none.” (I had received three proposals in the years following Jacob’s death, but none of a sort I would consider for even a moment. At the advanced age of thirty, with little money but a great deal of notoriety to my name, I had no expectation of receiving anything better.)

  “But you do not believe in what they tell you,” he said.

  “In ke’anaka’i?” I had given this a great deal of thought since speaking with Heali’i, and had reached some surprising conclusions. “If you mean, do I believe that I am the reincarnation of an inhuman dragon-creature from a Puian myth—then no, of course not. But taking the term in its simpler sense … then yes, perhaps I am dragon-spirited.”

  Suhail’s eyebrows went up, and I elaborated. “I have been mad for dragons ever since I was a child, and this, they say, is a sign that marks one as ke’anaka’i. Such people also transgress against the norms of society, particularly those which constrain behaviour on the basis of sex; this, too, describes me quite well. And—” I hesitated. “This will sound peculiar, I know. But this love I have for dragons, my compulsion to understand them … I have thought of it before as if there were a dragon within me. A part of my spirit. I do not believe it is true in any mystical sense, of course; I am as human as you are. But in the metaphorical sense, yes. ‘Dragon-spirited’ is as good a term for me as any.”

  He listened to this
in silence, his expression settled into the grave lines it assumed when he was deep in thought. “Do you believe you are neither male nor female?”

  I almost gave a malapert answer, but caught myself in time. We had an established habit of intellectual debate, and I valued it; I would not discard it now.

  “So long as my society refuses to admit of a concept of femininity that allows for such things,” I said, “then one could indeed say that I stand between.”

  It was not quite the same thing as the Keongan concept of a third gender. But Suhail nodded—less as if he agreed, more as if I had given him a great deal to think about—and there it rested for a time.

  * * *

  I fear I was not a terribly good husband to Liluakame.

  In part this was because I found myself almost thinking of her as my servant. I was accustomed to shifting for myself in the field; living in something like a proper house, with someone else arranging my domestic life, tempted my mind into the habits of home. But I think it was more my own troubles than our circumstances that made me fall into such patterns of thought. It was easier to envision her as a servant than as a spouse, for the former did not require any intimacy of spirit from me.

  Fortunately, neither did Liluakame. So long as I treated her with respect—which I did, quite scrupulously—she did not ask much more of me, and seemed content to hone her own skills in preparation for her impending marriage to Kapo’ono. She was, on the whole, a very good wife. Thanks to the efforts of her male kin, our ramshackle lean-to was soon replaced with a proper hut, its floor paved with rounded stones, its openings perfectly positioned to admit what cooling breezes were to be had. Had I intended to live there permanently, Liluakame would have started a garden; instead she worked in the garden of a cousin of Heali’i’s and brought home plantains, sweet potatoes, cocoanut, and breadfruit, as well as taro from the fields of the men.