The people looked back to Venus, expecting an answer, but before she could open her mouth, Uncle Caesar coughed and said, “You have a choice, daughter. This is a new world. You can choose your own name. I know Water-Drinker never felt quite right to you.” He coughed again, his body rocking forward.
She looked away, not wishing to offend him and not sure what to say. He said, “Before you choose, you should know that the first Venus was a powerful woman, a god, the only one of the gods to rise fully formed from the sea.”
“She rose from the sea?”
“From the depths. Standing on a clamshell like a warrior. The slavers didn’t know it, but they gave you a strong name. Maybe even the right name. Up to you to decide.” He hacked again.
She nodded, thinking. Powerful might be nice. Goddess, too. But even more: rising from the ocean. Rising. It seemed fortuitous, hopeful.
“My name is Venus,” she said.
6
THE PEOPLE found food, shelter. The island was tiny, just a circle of hilly ground around a deep cold lake, but it was big enough for them to find coconuts and fish and mangoes—and from a sunken ship and other storm detritus, wood for building whatever they might want. There were monkeys, and birds of all kinds, and not much else. Most of the people wanted to return to Africa, to their original homes. There is no going back there, said Venus. It’s done for us. But people didn’t want to believe that. And everyone felt this island was too small to keep them.
They talked of where to go next.
Venus didn’t. She slept deeply, for the first time in months; and she began to dream. Images drifted back to her, not just the walking underwater as a child, but also: the shock of waking to a rough hand pressed over her mouth, the gray outline of a ship even bigger than the Zong, tiny hands grabbing at a mother’s sleeve as it slipped away. And so much more.
She couldn’t. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to remember. She was only fourteen. She wasn’t ready. So she stopped sleeping, and she walked and walked and explored the island, forcing her mind to consider only what was here, in front of her, and dozing in uneasy snatches, until the dreams receded and she could sleep and live again in peace.
By then she knew there was something different about this place; she’d brought her people somewhere entirely novel. But it wasn’t until the day she spotted—just off the coast—the giant sea monster, bigger even than the island, waving a tentacle at her and winking its enormous eye, that she knew: they were in the second world. She didn’t use those words then, of course; she just thought, This is nothing like the same waters the slaver sailed. This is completely different. And in her heart she pondered the sea monster and this new world, and considered how her people had finally arrived at their freedom because they had disappeared from the world that stole and sold them.
Uncle Caesar, meanwhile, sickened. His lungs bloomed with phlegm and his skin raged with fever and sweat. Three days after they landed, the old man died, holding the hands of his two beloved children. Venus and Swimmer buried him deep in the sand near the spot where they had stumbled ashore.
Afterward they stood and looked outward, across the blue-green waves, and Venus wondered what could possibly lie ahead.
• • •
AFTER UNCLE CAESAR’S death and burial on the little island, Venus’s mind spun with the need for something more to think about. She turned her back on the monkeys and multicolored birds and the deep central lake, and she fixed her worry on the ocean and the giant sea monster, which appeared whenever she walked alone on the beach. Its rolling eye contained a message she could not decipher.
The day after Uncle Caesar’s burial, she walked into the little bay to look for it, but when she plunged her head underwater she could see only a dim shadow far in the distance. It would not come near her. Finally, after days of seeing the eye blink at her from shore and losing sight of it when she entered the water to converse, she asked Swimmer, whose gifts were greater in this area, to try to commune with it.
Swimmer strode into the bay, submerged, and returned an hour later with a tale of his meeting—though owing to his clipped way of talking, it took a couple of days to ease the story out of him. The creature was called a Kraken, he was a male, and he had lost his mate. His wife had left after an argument—he’d wanted to settle down; she’d wanted to travel and see the world—and though the Kraken had stewed for many decades, finally his resentment over being left behind had dwindled. He wanted to find his wife again. He missed her desperately.
“Desperately?” said Venus, smiling when they finally reached that part of the story. How desperate could a Kraken be? He wasn’t human, after all.
Swimmer glared at her. “He’s looking for his wife. Asked if we’d ever seen her. I told him no. He was—disappointed.”
Through prying at her brother like he was a clamshell, Venus found out a few more details about Swimmer’s meeting with the Kraken. Swimmer had promised the Kraken he’d keep his eyes open for the wife. The Kraken had said he was sorry he’d fought with his wife, he missed her, he wanted her back. He asked: could they relay this message if they ever found her? Could they tell her to please come home? He was going to go there now and wait for her. Maybe she’d return.
“Where’s home?” asked Venus, intrigued.
Swimmer shrugged. “A string of islands. Long way. With people. But no slavers. Maybe we’ll visit.”
Venus wasn’t sure where she wanted to go from here, and a faraway group of islands sounded just as good as anywhere else. People kept looking to her for advice, her and Swimmer. They might have looked to Uncle Caesar instead, but he had died and left them alone to make all the decisions.
Walking in the deep, she had known what to do, where to go. Here on the surface, she felt like a child, alone and unsure of herself. She didn’t want to make choices anymore. She was tired of choices. “Where do you think we should go—for good, I mean?” She wondered whether Swimmer felt as she did, unfettered and directionless. But even if he did feel that way, would he tell her? He’d always been short on speech, and now that Uncle Caesar was gone, his jaw seemed locked.
He answered without a pause. “Africa. We go back to Africa.”
There was an of-course tone to his voice that made her ask. “Why?”
“It’s where we’re from. So we go back.”
He walked away before she could ask all the questions that wanted to burble up: Go back even though that world isn’t safe for us anymore? Even though you and I have already been stolen—twice, according to our uncle—and only escaped at great loss, at the loss of all else? And the hardest questions: How many times must we return before we look for elsewhere? And: can we even get back?
But they were questions she never voiced. He seemed so sure of himself.
• • •
THERE WERE OTHERS besides Uncle Caesar who died in those first days. The people were sick when they were tossed overboard, after all; and though everything unpleasant had receded underwater, here in the second world, their ailments resurfaced. Of the 133 souls, a full thirty-three died during that first week on land. Burials everywhere. The woman who’d held Venus’s hand all that time below—her with the facial scars and the wisdom lines and the pepper-gray hair—died the same day as Uncle Caesar, though Venus didn’t find out until the next day. She never knew the woman’s name, but she felt a sharp loss at the news of her death, as if at the passing of a dear aunt. She could still feel the woman’s hand pulsing in her own, warm and strong.
The remaining hundred, under Swimmer’s leadership, constructed rafts. That is, he told them to build, and they found a man among them who knew something about raft-making and built with this man’s direction. They fashioned small floats, enough for a family to make a shelter on, and linked them together so that they could walk from one to the other and yet ride the waves with flexibility. The center rafts they built strongest and with real w
ooden shelters where a hundred people might gather to ride out a storm. They built a floating island to take them home. To Africa, Swimmer said.
Venus watched as Swimmer, still silent about almost everything, became a leader of the people. He was so tall and handsome! How had she not noticed her own brother becoming a man? His chest was wide; his voice was deep enough to stop a howling monkey in its path; when he said, “We go to Africa,” people listened to him and asked, “When?” and “How?”—and then they heeded his compressed answers.
By the time they departed the little island, Venus had grown to like the place. The round shore and sandy beach and, like a gem in the center, the small deep lake. The trees around the lake. The bright birds and the iguanas and even the monkeys. The burial plots up the dune and the endless sunshine. The fish flashing like jewels. The shells glittering like fish. The openness, and the feeling that no slave ship could ever find them here, not ever. She liked it more than she could say.
And yet, memory always pressed on her. She could feel it threatening to return, the more time she spent alone and quiet. So when the day came to leave, she left. When everyone else climbed on the rafts, and her brother twitched his lips and said, “Come,” she stepped on, too, away from the island, away from the graves of Uncle Caesar and the scar-faced woman and all the others she’d rescued only to lose, away from the comfort of sand and the endless coconut milk and mangoes, and headed out again, into the big blue sea. She could have stayed, of course, alone. But she didn’t want to. And it wasn’t just that she wanted to avoid her old dreams. These were her people. She’d saved them, she and Swimmer and Uncle Caesar, and she’d see them again to safety, even now that someone else was leading.
7
RIGHT AROUND the words, “now that someone else was leading,” Pip fell asleep. Jupiter probably said more sentences after that, but Pip didn’t hear them, and somewhere along the way the old man must have realized Pip wasn’t listening and stopped talking. When Pip woke up in the middle of the night, he was lying on the floor cushions, a blanket tucked over him. Jupiter was snoring, half sitting, a few feet away on his bench. Pip staggered to his feet and dragged himself to his own bed.
When he woke for real, in the morning, the sun was streaming in the window above his pillow, and he could smell fresh bread. He peeked around the partition. The old man was humming, the steam from the bread rising around his hands as he tore it.
He turned to Pip. “Sleepyhead. This bread is so new it doesn’t even have a name yet.” He sat down and spread tomato jam on a hunk. “Hurry before it cools.”
As Pip took a heel—his favorite part—he sat down across from Jupiter.
The old man pointed his knife at him. “You fell asleep midway.”
“I’m sorry,” said Pip.
“No matter.” They chewed for a few minutes, Pip working to get through the thick crust. “There were two stories I meant to tell you, and you heard only one. Part of one.”
“But I think I understand why you told it,” said Pip. He’d been thinking about it since he woke up. “The Raft King wants someone to save his people—like Venus saved her people by taking them to this world.”
The old man nodded, watching Pip.
“But what I don’t understand—” Pip shook his head. He still felt groggy.
“Go on,” said Jupiter.
“What I don’t understand is how I could save Raftworld. I mean, Venus walked underwater. And she brought your people here, to the second world.” Pip took another hunk of bread and studied it. It was good, higher rising than bread on the Islands—and with a green tinge.
“Seaweed,” said Jupiter. “In the dough. My neighbor bakes many loaves and brings me one each morning.”
Pip nodded his appreciation. “But the Raft King can’t expect me to do the same as Venus. I mean, where would I take you? I couldn’t take you to another world.”
“Why not?” the old man asked mildly. Now his eyes were on his bread as he ladled jam onto it.
“Well, because—we’re already here. There isn’t a third world, is there?”
“Not that we know of.”
“Then—I can’t do what Venus did. There’s nowhere for us to go.”
“Unless,” said the old man slowly, putting down his bread. “Unless we go back.”
8
SO THAT was what the Raft King wanted—to go back to the first world? Why?
Jupiter couldn’t explain it all. He didn’t know what the king wanted; the king hadn’t told him. He was surmising, based on what the Raft King had said—and his own knowledge. “There’s one more story I want to tell you. About Amelia.” They sat outside the hut now, side by side on a wooden bench in the little garden, soaking up the sun and breeze and listening to the birds and the hum of the insects. Jupiter’s garden dripped with tomatoes in every stage of growth; his neighbor, he said, gathered some when she dropped off the bread, and so did the man who brought Jupiter eggs.
“I know who Amelia was.”
“Yes?”
Pip tried to pull together all the details he could remember. “She had pale skin, almost white, like my grandfather, and reddish hair. She was the Raft King’s mother. Adopted mother, that is. The old Raft King rescued her when she came here, in a storm, from the first world. He picked her up from the island she crashed on, and she stayed with Raftworld and she adopted the Raft King and named him Putnam—he was a baby then—and she was his mother.” Pip worked up to the most important detail of the story, in his opinion. “She could fly. One day she flew away, and she never came back. Some people say that she’s going to come back someday,” he confided. “But in other versions of the story, they say she turned into a bird or a butterfly and she doesn’t know how to return to human.”
“Well,” said Jupiter. “I’m going to tell you a still-different version. I was there when she arrived and lived with us, and I was there when she left. I knew her.”
“How old are you?” gasped Pip—before he realized how rude the question was. He hung his head, embarrassed. Kinchen would be furious with him for saying such a thing to an elder.
But Jupiter laughed. “It was thirty-odd years ago—which, as I get older, seems less and less in the past. However. You want the story?”
Pip nodded.
• • •
IT WAS 1942—quite a while ago now, and a different world in many ways. We barely had hydraulics then, not nearly the capacity we have now. And we weren’t quite so crowded. But that is a different story. This is about Amelia.
She was Putnam’s adopted mother—the only mother he ever knew, as his first mother had died giving birth to him—and she was funny and adventurous and wild and full of hugs; exactly the way a mother should be. And then one day, right out of the blue, she left him. She’d been tight-faced for weeks, twitchy. Unhappy. Even a little boy could see that something was wrong. That something she wanted wasn’t there.
Five-year-old Putnam did everything he could to make Amelia happy. He called her “Darling Mama” and told her over and over that he loved her; he brushed her floppy hair with the little bristle brush she liked to feel against her scalp; he brought her orange juice in a bright yellow bowl she once said reminded her of the sun; he sang to her all the songs he could think of. Nothing worked. Her lips smiled at him as he carried the bowl, the brush, and the songs; but her smile wasn’t alive. She loved him—but she wasn’t happy.
One day, however, she woke up glowing. It was like a birthday, she said, and she could feel something coming. “Anything can happen today. I know it.”
“An adventure?” said Putnam, hoping for good times again.
“I don’t know what,” she said, “but something.”
The old Raft King, Putnam’s father, said, “If you believe something will happen, it probably will.” The boy Putnam made a wish right then that Amelia would be happy here forever, and that she w
ould be his mother for always. And he believed it would come true.
But of course nothing happened as he wanted. Later that afternoon, the birds arrived, dozens of them, large ones, mostly albatrosses and terns—even an oversize eagle, so out of place. They landed on the roofs of Raftworld, where they rested silent and almost motionless. The boy Putnam slipped his hand into Amelia’s as they sat below the birds and gazed up. Amelia stared at the birds for a long, long time like she was asking them a question inside her head and listening to their answer. Then she dropped Putnam’s hand and stood up to her full, lean height. “I’m going now, my love.”
“What?” said Putnam. “Where?”
“With them.” And she gestured to the birds.
“How?”
She bent and kissed the top of his head. “If I could stay for anyone, it would be you. Believe me, little man. But I can’t stay—not even for you. I’m sorry. My gift is to fly, and if I can’t fly I’m not really alive. You understand?” But he didn’t understand. He didn’t. What could be more important to Amelia than staying with her boy, her special boy? He was her son. How could she leave him? What did the sky have that he did not?
He wished then, more than anything, that he too had a gift: the gift to make her stay. Angry tears coursed down his cheeks.
Or—he thought in later years—if not the gift to make her stay, then the gift to make her return, and to hurt her exactly as much as she was hurting him. That’s what he wanted.
She wiped his cheeks with her hand and sighed and kissed his forehead one last time while the birds rustled and shifted themselves into a clump on the raft behind her. She walked toward them, then turned and waved and called—not just to him, but to everyone—I’ll come back as soon as I can! I’ll come back for you, Putnam—and anyone else who wants to join me! I’ll take you back to my world, I’ll take you to Africa if that’s what you still want! And she leapt into the center of the birds and they lifted, a flurry of white wings, and he couldn’t even see her anymore, her red hair flaming in their soft center somewhere, the whole mass rising and rising and then gliding away until they were merely a dusky blur and then a dot and then, finally, altogether gone.
A Crack in the Sea Page 9