The Sea Is Ours

by Jaymee Goh

  “She loves natural beauty, yes.” Udaya met Maria Flora’s eyes behind the priest’s back. The other woman left smeared fingerprints on the cooled surface, the only sign of her fear. The ambassador may never have seen one, but she knew what these were. No matter where in the world, every child of the islands grew up knowing the word aswang.

  “This way.” She gestured. Maria Flora leapt at the chance to leave the boxes and their precious contents. The priest was slower, but he followed shortly thereafter.

  “So many,” Maria Flora whispered as they continued towards Kagubutan’s reception area, more gold-framed boxes stretching before them.

  When they reached the end, Father Ignacio pointed at the last one. “This is empty.”

  Udaya shook her head. “It’s not.” It was, after all, filled to the brim with chilled vinegar.

  Kagubutan waited for them, lounging on her rattan throne. Next to her a boy prepared buko to drink, the bolo slicing through the air with practiced care. By her feet dozed a wooden crocodile, lids low over capiz eyes. She brightened at their arrival. “Marikit, you’ve grown! Come closer. I want to get a good look at you.”

  Color bloomed on the ambassador’s face. “My name is Maria Flora.”

  Kagubutan laughed. “Perhaps in that land across the sea but here, you are Marikit. I named you.” Her tone offered no room for disagreement. The diwata sighed dramatically. “Why do the ambassadors always change their names? As if that will make anyone forget who they are. We cannot hide. We bear the marks on our faces and bodies.”

  Visibly discomfited, Maria Flora approached Kagubutan and curtsied. “Did your gifts arrive?”

  The diwata frowned and ignored the woman’s question. “Raise your head. I said I want to look at you.” The frown deepened as she took in Maria Flora’s gown. “You must be sweltering in that. Udaya, bring her proper clothes.”

  Father Ignacio paled in alarm. “No!” Udaya had no doubt what he protested, judging by the glances he gave her bare shoulders and back.

  Kagubutan arched one graceful brow. Stronger men than the priest had broken beneath that upward sweep. “It is your choice to wear that frock, foreign liaison. I will not have one of my daughters wear such a ridiculous thing. Not during the height of summer.”

  “Diwata Kagubutan,” Maria Flora said. “It is all right. I am comfortable in this gown, and it is also hot in Americana Mexica although the heat is dryer further inland rather than wet. I don’t require new clothes.”

  Skepticism painted itself across Kagubutan’s face. She obviously believed the decision to choose layers of stifling fabric over the lightweight halter and wrap-skirt was foolish. “Very well,” she relented. “To answer your earlier question, I did. I’ve never seen such jewelry before. Who made it?”

  “They are presents of goodwill from the Maya. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with their nobility and they are interested in fostering a relationship with the diwata across the sea.”

  “Are they?” Kagubutan asked, her gaze sharp and clear.

  Udaya bent her head. Ah, so Maria Flora hadn’t come to view the ritual at all. That explained much. “Noy,” she called to the boy who was arranging the buko for their refreshment. “Will you please take Father Ignacio on a tour? I doubt he will have many opportunities to walk inside a balete.”

  “Indeed you are correct, liaison.”

  After they left, a prepared buko in the priest’s hands, Udaya turned to Maria Flora. “Why are you here?” she asked in Cebuano.

  “Udaya,” Kagubutan chided.

  “No,” Maria Flora shook her head, her brow furrowed. “I want to. Just… talk slowly. I don’t have much opportunity to practice.”

  “We can send a girl back with you,” Udaya said. “You mustn’t forget our tongue.”

  “I’d like that,” the ambassador accepted, her words stilted and slow.

  “Well,” Kagubutan said, playing a lock of her floor-length hair. “Answer my liaison’s question.”

  “The Maya wish to request aid. More of their cities have fallen under España’s rule. They have fought long and hard but—”

  “They are the last ones left, aren’t they?” Kagubutan tapped her lip. “I believe the other tribes have fallen long before now.”

  Maria Flora nodded. “The Aztec and Inca fell before I was born.”

  “And if the Maya fall, there will be no one else.” The diwata sighed. “It is hard instigating a revolution.” Udaya watched as her solemn gaze fell upon the dual rows of gold-framed boxes. A smile bloomed across Kagubutan’s face. “But I do have a suggestion.”

  ~*~

  Udaya tapped her foot. Where had the priest gone? “I shouldn’t have trusted Noy to keep an eye on him. He’s a good boy but easily distracted.”

  Maria Flora lifted her shoulders in a graceful shrug. “Perhaps he went back outside.” She was in far better mood after having listened to Kagubutan’s plan.

  “I hope not.” Udaya ascended the stairs, touching one gold-framed box after another. “It’s easy to get lost here.”

  “The way looks simple enough. One way in and one way out. The same way, no less.”

  Udaya smiled at the young woman. “That is only because I am with you. You wouldn’t have been able to make it inside by yourself.”

  Unease filling her face, Maria Flora changed the subject. “I thought the aswang were supposed to have been destroyed.”

  Udaya snorted. “As I told the priest, Kagubutan likes natural beauty.”

  “The aswang are natural?”

  She’d strike another person for asking such a question, but Maria Flora was genuinely curious without a hint of malice. “Of course.” Udaya glanced at the ambassador. “I thought your father told you about me.”

  She expected the other woman to ask about the lone box that stood empty, but the ambassador kept silent. Perhaps Maria Flora was beginning to learn what needed to remain unsaid.

  They reached the entrance in considerably less time than it took for them to walk to Kagubutan’s reception area. An ominous discrepancy and one Udaya knew the meaning of all too well. But how it would manifest—

  There, at the entrance of the balete, lay the body of Father Ignacio. Udaya exhaled at his nearly bisected torso. In another life, Javier would indeed have been a conquistador. Udaya cared little for those who bore crosses as symbols, but she hoped the priest would find peace in the arms of his stern and distant god. Living goddesses who walked through forests and across mountaintops had nothing to spare for dying men.

  As Maria Flora screamed, Udaya met the eyes of Javier. She glanced around and saw the cut branches that had been hacked to pieces. Then she spied the matching scratches across his face, the way his clothes hung ripped and torn. The branches had lost—wood such as this had little hope of defeating steel—but not without a fight. “You shouldn’t have fought. You should have stayed.”

  “Javier!” Maria Flora shouted. “What are you doing?”

  The genuine shock in the ambassador answered Udaya’s question at least. She hadn’t known or expected this. Good. Kagubutan had conspired with the ambassador, after all, and Udaya hated to see her diwata’s trust so misplaced.

  Javier lifted his bloodied sword. “I apologize, ambassador, but this is for the glory of España.”

  Udaya pushed Maria Flora behind her. “Let’s see. A priest and an ambassador come to watch a ritual in good will. I imagine Maria Flora is well-loved in Americana Mexica? Her death would be met with anger and the priest’s with outrage. Add in a diwata and a balete tree? It makes for a neat trap.” Not just trade and faith then. España had indeed wanted to renew the violence, this time testing the islands’ magic-fuel tech against their steam-powered machinery.

  Who would have won? And how long would it have taken to determine the victor, no matter how many lives were lost in the process?

  Udaya glanced at the sky. More time had passed than she’d thought. The sun had begun to set, and shadows gathered thick under the bale
te.

  “How dare you?” Maria Flora snapped. “I will have you tried for this!”

  “How?” Such arrogance in Javier’[s voice. “You will be dead.”

  “No,” Udaya interrupted. “She will not.”

  She placed a hand on Maria Flora’s breastbone and shoved. The ambassador hit the ground as the sun fell below the horizon. “And a trial won”t be necessary for you.” She pressed a hand against her belly, which had begun to burn as it did each and every night the sun set.

  Javier sneered. “I will be glad to kill you, woman—”

  He trailed off into silence as Udaya’s knees hit the ground. But only her knees—her head and shoulders did not sink. Pulling the gumamela from her neat bun, her black hair streamed down over her shoulders and bare back. It slipped over the entrails that hung freely from beneath her rib cage.

  “I was a babaylan before your people came to these shores,” she told him. “Men like you came, bearing steel and crosses. They attacked my village and killed everyone. A man like you cut me in half much like you just cut your priest down. But Kagubutan found me and saved me.”

  Horror transformed Javier’s face. Fear, the great equalizer. “You’re one of them.”

  “You made us. You went after babaylan like me because you thought removing us would make it easier for your priests. But the diwata would not let us die. And so we became like this.” Udaya gestured to her floating torso. The skin over her shoulderblades itched. Soon the wings would burst forth. Below her, the bottom half of her body knelt in graceful stillness.

  “You made us,” she repeated. “Spare me your regret. If we terrorize your dreams from across the sea, it is your fault.”

  She attacked him.

  The blood of adult men lacked the delicacy of children or the sweetness of unborn babies, but a liver torn from the body of a warrior tasted of victory all the same.

  ~*~

  Udaya cracked open the gold-framed box. She jerked back as a feathered serpent poked its head out, its tongue flicking at the air.

  Kagubutan descended from her throne and joined Udaya’s side. “A snake?” The childlike wonder in the diwata’s voice gladdened her heart. It had been so long since a living snake tasted the islands’ air with its tongue.

  The little serpent wavered between the two—the aswang and the diwata—before making a decision. It used Udaya’s arm as a means to reach Kagubutan, where it coiled around her head like a crown. “A present from the Mayan nobility, or so Maria Flora says.” She handed the accompanying letter to the goddess.

  Kagubutan smiled indulgently. “So they liked my gifts.”

  “They’ll like it even more at the solstice. Though the Spaniard spectators less so.” Udaya regretted the fact she couldn’t be there to witness it, but one must always remain by Kagubutan’s side.

  She looked at the spiraling steps that led to and from Kagubutan’s reception area. The gold-framed boxes that had once lined them were gone. Carried away on a Kalakalang Galyon, now they were in the possession of a certain ambassador, with tikbalang in kamagong armor protecting them all.

  Only one box remained, but that one had always stood empty saved for the chilled vinegar that filled it.

  Udaya’s eyes fell upon Kagubutan’s next project. It was yet in the beginning stages so only materials had been gathered: narra for the body, rose vines for the entrails, gumamela blossoms for the hair. But these were the easy pieces. The trick, as the diwata had explained to her, was figuring out what material to use for the wings—figuring out what would allow her new aswang to fly.

  Kagubutan hummed. “I did promise Maria Flora that she’d have someone to practice her mother tongue with.”

  “So you did.”

  And the diwata always make good on their promises.

  Life Under Glass

  Nghi Vo

  When I opened my eyes, the air was cooler and damper than it had been when I went to sleep the night before, as if the wind had brought the chill of the East Sea along with it. It reminded me that the monsoon season was close, and that my time in the Trường Sơn Range was nearly up. Before next week, Linh and I would have to send up the sky lantern that would signal the ranger station at Hải Vân Pass for a pick up by air. After that, it would be a careful trip by rail to Saigon where we could get to work unpacking our rare cargo.

  Our terrariums, some the size of my fist and a few that stood waist-high, were full of sleeping animals and insects, held in suspended animation until they could be released into the Trường Sơn dome at the Universal Exposition in Saigon. Between my sister and I and the five years we had spent on expedition in the Trường Sơn Range, I would guess that we were responsible for at least a quarter, if not more, of the flora and fauna in the Trường Sơn dome. There were going to be eight domes altogether, three from Vietnam itself, and five replicating biomes from around the world. The world was coming to Saigon in a year, and Linh had observed wryly that we wanted the world to know that we could keep it under glass if we wished to.

  Our return to Saigon was going to be modestly successful, but the thought of coming out of the mountains, back to the university, made my stomach clench. My memory is very good, a benefit when I was memorizing taxonomy and anatomical structures, and a nightmare when it came to personal failure. I shook aside the ghostly memory of a slender hand holding mine and sat up in my cot.

  Linh had let me sleep late. Outside my tent, I could already hear her talking with the young boy who had been coming to our camp every few weeks.

  “No, we need more than just one,” she was saying in Cham. “It’s a beauty, but if you only have one, we might as well leave it here.”

  Curiosity piqued, I pushed aside the mosquito netting and pulled on my trousers and my tunic before stepping into my shoes.

  “What’s a beauty?” I asked, coming out to join them, and the boy turned to me to show me what he held.

  It was a frilled lizard barely longer than his palm, and it sat still as a statue as I examined it. The scales were small and fine, giving it a jade-like translucence, and the frills around the lizard’s head and running along its back and, most exceptionally, its tail were just a shade darker. I could see how the mixture of light and dark green would allow it to be nearly invisible in the dappled light under the canopy, and when it opened its eyes at me, I was delighted to see that they were a deep amber flecked with black.

  “It is a beauty,” I agreed, and on impulse, I dug into my bag for money to pay.

  “Oh, Thi,” Linh said disapprovingly, “You know we can’t just bring back one.”

  Saigon was thinking ahead. It wanted the domes to be more than just tourist attractions for the year the world came to call. The domes were experiments in sustainability, an attempt to create functional environments in glassed spaces as large as small towns. Everything we brought back should ideally not only live out a natural span, it should reproduce and thrive. Unless the little frilled lizard happened to be parthenogenetic, like the whiptail lizard that An had brought back from her internship at the Hopi preserve in North Americas, there wasn’t much point in bringing it back.

  I frowned, not wanting to think of An yet again. She was like a sprained ankle; just when I thought I’d healed, I’d have a memory of her hand on my face or the smell of her hair at the nape of her neck, and I’d stumble all over again. I dropped a few bhat into the boy’s hand and he dropped the lizard into my cupped palms. It was a calm little thing, and I wondered if, like some of the animals we had collected, it was so unused to humans as to think we were merely part of the landscape.

  The Cham boy turned to go, but I stopped him.

  “Tell me where you found him, and I’ll give you more,” I said, and he nodded, sticking out his hand. When I gave him a few more bhat, he pointed.

  “North, past the rock that looks like a man, and after that west, following the stream. There’s a pool there.”

  “Are there others like this one?” I asked, and he shrugged. I sighed
and sent him off.

  I avoided Linh’s gaze as I carefully closed the little lizard into one of the terrariums. It was small enough that the lizard had to curl its elegant tail around its feet, but when I pressed the button that activated the soporific gas and dropped the temperature, it blinked, yawned hugely, and curled up. It would rest peacefully until we began the process to wake it up in Saigon. The terrariums were simple enough when dealing with reptiles, but some of the larger ones and the ones designed for dealing with mammals and birds were more complicated. I busied myself checking the other terrariums, where various lizards, rodents, and birds slumbered until they could be released into an area that would hopefully be indistinguishable from home. I paused over our real prize for the trip, a quartet of striped rabbits sleeping in a pile, and at that point, Linh lost patience with me.

  “We’re going to spend today locking things down,” Linh said. “We don’t have time to go running off after a single lizard.”

  “It’s not that late yet,” I said, still avoiding my older sister’s glare. “You can stay and start locking down, I’ll go out and look. Maybe I’ll bring back some other things too. It’s gorgeous, chi Linh, and the department’s going to love it to bits.”

  “We’re already going to be somewhat late getting back to Saigon, and I don’t want to make it very late.”

  She paused, and I got a puck of glutinous rice and mung beans wrapped in green leaves to slide into my bag along with a few of the small terrariums. I might have managed to get out of camp with only her disapproving glare weighing me down, but she shook her head.

  “This is about An.”

  “Not everything is!” I snapped, and her elegant eyebrow arched in disbelief.

  “I didn’t say everything was, I said that this was. You know you’re going to have to come home eventually, and she’s going to be there too, sooner or later. The department isn’t that big.”