The Sea Is Ours

by Jaymee Goh

  “The world’s plenty big,” I protested, knowing even as I did that I was fighting a losing and fairly stupid battle. “Maybe I’ll transfer up to Thăng Long. Maybe I’ll decide I want to take that teaching position in Hue. Maybe I want to just stay here.”

  “First, the world’s smaller than you think it is, second, you hate northern food, third, you hate teaching, and fourth, I’d like to see you stay here when the monsoons come in and you’re still hiding in your little canvas tent.”

  I glared, and she glared back. My sister isn’t a soft woman, but she’s a family woman through and through. She may not have understood my relationship with An, but my older sister had my mother’s firm belief that taking charge or feeding me would fix it.

  “Stay here. Help me lock down, and we can send up the lantern tomorrow night. We can be back in Saigon before the end of the week, and you can figure out that no one at the university gives a damn about your little romance, em…”

  “It wasn’t just a little romance!” I shouted, and I chewed my lip in frustration when Linh only nodded.

  “Come on. Come help me with the terrariums. We’ll be in Saigon before the end of the week. I’ll buy you an oxtail curry, and maybe you can lose your head over another girl.”

  I might have done it except she mentioned another girl, and I stomped off down the northern path.

  “You have to come back eventually, em!” she called after me, and just because she was right didn’t make me happier.

  ~*~

  The forests of the Trường Sơn Range are as unlike southern Vietnam as night is to day, or, as Linh would have said, as different as a moist broadleaf forest is from a verdant river delta. The air was cooler, the colors different, and even the buzz of the insects was lower. I caught myself humming as I walked along the wild pig track that Linh and I had been using to go north, and when I stopped, there was something strangely soaked about the silence. The air was sullen with the promise of the monsoon to come, and I shivered to think about how much inhospitable the forest would become drenched in bucketing water.

  The Cham boy had mentioned the rock that looked like a man, and I knew what he meant, but when I passed it, it occurred to me that it didn’t look like a man at all. It was a jut of old stone, smooth and gray in the forest’s green, and though I could see an indentation that looked like a pair of legs, and a bend of the stone looked like a man’s curled arm, I could think of it as nothing but a lizard, sitting up, alert, and ready to flee or bite.

  I patted it on the head as I walked by, and it reminded me of An and I picnicking together as undergraduates at the university. She had gotten me in the habit of patting the stone lions that guarded the university gates, and I had never quit.

  I walked faster, following the stream as the boy had directed. If I walked faster, perhaps I would be able to out-pace the memories that seemed to crowd close whenever I thought of An and of the six years we had spent together. The memories weren’t as sharp as they were, but as my father had always told me, dull knives are the most dangerous.

  I had been stupid, I had been naïve, and worse than that, I had been in love, though by the end, I realized now that it was less love than habit. My family had been understanding, but confused, both when I brought An home and when we broke up, and soon, I knew, they would start the round of introducing me to friends’ sons and grandsons and nephews, and perhaps I would meet someone interesting, someone funny and kind, and then An and I would just be a memory.

  I walked faster, and then I made myself slow down. It was dangerous to walk so quickly in the forest, and Linh and I had had more than a few sprained ankles to tell us that.

  The stream grew a little broader, and I followed its edge closely, watching the shallows where the sunlight pierced the water with aching clarity. I saw a few lizards, several that we had already collected, but I couldn’t find a match for the little jade beauty that was sleeping back at camp. It was a lovely thing, but if I couldn’t find it at least one mate, Linh was right, we were better off leaving it in the mountains than bringing it to Saigon

  The stream continued west, but I veered towards a protected sandbar that created a grotto underneath the shelter of the evergreens. It was the pond that the boy had told me about, and I could see small fish breaking the surface, and as I watched, a laughingthrush fluttered down to the water to drink. It would usually have been a dim little spot, but there was a bright ray of light coming through the canopy, lighting up the water and bringing it to life.

  I squatted down close to the edge of the pond, pulling out my collapsible net. I could sit like a stone for hours if that was what it took, and I relaxed, scanning the water and keeping my eyes on the shallows.

  This type of observation and collection was almost meditative, but what I was meditating on, unfortunately, was An. Her speciality was on the deserts of North America, and she was spending the next semester in Hungo Pavi as a resident professor. When we had first met, she was fresh from her successful internship there, and now that we were over, she was headed back again. I wished I could ascribe her trip to a broken heart, but I knew better.

  I couldn’t remember whether she had broken up with me or I had broken up with her. It’s strange that the important parts of the end were so muddled when the insignificant parts were so achingly clear. I remembered the last night we spent together before the break up, and then the awkward nights after that, when I was sleeping at Linh’s and being fed bowl after bowl of clear soup and Chinese buns. I remembered coming across a pillowcase that still smelled like her in my things, and I remembered the first disastrous time I tried to go out on a group date with my friends. It had gone so badly that I slipped away in the middle, tired and miserable in my brand new orange áo dài.

  My mind chased after the familiar thought that I would do anything to have her back, and then I realized that instead, I was thinking how wonderful it would be if I could just lose the grief, regardless of whether she came back or not.

  The thought was so startling that it sent a shiver down my back, making me straighten up, and that was when I realized that I was being watched.

  Across the pond, sheltered by the enormous trunk of an ancient evergreen, I could see a frilled head the size of my torso, a long and elegant neck, a body that was almost snakelike and behind it all, a tail that was surely at least three meters long.

  The lizard was enormous, and though later on I would think of the Komodo dragons of Indonesia and the nearly extinct aiolosauruses of Mongolia, right then, all I could think, all I knew, was that I was looking at a dragon.

  The dainty frills of the lizard I had bought that morning were fully realized into crests of spines that lined either side of the dragon’s face, and I stared at the animal that had surely had the myths of a civilization built on its smooth back. For better or worse, my stillness and silence is probably what drew the dragon closer.

  In a single bound, it leaped across the edge of the pond, landing on all four feet. I couldn’t help but notice the twisting of the long body, a gait suited to an animal that was as comfortable slithering close to the ground as it was springing on prey. Up close, I could see how lithe it was. Its body was slender rather than dense, and there was something crocodilian about its face. The eyes were amber flecked with black, and I thought blankly that I had gone looking for a match for my lizard and that I had found it.

  The dragon opened and closed its mouth rapidly at me, and its frills expanded in what I realized in sudden stark and primitive terror was a threat display. I could see needle-sharp teeth, noting somewhere in a corner of my brain that there were two full rows, one behind the other. I remembered how the bite of similar animals turned septic inside of a few hours.

  I stood stock still, and the dragon came closer yet, splashing water as it went, and dropping its head to look at me. The black slit pupils contracted and expanded, and I could smell its musky dry scent. Those scales that were so small on the hatchling were still small on the adult. The effect was
an animal carved from jade with darker veins underneath, and for one single, insane moment I wanted to reach out and touch it.

  The dragon huffed at me, almost catlike, and then abruptly, deciding I was neither food nor threat, it turned. I saw its body tense for a split second before it sank to the ground, its neck stretched out and level with its torso. I watched in fascination as it slithered into the underbrush, both snake and lizard, and it wasn’t until its tail tip vanished into the forest that I slumped back on my rear. I gasped out my panic and terror, and what they left behind was a nearly frantic exhaustion and a whirlwind of thoughts.

  There had always been stories of large crocodilians and monitor lizards in the mountains, but dragons were another thing. People hunted them the way that they did thunderbirds in North America and bunyip in Australia, and while there was always the odd footprint or scale to set off a new fervor, there had been nothing like this.

  The Trường Sơn Range was vast, however, and I wondered if recent mining on the Laotian side of the border had brought it out of hiding, or if it was merely that there were so few of them that a sighting was impossibly rare.

  I thought of population densities, about how close I had come to getting my throat ripped out, and about what it would take to bring a dragon back to Saigon, and suddenly, as suddenly as a dragon coming out of the evergreen trees, I started to laugh.

  For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t thinking about An. That was when I could see the beginning of the next part of my life, and it was all about dragons.

  ~*~

  By the time I got back to camp, it was already dusk, and Linh had most of the equipment secured. She would need my help to take care of the rest, but instead of coming to harry me to work, she handed me a bowl of warm egg soup instead. There were a few species of wild fowl that were tame enough we thought that they had simply gone feral, and we’d been thieving from their nests off and on for the last few months.

  I drank the soup quickly, feeling the warmth sink through me and the richness of the egg yolk giving me strength. Linh sat next to me on the log we’d pulled up next to our camp fire, sipping delicately at her portion. She’d always been thinner than me, but our months on the Trường Sơn Range had made her gaunt. Tuan, her husband, would tsk and make her caramelized pork belly and every other dish she loved to fatten her up again, and she wouldn’t have to cook at all until she was back in the mountains with her stubborn sister.

  “We’re sending the lantern up tomorrow night,” she said, a note of warning in her voice. It said that she didn’t want to fight, but she would if she had to.

  “Let me change your mind,” I said, and before she could protest, I started to talk.

  ~*~

  We went back to the pond the next day, but though we looked, we saw no sign of the dragon or the hatchlings. Then, no matter how much we wished otherwise, we needed to pack up, because the morning had brought with it the first splatters of the monsoon rains. We were going to be really late rather than somewhat late, and packing up camp and securing our living freight took most of the next day.

  We waited for dark, and we pulled out the sky lantern. It was a lovely thing made from white oiled paper on a frame of treated wood. When it was lit, the hot air caused the balloon to rise, and when it reached its apex, the fuel reserve would cause the lantern to hang in the sky, burning brightly so that the rangers watching for us at Hải Vân Pass would see. Unlike the antique paper lanterns of the past, this lantern would burn until nearly all of the fuel was gone, and then begin a quick, nearly vertical descent. The cool air extinguished the flame as it fell, and soon the only remnant of our message would be a few charred sticks of wood.

  The white lantern floated up in the indigo sky and burst into brilliant chemical flames, hovering high above like an amber eye.

  “I’m glad we’re going home,” Linh said softly, and I linked my arm through hers, standing close.

  Linh and I were coming back to the Trường Sơn Range, and next time, instead of running away from a love affair, I would be searching for something beautiful and strange.

  We stood in the dark, watching the red fireflies flicker through the trees. The cold wind was going to bring rain by morning, there was a dragon hatchling sleeping in our cargo, and we were going home.

  Between Severed Souls

  Paolo Chikiamco

  A memory of voices, raised and reverent:

  To those who emerge untouched…

  We give greetings. Hmmm…

  We give respect. Hmmm…

  May our words not become unpleasant.

  To the watchers of the world.

  ~*~

  April, 1762.

  “I come bearing a gift!”

  The voice boomed from just beyond sight, funneled down the gash in the rock that was the only access point to the cavern that served as both workplace and sanctuary for Domingo Malong.

  “Then you may leave with it as well,” said Domingo, but he knew better than to think his words would so much as slow his brother’s pace. Dominador Malong had difficulty grasping the notion that his little brother might have desires that weren’t completely in accord with his own.

  So Domingo was unsurprised to hear the echoes of his brother’s heavy footfalls playing out between the rock walls. What finally made Domingo turn away from his work was the realization that he didn’t hear only one set of feet.

  “Damn it,” Domingo growled, as his eldest brother came into view. “This is my workshop, not a plaza.”

  In better days, it would be easy to see that Dominador and Domingo were siblings. While Domingo had inherited the slim build of their mother rather than the solid frame of their father, he and Dominador shared the same heavy brows, the same low cheekbones, the same stubborn jaw, all features that had long identified the Malong clan. But Domingo hadn’t bathed in weeks, and his hair was so thick with sweat and dirt that strands could serve as nails for his machines. An over-sized camisa de chino hung to his knees when he stood, covering worn trousers that looked old enough to have sailed to the islands with Magellan.

  Dominador, on the other hand, dressed in accordance with his perceived place in the world. He wore the breeches, stockings, coat, and waistcoat of a European gentleman of means, a sword at his waist and a cane in his hand. He gazed out at his brother from behind green tinted spectacles, an irritating affectation he’d brought home from his sojourn at the University of Glasgow. For a time, he’d even taken to wearing a wig before…

  A memory rises, riding the gaps between heartbeats—

  A suppressed giggle, the feel of her warm palm over his own mouth. The scent of burning hair and the reflected light in her eyes.

  This is the sexiest thing we’ve ever done, Dom.

  —it’s gone, pushed down deep. The absence was both a salve and a wound, and Domingo found himself short for breath, barely catching the tail end of his brother’s words.

  “—would imply that actual work was being done here, bunso.” Dominador looked around the large domed cavern, wrinkling his nose at the stench. Above them, a colony of bats dozed away the daylight, while regularly expelling the remnants of last night’s bounty onto whatever was unfortunate enough to lie below them. The elder Malong stepped around a few larger deposits of guano, and stopped before a pile of machine parts.

  “I had to call in a lot of favors, fill a lot of pockets, to get working parts of a Newcomen clockman,” said Dominador, scraping a copper elbow joint gently with his cane, tracing a spiral pattern in the accumulated dirt and excrement. “If this is some new method of reverse engineering, I must say it is a remarkably slow one… But of course, that too, would imply some sort of progress.”

  Domingo said nothing. He turned his back on his brother, hunching over one of the workshop’s smaller carving benches. For a few minutes, there was no sound in the cavern other than the whisk of a blade biting into soft wood, and the curses of Dominador’s men as they navigated the broken rock of the cavern floor. From
the scuffling of their feet and their labored breathing, it was clear they bore something of significant weight.

  Domingo resisted the urge to turn around and look. It didn’t matter if Dominador walked an entire army of the English machines through the door. “So it’s to be another lecture then, I take it? Tell me, if I list the accomplishments of every Malong for the past hundred years, will you spare me your exhortations? What about if I named every family that’s broken their oaths to us since the Grand Revolt? I know how old grudges keep you warm at night.”

  Dominador struck a brass plate with his cane, and it took a full minute for the echoes of the sharp clang to fall silent. “Don’t mock our heritage,” said Dominador, his voice as light as his meaning was plain.

  Domingo felt a pang of guilt. His heritage… Domingo’s entire life had revolved around the obsession of his family with the fact that, for five months, their ancestor had once been King of Pangasinan. Since then, everyone with Malong blood was expected to do their part in recovering the family’s lost “kingdom”, and in punishing all those who had benefited from their downfall. Each Malong was expected to give his all for the great Cause.

  Domingo had never possessed the same fervor as the rest of his brothers. Hell, even Clarita showed more fire for the Cause. Years of education in the Fleet of Wisdom had made Domingo’s wife more sensitive to the daily affronts and indignities of Spanish rule, things that many Tagalogs took for granted.

  And now, Clarita was dead.

  “Considering what that heritage has cost me, I—”

  Domingo felt the carving knife spasm in his grip. A delicate incision became a cut too deep to salvage. With small, controlled movements, Domingo set the knife down. For his brother’s sake, he set it down far enough away that he’d have to think twice about reaching for it once Dominador started in on the inevitable tirade.

  “What do you want, kuya?”

  Dominador sighed. “You never were a very good listener. Particularly when I’m the one doing the talking.”