Islands of Fire

by Eldritch, Brian

The canoes remain unnoticed. Kina slides one into the water and drops into it, her hands seeking out paddles. Before long, she is far out of the bay, slicing through the breakers thundering over the coral wall. She glances behind her but Toko-Mua is lost in smoke and fire. A fitting end, she thinks, and tries hard to forget the ignoble deaths of all her friends, each coming to their end in that grim village.

  As the sun crests the eastern horizon, spilling an amber light across the flat horizon, Kina turns the bow of her canoe westward, toward the far island of Howe`a and what she is sure will be her own death.

  Fire and Water

  For many days, Kina sails alone across the ocean. It is an easy voyage, without choppy seas or sudden squalls. The wind remains placid and and refreshing, blowing cool and low out of the north, with just enough force to fill the single sail. Kina needs only sit in the rear of the canoe, one hand on the tilling paddle and the other on the trailing line that controls the angle of the sail. When she is hungry, Mother Ocean delivers a fish to the surface, and when she is thirsty, she drinks from gourd bowl filled overnight with condensation. Gliding beside the canoe is a pod dolphins, taking turns leading the bow or doing great acrobatic leaps.

  So it has come to this, Kina thinks, looking out across the long, flat line of the sea. Being led by dolphins to a deadly, volcanic island to kill a goddess. She couldn’t possibly have predicted this, all those months ago when she was first captured by the warriors of the Ebon Flame, taken in their prison galley to Keli`anu, and tossed in the slave pits. Yet, there is something gratifying knowing this old street rat from Huka`i will finally come to something in this life. Sadly, she knows all her surviving friends will never know what she is doing here; in fact, it is possible no one will ever know.

  Thinking of the slave pits calls to mind Motua. Kina sinks lower into her seat and tries to push back tears at the memory. He had surely been smitten by her, though he had struggled to keep signs of it to himself. Instead, he had focused on a fervent desire to get Kina out of the slave pits. He had accomplished his goal, at least for a while. Only, the Cult of the Ebon Flame is not so easy to escape. The two of them had fled in a tiny craft, certain they couldn’t be followed across the naked ocean, but Nakali and her warriors were never far behind. No matter where Kina went, the Ebon Flame was close on her heels. How quickly they drew Motua back into the pits, even dragging in new people whom simply had the misfortune of meeting Kina!

  So, perhaps they had never really escaped, after all. By now, Kina can see that her escape has only helped the Ebon Flame grow more powerful, introducing them to those strange, black weapons, and renewing Puahiki’s goal of vengeance.

  Or, perhaps, that had always been the idea. How powerful was Puahiki, anyway? What influence did she have beyond her shores? It was known that gods were limited to their holdings, those islands great or small, scattered across Mokukai. But Puahiki is more than one of these minor deities. She is of an earlier time, and who can say what mana she might hold?

  She looks at the shield, the second piece of the Kota`ianapahu. At the moment, the flames that wreath the shield are quenched, the round, flat bowl inert. Kina slides over to it and hoists it into the air. Though it is made of obsidian, which Kina has heard to be brittle and glassy, it is very light and easy to carry. It deflects weapons as though they were the gentle brush of ferns on the forest floor. It’s hard to believe this simple thing can pose such a threat, but she knows it was created by Puahiki and is instrumental in her goals. Mother Ocean claimed the black pahi. Here, far out in the ocean, it is time the same fate met the shield.

  Kina picks it up and heaves it overboard. It slices into the water, knife-like, and is immediately gone. Kina imagines it sinking, maybe sawing slowly back and forth like a falling feather, down deep into the inky blackness of Mother Ocean’s bosom. What becomes of the Kota`ianapahu down there? Are they simply ensconced in the deepest trenches of the forgotten sea floor? Or does Mother Ocean absorb them somehow, destroy them?

  A part of Kina mourns the loss of the shield. While evil, it is certainly a magnificent tool, and would have proven very useful in the future. Perhaps, one day, Mother Ocean will craft her a shield of coral to replace it.

  Kina glances back at the spot where the shield sank. It is just another featureless patch on the ocean, indistinguishable from anywhere else. Soon it is gone.

  She loses track of the days, drifting in and out of sleep under the cloth cover she erects on the canoe. There’s no way of knowing how close she is to Howe’a, though one afternoon she is sure she sees distant islands to both her left and right. Could those be part of the ring of islands surrounding Howe’a?

  Standing up, Kina gazes across the water, barely able to make out the islands through the misty haze always lying over the sea. From here, the islands look like almost featureless silhouettes, almost the same color as the sky behind it. By late afternoon, she is more certain. The island to her south looks much like Apahana, the rugged, windswept place where Kina had tried to settle after traveling across Mokukai. The people of Apahana were uncomplicated, impoverished but trustworthy, the descendants of a slave caste that either escaped or were banished from the more populous islands elsewhere in this archipelago — the story varied depending on who was doing the telling. It was there that she learned that Apahana, like her sisters Heka, Ava`a, Lo`onai, Lo`okapo, Ikepmua, and dozens of smaller, uninhabited islets, were the last remnants of the outer crater wall of a volcano so huge it must have once stretched into the clouds and spanned a distance that would even make the great island of Kotuhiwa seem small.

  Kina tries to picture a volcano that large, one that would take weeks to sail all the way around, even with a sleek canoe and dedicated crew, but the picture defies her imagination.

  Silently, she yearns to turn the prow southward toward Apahana and reclaim the life she was trying to build there. Even now, not far from here, there were people who would welcome her back. There was a hut they had helped her build, possibly in need of repair after the Burning Warriors raid, her self-planted seeds bearing crops in the red soil on the slopes behind it.

  But she knows she can’t go back there. Not until she has done everything she can to stop Puahiki. If she turns away now, the Cult of the Ebon Flame will only grow more powerful, fueled by the wicked goddess on Howe`a and her desire for revenge.

  When at last Apahana vanishes from sight behind her, Kina wipes tears from her eyes and faces forward.

  It is another day before she grows near enough to see Howe`a.

  She first spots it long into the night. Stirring from a deep sleep, she notices a glow on the horizon where the sun had set. The night sky is the deepest black, the tiny stars like a reef of light high overhead. Kina knows it is far too late to be seeing the sunset; in fact, she thinks it won’t be but a couple of hours until the eastern sky begins to lighten in advance of morning. So what is she seeing?

  The glow continues until it is lost in the morning light, then all through the next day Kina sees great clouds of steam and smoke rising up like a wall to the west. When the sun once more sets, the sky is perpetually lit in that direction, those vast clouds of smoke lit up from beneath by Puahiki’s fires.

  At last, Kina spots the shore, a brittle black line split by jagged cracks of red and orange. Streams of lava course down the slopes and meet the sea in great booming thunderclaps, throwing up ramparts of steam. Here, Puahiki does battle with Mother Ocean, the two of them locked forever in a contest of wills. Puahiki hurls her fire at Mother Ocean’s cool waters, the magma cooling into a tumbling, cracking black stones that, in turn, boil the water and drive away life.

  As far as Kina can see, this battle rages along Howe`a’s coast. She had always heard this island was a no-man’s land, not just uninhabitable but impossible to visit. Now she can see why. There is no safe place to land a canoe, and hardly anywhere to walk if there was.

  She finds a patch of dark rock as far away from the rivers of lava as possible, pointing the canoe
in that direction. The dolphins chitter and fall away, sliding back toward cooler, calmer waters. Kina watches them go a little wistfully, then turns her attention to landing the canoe. Before she approaches the shore, she sees the water around her seething and writhing as if in pain, and the canoe starts to become very hot. Kina drops the sail in favor of the more exacting navigation by paddle, fighting against the tides and strange currents so she can keep the prow pointed toward shore. By the time she knocks the canoe against rock, the searing waters have made the canoe very uncomfortable. Without her tattoos, Kina is sure she would be already dying from the heat.

  Kina takes up a length of sennit rope, looping it over her shoulders. Abandoning the canoe, she leaps out onto the rocks, which sea spray and wind have cooled into jagged, crusty shapes. They make for easy climbing but are sharp to the touch. Clinging to the rocks, she turns and watches the canoe get pulled away from the edge, sucked quickly out of reach. It bobs, drawing ever farther away in the boiling water, and Kina feels a pang of renewed terror. Already there is no going back.

  She reaches down and stretches out her open hand. A crumpling wave slaps against the rock, sending up hot spray. When it recedes, the coral pahi is in her hand. Kina offers a silent thanks to Mother Ocean, knowing this is where they will part.

  The wall of rock is not hard to climb, even with one hand clutching a weapon. When she finally crests the top, Kina looks out over a hellscape of magma, jagged rock, and steamy fog. Lit from within, the steam glows like fire, streaked by streams of lava that fade out of view. The scene echoes with the ear-splitting roar of lava meeting water, the high hiss of hot steam.

  She takes a moment to tie the pahi to her back with a section of the rope, then Kina picks her way across the ground, slowly at first, unsure. She is hemmed in by the rivers of molten rock on either side. Her tattoos hold the heat at bay, a heat that would surely kill her otherwise, but she isn’t sure if even their magic can repel magma, so she vows to stay away from it as long as possible.

  There is a loud crack, powerful enough to make her ears ring, that seems to originate in the ground itself. Suddenly, everything is tilting. Kina drops down to the sharp rock, attempting to stabilize her center of gravity, but with a sudden horror she knows the fragile rock shelf is snapping. It will sink into the boiling water, taking her with it.

  The force of it dropping flings her down, cutting her skin on the razor-sharp rocks. There is a moment of stability and then the ocean begins to swallow the sinking rock. Kina hurls herself at the wall of rock newly risen before her, and tries to catch her breath as the platform vanishes beneath the waves. Once more she is climbing, streaked with her own blood.

  This time when she reaches the top, she stays low and moves quickly, putting as much distance between herself and the dangerous rock shelf as possible. Sounds of the violent battle between fire and water reach her ears long after she arrives at a safer vantage point. Here, the rock is several years old, the slivers of pointy magma blunted by wind and rain. Her feet are still bare, a terrible oversight on her part, and even as tough as they are with years of calloused soles, they are now cut and bleeding.

  Kina grits her teeth at the pain and finds a place where she can sit for a while. There is nothing she can do to protect them, at least not here, so eventually she rises and hobbles on.

  Away from the sea, the lava forms great hills and valleys, rising where plumes of magma burst through the crust years ago. Kina moves around these, sticking with the low-lying areas. Hours later, the sun breaking over the eastern sky, she finds a cave — more of a pocket of air in the side of a slope of cold rock — and stretches out to get some rest.

  There is no food, no water. When Kina finally rises the next day, she is achingly hungry and her mouth is parched. She stands at the entrance to the cave and whispers a prayer to Mother Ocean, unsure if it can even be heard in such a place. But a couple of hours later, clouds have built overhead and a torrent of rain hisses down. Kina slides back out of the cave, keeping off her feet, and finds a little rivulet of fresh water trickling down through the cracked stone. Without anything to store the water, she instead drinks her fill and then keeps going, willing her body to take as much water as it can. She doesn’t know when she will next have this chance.

  Another night, and when dawn comes, Kina comes out of the cave. Her feet are scabbed over and starting to heal, but though they still sing with pain, she knows she has to keep going. She might have time, should she wish to take it, but without food and reliable water, that cave will soon become her tomb.

  The landscape is empty, windswept, and barren. It smells of sulfurous smoke and hot rock. Kina climbs over the mounds of old, cold stones, turning inland and keeping her gaze on the towering lava dome in the center of Howe`a. Day and night, the peak of that volcano lights up the sky with gouts of fire and an immense cone of smoke that spreads out over much of the island and the sea around it. How she will reach it she isn’t sure, but she knows it must be her destination. Surely, of anywhere on this island, that is where she will find Puahiki.

  When she finally leaves behind the relatively peaceful rocky plains near the edge of the island, she is at first glad to be rid of them. Seemingly endless, the fields were featureless, save for the mounds and troughs of tumbling and cracked stone. Kina had been happy to see the occasional hardy weed poking up between boulders. But now, pressing ever inland, the ground seems to grow hotter, and fumaroles of piping hot steam venting out of the ground speak of the activity taking place not far under her feet. She is forced to veer around huge chasms with no bottom, craters of percolating, gloopy lava, or patches of earth riven with glowing cracks that warn of lakes of lava right beneath the surface.

  By day, this world looks gray and crude, nothing but naked rock and ghosts of steam. But when the sun finally sets, Kina is astonished to see the world around her lit a hellish orange from the many hot fractures and open seams in the ground. The air is alternately choking with toxic smoke and humidly wet. Her only respite is a steady wind that races across the denuded landscape, first from the warm island interior and then reversing to rush onshore from the distant ocean. In breathes the island, out breathes the island. Kina’s hair whips in the eddies caused by this endless back-and-forth between the land and the sea.

  Occasionally, she feels the ground shift beneath her baking feet, the sensation similar to an unborn baby moving within a mother’s womb. Kina’s feverish imagination tells wants to tell her there is something living down there, but she knows it is likely just the ebb and flow of huge lakes of lava pushing against their rocky prisons, no more than a stone’s throw directly underneath her. Patches of superheated ground give credence to this theory. Her tattoos keep the heat from causing her harm, though she does feel it. As if to underscore the shifting quality of the ground, she is knocked off her feet every once in a while by a tremble like a shiver running through the rock.

  Though her hunger has grown from an ache to a howl to a dull relentless pain, she presses on, always toward the inferno at the center of the island. She begins to find herself hypnotized by the monotony of the landscape, her mind breaking under the inhospitable alienness of it. At one point, she is so deep in this daze that she nearly trips over something nestled between the rocks.

  She stops and looks down at it. A curved, hornlike block of wood, no longer than her forearm and polished smooth by wave action has come to rest here. How it got so far inland from the ocean is impossible to figure. Kina glances back but already knows the shoreline is out of sight, many miles away and far down the shoulder of the mountain. What sort of wave could have delivered this thing all the way up here?

  Kina kicks it, surprised at how heavy it is. Dry driftwood like this is usually light and brittle, but this seems very solid. She bends down and picks it up. One end is ragged and bulbous, while the other tapers down to a point so fine she would have imagined it had been whittled. Sure enough, the tip is sharp as any spear. If she didn’t know any better, she would th
ink it was a claw, or perhaps a tooth.

  And then she knows. She thinks of that strange skull mounted in the temple at Ka`atahako, the one that seemed to gaze into her soul during the tattoo ritual. That thing had teeth nearly the size of this, though different in shape. Could this be another of those old bones?

  She looks around but sees nothing else like it. Possibly the rest of the skeleton is buried beneath the rock, and this happened to escape its fate, but even as she thinks this she knows it can’t be true. This rock is very fresh, no more than a few years old. Nothing could have died here, been buried under soil, and then reinterred centuries later. This was new.

  As if it was cursed, she drops it and wipes her hands on her sides. The thing makes a clacking sound when it strikes the rock, then comes to rest as inert as when she first saw it.

  Kina is determined to forget about it. She forges ahead, leaving the strange object to its fate.

  Deep into the night, she crests the immense rise of the central cone. The glow has been growing more savage, more bright, as she has climbed up the steepening slope, and now she can see why. Inside the center is a broken and infernal terrain made of lakes of churning lava, islands of teetering pinnacles of rock, rivers that course from open wounds in the earth, and great clouds of sizzling cinders. The air is filled with the constant boom and crack of magma bursting from beneath. Rocks of all sizes, some still white-hot, fall like constant rain. Warm wind, her constant friend, is trapped inside the colossal crater walls in swirls and eddies that whipsaw the plumes of fire into miniature tornadoes.