The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  Utterly lost, Kuwa’i threw himself into his craft, sublimating his grief into an obsession for the new boat. He shaped the last of the wonderful peran wood into a frame of his own design, binding rails along the sides like the ribs of a great starving dog. The wood from walking trees was stronger and more flexible than other kinds of timber, resulting in strange design possibilities. He combined the old outrigger design with the new shapes he’d seen in the harbors; and to that eccentric compound he blended a shape seen only in his head. He curved and raked the transom, pushing the limits of the material, forming the hull in a confluence of strong, malleable planks that developed more and more, as the summer wore on, into something that looked decidedly alien. The lagoon had never seen such a boat.

  Sitting on the center beam, he paused in his work. “Why do the old families die worst?”

  Laklani did not look up from his sanding. “The old families are good at many things,” he said. “Staying is not one.”

  On the hottest days, the old carpenter’s niece, Elissa, would bring them coconuts of cool milk. She was a year older than Kuwa’i and already the long-suffering wife of a shopkeeper’s son in nearby Ahana, a large town a half day’s travel along the beach. Disinclined towards his father’s occupation, disinterested in manual labor, and dismissive of his nuptial vows, her husband also had the fault of choosing occasionally to expend his considerable untapped energies through quite astonishing violence—and after those occasions, if she could walk, she came to stay with her uncle for a while. To Kuwa’i she arrived as a chameleon, this sleek, large-eyed creature with a wide, fine mouth—whose bruises changed colors over the weeks that followed.

  She watched the men while they worked, and after looking for a long afternoon at the structure developing before her eyes, she said her first words, “It looks like two machetes.”

  The old carpenter laughed from his stool, saying, “That’s it then! We have found a name for her: Two Machetes.” And he ran up to his niece and kissed her hairline. “Thank you. It is good luck when a woman names a boat.”

  Elissa seemed to blossom under the attention, and though her cheekbones no longer quite matched each other, her smile was a thing which ate her entire face, and she was suddenly transformed and so beautiful that Kuwa’i felt his face grow flushed. He put the awl down and stared openly at this striking girl who had such an amazing plentitude of wide, perfect teeth—and then, thinking of her husband, he wondered how she had managed to keep them.

  Word of Two Machetes spread, and as the weeks passed, the old carpenter’s shop received many visitors. Some from as far away as Moloa, the island’s biggest town, which sat on the opposite shore. There were offers made, and always old Laklani would put them off, saying, “I never discuss money until a boat is finished.” But he’d tell Kuwa’i the numbers as they ate their lunch, and the seventeen-year-old hadn’t known such money existed in the world.

  On the last day before the boat was finished, when there were only the toe rails and riggings left unfinished, Kuwa’i went back to the launch after dinner, and, intending to watch the sun go down in the trees beyond the lagoon, he climbed up onto the deck of Two Machetes.

  Elissa found him in the twilight.

  She touched the back of his neck and did not ask what was wrong, only kissed his wet cheeks softly with her amazing mouth, an invitation to a deeper kind of kiss; and he accepted, moving toward her, running a hand along her sinewy contours.

  Though her skin and eyes were dark, she was long-waisted in a way not found among native islanders, and he discovered her hands in his, larger than his—some mixture of ancestry producing long, delicate fingers. And then she guided him back, her hair a black wash across his chest as she whispered into his mouth, “My husband cannot…unless he beats me first.”

  “I would never,” Kuwa’i said.

  She replied only, “I know,” like she understood this, and their teeth grazed each other slickly as she moved on him—and the sensation was of something remembered, though never before experienced, as if his body knew it already: like dreams of falling, of dying, might one day make those acts seem familiar. And in the middle of it, he felt connection to everything that had come before, and everything that might come after, and he knew that when he one day tallied his life before the God of the little chapel, he would count this among his very favorite things.

  The heat of the day brought the bidders again, and without very much trouble the boat was sold to a merchant from Ahana who seemed truly grateful for the opportunity to buy it—and who paid extra to have the sails done in red canvass. Elissa and Kuwa’i used every smallest excuse to be alone and played at love several times a day over the next few weeks. If Laklani knew, he said nothing.

  On the morning her husband came for her, Elissa had a nightmare that she was falling, and Kuwa’i woke to her gazing down at him from her elbows.

  “Do you love me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied without thought or hesitation.

  Elissa’s husband was called Myer, and he arrived at midday accompanied by a group of big men who worked hard at looking as if they were all simply out for a casual stroll. Myer was tall and broad-shouldered and fair. His eyes were sandy-colored, like his hair, and he moved easily among the people of the valley, talking and laughing as his men walked toward the boat works. He wore a shirt like brown canvass, in the style of men from the mainland, though when he spoke, Kuwa’i could detect no accent.

  “Elissa,” he called out when he saw her. “I see your visit did you some good. You look well.”

  Elissa stood frozen. Gone pale and expressionless, the asymmetry of her broken cheekbones once again apparent, she looked suddenly most unwell.

  Myer strode up to her and gathered her in his big arms.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said, then whispered so his friends could not hear, “I’m sorry.” He turned back to the crowd of people he’d brought. “Let’s celebrate!”

  That night there was a large pit dug into the ground and lined with stones, and in it was roasted three whole fatted pigs that Myer paid extravagantly for, and most of the nearby families were involved. They danced around the fire well into night. Laklani remained distant, refusing to be pulled in by the lure of festivities. Kuwa’i sat on the rise near the waterfall, watching the party with a sense of dread. In the night, Elissa managed to get away, and she found him sitting on a rock with his feet in the water.

  “Let’s run away,” she said, out of breath from her scramble up the hillside. “Tonight, let’s leave this place.”

  The waterfall cascaded down from above, splashing into the pool, making ripples on the water. “Where would we go?” Kuwa’i asked.

  “I don’t care. Let’s take a boat for ourselves and let the wind take us where it’s going. There are other islands beyond these.”

  “I couldn’t steal.”

  “You built most of them! It wouldn’t be stealing.”

  “It would.”

  “You’d just be taking one back. You deserve a boat of your own for all the work you’ve done.”

  “It wouldn’t be right.”

  “I don’t care what’s right. Let’s go now before my husband comes looking for me.”

  “This island is my home, I can’t just leave in the middle of the night.”

  “Then when?”

  Kuwa’i stared at her. “When it’s not my home anymore.”

  “Please—”

  “Elissa,” he whispered. “I can’t.”

  She dropped her eyes—and something happened, a change, like a chameleon, and she appeared a different kind of creature than she had been moments before, deflated, the hope having seeped out of her.

  “I—” Kuwa’i began.

  She put a finger to his lips, silencing him. Then she turned and went back to her husband. In the morning the couple was gone.

  Laklani did not speak to Kuwa’i for three days, and when he did, said only, “You let her go back.”

  Kuwa�
�i blinked at the accusation. He had no response.

  And in the coming days, Kuwa’i found he could not endure the emptiness. The silent work. The daily lack of her that would have no end.

  He probed the place that she’d occupied in his life and found only a silent, hemorrhaging cavitation.

  He walked the beach to the nearest town where he sought out a tavern to dull his wound; but the old man behind the bar, who managed the trick somehow of being both old and wise beyond his years, only listened to his plight, and when Kuwa’i asked for a second drink, said, “Drink won’t help,” and pointed out through the window at life going on in the street—a small gathering of dark-haired girls talking in the market, and Kuwa’i understood what the old man meant.

  Kuwa’i charged across the street and asked the prettiest one to go for a walk with him. She agreed, and he discovered her name was Anna, and two nights later, in her parents’ house while the rest of the island slept, he discovered her body was like a thing remembered, and her taste like ripe melon.

  Laklani’s tendency toward silence devolved into a kind of verbal longhand. They communicated only about boats, and only if the boats were projects they worked on. Their lunch times became studies in quiet bereavement, and Kuwa’i chose eventually to work straight through the day. The boat works prospered, and Kuwa’i’s reputation began to eclipse that of his master. People came from faraway places to gaze at the ships.

  One evening, a rich man from Motoa visited old Laklani in the boat yard, bringing with him a tall, long-haired daughter who hung back from the business talk of men, instead wandering to inspect the half-finished boat. She caressed the tools with a delicate index finger. “You’re the craftsman my father talks about,” she said. And Kuwa’i stopped his hammering and turned his head in search of whom she might be speaking to. She laughed, mistaking his ignorance for humor, but astride him later that night, she explained why buyers were drawn to his work above others. “Your boats are beautiful,” she said. And then she lay back on his sheets while he slid above her, and she showed him what action to take so no dishonor would come of it. Afterward, as they lay in the stillness of his bunk, she asked, “How is it that boats can sail against the wind?”

  “Not straight against it,” he said. “But only at an angle.”

  And he told her that the minor god Kulipali had bequeathed his tongue so that men may make keels. And he told her about the steel hulls of ships he’d seen in the harbors, and about the humble outrigger that had conquered oceans, and he told her that in the old language, which he could not speak, the word for horse was canoe-which-walks-on-land.

  It was nearly seven months later that Laklani spoke to him regarding something other than work. The broken silence was shocking as a thunderclap, and Kuwa’i could not, for a moment, pry understanding from the words.

  “What did you say?” Kuwa’i asked.

  “Elissa has a baby.”

  Kuwa’i stood perfectly still for a moment. Then without taking off his work belt, he climbed down from the launch, scrambled up the shoreline and set out at a dead run for the town of Ahana.

  He found the town larger than he remembered, but not so large that people might be strangers to each other. Still, oddly, it took him nearly half an hour to find someone who knew of a young girl named Elissa with wide perfect teeth.

  The man said only, “I know who you’re talking about.” And there was an irony in his voice Kuwa’i would recognize only later while he sat behind bars and went over the events again and again in his mind.

  The house was small and wooden and deteriorated, with the wind shutters amassed in the dirt below the windows. Weeds grew all around the structure, and from within could be heard the squalling of an infant. Having come this far, Kuwa’i found he could advance no further. He stood in the road as if lacking any sense at all, and those who noticed him thought he was either an imbecile, or in love, and in either case pitied him equally.

  Movement through the window caught his attention, drawing him forward so that he found himself walking; and in the doorway, which was open on broken hinges, the sound of the baby’s crying was very loud, and when his eyes had begun to adjust, he heard Elissa gasp, and in that instant they saw each other.

  Her teeth had been smashed out, at the gum-line, as if by a hammer.

  Kuwa’i turned and walked away. He found Myer in the third tavern and buried an awl in one sandy-colored eye.

  Myer did not die immediately but instead spent nine agonizing days at it, eventually succumbing to an infection which, by his last hours, had ballooned the left side of his face into a tumescent and suppurating casaba melon which finally split along the jaw-line with a fetid smell of corruption that drove the nurses from the room. And still he had not sense enough to pass, but hung on throughout the night, alternately howling out from his deathbed and gagging noisily on the stench of his own septic brew.

  Afterward, they laid him to rest during a quiet ceremony, placing him into the ground next to his wife, Elissa, who had been found with her wrists slit. She had taken Kuwa’i’s withdrawal for rejection and killed herself before she learned her husband’s fate.

  On the evening of the funeral, while Kuwa’i sat shackled to a bench in the Ahana courthouse, it was agreed by all interested parties that the cause of Myer’s death had been exactly what it was: an unfortunate though not altogether unforeseeable (or underserved) sepsis of the eye. They absolved Kuwa’i of responsibility for the death, released him from custody, and told him never to return to Ahana, or he would be hanged.

  “What about the child?”

  “The boy looks like his mother,” the judge said, cutting to the point. “Her husband’s parents have offered to raise the child as their own to replace the one they’ve lost.”

  “They did such a fine job the first time,” Kuwa’i said.

  “We’ve offered you your life for nothing. I suggest that you requite yourself of the bargain and do not trouble the boy again, or we may change our minds.”

  And with that, the matter was settled. Two burly guards escorted Kuwa’i to the town limits, and he left Ahana for the last time.

  Old Laklani, when he heard finally of what happened, began speaking again in Kuwa’i’s presence. They spent a drunken night at the boat works, crying for Elissa, who died too young and left behind an orphan to be reared by jackals.

  “I have no sons,” Laklani said. “And now no niece. What did they call the boy?”

  “They never said.”

  “There can be protection in a name. The Kuhiki can’t remember what they can’t write down. They can’t write down what they can’t pronounce. When you have your own sons, remember, it is a good name that can’t be pronounced by outsiders.”

  Work, as Kuwa’i had found before, was a poor analgesic for a wounded conscience. But there were other ways. Although Wik’wai was a place and not really a town, it came to be known for the boats it launched into the lagoon. The valley prospered, and over the next year, Kuwa’i played at love with many of the girls who lived there, eventually coming to favor, for reasons unclear to himself, darker girls over lighter. Taller over short. And when he realized this, his contrary nature caused him to set his sights on the illegitimate daughter of Wik’wai’s seamstress, Iasepa, who herself was reputed to be the offspring of a whaler from beyond the islands. The girl’s name was Mara. She was short and unlikely—her hair almost blindingly blond in the summer sun. When Kuwa’i finally managed to drive away the swarm of boys that seemed always to orbit her, he found her intelligent and receptive. She spoke of travel and seeing the world. They explored each other’s bodies the first time in the garden behind her house, driving themselves into the dark earth with such fervor that no one who saw the print could have doubted what took place there.

  The affair continued for an entire season, and the girl talked and talked on the subject of people, to the exclusion of other subjects, disgorging every smallest gossip in an unending torrent of hearsay until Kuwa’i could stan
d it no more. When the wind changed, Kuwa’i told her it was over.

  At first she denied it. Then grew angry. “Look at you, then look at me,” she said, whipping her blond hair over her shoulder. “You’re beneath me.”

  “Then I’m doing you a favor,” he said.

  “I hope you burn in hell,” she said.

  The next day Kuwa’i found the boat shop’s windows had been smashed out by a rock, and all his tools were stolen. “I will fix the glass,” he told Laklani. He paid children to fish his tools from the lagoon.

  Their work continued through several seasons, and during this time, Laklani gradually gave over control of the boat shop to Kuwa’i, who accepted the work with enthusiasm but resisted his employer’s attempts at financial remuneration. He and Laklani had long contentious arguments on the subject of Kuwa’i’s compensation, with Laklani attempting to pay more and Kuwa’i demanding less, while the whole valley smiled at their backward negotiations, which sometimes got quite heated. Laklani eventually took to lying about how much he was paying, and Kuwa’i had to be sure to count his salary carefully because of Laklani’s tendency to slip extra money in among a confusing heap of small denominations.

  Finally one morning, Laklani did not arrive at the boat shop as a working man just after sun-up, but closer to noon, as a visiting companion. It was a small thing that neither of them discussed, this tardiness. And when Laklani arrived at the same time the following day, they were both sure of what had just happened. Thus was succession achieved. Laklani continued to visit the boat works often, occasionally lending a spare set of hands, which—though their usefulness had declined—Kuwa’i took a sick sort of satisfaction in overcompensating. And thus were their reverse negations resumed, and reversed once more, with Kuwa’i attempting to pay more, and old Laklani demanding less.

  Laklani’s visits varied in length in accommodation to his moods and health, though, truthfully, his health was remarkably good for a man his age. He had descended into a stolid and steadfast species of enfeeblement which gave every indication of providing for his continued existence above ground well into the next century. He had never smoked and drank only wine, and only then in moderation. He had eaten fish from clean water on every day of his life. Though slightly hunched and less mobile than he had once been, he was still trim and able to get about slowly to where he was going.