The Great Wave of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  Yellow arm sashes flashed everywhere, like flowers that had bloomed overnight, and were being tugged this way and that on the bright, windy hills and valleys of the swelling crowd. The air was bursting with boasting and bravado, with jokes that Penny couldn’t quite catch and laughter that exploded suddenly and startlingly.

  It was impossible to stop anywhere – she had to keep steering out of the way of gnashing teeth and tusks and flinty hooves. Within moments a film of dust coated the bike and cart and made an acrid paste in her mouth. The sun was already baking – it was going to be a steamy day. Uniformed officials moved through the crowd, logging the competitors. Penny recognized a few of the Bloom Players from the day before; others they were seeing for the first time. She caught sight of the Lamlo Diver riding a buffalo-like animal with an ancient face buried deep in his shaggy beard, and the Dorado brothers astride a fidgety pair of striped chestnut horses. From their low vantage, everyone and everything looked bigger, stronger and more ferocious than the children and their bicycle and cart. As they were pushed through the crowd, Penny saw that the yellow flag was still on top of the message pole, but she had no time to feel disappointed.

  ‘Watch out!’ cried Jebby.

  Like a flint striking stone, a razor-sharp hoof punched the earth within inches of the bicycle’s front tyre. Penny swerved out of the way and the cart tipped to one side before righting. The children turned to see what had almost crushed the tyre and found themselves looking up at Kal, high above them astride a nimble-footed, swan-necked creature. More antelope than horse, its legs were long and lean, its striped, brandy-coloured coat groomed to a high, electric glow. Muscles rippled like pure, coiled energy beneath its hide. Its legs were so long that its neck and haunches were too high to have been touched by the cloud of kicked-up dirt that hugged the ground, and as the children looked up at it through the haze these high points glinted like mountain peaks on a clear day.

  ‘That’s a lumphur,’ whispered Tabba.

  Unlike the skittish creatures prancing around, it wasn’t frenzied and foaming. It was alert and self-possessed, conserving its energy. It observed them with a cold, sharp eye.

  For a moment after he saw the children, Kal’s face relaxed and he laughed. It was the first natural, spontaneous response Penny had heard from him: he thought they looked ridiculous.

  ‘It’s going to take you a week just to reach Jaipa on that thing!’ he called down.

  Next to the sleek and mighty lumphur, the bicycle and cart that the children had been so proud of just a short time ago suddenly seemed like an embarrassing miscalculation – a silly, improbable and unreliable contraption. As the triton sounded again, Kal and the lumphur pushed in front of the children and muscled their way towards the front of the line, the lumphur’s tail delivering a stinging swat to Penny’s arm as it passed. Penny, Tabba and Jebby found themselves shoved this way and that until they were at the rear of the crowd of Bloom Players, struggling to see through tossing heads and swishing tails to where the Council of Elders had assembled on the elevated platform in the middle of the square.

  The Council wore flowing, jewel-coloured robes and carried staffs encrusted with polished seashells whose tips caught the light like broken glass. The Elder of Tontap was among them. He had washed and brushed his beard, which hung straight down in the breezeless air, and his bare head shone with coconut oil. He stepped forward and raised a large and ancient triton shell. There would be no speech or ceremony that morning, no final advice. He lifted the shell to his lips and blew.

  A sound emerged, sonorous and otherworldly, as if it came not from the shell but from another atmosphere, out of the past, as it had so many times before to send forth new generations to seek the Bloom. Before its single note began to fade, the horde of competitors lunged on to the road out of the town with a roar.

  ‘Goodbye! Good luck!’ called people in the crowd, waving vigorously as they surged after the Players. Small children were lifted on to the shoulders of adults so they could see, the elderly given elbows to lead them back to the shade, and soon a growing space had opened between the pack and those who had come to see them off. The children didn’t see Ma or Da or the little Silverlings or Rai or Bellamy during the frantic dash. Penny pedalled furiously, the bicycle’s tyres whirring to keep up with the hooves and paws and talons up ahead.

  The competitors began together on the same road out of the town but quickly dispersed. Kal’s lumphur loped along far ahead of the pack and soon dropped from sight. The team on the hippo-like beast charged straight into the jungle. Penny caught sight of Grasshopper Boy ducking on to a shadowy dirt track. A few teams had ventured out in boats, though in the windless day they made little progress, fluttering in circles in the harbour, sails luffing. Penny, Tabba and Jebby headed north. The dust kicked up by the animals clouded their view. When it cleared, both animals and town were gone. Seagrape flew high above them like a green kite attached by an invisible string. The wheels of both bicycle and cart ran smoothly – no rattling or squeaking – and the grass streamers buzzed in the wind.

  As the sun blazed down on her shoulders, it struck Penny that she had never been so free in all her life. She already had two new friends, a shiny bicycle to take them where they needed to go and a plan to get a Molmer egg. It was better than the last day of school with summer sprawling out before her, better than one hundred summer holidays back to back!

  ‘We’re free!’ she cried joyfully. ‘We don’t have to be in Jaipa until tonight!’

  ‘That isn’t very much time,’ warned Jebby from the cart. ‘You heard Elder – only the first twenty teams back will make it to the next trial. We don’t have long!’

  Penny braced her arms against the handlebars and pedalled hard. The sun climbed in the sky and beat down on the farm fields and piping-hot road. When her calves began to burn, she stopped to let the others take over. At first she ran alongside them, shouting encouragement and catching the bike if it began to wobble, but soon Tabba and Jebby were as capable and as fast as she was, and she was able to ride in the cart, gazing out at the shining fields and hot blue sky, soaking it all in. Seagrape flew back down to perch on the back of the cart, the breeze glossing her feathers to green lacquer.

  The children passed hundreds of people streaming in from all around for the festival. Young and old, everyone in Kana seemed to be on the move. Families rode in mule-drawn carts, piled precariously with everything they had brought with them for their journey. Others travelled light, their few possessions stuffed into the same kind of sackcloth backpacks that Tabba and Jebby carried. People stopping to picnic on the roadsides saw the children’s yellow arm sashes and waved and cheered, and the children rang the bicycle bell back. The whole island seemed to be in high spirits. Penny thought that the dark warnings from Elder and Bellamy and Ma and Pa Silverling seemed misguided – adults were always exaggerating danger. How could Kana be in trouble? It was too bright and vibrant, ringing with too much life. The whorl she had seen at Elder’s was strange and unsettling, sure, but it had lasted so briefly, like a passing mood, easily forgotten.

  Jebby pointed out a sapsoo, a tall tree with pale bark and elastic vines waving in the breeze like upside-down garden eels. The vines were the same type that had been used for the bicycle tyres. Bellamy had been right – the bike rode so smoothly on the new tyres that the children really did feel as if they were floating along on a cloud.

  They had just passed the sapsoo tree when a great clattering, scraping sound came from up ahead. When they turned the next bend, Penny saw a pair of mighty elephantine animals hauling a rattling cargo of empty oyster shells caught in a trawling net. They were compact creatures with round haunches, pale blue hides and reedy tails that swatted away flies. A couple of men walked beside them.

  ‘They’re taking shells to Palmos to build the breakwaters,’ said Jebby. ‘So when the wave crashes it won’t rush up and destroy the town.’

  ‘They’ve been building the breaks for ages now,’ added
Tabba. ‘Since we were small.’

  The children moved to the edge of the road to pedal past and caught a whiff of oysters and dung, but soon the clanking shells faded behind them.

  Whenever Jebby was in the cart, he worked on the new whistle, stopping to play a few notes on it, then carving the holes to adjust the pitch. The tunes summoned different birds that appeared on the edges of the undergrowth, blinking curiously at the children from beneath fluffy feather caps, or swooping in small neon flocks in front of them, trailing their scraggly shadows across the dusty road. He pointed out different birds to Penny: sagwonds, with frilled purple tail feathers; trilbadors, who made only a single note, a low, mournful G-minor; pellucines, who sang only for three minutes at dawn and three at dusk; and a lone bowerbird, a nondescript figure who Jebby claimed built a nest as elaborate as a castle, decorated with tiny treasures he gathered from the jungle. Seagrape sat on the handlebars, nodding to all of them as if she were passing royalty.

  ‘If we get one of the Molmer eggs, we’ll be bringing back something that no one’s seen since before the last bad Bloom,’ Tabba mused. ‘It’s pretty amazing.’

  ‘It is pretty amazing,’ agreed Penny.

  She liked Tabba and Jebby so much. It had been a long time since she had really hung out with anyone her own age, and she had forgotten how much fun it was to be with other people. She remembered Simon’s compass and took it out to show them. They marvelled at its needle, which pointed faithfully north and could not be fooled, and they used it with the map to guide them ever closer to the Blue Pit.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Oyster Point ✵ The Blue Pit ✵ ‘As if a place on the earth had ceased to exist’ ✵ Descending into the Void ✵ Molmer Egg ✵ A Mottled Beast ✵ A Lightless Thunderbolt ✵ Cold to the Core

  By the time the sun had reached its peak, they had covered a lot of ground, a person in the cart checking off each town on the map as they skirted its edges. The crowds going east to Jaipa thinned, then petered out altogether, until all that was left was the occasional farmer carrying a basket of muddy vegetables or, once, a man driving a mule pulling a cart of clattering mussels. There were no other Players, and when the children reached the valley they saw no one at all. Nervously, they pedalled faster. They had taken a chance coming out so far. If they were unlucky, there was no way to make it to the other Blue Pits and still get to Jaipa before the other Players did.

  They raced across the floor of the valley, but their pace slowed as they began to cycle up its far hill. The sun beat down mercilessly. Rills of sweat coursed down their faces and drenched their clothes. Eventually it grew too steep and they had to get out and push the bike and the cart the rest of the way. At the top, light-headed, they stopped to catch their breath. The other side of the hill dropped abruptly down a series of switchbacks on to a long, narrow peninsula that sat barely above sea level. At the end of it lay the shingly remnants of what must have been, at one time, a town. Beyond it the vast sea undulated in sallow, blue-gold swells for miles before finally ascending into haze on the horizon.

  ‘Oyster Point,’ said Tabba, gazing down at the stony ruins.

  But Penny had lifted her gaze and was staring beyond the town, at the sea half a mile from shore – at a dark hole, an unexplained void in the corrugated surface of the sea.

  ‘The Blue Pit,’ whispered Jebby as he caught sight of it, too.

  Even from so far away, coldness seemed to emanate from it. The children’s excitement drained away and a sick feeling lodged in their stomachs. Nobody spoke. Seagrape growled softly. There in the bright sun, Penny’s skin prickled with goosebumps and she wanted to pull a blanket over her head and hide. Grimly, Jebby took a reckoning so that they would be able to find the pit from shore, then they began the plunge down the hill towards the empty town.

  When the children reached the end of the peninsula and rolled into Oyster Point, tyres clattering over shells, it was obvious that they were the only ones there. No other Bloom Players had ventured this far. The town was abandoned, as Bellamy had said it would be. It was becoming hard to see that a town had been there at all, in fact. The homes, once made of shells compressed into bricks, had mostly slumped into piles of rubble, swallowing the streets that had run between them. A breeze whistled forlornly through the cracks. Seabirds sat on the mounds, their beaks tapping on hard, empty volutes and oysters. They observed the children with the watchful, unfriendly stare of those unused to visitors. Mosquitos not driven off by the stiff sea breeze multiplied in the pools of old rain drums whose tops had rotted away. A frazzled net had washed in and got hooked on the lone, wind-gnarled shrub that still clung stubbornly to the rocks. Sea urchins glistened on the edges of the shore, their menacing points advancing in a slow, pointed creep.

  It seemed impossible that in such a short time the children could have gone from the lushness of fields and jungle to a place so devoid of life.

  ‘Hello?’ Tabba called as they pedalled through storm-split stones. ‘Hello!’

  It felt like a necessary gesture, to throw something hopeful and human out into the desolation, but all that returned was Tabba’s own voice, echoing thinly off the crumbling shell walls. The children put the bicycle inside one of the few intact huts, more to keep it from toppling over in the wind than out of any need to hide it. Something spooked the birds and they took off together, flying seaward where they disappeared, leaving the town entirely deserted except for the newcomers.

  ‘There aren’t any boats left at all,’ said Jebby, returning from a brief expedition around the shoreline. ‘I didn’t even think of that …’

  The children endured a brief moment of silent panic, before Penny said, ‘The cart – we’ll take the cart off and paddle out there in it.’

  They turned in relief to the little yellow cart.

  ‘I think the three of us can squeeze into it,’ said Penny.

  ‘I’ll detach it from the bike and take the wheels off,’ said Jebby.

  ‘I’ll get the stones for our weight belts,’ said Tabba.

  ‘And I’ll try to find something we can use as a paddle,’ added Penny.

  She stepped quickly and carefully through the ruins. The gurgle of the tide was amplified through the shells. There was hardly anything left – a child’s faded toy, a dented, smoke-stained kettle. Finally she saw a paddle – an actual paddle, they were in luck – poking out from between two stones. Bracing a foot against a rock, she yanked it out. It turned out to be only half a paddle – split and splintered, its wood pocked with shipworm holes – but it would do. She returned to the others with it. Tabba had found stones and secured them in the weight belts, and Jebby was just removing the last wheel from the cart.

  Together they carried the cart down to the shore. With the cargo of stones it sat precariously low in the water. It groaned when one after another each child eased tentatively into it, but it held steady. Kelp pods and sea lights safely stowed, they set out from shore. As if to lighten the load, Seagrape flew ahead of them, an electric green volt in the burnt-out sky.

  When they neared the Blue Pit, the children stopped paddling and let the cart drift towards the edge. The Blue Pit was just that – a pit – a vast underwater hole in the seafloor, as though a place on the earth had ceased to exist and nothing had replaced it. It was impossible to tell its depth. The surrounding seafloor was only ten or fifteen feet deep, but the circumference of the pit dropped abruptly into steep cliff walls. A few shafts of light angled down but were soon swallowed into an unknowable knot of darkness far below. Gloom crept up from the depths like cold, foul vapour, entering Penny’s lungs and chilling her. The cart floated over the edge, and a moment later the children found themselves suspended precariously over the abyss.

  They realized they had no way to anchor, so someone would have to stay with the cart. They drew straws. Tabba would remain on board, paddling to keep over the middle of the pit. Penny and Jebby divided the kelp pods between them and tied the nubby stalks of each bunch with fishing
line. With only two people underwater, the air in the pods would last longer.

  ‘Do you need to practise breathing from them first?’ Penny asked Jebby.

  ‘No,’ he said tensely. ‘I’ve done it before.’

  ‘Only once,’ said Tabba quietly.

  Tabba had fashioned headbands out of twisted cloth and had secured the sea lights to them, and now Penny and Jebby adjusted the straps until the sea lights rested firmly on their foreheads. They tightened the stone weight-belts round their waists. Penny practised a quick release knot until she was satisfied she could drop the weights quickly if she needed to. She tucked the kelp straws into her belt. She and Jebby sat on opposite sides of the cart to balance it. With difficulty due to the weight of the stones, Penny inched round until her legs were dangling over the pit. This was it. She felt excited and afraid, as if she was slightly outside her own body. Carefully she polished her goggles, then put them on, pulling the strap behind her head and lowering the lenses over her eyes. The world blurred slightly. She tied the fishing line with the kelp pods round her wrist. She turned her head to look at Jebby. They nodded to each other and, each taking a last deep breath, slid in.

  The stones weighed Penny down and despite the buoyant kelp pods she descended briskly. A panicky sensation gripped her and subsided only when she breathed from the pod for the first time and found that it worked. Breathing seemed harder here than it had been at the surface with Tabba yesterday, but she willed herself to stay calm. Every few feet she pinched her nose to equalize the pressure in her ears. The air in the pods tasted like seaweed, and the taste grew stronger as she went deeper. She glanced up to see that Jebby was beside and just above her. They each held a cluster of kelp pods, like people selling balloons in a park.

  It felt as though they were dropping down a large, deep well, bounded by sheer walls. They were only able to see the wall they were closest to. Beyond that the water became too dark and murky, the opposite side too far away. If Bellamy was right, a Molmer egg would be nestled in a nook somewhere in this underwater cliff. If one was here at all, that was. Penny and Jebby stayed as far from the cliff as they could to have the widest perspective possible, but close enough that they wouldn’t miss an egg.