The Great Wave of Tamarind

by Nadia Aguiar

  Neither of them spoke, and Penny began to be afraid that after so long of thinking about him and missing him they would have nothing to say to each other. Maybe the person so vivid in her mind all these years was only a figment, about to be dispelled. After this they would go their separate ways without even the daydream of something still to come.

  ‘You found them,’ he said at last, nodding to the flags.

  ‘In the Gorgonne,’ said Penny quickly, grateful he had spoken. ‘Where you left them for me.’

  ‘After Seagrape found me outside Santori, she flew through a whorl and I followed her, and it took me there,’ he said.

  ‘Did you see the mandrill?’ Penny asked.

  ‘I did. Did you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They stared at each other, awkward and halting, but allowing the shared experience of the dark, strange place and its solitary creator to connect them for a moment.

  Suddenly in the distance rain bucketed down from a whorl over the valley. Lightning lit the silvery tips of the cane and illuminated the veil of rain, and thunder reverberated off the hills. It broke their awkwardness.

  ‘They’re still mostly quiet now,’ said Helix. ‘But every now and then one of them opens up and startles everyone. Snow was coming through another of them earlier today – actual snow. And earlier tonight there was a deluge high in the hills that caused a landslide down the coast.’

  ‘After tomorrow they’ll be gone,’ said Penny. ‘At least … I hope so.’

  ‘They will,’ said Helix. He smiled at her. ‘Because you’re the Bloom Catcher.’

  His smile encouraged Penny. ‘When I was in the Gorgonne, I remembered everything you taught me about tracking,’ she said. ‘About finding marks in the moss and looking for just part of an animal in the trees, like a puzzle piece.’

  ‘You remember that?’ asked Helix. ‘You were so little!’

  He came closer to the porch. After a moment they both sat down on the stairs. They faced the lagoon, but Penny sneaked glances at him. If, before she had seen him, Helix had existed in a fond blur in her memory, being reunited with him brought everything about him back to the surface of her mind, and almost instantly she remembered a thousand tiny things about him.

  ‘Everyone still talks about you,’ she said.

  Helix smiled at that. ‘I still think about all you, too,’ he said. ‘At first I thought that maybe Maya and Simon might have come back with you.’

  ‘No,’ said Penny. ‘Just me. But they’re coming home for a visit next week.’

  ‘For a visit?’ asked Helix. ‘That means they don’t live there any more,’ he murmured to himself. ‘I figured Maya wouldn’t, but I never knew where to picture her,’ he said to Penny. ‘How is everyone? Simon? Your parents? Granny Pearl?’

  Penny told him about everyone. When she got to Granny Pearl, she began to explain that was why she had come, to get the Bloom for her, but she felt a lump in her throat and stopped.

  ‘So that’s why you’re here,’ said Helix. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said kindly. ‘You’ll be taking some of it home for her very soon.’

  A breeze whispered through the cane and stirred the surface of the lagoon, and moonlight wrinkled its shallow floor. Slowly they were falling into an easy rapport – a deep, old familiarity still existed, was coming back to life.

  ‘My old shark’s tooth necklace,’ said Helix, noticing it round Penny’s neck. ‘How did you get it? I left it for Maya.’

  ‘I, um, borrowed it,’ said Penny.

  ‘“Borrowed”?’

  ‘Well, when she moved out she left it,’ said Penny. ‘In a drawer.’

  ‘Oh,’ Helix said, frowning. ‘Well, it’s not something that she’d wear any more. She probably only wears beautiful things.’ He paused. ‘It’s not something I would give to her now.’

  ‘She wore it for ages,’ said Penny quickly. ‘Even in the shower. And she did keep it.’

  ‘Or she just forgot it was there,’ muttered Helix.

  ‘She used to write letters to you, in her diary,’ Penny said suddenly.

  ‘And how do you know that?’ Helix asked.

  ‘I guess that means you don’t want to know what she wrote,’ said Penny.

  Helix laughed. ‘All right, you’ve got me,’ he said. ‘I’m curious. What did Maya have to say?’

  Suddenly Penny felt a glimmer of betrayal – late, she knew – but powerful nonetheless. She had veered into grounds of sisterly disloyalty with no safe retreat. She hadn’t seen Helix in so long – why was she telling him all this?

  ‘She missed you,’ she said. ‘That’s about it. We all missed you.’

  ‘For someone who goes snooping around reading someone else’s diary you’re being very secretive all of a sudden,’ said Helix.

  ‘She missed you a lot,’ said Penny. ‘That’s what she wrote about.’

  ‘And when was the last time she wrote that?’ Helix demanded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Penny. ‘Three or four years ago. Before she left home.’

  ‘A lot changes in three or four years,’ said Helix.

  They fell quiet. A breeze rustled the palms. The sound of surf breaking over rocks, invisible in the darkness, carried across the water every few moments.

  ‘Well,’ said Penny. ‘After tomorrow it won’t matter.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You can see her yourself,’ said Penny. ‘After I get the Bloom, when we go home.’

  Helix just looked at her.

  ‘You’re coming with me, aren’t you?’ she asked.

  He didn’t speak for a minute, keeping his gaze out over the dark water.

  ‘For a little while, after I saw the second flag, I thought so,’ he said at last. ‘But no … I can’t go back with you.’

  Penny felt confused. Somehow she would have understood if Helix had never even shown up at the hut. But now that he had, now that they had been talking as though no time had passed, now that it was obvious to her how much he still thought about Maya, she had believed, suddenly and surely, that the whole purpose of their finding each other again was so that he could come home with her, as if everything had been leading up to this all along.

  ‘I thought –’ she began.

  ‘Going back would be …’ Helix paused and shook his head. ‘It’s a crazy idea.’

  ‘What’s so crazy about it?’ asked Penny.

  ‘This is my home,’ said Helix. ‘I belong here. What would I even do on the Outside?’

  ‘See Maya,’ said Penny.

  ‘And then what?’ asked Helix.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Penny. ‘You’d figure something out.’

  Helix laughed. ‘It’s that easy, is it?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Penny.

  Suddenly Helix was angry. ‘And what makes you think Maya wants to see me?’ he asked.

  Penny thought about how he hadn’t found her after he had seen the first flag. Or the second. He had waited. Not because he hadn’t wanted to see her. He was scared. He could come back to the Outside with her, but what if Maya no longer cared? Penny felt the grip of a new type of fear, one she’d never felt before, that didn’t have to do with beasts or darkness or physical peril, or even the fear of losing her grandmother.

  Helix’s flash of anger had passed quickly.

  ‘The whole time I watched you all sail away I was afraid I’d made a terrible mistake,’ he said. ‘I believed that for a long time after. There hasn’t been a single day that I haven’t thought about all of you.’

  He paused.

  ‘Your sister was my first real friend,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve never had a friend like her. But we were kids when we knew each other. Things move forward, not backwards. I can’t go back. Too much has changed.’

  The tide had begun to recede and the sound of the surf was further away.

  ‘That’s why you could,’ said Penny at last. ‘Because enough has changed.’

  They sat in silence then Helix got to
his feet.

  ‘Now’s not the time to talk about this,’ he said. ‘I’m happy I saw you tonight, Penny.’ He hugged her. ‘Now you need to get some rest before tomorrow. You don’t have the Bloom yet, you know. I’ll stay nearby tonight. Just in case. Seagrape will be with you. I’ll see you after the Bloom, to say goodbye. I promise I won’t run off this time. Get some sleep.’

  Seagrape murmured from her perch on the steps beside them. Helix stroked her silky head before he disappeared back into the cane.

  Penny stayed sitting on the step for a while longer. It had been so good to see Helix, but now she felt crushed – more disappointed than she would have been if she had never seen him again at all.

  ‘This can’t be all there is,’ she whispered to Seagrape. ‘It just feels wrong.’

  Finally she went into the hut and lay down on the grass mat. Seagrape followed, warbling softly, begrudging but submissive. She let Penny pull her close and tuck her under one arm like she had when Penny was a small girl. When Penny finally slept and her arm fell slack, Seagrape wriggled free and hopped out to sit on the porch railing in the fresh air. As the tide ebbed, the shore shifted invisibly outward in the dark. The world was in transition, unfinished. Over the valley the whorls gathered thickly in the sky, more with each passing hour, and people slept fitfully beneath them.

  PART III

  * * *

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Great Wave

  Penny woke soon after dawn. The smell of the moss exposed by the receding tide had grown stronger in the night, and the air was pungent and briny. She heard the clatter of hundreds of beaks against the middens. She hurried on to the porch and drew in her breath. It had begun! In the grey light she saw that the tide had crept out in the night and the lagoon was drained, the damp shock of its soft fans and mosses and coral exposed to the air for the first time. Though she had expected it, it still felt unreal. Beyond the lagoon the milky-blue sea was receding slowly, like a storm in reverse.

  In the distance she saw that the whorls had proliferated overnight and were now packed together in the sky over the town. They seemed to suck the air out of the day, and it felt hard to take a full breath in. It was morning, but the light seemed already to be fading. The cane grass looked wan. Not a blade turned or tassle shook. There was a feeling of airlessness, like before a storm.

  Penny saw a woman approaching on the road through the eerie light, hurrying, carrying a bundle tucked under her arm.

  ‘Good morning, Bloom Catcher,’ she said as she reached the hut. She bowed her head respectfully, a little in awe of Penny. ‘It’s time to get ready – the elders are on their way to escort you!’ She put a basket of bread down by the door, then carried a jug of water into the hut and poured it into a basin for Penny to wash.

  Penny splashed her face with water and did her best to unsnarl her hair with her fingers. She put on her bathing suit and pushed her goggles up over her forehead. She ate quickly, too nervous to really taste anything. One of the councilmen was blowing the triton. The faint sound drifted through the window, growing louder as it got closer. Penny returned to the porch, where the woman was waiting with a bright bolt of cloth.

  ‘This was made for you,’ said the woman, shaking out the fabric. ‘The Bloom Catcher always wears a cape out to the wave. Before you dive in, let it drop from your shoulders.’

  The ceremonial cape was made of heavy, plum-coloured silk that glistened in the light. Lustrous tellin shells were stitched into a swirling pattern on its back, and the hem was weighted with heavier, iridescent oyster shells. The woman lifted it over Penny’s back and tied it under her chin. Penny felt a strange, deep calm as the weight of it settled on her shoulders. She could see the Council of Elders approaching the hut on the dirt road. They were dressed in their festival finery, robes bejewelled with shells and fringed with coloured palm fibres. The bald dome of Elder’s head had been polished with oil and it shone in the dull light. He carried a crooked, knotty staff, which he banged on the ground when he stopped in front of the hut.

  ‘Good morning, Bloom Catcher,’ he said briskly. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘I’m ready,’ said Penny, though her heart was already pounding.

  She went down the steps and walked with the Council towards the town.

  Along the edge of the coast, people had strung nets between the trees to catch fish that would be tossed up when the Great Wave broke. The shells of the midden breaks were pale and luminous. The maze of deep channels dug to absorb the wave and deflect it back to sea lay shadowed and empty, waiting for the rush of foaming surf to fill them. At the base of the valley she could see the great hand of the stone dial. It had shifted in the night and was now just a hair’s breadth from finishing its long sweep.

  At first Penny thought that a flock of thousands of birds had gathered on the steep hillsides above the town, but as she drew nearer she realized that the figures were people crammed together on the long, mossy stone benches of the amphitheatre. The theatre twinkled with the constant glint and flash of bits of magnifying shells raised to see the Wave. Penny searched in the crowd for Tabba and Jebby but couldn’t see them, or Kal, either. Her chest felt tight.

  The light was not like morning at all but like the weird light of an eclipse. Whorls jammed the sky. There was a disturbance – a sudden gust of wind from one of them brought icy bullets of hail that scattered the jittery people below. As quickly as it started the hail ceased, but the people were slow to return, leaving a gap in the crowd.

  During the walk into the town, Penny had been purposely kept from facing the sea, but when they turned the final bend that brought them to the foot of Palmos she caught her first glimpse of it.

  The tide had receded dramatically and the bay was empty. Where water usually was there was only rocks and sand, still wet and shiny, its nakedness new and shocking. When Penny looked out to see where the water had gone, her legs began to tremble.

  A few hundred yards from shore, a towering, pewter wall stood straight up from the sand. The Great Wave. It was still building. With each second that Penny watched, it loomed taller and further from the town. It was spectacular, perhaps one hundred feet long and already fifty high, a vast bolt of grey silk flung improbably skyward. She had never seen anything so tremendous, so intimidating, could not have imagined that something so powerful and seemingly impossible could be real.

  Elder handed her a spear, its tip a chunk of polished black stone chiselled to a fierce point, and a single kelp pod.

  ‘The spear is to protect yourself in the water,’ he said. ‘And the kelp pod – when the air in it is used up, you’ll know you have only moments to leave the Wave before it comes tumbling down.’

  Then he unwrapped the mandrill’s shell from a cloth. It was crystal clear, not a single fingerprint smudged it. An orange sea sponge corked it. A gold string had been tied to an aperture near its top. Penny bowed as Elder put it over her head.

  ‘You’ll catch the Bloom in this,’ he told her. ‘On the way out, stay calm. Don’t go too fast or too slow. You need to reach the wave at the right moment. Once you’re there, don’t delay – dive in at once.’

  ‘All right,’ whispered Penny, her gaze fixed on the receding water. She felt sick and nervous. What if she didn’t reach the Wave exactly when she was supposed to? Or if she ran out of air before she had gathered the Bloom? And would she even know what the Bloom was when she saw it? But Elder had no more advice for her.

  He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it. ‘Good luck.’

  Drums rolled on the shore behind her as Penny walked out to the Wave. She used them to keep her footsteps measured. Step, step, step. Steady beats in the glossy sand. The rest of the world faded away.

  The pace of the receding tide quickened and Penny walked more determinedly to keep up with it. The wet sand was hard under her bare feet. She walked past the middens, out past reefs lustrous and dripping in the weak light, plastered with limp seafans and capped with mustard-yellow brai
n coral. A few fish left behind struggled on the sand, flapping and flailing. From the corner of her eye, Penny saw them get snatched up by diving seabirds. The Wave itself was like a celestial grey screen, empty before the action started. The air pressure changed as the water was drawn up and Penny felt her ears popping. Then the Wave stopped building and – improbably and magnificently – stood where it was.

  Penny had almost reached it. She looked up at the sheer wall, dizzied by its height.

  The sun came out suddenly, dazzlingly, through a crack in the clouds, injecting potent, dangerous colour into the world. The wave looked like the glassy face of a great aquamarine jewel.

  Don’t be afraid, she told herself. Dive through.

  She pulled her goggles down over her eyes. She shrugged her shoulders and the cape slid off and fell at her feet. Without breaking her stride, she took a last long breath, raised her arms over her head, pressed her hands together and pointed her fingers. She didn’t hesitate.

  She dived.

  The first thing she felt was the cool water all over her body, a pleasant shock after the heat in the air outside. She opened her eyes.

  The outside day was gone, the crowd on the hillside, the sounds of the drums. Penny saw a few fish in spinning schools, illumed in the murky distance. A lone turtle swam past.

  The first eruption of Bloom happened near her – a brief, mesmerizing blaze that hovered for a second before a school of silver fish bulleted through, devouring it before it could dissipate.

  The next patch of Bloom burst open, and then everything began to happen quickly. The creatures waiting in the wings exploded forth into a feeding frenzy. An eel rippled past. A nervous school of squid veered here and there, changing colours each instant. Turtles appeared, gobbling the sudden profusion of jellyfish. A shark sliced through a huge shoal of yellow fish, and the fish spun away like fallen leaves swirling up from the pavement in the wind. Penny gripped the spear. Above her, distorted by the lens of water, she could see seabirds circling and diving, wings folded into their bodies at the moment of impact, silver bubbles clinging to their feathers as they torpedoed underwater. Creatures zipped and zoomed through the clouds of blue-green phosphorescence. It was a wild, unstoppable torrent of life.