by Linda Talbot
One day Aniel grasped Yiasa by the hand. "Walk with me. Let's talk!" he said. Loathe to leave Zepheris she nonetheless acquiesced and they entered the echoing cave. Aniel however, said nothing and did not release his hold. The sea boomed, as though seeking admission to the cavern. The mottled rock moved with restless crustations.
"Where are we going?" Yiasa was uneasy. Still Aniel was silent.
They reached a gaunt chamber with a roof of shifting shadows. The far wall was not visible. Yiasa hung back.
"Now here's a place for a heartless woman who thinks more of her son than of me!" Aniel said at last. He dragged Yiasa, who was now crying out in protest, down a winding passage that struck into the cave's appalling depths. He turned to right and left, doubled back and then took fresh directions. The cave was a labyrinth, as formidable as Knossos. Aniel released Yiasa's hand, swiftly turned and vanished.
Yiasa started after him but was confronted only by rock. Aniel might not have existed. She cried his name. It was flung coldly back at her. She reached for the walls of the passage to steady herself. They were clammy and smooth, like the skin of some creature bred on neither land nor sea and, very faintly, they pulsed.
She slid frenziedly up and down, trying not to touch the walls which left a strange sensation on her skin. At last, she sank to the ground, head in hands.
The sea was distant now, like the memory of a former life. But there were other sounds; a crustaceous rustling and an intermittent whine like traces of wind trapped underground.
As Yiasa's eyes grew used to the dark, she saw that the walls were almost imperceptibly moving; the crustaceans were breeding. Yiasa was hunched in the middle of the passage but could still see the conical striped shells shifting on the slug-like bodies of the cave creatures. They had long antennae to feel across the rough rock face and to communicate with each other. Yiasa hung her head and wept.
Aniel told Zalazin that, tragically, Yiasa had died. Death from unidentified disease was rife, although not enough to radically reduce the community.
Zalazin was grief stricken but not surprised. Aniel now went regularly to Zalazin's house. He listened to Loel sing and slowly gained her confidence. Soon he was walking with her in the moonlight, his frustration growing at not being able to physically love her.
One night, Zalazin took Aniel aside. "You can have her if you wish," he said, "But give her a ceremony. She's a virgin and needs to be eased into these things." Aniel agreed.
Zalazin came to Aniel. "I'll take Yiasa's body," he said. Aniel rapidly replied, "She told me that if she died she wanted to be buried at sea. She spent all her time walking by it. I should have let you see her first but I was so distressed, I gave her to the waves that same night."
Zalazin was shaken, but hung his head and left.
Yiasa shuddered as the whining increased, like the ghost of someone who had succumbed to the cave before her. The creatures' rustling persisted above the wind. The incessant agitation of their shells besieged her brain. She could not sleep or think. There was neither water nor food. The gloom seeped into her soul and she began to forget the outside world.
Then Loel's frightened face rose, half-formed, before her. At first it was marred by the graininess of the rock from which it materialised, but as her features formed, the grains dropped away and her pale face contorted. Yiasa knew she was being violated. She reached for the disembodied face but clutched only air. The features faded.
"Loel!" Yiasa cried and cast about the cave, scraping the crustaceans from the walls as anguish overrode fear. She knew Aniel had raped her.
Loel lay in a darkened room in Aniel's house. She had come to visit him before the ceremony. Aniel, frustrated without the physicality of a woman and seeing no sign of Zalazin's decline, had watched Loel poised, as though expectantly, at the end of the room and had pulled her in a frenzy to the floor.
Afterwards he opened his eyes as though from an untenable dream and gazed numbly at Loel, sobbing where she lay.
Aniel entered the cave and wound through the labyrinth until he found Yiasa, rocking in the dark.
When he touched her, she started and swung to face him.
"Rapist!" she shouted.
"How did you know?" Aniel uttered hoarsely.
Yiasa did not reply. Aniel feared she had unearthly powers. He took out a knife, salvaged from a former world, and pulling back Yiasa's head, forced her to thrust out her tongue. With one stroke, he cut it out.
He dragged her, unconscious, through the cave, unable to understand why he did not kill her. Did he fear her apparent power?
He took her to the group of women on the other side of the island, who were working on Loel's ceremonial dress. When she regained consciousness, he made her hide her face. He could not risk Zalazin discovering her.
But, as she wove the magical lengths of fish skin, she depicted her plight in a code that she and Loel had used as children and which only Loel would see as she stepped into the tunic.
Aniel found Loel where he had left her. She shrank from him and he tried to reassure her, fearing she would go to Zalazin and he would lose her.
Eventually she calmed. Was Aniel's behaviour part of becoming a consort? Aniel persuaded her to stay until the ceremony and persisted in taking her roughly each night in the darkened room.
Then Aniel began walking to the oracle. He had dismissed its prophetic power as a device of Zalazin's manipulation, but now some inner force drew him to the stones and as he looked at the half spent moon, he felt a strangeness in the air, as though pervaded by some presence on the point of disclosure.
And, instinctively, Aniel knew Zepheris would be harmed by someone close. Since Yiasa's imprisonment, Aniel had come to love the undemanding child. He saw himself in retrospect, discovering the enormity of the sea, the frightening faces etched by erosion in the rocks and, from a height, the movement of the cloud-banked sky.
He had the joy of hearing his son's first words and suffered the sorrow of his tears when he missed his mother. He hurried back. The child too would have to be kept in custody.
Loel lived in dream. Her days seemed endless as she aimlessly drifted round the house. Her nights were brutal. The imminent ceremony seemed irrelevant.
Loel's tunic was brought; glimmering with skilfully interlinked scales and hung with iridescent shells. She held it at arm's length, admiring the intricate stitching with a fine fish bone. She opened it out. She was about to step in, when she saw the carefully wrought code inside.
Momentarily, she relived her happy childhood. She recalled the day she and Yiasa pretended to be birds, running along the beach with arms outspread, wishing their feet would leave the sand and they could rise at will above the waves. They invented the code, writing messages in the sand, to bewilder passers-by. This message told her where Yiasa was.
She ran from the house. Aniel was walking with Zepheris on the beach. Loel knew vaguely where the women workers lived. The rough road left the shanty settlement, winding through the sun-depleted scrub that thrust defensive thorns against the implacable blue. Loel shivered despite the heat. Why had Aniel claimed Yiasa was dead?
The track narrowed. Stunted trees with blue-green leaves were bent almost double by the wind. From the top of a bare hill, Loel saw the women working in a compound with a bamboo roof. She could not see Yiasa.
Then at the end of one row, a woman broke away. It was Yiasa. Other women tried to restrain her. She struggled, screamed and they let her go. She ran up the rock-strewn track, clawing the air.
Loel skirted the workers and reached Yiasa as she gasped and stumbled towards the sea.
"Yiasa!" She paused, turned and stood stock still. She was haggard, her eyes unfocused, her long hair loose and bedraggled.
"What happened? We thought you were dead," said Loel. She took the distraught woman's arm. Yiasa drew roughly away, staring without recognition at her sister. Then her face registered recollection and she let Loel touch her.
"What happened?" Loel repeated, unaware she co
uld not speak. Yiasa looked blank. She could recall nothing.
"Come here!" Loel urged. A dark hint of the past filtered through Yiasa's fevered mind. Distressed, she ran over the rocks and disappeared. Loel pursued. But there was no sign of her on the other side of the hill.
Yiasa stumbled into a cave, running blindly through its clammy ways, winding like the foul veins of a stranded sea beast. She paused and listened. Only water seeped steadily through rock.
She crouched on the wet ground, her hands pressed hard against her ears. Eventually she rose and walked unsteadily towards a distant chink of light. Outside, the sea washed and eddied on the white beach. A small figure played at the edge of a rock pool. Yiasa, demented, winced in the sun. The figure wavered, its small back strangely hunched. She approached, crunching through the narrow strand of shingle near the water.
The figure turned. The sun shone directly into Yiasa's eyes. The creature's face was distorted; a mocking mass of light. Its hands twitched with long claws.
Yiasa screamed as the being rose and started towards her. She sprang upon it, pressing her hands hard around its throat.
The limp body fell into the water and the pierced white shell that Aniel had given her before the birth of Zepheris, fell from her neck beside it. Zepheris lay lifeless in the pool, while the crabs he had caught, scuttled away.
Aniel reached Zepheris first. The boy had run ahead, anxious to explore the pools. Incredulous, Aniel lifted the child and saw the strangulation marks on his neck. Then he saw the pierced white shell.
Yiasa had rounded a bend in the beach and waded into the water, splashing its salt wildly into her face. She perched like a mad mermaid on a rock, pushing agitated fingers through her matted hair. Her muddled mind wove beings from the hovering heat haze and, defensively, she thrust out her hands.
Aniel turned up a track that was a short cut back to his house, so did not see Loel running along the beach, desperately looking for Yiasa. Loel passed the rock pool, where Zepheris had died and slowed to draw breath.
Yiasa saw her materialising from the haze; a half being, whose feet did not touch the sand. Yiasa shaded her eyes, peering into the heat and recognised Loel. They embraced. Silently, Yiasa wept.
"Come to our father's house," said Loel. And still unaware Yiasa could not speak; "Tell me what happened." They walked unsteadily up the track recently taken by Aniel.
"Listen!" Loel stopped. Aniel was slumped on a rock, the dead child in his arms. Yiasa recognised Zepheris but could not recall what she had done. She halted, horrified. Aniel, sensing a presence, looked up. His face darkened. He fumbled and found the white sea shell and swung it before her. Slowly, she recalled what she had done. Shaking, Aniel rose. The women turned and fled back to the sea. Aniel cried out like a wounded beast that sees hunters moving mistily through his pain and stumbled in their wake.
Over the water the women saw the wide-winged sea birds and remembered their childhood game. The birds swooped to settle on the foam, then dived for the multi-coloured fish. Loel and Yiasa spread their arms as they ran, feeling the light wind fly through their fingers.
Suddenly they were airborne, their hands fluttering with feathers, their legs pulled hard beneath their bodies. Their bones were hollow, their heads thrust into the wind as they glided out to sea.
Aniel stopped and strained to look along the beach. He saw no one. Only two birds flying over the high white waves.
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