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spices into a leather bag with hot rocks. The ember and starlight accentuated her rhythm of nose and upper lip like the higher ridges of Vorra Mound in sunrise red. He watched her fill the small cups and thought he saw the beginnings of a smile as she glanced up at him. He was unsure in the deceptive light.
At first he ruptured with talk, encouraged by her silence. He explained the simple mathematics of large families that became ever larger and the limited resources that dictated the need for control. The dichotomy of branding loyalists versus so-called pro-life advocates confused him. Each side, or at least some staunch believers from each side, knew one hundred percent that their approach and conviction of the situation was correct, and that the other was mistaken. How could each side be one hundred percent unmistaken? Their perceptions were convinced. It was impossible.
Like a chorus of mossy hemlock and fir, her voice, though quiet, filled the antechamber: ‘I don’t have any saudaris and I will not be having any children.’
In the still space after her riposte, while Sircy sipped her spicy and warming tea, Ravno heard muffled breathing in the adjoining room.
‘There are seven of us in this pack, altogether. Three in the room beside us and three more in the house across the garden.’ She inexplicably synced her comments with his thoughts; it shook and allured him.
After they finished their tea, she showed him where the closest lavvy sat on a slight hill back toward the Sunberry Trench. Then, back at the pack, she folded her capa like a pillow and settled closely behind him. The hemp blanket enshrouded them both as they lay on the leaves. His eyes remained open and his mind-river swished around the bends and down drops and over stones.
And what, Ravno wondered, is the water? Life. So we live in our thoughts? Well, we live through what we perceive.
He listened to Sircy’s breath and matched his breathing to hers. In through the nose and down to the stomach, out from the chest and out from the nose. He had to breathe a bit quicker to match her pace. The blankets rose with their shoulders and few sounds fell around them as they lay. Her thin brows gathered at the moment he switched to her eyesight. His body just lay there. His breath came in through the nose and down to the stomach. A sharp intake of air through the mouth, and the skin around his ears and scalp tightened as his vision pounced back to his own eyes. Aron was right about the intimacy of being inside someone’s head. It was like talking for hours about minute details, but all within the brief instants of a switch.
Ravno left after carefully tucking the blanket between where her chin curled against her shoulder. His gaze briefly lingered on her closed eyes. She lay awake, of course, but she let him leave in the darkness. He made his way to the trench, unconcealed. He bunched his still-damp clothing in considerate and calloused hands above his head as he swam across the canal.
Just as Ravno exited the water, Keba left his pack in Mara where she had been watching the breeze play with the black leaves. Her bare feet, numb from navigating the forest and waiting all night, led her back to her pack in Phoyara where her saudara and the others slept. Though still troubled by the evening’s events, her thoughts inevitably returned to her parents. She had no idea where to find them and, in her memory, she only saw their shapes in a boto with a basket beside them. Keba also remembered a cry in the night as her mother had looked back with worry at her. Keba had hardly stayed composed; she had waited till the sounds of the paddles and hull in the water dissolved before falling with her hands in the sand and sobbing.
Confusion around Dabi’s letter and who thinks what about it
Jasmin Sanjukta held Keba tightly. Their hair mixed as storm clouds. They distressed in their speculation together about the possibility of the Eleven convincing Dabi to join them in their judgment. They wondered if Dabi had tired in resistance and if the enemy fed on her fatigue with their insatiable governance. Keba wore her disappointment plainly on her body after her friend confirmed Dabi had indeed left Lurruna before the last quarter. Jasmin Sanjukta saw the trip as a wise decision and understood the motive to get away. Advocates too involved become disillusioned and lose sight of the entire archipelago, as it were. Yet subtle unease crept between the many colors of Jasmin Sanjukta’s patchwork capa.
As it happened, with the sun halfway along its cosmic path and the last of the moon unassumingly low in the blue ether, Dabi returned that same day. After they greeted each other and settled on the warm earth, Jasmin Sanjukta asked her maitatu directly about the point of her travels; the answer was vague and indirect. Dabi had retired to Santulita to meet with some family there as she had explained before her trip. Her answer for the brevity of such a journey made sense in that she wanted to keep the momentum on Lurruna. But Jasmin Sanjukta still waivered, unconvinced because of the timing and clues from what Ravno mentioned to Keba from the letter.
Dabi mulled it over and wondered why she couldn’t tell Jasmin. She answered to herself that the discussions with the Eleven were in their infancy and hard to define. Yerek had proposed a licensing program for those who desired to become parents. Yerku supported the idea and explained the necessity of the approach. But Dabi was unsure whether parental screening would eliminate the unethical batsu omhaals—they would still need to penalize those who gave birth without license.
Yerek had been right though, in the letter, that Dabi’s canal would be redirected from the meeting. Dabi returned to Lurruna with a clearer understanding of the Bhavata’s role and even more so of her love for Jasmin Sanjukta. Dabi reasoned that Jasmin would become unnecessarily suspicious if she had known of the meeting with Yerku and Yerek, though her trust already seemed depleted in a way. Her usually vivacious eyes were held downcast and troubled. Perhaps tomorrow’s batsu omhaal was the cause, as it would steal another kukui nut from the lovely chersonese of her body.
Dabi looked kindly at her true love. She spoke of how they could overcome the population mandate and lessen the awful batsu omhaals. They would educate their people and Wawasens would rise as one, from life’s myriad species, and embrace the abundance of life and possibilities under their insulate skies.
Jasmin Sanjukta was not so easily placated. She inwardly questioned the usefulness of the Bhavata with a compromised leader. She went over to where Keba sat on the sand, just outside the Wawasen sitting circle on the beach side of the house. Keba split leafless hemp stems and twisted and braided the inner strings on her knee. Jasmin Sanjukta revealed that Ravno may have seen something legitimate and that the letter may have been a call to complacency and an attempt to dismantle the Bhavata House. Keba said nothing and finished the length of braided rope. She let the sun dry the small pile of gutted stems at her feet. The ocean waves continued their obsession with the shore and a gull passed high overhead, carrying an object, bright orange and lifeless, in its beak.
No ini kayama
On the eleventh day’s waning, three days before the new moon of bulanau replaced the sun in the sky, another victim and her family were branded on a bare headland in the north. The Duat and Teratas canals joined in a half circle close to Maradanicki’s small cluster of packs. The sun burned away all traces of steam or mist from the scene, where they assembled.
Keba met Ravno farther down the Duat, beside Mara, as they had planned when on their way to the para zona two days prior. His face was blank, the forehead crease mostly imperceptible, and they skipped the greeting.
Keba looked at him coldly, if at all. ‘You’re right about the letter. Dabi just got back yesterday from Santulita. Jasmin is crushed. I hope you’re happy.’
She didn’t get in the boto as it pulled up and Ravno said he would see her later. The sugar pine felt oddly hard under his thighs. He shifted uncomfortably. He felt guilty that he had exposed Dabi’s secret and had possibly slated the women against each other. But the guilt was heavily mixed with an accomplished sense of ownership. Wasn’t it best to expose them before Dabi’s plan developed further? Ravno had discovered the plan with a switch, the only action he had accomplished through hi
s secret craft.
Even so, Keba’s hard words made him feel useless to try anything against a power greater than himself.
The boto reached the spit of land before the Teratas Canal. Twenty-three people milled about and, despite his misgivings and indecision, Ravno still came to rest on his knees with two others. Ravno felt particularly unnatural in this position, with the high contrast of sun on bare land and no clouds or haze to hide behind, no Keba to depend upon. Though, he saw Keba’s saudara standing fixedly within the crowd. He also noticed the man in the red capa—first he noticed the capa, then the man—and Ravno automatically switched with him. The man conversed with his kashimat’s saudari. Ravno recognized her from the time with Aron by the large eucalyptus—old tree, old woman. She made a comment to the man but Ravno could only see her lips move amid the canals of her old face; the sound was lost in the wide stillness. Here, the man’s chest overflowed with explicit fervor, a fervor contrary to the somber setting and the eagle grip of the Kawani’s hands on the scroll. Ravno fed on this positive energy and drank it like a sea-starved grebet who’s lost her way between the islands. The man dropped to his