as her lanky fingers trailed the bark. Then, with more intensity, as her talons fingered a contorted sprig, she emphasized the line, ‘Noh shinboru ini naisetsu.’ Please observe the symbol inscribed…. She quickly folded her shame-colored capa on the dirt as a marker. Her half-naked body slipped through the chaparral. Thus she snuck, a lark through the branches, without a sound. The gophers and shrews and lemmings were all surprised when they saw her. She used her skin as a heightened sensory organ to help her scout through the scratchy spears and soft berries. A stick in the sticks, oak in the oaks, her feet and her knees moved like navitas and botos. She glided and whooshed and floated in pursuit.
Tears streaked Ravno’s cheeks as he ran. Tears from the air in his eyes and from the grief in his heart. His tears leapt into the forest as he half-whispered, half-mouthed, ‘I’m sorry Keba, I’m sorry Keba. Tam’ini miwa tekina. I’m sorry Keba.’ The creambush rod was like an extension of his stressing knuckles. He held the noh safely against his chest and offered the skin of his arms and shoulders to the forest in defense of it.
All at once the rod became a scroll as he switched with the Kawani as an afterthought. His chest shuddered, as he simultaneously chased and was chased, her swift feet through the brush and a sudden branch in his face. He felt the cold fingers in his head and warm blood pour from his nose with skin-of-fish taste. He switched back to his own self with a shattering and fell hard and broke the billet. He panted forcibly into the grass and twigs and leaves. Blood from his nostrils coated the noh, now more of an oval or an eye than a nine. His knees shuffled under his torso and his arms carefully steadied and raised his body. One eye worked the ground in search of the noh’s broken tail. The other eye followed the first, as a proselyte, and offered rough and red-blurred vision for his brain to decode.
‘Makian, my mat and all her jebatis,’ he said in frustration. His hands worked wildly through the canopy chaos and he sneezed snotty blood into the fray. He breathed roughly through his mouth and licked his bloody lips. Then he abandoned the lost tail and ran forward without a trail.
Back at the canalside the boto floated idly. The Ishi from Bu needlessly examined his articles while the navita and grebets signed about their afternoon plans.
‘Once they find that guy with the hair we’ll do one last trip down the Sunberry and Lurruna for the trio,’ the navita said.
The grebet that stood in the mud and held the boto added, ‘Then let’s spend some time in the para zona to chat about this debacle in private.’
Buried in his rainy-grey capa the Ishi self-consciously averted his eyes from their signed conversation. Yet he concocted the entire discussion in his mind, anyway.
The Ishi imagined one grebet say with disgust, ‘These are them, the three designates from Bu. They’ve been up here thrice since bulaniru you know.’
‘They won’t leave us alone,’ the Ishi made the other grebet say.
‘Though I wonder how many other ceremonies they do elsewhere. They must be burdening more islands with a private chartered boto all day.’
As if to justify his actions he made the navita say, ‘But it’s all the disobedient people that necessitate it….’
And on and on till he began to sweat in the early afternoon sun. The boto rocked gently in the canal. The wind strengthened and had long since cleared Roka’s purple shame and increasingly agitated the tops of the trees.
Back on the trail, the Ammit, hand-squeezer and billet-bearer, though currently deprived of his largest creambush rod, trumbled after the quick Kawani and her culprit. He eventually found her folded violet marker—with difficulty, since she had stopped shrieking. He speculated at the forest’s threshold as his large hands gently thumbed the illustrious capa. His jutting nose took in the honeyed smell of it.
The Kawani’s hunt continues
Vorra Mound sent her needle up and up. An improbability of shearwaters sailed close to it, a sure sign of strong offshore winds or a budding gale. Ravno couldn’t see the three or more black pimples in the whitening blue as he stumbled through the trees. He reached a clearing of wilted yellow coneflowers and slowed to the center—was that the sound of crackled wood back that way? He spun twice and grazed the timber with both his eyes. Disoriented, Ravno located Vorra’s needle; only then did he see the short-tailed birds, high as comets. He raced again for thicket’s edge. But again he slowed then stopped, turning the way he had come. He knew she trailed him directly. He switched to pinpoint her advance. As his eyes slid into place and he watched the branches brush by her face, he realized how automatic switching had become. Deliberate, usually, and still hard to control once there, but such as detecting a flash of firelight or shivering in the cold, the process had matured into an extension of his senses. He smiled. The hinge of his mind on his forehead diminished in the face of saturated concern and stress that dripped from his temples.
Ravno watched the scene brighten through the Kawani’s perspective when she reached the far lip of the clearing. He ran toward her posthaste. Ravno watched himself approach through the yellow and black polka-dotted carpet. The vibrancy of all the flowers subsided with the gathering clouds. He marveled that his own body could run without the need to watch from his own perspective. Suddenly the aspect of the chase became hilarious to him and he thought he would make her grin as he occupied her eyes.
Alarmed, the Kawani slowed her pace and narrowed her brow, yet kept on the advance, the subject of her hunt within reach. In a glance she saw a peculiarity about the noh and scratch lines on Ravno’s chest. She planned to keep her distance and use her authority to command him. Her determination was Ravno’s impetus to hold the charge toward her, and in a skip they were together. His arms pinned her arms tightly at her sides, a scroll a pendent in her hands. His adrenaline helped hold his web of strength as she struggled, his beating heart and her pulse and heavy breath all mixed up together.
She used her most dominating, staccato tone to command him to let her go. ‘Tame saya soltani.’ He slackened his grip just enough to show his suspicious smile and tensed again when she attempted escape.
‘Is this broken noh so important to you?’ he said. Her defeated slouch showed her frustration and anger. But he thought there must be more between the stitches of her hot emotion and, as he looked through her eyes, he sensed confusion, or was it hesitation—a faltering doubt?—that stained her rage. Also, though he couldn’t be sure, a hint of admiration when she looked at his jaw from the corners of her eyes. Because he sensed a great irony in it all, Ravno kissed her temple and laughed. She breathed in his sweat and he exhaled his blood. He felt numb, as if he followed a script.
‘We’re running after the same thing, aren’t we?’ he asked the Kawani.
‘Obviously,’ she said, indignant.
‘No, not the noh. I mean, I want to live and you want to live and we just see it a bit differently.’
She shifted a shoulder in protest or annoyance and wiggled to get free. She tried to raise a threatening knee but he kept his legs together.
He said, ‘We both want people to be responsible, am I right? We both need each other and everyone and everything else to carry on.’ I’m starting to echo Dabi like Keba does, he thought.
‘But we didn’t need that third child. Avalokana karo, kudasai.’
‘Not before, but she’s here now,’ Ravno said. ‘Why not teach her to see clearly with patience and respect? Instead of scalding the little thing with—’
‘Pada sariana dari kaku sankasha….’
Then there was silence. Ravno slackened his hold and the Kawani looked down at the papyrus.
‘All these names on this scroll, noh shinboru ini naisetsu, I’ve witnessed them all.’
The remorse smothered her words. He stepped aside, allowing her to unroll the thing to its full, ugly length. ‘Each person.’ Her fingers lingered on a name, Jaga, and another, Allete. ‘Most of them children when they were inscribed.’
Ravno’s face hardened with bitter sympathy. He felt out
of control. He stood back from her slightly and twirled the noh in his fingers. How many of these names did this one billet mark? It’s broken now. Suddenly, her palm crashed into his nose. The attack brought tears to his eyes and a startled cough to his throat. She grabbed the noh and disappeared through a sudden surge of rain. Ravno stood as a sugar pine, stuck to his roots in the earth, as if he watched his sister tree get cut down and removed.
The yellow, wilted petals of the flowers in the field drooped, wet, like his arms. The coneflowers surrounded him. The rushing rain water brought blood from his nose and chin down his neck and over the center of his chest. It ran under his cloth and stained the hemp material red, like the dirt that turned to mud between his toes. Ravno reflected how cold the rain was, and how appropriate. He switched with the Kawani—not for retaliation or to track her down but in an attempt to find that hesitation of hers. Surprised, he saw himself through branch and tree, through the impromptu waterfall, like a drenched feline in the freckled flowerbed, his hair flattened around his skull. He switched back to his own body and looked over in her direction. He couldn’t see her through the composite of water and bush, but he held his second hand to his heart. Cahaya.
She turned and fled.
Ravno’s inadvertent backup
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