by Dan Simmons
Cordie’s round face had taken on an unreadable expression. “Nothin’, Nell,” she said. “I was just thinking how useful that would be…go on. This is better than General Hospital.”
“It’s just that Kamapua’a has also raped Pele dozens of times over the centuries,” said Eleanor. “There’s a place around the south end of the island in Puna called Ka-lua-o-Pele, where the land is torn and tumbled, and the legends say that this is where Pele lost the first great battle with Kamapua’a and where he…had his way with her.”
“Screwed her,” clarified Cordie. “Raped her.”
Eleanor nodded. “I’ve seen pictures of the place. It looks like tousled bedsheets.”
“Too bad Pele wasn’t strong enough to fight the oinker off,” said Cordie as the waiter cleared the last of the dishes.
“She might have been,” said Eleanor. “It was a hell of a battle—Pele’s fires against Kamapua’a’s deluges of rain. He even sent thousands of hogs to eat all the undergrowth so there would be nothing to burn. Pele turned his hurricane storms to steam. She covered his lands with lava. He fought back with more torrents. Pele was willing to be destroyed rather than yield to Kamapua’a. But the legends say that in the end her brothers—the ones in charge of the firesticks—saw that she was losing and ordered her to yield to him. They were afraid that all of the fires would be doused.”
“Typical,” said Cordie, and cracked her knuckles.
“Yes,” said Eleanor, musing. “Kamapua’a would be a likely suspect, but he rarely comes to the leeward, dry side of the island according to…”
“Holy shit,” said Cordie. She was staring over Eleanor’s shoulder.
Both women stood and moved to the terrace railing. In the last indirect glow of sunset reflected from the lowering ash cloud, thousands of tiny filaments were drifting through the air, catching the sunlight like thin fibers of pure color. Cordie and Eleanor rushed out of the Whale Watching Lanai and onto the garden area between the Big Hale and the beach. Strands of the stuff lay in the grass, on the pathways, and in the foliage along the way. Clumps of the pliant fibers, many stretching a yard or more in length, lay in waves like a woman’s hair.
“What is it?” said Cordie.
Eleanor shook her head. Now that the sun had set, the filaments had lost most of their color and seemed a faded red or polished silver gray. The impression of looking at a woman’s hairpiece was uncanny.
“Pele’s hair,” said a voice behind them.
They turned to see Paul Kukali standing there. The curator still looked distracted and worried. His voice was flat. “It’s a form of spun glass,” he said, “created when Mauna Loa and Kilauea are in full eruption. Touch it…see how pliable it is? It rarely travels this far.” He looked to the east, where the sky was brighter red than in the west. It was as if there were two sunsets this night. “The eruption must be worsening.”
Eleanor touched the hairlike fibers a last time and stood. “Does that mean we can’t go flying?”
“No,” said Paul, “just the opposite. The chopper’s here, although we’d better leave quickly before the ash cloud gets worse and they won’t let us fly.”
Eleanor turned to Cordie. “Are you sure you won’t…”
“Uh-uh,” said the shorter woman. “I ain’t afraid of much, Nell, but flying scares the shit out of me. I don’t want to do it when I don’t have to. I’ll go out and watch you leave, though.”
Paul had brought a golf cart and they rode back around the Big Hale, past the tennis courts and parking lot, through a section of the north golf course, to the heliport carved out of the a’a fields. Out here beyond the trees, the sky was lighter but the ash cloud remained a gray presence a few thousand feet above the ground.
The helicopter sat in the center of the asphalt circle, its rotors still turning slowly. It was much smaller than Eleanor had imagined, not much more than a bubble with a tail assembly and rear rotor. The wind from the southeast kicked at the orange wind sock hanging from the pole on this side of the landing circle. Because of the sky’s reflection on the Plexiglas canopy, the pilot was visible only as the vaguest silhouette.
Eleanor turned and gripped Cordie’s upper arm. “See you in an hour or two.”
Cordie’s eyes looked directly into Eleanor’s. “You be careful, Nell. If you find who I think you’re looking for, say hi for me.”
Eleanor smiled, nodded, and followed Paul’s crouched approach to the machine.
Cordie stepped back out of the wash of the rotors. She could not see the pilot from where she stood, but she watched as Paul crawled in first and then Eleanor strapped herself into the front seat. The helicopter’s engine climbed in pitch, the rotors blurred, and the small machine seemed to leap into the air like a dragonfly. Cordie watched it circle the resort once at low altitude and then swing out to sea, humming south along the coast.
“Good luck, Nell,” Cordie whispered. Then she turned back toward the oasis of gathering shadows that was the Mauna Pele.
NINETEEN
The bright gods of the underworld.
Shining in Vavau are the gods of the night.
The gods thick clustered for Pele.
—Pele’s prayer
June 18, 1866, In an unnamed village along the Kona Coast—
The sun had not risen above the mass of volcano at our backs, clouds were gathering, but the sky had brightened to a distinct gray by the time the will-o’-the-wisp guide brought us to the entrance to the Underworld of Milu.
The last mile or so of that descent toward the coast followed a raised macadamized road of uniform width. My tired horse had been plodding along this highway for several minutes before I heard the change in the noise his hooves made, and bothered to look down in the lifting gloom. The road was paved with flat stones, was obviously ancient, and had been constructed with a high degree of engineering skill. The stones were worn and smooth.
“It reminds me of those ancient paved highways leading out of Rome which one sees in rotogravures,” said Mr. Clemens, letting his horse fall back to ride next to mine now that the path had widened. Ahead of us, the sphere of burning blue gas floated along like a hunting dog leading the way to the fields. Our exhausted horses followed it with no sign of fear.
“I wish we were going to Rome,” I said, realizing how worn with fatigue and shock I felt.
“Hmmmm,” said Mr. Clemens in a tone of agreement. “It would seem a more pleasant prospect even to be visiting the Pope than to have an imminent audience with the King of the Ghosts.”
Despite the warming air, I shuddered. “We should not jest,” I said. Then, feeling that my tone might have been too harsh, I asked, “Have you been to Rome?”
“Alas, no,” said the correspondent, “but I hope to see all of Europe before I grow much older. If I grow much older…” Then he glanced at me with an expression that may have suggested discomfort at alarming me. “Have you been to Rome, Miss Stewart?”
I sighed. It was a tired sound. “I have just begun my travels, Mr. Clemens. I have seen little of the world, and my main regret in life is that I cannot live long enough to see it all. I had hoped to see Rome on this voyage.”
I could see my companion’s eyebrows rise. “Yet you said that you were headed west across the Pacific from here…”
“Yes,” I said. “Having seen the Rockies and written a description of my travels there…” I paused, shocked at my indiscretion.
“You write!” cried Mr. Clemens. “A travel writer! A fellow scribbler!”
I looked down at my hands, furious at myself for admitting such a thing and for the blushes that burned my cheeks. “Only certain journal entries I sent to my sisters,” I said. “They were bound…privately published…not a real book.”
“Nonsense!” cried Mr. Clemens, his voice rising. “I have been traveling with a fellow spirit without knowing it. Each of us has abandoned honest work for the highwayman’s pleasure of the pen.”
Knotting the reins tightly in my hand, I
attempted to change the subject. “From the Sandwich Islands, I had planned to go on to Australia,” I said. “Then back to Japan. Then perhaps China… I have a cousin who is a missionary there…and then India, and then perhaps overland to the Holy Land…and then Europe… Rome…” I trailed off, aghast at my own talkativeness.
Mr. Clemens was nodding as if impressed. “A respectable itinerary for a small lady traveling alone.” He patted his coat pockets as if looking for a cigar, frowned, and said, “How long have you set aside for this circumnavigation?”
I raised my face to the fresh breeze blowing up from the forested areas lying between us and the coast. The sea was quite visible now, glowing in the reflected light from the sky. “A year,” I said. “Two? More. It does not matter.”
“There is nothing in…ah… Ohio to draw you back?” he asked.
Instead of answering directly, I said, “My father left a considerable endowment for me in his will. For some years I have suffered from chronic ailments. My doctor advised me to travel.”
Mr. Clemens’s eyes glinted. “Hardly imagining,” he said, “that his patient would set off around the world.” He raised one leg and set it sideways across the saddle horn in a languid gesture. His boots were dusty. “Had your doctor known what adventures the Sandwich Islands would bring, I doubt that he would have included them in his prescription.”
Glancing to our right, desperate to change the subject, I said, “How strange. The surf is more than a mile away but one can plainly hear it.”
Mr. Clemens glanced over his shoulder at the distant line of breakers far below. “Have you watched the heathen at their national pastime?” he asked.
I shook my head. The horses plodded along the smooth stones. The will-o’-the-wisp guide seemed almost ordinary in my haze of fatigue and shock at Reverend Haymark’s death.
“Surf-bathing,” said the redheaded correspondent, patting his pockets again as if some cigar had escaped his notice. Evidently none had.
“Ah,” I said. “No, I have heard of it, in Honolulu, but have not seen it.”
“A magnificent sport,” said Mr. Clemens, resuming his normal posture in his saddle. “On my second day on Oahu I came upon a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing and surf-bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen. I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and I was satisfied that they were running some risk, but they seemed unafraid and went on with their sport.”
I looked down and said nothing, looking away so that this brash young man would not see my smile. Suddenly the old woman’s speech came back to me—‘You will rid yourselves of the absurd haole raiments which you have draped upon your bodies…’—and my smile faded.
“By and by,” continued Mr. Clemens, “the young men of the village joined the ladies and I became interested in their surf-bathing. Each heathen would take a short board with him, paddle out to sea for three or four hundred yards, wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along, and then fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board. It was amazing to watch, Miss Stewart. The best of them—male or female—would come whizzing in toward shore like a bombshell, like a lightning express train! Meanwhile, the heathens would be balancing on one leg, waving to one another, doing handstands, braiding their hair, as their boards came roaring into land atop these amazing crests of surf.”
Smiling once again, this time to show my incredulity, I said, “And have you tried this sport, Mr. Clemens?”
“Of course!” said the correspondent. He frowned at the recollection. “I confess that I made a failure of it. I got the board placed right—and at the right moment, too—but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom at the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. I suspect that none but the natives will ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.”
The sky was morning bright now, the sun just hidden by the peak of the volcano to the east, but the clouds moved in low and sullen from the sea and, despite the contrary winds, there was a stench of the firepit in the air.
I sighed again. I knew that all of my companion’s badinage was to raise my spirits and to take my mind from the terrors yet ahead, but the sense of uncanny urgency remained as real as the floating will-o’-the-wisp that now left the ancient paved road and floated across the a’a field toward the coast. Our horses hesitated a moment, clearly reluctant to return to the effort of finding a way through the sharper stone, but we urged them on and they eventually obeyed. The ball of blue gas had seemed to wait for us until we entered the lava field, but now it floated on ahead again.
Striving to speak in the same light, offhanded tones that Mr. Clemens had been affecting, I said, “I’m afraid that I will have trouble leading the haole ghosts from the Underworld… I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Clearing his throat as if preparing for another anecdote, Mr. Clemens replied, “Nor did I, until a certain autumn night two years ago in Carson City when…” He paused and then reined his horse to a stop. Ahead of us, a steep wall of lava had long ago pitched a thousand feet in a fiery waterfall now cooled to stone to smooth itself into a circular amphitheater that led down to a broad bay. The surf crashed audibly some quarter of a mile below. In this amphitheater stood a coconut grove and a few ruined homes.
“I think that this may be Kealakekua Bay,” Mr. Clemens said softly, as if we might be overheard. “Where they killed and cooked Captain Cook some years ago.”
Whatever the bay was called, this strange circle of smooth and rippled stone was bisected by a single great fissure, a narrow crevasse which was obviously the collapsed ceiling of one of the many lava tubes we had encountered on our ride. Where the will-o’-the-wisp had disappeared, the ground fell away and the opening to the fissure was more like the entrance to a cave.
The horses would not come nearer than thirty feet to this fissure and entrance. We dismounted, Mr. Clemens hobbled the tired beasts, he pulled a longer coil of rope from his saddle, and we walked slowly to the opening.
The sense of a cave entrance was misleading; even here where the ground fell away in lava folds, the fissure was more vertical than cavelike. Because of the overhangs of rock where the roof had fallen in, it was impossible to see whether the crevasse was six feet deep or six hundred.
My companion had tied one end of the rope he carried around a small stone. Now he tossed it into the aperture at our feet. “We need a lead,” he said, obviously distracted. The stone struck rock with less than twenty feet of rope played out into the opening.
“Good,” said Mr. Clemens, pulling back the rope and coiling it with the ease of endless practice. “Mark twain, I think.” He cast again, farther this time. “Yes,” he said.
I showed my lack of understanding.
“An old riverboat term,” said Mr. Clemens. “It means that the lead shows two fathoms ahead. Twelve feet. Deep enough for the keel to pass. Good news for the pilot. Actually, I like the term so much that when I submitted the Hornet article last week, I…”
“How shall we climb down twelve feet?” I asked, not wanting to interrupt but being much more interested in the task ahead than in quaint riverboat lore.
“The old hag said something about ieie vine,” said Mr. Clemens. “But I thought that this rope would be a better…” He stopped, staring over my shoulder with an expression so peculiar that it made me spin around.
A young woman was standing not six feet behind me. I had not heard her approach, even though the pebbles and stone had scraped under our shoes. She was a native, young, beautiful, with glowing brown skin, bright, dark eyes, and flowing hair the luster of a raven’s wing. She held two things in her slender hands—a stoppered gourd and a coil of what looked to be braided vine.
Before either of us could speak, the young woman said, “You must hurry. Pana-ewa and the others sleep for a short time after dawn, but they sleep lightly and wake easily. Qu
ickly now, shed those haole raiments…”
The voice was young, vibrant, soft, liquid in its native handling of the English vowels…and it was unmistakably a younger version of the old crone’s voice.
“Quickly!” said the beautiful young woman, gesturing with the hand that held the coiled vine. “Remove your clothes.”
Mr. Clemens and I looked at each other.
“Will, I was arguing with a pig,” said Byron Trumbo, tossing back his second vodka on the rocks. “A fucking pig.”
Will Bryant nodded, glancing toward Hiroshe Sato and the others across the long buffet table. “I know,” said Will. “Mrs. Trumbo refuses to leave and her lawyer insists that we…”
“Not that pig,” said Trumbo, turning quickly and wiping his upper lip. “I mean a real pig. A hog. An oinker. A big, fucking swine.”
Trumbo’s executive assistant squinted at his boss and said nothing.
“Goddammit, don’t give me that look!” roared Trumbo, loud enough that Sato and old Mr. Matsukawa and Dr. Tatsuro turned to stare.
Trumbo turned away, pulling Will with him. “Don’t give me that you’re crazy look,” he whispered raggedly. “I mean just what I said…there was this giant hog in a hole in the ground and he was down there with Sunny Takahashi…who was glowing like some damn radium dial from the fifties, Will…and he had, I think, eight eyes. The pig I mean.” Trumbo grabbed Will Bryant’s upper arm. “You believe me, don’t you? Tell me that you believe me.”
“I believe you, Mr. Trumbo,” said Will Bryant. He gently pulled his arm free.
Trumbo squinted suspiciously, but Will Bryant was nodding. “There are enough strange things going on around here,” said the assistant. “If you say you argued with a pig…you argued with a pig.”
The billionaire patted Will Bryant’s shoulder. “That’s what I like about you, Will…beneath that smooth Harvard Law School exterior there beats the heart of a real ass-kissing go-ahead-and-piss-on-me lackey. No offense, Will.”
“None taken, boss,” said Will Bryant. “But I have to tell you that we found Sunny Takahashi…”