The Shark God lifted Mirali high above his head—she was startled, but no longer frightened—and he spoke out, first in the language of Mirali’s people, so that she would understand, and then in the tongue known by everything that swims in every sea and every river. “This is Mirali, whom I take now to wife, and whom you will love and protect from this day forth, and honor as you do me, and as you will honor our children, and their children, always.” And the sound that came up from the waters in answer is not a sound that can be told.
In time, when the lagoon was at last empty again, and when husband and wife had sworn and proved their love in the shadows of the mangroves, she said to him, very quietly, “Beloved, my own olohe, now that we are wed, shall I ever see you again? For I may be only an ignorant island woman, but I know what too often comes of marriages between gods and mortals. Your children will have been born—I can feel this already—by the time you come again for your tribute. I will nurse them, and bring them up to respect their lineage, as is right…. but meanwhile you will swim far away, and perhaps father others, and forget us, as is also your right. You are a god, and gods do not raise families. I am not such a fool that I do not know this.”
But the Shark God put his finger under Mirali’s chin, lifting her face to his and saying, “My wife, I could no more forget that you are my wife than forget what I am. Understand that we may not live together on your island, as others do, for my life is in the sea, and of the sea, and this form that you hold in your arms is but a shadow, little more than a dream, compared to my true self. Yet I will come to you every year, without fail, when my tribute is due—every year, here, where we lie together. Remember, Mirali.”
Then he closed his eyes, which were black, as all sharks’ eyes are, and fell asleep in her arms, and there is no woman who can say what Mirali felt, lying there under the mangroves with her own eyes wide in the moonlight.
When morning came, she walked back to her parents’ house alone.
In time it became plain that Mirali was with child, but no one challenged or mocked her to her face, for she was much loved in the village, and her family greatly esteemed. Yet even so it was considered a misfortune by most, and a disgrace by some, as is not the case on certain other islands. If the talk was not public, it was night talk, talk around the cooking fire, talk at the stream over the slapping of wash on stone. Mirali was perfectly aware of this.
She carried herself well and proudly, and it was agreed, even by those who murmured ill of her, that she looked more beautiful every day, even as her belly swelled out like the fishermen’s sails. But she shocked the midwife, who was concerned for her narrow hips, and for the chance of twins, by insisting on going off by herself to give birth. Her mother and father were likewise troubled; and the old priest himself took a hand, arguing powerfully that the birth should take place in the very temple of the Shark God. Such a thing had never been allowed, or even considered, but the old priest had his own suspicions about Mirali’s unknown lover.
Mirali smiled and nodded respectfully to anyone who had anything to say about the matter, as was always her way. But on the night when her time came she went to the lagoon where she had been wed, as she knew that she must; and in the gentle breath of its shallows her children were born without undue difficulty. For they were indeed twins, a boy and a girl.
Mirali named the boy Keawe, after her father, and the girl Kokinja, which means born in moonlight. And as she looked fondly upon the two tiny, noisy, hungry creatures she and the Shark God had made together, she remembered his last words to her and smiled.
Keawe and Kokinja grew up the pets of their family, being not only beautiful but strong and quick and naturally kindly. This was a remarkable thing, considering the barely veiled scorn with which most of the other village children viewed them, taking their cue from the remarks passed between their parents. On the other hand, while there was notice taken of the very slight bluish tinge to Keawe’s skin, and the fact that Kokinja’s perfect teeth curved just the least bit inward, nothing was ever said concerning these particular traits.
They both swam before they could walk properly; and the creatures of the sea guarded them closely, as they had sworn. More than once little Keawe, who at two and three years regarded the waves and tides as his own servants, was brought safely back to shore clinging to the tail of a dolphin, the flipper of a seal, or even the dorsal fin of a reef shark. Kokinja had an octopus as her favorite playmate, and would fall as trustingly asleep wrapped in its eight arms as in those of her mother. And Mirali herself learned to put her faith in the wildest sea as completely as did her children. That was the gift of her husband.
Her greatest joy lay in seeing them grow into his image (though she always thought that Keawe resembled her father more than his own), and come to their full strength and beauty in a kind of innocence that kept them free of any vanity. Being twins, they understood each other in a wordless way that even Mirali could not share. This pleased her, for she thought, watching them playing silently together, they will still have one another when I am gone.
The Shark God saw the children when he came every year for his tribute, but only while they were asleep. In human form he would stand silently between their floor mats, studying them out of his black, expressionless eyes for a long time, before he finally turned away. Once he said quietly to Mirali, “It is good that I see them no more often than this. A good thing.” Another time she heard him murmur to himself, “Simpler for sharks….”
As for Mirali herself, the love of the Shark God warded off the cruelty of the passing years, so that she continued to appear little older than her own children. They teased her about this, saying that she embarrassed them, but they were proud, and likewise aware that their mother remained attractive to the men of the village. A number of those came shyly courting, but all were turned away with such civility that they hardly knew they had been rejected; and certainly not by a married woman who saw her husband only once in a twelvemonth.
When Keawe and Kokinja were little younger than she had been when she heard a youth singing in the marketplace, she called them from the lagoon, where they spent most of their playtime, and told them simply, “Your father is the Shark God himself. It is time you knew this.”
In all the years that she had imagined this moment, she had guessed—so she thought—every possible reaction that her children might have to these words. Wonder…. awe…. pride…. fear (there are many tales of gods eating their children)…. even laughing disbelief—she was long prepared for each of these. But it had never occurred to her that both Keawe and Kokinja might be immediately furious at their father for—as they saw it—abandoning his family and graciously condescending to spare a glance over them while passing through the lagoon to gobble his annual goat. Keawe shouted into the wind, “I would rather the lowest palm-wine drunkard on the island had sired us than this…. this god who cannot be bothered with his wife and children but once a year. Yes, I would prefer that by far!”
“That one day has always lighted my way to the next,” his mother said quietly. She turned to Kokinja. “And as for you, child—”
But Kokinja interrupted her, saying firmly, “The Shark God may have a daughter, but I have no more father today than I had yesterday. But if I am the Shark God’s daughter, then I will set out tomorrow and swim the sea until I find him. And when I find him, I will ask questions—oh, indeed, I will ask him questions. And he will answer me.” She tossed her black hair, which was the image of Mirali’s hair, as her eyes were those of her father’s people. Mirali’s own eyes filled with tears as she looked at her nearly grown daughter, remembering a small girl stamping one tiny foot and shouting, “Yes, I will! Yes, I will!” Oh, there is this much truth in what they say, she thought to her husband. You have truly no idea what you have sired.
In the morning, as she had sworn, Kokinja kissed Mirali and Keawe farewell and set forth into the sea to find the Shark God. Her brother, being her brother, was astonished to realize that she m
eant to keep her vow, and actually begged her to reconsider, when he was not ordering her to do so. But Mirali knew that Kokinja was as much at home in the deep as anything with gills and a tail; and she further knew that no harm would come to Kokinja from any sea creature, because of their promise on her own wedding day. So she said nothing to her daughter, except to remind her, “If any creature can tell you exactly where the Shark God will be at any given moment, it will be the great Paikea, who came to our wedding. Go well, then, and keep warm.”
Kokinja had swum out many a time beyond the curving coral reef that had created the lagoon a thousand or more years before, and she had no more fear of the open sea than of the stream where she had drawn water all her life. But this time, when she paused among the little scarlet-and-black fish that swarmed about a gap in the reef, and turned to see her brother Keawe waving after her, then a hand seemed to close on her heart, and she could not see anything clearly for a while. All the same, the moment her vision cleared, she waved once to Keawe and plunged on past the reef out to sea. The next time she looked back, both reef and island were long lost to her sight.
Now it must be understood that Kokinja did not swim as humans do, being who she was. From her first day splashing in the shallows of the lagoon, she had truly swum like a fish, or perhaps a dolphin. Swimming in this manner she outsped sailfish, marlin, tunny and tuna alike; even had the barracuda not been bound by his oath to the Shark God, he could never have come within snapping distance of the Shark God’s daughter. Only the seagull and the great white wandering albatross, borne on the wind, kept even with the small figure far below, utterly alone between horizon and horizon, racing on and on under the darkening sky.
The favor of the waters applied to Kokinja in other ways. The fish themselves always seemed to know when she grew hungry, for then schools of salmon or mackerel would materialize out of the depths to accompany her, and she would express proper gratitude and devour one or another as she swam, as a shark would do. When she tired, she either curled up in a slow-rocking swell and slept, like a seal, or clung to the first sea turtle she encountered and drowsed peacefully on its shell—the leatherbacks were the most comfortable—while it courteously paddled along on the surface, so that she could breathe. Should she arrive at an island, she would haul out on the beach—again, like a seal—and sleep fully for a day; then bathe as she might, and be on her way once more.
Only a storm could overtake her, and those did frighten her at first, striking from the east or the north to tear fiercely at the sea. Not being a fish herself, she could not stay below the vast waves that played with her, Shark God’s daughter or no, tossing her back and forth as an orca will toss its prey, then suddenly dropping out from under her, so that she floundered in their hollows, choking and gasping desperately, aware as she so rarely was of her own human weakness and fragility. But she was determined that she would not die without letting her father know what she thought of him; and by and by she learned to laugh at the lightning overhead, even when it struck the water on every side of her, as though something knew she was near and alone. She would laugh, and she would call out, not caring that her voice was lost in wind and thunder, “Missed me again—so sorry, you missed me again!” For if she was the Shark God’s daughter, who could swim the sea, she was Mirali’s stubborn little girl too.
Keawe, Mirali’s son, was of a different nature than his sister. While he shared her anger at the Shark God’s neglect, he simply decided to go on living as though he had no father, which was, after all, what he had always believed. And while he feared for Kokinja in the deep sea, and sometimes yearned to follow her, he was even more concerned about their mother. Like most grown children, he believed, despite the evidence of his eyes, that Mirali would dwindle away, starve, pine and die should both he and Kokinja be gone. Therefore he stayed at home and apprenticed himself to Uhila, the master builder of outrigger canoes, telling his mother that he would build the finest boat ever made, and in it he would one day bring Kokinja home. Mirali smiled gently and said nothing.
Uhila was known as a hard, impatient master, but Keawe studied well and swiftly learned everything the old man could teach him, which was not merely about the choosing of woods, nor about the weaving of all manner of sails and ropes, nor about the designing of different boats for different uses; nor how to warp the bamboo float, the ama, just so, and bind the long spars, the iaka, so that the connection to the hull would hold even in the worst storms. Uhila taught him, more importantly, the understanding of wood, and of water, and of the ancient relationship between them: half alliance, half war. At the end of Keawe’s apprenticeship, gruff Uhila blessed him and gave him his own set of tools, which he had never done before in the memory of even the oldest villagers.
But he said also to the boy, “You do not love the boats as I do, for their own sake, for the joy of the making. I could tell that the first day you came to me. You are bound by a purpose—you need a certain boat, and in order to achieve it you needed to achieve every other boat. Tell me, have I spoken truly?”
Then Keawe bowed his head and answered, “I never meant to deceive you, wise Uhila. But my sister is far away, gone farther than an ordinary sailing canoe could find her, and it was on me to build the one boat that could bring her back. For that I needed all your knowledge, and all your wisdom. Forgive me if I have done wrong.”
But Uhila looked out at the lagoon, where a new sailing canoe, more beautiful and splendid than any other in the harbor danced like a butterfly at anchor, and he said, “It is too big for any one person to paddle, too big to sail. What will you do for a crew?”
“He will have a crew,” a calm voice answered. Both men turned to see Mirali smiling at them. She said to Keawe, “You will not want anyone else. You know that.”
And Keawe did know, which was why he had never considered setting out with a crew at all. So he said only, “There is a comfortable seat near the bow for you, and you will be our lookout as you paddle. But I must sit in the rear and take charge of the tiller and the sails.”
“For now,” replied Mirali gravely, and she winked just a little at Uhila, who was deeply shocked by the notion of a woman steering any boat at all, let alone winking at him.
So Keawe and his mother went searching for Kokinja, and thus—though neither of them spoke of it—for the Shark God. They were, as they had been from Keawe’s birth, pleasant company for one another: Keawe often sang the songs Mirali had taught him and his sister as children, and she herself would in turn tell old tales from older times, when all the gods were young, and all was possible. At other times, with a following sea and the handsome yellow sail up, they gave the canoe its head and sat in perfectly companionable silence, thinking thoughts that neither of them ever asked about. When they were hungry, Keawe plunged into the sea and returned swiftly with as much fish as they could eat; when it rained, although they had brought more water than food with them, still they caught the rain in the sail, since one can never have too much fresh water at sea. They slept by turns, warmly, guiding themselves by the stars and the turning of the earth, in the manner of birds, though their only real concern was to keep on straight toward the sunset, as Kokinja had done.
At times, watching his mother regard a couple of flying fish barely missing the sail, or turn her head to laugh at the dolphins accompanying the boat, with her still-black hair blowing across her cheek, Keawe would think, god or no god, my father was a fool. But unlike Kokinja, he thought it in pity more than anger. And if a shark should escort them for a little, cruising lazily along with the boat, he would joke with it in his mind—Are you my aunt? Are you my cousin?—for he had always had more humor than his sister. Once, when a great blue mako traveled with them for a full day, dawn to dark, now and then circling or sounding, but always near, rolling one black eye back to study them, he whispered, “Father? Is it you?” But it was only once, and the mako vanished at sunset anyway.
On her journey Kokinja met no one who could—or would—tell her where
the Shark God might be found. She asked every shark she came upon, sensibly enough; but sharks are a close-mouthed lot, and not one hammerhead, not one whitetip, not one mako or tiger or reef shark ever offered her so much as a hint as to her father’s whereabouts. Manta rays and sawfishes were more forthcoming; but mantas, while beautiful, are extremely stupid, and taking a sawfish’s advice is always risky: ugly as they know themselves to be, they will say anything to appear wise. As for cod, they travel in great schools and shoals, and think as one, so that to ask a single cod a question is to receive an answer—right or wrong—from a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Kokinja found this unnerving.
So she swam on, day after day: a little weary, a little lonely, a good deal older, but as determined as ever not to turn back without confronting the Shark God and demanding the truth of him. Who are you, that my mother should have accepted you under such terms as you offered? How could you yourself have endured to see her—to see us, your children—only once in every year? Is that a god’s idea of love?
One night, the water having turned warm and silkily calm, she was drifting in a half-dream of her own lagoon when she woke with a soft bump against what she at first thought an island. It loomed darkly over her, hiding the moon and half the stars, yet she saw no trees, even in silhouette, nor did she hear any birds or smell any sort of vegetation. What she did smell awakened her completely and set her scrambling backward into deeper water, like a frightened crab. It was a fish smell, in part, cold and clear and salty, but there was something of the reptilian about it: equally cold, but dry as well, for all that it emanated from an island—or not an island?—sitting in the middle of the sea. It was not a smell she knew, and yet somehow she felt that she should.
Sleight of Hand Page 6
