Telesa - The Covenant Keeper

by Lani Wendt Young

  I shook my head impatiently, already moving on to the next thought. “Oh never mind, she’s just some comic book character. You know, a MADE UP person in a book, nothing like this boring reality staring at us in the face right here. You and your sisters, you can all do things with lightning and rain and wind, right?”

  A nod.

  “All those women I met the first night I was here, the ones that are always in and out of this place, those are your covenant sisters?”

  Another nod.

  “But me, my fire thing, I’m different? So where are the telesā that can do what I do? Where do they hang out? Where’s their feagaiga sa?” I stumbled over the unfamiliar words.

  Nafanua frowned and took a thoughtful moment before replying. “There aren’t any. That we know of. In fact, most telesā think telesā fanua are only a myth, a scary tale dreamed up by our mothers to fascinate and frighten. None of us have ever come across one before. I am the eldest of my sisters and even I have never known one. As a young child, my mother would tell me of her grandmother, Sau’imaiafi. She herself had never met her but they would speak of her with awe. With fear. It was she that raised these islands up from the ocean. She led her people from their original homeland and they travelled many miles, many months across the sea in search of new land to settle. After many days they arrived at a small cluster of islands – far too small to support them. The people were weary of travelling, hungry for taro and green things, tired of eating fish. They cried to her for help. Sau’imaiafi spoke to the earth, she summoned a volcano, the earth rose up out of the ocean in a magnificent eruption, and the islands of Samoa were formed. Can you imagine it? Mountains of lava and red fire moving to this one woman’s command, running over the ocean, forming valleys, rivers, rich fertile earth. Is it any wonder then that Polynesians call the earth fire goddess, Pele – the creator and destroyer of worlds?”

  I paled. If Nafanua was trying to impress me with the ‘awesome-ness’ of this fire power, then she was succeeding. It was so terrifying that I wanted to vomit.

  “So did you know that this was going to happen to me? When you had me?”

  She was shaking her head but I rushed on, my voice building to a crescendo as the rage rose within me. “How about when you came to Auntie’s house, when we first met? Did you know then that this was going to happen? Ohmigosh, all these weeks, I’ve been having these heat attacks and freaking out, not knowing what was going on with me. Why didn’t you come tell me? You should have warned me! Prepared me! Given me some formula or something to take so this wouldn’t happen.” I turned on her. “All my life I’ve never belonged anywhere, always been the outsider and now? Now I’m really a freak! Why didn’t you stop this!? You should have ASKED me if I wanted this. This isn’t right. This isn’t fair. I never asked for this. You had no right to do this to me.”

  Nafanua tried to calm me, “It’s not like that. Your gift is part of who you are. It’s written in your genetic code. It’s not something you can take a miracle cure for. Or wish away. Nobody put a spell or voodoo curse on you, you’re my daughter and so you’re blessed with special powers. Powers that many others would give their souls to have.”

  “No. I don’t want them.” My shoulders slumped defeatedly as I stared at my bandaged hands. “I don’t want to set things on fire. I don’t want to hurt people. Please, can’t you just give me some medicine to make it go away? I don’t want to be different, gifted, or special. I just want to be regular. Belong somewhere for the first time in my life.”

  Nafanua moved to stand beside me, gently taking my hands in hers, raising my face to look in my eyes. “If that’s what you want then stay with me. I can teach you how to control this. I can make sure you don’t hurt anyone. I’m your best chance at regular.”

  Did I really have any other options? Was there really anyone else I could turn to for help? Shoulders slumped resignedly, I followed Nafanua back into the house. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  

  It seemed ridiculous that something as mundane as school on Monday should even still be happening. The universe – for me – had imploded. Nothing was as it had seemed and all that I had believed to be ‘real’ and ‘important’ now seemed so meaningless. Of what import was Ms. Sivani’s English class, now that I knew such things as telesā existed? Spirit women who lived impossibly endless lives. Who could summon storms. And burst into flame when they kissed. Or burn a boy’s face off when they got mad? I was no longer the same person. I was an earth fire spirit. And my mother was really a hundred and sixteen years old. And she could call down rain from the heavens. And throw lightning with nonchalant ease. The universe had been rocked on its axis.

  I spent Saturday in a numb trance, following my mother around as she continued to explain what we were. The floodgates were opened and she was on an electric thrill as she recounted for me the history of ‘our sisters.’ Our kind. It was like cramming for a lifetime worth of exams in day as she tried to ‘catch me up’ on the sisterhood. The sisterhood. The word scraped at my insides like fingernails against a chalkboard.

  There was an electric thrill to the air as we walked through her garden, wisps of lightning kept dancing in the overhead sky as she spoke. I listened politely with one half of my brain filing everything away neatly. The other half I kept protected. The half where I was screaming. Soundlessly.Wishing she was just a certifiable lunatic spouting rubbish.

  “Leila, all of us have a special affinity with our mother the earth. She speaks to us and we cannot help but listen. To her pain, her cries for help. This gift manifests very early. A toddler will delight in her mother’s garden, flowers. She will cry when the earth is scarred. Burned. Defiled. She will grow to love plants. All life. Things will grow to her command, thrive to her nurturing.” She paused beside a gardenia. “Our very presence will bring joy to a gardenia and vice versa. Where did you think your gift with plants came from?”

  I shrugged. For as long as I could remember, plants had made more sense to me than people. But I had always just assumed that was because I was a miserable people person. Even now, my mind shied away from my link to my garden back home. Or the time I had gotten ill when Dad and I had visited a mass burial site in Nigeria.

  Standing on the plain with wind whipping through my hair, a wave of nausea swept over me, so powerful it brought me to my knees. ‘Leila?! What is it? Are you okay?’ Dad’s anxious hands helping to lift me. My vision blurring a hazy red. Everywhere there is blood. Dark, thick, wet blood that stains the soil. Soaks it. It cries out to me. Speaks to me. A child huddled beside her mother. Screams. Bodies being hacked to pieces. Gunshots. Raucous laughter. Dirt. Shoveled earth. Covering but never forgetting. I stumble away from the site to throw up again and again beside the rental car. My dad holds my hand and worriedly gets me a drink of water. I am crying. Mumbling incoherently. ‘Dad, can’t you feel it? Can’t you see it? There’s blood everywhere. This earth can’t even breathe, it’s so smothered with it. Please, Dad, take me away from here, please.’

  She continued, oblivious to my discomfort. “We are protectors. Guardians of this land. That is why we have these powers. Anciently, telesā were guardians for specific areas of land and the people of that area would pay her homage. It was her responsibility to watch over that space and its life, make sure that the balance of our mother earth was not disrupted. Things are a little different now. Man tramples haphazardly over earth and so we telesā have had to band together more. Unite in a sisterhood. I am the leader - the covenant keeper - that holds our sisterhood together. You have met all my sisters. The six of us make up our covenant.

  Now, there are three different gifts, each attuned to one piece of our mother. First, there is telesā matagi. We are woven to the atmosphere’s currents, and patterns. We can speak to the wind, storms, the rain.” She turned and waved her hand gently. One gesture is all that it took and a gust of wind rushed past me, almost ripping my hair out of its clips in its ferocity. Another flick of her wrist, a half smile
and a light sprinkle of rain misted down out of nowhere, watering the gardenia bushes beside us. I stood still, fighting for control, fighting the urge to run screaming for the house. My dad would have been impressed with my self-control as I shrugged my shoulders and continued walking beside this woman who could summon rain and send wind to rip out your hair.

  “The most powerful of us with this gift can manipulate the air currents so we can fly.” I was weak with relief when she didn’t give me a demonstration of that one. I didn’t think that my overloading brain could handle the sight of my mother flying. “But it takes many years of nurturing one’s gift and building your bond with air before you can enjoy that kind of ease with it. I have it, but Sarona, for example, she is younger and not as experienced, so she has yet to attain that depth of her powers. She can be impatient and headstrong at times that one. I am trying to be forgiving of her impetuosity. Before you came, I had thought it necessary to indulge her as she was the most obvious choice for my successor.” She had a thoughtful look on her face as she regarded me in the afternoon light. “Everything will be different now that you are here. We can move forward unimpeded now.” Her step quickened and a flash of lightning, far more vicious and vivid than the others crackled through the sky, setting my teeth on edge and making me jump.

  “The second gift is water. Well, ocean. Telesā vasa loloa. They are woven with the sea and, to some extent, rivers and streams. They speak to water and can summon tidal waves and whirlpools. It’s somewhat different from the other gifts because they usually have a close affinity to the animals of the sea. The most powerful of them can speak to sea animals. The legends tell of them living as one with dolphins and whales. They are amazing swimmers. I knew one sister whose gift spoke very early in her life. She was only eight years old when she summoned a wave to upset a fishing boat – some fishermen were hunting a pod of dolphins she had befriended and the two men were killed.” She pursed her lips, disapprovingly. “It can be very dangerous when a gift speaks to one so young, children have little self-control and are very impetuous. I had worried about you so far away and what would happen if your gift spoke to you before I could find you.” She shook her head at unspoken thoughts and remembering the raging inferno I had caused at the school, I couldn’t argue with any of them.

  She drew me to sit beside her in the garden chairs under the frangipani tree and took both my hands in hers. “That brings me to the final gift. Yours. Earth. Telesā fanua afi. Earth fire. It is potentially the most powerful and the most rare. We have not seen anyone with this gift for several hundred years and so we don’t really know much about it and how it works. Polynesian mythology speaks of the volcano goddess Pele, as the creator and the destroyer of lands. Your gift comes from the earth’s core. There is incredible heat, pressure, and movement there. You will be attuned to the earth’s movements, currents. You will control fire. Summon volcanoes. Call earthquakes. Mafui’e. And in many ways, Pele can call on the gifts of her sisters. Your earthquakes can move the waters. Call on the earth to bring forth life. But understand me clearly my daughter – Earth does not give her gift without a price. Yours is the power that is most difficult to control. Once unleashed, fanua afi does not often willingly recede. Your gift is intertwined with your emotions. Anger. Fear.” She took a deep breath before rushing on. “And physical desire. The fire will not allow you to love. Do you understand me, Leila? At least not without dire consequences for your lover. I would not recommend that you attempt to test your fire’s limits. It is not so with us air and water telesā but still, we do not have attachments. We will take a lover but we will not love. This is imperative. It is the first rule of the telesā. Men cannot be trusted. They can never understand our gifts. Or be aligned with them. They will only seek to control us for their pleasure and their own agendas. We never allow ourselves to be emotionally beholden to any man. The other night when you were …” she paused delicately, “with Daniel, your powers ran wild because you did not have the necessary training and other controls to handle such physical contact. But now, together, we can work very hard to ensure that such a thing does not happen again. I will teach you. The first key to control is to master your emotions. As you have found out for yourself, extremes of feeling are enough to spark your powers. So, you need to work on self-control – don’t get angry, don’t get upset, don’t get excited. You have to strive for inner peace and calm. And there are other things you must do.”

  I looked at her questioningly. “What things?”

  Nafanua led us back inside to the kitchen where she poured me a glassful of green liquid from a pitcher in the fridge. “Here, drink.”

  I sniffed at it suspiciously. “What is it?”

  She rolled her eyes at my mistrust. “It’s a blend of too many plants for me to explain right now. Suffice it to say that all telesā drink it. It refines our awareness of our gifts and our control of them. Go on, the sooner you start taking a glass every day, the easier it will be for you.”

  Steeling myself for something disgusting, I drank and was pleasantly surprised by the slight hint of mint and whiff of papaya. “Hmm, not bad I guess.”

  She smiled at me. “Well I have been blending medicines and treatments for a very long time, so I think I can make it taste halfway decent.”

  I ignored her effort to make light of this whole nightmare. “What else do I have to do to master this thing?”

  Nafanua took a deep breath and grimaced slightly. “I’m afraid that the other control is not so easily undertaken. You will have to prepare – mentally and physically – before we can give you the other vital tool for telesā self-mastery. You are not ready, it will take time.”

  I pressed her. “What is it? Tell me.”

  In answer, Nafanua slipped off her seat and with one swift movement, hitched up the side of her skirt to the mid thigh, revealing the band of black patterns tattooed on her skin. It began at the knees and ended at the height of her thighs. “A malu. The traditional tattoo given to women.”

  I stared at her aghast. “That? I have to get a tattoo like yours? No way. I can’t. I’m not doing that. No. I won’t do it.”

  Nafanua raised her hands appeasingly. “Hush my daughter. Don’t worry. It’s not something that you have to consider right now. There will be plenty of time for it later. And we telesā have herbs that mean it is not that painful. We won’t speak of it again until you are ready, until you have reached a certain point in your training. The malu is the final step in the journey towards becoming a telesā. It is essential to your mastery of these gifts. The inks are made with certain plants that will give you the infusion you need to be in complete control of your fire. We prepare the inks and administer the malu ourselves. Now come, we have much more to talk about and there are things I want to show you in my lab.”

  I was happy to have her change the subject as I slowly followed her to the backyard lab. A tattoo was the last thing on earth I would ever do. No way in hell was I going to get one of those. For a brief, unwilling moment, an image flashed in my mind, of Daniel with his tattooed chiseled arm. The look in his eyes as he explained the different markings. The edge of excitement as he told me about his plans to get a full-body pe’a. The feel of his skin under my fingers as I delicately traced the black patterns. His kiss. NO. I resolutely slammed a wall on that image. Stop it Leila. It was too dangerous to think about Daniel. No. I wouldn’t go there. I had almost killed him and I could never allow myself to get close to him again. That was the only thing I knew for certain.

  

  The rest of the week passed in a blur. Daniel called. Again and again. But I switched the phone to silent and just watched the ring tone dance on the receiver. And each time I ignored his call, another piece of me withered. He tried calling the house phone. But Netta politely told him I was unavailable. And each time she did, I cut a little deeper. Monday, I told Nafanua I didn’t want to go to school. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, the same. Instead, I slept. And slept some more. Simone texted me. Si
nalei called. But I sent them vague replies, telling them only that I was busy with family stuff. Nafanua spent most of her day at work. She had endless meetings with some environmental agents visiting from Europe. Something to do with logging rights. And a volcanologist expedition on the other island of Savaii. I slept. I didn’t want to feel. Didn’t want to think. Didn’t want to remember. If ‘inner peace and calm’ was the key to control then I figured the best way to achieve that was not to feel anything at all. Sleep was the answer.

  Friday morning, a green truck pulled up out front. Daniel. I watched him walk to the door from my window. I felt nothing. A bland dullness. I was disengaging. He couldn’t be part of my new life, so the quicker I cut him out of my consciousness, the better. Netta told him I was sick but I could hear him arguing with her, insisting that he needed to see me. I wanted to do nothing but lie in my curtained darkness and sleep, but sympathizing with timid Netta’s attempts to obstruct a six-foot tall rugby player, made me drag myself out of bed and go downstairs.

  He stood in the living room, his face flushed and defiant, shoulders rigid, fists clenched. I stopped short at the sight of him. I was wrong. A week had not lessened the impact of his beauty on me. It pierced my numb soul and cut through my dead stupor.

  “Daniel …”