Frank Herbert

by Frank Herbert

  “She had no thought of using her knife. Blood would have brought other sharks. Besides, she was still praying to Kau-hu-hu, the shark god, and didn’t want to offend him.

  “She swam on, keeping an eye on the shark as it circled her.

  “She says this was Kai-ale-ale, the king of the sharks. Her listeners know Kai-ale-ale. He is part of another legend.

  “This king of sharks waited longer before making the second rush. Again she met it with a hand on its snout. Twice more she met the attacks with the flat of her hand. Kai-ale-ale gave up and went back to his palace in the bottom of the sea. There were no more sharks that day. Grandma gained the net and prepared for another night. The pull of the waves swayed her body and made the coconuts knock against each other. She could still hear the gulls. Salt needles stabbed at a score of scratches she had suffered in the breakup of the Auroheva. And in her heart, Grandma Pu-pu was certain that all of the others had met death, but she had no time for grief.

  “Survival came first.”

  “What about the waters of Kan-e?” I asked.

  “In due time,” Paul said. He smiled toward the beach, where Grandma Pu-pu was chanting a new story for the children.

  “Before the dark came on that day, she broke out another nut and drank the milk,” he said. “The pain of grief hovered about her like a man-o’-war bird. She clung tightly to a small thought given her by Noana, the sea, and held away the grief.

  “Grandma catnapped that night, her arms laced through the netting, never dozing for more than a few seconds at a time. The water was warm and caressing. It comforted her.

  “The next day, the birds began to bother her. They were ha-lu-lu, she thought—birds of evil. She felt that she was near death, and she didn’t want the birds to have her. When they alighted on the netting, she shooed them away. When they circled overhead, she screamed at them. At last the circling birds made it impossible for her to forget her loss. She opened her mouth and let the death chant pour out, shouting it to the ha-lu-lu and the lapping sea. In the middle of the chant, she improvised new verses to tell of her husband and her sons and their friends.

  “For the better part of that day, she wailed her chant of grief. I have heard it just once, and I will never be the same again. ‘The breath of my life has gone out beneath the shroud—the black shroud—of the sea,’ she chants. ‘Bones of my ancestors, gather up softly these I love. Carry them up the rainbow, oh Hina-in-the-sky.’ When she chants them, all the listening people are still. They hear in Grandma Pu-pu’s chant a part of their past, and they mourn as much for the loss of that as for Grandma’s loss.

  “Again the following night she dozed, and again the sharks did not come. ‘Kau-hu-hu answered my prayers,’ she says. Well, who is to say to her, ‘nay’?

  “On the third morning, she began to take more careful stock of her situation. A land bird rested for a while on her net. She knew she wasn’t more than fifty miles from Faaite, but the current set away from the island, toward Rangiros and Makates there. Both were more than sixty miles distant. She drank the milk from two more coconuts. They gave her strength, and she thought. She knew the current, unaided, would set her south of these islands into the interisland channel. That would not do.

  “Alternating with a period of rest and a period of work, she began swimming northward, towing the net of coconuts with a line across her shoulder. All that day she struggled, pausing only to eat of a nut when she found the need. That night, she wedged her face between a stack of nuts and the netting and slept until the shifting cargo made her change position. She had gained perhaps four knots the whole day.

  “Again the next day she took up her work.

  “On her seventh day in the water, she saw a steamer’s smoke in the south, but not the steamer. It was the President Cleveland limping into Papeete, taking more water into her holds than her pumps could handle. The storm had caught the ship near Flint Island, and it had been all that time coming south. Grandma watched the steamer’s smoke disappear below the horizon. It was like a last touch with the world of humans.

  “Another day passed, and another. She was still a mountain of a woman, floating high, but her skin had begun to loosen, and there was a chafing sore on her shoulder where she swam against the line of the cargo net. Around her was nothing but the ocean, the sky, and an occasional seabird. She says that her skin began to get numb and she couldn’t feel the water or any pain.

  “She already had been alive in the water longer than doctors say is possible for a human.

  “On the fourteenth day, Kau-hu-hu sent another shark—or perhaps it was Kai-ale-ale again come to test this woman and her prayers. Grandma, a woman whose flesh was puckered and ridged from the long immersion, swam out to meet the attack. She caught the first rush with the flat of her hand on the shark’s snout. Seven passes that shark made before abandoning the fight. Grandma swam back to the net and clung to it. Her left arm had been torn from wrist to elbow by the shark’s sandpaper side as it brushed against her, but she swears her wound did not bleed.

  “‘It was a sign from Kau-hu-hu,’ she says.

  “From that point on, Grandma isn’t too clear as to how many days passed between incidents. Somewhere in that period, her strength ebbed to the point where she could no longer tow the cargo net and its coconuts. The nut supply had gone down to less than half of the original load. She no longer felt as much like eating, though. And as her strength diminished, so did her flesh.

  “We know the date the Auroheva broke up, and we know the day Grandma was found. Therefore, we know it was the night before her twenty-third day in the water when she heard the surf on the barrier here at Makatea. She said another prayer to Kau-hu-hu.

  “In the first dawn light, she saw the reef and beyond it, in the lagoon, a canoe with two fishermen. They were too far away, she knew, to hear a shout. She saved her strength. The coconut net floated nearer and nearer the reef. With her last strength, Grandma maneuvered the net between herself and the sharp coral of the barrier. She was so intent on the task that she failed to see the final shark Kau-hu-hu sent against her. The shark was a big fellow, a mala-ke-nas that had feasted on human flesh before. It circled behind her and dived down deep, deep—a milky-gray shadow beside the rainbow colors of the reef.

  “As the wave which Grandma hoped would carry her over the reef lifted under her, the shark made its run. She sensed her peril—‘Kau-hu-hu warned me,’ she chants—and put her head in the water in time to see the monster rushing up at her. She rolled sideways, and the shark came up alongside her. Its hide rasped the skin from her stomach, the inside of her left arm, which held the cargo net, and the left side of her face. It was that close. Then the wave deposited both of them on the reef.

  “Coral spines gouged into her. The flailing shark struck her a glancing blow, which broke her leg. And the following sea came onto the reef and washed both into the lagoon. The shark was gone in the instant, but Grandma was bleeding now in a dozen places, and she knew others would come. The coconuts had become lodged on the reef, and she no longer had a float. Her buoyant flesh was gone. But Grandma wasn’t finished. Nursing the broken leg, she set out toward the canoe, shouting on every other stroke.

  “There were two fishermen in the canoe. They saw her when she had covered about a third of the distance from the reef.

  “‘Save me!’ she cried.

  “But she wasn’t fooling those fishermen. They knew a sea demon when they saw one. They were certain it was a demon because the creature came from the sea and not from the land. ‘Mo-o!’ one shouted. And they fled, beating the water to foam with their paddles.

  “Grandma Pu-pu almost gave up when she saw that there would be no help from the fishermen. She floated for a minute in the water and then, she said, there came a last strength. Slowly, she began the long swim to the island two miles away. Her leg was broken, she was bleeding over half of her body, she had been a full twenty-three days in the water, and she had lost more than one hundred pounds of
her fat. But she still had the will to survive.

  “Look at her!” Paul gestured with his right hand, his finger pointing. “I say she is magnificent!”

  The group was still beneath the fara tree, and now the children were laughing as Grandma Pu-pu recounted a humorous part of the story she was telling them.

  I could see it too. It was a calmness that mantled every gesture she made. There was no mystery in life for her. She knew. She knew!

  “The two fishermen reached the island here,” Paul said. “They ran up the beach, shouting, ‘Mo-o! A Mo-o comes from the sea!’ People scattered before them.

  “They ran past the hut of Tiki, the one-legged diver, and Tiki, who could not run, came out to watch their retreating backs. ‘A Mo-o,’ he sniffed, rubbing the shark-chewed stump of his left leg. ‘It is more likely someone from the storm.’

  “He took his crutch from beside the doorpost and made his way down to the canoe the fishermen had abandoned. Out in the lagoon, he saw the swimmer. Hidden behind him, the people watched. He picked up the paddle and shoved off. The gap between swimmer and canoe closed rapidly. Then the canoe swerved in front of the swimmer.

  “Even Tiki’s courage wavered when he saw Grandma’s bloody face and torn body. He took two deep breaths and thought back to his own time in a sea turned red by the blood pouring from the stump of his leg. Then he reached down and pulled Grandma into the canoe. He marveled at the way her skin hung loosely on her thin body.

  “At the beach again, Tiki shouted and reviled his neighbors before they ventured down to the canoe. ‘It is a poor sufferer from the storm!’ he screamed. ‘Would you leave her to die and bring down a curse upon us?’

  “At last they came, with Chief Kauo-la-oe, the father of the present chief, leading the way.”

  Paul chuckled. “I imagine Grandma was quite a sight. For that matter, she still is. As you see, her skin, which was bleached a dirty gray, never quite regained its original pigment. She says it took two months before people were wholly convinced she was a human being. Tiki’s mother doctored her with herbs for almost four months before she really regained her strength. And in five months, when the mission schooner Faith of Jesus put in here, she was well enough to board and make passage for Papeete. She was still quite a sight, skin loose, the left side of her face scarred into a grimace. Most people shunned her.

  “At Papeete, she was greeted as one returned from the dead. The wreckage of the Auroheva’s longboat had been picked up by a trader from Tahanea and its story pieced out. Along with the others aboard, Grandma’s name had been added to the rolls for the Easter Mass.

  “She chanted her story there at the spring feast, and her fame began to spread. In about three months, an insurance agent came around with a check for the schooner and Pete’s life insurance. Grandma was suddenly a very rich woman by any standard. She was thirty-six years old, which is aged for Polynesian women, but she found herself very popular, surrounded by suitors—all with some scheme or other they wanted her to finance. She thumbed her nose at the lot of them. When the Faith of Jesus made its fall run back here to Makatea, Grandma was aboard. She was just Mrs. Pupuamahele Mahi, a widow, though.

  “She stepped out of the schooner’s boat onto the beach here and went right up to Tiki’s hut. Did I tell you about Tiki? You’ll see him around. He’s as ugly as original sin and a born clown. The shark that took his leg also got part of his face, and he has a perpetual grin. It’s pretty horrible until you get to know him. Grandma went up to the village and stopped there, where Tiki sat in the sun outside his door. She was acting as shy as a schoolgirl and ignoring all greetings.

  “‘Mea maitai?’ she asked. ‘You are well?’

  “‘Tauhere, you have come back to me,’ he said.

  “And that’s the way it was settled. Captain Arahab Nobles of the schooner read the ceremony that afternoon. Grandma Pu-pu was a bride again at thirty-six.

  “Old as she was by Polynesian standards, Grandma Pu-pu bore three more sons—Tiki Junior, Pete, and Joe.

  Paul pointed toward the old woman who was getting to her feet stiffly at the fara tree. “That toddler is Joe’s youngest, Wim.”

  “Where did she get that tremendous will to survive?” I asked.

  Paul watched the group on the beach. “She told me once that it came over her when she realized all of her sons were dead. Out there in the ocean, she knew that if she died, the lines of her family died, and so did part of her race.”

  “What about the waters of Kan-e?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it plain to see?” Paul countered. Again he pointed at the old woman.

  Grandma Pu-pu had picked up the toddler, taken another youngster’s hand, and was leading the procession away down the beach. “Where do you think they’re going?” he asked.

  “Where?”

  “Down to the lagoon,” Paul said, “for their daily swimming lesson. In Polynesia, it is the sea that buoys up life, feeds it, carries it on its bosom, makes life possible at all. The sea—it is the source of life. They swim in the waters of Kan-e.”

  Paul’s Friend

  “That’s Paul’s Friend.”

  Charlie Jens waved a whiskey glass toward the fire, a demon of red-and-yellow light on the hot beach below the veranda. At the fireside squatted a black man, part of the darkness around him, taking of the world only in mahogany reflection from the blaze. The light showed a broad, dull face with brow and cheeks a plowed field of scars. His flanks were thin and dim in the shadows; his heels were drawn back beneath him in the aboriginal way, and he stretched scar-laced arms toward the flames.

  It was the fire which had prompted me to ask, “Who is that?”

  A beach fire in July on the equator is a thing of fiction. And this night had drunk too freely of the sun’s heat on the day just past. It was hot beyond caring, and the only escapes were in getting sodden drunk or flirting with the sharks beyond the drumming reef. Charlie Jens and I were choosing the former. In the tropics, it is a white man’s privilege.

  “Paul’s Friend?” I asked. “Doesn’t he have a name? Who’s Paul?”

  “That’s his name, Paul’s Friend,” Charlie said.

  There was silence broken by the gurgling of the bottle as Charlie poured. From up in the village beyond the palm-guarded beach there came a high-pitched, giggling laugh. Someone began playing a harmonica on the schooner in the lagoon. And the heat closed in, carrying the scent of night blooms like a dark weight that oppressed the senses.

  I waited. The signs revealed that Charlie Jens was about to tell a story.

  Instead, he slammed down his glass, spilling the liquor in a dark blot across the rattan table.

  “Damn your nosy, stinking prying to hell!” he shouted. “Don’t think I don’t know why you come up here, filling me full of your good liquor! I don’t know why I put up with it.”

  Again there was silence interlaced with the dim harmonica music. With a shaking hand, Charlie picked up the bottle, looked at it, and filled his glass to the brim.

  “Yes, I know. This is why.” He held up the bottle and slammed it down. “You’ll take my stories, and you’ll write ’em up like I always intended and never did. And you’ll get rich while I stay here, selling trade goods to heathens.”

  “They’re Christians, Charlie,” I said.

  He snorted and gulped the drink, throwing back his head to show a thin neck with a bobbing Adam’s apple. The light from a hissing gas lantern that hung from a porch rafter sent a black shadow across his left cheek, reproducing a thin caricature of his bulging nose. His hair, totally white, hung unkempt down to the collar of a faded blue navy dungaree shirt. On top, it rimmed a bare pink spot in the center of his head—like an island surrounded by surf.

  “Christians!” Again he snorted. “Fat lot you know about it!”

  I leaned back, watching the play of Charlie’s wide mouth as he spoke.

  “Take Paul’s Friend there,” he said, spilling a bit of his drink on his arm as he gestured wit
h it. “He was an orphan, raised by a missionary on the mission grounds like one of their own. Speaks almost as good English as you; better than me. Many’s the time he’s come here to borrow my books to read. Don’t look it, does he?”

  The black man by the fire stirred slightly and lowered his arms. I became embarrassed. The man wasn’t sixty feet from us, just below the palm line. On the still air, sounds carry far. I knew he could hear us talking. Before, when I had considered him just another bêche-de-mer native, it had made no difference. When I realized he could understand us, it touched a chord the white man does not enjoy. It vibrated at the wall of our security.

  “His parents were kinky-haired cannibals,” Charlie Jens said. “How far away from them you think he is? Feh!” He spat over the veranda rail. “People don’t live forever on the equator, especially black people. He’s forty years removed from cannibalism. Christianity’s a thin skin on him.”

  “How’d he get his name?” I asked.

  Charlie reached over to the veranda rail with his whiskey glass and very carefully squashed a red crawler almost hidden in the shadow of a pillar. Then he sat back. The flesh of his stomach, showing fish belly white through the spread front of his shirt, began to quiver. The laugh rose within him like a shark swimming to the surface, and it broke coldly on the fetid air.

  “Aani Paul,” he said, making the Paul come out Pol. The laughter died slowly, struggling on the hook of his curved lips. “Paul’s Friend!” He bit it off.

  “She was gorgeous …” His voice had suddenly grown dim, almost hidden under the soft hiss of surf on the shingle of beach, blending with it. “She had hair like golden feathers, eyes like the blue-green of the lagoon on a spring afternoon. And she was proud of her figure and her long legs. She carried her breasts high.”