by Matt Larkin
Kanaloa must have sent those two to attack because he learned of her presence. Either he knew what she was about, or he or the other mo‘o wanted to avenge the death of Kū-Waha-Ilo, as they had tried upon Pele. Regardless, surely they had come here hunting her.
The only chance she had to prevent more bloodshed now was to find Mo‘oinanea and reach an accord with her.
A peal of thunder echoed outside.
22
Climbing a mountain used to be fun. That was back when Kamapua‘a’s legs worked the way they were supposed to. It became less fun when your legs swelled up and made every step torture.
Plodding along, in the rain, torture with the left foot. Torture with the right. Left torture. Right torture.
Where the actual shit pit did the Snow Queen even think about a curse like this? Had Kama deserved this sort of torment? Sure, he had the Boar God inside his body, making itself at home, but it wasn’t as if Kama invited the shitter over and offered him a coconut.
He huffed along, mud squelching between his toes as he struggled to make his way up Mount Waialeale. He wasn’t even supposed to be on Kaua‘i after Kana had banished him. If his nephews found him now, they’d probably have to sacrifice him to Kū or some such pig shit.
And here he was, climbing a mountain he’d not have tried to climb back when he was running around the wilds as a bandit here. Because everything in his whole life was composed almost entirely of shit.
The winds picked up, whipping his hair and tugging at his malo, leaving him tempted to just let the thing fly away. Sometimes, in fact, he was tempted to just give up. Let the rot take away his legs, and then maybe the Boar God couldn’t murder anyone.
An eel slithered around his gut as the god grew angry at his thoughts.
“Well, what?” Kama demanded. “You like murder too much, all right. Murder is not nice behavior. Good people do not murder other people. At least not very often. Not without reason.”
Again the convulsion in his abdomen, a clenching about his balls.
“No!” he shouted. “Liking to see people die doesn’t count as a good shitting reason!”
The wind continued to thrash him, intensifying the rain as it flung it on him. And carrying a scent … something familiar.
What was that?
A … mermaid? Up in the mountains?
Huh!
Yeah, and weirder still, he knew that mermaid. Pele’s sister, Namaka, was below, heading for the same peak as him.
Kama groaned and slumped down on his arse, which too squelched into the mud, forming a cozy seat for him. Why the shit would the mermaid princess come up here? Last time he’d seen her, she’d helped recover the Waters of Life for her and Pele’s sister. Or he’d helped them do it. Either way, it had been a remotely good time that had left him feeling like slightly less of a miserable shit.
Did that mean anything? He didn’t hold much with people going on about fate and so forth. Sounded like excuses to him. He snorted. “No, no, no, I’m not responsible for that steaming pile of shit in the common house. Fate made me do it.”
What nonsense.
But then, how was she here, now, climbing the same shitting peak he was?
Could she be seeking the dragon herself?
As he rose, another scent came to him … Niheu? His nephew?
Huh. Hadn’t ever expected an unclimbable mountain in the middle of the island to get crowded.
Fate or not, Kamapua‘a found himself holding fast, waiting for Namaka and her little party to catch up to him. As it turned out, there were three mermaids climbing the mountain. In case one had not been silly enough.
“You?” Namaka asked, staring up at him when he rose.
With the moon behind him, he must have presented a stunnifying figure. Just to be sure, he planted his feet wide and jammed his fists in his hips. If he could’ve called up a lightning bolt right behind himself just now, it would have completed the—
Lightning flashed, only in front of him, blinding him with white light for a moment, leaving him blinking at the sight of his own magnanimity.
By the time the haze cleared, Namaka had closed the distance and shoved him, sending him sprawling onto his arse.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“We found the Waters of Life together,” he ventured.
“So?”
“So, I thought maybe, if you were again looking for the same thing as me, we’d find it together again. Like, you know. Between the two of us, we’ve got two brains.” He climbed to his feet. “Two balls, too, if that comes up.” He shrugged. “Anyway, mine’s great big and filled with smarts, so maybe it can help you.”
“Your balls?” the mermaid asked, mouth suddenly full of pointed teeth.
“Nah, my brains. I mean, I guess the balls could help if what you need is—”
She raised a hand to cut him off, instead glancing back at Niheu.
The boy sighed and rubbed his face. “You’re not supposed to be here, Uncle.”
Kamapua‘a raised a finger. “See, it’s all right I broke the tabu and shit, because I had a reason for it. On account of I’m looking for Mo‘oinanea. And she’s related to us. So. Nothing to worry about. Rules only apply when they’re not in your way.”
Niheu groaned. “I am forever torn between wondering whether you actually believe the stream of absurdities that flow from your mouth, or whether it’s an act to shirk responsibility for your actions.”
Kama snorted at that. “Please, like I need to act just to shirk responsibility. Kid, I shirk off so much they renamed it after me. In some places, they call avoiding work, ‘doing the Pua‘a.’ It’s true. I’m great at shirking.”
Another groan. “I’m sure at least some of those words are true.”
Well, of course some of them were true. Kamapua‘a couldn’t say for certain which ones, but he usually figured if he used enough words, at least some of them would work out to be correct. That was how smart people talked, after all. Clearly, his nephew needed additional education.
“You want to find the dragon?” Namaka cut in. “Why?”
Kamapua‘a waved at his legs in case she had forgotten. “She’s my great-great … some kind of greatest grandmother, so a kahuna told me maybe she can help dig my way out of this stream of shit. Which shitting hurts. Also, I’ve got a Boar God trying to take over my body, which is generally not desirable.”
The mermaid stared at him a moment, then motioned for him to follow behind her as she set off further up the mountain.
Kamapua‘a watched her and the other mermaids climb. He scratched his beard, wondering how he’d wound up in such a gathering. When the others had moved on a little, Niheu lingered.
“What am I to do with you? What will I tell Kana?”
He looked to his nephew. “Your mother is home now, right?”
Niheu nodded.
Well, some good news at least. They’d managed to get her out of Haupu. “When you get back, tell him whatever you feel is right. That’s all on you.”
In the meantime, it was time to start reeducating his nephew. They had a long climb in which to bring the boy around Kamapua‘a’s way of thinking.
23
Namaka crested the hill, breaking through the tree line, and stared beyond it to the slopes rising at impossibly steep angles all across this mountain. She would not enjoy this. The rains had abated briefly in the morning, after they encountered Kamapua‘a, but resumed their barrage by that afternoon, swirling up into a full-fledged storm by evening.
And ahead of them lay one of the tallest peaks on the island.
Niheu was guiding her, honoring his brother’s pledge, though she knew she ought to send him back. The mountain was clearly in sight. But his presence was welcome … more welcome than any of the others, in fact.
She blew out a long breath before starting the ascent. The dense jungles covering the lower mountains had made her going slow, but at least she had handholds on the tree trunks, vines, and
low branches. More than once she twisted her ankle, cut her feet on rocks.
That, and her ribs ached like fire, each breath burning as though drawn through a volcano. A mortal would have died from the wound the mo‘o had given her, and even she had little business on her feet now. But every moment of delay risked more attacks on the humans, more danger to the Muians, or more chance Kuku Lau would lead the people so far away there would be no return.
Ahead, the tree cover remained dense, but the declivities grew so steep she couldn’t imagine an easy way to climb the slope. From here, she could see and feel the torrential outpouring of streams running off the mountain, overflowing into plummeting falls of immense beauty. Perhaps she would have reveled in such a landscape, had she not needed to scale it.
Instead, she stood there, rain plastering her hair to her face, caught in equal parts wonder and horror at what lay before them.
“It’s shitting wet as shit out here,” Kamapua‘a complained from behind her shoulder. “I mean, not like a wet shit, because that’d be nasty. Thinking about Wākea spewing his shitting guts out on our heads. But you know what I mean, right?”
Niheu coughed. “I find it hard to believe you’re my uncle.”
“You mean because I’m more like a father to you. The father you almost never met. Who’s kind of a big brother to you, but a little brother to your mother.” The wereboar grunted. “Yeah, don’t go thinking too hard on the relationals between us all.”
Sparing him only enough time to roll her eyes, Namaka pressed onward, over the cleft of the hill and into the last valley that lay between them and the final ascent toward the caldera. She placed each foot with care. Even with the nest of roots adding some stability to the soil, rushes of mud slipped past her in sporadic bursts, trying to sweep each of them aside, and if she wasn’t—
Tilafaiga shrieked, caught in another rush of mud. She toppled onto her arse, half disappearing into the waist-high torrent, and pitched down the slope, tumbling in a wailing, sloshing plummet. And all Namaka could do was gape at the other mermaid while clutching the wound in her side.
“Well, shit,” Kamapua‘a said, for once echoing Namaka’s own thoughts.
Groaning, Namaka spread her hands, separating the pitching water into twin streams to either side. With her injury, it felt a lot like she was physically holding up the weight of so much liquid, but it exposed where Tilafaiga had fallen, three score feet below.
“Huh,” the wereboar said, trudging down to her, then helping her up. “I was pretty sure you’d just gone and drowned.”
With a gasp, Tilafaiga shoved him away, shaking her head. “Filthy Moon spirit. I’m a mer. I’m not going to drown.”
“In mud, you might,” Namaka cut in. “Try passing that through your gills?” While she understood the impulse to cover one’s shame with anger and indignation, she had seen enough to know nothing could prove worse than provoking the spirit inside that wereboar. Tilafaiga may have sensed something dire inside Kamapua‘a, but that was nothing compared to actually seeing it rampage, ripping menehune and harpies to shreds with such feral abandon as would shock the most savage of beasts.
Her hand was shaking now from the effort of keeping the waters separated, so she ushered the group up onto higher ground before releasing her grip. The mudslide resumed its natural course, flushing back down into the valley with such force as to strip away some of the lower underbrush, washing everything clean.
Groaning, Namaka bent over, hands on her knees, panting.
“All right?” Taema asked.
Namaka managed to bite back the answer that she had taken a mo‘o spur through the chest and then had to use her strength to save Taema’s sister. So much of her mana at the moment went to simply staying on her feet. Instead of any of that, she just nodded slowly, until Taema helped her rise.
From the look of the others, none fared so well, save perhaps for Niheu. The other mermaids looked overwrought, weak and afraid at straying so far from the sea, while Kamapua‘a—perhaps nominally the strongest of them all—appeared to have suffered a severe disease of the legs, producing monstrous swelling. Dropsy, she would guess, though she was no kahuna, and regardless would have thought anyone possessed immune to such a thing.
Despite Tilafaiga’s rejection of his uncle, Niheu still helped the mermaid up, while Taema and Namaka climbed side by side. She clung to the protruding roots of banyans, hefting herself ever upward. As the slope became almost sheer, she used these handholds more as a ladder than a mere aid.
Looking down, she found a drop of hundreds of feet sprawling out beneath her. The canopy and mist obscured her view, but she could feel the torrent of floodwaters down there, streaming from the mountain into the valley. A few dozen paces to her right, a waterfall pitched into that current.
Taema followed her gaze. “Do you think it runs all the way down to the sea?”
“Eventually,” she admitted. “But you’d probably get dashed against rocks and roots and Deep knows what else long before you made it there.”
“Huh. Land is so treacherous.”
Namaka snorted, sputtering as rain pounded against her face. “What about your host’s memories?”
“Uh … faded. It was so long ago, the host is gone. Her mind collapsed, I think, and her life seems a dream.”
Namaka grimaced, gripping a higher root and hefting herself up. “It wasn’t a dream. And you stole it from her.” She did not look back to see what reaction, if any, Taema would have to her accusation.
How, indeed, was any mer meant to react? They took human bodies as if it was their right, feeding on their mana to sustain themselves, relishing in the pleasures of the flesh that seemed so muted in Avaiki. And safe—far safer here than in the Spirit Realm, where an endless cavalcade of horrors sought always to consume one’s soul. If the politics of Mu and the Seven Seas of the Mortal Realm were interminable and maddening, those of Avaiki—of any spirit world, she imagined—became downright labyrinthine, torturous and treacherous, without the barest hint of human compassion to stifle the baser impulses.
This world was the salvation of mer, the escape they longed for, the course that led from their own damnation. And Namaka would condemn them for taking the only means of ingress available to them.
“Didn’t you take a host, too?” Taema ventured.
That caught Namaka off guard and she did glance down at the other mermaid, though the streams of rainwater prevented her from making out Taema’s face clearly. “I’m in a symbiotic bond—two souls merged. You know that.”
“But Nyi Rara—the real Nyi Rara—took the host first. Only later she bonded to become you.”
Grunting, Namaka pulled herself up higher, having no good answer. Was she to feel guilty for crimes done to herself? Did her actions since then abrogate any such responsibility? Moreover, to whom should she apologize? She was Namaka, and Nyi Rara, and could draw no distinction between the two, save semantic ones.
No, all she could do now was continue to push onward, upward, deeper toward the heart of Kaua‘i and the mountain that might hold the answers they all sought, all needed.
Growls permeated the night, lacing between peals of thunder like a weave of sound, almost tangible, as if the mountain itself rejected the five of them as interlopers in a place none of them belonged. Namaka wondered if the mo‘o presence kept the Wood spirits from accosting them. Or rather, did the fact four out of five of their number were possessed leave such akua disinclined to risk conflict?
The rain had abated, somewhat—which was to say she could now see more than five feet ahead of herself, albeit not by much. The path had carried them up into a mountainous shelf of shallow enough incline they could once again walk upright, though she continued clinging to tree trunks for support. After all, it remained steep, and though no mudslides ran past them at present, the fall would likely kill anyone of them, save perhaps the wereboar.
Panting, Niheu wended his way up to her side. “Not so far from dawn now.”
Up here, above the waves, Namaka could feel it more clearly—that burning orb, lurching through the firmament, ready to pierce through the reprieve of night and sting her eyes, sap her stamina. Niheu might welcome dawn, but it would only make the rest of them weaker.
And indeed, as it was, Kamapua‘a huffed and wheezed, not bothering to hide his pain. His once interminable energy was long gone now, and Namaka almost wanted to ask what had happened to him. Save that it was none of her business, and if he wanted to share, surely he would have.
“How far to the caldera?” she asked.
Niheu shrugged. “I’ve never climbed this peak.”
Namaka whirled on him. “Then what are you even still doing among us? Go back to Waimea and protect your people.”
The young man winced, causing Namaka to clutch her wounded side defensively, as if to say, ‘forgive me, I’m injured.’
“I’m sorry. I just … You put yourself at risk coming any further. Leave it to us.”
“Nah. I, uh … I’ll climb back down with the rest of you.”
Kamapua‘a huffed once more. “My nephew-son-brother means he forgot which way is down and can’t figure out how to get off the shitting mountain … best fall in, my multi-relational companion. We’ll watch out for you.”
“Fine,” Namaka said. “Then we keep climbing. Make it as far as we can before sunrise.”
“Then rest?” Taema asked.
“No,” Namaka said. “Then we keep climbing some more.”
Near sheer declivities ringed the better portion of the caldera atop Mount Waialeale, creating an almost impassible semicircle—a wall of green that blocked and obscured, funneling them into the singular point of ingress. There the slope rose in more gradual incline before dropping away rather suddenly, pitching into the caldera itself. Far below, the hollow was filled with a lake, disturbed only by continuous rain and numerous falls emptying down into the basin.
