His persistence in the world at his current low level of functioning appeared so sustainable that it was widely opined that he would live until something killed him. Which is what happened. And the way it happened shocked no one. Several days before his seventy-first birthday, he fell from the rigging of a boat under construction. He did not rise. Kuwa’i found him slumped on the deck, wood chisel still in his hand. He was put to earth among the tall grass, and all who knew him agreed his had been a fine and full life. They stacked black lava rocks upon his grave, and upon the rocks was lain a large wooden plank carved in intricate filigree, the likeness of a ship.
With the summer heat came restlessness and a tall, dark girl named Lura whose teeth flashed when she talked. Lura arrived with the trade winds on an enormous, creaking cargo vessel from the outer islands. Kuwa’i pulled her aside the first hour he met her, and he kissed her at the docks. That night, they met in the trees at the edge of the forest, and she laid back, long arms circling in the warm earth while her legs locked around him, and afterward, in the golden brazenness of morning’s first light, he went to her man and told him she no longer belonged to him. The man looked down at Kuwa’i, who was three inches shorter, and he must have recognized the determination in his eye, or perhaps he’d heard about the awl, because he said, “If she wants you.”
“She does.”
“Take her then, I have several,” he said. “You can’t keep a woman who won’t be kept.”
Kuwa’i said only, “Not for long, anyway.” And he put the awl back in his belt.
The next day, before the put-upon and disgruntled elders, and before all the startled populace of the valley, Kuwa’i and Lura declared themselves married.
She bore him two children in quick succession, though the eldest, a girl, never took hold of the world and was buried with a name, Agatha, in a plot near Kuwa’i’s father that neither parent could bring themselves to visit. She retreated into her miserable disconsolation, he into his rage. And Kuwa’i would have burned down the forests, and swallowed the streams, and eaten the mountain stone by stone until his teeth were all broken to the gum-line, because he found the world was not large enough to contain his anger, and he seethed with an inner heat that left him, after many months, a man of blackened cinders, and finally, as cold and empty and disconsolate as his wife.
But from the cinders rose another child, a son, grown like a sapling in the newly churned soils of their hearts, and still Kuwa’i could not bring himself to love again all at once but only in installments as the child grew stronger. And at two years old, they finally named him, and they called him Ta’eo Hokiluli’hi’i, which in the old language meant the one who stayed. “It is a good name,” Kuwa’i said to his wife, “which can’t be pronounced by outsiders.”
Ta’eo was a bright child like his father, and Kuwa’i showed him how wood could be worked—and together they built a small wooden box so that the boy’s mother might have a place for her necklaces. Next they made model boats to be floated at the edge of the lagoon, and Kuwa’i told him, “A boat is like a knife.”
A third child swelled Lura’s belly while she still played games with the second. She let little Ta’eo touch her stomach as it expanded, and together they took short walks through the valley, hand in hand, made equal by their off-balanced waddling while she explained to him the uses of things he was curious of. She told him where fish came from and why they preferred the water, and she explained in great detail their astounding facility at breath-holding. “It’s why they gasp so much when they’re pulled onto shore—their relief at breathing fresh air again.” And she told him the sea was blue because all the green had been used by the trees, and all the black by the night, and all the brown by the dirt. And blue was the color least used by nature, and so was the only pigment left in large enough quantities to fill up a thing as big as the ocean.
The boy, though he was still so young he wet his bed, nodded solemnly, because this was all very logical to him.
Together they walked the beaches and collected shells in the small wooden box.
She spent every waking moment with her son, like she knew something was wrong. And in the tenth month, when the new baby still hadn’t come, she asked that little Ta’eo stay in the room with her even while she slept, as if she could soak him in to make up for all the time she would lose. All the things she would miss. She put away the little clothes that she’d been making that no baby would ever wear. She put away the little pig-skin pouch that no baby would ever sleep in. She struggled, too, to put away her fear, but it was not so easily folded up and stored away.
She looked at her son who was still so small, and prayed, “Please God, I’m not done yet.” But if the God of the little chapel heard her, He gave no sign. So she prayed to the old gods of the islands, but they, too, were silent. Then she prayed to any god, to any being out there that might hear her. “Please,” she moaned into the nameless darkness, praying at last to it, the final refuge of the hopeless. But only pain answered her prayer, a burning heat inside her which grew over the days which followed.
Her abdomen pulled taut and stony but grew no larger, while her strength ebbed until she could not walk, and finally the lowest form of god was summoned. Without the power to cure, but at least to diagnose—a big man with a German accent and a medical bag, brought in from the harbor town. “The baby inside me is dead, isn’t it?” she asked.
And he examined her, and gave her the news. “There is no baby. There was never any baby.”
She turned her head away. “But I felt it kick.”
But the big German only shook his head. “No,” he said. “Only fluid; the cyst has ruptured now.” Then he closed his medical bag. “The infection is very advanced. I’m sorry.”
Little Ta’eo stayed close to his mother after the strange man left, and he did what the grown-ups asked because even he sensed something was not as it should be, and only when the screaming began did he leave. And only when it ceased did he cry, holding his mother’s hand in the dark while the adults around him wailed, and his father raged like a man without his mind, tearing their house down around them; and during the night, the distant chapel bell tolled, and they took away his mother wrapped in palm fronds. Only one old woman remained, saying, “There are some things conceived which can’t be born.” Finally in the empty room, without his mother’s heat, without his father, there awakened in Ta’eo the first understanding that people can end. That life can end. That nothing would ever be alright again.
Kuwa’i had known pain before and knew himself well enough to suspect he might kill somebody, so did not stay for the funeral. And the boy lost both parents in a single stroke.
When Kuwa’i returned several months later, he did not speak of where he’d been, or what he’d done. He inquired as to his son and one late night stopped by the house of the family who’d been caring for him. The woman saw Kuwa’i in the doorway, and she said nothing to him. Instead, she turned and called softly into the house, “Ta’eo.” And then softer still, when she had the boy’s attention, she said, “Your father is here.”
Kuwa’i took his son home, and in the morning, with a new child apprentice, returned to building boats.
The valley of Wik’wai changed subtly with the passing of years, while the rest of the island shifted around them. The sicknesses came and went. The old ways grew older; the new ways, newer. The cattle ranches grew larger, eating more of the land. In the harbor communities, the outsiders kept coming until you might walk the streets and see few besides. Enough different walks of people, in all shades and colors, speaking such a variety of languages, that Kuwa’i had to wonder at how many types of men the world might contain. It seemed to him a flagrant excess on the part of the maker.
And with the influx of people came the steady, inexorable reorganization of power—a thing which had always been happening since the first moment that steel touched the island, but now had reached a tipping point.
For a time, talk of annexation w
as common as talk of weather.
And as with talk of weather, sometimes, in the distance, there could be heard the evidence of thunder—but those rains never reached Wik’wai. Not directly. But in a thousand little ways, in the number of ways rain reaches the ocean, Wik’wai felt the storm.
He was a man called Underhill.
He’d left Hiwiloa as a landed man and returned six years later with a charter, already the veteran of numerous territorial appropriations that had all begun to run together the way waterfalls run into streams, which run into the lagoon. He returned with his signed articles, and with the authority of foreign gun ships, and the title Local Administrator to the Island. Auspices were invoked. He wore a formal black suit despite the heat, and despite his size. To the locals, he became known as the administer.
Welcomed home by the cattle ranchers and business men, of which he was one, he wasted little time in asserting regulation over Motoa and Ahana, and eventually expanded his sphere of influence until it stretched around the whole island. Legislation was adopted from faraway lands. Men were needed to enforce these prescripts. They called these men deputies of the protectorate , but they were really just the administer’s men—his sons and cousins and nephews.
One windy dawn in his son’s seventeenth year, Kuwa’i walked the sandy beach of the northern shore, watching the waves crash in while the sun rose out of the glittering water. It was beautiful beyond beautiful—even still, after all the years of looking at it. Later that morning, as he breakfasted with his son on poi and coconut, he said, “This next boat will be the last I build.”
“Why do you say that?” Ta’eo asked.
“Because it is true,” he said matter-of-factly.
The following morning the two of them set out for the mountains, and Kuwa’i told his son that the top was falsely rumored to be in close proximity. He then asked him if he’d ever wanted to touch a cloud.
The field of stumps was still there, unchanged, as Kuwa’i sensed it would be for another thousand years—because walking trees, in addition to being both stronger and more pliable than normal wood also resisted rot. Kuwa’i put down his axe and told Ta’eo about the special trees that had once carpeted the mountainside. He told him that they jumped from the cliffs if not tethered, and that they’d begun jumping when the first outsiders came to the island.
“I hate the outsiders,” Ta’eo said.
“You are them, partly. As am I.”
“I don’t care.”
“It’s the same as hating yourself.”
The boy looked around at the field of stumps. “Where did the trees go?”
“Into the lagoon, one by one.” Kuwa’i said. “Things without book names often disappear from the world.” And after climbing for most of the afternoon, they finally located the sapling. It was not yet gnarled, nor thick, nor impressive, really, in any aspect other than its unusual pitted bark. Though it had reached already some measure of its full height, for they were not ever tall trees. It still swayed gently when Kuwa’i pushed his weight against it. His hand came away black, painted with soot.
“I planted this one in the crazy time after your mother died. I was here many months looking for seeds, which are small and curved and brown, like cashews. I found only five. I planted three.”
“Why only three?”
“I hoped three would be enough. Why plant trees where they’ll want only to die?”
“Where are the two seeds you didn’t plant?”
“Back at the house, in your mother’s wooden box. Of the three I planted, this is the only one that grew. When it sprouted, I returned and tethered it to a stone.”
The tree, in its restless eagerness to die, had worn a circular path around the stone, held back only by its thin white rope.
“This tree is already fifteen?”
“They grow slowly. I planted it so that one day you could cut it down to build your masterpiece.”
Ta’eo touched the soft bark, then looked at his father. “It’s hot.”
“They burn from the inside,” Kuwa’i said.
“How?”
“I think they always burn. I think they spend their lives burning.”
“I don’t want to build boats.”
Kuwa’i took a step away from the tree and looked over the cliff. “I know,” he said. “I have known for years. I want you to do something for me at least.”
“What?”
“When you have a son, tell him the story of these trees.”
They knelt at the roots, and Kuwa’i bent forward to caress the pitted bark. The tree vibrated, pulling back from his touch, dark roots twisting along the ground while from above came a sound like wind through the fronds, though there was no wind.
The tree strained against its tether, yearning for the cliff.
Kuwa’i saw that if a blade were touched even lightly to the taught and creaking rope, the tree would fly to its death.
“I come as your friend,” Kuwa’i whispered to the tree. “To give you what you want.”
With that, he stood. He raised the axe high and brought it down with all his strength, burying the steel in the base of the trunk. The tree shook for a moment, then stilled.
They spent half a day piecing out the core wood. Then they took the precious commodity down the mountain. Five days later, after much planning and careful calculation of where the small measure of precious wood might best be used, they began Kuwa’i’s opus.
They worked methodically through the season, and Kuwa’i was careful not to talk of his son’s plans. He thought of his father. Hiwiloa is two islands at the same time.
In the days before books trapped history, the island people had been travelers. They’d begun their journey long ago, expanding outward from some forgotten homeland, jumping from island to island, and at each new place there were some for whom paradise was not enough; and so the process would continue, some smaller subset raising up and moving on to see what lay beyond the horizon. Not so anymore.
Now the islanders talked of leaving but never did—like the seamstress’s blonde daughter, Mara, who made a plump wife to a fisherman in town. (And who, in addition to a slew of brunettes, had also born a child as unlikely as herself, a girl with copper-colored hair—a condition seen only once before in Wik’wai, on a traveler from Hamburg the year before, and thereafter the subject of much speculation.) Kuwa’i thought of the walking tree, and the field of stumps, and of the growing cities, and the steel ships in the harbors, and all the plant-choked trails of Wik’wai.
The lands were stolen, the old ways fading. It would not be long.
Hiwiloa would be one island again.
And the island he’d known as a child would be gone forever.
In the fourth month of construction, at dusk, as Kuwa’i and his son were finishing the interior joinery and beginning the bulkhead housing, a group of men entered the boat shop. Ta’eo heard the bell and walked around to the front to see who had arrived.
“I’m here to see the shipwright,” a deep voice proclaimed.
Kuwa’i put down his tools. He walked inside and found four men and a teen-aged boy glancing around the shop. He recognized the black coat immediately. The administer was enormous. He had big arms, and a big chest, and a big belly that swayed independently from the rest of him as he moved slowly around the room. Florid, pockmarked and balding, he appeared far older than Kuwa’i had imagined. But it was old the way a bull gets old. He was one of those men for whom aging is not a deconstructive process, but one of simple sedimentation—a gradual building-upon of layers so that you had the idea there remained a bitter and fossilized embryo buried somewhere beneath all the fat, and muscle, and folds of skin that had accumulated.
“So you’re the carpenter,” the administer said.
Kuwa’i nodded.
“I want you to build me a boat.”
“I build boats, and then I sell them. Not the other way around.”
The administer nodded like he understood but then c
ontinued on as if Kuwa’i hadn’t spoken, “I want you to build me the best boat on the water.”
“I build what boats I can.”
“They tell me you’re the best.” The large man walked past him, moving deeper into the room, and Kuwa’i found himself following the administer through his own place of business.
“I’ve heard much about you,” the administer continued. “First years ago, after your trouble, and now these boats.” The administer stopped. He stood at the rear of the room, looking out at the boat yard at the edge of the water. “God’s grace.”
His companions came to rest behind him, open-mouthed, eyes widening on the half-finished construction in the launch.
“You are an artist,” the administer said.
“No, I am a just craftsman.”
“This is more…” the big man gestured toward the half-finished boat in the launch. “More than just craft, my friend.”
“I make things that are to be used, like any craftsman. And like any craftsman, there are rules I must follow. A true artist has no rules. You wouldn’t want an artist’s boat.”
“Why not?”
“It might not float.”
The administer burst into laughter and clapped one enormous hand on Kuwa’i’s shoulder. “I like you.” He bent closer. “I like this boat. I want it.”
“I auction my boats when they are finished.”
“I want the boat.”
“It is the way I’ve always done it.”
“What’s the highest bid you’ve ever taken?”
Kuwa’i told him honestly, and the administer waved off the number in disgust. He snapped his finger and a heavy guard produced a fold of bills, which the administer then placed forcefully in Kuwa’i’s hand. “This is almost twice that.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven Page 42
