“The walking trees are going to vanish?”
“There is steel here now,” His father said. “Magic cannot stay.”
And then, after a long and silent contemplation, Kuwa’i asked, “Why do you not believe the top of the mountain is just beyond here?”
“Because I do not believe in the top of the mountain.”
Even in the wildest, oldest valleys of Hiwiloa, school was an option most families indulged their children in to some extent. Almost every child began school at some early age, and thereafter could choose to attend and learn, or not. They learned the book history of the islands: how the first people lived under chieftains in superstition and darkness, until there arrived from across the water a new people who came in small numbers at first, but who kept coming, bringing roads, and schools, and medicines. And the need for medicines. Most of the valley’s children attended school so long as they had curiosity of wider things, and once satisfied of their place in the world, afterward contented themselves with the narrower aspects of daily living along the water’s edge. There were, after all, chores to be done, and fish to be caught, and adventures to be had—each in proportion to one’s temperament.
Kuwa’i was unusual not in his curiosity of the wider world—there were others who shared his curiosity—but he was rare for the narrow focus of his interest. Even as a child, Kuwa’i was fascinated by boats. He watched them from the sandy shores of the lagoon as they plied the trade route around the island, sails guttering in the wind that blew from the East. He loved the way they moved, leaning hard into the waves under their burden of wind.
Laklani Pritchard, one of the oldest and most prosperous boat builders on the island, noticed the child watching the boats as he played in the water under his father’s watchful eye. Laklani had never had children of his own. He bent toward young Kuwa’i, gesturing with a small chunk of wood he’d been whittling on to pass the time. He placed the piece of wood on the water near the boy’s knee. “A boat for you,” he said.
But Kuwa’i only looked down at the crude chunk of flotsam. “A boat is like a knife,” he said, and he cut the water with the blade of his hand in a way that made no splash at all.
In embarrassed outrage, Kuwa’i’s father sprang to his feet and apologized to Laklani for the boy’s rudeness. The old boat builder only stared at the child and said nothing. The next day, Laklani made the long walk to their house at the edge of the valley and made a formal offer to apprentice the boy.
This was a great honor, and when Kuwa’i’s father expressed his surprise, Laklani would say only, “The boy has a sense for boats.”
Kuwa’i grew strong over the coming years, though never tall, and in addition to tending his employer’s garden, and fetching water, and cooking meals, he learned through meticulous attention to detail the craft of woodworking and the art of building ships. He was by all accounts a prodigy and mastered quickly the hard-earned lessons that most shipwrights spent a lifetime accumulating.
In the late evenings, while the valley’s other young men played either peaceful matches of motaro’a, or violent battles of cricket, he would walk the shores near his home, taking note of the water, for the old shipwright had told him that to know boats, you had to first know the ocean. On the western shores of Hiwiloa, in the lee of the wind, the water is calm—an undulating blue expanse broken only by the spouts of dolphins. But on the windward side of the island, unprotected by the lagoon, the waves took on a different character, and here the ocean revealed its true nature. Kuwa’i walked the black sands down to the waterline until incoming waves slammed his knees, threatening to yank his feet away. He stood, and he watched as the sliding ocean drew back from the shore like an arm ready to punch and then struck a curling blow to the island. Again and again. Such was the ocean’s dislike. And the shining blue water rose, beautiful and deadly, glistening in the bright sun, pulling itself to the height of a man, then taller, rising like indignation, to crash down in a frothing tide that surged up the sand toward him—and Kuwa’i knew it was only a special kind of boat that might go safely beyond the lagoon and out into the open ocean.
When the opportunity presented itself, he still accompanied his father on expeditions for timber. They returned to the mountain terrace season after season, year after year, while the price of the precious commodity climbed, until finally, together, when Kuwa’i was sixteen, they faced the last of the ancient, gnarled walking trees. It stood among a field of stumps, a final dying specimen, so hot it could barely be touched. His father hesitated with his axe. “We can buy new nets,” his father said. “New shoes and a bolt of cloth for your mother.” The axe fell.
His father collected the last segment of white screw-pine rope. They did not talk much as they returned to Wik’wai, backs bent under their combined burden of core wood, grief and guilt. And when the timber was laid out at Laklani’s shop, Kuwa’i made the old carpenter understand this wood was to be the last of its kind.
“Then we will build something special from it, you and I,” the old man said.
Later that season, when the boat was just begun, Kuwa’i’s father died of an epidemic that burned a black seam through the island, starting in the harbors, striking down the families with old names and leaving the new.
The funerals were grand and sad, and Kuwa’i was strong for his mother and did not cry, supporting her slumping form while they walked from the grave. And afterward he could not recall the funeral—could not recall if it had been raining or dry, if the elder’s words had been solemn or uplifting. He could not recall his mother’s expression as they lowered her husband into the ground. He could not recall if there had been flowers, though he supposed there must have been. He couldn’t recall anything about that day, and sometimes he wondered if he had been there at all.
Laklani pulled him aside. “The old families die worst of the new sicknesses,” he said. “Be glad for your mixed blood.”
Utterly lost, Kuwa’i threw himself into his craft, sublimating his grief into an obsession for the new boat. He shaped the last of the wonderful peran wood into a frame of his own design, binding rails along the sides like the ribs of a great starving dog. The wood from walking trees was stronger and more flexible than other kinds of timber, resulting in strange design possibilities. He combined the old outrigger design with the new shapes he’d seen in the harbors; and to that eccentric compound he blended a shape seen only in his head. He curved and raked the transom, pushing the limits of the material, forming the hull in a confluence of strong, malleable planks that developed more and more, as the summer wore on, into something that looked decidedly alien. The lagoon had never seen such a boat.
Sitting on the center beam, he paused in his work. “Why do the old families die worst?”
Laklani did not look up from his sanding. “The old families are good at many things,” he said. “Staying is not one.”
On the hottest days, the old carpenter’s niece, Elissa, would bring them coconuts of cool milk. She was a year older than Kuwa’i and already the long-suffering wife of a shopkeeper’s son in nearby Ahana, a large town a half day’s travel along the beach. Disinclined towards his father’s occupation, disinterested in manual labor, and dismissive of his nuptial vows, her husband also had the fault of choosing occasionally to expend his considerable untapped energies through quite astonishing violence—and after those occasions, if she could walk, she came to stay with her uncle for a while. To Kuwa’i she arrived as a chameleon, this sleek, large-eyed creature with a wide, fine mouth—whose bruises changed colors over the weeks that followed.
She watched the men while they worked, and after looking for a long afternoon at the structure developing before her eyes, she said her first words, “It looks like two machetes.”
The old carpenter laughed from his stool, saying, “That’s it then! We have found a name for her: Two Machetes.” And he ran up to his niece and kissed her hairline. “Thank you. It is good luck when a woman names a boat.”
Eliss
a seemed to blossom under the attention, and though her cheekbones no longer quite matched each other, her smile was a thing which ate her entire face, and she was suddenly transformed and so beautiful that Kuwa’i felt his face grow flushed. He put the awl down and stared openly at this striking girl who had such an amazing plentitude of wide, perfect teeth—and then, thinking of her husband, he wondered how she had managed to keep them.
Word of Two Machetes spread, and as the weeks passed, the old carpenter’s shop received many visitors. Some from as far away as Moloa, the island’s biggest town, which sat on the opposite shore. There were offers made, and always old Laklani would put them off, saying, “I never discuss money until a boat is finished.” But he’d tell Kuwa’i the numbers as they ate their lunch, and the seventeen-year-old hadn’t known such money existed in the world.
On the last day before the boat was finished, when there were only the toe rails and riggings left unfinished, Kuwa’i went back to the launch after dinner, and, intending to watch the sun go down in the trees beyond the lagoon, he climbed up onto the deck of Two Machetes.
Elissa found him in the twilight.
She touched the back of his neck and did not ask what was wrong, only kissed his wet cheeks softly with her amazing mouth, an invitation to a deeper kind of kiss; and he accepted, moving toward her, running a hand along her sinewy contours.
Though her skin and eyes were dark, she was long-waisted in a way not found among native islanders, and he discovered her hands in his, larger than his—some mixture of ancestry producing long, delicate fingers. And then she guided him back, her hair a black wash across his chest as she whispered into his mouth, “My husband cannot…unless he beats me first.”
“I would never,” Kuwa’i said.
She replied only, “I know,” like she understood this, and their teeth grazed each other slickly as she moved on him—and the sensation was of something remembered, though never before experienced, as if his body knew it already: like dreams of falling, of dying, might one day make those acts seem familiar. And in the middle of it, he felt connection to everything that had come before, and everything that might come after, and he knew that when he one day tallied his life before the God of the little chapel, he would count this among his very favorite things.
The heat of the day brought the bidders again, and without very much trouble the boat was sold to a merchant from Ahana who seemed truly grateful for the opportunity to buy it—and who paid extra to have the sails done in red canvass. Elissa and Kuwa’i used every smallest excuse to be alone and played at love several times a day over the next few weeks. If Laklani knew, he said nothing.
On the morning her husband came for her, Elissa had a nightmare that she was falling, and Kuwa’i woke to her gazing down at him from her elbows.
“Do you love me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied without thought or hesitation.
Elissa’s husband was called Myer, and he arrived at midday accompanied by a group of big men who worked hard at looking as if they were all simply out for a casual stroll. Myer was tall and broad-shouldered and fair. His eyes were sandy-colored, like his hair, and he moved easily among the people of the valley, talking and laughing as his men walked toward the boat works. He wore a shirt like brown canvass, in the style of men from the mainland, though when he spoke, Kuwa’i could detect no accent.
“Elissa,” he called out when he saw her. “I see your visit did you some good. You look well.”
Elissa stood frozen. Gone pale and expressionless, the asymmetry of her broken cheekbones once again apparent, she looked suddenly most unwell.
Myer strode up to her and gathered her in his big arms.
“I’ve missed you,” he said, then whispered so his friends could not hear, “I’m sorry.” He turned back to the crowd of people he’d brought. “Let’s celebrate!”
That night there was a large pit dug into the ground and lined with stones, and in it was roasted three whole fatted pigs that Myer paid extravagantly for, and most of the nearby families were involved. They danced around the fire well into night. Laklani remained distant, refusing to be pulled in by the lure of festivities. Kuwa’i sat on the rise near the waterfall, watching the party with a sense of dread. In the night, Elissa managed to get away, and she found him sitting on a rock with his feet in the water.
“Let’s run away,” she said, out of breath from her scramble up the hillside. “Tonight, let’s leave this place.”
The waterfall cascaded down from above, splashing into the pool, making ripples on the water. “Where would we go?” Kuwa’i asked.
“I don’t care. Let’s take a boat for ourselves and let the wind take us where it’s going. There are other islands beyond these.”
“I couldn’t steal.”
“You built most of them! It wouldn’t be stealing.”
“It would.”
“You’d just be taking one back. You deserve a boat of your own for all the work you’ve done.”
“It wouldn’t be right.”
“I don’t care what’s right. Let’s go now before my husband comes looking for me.”
“This island is my home, I can’t just leave in the middle of the night.”
“Then when?”
Kuwa’i stared at her. “When it’s not my home anymore.”
“Please—”
“Elissa,” he whispered. “I can’t.”
She dropped her eyes—and something happened, a change, like a chameleon, and she appeared a different kind of creature than she had been moments before, deflated, the hope having seeped out of her.
“I—” Kuwa’i began.
She put a finger to his lips, silencing him. Then she turned and went back to her husband. In the morning the couple was gone.
Laklani did not speak to Kuwa’i for three days, and when he did, said only, “You let her go back.”
Kuwa’i blinked at the accusation. He had no response.
And in the coming days, Kuwa’i found he could not endure the emptiness. The silent work. The daily lack of her that would have no end.
He probed the place that she’d occupied in his life and found only a silent, hemorrhaging cavitation.
He walked the beach to the nearest town where he sought out a tavern to dull his wound; but the old man behind the bar, who managed the trick somehow of being both old and wise beyond his years, only listened to his plight, and when Kuwa’i asked for a second drink, said, “Drink won’t help,” and pointed out through the window at life going on in the street—a small gathering of dark-haired girls talking in the market, and Kuwa’i understood what the old man meant.
Kuwa’i charged across the street and asked the prettiest one to go for a walk with him. She agreed, and he discovered her name was Anna, and two nights later, in her parents’ house while the rest of the island slept, he discovered her body was like a thing remembered, and her taste like ripe melon.
Laklani’s tendency toward silence devolved into a kind of verbal longhand. They communicated only about boats, and only if the boats were projects they worked on. Their lunch times became studies in quiet bereavement, and Kuwa’i chose eventually to work straight through the day. The boat works prospered, and Kuwa’i’s reputation began to eclipse that of his master. People came from faraway places to gaze at the ships.
One evening, a rich man from Motoa visited old Laklani in the boat yard, bringing with him a tall, long-haired daughter who hung back from the business talk of men, instead wandering to inspect the half-finished boat. She caressed the tools with a delicate index finger. “You’re the craftsman my father talks about,” she said. And Kuwa’i stopped his hammering and turned his head in search of whom she might be speaking to. She laughed, mistaking his ignorance for humor, but astride him later that night, she explained why buyers were drawn to his work above others. “Your boats are beautiful,” she said. And then she lay back on his sheets while he slid above her, and she showed him what action to take so no dish
onor would come of it. Afterward, as they lay in the stillness of his bunk, she asked, “How is it that boats can sail against the wind?”
“Not straight against it,” he said. “But only at an angle.”
And he told her that the minor god Kulipali had bequeathed his tongue so that men may make keels. And he told her about the steel hulls of ships he’d seen in the harbors, and about the humble outrigger that had conquered oceans, and he told her that in the old language, which he could not speak, the word for horse was canoe-which-walks-on-land.
It was nearly seven months later that Laklani spoke to him regarding something other than work. The broken silence was shocking as a thunderclap, and Kuwa’i could not, for a moment, pry understanding from the words.
“What did you say?” Kuwa’i asked.
“Elissa has a baby.”
Kuwa’i stood perfectly still for a moment. Then without taking off his work belt, he climbed down from the launch, scrambled up the shoreline and set out at a dead run for the town of Ahana.
He found the town larger than he remembered, but not so large that people might be strangers to each other. Still, oddly, it took him nearly half an hour to find someone who knew of a young girl named Elissa with wide perfect teeth.
The man said only, “I know who you’re talking about.” And there was an irony in his voice Kuwa’i would recognize only later while he sat behind bars and went over the events again and again in his mind.
The house was small and wooden and deteriorated, with the wind shutters amassed in the dirt below the windows. Weeds grew all around the structure, and from within could be heard the squalling of an infant. Having come this far, Kuwa’i found he could advance no further. He stood in the road as if lacking any sense at all, and those who noticed him thought he was either an imbecile, or in love, and in either case pitied him equally.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7 Page 41
