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As he strode through the seaside forest, Bujiji glared again at the marks on the message tube. Those marks were clear evidence of his late arrival at the beach, and the near-disaster his tardiness had caused. Bujiji had only himself to blame for whatever happened next. Jass Imbiah had told him the gede would be waiting for him to pick up, but he had stayed too long with Awiwi, his current love, before going to the beach to retrieve the message the construct brought.
It was worth it to I, Bujiji thought, remembering the sensation of Awiwi’s sweat-slicked skin sliding against his as they made love. Well worth it.
The ubia-vine had not broken the tube; the message inside remained intact. That was the most important thing. Bujiji knew Jass Imbiah would berate him, and that would be an ordeal, never mind the far worse punishments the woman who was the ruler of Jayaya, and first among the Jassi of the other islands, was capable of inflicting. Those other punishments were not likely to happen ... he hoped.
“It was still worth it to I,” he said aloud, not caring that there was no one close enough to hear him.
Bujiji was a sturdy, sienna-skinned man of medium height. His only garments were a multicolored cloth knotted around his lean waist with ends that hung halfway to his knees, and a pair of leather boots that warded off the grasping strands of grass that adhered persistently, and painfully, to whatever flesh they touched. His knife, which he had sheathed again, bumped against his hip as he walked into the mwiti-forest.
In contrast to spies like Sehaye, Bujiji could never pass unnoticed on the mainland. His head was shaved, and he allowed no hair to grow on his face. His scalp was covered with lines of raised scars that stretched from the beginning of his forehead to the nape of his neck, giving the effect of a spiderweb. A series of straight, vertical lines were incised into the rest of his face.
His upper body was decorated with a stylized spider-cicatrice. The outline of the spider’s bulbous thorax had been carved into the middle of his chest, and its eight legs reached across his entire torso, meeting in the middle of his back, as though the arachnid had trapped him in a lethal embrace.
The scarification patterns were symbolic of Legaba, the only god the Uloans acknowledged, considering all the other Jagasti to be Mainlanders’ devils. All but a few Islanders wore his holy image on their skin, and gladly bore the pain of its incision during their coming-of-age ceremonies.
Bujiji thought about the spy who had sent the message from the Mainland. He did not know the identity of the man or woman; those who were to be sent to the Mainland were singled out at a young age and isolated from the rest of the islands’ populace until the time came for them to go across the sea. Of necessity, informants were left blank-skinned, like the Matile.
And for that, Bujiji pitied the spies, regardless of their value to the ultimate cause of Retribution Time. He was glad that he had not fit the specifications that would have placed him in their ranks.
Without conscious thought, the Uloan ducked away from an ubia vine that had extended itself from an overhanging tree limb. The sweet scent of the clenching flowers tickled his nostrils. He ignored the smell. If the petals of those flowers ever touched his skin, they would fasten onto it like the waving grass, and they were even more difficult to tear away. Yet if they were not removed, they would cling until all the blood had been leeched from his body.
As he trotted through the weaving grass and towering trees, Bujiji passed charred, twisted ruins caught in the embrace of encroaching mwiti trees – remnants of the destruction the Storm Wars had wrought. Bujiji paid the relics no heed. The Dying Time was part of the far-distant past. And Retribution Time – the time when vengeance would be wrought against the Mainlanders – belonged to an unknowable future that would soon come, however long “soon” proved to be.
Then a chittering sound from a nearby tree caught his attention. Bujiji looked up, and saw a vaguely manlike shape capering in the branches. The creature pointed at him and its screeches sounded like imprecations.
“Hush, munkimun,” Bujiji said. “You got no quarrel with I.”
Unlike on the Mainland, there were no true monkeys in the islands. But the swarms of long-armed, long-tailed arboreal creatures the first settlers had encountered when they arrived bore a strong resemblance to the simians they had left behind. However, the islands’ tree-dwellers had huge, round eyes, and the ears that jutted from their heads resembled those of a cat more than they did a monkey or ape. The creatures were lemurs, distant relations of monkeykind that had mostly died out on the Mainland ages ago.
Even on the islands, there were few munkimun left now. And whenever one of them saw a human, it would scream out its grievances over the ravages of the Storm Wars, and their displacement from the home that was theirs before the humans cleared parts of the forest to build their own dwellings.
Bujiji listened to the munkimun’s imprecations a few moments longer. Then he found a fruit – one that did not pulsate – and tossed it to the arboreal creature, which caught it deftly and began to chew on it. And he continued his journey away from the beach without having to hear anything more from the lemur.
Soon there were no more ruins to be seen. The grass no longer moved, nor did the fruits on the trees pulsate. Bujiji was now back among the flat-roofed coral houses of Ompong, the capital city of Jayaya and the last outpost of the Uloans’ former splendor in the time when they were truly the Happy Isles.
Bujiji greeted the other spider-scarred people he passed. As they returned his calls and waves, the other Uloans cast a wary glance toward the damp tube in his hand. Their eyes were sharp enough to see the marks the ubia’s teeth had made, and they knew what would waiting for Bujiji when he delivered the spy’s message to Jass Imbiah. After he passed, they sucked their teeth and shook their heads in sympathy even as they thanked Legaba that they were not in Bujiji’s boots.
Jass Imbiah will not be too vexed with I, he tried to reassure himself as the notched tube pressed hard against his palm. At least I catched the message before that ubia did ...