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A tiny, gurgling wail pulled Awiwi from her troubled sleep and rescued her from a terrifying dream. In it, the Retribution Time fleet had made its long-awaited return to the Islands. Along with all the other surviving women, children, and elders of Jayaya, she waited on the beach. As always, the Uloans scanned the empty horizon, hoping that this time, the sight of sails would reward their never-ending vigil.
In Awiwi’s dream, the sails appeared, one after the other, until they covered the sea like fronds torn from palm trees during a storm. There were far more ships returning than had set off to wreak havoc on the mainlanders. But in her dream, that anomaly didn’t register.
The ships drew closer. The cheers of the Uloans on the beach drowned out the rumble of the waves that lapped the shoreline. But when the ships came close enough for their occupants to become clearly visible, the triumphant shouts of the Uloans fell silent, as though a single hand had clutched and squeezed all their throats at once.
The shapes that lined the decks of the Uloan ships were not alive. The occupants of the ships were jhumbis, one and all. Not a single living Islander could be seen on the ships; only clay-coated figures with broken sea-shells as substitutes for eyes and teeth.
Like all the other women on the beach, Awiwi cried out in horror and protest at what she saw on the ships. She didn’t try to look for Bujiji. She could not tell the jhumbis apart, nor did she want to. If Bujiji had now become a jhumbi, that meant he was dead and gone from her forever, even if he could still walk and do the bidding of the huangi.
Awiwi’s own outcry awoke her, as it always did when nightmares like this plagued her sleep. But this time, there was another cry as well.
Instinctively, she reached for the infant at her side. Her hand touched him ... and then she could feel him being pulled from her grasp. His cries were muffled, as though something was covering his mouth – or constricting his throat.
In the dim Moon Star light that filtered through the flimsy thatch of her lean-to, she saw her baby son moving slowly toward the structure’s entrance. He wasn’t crawling. He was being dragged by an ubia-vine as thick as her wrist. The plant had wrapped part of itself around the infant’s throat, and was choking him even as it inched its way into the darkness outside the lean-to.
With a wordless cry of rage, Awiwi reached for the coral dagger she kept at her side. Then she seized the part of the vine that was not wrapped around her son, and began to hack at its green flesh. Even as the ubia-vine writhed and buckled, the baby’s cries weakened. Awiwi’s slashes became wilder, missing as often as they landed. Some came close to cutting her baby. Yet enough of them eventually landed to rip the sorcerous life out of the ubia. When the vine finally lay still, Awiwi frantically tore its loops from her baby’s body, not noticing that the infant lay silent.
Awiwi lifted him and laid her ear on his small chest. And she heard the tiny flutter of his heartbeat. He was unconscious, but alive.
As she held her baby to her breast, Awiwi sobbed quietly, tears falling from her face to the infant’s brow. She had not yet given her child a name. None of the infants born in the Uloas since Retribution Time had been named. The father and a huangi had to be present for a proper naming ceremony to occur. But all the fathers and all the huangi had departed for the war on the mainland. Without their presence, the new children had to remain nameless.
As time passed, the ubia-vines had become bolder. If the huangi did not arrive soon, the human inhabitants of the islands were in danger of being overwhelmed by the animate vegetation.
“Legaba ... help I,” Awiwi whispered into the darkness
She made that plea out of lifelong habit, even though she knew her words would be answered only with silence. Legaba was ... gone.
Awiwi refused to countenance the possibility that the Spider God had vanished forever. To think that would be to lose all hope. And the loss of all hope would be the final step into the abyss of oblivion.
But still ... Legaba was gone, leaving no trace of a presence that had existed since the time the Uloans began to worship him. And so were Jass Imbiah, and the huangi, and all the fighting-age men, and even the walking dead. Each day that they did not come back was another day closer to the end of the Uloans who remained on the islands. And they would remain, despite the mwiti. They could build boats, but there was no safe destination to which they could sail; certainly not to the Mainland, nor to the Sea of Storms.
The ubia-vine’s attack had occurred swiftly, although to Awiwi its coils had touched her infant’s skin for a loathsome eternity. Her outcry had awakened women in neighboring lean-tos, and some of them now came to her, and held her, and whispered soothing words into her ears. They knew all too well that on the next night, one of their children could be the target of the ubias’ hunger.
They tried hard not to lose hope. But the struggle was growing too difficult, and before long, their will to live would be gone.