YASHU

 

 

IT WAS THE day of Swim-Through-The-Rock. The sun was already riding high and brimming with warmth as Yashu set out from her aunt’s cottage on the crag above Second-Cliff-Village. The air was tangy with breezes. The sea was a million-flecked dazzle of light.

Yashu had on her best dress, a plain cotton shift with a beading of tiny seashells around the neck and hem. She had drawn back two strands of hair from her temples and tied them behind her head. Around her neck was a cord of braided leather from which hung a frond of coral, one she had teethed on as an infant and ground to smoothness.

As she was leaving, her aunt told her she looked beautiful. ‘Huaso will be a fool if he doesn’t fall in love with you all over again,’ Liyalu said, leaning on her walking-stick in the kitchen doorway. She braved one of those smiles of hers – weak, more a slackening of the jaw muscles than anything.

‘Huaso is a fool,’ Yashu replied. She said it kindly, and with a certain amount of self-deprecation.

Her aunt gave a wry nod. ‘You will have a good day,’ she said. ‘Mala.’

‘Mala,’ Yashu replied. ‘And mala to you too,’ she said to the goats in their pen, as she stepped onto the steep path that led down to the coastal track. The goats blinked dumbly back.

It was a long journey round from Second-Cliff-Village on the windward side of I*il to Half-Moon-Bay on the leeward, almost half a circuit of the entire island. It was a progress from rough to smooth, from rugged to undulating, from grassy steep-slope land that was useful for not much other than pasture to land whose soft folds and rich, giving earth fostered crop-fields and groves of orange and olive trees. Yashu followed the coastal track’s ups and downs with a loping, easy stride-rhythm. The piece of coral knocked gently against her collarbone as she walked. She broke step only for the occasional protruding hiccup of rock which countless generations of passing soles had polished smooth but had not been able to erode to perfect flatness like the rest of the track. The route took her by Grey-Seal-Inlet, and Wave-Clash-Cove, and the series of five evenly graduating, freestanding pinnacles known as Fingers-Of-Oriñaho.

Just past there, she fell in step with a family who came from First-Cliff-Village, even further round the island. The eldest son was twelve years old, just the right age for his Flow to make itself known. It had not done so yet, but surely would after his Swim-Through-The-Rock. The father of the family asked Yashu if she herself was performing her Swim-Through-The-Rock today, although he undoubtedly could tell that she was at least two years too old. When she replied that she already had, he then enquired what her Flow was. An impertinence, she thought, but managed to restrain her irritation as she said she had none. The father nodded and said, ‘Ah,’ in a trying not-to-sound-pitying way. So you’re one of those, his manner seemed to say. One of the Dammed.

Yashu politely wished the family mala and increased her pace. Soon she had put distance between her and them. Resentment simmered inside her. She told herself she should not let one idiot ruin the day for her. She thought of Huaso. The prospect of seeing him again steadied her.

At long last she rounded a turn and there was Town-By-The-Dunes spread out ahead, clustering along the curve of Half-Moon-Bay. She surveyed the bumpy, gorse-thatched roofs, the narrow zigzag streets, the numerous market squares where trade with coastliners and mainlanders was conducted. Quite the metropolis, home to nearly a thousand souls. Home, once, to Yashu herself, although she had no memory of living there. She had been only an infant when the Worldstorm came this way last and erased most of Town-By-The-Dunes. She, lucky, had survived the wrecking, the flattening, the destruction. Her parents had not. The town had been rebuilt, as it always was after a ’Storm. The bodies of her parents, along with nearly a hundred other people, had been consigned to the sea.

She turned her gaze to the beach of Half-Moon-Bay. Several dozen of her own-islanders were already gathered down there on the sand. Some were digging barbecue pits at the base of the dunes and priming them with driftwood and dried-bladderwrack kindling, over which they laid faggots of peat. Others were milling on the foreshore, greeting, chatting, looking to seaward, while the waves at their feet ebbed gradually out, leaving fine black skeins of seaweed behind. Out on the sun-sheened sea, dotted from here to the horizon, there were boats. Not mainland boats, because coastliners and mainlanders knew better than to travel to I*il on the day of Swim-Through-The-Rock. Other-islander boats, a small fleet of them, converging on I*il from all parts of the Li*issua archipelago. From Uss, from Haroo, from Arashi, from Ra*ai, from Nyaim... From Shai. At least one of the boats would be from Shai, and aboard it, Yashu knew, would be Huaso. She pictured him, eager at the bows, hand shading eyes, watching as the three peaks of I*il slowly, oh-so-slowly grew larger, and perhaps urging the shaper-of-water who was in charge of the craft to propel it more quickly (and the shaper-of-water roundly ignoring him, because there was only so fast a boat could be driven, only so much water a person could displace at once). She grinned.

By the time she got down to the beach, a dozen of the boats had put in and a couple of dozen more were closing in on the shallows. The usual assortment of vessels had been pressed into service for the occasion: blunt-nosed fishing boats, ungainly-looking but uncapsizeable shore-crawlers, racy wave-skimmers with their daringly narrow freeboard, wallowing broad-beamed ferries, deep-hulled freighters, manta boats with their wing-like mesh-covered outriggers. As each made its final approach, the shaper-of-water at the stern made one last mental exertion and built up a large swell behind the craft which sent it surging forward to grind prow first into the sand. The shaper-of-water then slumped, exhausted from his efforts, and answered the thanks of his passengers with a bleary waft of the hand.

The first passengers to alight off any of the boats were almost invariably the children of Swim-Through-The-Rock age. Leaping onto the beach, they sprinted off without pausing, bound for the promontory at the eastern end of the bay. They scrambled along to the tip of it and stood there looking down at the Rock, which was separated from the promontory by a channel some thirty paces wide. The children’s excited gesticulations were matched by their shouts and yelps, which echoed all the way across the bay. Yashu recalled how she herself had stood where they were standing, on her own Swim-Through-The-Rock day. She, too, had been excited. Nervous as well. And bitterly disappointed in the days after, when nothing happened, no Flow came. She had focused hard on distant objects, hoping she was a sharp-sight, like her aunt. She wasn’t. She had tried staying underwater for long periods, hoping she was a breath-holder, and had almost drowned. She had sat for hours staring at a bucket of water, trying to mould and manipulate the bucket’s contents with her mind. No use. Eventually, after long, frustrating weeks and countless failed experiments, she had had to accept the unwelcome truth. She was what mainlanders called an Extraordinary. She was without-Flow. Dammed.

‘Hallo-o-o! Yashu! Hallo-o-o!’

A boat was hurtling through the waves toward landfall. A boat from Shai. Yashu saw the clan colours of Shai painted along its gunwales – red, grey, blue, in curlicued, interleaving stripes. At the bow, just as she had pictured him, Huaso. Waving at her like a madman. Both arms flapping.

She raised a hand to wave back, and then tried to shout out a warning. The boat was going too fast. Huaso wasn’t braced for the —

Too late. The boat’s keel sliced into the beach, bringing the craft to an abrupt stop. Huaso went flying off forwards and fetched up with a thud in a gangly heap on the sand.

He leapt to his feet immediately. ‘I’m all right!’ he announced, checking his limbs and brushing himself down. ‘I’m fine!’ And when it was clear that he was fine, everyone who had witnessed the incident started laughing. The laughter erupted with such suddenness and loudness that it was obvious that people had been having a hard time keeping it in and were relieved to be able to let it out. Yashu herself could not help but contribute to it. Even Huaso chuckled, but then he was used to embarrassing himself in public, and indeed did it so often that it might be considered a habit.

‘Shaihuaso,’ Yashu said, coming forwards to him.

‘I*ilyashu,’ Huaso replied, and bowed with as much dignity as someone with his hair half covered in sand could muster.

‘No serious injury?’

Huaso grinned gamely. ‘Even if there was, it would mean nothing now that I am with you again.’

Before Yashu could deliver a suitably complimentary reply, she was forestalled by a high-pitched yell from the Shai boat: ‘Yashu! Yashu!’

It was Zeelu, Huaso’s younger sister. She vaulted off the boat, landing as gracefully as Huaso had landed ungracefully. Her and Huaso’s parents, Imersho and Pharralu, were waiting behind her in the queue to disembark.

‘Yashu!’ Zeelu came running up the sand. ‘Did you see my brother just then? Ha ha! What a clumsy-bum he is! I’m doing Swim-Through-The-Rock today, did you know that? But I already have my Flow. A fish-in-the-air. Everyone agrees that’s what I’m going to be. I can already float a little bit. Do you want me to show you? I can show you if you like. Look!’

The words came out in such a breathless tumble that even had Yashu for some reason not wanted a demonstration of Zeelu’s Flow, she would have been hard pressed to say so. The next thing she knew, she was watching Zeelu raise herself onto tiptoes. Then, with lip-chewing concentration, Zeelu lifted one foot to horizontal, following it with the other, so that both soles were clear of the ground. She hovered unsteadily in this position for several heartbeats before her focus went and gravity reclaimed her.

‘See? Mamu says there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to make other things fly too. I’m going to be a great fish-in-the-air!’

Pharralu, joining them, admonished her daughter with a stern look. ‘Zeelu, perhaps you shouldn’t be showing off in front of Yashu. What did we say?’

Zeelu’s cheeks flushed a faint pink. ‘Oh yes. Sorry, Yashu.’

‘Not to worry,’ Yashu told her. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘I*ilyashu,’ said Huaso’s father, with a nod of his head.

Yashu offered him a low, grave bow. ‘Shaiimersho. I*il is honoured by your presence. Yours too, Shaipharralu.’ Another low bow. ‘It’s very good to see you both.’

‘The feeling is mutual,’ said Pharralu, but it wasn’t and both she and Yashu knew it. Pharralu was never anything less than polite to Yashu, but her politeness was false. You could hear it in her voice, like the chiming of a cracked bell. It was obvious to anyone. She didn’t think much of Yashu, and Yashu knew why. Since Yashu was without-Flow, and Huaso was also without-Flow, it seemed acceptable that the two of them should get together. It seemed, in a sense, unavoidable, since their kind were not exactly spoiled for choice when it came to finding a mate. If, however, they were actually to marry, there was little chance of them having with-Flow children. On the other hand, if Huaso were able to find and marry a with-Flow girl – and likewise Yashu a with-Flow boy – then the odds on the issue of either union being with-Flow were that much greater. Pharralu, therefore, was torn between the wish for Huaso’s happiness and her instinct for the greater good of Li*issua as a whole.

Imersho, too, felt that schism, but his loyalty was first and foremost to his son. There was only ever friendliness in his eyes and his voice when he spoke to Yashu. He would not mind having her as his daughter-in-law.

‘Mamu! Papo!’ Zeelu was hopping from foot to foot impatiently. ‘I want to go up and have a look at the Rock now. Can I?’

Pharralu said, ‘Let’s all go up and look at the Rock.’ It wasn’t clear whether the all was meant to include Yashu or not. Pharralu injected a great deal of ambiguity into the word.

‘I’d prefer to stay here,’ Huaso said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’ve seen it already, mamu,’ Huaso said simply, ‘and it’s not as if it holds any marvellous memories for me.’

His family headed off in the direction of the eastern promontory, with Zeelu skipping in front of her parents, begging them to walk a little faster.

‘Look at her.’ There was brotherly pride in Huaso’s eyes, but an admixture of sorrow too. ‘She couldn’t be more thrilled.’

‘And why shouldn’t she be?’ Yashu said. ‘It’s a big day for her.’

Huaso shrugged, nodded. ‘Still... What it must be, to know your Flow is coming through already.’

‘You mustn’t envy her. It’s mala for you just to be happy for her.’

‘Oh, I am, I am. All the same...’ He looked gloomy, like a child half his age, perhaps ready to shed tears.

‘Come on, enough of that.’ Yashu nudged him on the arm. ‘Are you hungry? After your journey, I bet you are. And if I’m not mistaken, they’ve just started to cook some grilled-eel-on-stick.’

They ate their grilled-eel-on-stick sitting side by side at the top of Tallest-Dune, amid a thicket of hissing marram grass. At their feet, the beach got busier as more other-islander boats pulled in and more own-islanders traipsed down from the coastal track. The sun was launching itself ever higher. The tide crept towards its lowest ebb. Yashu and Huaso talked about what they’d been up to since they last met, which was four spring-tides ago, on Arashi, at the celebration of Anointing-New-Boats. Huaso complained about school and particularly about having to learn Common Tongue, which he was bad at and couldn’t see the point of mastering since he never expected to have to use it, because he was going to be a fisherman and therefore would not have to trade with mainlanders to make a living, only with islanders and coastliners. Yashu wanted to know what he would do if some mainlander came up to him at market and wanted to buy some of his fish, and he said, ‘I’d tell him this,’ and made an obscene gesture peculiar to the people of Li*issua but at the same time universally intelligible, and they both giggled. Yashu then told him about her aunt, about how Liyalu’s illness was continuing to creep through her body, slow and painful, and from day to day there never seemed much change in her but if you looked back not very far and remembered how she had been then and compared it to how she was now, if you considered for example that she once hardly ever used her walking-stick to get around and now depended on it almost all the time, then the deterioration was all too apparent. It was a grim, greedy disease Liyalu had. It seemed to eat her from within, gnawing away at her vitality. She was only forty but sometimes, particularly at the end of the day, she looked twice that. And there was no remedy for it, no cure for her condition, nothing anyone on Li*issua or on the mainland could do for her. She was just going to get worse and worse, her faculties failing, her strength trickling away, until finally, far sooner than was fair, she lost her hold on life and her spirit entered the Great-Ocean-Beyond. Yashu said all this matter-of-factly, without rancour, but around the edges of her voice there was brittleness, for she was talking about the woman who had without query or complaint taken her sister’s daughter into her home and given the orphaned child as good an upbringing as anyone could ever hope for – the woman who was not just her aunt but to all intents and purposes her mother. Yashu had lost two parents already, and was facing the prospect, horribly near, of losing a third.

Huaso could think of nothing to say in response, so he laid a hand gently on Yashu’s leg. It was a comforting, confirming touch – I am here. She studied him sidelong and was glad to be reminded that he was as good-looking as she remembered. Not handsome, not by any conventional reckoning, but he had a kind mouth, a nice symmetrical nose, deep eyes. She saw a future for herself in those eyes. She saw a life beyond the time Aunt Liyalu passed on, a life on Shai, a home for the two of them, Huaso off before dawn every morning in his boat with a shaper-of-water and a boomer among the crewmembers under his command, and she at their house, busy with children, two of them, possibly three, and minding a herd of goats, just as she did now. Shaiyashu – it was a good-sounding name, and one she had several times, when alone, uttered aloud, to see how it seemed to her ears, to give it greater reality by bringing it audibly into the world.

A shout went up from the eastern promontory, announcing that the tide was almost fully out and the ceremony would begin shortly. Yashu and Huaso got to their feet and hurried along the crest of the dunes. They reached the promontory – and a good vantage point – ahead of most of the crowd. They settled down and watched as the Swim-Through-The-Rock children formed a queue on the hand-chiselled, foot-worn steps. The steps descended to the jumping-off point, a kind of narrow natural jetty which had been festooned for the occasion with banners from all twenty islands of Li*issua, the tricolours of every clan. Adult supervisors marshalled the children, instructing them not to shove, to keep their voices down, remain calm and wait their turn. Out in the channel, breath-holders sported and cavorted like dolphins, diving, sounding, surfacing, rolling. They put on this display as much for their own enjoyment as for the entertainment of the people on the promontory, although all their splashing and activity did have the additional benefit of keeping away any marine predators who might happen to be patrolling near the shoreline. The Rock, dome-shaped, imperturbable, rose above the flexing whitecapped waves, whitecapped itself from all the guano that had been deposited on it over time by resting and nesting seabirds. No human had ever set foot on it since the days of Finder-Founder Oriñaho, for whom the Rock reared out of the water as his ship approached I*il, stranding the vessel on its back so that Oriñaho, and his twenty wives, had no alternative but to disembark, swim to shore and make the island their home. Back then, all those countless generations ago, after the birth of the Worldstorm, in the time of the Great-Fissuring, I*il had had no name. Nor had Li*issua. It was Oriñaho who had given the archipelago the title of Place-Of-Respite, and who had then gone about populating it, siring two sons and two daughters by each of his wives and commanding these eighty offspring to intermarry and go forth and colonise all the islands of the archipelago. Thus were the great clans created, and to this day each still held sway over the island that bore its name.

Huaso pointed out Zeelu, fifth in the queue of not wholly quietened youngsters. Yashu made the observation that she looked about half a head taller than anyone else, and Huaso said that probably had something to do with the fact that she was so full of excitement she was floating off the ground without even realising it.

Yashu directed her gaze past the children, out to the Rock again, and focused in on its base, where it shelved away into the clear blue water, losing itself in the cloudier, bluer depths. She could just make out the mouth of the tunnel which bored through one corner of the Rock, a tide-eroded passage that was about ten paces in length and a little wider in diameter than the shoulder-breadth of a pubescent child. With the tide at its lowest ebb, as now, the tunnel’s entrance and exit were only just below the surface. Holding a deep breath, you could easily submerge and wriggle through. The feat itself was not difficult. What it represented, however, was immense. If someone’s Flow was not already making itself known by the time that person reached Swim-Through-The-Rock age, without fail it emerged within days of the ritual being undergone. The ritual seemed to induce its arrival – except, of course, when it came to people like her and Huaso who, for no reason other than the caprice of the spirits, had no Flow and never would.

‘I told Zeelu to try and take everything in,’ Huaso said. ‘To concentrate on what is happening around her, to be aware of it all in such a way that she will never forget it. I barely remember my Swim-Through-The-Rock. It’s all mist in my mind. Perhaps that’s just as well, I don’t know. But I want her not to be as overwhelmed by the occasion as I was. She, at least, should be able to recall every moment of this day.’

‘You’re a very good brother,’ Yashu said, linking her arm through Huaso’s. ‘I’m sure she’ll follow your advice.’

Huaso grimaced. ‘There’s always a first time, I suppose.’

Then Rhinazu, headwoman of I*il, appeared on the promontory to address a short speech to the children. Her words weren’t audible from where Yashu and Huaso were sitting, but if previous form was anything to go by, she was covering the usual topics of responsibility to Li*issua, respect for clan, obedience to elders, the importance of Flow and of nurturing and developing Flow. She then stressed the symbolic significance of Swim-Through-The-Rock – a journey, via the medium of water, from the state of childhood to the state of manhood or womanhood, a kind of second birth. When she was done, she gave the nod for the ritual to commence.

The first of the children leapt from the jumping-off point into the sea. Breath-holders gathered around her and swam alongside her across the channel to the Rock. The crowds cheered encouragement as the girl gulped in a breath and ducked under, minnowing down towards the tunnel entrance with a kick of her legs. When she reappeared moments later on the far side of the tunnel, bobbing to the surface, the encouragement turned to applause. The girl was escorted back to shore while the next child in line, a boy, plunged into the water.

When Zeelu’s turn came, she stepped boldly off the promontory and traversed the channel in a splashy, flailing doggy-paddle. (‘Not much of a swimmer, our Zeelu,’ was Huaso’s comment.) With two of the breath-holders on either side of her, and another two waiting by the outlet of the tunnel, she readied herself to dive. Down she went. Moments later, up she came on the other side.

Huaso went down to hug her, and came back with the front of his shirt dampened with an imprint of her wet body. If he had looked proud before, he looked infinitely more so now. Fit to burst with it.

‘So anyway,’ he said. ‘That’s that. There’s about seventy more children. How long do you think it’ll take for all of them to go through?’

‘I don’t know,’ Yashu said. She saw a conspiratorial glint in Huaso’s eye and felt the corners of her mouth turning up. ‘A while. Why?’

‘Perhaps we could...’ He gestured hesitantly towards the beach.

‘Yes, perhaps we could.’

They stole through the crowd, hand in hand, heading back to the dunes. There, they found themselves a hollow where they were well sheltered from the onshore breeze and where the hubbub from the promontory was deliciously, illicitly distant. They weren’t the only ones to have had this idea. In every other dip and cleft in the dunes, or so it seemed, there was a couple of similar age to them cuddling and canoodling. Some of the couples were going further than that, locked in positions that at first glance seemed innocent but were anything but. Furtive rocking motion and the odd ungovernable moan gave away the truth. Yashu and Huaso, in their own private trysting spot, confined themselves to deep, lascivious kissing and the hot pressure of body on body, but their hands strayed all over each other and once in a while – more than once in a while where Huaso’s hands were concerned – brushed as if inadvertently over a taboo area. They teased and frustrated each other in this way until the only sensible thing they could do was roll apart. Both wanted and yet were not prepared to go further. Neither of them had the necessary self-assurance yet.

Lying on their backs, Yashu’s head on Huaso’s chest, they watched clouds for a while, feeling their pulse rates slowing and a sense of propriety reasserting itself. The clouds were white and sharply defined except for the wind-smeared tail each dragged behind it. Huaso likened them to ships of the sky, churning up soft furrows in their wakes.

‘We’ll have a house of our own when you come to live with me on Shai, Yashu,’ he then said. ‘I’ve already picked out the one. It’s in Purple-Cowrie-Beach-Village. No one’s lived in it for ages, and I’ve put in an application with the headman to be allowed to take it over. It’s survived two ’Storms more or less intact, and it has seven rooms. Seven! Some of them need repair doing to them, but that’s all right, I can manage that. Some of the planks outside need replacing too, and the roof has holes. The good thing is, it’s big enough for all of us. You, me and Liyalu.’

Yashu turned her head to look up at his face. ‘You wouldn’t mind Aunt Liyalu living with us?’

‘Of course not. Why should I? Besides, I’d never expect you to leave her on her own to come to live with me. This way, you and I could both help look after her, we get to live together – everyone happy.’

‘I don’t know whether Aunt Liyalu would agree to move to Shai. It might take a lot of persuading.’

‘But if you start working on her, and tell her how wonderful the house is, or will be when I’ve finished with it, and how beautiful Purple-Cowrie-Beach-Village is, which it is, believe me, and tell her about all the new friends she’ll make on Shai, I’m sure she’ll come around.’

‘Aunt Liyalu’s not very good at making new friends.’

‘Not on I*il, maybe, but on Shai it’ll be a different story.’

It was all so simple to Huaso. He had decided on a plan and could not see how anything might prevent that plan from succeeding. Yashu was both charmed by and envious of his straightforwardness. It was one of his most attractive qualities, that he had a faith in the future – in their future together – that was utterly unhindered by doubts. Perhaps it was because he hadn’t lost his parents to the Worldstorm and because he didn’t live with a relative who was dying. He had experienced hardships of his own, certainly. But even discovering that he was without-Flow had not crushed his innate optimism. Life still seemed basically fair to Huaso, and Yashu was drawn to that as a hermit crab is drawn to an empty shell.

Too soon they heard the sound of people traipsing back from the Rock. The ceremony was over. Reluctantly, Yashu and Huaso drew apart, got to their feet, brushed themselves off, and descended from the dunes.

On the beach, the barbecue pits were ablaze. It wasn’t long before roast food was being distributed through the crowd: lobster, crab, cobs of corn, potatoes, sizzling fish steaks. There was orange juice for the children to drink and, for the grown-ups, something also made from oranges but a little more potent, sirassi. Yashu and Huaso lunched with Huaso’s family, and the atmosphere in their little group was convivial enough. Zeelu dominated the conversation. She was of the age when the sound of her own voice was the most important thing in the world, and her relentless chirpiness kept everyone amused.

When lunch was eaten, the storytelling show began. A troupe of fish-in-the-air puppeteers who had set up a stage on the dunes began manipulating their life-size marionettes against various backdrops. From a distance they made the elegant, articulated wooden figures strut, gesticulate, bow, swoon, skip, fight, dance, pirouette, gyrate, all to match the words of I*il’s narrator-in-residence, I*ilaziano, who stood atop Tallest-Dune and bellowed out his versions of old, old tales in his boomer voice, loud enough to be heard across the entire island. These were stories which had been around as long as there had been people on Li*issua, and they told of true events that were also myths, legends that were also history. Such as: Finder-Founder Oriñaho’s defiance of the Worldstorm, which he managed to scare away by shouting at it louder than its own thunder (for in Oriñaho there was every Flow, including booming). Such as: the adventures of strongman Sheelo, long-ago headman of Ra*ai, who would wrestle killer whales for sport and once ate an entire netful of sprat at a single sitting and then, suffering from a terrible stomach ache, vomited up all the fish alive. Such as: the exploits of the heroine Ussyashu, Yashu’s namesake, who averted conflict between the residents of Uss and Haroo by swimming back and forth across the treacherous strait between the two islands no less than a hundred times, a feat which so impressed the warring factions that they immediately set aside their differences and sued for peace.

For each story, the stringless puppets executed a mime of gestures and dance that followed the rhythm of Aziano’s words and brought the narrative to life. Some of the stage scenery also moved. Here were dark grey clouds that represented the Worldstorm, shying angrily away from Oriñaho’s breast-beating bellow. Here were the killer whales that Ra*aisheelo knocked flying. Here were interleaving blue-painted boards that were the seething waters of the Uss-Haroo strait, doing their best to overwhelm a figurine representing the dauntless Ussyashu. Aziano returned again and again to certain descriptive epithets he had coined in order to set his personal stamp on the stories, while the puppeteers had their creations perform certain equivalent manoeuvres of their own devising, a combination which made the show uniquely I*il and uniquely now. Other-islander puppeteer troupes used different signature movements. Future troupes all across the archipelago would have to devise all-new, idiosyncratic variations for themselves. In this way, the stories were kept fresh and alive and eternal.

Everyone loved the show, children and adults alike, and there was a tumultuous round of applause at the end, with hoots and whistles. As Aziano, the puppeteers and the marionettes took their bows, Zeelu solemnly announced that, now that she knew she was a fish-in-the-air, she planned to become a puppeteer herself when she was older. No other job would do for her. Her mind was absolutely made up.

‘And you like stories about Ussyashu, don’t you?’ she said to Yashu.

‘I do,’ Yashu said, although it would have been more accurate to say that she used to. Back when she was young. Back when she believed that anything was possible. Back before she was Dammed.

‘Then I’ll make sure that when I’m a puppeteer we always put on at least one Ussyashu story,’ Zeelu said. ‘Just for you.’

The show marked the culmination of the day’s events. I*ilrhinazu thanked people for coming and once again congratulated the Swim-Through-The-Rock children. Then a gradual exodus to the boats began. Since Shai was one of the furthest islands away, Huaso’s family were among the first to leave. Down at the water’s edge, Yashu said formal farewells to Imersho and Pharralu, and also to Zeelu, who was delighted to be addressed as Shaizeelu for the first time in her life. Then Yashu turned to Huaso. He looked gloomy.

‘Will you be at the celebration of Cross-The-Causeway on Oöyia the ebb-tide after next?’ she asked.

‘If there is a boat going from Shai.’

‘Then I’ll see you there. We’ll gorge ourselves on cockles until we’re so heavy that we sink into the mud up to our knees.’

This seemed to perk him up, and when he bowed to her his mouth was trying to bend into a smile. ‘Mala, I*ilyashu.’

‘Mala, Shaihuaso,’ she said.

As locals helped shove the Shai boat off the sand, Huaso took his place at the prow again, standing there with his arms limp by his sides, looking back at Yashu. When the boat was afloat, its shaper-of-water turned it about on a sideways welter of water and aimed for open sea. Huaso turned too, contrariwise, and kept his gaze on Yashu until each of them was too far off to distinguish the other’s face. Then he waved to her, and she waved back, until the distance between them was too great for even that gesture to be visible. Finally the boat was just one of several dispersing black dots on the horizon, and I*il, from Huaso’s viewpoint, just a receding, triple-peaked silhouette, dwindling into haze.

Yashu helped her own-islanders tidy up after the revelries, tossing handfuls of food detritus off the beach into the lap of the sea. Gulls swooped in to scavenge whatever floated. Whatever sank would be nibbled up by marine creatures. The sea was all-effacing, all-embracing, all-erasing.

Once the beach was clean, Yashu made her way up to the coastal track and trod back round to the island’s windward side, part of a strung-out procession of people making the same journey.

Arriving home, she was greeted by the goats first. The two nannies congregated at the fence and bleated to her plaintively. Both were in need of milking, their udders hanging heavy. Meanwhile the billy stared from a short way off, his slotted gaze appraising. Yashu told the nannies she would attend to them shortly, and entered the cottage by the kitchen door, calling out Aunt Liyalu’s name.

Liyalu was asleep, slumped in her favourite chair in the main room, facing the windows and the view out over the rooftops of Second-Cliff-Village to the expanse of sea beyond. Her head was angled heavily against one shoulder, and Yashu thought that this was how her aunt would look if she were to have died just now. She seemed to have no support in herself, her body sunken under its own ailing weight.

Gently she awoke her. Liyalu came round slowly, her thin hands groping at the air as though sleep were a net she was having to claw her way out of. It took her several moments to focus on her niece’s face.

‘Is it late afternoon already?’ she said.

‘Afraid so.’

‘Oh shit and seaweed, I’ve slept most of the day away.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does. I was hoping to get some housework done. I just sat down for a rest...’ She tried to get out of the chair but couldn’t manage it without assistance from Yashu. ‘Was it a nice day?’ she asked, stretching out cramped limbs

‘Mostly, yes.’

‘The ceremony went well?’

‘Fine.’

‘And Huaso was happy to see you?’

‘He was.’

‘That’s good then.’

Yashu changed out of her best clothes into something plainer and more practical. Then it was chores: milking the goats, washing bedlinen in the tub by the stream and hanging it out to dry, and, finally, stoking up the stove and reheating last night’s rabbit stew for supper. It was a warm evening, so she and Liyalu ate at the table outdoors, lit sidelong by the rays of sunset. Controlling her hands was a struggle for Liyalu, and becoming more so as time went by and her illness worsened. As much of each trembling spoonful of stew slopped back into the bowl as made it into her mouth. Yashu found it painful to watch, but had become expert at masking her pity. The last thing Liyalu needed or expected was pity.

‘You said it was “mostly” a nice day,’ Liyalu said. ‘Something must have squirted its ink into the water. What?’

‘Just Shaipharralu. She hates me, and she tries to hide but it’s plain as anything.’

‘I don’t know if she hates you. It’s just mothers and their sons, that’s all. No girl would be good enough for her Huaso.’

‘But when she talks to me, it’s like her voice is dripping with vinegar. You know, sweet, but more sour than sweet. Do you think she’ll ever approve of me?’

‘I think,’ said Liyalu, ‘you should clear away the dishes and fetch me my pipe and my pouch of ninespike, please.’

Yashu did as asked, and fumblingly Liyalu gathered up pinches of the dope and tamped them into the bowl of the pipe. Then, with the aid of a match and plenty of sucking, she got the dry, dark-green shreds alight and fuming. She inhaled blissfully, holding the smoke in her lungs as long as she could. Liyalu lived most of her life having to endure rough, rasping aches all over her body, like miniature saws working away deep in her muscles, sometimes in her bones. The dope helped soothe the pain.

‘Better,’ she said, and dragged on the pipe a few more times before offering it to Yashu. Yashu took a couple of not-as-deep puffs before passing it back. The ninespike, grown locally, was a particularly harsh strain, and she disliked the way its smoke scraped at the back of your throat. What she did like was the mild giddiness it brought.

She thought Liyalu would be carrying on the conversation about Pharralu. When that didn’t happen, she attempted to revive the subject.

‘Maybe if I had Flow...’

‘Maybe,’ Liyalu replied. ‘Do you know what the worst thing about this illness of mine is? Not that it’s slowly killing me. Who fears entering the Great-Ocean-Beyond? And not that some part of me or other is usually hurting because of it. It’s that I don’t have my sharp-sight any more. That was the first thing the illness took from me. Which is usually what happens, isn’t it? You know something’s seriously wrong with you when your Flow starts to fade. But I used to be able to see so much. I could count the petals on a daisy at a hundred paces. I could tell you the colour of a seagull’s eye a mile away. I could look down there’ – she pointed at Second-Cliff-Village, now blanketing itself in a haze of chimney smoke – ‘and spot wasps building a nest under somebody’s eaves. On a clear day I could even make out the mainland from here. At night, there were stars visible to me that weren’t visible to anybody else, hundreds of them. All gone now. The world’s become dull. Drab. Like I’m peering at everything through a veil. No, not a veil. Through wool. That’s how bad it is. I’m glimpsing when I used to be able to look, truly look. And I miss that so much. So much it sometimes makes me want to weep.’

Her eyes glistened, and Yashu remembered how, when she was small, she used to think that her aunt’s sharp-sight didn’t only bring distant objects closer – that her aunt was capable of peering into her mind and uncovering her innermost thoughts. She hadn’t known then that this was an ability almost all adults had when it came to children.

‘I don’t mean to belittle what you’re going through,’ Liyalu said, stroking her niece’s arm. ‘I’m just saying I understand. And that things could be worse. That maybe, looked at a certain way, it’s better for someone not to have Flow at all than have it and then lose it.’

‘I wouldn’t mind even having a not-of-the-archipelago Flow. Even that would be better.’

‘What, and have to be packed off to the mainland to learn how to use it properly?’

‘I’d never go! I’d never leave you!’

Liyalu’s gaze was sad and fond. ‘You’re a good girl, Yashu. Life’s been pretty unkind to you, yet you’ve always managed to keep your chin up and take the mala view. I’m so proud of you for that. If it’s any consolation, I’m sure there’s a purpose behind everything that’s happened to you. I’m sure there’s a reason why you were pulled alive and unharmed from the ruins of your parents’ house, and I’m sure there’s a reason why your Flow is as it is. I have no idea what the reason might be, but you should trust the spirits. They don’t misguide us. Sometimes their schemes might seem a little foggy, but by and large they want what’s best for all of us. Do you believe that?’

‘I do.’

‘Then that’s all that matters.’ Liyalu reached for the pouch of ninespike. ‘Mind you, when I get to the Great-Ocean-Beyond, I’ll be having words with them. You can count on that. “Give Yashu a break,” I’ll tell them. And they’d bloody well better listen.’

In spite of everything Yashu laughed. One of the things she loved most about her aunt was her irreverent streak. Liyalu observed the codes and conventions of life, but not slavishly. And it was easy to imagine her, after death, doing just as she had said – causing trouble, being ornery, refusing to let her spirit surrender gracefully to the massed anonymity of the Great-Ocean-Beyond. As obstinate as a limpet while alive, she was hardly likely to be much different when dead.

The sky dusted over with dusk. The stars sprinkled out. The moon rose, hard and pure, striping its light over a tar-black sea. Liyalu finished a second pipe of ninespike, with help from Yashu, then turned in for the night, planting a soft kiss on the crown of her niece’s head before hobbling indoors. Yashu remained where she was, settling back into her seat and listening to the beat of the waves against the rocks below Second-Cliff-Village. Their rhythmic throb lulled her blood.

If there was a purpose to it all, as her aunt had said, all the misfortunes, all the things gone wrong, then fine. Yashu just wished the spirits would hurry up and reveal it.