Gods of the Greataway (7 page)

“I’d like to
see him shouting underwater,” one of the jerkfishermen remarked to his neighbor, sourly.

“He couldn’t stay down long enough to try.”

In point of fact, Kikiwa could hold his breath for over five minutes, as long as most Riders. Physically he was well qualified for advancement too, being tall and strong and a fine swimmer. Aware of the dashing figure he cut, he circled the orca around the bay, hoping Kelina might happen this way and pause to admire him.

The event that was to change the course of his life happened quite simply, by accident. A child, walking along the shore, caught her foot in a loop of grass and, thrown off balance by a sudden swell, tumbled into the sea. At first, nobody saw her. Like all Polysitians, she had been able to swim almost from birth, but a strong offshore wind and underisland current carried her away. Kikiwa heard her screams and headed the orca in her direction.

The huge black-and-white animal cut the water like a battleship, throwing an impressive bow wave. Kikiwa sat upright, holding the rein with one hand, the other arm extended theatrically for balance.

And then, suddenly, he and the orca were no longer the only large creatures in the bay. Another dorsal fin cut the water nearby. A sinuous shape was clearly visible underwater. With a yell of fear Kikiwa caused the orca to veer away, allowing the shark to move in on the little girl.

The violent swerve of the orca unseated Kikiwa, however, and he fell howling into the water. The orca, released from the immediate proximity of his fear-thoughts, swerved again, sighted the shark, and attacked. The water churned red. Kikiwa and the child drifted on. Then the whale returned, triumphant, and a shaking Kikiwa pulled himself on board, at least having the presence of mind to drag the little girl after him. He urged the orca shoreward and shortly was basking in the plaudits of the crowd. The next day, in a brief ceremony, King Awamia pronounced him Or Kikiwa, and it seemed to him that Kelina, at her father’s side, regarded him in admiration.

When he tried
to follow the matter up, however, he was rebuffed. “Yes, you are a Rider, Or Kikiwa,” she said, “but there is more to a man than simple physical courage.”

Or Kikiwa was no hero. Although his appearance was impressive and his riding ability adequate, he knew, deep down, that he was a coward dressed in Rider’s skins. He tried too hard to compensate for this, dealing arrogantly with his people and snapping back at imagined insults. If he had been a difficult man before, he now became impossible. His workers left him. His exploits on the back of his orca became so foolhardy that the other Riders began to refuse to accompany him, for fear Or Kikiwa would lead them to purposeless death. “You are neglecting the Code,” said Or Halohea at last, pointing up the ultimate folly of Or Kikiwa’s behavior. “Squid and parrotfish are eating at your shores while you take on sharks as though they were dragons. And your land is so decayed it begins to threaten your neighbor’s.”

Indeed, Or Kikiwa was in danger of suffering the ultimate disgrace for a Rider: isolation. His neighbor, Or Honu, had made representations to King Awamia. He wanted Or Kikiwa’s lands cut adrift before his own lands could be poisoned. “I invoke the Code,” he said. “What I ask is for the good of the grass.”

Possibly this is when that fated man’s reason finally snapped. Or Kikiwa disappeared and was never seen again by the islanders. His domain lay deserted and rotting, his tower listed and sagged, in danger of falling through the ground that decayed beneath it. His orca was gone. It was said that he’d ridden off on it, seeking new lands and a fresh start.

And Kelina was gone too.

King Awamia was beside himself. He dispatched his ten best Riders to search the ocean, bending the Code in leaving only a handful of Riders to defend the island. In due course the search parties returned with tales of strange beasts and strange lands, but no word of Or Kikiwa or Kelina.

King Awamia decreed that Or Kikiwa’s rotting land be severed from the island, and for six days the Riders urged their mounts to chew, and all the people tore at the fibrous blades and roots with their bare hands and chopped with sharpened turtleshell and cuttlefish. On the seventh day, the domain of Or Kikiwa drifted away on the trade winds, with no guide-whales to restrain it.

And, unknown to
King Awamia, his daughter Kelina drifted with it.

She lay where she’d lain for many days, in a chamber of Or Kikiwa’s tower so tightly woven that it would have taken her weeks to pick herself free. She had food: a pool of trigger-shrimps and fish enough for a season. She had air, for the dense mesh of her prison was still porous enough to allow the trade winds through. Water she didn’t need; like all Polysitians, an occasional immersion in the sea fulfilled all her body’s requirements. Hope she didn’t have — after two weeks she had only unraveled a fraction of her prison walls. She thought of diving into the pool and swimming under the island, but the tower was situated in the center of Or Kikiwa’s domain, and she knew she would never be able to reach the shoreline before she drowned. So she lay there, day after day, quietly picking at the mesh of fibrous roots.

Or Kikiwa was elsewhere. He had visions of glory. He had dreams of an empire so vast that all people would be forced to acknowledge his greatness, even the powerful Black King Usali. He would bring Kelina back a domain of inestimable size, propelled by guidewhales of prodigious strength, peopled by workers of unusual skill and subservience.

A normal man, possessed of such a vision — if normal men do have such visions — would have set to and captured wild guidewhales and trained them, a process that would only have taken a few years. He would have then set his guidewhales to rounding up uninhabited rafts of grass. Grass soon knits together, and a sizable island could be collected in a lifetime.

But Or Kikiwa didn’t have a lifetime. Kelina was waiting for him, so the empire must be built rapidly. He must conquer. Drunk with the madness of omnipotence, he shouted his desires at the sunrise as he urged the orca eastward. The low profile of a small islet appeared on the horizon.

He attacked at noon and was driven off by three contemptuous Riders waving whalebone clubs. He attempted to outflank them and gain the shore, and they let him do this and followed him inland, pinioning him and taking his orca-rib dagger from him. The ordinary people laughed at him. Women cast clumps of stinking, diseased grass at him, men slipped wriggling fish inside his sealskin. They dragged him before the king.

“Submit or
be conquered!” Or Kikiwa shouted. By now he was totally mad.

“Throw him back,” said the king. “He’s not worth keeping.”

If he was mad, his first experience nevertheless lent him cunning. When he approached the next island, he behaved with more circumspection. Asking for an audience with the king, he was received into the royal tower. In a sagging, swaying chamber he proposed a great alliance, linking his host’s lands with those of his own, which, in his imagination, by now covered a fair percentage of the ocean. The king was puzzled.

“Alliance against what?”

Or Kikiwa explained that the alliance would involve a pooling of knowledge and resources and, in accordance with the Code, would result in betterment of the grass. With all the smaller islands eventually joined into one, the boundaries would be proportionally shorter and easier to defend against predators.

Now the king’s advisor spoke. “That is Black King Usali’s talk. The grass only grows at the shoreline. It is more in accordance with the Code to have a large number of smaller islands. Thus will the grass prosper. And in any case, the domestic fish thrive at the shoreline, too. There is a maximum size for an island, and we have reached it. Go and join Usali, Rider.”

Insane, enraged, Or Kikiwa rode on, to receive progressively more hostile greetings as King Awamia’s Riders spread the story of the kidnapping. Finally he rode homeward. His thoughts were twisted and malignant. He felt betrayed and scorned by the Polysitian race and, in particular, by Kelina, who had caused him to undertake this mission. If it had not been for Kelina and her arrogant airs and her notions of superiority, he would not have found himself in this predicament. He would have been, instead, a respected Rider on a prosperous island. She had brought him to his knees with her sly ways — and now she would pay for it.

He thought of her
lying there helpless, and his thoughts were crazed and vengeful. She would pay. He shouted his intentions at the stars as he rode westward, and his intentions were inhuman. The orca swam stolidly, trying to blot out the insane thoughts that its gentle mind could not help but receive. Or Kikiwa raved on.

Legend tells that Starquin heard him.

Meanwhile, Kelina lay picking at the roots. She had reached a point where she could distinguish night from day through the thinning mesh, but she had a long way to go. Occasionally she let herself wonder about Or Kikiwa, and she wondered if he were dead. She guessed that his domain had been cut adrift. She expected to crawl out of her hole in a few days’ time to find she was completely alone. She couldn’t bring herself to feel vindictive toward Or Kikiwa, she knew the man was not normal. Soon she would be free and would send a dolphin to find an orca. Then she would locate her father and ride home. As the mesh thinned under her busy fingers, her spirits rose — but by that time Or Kikiwa, mad with vengeance and lust, was one day’s ride away.

Then the sky began to streak with high hurricane clouds. Kelina felt the motion of the raft change. Long swells rolled underground. She sensed a change in the air and redoubled her efforts to escape. It is not a good thing for a tiny island to be caught in a hurricane without guidewhales. She had to return to the safety of her father’s land, which was big enough to ride out anything the gods might send.

That night was one of the wildest in memory. The hurricane, changing direction for no good reason except divine intervention, fell upon a small area of Polysitia and scattered the islands far and wide. King Awamia’s land was driven three hundred kilometers north, other islands were pulled into the Roaring Forties and raced eastward. Many broke up, and new kingdoms arose, and new domains. Many good people were lost in the howling winds, swept from their lands, never to be seen again.

A week later a trained orca, riderless, was seen patrolling a bay off a large continent where there are real mountains, real rivers. The orca was scarred from many floggings. The rider was never found. It is said that nobody cared, anyway. Or Kikiwa was never heard of again.

And Kelina? She became
famous and found her place in the Song of Earth so that both land-based minstrels and the minstrels of Polysitia sang of her, forevermore. Although the minstrels tell the same story, the language is different. In the land dialect, with its multiple consonants, so different from the liquid tongue of the floating islands, Kelina is called Belinda.

S
o the Song of Earth
is not composed solely of the embellished observations of the Rainbow. There are other sources, such as the legends of Polysitia, which were fed into the Rainbow by scholars and historians when they came to light. The Rainbow was then able to examine these legends and search its memory banks for links with observed history.

The trio of Polysitian stories that make up the Legend of Kelina were finally linked with the epic tale of the Triad. The dating — so far as it could be established — was approximately correct. The events and the characters were unmistakable. The triumph of the historian who first pieced together the Rainbow’s findings can only be guessed at.

*

On a remote shore of Malaloa, which is the biggest island of Polysitia, there lived a sun oven craftsman named Peli.

Over the years Peli had built up a reputation for good work, and his sun ovens were things of beauty and utility, able to cook the thickest seal steak to a turn, on a fine day. Peli was proud of his ability and, in his earlier years, not a little boastful. He could afford an orca of his own, on which he traveled to the coastal villages to set up his ovens, bringing back payment in the forms of meat, vegetables and artifacts. He grew rich by the local standards, and his woven dwelling was not far short of a Rider’s tower in opulence.

Then
his eyesight began to fail.

Possibly this was due to the nature of his work; certainly it seemed to be an occupational hazard with sun oven craftsmen. Sun ovens are built as follows: First, a large basket is woven, hemispherical and about five meters in diameter, carefully aligned with the direction of the sun’s travel so that the sun will shine directly into the basket at cooking time.

Next, the inside of the basket is liberally daubed with a glue made from fish bones boiled in a whale-skull pot.

Finally — and this is where the real craftsmanship comes in — hemitrexes, which are the hard, reflective shells of certain mutated jellyfish, are set in glue. Now the builder must squat inside the basket, with the sun high, and adjust each hemitrex until the focused rays of the sun pass through the central point of the basket where the food will be hung. It is hot, blinding work, and the builder will usually pick a day of slight overcast and arrange for the villagers to keep his body well cooled with water. It is work that demands an accurate eye.

And Peli was going blind.

“Peli’s ovens are not good these days,” people would say. Usually the oven is situated in the middle of a village so that its use can be shared. It was noticed that meat cooked unevenly in them. Ovens need constant attention — realignment according to season and to correct for warping of the basket and the shifting positions of the island itself. After each adjustment by Peli, an oven seemed a little worse than before. But Peli was a proud man and would not admit his infirmity. People asked for his services less and sought out other craftsmen to maintain the sun ovens.

Peli began to spend much of his time sitting on the shore outside his dwelling, idly fingering the stock of hemitrexes that he could hardly see, his mind full of unhappy and bitter thoughts. And here he might have remained for the rest of his days, if a strange thing had not happened one evening as he sat staring into the setting sun.