The People in the Trees (15 page)

It was Tallent who spoke next. “I want to tell you a story,” he said, and then paused.

I would grow accustomed to this as well, his way of beginning and then stopping, of great, paragraphs-long speeches that would end, abruptly, in silence, sometimes for minutes, occasionally for hours. But this time his silence was brief, and when he spoke again his voice was strong, and the story that emerged was delivered less as a speech and more as a recitation, as if he were a wandering storyteller whom I had encountered in a dark piney medieval forest, not a humid jungle, and I had given him a coin and a slab of black bread to bewitch me, for a moment to transport me from this world.

“Many years ago, many, many years, before the age of man, there was a great stone, a god, named Ivu’ivu, who ruled alone over a vast kingdom of water. He was very powerful, this god, and his dominion contained everything below the surface of the sea—his was a kingdom of tail-whipping, tooth-bared sharks and gigantic, blind-eyed whales and fleets of fish and fields of swaying sea grasses that brushed against his base like nymphs’ hair.

“But Ivu’ivu was lonely. All around him he saw couplings, beasts that joined and bred and glided by him, trailed by their offspring. Even the loneliest, the most solitary of his subjects—the hermit crabs with their whorled, spotted shells and the creeping, prickly starfish—were surrounded by children. Being a god, Ivu’ivu was not worried about mortality, but he thought he would like someone to be with, with whom he could discuss the burdens and difficulties of being a god and a king, with whom he might give birth to his own race of children. But for this he would need another god, his equal.

“Ivu’ivu had a dear friend, a turtle named Opa’ivu’eke, who was almost as old as Ivu’ivu himself and who, because he could live both below and above water, had traveled far and wide and had many marvelous tales about places Ivu’ivu had never been. He regaled his friend with stories of the air and the land, where there were as many creatures as were underwater but who flew instead of swam—Ivu’ivu had to ask the turtle to explain flight to him many, many times before he was able even to begin understanding what it was—or who walked, or ran, or crept on two or four or a dozen legs.

“One day Opa’ivu’eke was telling Ivu’ivu about his latest journeys, and the god could not help but sigh. ‘What is wrong, my friend?’ asked Opa’ivu’eke.

“ ‘Ah, friend,’ replied Ivu’ivu, ‘I am lonely. All around me I see
happiness, companionship. I too would like a companion, some children. But I need another god, and there can be only one ruler of this world.’

“The turtle was silent for a long time. Then he bade his friend goodbye and swam away.

“Some time later the turtle returned, again with wondrous news, but this time even more wondrous than the god could have hoped. On his most recent trip above water, Opa’ivu’eke had talked to another friend, A’aka, the god of the sun, and explained to him Ivu’ivu’s desire. A’aka, it emerged, would like to meet this powerful god of the water about whom he had heard so much. And so a romance began between the god of the water and the god of the sun, with the turtle their messenger. It was he who ferried comments and compliments and questions and chants, spiraling into the cold black depths of the water to deliver A’aka’s words to Ivu’ivu and then, his flippers fanning through the currents—which Ivu’ivu calmed to make his friend’s journey easier—up to the surface, where A’aka would pause in his course in the middle of each day to listen to the news from a world he could never visit.

“Within time, three children were born: the first a boy, named Ivu’ivu, after the god of the sea; the second a girl, named Iva’a’aka—the Daughter of Stone and Sun; and the third a boy, U’ivu, whose name means simply Of Stone. Half of all three children lived below water, like Ivu’ivu, and half of them lived above it, like A’aka. They floated in and were cooled by the watery kingdom of one father and warmed and nourished by the heat of the other. Always they were sustained by their parents’ love and devotion. And so when they too grew up and became lonely, they turned to A’aka, who blessed them with their own children: mankind. And as long as the humans were kind to their parents, A’aka made sure that their crops would always grow, and Ivu’ivu promised that the sea would always be full of fish and that they would always be able to sail his waters, because men, after all, were his descendants as well and therefore his to cherish and protect.

“As for Opa’ivu’eke, he lived a long, long life, long enough to see his friends’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren grow and prosper, long enough to give birth to his own children, who bore his name—Stone-backed Animal—and
who on land preferred to live atop and in water around the turtle’s favorite child, his godchild, Ivu’ivu. Opa’ivu’eke was not a god, of course, but he was, and is, always honored not only by his two friends but by all his friends’ descendants—for his devotion and selflessness, of course, but also for his noble duties as a messenger. This is why, when a man is lucky enough to find an opa’ivu’eke, he must make a sacrifice to the gods and also eat some of its flesh himself. To do so is to send a message to the gods, a prayer for the one thing that A’aka withheld—with Ivu’ivu’s approval—from his grandchildren: immortality. And maybe one day the gods might answer them.”

Tallent stopped talking and we both sat for a moment without speaking.
I am sitting on the child of a god
, I thought.
Two gods
. It was preposterous, and yet I felt, despite myself, a tremor ripple through me.

“That is the first story a young U’ivuan learns,” said Tallent quietly. “It is almost as old as these people are—thousands of years old, and it has never changed. They have no written language—or at least they didn’t until the missionaries—but everyone knows it. This symbol”—he traced a circle on the ground with a stick, and through it a straight vertical line—“means
turtle
, and you find it on ceremonial stones and dishes from hundreds of years ago, from people who have made an offering of one of Opa’ivu’eke’s children to Ivu’ivu and A’aka, hoping that they will be the one who will be granted the exception, who will finally be allowed to live as a god.”

He was silent again.

“But there is another story now, one that is not old at all, one that has in fact emerged only in the past century or so. For many years the grandchildren of Ivu’ivu and A’aka made their grandparents and parents proud, and why not? The humans were brave and resourceful. They were excellent hunters, superior fishermen. They protected their parents against all invaders and properly respected both of their grandfathers. And although years, more than anyone could recall, had passed without anyone finding one of Opa’ivu’eke’s children to sacrifice, neither god seemed to be offended, and all passed in harmony.

“But then, slowly, so slowly that no one noticed for many years,
things began to go wrong. The people of U’ivu felled many trees and did not replant. They allowed people who did not belong on the islands—ho’oalas, or white people—to live among them. The ho’oalas brought with them great beasts made of iron that churned up the soft soil of Iva’a’aka, and great nets with which they scooped vast quantities of seafood from the ocean, more than could ever be consumed. They made waste, mountains of it, and what was not left on the land—on top of their parents!—the humans shoveled into the sea.

“From below and from above, Ivu’ivu and A’aka grew first alarmed and then angry. Ivu’ivu sent towering waves to batter his children, and A’aka wept to see him do so, for although Ivu’ivu intended only to scare the humans into respect, by destroying them he also destroyed part of the gods’ children—chunks of all three of the islands crumbled into the sea. But still that did not change the humans’ ways. And so A’aka sent blistering waves of sun, ceaseless, remorseless. During the months that he normally retired and left the skies to his sister, Pu’uaka, the goddess of rain, he instead stayed on, hurling sharp daggers of burning light to the ground. And now it was Ivu’ivu’s turn to cry, for although A’aka’s efforts caused the humans’ crops to shrivel and many of them to die, he knew that his children were scalded and scorched and parched and that they longed for fresh water.

“The gods knew that not all of the humans had forsaken the old ways, and they felt sorrowful that they could not separate and save the good from the bad, the righteous from the disrespectful. But still the humans continued to ignore the gods and the agreement that they had made with their grandparents so long ago. And so the gods were forced to continue their punishments, the tidal waves, the fierce droughts. A’aka asked his sister to join his efforts, to subject the humans to torrential rains, rains so terrible that many-hundred-year-old trees were uprooted and slid groaning into the sea, and that waterfalls overspilled their canyons and turned creeks into barreling, angry rivers. With each attack, the gods watched their children grow weaker and smaller and more depleted, and with each attack, their sorrow grew.

“As did their anger. And so the gods decided that they had no choice. One day, after many years, a man named Manu’eke—Kindly
Animal—was fishing in a cool stream high atop Ivu’ivu when he saw swimming in the shallows, unbelievably, a turtle. Quickly he grabbed the creature and rushed home to his village. There he killed it, and in his eagerness and haste and perhaps poor manners, he ate the entire animal without sacrificing any to the gods, his forefathers.

“That night he dreamed that he had been turned into a god, that he was the first to be allowed to live forever. But oh! The gods were furious. They saw what Manu’eke had done, and they knew that if a human could forget to offer some of this sacred creature to them, as was their right, then man had fallen very far indeed. And so they decided to punish Manu’eke by giving him what he most desired, eternal life. But a horrible life. For after his sixtieth year—some say earlier, some say later—Manu’eke became less and less human. He forgot what it was to be a man. The people he had once known became strangers to him. He spoke in a voice no one recognized. He forgot to keep himself clean. He became a creature that was not quite an animal, not quite a man. He was driven from his people and never allowed to return.

“And so Manu’eke wanders the jungles still, not one thing and not another, a memory of a man, an example of the gods’ wrath and their warning as well. He reminds us of Ivu’ivu’s and A’aka’s power, that life is theirs to give and theirs to take, and that they are always watching us, ready to take or give the gifts that men most desire.”

Here Tallent stopped, and once again I felt that shiver. Around us the night seemed to have grown darker still, so dark that I could not even see Tallent seated right next to me, so dark that his voice seemed to become something tactile and textured, a curtain of deep-plum velvet hanging between us.

And then I felt yet another shiver, but this one more frightening and colder, because it was in this moment I realized: this story, this myth, memorized by Tallent from who knows whom and secreted and cultivated and petted and caressed until he was able to almost sing it, perfect in its pauses and rhythms, was why we were here. He meant to find Manu’eke; he meant to give meaning to a fable; he meant to hunt down a creature that loped through children’s nightmares, that populated campfire tales, that existed in the same universe as stones who could mate with planets and father mountains and men. Suddenly my existence here seemed surreal, and the
quest—even the word
quest
was something out of fictions and fantasies, in which an object, magical and imbued with improbable powers, is sought by a group of feckless heroes—we were to undertake seemed tinny and cheap.

And yet—and this was even more frightening still—I could also feel something within me come undone. Even today, all these decades later, I cannot explain it with any greater accuracy. I found myself suddenly imagining a long, fat, chalked line stretching across a flat burned earth. To one side was what I had known, a neat-bricked city of windowless structures, the stuff and facts I knew to be true (I thought, unbidden, of my staircase, its names of those wiser than I, and was at once embarrassed for myself, for finding myself in this situation, in speechless thrall to an anthropologist). And on the other side was Tallent’s world, the shape of which I could not see, for it was obscured by a fog, one that thinned and thickened in unpredictable movements, so that I could discern, occasionally, glimpses of what lay behind it: nothing more than colors and movements, no real shapes; but there was something irresistible there, I knew it, and the fear of succumbing to it was finally less awful than never knowing what lay beyond that fog, never exploring what I might never again have the opportunity to explore.