The Sea Is Ours (10 page)

Kagubutan smiled indulgently. “So they liked my gifts.”

“They'll like it even more at the solstice. Though the Spaniard spectators less so.” Udaya regretted the fact she couldn't be there to witness it, but one must always remain by Kagubutan's side.

She looked at the spiraling steps that led to and from Kagubutan's reception area. The gold-framed boxes that had once lined them were gone. Carried away on a Kalakalang Galyon, now they were in the possession of a certain ambassador, with tikbalang in kamagong armor protecting them all.

Only one box remained, but that one had always stood empty saved for the chilled vinegar that filled it.

Udaya's eyes fell upon Kagubutan's next project. It was yet in the beginning stages so only materials had been gathered: narra for the body, rose vines for the entrails, gumamela blossoms for the hair. But these were the easy pieces. The trick, as the diwata had explained to her, was figuring out what material to use for the wings—figuring out what would allow her new aswang to fly.

Kagubutan hummed. “I did promise Maria Flora that she'd have someone to practice her mother tongue with.”

“So you did.”

And the diwata always make good on their promises.

Nghi Vo

When I opened my eyes, the air was cooler and damper than it had been when I went to sleep the night before, as if the wind had brought the chill of the East Sea along with it. It reminded me that the monsoon season was close, and that my time in the Trường Sơn Range was nearly up. Before next week, Linh and I would have to send up the sky lantern that would signal the ranger station at Hải Vân Pass for a pick up by air. After that, it would be a careful trip by rail to Saigon where we could get to work unpacking our rare cargo.

Our terrariums, some the size of my fist and a few that stood waist-high, were full of sleeping animals and insects, held in suspended animation until they could be released into the Trường Sơn dome at the Universal Exposition in Saigon. Between my sister and I and the five years we had spent on expedition in the Trường Sơn Range, I would guess that we were responsible for at least a quarter, if not more, of the flora and fauna in the Trường Sơn dome. There were going to be eight domes altogether, three from Vietnam itself, and five replicating biomes from around the world. The world was coming to Saigon in a year, and Linh had observed wryly that we wanted the world to know that we could keep it under glass if we wished to.

Our return to Saigon was going to be modestly successful, but the thought of coming out of the mountains, back to the university, made my stomach clench. My memory is very good, a benefit when I was memorizing taxonomy and anatomical structures, and a nightmare when it came to personal failure. I shook aside the ghostly memory of a slender hand holding mine and sat up in my cot.

Linh had let me sleep late. Outside my tent, I could already hear her talking with the young boy who had been coming to our camp every few weeks.

“No, we need more than just one,” she was saying in Cham. “It's a beauty, but if you only have one, we might as well leave it here.”

Curiosity piqued, I pushed aside the mosquito netting and pulled on my trousers and my tunic before stepping into my shoes.

“What's a beauty?” I asked, coming out to join them, and the boy turned to me to show me what he held.

It was a frilled lizard barely longer than his palm, and it sat still as a statue as I examined it. The scales were small and fine, giving it a jade-like translucence, and the frills around the lizard's head and running along its back and, most exceptionally, its tail were just a shade darker. I could see how the mixture of light and dark green would allow it to be nearly invisible in the dappled light under the canopy, and when it opened its eyes at me, I was delighted to see that they were a deep amber flecked with black.

“It
is
a beauty,” I agreed, and on impulse, I dug into my bag for money to pay.

“Oh, Thi,” Linh said disapprovingly, “You know we can't just bring back one.”

Saigon was thinking ahead. It wanted the domes to be more than just tourist attractions for the year the world came to call. The domes were experiments in sustainability, an attempt to create functional environments in glassed spaces as large as small towns. Everything we brought back should ideally not only live out a natural span, it should reproduce and thrive. Unless the little frilled lizard happened to be parthenogenetic, like the whiptail lizard that An had brought back from her internship at the Hopi preserve in North Americas, there wasn't much point in bringing it back.

I frowned, not wanting to think of An yet again. She was like a sprained ankle; just when I thought I'd healed, I'd have a memory of her hand on my face or the smell of her hair at the nape of her neck, and I'd stumble all over again. I dropped a few bhat into the boy's hand and he dropped the lizard into my cupped palms. It was a calm little thing, and I wondered if, like some of the animals we had collected, it was so unused to humans as to think we were merely part of the landscape.

The Cham boy turned to go, but I stopped him.

“Tell me where you found him, and I'll give you more,” I said, and he nodded, sticking out his hand. When I gave him a few more bhat, he pointed.

“North, past the rock that looks like a man, and after that west, following the stream. There's a pool there.”

“Are there others like this one?” I asked, and he shrugged. I sighed and sent him off.

I avoided Linh's gaze as I carefully closed the little lizard into one of the terrariums. It was small enough that the lizard had to curl its elegant tail around its feet, but when I pressed the button that activated the soporific gas and dropped the temperature, it blinked, yawned hugely, and curled up. It would rest peacefully until we began the process to wake it up in Saigon. The terrariums were simple enough when dealing with reptiles, but some of the larger ones and the ones designed for dealing with mammals and birds were more complicated. I busied myself checking the other terrariums, where various lizards, rodents, and birds slumbered until they could be released into an area that would hopefully be indistinguishable from home. I paused over our real prize for the trip, a quartet of striped rabbits sleeping in a pile, and at that point, Linh lost patience with me.

“We're going to spend today locking things down,” Linh said. “We don't have time to go running off after a single lizard.”

“It's not that late yet,” I said, still avoiding my older sister's glare. “You can stay and start locking down, I'll go out and look. Maybe I'll bring back some other things too. It's gorgeous, chi Linh, and the department's going to love it to bits.”

“We're already going to be somewhat late getting back to Saigon, and I don't want to make it very late.”

She paused, and I got a puck of glutinous rice and mung beans wrapped in green leaves to slide into my bag along with a few of the small terrariums. I might have managed to get out of camp with only her disapproving glare weighing me down, but she shook her head.

“This is about An.”

“Not everything is!” I snapped, and her elegant eyebrow arched in disbelief.

“I didn't say everything was, I said that this was. You know you're going to have to come home eventually, and she's going to be there too, sooner or later. The department isn't that big.”

“The world's plenty big,” I protested, knowing even as I did that I was fighting a losing and fairly stupid battle. “Maybe I'll transfer up to Thăng Long. Maybe I'll decide I want to take that teaching position in Hue. Maybe I want to just stay here.”

“First, the world's smaller than you think it is, second, you hate northern food, third, you hate teaching, and fourth, I'd like to see you stay here when the monsoons come in and you're still hiding in your little canvas tent.”

I glared, and she glared back. My sister isn't a soft woman, but she's a family woman through and through. She may not have understood my relationship with An, but my older sister had my mother's firm belief that taking charge or feeding me would fix it.

“Stay here. Help me lock down, and we can send up the lantern tomorrow night. We can be back in Saigon before the end of the week, and you can figure out that no one at the university gives a damn about your little romance,
em
…”

“It
wasn't
just a little romance!” I shouted, and I chewed my lip in frustration when Linh only nodded.

“Come on. Come help me with the terrariums. We'll be in Saigon before the end of the week. I'll buy you an oxtail curry, and maybe you can lose your head over another girl.”

I might have done it except she mentioned another girl, and I stomped off down the northern path.

“You have to come back eventually, em!” she called after me, and just because she was right didn't make me happier.

~*~

The forests of the Trường Sơn Range are as unlike southern Vietnam as night is to day, or, as Linh would have said, as different as a moist broadleaf forest is from a verdant river delta. The air was cooler, the colors different, and even the buzz of the insects was lower. I caught myself humming as I walked along the wild pig track that Linh and I had been using to go north, and when I stopped, there was something strangely soaked about the silence. The air was sullen with the promise of the monsoon to come, and I shivered to think about how much inhospitable the forest would become drenched in bucketing water.

The Cham boy had mentioned the rock that looked like a man, and I knew what he meant, but when I passed it, it occurred to me that it didn't look like a man at all. It was a jut of old stone, smooth and gray in the forest's green, and though I could see an indentation that looked like a pair of legs, and a bend of the stone looked like a man's curled arm, I could think of it as nothing but a lizard, sitting up, alert, and ready to flee or bite.

I patted it on the head as I walked by, and it reminded me of An and I picnicking together as undergraduates at the university. She had gotten me in the habit of patting the stone lions that guarded the university gates, and I had never quit.

I walked faster, following the stream as the boy had directed. If I walked faster, perhaps I would be able to out-pace the memories that seemed to crowd close whenever I thought of An and of the six years we had spent together. The memories weren't as sharp as they were, but as my father had always told me, dull knives are the most dangerous.

I had been stupid, I had been naïve, and worse than that, I had been in love, though by the end, I realized now that it was less love than habit. My family had been understanding, but confused, both when I brought An home and when we broke up, and soon, I knew, they would start the round of introducing me to friends' sons and grandsons and nephews, and perhaps I would meet someone interesting, someone funny and kind, and then An and I would just be a memory.

I walked faster, and then I made myself slow down. It was dangerous to walk so quickly in the forest, and Linh and I had had more than a few sprained ankles to tell us that.

The stream grew a little broader, and I followed its edge closely, watching the shallows where the sunlight pierced the water with aching clarity. I saw a few lizards, several that we had already collected, but I couldn't find a match for the little jade beauty that was sleeping back at camp. It was a lovely thing, but if I couldn't find it at least one mate, Linh was right, we were better off leaving it in the mountains than bringing it to Saigon

The stream continued west, but I veered towards a protected sandbar that created a grotto underneath the shelter of the evergreens. It was the pond that the boy had told me about, and I could see small fish breaking the surface, and as I watched, a laughingthrush fluttered down to the water to drink. It would usually have been a dim little spot, but there was a bright ray of light coming through the canopy, lighting up the water and bringing it to life.

I squatted down close to the edge of the pond, pulling out my collapsible net. I could sit like a stone for hours if that was what it took, and I relaxed, scanning the water and keeping my eyes on the shallows.

This type of observation and collection was almost meditative, but what I was meditating on, unfortunately, was An. Her speciality was on the deserts of North America, and she was spending the next semester in Hungo Pavi as a resident professor. When we had first met, she was fresh from her successful internship there, and now that we were over, she was headed back again. I wished I could ascribe her trip to a broken heart, but I knew better.

I couldn't remember whether she had broken up with me or I had broken up with her. It's strange that the important parts of the end were so muddled when the insignificant parts were so achingly clear. I remembered the last night we spent together before the break up, and then the awkward nights after that, when I was sleeping at Linh's and being fed bowl after bowl of clear soup and Chinese buns. I remembered coming across a pillowcase that still smelled like her in my things, and I remembered the first disastrous time I tried to go out on a group date with my friends. It had gone so badly that I slipped away in the middle, tired and miserable in my brand new orange áo dài.