Through the Whirlpool (2 page)

In the family space,
his parents were waiting for him. His mother smiled tightly as she hugged him, though he sensed her tears. His father’s frown shielded his feelings as he too embraced his son.

“
Just follow what you learned at training. Good luck.”

This was it.
Kreh-ursh left the hut, heading for the beach. Sea-nomad-becoming had begun.

S
he was swimming. Deep in the green, beneath the waves, far down where massive blocks of stone piled in weighty majesty to create palaces. She was swimming. Clouds of sparkling color surrounded her like ribbons of fine sea kelp. Yet this stuff seemed aware, sentient. She felt it brush against her as she propelled herself forward and ever downward through the green… through the phosphorescence… almost felt its whispered thoughts. Far off, sea creatures wailed and moaned, distracting her with their guttural syllables that sounded so achingly familiar.

Somehow she knew they were singing for her, but
she could not understand their tongue.

“
Jade!”

This time the voice was human, someone calling from far away. She knew it was just a dream. Yet like no other. Still she swam, wanting to dive deeper, down
toward the kelp voices, careening through the green…

“
Jaa-aade!”

She was being pulled from the depths, but the clouds of kelp—lilac, red, green
, and silver—were also calling, pulling her backward. She had to leave… but those voices again, were speaking… to her almost. As if she had caught their meaning but could not quite remember. This was important, something about colors that could save her, save someone, but she was being pulled up. A strange boy’s laugh trilled long, taunting her. Everything else began to fade. All gone except for that echoing laugh, mocking her because she could not stay. His disdain held a note of frenzy she distrusted.

“
Jade!”

She tasted salt, sand in her mouth and knew she was back. Cold hugged her like an octopus
’s clinging tentacles. Those colors were flooding in, slamming into her eyelids, overwhelming… and still the voice moaned.

“
Jade!”

She opened her eyes to see Kyle, oversize
d boogie board under his arm, standing beside her towel.

“
Mom’s on her way down. It’s high tide. Come on, there’s surf!”

The waves rolling
in were high. She was on the beach, lying on her towel. Kyle was staring at her with as much concern as a kid brother could muster, more wrapped up in his own predicament: missing all those beautiful rollers that were surging into Mauri Cove.

“
Chill. If you go in before Mom gets here, we’ll be having barbecued Kyle for dinner, I promise.”

She sat up, trying to organiz
e her thoughts, bring herself back into the present. It had happened again, the strange dream or nightmare, almost as if she were there, so real it seemed. Kyle flopped down beside her.

“
I’ll never learn to surf if I have to sit here on the beach all the time! What’s taking her so long?”

“
The usual. One of her clients called. Some company wants to gut some old mansion. Mom’s getting an injunction.”

She did not bother to explain
“injunction” to her brother’s raised eyebrows. Four years younger than Jade, if she was not sure, Kyle would have no clue. She wanted to go in surfing as well. The thought of the spray crashing as you sped down the waves like some goddess of the ocean—it cured everything. On her own she might risk it, but with Kyle there, she would definitely be dragged through seven separate kinds of hell.

She
lay back again. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the buzzing red behind her eyelids... This dream: for a week now these spells had been recurring, calling her down to dive deep into the green among those colored ribbons. Afterwards, she would shiver and feel deathly cold as if she were lying on the ocean floor deep down… like a disabled submarine on the seabed. And that chanting, the laughter… It was as if she were being challenged, or summoned... Those haunting syllables and a boy’s cruel laughter. She had no idea what it meant, but the colors were so beautiful—like every hue wrapped together—a silky matter that floated deliciously in the depths… And then this dizziness…

It
had been the first week of their school holidays. Jade had put on her wetsuit in the dark and taken her board out to sample the early morning breakers. The old rule was that neither Jade nor Kyle was allowed in the water alone, but finally this summer their mother, Joan, had said Jade could go surfing as long as she went with one of her friends and they stayed well inside Mauri Cove’s rocky arms.

But
Jade had a sunrise ritual that she preferred to complete on her own. She would paddle out to where the waves rolling into the bay heaped themselves into long, arching ridges as they rounded the point. Rank upon rank of those blue-gray hills stretching to the choppy horizon. She would sit on her board and watch the sun come up, turning the water to gold before her. The only thing marring the view east: the three pale, distant towers of the new research station.

That morning
a week ago, Jade’s vigil had been interrupted by the sound of a speedboat. While not so unusual in itself, the direction it came from was strange. Turning to look over her left shoulder, she saw a slick, fiberglass craft come skimming around a bend in the Mauri River, bump across the rapids at the river mouth, and aim for the open sea. As it passed her, sunlight reflected off its windshield and she could not see the vessel’s occupants. Then she forgot all about it, and turned her board shoreward to catch her first wave of the day.

T
he larger waves were breaking at the north end of the beach, close to where the Mauri River emptied into the bay. It was a tricky place to surf because of the turbulence the river caused, and she needed all her concentration. So she did not notice the speedboat’s return, half an hour later, until it was almost too late. Paddling out, cresting a wave, she found the craft’s shining bow bearing down on top of her.

“
Hey! Watch it!”

T
he driver saw her and swung the wheel hard left. Jade threw herself to her left also, but her board smashed against the vessel’s hull. Something sloshed from a tank on board. Then Jade was underwater, trying to kick back away from the launch’s spinning propeller. Multicolored ribbons of some sort of seaweed filled the water around her, clinging to her body and twining through her hair.

When she broke water, a strange taste filled her mouth, something other
than the saltiness of the sea. She also heard a familiar voice:

“
It’s Weasel! Hey brat, I’m coming for ya!”

Then she recogniz
ed the boat’s occupants: Rena, accompanied by her two cronies. So Jade knew she was in trouble. Some years older than Jade, Rena worked as the security guard up at the new lab. That was where they had first clashed. To Jade and her mates, it had seemed fun at the time to tease her, careering around in the darkness on the half-built site, trying to stay ahead of Rena’s torch beam. That was until the day Jade’s partner in crime, Miguel, had “fallen” from his bike out by Point Mauri and broken his arm. Jade now knew that Rena was bad news. Beside her in the speedboat sat the Head, a thick-shouldered boy of limited intelligence but unswerving loyalty to her, and Screwdriver, the rat-faced youth who was steering.

P
ulling herself onto her board, she began to paddle furiously, expecting to hear the craft behind her again. But when she threw a glance back, the launch had turned and resumed its course for the river mouth. Strange that there had been no pursuit. Thinking over events later, she could not imagine what might have been more important to that crew than settling their score with her when they had her there, trapped in the water. It could only have been some shady job they could not afford to delay.

A
shadow blocked the sun as she lay on her towel. Squinting against the light, she peered up. And her heart stopped. Unused to seeing the blubbery body out of uniform, dressed only in beach shorts and a tee, one arm wrapped around her board, Jade could still not mistake the sadistic glint in those eyes. The older girl may have let her prey slip away the week before, but this time Jade knew she would not be so lucky. No escape… and Kyle right beside her.

“
What do you want, Rena?”

Bluff it out, Jade was thinking. Yet Rena
’s muscled arms looked like they could do some serious damage.

The older girl scowled:
“You, Weasel. I want you!”

W
hen Kreh-ursh arrived at the beach, seven of the blue-robed shahiroh—the sea callers, those most powerful chanters among the sea nomads—were standing in a group. A short distance beyond, his village’s proudest possession, the great canoe, was pulled up at the tidemark. The length of fifteen men lying end to end, and so wide a sailor could sleep across one of its benches, it dominated the sand, dwarfing the beached fishing canoes alongside. Capricious magic flowed from the intricate designs in its high, carved prow and stern, tingling with life, demanding respect.

A crew of forty or so
Shahee, or sea nomads, clothed in their customary green, stood beside it. At a distance from them, six pale-robed candidates, all weighed down by packs and blankets like himself—four girls and two boys—huddled into cloaks against the dawn chill. As he approached, only Geh-meer broke her tense concentration to flash him one of her brief smiles. The others just looked nervous, unwilling to talk.

“
Ready?”

“
I don’t think so. Is it too late to pull out?”

She smiled again.
“You know you wouldn’t. We’ll be fine.”

Her words, sparse as they were, comforted. Once on the island, they would be alone, bound to silence—mental and verbal—reliant only on their own skill. If and when they returned, the celebration would be memorable, but that was a world away, on the far side of this test.

It had been a harsh year: climbing jungle slopes; swimming tiring stretches against the current; cutting, shaping, and carving heavy logs; being tossed together in a flimsy canoe on treacherous Shah—the wide sea. Together the eight of them had fought to master the sea nomad’s five skills. Mind speech, the most important of these, was how his people spoke to each other, the Shahee sea nomads with easy precision, but the shahiroh sea callers as true adepts. Next, candidates had to know how to read the sky and waves for the information they could reveal. Wavecrafting, the third skill, meant shaping ocean currents, literally bending water. Akin to that was windcalling, harnessing the rhythms of the air to do one’s bidding; finally, though not least, came woodworking and carving, learning to feel for the life within growing things, especially the trees, and mold it to one’s purpose.

These five skills, along with adherence to the
life code, or unwavering respect for all living things, was the backbone of Shahee heritage. Shah, the eastern sea, was their home. Though voluntary, sea-nomad-becoming should be undertaken only when one was ready, and Kreh-ursh would rather perish than fail this test. His future, he knew, was with the Shahee, his people. Any other alternative was unthinkable.

On the shingle above the high tide mark, a crowd had gathered. Kreh-ursh spied his parents
and waved, then stopped, unsure if that seemed too childish for this moment. Then he saw her, another figure standing apart, her loneliness like a shout against the strong group feeling shared by the village. Their eyes met. She tried to smile, but merely prompted his own tears to swell. He swallowed, biting back guilt, rage, many things he could not express. However, he showed her, pulling the scarlet leather pouch from his tunic so the boy’s mother would know: Kaar-oh might yet complete sea-nomad-becoming, symbolically, if not in fact.

“
It is time!”

At the
shahiroh’s cry, Kreh-ursh, Geh-meer, and the other candidates walked down to the water’s edge. The wet sand felt cold underfoot. The Shahee placed themselves on either side of the heavy vessel, and, as the shahiroh began to chant, they added their voices. Sacred syllables spilled into the crisp dawn. Energy rippled from the chanting sea callers to the great canoe and back again. Unseen currents hummed, reaching deep into the marrow of bones, yet uplifting, calling upon all those present to believe in the event about to begin: sea-nomad-becoming, the foremost rite of their tribe.

The
shahiroh scrambled aboard, calling the seven candidates after them, guiding each to a separate bench, isolated from their companions.

Seaward, the sky was pale aquamarine torn with pink-tinted clouds. A marine bird screamed harshly. The
Shahee began to heave at the canoe, which slid slowly out into the morning surf. This was a sight Kreh-ursh had often seen in the dawn, but always from the beach: sailors wading waist deep into the waves, spray cascading, drenching backs, shattering itself against the wooden hull.

At another command, the
Shahee scrambled aboard, and paddles were grabbed up with bangs and rattles. There was a sharp smack as fifty blades hit the water in unison. The heavy canoe reared against the breakers, straining for the open sea. Soon they were sliding between rocky headlands, leaving the enclosed harbor behind. As the canoe struggled to the top of the first long ocean swell, Kreh-ursh could not resist sending a silent farewell to his village, to his parents and friends... but especially to that woman alone on the shingle. The horizon, paling to celestial blue, was now glimmering white-gold, echoed by the rolling banks of kree-eh that sucked in the growing light, reflecting it back through the waves. Then a bright sliver of the sun’s disk slipped above the edge of the world. The great canoe, paddles flashing like fins, surged across the sea toward the sunrise.