IGMS Issue 44 (12 page)

I lived, though barely.

The storm passed, leaving me with bleeding knuckles and bruised shins. The next several days passed with clear skies. Pehlu brought me fresh-caught fish, and I drank the rainwater stored in the small urns at the bow. I was so often thirsty, and hungry, and heartsick. Except for Pehlu, I was alone.

And Pehlu did not remain the same.

He turned into a dolphin, and then a whale, all within days of each other. He breached the surface next to me on the eighteenth night, his bulk as long as six fishing boats lined up end to end.

"I tried to hold it off before," he explained, "but you need me to change, Ulaa."

The ocean lapped against the wood, and I lay in the bow of the boat, my skin cracking, my mouth dry, as I tried to form words.
Why?
I wanted to ask him.
Why do I need you to change?

Twenty-three days after I'd left home, I found out.

I woke in the morning -- not to the slap of water against wood, but to silence. I crept to the edge of the boat and peeked over it.

Sand, white sand, with the first sprinkling of sea grass. As I lifted my gaze, I found dirt, and saplings, and the gentle slope of a hill. The sight helped me tap into a reserve of strength I hadn't known I'd had. With a heave, I rose to my feet and stepped onto the land. I ran for the vegetation, my legs nearly giving way with each step.

A pool of fresh water greeted me just beyond the saplings. I fell to my knees and drank deeply of it. Only once I'd sated myself, the cold water dripping down my chin, did I think of Pehlu.

"Pehlu," I called. "Where are you?"

The earth answered.

I am here, Ulaa. No need to shout.

"But are you on the island? I don't see you."

Ulaa, dearest, I am all around you. You are looking at me now.

I wanted to laugh, to cry, to shout anew. This was why there were no more islands.

But how could we have known?

I laid my palm upon the moist ground. "You saved my life."

His presence surrounded me, warm and gentle as an embrace.
Look after my children, please. I will be a good mother, but I will need help.

It took me nearly a year to settle in, to build a house, to cultivate things that I could eat. Pehlu helped in the ways he could.

I helped in the ways I could. My people would find this island, one day or another. I hoped my mother would find it. And every few days, I went to the beach and searched for
kailun
.

They came to me as spiders, as sandpipers, as crabs and sparrows. I picked up each one of Pehlu's children, cupped them in my palms, and whispered to them their second names. And for those that were shy, for those that hid in the brush and hesitated to approach, I made of myself a fool. I spread my arms and ran across the sand, my hair flowing free with the wind.

"Ulaa comes for you!"

I'm not sure if I should start with the crow or with Carla. It began with them both, but it did not end with them. The crow spoke his word and flew. Carla spoke hers and did the same. It ended, as all stories do, with Mab. But Carla and the crow were the keys. They were the first cracks in the wall.

When I try to remember, I'm not sure which found me first.

I'll start with the crow, because I can no longer recall Carla's eyes. Here in the hills, I imagine that fact should pain me more than it does. I know her eyes were sharp though. The crow's were sharp too, tiny points of flint that studied me one at a time as it cocked its head. (Mab wears a crow's head at times, but her skin is always white.)

Fall started early, and the crow found me one clear day in the middle of August when it should have been warmer than it was. There were about half dozen crows sitting on the antenna of a house a few down from mine. They were having some kind of debate, rough and loud enough that their voices would have woken me had I not already been up and walking to school. I usually biked the several blocks to campus, but one tire was flat and I hadn't had a chance to repair it.

They broke off when I approached. When I passed, one spiraled away and perched in a low branch farther down the sidewalk. I fished out the peanut butter sandwich I'd packed for lunch, tore off a piece, and tossed it. The crow caught it deftly in its beak.

That was more or less how Hamilton adopted me. I did not know then that Mab had sent him, though I would like to think that on a cool August afternoon like that he would have found me anyway. I'm sure he gave me a name, but I never learned it. I couldn't decide whether to call him Hamilton or Lagrange, but he struck me as a crow more Irish than French.

The first day he followed me all the way to campus, watching me pass on the sidewalk and then flying to a tree where I would pass again. By the time we reached the gates, he had gone through half my sandwich. He didn't come any farther, just perched on a lamppost and watched me walk down the brick pathway into campus. I know he couldn't have waited there all day, but when I walked home in the evening he was sitting at the same lamppost.

It only took a few days of that before he was riding my shoulder and I was packing an extra sandwich for him. I was never sure he'd come back, but he always did.

I had always wanted a pet crow. You don't see many people walking around with a tame one on their shoulder. (Hamilton certainly wasn't tame, but he pretended.) We had only been together for a few weeks before he started talking.

There are many crows, and they all talk. They call Mab's name, and in the stormy evenings they bring her news of the far and the wide world. I've asked them about Hamilton, but they say they don't know him. Perhaps they've disowned him for the word spoken on my behalf.

I need to say something about Carla here, too. Mab has not answered all my questions about her; about the things she was able to do. She says only this: "I grow old, and all stories have a beginning."

Make of it what you will.

I don't think Mab sent her. That might have been the only part of this story left to chance.

This was a college town, and there was something that everyone joked about, but they were sort of serious too: you came to school here -- or at least, lots of us did -- hoping to leave married. In lots of ways it was that type of college: small, denominational, traditional. It was a bit embarrassing sometimes how hopefully parents would scan the crowds at orientation.

Carla wasn't one of the girls from campus. She worked at a gas station several blocks from school, along the route I walked or rode my bike each day. I think she had taken classes on campus for a semester or two, but she hadn't stayed.

She worked the night shift. I first became aware of her when I went in one evening to ask about the air machine. I was on my way home, and one of the tires on my bike was again low. She had to come out and show me the button.

I say the gas station was on my way to and from school, but it was actually along one of many potential routes. After that evening, I went that way every time. I started trying to think of reasons to stop. I bought candy bars. I wished I had a car to get gas. Finally I stopped buying anything and would just go in to see her. When I stayed late on campus there was usually no one else at the station, so I'd sit at the counter and we'd talk.

I eventually found out that she was engaged to a guy named Dan. He never came around though, and for some reason the engagement seemed irrelevant.

One evening I stayed until she got off work, which was close to midnight. I volunteered to walk her home. She didn't live far from the station so she didn't drive to work. She said fine, but she first needed to stop by the library. I assumed she needed to drop a book off in the after-hours return.

When we got there she reached into the satchel she carried and pulled out a wrench. There were two metal lions flanking the library's doors, some rather pathetic echo of the lions at certain, more famous, public libraries. The lions stood with their paws fixed by huge bolts to cement pedestals. It was to these that Carla applied the wrench, her small arms straining.

"What are you doing?" The library entrance was not in any way secluded. We were standing in front of a well-lit parking lot beside the main street downtown. Cars passed every few moments.

She didn't say anything, just glanced at me with one raised eyebrow as if to ask why I wasn't helping.

I should say something about Carla here, something more than I have. I should say it, even though Mab waits with lifted arms beneath the tossing trees.

She was lovely. You do stupid things when you think you're in love with someone, even if she says she'll be marrying a man you've never met. She had dark hair that fell across her eyes as she strained over the bolt, and she had blue eyes.

I watched like an idiot until the first bolt holding the lion's front paw was out. When it was clear she wasn't stopping, I took the wrench from her and went to work on the second.

In a few moments they were all out and no one had stopped us to ask what we were doing. I stepped back and looked at the lion, wondering what she'd do now.

"The other one," she whispered, pointing at the paws of the second lion. I shrugged heavily and turned to it as Carla started whispering to the first. She had taken its head in her hands while I was working on its back paw.

The second lion was nearly unscrewed when something brushed my leg and I felt more than heard a low rumble. I nearly dropped the wrench and looked behind me.

The first lion was still the color of dull metal.

It rubbed its head up against my leg and kind of purred.

Carla wasn't saying anything now. She was watching my progress on the second lion like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

When I just stood there, staring, she got this bemused expression and took the wrench and loosed the last bolt herself. Then she went to its head and started whispering again. I couldn't tell when exactly it happened, but the lion stretched itself, flexed the paws where they had been bolted to the cement, and bounded down from the pedestal.