Shadows in the Cave (5 page)

8

S
alya was gone, gone, gone. Shonan let that single word be the mark of his rhythm as he loped along the sand behind Oghi. As far as he was concerned, the sea turtle man didn’t run hard enough. On the other hand, Oghi was small, and at least he never stopped. He trotted step after step over the dunes, through the marshes, and across the creeks. He waded into the river without even slowing down. Their dog Tagu, with elk blankets and deer hides wrapped around dried meat, stayed at Oghi’s heels, as if following a new master. At the rear Aku kept up, relieved that they didn’t have to go faster.

When they came to the first creek, the turtle and dog swam the same way, head up and legs waggling below. The father and son swam like most Galayi men, on their sides. Oghi got to the other bank first.

The sea turtle man called a food break, brooking no disagreement. While the warriors munched their deer meat, he waded into the tide pools, popped shelled creatures off the rocks, and scooped out the meat. When he sat back down with them, he smiled and said, “Mother sea.”

When they came to a big river marked on their map, they faced a high palisade on the far bank. “We can’t land over there,” Oghi pointed out.

“Let’s swim upstream,” said Shonan. He was leery of the sea.

“Can’t,” said Oghi. “The tide’s going out. Formidable current.” Aku was tickled by the formal way the sea turtle man talked. “The only way is the ocean,” Oghi said cheerfully.

Without waiting for a response, Oghi plunged into the salt water and led them, swimming, parallel to the shore. Gradually, the palisade became a hill, a slope, then just some dunes. The sea was calm and glassy. The sea turtle angled toward the beach.

Just then he rocked in the water and called out, “Riptide!” Bizarrely, he started sailing out to sea.

In a moment Tagu was bobbing along behind Oghi, Shonan behind both of them, and Aku last. It was an odd sensation. Aku felt like he was flying above the sea floor, riding some sort of water-air to a destination.

What the hell was happening? He turned and swam as hard as he could toward the shore.

“Keep …! Don’t ….!” Oghi yelled, but his words were garbled.

Aku yelled, “What?!”

“Swim,”
yelled Shonan. He waited for a moment while the sea sloshed over his head. “Don’t …”

Aku stopped swimming for a moment. He felt as if he were sailing as fast as an eagle that launches off a rocky point and soars on firm wings. Except that he was soaring out to sea, and to death.

He aimed straight toward the shore and kicked hard again. After a furious effort, he stopped, turned, and saw that he was much further from the beach than anyone else, and not as far past the mouth of the river. Tagu issued one ferocious bark. Aku felt himself flying backward into the infinite ocean.

He looked down. The water was clear, and probably only
two or three times as deep as Aku was tall. He thought for a moment about stretching out on the bottom and not being able to breathe. He felt panicky. The more he looked, the more panicky he felt. And he could see that, all along, he was floating further and further into the ocean that went on forever.

In a flurry he set himself for one more charge toward the land. He kicked his legs and flailed his arms and kicked his legs and flailed his arms. Then he took a careful look down and saw that he was still sailing out to sea, as a cloud sails the skies at the mercy of the winds.

He stopped. He looked back toward the familiar land, where a person could walk, talk, find something to eat, and never come to a single place completely without air. The land was getting farther and farther away, and the palisade looked lower, much lower, and vague. He realized that he could float so far out onto the everywhere-is-water that he wouldn’t be able to see the land. As the sky was everything above, the water would be everything below.

He looked down and saw the no-air-at-the-bottom place drifting along beneath him. He let himself imagine, just for a moment, how much of the no-air place there must be. Some people thought the ocean went all the way around the Earth, to the far side of the rolling country that was on the other side of the mountains where the Galayi people made their home. Some people said that, if you could walk on water, it would be a hundred days’ walk all the way around to that rolling country. Other people said a thousand days. And probably the everywhere-water was as big up and down as it was across. The no-air part of Earth might be as big as Turtle Island herself was. Or bigger. At the very beginning, when all the plants and animals, including human beings, were ready to come down and live on Earth, the entire planet
was water. Then Water Beetle started diving down and bringing up dirt, making places to walk and build houses and live. No one knew how much of the everywhere-water Water Beetle had covered with dirt.

Aku decided he couldn’t swim anymore. He was far too tired in his muscles and he felt woozy in his head, too. He would sail like a cloud. Why not? He didn’t have any choice, and it felt good. He would wag his legs gently and sail and sail and sail until the water was as big as the sky and then … He guessed he would slide down and lie on the bottom.

“We’ve got to do something!” Shonan said.

“There’s nothing to do,” said Oghi, looking out to sea. He couldn’t see Aku. “He’s in the riptide. He can’t swim straight against it, but he kept trying, and going the wrong way.”

Both men were mixing in words of the Galayi and Amaso languages, hoping the other would figure it out.

“Where will he end up?”

Oghi shrugged. “Nobody who swam against one ever came back. We learned to swim across them.”

“I’m going to do something.”

Oghi looked at Shonan with questions in his young-old eyes.

“He’s my son,” Shonan said.

Tagu let out three soft barks.

Shonan could see that Oghi was pondering something, but he had no idea what.

“We could ride the tide out, just like he did.”

Oghi stared into space.

“We could take something …” Shonan looked around and saw various pieces of flotsam, but they were all spindly.
He wasn’t sure they’d hold him and Aku. Then he spotted a big piece of driftwood no more than twenty steps into the water. It was taller than a human being and thicker than a man’s thigh.

“How far out does the riptide go?”

Oghi shrugged.

“I’m taking that log and going after my boy.”

The sea turtle man let a beat go by, gave a truly odd smile, and said, “Me, too.” He broke into a grin. “Tie Tagu to a tree, will you?” No question they couldn’t make the dog stay, not when his master was out there.

Shonan waded into the water, climbed onto the log, and straddled it. He looked back and in amazement beheld…

The sea turtle man’s fingers and toes turned to claws. His arms and legs were rough, bumpy, like a turtle’s.

Oghi wore a scrunchy look of deepest concentration on his face. He fell onto all fours. His back metamorphosed into a carapace. His neck developed a wattle. His nose and mouth joined into a beak. His body doubled in size.

The turtle four-footed his way to the edge of the water. Only his young-old eyes stayed the same. Shonan would have sworn that he grinned, except that a turtle couldn’t do that.

“A small person,” said the sea turtle man, “but a giant turtle.”

Oghi pointed. “Right over there’s where the riptide starts.” He launched into the water, swam with extraordinary grace to the log, and started pushing it toward the rip.

Shonan joined in. He didn’t intend to say anything, certainly not ask for anything, not for a long time. The two of them got behind one end of the log and chugged it into the rip, and away they went.

The sea was cool, and he was becoming cool as the sea. Aku waited. He daydreamed. He scudded pictures of Iona through his mind, and not only pictures but smells, tastes, the touch of her warm flesh, the music of her moans. Slowly, slowly, he scissored his legs, barely moving. All they had left was the strength of leaf stems.

Ocean slurped up his nose, and his legs wiggled faster. He sneezed it out. Nasty stuff.

He glanced up at the sun. Fine old Grandmother Sun, he liked her. He noodled his legs around. Yes, fine old Grandmother Sun. He looked at her through eyelids nearly shut, making the bright star into a bright haze. He wondered if she’d look like that from the bottom of the sloshing sea.

He looked down. He could still see the bottom, though it seemed further away. He supposed that if he lay on the bottom and looked up at Grandmother Sun, he would see a sheet of light, a glaze on the surface of the water, and Grandmother Sun’s weightless beauty, lighter even than a breath of breeze on a hot summer’s night.

It wouldn’t be hot on the bottom, would be cold. Here he was cool, too cool. Bodies cool when people die. Down there cold, all the way cold. Wouldn’t be a breeze, or any air at all at all at all. Maybe he would suck air in and slide gracefully to the bottom, the way a yellow leaf slides off the branch of an oak tree and floats to the frosty grass. And there on the bottom he would shudder with cold, shudder and shudder. For a little while he would hold onto that marvelous air and look up at Grandmother Sun’s glaze of light and hold on some more and hold on, until the air evaporated, all of it, evaporated, and then he would close his eyes.

Now he let his eyes shut and turned his head up to the sun and bathed his face in her gift of light. He nudged his mind toward Iona again. He bid her bright eyes come to
his attention, then the feel of her lips, the softness of her breasts.

Grandmother Sun, though, felt more real. He luxuriated in her. Sun warm, sea cold.

A wave whacked its way up his nose. He yelled and spat and shook his head. Ugly stuff, that ocean water, ugly stuff up the nose where air belonged.

Wide awake now, he noticed that he wasn’t sailing any longer. He was bobbing up and down in one place, wagging his legs slowly, and he wasn’t cloud-flying out into the everywhere-water anymore.

So this was the spot. He inspected the bottom, as well as he could see it. It looked no more distinguished than any other, and no less, for a quiet death.

His mind drifted down there.

Just then four pelicans caught his attention. They flew solemnly, gray-brown birds with jaw pouches for carrying food. Iona had pointed them out to Aku. He thought they were funny. Even now they made him smile.

And they gave him thoughts.

I promised my sister I would. My lost sister
.

My mother wanted me to
.

My father loves me. He wants me to live
.

I don’t know
…

My mother would want me to. My mother would want me to. Look right over there
.

Over there was a piece of flotsam, not big enough at all to hold a human being, but…

He took a couple of strokes and grabbed it. It made floating a little easier.

He held his hands in front of his face and imagined the fingernails as claws. They began to change.

Stunned, he held his feet up one at a time and pictured
them as talons. Awkwardly, with the flesh still clinging, they turned into an owl’s feet.

Focusing fiercely, he made his arms into wings. He feathered his body. He altered his head, nose, and mouth.

Now he stepped onto the flotsam, and it bore his weight. He turned his head backward on its axis and looked at the land. The shore was an impossible distance to swim but an easy flight.

He jumped into the air and flapped. He teetered, swooped down, and got dunked. He climbed back onto the flotsam and launched again. The second time he achieved … well, it was his version of flight.

He let out a triumphant screech.

“Aku!”

“Aku!”

“Hey, Aku!”

“Can you hear us?”

Nothing. Out this far Shonan and Oghi couldn’t hear even the shush of the surf. The air was still, as though the earth had stopped breathing. The waves blocked their view. They couldn’t have seen Aku thirty strokes away. Far off to the left four pelicans cruised low over the water, on the hunt. Nothing else on earth or in the sky moved, except for the waves, in deadly procession.

Suddenly, Shonan saw something odd. A bird fast-flapped low over the water. It had no business being there—it was an owl, and owls hunted only on land and only at night or twilight.

“A winged panther!” exclaimed Oghi.

“A what?”

Oghi repeated the words, pointing at the owl.

“We call that a great dusky owl,” said Shonan.

Oghi shrugged and waggled his head oddly, like he was dancing.

The owl changed course and flew straight toward them. More amazingly, it hovered over the log they were pushing and circled, looking. It said in Aku’s voice, “Hi, Shonan. Are you Oghi?” the bird said to the turtle.

“Yes!”

The owl landed. “Sure am glad to see the two of you.”

Now Shonan had to watch Aku do it. Orange-faced, horn-tufted, beaked head into his son’s face. Wings into arms. Feathers to skin, talons to feet. Aku grinned at his father.

Shonan said flatly, “I hate that.”

Aku started to snap something back. Instead he slid into the water, so he could help push their log boat back to shore.

“You could have flown all the way back,” said Oghi.

Aku bit a lip. “Sounds weird, but flying so far makes me nervous. I’d rather be with you.”

They swam the log back toward the shore. It took forever.

Before long Shonan noticed that Aku seemed lackadaisical in his kicking, and unsure in his grip on the log. He put his arm around his son. Aku gave him a dazed smile.

“He’s chilled,” said Oghi. “When we get to shore, we’ll warm him up.”

Before long the three of them and the dog sat next to a driftwood fire. Aku managed a few words, and an occasional nibble on the parched corn they’d brought. Mostly, his eyes were busy soaking up the sea turtle man, who was no longer a man and was munching some grass in the shallow water.

Aku felt carefully, one by one, each of the owl feathers tied into his hair. He hadn’t lost any. Wondering how he got
back into human form with all his clothes and gear, he drifted into slumber.