Ivory and Bone(63)

“Then, when everything was ablaze, Lo came.”

My heart sputters at the sound of her name. Lo? She couldn’t have been here. I’d left her in her own camp when I came back.

They must’ve left her a kayak. She must’ve followed her people over the bay when I was safely out of the way, running the land route.

“When she learned that Chev wasn’t here, she flew into a rage. She went around the camp ignoring the flames, peering into burning huts, screaming Chev’s and Mya’s names.

“Then, calling for the Divine to curse our clan, she ran to the shore. She called them all to the boats and they left.”

“To go south,” I say, more to myself than to my brother.

The healer leans over Pek and drips a steady stream of cold water onto his arm from the shell of a long, thin clam. Pek flinches and squeezes my hand. The healer refills the shell and repeats the process farther down his arm. My brother’s eyes bulge over sunken cheeks, yet through it all he stares into my eyes.

“Go to them,” he grunts. “To Seeri and her family. To Mya.” The healer drapes a soaking hide across Pek’s burned arm and a high, bright cry bursts through his lips.

I clasp his other arm—the whole and unharmed arm that appears to belong to a different man—and lean down to speak directly into his ear.

“Rest now,” I whisper. “And don’t worry. I can stop Lo, and I will.”





TWENTY-FIVE


All at once the beach goes dark as if the sun has set, though it’s not even midday. The storm clouds I’d seen from the ridge—storm clouds that had seemed so far off—have already arrived. With the loss of the sun, the air chills rapidly; the summer morning has been chased away by something that feels more like an autumn afternoon. Wind blows down from the north, sending burned scraps and cinders billowing through the air like snow.

But it’s not snow that is coming. It’s rain.

I hear it before I feel it—the thrumming of huge drops against the parched ground. The skies above the beach open abruptly, and cold, hard rain falls with the power of a wave on the sea.

Two of the injured are well enough to stand—one of my cousins and one of the women. They climb to their feet and are helped to a sheltering spot among the brush that grows beyond the dune grass. Urar calls out for help in carrying the others to cover.

I try to help, responding to the healer’s shouted instructions from behind me, but in front of me, still lying at my feet, Pek screams at me, too. At first I think he’s screaming in pain, his open wounds exposed to the cold hard slap of water. But it’s not that. He is surely in pain, but he is screaming at me out of anger. Anger at me for not heading south as fast as I can.

“Leave us!” he seethes, his body twisting on the ground. Watching him, every instinct in me screams with a voice as loud as Pek’s to stay. “There are plenty who can help us.” He stretches and straightens his body, reaching for me, fighting the pain in order to look me in the face. “There is no one else who can warn them.”

No one else who can warn them . . . No one else who can warn you.

He’s right—I know he’s right.

I close my eyes tight and think back on everything my clan has suffered at Lo’s hands—the fire, the panic, the pain. I imagine the same scene playing out at your camp.

Pek’s right—I have to stop it.

It’s almost suicide to take a kayak out in a storm this strong—I know it; Pek knows it. But I can’t worry about the risks now. I just need to leave quickly.

I nod at Pek, whose hands have wrapped around my ankles. He releases me. Without another word—without a mention of the dangers I’m running into—I turn and run down the waterfront to the spot where my clan’s kayaks are stored. The assault of the pounding rain slows me slightly, as I struggle to keep the inside of the kayak dry while climbing in, pulling the straps over each shoulder, and tying the sash securely around my waist. Once I am in, though, I get away surprisingly easily. No one is watching the sea. No one is looking for me. There is damage to repair and injured to tend to.

I have no time to dwell on the guilt of leaving them. The sea demands all my attention. Waves swell on either side of this tiny kayak—a boat whose size seems to shrink as the power of the storm seems to grow. Paddling is all but futile. The water swirls all around me.

If there is any benefit at all to the power of the waves, it is the speed it gives me. Almost like the current on a river, there is a current on the sea, and for now it takes me in the direction I want to go—out to sea, away from land, south to the rocky point that borders our bay.

Just stay upright, I tell myself. A capsize now could kill me. Managing a roll in waves like these may prove impossible. I’ve never tried it, and I don’t want to try it today.

Water hits me from every angle—from left and right, from above and below. Sheets of rain mingle with rising waves until I feel that I am drowning in a mix of rain and seawater. I taste brine in the sheets of water that streak down my face from my hair. Water is everywhere. I whip my head around sharply, trying to clear my face enough to search the shoreline for landmarks, not daring to take a hand from my paddle for even the time it would take to wipe the hair from my eyes. The paddle may be all but useless, but without it I would have no hope at all.

The shoreline offers me no help either. Where is the point? I seem to have been carried by the waves to another coast entirely, as if the Divine has carried me away and dropped me into a world of water that has no boundaries. I search to my left frantically, seeing nothing but sea to the horizon. My heart burns with panic. Where is the shore?