“Cat? Cat!” A shadow blocked the hole. “Throw me some cursed rope, Kofi!”
I heaved, lungs spasming.
Barely heard over the rough tearing rumble of the wind, men cried out in warning.
The whole building rocked as the flood slammed into it and boiled up underneath, filling the entire overturned boat, which was my prison. I had time to suck in one gasp of air before the slippery grasp of the water embraced me. Its moist mouth fastened over my lips to inhale the breath out of my lungs. A liquid voice murmured in my heart: “Let go, little sister. Walk with me and me brother who is the thunder. Walk with us into the storm.”
I open my mouth to call for my mother, for it is her hand clutching mine, but the furious water wrenches her away and I am drowning in the churn of the flood.
My head hit a corner and my knee scraped up splinters like a nest of prickling burning bites. I fought, but fear tore out my courage as water streamed through my parted lips.
Then Vai’s arms held me, and he dragged me out. Foam popped at my nostrils. My head breached. I gasped in air. Vai hauled me up. I hung on him as a dead weight, for I was a quivering frightened drowning child who had lost her papa and mama to the flood.
He carried me over the wreckage of the under-space, slipping and sliding. Kofi had already gone up with the old man. Distant shouts barked a warning.
Another huge wave slammed into the building, shuddering the structure half off its stilts as the entire building groaned. Water gushed into the under-space, rushing up to engulf everything including us.
My ears popped as the temperature dropped. The wave crackled into a ragged, rippled curtain of ice, stopping just short of washing over us. Above, water poured down through the hole on top of us and slapped into the ice wall, hissing and grinding.
Vai was shaking all over, his skin as cold as winter. He had his free arm outstretched. In the curve of his forefinger and thumb, he was holding a necklace chain with a round metal ring like the eye of a spyglass. Within the ring was a circle of what looked like cloudy glass. He released the ring, and the chain dropped limply against his wet singlet.
“I can’t use that a second time,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You’ve got to stand, Cat.”
The rippled curve of the ice wave began to pit and sink as a fresh swell surged up below.
“Ja, maku!” Kofi stuck his head down. “Hurry, yee jackass. Another wave coming.”
I was not a jackass. I jumped; Kofi caught my hands and hauled me up as another man cast down a net for Vai. I had used the last of my strength. Kofi threw me over his broad back and ran, me retching as water chased us across the avenue.
The tearing baleful wind, most frightfully and dreadfully, ceased.
I wriggled and slipped, and landed on my knees as pain pierced into my brain and every joint in my body screamed with a bone-drilling ache. The sky turned yellow. I looked up into the eye of the Angry Queen. The spirit of the hurricane was a woman, a vast looming face with a brow of thunderclouds and a mouth of lightning. The curve of her arms was the tearing circle of the howling winds. Here, under her face, the world lay still.
Vai splashed up carrying rope, net, and tools.
“She have got the kick of a mule, I swear!” said Kofi. “I shall have a bruise.”
“Why did you let her crawl under the boat?” Vai demanded. “She almost drowned!”
“I was too big to fit through. But maku, tell me now, have yee ever tried to stop her doing some thing she mean to do? Had yee much fortune with that? Hurry! The worst is coming, and it shall hit like the hells.”
The woman loomed over us. They did not see her, for she was a spirit, not a body.
She bent down and, with a lick of her salty tongue, she ate me whole.
I stood on a beach of fine white sand as cool as silk beneath my bare toes. I wore nothing but a gauzy shift like a caul of light. My lips were cold, and my feet, sipped by wavelets, were warm. The Angry Queen stood on the surface of the water. She was tall, with broad shoulders and powerful arms ropy with muscle, and the girth of one whose appetite makes her strong. Her eyes flashed with lightning, and her presence was the gale.
“Yee sire is waiting. Go to him.”
“No.”
Thunder growled although the sky lay so clear and blue above me that one might believe it as bottomless as trust.
“Yee cannot fight him. He is stronger and have always been stronger and shall always be stronger. The great ones stir in the abyss. Can yee not hear them?”
On the water’s tickling swell I traveled far and deep into the crushing trench of an abyss where the twinned beasts called leviathan shuddered as they struggled to wake from the stupor that bound them.
“Do yee serve the master still? That is the question he ask of yee. He alone must hold yee allegiance or there shall be ill to pay. Yet yee have a defiant heart. ’Tis a spark easily seen, little cat. Better if yee extinguish the spark than if he do, for he shall not suffer rebellion.”
“So must we fight,” I whispered, “rather than submit.”
A turtle rose out of the glassy blue waters, its blocky head a stub above the waves, eye staring until with a flip and a roll it sank back under. For some reason, its presence heartened me.
“Do you serve him, too?” I asked her.
Her laughter boomed, the sound cracking so hard I was driven to my knees. Her fingers like the grasp of death closed over my face.
“Yee talk too much. The secret is not yee own to share.”
A mask of water hardened over my face. The foul liquid coursed into my eyes and nose and mouth. But the flood had not ripped me away. Vai had saved me from the drowning waters.
Water splashed in my face. I was being carried through the rain-washed streets.
“Let me down. Let me down!” I struggled free and landed on my knees, first coughing, then heaving uncontrollably until I thought I would retch the entire sea out of my lungs.
Vai knelt beside me. His skin was hot, or mine was cold. “Catherine, we have to keep moving. The sea is flooding inland.”
“I have to save Bee!” But when I tried to rise the darkness beneath the overturned boat engulfed me until I saw nothing. Perhaps I flew. Perhaps it was all a nightmare.
For then I was sitting in the chair under the shelter by the kitchen with my muddy wet blouse stuck to me and a dry pagne draped modestly over my soaked drawers. A poultice soothed my scraped knee. One of the toddlers cuddled in my lap, a comforting presence.
“’Twas bravely done,” said Kofi, behind me, “but I still reckon that gal be hiding the truth from yee.”
“This is the not the time to speak of it,” said Vai. “She saved your uncle’s life when we all would have left him there not knowing he was trapped.”
“’Tis true. She saved him. I shall go over to he daughter’s place to see how he fares.”
Their voices faded. The wind mocked me in its singsong chant: We want one of they, do yee hear, me sissy-o?
The old man was dead. The spirits had taken him. The thread that linked him and me unraveled and its last tendril snapped like a hand slipping out of the hand that seeks to hold it in this world. His spirit sighed, and crossed over. A crow perched on the open sill and watched me as the sun behind it made a cowl of golden light for its form. Weary beyond measure, I went to bed.
I woke the next morning on the cot, wearing fresh drawers and a clean blouse I had no memory of putting on. The sound of hammering and sawing beat at my aching head. My mouth tasted of a vile brew that I could only imagine had been fermented from a stew of rotted worm guts and moldy rat droppings. Gagging, I fastened my spare pagne around my hips and, aching in every battered muscle, creaked down to the washhouse to do my business. After, I hobbled to the kitchen, where Aunty Djeneba greeted me with a cup of fresh juice and a kiss on each cheek.