But she needed help.
She needed Mama Cascade.
The legend of Mama Cascade was as slick and slippery as the goddess herself. At times, she was a cautionary tale. At other times, a comfort. Everyone knew that Mama Cascade lurked beneath the surface of the river Bombio, eager to pull down children who strayed from marked paths. But Mama Cascade also birthed the fishes they ate and shaped the banks upon which they lived, and it was far more common to pull a fish from the river than a missing child.
All of her stories were bound by three common threads. She was voracious, she was curious, and she was maternal. These were all dangerous qualities in a goddess, perhaps the last one most of all. Mama Cascade protected her children fiercely, but she was pitiless to those who misbehaved.
Arwa approached the waterfall Mhaiko with all of this in mind. She had traveled for three days to reach this place, terrified all the way that she was wasting time better spent on carving weaponry. But there was nowhere better to make her request.
Here, Mama Cascade’s waters flowed down a series of shale steps and filled a turbulent pool before joining the main body of the river Bombio. It was the seat of her power. Her home.
There were three gifts attached to Arwa’s belt, and she untied each one and held it up to the sunlight. “Mama Cascade!” she called. “I have brought you a dagger with which to slice your enemies! Mama Cascade, I have brought you red clay to paint your cheeks! Mama Cascade, I have brought you the meat of the long-arm monkey, to fill your stomach!”
She threw each of her gifts into the froth at the base of the steps and then sat on a damp rock to wait. Midday turned to afternoon, and the sun shone dappled and green through the vegetation at Arwa’s back, but she was patient. When the roar of the waterfall faded to the buzzing of a distant bee, she knew her gifts had been accepted.
Mama Cascade slithered up from the depths of the pool and onto a rock just beyond Arwa’s reach. Her stomach was round and taut, her cheeks were red, and a new stone dagger hung from her belt. She slapped her tail against the rock three times, and she said, “Thank you for the gifts, child of the Bitumb. Have you a question for me?”
Arwa shuddered at the sight of her claws and teeth, at her bulbous eyes and tangled hair, and for a moment she considered fleeing back the way she’d come. But she thought of the Timbos’ grief. She thought of that same grief reaching Shanto. She couldn’t return alone.
“I’ve come to learn from you,” Arwa said. “Teach me how to manipulate the river. Teach me how to fight.”
Mama Cascade stared at her, unblinking and terrible, but also—yes—also curious. It was a new and strange thing that Arwa was asking, and the goddess liked new and strange things. In a voice as slow and deceptive as water over a deepening trench, she said, “Persuade me.”
Arwa’s pulse quickened. She had practiced her plea for three days. She only had to keep from stuttering.
“The Bitumb have lived along your banks for twenty generations,” she said. “The border of jungle and grass is our territory, and none of the other peoples dispute it. But there are creatures coming for us, coming to strip our land, consume our hupa, burn our homes. The village of the Timbo people has been destroyed and their children taken. Soon they will reach the Bitumb, and we must be ready. Will you help us, Mama Cascade? Will you teach me to wield the river?”
She stopped, breathing hard, and waited.
The goddess stretched along her rock, her scales glittering green and brown in the warm afternoon sun. Her woman’s face was dark and terrible and thoroughly unimpressed. “Child of the Bitumb,” she said, “what does the water care who drinks it? I am equally indifferent to the long-arm monkey, the howling marhaña, even this new creature from beyond the grass. Why should this concern me?”
Arwa had hoped that Mama Cascade’s curiosity would prevail over her fickle nature, but she had not traveled so far on hope alone.
“If you will not help out of love for the Bitumb, then do it for me,” Arwa said. She smiled, big-toothed and broad. “For I am your daughter.”
Mama Cascade’s appetites were well known. For food, for drink, for death, and for children. Sometimes she imposed herself on maidens who bathed too long in her waters, and in this way, she mothered river babies.
A river baby was announced by the astounding volume of water shed just before its birth. As a child, a river baby was curious and fearless, a natural swimmer. As an adult, a river baby had moods as unpredictable as the rapids.
Arwa was named for the rapids that tore up the river between the Bitumb and the Mendewa, and she had a temperament to match. Fierce. Unrelenting. Difficult.
From the day of her birth, Arwa had been told the river was her second mother. Her first mother, Nambi, told the story often—so often that Arwa could almost remember how it went. The rush of waters. The rain dripping through the canopy. How she spat her own lungs clear and screamed for days, offended at leaving a wet womb for dry air.
Faced with the terrible beauty of Mama Cascade, Arwa had to wonder: How much of the goddess was in her? To come all this way only to fail was unthinkable.
So Arwa would not fail.
Mama Cascade said, “Come to me,” and slipped underwater. Arwa strode into the pool as though her stomach weren’t writhing. Tiny fish nipped at her toes, more annoying than painful, and larger things slithered past her calves. Nothing fled her presence. There was only one creature to fear in the pool, and there was no point trying to evade her.
“What should I—?” Arwa’s question was cut short by the clasp of a hand around her ankle. Before she could draw breath, she went under.
The bottom of the pool stretched away. Moments ago, the water had only reached her knees, but now the river was a vast chasm, deepening by the second. She shut her eyes against the grit, and bright lights bloomed behind her eyelids, forcing her to see it anyway: a subterranean world of shadows limned in green.
It was too much. Arwa kicked and kicked and kicked, until her head broke the surface and a familiar bed of rocks reformed beneath her feet.
She clutched the nearest boulder, gasping for breath, and recoiled at the sight of Mama Cascade floating her way, submerged up to her neck in defiance of the shallow water. “You cannot learn the river from the bank,” the goddess scolded.
“Please,” Arwa said. “Give me one night to prepare.”
Mama Cascade pursed her lips, but she did not say no. When she swam away, Arwa sat down and cried.
That was the first day.
On the second day, Arwa fashioned herself a breathing apparatus. She cut down a hupa vine and drained the sap, creating a flexible hollow tube as long as three men. She lashed the vine to a plauplau branch hanging over the pool, and she used two soft-coated melly nuts to plug her nostrils. This time, when Mama Cascade tugged her down, Arwa shut her eyes and succumbed, vine in hand.
The underwater village came to life again, an entire civilization contained in the walls of a bottomless pit. Breathtaking and unfamiliar creatures inhabited dozens of alcoves, visible only as glowing green outlines. Arwa held tight to Mama Cascade as she sank past strange configurations of jagged fins and pendulous limbs, round bellies and long spines, claws and suckers, and always the silhouette of a human head.
It was a struggle to draw air down the long, sweet-tasting vine, but Arwa managed to hold and release four big lungsful before the pain in her chest sent her back to the surface. On her next descent, she managed six. With every trip, she explored more of Mama Cascade’s world, the goddess a constant presence at her side. On the third day, Arwa ceased to wonder how she was descending so far without losing hold of the hupa vine.