Mama Cascade had no interest in prior attachments. She lured Arwa deeper into her world, and Arwa felt her body adapting with every passing day. Her black claws were joined by dark scales on the backs of her hands. Her vision sharpened, her shoulders broadened, her legs lengthened.
Arwa’s mind expanded to all the rapids and shallows and chutes through the hills. She knew their every dip and rise. She knew the names of every creature between her banks, and they responded to her wishes without a whisper of resistance.
During a quiet time between skirmishes, Mama Cascade led Arwa to the river’s source, a journey of several days that ended in a shallow marshland. There were different plants there. Different birds. Arwa felt her awareness weakening as they progressed.
“I don’t like it here,” Arwa said, sitting half submerged among the reeds.
Mama Cascade slapped her tail impatiently. “Know the limits of your domain. If it does not live within your banks, it does not warrant your attention. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Arwa whispered. And she did. There would be no more evening meals with Shanto.
Arwa struggled to retain the sense of purpose that had driven her to Mama Cascade in the first place, but the more time she spent in the water, the less interest she held for human cares. The land grew duller by the day. The troubles of the Bitumb were distant, irrelevant. As the goddess herself said: What does the water care who drinks it?
“Come below with me,” Mama Cascade said.
Arwa happily abandoned the discomfort of the air for the familiarity of the other world. Many days passed before she surfaced again.
A strange thing happened as Arwa succumbed to the influence of her second mother. It was not only the insects and the fishes that she understood, but all living things that spent time in the river. The Bitumb, the Howlers, the isolated villages on every far-flung branch of the Bombio—they were all equally intelligible. Arwa was developing her goddess ear.
And all peoples spoke the same news. The invaders were creeping steadily north, claiming fresh ground anywhere the hupa vine flourished—this, she already knew. But there was a second purpose to their invasion, stranger and more insidious than sap lust:
Exploration.
It was a concept that meant little to the Bitumb beyond the search for new hunting trails, but information trickled in to the river people from the jungle people, who heard it from the grass people, who had engaged in some manner of communication with the invaders: they wanted to draw the river with ink and bring it back to show their people.
The word was whispered from person to person to person, and it reached the river in their prayers and pleas: map. Once they had this map, the grass people warned, the invaders would control the river. They would be unstoppable.
Arwa was outraged. But every time she resolved to do something about it, the goddess devised a new distraction for her. Mama Cascade taught her to wrestle giant eels and eat fish in a single bite. She massaged Arwa’s legs until they sprouted finlike ridges. She made plaits of Arwa’s hair and taught her how to use them to grasp vines and reeds.
And each time, Arwa’s attention drifted from old concerns.
Once, Arwa sensed a fight on the surface: splashing and gurgling and thick spurts of blood. She bubbled her question, Should we intervene? But Mama Cascade had grown bored of people for now, and instead she showed Arwa how to dig her own bedchamber in the wall of the underwater tunnel. Arwa lined it with glowing shells like stars and slept coiled in a nest of algae.
Arwa had set out to learn the ways of her second mother, and she had succeeded. But the only way to embrace the river was to leave the land behind.
Arwa’s name was being spoken in the air.
She became aware of it gradually, like the approach of a distant bee, and much like the approach of a bee, once the sound lodged in her ear she couldn’t shake it loose.
She was irritated and curious in equal measures, so she followed the call all the way to the Mhaiko. Three bundles splashed into the pool in rapid succession: a ripe, round guevia fruit; a bone necklace; and four bright blue feathers braided together for use on a ceremonial skirt.
Arwa eagerly consumed the guevia fruit—a rarity for her now, as it grew far from her banks—and donned the necklace and feathers before rising to thank her petitioner. She climbed a pleasantly warm rock, enjoying the sun on her scales, and cast a benevolent smile upon—
Shanto. Shanto stood on the bank, radiating anticipation and fear. It was a curiously vulnerable blend, and it cast a subtle scent on the air between them. The heady vibration between predator and prey.
“Thank you for the gifts,” Arwa said. “Have you a question for me?”
With that, Shanto’s vulnerability gave way to anger. “A question? Yes, Arwa! Where have you been? Why have you abandoned us? Do you know what is happening to the Bitumb in your absence?”
Arwa’s under-eyelids retracted, and more details came into focus: one side of Shanto’s head shorn in grief; a livid, half-healed cut across her collarbone; her hip cover ragged from days of travel. Old emotions surfaced, and Arwa swallowed them back. She smacked her heels against the rock. “I have been where I belong.”
“You went to Mama Cascade on our behalf,” Shanto protested. “To help us.”
“Yes, and I did. I moved the village. I fought off enemy after enemy. Why should I spend all my days on your tiny bank, when I have all of the Bombio to roam?”
Shanto stared, and those big eyes of hers were shiny with tears. “We are birthmates,” she whispered. “Have you forgotten? We spent every day of our lives together until you met her. We shared everything. Every meal, every chore, every thought. How could you leave me so easily?”
Arwa maintained her calm, even if her insides roiled like the rapids for which she was named. “We are entirely different. You were never part of the river.”
Shanto left at last. Arwa was so upset she nearly threw the bone necklace away, but it was extremely flattering, so after some deliberation she kept it. She swam back to her bedchamber in a furious flurry, determined to ignore all future petitions, determined to tear up the Bitumb’s fishing troughs, determined to slumber until Shanto and Nambi and everyone else she had ever known was dead.
But Arwa’s changeable nature prevailed, and by the time she reached her bedchamber, all that remained was the bile of guilt. She winced at how cold her tone had been. She wished that she had put her friend off with better words. At least now Shanto would give up.
Except Shanto did not give up. Two days later she threw one of Arwa’s favorite foods into the pooclass="underline" crunchy tree lizards, dried on sticks. Two days after that, she offered deep red flower chains, the sort they used to braid around one another’s necks while waiting for the storyteller to begin. And another two days after that, she brought a freshly woven hammock, of a size to fit two young children who never wished to part.
Each one was an excellent gift, and each gift was also a memory. Shanto didn’t say a word as she tossed her offerings at the foot of the waterfall. She didn’t have to. Her presence screamed: Remember me! Remember us!
Arwa took the gifts to decorate her bedchamber, and the more she surrounded herself with their memories, the more restless she became. Her mouth watered in anticipation of cooked food. She chafed at the way her decorations tangled when she swam. All of her bright colors were muted in the deeps, barely visible without an otherworldly glow of their own. Arwa missed conversation that wasn’t transmitted by bubble.