It should have worked. With his last mighty heave the axe should have come free. That’s how it should have been, in a perfect world. But the swollen wood had gripped it firmly.
Mau dived again three more times, and came up every time coughing and spitting seawater. He had a deep, angry feeling that this wasn’t right; the gods had sent the axe to him, he was sure of that. They had sent it to him because he was going to need it, he was certain of it, and he had failed.
In the end he swam back to the canoe and grabbed the paddle before the grandfather bird was out of sight. They always flew back to land at night, and he was pretty certain that there couldn’t be much of the Boys’ Island to go back to. The tabago tree was hundreds of years old, and it had roots thicker than Mau’s waist. It looked as though they had practically held the island together! And there had been a god anchor among them. No wave should have been able to shift a god anchor. It would be like moving the world.
The grandfather bird flapped onward. Ahead of it, the thin line of the horizon grew redder, redder than any Mau had ever seen before. He paddled on as fast as he could, trying not to think about what he was going to find ahead of him; and because he was trying not to think them, the thoughts ran around in his head like excited dogs.
He tried to calm them down. Look, the Boys’ Island was hardly anything more than a lump of rock surrounded by sandbanks, was it? he thought. It wasn’t good for being anything but a fishing camp or a place for boys to try to be men. The Nation had mountains — well, one good one — had a river, there were caves, there were whole forests, there were men who’d know what to do!
Wouldn’t they? And what could they do?
But the little picture of his man-soul feast flickered in his head. It wouldn’t stay still, and he couldn’t find the silver thread that dragged him toward it.
Something dark drifted in front of the sunset, and he almost burst into tears. It was a perfect sunset wave, rolling across the red disk that was just sinking below the horizon. Every man in the Islands of the Sun had that image as his manhood tattoo, and in a few hours — he knew it — so would he.
And then, where the wave had been, there was the Nation. He could recognize its outline anywhere. It was five miles away maybe. Well, he could do another five miles. And soon he’d see the light of the fires.
Paddling faster, eyes straining to see the darker shape in the strange twilight, he made out the whiteness of the surf over the reef. And soon, please, soon he would see the light of the fires!
Now he could smell them, all the smells of the land except the one he wanted, which was the smell of smoke.
And then, there it was, a sharp little tone in the scents of sea and forest. There was a fire somewhere. He couldn’t see it, but where there was smoke, there were people. Of course, if the wave had come this way, there wouldn’t be much dry wood. The wave wouldn’t be bad here, not here. He’d seen big waves before, and they would make a mess, and splinter a canoe or two. All right, this one had looked really big, but waves did when they went over the top of you! People had gone up the mountain and brought down dry wood. Yes, that’s what had happened. That was certainly what had happened. He had worried about nothing. They would be back soon.
That was it. That was how it would be.
But there was no silver thread. He could make the happy pictures in his mind, but they were out there in the dark, and there was no path to them.
It was almost fully dark when he entered the lagoon. He could make out leaves and branches, and he hit a big lump of coral that must have been broken off the reef by the wave, but that was what the reef was for. It took the pounding of the storms. Behind the reef, around the lagoon, they were safe.
With a little kiss of crushed sand, the canoe touched the beach.
Mau jumped out, and remembered just in time about the sacrifice. It should be a red fish for a successful journey, and this journey had to be called a success, even if it was a very strange one. He hadn’t got a red fish but, well, he was still a boy, and the gods excused boys many things. At least he’d thought about it. That must count.
There were no other canoes. There should have been many. Even in this gloom, things looked wrong. There was nobody here; nobody knew he was standing on the shore.
He tried anyway: “Hello! It’s me, Mau! I’m back!”
He started to cry, and that was worse. He’d cried in the canoe, but that was just water escaping from his face. But now the tears came in big sobs, dribbling from his eyes and nose and mouth, unstoppably. He cried for his parents, because he was afraid, because he was cold and very tired, and because he was fearful and couldn’t pretend. But most of all he cried because only he knew.
In the forest, something heard. And in the hidden firelight, sharp metal gleamed.
Light died in the west. Night and tears took the Nation. The star of Water drifted among the clouds like a murderer softly leaving the scene of the crime.
CHAPTER 2
The New World
THE MORNING WAS A lighter shade of night. Mau felt as if he hadn’t slept at all, hunched up among the broad fallen leaves of a coconut tree, but there must have been times when his body and mind just shut down, in a little rehearsal of death. He awoke or maybe came alive again with the dead gray light, stiff and cold. Waves barely moved on the shore, the sea was almost the same color as the sky, and still it rained tears.
The little river that came from the mountain was choked with sand and mud and bits of trees, and when he dug down with his hands, it didn’t flow. It just oozed. In the end Mau had to suck at the rain as it trickled off leaves, and it tasted of ashes.
The lagoon was a mess of broken coral, and the wave had ripped a big hole in the reef. The tide had changed, and water was pouring in. Little Nation, which was barely more than a sandbank on the rim of the lagoon, had been stripped of all its trees but one, which was a ragged stem with, against all hope, a few leaves still on it.
Find food, find water, find shelter… these were the things you had to do in a strange place, and this was a strange place and he’d been born here.
He could see that the village had gone. The wave had sliced it off the island. A few stumps marked the place where the longhouse had stood since… forever. The wave had torn up the reef. A wave like that would not have even noticed the village.
He’d learned to look at coasts when he’d been voyaging with his father and his uncles. And now, looking up, he could see the story of the wave, written in tumbled rocks and broken trees.
The village faced south. It had to. The other three sides were protected by sheer, crumbling cliffs, in which sea caves boomed and foamed. The wave had come from the south of east. Broken trees pointed the trail.
Everyone would have been on the shore, around the big fire. Would they have heard the roar of the wave above the crackle of the flames? Would they have known what it meant? If they had been quick, they would have headed up Big Pig Valley, to the higher ground beyond the fields. But some of the wave would already have been roaring up the eastern slope (all grassy there, nothing much to slow it down), and they would have met it pouring back on them.
And then the rolling cauldron of rocks and sand and water and people would have broken through the west of the reef and into the deepwater current, where the people would have become dolphins.
But not everyone. The wave had left behind fish and mud and crabs, to the delight of the leg-of-pork birds and the gray ravens and, of course, the grandfather birds. The island was full of birds this morning. Birds Mau had never seen before were squabbling with the familiar, everyday ones.