Cloud Permutations (11 page)

He was awake when the leaves came drifting in the wind and settled on the ship. He watched their approach warily, for he had seen too many strange things come out of the sea and the sky in the time since they had left the archipelago behind. Everything they encountered hunted something else. It was a world of food, food hunting food, onwards and upwards all the way to Man, who ate most of them when he could. And they would eat us too, he thought, sleepless and unrested, as he stood watching the ocean and the sky. They are food, we are food, and it’s just a matter of seeing who eats who first. ‘
Fres kakai
,’ he remembered Mr. Henri saying once, praising the wonders of Heven once again for his students. ‘Caught today, cooked today, eaten today. Fres kakai.’ For a while after that the children all made fun of him, saying, ‘Fres kakai! Fres kakai!’, repeating Mr. Henri’s sermon to each other as they sat on the beach and boiled sand crabs or roasted bananas. ‘Fres kakai!’

It was a world of gluttony, Kal thought, where even the fish could think only of their next meal, and their next meal might just turn out to be us.

But when the leaves came he mistook them for what they seemed, leaves drifting in the wind, and he merely watched as they drifted closer, before he realised their size—that each leaf was the size of a boat, almost, and that underneath each one a small dark figure was strapped, head pointing forward. He could see the glint of eyes.

By then the wild humans were already on the ship and unstrapping from their flying crafts, and when two of them grabbed him—young boys, he realised, almost half his size but each with a hard, detached expression and a knife made of volcanic stone—he didn’t resist.

The
Sanigodaon
was captured without a fight, with no sound, and with no undue haste. When Captain Desmon was hauled on deck he seemed almost relieved. ‘At least we’ll get a night’s sleep on land, boys,’ he said, and massaged his scalp, bald but for a ring of hair at the extremities. ‘Yumitri nidim spel smol.’

The three of us need a short rest
. As a joke, Kal thought, it didn’t quite meet the requirements. Their captors took charge of the ship. They folded their—parachutes? Gliders? They
were
leaves, he saw, but what tree could possibly produce such a giant foliage?—and threw them overboard. Kal watched them drift at first, then sink slowly, and felt jealousy. Not fear—that was what he remembered later, that he wasn’t afraid, but jealous. They could fly.

The ship changed course. Kal’s hands were bound behind his back. So were Bani’s. Desmon, however, was allowed to release one arm, and he sat quite contented on a coil of rope and smoked a pipe. That was the other thing Kal remembered about that night—the seemingly endless journey into the unknown, no light but the moon describing an arc above, and the foul
lif tabak
smoke rising from Desmon’s pipe like the emissions of a dormant volcano.

Their captors didn’t speak once. They were boys, Kal thought again. Small ones, at that. To be captured by a group of
pikininis
was … embarrassing.

He tried to speak to them. He tried Bislama first, saying ‘Olsem wanem?’, saying, ‘Nem blong me Kal, wanem nem blong yu?’, saying

‘Yu no save toktok Bislama?’

Nothing. How are you? Stare. What’s your name? Go ask the stars. Ask the clouds. You don’t understand Bislama? Maybe we do, maybe we don’t, but you won’t get an answer out of us.

Pikininis. They were as old as he was the day the kite crashed. Again, he was jealous, with a bitterness that surprised him.

He tried the language of Epi. Nothing. He tried Tanna. No response. He tried a little bit of a Malekulah dialect, and Efate, and North Pentecost. Desmon watched him through the pipe smoke, with a face that seemed to know more than it was telling. Bani was asleep, curled up on the deck like a baby.

Kal gave up talking. The ship sailed on, through water so calm it was like being on land. There were no clouds but for the Captain’s.

He woke up with a sore head and didn’t know where he was. He had dreamed, though recollection was evaporating fast: a sense of running away, of being pursued through a white and grey landscape by unseen enemies, at last of falling—

He opened his eyes. The ship had stopped moving and was rocking gently. Early morning sun came through a clear sky turning from dark to light blue.

Captain Desmon was still sitting on the coil of rope, the pipe stuck between his teeth, though thankfully it was no longer lit. His eyes were bright, and he smiled through the pipe when he saw Kal was awake, and motioned with his head, a silent gesture that said,
would you look at that.

‘Bani?’

‘You were on the deck!’ The voice was close-up to Kal’s ear, and he cringed. He turned his body with difficulty, muscles stiff, and found himself face to face with a bound Bani, face paler than usual.

‘Couldn’t you
singaot?
’

‘What was I supposed to do?’ Kal said. He was thirsty, and his voice was raw. ‘Shoot those kids with a catapult?’

‘It wouldn’t have been a bad idea!’

‘I didn’t see
you
putting up much of a fight!’

They stopped arguing to the sound of laughing. Captain Desmon, his shoulders shaking, while a group of small boys—their captors— stared at them from above with closed faces.

‘Get up,’ the Captain said. ‘You’re embarrassing me.’ He motioned for the boys who—miraculously, Kal thought—went over to Kal and Bani and helped them to their feet. Desmon motioned again with his head. This time, Kal turned around to look.

There was never sun under that tree. Leaves billowed high above, in the high winds not felt below. Leaves as large as houses, as large as boats, larger than islands. Their shadows were lakes.

The branches of the tree twisted and spiralled, upwards and upwards, dipping into majestic high clouds, like an upturned reflection, like roots growing out of a foamy sea. As they rose they multiplied, and multiplied again, growing upwards in powers of two. It was a tree as big as a monster. Which is not to say it was monstrous.

There was a beauty to this land—was it land? Or was it all tree?— and there was a strange calm to it, too, a cool dark peace that hung underneath the awnings. The
Sanigodaon
was moored between two roots that formed a comfortable bay. The water was muddy, yet shallow enough for Kal to look down and see the bottom. An island, then?

He looked up. He couldn’t help himself. Here, in this presence, there was no other direction to look but up. He craned his neck (it was still sore from sleeping on the deck with his hands bound) and tried to discover the top of the tree, but couldn’t.

He began to discern houses. Not just houses, he thought—clumps of houses, gathered together—villages. On different levels of the tree there were different houses, built with the wood of the tree, almost invisible against its protective background. There were ropes, he saw—or were they vines? creepers?—linking the different levels, each branch the stretch of a sand beach. And ropes for swinging from, and ropes for—

He sucked in his breath between closed teeth. There were ledges, leaning over open chasms unhampered by root or branch. As he watched a boy high above came to the ledge. He was strapped to a leaf. He was alone. Kal looked up and the boy looked down, but their eyes never met.

The boy jumped.

He fell off the ledge like a leaf. The wind snatched him, shook him this way, that. For a moment he tunnelled down, fast, too fast, and Kal held in the breath he had taken, keeping it inside as if it were his last. Then the boy—the leaf—moved
this
side, and back, and straightened, and—

Suddenly he was gliding. The boy dipped, rose on an unseen current of air, fell gracefully back again. He was like a seagull, like a spaceship, like a dove. He sailed above their heads, but always in the shadow of the great tree. For a moment he passed directly above the ship and now Kal could clearly see his face.

The boy’s eyes were closed, and he was smiling.

— Chapter 17 —

WAN GEL BLONG BIGFALA WUD

THERE WERE NONE of the quiet, serious boys here. There were no leaves, none of the rope ladders he had been forced to climb for what seemed like hours, until he was sweaty and bad-tempered and hot. But at least they had unbound his hands for the purpose. He almost fell, once. And he thought—where can you possibly escape to? The only way out is—down. And the only quick way down was to jump.

Kal didn’t fancy his chances. The ground was a long way away.

Here, however … here there were almost no signs that one lived in a tree. There was a room, palatial, with gold masks wearing wild faces, some grinning in a skull-like fashion, others morose, others still inhuman altogether, the faces of fantastical creatures: though here and there, scattered around this room, this
throne roo
m, he could discern the beaked mask of a life-sized Olfala Bigwan, and even, with a nervous tenseness in his arms, the faces of the ghosts he had hallucinated seeing in the tunnels under that tabu island, the faces of what could have been the
Narawan
.

There was nothing tree-like about the room. The walls were stone and metal, set with glowing precious stones as large as fists. Against one wall the heads of dead beings stared down, giant fish and squid-like things and birds with heads the size of dolphins. In a corner stood a statue—was it a mask, a body, a face—a thing made of the grey-brown bark of driftwood, like a petrified god with two crude holes resembling eyes that watched and watched, their stare as cold and empty as the space between two clouds.

In the midst of this barbaric opulence, on a chair made of white bone and embedded with vulgar red rubies, sat a woman.

The woman wore a robe of gold threads; her bare arms were muscled. She had almond eyes set in a round face, a halo of thick dark hair all around her head like a cloud, and a mouth that begged—so Kal thought, with an intensity he found surprising—to be kissed. Though it was currently engaged in delivering a volatile and acidic volley of abuse against the three of them.

‘—and just what were you
thinking?
Just how stupid are you? And you, Captain—’ she said, singling out the abashed Desmon for a moment (he sat with his cap in his lap, one hand massaging the bald spot on his head)—’I’d have expected more from
you.
To sail to the Forbidden Tower? For what purpose? Did you think no one would know? Did you think the
clouds
would watch you from above and remain ignorant? There are five ships sailing after you, like sharks after fresh and stupid meat—ah, you are paying attention now? Good, so you should—five ships, like whalers after a big white whale.’ Her eyes were violet and intense and were examining Kal and Bani in turn. Her mouth was upturned—a grimace, or was she trying to hide a smile? ‘Did you think no one would know? For a month now I have felt your coming. It is in the leaves, in the way the flowers on the upper levels grow, it is in the roots and in the water and the dew. The Forb—’

‘What is it with you people?’ Bani, voice languid and superior, his designed-to-irritate voice. ‘Guardians this, Forbidden that, did you all get stuck on the same textbook back at school? Could you not at least be
imaginative?’

‘We reserve our imagination for coming up with new methods of torture,’ the woman said, equally languid. ‘Would you like to try some of them?’

‘I have a weak constitution,’ Bani said.

‘What about your friend?’

‘He has a bad stomach.’

‘Oh? Afraid of heights?’ She was definitely smiling. But it wasn’t, Kal thought, a nice expression. Though he had to admit it had a certain magnetic quality to it. He wondered again about kissing her. Bani, beside him, nudged him with an elbow, rather hard.

‘Afraid of you, more likely,’ Bani said.

‘And so he should be.’

‘Excuse me.’

For a moment they both ignored him. Was it really him speaking, he wondered? His voice sounded like another’s. ‘I’m not afraid of heights.’

He felt blood rising to his cheeks. He sounded to himself like a petulant school-child. The woman arched her eyebrows, which were perfectly painted. ‘Oh? And what
are
you afraid of, Kalbaben?’

So she knew his name. What else did she know? He said, with sudden insight, ‘Why are
you
afraid?’

For a moment they stared at each other. The woman’s face came into sharp relief for him, her halo of black hair framed against her throne, and he thought—
she’s my age.

Woman—girl—queen—she stared at him and said, ‘Do you know who I am?’

Kal said, ‘No.’

There was a silence. Then, with a loud sound like an explosion in the depths of the room, the girl burst into laughter.

Kal caught Bani’s sideways glance; it seemed envious. He said, ‘Well, I
don’t
—’, feeling defensive for a reason he couldn’t quite articulate. ‘I don’t even know why you’ve kidnapped us and taken us here. What business is it of yours where we’re going, anyway? It’s against
kastom
to interfere—’

He probably would have gone on in this vein, self-righteous and indignant, for a quite a while, but Bani’s elbow, once again, jolted him, this time into silence.

The girl had recovered from her laugh. She had nice eyes, Kal decided. They seemed to twinkle, not like the rubies around them, but like something alive and vital, like a reflection of dancing beside a fire. She said, ‘It’s my
business
, Kalbaben of Epi, because this is my land, and your ship has entered my territory without my permission. Which is against
kastom
, is it not, Kalbaben?’

She seemed to expect an answer from him. He mumbled something which she took for assent. ‘It is
also
my business, because you aim to reach the tower, and you do not know why or with what consequences. You paddle through a sea of ignorance as if not knowing was a blessing. Are you really as stupid as you look?’