Siren (5 page)

Not far off the beach, he saw a small number of rectangular thatched huts with peaked roofs and the signs of a village that subsisted on fishing. Women were tending to various duties, while a few men mended nets. All stopped their activities and stared as he walked into the center of the village. He supposed he ought to be wary of these people, but he saw no signs of hostility, only curiosity.

The children he had followed clung in a group behind a thin old man, with a younger man standing beside him.

Huffing out a breath of what he realized was actually air, John walked up to the gathering. The old man sat on his woven mat and looked John over, top to bottom, and across all limbs. He spoke strange words to a tall, thickly built young man standing beside him.

"I am Kekoa," said the younger man. "You come out of the sea."

"It appears so," John Wall replied. "I am John Wall. Can you tell me where I am?"

"This is Oahu Island. Honolulu Port is not far, on the other side of the
Pali
." Kekoa turned slightly and pointed toward a gap in the cliff where a narrow road ran. "Did your ship sink?
Haoles
do not come from the sea except in their big ships."

John shook his head. He could think of no way to explain where he had come from.

The old man spoke some words in a lyrical language, and the younger one nodded. "Hiapo thinks you come from Namaka-o-Kaha'i."

"I don't know that place."

"She is the sea goddess, sister of Pele. Hiapo says you bear her mark. I do not see it, but he says it is so and so it must be."

The old man spoke again, and again the younger translated. "Hiapo says Namaka-o-Kaha'i has thrown you from her sea, and you are a very lucky man that you are not dead. But you must never go back, or you will anger her. He says Namaka-o-Kaha'i will drown you before she throws you back next time."

John nodded. Perhaps this Namaka-o-Kaha'i was their name for Siren. The last thing he wanted now was to go back to the sea, anyway. He had thought he would never walk among men again.

"Hiapo says maybe you want to go to Honolulu Port because the
haoles
are there. But he says we must offer you hospitality. Are you hungry?"

Suddenly he was very hungry, hungrier than he could remember since before the
Telesto
sank. "Yes," he replied. "Thank you."

He'd been around the world enough to know he should be mindful of local customs, so hungry though he was, John watched how the Islanders ate, how they sat upon their mats, how they talked with each other, and questioned him. It surprised him that so many of them spoke English, and in a reasonably good form. Even more surprising was that some of them could read, in both English and their native Hawaiian language.

"It is the missionaries," said Kekoa. "Now we are all learning English."

John glanced at Hiapo, serenely sitting on his woven mat beside his aged wife.

"Him, too," Kekoa added. "But he does not speak it. He is of the
Ali'i,
but he eats with his wife in the new tradition. His great aunt was the wife of our last king of Oahu. Tonight the singer will tell the story of the last king, in the old language, and I will tell it to you."

That evening, John Wall was given a place of honor at what appeared to him to be a feast, where the men and women sat together and ate, and he was told of the old ways when it was
kapu
for men and women to eat together.

The drums played a heavy rhythm that thrummed in his chest. An Islander whose face was heavily weathered by many years in the sun sat upon his mat and chanted in monotoned verse the story of the first King Kamehameha who came with his army and battled the Oahu king, driving him and his warriors up into the mountains and over the
Pali
to their deaths. Pali, Kekoa said, meant cliff.

John slept that night in the old man's grass house, which he learned was not grass at all, but covered in the thin-leafed fronds of the coconut palms.

The next morning he thought he ought to go find Honolulu, but he could not make himself want to return to the civilized world of the white men. How could he explain himself? They would think him crazy. Here, at least, these pleasant people who moved with leisurely grace seemed to understand him in some way, and revere him in another, as if he had been touched by their goddess of the sea with the very long name.

He could not go farther than the sand on the beach, not so much as touch his toe in the sometimes heavy surf, before one or another Islander would gently tug him back, imploring him with their lyrical fractured English. The angry Namaka-o-Kaha'i would snatch him away, they said. It was hard to understand why they were so kind to him. He knew all too well how the white man treated natives all over the world. But always, he felt welcome among the Islanders of Hiapo's village.

Daily, when the rains came, he stood near the cliff and watched the waves rush against the rocks, remembering the times when Siren had walked on the wave crests, singing her song that rang with the beauty of golden bells. He could still hear it echoing in his mind, and its sound made his heart ache so deeply, he thought he would die from the pain.

He was restless at night, and often left the chief's hut to walk, but he did not go near the water. They called him sometimes the
haole
who walks, for he could not be still, and they tried to give him solace, for they said his heart would never be free of the sea goddess.

Finally he asked for a place to be alone, apologizing for so often disturbing them, and then they, too, thought him perhaps a bit crazy. But as he did not want to re-join the white men with their whaling ships, they helped him build a small shelter for only himself and the dreams that came to him every night, and left him shouting and calling out. They did not know what to do with such a man. They did not want him to be alone, but they thought maybe he needed to be alone with the gods. They were Christians, they said, but they had not forgotten the Old Ones. And so he had his little shack, away from the village beneath the high cliff.

At night, every night, he dreamed. Always he heard Siren calling to him.

"Come to me, John Wall."

Even when he knew it was a dream, the feel of her smooth hands on his flesh haunted him. He could feel her glorious hair trailing over his body. And in the dream they made love with a moaning frenzy that brought him to climax in the shouts that echoed against the lonely cliffs, and, in his mind, drifted far out to sea in search of the lost love.

He awoke in a sweat, his heart pounding, even his bones aching with the yearning. It could not be love. But she had made it seem to exist when it had not. Yet never had he hurt so deeply, longed so much, for one he could never have again.

In the morning he again walked like a dead man, and the villagers watched him sadly. He went to the old man Hiapo and asked his advice. But the old man shook his head.

"Stay away from the sea," he said. "You were not meant to live, and if you go back, this time it will be no more for you."

So John instead took the winding dirt path that led along the foot of the great crater called Diamond Head to make his way among his own kind in Honolulu Port. He had too little to do among the people of the village, and it left him too much time to think. He found work as a dock laborer, loading sugar onto the big five-masted American clippers. He dodged the curiosity of the dock hands who asked how he had come to Oahu Island if he had not come by ship.

"The things I can remember are like dreams that cannot be true," he said. And they all avoided him when they could.

In his pockets he carried the three gold Spanish coins Siren had left with him. They were all he had left of a life that now a strange erotic dream that refused to fade. He could not live among the
haoles
, nor among the Oahuans. So he made himself a tiny shelter in the rugged hills beyond the port village.

But no matter how hard he worked, how weary he was when he dragged himself back to his little lean-to made of branches and palm fronds, when he closed his eyes to sleep, the dreams came upon him. He hated their torment, yet longed for them, for in his dreams he was with his Siren again.

"Come to me... come to me... come to me..."

And in his dreams, his love was real, and he swam with his Siren in the warm, deep aqua waters of the Summer Sea, made love in her bed of sponges or tangled their bodies together in the weightlessness of the waters, placed garlands of summer flowers in her golden hair and necklaces of gold and emeralds that rested against her sleek pale skin.

The ache in his heart would not go away.

More and more, he dreaded going to sleep, so he sought the taverns where seamen and laborers celebrated their pay and drowned their sorrows.

On a September morning, he spotted the ominous clouds of a gale on the horizon to the southeast. By afternoon, the dock closed down, but no ship was in port, anyway. There was not much point in going to his little lean-to in the hills, for the wind would soon be tearing it to shreds. So once again John walked to the one tavern which had become a comfort to him.

As was his habit, he drank alone every Saturday night, standing at the bar with one foot on the worn brass rail, never looking another white man in the eye. That was not hard, for they all kept their distance from him.

"I know you. You're John Wall. I met you in Singapore oncet."

He looked up from his whisky. He remembered the face. The short, thickset fellow was called Tom Bartholomew. An American. Very drunk. John nodded.

"You was captain of the
Telesto
. I heard she went down, all hands."

"Off the Skeleton Coast," John replied.

"How come the captain lived, and his men didn't?"

"I don't know if they did or not. Last I saw, the long boat was headed for shore. They might've made it."

"Then how come you're here?"

"I can't say. I have no idea."

"I'm saying. I say you're a coward, Captain Wall, and you saved yourself and left your crew to die."

John frowned as he stared at the drunk who had begun to press his finger into the worn linen of John's shirt.

"No," he said. He turned back to his whisky and stared into a dirty glass full of something he did not want.

"Hey, I'm talking, Wall. Don't you turn away from me. And I'm saying you're a coward."

John made a quarter turn to face the rummy belligerent. "You ought to try better manners, Bartholomew. You're too drunk to win a fight."

Bartholomew pulled back and swung, a punch easily dodged. The drunk swayed, over-compensating for his effort. He folded over John's rapidly advancing fist into his stout gut. John connected his left into the side of Bartholomew's face and the man crumpled to the floor.

"That was quick," said a grizzle-bearded man who had been standing to Bartholomew's right.

"I don't like brawling," John said. "Best to get it over with. You'll see him home? I'd hate to see him drown in some ditch."

The man nodded. John left his half-empty shot glass and walked out into the rain.

It was a fierce, heavy wind, catching him sideways instead of head-on as it had done that afternoon. So the eye of the storm must have passed. He knew he should go to his hut, but it was just as likely there would be nothing left. He walked instead, seeking the cleansing of the soaking rain and fighting the howling wind to stay erect, as he has so many times on the deck of the
Telesto.

Over the roar of the storm, he heard Siren and knew she rode the huge waves that crashed and tossed the ocean.

"You are for me, John Wall
." The old hunger roared to life so violently, it made him think his guts would be torn out. He had to go. Had to be with his Siren again.

And to go to her would be to die.

Up the road to his hut he wandered, deep mud sucking at his new shoes. If he'd had a coat, he would have clutched it tight, but he didn't, and instead let the deluge whip into the side of his face. As he suspected, there was little left of his lean-to but a few poles of the frame.

He sat on a rock, his knees up to his chin.

Oh, Siren, Siren, how I miss you.

He had never been a man to shed tears. But even if he had been, they would mean nothing against the stinging, pelting rain.

Chapter 7

"Come to me... come to me... come to me..."

The Siren's song rang in his ears, like bells going on and on. Haunting, never ending in the storm. "
Come to me..."

The gale raged, swirled, battered him, and the song swirled with the wind, tormenting his soul. No, it was not a storm. It was Siren. Siren was the storm. Come for him.