Originally published in Bamboo Ridge #122 (2022) and reprinted in Snaring New Suns: Speculative Works from Hawai’i and Beyond
A flaying wind off the mountain glacier batters Sangee’s back with icicled fists. Each strike hits wild and sudden, with the same unconcerned familiarity her mother might have after a long hunt and longer indulgence of moss wine. It is only right. The land had bled, feverish and thrashing, through her tribe’s birth and anything brought forth in pain deserved pain in turn. Pain was the seed of strength and anything you wanted strong, unbreakable, you loved.
When her mother struck the sound from her ears, that was love.
When the ice blushed the skin of her nose black, that was love.
The spear in her hand, the honed tip: love.
Sangee treks through the tundra with the touch of many mothers at her back and her front, in bruises and cuts and ice-burned skin. Her quarry, an older delver, churns through the snow at a steady speed, losing its footing every so often when it’s wide hooves hit packed ice. The beast is shaggy and fat, it’s segmented shovel of a face hidden beneath the knotty wool of it’s coat. The delver is not made to run but Sangee has already struck it once, the spear slanting through it’s nasal hood.
Shouts from Sangee’s hunting mates barely break through the windy roar, faint pleas for her to stop, turn back. Even the delver is flinching as hailstones nick his muzzle and strike his calloused nasal hood. Sangee ignores them, taking the storm’s whipping as a challenge and grinning whenever pain blooms in her shoulder or knee. Her thighs burn as she withers the distance between them.
Spear back, twisting at her waist to gather power. As she flings the spear, a large hail stone hits her mouth, jerking her head down. Her vision flashes white, bittersweetness coating her tongue, but she let’s the spear loose. She ignores the blood, blinks away the false white.
Her weapon always flies true. She can’t afford for it not to.
It lands with a wet thunk, piercing through the back of the delver’s thick neck and out the front of its fleshy throat. Lowing, air gurgling through the wound, the delver crashes to a stop in a cloud of ice dust. Sangee drops to her knees and watches the beast spam and choke, taking deep breaths to ease her overworked lungs. She wishes she had gotten it the first time, in the eye; she can always be sharper, more precise. The delver stills. Sangee spits red into the white, brushes the bloodied rime from her chin.
“Sangee!”
A scowling mouth is the first thing she sees through the snow. Her mother jogs towards her, forearm held overhead to protect from hail. Sangee is taller than her mother, than most of her tribe even at her meager sixteen seasons, and yet she still feels her heart flinch away at the woman’s voice.
“We’re too far out of our territory for a catch this big,” Meleq growls. “You killed it for nothing, child.”
Child.
The word stings as it’s meant to. At sixteen, Sangee is several seasons past the age she should’ve had her first blood, gone through her rites to be an adult wahinaq. She is an bloodless babe, stretched to disgraceful heights. Sangee hates being an overgrown child in her tribe’s eyes. She shifts her weight in the snow, looking down at the space between her mother’s feet and her own, wishing it would grow.
“Next time, stop when I tell you, lo. Now we have to spend all night in the storm cutting it up and dragging it back.”
“Sorry, ama.” She could never win with her mother. There was always too much blood between them or too little. Squinting past her mother, Sangee spots a dark hazy line strecthed across the horizon, a wall of volcanoc stones, a curtain of smoke–.
No. The ocean.
In the black of it, she makes out white crests, seafoam and glacial fragments. A ripple that is towering waves. And then among the darkness, another dark shape rising up from the narrow strip of sea, its figure unfurling into every direction like a blot of swelling ink, a black sun glowing. It sinks back down, quick as its risen, the stark line of the black sea once again unmarred by its presence.
Behind her, the other hunters are already quartering the delver into cartable pieces. With Sangee’s help, they finish and tie the delver’s cuts onto the wooden packs. The long trek back to the village is silent save for their panting. They walk with their faces away from chilled oceanward winds, away from the watching sea.
Sangee doesn’t look back.
#
The smoky scent of charred meat and boiled river grass drifts out from her grandmother’s burrow hut. Sangee kicks the snow off her boots before ducking down inside the narrow entrance, emerging into the spacious excavated dwelling. Radzi turns the meager stew over with a bone spoon, flames blackening the bottom of the small stone pot. Beside her sits Sangee’s younger sister Nnasa, twelve seasons old and inevitably petulant. Sangee bends and kisses Nnasa’s forehead, pleased to receive a predictably grumpy hum in turn.
“Good hunt?” Radzi asks. The sleeves of her wool robe are shucked up above her elbows, white hair hanging around her shoulders like a cape.
Sangee kisses each of her grandmother’s cheeks with a tired smile. “I thought so but ama disagreed.”
“That’s the nature of mothers and daughters.”
“You were like that, too?”
“Always.”
“Atu, I’m hungry,” Nnasa whines, leaning onto Radzi’s shoulder.
Radzi smiles, pats the girls cheek hard. “You mustn’t whine, Nnasa. If the qalipuk hear you they will take you down under the glaciers with them.”
“At least they’d kill me quick instead of letting me starve,” Nnasa mumbles. The older wahinaq liked to warn the younger about the ocean people and how they liked to snatch up naughty children and hide them in the center of the deep sea nests. It was a solemn jest because it had once been true long ago, but now peace had been brokered between the two people; stolen children could once again be joke.
“Oh, they’d feed you good,” Radzi says, stirring the coals. “My qalipuk once brought us a shoal of fish so huge, we had to leave most of it on the beach! It stank for weeks until the birds came and ate it away.”
Nnasa says nothing; she is distrustful of the qalipuk, as are many of the wahinaq. There were rules between the wahinaq and the qalipuk, their pact of peace like an impossibly long fishing net filled with twisting, savage eels. It felt on precipice of tearing, all Sangee’s tribes hopes just a thread away from unraveling, dropping back into the dark depths. Because with peace came sacrifice. Certain hunting grounds were made off limits, types of prey forbidden for them to hunt or fish. And wahiqaq or qalipuk were forbidden from fighting or even interacting outside ceremonial meetings.
Some people don’t take well to rules; Nnasa was one of them but Sangee knows there are more grumblers in the tribe, unsatisfied with the treaty. But there was no fighting it.
No fighting them.
The qalipuk were massive beings, bigger than a hundred wahinaq pressed together into one body, one weight. Impossible to defend against, almost impossible to kill. And if Sangee’s people held grudges over this pact, then it stood to reason the qalipuk must as well.
Between the two, there were debts and memories, bitter as smoke, sweet as river grass.
It was as child still strapped to her mother’s back when Sangee first saw one of them. A towering, foamy black-and-white blur rising from the ocean, making the glacier they stood on keen and crackle with its weight. Sangee remembers a giant tendril like a finger coming to brush down her cheek, sliming down the edge of her jaw. Sangee didn’t remember what else the qalipuk looked like but she would never forget its texture, slimy-slick and granular with caught sand. The tang of salt and an unknown flavor was on her tongue for days afterwards, souring her teas and moss puddings.
“I’m sick of this,” Nnasa says, jerking her chin to indicate the stew. “If we could hunt the shore voles, we wouldn’t be so weak.”
Radzi reaches to slap her but Nnasa dodges; unacceptable.
“Rancid little egg! Your ama hears you talk like that, she’ll turn your face purple.”
“Tch, I’ll just make sure she drinks too much bitter moss. She’ll be too dizzy to beat me.”
Sangee sucks her teeth. “She’s still our ama, Nnasa.”
“I wish she wasn’t, kaiqua.” She spits the last word out–the formal word for older sister–with a measure of acid. “I would rather be taken by the ugly qalipuk.” The words snap like the embers beneath the soup pot.
Radzi sighs as if a great stormy cold has slipped in from the ice fields outside and draped around her like a coat. “You are getting older, little egg. You will be free of many things soon. More than you wish to be.”
#
To the qalipuk belonged the ocean, its churning blackness, its endless ravines and the unknown life that it continued birthing forth from its depths like a vast abyssal womb.
To the wahinaq belonged the ice fields and the rivers, its swiftness and freshwater meadows, the streams like unwavering blue veins traversing the white body of the land.
Through that blueness, the women’s paddles cut. Three narrow canoes slice through the crisp waters in silent procession. Sangee and Nnasa paddle besides each other with six more wahinaq in pairs paddling behind them. They are heading towards the mouth of the river where it empties into the sea; a sacred place of cyclic sacrifice that would honor the impending ceremony. They steer the boat to a makeshift dock to the south side of the river and tie off the canoes.
Iyamei disembarks first. She is small for her thirteen seasons, black braids wrapped around her head and woven with yellow reeds, green shells. A wrap of tanned delver hide fits around her hips and a wash of red clay from top lip to clavicle, from fingertip to elbow. Her belly is carefully etched with a blade, three stippled arcs curving neatly around her belly button, matching the contours of her stomach muscles. She walks out onto a jetty of black and red stone, the brackish sea slapping at her legs. Her gait is unbalanced; a side effect from her unbroken fast and the smoke of a particularly potent reed pipe meant to cloud the mind as well as the body’s sense of pain. At the end of the jetty, she stands and waits.
Sang had been invited to two ceremonial pilgrimages before. This was Nnasa’s first and she feared her reaction, worried her scorn for the creatures would only grow at the sight of them.
Sangee whispers, “Okay, kaiqu?”
“Fine.” Nnasa sits stiffly, hands gripping her paddle tight as if anticipating an attack. “I’m not scared, kaiqua.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You might have–“
Beyond Iyamei and the jetty, a single tentacle rises up.
Nnasa inhales sharply. The first wahinaq had said the qalipuk resembled terran creatures like the salamander, the whale, the octopus and the anemone yet none fully encompassed the fearsome air the qalipuk had. Slow as drifting ice, it ascends out of the sea. Dark waters cascade from its black spine and a musk fills the air, heavy with brine and an unfamiliar floral sweetness. It pulls itself into the shallows by the jetty, a myriad of thin tentacles rippling down along the length of its body like a bird forever ruffling its feathers. Its six wide fins, tipped in stubby claws, clutch the rocks to maneuver itself. The care it takes settling its massive head down on the jetty is more frightening to Sangee than its rows of crushing teeth.
The qalipuk’s belly glints shell-white in the daylight, catching the light and refracting it into Sangee’s eyes. Along its tentacled flank, three stripes color into existence: this was the qalipuk’s resting markings, the same pattern that had been cut into Iyamei and every other woman that had gone through their first blood. It was the first step to their binding and the ache of the tattoo would serve as preparation as to what was to come.
The qalipuk sucks in great bellowing breaths. A low groan vibrates the pebbles under Iyamei’s soles. Sangee, Nnasa and the other wahinaq disembark and take their seat on the stony beach, ready to witness the exchange. Each wahinaq has come with a hollow gourd and together, they begin beating out a rhythm, steady as the tide lapping at the craggy coast.
Iyamei nears the qalipuk; she barely reaches the top of its shoulder. Swaying, she reaches out, placing both shaking hands against the side of its slimy stomach, just behind its foremost shoulder. The pelt of tentacles flinch then flatten into a glossy smooth surface. The echo of the beaten gourds hammer in the air.
An oily cascade of colors radiates out from where her palms rest on the qalipuk’s skin. Translucent goo thickens between her painted fingers and seeps over her knuckles. The iridescence marks leap across its ribs, the deep rainbow blemish suddenly darting one end of its belly to the other. The shape blushes into symmetry, then fades a deeper color, the hue of rich soil.
Iyamei blinks.
The pattern on the qalipuk’s skin blinks back, two white dots flashing red and then white again.
Iyamei’s stumbles back. The colors on the qalipuk move in tandem. It has painted her reflection in its skin, a living breathing mirror; a signal of kinship between their two peoples, a mating gift, a mark of acceptance. Iyamei raises her hands back to the qalipuk’s ribs, her skin-painted reflection mimicking her in liquid shimmers and salted glitter. With slow precision, she signs into the wetness of its body.
‘I welcome you.’
This would be one of the last times Iyamei would speak to the qalipuk, unless she became tribe head or counsel. For people like Sangee’s mother Meleq, tribe head, they communicated frequently. The ancestral wahinaq had found speaking through tactile sign the best way to communicate with the qalipuk. Their hearing, the build of their mouthes, was not made for spoken conversation, but the sensitive tendrils of their body lent itself perfectly to tactile speech.
What is it like to touch them? Sangee wonders. To feel their color change under your palms.
The qalipuk exhales a content hiss, vibrating as its dark body shifts to a searing blue decorated with intricate whorls of white. The white pigment spins and collects along its body like building storm clouds. Iyamei moves towards the qalipuk’s head and strokes down the sloped muzzle, fingers dancing on the tips of it’s long serrated teeth hanging perilously over its lip. Tendrils unbraid across its flank and lift, revealing hundreds of opalescent disc-like barnacles anchored across its side and belly. With a tender touch, it prise one away from its flesh, loosing a cloudy green liquid Sangee knows to be its blood.
The sea shimmers emerald. Gingerly, the qalipuk offers the hard carapace to Iyamei who receives it with quivering hands. The barnacle was just barely convex, no bigger than Iaymei’s hand. Fleshy coils of bluegray meat twitched on it’s underside. The beat of the gourds slows and Sangee feels her heart follow suit nervously.
Iyamei hesitates, then presses the underside of the shell to her belly. She is still for several heartbeats before a cry rips from her throat. This is the part Sangee has heard much of, the invertebrate sinking its penetrating tendril into her stomach to her womb, tiny filaments latching onto fragile organs. Iyamei sinks to her knees in pain, cupping the shell that has joined itself to her, given her the gift that all the wahinaq are lacking. The ability to bear children.
The gourd song rises in urgent tempo as Iyamei screams. The sea crashes a chorus and the qalipuk, hums a sweet low tone, louder than all of the wahinaq together. Iyamei’s voice cuts off in a choked whine before she collapses to the jetty. The song of her adulthood rite plays on, into the light of the white sun, the shade of the black ocean. Into the jealous heat of Sangee’s heart.
#
Meleq takes her daughters to the seeding field when they are eleven seasons and seven. It is the only place Sangee knows with color that is neither the white of snow, the black of sea or the grey of soil. The seeding field is a charge crater, a dent in the land so deep and wide that she could not see outside of it once within. And in it’s center: the Sun Seed.
Sangee’s ancestor Kiele had brought the Seed over five hundred seasons ago on a canoe–“it’s called a starshep,” Meleq had said, “because it shepherded us through the stars themselves”–so large its hull was said to stretch from one horizon to the next. The Seed boasted the same magnificent size, larger than one hundred qalipuks squished together into a pod. When Meleq let Sangee touch it, she had been surprised to feel that it was burning hot, harder than stone and smooth as ice. Metal, her mother called it. Unbreakable.
Together, they would race through the orange foliage bursting from the ash-and-snow fields that surrounded the Sun Seed. When they reached the Seed’s edge, they would compete to find the largest orange fronds and yank them mercilessly out of the ground, revealing their juicy yellow roots. When they had a good pile of the tubers, they would sit besides their mother chewing them into a paste, the Sun Seed glittering before them.
“My ama used to draw pictures of our mother world,” Meleq says during one visit. She brings her knees to her chest, a distant look in her pale eyes. Draws a finger into the ash, making a meaningless symbol; she had no eye for drawings, not like Nnasa. “Did you know they used to drop supplies here for us once a season?”
“Who is ‘they’, ama?” Sangee asks.
“You know she’d been on one once, my grandma? A starshep. She said it took her to another sky full of stars, a place with a sun.” Meleq jerks her chin at the Sun Seed. “Like that but as big as a world and impossible to look at. It made all the nearby worlds green.” A bitter laugh. “This world was supposed to be like that, too.”
Nnasa grips her mother’s sleeve. “Why isn’t this world green, ama?”
Meleq takes a drink from her waterskin though Sangee smells, not water, but fermented algae. A bad sign for both of them.
“It was supposed to be. All this,” she rips up the ember blooms by their juicy roots and shakes them in Nnasa’s face. “It was supposed to grow this everywhere. All kinds of flowers and plants and fungus. Animal’s too. A whole ee-colo-gee.”
“It did a little,” Sangee says, as if the Sun Seed can hear them and needs defending.
“But it broke,” Meleq snaps then gestures at the base of the Seed. “Under it, just there, is an awl. It pierced the land here, through the ice and into the frozen oceans. Made them boil and bled little creatures into the sea. It woke the grass and the algae and the ember flowers. Melted the ice and let the qalipuk see the sky.”
Another reason Nnasa disliked the qalipuk: the would have never seen the starts without them.
“It did a lot,” Sangee says cautiously.
Meleq smiles but it’s an ugly expression, one that says she knows better and finds her daughter’s stupidity amusing. “But not enough.” She rasps a laugh. “A little warmer and we’d have proper greenery to live off of. And no qalipuk.”
“No qalipuk?”
“None. But unlucky for us, the heat only killed their wahinaq. That’s why only their kanaqs are left.”
Kanaqs. Men. Sangee nods as if the words if familiar but it’s anything but. Nnasa holds her half-eaten root in her lap and stares at her mother, chapped lips pressed into a small frown.
“If you want them all gone,” Sangee says quietly, “Why do the wahniaq let the qalipuk put their shell us?”
“Not shells, child,” Meleq says. “It’s their seed. The warm waters burned up the qalipuk mothers so that they couldn’t have any children. Kiele wrote in her journals that for months after the Sun Seed landed the beaches were covered in infertile eggs and dead qalipuk. As for us, the wahinaq had no way to make children. We only had eggs, a womb, but no seed.”
Nnasa crosses out her arms gruffly. “Why? Why couldn’t we make eggs and seed by ourselves without the qalipuk?”
“Wahinaq are only one part, child. On our home planet, we had another part we called them kanaq. It takes two types of bodies to make a child. If we wear the qalipuk seed on our bellies, we can make children by ourself.” She thumbs Nnasa’s cheek, pinches it until the girl cries. “Little copies. No kanaq.”
Nnasa was quiet. “I don’t like the qalipuk.” She digs a hole in the soil between her legs. “They hurt the wahinaq. And the qalipuk don’t do anything except fill the ocean with slime and stomp on wahinaq during the spring hunt.” Nnasa munched on her fire root and crossed her legs. “I bet I could kill them all with my spear. I’ll make a big one and skewer them all!”
Meleq, dazed of her fermented drink, drowses off. Sangee smirks at her sister then shoves Nnasa down before running off into the brush. She hurls fire roots from a distance, pelting her sister in the head and stomach.
“Big words from a big mouth!”
Nnasa screeches and chases after her, tears welling in the corner of her eyes.
“I hate you! I hate the seeds! I hate the qalipuk!”
“Big mouth, big mouth!”
“I’ll show you! I’ll hunt the qalipuk and eat their blubber and use their bones for my starshep!”
Thwack!
Nnasa yelps, her face jerked to the side, a handful of ember blooms still clasped between her fingers. Meleq stands woozily besides her, arm still flung across her chest from the powerful slap. Their mother’s eyes were red and narrowed: fury stank like old, tart algae.
“Little brat. If you hate the qalipuk then fine. Stay a useless little child. A child with no children, no blood in the tribe.” Nnasa’s face contorts in frustration, holding back tears as she presses her palm to her burning cheek. Meleq turns to Sangee and yanks her up by her braid. “And you. I brought you here to remind you of Kiele. You come from a line of chiefs, settlers from the stars. You have the sun in your blood, girl! And you make a mockery of it with your foolishness.”
Meleq throws her to the ground and turns on a wavering heel towards the village. The sisters stay kneeling on the ground, rolling over the light taste of ember root in their mouth that had somehow become heavy and sour. The circle of bare soil where Nnasa had ripped out the ember blooms was littered with withering leaves, the orange fronds dulling to a sullen brown. Behind them, the Sun Seed scorches the air with it’s brilliance but all Sangee feels is a colorless sting.
Not even a sun could burn as badly as her mother’s scorn.
#
Almost a season after Iyamei’s ceremony, Sangee finds she can’t sleep.
Her skin tingles, her stomach quivers with unfamiliar nausea. Silently she hopes this is the sign of her blood coming, that her tortuous wait for adulthood is about to finally end. A handful of days pass and still nothing changes except the intensity of her discomfort. Sleep withers into an impossibility.
Sick, Sangee thinks. She’s sick. Another new failure to confess to her mother. No, she’d die before she told her. She keep her exhaustion to herself, pretends to sleep so Nnasa doesn’t start asking after her.
Except one night, she can barely lay still, an itch puncturing every pore on her skin.
“Can I see?” Sangee whispers when she peeks from her blanket to see Nnasa awake and sketching.
“I thought you were asleep!” Nnasa yelps, splaying a hand over the drawing. Sangee smiles weakly. Nnasa sighs, slides the book towards her.
Sangee pulls it closer and leafs through the sketchbook attentively, knowing her younger sisters’ pride would be wounded if she looked too concerned. Nnasa had talent; she’d deftly sketched a variety of animals, layouts of their huts and how to expand them, strange weapons, and…starsheps.
“I…I really want to go to terra,” she whispers once she sees where Sangee’s eyes have landed. “I want to fly among the stars. Radzi told me there might be a ship in the southern archipelago. A supply shep that crashed many seasons ago.” She chews her lip. “I want to go to it. See if I can call the terrans. Or repair it.”
Sangee stifles a laugh. “You’re smart for an egg but you know you can’t trust atu’s old tales. There are no more starships or terrans.” Sighing, she hands back the sketchbook to Nnasa who snatches it with simmering offense. “It’s nice to dream. But you need to work on helping here. How will you catch a delver with this?” She gestures to the sketches. “Ask it to sit for a portrait? Distract it with a drawing of a female?”
Nnasa flushes. “What do I care what a child thinks.”
Rage cores out all the softness of the prior moment. Nnasa had never moved Sangee’s body like that before. “You…you little welp! The hunt matters! The tribe matters! You can’t survive of dreams of stars. The sky is just as cold as it is here. It’s nothing. There’s nothing else but this.”
“That’s what a child would think.” Nnasa shoves her sketchbook beneath her blankets and wriggles her head beneath the furs. “You can play in the mud with those ugly fish all you want. I’m going to the stars, kaiqua. You’ll see.”
#
Another night, another stronger, repetitive agony throbbing in Sangee’s marrow. Her skin burns with a violent itch and she wants nothing more than to skin herself and leave her hide on a rack. Sangee moans and tosses on her bedroll, blinking away the subtle blur of tears from her vision. Dry. Everything is too dry. She licks her chapped lips and gags when the taste of sour seaweed meets on her tongue. The flavor turns putrid in the back of her mouth but somehow it recognizable. A low keening echoes in her head. Sweat tickles at her cheek.
“Your bones need to stretch, egg,” Radzi murmurs at her side. But where is she? Sangee can her her but not see her. “It will hurt but you will be stronger for it.”
Sangee doesn’t feel strong. She feels like every bone in her body is trying to escape her skin. Shivering uncontrollably, she lifts a hand to scratch at her face. But something catches her eyes, a brief glittering. A viscous clear slime coats the skin of her hand, webs beneath her fingers. She lifts her arms up with effort: more slime, drying into a segmented pattern encrust the entirety of it. Sangee emits a strangle yelp, scraping at the mucousy glaze, but the fluid is thick and impenetrable despite its transparence.
What was happening to her? What sick disease had she caught and from where?
She hears the scream before she can locate the sound from her own throat, her own overused lungs. Her vision crackles with white fire until her breath gives out and darkness steals her to sleep once more.
#
A chorus of throat-singing slowly burrows into Sangee’s sleep-clotted ears. Her eyes crack open. She is lying in the community hut, her tribe watchful around her. Radzi touches her first, a cool hand pressing against her forehead. At her feet, she sees Meleq, arms crossed and a tension in her face that betrays anger and, strangely, fear. Bile scorches Sangee’s throat; what had she done wrong now?
Sangee shifts, trying to push herself up but quickly realizes she can’t move. Have they bound her? She tries to lift her head; nothing. She shifts her eyes, peering down at her hips and legs to see how much rope they’d wasted tying her. But there is no rope. There is nothing. She can’t move because her body is not listening to her. Sangee’s eyes widen and she cries out, her vocal chords searing in pain at the force of her terror.
Sangee’s legs are tucked up to her chest, her arms looped around them, petrified. A foggy translucent shell encases her body up to her collarbones and the fluid inside the shell was seeping up towards her head.
It meant to entomb her whatever this disgusting fluid was. A new parasite?
“ama…ama…please…”
Meleq watches her silent. Besides her sits Nnasa, her eyes swollen from crying. Radzi strokes Sangee’s head again but she spasms and gnashes her teeth, trying to escape the gelatinous casket.
“Be still, Sangee,” Meleq says, her voice hushing the congregation of singing wahinaq instantly.
Only Sangee could be heard, breathing harshly. “What is this, ama? Am I sick? I can’t… feel anything. I’m dying. I’m dying, aren’t I…?!” Numbness creeps up Sangee’s throat, a void of sensation tingling through the length of her spine.
“Sangee, listen to me.”
Sangee whimpers but keeps her eyes on her mother. The tribe was as still as a wall painting.
“We’ve been waiting for this. What’s happening to you now.”
“We?”
“Us. The wahinaq. The qalipuk.”
“What’s…happening…”
“You’re becoming like them.”
“Like yourself. There is no one like you yet, Sangee.” Meleq touches the hard shell at encasing Sangee’s feet, expression a mingling of fear and awe.
“You’ve been doing this.” Sangee can’t see her but she knows Nnasa’s voice. It’s flatness the timbre of cold fury. “Letting them poison you. To make us into…that.”
“You don’t understand. We can’t survive as we are.”
Sangee hears a crash, several voices rising up in shouts and scream. A scuffle, a snarl.
“All their dead,” Nnasa’s hisses. “They remember. Every single one. I told you. They remember all of them. They haven’t forgotten. And you want to give us over to them?”
Meleq stumbled after her. “Daughter, please–”
A slap resounds in the crowded hut. The wahinaq suck in their breaths. Sangee can feel the shock on her skin, the smack of cold air as someone leaves the room. Sangee would have cried out for sister had she the strength but instead her throat constricts, each breath a series of blades down her gullet. Radzi hovers over her and when Sangee chokes, she can see blood spatter her atu’s face. She tastes sulphur and something sweet, weightless. The slime that was solidifying just beneath her chin is now over her mouth, sealing it shut.
“Mm…mm!” Sangee wants to cry but her eyes are swollen so tightly shut, cutting off vision, impressing her tears.
“I’m sorry, Sangee-ke,” Meleq sobs, the weight of her pressing over the tucked bend of her legs. “I’m sorry, so sorry…”
The wahinaq take up their mournful singing once more, a song she doesn’t recognize: not a dirge but not a celebration. A hymn of loss. As the liquid shell closes over her head, hardening out the world, Sangee hears something lower. A single, deep bellow, rippling through the voices of her family like a tidal wave over land, forging further, deeper, until it takes the place of her pulse.
“I’m sorry,” says the abyssal tone but who is offering such contrition, Sangee doesn’t know.
#
Nothing.
Nothing and then a seashell roar.
The slow and clear thump of blood in Sangee’s skull. Beside it leapt another docile tone, more faceted, dancing low. Somehow the deep rumbling vibrato calms her, as if her head is resting against someone else’s warm beating heart. The first flecks of light flare blearily in the corner of her vision. Listening intently to the rolling murmur, Sangee peels her heavy eyes open. Indistinct white blurs, the murky wisps of blackblue shapes shift before her.
The wavering drone dips behind an invisible veil, quieting as the object moves around her and away. A tingle crawls down her back; a touch, contact. Sangee yelps but a gurgling replaces her scream. A sharp inhale admits a rush of water into her lungs, the thickness of it expanding in her chest like stones, fire, drowning, she was drowning–
Exhale. The water drifts out, easy as air. Sangee inhales again, the heavy water harder to draw in than oxygen but just as relieving. How? Where was her ama, her atus, Nnasa.
Again, the sensation of touch down her back. Sangee tries to turn, to see what it is but finds herself tangled up in a viscous thicket. Shaking herself free of the gooey nest, Sangee kicks through the water, trying to let her body tell her which way is up; all the light is the same here, an indigo haze. How deep is she for it to be this dark, she wonders. She can’t even see her own hands in front of her face.
She’s only sure she’s swimming because she can feel the cold wet current pulling at her skin. Finally, she reaches a lightening. A horizon clarifies in the submerged distance, the crest of a unknown mountain range inking the band of abyssal shadow. Sangee follows it’s peak up.
Something was wrong with the sky. The entirety of it seemed to be shimmering, the moonlight casting twirling rays of light down into the shadow world. Sangee looks down. Below her, miles and miles of impenetrable blackness. And her, easily suspended above it all, floating and wingless.
Had her family dropped her into the ocean, thinking her dead? Why? Sangee screams in confusion, expelling her liquid breath with as much force as possible.
Tentacles wrap around her body, one brushing feather-light between her shoulderblades.
‘Calm.’
The sign is different from how she’s learned it; her atu’s bony finger on her skin. The way the qalipuk sign is liquid, vaporous.
‘Calm.’
Sangee turns, using her hands to paddle herself in the direction of the speaker. The qalipuk doesn’t look as large as she expect its; in fact, it’s her size. It holds her almost tenderly, tentacles cupped to brace her against the currents.
‘Up! Air!’ she signs frantically onto its smooth muzzle.
The beading of it’s eyes blinks thoughtfully. A tendril catches her by the hands and simply signs, ‘No. Calm.’ It touches her behind her ears, draws another word: ‘Breathe’.
Sangee touches where the qalipuk has and her eyes widen. On exhale, water passes through her sinus and out the sides of her neck. Her fingers feel up to just below her ears, down her neck: five frilled open slits flutter under her fingers.
She claps her hand over the openings, accidentally smothering herself. She looks down at herself, hyperventilating: all across her body, from chest to toe, tentacles and tendrils ebbed and curled in a long undulating coat. Shakily, Sangee touches up her face to her hairline. Frictionless skin, hairless. At her scalp, a fleshy mass of filaments. She touches each one and they touch back, under her will. Her throat begins to collapse in on itself with fear.
‘Did you do this,’ she signs to the qalipuk with quivering fingertips.
It pause in consideration, its tendriled mane flaring out in thought.
‘Yes,’ it signs back onto her arm. ‘Daughter.’
Sangee wants to scream again but the pathetic muffled exhalation of water does nothing to ease her. ‘What’s happening to me?’ she signs roughly onto his muzzle, her eyes catching on the clean white of its teeth.
‘You are our first child since the bright star fell.’ It pauses, tendrils dancing along her cheeks. ‘Our first child since the killing heat.’
Our child. The qalipuks and the wahinaqs. Sangee pulls her arms into her chest at the revelation, her own head tentacles unconsciously twisting.
‘Calm.’
‘Stop! Stop…calm!’ she burbles in fury, sick of being chided. Signing furiously, she adds, ‘I want my ama! Up, now!’
‘Now,’ it answers. The qalipuk gathers her into its white underbelly, expanding all its tentacles and propelling them through the water with a blurring speed. Sangee gurgles a screech and latches onto them, hoping her ama is there which she reaches the shore, that her tribe hadn’t just left her in the water to die.
Please, she thinks. I’m still Sangee. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.
#
The invisble ocean floor rises up to meet them as the qalipuk swims them inland. Sangee has no sense of time but she sees the light and shadow of day and night change the underwater surface. How many days had they been traveling? She stops trying to count, drifts in and out of sleep, waking herself when she accindetaly bites her lip with newly formed fangs or pinches a tentacle between her body and the qalipuk’s.
When they breach the surface, Sangee stifles a sob. Above the crest of the waves, she breathes in the familiar air, light and effortless, warmed by the piercing heat from the sun. But the sky is not the white of winter she expects; it’s yellow. Sea birds flitted about above her, their gawky young ones falling into the water before awkwardly taking off again. Spring. She has been gone a whole season.
The qalipuk swims her through a maze of coralled rock and makes her wait in a lagoon offshore. It roars a request for the wahinaq’s presence, a sound Sangee knows her family would hear all the way to their territory.
A day passes before she sees them. Her tribe comes off the high plateau and down onto the rocky shore, marching out along the jetty. Sangee makes an unintentional roar, flailed her arms–fins, she had clawed fins now–excitedly. The qalipuk makes another welcoming call, waiting for the wahinaq’s voices to answer back.
Arrows fall around them like a spring shower.
They whir past Sangee’s ears and bounce off the qalipuk’s tough hide like rain drops. Sangee screeches and waves her arms frantically for them to stop; when she tries to call out her ama or Nnasa’s name, only wounded bellows emerge from her mouth. The qalipuk’s tentacles bloom outwards and shake, making a loud vibrato sound that trembles the water’s surface.
The arrows stop.
On the jetty, Nnasa’s pushes forward. Long spear in hand, ten wahinaq on either side of her with arrows at the ready. Her face is hard, jaw tightened. Sangee thinks from her vantage, that her sisters looks older. Much older. How long had she been asleep in the sea?
“I know it’s you, Sangee. We’ve been waiting. We won’t be a part of this–,” Nnasa gestures between herself and the qalipuk, a disgusted expression wrinkling her face. “–anymore. We won’t make room in ourselves for these creatures and made to suffer for their misfortunes. We’re going to the south, to the archipelago where Kiele’s ship lays in the ice. ”
Sangee’s jaw drops open, revealing rows of sharp serrated teeth that even she hadn’t discovered she had yet.
“Ah-ma,” Sangee groans out, her new face, her new throat unable to form coherent words. She swims forward into the shallows, rocks and shells scratching at her underbelly. Nnasa was only a few arms length away from her now. Besides her, the wahinaq–other young ones she recognizes as Nnasa’s rebellious friends–draw back their arrows and hold.
“Ama. Ama is gone She’s been gone for four seasons. She carried you into the sea that night. She wouldn’t leave you. I tried to get her out of the water but she wouldn’t…I watched her lips turn blue. Watched her eyes ice over.” Nnasa swallows down her tears, clears her voice. “It doesn’t matter. We had to be rid of the old wahinaq. They all knew what they were doing. Trying to make one of you. Trying to make us make of you, too. We couldn’t trust them.”
Every part of Sangee felt wet and impermanent, each of her sister’s words chipping away at the last of her hope.
“I am chief now,” Nnasa shouts over the sea’s wailing. “And I am taking everyone home! Our true home. Our distant mothers were banished to this world, but we don’t deserve to be. We will not sit here and die in the ice. Die like one of you, an abomination.” Her eyes are wild now, hunted, haunted. “I will live in the sun and in the green worlds like we were meant to. Like we were all meant to!”
Sangee sobs and moves towards her sister, reaching out with each of her hundreds of new appendages, wanting to hold her, comfort her, anchor those lost eyes. I’m so sorry Nnasa, she thinks. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. Please.
Nnasa holds her spear tip at Sangee’s wide throat.
“Don’t. Don’t come any closer. You’re one of them now.”
“N-oh,” Sangee says, struggling with the sounds. An outstretched tentacle gently brushes her sister’s cheek before moving to draw a word into Nnasa’s skin: sister, my only sister.
Nnasa draws back and Sangee closes the new space. Her younger sister’s eyes dart to the side: the other wahinaq are watching. Watching their new leader and waiting to see a demonstration of her headship, her hate.
The spear flies.
Sangee’s mind tells her to let the spear pierce her. Make a dead beast of herself. What else did she have? No mother or sister, no tribe. But her instincts pull her to the left just in time, forcing the spear to glance of her shoulder. Sangee lunges, catching Nnasa around the waist in her mouth and pinning her to the ground. Nnasa screams out a single word. A twang of taut hide hissing fills the air for a breath.
Sangee curl over Nnasa like a nautilus as a forest of arrows fill her hide. Rivulets of inky blood splash from her opened flesh, dripping down Sangee’s shoulders and ribs, striping the rich ruddy color of Nnasa’s skin black.
Tears wash away the blood splatter on Nnasa’s face. “No…why…”
Sangee felt the arrowheads lodged deep within her muscles, radiating agonizing heat with every bodily twitch. Nnasa reaches out a fearful hand, touching Sangee’s face. Do I still look like myself, Sangee wonders. Her mother’s eyes, her great ama’s jaw. Or do I look like them? Or like no one.
“I’m sorry,” Nnasa’s says, strangled. “I can’t. I don’t want the ice. I don’t want the sea.”
Sangee embraces Nnasa with every bit of her body she can, tendrils winding around her, weaving to hold her close. She embraces her all the way down to the heart, to the vein.
Sulfur and sweetness, salt and blood. A familiar scent but just off, not hers. Nnasa pushes Sangee back and then she sees it: a glint of opalescence on her younger sister’s neck like the inside of a shell. The color of change, the scent of a shift.
The shining beginning of her chrysalis.
“I wanted the stars, Sangee. I wanted the sun…”
Sangee cups her sister’s neck, rocks her in her arms. The frothy tide pulls in around them like a warm blanket. The other wahinaq back off, angry, confused and fearful. Behind her, more qalipuk breach into the shallows to observe their union. The sun beats down on them all, seabirds and the salt, the two tribes and the watery blood between them. The sisters remain locked in an embrace, mourning in the foam, knowing their paths are set for them, their wills be damned.
As the sun sets, the wahinaq sing their sorrows and pluck the arrows from Sangee’s body, watching in awe as her tentacles knit the wounds closed of their own accord. From the deep, the qalipuk follow along with their own wordless psalms, voices floating off the water, a song of mourning and a song of birth, resounding out into the ocean past the seamounts where more qalipuk swam and sang in reply.
Like their mothers, they would forge a home in the world they had and in the bodies they were given, no matter the shape. Together, the two peoples sing, down into the heart of the sea and up into the expanse of the sky, where the stars lie waiting and distant suns rest, pulsing brilliantly like hearts in the darkness.