Mortal Fire

  Sisema’s father was the head of one of the three chiefly families of Lost Link. He called a meeting in one of the island’s churches and told the people about the Japanese officer who had come to speak to him, and what conditions the officer had given for their safety. “He said that we must treat their enemies as our own,” said Sisema’s father. “And I asked him whether he was a Christian. And he said to me that he was not, and that his duty lay with his emperor and his admirals.” This was all that Sisema’s father said. He then took a seat and folded his arms. The church filled with murmuring. Sisema’s father listened to the murmuring and remained impassive. Then the priest got up and raised his hands for a hush and began to say, “It is clearly our duty—”

  He was interrupted by Sisema’s father, who heaved himself to his feet again and said, “We know how much God loves our singing, but he also loves our silent prayers.”

  Again there was that murmur.

  “God knows what’s in our hearts,” Sisema’s father finished, and looked meaningfully at the congregation. The priest gestured for the congregation to stand. He told them what hymn they should all have, and the rest of the meeting was spent in song.

  A month later, in August, when the migratory humpback whales were passing by the island, a man turned up at Sisema’s father’s house, pale with excitement and still carrying his fishing spear and his catch—a brilliant green parrot fish. Sisema’s mother told him off about his wet feet on her dry mats and took the fish from him, though it wasn’t a gift, it was his dinner, and he looked sadly after it when Sisema’s mother handed it to her and asked her to go down to the shore to gut and scale it. The fisherman said he had to speak to his chief, urgently. He was invited in to do so.

  When Sisema came back with the gutted fish, her hands smelling of tangy iron, she discovered that her father had gone out. She didn’t see him till the next day. He seemed preoccupied. Her uncles and older male cousins kept coming and going. There were whispered conversations. And, in the evening, Sisema’s mother and grandmother hauled her father out into the pawpaw grove some distance from the house. There was a spectacular shouting match. Sisema’s father stalked back indoors with his mother trailing after him weeping, wringing her hands, and begging him to “think again.”

  It was Sisema’s little brother who finally filled her in. Apparently the priest was hiding two airmen—Southlanders—whom the fisherman had spotted clinging to the wreckage of their downed plane. They had been adrift for days and were both blistered by sunburn. One had a concussion, and the other a festering wound on his scalp. The airmen had to be gotten off Lost Link. It would be no good taking them to the Shackles, because the main islands were full of Japanese. The plan was for Sisema’s older brother, Benemani, to take the best outrigger and carry the men off to Port Morrison, far to the southwest, a journey of nearly five hundred miles. Sisema’s grandmother was furious that her son would even consider sending his firstborn son. And the rest of the family thought that the whole idea couldn’t possibly work anyway.

  Every Sunday, Japanese soldiers would appear at the morning church services. They’d make a count of the youths and grown men. If Benemani went, he’d be missed. If he waited till after the count he’d have seven days—but every day the airmen were on the island they were putting people in danger. So, the plan was that Benemani would go immediately, and then, on Sunday, Sisema’s tearful family would show the Japanese a fresh grave.

  “But funerals last three days,” Sisema said. “The Japanese will know that by now. And if Benemani was to die, everyone would come to his funeral. He’s not a by-the-way person. Someone less important should go.”

  “Father can’t ask anyone else to send their son. And Benemani has offered,” Sisema’s little brother said. “I’d do it, but I’m not strong enough.”

  It was then that it came to Sisema that she was strong enough. And she wouldn’t be missed since the Japanese never bothered to count the women. She went to her father and said she’d go; she’d take the Southlanders to Port Morrison. And her father looked at her, and she could tell he was thinking that, with her, the airmen would have a good chance of a safe landfall. Her father knew that his sons were all good, God-fearing boys, but, for years, he had been calling his daughter life-heart, not after life or hearts but after the hardwood tree the people made their spears and oars from. And he said, “Yes, daughter, I will send you. You should follow the whales. Their long path passes within fifty miles of Port Morrison. You must watch for the appearance of smaller seabirds. Then you’ll know you’re near to land. Watch to see where they fly at sundown, and go after them. Port Morrison has a reef, so you’ll know what to listen for, even if it’s very dark.”

  That night Sisema set out in her father’s best outrigger. She had green coconuts and breadfruit, pawpaw and pineapple. She had dried fish, and fishing tackle, and bait in a jar. She had blankets, and a big finely woven flax mat that would be more use against wind and rain than a tarpaulin. She had a knife. She had gourds full of fresh water. She had limes and oranges. She had her father’s compass, the one he was given when he retired from his job as harbormaster. And she had the men in her care—Captain Young and Flight Lieutenant Stopes.

  Before she set out she kissed her family, and they all knelt on the sand while the priest said a prayer. Then she climbed into the outrigger, and her brothers pushed her out into the lagoon. She paddled quietly to the Oloi Passage, waited for the right break in the surf, and sent the outrigger surging into the open water. She paddled away from Lost Link and didn’t put up her sail till the island was a little bump on the horizon, the long coast of the Shackles beyond it, under cloud.

  Sisema followed the whales, sailing among them for six days and nights. Then a contrary wind came up and she had to tack. The whales went on without her. The wind died, and the sail lay slack on the mast.

  Sisema had been eating the fruit, and sometimes baiting her hook and trailing a line behind in the water. She’d had some luck, but, becalmed, she decided to fish for a while in earnest and maybe catch enough to restore her strength. One of the airmen—the concussed captain—had by that time improved. He took a line too and they both sat, twitching their lines on either side of the bow. He caught a fish. She gutted, scaled, split and boned it, ate one fillet herself and gave the other to the captain. She kept its head for bait, and they tried again. They fished and gorged. Then he took the paddle while she watched the stars and worked out where they were. She used her father’s compass to set a course, then retrieved her paddle and forged on.

  A wind found them again at dawn and they sailed on till, after another day, she saw five frigate birds flying toward a patch of mounded white cloud. Sisema was sure that land was there. She and the airman paddled furiously as the day darkened.

  It was full dark when Sisema first heard the reef—a sound she’d lived with most of her life and had missed so much when she was at school in Calvary that, for a long time, she hadn’t been able to sleep without it. Eventually she and the airman could both see the reef, its line of white.

  Sisema turned the outrigger, and they paddled along the reef till she thought she discerned a break in the surf. She put her hand over the side and tasted the water—there was fresh mixed with the salt. That meant she had found a passage. She turned the outrigger again and brought it in close. She waited, and had the captain wait, till at a word from her they both paddled madly. The boat hit a big reflected wave, and its stern dropped, then its bow slewed around and, for just a moment, Sisema saw the reef below them, phosphorescence combing through its corals. Then a wave came under the hulls, the outrigger accelerated, and shot forward into the lagoon.

  They beached the boat. The airman carried his mate up to the tree line, then returned to help Sisema haul the outrigger up onto the dry sand. They lay down to wait for morning. They couldn’t sleep. Their bodies were full of fear. Fear like venom. They were both afraid that they’d find that the Japanese had gotten to Port Morrison ahead of them.
r />   The beach would not settle down, all night it rocked and heaved, as the boat had. To pass the hours the captain told Sisema something about himself. He talked about his brother who was in the coastal watch, his sister who was a nurse on a hospital ship now stationed off North Africa. He talked about his father, who had died many years ago in the explosion at the Bull Mine in Massenfer. And then the sun came out, and they saw a PT boat heading in toward some port just around the next headland—a port whose lights they would have been able to see the night before, if it wasn’t for the wartime blackout.

  Sisema put the outrigger back in the water, the captain laid his feverish friend down between them. Together they paddled around the headland and into the harbor. By the time they reached the wharf, the ships they’d paddled past—two American PT boats and one frigate—had sent signals to the shore. A crowd had gathered on the wharf. The airman called out his name, “Captain Alan Young of 22 squadron, SAF. We were shot down off the South Shackle, fifteen days ago.”

  Someone said, “The Shackles? But that’s five hundred miles away. How did you get here?” And then they all fell silent. The captain pointed with one blistered hand at Sisema. “This is Miss Sisema Afa of Lost Link Island. She brought us all the way here.”

  Miss Sisema Afa. Eighteen years of age. A tall, dark, powerful girl, who was a hero from that moment on.

  Sisema left Port Morrison for Southland two weeks later, strapped into nets in the belly of a transport plane. She was wearing a dress the head of Port Morrison’s USAMC nurses had run up for her on someone’s sewing machine, standard-issue white leather shoes, also courtesy of the USAMC, her own salt-burned flax hat, and her father’s gold compass, all polished up.

  A big black car was waiting for her at the airstrip in Southland. There was a short ride through green farmland, where Sisema saw cows, whole herds of them, tall trees, houses with clay tile roofs, then Founderston’s somber greenish-white stone buildings, and a sinuous, silvery river—the Sva. The car passed through gates into the inner courtyard of a vast building, and Sisema was ushered through a succession of grand and cavernous rooms before finally hearing herself announced. “Miss Sisema Afa.” She was ushered in to meet the president of Southland, who took her hand in his two warm ones, and called her “My dear girl.”

  * * *

  “IT WAS AFTER THEN THAT SISEMA’S TROUBLE started,” Sholto told Susan. “The stuff no one talks about, though people keep telling the story, with relish. Before Da met Sisema, I heard him tell her story. And when he told it, he had tears in his eyes. But back then, during the war, Sisema was forbidden to tell it herself. She was congratulated, and was taken into the president’s own household until she was ready to decide what she wanted to do. But there were no ceremonies, or dinners in her honor, or newspaper stories. So long as the Shackles and Lost Link were occupied by Japanese, Sisema couldn’t even explain to people she met how she came to be in Southland, who she was, and what she’d done. Because, if it got back to the occupation forces, her family and village would have been in danger.”

  “So what did she do?” Susan said.

  “Lived in Founderston with a Methodist minister’s family. She was Catholic of course, but she made it pretty clear that, after her convent schooling, she’d had enough of living with nuns. She enrolled in a secretarial school and set off every day to learn shorthand and typing. She went out in the evenings and had some nice party dresses. Air force wives and ladies from the foreign office had taken her shopping. They’d take her out to tea. She had a generous allowance. She was always being asked over for dinner by various people who only knew that she had rendered their country some great service. She was spoiled and cosseted—and desperately lonely. She’s admitted as much to me. But she doesn’t elaborate. For instance, I asked her if the other girls at the secretarial school were nice to her. And she just shrugged.”

  “Like Canny,” Susan said, and laughed.

  “It always means ‘No,’” Sholto said. “If Sisema or Canny shrugs, it’s not noncommittal. It’s not skeptical. It means ‘No,’ and, ‘Now you’re going to have to show me that you have wit enough to understand that I just said no to you.’”

  “Oh dear,” Susan said, still laughing.

  “That’s not true,” Canny protested.

  Susan said, “When were the Japanese driven out of the Shackles?”

  “June 1943.”

  Susan fell quiet, but Canny could still hear her slow, idiot calculations. And still she had to ask, “So when was Canny born?”

  “September 1943.”

  “Is this the summit of the pass?” Canny asked, to change the subject.

  “The summit is about two hundred feet up, and over there,” Sholto pointed to one side of the road.

  “Oh look!” Susan breathed in wonder. Sholto pulled over so quickly that the Austin slid in a drift of gravel and rocked to a standstill. Canny was about to tell him off for nearly losing the exhaust pipe, but stayed quiet once she’d looked too.

  Sholto said, “I’ve heard about this. It’s famous. There’s a hiking track up to it through the Zarene Valley.”

  There was a rock formation on the summit of the pass through the Palisades. It was made of limestone, stacked like blocks of hand-hewn masonry. Some of the rock was pale, fawn and beige, some gray, and some was the rich color of olivine, and as smooth as marble. There were turrets and columns of one kind of stone capped by balancing big blocks of another.

  They got out of the car and walked past a sign that read “Fort Rock.” They went up a path worn through the turf of the pasture. Now and then one of them would stumble. Sholto once came down hard on his knees, and Susan, snatching at a thorn bush to steady herself, pierced her fingers but didn’t swear, only sucked them and continued to stare at the astonishing formation.

  They couldn’t take their eyes off it.

  The summit of the Palisade Range was completely dry, but there must have been a spring under Fort Rock, because the illusory castle seemed to be surrounded by a real garden, a rock garden with heathers, and hebes, and mats of carnations in shades from white to cerise.

  They skirted the formation, stumbling through its garden, gazing and gazing.

  “Apparently it is almost impossible to photograph,” Sholto said. “Look at those colors!”

  They feasted their eyes. Canny’s started to water. She wiped them and gazed some more.

  “We should have a picnic here,” Sholto said. “I’ll go get everything.” He turned his body first, then his head followed, his eyes lingering on the spectacle. Then he sighed and bounded away downhill to the car. Susan felt around behind her and found a boulder to sit on.

  “Is this one of your folklore things?” Canny asked.

  Susan looked perplexed but didn’t turn to her. Canny thought there was something strange about the fact that Susan didn’t look at her. Susan wasn’t angry. She was just riveted by Fort Rock.

  Susan said, “No. Why do you ask?”

  Canny heard the car trunk slam but didn’t look. She could scarcely take her eyes off the rock formation. It was like an entity. It exhibited grace and majesty. It was like a tiger stretching in the sun, untamed and self-satisfied. “Susan,” she said, “why is there a special walk up to Fort Rock when the road goes so near?”

  “It’s supposed to be more beautiful when you come on it gradually. The walk is some kind of secular pilgrimage, I think. The Zarene Valley doesn’t have roads, only walking tracks. It’s all apiaries and orchards. They sell honey and honeycomb, apples, cider, jams and jellies, cherries, apricots—the fruit from the valley is famous.”

  Sholto arrived, out of breath. He had the remainder of the farmwife’s loaf of bread and the eggs he’d boiled in the billy last night—before putting in the tea leaves, so that their tea had been a little sulphurous from the eggshells.

  Sholto sat down facing the rock. He spent another few minutes admiring it, then looked away to saw off several rough slices of bread. They peeled their eggs
by touch, munched, and stared.

  A skylark was singing. Its shadow passed overhead. Canny looked up and followed its flight with her eyes. Then she saw the Extra. The air over Fort Rock was thick with it, long strips like blown ribbons. It was clearer than ever, though semitransparent or, at least, the same color as the sky. Canny could see the rock through it, and the clouds, and the blue air. The Extra went up in billowing banners, long lines of calligraphy flowing up, renewed constantly, like the tape flowing out of a telex machine, full of information, endlessly complex, but still only a long calculation with a sum. And the sum said one thing. “Look at me,” it said. “LOOK,” it implored, “AT ME.”

  “Can you see that?” Canny said.

  Sholto said, “I’d fetch my camera, but the film is only black-and-white.” He sounded mournful.

  Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you’d better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the world owns it too. Canny had been reading a selection of those sonnets and had noticed how the poet didn’t so much elaborate on a simple idea as demonstrate it over and over, with proof after proof made of observations about changing fashions, or the seasons, or the frailty of memory. Fort Rock’s Extra worked in the same way—it described something striking, over and over. It said it was worth taking time to really look at some things. It said, “You may never come here again.” It promised, “This will one day be your castle, your refuge in some moment of lonely pain.”

  Canny could read it—or at least get the gist of it. And she was pretty sure that even if Sholto and Susan could see the Extra they wouldn’t be able to read it any more than they could find a solution to a complex math problem.