Chapter 5
WAN PROFESI BLONG WOTA
KALBABEN was an ancient Tannese name. It was the name of a local god, or the son of a god—after such a long time no one was quite certain any more—and there were stories associated with that name, and one prophecy of water.
Kal came to the island of Tanna thirty days after the death of Vira and the loss of the kite. He came by boat, with only his grandfather for company. By then, the island of Tanna was quite close, a mere two hours away by a boat with an outboard motor.
The sea was calm. The high clouds, which had gathered over the island of Epi like a council of war, seemed to be slowly dispersing. Kal watched them as he looked at the island recede in the distance. He wondered if he would ever see Epi again, which was a natural enough thought. He felt anxious. He also felt excited, which again was natural.
What wasn’t natural, or was, at least, highly unusual, was the scene that welcomed Kal—Kalbaben—to the island of Tanna.
The scene was this:
On the shore of the island there stood a woman. Later, had he been asked to describe her, Kal would have been unable to do so. Her features, her presence, slid off of memory like water over a smooth round pebble.
What he remembered, what he could remember, was her calm. She stood on the shores of Tanna like a pool of still, expectant water. She watched him approach. Beside Kal, his grandfather said something in a low voice. It sounded like a curse, or a prayer.
As the boat approached its engine sputtered and died. The boat, Kal and his grandfather inside it, drifted.
Behind the woman, far in the distance, the mountain of Tokusamwera towered. When the Tannese had built their island, they deferred at times to the old island, the one left far behind in the vastness of space; and at times, too, they differed from the original plan.
Mount Tukosamwera was one of those instances. Here, in the new Tanna, it was made in the semblance of a volcano. Smoke rose out of the mountain, and sparks of bright fire, but it was not magma that fought to escape from within it. Instead, the mountain was used as an enormous escape hatch for the heat and steam generated by the huge engines that lay deep within the island, powering its movement across the ocean.
The mountain, then, lay behind the woman on the shore. It belched smoke like a magician. The woman raised her hand.
The water the boat was drifting on seemed to subtly change. It became thick, like a blue, delicious jelly. The boat was stopped in it, fixed to one spot. Kal dipped his hand in the water and cupped some in his palm. He brought the water up. The woman watched him.
The water wobbled in his hand. He brought it to his mouth. On an impulse (had he been asked, he would have been unable to explain it) he tasted it. Then he smiled in surprise: it was sweet.
Kalbaben, something said. It had the voice of wind, or water, or the rustle of leaves in a wind. He looked up. The world was hazy and bluish-pink. He felt a smile trying to split his face in half.
Woman like water, speaking in riddles … the water before Kal changed again, smoothed out like paper. The woman stood above them, looking down. Her finger, pointing, moved, and as it did lines formed in the water like a script.
‘Wotadroing,’ Kal’s grandfather said. Kal nibbled on some more of the water in his palm and grinned spontaneously. He couldn’t stop.
Later, when he had first tasted kava, Kal tried to describe that sensation. It was a little like kava, the way the body was numbed, the senses calmed. But it was much, much stronger. Different, too: it made him into a small child again, enchanted by the interplay of light and water. That was it, the word he searched for. Enchantment.
Perhaps, then, the woman was kava. It was a long-standing belief of the people of the archipelago that kava—that root that, brewed, gave peace and allowed speech and gave some the power of prophecy, too—was a woman.
But it is unlikely. In fact, records kept by the Tannese show that the woman was named Moli Solomon, wan woman blong wotadroing— that is, a woman who drew in water. Those same records, were they to be pursued by an historian, show that the first instances of wotadroing appeared during the first century of settlement. They were, in a way, a product of a much earlier Earth tradition, which was that of sand drawings. Sand drawings were ancient kastom: elaborate, beautiful patterns in the sand, that told the secret stories of the people and, sometimes, worked as magic: magic for marriage, magic for last rites, magic for fertility and magic for peace.
Water drawings were … somewhat similar.
Kalbaben, something said again, and it had the voice of the ocean. On the sluggish water before him, Kal could see a complex pattern slowly emerge as the woman moved her finger and drew. The image began as several straight lines, which were then woven through with increasingly complex, interlocking vortices, the whole thing at first wonderfully abstract, until one final line rose, emerged, completed something and the whole image became suddenly visible, so obvious that you might wonder how you had never seen it before.
The thing Moli Solomon was drawing in the water, Kal had suddenly realised (though still he could not stop giggling!), was a tower.
The tower emerged out of the circles and lines, drawn in still water, rising and rising ahead of Kal like an alien monstrosity. Pausing, the woman on the shore lifted her eyes to him. It seemed to him she may have smiled. Then the pointing finger pressed forward, one small sharp tap, and the drawing was complete: a small dot, a smudge really, free-falling against one side of the tower.
Kal swallowed. And choked. The jellied water, sweet only a moment before, was now turned back to salty liquid. For a moment, the water that stood between the boat and the shore wavered. Then the waves rushed back in, the drawing disappeared, the engine came back to life and the boat moved again, almost ramming the shore. By the time Kal and his grandfather landed on the beach and pulled the boat to safety, the woman had disappeared.