First Fall: The Canoe Thief Read online

  The Varekai cooking fires were small and scattered. The houses were made from hide and wood. They looked temporary compared to the large wood-and-rock homes the Elikai made. Some were even in the trees, with ladders and ropes for the Varekai to pull themselves up at night.

  Tare’s arrival did not go unnoticed. At once the Varekai emerged from their homes or left their weaving, carving or cooking. They gathered in clusters, murmuring to one another, sliding from group to group in a constant hum of communication.

  Just like the Elikai, the Varekai were all about the same age. Just like the Elikai, the Varekai had no children—a thought that brought both relief and a sense of hopelessness. Both tribes were slowly dying out.

  Charlie addressed the tribe. “This Elikai has returned the canoes. Now she wishes to leave.”

  Whiskey cut Charlie off with a sharp slash of his spear. “I say we keep her. I say we demand spears in trade. How many knives do you think this Elikai is worth, sisters? How many pigs?”

  Charlie chewed his lip, looking at the ground, the sky, his own hands. Tare guessed this wasn’t what he wanted. Sugar was the same, too subdued for his own tribe. Too willing to take the path of least resistance.

  “If I may—” Tare started, but Charlie gave him a hard look.

  “You may not. Sisters, we have to talk about this rationally. We have to consider the consequences.”

  “Do you want us to look cowardly?” Whiskey demanded. “Make them see we won’t tolerate this. Send her back, but keep her ears.”

  Tare cupped his hands over his ears defensively. They would do it. They were just as vicious and horrible as Romeo always said. Charlie looked even more exasperated. “India, take the Elikai to your hut. Keep her there while I talk some sense into the others.”

  India nodded, and Tare followed him passively between the little shacks. The witchdoctor seemed to make a genuine and concerted effort to be impossible to read. It was only the slight frown, the slight hunch of his shoulders, that betrayed a faint air of displeasure.

  India’s was made from bamboo, folded over in a dome and covered in hide and palm leaves. Inside it was small—cozy, Tare decided—padded with animal pelts.

  Clothes and trinkets were hung from the bamboo supports, and they brushed against Tare’s hair as he made himself comfortable, sitting cross-legged on the floor. More interesting were gourds swaddled in fur, tiny straw people with colored glass eyes and a horrible thing of carved wood and dried herbs sewn into pig skin in the shape of a baby.

  “I don’t have to tell you not to run or try and take me hostage,” India said.

  “Dogs don’t understand hostage situations.” He made his eyes go wide with feigned innocence, though the Varekai didn’t seem particularly sympathetic to his ploys thus far.

  “And it would be a painful way to die.”

  He tried to smile, but the mental image was making him queasy. “I think I’m better off enjoying your company awhile and losing a few pig carcasses.”

  “A sensible choice.”

  “Speaking of,” he said cautiously. “What are those?” He pointed out the collection of malformed, baby-shaped things.

  India’s expression twisted into something that was part disappointment, part disgust. “I thought I might be able to breathe life into them. To make more Varekai.”

  In Eden, new brothers had just been handed to them, pink and screaming. Just as often they would be taken away and never seen again, or replaced a few weeks later. It had never occurred to Tare to try to make a baby.

  “Ah,” Tare said tactfully. “That’s...gross.”

  When India didn’t respond, Tare sighed. He could still see a wide slice of the Varekai village through the open flap. The Varekai brothers were debating, presumably about him, though he noticed Charlie was mostly silent. Just like Sugar, always listening to opinions instead of having one. Those two would probably get along. Perhaps he should have been terrified right now. He was nervous, but it was hard to imagine they were going to decide to kill him in cold blood. Throwing the tribes back into all-out bloodshed was just insane. Particularly over two little canoes that he’d just returned.

  “So this is the Varekai village,” Tare said.

  India didn’t look at him. “I’d prefer you didn’t speak.”

  “Oh come on, I’m bored already.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You know you’ve been kidnapped?”

  “Yes.” And Sugar was going to make his life a whole lot more painful than it was right now when he got home. So far, this was not worth the lecture he was going to get. “I thought it would be more interesting. I thought there would be skulls on sticks and gruesome, bloated totems to show the spirits how terrifying you are. Not weird little pig-sack Varekai dolls.”

  India blinked, head tilted in confusion. “Is that what you think of us? That we’re bloodthirsty monsters?”

  “Pretty much. You did destroy life as we knew it.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” India turned cold, his eyes narrowed into crocodile-like slits. “What happened at Eden was not the Varekai’s fault.”

  “I was there too,” Tare reminded him.

  They both lapsed into silence again. No one liked to talk about Eden at the Elikai village either. Some of the brothers believed it was bad luck, that just to mention it would make the spirits angry. Tare thought that was superstitious and stupid. It was really because remembering Eden made everyone sad. Or sick, thinking about those last days, trapped in the darkness with the rotting bodies...

  “What is that thing?” India was pointing between Tare’s legs. The question surprised him. He thought India must know everything. Maybe he wasn’t so annoyed after all. Maybe they could talk.

  He glanced down at his penis peeking out of the soft, dry grass of his skirt.

  “That’s my cock.”

  “What’s it do?”

  “I pee out it. It does some tricks. Do you want to see?”

  India pulled a disgusted face. “I don’t want to see you pee.”

  “Other tricks. Don’t Varekai have cocks?”

  India shook his head.

  “I thought maybe you were like dogs and they were hidden away inside,” Tare mused.

  “We have a little shell.” India brushed back his hair, and the bones and shells clicked.

  Tare was pretty sure Romeo had never mentioned having a shell of any kind, but then, he tended to lash out if any of the Elikai got too close to him or showed too much of an interest in his groin. This would be the first and probably last time Tare would be able to ask questions about Varekai without being punched in the throat. “Does it have hermit crabs in it?”

  India rolled his eyes. “Not that kind of shell. Back in Eden the teachers had other words for it, but we prefer our own.”

  Tare lost interest. Whatever you called them, empty shells were only useful if they were giant ones you could make trumpets out of.

  “Why do you have fat on your chest?” he asked instead.

  “Breasts?”

  “Is that what you call them?”

  India nodded. “They’re soft and warm, and they float.”

  “They look stupid.” Tare couldn’t resist trying to get a rise out of him.

  “Cocks look stupid,” India retorted, and the bones in his hair clicked and whispered.

  Tare decided maybe it was better to ignore India. Outside the hut, it seemed most of the Varekai were losing interest in the debate, becoming distracted by cooking or weaving again. Two of them were drawing closer to the hut, arms around one another’s waists, deep in intimate conversation.

  They touched like lovers, pausing to kiss beside a tent before pulling back the hide flap and sliding down onto the furs within.

  “Who are they?” Tare asked. />
  India glanced up. “That’s Sierra, and the blonde is Yankee.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Touching,” India said, with a dire note of finality.

  Tare could see they were indeed touching. Stretched out side by side, they kissed and cupped the globes of fat India had called breasts, slowly stripping away each other’s clothing. Tare settled down to watch, curious to see how the Varekai had sex without penises.

  The Elikai had sex too, of course. In Eden touching was not permitted, but after the world was born there were no teachers to tell them to keep their hands to themselves or that touching themselves was inappropriate. Cuddling together for warmth had come first, and then touching, but it had developed quickly into a whole gamut of sexual experiences.

  Elikai intimacy was penis-focused. Tare had simply assumed sex was something the Varekai could not do.

  The Varekai continued to kiss, holding each other’s chests, molding the fatty flesh that Tare had just so casually mocked in their hands and making soft sounds of pleasure. Their legs were twined together, and every so often one of them would flex their hips, pressing their cockless groins together.

  Sierra kissed his lover’s chin, his neck and down his chest to suck on Yankee’s nipples, teasing and licking, tugging with gentle, tactile lips. The contrast between the two Varekai was intense. Sierra’s bark-brown skin against Yankee’s, all pink, pale and flushed, made into confusing lines and patterns by the dyes on their skins. Tare wondered what his brothers would say if they could see this. Would they be disgusted? Should he be disgusted?

  Sierra’s dark fingers were vanishing between Yankee’s thighs, delving deep. Tare could smell the sharply alien scent of their sweat, musky and hot, somehow arousing despite being utterly foreign.

  Between his own legs, his cock stirred, and he felt a sudden, sharp spike of shame. He forced himself to look away. When he looked up, Charlie was beside him, looking down with a sneer of distaste. Behind him, across the path, Sierra and Yankee continued to rut with increasingly vocal passion.

  “A decision has been made,” he said.

  “And?” Charlie was addressing India and not him, but he asked anyway.

  “You will be traded for goods.”

  “Do you want me to take her?” India asked.

  “No. I’ll go.” Charlie glanced west. “I’ll fire a message arrow into the Elikai camp, and we will hand her back unharmed after the moon.”

  India looked troubled. “We should hand her back before the moon. We would look like fools if we agreed to a trade, then handed back a corpse because someone got carried away.”

  “There is no time,” Charlie said. “The blood is already rising. There will scarcely be time for me to make it there and back before we begin, let alone meet for the trade.”

  “The moon?” The hair on Tare’s arms prickled as he watched Charlie walk away. He cleared his throat. “Is she talking about that thing you do with the drums and the screaming?”

  India nodded. “The blood comes tonight. You should be pleased; Whiskey will be too sick to move. The blood hurts all of us, but it’s worse for her.”

  “I don’t understand,” Tare said. “What is going to happen? Where do you get the blood?”

  “It comes out of us.” India touched himself between his thighs. “It comes from the shell. Not all of us. Not always. When the world was born and we left Eden, it started. Just a few at first, then one by one we all got it. On the full moon it comes back, and we scream and drum to drive away the bitter spirits of Eden.”

  “The spirits are punishing you, for birthing the world.” Tare expected India to be angry, but he just nodded.

  “Whiskey is the most bloodthirsty, so she suffers the most. But the moon is power. The blood is power. It is the strongest of us who bleed. Sometimes I don’t. I am too thin.”

  He studied India, looking for signs of illness and finding none. “Will you bleed tonight?”

  “We will see.”

  Tare shivered, suddenly certain he would not live to see the dawn.

  Chapter Three

  The trunk of the tree was rough and unyielding against Tare’s spine. His wrists and feet were bound with hide, which was in turn bound with rope to a branch. He could shuffle around to make himself slightly more comfortable, but he was highly visible close to the middle of the village in the light of the many campfires. Even if he did escape the binding, he couldn’t outrun the dogs.

  Watching the Varekai prepare gave him goose bumps, and his heart beat faster with a queasy, uncomfortable sort of fear. There were blankets laid out on the ground and bowls of pig blood resting up in branches, where the dogs couldn’t reach them. They were painting each other with black ink, much more than usual, so they looked less like Varekai and more like the demons Tare had seen in nightmares.

  The fires were built up high. The smoke and heat were oppressive. Every so often, someone would throw a bone or a strip of skin into the flames, so the smell of burning hair and charring meat clung to his skin. The Varekai carried hide drums, spears and clay bowls of a gray paste made with animal fats, berries and tiny blue fungi that would kill a brother if eaten.

  Tare was starting to notice it now—the red smears between the Varekai’s thighs. Sometimes orange, sometimes brown. On most of them, it was not much. Just a kiss of blood. But as in all things, Whiskey stood above his brothers. It ran down his thighs in thick trickles, clotting about his knees, fanning across his ankles so he left bloody footprints in his wake. Occasionally he would cringe, hand over his stomach as some inner pain assaulted him.

  Tare cringed. What if the affliction was a disease? Or if the spirits saw him here and he sickened too? He had to get away.

  The drums started as the last of the light faded. The camp was orange and red with firelight, and the Varekai paced, black demons in their war paint. They beat their drums in a steady pulse like the thundering of a massive heart. They threw meat on the flames, but ate nothing. Tare saw some of them taking handfuls of their toxic mushroom paste and smearing it on their arms and bellies. It made the black ink on their skin glisten.

  The wailing started from the huts, short, desperate howls that lasted only seconds. As Tare watched, Whiskey clutched his belly again and shrieked, sinking down to his knees on one of the mats. Blood streaked his thighs. Tare wondered, briefly, if the Varekai would bleed to death.

  The brothers shook their weapons. They screamed. The drums pounded louder and faster. Some of the Varekai danced horrible serpentine dances with their feet moving in time to the beat but their bodies all bendy and boneless, like snakes in the water.

  Whiskey was prone in the middle of the cooking fires, curled up in a ball and, Tare suspected, bleeding to death. Though none of his brothers seemed to care.

  Tare was certain they would kill him.

  But when the flames died down many terrifying hours later, the Varekai sunk with them. And when the fires were only embers, there was nothing but silence.

  * * *

  Sugar wanted Tare back, but only so he could kill him with his own bare hands. He wasn’t the only brother who was angry, though the tribe couldn’t seem to decide if they were angrier at the Varekai or Tare.

  Love had been beside himself since Charlie’s arrow message had been delivered. When Sugar found out Love had known about Tare’s crazy plan, he’d wanted to thrash him too. Given the angst he had been through in Tare’s absence, Sugar had ultimately decided he’d been punished enough. It had been a long, tense night.

  Sugar took Love with him to the trade, but only because the smaller man had begged. He’d also brought Fox and Xícara. Xícara was one of the more docile members of the tribe but was also one of the largest. He was intimidating, and Sugar hoped his size would convince the Varekai not to try anything else crazy.

 
Fox was not big like Xícara, but he was fierce and cunning. Sometimes too cunning for his own good.

  “I am telling you—” Fox had been harassing Sugar since they left camp, “—if we let them have Tare for a week they would pay us to take him away. In fact, tell them they can have the pigs and spears, as long as Tare stays with them indefinitely.”

  “Don’t say that!” Love was aghast. “Tare is our brother! Who knows what they have done to him. We need to get him back today, before they break his fingers.”

  “I’m looking forward to doing that myself,” Sugar muttered. Love gaped at him and Fox grinned.

  “There they are.” Fox pointed to the trees, but it was another moment before Sugar spotted the well-camouflaged shapes of the Varekai resting in the shadows. Tare was standing with them, his hands tied behind his back. Sugar recognized Charlie, the curvy Varekai leader. With him was the lean killer Whiskey, whom all the Elikai had a healthy fear of, and Tango. Tango was tall, dark-haired and hideously scarred across the face. A good hunter, though not as violent as his red-haired brother.

  Sugar almost didn’t notice the fourth Varekai, the tiny, shadowlike India hanging back behind the others, lost in the dapple shade. While Sugar’s brothers were afraid of him because he was a witchdoctor and a prophet, Sugar was just wary. Respectful.

  They had agreed to meet on the vanishing beaches, a series of wide sandbanks that appeared between two of the islands at low tide. Here and there were pools with fish trapped inside. The more industrious, adaptable eels and octopi were dragging themselves across the sand and back to the sea.

  “No sudden moves,” Sugar warned his brothers. “I want this done peacefully and quickly. If blood is shed, we’ve failed.” A failure they could scarcely afford if it was their blood on the sand.

  Xícara nodded agreeably, but Fox snorted. They walked toward the Varekai together, bringing the goods Charlie had demanded: three young pigs, gutted and smoked, and eight spears.

  “Put it all down and back away,” Charlie called. It was so rare to see the Varekai out in the sun. The years really had changed their forms. When they had left Eden, it was almost impossible to tell Elikai and Varekai apart. Now Sugar could see how small they were, how their bodies formed an almost hourglass shape, one almost comically exaggerated in Charlie’s case.