Shadow Dance
a NOVEL by H. C. Turk
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
©2011 H. C. Turk ~ hcturk.com
Smashwords Edition
HCT Kindle books at Amazon.com
Chapter 1
Human Jewel
Air lifted ashes from a fire mountain across a sound that had flowed as magma in an earlier age. Too fine for men to notice except as a smell, the ash settled on a busy weapon. Nine hundred balls of iron had erupted from the cannon’s mouth, causing no damage to the sea. Number nine-hundred-one curved into invisibility above an atoll of orange coral, falling into a goddess’s trench. The size of a Sumatran crocodile though floating lower, the trunk of an ironwood tree seeded in a previous century received the iron sphere. As the blast to their ears subsided, five men received a lesser, more satisfying, sound. Only partially absorbed by salt water, the log’s vibrations came as a hard knock that could have been God’s tapping a clapbox of holy bamboo in Heaven’s gamelan, orchestrating earthly success.
One man fell to his knees.
“God’s spirit of the air has blessed us with perfect accuracy these latest days of our trials, Governor Sriwigare.”
As the priest bowed, his sleeveless robe and hairless pate contacted the coppery soil of this island’s highest rise, limp jute, taut scalp, and volcanic grit all of a similar hue, this quiet contact as assured as cannonball conjoining with floating tree after nine hundred and one attempts, guided by even more numerous prayers.
The sounds were the same. God hears distant prayers as readily as humans notice nearby cannon blasts.
“The log remains undamaged,” Garendi Sriwigare observed.
Though the priest looked up from his knees, a reply for the governor came from Garendi’s esteemed son.
“Only the final projectile contains explosives,” Kelada Shark reported. “Citizens of the home island would surely hear this praying. We cannot disguise such hard fireworks as mere belching of volcanoes.”
“What is your worry of noise when we stand nearer to Malaysia than our own nation?” Garendi snarled. “You might worry of the bomb flying differently from these dead balls.”
And the priest replied:
“Oh great king, the Chinese are long masters of such weapons. They have perfectly balanced those nine hundred, ninety, and nine of iron with that one of eruption.”
“Ah, and suitable it is that the traitor dies by the same foreign trade that ruins our nation!”
The governor looked beyond, Balapasar visible only as the truncated tops of hot mountains emerging from the ocean, though the highest peak showed cool white. Monkey Mountain steamed peacefully, the volcano’s quiet smoke mellow compared to the cannon’s abruptness.
“What if your practice falters, and you need more balls?” Garendi wondered.
“But grandest king, no man can count a higher number!”
Garendi could not argue with the priest. He noticed white on the sound between the two islands. A wind from the north had left the greater body for the lesser.
“Why does your practice not commence?” Garendi growled as he glared at the men of firing and loading. “A wind perks the sea. Can you strike your target during this western monsoon?”
Shoeless and shirtless, wearing only thorn necklaces and breeches with blades, the two guards bowed their heads while sprinkling the iron barrel with water droplets from staved buckets. The priest rose, but Kelada replied, hearing the barrel hiss as he glimpsed Monkey Mountain’s hot vapors.
“The betrothal comes too early in the day for wind to concern us.”
“Do you ever argue with me?” his father snapped.
“The barrel must cool,” Kelada added, “lest the iron be distorted, along with these warriors’ aim.”
Tilting his head upward, Garendi grasped his cap of embroidered stars with both hands while crying, and praying:
“Do you ever argue with me!”
“Those of excitable thinking misconstrue explanations for argument.”
The governor whirled from his son, the sleeves of his plain shirt flying together as though fighting kites. Garendi stalked to the cannon, and its keepers. These warriors who had never shied from an enemy now recoiled from the smaller man of greying hair and softening flesh as he harshly bent to the nearest bucket, scooping out handfuls of water, which he tossed against the barrel blackened by the mouth’s explosive coughing.
The hissing now came as a smell, as though the saltwater steam were a broth for cooking a cannon. Overcooking, as Kelada explained.
“If the barrel cools too quickly, the iron will not regain its proper shape, and thereafter fire crookedly.”
Staring toward Garendi as though the governor were a demon, the priest gasped:
“We must not corrupt our prayer with anger.”
“If the girl does not die, you shall die—that is my prayer!” Garendi shrieked.
As though scooping up iron spheres with his waving hand, Garendi gesticulated to the wooden pallet containing ninety-eight cast balls. The guards complied. The man of firing cleaned the rifling lands with a hemp swab inundated with lontar oil, then poured the correct quantity of powder inside, his measure sheer experience.
“At the betrothal, we will have a single opportunity,” Kelada Shark asserted. “If we fire in haste, we lose our nation.”
“I make haste to save our nation!” the governor exclaimed, hand raised in an abstract oath.
As the man of firing tamped gunpowder into the barrel, Garendi aided the loader in lifting a ball exactly equal to the previous nine hundred one this warrior had lifted alone, muscles hardened by handling iron.
“Ah, our cautious prayer must not be corrupted with the ingratitude of haste!” the priest begged.
A stiff wind cleared the weapon’s muzzle of steam.
The loader, Fatupa, had never been so near a great leader. Even when a guard captain slapped him a decade earlier, the two had been separated by the length of one bent arm. But Garendi’s bent arm now rubbed the guard’s, which responded by popping.
Garendi stared down to that sound, the large muscle of Fatupa’s upper arm showing a dark stain beneath his skin. A stain that spread until the size of a man’s palm.
“Ah! the mark of a demon’s intervention!” the priest cried, throwing himself to his knees to kiss the brown soil, rubbing moist grit against his forehead as he prayed.
“Perhaps the mark of intervention by a leader out of place,” Kelada stated firmly.
Garendi ignored his son, glaring at that flesh stain as he and the loader placed the ball against the cannon’s orifice. As Fatupa rammed the huge ball down the barrel, not daring to glimpse his own, foreboding arm, the governor determined:
“If this be a sign of demonic intervention, delivered by a cretinous breeze, we must expel the influence, and hurriedly. Man of firing, unsheathe your blade in order to remove this offending arm that we might burn it.”
The guard removed his short sword from its oxhide sheathe. Facing his peer, he stared at that dark, bodily mark, which seemed hot.
“Governor,” Kelada quickly stated, “I must say that this troupe has achieved perfection in their task, that of saving our nation. If we remove one of the collective, surely we shall remove that perfection. We lack the time to begin again.”
“Kelada! I must say that you shall not become governor until I die!”
Proving himself more of a warrior than a governor, Kelada reached to the man of firing, twisting his wrist until his sword fell.
With the blade in his grasp, Kelada Shark confronted the marked man.
On his knees, the priest considered intervening, but could not judge if the matter before him were of God or family.
“Fatupa, if God remains within you as your greatest force, deliver this iron to the mark with your soul as guidance. If your aim proves false, so be your soul, and I shall remove the offending influence myself.”
Kelada held the sword with a grip as certain as his voice and gaze. Turning away, Fatupa raised both hands to feel the wind. He examined the waves’ disruption. Stepping to the cannon’s carriage, he bent to the paired verniers, adjusting latitude and longitude; and the cannon lifted its round lips.
Fatupa faced his comrade. Though scarcely moving any part of his face, the man of firing changed the calibration of his expression to signify affirmation to his peer. The marked guard looked down, and pulled the lanyard.
A part circle of iron curved over the ocean, then spoke.
In Heaven, God sounded his gamelan drum of salvation, heard by mortals below as an iron nut dropping hard against a tree trunk.
Of the five men, only Garendi and Kelada did not kiss the gritty land. As rapidly as the cannon troupe bent to their praying, Governor Sriwigare stalked away, to a small boat and its waiting sailors. At his feet, the coppery soil became lighter, intermingling with sea sand.
After placing the blade beside its owner, Kelada followed his father, though none present could say which of the pair truly led, a hierarchy that God might ultimately determine from Heaven.
* * *
After drying for a decade, the sandalwood surrendered its fragrant flesh. Beneath the roof of a thatched shade house at the cultivated bank of the river’s inlet, men with steel tools sawed a log into narrow strips of constant thickness. Their planes and gouges reduced the planks into shapes that, when fit together, resembled the palace behind. Neither two hundred paces of removal nor an intervening garden of tall ring palms could conceal the central roof’s four boat-bow ridges curving down from peak to fascia. No scalloped, azure tile would sheathe this vehicle’s frontal ridge, the bow inset with a strip of ebony, hard stripes of black-brown in contrast to the sandalwood’s gold.
Hot pitch applied as thin as skin sealed the joints from water’s invasion. Beneath the iron pot wherein heat transmuted sap from stiff resin to pourable fluid, Chinese coal burned from black to white, the rising smoke reminiscent of tall Monkey Mountain far inland from Kraton Palace.
After months of effort, the king’s finest boatbuilder carried the smallest of royal vessels to the water, aided by the king’s finest sailor.
In an open building near the river’s mouth, workers repairing cracks from coral in the king’s yacht did not find their vessel more substantial than the svelte hull now set afloat.
“Ah, what a holy little boat,” one youthful worker joyfully smiled.
“Not holy, son,” his master replied. “Most royal, yes, but the ceremony is of man more than God, in that it conjoins families, not people and spirits. Not so holy, but sublimely royal, as is the occasion of transporting an upcoming queen.”
“Sir, the sailor and builder have set the craft in the water, and I see it floating crooked. They speak, but I cannot hear from this distance. They must be discussing why their ballast is not proper.”
“Strange it is that mountains, with no words or ideas, can be heard from island to island, but men are silent once out sight. But I know what these men say from what is seen. They speak with prideful murmurings of their worthy craft. Worthy of the water in which it floats, and the ceremony that the boat conveys.”
“The pitch seal is quite excellent,” spake the builder, Tanagrot, “despite your complaining about the heat for softening.”
“I have sailed for the king since apprenticing with my father,” declared sailor Bhariz, “long before you melted resins with coal brought from an entirely different nation.”
“I know the man who cut this sandalwood himself,” Tanagrot stated. “His daughter shall stand in the bow, being the nation’s betrothed.”
“You do not know the man who dug this coal, for he was Chinese. I say that our woodcutters should have been allowed more work on this boat. Limbs from our own dense stone wood trees burn near equally as well as China coal, especially when infused with palm oils.”
“Perhaps you should be sailing for the Sriwigares,” grumbled Tanagrot.
“Perhaps you should not tempt me toward patriotism.”
“Let us listen to the mountain talk, Bhariz, instead of each other’s complaints.”
“I hear it, and have for a time. Why, I might say as long as you have been building this craft. But only ocean lies southwest.”
“Those bumps in the air are surely small volcano farts. Perhaps from a Malaysian island. Look, Bhariz, the balance is good, in that the bow rides low when empty.”
“And when the wind does not blow our way, do those mountain belches issue without our hearing?”
“Do you see the balance, Bhariz? With the one virgin before those three eunuchs astern, the floating will be flat as the river. Much more level than your pointed question, which requires a priest for the answering.”
“Why, boatman Tanagrot, here comes one now. The priest of the palace, following the king and those pale aliens, the exact opposite of coal in their coloration.”
“But they are not from China, Bhariz.”
“More foreign they are for having come from a nation I cannot place in the world.”
Regardless of his position, the central figure impressed as being consequential due to his mien. This man would not avert his step to avoid any person. His neck showed no deflection from the perfectly vertical due to a lifetime of canting deferentially to superiors. During any exchange of glimpses, this pair of eyes held the superior view.
Though in his ending adulthood, old age’s degeneration of energy, King Jastakair retained a headful of long, black hair, though hard sunlight revealed the sheen of macassar oil and its accompanying dye.
In the fore and lead stepped a trio of young men, each with sword and lance, their nude chests painted with scenes of forest and shore. A married pair of foreigners discreetly followed their host. Between king and lead guards in position and age stepped a man who seemed to be viewing nowhere. He had no visible hair, no sleeves on his simple tunic, which ended at his knees.
Separating as though opening a channel, the foremost guards had no notice for those commoners immersed to their thighs. The boatmen had concern only for the person they looked away from, bowing before their king.
“This vessel’s floating is crooked,” Jastakair observed.
Tanagrot saw the king’s feet. Jastakair wore pants tight at the bottom, ankles encircled with chains of beaten gold, as though metal ribbons. Thinking of his ebony bow, Tanagrot prayed to God that the beauty he had crafted approached the king’s pants in elegance, for both items were made to contain royalty.
“You might consider that a question,” Priest Papanawesi said to Tanagrot, as though curious himself.
The plainest man present had spoken, proving his complexity by fitting perfectly between monarch and employee, an extension of his sacred profession of fitting between God and man.
“Oh king,” Tanagrot said, “the boat will ride the river quite flatly while bearing its passengers.”
Bhariz felt relief that he did not have to speak to Jastakair. Rarely in decades had he spoken to this monarch, or the previous. Despite his words, Tanagrot would not view above the king’s chest, seeing glints from gold threads in the fabric of his vest. How severe that last man appeared, wearing a white shirt of no ornament and black jacket cut like a box. Square shoulders and sleeves, a tight, white collar that surely irritated his neck. This foreign apparel seemed intended to contain the wearer instead of following the shapes and movements of his body. Contain him like a box.
“What a beautiful little boat,” Reverend Flynn remarked.
His wife opened her mouth, but looked to the king instead of speaking. To Tanagrot, that clenching of her jaw did not imply timidity, but propriety. As though a feminine version of her husband’s attire, the woman’s expansive dress seemed a tent, concealing the entirety of her feminine shape. How sad, Tanagrot felt, that one of God’s greatest creations should be hidden by the people of one of his newest nations. One of his palest nations. The pastor’s wife had hair and skin of similar hues. How bright was America’s sun to bleach its people?
“It is unfortunate, King Jastakair, that Prince Pameri Bear could not share the boat’s christening.”
The foreign priest had spoken Balapanese with a minor accent.
“My son sleeps now.”
Mrs. Flynn whispered, “But the sun has been up for hours,” in a language only the foreigners understood.
Despite the Americans’ long faces, protruding noses, and pale skin, the boat builder could determine their age. Younger than he. Younger than the king, though mature in their adulthood. Everyone was younger than Tanagrot. This would not last, he thought, a striking idea that Tanagrot did not fully comprehend.
Like a parrot rushing from the forest in a strike of brazen flight, a bright woman ran along the palatial path, her sarong glowing with the sheen of fine silk. Her sarong moved in accord with the woman’s fleshy, feminine shapes. Though with residual grace, the woman’s harsh running did not impress as being satisfyingly sexual. Not with those trembling hands pressed against a face of anguish.
This fem viewed only that central figure as she ran past the rear guards and fell to her hands and knees.
“Ah, my king, how could you reject the mistress who has brought joy to your loins!”
“You must not dismay at leaving the harem as its mistress, Loro Kidul. Surely, my wife will find a fitting place for you in our palace.”
“Though too common to have become your queen, I remain queen of the still-bosom dance!” Loro cried, having risen to her knees.
As though running again, Loro Kidul made a rapid movement of her lower body, knees against the path, her torso above the waist remaining stationary, as though her spine had been nailed to the air. Only foreigners did not understand.
“For that dancing in bed that was once your favorite, I still have my lively breasts!”
Loro Kidul clutched her apparel, ripping her sarong until her bosom fell from her clothing, a prideful, powerful beast released from its tent, stepping forth in a swagger.
As Reverend Flynn covered his mouth and turned away, his wife stared at Loro Kidul as though a child seeing her mother nude for the first time. Bhariz nearly swooned. Despite bowing before the king, he gazed at the sea goddess. Seldom had he seen those uniquely green eyes, as though individual spirits inhabiting her face. Never, never had he seen her femininity so fully.
Jastakair spoke to that trio behind.
“Guards, remove this concubine from my sight, then remove both of her breasts with your blades.”
The men stepped forward to grasp Loro Kidul beneath her underarms. Now her upper torso moved, breasts and shoulders bounding from the upward thrust, ribs jolted by the fem’s sudden breath.
The next loud breathing from a woman came in accented tones.
“King Jastakair! In the name of Jesus, you cannot mutilate that poor woman!”
“Jesus is no name to me,” Jastakair replied to Mrs. Flynn with the same mild voice used to condemn his former lover. “You do not know the spirits of my land, and I do not know your savior.”
“Esther,” Reverend Flynn said quietly in English. “This is not California.”
“Neither is it Hades!” Mrs. Flynn declared, words only for her husband, though she stared at Jastakair’s side. “Why, even in the Western Pacific, it’s 1853, not the middle ages.”
The king’s final glimpse to his guards encouraged them to drag the former harem mistress away. Another strange stasis had come to Loro Kidul, for she moved despite rigid limbs and torso, retreating through no muscular initiative of her own. Loro did not scream, only weep like a child, her tears from sorrow, not terror, a sound that receded with her sight.
The priest came forth with quiet words heard readily by the godly people present.
“The king might better hear you, Mrs. Flynn, if you spoke of cooperation instead of condemnation. You might recall your previous dismissal of Jastakair’s offer for you to share your knowledge of the world with the Princess of Betrothal.”
“But, we are teacher’s of God’s word, not mankind’s world,” Reverend Flynn stated.
Loro Kidul had regained her feet, striding firmly between the guards, who had not lessened their hold on her arms. Sailor Bhariz considered the flagrant swaying of Loro Kidul’s hips not provocative, but a blessing to all men with vision.
Prayers for her safety came as readily as stares.
“Husband, I think we can agree in order to spare this woman,” Esther Flynn urged.
Joseph viewed his frustrated wife with uncertainty. In the separated entourage, a guard’s knee brushed against the blossom of a cat orchid, with stamens like whiskers, releasing a fragrance reminiscent of pineapple, sweet but acidic.
“Though not a priest,” Papanawesi said to Reverend Flynn, “our king well knows God and all his holy rites. He knows the spirits who aid our living, such as that within Loro Kidul’s heart, and the demons who denigrate our souls, such as that to have corrupted Loro Kidul’s passion. As well as being expert in your own religion, you have learned of the greater world in your travels as missionaries.”
Reverend Flynn looked between his wife, whose expression was stressed enough to crack, and the calm priest. Joseph wondered of that new fragrance he sensed, like apple cider.
“If you are still interested, King Jastakair,” Reverend Flynn said with a nod, not a bow, “why, we would be willing to....”
Jastakair looked toward the boat while clapping once, the guards behind receiving their wordless decree. After releasing Loro Kidul, they returned to their king. Once near, the men bowed with no depth, and no sound. Loro Kidul remained static, accepting the exposure of her upper torso. Seeing the erotic shape of her shoulder blades, Bhariz praised God for the sight, and for salvation.
Her breath coming in abating stutters, Loro Kidul would not turn toward her benefactors. To do so, she would have to face her condemnor.
He spoke to the priest.
“I shall have the vizier contact the family of the betrothed, who will accept into their home, after the ceremony, three teachers.”
“Three teachers, king?” Reverend Flynn returned.
“The third shall teach young Starling the position of women in the royal world. Though ostensibly a sex bitch, Loro Kidul remains deeply aware of God’s great wealth known as femininity.”
Loro began walking again, slowly, not toward the palace, but through the gardens. She stopped to smell a cat orchid blossom, the hard and soft scent reminiscent of survival in chains. Loro considered her future. A rich, rapid death versus extended, impoverished living. She continued, life a tide of high water and drought alternating in spirited cycles beyond.
Through the garden, past Kraton Palace, across the river, along Balapasar’s coast, beyond the royal city of Manabaya, past coral reefs and quiescent coves, over old lava flows hardened by contact with the sea, through groves of coconut palms and along the edges of savannas, the regal connection extended to the nation’s second city of Kinalabumi and Governor Sriwigare’s mansion, inland to the vast Agara plantation. At the forest’s edge lay a sizable, simple house. Within her home, a girl stared through melted sand.
“Yes, daughter,” Hailera Agara smiled to the young fem, “glass is made by melting sand. When the fluid is allowed to flow and dry, glass results.”
The girl viewed through the building’s only window glazed with glass. She stared at a bamboo cage big enough for a child that contained a single bird, a silver starling of Balapasar. Colorless but iridescent, showing all colors to those with bright visions.
“For nearly fourteen years, the bird has lived and flown within the cage, my daughter. I do not believe we should release a creature that has never suffered a wilderness life. I am certain the bird is happy living by the window of the person who received her name from its very living, even as that living began the day of her birth. Do you not agree, my Starling?”
Dancing came to the house that day, along with the wind. Kinalabumi’s mistress of dance directed Starling in the Agaras’ large chamber of living. The girl learned to make her eyes open yet invisible, seeing nothing, remaining mere panes of melted sand on her head as she divulged art with her body.
Feeling its wings pulled into a position of flight exclusive of intent, the silver starling retreated into its tiny house, a lee-side hut of sandalwood and striped ebony.
Too intent on her education to hear nature’s music of seasonal winds, the girl learned to hear the rhythms of her pulsing limbs. She learned to hold her fingers in signs that would placate demons and bring laughter to happy spirits.
Peering out only to feel more wind, the bird danced toward the stasis of sleep.
Later, the Agara family received a visit from their land’s highest priest. Papanawesi came to teach the girl a holy dance wherein her body would remain as reposed as though in sleep while history pulled her along its flow of heritage.
Months later, the girl had learned the static dance of betrothal. The greater art of dance would require that study known as a lifetime. The wind slept. Came the legacy of rite.
The nation connected from northernmost Batuba to easternmost Manabaya, from forest to river where its mouth kissed the sea, adjacent to the inlet behind Kraton Palace. Night collapsed from Balapasar, leaving a blackness corresponding to the palace’s shadow. With the sun a red eruption emerging from the river’s mouth, silence ensued at this edge of the island. No cocks crowed the new morning. No monkeys cried against adversaries after a night’s foraging. No birds called out their positions to peers across the forest. Sensing a rare, massed gathering of their land’s most dangerous beasts, animals remained in their shelters of earth burrow and foliage. More perceptive but less intelligent than ever-thinking humans, creatures shied from the ceremony of strangeness.
Thousands of breaths filled the dark air with dissipating pressure. Taller than any nearby tree, the palace sat black against a sky becoming golden. Earlier, when the building had still been invisibly dark against the darkness, the people felt its presence. They sensed a regal population inhabiting the fore terrace, looking toward them. No sound. No shifting chairs, not the porting of the monarch’s throne, not the first dragging step of a shoe sole invaded the morning.
When the palace became a recognizable shadow, people viewed a change in the landscape that caused them to stare. The opposing riverbank had been obscured. They saw no soil, no grasses, no cultivated flowers, no shrubs, no clay walkways leading to the water. During the night, the entire riverbank had been covered with people. Opposing groups of friends gazed at one another, separated only by water, connected by their land.
They could not discern faces. Not at noon would they be able to distinguish identities across the river’s width. But they saw color and glitter. They saw brilliant fabrics replacing duller work attire. They saw bright specks around necks, against heads, encircling wrists, polished minerals not worn during marketing now enlivened by the morning.
When the substance between them became perceivable as water, the audience viewed inland along the River of Balapasar, waiting for a subtle spectacle to appear around a bend. They waited for the stillness to be broken by the passage of their queen.
Low tide. The connection continued up the bank, past citizens collected in irregular rows, inland and to a stand of knuckle rubber trees, their roots protruding like the top of a hard hand in a fractal pattern of stumbling. No wood carver had built a hut for his sculpting on this awkward ground, but there sat a tent, similar in color to the adjacent trunks. Secured with ropes and stakes, the tent likely had been established by visitors to Manabaya. Perhaps traders.
Holiness transpired within. A troupe of three men had become accustomed to walking the irregular roots. That man devoid of hair prepared to bless a ball. Bending above an incense burner, the priest inhaled a smoke that caused his eyes to dry and his senses to enlarge. Turning to that single cannonball on a gilded pedestal, he spoke to God, his perceptions all of expansive air and time, hearing the atmosphere breathe between Balapasar and Heaven, smelling the extension of human living from a nation’s birth to one person’s death.
All three knelt as one, bowing to no man.
“Great God all of joyous blessing creativity. Great God, who enraptures us by hearing our prayers. Pray for our nation, that the land become free of hatred. Praise God to receive into his holy clutch the traitor who would ruin us.”
Larger than his head, similarly hard but more ductile than stone, the dark ball received his prayer, and what could have been a tear. Holding a silver vial smaller than his thumb, engraved with the name of God and of Balapasar, the priest split the wax seal with his nail. Inverting the vial above the final cannonball, he concluded his prayer.
“With this water that cleansed the Enlightened One’s feet, we pray to guide our vehicle of salvation to the ruinous traitor, that we may deliver her soul to you, thereby killing the demon of treason.”
All three arose, the priest pressing his thumb against that malleable seal, contemplating condensation on a minuscule, immortal level. With quiet, mechanical passion, the guards began loading, waiting for their aim, their target a child.
Standing on the bank near the palace, a boatbuilder viewed along the river, waiting for his art. He had never seen so many people gathered. Though the water lay but ten paces down and beyond, Tanagrot saw fifty people between himself and the river’s edge. Everywhere he turned, Tanagrot saw layers of faces receding in the distance, every visage moderate, expectant, pleased. Looking toward the palace, he saw bodies beneath the portico’s ceiling of stone sheets. Standing bodies, seated bodies. He recognized them by color. Male chests adorned with paint corresponded to guards. Two pale faces, two aliens. The detail work of the three vast, central chairs described those persons they supported: the king, flanked by his wife and son. Lesser chairs supported the queen mother, the nation’s vizier, the remainder of the royal family.
A sight more important than royalty captured sailor Bhariz, who stood beside Tanagrot. Though no longer royal, Loro Kidul remained the name of the goddess of the surrounding seas. If she desired, the fem could have met Bhariz’s gaze.
Viewing away from the sea and toward that bend, Loro Kidul waited for the sight of her new mistress, a child not to be met until after the betrothal.
Loro would not turn to the palace, where her heart remained. She looked only upstream, where her future waited. There, she saw a bluff overlooking the ocean. One man stood on this high land, which would likely afford him a better view of the forest than the river.
Kelada could only see the top of the tent. He did not hear the priest’s chanting within, a quiet sound filling the air with idea, the concept that no single human is more important than the society he influences, or she denigrates.
Kelada Shark glimpsed Kraton Palace. One blast of the cannon would kill both king and heir. But slaughtering the royal family would be the wrong ritual.
Noting with peripheral vision a slow movement on the water, Kelada turned away from the palace, where the male missionary asked of a seated man aged thrice the magic number of seven:
“Prince Pameri Bear, you must be very expectant.”
“I expect this ceremony to soon be over, that I might return to my hunting. The Balapasaran leopard approaches shore but one month a year.”
“But, Prince, this is your first meeting with that person to become your wife.”
“We do not wed until the girl’s twenty-first year, which will be seven years from now. Today’s betrothal is not an activity, but a ritual.”
As though wondering aloud, Priest Papanawesi commented:
“Pameri Bear, ceremonies are the spirits of mankind’s acts, without—”
A feminine inhalation interrupted him. The American woman stared along the river, smiling as though kin approached.
The river glistened with a ripple. A small, narrow boat followed the pressing motions of three sexless men with paddles. Though moving simultaneously, clearly the seated eunuchs followed the vision before them. She stood in practiced poise, arms at her side, the girl’s dark skin and black hair rich contrasts to the accouterments of apparel she wore, all colorless, white gown and pearls, clear jewels, silvery headpiece.
Though no person on the bank stood near enough to discern the girl’s visage, thousands smiled or wept in subtle joy, perfectly aware of beauty expressed by celebration.
No person spoke until the explosion.
Tanagrot watched with pride to see that his boat’s wake disturbed the river no more than the formation of clouds disrupted the greater sky. Then a sound drove his hand to his breast.
Only Kelada saw the tent’s roof retract. But hundreds of people saw the lower sky struck with a bright blast, as though a small sun thrust from the forest horizon.
All filled with glorious prayer in the minds and bodies of those men in the tent as he of firing pulled the lanyard, which broke.
After a pause in which all three men instantaneously returned to the travails of common living, that man of firing knelt not for prayer, but to tie the string’s ends together. After the man of firing manipulated the carriage verniers, Fatupa pulled the lanyard, the familiar sound of a clean blast commencing.
Even the prince rose to his feet upon seeing the water’s calm surface ruined. Behind him, the Agara parents gasped.
Tanagrot did not understand the sound. Had that pain in his chest caused the blow in his ears? No, even Bhariz gasped at the noise. Only Tanagrot fell from it, along with the eunuchs, and the girl.
She did not see the water breaking behind and beside her. The ripple did not cause her to sway as the cannonball continued to the river’s bottom, striking a stone, and exploding.
The foolish notion came to Loro Kidul that she would now be able to return to the palace, for her mistress had been killed by a cannon blast that threw the boat onto its side. This instantaneous shame evaporated immediately. Loro Kidul prayed for the girl to live.
“Lift me, lift me!” Tanagrot whispered harshly.
As Bhariz aided his friend, Tanagrot managed to focus, looking beyond. He smiled, seeing that his boat had righted itself with no aid.
Focusing on the roiling water, the celebrants saw bodies floating.
Kelada felt the unique sensation of having stopped in time as the world proceeded. The blast, the cannonball’s striking only water, the explosion heard even through water paces deep, the boat flipped onto its side, then righting, four persons swimming to their craft.
Despite the immersion, Starling did not feel wet. She felt herself buried in a sinkhole, smothered by dust. The girl ached for air.
Upon seeing that white form reach for his ebony bow, Tanagrot achieved enlightenment. His impression on the palace grounds that everyone present was younger than he. This position now ended. Everyone living would now have opportunity to follow the boatbuilder.
Upon Tanagrot’s release, Bhariz moved to encircle his friend’s chest with his arms, holding him upright as the boatbuilder’s finest creation continued.
Kelada watched as the crowd expanded. Several hundred of those many thousands ran toward the sound. They charged the tent, producing a din of fury. Without slowing, stepping on those knuckle roots as though in a practiced dance, the horde collapsed the tent walls with their mass. Inside, they saw a prayer fulfilled, for they watched the man of firing insert a dagger into his eye.
Those hundreds completed this prayer by swarming throughout the tent, legs pummeling the contents, not that iron tube, but those religious failures, who had failed to achieve God’s blessing.
Upon returning to the river, the horde did not notice that one man behind survived, despite a crushed arm that would drop like dead fruit.
Kelada had to look away from the tent. All four sodden people had pulled themselves into the boat. The sexless men regained their paddles and began stroking. They did not have to wait for the child. Standing at the bow, Starling seemed taller now despite having lost her priceless headdress, and her sopping hair hung in limp, awkward clumps across her face and neck. She seemed taller because the cannon had not drowned her royal poise.
From the riverbank, the dance mistress of Kinalabumi saw a courage no artful dance could teach.
Art is the light of life.
In that moment, Kelada did not feel failure, but desperation. Uselessly he stared at the river, hoping to view her face, feeling the need to see into the eyes of the blessed. He ran along the bluff, not looking to place his feet. Stumbling, he could not see her eyes, only the glistening back of her gown. She might have been silver.
Kelada saw only her blessing. At this distance, her figure had no features. Only in overdetailed dreams would he recognize her silhouette, the stature of her soul.
Even though hundreds of paces removed, Hailera and Nijeng Agara recognized their daughter’s state. The remainder of the palatial audience viewed with less certainty. Even the king and queen stood to gasp, as though farmers seeing their peasant children threatened by lightning, proving that royalty does not remove humanity from a person.
The king finally spoke.
“God has blessed our princess.”
To which his son replied:
“Or cursed her.”
“Perhaps both,” spake the priest.
Citizens produced the river’s next sound. As quiet came to the horde’s hate-filled extension, the greater audience began a hymn that seemed to soothe the water’s disturbance, a disruption that Starling left behind.
“...beauty of our land, our king, his family, the family of our land....”
They looked only to the girl, though no one inferred tears instead of water on her face. Not from a princess who had celebrated her birthday by vanquishing the demon of fear.
Bright highlights glinted against her skin, tears or river water, streaks and spheres reflecting the rising sun, as brilliant as glass, and descriptive of a human jewel.
Chapter 2
Territory Of Passion
A rope around the leopard’s throat secured the kingside sail. Recognizable though not realistic, the spotted leopard had held its mouth agape for generations, each fang delineated in dense ironwood. Despite its age and occupation, the fist-sized carving showed no wear, only a dark patina from saltwater exposure, the deck post carefully flared to guide the rope away from that terminal carving when released.
Slipping the thick hemp into a tension knot, an act as effortless as yawning, Bhariz wondered if any man had ever followed the carver’s knife into that mouth, perhaps dropping a food morsel between those teeth, down that gullet seen only as a shadow behind the tongue. In the chore of poor illumination, the setting sun competed with a swaying moonlamp: a globe of blown glass retaining the sizzling and spitting of burning palm oil, releasing only a yellowish glow. Before proceeding to his meal, the sailor paused to feed the leopard. He inserted his smallest finger between the wooden cat’s incisors, reaching for the gullet, only to feel a tooth break away. Break away and fall into the mouth. Bhariz did not see it stop, wondering how far the tooth had traveled in its ending venture of foreboding.
A spot had formed on his finger. Dark brown in the impure light, a drop of blood. Confusing fear then struck Bhariz, who did not know if the blood had come from his punctured finger or the feline’s broken tooth. Teeth do not bleed. Without wiping his skin, he turned and walked away while praying.
Surreptitious men waited between deck house and rope chest. A tall young man armed with two blades, his chest painted in a leafy pattern, stood behind a bent man with full robes of good color, that hair on his face and head exceptionally long. The king’s guard and the king’s final guest spoke quietly. Bhariz noticed them, though not the youth they observed, a fem who studied the sailor. Bhariz departed, not concerned with having damaged the ship. Though the very King Jastakair possessed this vessel, ships at sea belong to the sailors who keep them afloat.
He passed the royal house, queenside wall, situated center deck. A ship’s cabin larger than many homes, the royal house lodged no royalty, only guests of the king, and future family. Outside, the roof of curved tile glazed in blues and blue greens, the shapes and colors of the ocean swells, received support from elbow timbers carved to resemble palm weavings, cloud formations, and creatures. Bhariz counted thirty-seven animal sculptures, some flat and long, some small and intricate, some the size of his torso, a rhinoceros, two deer, many monkeys, several egrets, one silver starling, none containing blood, but all retaining the energy imbued by the effort of their creation. He touched no more.
The sky darkened only to receive the rising moon. The face of this glazed plate seemed to contain the entire day, reflecting all those bright hours in a more contemplative mode. Beneath the moon, as though a shadow impossibly cast by a light source, the greenest streak of sea turned black; while within the artificially bright house, contemplation and character glowed, snagging the sailor.
“You will not pass by!”
More confusion came to Bhariz. Though he heard that voice through a nearby window, the adjacent door opened to reveal a servant, a member of the king’s staff whose purple headpiece signified the highest rank.
“Sailor, from your knowledge, you will answer a query from the nation’s guest,” the servant instructed.
Only upon viewing through the doorway did Bhariz smell. No longer with a noseful of fish killed by the red tide, he saw a table bearing a meal from no sailor’s pantry. But that odor. Thick, irresistible, not from normal eating.
“I was wondering why we anchored so far from shore. If the weather comes up bad, and the boat is damaged, we would have so far to swim.”
One of the two pale foreigners, the male priest, spoke in Balapanese. Reverend Flynn and his wife sat across from the betrothed’s parents and that most womanly passenger of the goddess body, her knees crossed and visible, hips all of longing and a sailor’s sighs.
Loro Kidul wore crossed clothing, or shirt-skirt, a garment in two pieces, the upper wrap crossing downward between the breasts; the ends of the lower segment angled up from below the knee and across the hips. Commoners wore dyed cotton, the ends secured at the waist with bows or knots, as though a sailor’s rope. Wealthy fems, such as this voluptuous passenger, wore silk with jeweled clasps. Though the remaining two women did not lack status, Bhariz did not notice Hailera Agara’s sarong, did not care to notice Mrs. Flynn’s bulky clothing. The spirit of the sea again had captured him.
Bhariz lowered his head, but did not quite bow. In this nation, no servant commanded a sailor, and no royalty dined on this deck.
“Why, we have settled too far for any inland clan to attack. They will not approach the goddess, honored guests.”
The Americans looked to each other, as though verifying that word.
“If we are in danger from savages,” Mrs. Flynn added, “why do we not go on to Kinalabumi?”
“The weather is so calm, and the moonlight so clear,” Joseph concluded.
Bhariz could not turn from her. His words seemed to come from the ocean.
“We have come to the deep trench too powerful to pass without daylight. Even now, honored guests, we can feel the hull pulled by the currents of Loro Kidul. That is she,” he declared, nodding to the water, “seen as the darkest run of water, and the deepest. The goddess of our seas.”
“No, that is she,” spake Nijeng Agara, smiling past his wife, toward the final fem.
The sailor recognized Nijeng’s expression. The breadth of his smile matched the breadth of this woman’s beauty. But Nijeng spoke of no mere fem.
“Our daughter’s new mentor in the ways of female living is that very Loro Kidul, known in every nation from Borneo to Burma as goddess of the surrounding seas!”
“Sailor, see no deity in me,” spake the former harem mistress. “See that I was named for my eyes.”
She turned to him with a moderate smile, showing more interest in her eating. Eyes like oceans. She bit into a rare thorn fruit, the durian’s juice running along her fingers.
The fragrance. Bhariz restrained a cough. The thorn fruit smells of the body. But the taste is intoxicating. He could not look away. He could no longer look. The sailor fell to his knees.
“Ah! Loro Kidul, the sailor’s mistress!”
Bhariz could not immediately rise. Perhaps he did not care to. The sailor could not judge his own condition. Prostrate before a water icon, limp from a long day amongst the masts, overcome by a fem’s beauty, drunk on the scent.
Loro Kidul turned to the sailor, swiveling on her cylindrical stool. This move caused her knees to part. Looking down the leopard’s throat.
“Even demons have names,” she smiled.
That scent.
“Praise our heavenly Father, Joseph, but this Balapasaran foolishness is oft too much for a Christian woman to accept!”
Only one man present understood Mrs. Flynn’s speaking.
“Joseph, I accept that ancient beliefs remain important to this culture, but lust is not a religion—it’s a sin. That sailor is worshiping nothing but that woman’s, er, knees. Unless he’s about to throw up from that unholy smell. How can we explain modesty to these people? How are we to tell this woman that a lady’s thighs should remain between herself and God? God in Heaven, how can she eat that thing?”
“We must have patience, Esther,” her husband replied. “What we have to make these people understand is the truth of Jesus. Demure clothing and proper eating will follow the word of the Lord.”
As the servant stepped to kneeling Bhariz, Loro Kidul in a restrained movement grasped her left breast, causing the nipple to extend against the silk, toward Esther, as though a child sticking out her tongue.
Mrs. Flynn’s left hand, holding a sea grape, stopped inches from her mouth, as though the American could not eat and stare simultaneously.
“In much of the world, that hand used for wiping the lower holes is not used to feed that hole on top,” Loro mentioned as she continued eating, with her right hand.
“Why, I believe these people are beginning to understand us, Esther,” blushing Joseph offered to his wife.
The servant bent to tap the sailor on his elbow.
“Off with you now, and the king’s guests appreciate your information.”
With the discretion of the sun slipping behind a cloud, Bhariz retreated through the bamboo door, which the servant slid closed.
Before moving below deck, the sailor lowered his pants, leaning backward between railing stiles in order to defecate over the side. Then he moved to the crew’s hold, glimpsing the cabin where an oil lamp etched a silhouette of the ship’s master against the glass window’s plane. Sweet smoke leaked through.
He next smelled rice and lobster, a fine meal to fill a sailor’s belly. But Bhariz felt a lack in a different area of his person. Settled on his hammock, the sailor would feel no further urges until the sky released a body into the sea.
“Praise God the girl did not witness such a display,” Mrs. Flynn told the reverend as she lowered her hand, and her eyes. “Even these people know the difference between a princess and a prostitute.”
English words not directed toward the wench with dripping juices.
As the servant passed behind her, Hailera Agara asked:
“Servant, have you seen my daughter?”
Nijeng stared at his wife, wondering why she had spoken during a public meal, being neither a foreigner nor a goddess. Of course. She was also a mother.
“I have not seen the Princess of Betrothal, Mistress Agara,” the man replied, bowing. “Shall I have her sought?”
Loro Kidul then rose.
“I shall seek her myself.”
Blatantly examining the woman’s figure as she stepped to the door, Nijeng believed that her very rising imparted a scent to the air.
“I hope she takes that hairy thing with her,” muttered Esther.
The final guest watched the girl learn how sailors tie secure knots with casual leveraging of their wrists. After Bhariz departed, the guest bid the king’s guard to follow.
“I cannot leave the princess alone on deck, for the betrothed one is my charge,” the guard whispered.
“You might leave her security to God, and to me,” the guest urged.
The guard responded by bowing so deeply that his action seemed an effort. He departed, making no more noise than the ocean, though Loro Kidul’s currents transformed the deck into a gentle wave, floating fore and aft, kingside, queenside, wooden joinery responding with creaks that implied experience, not weakness.
The girl did not appear furtive as she stepped to the leopard, her movement as unaffected as the sailor’s finger work. Their methods for confronting the animal differed. Bending to look carefully, the girl reached into the mouth to remove that broken tooth, which she replaced by pressing sharp form against hard gum. The tooth remained, and the girl grasped the rope’s loose end. Unlike the sailor with his hard forearms, this fem required both hands to undo the knot, but she had learned the thick string’s design with one view.
Further unwinding would allow the arm to swing free. Reaching upward, the girl grasped that rounded timber, feeling its potential motion, as though a puppet master casting movements in the air. Leaving the final twist of hemp on the post, the young fem spoke without turning.
“I know you are hiding.”
“If you know, then my concealment fails,” the final guest replied. “How are you aware?”
“As a dancer, I am accustomed to people in unusual costumes.”
“But you do not look toward me.”
Still facing away, the girl requested:
“If I reveal a terrific secret, will you aid me?”
“I would be honored to aid you, and would be pleased to hear your terrific secret.”
“The secret is that you are the priest of the palace, Papanawesi.”
“Correct you are, though I find no terror in the secret. How might I aid you?”
“Aid me by luring Loro Kidul near that I might force her into the ocean with this sail timber.”
“And why, Starling Agara, would you heave the woman overboard?
“To prove herself worthy of the water.”
“As you proved yourself before the betrothal ceremony?”
“What I recall best about the ceremony is breathing water, and fearing that I would next breathe death.”
“You would wish this terror on a person who comes to serve you with education?”
“I do not wield a cannon, sir, but a stick. Clubs clobber; sticks only poke.”
“Betrothed, what is the true proving that you would poke from Loro Kidul?”
She hesitated for the duration of one ocean wave.
The world seemed silent, for the speaking had ended. But the ship creaked from wood stretching against wood. Voices with no discernible words emanated from the regal house, and glory birds called out their identity from the forest. No person heard the crunching of the insects they ate.
“I, I would prove that I could influence a woman so magnificent,” Starling said quietly, looking down to the leopard, whose mouth was whole again.
“Perhaps you should influence her with your soul instead of your stick,” Papanawesi suggested.
“Perhaps I should not bargain with priests who do not keep their word.”
“Your quiet sound lacked confidence in that final speaking,” Papanawesi noted. “Nonetheless, I complete my bargain, for your victim approaches.”
Loro Kidul stepped between royal house and deck rail. Starling knew that this fem would see the rounded timber approaching. Then, behind her, a monkey called out the name of its tree.
No monkey sailed with these guests. Loro Kidul turned as the priest lowered his hands from his mouth. Having released the rope, Starling firmly pressed the hefty arm toward the woman’s back.
Through the square porthole in his hold, sailor Bhariz saw a goddess fall into the ocean.
After a splash came the sound of Loro Kidul’s calling out with no urgency:
“Oh, help, I have landed in feces. Why, how wondrous! The very sea smells of thorn fruit!”
Laughter came as her following sound.
Starling stepped to the rail, looking over. From his station, the night watch, Pulapan, moved rapidly to the noise. As Pulapan spoke, other sailors joined him, including that man of odorous appetite.
“Ah! the goddess Loro falls to the sea!” Bhariz cried. “The terrific undertow will pull her down till she is lost to us!”
Starling saw Loro Kidul swimming calmly, avoiding a small, floating form.
“Toss her the rope,” Pulapan urged that most agitated sailor.
“No! I must go over myself!”
Loro looked only to Starling, speaking while treading water.
“Men, you will learn, save women for their own purposes. What purpose have you to leave me here?”
Still not fully cognizant of the ways of magnificent women, but craving to learn, Starling leapt into the sea.
“Another goddess overboard,” Pulapan sighed.
Before regaining the surface, Starling felt the current pull her, not away, but down. Secure Loro Kidul swam backward, and Starling followed, having difficulty keeping her nose clear of water. Those male voices above seemed to originate from a different world. Starling and Loro Kidul remained in theirs. In hers. A more intimate cry then replaced concerns about goddesses.
“My daughter!”
In response to Hailera’s maternal call, wet fabric flopped onto deck between the sailors and herself. Silk. A similar raiment followed, though having less material.
After freeing her legs, Loro Kidul reached down for Starling’s skirt. The girl could not resist both the undertow and the concubine. The older woman remained so near that Starling felt their legs rub, not clashing.
Head stationary and free of the water as her limbs reached, pulling the fluid near for support, smiling Loro said to Starling:
“If you would have the water for our stage, here is a dance for us fems alone. Under the hull we go to speak without the noise of men.”
“But, I, I cannot swim so far in this current,” Starling gasped, neck bent back to keep her head up.
“Give me your hand, child,” said Loro, reaching.
Starling did not know if she willingly complied, or if Loro Kidul stole her grasp. Regardless, treading water became no easier.
Legs rubbing, the undertow a weight against her body, Starling breathed painfully as swells pressed the salt smell ever nearer her nose. Above them and behind, but in the same world, dry people plotted to save them from each other.
“You are no child,” Loro observed. “I can feel in your energy that you are leaving childhood to become a complete person.”
Loro Kidul reached down to touch Starling’s waist with her free hand, and Starling felt more buoyancy, felt the undertow’s clench partially replaced by Loro Kidul’s.
She had never been so near her new teacher. In the darkness, Starling felt that she could sense the fem completely.
“Do not release my grasp, Starling, at the peril of your air. As long as you hold my hand, you will not need to breathe.”
Placing one arm around Starling’s shoulders, Loro Kidul sank, pulling the girl along.
“My daughter!” the mother cried, seeing a suffocating nightmare repeated.
Starling did not hear that cry, only the cannon. She saw the bright world turned upside down as brackish water buried her. The ceremony of terror smothered her senses again.
Kicking with both legs and one arm, Starling felt Loro Kidul’s hand on her own forming a grasp stronger than the current’s influence. Holding her breath, Starling followed, closing her eyes yet seeing the hull above, a dry sky for airless adherents to seek. With each stroke, Starling’s rhythm of effort more nearly matched Loro Kidul’s energy, until the girl understood they now swam upwards, as though the current pressed them toward air. Then, above, the demarcation between drowning and breath. The water’s surface immediately above gave joy to Starling, not due to the air on the other side, but because she had to break this barrier.
Starling breathed deeply, her face now free of the water, floating in the sky. Gleefully, she cried:
“Loro Kidul, you are a goddess!”
“No, I am but a woman, Starling,” Loro replied, breathing deeply but without pain. “I gave you no air, for you are a princess, and I am your servant.”
“Then I am your slave!” Starling shouted in either delight or delirium.
The difference would not be discerned by the fems who now embraced, half laughing, half gasping, completely enthralled.
In the forest, wild beasts heard the call of unknowable creatures. This territory of passion they would not invade.
Chapter 3
Stuffing A Cesspool
Shoeless men with knives sheared individual leaves of the central courtyard’s fern-grass lawn, where the king would soon be stepping. They placed their knees on silk-covered pads, not to prevent the foliage from staining their pants, but to preclude any crushing of the delicate, creeping growth by their hard, human bones.
Three stories above, winds slipped across roofs encircling the courtyard. Eleven men bent to their daily chore of grooming the low growth between pathway and pool, the former constructed of lava block, the latter containing one white eel that only rose from the bottom for feeding. Positioned in accord with ancient arrangements of protective tenets, statuary carved with bronze tools guarded the courtyard. Demons distressed to be sent to eternal rest by stone spirits wielding holy daggers frowned with lolling tongues. Brandishing only an insolent smile against the demons, one spirit sculpture had lost its blade lithe enough to test the ripeness of that fruit below, miniature palms bearing tiny coconuts plucked by men with curved spines before the hard shells could fall and damage the king’s living carpet.
Beneath the topmost roof’s azure tile, a barber bent over the king to shear his beard by stroking his skin with glass. On a wooden platter crafted from a single plank as wide as a man’s shoulders, a servant delivered the day’s pane. Sunlight sparkling through glass, doubly refracted by the wall’s window and the shaving pane, caused the silkwood’s figuration to glisten. Irregular in shape, greyish in color, the glass had been poured from a ceramic crucible the previous week, requiring six days of curing to achieve the proper temper.