Season of the Waves

Season of the Waves

The Blood Comet hung in the night sky, languid and crimson, bisecting the Vast Black and its white lights with a flaming thread. The Second Orange Moon had grown large, dipping slowly and horizon-bound, like some colossal, vermillion prey. It bled its last as it fell exhausted to the nadir.

The elders had long known of the augury at play in the skies. The Season of Waves was but two days away. The Soombah had been faithfully preparing for it. It would be ushered in by westerlies that would lash the Mukon Pine forests and launch sand clouds that would scud across the Hylu beach heads and the green cape too. The swelling and billowing of the sea would soon render its warm, cerulean waters impossible to fish. The community would brace itself for at least six moon-cycles of hardship. 

On the eve of the Season of the Waves, the rocky peak of the Lakan Column hosted the Second Orange Moon. Its rocky needle-stacks aligned symmetrically with the perimeter of the celestial body as viewed from the Dinzoi Cape. There, legend said, the spirit of Chief Guzu would confer with the Wind. He would beg for the safe passage of the remnant Soombah over the Loppi Reef—an unnavigable body of coral that separated the community Now from the community Then. Legend told that, hundreds of moon cycles ago, Chief Guzu had managed to sail a craft beyond the reef—over the Uncrossable, to a rich and abundant life beyond. It was believed he sent the Orange Moon to remind the Soombah that, if they were to move beyond the austerity of their lives, they must find him and reunite. Hence, the Soombah continuously sought a gifted leader, The Missing Chief, as courageous as Guzu - one who could bring together the people of the Then and of the Now. This they did on the eve of the Season of Waves, when the Orange Moon and the Red Comet appeared together.

Mama Huzoi was elderly now; her body gnarled and wiry, her spine curved from years of tending the embers. Children were both intrigued and terrified by her and her fumorous dwelling. “Be good, or Mama Huzoi will smoke you in her hut!” She was chalked in pale soot and ashes such that her whole body appeared grey and dust-clad. She coughed perpetually, hacking and spitting sooty globules wherever she went. Her voice broke huskily when speaking, and she used only archaic Soombah—a language few in the community now understood. “Mama Huzoi know. Mama Huzoi know all, everything.”

Moreover, Mama Huzoi oversaw the cadaverous Ledger Smokehut. She tended to the flame and ensured the atrium was continuously filled with preservative fumes. Within its ashen haze lay the many bodies of the Soombah who had died from Kalabrynx stings and poisoning over the moons. It provided a perfect record of the community’s sacrificial devotion to the powerful fish-deity that was so prolific in these waters.

There were two types of corpse within the hut: Commoner and euthanised Chief. The Commoner, through no fault of their own, had died following accidental contact with a Kalabrynx. Perhaps, in shallow waters, its spines had brushed their leg. Or maybe, while fishing, one lurked unseen in a net and they clutched it. Many children and adults had died this way, their rigor-mortised, soot-blackened bodies filling the hut, coated in layers of ghostly pale woodsmoke. Mama Huzoi skillfully replaced their shriveled eyeballs with the decorated eggshells of Limwii birds, permitting them sight in the afterworld.

Euthanised Chiefs, by contrast, were the ritualistic victims of premeditated Kalabrynx poisoning. Every six cycles, the exiting Chief would stand under the Second Orange Moon and drink the gelatinous green oil of the Kalabrynx. Mama Huzoi prepared the foul-tasting, lethal substance. Once a Kalabrynx had been caught in a consecrated net—a Retiqol—a long wooden spoon was then used to place pressure along the glandular tissue at the base of the dorsal musculature. From the spine-tips, the neurotoxic Grifdoi slowly extruded and was collected in a wooden bowl. The receptacle, and any remaining Grifdoi, would later be destroyed by fire. Even then, its fumes were bitter and had been known to induce transient palsies when inhaled.

Death by Grifdoi was violent. Victims were tormented by strong convulsions, hemorrhaging from their mouths and even their eye sockets. They tended to wail and weep, delirious, lost in terrifying visions of the Uncrossable. A signature sign of Grifdoi poisoning was bleeding through the skin itself, with large clots of blood forming particularly on the forehead and temples. Mercifully, the ordeal did not last long. However, the dying Chiefs ingested the poison orally which, unlike a sting, protracted and worsened their painful yet inevitable journey to death.

Mama Huzoi’s Ledger Smokehut was so called because it served as a record of sacrifice to the sacred Kalabrynx. The Soombah retained these bodies, embalmed by smoke, as evidence of the reverence in which they held the fish. They prayed that it would bless them with an abundance of food from the sea in the seasons ahead. They also prayed for the Kalabrynx to permit them passage beyond the Uncrossable. For many Soombah, however, the Kalabrynx was seen as an unduly capricious and bloodthirsty being, taking their lives and offering no coherent pattern of reward to the faithful. The Soombah Elders did their best to vanquish these fears and cultivate reverence for the creature. 

The incoming Chief was Duru. Like all chiefs before him, he would participate in an orchestrated show of false strength - though its trickery was an open secret. Duru, like the outgoing chief, would drink Grifdoi. His survival would, superficially at least, prove his worth over the freshly deceased Chief. However, in the hours before its consumption, the initiate chief would consume a prophylactic substance provided to him by Mama Huzoi. While Grifdoi had no antidote per se, there was nonetheless a preventive medicine of sorts—Rhulee. It was a resinous substance derived from the sap of Seven Sacred Pines in the Makon forest. When combined in careful quantities with distilled seawater and gently warmed over hours, it formed a consumable gel. Rhulee’s astringent nature was bitter to the taste and was usually eaten upon bread or grains. It rapidly formed an unpleasant grout within the mouth, requiring effort to swallow. 

However, Mama Huzoi had not merely warmed the concoction this time, but had boiled it. She had been careless too with the relative amounts of each of the Seven Sacred Pine oils, omitting some altogether. The Fifth Pine bottle, so carefully collected by the Soombah Herbalists, sat unopened. This was most unlike Mama Huzoi and would, for certain, cause the death of anyone who dared to consume Grifdoi.

And so, by the shoreline and under tangerine moonlight, the elders gathered. They expected the usual performance—a faux king. But Duru stood neither tall nor victorious in the expected manner. Instead, he writhed and convulsed amidst the shallows. Great beads of blood dropped into the waters from his brows and the whites of his eyes turned ruby red—the signature of Grifdoi. Duru shook and gasped for air, his limbs spasming, his bloodless knuckles glowing white with fear. He heaved and wretched, calling to Chief Guzu for mercy. All the while, Mama Huzoi watched closely—nodding, smiling, then laughing hysterically, her pink tongue in stark relief against her charcoal-layered skin. This continued for hours; the elders strictly forbidden from assisting Duru. The outgoing Chief’s body had already been placed in the Ledger Smokehut.

“Chief Duru!” chanted Mama Huzoi. “Chief Duru, prevail!” She danced and danced to a music only she heard—in the shallows by Duru’s side, in the light of the Second Orange Moon, splashing, manically, dancing, dancing, washing the ashes from her body in the waters, her papery skin released from its captivity to dust, her withered torso cleansed of the ash which had encased it, she danced, danced, panting and rasping, clawing at air, grinning toothlessly, eyes rolling white, shrieking, and dancing, dancing in the inky black water across which the orange moonlight strafed and bent its way from Chief Guzu, dancing, dancing, calling beyond the Uncrossable, beckoning the Waves to ignite the cerulean sea, she danced. “Chief Duru, prevail! One and true! One and true! The missing Chief is found!”

Meanwhile, Duru was lost in fevered visions of Kalabrynx and the Uncrossable. In the rhythms of Mama Huzoi’s chanting, and in the faces of the Kalabrynx-dead. He was bent double by cramps, writhing, clutching his abdomen, groaning, tormented, spinning in some liminal space; roiling amidst the Uncrossable, tangled in the vastness of some spirit Retiqol. All the while, Mama Huzoi danced, danced, she chanted, she danced.

By dawn, exhausted, Duru was alive. “One and true! One and true! The missing one we have found! We have found the missing!”

The Elders forgave Mama Huzoi her risky breach of herbal tradition. “This man bled and has survived Grifdoi—no man has ever done this without Rhulee! He is the Chief! Mama Huzoi has revealed the Chief!” Duru, semi-conscious, was hoisted onto their shoulders and carried through the village: the leader who would indeed lead them beyond the Uncrossable. The Chief who would find that narrow fissure that admitted a skiff through the coral to the still waters beyond. He would reunite the Soombah of Then and the Soombah of Now. He would find Guzu’s descendants. Duru would establish a channel—for goods, for trade, for hope.

As the sun rose behind grey clouds the Season of the Waves began ravaging the coastline and the village. It was several hours before anyone found Mama Huzoi. There she was, in the Ledger Smokehut. Motionless, seated among the Kalabrynx-dead, her eyes bejeweled with Limwii eggshells, returned to the Vast Black, smiling in the afterworld. Her work done—Duru, the missing Chief, was found.