BEAST OF THE WOODS

Chapter 20

Captain Evans, aping civilized speech, has been talking to us for several minutes. He is fifty and rake-thin and has hooded eyes that make him mournful forever. I don't really know what he's saying; I can't concentrate. I just feel numb, as if I'm not really there.

Blake insisted on fighting what could not be fought. So did most of the others. I watched from behind my bars as first the bombs came and then the troops. I heard Blake die, although I didn't see it. He was cursing and screaming at them; he didn't go easy. shin was shot in the leg, dragged himself off moaning. I don't know if he made it.

I forced myself to listen - to all of it.

They had orders to take me alive, and they did. They found the Lady Salt with a gutting knife, but took her too when I told the Captain I'd cooperate if they let her live.

Her presence at my side is something unexpected and horrifying. What can she be feeling? Does she think I could have saved Blake but chose not to? Her eyes are dry and she stares straight ahead, at nothing, at no one, while the Captain continues with his explanations, his threats, his flattery.

"Beckie," I say. "Beckie," I say.

The whispered words of the Lady Salt are everything, all the Chief Engineer could have expected: "Someday I will kill you and escape to the sea. "

I nod wearily and turn my attention back to the Captain, try to understand what he is saying.

Below me, the village burns as all villages burn, everywhere, in time.

SHARK GOD VERSUS OCTOPUS GOD

(Based on a Fijian Myth)

i. The Shark God Cometh

A long time ago, when Dakuwaqa the Shark God was young and not so wise, he made all who lived in or near the sea fear him. They feared him for his knives that posed as teeth. They feared him for his relentlessness. They feared him for his speed. They feared him because the bloodlust was buried so deep in him that he loved to fight for no good reason.

Dakuwaqa could take many shapes, but he enjoyed the shape of shark the best in those early days. It fit him. It fit his appetite.

When Dakuwaqa swallowed up a fish, he would give a big, b****y, toothy smile, and say, "One more. I'm still hungry! I'm the f*****g Shark God. Give me more!"

No matter how full Dakuwaqa was, he still wanted at least one more fish. This made Dakuwaqa dangerous. It also made him take risks.

Sometimes, when Dakuwaqa was bored, he would take human form. In that form, he was a handsome, tall, dark-eyed youth with gleaming white teeth. Then, he would visit an island and lure a young woman down to the edge of sand and tide. Returning to his shark form, he would devour her, the water tunneling red against the white of the surf.

Such pastimes reflected the most animal part of his shark nature. But the game he liked best of all was defeating other gods throughout the ocean. It seemed to be his calling.

"It's what I'm f*****g good at," he liked to say, with a bloodstained leer, to his remora advisor, Selqu, as they loitered in some underwater cavern.

ii. Selqu, the Remora Advisor

Selqu had perfected the art of the simpering suck-a*s. His bloated gray-black body shuddered with a wild pleasure whenever he was called upon to approve of Dakuwaqa's tyranny. His mad gaze, performing endless circles of his surroundings no matter how motionless he floated, reflected the strain of his abandonment of self.

Selqu longed to become the Lord of the Remoras. He longed to be brought tribute from the least and the mightiest among his species - the flakes and flecks, the cartilage and the bone they had gleaned from whatever species of shark they had attached themselves to.

Smelling of blood seemed to be no great thing to Selqu. Not if he could remain the Shark God's Remora.

So he fed Dakuwaqa the tale of his invincibility in a thousand words as golden as the light that slides through the reef at dawn, making of that heartless, cut-throat community of eaters an illumined castle of enchantment.

"Just one more," Selqu often murmured to himself at night, as he lay attached to the sleeping Shark God's body, the light of deep ocean a blue-black flecked with the tiny pulses of miniature jellyfish. "Just one more."

Soon, they would rule over all.

in. The Shark God's Invincible Army

Dakuwaqa had an army of ten thousand steel-gray sharks at his command: hammerheads, great whites, tigers, and more. Their eyes were cold black coral dots, their hunger as ceaseless as his, their fins sharp as their teeth. With them came their battle-hardened remoras, eager for morsels of stray flesh, starved for foreign parasites. Behind them came battalions of skates, rays, and lion fish, all ready to gobble up whatever remains the sharks and remoras left for them.

This army did not know the value of mercy. When they swam into battle, the water turned the color of storm from their passage. Hundreds of miles away, fish would pause in their travels because they could hear the swishswish of ten thousand dorsal fins, because they could hear the muttered underwater echo, washing across their hearing in waves, that was the shark army's mantra: justonemore, justonemore, justonemore, justonemore...

The sea in their wake turned red with the memories of living flesh.

iv. The Relationship Between the Shark God and His Army

Dakuwaqa led this shark army, of course, and he had an excellent record against the other gods. He had to. Because of the rules by which the gods are bound, Dakuwaqa's shark army could not move in until Dakuwaqa had first vanquished the god being attacked. If the attacked god defeated him, or he showed any other sign of weakness, Dakuwaqa would find his shark army attacking him. Nothing would please the remoras, the lion fish, the skates, more than to feast upon rich god-flesh. For Dakuwaqa may have been a god, but he was not invincible; he could be sorely wounded by mortal teeth.

At the thought of this possibility, Dakuwaqa always laughed and told Selqu, "Those bastards can't take me. I'm Dakuwaqa, the Shark God - the most ruthless killer in all the ocean."

"Yes," Selqu would say. "Yes, you are."

Dakuwaqa was very young. He loved the thrill of dominion so much that he had never acquired any fear of defeat, of limitation. He had come fully formed from the Sacred Egg Sac and never known his father or his mother. This had made him think of himself as deathless and ageless. Dakuwaqa did not know that immortality could contain a kind of death within its endless span.

Every morning, he would swim out from his sumptuous coral palace to inspect his shark army, secure in the knowledge that they would always be loyal because he would never be vulnerable.

v. The Shark God's Excellent Record Against the Other Gods - And Why This Was a Bad Thing

In a matter of just a few years, Dakuwaqa and his army had beaten the God of the Dolphins, the God of the Whales, the God of the Moray Eels, the God of the Lobsters, the God of the Lesser Fish, and the God of the Greater Fish. Not only had he defeated these gods, he had eaten most of them, ransacked their seas, and taken from them the islands under their protection.

Dakuwaqa became more powerful with each victory. His gleaming gray legions grew in size as he grew in size. His name evoked fear from Easter Island to Viti Levu, from Papua New Guinea to Tonga.

The people of the defeated islands could no longer fis

h in the seas for fear of Dakuwaqa and his army of sharks. The animals in the sea cowered in their homes, hoping that Dakuwaqa or his remora messengers would not knock on their doors and say, "We need one more, just one more."

The women of the islands no longer smiled at dark-eyed muscular young men. They looked away. They boarded up their huts and homes when they heard, carried by the breeze, from the sea, the breathy thick whisper of "Come down to the water, my beautiful ones. Come down here." Often now followed by, as the women grew more wary, the words "Come the f**k down here! Now!"

"Why won't they come out of their homes? Why won't they come down to the sea?" Dakuwaqa would moan to Selqu. "Why do they disobey me so?"

"They are not like the creatures of the sea," Selqu would respond. "They, my God-Emperor, do not understand your glory."

"Well, you might be right about that," Dakuwaqa would say. "It is not an easy weight to Beast, my glory. But the hell with it - I'll manage somehow." And so saying, he would have another tuna fish brought to him for dinner.

For a long time, it looked as if the God-Emperor Dakuwaqa would defeat all of the other gods and become God of the Sea.

VI. The Previous God of the Sea

Now, it should be revealed that no god had been powerful enough to become the God of the Sea for centuries. The last God of the Sea had been the God of the Turtles, many centuries before. The God of the Turtles was the size of a large island. In fact, he was an island - a slow-floating island carried by the current, atop which birds had, over the years, dropped seeds and soil. Until now, from his back, there grew a great jungle of plants and trees. Animals roamed the surface of his covered shell like fleas upon an uncaring dog.

The God of the Turtles could have beaten Dakuwaqa with his size and his implacable calm, garnered from thousands of years of slow, deep thought. But he was very old and, for his own unknowable reasons, had abdicated his place as God of the Sea in favor of finding the deepest, most remote oceans. And there he floated, lost in deep turtle thought, surrounded by the most ancient of waves, while creatures lived and died upon his shell.

Some said he dreamed - that he had dreamed for centuries now, and that the God of the World had recruited him to dream the World through its next few thousand years of existence so that the God of the World could take a brief vacation from that duty.

As the God of the Manta Rays, whom Dakuwaqa had always considered inedible, said from his prison deep beneath the sea, "The God of the Turtles dreams the dream of this world, and woe to him who goes against that dream."

"That's bullshit," Dakuwaqa had responded, wondering how they'd even gotten on the subject. "Dreaming is bullshit." He had always hated the way that the God of the Manta Rays spoke.

Dreaming the world. What a load of whale crap. Why, Dakuwaqa thought to himself as he swam through the coral outcroppings of his crab-built palace, I never dream. I never have time to dream - I just swim endlessly forward, and that is enough for me.

Still, in building his empire, Dakuwaqa had been very careful to avoid the Turtle.

vii. Kadavu Island and the Octopus God

Soon Dakuwaqa ruled all of the ocean except for the Turtle and one island: Kadavu island, on the western fringes of his empire.

Kadavu Island was large and bountiful. Its clear streams provided water for animals and people alike. Its forests provided shelter and food. Its hills and small mountains provided relief from heat in the hottest part of the year. Banana and breadfruit grew there. A barrier reef encircled most of the island, and within its embrace lay many lagoons in which to fish. Not a single shark patrolled those lagoons. The god that protected the lagoon would not permit it.