Chapter 26. Sand Maila Isle, at the edge of the Empire
Aboat with blue sails. Every time Sand’s memory threatened to go hazy, she thought of the blue sails. They hadn’t all been here on Maila for ever; perhaps none of them had. A boat had brought them. It followed that a boat could take them away.
Sand worked at the problem the way a child might worry at a loose tooth with her tongue. Coral had arrived later, and there had been someone before Coral that Sand could not remember. So the next night, when everyone lined up to receive their bowl of food, Sand went to a nearby coconut palm and scratched out a tally. Two hundred and seventeen. That’s how many of them were here right now. If she’d had the time, she would have written out all the names she could remember, but a sense of urgency drove her forward. What if whatever happened to her during her fall from the mango tree just disappeared? What if she became like the rest of them again?
She searched for another person she couldn’t recall being here for ever. It came to her a little easier this time, like she was exercising a muscle she hadn’t known existed. “Leaf,” she said, approaching a frail-looking young man. He sat near one of the bonfires in the center of town, eating his stew, his glassy eyes reflecting the fire. He didn’t wear a shirt, and his ribs pressed against his skin like fingers across a taut piece of leather. He nearly dropped his spoon when she spoke to him.
“Yes?” he said.
Sand didn’t bother trying to coax the memories from him the way she had with Coral. She needed to push farther. “You came here on a dark, blue-sailed boat. You were placed in the hold. But when you came onto deck, when you arrived on this island, where on the island were you put ashore?”
“I’ve been here for ever,” Leaf said. He held his bowl tight to his chest as though it could protect him.
“No,” Sand said, and he trembled. She stalked closer. “You were somewhere else before you were here. Tell me where you disembarked.”
His eyes grew wide. “I don’t remember.”
But her words were starting to make sense to him, Sand could tell. “Did you see any landmarks? Where was the sun?”
“A cove.” He looked startled to hear the words coming out of his mouth, like he’d suddenly realized he was spitting up butterflies. “The sun was behind us.”
A cove on either the east or the west side of the island. Maila wasn’t small, but it wasn’t very large either. If only she’d spent her time exploring instead of going back to the same bedamned mango grove over and over. “Anything else?”
He shook his head. “No.” Then he frowned. “Wait! There was someone aboard who was not like us. He wore a gray cloak.”
Not anything that would help with the location, but Sand stored the information away for later use. Leaf went back to his bowl of soup, though he now wore a troubled expression. But Sand didn’t have time to waste on comforting him. If Coral was any measure, he’d forget again soon enough. She looked around at her fellows until she found another who’d arrived more recently.
When the evening was done, she’d questioned five of them and had more specifics. The cove they were all brought to was on the east or the west side of the island, it was small – large enough to fit the boat and no other vessels – and the beach was rocky, littered with bits of coral. One tall banana tree stood just off the beach. She rubbed a hand over the wound she’d stitched on her arm, feeling the roughness of the threads against her palm. They could find it if they looked for it. She’d spend every day looking, and she was sure no one would notice that they no longer had mangoes.
A hand tapped her on the shoulder. Sand whirled. It was Coral, eyes large and brown as hulled coconuts. She held a bowl of stew out to Sand. “You forgot to get your dinner,” she said. “Here.”
Sand took it, a little mystified. No one had ever brought someone else food. You went to the cook pot or you went hungry. “Thank you.”
“I heard what you’ve been asking the others,” Coral said. “You’re trying to find out where we came from.”
Sand looked to the bonfires, warming her hands on the sides of the bowl. “No. I’m trying to find out how to get away from here.” She thought Coral might react with alarm or consternation, the way she had when Sand had questioned her the night before.
Instead, she nodded. “If we came here somehow, then there must be a way off the island. Even with the reefs.”
Last night it had been as though Coral had been wiped clean; now she spoke like Sand’s plans were her own.
She caught Sand looking at her. “It came back to me tonight when I sat down to eat, and then more when I heard you asking questions and you didn’t get in line. Before that I was foggy again. But I’m clear now.”
Sand’s hands shook. She didn’t need to search alone if she could bring the rest out of this fog. She started to set her bowl down, but Coral stopped her.
“Eat. I’ll start asking the others how they came to be here. You need to eat.”
“But what if it goes away?”
“It won’t.”
Still, Sand devoured the stew, burning the top of her mouth. She was making progress, and that meant they could get off the island.
Even with the both of them, it still took two more nights before any others seemed to find their way out from the fog. Grass found his way first, when he went to Sand and asked her why they were all on this island in the first place. Leaf was soon after, along with Frond and Shell. As they began to clarify their thoughts, Sand began to plan.
“We need to scour the island for the cove we arrived at,” she told them over dinner. “We’ve been arriving in waves, yet we don’t seem to remember when it happened. The boat doesn’t sound big enough for all of us. If the boat brought us here in groups, then it is possible it will come again. If we prepare, if we bring others out of this mind-fog, then when the boat comes again, we can seize it.” The words felt wrong in her mouth somehow, though she couldn’t place it. “We can find this one on the boat who is not one of us, and we k—” We kill them. She could barely even think the words. It was like trying to see through clouded water. She just couldn’t work her way to the bottom. She looked to Coral. “What would you do to the one sailing the boat?”
“I would—” Coral stopped and frowned. She tried again. “Obviously, we have to—”
Sand held up a hand to forestall any further effort. “There’s something stopping us from violence.” It was as though she wore a collar and each time her thoughts went in that direction, someone pulled on the leash.
“Direct violence,” Coral said, her large black eyes focused on the tree line.
Sand felt a little ashamed that she’d ever thought Coral soft and weak. “An accident might have to suffice.” She could say “accident”. She could think about it too.
“I can start looking for the cove on the east side of Maila,” Leaf said.
“The west side of Maila is larger,” Frond said. “Shell and I can look on that side.”
Sand looked to Coral. “Talk to more people. See who we can lead out of the fog. The more of us there are, the easier this will be.” She stood, her bowl still in her hands. Something about the movement triggered a memory. Sand wasn’t here by the bonfires – she was rising to her feet in the dining hall of a palace. The beams above her were painted in red and gold; the wall panels were murals of cloud junipers and leaping deer. The air smelled faintly of fish sauce and green tea.
Across from her, at the table, a man watched her. Straight-backed and handsome, dark eyes regarding her with wariness. His blue silk robes spilled about him like a waterfall. “What is it exactly that you want to know?”
Sand found her mouth opening, and a voice that wasn’t hers emanating from her throat. “Everything.”
A blink, and she was back on Maila once more, her empty bowl in hand, Coral’s hand at her elbow. “Are you all right?”
These memories that weren’t hers – whose were they? She knew instinctively that she wouldn’t find her answers here on Maila. “Fine,” Sand said. “But the sooner we find the cove, the better.”