Lalani of the Distant Sea Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Prologue

  The Three of Them

  House of Light

  Girl on the Rocks

  House of Shadows

  You Are Where the Binty Sing

  Pardon Me

  The Loomers

  Valiant Hetsbi

  Mouthful of Yoonfish

  You Are Sanlagitan

  Hearts of Clouds and Rock

  Through

  Shifty

  You Are the Weeping Loset

  Then They Strike

  Eyes

  Ellseth’s Story

  Just Such a Girl

  Three Drops

  You Are the Nalupai

  Hetsbi the Believer

  Under the Cloudless Sky

  Stand Right Here

  The Strongest Fish

  Sailing Day

  Pshah on That

  One, Two, One, Two

  Thank You, Ellseth

  Rain

  A Lesson

  Straightening Out

  Again

  Only a Mountain

  Buried

  You Are Ditasa-Ulod

  Waste Nothing

  In the Darkest of Night

  On the Veiled Sea

  You Are a Goyuk

  A Distant Shore

  In Sanlagita

  You Are Whenbo

  The Forest

  Usoa’s Story

  Beintai

  The Whenbo Forest

  You Are the Yootah

  Boys With Baskets

  Little One

  The Animal That Never Was

  Three Days Left

  Brother, Sister

  You Are Bai-Vinca

  A Death on the Horizon

  Gong

  A Simple Solution

  Bai-Vinca

  Lalani’s Story

  Cade

  In Sanlagita

  Challenge

  You Are Ziva

  Fei Diwata

  Rise

  Pointed to the Sea

  You Are a Sanlagitan

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  Prologue

  There are stories of extraordinary children who are chosen from birth to complete great quests and conquer evil villains.

  This is no such story.

  Sometimes, you are an ordinary child.

  Sometimes, you choose yourself.

  Come closer. Nestle deep. Travel now to two mountains. They are alive, at least to those who live among them. One of them towers darkly. It casts a shadow of vengeance, impatience, and fear. The Sanlagitans call it Mount Kahna.

  The other mountain—if you can call it that—is bathed in light. Set foot here, and you will have all of life’s good fortunes, whatever those may be. This is Mount Isa.

  You can’t see Isa now. No human has ever laid eyes on her. Nevertheless, the Sanlagitans are certain the mountain calls to them. They die trying to answer. They attempt journey after journey. They are pushed by their faith, not knowing that they believe in the wrong things.

  Their ships sink. Their hearts break. And yet, they make the trip, because they feel Isa’s presence on an invisible horizon. Somewhere far away, yet close enough to touch. Somewhere beyond the distant sea.

  The Three of Them

  Twelve-year-old Lalani Sarita had heard the story of the mountain beast many times. She knew of his mangled face, his house of stolen treasures, and his penchant for evil trickery, but she begged to hear it all again anyway. It was the perfect night for ghost stories. The moon cast a bluish glow through the slats of the Yuzi house, and jars of bulb flies shined like stars in the corners of the front room. Lo Yuzi leaned forward in her rocking chair to eye the members of her audience closely. There were three of them, of course: Lalani; her best friend, Veyda; and Veyda’s younger brother, Hetsbi.

  “Imagine you are an old man,” Lo Yuzi, who was Veyda and Hetsbi’s mother, said. She spoke in the loudest of whispers, and the chair creaked when she moved. Her hands, rough and scarred from years of pulling plants, sat folded on her lap. “Your face is weary with wrinkles, and your nose is missing.”

  Lalani pressed her palms to her cheeks and pulled them down, imagining her face sagging with age. Hetsbi, who was only one year younger than the girls, laughed behind a closed fist.

  “You live on Mount Kahna,” Lo Yuzi continued. “You spend your days all alone, dreaming of your other life, when you had friends and family. But you know that this life is what you’re due, because of all your sins. And one day, a brave but frightened boy decides to climb the mountain, even though all the villagers tell him not to.” Her expression darkened. “‘Mount Kahna doesn’t wish to be disturbed!’ the villagers say. ‘It will eat you alive!’” She snatched at the air in front of their faces and they all flinched, even though she’d done this dozens of times before. “And you know they’re right, because the mountain only loves evil things, like you. But this boy doesn’t listen to the villagers. He fills his lucky bronze canteen and sets out anyway. And this makes you happy because—”

  “Wait,” said Hetsbi, frowning. “You forgot the eyes.”

  Oh, right! Lalani realized that, too. The eyes were the most important part of the story.

  Veyda tossed her long, raven hair over her shoulder and braided it, something she did when she was impatient.

  “Ah, yes, the eyes,” Lo Yuzi said. She sighed and leaned back. Creak. “I suppose we’ll have to start again another time.”

  “Just backtrack a little bit and we can keep going,” said Lalani quickly.

  “I’d rather start a new path than trace old ones,” Lo Yuzi said. “Besides, it’s time for sleep. We need to wake as early as we can to beat the sun.”

  But there was no point in that, and they all knew it. There’d been no rain for months, and the heat was relentless. It didn’t matter what time you woke up, you were going to sweat.

  Veyda was already half standing. Lo Yuzi snapped her fingers toward her daughter and motioned for her to sit back down. “We have benediction.”

  Veyda sighed and took her seat again.

  Lo Yuzi bowed her head. Lalani did, too.

  “Mount Kahna,” they all said in unison—although Lalani suspected Veyda wasn’t saying a word. “Spare us another night. Remain quiet and peaceful in our gratitude.”

  Once they were nestled in their oostrum-stuffed blankets, which splayed across the floor of the sleeping room, Veyda grumbled as usual about the benedictions.

  “It’s so silly,” she whispered. She turned on her side to face Lalani. Lo Yuzi was in the basin room, rinsing the vegetables they’d picked earlier that day. “Why are we asking a mountain to remain quiet? Mountains are mountains.”

  “Don’t say that!” said Hetsbi. Lalani didn’t know another boy who spooked as easily as Hetsbi. Maybe because he didn’t have a father to show him all the ways of men. Then again, many boys didn’t. Not if they were children of sailors, as the three of them were.

  The life of a sailor didn’t last long in Sanlagita, after all.

  “Either way, it’s a good story,” Lalani said. “I wish my mother told stories like that.”

  She thought of her mother’s lined face and tired eyes.

  “But that’s all it is. A story. This place has too many of those,” said Veyda.

  “Maybe you should go climb it then,” Hetsbi said, elbowing her in the back. “Since it’s ‘just a mountain.’ Take a canteen and go up tomorrow and let’s see how brave you are.”

  “I have more important things to do,” said Veyda. “I need p
lants for Toppi’s salve.”

  Toppi Oragleo, the sick baby three houses down.

  Lalani pushed her blanket away with her feet. Too warm for a blanket. Too warm for anything.

  “I’ll help you pick them,” Lalani said.

  Veyda smiled mournfully. “I’m not sure I’ll need much help, sola. There aren’t many plants left.”

  “Speaking of Toppi,” Hetsbi said excitedly. “His sisters said they found hair on the rocks along the southern shore. Ziva’s hair.”

  “Really?” Lalani said. Veyda rolled her eyes. “How do they know it’s Ziva’s?”

  “It was long and black and stretched between the rocks like a web!” Hetsbi said, weaving his narrow fingers together. “There’s no other explanation.”

  “All the women in the village have long, black hair,” Veyda said. “It could belong to anyone.”

  Hetsbi dropped his arms to his sides. “But how did it get between the rocks then?”

  “Any number of ways,” said Veyda. “Like I said, this place has too many stories. We need to solve real problems, like how I’m going to make medicine without any plants.”

  The three of them lay there, silently.

  That was a real problem indeed.

  “Maybe we can ask the mountain for rain,” Lalani said softly.

  “I’m not asking the mountain for anything,” Hetsbi whispered. “What if the mountain beast hears us? What if he’s listening now, with his pointed ears, and he comes and steals us in our sleep?”

  “They’re just stories,” Veyda said.

  Lalani took her friend’s hand and squeezed. “I’ll ask, just in case.”

  She closed her eyes. Please, Kahna, give us rain. Her imagination floated up and up the mountain, trying to picture a peaceful benefactor. Instead, she saw the beast, just as Lo Yuzi described—except now he had sharp, pointed claws. He scrambled toward her, scuttering like a tree creature, toppling treasures in his wake.

  Give me your eyes, he hissed. And you can have anything you wish for.

  House of Light

  When Lalani woke up the next morning, the sun had not yet risen over the island of Sanlagita. She found Veyda sitting on the floor of the front room with an empty basket.

  “Look at these plants,” said Veyda. There were a few leaves in the basket’s cradle, but nothing compared to the usual number. She lifted one. Brown and wilted. “I don’t know if I can use this for anything, and the baby’s cough is only getting worse.”

  Toppi. A wiggly little boy with three older sisters. The girls had names, of course, but since they were rarely seen apart they were known simply as the Oragleo sisters. And their brother, the first boy of the family, had been sick for days. Their mother was so desperate that she had asked for Veyda’s help. In secrecy—no one could ever know that a twelve-year-old girl was dispensing medicine. Not even Toppi’s father, Maddux, and he was a good man. But in Sanlagita, girls had to keep secrets. Especially from the village menyoro, the man who watched over them all.

  “Is there anything we can do?” Lalani asked, squatting next to her.

  Veyda dropped the leaf and shrugged. “We need rain. It has to come eventually, right?”

  Lalani was quiet.

  “You should get home soon,” said Veyda, standing. “There are men already on the water.”

  Lalani stood, too. Reluctantly. She hated going home. Veyda’s house was alive with stories and big imaginations. And although Lalani’s house looked the same, as did all the houses in the village—built with wooden slats from felled trees; front, sleeping, and basin rooms for daily living—the atmosphere was something else altogether. There were invisible shadows in Lalani’s house and a charged air.

  There were no shadows in the Yuzi house.

  Only light.

  Girl on the Rocks

  Ziva could have been saved by her hair. Instead, it was hacked off and she slipped into the Veiled Sea, never to be seen again.

  Veyda was right about Sanlagita and its stories. And of those tales, the story of Ziva was Lalani’s favorite.

  Mora Pasa, an old woman with deep valleys of wrinkles, was the only person left on the island who had known Ziva—not as a ghost, but as a living, breathing girl. Mora was an elderly matriarch of a spiteful family of loomers that Lalani often visited to get thread for her mother. Every time she did, she asked Mora to tell her about Ziva.

  Mora told it the same way every time:

  “She was smart, like your friend Veyda,” Mora would say. “But she was cursed. It was clear from the moment she was born. She looked like no other infant in the village. Her smooth brown skin was tainted with stains of deep red, like blood that could not be washed away. The birthmark stretched from her neck to her ears, as if it was alive and crawling up her face. There was nothing the menyoro could do. He warned all of us—even the little children, like I was at the time—to avoid Ziva or risk being cursed ourselves. Her parents were ashamed. Ziva was made to feel ashamed, too. Her life was weighted with misery. She escaped in the stories of Sanlagita. Especially the story of Mount Isa. She believed, with all her heart, that there was an island to the north that held all of life’s good fortunes. But the menyoro would never make her a sailor. A girl sailor! And a cursed one at that! Can you imagine?”

  No, Lalani could not.

  According to Mora Pasa, Ziva was only thirteen years old when she hid on a ship on Sailing Day. Ziva believed that the men could not—would not—turn her away once they were out to sea. Not a young girl like her.

  Oh, how wrong she was.

  Mora Pasa insisted that Ziva had been kind when she was alive. But death had made her angry and vengeful. According to the villagers, she stalked the island’s shores. When she was in a particularly foul mood, she dragged the fish so far down that no hook could reach them. Once a village fisherman was caught in a sudden storm and drowned, and that was blamed on Ziva, too.

  Some even blamed her for the lack of rain.

  But Lalani knew better.

  “I know it’s not you who dried the earth,” Lalani whispered to Ziva now as she veered off the central path and walked briskly to the southern shore. “And I know it’s not your fault for being born with a mark.”

  If I had known you then, Lalani thought, we would have been friends.

  In the very early morning, the shore was covered with fishing boats for as far as the eye could see. But many of the fishermen were already on the water now, so only a few remained—a daring few, considering that the menyoro sometimes made surprise inspections to find out who was lazy and sleeping in.

  Then again, children weren’t supposed to dally, either. Today Lalani decided she would check the rock bed quickly, then she’d go straight home. Who knows? Maybe the Oragleo sisters had missed something in plain view.

  The sounds of fishermen calling to one another swelled with the sun. The absence of clouds made it feel like midafternoon. Sweat trickled between Lalani’s shoulder blades as she navigated the rocks. The rock bed could be dangerous—one slip could easily snap a bone. Luckily the rocks were mostly dry. The tide hadn’t come up this far lately.

  “Ziva,” Lalani said quietly as she balanced herself. “If I find your hair, I promise I will only show Veyda and Hetsbi. We will keep it a secret.”

  Although Lalani was one of many Sanlagitans who had searched these rocks for signs of Ziva, she felt that she did it with greater purpose. She was more interested in the girl than the ghost. The one who was punished for sins she didn’t commit. The one with dreams of escape. Lalani tried to imagine herself hiding on a ship, crouching in a dark corner, desperate to find something better. But that was something she could never do. How brave Ziva must have been, even if it hadn’t ended well for anyone.

  “I know you didn’t mean any harm,” Lalani said. “If I find your hair, I will cherish it forever.”

  She’d searched this shoal many times before, but it had never appeared so vast. Half the bed was typically underwater. She relied on her we
ll-practiced routine: balance on two sturdy rocks, then squat and look for strands of hair. Move to the next pair of rocks, repeat.

  Every now and then she’d find old fishing wire or an old piece of netting, and she’d carry them home for her mother. But today, the rocks offered little.

  She moved farther and farther out, both arms raised for balance. The rocks became flatter and smoother. At first Lalani thought this would help her, but there was a downside to these friendly surfaces: they had no grip, and neither did her sandals. When her foot slipped the first time, the unexpected glide startled her, and she felt unbalanced even when she managed to stand straight up. Her heart raced.

  The water lapped more loudly here.

  How far out had she’d come, anyway?

  She turned.

  The shore was farther away than she expected, but it wasn’t an impossible distance. All she had to do was backtrack, rock by rock.

  How long had she been exploring?

  All the fishing boats but one were out to sea now. She saw the pitched roofs of the village. It was time to get home.

  She stepped carefully.

  When had the rocks become so slippery?

  She tried to step in the same places—after all, if she’d made it across before, surely she would again—but she couldn’t remember exactly which ones she’d stepped on.

  Her foot slipped again. She waved her arms to regain her balance and did.

  The sound of the water surged in her ears.

  She didn’t like water.

  Yes, she lived on an island.

  Yes, it always surrounded her.

  But she didn’t like it. She wasn’t afraid of the water itself. It was being inside the water that terrified her. She wasn’t a swimmer. Not many on the island were. Why would they need to be? Only the sailors and fishermen were ever on the water, and there were many fishermen who didn’t know how to swim, either. The sailors were the strongest swimmers—the strongest at everything, really—so they were the ones who could best find their way back home using only their arms and legs.

  Theoretically.

  Lalani and Veyda had talked about the idea of swimming many times. When pieces of broken ships drifted back to shore, they’d wonder: Could the men have survived? Did they swim? Did our fathers swim somewhere? Are they still alive?