She strained to make sense of the world, but the world was shrouded in a veil that could not be pierced.
When Mimi was five, she woke up one night, disoriented. Her mother was soundly asleep by her side, and she couldn’t remember the dream that had awakened her. She felt a premonition of something important happening beyond the walls of the hut, and she got out of bed, tiptoed her way to the door, and slipped out.
The sky was completely dark, with no moon and no stars. A faint breeze came from the sea, carrying the familiar briny smell. But out on the northern horizon, where the sea met the sky, flashes of lightning flickered, and the distant rumbling of thunder came to her, delayed and muffled.
She squinted and peered at the horizon. Indistinct shapes seemed to reveal themselves in the murky blend of sky and sea as the lightning flashes continued. A giant turtle, as large as a floating island, was limned in the hazy sky-sea like some hovering airship and swam jerkily to the west as the lightning bolts strobed. Behind it was the outline of an even more massive shark that snapped its jaws as it darted through the sky-sea, leaping up in powerful arcs from time to time and revealing teeth made up of jagged trails of lightning. Though the turtle seemed to be paddling its flippers leisurely and the shark swinging its tail in a frenzy, the shark never caught up to the turtle.
She knew that the turtle was the pawi of Lutho, god of fishermen, while the shark was the pawi of Tazu, god of the destructive nature of the sea. She watched the drama avidly like a show put on by one of the traveling folk opera troupes.
Then the eerie light show in the sky-sea changed again, and now she saw a ship with a strange design being tossed in the waves. It was circular in shape, like half of a coconut shell or a lily pad bobbing up and down in the tempest. A single massive mast, pure white in color, poked up out of the center of the ship like the stalk of a lotus flower, though the sails had long been furled or else torn away by the wind. Tiny figures were trying to hang on to the rigging and gunwales of the ship, but a few seemed to be shaken loose with each rise and fall and tumbled noiselessly into the waves. The unsteady illumination of the lightning seemed to emphasize the terrible fate that the ghostly ship found itself subject to.
The giant turtle swam up to the ship, dove down, and rose again with the ship lodged securely in the deep grooves etched into the back of its shell, as though the ship was a mere barnacle. Leisurely, the island-turtle continued to swim west, while the shark pursued close behind, tail whipping and jaws snapping. Slowly and inexorably, however, the turtle was pulling away.
Before the sea, all men are brothers.
Mimi felt the instinctive sympathy and terror of all the islanders for those who braved the whale’s way. Before the vast brutality that was the sea, all humans were equally powerless. She cheered and cheered for the turtle and the ship it carried, though she was certain that whoever the refugees in the ship were—ghosts, spirits, gods, or mortals—they were too far away to hear her.
Once more, the great shark leapt into the air, higher than ever before, and, as it reached the apex of its arc of flight, shot out a long, twisting bolt of lightning. Like the tongue of a great python, it reached across the space between the shark and the turtle and struck the ship nestled on the back of the turtle.
Everything froze in the harsh, cold glow of the lightning for a moment, and then darkness hid the scene of destruction.
Mimi screamed.
Once again, the horizon lit up with flickers of storm-glow. The great shark on the horizon seemed to have heard her. Whipping its powerful tail, the shark turned toward the island, and its giant eyes, like the beacons of lighthouses, focused on her. The lightning-jaws snapped open, and after a few seconds, a massive peal of thunder boomed around her, and rain poured out of the sky in a sudden flood, drenching her so completely that she thought she was drowning.
Is this what it’s like to defy the gods? she thought. Is this how I will die?
The shark swam toward the beach, its colossal figure now a looming island of roiling lights. It opened its jaws once more, and a long zigzagging lightning bolt shot out, reaching for Mimi like a long tentacle. Air crackled around the lightning bolt, energized by it and glowing with the heat.
Time seemed to slow down; Mimi closed her eyes, certain that her brief life on earth was about to come to an end.
Some hulking presence swooped over her head, so low that the skin over her skull tightened and tingled. She snapped her eyes open and looked up.
A gargantuan, shimmering raptor dove toward the ocean, toward that flickering tongue of lightning. The falcon’s wings were so wide that they blotted out the sky over her head like a bridge made of liquid silver; the flight feathers at the trailing edges of the wings flashed like shooting stars. It was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.
The falcon lowered its right wing like a shield to block the advancing lightning bolt shooting from the shark’s jaws. The shark’s eyes widened in surprise and then narrowed, and the hissing tongue of light connected with the raptor’s wing. There was a brilliant, massive explosion of sparks like the eruption of a volcano. Bolts of lightning zigzagged in every direction.
One of the smaller bolts shot out at Mimi and struck her in the face.
She felt a searing tongue of liquid heat tunnel right through her. It was as if she had been turned into a funnel for molten rock that was being poured into the top of her skull; the sizzling lava flowed right through her torso to melt all her organs, and then left through her left leg to sink into the ground.
Mimi screamed. And screamed.
She couldn’t believe how long she remained alert as the heat fried every cell in her body, and the last image she remembered before sinking into the bliss of unconsciousness was the giant falcon of light diving toward the shark while the shark leapt out of the ocean, as though the sky and sea were about to consume each other in a titanic battle.
The lightning strike left Mimi’s face scarred and her left leg paralyzed. For days she lay in bed in a coma, waking from time to time screaming and babbling incoherently about what she had seen on that night.
“She was a pretty child,” said the village herbalist, Tora. Then she sighed. In that sigh were a thousand things assumed but unsaid: the loss of a worthy husband perhaps; the denial of a secure future for Aki, who was without a son; a lament for the inconstant ways of the world.
“She is a hard worker,” said Aki peacefully. “Scars do not take away from that. What can you do for her?”
“I can offer some iceweed for the fever and Rapa’s Lace to allow her to sleep better,” said the herbalist. “Keeping her comfortable is about all we can do…. You might also want to… ask the neighbors to help prepare a grave, just in case.”
“The gods did not give her in my old age only to take her away before she can ask them her purpose,” said Aki stubbornly.
Tora shook her head and mumbled something about the cursed hour of the child’s birth, and then went away.
Aki refused to give up. She curled herself around Mimi in bed and kept her warm with her own body heat. Neighbors brought her the rare seawife’s purse—the dyran egg sacks sometimes found attached to the tips of kelp ribbons in undersea forests—which Aki made into soup and fed to Mimi with a fish-bone spoon to add to the soup’s strength.