Deathsworn Vol. II

1 - Mother Mami

Mother Mami was angry. Kana could tell this from the way she thrashed her children against the rocks, from the screams they made as they broke upon Ooama's western face, rising almost so high as Kana herself.

Tattaga was furious, too. His whistling, so usually a dormant beast on Ooama, had become an echo that sang of forthcoming tumult. His servants whipped about Kana as she perched on the brink of the cliff, they threatened to rip the coarse pelt from her otherwise naked body, colluded to enchant her necklace of bones, forcing it to dance to a natural tune. They would surely have wreaked havoc with her hair, had she any upon her head.

Kana clutched tightly to her spear, squinting to lessen the sting of salt spray. She had the best eyes in her tribe, not a soul on Ooama would deny it. In their tongue, the very word 'kana' implied long sight. That was why she did not forage and pick and gather like the other women, did not concern herself with the saplings of the tribe while the men fished and hunted. Instead, she watched from her roost as the great Mother Mami, in all of her blue glory, worked her fury up towards the most terrible of crescendos.

On the western horizon, too far off for normal eyes, Kana watched a doomed blot. Little more than a smudge, it was, a smudge straddling the line where the endless Mother Mami met the infinity of the cloudless sky. And yet Kana saw it clear. Her eyes perceived its bitter struggle as its crew fought doggedly for control.

There were five of them in total, five souls sure to be dashed in Mother Mami's throes when her violence ascended to its apex. Her eyes couldn't count their number, for even they weren't keen enough for that. But they didn't need to. Kana had been warned of their existence by Umitti, when he and the other men had withdrawn from Mother Mami ahead of the coming storm. "Five men," he had told her, words shaped in the heavy tongue of their people, "they ride a big tree and come for Ooama."

Kana was sure they weren't coming for Ooama, just as she was sure her knowledge of the pale men's tongue was significantly better than Umitti's. Where he said "big tree", she knew the pale men would say "ship". When he claimed "come for Ooama", he meant only that they were heading for the island itself. Whether they did so by intent or by the immutable hand of Mother Mami, she could not say.

She had seen very few pale men in her time. They came from lands in the west, lands the people of Ooama had heard of but never seen. Very rarely did they come to trade for fruits and spices. When they did, they wore pelts of steel and navigated Mother Mami on huge ships. They bartered with the brutes of the Congana tribe, those that controlled the Pangonia Isles and swore the other three tribes, the Ooamanee included, to tribute. It was the pale men who had given the Congana steel claws to murder with, and shields made from the trees in place of skins and hides.

The five on the horizon weren't like the other pale men, though. They couldn't be. Even the pale men, ever hungry and unpredictable as they were, knew not to risk Mother Mami in storm season. The fishers and hunters of Kana's tribe, men like Umitti, would venture out on the days Mother Mami was sleeping, but they soon darted their canoes back to the refuge of Ooama's island breast at the slightest hint of her stirring. She consumes any and all who contest her when she wakes.

Umitti had said there was a dark man among them even so, an Islander born. One bigger and thicker than Pono even, he had claimed. Kana doubted this, for Pono was half a head taller than any other man in the tribe, his hands capable of swallowing a papryus fruit whole. In any case, she wondered how any Islander could be so foolish as to bring his friends near Ooama in the season when Mother Mami and Tattaga agreed only on devastation.

A sigh slipped from Kana's thick lips as she accepted the inevitability of the coming chaos. The storm clouds were rolling from the south, black as the nightcats that tore saplings from their mother's arms. The blot on the horizon continued its fruitless battle and Kana said a prayer to Mother Mami herself for the five damned souls. She prayed that Mami take them all and leave none alive. It would be kinder for them not to wash up on Ooama still breathing.

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