Chapter 1

 

I have learned that, despite my glimpses into the future, there is nothing in this life that goes exactly the way one thinks it will.

Being the child of a god gives one a decided advantage when confronting the unknown. But it does not give absolute resolution or restitution. My former position in life, being half human and half holy, gave me status among my people. It assured that I would be cared for by my tribe, the people of the Brunka living on the coast of the wide Western Water, and would be kept safe by the sacred earth of our ancestors.

My position was special, unique.

In our tribe, women were valued for their contribution to the village and for giving life to the younger generation. Usually, though, they did not wield much power outside of their own teccat. Even then, the teccat, the thatch hut we all lived in, was built by a man and given to a woman as assurance of being cared for.

Few women were allowed on to the Elder's Council, and fewer still were given any sort of responsibility other than rearing children, gathering food, weaving, hunting and maybe creating goods that could be traded.

My people, the Brunka people, had been blessed with two women in unusual positions within the tribe.

My teacher, Chana, had been our healer. She was also the beloved spouse of our chief, Kuranal. She had learned at the knee of her grandfather, absorbing all the tales and knowledge that he flung at her, which she gobbled like crumbs of maize bread by a minnow. Her father had no interest in peeling bark from trees and traipsing about in the muddy holes of the jungle in search of healing ochre mud.

Chana had loved every minute of it.

As she grew older, the elder son of the chief at the time thought it strange that the tall, gangly girl would prefer to pound powder into tinctures rather than braid her hair and blush at the young hunters. He decided to make her his.

It took him a handful of years and much private begging before she laughingly said she would join herself to him. He became chief just two years later, and she was installed as our healer.

One year after that a young Brunka woman named Nalhi had declared that a god of the sky had taken her as his mate. It became apparent that she was pregnant after just a couple turns of the moon, and I was born, half human and half deity.

The Elders had convened and sent runners to our neighboring tribes, trying to recall the place of a jonka, the child of a god. Threads and ribbons of memories and tales were woven together into the confines of my future, such as it was.

I showed myself able to commune with my ancestors, the gods and goddesses of our land. I would speak, sometimes nonsense, other times directly related to the task I was completing. My visions would always, always come true.

My mother supported me on her own with nothing more than a necklace of the bluest stone and my golden eyes to assure her of my godly progeny. As my gifts became more apparent, she turned to the Elders to guide me and train me.

Chana stepped in, teaching me to meditate, to commune...and to heal. She taught me how to sit still - no small feat for a five-year-old child - and how to go Beyond. She showed me ways to let go of my body and fly over the land, she led me from feeling to Feeling.

I had chosen my path, deciding to give up the rights of being mated and having children of my own in order to be jonka. I would care for my people, and they would care for me. I would intercede on my tribe's behalf when the gods were angry, and I would go to other tribes as a means of drawing them closer through peace instead of war.

All this had been my destiny until the New Ones had come.

Arriving in canoes larger than a village, they had exploded on to the shore of the Waters of the Rising Sun, riding huge deer they called horses and using their thunder sticks to kill any who stood in their way. Making their way across the thinnest part of our land, the New Ones had trekked up the coast of the Waters of the West, the sleeping place of the sun. When they had come upon our village, they had been merciless.

Only a handful of our people had survived, most of them children and nearly all of them as a result of my efforts that night. I was thankful that there were as many survivors as that, since it could have been much worse. If a tribe loses their youngest generation, there is no hope of survival as a culture.

I had been irretrievably damaged during the attack, the brutal force of two men taking my innocence and my physical purity in an affront to my position as jonka. I had lived, while most of my tribe had bled their last into the ground.

Taking the straggling infants and children to our sister tribe in the mountains, I had returned to our village to die. Teelan, one of the young girls I had rescued, begged me to teach her what I knew of the healing arts. She made the half-day trek from her new home with her mother's brother to her old home just to listen to me instruct her on the ways of binding a sprain. Other survivors made their way back to the home of their past and I realize I had a new reason to live. There were still members of our people alive, and they would one day come back to the land of our people. I had to make sure that it was cleansed, and that the New Ones would never return.

It was to this end that I had dressed in my finery and taken my orphaned monkey, Behat, away from the coast in search of the Boruca, our extended family along the peaks of the black mountains.

Their chief, Tnezatahl, had let me beg assistance from his people. The New Ones were making their way back down the coast, reinforced after being beaten back by the Mayan people far, far to the north. Our neighbors, the Quepos people, had come to my vacant village to inform me of the intruders and I had taken flight.

My idea was simple; using our knowledge of the junga, the jungle that had protected us from the time our people were placed here at the will of the gods, we would defend the village of the Brunka.

Now, tossing and turning in the hut of Teelan's aunt and uncle, I was unable to fall completely within the spell of sleep. Each time I felt myself drifting off into the land of dreams I would feel as if something were chasing me. I would startle awake, my stomach tumbling as if I had fallen out of a sleeping hammock.

In the darkest part of the night I made my way outside, wishing that I was back on the coast and able to feel the comfort of the stars and the moon.

Sitting by the dying embers of the hut fire, I clutched my knees securely to my chest and imagined the sound of the waves in the western water.

He jolted awake, his eyes wide and his chest breathing hard, as if he had run a long distance in the sweltering heat.

His hands, working on their own accord, splayed his fingers wide and began to search in the darkness, patting the ground around him.

Finally, his eyes acclimated to the dark and he realized where he was, his face crumbling under the weight of his disappointment. Dragging a now-idle hand through his hair, he pounded his heel against the dirt floor in frustration.

"Hatebe, will you never leave me?" he asked in a voice as familiar as my own. "If only I knew you were dead, I could let you go."

I shook awake, my body trembling with the vision. Behat, my little white faced monkey, squirmed next to me and settled back into sleep.

I had not had one of my visions since the attack had occurred, and had naturally thought that my ability was gone due to the violence that had been executed on me that night. But, all my training was geared at telling the difference between a dream and a vision.

My dreams were always in black and white; my visions were in color.

The wisps of the scene solidified as I remembered each part, each motion that slid one into the next.

Yes, there was the exact shade of his eyes, brown and deep and unending. His hair was almost black, with shots of orange reflected from the small fire that was near his feet. The burnt shade of his skin, pulled tight over muscles that had grown larger and longer.

Ditan.

I had not tried to see since the invasion, not wanting to insult the gods and goddesses of my people. I tucked my knees tighter under my chin and thought back to what Tnezatahl had said earlier that day.

Perhaps the gods did not care if our bodies had known the touch of another. Maybe as long as our hearts were pure and our minds were dedicated, they would understand the folly of our flesh. They had created us. They themselves enjoyed the physical act of love. This was proven by the creation of life from the very act that supposedly sullied their gift.

I propped my head on my knees and closed my eyes slowly. Breathing in the lush air of the jungle, I deliberately pushed the treasured sight of Ditan's face from my mind and let go.

Everything that was around me, anything touching my person, the breeze that lifted a few strands of my hair, I let go. Finding the darkest spot behind my eyes, I pushed myself forward and tumbled into the abyss.

It was so easy I almost lost the connection, smiling at the way my soul and mind remembered just what to do. Years and years of training with Chana paid off, and I was soaring in the void before I could believe it.

My gift was not gone.

No matter what those men had done to me, I had been the one that held myself back. I had not believed I was good enough to be the person I had been before, so I had never tried.

Ditan had found me out, shown me that I was still his Na'ru tebe, his sleeping moon, that I was always the one in my own way. He gave me back the most intrinsic part of myself, and he did not even know it.

He had been my closest friend, my partner in adventures that would cause both our mother's to chide us. Being a year older than I, he had rejected the idea of taking a mate until I had forced him to realize I was not an option. The day after I had told him, he had chosen a woman and begun building his teccat.

It had been the right thing to do, I reminded myself, trying to make the hollow pit in my chest bearable. I had always thought there was no other way to live my life, right up to the point that the invaders had shown me otherwise.

Keeping my focus on the dark spot of my mind, I separated the one thread of conscious thought and grabbed a hold of it. Ditan's face, as I had just seen it; the thought yanked me from the shell of darkness and thrust me into the blinding light of a small camp fire.

He was in a village, a small one. He was lying inside a hut of some sort, though I could not make out the details. The air did not smell of the sea, but was a mix of arid plains and over-oxygenated forest.

Around him were sleeping forms, dressed in a style similar to that of our people. He was with a tribe, somewhere, and he was aching for me even though he was surrounded by others.

The emotion swelled up in my chest before I could stop it and I snapped back into my own body with a painful twang. I had not had my concentration broken like that in a long while, and the ache made me smile, thinking of the rebuke that Chana would have given me for my lapse in control.

"Ditan," I whispered, pulling my head from my knees and standing up to return to the sleeping pallet inside.

He was alive. The words brought a peace to my heart that I had not known in almost a year. I could sleep now, knowing that he had escaped, and that he was safe. Perhaps, sometime in this life, the gods and goddesses would be kind enough to let us see each other one more time.

Until then, I had a purpose. It was enough.