After the Apocalypse (7)

Cahya shrugged off Gemi’s disappointment over his poor pilfering; he didn’t know that he was pilfering anyway. She reminded him of the glorious rendang they would get to eat on Thursday, a village feast day. Taking the little boy’s -the after all not so little boy’s- shoulder, she guided him back toward the path to the village. On the way down there was no talk, or even thought, of the vacant bird traps. Gemi felt it would be a while before he would return to the secret grove after this latest poor reckoning. He’d long since lost interest in trying to catch the tiny songbirds.

Cahya finally found a chance to talk with Wein on the night of the village feast. Several of the wealthier merchants had combined resources and put on a display of whizz-bangs and colorful rockets which had scattered the feeding fruit bats and roused the diurnal birds. It was the most beautiful thing Cahya had ever witnessed; in keeping with the meaning of her name, ‘One who is the light in darkness’. The beautiful magic of the rockets’ chemistry so soon after the eerie magic of the little woodland folk filled her heart and she simply couldn’t retain her secret any longer. She grabbed Wein by the hand, not even pausing to reflect that it was the first time she’d ever touched him. His palm was softer, suppler, than she would have expected. Amazed, he followed her to a pair of seats on the quiet side of the ancient central village banyan.

“Is everything okay with you, Light?” Wein had tentatively begun to use this derivation of her name after she’d given him the little ora lizard icon.

“No, all is fine, Wein. Wasn’t the skyfire display a wonder?!” He nodded his agreement. He found he perceived her as less ugly lately. She dashed right into her story, not wanting to be sidetracked by these uncomfortable new feelings around Wein. “I saw something the other day, I saw something very strange up the mountain.” He listened more attentively than she knew she had any right to expect, considering the bizarre nature of her tale. When she was finished with her careful description of the strangeness of the people, the experience of them, he sat for long seconds staring in the firelight at a gnarly root of the great tree which was pushing through the ground near his foot.

Cahya held her breath, fearing reproach, mockery, ridicule. Instead, Wein raised his head suddenly, though without looking at her. He looked off into the darkness of the village. “Light in the Darkness, before we talk more about these… these little ones, I need to ask you something. I don’t know that you’ll care to answer me.” His careful wording hinted at many rehearsals and abundant practice.

“Maybe I need to talk with someone about it anyway,” Cahya prompted the boy.

He gulped, “What really happened to you that day?” There was no need for him to elaborate.

Shyly this time, she touched his hand again. “Yes, I need to talk with you about it best friend, but it isn’t a story I can make pleasant in any way.” She lifted her feet to her seat and continued, “First, what do you know about it?”

“All that I know of it is that you lived nearby to Krakatoa, and you are the only survivor from your village.” Wein looked almost ashamed of the boldness of his statement. He added quickly, “That’s all I know…, except Gemi of course. I would like to know who he really is too, if I could. I don’t disbelieve that you found him afloat on the surface of the sea on top of floating rocks, though I can’t understand it; only, start from the beginning please, Light. Did you have a family in Sumatra?”

“Of course I did, silly! How could I not have a family?” She took her hand from his and playfully cuffed at the long bangs he was growing over his head wound. She paused and a brief pinched expression crossed her face before she pressed on. “I had two younger sisters and an older brother. My father was a fisher, but he was in town that morning. No one was away. The volcano had been shaking us and burping ash for days. Fearful signs were everywhere. People didn’t know what to do. My town was much bigger than this village; many thousands of people lived there. You didn’t get to know everyone there like you do here.”

An unrelated memory drew a smile across her face. To Wein’s relief it remained in her eyes for a few moments without fading as she described the provincial fishing town on the Sunda Strait where she used to live. It was a great way up a narrow inlet off Lampong Bay between high hills. The town had several markets and an old section which always smelled of incense and Cahya’s mother. That’s the area where Cahya had lived. It was a useful and storm-protected location for the fishery, so the Dutch had built a concrete processing plant at the harborside. The hills above the town often bore berries and that’s where Cahya had gone with her brother Sartono very early that morning, a breakfast of hill berries would give them a good start toward collecting more berries to bring home.

They climbed into the hills on the north shore of the inlet as that’s where the ripest harvest would be. From up there you could see the pointy main peak of Krakatoa to the south beyond low islands, away in its corner of the Sunda Strait. Beyond Krakatoa you could see other high conical peaks in the distance, some also smoking though not as boldly.

Before Cahya and Sartono had left at dawn earthquakes shook the town, but there had been many of those recently. In the regular business of work and gathering food people had become accustomed to carrying on despite their fear. Cahya and her brother climbed the hill paths looking for the juiciest berries. They were just finishing their breakfast, about to start gathering in earnest, when a very different sound, which Cahya described as a mighty ‘pop’ by putting her index finger inside her cheek and rapidly pushing it out of her mouth, caused the two of them to simultaneously look up and south at the peak of Krakatoa. At that instant the mountain vanished in a flash of something very much like lightning followed by black billowing clouds racing toward the sky. Cahya and Sartono were terrified. Dropping their baskets, they fled down the path back to town. Beyond the southern islands Krakatoa seemed to be going completely mad. Through the teeming thick black clouds flashes of red pulsed like angry sword wounds. The pyroclastic flow spewed outwards.

It was some twenty minutes down the hill before they broke into the first clearing opening out toward the town. They raced across the field, if anything even more panicked than before. From sea-level they could no longer see Krakatoa amid its ash cloud, but they could feel its shaking, they could hear a constant roar and they could see the southern sky so quickly filling with the dread blackness. Strangely, they could smell ash mingled with the tangy, salty mud of a low tide.

Sartono stopped suddenly and Cahya collided with his back. He turned very quickly and began to push her forcefully back in the direction from which they’d only just raced. He yelled to Cahya to run- the water- but that was all he had time to call. It was the last she saw of him. A surging wall of brown and white much taller than the biggest buildings was moving impossibly fast up the inlet toward the town, toward them. There was only time to panic and run a frantic, pell-mell, desperate run against all hope. As she turned, out of the corner of her eye she saw the gunboat Berouw fly past her toward the Brazilian rubber trees planted at the edge of the forest. The Dutch warship slammed its keel down hard from an impossible height and Cahya remembered no more as black roiling water hurled her into the treetops along the Koeripan River.

Please continue reading this story in "After the Apocalypse" (8)

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