Hawaii - James Michener [60]
"A voice crying, ‘You have forgotten me!' Was that your dream, too?"
"No," the king replied in ashen tones. "Two stars, combing the heavens, looking for something I had forgotten to put into the canoe."
"Was that why you unpacked everything at the last?" Teura asked.
“Yes."
"And you discovered no lack?"
"Nothing." The two wise people, on whom the success of this voyage now depended, sat despondent. "What have we forgotten?" They could find no answer, but they knew, each now fortified with substantiation from the other, that this voyage was conducted under an evil omen. "What have we forgotten?" they pleaded.
In bleak despair they stared at each other and found no answer, so Teura, her eyes already inflamed from watching the merciless sun, went out to the lifeless platform and prayed for omens, and as she gave her whole being to this duty, the great blue shark came beside the canoe and whispered, "Are you afraid that you will die, Teura?"
"Not for myself," she replied calmly. "I'm an old woman. But my two nephews . . . Isn't there anything you can do for them, Mano?"
"You haven't been watching the horizon," the shark admonished.
"Where?"
"To the left."
And as she looked, she saw a cloud, and then a disturbance ruffling the ashen sea, and then the movement of a storm, and rain. "Oh, Mano," she whispered, afraid to believe. "Is the rain coming toward us?"
"Look, Teura," the great blue shark laughed.
"Once before it looked the same," she whispered.
"This time follow me," the blue beast cried, and with a shimmering leap he splashed into the sea, her personal god, her salvation.
With a wild scream she cried, "Rain! Rain!” And all rushed out from the house, and dead sleepers wakened to find a storm bearing down upon them.
"Rain!" they mumbled as it marched across the ocean nearer and nearer.
"It's coming!" Tamatoa shouted. "Our prayers are answered." But old Teura, laughing madly as the benign water struck her face, saw in the heart of the storm her own god, Mano, his blue fin cutting the waves.
Almost as if by command, the near-dying voyagers began to throw off their clothes, their tapa and their shells, until each stood naked in the divine storm, drinking it into their eyes and their blistering armpits and their parched mouths. The winds rose, and the rains increased, but the naked men and women of Bora Bora continued their revel in the slashing waves. The sails came down and the mast of Ta'aroa was almost carried away, and the dogs whined, but the men in the canoe swept the water into their mouths and embraced each other. Into the night the storm continued, and it seemed as if the sections of the canoe must break apart, but no one called for the storm to abate. They fought it and drank it and washed their aching bodies with it, and sailed into the heart of it, and toward morning, exhausted in sheer joy, they watched as the clouds parted and they saw that they were almost under the path of the Seven Little Eyes, and they knew that they must ride with the easterly wind that had brought the storm. Their destination lay somewhere to the west.
IT WAS A LONG leg to windward they took. For nearly two thousand miles they ran before the easterlies, covering most days more than a hundred and fifty miles. Now the fixed star remained at about the same height above the horizon, on their right, and they followed close to the path of Little Eyes. At sunset Teroro would tilt his coconut cup backward to catch the bright star that stood near Little Eyes as they rose in the east. Later, as the constellation which men in the deserts had named the Eagle sank into the west, he would steer by its bright star, shifting back and forth between it ahead and Little Eyes to the rear, thus keeping always on course.
It was on this long westward leg that King Tamatoa's earlier insistence on discipline preserved the voyage, for now food had run perilously low and for some perverse reason the numerous fish in these strange waters would not bite; Tupuna explained that