The soul does not leave, remains distant, unmoving.
I turn to the euyom, make a quick suggestion to her, gather the unstripped yau stem up around me, and begin unraveling the naked stem until it lies at full length waving in the water.
Taking the mass of leaves, I place them on my own shoulders and hold them there with my left hand.
Crawling onto the euyom’s back, I grip her shell with my right hand, clench the end of the naked hollow stem between my teeth, and motion to the euyom with a pale jerk of my soul.
Slowly the female begins moving toward the end of water, the start of dry sands, to leave the water as she has often done when her eggs cried out in need of a dry sandy place for hatching.
“One moment,” I say abruptly, and the euyom stops, and the two of them bob under the bubbling waves in shallowest water, the bottom so close, the surface almost touching.
I want, need, want a prayer to blood. So I sigh to my deepest name, and begin to pray, wanting, needing, praying.
(For my kind a prayer is soul’s finger back through time. Each family, every line of blood, has its own prayer growing with each new generation, passed down from father to son to son’s son, all leading back to the pounding remembered beginning.
(So I pray, turning my soul inward upon itself, and the finger begins pointing, chanting the red-orange of memory, rushing to cover the million days of my fathers, as my soul becomes them praying, praying, and the darkness is made light by the coursing of time’s blood.)
I am fishsinger, praying....
I am screamdeep, praying....
I am purplewave, praying....
I am hardred, praying, and simplehere, praying....
I am bluehair and dancedark and greenflow, praying....
I am songsung and pinkup and finrunner and sweetcall and oncegray and whitemine and everred and whispernow and saybluish and wavingdown and therepale and darklove and whilesoftly and orangeweb and threeveins and greenhump and redson and jawwhite and swingup and wholehole and youpiece and findyellow, praying....
I am largebluehereandnowson and largebluenowandhere and mewhite and mered and clearme and huntingmeme and menow...? and me...? and livingme...?! and help...? me...! and memaybe “Tam”? and memaybe”Tam”! and memyself-of-sometime”Tam” and Iamfrom”Tam” and me”Tam” and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me...sah and pale...? and living...? and darklight and...? and...? and...?, praying....
I am mefrom”Geor”and...and meherefrom”Geor” and...and “Geor” and...and “Sim”andsonof”Ruik” and me”Ruik” and me”Tiss”andsonof”Sim” and “Sim”and...and “Jums”-and...and “Bedee”and...and sonof”Hel” and “Hel”and....praying, praying....
I am fishsinger, farthest from the first, and I pray to the blood of the bigshinegray which brought me, me, me, me, me, me here, now and then....
...To the bigshinegray, that has come—
(I and my fathers have always prayed to the past for the future—and the future is light, and I’ve often seen that the future is the only real light we have. If that light should ever dim....)
I complete my moment and find that the euyom under me still trembles.
“You, so many souls,” she mumbles.
The distant soul of girl is still present, and I envelop my anger in the white of another attention.
To leave the bubbling waters....
One end of the long hollow stem will be clenched between my teeth—the other end will remain in the water.
The mass of wet yau leaves will be held on my back.
And the euyom will carry me out into dryness...but with the stem and leaves I will bring some of the sea with me.
The euyom resumes her swimming, slow and sure.
(And when the length of hollow yau stem can no longer cover my distance from the water, how will I breathe then?)
The water soon grows so shallow that bubbles of dryness make breathing difficult. I cover the end of the hollow stem with my lips and begin sucking, breathing easier with the bubbleless water pulled through the stem.
Only a few hands’ lengths ahead of me, the scaly head of the euyom suddenly breaks through the surface into dryness.
In the next moment my own head snaps from water, is washed by a wave, and then is completely in dryness. And in the jaws of shock.
(My soul screams yellow and black, and the surprise of the rise of two opposite feelings makes me scream again.
(The bright yellow of joy, the depths of fear’s darkness—this moment becomes one long day, and the stomach of my soul throws up shimmering faces of darkened seas, brilliant lights, funneling greens of a strange sweet green flesh, and reds of bitterest bones.
(So now all of my people scream within me. My prayer comes alive, gains flesh, and I am its own prayer, living. I feel, I see, I know myself leaving the water, and a million unblinking eyes watch me, praying, living.)
The dryness strokes me, but not unpleasantly.
And the bodies of tiny invisible souls begin to die on my drying skin; and they scream—but not unpleasantly.
And the last unpleasant quiver of my flesh is rushed into joy when the strongest image I have ever known begins to rise from bottoms beyond bottom in my soul.
The image begins formless—whites and blues and whites—but in a moment is a form whose clarity is greater than my own fishsinger name. It grabs my body, tells it to shiver in bright yellow of the widest white, and I obey it without question.
And then the rising image faces me:
A pale fish...crawling from the sea...into dryness.
(I scream, and oddly my scream is one calm “Yes.”)
The stem slips from my mouth—
A pale fish! crawling from the sea! into dryness!
(My soul gathers its thousand fingers and throws the image out, higher than dryness, faster than speech, to the ends of water.
(And I dimly recognize the image. Screamdeep knew it twice. All men know it, and scream their pleasant “Yes,” and give it to the women who will bear their children.
(And the image is like my name. It is like me, leaving the sea on an euyom’s back, touching her, making two bodies one—
(Touching? I can remember Father’s advice against touching anything....Why?)
But in the end the image of the crawling fish is greater than my name, greater than my act, and my soul knows this truth without being told.
The
