On Silver Wings

by Cenizas de Rosas

The night wore on and on, black and chill despite the tropical clime below. The small plane hummed and sputtering once, passed over the sea like a shadow against the night. Sleeping islanders stirred once, twice at the sound passing overhead and then returned to dreams. Kané was wakeful in the night, watching the moon-silvered waves roll in from the Pacific and murmur along the strand.

A storm was brewing.

Kané could feel it in the aching of old bones. The storm-knowing which was his Gift told him that the gale which now brewed in the east was no ordinary blow. A storm would come with the dawn with winds and crashing of thunder, and behind that, a greater storm followed with fire and blood. A storm that, coming ever closer, unsettled Kané's mind as he watched with furrowed brow the waves surrus over the sand.

Kané was a man. An ordinary man who had spent his life on the sea searching for fish to feed his family, and sometimes for pearls to sell to white traders. Kané had a wife who could sing like the birds of morning and who had given him three sons and a daughter. Her fine black hair had begun to silver with time as the moon now silvered the ocean waves, and he found her all the more beautiful for it.

The sky above remained clear, the stars reeling overhead in the great, black dome of night. The waves caught the light of those stars and that of the lowering half moon as they rolled into the protected cove where Kané crouched on the sand. The storm-knowing crept up his spine anew, making him shiver even in the warmth of the tropical night, as the eastern horizon began to darken -- as he had known it would -- with black roiling clouds, and the murmuring waves exchanged their surrus for a stronger syncopate.

It was a tiny atoll. In the sky, the pilot watched it pass below, checking her charts -- Kekaimalu -- on course -- she sighed and leaned back into her seat and felt the tropical breeze play around her face. More coffee -- mustn't sleep, she thought -- reaching for the thermos on the console before her. The stray thought came to her as she sipped tepid brew that she should return to these islands with her fiance´ one day. If the war didn't catch up with them both too soon. Already the fires of war from the east had begun to stalk these peaceful islands dreaming in the sea below. Japan expanding in China, with designs upon Indochina and the long-disputed Kuril Islands ...would Japan join the Axis powers and march across the Pacific? Shrugging her scrimpy shoulders, she thought: so much for tropical breezes and island paradises. Suddenly shuddering, she recalled the visitor to their small airfield shortly before her takeoff on this flight: All spit and polished brass and clipped words concerning patriotism and the war-effort. Well, she'd agreed to do what she could. This journey was for her. Because she could do it. Because it would insure her role in the future business of flight. And, because, in another six months, a year on the outside, the war would be here.

The plane's engine caught, sputtered, and re-caught. Amelia looked at the fuel gauge and tapped it with a neatly gloved finger. Full enough. Come on, sweetheart, she thought, don't fail me now; we're almost there. The barometer began to fall.

Kané watched a night bird fly from tree to tree and swoop into the shadows, disappearing. He had moved from his seaside vigil and started toward the path to his hut, intending to seek his bed once more. A whine, a roar, a sound he had never heard before caused him to stop short. A shadow passed overhead and Kané looked up -- something black against the night. A shadow in the sky blotting out the stars. Kané had never seen an airplane; he'd heard tales of these fabulous machines from the white traders who bought his pearls. Could this be one of those? No, he decided, a strange bird, emissary from the gathering storm. Kané shivered, crouched in the shadows, unable to move as a vision of fire and war came over him, passed through him with the whine of the engine overhead.

The wind rose, and the sea boiled as thunder rolled behind the vision: the storm had arrived.

Wakeful through the night also was She who wove the patterns of sea and sky and wind, gathering a storm to water the islands. Tending to the order of things, Her purpose. With the dawn, the winds would blow, and the sky; blacken bringing a squall to winnow through the waves tossing the palms like feather pom-poms in the gale. So She had done since the world was made. Tonight, as She gathered the winds into Her hand something new came with them: A fragile bird with silver wings flying against the winds. A metallic shadow in the night -- a thing made by men on the distant shore of a different sea where She did not go.

The wind had grown stronger, buffeting the plane. Amelia frowned at the falling barometer; this would bear watching. A blast of wind hit the side of the plane, sending shudders from tail to nose. Amelia continued to frown at the barometer, as if she could make it all right by force of will alone.

Kané dared to peek upwards at the approaching shadow in the sky and felt the winds change and the temperature fall. He scanned the horizon beyond the shore: thunderheads building, sudden and black. Thunder rolled again across the heavens, and in a gasping moment, lightning lit up the night. The clouds had now blotted out the night; rain began to fall. Kané jumped up from his crouch as fast as old bones would let him; he had to hurry to reach shelter -- the wind rose higher and began to whip his hair into his face and make the palms creak as they bent and swayed with the storm. Over the howl of the wind, he could no longer hear the whine of the strange emissary in the sky.

The clouds billowed black and fierce, unfolding like a new-made tapa across the sky. The waves behind him cast their foam and sea flotsam across the sands, rolling in like the thunder brought with the storm.

Tropical storms can be swift and violent, appearing over the seas, blotting out the sky, seemingly from nowhere; the wind lashing out at the small atolls and islands with slashing rain and winds tossing debris and sea wrack while throwing waves to and fro and blowing salt foam far inland. High above the atoll where Kané ran before the gale, Amelia's craft shook with the hurly-burly of the storm as it seized the little plane in its airy fist and pitched it across the roiling clouds like a discarded toy in the hand of a petulant child.

Amelia clutched the gears, grinding them fiercely as she fought to gain control of the aircraft. "Up!" she silently commanded, "Stay up, damn you!" She could no longer see the ocean below. Going off course for certain, she thought, as another fist of tumult slammed into the side of her craft and the bellowing wind drowned out the whine of her engine. Lightning flashed, creating a deceitful dawn in the cockpit. "Come on, sweetheart, stay together; we're almost there." As Amelia peered out the cockpit window, a hole appeared in the clouds, and a speck of land below seemed to call to her. The engine coughed, the wings heaved and yawed; could she land? Where? That atoll, Kekaimalu, a wide sandy beach -- if the clouds would break just a little bit more ...

Amelia tried the radio, "Mayday! This is the Flying Laboratory! Mayday! Mayday!" she shouted above the wind. No answer; just roaring static. "Mayday! Mayday!" She shouted a second time into the radio. Then a roaring blast against the plane took all her attention to keep from falling into a spinning dive into the blackness all around her. Lightning crashed again, and the wind howled, bending and twisting the metal into shapes it was never designed to achieve; and Amelia saw, clearly, the Death's owl-eyed cadaverous visage in the roiling murk between her and the sea below.

Kané looked up into the sky as a layer of clouds parted, and lightning lit the sky, revealing anew the shadow in the sky. The wind tossed debris across his path, and the palms shook their fronds like feathers loosed from the wings of a feckless albatross. Another mercurial flash of lightening illumined the outline of wings in the sky: silver wings. In a flash of insight, Kané saw a woman riding those silver wings. Lashed by the rain, her hair flying about her face in the wind. A woman clutching that silver bird: desperation in her face, as if by her will alone the bird would stay in the sky and outfly the storm . Kané frowned and reached skywards, reaching for the silver winged bird, as if to add his own small will to hers, impelling her to succeed. "Fly with the wind, Silver Bird!" he cried into the storm, his words taken by the wind to the ears of --

-- She who made the winds blow; She paused in Her making - paused - and the world also paused, save for the howling storm. She, peering into the gale, saw silver wings; and following close behind, the black, fiery wings of war. Strange men with stranger weaponry come to Her islands, bringing fiery death to Her people.. And others, on silver wings from lands far from the sea, arriving to stem the tide of war. She could do a small thing:

As the engine sputtered - once- twice - coughed, then failed, Amelia cried out a prayer to the God of aviators. The metal screamed as the little plane twisted around her. A piece of flotsam flew toward her hitting her head. Dazed, Amelia blinked; black spots, blacker than the inky night without, swelled to fill her vision as she realized she was herself falling, falling into the storm. "No!" she protested, "No! It can't end! Not this way!" Defeated, the craft circled, sputtered, spun, and fell, breaking up as it tumbled from the sky, taking the woman with it.

She who made the pattern of storms heard the woman's cry, and said "No, it shall not end so." And, She wove a new ending to the tale: a small thing in the gale, a small thing against the blacker storm ahead.

Later, Kané would tell his wife and children of his vision. His sons and daughter would tell their children; and his wife would tell her sister; and her sister would tell her children. Adding a little to the legend which grew up around the world about the little aviator whose plane was lost as the storms of war blew across the Pacific a generation ago. How the storm gathered up the woman in its grasp just as its fury scattered the broken metal of her aircraft in its wake, and how Amelia awoke ...

... in a clear night sky with the impossibly bright stars of a tropical night around her while below the waves caught the light of those stars tossing it one to another across the sea from atoll to island to atoll along chains and archipelagos through the years of war ahead and beyond.

There is a star, aviators say, in the eastern Pacific sky. A small star, bright and steady, which will guide a lost pilot home, even through the storms of war. If such an aviator were to point out that star to the great-grandson of a fisherman who had seen a silver shadow cross the sky during a swift tropicial blow, he would tell the tale of a brave-hearted woman who now flies the sky on silver wings straight into the morning.

End

Author's disclaimer: This story has nothing at all to do with any of the historical facts concerning Amelia, except for her disappearance over the Pacific and the name of her aircraft. The islands are not a real place. I did hear a story once from an old time pilot who flew over the Pacific during World War II that some believed that Amelia, her co-pilot, and other pilots lost during wartime, have "stuck around to help the rest of us along" in finding safe flight paths and landing places.

"For those who have perished on September 11, 2001, may their stars shine brightly for all of us in the coming days. Perhaps it will be said that they have joined Amelia's star and shine for all the "silver birds" in the sky and guide them safely home."--Lezlie Kinyon
(aka)Cenizas de Rosas)

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