Pele Sends Her Sister Hiʻiaka to Fetch a Lover

Pele hears a drum in her sleep.

She is resting in the caldera at Kīlauea, lying in the volcanic rock that is her bed, and across the water from the island of Kauaʻi comes the sound of a hula drum and a voice singing. The voice belongs to Lohiʻau, a young chief of extraordinary beauty who dances on the cliff edge of his island as if the Pacific wind were a partner. Pele’s spirit leaves her body and travels north. She finds him. She dances with him in spirit form, and he knows — the way people in these stories always know — that his dancing partner is something more than human.

They are together for three days. Then Pele must return to her body.

She tells Lohiʻau she will send someone to bring him to her. He waits. He waits until the waiting kills him — or almost kills him; the stories vary. When the messenger arrives he may be a ghost, may need to be revived, may be tangled in the complications of a death that grief caused. What is not in doubt is the mission.

Pele calls her youngest sister, Hiʻiaka-i-ka-poli-o-Pele — Hiʻiaka-in-the-bosom-of-Pele, the sister she loves most. She makes Hiʻiaka two promises: that Hiʻiaka’s dearest friend Hōpoe will be kept safe at home, and that if Hiʻiaka succeeds, Pele will reward her. She makes Hiʻiaka one demand: do not touch Lohiʻau. He belongs to Pele.

Hiʻiaka sets out. She has forty days to make the journey to Kauaʻi and back.

The journey is a descent through everything Hawaiʻi contains that is dangerous. Hiʻiaka fights the mo’o — the great water lizards who lurk in pools and consume travelers. She defeats them with lightning she carries in her pā’ū skirt, striking the creatures dead in flash after flash of divine electricity. She navigates sorcerers who do not want her passing, chiefs who want to detain her, supernatural obstacles that the landscape seems to generate as if it knows what she is carrying back.

She reaches Lohiʻau. He is dead, his spirit wandering. She climbs the cliff, finds the spirit, guides it back into the body, speaks the words that restart a life. He opens his eyes and sees Hiʻiaka.

What follows is the complication. He is beautiful and she has saved him and they travel back together across the islands over weeks of journey, and Hiʻiaka does not touch him. She honors her sister’s claim exactly, precisely, painfully. She watches him and does not take what she could take, because she is a person of her word even when her word costs everything.

Pele, back on Kīlauea, becomes jealous of the delay. She cannot see what her sister is doing — only that they are traveling together, slowly. Jealousy is one of the things the volcano is made of. She sends lava to Hōpoe’s grove and kills Hiʻiaka’s dearest friend. She destroys the grove. She destroys the dance.

Hiʻiaka arrives. She finds what has been done to Hōpoe. She looks at Pele. She looks at Lohiʻau standing beside her. And then she does the one thing she was forbidden to do: she takes his hand. Not secretly — openly, in full view of her sister’s fire. She holds Lohiʻau and lets Pele see.

It is not love triumphant. It is grief finding the shape of defiance. It is Hiʻiaka saying: if you will break your promise, I will break mine.

The volcano erupts. The story does not end cleanly; it ends the way relationships end, with damage on all sides and a reckoning that comes in the shape of other stories, other chants, other versions of the same argument that Pele and Hiʻiaka have been having since the fire and the forest grew up side by side.