by Peter Tonkin
But the cannery manager, farmers and villagers had left the manager’s son as watch-keeper. He was a natural choice for watch-duty, in spite of the fact that he was just entering his teens, because he knew every nook and cranny - he had been brought up there and was possessively protective of the place. And he was too small to be of much help in Baya City. A keen and ambitious lad, named Bambang after Suharto’s son for reasons of political insurance rather than paternal affection by an over-careful father, shortly before the general’s fall from power, the manager’s son saw the two men staggering down the muddy slope towards the cannery. He paused on his patrol. Looked at the clearly demarcated boundary and the notice announcing private property which they were clearly ignoring. Then, fired by all the righteous indignation of a young man who felt that the factory was not only his own private property but also his home, he ran out at once to confront them.
Fortunately, Bambang recognized Sailendra at once, and only an instant before he also recognized the symptoms of gassing. The details of the effect that nitrogen has on a victim of gassing may differ significantly from those of carbon monoxide, but the broad brushstrokes are the same. Certainly Bambang never doubted what he was seeing. Of course he had attended his father’s lecture on how to use the first-aid equipment soon after it had all arrived in the cannery, he had helped the maintenance man put it all safely away in the organic-chip area, and he had secretly tested the oxygen on himself once or twice, marvelling at the sudden burst of energy the gas had given him. So he knew exactly what he had to do with the staggering, gasping man who also happened to be his prince.
‘This way, Your Princeliness. You must come this way,’ he said, taking the dead man by the arm and aiding the staggering Sailendra with all his wiry strength. Fortunately, the organic-chip area was the nearest of the cannery’s rambling sections. It had a big sliding door that Bambang pulled wide, as though his prince was a Mac truck. He ran on ahead of the stumbling prince, heading for the security cage at the back of the hangar-wide space. It was never locked, in spite of his father’s security consciousness. Bambang swung the wire door wide and grabbed the two red-painted oxygen cylinders. They were about the same length as the boy’s arm, and too wide for him to grasp with fingers and thumb. So he tucked one under his arm and cradled the other like a baby, returning at a run to the kneeling man who seemed to be held upright only by the arm reaching back to the mud-crusted bundle of his dead friend.
Bambang pushed the triangular mask of the first against the prince’s face and hit the button that released the gas. Prince Sailendra gasped a great breath. His left arm swung up and Bambang pushed the bottle into his hand. When he was certain that the prince could - and would - continue to hold it in place, Bambang went to check on the other man. He did not seem to be breathing at all, but because he seemed to be the prince’s friend, Bambang persisted. And the pressure from the oxygen bottle filled Parang’s flaccid lungs exactly as the nitrogen from the system was designed to fill the chip bags. Parang shuddered as though the oxygen held a considerable electrical charge. Bambang took a sniff of the almost magic gas himself, then settled seriously to work.
Sailendra really realized he was alive when he began to feel the pain in his head. Dead princes do not feel as though they have been hit repeatedly with a heavy club. For some reason he could not quite fathom, his shoulder and arm were stiff and painful too. Some sort of recognition of his surroundings began to swim in through the mists. Not detailed, for he had never been in this section of the factory before, but an increasingly lively awareness of where he must be. And when, after some uncounted time, he felt able to look down, he recognized the lean, intelligent face of the manager’s son. He said nothing for a considerable time longer, however, fearing that if he took the mask away from his nose and mouth, even to say thank you, he would pass out.
And so continued one of the strangest parts of Sailendra’s life: the hundred hours - give or take - for which he was away from Baya City. The hundred hours in which on every level, things on Pulau Baya went from very bad indeed to incalculably, unimaginably worse.
To Sailendra it seemed that, trapped here as he was to begin with, the fight to save his island was reduced to its barest essential - the fight to save his friend. But then, as he began to get some freedom of movement, it widened into a fight to solve the terrible mystery of what had happened on the paddy fields. Then the battle to make sure the same fate did not overtake the elderly, women and children in the village beyond the cannery and the farms. The almost fatal effort to get the truck back on the road. And finally the fire on the mountain.
As soon as he dared, Sailendra pulled the mask away from his face. He took great heaving gasps of the air in the shed, confident that it must at least be wholesome or the boy would not look so bright. His head began to reel again, but he fought the dizziness and the nausea. It was clear that Parang was in a very bad way still. The less oxygen Sailendra needed, the more there would be to help his friend.
‘You have saved our lives, young man,’ he gasped at last. ‘Thank you.’
‘I am Bambang, son to the manager here. It was my duty, Your Highness. But your friend is still very ill, Your Highness. According to the health and safety manual we should summon a doctor.’
There was a glimmer of hope in Sailendra’s heart powerful enough to ease his headache for a moment. ‘There is a doctor? Where is the doctor?’
‘He has gone to Baya City with the others.’
‘A pity.’ The headache thumped back. But then another thought: ‘How would one summon him, however? Is there a telephone? A radio?’
‘A telephone. But it has not worked for a couple of days. I can run to the village and see if anyone there could help but everyone strong, well trained and capable has gone to Baya City. I could fetch my mother.’
Sailendra thought about it. Any contact would be welcome.
But Bambang continued his thought: ‘Except that there are three dead dogs on the road to the village. I have never seen such a thing before, and I am concerned that what has attacked you might have killed them.’
‘We need a meter or monitor. Did one come with this kit?’
‘Yes! I had not thought of that! There is a clean-air monitor. I will fetch it at once.’
The monitor turned out to be a simple little hand-held battery-powered box with a needle designed to move across a scale marked in red and green. It measured the presence - or lack - of oxygen in the immediate atmosphere. And so was just as well able to check for carbon monoxide or for nitrogen. Sailendra took it at once and switched it on. The needle settled safely in the green. The prince pulled himself to his feet and crossed to the wide-open door with hardly a stagger or a stumble. He pushed the monitor to arm’s length in the bright afternoon air outside and waved it around as best as he could, given the fact that he had pulled most of the muscles on that side by dragging Parang here. The needle stayed in the green. He stepped out and looked downhill to the narrow beach and the sea. The sea-breeze fluttered in his face and faded. He stepped right outside, turned determinedly left and crossed the front of the building to the car park. This wire-walled enclosure overlooked the road that led down to the village. A dusty track that split a kilometre or so away to send a branch up towards the pass and the upper road that he had driven along this morning. Thus he discovered the three dead dogs Bambang had mentioned. And learned that when the monitor’s needle went into the red it sounded a piercing alarm.
Sailendra tested that alarm considerably during the next half-hour as he explored the outer limits of the bubble of safe air around the cannery. Then he returned to the nascent chip-packing facility and slid the door shut. ‘We’re trapped for the moment, Bambang. Can we move Parang to an upper storey? Is there a bed for the watchman or anything like that?’
They moved the still inert secretary with some difficulty to the offices on the upper floor. The upper offices seemed to be half afterthought, half ship’s bridge in design, a set of clapboard prefabs s
itting on top of the main factory building, accessible via a spiral stair that led through a rough-cut hole in its ceiling. There was a watchman’s facility up here, a toilet, a basin, a grudging shower and a fold-away bed. Here the three spent the night. Sailendra paced restlessly, working his stiff shoulder and massaging his aching head until he collapsed into a chair and sank into a deep sleep, snoring gently and regally. While this was going on, the ever-amenable Bambang did the nursing, secretly and excitedly locked in a death-defying adventure fit for repeating to his grandchildren, in time. And his parents in the meantime. The fact that he was increasingly hungry simply added to the sense of adventure. There were several thousand tins of mixed fruit in the warehouse below so he could afford to luxuriate in the feeling, knowing he could easily sort things out if it all became too much. And the hunger distracted him from the worrying possibility, which the prince did not yet seem to have registered, that there might be more than dead dogs lying on the road down to the village. That the village itself, indeed, and all who used to live in it, might be dead.
The oxygen ran out at midnight, but the prince’s friend seemed to be breathing more easily then. After a while, having checked and double-checked, Bambang went down and opened a tin of golden mangoes, eating and drinking as he climbed back to his lookout. In the distance he could see the fires and oil lamps that told him the village was safe for the moment. With his heart pounding with relief, he lit the big signal torch that told his anxious mother that he too was fine, and went to bed like a faithful hound, on the floor between the prince and the prince’s friend.
Chapter 19: Fire
The three were awoken by Bambang’s mother. She was doing as she did every morning - bringing breakfast to her son. She had walked up from the village bearing a basket of flat breads and fruit with a screw-top jar full of fresh goat’s milk. She had seen the dead dogs, but had noticed no ill-effects upon herself, and was surprised that they should expect her to have felt any. By the same token, if she was surprised to find her son sharing quarters with a prince and his secretary, she did not show that either - much to Bambang’s secret chagrin. It was a bright, clear morning and the first promise of the southern monsoon had arrived, bringing a breath of fresh air to the whole of Pulau Baya’s southern coast.
Parang was still weak and sick, coughing like a case of terminal lung cancer, but he declared himself strong enough to walk back to the village with Bambang’s mother. So Bambang got to remain as a leading actor in the adventure. He locked the cannery carefully and sent the key home with Parang as a punishment to his unflappable, unimpressed mother, then he joined Sailendra when the prince, armed with the clean-air monitor, went off up the hillside once again.
With the breeze at their backs, they toiled up the slopes Sailendra had come crashing and sliding down yesterday afternoon, his path easy to see but impossible to follow as it was still running with overflowing water. Sailendra found Bambang to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand he was an interesting, energetic and enthusiastic companion, full of insight into his own small world and inexhaustible in his desire to impart it. On the other, of course, he could not be the equal in discussion that Sailendra needed. Bambang had none of Parang’s knowledge or insight. He could not be expected to hold his own in anything to do with political necessities or practicalities. He could not be trusted to accept an opinion of political weight and guarantee to keep it secret at any price in order to protect his prince. And Sailendra needed to have that conversation and discuss those opinions, for he was all too well aware that Councillor Kerian would not be wasting these precious hours that the prince was absent from the political arena. Furthermore, the reason Sailendra was extending that dangerous absence was so that he could find out what had killed the people in the paddies. And here he found himself hesitant to expose the voluble but overpoweringly innocent child to the grosser horrors of mortality.
Sailendra found himself considering the corpses in the flooding paddies from a distance, therefore, allowing Bambang to catalogue little more than seeming bundles of sopping rags. Likewise, when they reached the truck, frozen in a half-slide towards a particularly precipitous series of paddy fields, he kept the pair of them far further back than he would have kept Parang and himself, had the trusted secretary been here.
The alarm on the clean-air monitor began to sound once they started following the road above the paddies, but every time Sailendra raised the shrilling monitor to check how far into the red the needle had moved, it fell back into the green once again. And the intermittent insistence of the new-born southern monsoon wind gave him the confidence to proceed. For this road led along the back of the paddies, just beneath the high ridge of the watershed to the jungle village housing the rice workers.
Sailendra found that the nearer he came to the village, the slower he moved, fearing that he would suddenly present Bambang with a sight so horrible that it would scar the ebullient youth for life. But the huts appeared with nothing more sinister than the occasional shrilling of the monitor. The occasions seemed closer together, but apart from that, there was little to worry Sailendra at first. The huts stood in an overhanging jungle clearing around a central longhouse, for the mountain people were of Dyak ancestry just as the coastal dwellers like Kerian claimed Bugis blood. The huts stood in a circle and the longhouse stood at the centre, on its long legs - in spite of the fact that there would be little flooding here. Beneath the longhouse lay the first warning sign, however. The legs of the longhouse itself were joined together by simple fences made of woven twigs. Within the little compounds these made there were pigs and chickens, the occasional goat. And they were all lying dead on the ground. ‘Look in the huts, would you, Bambang?’ ordered Sailendra, aware that the huts were used as storerooms by the people who lived in the longhouse and worked in the paddies. So while the boy checked whether the simple staples of the village, like rice bags and cooking fuel, had survived whatever had killed the livestock, the prince ran up the notched log leading to the veranda surrounding the building and looked into the darkness of the longhouse itself. Such was his concentration that he forgot all about the clean-air monitor in his hand. He stepped into the darkness utterly unaware that he was carrying it.
The longhouse was divided into areas exactly like the animal compounds beneath, only each area up here was designed to hold a family. There were reed mats. There were the possessions clearly belonging to men and women, the toys and games belonging to children. But there were no people at all. The whole place was eerily empty. Sailendra drew in a deep - if unconsidered - breath of sheer relief. And as he did so, the whole structure seemed to shiver. The monitor began to shrill. A body crashed through the palm-thatched roof and smashed to the floor at his feet.
Sailendra was halfway down the notched-pole ladder before he really registered that the shaking had stilled again and the body was that of a gibbon. But the tremor and the shock were enough to get him in full retreat. The monitor continued to shrill, and he hit the blessedly still, solid ground, calling Bambang out of the nearest store hut. ‘Back to the road,’ yelled Sailendra, all too well aware that he was using up the last good air in his lungs, ‘RUN!’ In a sort of strange replay of yesterday’s nightmare, Sailendra ran towards the road, heart pounding already, refusing to breathe, watching Bambang scurry fearfully in front of him, already beginning to reel like Parang had yesterday. But there was one vital difference. The promising monsoon. Out on the roadway, the wind blew sufficiently steadily in from the sea to stop the monitor shrilling. But Sailendra was still concerned at being anywhere near the paddy fields and so he urged Bambang to keep running and stayed at the boy’s heels.
They had slowed to a jog by the time they reached the shallow valley across the track where the road had been washed away and the truck had crashed yesterday. It was dry now, and gave firm footing to half a dozen elderly men from the village who bowed formally to the prince and greeted Bambang with a great deal of affection. Parang was amongst them. ‘I thought we should at le
ast try to get the truck back on the road,’ he explained, breathlessly after completing his greetings and his thanks to both for their parts in saving his life. ‘If we can, it will speed up our return to Baya City.’
‘We must take these people with us if we can,’ added Sailendra. ‘I don’t like what’s going on here. Did you feel that tremor an hour or so ago?’
‘Yes. The villagers say there were other tremors yesterday. Do you think they have anything to do with what is leaking through the paddies?’
Sailendra nodded grimly. ‘It’s not just through the paddies. There are pockets of gas all over the place. But you’re right about the truck. Have you any lifting equipment?’
‘I have the stoutest of the remaining villagers and a good strong rope.’
The villagers remained on the road under Bambang’s leadership. Cheerfully obedient to the boy’s confident plans and orders - clearly familiar with both - they let the rope down to the truck so that Sailendra and Parang could use it to let themselves down the steep, slippery slope, and to pull themselves back up if need be. The two men slid down side by side until they could transfer their handholds from the rough hemp to the wooden slats of the lorry’s tailgate. Here they looped the end of the rope round the tow hook on the rear of the chassis, planning nothing more complex than to put the truck in reverse and get the villagers to pull her up.
But to get into reverse, of course, they would have to get down the length of the vehicle, climb into the cab and turn the engine on. So, like acrobats they worked their way round the comer until they were able to climb on down the truck’s side. Sailendra was the first to lose both grip and footing, slip and start to slide. Parang grabbed at him, missed and followed suit. Luckily for the dignity - perhaps the health - of both of them, Sailendra had left the door open as well as the key in the ignition when he climbed out, so the pair were able to catch at the open door and heave themselves aboard, one after the other. Their arrival was enough to shake the vehicle, however, and it moved a good thirty centimetres further down the slope, until the villagers brought it to a halt. ‘Good,’ said Sailendra, grimly positive. ‘At least it isn’t stuck in the mud.’ He wrenched the key round in the ignition and gunned the motor brutally as soon as it caught.