The Sacrifice

by Joanna Orwin

  Taka waited on the hill as Utaru returned to the beach. He saw Matu’s shoulders slump as he accepted the god stick. When Kai made a gesture of defiance, he knew his cousin would never Understand the choice he’d made. He saw the others join Kai in refusing to leave, and realized they were hoping he would change his mind. If his companions learnt of his careless betrayal, knew what he’d risked, they would see his decision as inevitable and undeserving of any recognition. Unlike them, he was a false hero. That sense of separation overwhelmed him. His body began to shake uncontrollably, but he would not falter.

  Taka waited alone on the hill until the brightening sky warned that dawn was near. The Travellers should be on their way. But below him on the beach, the four young men still stood facing in his direction, although he suspected they couldn’t see him against the rocks and tall grasses. He saw the Mara leader talk to Kai, then embrace him. He saw his cousin turn and make his way slowly into the water. One by one, the four Travellers boarded their canoe without him. He watched as they turned in his direction and silently saluted him with raised paddles. Only then did he step forward onto a rock outcrop where he thought they would see him and raise his arms in a responding farewell. He heard Matu’s voice coming faintly up to him as he gave the order to paddle. He waited, arms raised until they took the first reluctant strokes. Not until their paddling settled into a steady stroke rate did Taka lower his arms and step back from the rock outcrop.

  He watched the double canoe reach the opening to the passage to the sea. In his mind, he went with them, imagining them negotiate the narrow passage, then venture back out onto the Great Ocean, heading for home.

  ‘Take care of yourselves, my friends,’ he said out loud. ‘Tanga be with you.’ He felt his words take wing across the waves. A squall of rain swept across the passage opening, blotting it from view. The first warm drops caressed his cheek as he watched the waters of the harbour darken below him. A stir of air spread a ripple of silver across the tall grasses, then a sheet of rain fell over him like a cloak. Unheeding, he stood without moving until the rain passed. The harbour came back into view. Its waters were empty. The canoe and its occupants had gone. Only then did the tears come.

  Chapter 21

  The last months of winter dragged. The sun shone warm each day and it seldom rained, but Taka didn’t notice the balmy weather or the bright tropical flowers that bloomed in Sanctuary’s gardens. He didn’t notice the flourishing creeper twining its tendrils above his door, each night opening great swags of fragile cream bells that filled his room with heavy fragrance. Above Sanctuary, the mountain sent out ever denser plumes of vapour that was now mixed with ash. The evening sky over the island often flared crimson streaked with purple, and a thin layer of grey ash sifted onto the roofs and seeped into corners in the streets. The steam columns in the gathering place wailed incessantly. The inhabitants looked up anxiously as the mountain rumbled and protected themselves from the restless fire-demons with amulets and invocations. Cocooned by grief in a space that was colourless, soundless and without scent, Taka noticed none of this.

  Although the nights were fresh and cool, he tossed and turned, unable to sleep except in fitful bursts filled with vivid dreams. Dreams of the canoe sailing free on the Great Ocean, Matu at the helm, his long hair flying in the wind. Dreams of Kai, his face filled with sorrow, gazing back at a receding island, dark and forbidding. Such dreams were interspersed with grey, misted images of the sand dunes and swamps of a home where familiar figures had blurred features he could no longer recognize. It was always dusk in these dreams. Most mornings, he woke with tears still wet on his cheeks, his limbs weighted by sorrow and regret.

  Each day, he forced himself from his cot and trudged along to the Mister’s courtyard where he knew the boys would be waiting for him, their bright faces eager, their bodies filled with an energy he no longer shared. Each day, he forced himself to continue their training and design new routines for them as their skills developed. Although he tried hard to convince himself he’d gained all he had ever wanted, that Hina’s prophecy had been correct after all, such a destiny now tasted of dust. The loneliness that had beset him ever since he moved to the spear carriers’ quarters grew deeper. He told himself that he needed time to adjust to his new circumstances and form a real attachment to this still-alien island world of enclosed harbour and fire-breathing mountain — and to its people.

  His only consolation was the nights he spent with the Mister’s daughter. When Cleo discovered he’d not left with the others, that he was still in Sanctuary, she assumed he’d stayed for her sake. She was tender and loving towards him, and he didn’t have the heart or the strength to tell her the truth, to risk her withdrawing her favours and treating him with disdain. He put aside the knowledge that, come the rainy season, she would marry Choi Yu, that whatever kindnesses she showed him now couldn’t last. He suppressed the part of his brain that still suspected she was toying with him. The future would take care of itself.

  His waking hours he spent longing for the night, hoping she would send for him. When Thorssen escorted him to and from her room his face was impassive, though Taka sensed the man’s pity for his helpless enslavement. He no longer cared. Cleo was all that stood between him and the prison of his isolation, and the moments of forgetting were sufficient compensation for the dreary daytime hours.

  Then, without warning, even that consolation was denied. Day after day passed by, and the Mister’s daughter no longer sent for him. He lost his appetite, and when he wasn’t training his little dance troupe he wandered aimlessly along the shoreline. No matter how much he gazed out across the waters of the harbour, Tanga failed to reveal any sign of his presence. Taka grew thin, and the fire that lit his own dancing began to fade. The hard-won freedom from tradition he’d craved was no longer enough to spark his imagination into producing innovative dance forms. He struggled to find ways of incorporating elements of this fire-goddess’s realm into his performance, even though he knew that was what the Mister expected. He tried to convince himself that his creativity would return with the renewal of life brought by the rainy season.

  Then, for the first time in weeks, Thorssen came to take him to the Mister’s daughter. He lay with her among the tumbled soft mats, his desire quenched, his mind empty of thought. Content to lie in her arms until she sent him back to his quarters, he didn’t notice that she was unusually silent.

  After some time, Cleo took his hand, placed it on the curve of her belly and held it there. Taka felt a pulse stir beneath the skin. Startled, he snatched his hand away. Raising himself on his elbow, he looked at her searchingly, questions tumbling through his head.

  Cleo looked back, unsmiling. ‘A new life grows inside me.’

  ‘You’re pregnant?’ Taka exclaimed, then felt stupid when she didn’t reply. He swung his legs over the side of the sleeping platform and sat there, trying to make sense of his whirling thoughts. She watched him, not saying a word.

  ‘What happens now?’ he asked eventually.

  She shrugged. ‘The baby will grow some more and then I’ll give birth.’

  For the first time her games exasperated him. ‘Be serious. Does your father know? How will he take it?’

  She shrugged again. ‘He’s the Mister, I’m his daughter. I was meant to win him political gain from a strategic marriage.’

  Taka noted the past tense. He asked cautiously, ‘So the marriage arranged with Choi Yu won’t take place now?’ A sudden hope nudged him. If she wouldn’t be marrying Choi Yu, would she be staying in Sanctuary? Did this mean there was some chance for them after all? He had a fleeting image of himself leaning over her while she nursed their baby.

  ‘What do you think?’ Cleo laughed harshly. ‘Not even that barbarian would want me now.’

  Taka picked up a note of triumph in her voice. All those words of warning surged back into his head. He stared at her, shocked, the blood drumming its beat in his ears. Had she planned this all along?

  Cleo nod
ded. ‘I saw a chance to escape my fate and took it.’ There was no remorse in her tone. ‘Unlike you — you had your chance to escape yours, but chose not to take it.’

  He asked again, his voice flat. ‘What now?’

  Cleo raised her eyebrows, no sign of tenderness in her expression. ‘That’s hardly your concern. You’d better go. It’s almost dawn.’

  ‘Will you be all right?’ he asked, hovering, still hoping for some small sign of affection. ‘What about your father?’

  ‘My father dotes on me.’ She laughed harshly again. ‘He won’t be angry with me for long. I’m Pere’s living descendant. No one tangles with the fire-goddess. Nothing will happen to me.’

  As he followed Thorssen back to his quarters, his mind in turmoil, a desolate Taka registered the rumblings from the mountain for the first time. The spear carrier stopped in his tracks, and they both looked up as a huge ash cloud billowed from the fire-goddess’s hidden mouth. Dense, the colour of dirty sea foam against the dawn sky, blood-streaked where it was lit by the fires below, the cloud writhed as though it was alive. The steam columns moaned, a high-pitched keening that hurt Taka’s ears.

  Thorssen touched the amulet he wore around his neck and muttered a short invocation. He looked at the fire-jewel necklace Taka hadn’t found the energy to remove since the Travellers left and shook his head slowly. ‘Don’t think for a moment that will protect you now. The fire-demons grow ever more restless. The fire-goddess will need placating.’

  As the season of rains approached, the mountain continued to send up clouds of billowing ash. Most, though, was deposited on the uninhabited, far side of the island, carried there by the prevailing winds. Thorssen told Taka this might be a good sign, that the fire-goddess could yet prove merciful, but he couldn’t summon enough energy to take any hope from this. Cleo’s betrayal and abandonment were spiralling him down into a pit of despair. None of the consolations he’d thought would be his were left. The Mister no longer sent for him to perform in the evenings, even though he was expected to continue his training of the boys. Instead, his young troupe danced before Mister Goddard and his retinue, and were showered with small gifts and delicacies. The food now brought to Taka in his own room — the spear carriers refused to eat with him — was coarse-grained and meagre, scraps served on battered platters.

  Other than Thorssen, the spear carriers stayed well clear of him. Not even Harris would meet his eye. He would return to his room to find yet another of his small comforts had been removed, a soft mat, the stool, the oil lamp. The spear carriers made it clear in such petty ways that the Mister had ordered the withdrawal of even the humblest hospitality provided an unwelcome guest. Nothing overt was said, but Taka knew with a dull certainty that the Mister was merely biding his time. When it suited him, he would take full and public revenge as retribution for the defilement of his daughter and his humiliating loss of face with Choi Yu.

  Taka didn’t see Cleo again after that night, and no longer had any desire to do so. The inhabitants of Sanctuary took care not to venture near him and kept their children well away, so when he set off on his solitary walks along the beach or went to bathe in the mineral pool, forced into reluctant action by the confines of his empty room, he felt surrounded by an invisible, uncrossable barrier. Thorssen thought to comfort him by explaining that he shouldn’t see such treatment as personal. ‘You stand on a dangerous threshold between the ordinary world and the realm of the gods.’ He glanced up uneasily at the mountain, no longer professing to believe its activity was in any way benign. ‘You’re a sea-person, a creature of Tanga, yet Pere is claiming you as her own. People don’t know how to react to you, so they choose to avoid you.’

  Although Taka wondered why the spear carrier could possibly think he might find comfort in such knowledge, he was resigned to whatever fate the gods decided for him. His despair was giving way to indifference.

  The days drifted by, with increasing heat and sudden downpours of rain most afternoons. The mountain’s mood became more violent. Jagged bursts of lightning slashed the blackness of the sultry night sky, fastening the building column of ash cloud to the heavens with twisted ropes of fleeting white fire. The underbelly of the writhing cloud was streaked with ever-deeper crimson and flares of amber. The buildings of Sanctuary shook almost constantly as the mountain rumbled. The sun hid its face.

  Then Thorssen told him he was to be removed to the outskirts of the settlement. ‘People don’t want you here any more, in their midst, lest the fire-goddess takes it into her head to come herself to fetch you.’

  So Taka was once more sleeping in the abandoned hen house. Without the company of the Travellers, its dim interior, sagging roof, and rotting straw held no attraction, but he was relieved to be away from the averted eyes and turned backs of the inhabitants of Sanctuary. He spent much of his time curled up in a ball on the one coarse mat Thorssen brought him, passing the slow hours in a state that hovered between sleep and wakefulness. He scarcely touched the unappetizing food thrust through the doorway once each day.

  It was to the hen house, with its echoing absence of his companions and everything dear to him, that the black-robed priests of Pere at last came. It was there that his god-dictated destiny was revealed. Instead of someone chosen from among the Mara people, Taka would take central place in the sacred ritual that heralded the renewal of the island’s fertility with the coming of the rains.

  He listened to the priests’ solemn words without emotion.

  On a moonless night after the rain ceased and lightning whipped its brilliant strands of white fire across the black sky, on a night when the fire-demons flung glowing swathes of rich scarlet and orange up into the turbulent ash cloud, on a night when the fire-goddess roared her incessant claim, Taka was led up the mountain.

  At the entrance to a path beyond the cultivated slopes and terraces, the black-robed priests clothed him in fire-colours. Their hands unexpectedly gentle, they fastened a stiff skirt of scarlet bark cloth around his hips, then draped a heavy cape of black and yellow feathers across his shoulders, leaving his chest bare to reveal the necklace of fire-jewels. They knelt to bind feathered leggings around his shins and slipped his feet into woven sandals. Finally, they set a tall cap of scarlet plumes on his head. As the stiff garments settled around him like a carapace, Taka forced his weakened body to stand upright and bear the weight.

  With the priests beating a slow rhythm on muffled drums, he was led on up the mountain. The spear carriers followed behind in silence, clad in their full leather regalia, spears in their hands, knives sheathed on their belts. He knew Thorssen and Harris were among them, for they had told him they would be. Both were gruff and grim-faced as usual, but their voices had been sympathetic. He drew some little strength from their presence, the only men in Sanctuary who’d shown him any kindness.

  Up and up the small procession climbed, moving slowly along a path now grey with ash and rough with cinders. Ahead he could see people lining the way, still figures in the dark night. As the procession approached them he saw they were the Mara, and recognized among them Rauwai and the others with whom he’d dug kuma tubers and shared food around the fire. It seemed a long time ago. When the priests leading him reached them, the waiting Mara prostrated themselves. Only Utaru remained standing. As Taka passed through them, he heard a soft murmur rise and fall, barely audible against the roar of the mountain: men’s and women’s voices blending in a solemn song of farewell.

  Utaru stepped forward, and the priests halted. They drew back to leave Taka facing the Mara leader. His dark eyes so like Moho’s, his face grave but kind, Utaru reached out and placed a wreath of foliage around Taka’s neck. ‘Rongo go with you. We, the Mara honour you. This day will not be forgotten. Rongo go with you.’

  Taka bowed his head as the Mara song of farewell swelled. If he deserved their honour, it was only now, in this final act of redemption. The roar of the mountain diminished, then faded away. The Mara song flowed around him, filling the hollow c
hambers of his heart. A deep calm enveloped him. He raised his eyes and met Utaru’s steady gaze. For a long moment the strong ties of kinship connected them, an almost tangible, many-stranded rope binding them together. He felt renewed strength travel along this rope and build in every muscle, every sinew; he felt his spine straighten, his head lift. The weight of the carapace he bore fell away and he stood tall.

  The moment passed. Utaru saluted him and stepped back. No words were needed.

  Now the priests were leading him on. The Mara people dropped behind. Only the bleak, black rocks of the slopes leading to the summit stretched before him. The mountain remained voiceless, an eerie silence after the days of booming sound.

  At the summit, seated on a bench built up of slabs of black volcanic stone, the Mister and his retinue were waiting. Shadowed silhouettes against the blood-shot vapour rising from a gaping chasm behind them. Taka couldn’t see their faces, but knew that the Mister’s daughter was not among them.

  When one of the priests prodded him in the back, he stepped forward obediently. Directly in front of him, the huge mouth of the fire-goddess yawned. Thick lips of rock were striated and banded in dense blacks, sultry reds and dull ochres. Her coarse black tongue protruded, the low cliff of its pronged tip lying just beyond him, crusted and still smoking with heat. All around him, her dense, ashen breath swirled and rolled, forming a giant, flame-shot column that towered high above the summit into the sky, then spread like a canopy over the whole island. The fire-goddess. He absorbed all he saw and felt no fear.

  He could sense the Mister watching him closely. For a long time nothing was said, then the Mister spoke. Taka had been told what would happen, and he hardly heard the words now. He was in the hands of the fire-goddess and long past caring what became of him.