~~~~~
The rising sun beamed between the trees on the eastern ridge of the valley. The light rays shone onto Bandri’s eyelids and he stirred into consciousness. He felt a wet tongue licking his face. Blinking, he smiled weakly at the puppy scrabbling over his chest.
His legs were lying in water. He raised his head and saw around him a low wall of rocks. With an effort he pushed himself up into a sitting position, and peered over the top. Between some trees near to the river, he could see smoke wafting up. His thoughts started to come together - he recalled what had happened last night and why they were in the forest.
Agung appeared with a make-shift leafy container, dripping with forest honey. As the big man trundled and splashed across the river, he grinned at Bandri, who attempted unsuccessfully to grin back.
“How’s your leg?”
“I.. I don’t know,” he mumbled, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. He coughed and looked down at the enlarged leg and discoloured foot. “It’s swollen.” The numbing ache seemed to start right then.
Bandri looked up into the face of the man standing over him. The depth of feeling was too intense and they broke eye contact. His friend bent over to dip a coconut shell into the river water. Bandri swallowed several mouthfulls from the shell placed to his lips. Sensation tingled back into his tongue.
“Thank you,” he mumbled more lucidly.
He knew that he owed his life to Agung, but knew not what to say.
“I’ll try to stand,” he said instead.
“Rest,” ordered his guardian, grinning at him. “You need a good meal.”
Agung picked up the small bow and the quiver of small arrows, and then strode into the forest, to return almost immediately. He dropped the small bow and arrows beside Bandri, grinned again and then picked up the big bow. Flinging the quiver with its long arrows over his shoulder, he disappeared again into the forest.
Scooping up the sticky honeycomb and brood with his fingers, Bandri shoved it messily into his mouth. The smooth palatable sweetness countered the dry sourness still lingering from the night before. The puppies lapped up the honey that dropped onto his chest and the pebbles underneath.
As he waited, Bandri tried to wiggle his toes. They hurt, but they wiggled. He rubbed some more honey over the blister that had developed on his ankle. Massaging his hot swollen left leg, he felt something in the pocket of his kathok. Remembering the shiny little rock, he took it out to have another look.
It was heavy in the palm of his hand, but small; about the length and thickness of his little finger. When he washed the nugget in the river the water ran right off. It seemed dry but it also seemed slippery. He knew bronze was a shiny copper-yellow colour when it was polished, but bronze turned browner when it was left. This metal was different. It was all the same colour – a polished golden-yellow.
He dipped the golden nugget in the honey, and held it up to the light. The honey clung to the nugget – it looked as if it was melting. The colours were the same, making a great golden drop of honey. He smiled, thinking that this will be a suitable gift for Ayu.
Bandri sucked the honeyed-gold clean, raising his eyebrows in pleasure.
The spit-roasted cucus marsupial served as a meal for the men and the puppies. Agung supplemented the main course with some cooked medicinal roots, a couple of ricefish caught in the river, clusters of snake fruit, a powerfully-pungent durian and a barbequed tarantula.
Bandri looked at the reddish-brown snake fruit with its scaly skin and shuddered. Agung chuckled and pinched the top of the fruit, peeling back the scaly skin to pull out the lobes inside.
“They’re good for snake bite,” his friend informed him. “I searched a long time.”
Feeling obliged, Bandri gnawed at the acidic pulp around the seeds, overcoming the astringent taste. He fared better with the durian and the tarantula, first making sure that all the hairs were burnt off the giant spider.
With a good meal inside him, Bandri announced optimistically:
“The swelling has stopped.”
He hobbled to his feet to try and lift the impossibly heavy backpack.
“Take the ore out,” said Agung, with a sad shake of his head.
“Alright,” Bandri answered, giving up the attempt. “But I’ll keep the best rock.”
“We can hide the ore,” Agung told him. “I’ll pick it up later.”
They looked around. There was a loose pile of small rocks near the river. Agung pulled the rocks to one side, leaving a deep depression in the ground. They packed the precious ore in Bandri’s pack into the hole, and then thinly covered it with river stones. Scanning the forest and mountains around them, they made a mental note of any landmarks so that they could find the place again when either of them came back for the ore.
“We need to mark the place well,” said Bandri, remembering the maze in the woods. “It could be difficult to find again.”
Close by a large granite boulder had a distinctive shape. Agung heaved and rolled it over on top of their buried horde.
“It looks like a head,” Bandri observed. “Someone has chipped at it to make it a head.”
“It feels old,” said Agung, thoughtfully running his fingers over the sculpture’s eye sockets.
“Father said the head-hunters made them.”
Bandri inspected the head, and looked around to see if there were any other signs of humanity. “No-one’s here now.”
“A spirit of the mountain?” muttered Agung.
The lonely stone statue appeared to stare back at them – a mystic survivor from the past.
“What happened to them?” mumbled Bandri, thinking now about the fragility of life.
He wondered if the poor woman had died after that gastly amputation. A few more moments of conversation with the sailors in Bitung and probably both of them would have been dead. He would have died from the snake bite – but Agung saved him.
“After the snake bite, what did you do?” he asked.
“I splashed water over you,” Agung said, turning away and pushing his hair back with both hands. “When you stopped breathing - I did it for you.”
Bandri closed his eyes for a few moments and tried to make more sense of his recollection. Opening his eyes to reveal the bright colours of the world around him, he took a deep breath and cleared his throat.
“Agu,” Bandri said, using Ayu’s soft name for her brother.
Agung looked at him.
“You saved my life – thank you.”
“Bri,” came the answer. “Not usually.”
Agung grinned and looked away again.
Bandri chuckled. He felt privileged to owe his life to this great shy man. He watched as Agung, standing with feet apart, nocked a large arrow into his big bow and drew it back at shoulder-height, aiming it somewhere into the trees. The powerful muscles in his upper body were taut, and those in his abdomen clearly defined as he turned side on. The great narra wood bow flexed mightily as he pulled the tendon bowstring back with three fingers until it touched his lips. His right hand under his chin, he focused on a target out along the shaft of the arrow.
“What will happen if I kill a monkey?”
Bandri followed the line of the arrow to see a crested macaque sitting on a far away branch. It was a small target at such a distance and one that most men would not be able to hit, let alone reach. The hairy black monkey had a long hairless nose and as it raided the eggs from a bird’s nest it would appear to have a smug grin on its face. The Malay considered that monkey spirits were contentious; some tribes thought monkeys might be regarded as ancestor spirits, and some tribes thought they might be partner spirits to living people, although Bandri was not inclined to believe either idea.
“If it’s an animal spirit it will affect no-one?” answered Bandri, not especially perturbed by the subject.
“Or someone might die?” Agung said, still holding the drawn bow as if he was a statue. He closed one eye and slightly adjusted the angle t
o allow for distance.
“If it’s an ancestor it may make no difference to what happens,” mused Bandri.
“If I shoot it - whatever happens can’t be changed.”
“So time is like an arrow,” suggested Bandri, drifting philosophically along with the idea. “If you release the arrow it goes into the future, and we will discover what happens.”
“What if it’s the partner spirit for -”, Agung growled the last word and let loose the arrow. “- Yasan?!”
With a sharp thrum from the bow the arrow flashed silently away in a barely perceptible low arc. In the distance the spirit tumbled out of the tree with limbs splayed loosely, dead before it hit the ground.
The Tropical Sun - Belief, Love and Hate Page 7