Savages

by Shirley Conran

  Annie looked around at the three other blood-smeared faces. They all realized how she was suffering at that moment—but Annie had drawn the longest piece of rattan. She had no choice. If she waited, it would get worse. Trying to help, Silvana encouraged her, “Do it like you cut my finger off.”

  Annie thought, How frightening Suzy had become now that she was no longer alive. She picked up Suzy’s limp hand, shuddering as she did.

  Patty shook her head. “Fingers have no flesh.” She pointed to Suzy’s naked buttocks, covered with saltwater sores.

  Annie shook her head.

  “Get on with it,” Patty snarled.

  Forcing her fingers to do it, Annie plunged the knife, cutting deeply into Suzy’s left thigh. The blood oozed over her hands as she hacked off a three-inch cube of raw flesh. Using the center seat as a chopping block, she cut it into four pieces, then grimly impaled the first one on the blunted end of her fish knife. She offered it to Patty.

  Patty took the piece of flesh, but hesitated.

  “Go on. Eat it!” Annie was shaking with resentment as she said it.

  Patty finally took a bite. Before she was able to chew it, she vomited. Pink froth dripped from her mouth.

  The other women waited.

  Patty took another bite. This time, she was able to keep it down.

  With slowly grinding jaws, unable to look at each other, the women chewed the small chunks, which tasted like uncooked pork. They ate very little. The thought of what they were doing was almost as bad as death itself.

  Patty croaked, “Sailors eat the heart and liver first—eat them warm. Then they dress the body like a deer.”

  With what strength she had left, Annie shrieked, “I’m not going to disembowel her!” She threw down her knife.

  Carey started to weep. “I can’t stand her staring eyes.”

  None of them could.

  “Sailors usually cut the head off,” Patty said.

  Two hours later, this is what Annie did. Patty put the head in the forward locker, because if it were thrown overboard, the excited sharks might overturn the boat in their feeding frenzy.

  “Let’s put it all in the locker,” Patty said. “So we can’t see it.”

  As Annie hacked at the body and dismembered it, Patty pushed each bloody limb into the locker. The dinghy was left in a ghastly condition, covered in glistening black blood that had already started to stink.

  “We don’t dare wash the boat down. Sharks,” Patty said.

  The women were all relieved that they no longer had to look at Suzy’s body. That afternoon they cut the raw meat into strips. They put the strips to dry on the seats in the sun. Dried, it would last longer. The women moved very slowly. Their unwilling arms seemed heavily weighted as they reluctantly prepared their food. Each woman’s unspoken thought was, Who will be next? Will somebody kill me in the night? Will three of them overpower me?

  Later, an even worse thought occurred to Annie: Will I be the last survivor? Will I rock in this terrible blood-blackened boat, roasting to death in the sun, surrounded by dead, swelling, decomposing bodies like the body of the soldier who had reeked of the sweet, foul odor of death at the bottom of the cave shaft?

  Hardly anyone spoke that day. Annie could see that they were nervous and on edge. Through the slits in her hood she watched the others. She was afraid to sleep. Suzy had not known what was going to happen to her. Her fate had been decided by whispers in the dark.

  The red sun glared down on the little white, bloodstained boat.

  Eventually, worn out, Annie could no longer keep awake. Her head lolled sideways. She was asleep.

  * * *

  “Wake up! Wake up!”

  Someone was shaking Annie’s shoulder. She opened her eyes.

  In the pearly light of dawn Carey was pointing. “Turtles. Quick!”

  Annie shook her head clear and sat up. Her mouth fell open. Incredulously she whispered, “Suzy!”

  Carey glanced at the little figure asleep in the bow.

  “Suzy had quite a good night. I don’t want to wake her. Take the other oar, Annie. We’ve got to catch one of those turtles! For God’s sake, Annie, move!”

  A hundred yards distant, three turtle heads protruded from the water.

  “But Suzy is alive,” Annie gasped.

  “Of course Suzy is alive,” Carey said irritably. “Quick, take the other oar and row with me to the turtles.”

  Crouched in the center of the boat, Patty and Silvana were hastily twisting all their pieces of rattan into one long length.

  Annie started to tremble. Her dream had been so vivid! Since they had been in the dinghy, all the women had slept badly. Restlessly, they gabbled nonsense in their sleep. They all had terrifying nightmares.

  Carey croaked, “Grab an oar. Hurry up! Patty has a plan!”

  “Where have all the sharks gone?” Annie asked, looking around.

  “Don’t know. Found a better picnic. Pull hard!” Carey gasped.

  As the dinghy drew alongside the first turtle, it turned its head and looked disdainfully at the anxious, gaunt faces peering over the gunwale. Turtles are very clever creatures, and it is almost impossible to catch a turtle from a dinghy. On a beach, as Jonathan had demonstrated, you can simply turn a turtle on its back—hence the expression “turned turtle”—but in the water, turtles are agile, swift and difficult to struggle with. In a fight, their horny claws are vicious.

  The turtle dived out of sight, with a beautiful, energetic swoop into the deep blue water, until it was invisible in the dark depths of the ocean.

  “No use trying to hit them on the head with the anchor, because they would simply swim away,” Patty explained to Annie. “So we’re going to lasso one.”

  They approached the second turtle.

  As it swam, the women rowed alongside the creature. Patty and Silvana, both roped by the waist to the center thwart, leaned over the side.

  It took only two attempts before they managed to fling the loop of their lasso over the turtle’s rear end. They pulled the rope tight.

  Leaning dangerously over the side, Silvana pulled the turtle toward the dinghy while Patty started to wind the line around its dangerously powerful rear flippers, working as fast as she could.

  Like rolling wool into a ball, Patty wound the line around the turtle’s rear flippers. Then she wound it around the front flippers. Eventually, the creature was immobilized.

  Wincing with the pain of the saltwater on her raw left hand, Patty helped Silvana slowly drag the turtle into the dinghy, avoiding all its attempts to bite them. Carey counterbalanced the boat by leaning against the opposite side.

  The turtle fell into the boat, and Patty and Silvana collapsed, exhausted. With Annie’s help, Carey quickly turned the creature on its back. As Carey cut the throat, Annie caught the blood in their bailer. With horror, she again remembered her nightmare.

  “Suzy first,” Patty said, carefully ladling a little blood into an inverted bamboo stopper. She handed it to Carey. “Don’t look so nauseated. Think of it as gravy that hasn’t been cooked. Drinking that blood may save Suzy’s life.”

  “Weighs about thirty-five pounds,” Silvana guessed, looking at the turtle. “Lucky it isn’t bigger, or we wouldn’t have had the strength to heave it aboard.”

  Using the anchor, Silvana and Carey broke open the turtle shell.

  As they forced down shreds of raw meat, Patty croaked, “I can’t understand how I could ever have eaten steak tartare.”

  “It’s disgusting,” Silvana agreed.

  Annie said, “I’m not complaining; it’s the first real food we’ve had for seven days.”

  Carey said nothing. Kneeling in the bow, she was trying to push some of the flesh past Suzy’s clenched teeth and into her mouth.

  “We’d better cut the turtle up fast and dry it before dark,” Patty suggested. “We can stow it in the locker.”

  Annie shuddered.

  The meat instantly gave new mental strength
to the women. At last, something had improved. They now had enough food for days.

  Just after midday, Annie nudged Patty and pointed to the horizon on their left. “Is it? Is it?”

  “Yes!”

  They all gazed at the small, low cumulus cloud.

  Annie hardly dared to breathe. “It could be land. And it’s only a few miles away.”

  They all knew that low, small clouds which don’t appear to move often surround the summit of a hill-topped island.

  Carey peered ahead. “Can anyone see driftwood or seaweed?”

  “If that’s land, we’ll see seabirds at dusk,” Patty said. Few birds sleep upon the water.

  “More rowing,” Carey sighed. “Thank God we’ve at least had something to eat.”

  Patty couldn’t row because of her burned hand. So while the other women struggled with the oars, she doused them with seawater. She also looked after Suzy, who was lying with her head under the stern seat where there was a little shade.

  In the blazing sun of early afternoon they rowed due north.

  Almost exhausted, Carey gasped, “If there had been an island under that damn cloud, we’d have seen it by now.”

  “Don’t waste your breath,” Annie grunted. “Keep rowing!”

  It was almost dusk when, having rowed three miles, they reached the little cloud. It hung motionless above them, as though painted on a school-play backdrop. Each woman had been daring the little cloud to move, and not daring to hope that it wouldn’t.

  Silvana prayed aloud for rain.

  Almost imperceptibly, the little cloud started to float farther north.

  “It can’t do that, there’s no wind,” Patty gasped.

  “I can’t row any more. I really can’t,” said Carey, who had rowed far harder than the other two. The palms of both her hands were now blistered and bloody, and her back felt as if somebody was trying to tear out her ribs. She stared in despair at the empty ocean. “If only we knew where we were.”

  “We’re not far off-course,” Annie reassured her. “We’re going in the right direction.”

  Patty said, “Better correct now, back to southeast.”

  The correction was unfortunate. At that point, the women were nine miles due south of Tanjung Vals, on the southernmost tip of Pulau yos Sudarsa, the island which Jonathan had chosen as their goal. Had they rowed a couple more miles north instead of southeast, they might have sighted a native fishing canoe within striking distance of land.

  * * *

  In the dark, Annie felt a fly on her cheek … No, it couldn’t be a fly out here … She felt another one … But if it wasn’t a fly?

  Incredulously, she brushed two huge drops from her cheek. She rasped, “Rain!”

  For days they’d been planning what to do if it rained, but for a few minutes nobody did anything except lick the water from their hands. They couldn’t believe it.

  At last Annie said, “For God’s sake, catch it.”

  In the dark, they hurriedly set out the five bamboo containers and their upended lids, together with the bailer and the turtle shell. They crouched around the turtle shell, holding their hoods up-ended. They hoped to catch the rain in them and dribble it into the shell, from which they planned to tip it into the jerry can.

  “Drink all you can,” Annie urged. “Your body can store all the water it can get.”

  “You’re supposed to drink it slowly,” Carey reminded, “or it’ll just be flushed out by your kidneys.”

  “Oh, God, I hope it rains all night. I hope this is another storm,” Patty said fervently.

  The rain stopped as quickly as it started.

  Hope flared in their hearts like a flame. They now had a little food and half a jerry can of water.

  In the pale dawn, Annie gazed fondly into the turtle shell. “Well over four pints. That will last us four days. Maybe five.”

  MONDAY, MARCH 25

  White-faced and weary, Harry sat in President Raki’s office. Once again he said, “I’ve already made our terms clear, Mr. President. Our lawyers in Pittsburgh have told us that they need five more working days on the documentation, before they can get them out here for signature.”

  Raki frowned. “As today is March twenty-fifth, that means we can’t sign until the first of April.”

  “Yes, sir.” Harry knew that he could not delay the signing beyond April 1 without good reason, or copper production would suffer. And the Nexus competitors would be in town.

  April 1 seemed to be everybody’s deadline, Harry thought, angry with frustration. He still had the impression that the answer to his riddle was very close, and that it was being deliberately withheld from him.

  “Very well,” Raki said. “April first seems a very suitable date, Mr. Scott. April Fool’s Day, is it not?”

  TUESDAY, MARCH 26

  “Any news?” Harry asked as usual, as he stepped down from the plane into the glare of the early morning sun.

  Johno shook his head. “For once, the answer’s no.”

  After the reward offer had been broadcast, Kerry had received hundreds of reported sightings of the lost dinghy. He now spent his days following up telephone and radio reports and sorting them out. Every night, he prepared a list of the reported sightings, all of which were checked by Johno. They were often confusing, if not contradictory.

  Harry burst out, “I can’t understand it! People don’t just disappear these days! You can find anything with modern technology. They can fish small airplane wheels up from the bottom of the Atlantic, for God’s sake!”

  “But lots of big ships still disappear without a trace,” Johno said. “Think of the Bermuda Triangle. You mostly hear about the successful rescues. Those pictures in the newspapers are of the guys who have been found. You don’t hear so much about the guys who are never seen again.” He looked at Harry’s thin, tired face and said, “The Cherokee chief pilot is in Kerry’s office. He wants to know if they can leave tomorrow.”

  “No,” Harry said. “Tomorrow we start again.”

  “You mean cover the whole area again?”

  “Yes,” Harry said. “Allowing for the current, of course, and moving the grid daily.”

  “You really mean it?”

  “Yes. Please try again.”

  “You sure are determined.”

  “You mean stubborn,” Harry said.

  Nobody contradicted him.

  Kerry was at his desk, sorting out reported sightings. As with road accidents, the moment a Mayday call is put out over the radio everyone in the area with nothing better to do seems to gravitate to the spot—especially if a reward is involved.

  Kerry looked up. “Same as usual, I’m afraid. Some of the amateur search craft have been reporting other search craft. We’ve had six vessels run out of fuel, one collision and a sixteen-foot dinghy capsized—with no loss of life, luckily. Some of the Australian coast guard have officially complained that we’re adding to their work, but they have joined the search.” He nodded at the piles of paper on his desk. “To add to the confusion, a lot of gawking tourists are now out there—incompetent idiots who should never have been allowed in the search area.”

  Johno said, “It’s March twenty-sixth. We only have four more days to search.”

  Harry said firmly, “The Katanga headman told me that the women had plenty of stores aboard. They could still be alive. Maybe they’re sitting out there somewhere enjoying the voyage.”

  * * *

  The boat stank of dried blood and putrid turtle. They had run out of drinking water the day before.

  Carey, who was steering, looked sadly beyond the sleeping women to Suzy, whom Carey nursed, fed and guarded fiercely.

  Even after drinking rainwater, Suzy had not recovered her sanity. Crouched in the bow, she crooned to herself in a hoarse, cracked voice. The only person who wasn’t distressed by Suzy’s plight was Suzy herself. Her face glistened, her purple-black mouth was flecked with foam, her blank eyes were turned upward, her teeth chattered when she spo
ke, and although the tone of her voice sounded reasonable, everything she said was merely a jumble of disconnected phrases.

  Suddenly a strange, fierce look came over Suzy’s face. She screamed, “I’m saved!”

  She started to clamber over the side.

  Carey lunged across the tiny boat and threw herself on top of Suzy, who fell beneath the bundle of bones that Carey had become.

  “Wassamatta?” Annie looked up, dulled by sleep and too lethargic to move.

  Carey croaked, “We’ll have to tie Suzy up. She just tried to jump overboard again.”

  The other two women roused themselves. Silvana and Annie slowly tied Suzy’s wrists together, then roped them to the center thwart. Then they bound her ankles.

  The sight of Suzy, her skeleton-thin hands covered with wizened skin, tethered like an animal, distressed them more than anything else had in the twelve days since they had embarked in the dinghy. But she had to be prevented from throwing herself overboard—and possibly pulling somebody else over with her. The sharks, which still accompanied the boat, would attack her within seconds, before she could be hauled back aboard.

  Six hours later Carey said, “I’m going to untie Suzy; now she’s too weak to move.” Cradling Suzy’s head in her lap, Carey was reminded of the two babies she had nursed.

  As Suzy’s limbs twitched and jerked, involuntarily, they realized that they were watching Suzy die.

  All day they watched in silence.

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 27

  As the sun rose, the fishing vessel Anna, with a good catch aboard, was clearly going to be late back to harbor. A bad lead and the failure of her bilge pumps meant that she would miss the morning market in Merauke.

  The crew of the Anna were intent on getting their boat back to harbor by hand-pumping, when they spotted what appeared to be a empty white dinghy about five miles to the west. Even with binoculars, the skipper couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t just flotsam, because the slight swell interrupted his view and the dawn mist created a mirage effect.

  Because of her own problems, the Anna wasn’t able to investigate the dinghy. Nor could she radio for help, since her radio was out of action too. So—although the skipper was obliged by law to radio a report of the sighting—he was not able to.