by Jase Kovacs
"Then where is he now?"
"I have much to do today. There is nothing more to discuss. You should prepare to accept his judgement tonight." She turns, ready to dismiss us.
"But what of Israel?" I say desperately. She pauses, as if she isn't sure of what she's hearing. "Have you forgotten the call?"
She half turns her head, looking at me without looking at me, and I see what I think is a flicker of uncertainty there. "What do you know of the call?"
"Your flock. Reuben, Dan, Joseph, Gad… these are the names of the Lost Tribes of Israel. They are the sons of Jacob, the Patriarch, who was son of Isaac, my namesake, who was son of Abraham. They held a covenant with God — as I'm sure you did once." Her body language tells me of an internal turmoil, and I push on. I know I'm on dangerous ground, needling a fanatic, but what's my other option? Wait here all afternoon until they nail us up? "Why did you leave God?"
For a moment, I think I have gone too far. She freezes, caught in profile to me, her back arching as she seems to draw down into herself like a cat about to pounce. But when she turns to me, I am astonished to see tears in her eyes. "I did not leave God. He left me," she says, her voice trembling. She holds up her arms so I can see the scars above her wrists. "We waited to be raised up! All of us faithful. We rejoiced when the last days came! We knew it was the time foretold, when we would be Raptured to meet the Lord in the air. We were the Lost Tribes of Israel, who had wandered the earth since the Kingdom was rendered from the hand of Solomon. We had waited to be gathered up to Zion! But days and weeks and years went by, and we knew we were forsaken. All the people of my Church. We had been forgotten. We had been left behind." She spits the last two words, as if they are an insult whose target is herself. "Eventually the people called for a sacrifice — as Abraham would have sacrificed you, Isaac. As the Lord offered up his own son as a sacrifice to absolve our sins."
"Where was this?" I ask very gently. "On Misima Island?"
"No. Our Church was a mission to Dalbarade Island." Her eyes grow misty, and tears fall as she speaks. "We were thirty-three during the Fall. Others came, wanderers and refugees, and we opened our doors to them. For ten years we heard nothing. Our prayers were unanswered, our pleas falling on heaven's deaf ears. Finally, my flock came to me at night and took me to the highest place on the island, where I was offered up. I hung for three days and, as I felt my life flee from me, I said, 'My Lord, my Lord, why has thou forsaken me?' And he answered! Not the false God, whose churches lie empty around the world, penitent corpses piled on their doorsteps like dust. No, from the darkness came the Green Lord, who said for us to come and see. And we did! We came, and he brought us into his Tabernacle, and he made us see! Don't you understand yet? Humanity is not meant for this world. We are on the outside of the Ark, beating on the wooden doors as the floodwaters rise over our heads. The generations of Noah will not be begat from Shem, Ham, and Japheth! No, they will be the children of the Green Lord and his kin, the God of Rocks and Creeping Things, the Pneuma of the Great and Empty Desert, the Pale King and his Crew. All of us will have our time on the cross, to be judged if we are worthy of eternal life, to stand by them as they repopulate the Earth!"
"And the man on your cross now. Was he worthy?"
Her brow creases with annoyance. The flame of her fervour flickers and fades, and I curse my thoughtless jibe. "What? No, of course not. He raised a hand against the Lord's servants. But the Green Lord is gracious. The man, despite his sins, was given a chance. But it is no surprise that he was forsaken. He and all of the Obsidian Tribe will feed the Lord's children. As, I suspect, will you."
"But why? Why will we not have the same chance you had?"
"Because you still speak with a forked tongue, cloaking your words in lies."
"Then ask me! Ask me anything, and I will tell you the truth."
She draws back, as if I've offered a plate of rotten food. "No. No, I will not. I have indulged you long enough. I will not lie down with serpents. I will leave you now. Make peace with your God. For what good it will do you."
Something unwinds in me then, as a tension that had bound my heart in a crown of thorns lets go, and a long-dormant muscle pulses for the first time in thirteen years. It would be naive of me to admit that all this talk of the divine has laid bare my own spirit's dormancy. The belief that had been inculcated in me as a child that the world was a good and just place slumbered since my father drowned himself and the jets, the symbols of a government that was supposed to provide succour, shredded my mother with cannon fire. I have spent the years since hiding on my island, my prayers to God, whose touch was forever absent, mere platitudes to appease others of my society, for whom the Bible was the only thing in the world that still made sense. But now, confronted with the madness that fills Deborah, I realise my faith, as weak as it is, is not just a shield but also a sword.
"You don't know, do you?" I say. "Your Green Lord hasn't told you, has he?"
Deborah steps back, her hands flat at her sides as if she is a soldier at attention. The air is hoarse with the groan of cicadas, and the temperature within the cell climbs as the sun rises to noon. In the far distance, I hear a crack, like a whip snapping. Deborah blinks compulsively, unnerved by the certainty that fills me. "You're a heretic. A serpent."
"The Pale King is dead. The woman who stalks your men? My captain. She killed him."
As if to punctuate my words, I hear four more cracks. It's gunfire. My people, my captain, are out there. Fighting still. Deborah moans like a woman lost in the depths of a deep and painful surgery. "Lies… "
"Her name is Matai. She fought the Pale King. Alone. She took on his army and emerged victorious. And now, she's out there Your Green Lord hides, as well he should. For he is not divine. He is not a god or a prophet of a god. He is simply a monster — a powerful, dangerous monster, that is true. But he can be killed. And he will."
"You are heretics, liars, pagans. All of you," she says. "God left his heaven. He abandoned us all."
"Deborah, you had faith once. But you wandered, and in your wanderings you fell under a monster's spell. I do not condemn you for this, no more than I could condemn a man dying of thirst for drinking from a poisoned well. You know in your heart that you follow a false idol. You know—"
But what she knows will be forever between the two of us. Shrieking like one of the damned, she whirls and beats upon the cell door. It flies open, and she is gone, the door closing down the square of daylight like a drawbridge rising on a castle.
"Okay," says Enzo. "So. What just happened?"
"I'm not sure." My hands are shaking as the nervous energy that filled me drains away. "I think I won."
"But we are still locked in the cell."
"It's more one of those moral victories."
"I see. Will it stop them from crucifying us?"
"Doubt it. If anything, I've made her more angry."
"So, you have somehow made the day we get crucified… worse." Enzo nods contemplatively, somehow managing to look sarcastically impressed. "Okay, can you please stop with the moral victories?"
"But don't you see what I got out of her? They thought they were going to be returned to Israel, but their community broke down in the years after the Great Dying. That's when the Green Lord, this alpha, came to her. Like how the Pale King tried to dominate Matty. But when Matty was able to resist him, Deborah was ready, even waiting, for him to give her something to believe in!"
Enzo rolls his eyes. "You know what you call people who die to prove a point?"
"Martyrs?"
"Idiots." He shakes his head with exaggerated mourning. "I should never have split up from Matty."
"Look, this is all important, right? We came here for information. I'm learning how the alpha is manipulating this cult. And I've put doubt in Deborah's mind."
"Yes, I understand. Is very important. We can talk about it on the cross tonight."
"Matty's still out there. Piper and Roman too."
"Perhaps. Or perhaps th
ey are dead."
"Didn't you hear that crack while we were talking? That sounded like a gunshot to me." I'm growing frustrated with him. "You've got have a little faith."
"A little faith, eh?" he says. "A little faith is what will kill us tonight."
***
But my sense of triumph has evaporated and my confidence is a memory by that evening, when they drag me from the cells, beat me, and lay me down on a plank of wood and press an eight-inch nail into my wrist.
The day passed in a slow haze as the temperature in the room climbed and our lack of water took its toll. After the adrenalin from my confrontation with Deborah wore off, I sank into a pit of despair. I hadn't eaten anything since the morning of the previous day. We beat on the door and called for water and were ignored.
The stifling heat in the cell lulled me into a stupor. I knew intellectually that the lethargy that filled me was a sign of incipient heatstroke, yet at the same time I welcome the soporific dulling of my senses, the way time began to skip forward as I lapsed in and out of consciousness. I murmured something to Enzo every now and then; he was as affected as I was and replied at random and then in French. For a while I spoke to my mother. I don't remember what was said, but I remember the taste of the tears that oozed despite my dehydration and which I wiped desperately into my mouth with fingers that were stiff and thick.
I drift into a fever dream, a re-imagining of a memory. I see the yellow yacht bearing down on Madau, under full sail in defiance of common sense, heedless of our warning shots. It burned to the waterline and broke up on the reef. But what would I have found if it had not burst into flames? If the hull had survived, would I have see the name Mirabelle painted on its stern, the yacht whose mayday Larry had received months earlier? Had its skipper been called to Woodlark, as was Deborah?
The memory of the hungry flames engulfing the vessel gel with the heat in the cell and the fever that now blazes within me. What had ignited the vessel in the first place? So many sources of fire on a yacht: LPG tanks, gasoline tanks, hydrogen gas being vented from overcharged batteries. But would explode now, thirteen years after the last refinery ceased production? As my own skin burns, I remember Matty's story of how the Pale King sent the damned out into the sunlight, to turn them into a rain of undead fireballs. Was the yellow yacht sailed by an alpha, hiding below decks from the dawn, who suddenly found his dark refuge torn open by our bullets? The morning sun flooding in to turn its yacht into a funeral pyre.
Broken snatches of memory dance into dreams as I fade into darkness.
My senses come back to me as the temperature drops; the air fills with the wet sulphur of ozone, and the breeze that stirs the kunai grass outside brings cool relief to our cell. When the door opens, the sky outside is grey and the men who come at us are nothing but shadows, the shades of a mad empress's praetorian guard. They double us over their cudgels and send us sprawling in the dirt, where men and women fight for the pleasure of kicking us.
Our arms are hooked backwards over long sticks, and we are lifted to our feet and driven forward. Blood runs from Enzo's brow, covering his face in a crimson caul, and his eyes are furiously white as he spits and curses like a mad cat.
I feel a spirit rising up from within, as if my parents were reaching forward from the past, to bear me up and send me forward with dignity. Wind whips the stubble of the kunai, and the trees sigh as the grey clouds pile up around the green hills like the regrets of a life not lived.
Deborah stands on the berm between a pair of naked poles that rise on either side of her like the goalposts of a game I've played but whose rules I didn't comprehend. She does not look confused or angry; there is not a trace of the woman who had fled our cell earlier. Instead, her seamed, tanned face holds the righteous hypocritical judgement of a Crusader watching Jerusalem burn, flames and smoke of the fire we cannot see reflected in her eyes.
Then I know that the seeds I planted have born bitter fruit; when the system of her world was been questioned, she doubled down on what she already knew. I had only served to make her belief stronger.
She smiles, a beautiful smile full of optimism and promise, but it is not for us. It is for her people, who murmur and fret in a circle around us as we are driven forward by Dan and his brothers.
Thunder cracks, and the rain comes down on us like a cloud of smoke. The way her people bunch up against each other reminds me of scared cattle pressed against a barbed wire fence by rising flood waters. She lifts her face to the storm and so do we, the rain on our parched lips a quantum of relief in our end time.
Someone kicks me, and I fall forward. The red earth of the berm is wet and slick, and I suck greedily at the mud as they free my arms and stretch me out. I wonder where this impulse lies in the spectrum of Darwinian evolution, the powerful desire to slake my thirst overwhelming the existential horror of my coming execution. Dan flips me over onto my back, and as if from a distance removed I watch them drag me onto the top of the berm, where they lay me down on a crosspiece of wood.
I think then of the intractability of fate and the crooked path that has led me to this point. I could no more rage against the cruelty of circumstance than I could condemn it for having me survive a plague that left seven billion of my kin dead. We came to this island seeking answers, and I have found them. I do not mind that the price I pay for this knowledge will be my life. I only regret, as do all who've left this world, that the secrets I uncovered would die with me.
I know now what drives authors to write, explorers to push back the horizons, and conquerors to raise statues of themselves up in the deserts — we are nothing but ships forging across a deep uncharted sea, leaving a wake of memories, and our lives only have value as charts we leave to guide others.
I fear the pain that is coming. But more than that, I fear that I have somehow failed Enzo, that there was some word or tricky construction of sentences I could have summoned to unlock the chains that bind Deborah's soul and that today my failure was not one of cunning but of eloquence. And then I wonder what was the point of all my years poring over the past, as if I were panning for gold in the rivers of history, when all it led me too was a pointless death in the mud and rain.
But as they hold me down and press a nail against my wrist, I look beyond the hammer held in Dan's upraised hand and see the last shards of the sun dying in the west. Time and tide wait for no man; that's what Matty says. The sun will come up tomorrow, and all I hope for, in the end, is the simple wish that my death will somehow benefit those I love.
CHAPTER TEN: MATAI
I follow Piper, and she follows a small girl, a tiny shadow of a thing, visible only because of the white bones painted on her body. When the trees part and moonlight shines on the path, it seems we chase a skeleton. Piper holds her finger against her lips when she first finds me, a needless caution as I know that the night jungle is alive with marys, now free to roam and hunt without the danger of a chance gust of wind opening a skylight through which a shaft of sunlight could set them ablaze.
But the creatures aren't interested in us; they're all are swarming down in the meadow, tearing at the old man on the cross while Deborah's people sing a tumbling chorus of religious ecstasy. The only danger I face as we climb up into the hills that crown Woodlark are low-hanging branches and unseen, ankle-twisting deadfalls.
My breath painfully rasps my throat by the time the child stops us. We have been climbing for an hour, a twisting, tortured route through what seems to be an impenetrable maze of thickets and copses. It's been a long, long day, and I am exhausted and filled with worry: for my crew, for my friends, and most of all for Blong. But Piper insists I follow, telling me that all will be explained.
Finally, we stop at the base of a tall ironwood. The tree is mighty even by the standards of this jungle — its trunk almost a metre across, lifting perhaps twenty metres into the sky, so it can spread its branches above the canopy. The girl looks up and makes a hiccupping cry that I would have mistaken for that of a forest bi
rd if I hadn't seen its source. After a moment, something comes tumbling down from above: a rope ladder made of woven vines and short, chopped saplings. She places my hands on a rung and pushes me, and I climb. Up and up, the ladder swaying sickeningly as I feel the forest floor diminish beneath me. Above me is a square hole in the night sky, and then a trapdoor opens to spill firelight. A man, his beard sandy and long, whispers, "Come on, dude, come on."
He introduces himself as Mad Mark from Madang. "Because you've gotta be mad, man, we're all mad here, this is the Heart of Darkness and the Hatter's Tea Party and Catch 22 all wrapped into one, I'm mad too, not Mad Max but Mad Mark." The words spill out of him as he helps me in through the trapdoor, his powerful arms lifting me as if I were no more than a sack of grain. "Don't be scared, ma'am, don't be scared, we're mad, but you're safe, it's okay, is it true you come from Madau? Are there still people there, are they—" He turns back to the trapdoor, his sentence discarded as he pulls Piper up. "Don't worry, miss, I've got you, you just jump up here, every thing's copasetic up here."
The room is lit by a small blaze built on a fireplace of flat riverstones. The walls and floor of the house are long planks of bamboo, split and hammered flat to lie across a woven frame of thin branches. The ceiling is a dense thatch of sago palm. It is exactly like every other traditional Melanesian house I've seen — except this one is twenty meters up a tree.
While Mad Mark begins lifting the rope ladder, the little girl hanging somewhere along its length, a smiling woman looms out of the flickering shadows and offers me half a coconut shell filled with sago and tiny slivers of meat. She's a local, about forty or fifty years old. Her hair rises in a thick afro as solid and dense as a helmet. She wears an old faded blouse dress that has been mended and patched many times. A young man, also a local, sits with her, his smile made unfortunately sinister by his skewed and broken teeth. "Don't let Mark scare you. He's just excited to see new people," says the woman. "You must be exhausted. Eat and rest, and we will save our explanations until tomorrow."