Gallows on the Sand

by Morris West

  On the other hand, . if they delayed too long the limpet bombs would go off and the depth-charges would explode when the lugger sank. The Wahine was moored so close to her that she could not possibly escape damage, even total wreck. Unmanned, she might easily be wrenched from her moorings and flung on to the reef by the first waves from the explosion.

  If that happened we might be in worse case than before—killers and victims alike marooned on a barrier island. I shivered in the warm sun. The prospect was grotesque but very possible. Three hours, Nino had said. Three hours from the time he fixed the mines to the hull of the black lugger. I thought that not more than an hour and a half had passed since Pat and I had left the beach for the hill. Allowing time for Nino’s swim, I thought there were not more than two hours to the blow-up.

  I scanned the green water of the lagoon for any sign of Nino’s shadow in the refracted sunlight. There was no shadow. There was no flicker or ripple that could show where he was.

  I looked over at the lugger. The crew were huddled in a shouting, gesticulating group amidships. They were arguing, accusing each other. They were discussing the merit of another foray for the treasure, or a quick run up the reef and into safe waters before news of the killing reached the mainland. There are a hundred islands between Macassar and Bandoeng where a man with a boat and a willing crew can name his own price for a little honest gun-running.

  I noticed that the boats were still tied alongside, their oars inboard, their bows bobbing and thumping against the planks. I thought that if they did not get the boats inboard in twenty minutes they would mean to stay and search for us in their own time. If they hauled them inboard and lashed them they would be leaving very soon. If they were not gone within two hours the lugger would blow up inside the reef and there would be bloody murder done on the white sand of my island.

  I decided that I would let Pat sleep a little longer; then we would go down to the beach and wait. If the lugger left, well and good. If she stayed we would wait till after the explosion, then take the work-boat and head for the mainland.

  I realized with a start that I had no means of warning Nino Ferrari. I had no way of letting him know that we were even alive. Even if, half-submerged under the counter of the Wahine, he had seen the wild rush to the shore, it could have meant any one of half a dozen things to him.

  Then an idea occurred to me. Allow twenty minutes more for Pat to be rested enough for the walk back -to the beach. Allow half an hour for the walk. There would still be an hour before the mines went off. Time enough for me to don my own aqualung and swim out across the lagoon to the Wahine. There was the problem of entering the water without being seen from the lugger. But Nino had done it, so could I.

  Now that the decision was made I felt suddenly weary and vaguely resentful of the new demand for effort and strength. I looked at Pat. She was still sleeping. Her breathing was deep and regular and the colour was flowing slowly back under the ivory skin. A small insect lighted on her face; she stirred uneasily and brushed it off with an instinctive gesture, but did not waken.

  As I sat there, slack and tired, and saw my girl sleeping and all the green wonder of the island spread below me, and all the blue stretch of ocean running out to the rim of the world, I was conscious of a feeling new and strange to me. A sense of truncation and of loss, because my friend was dead and because the last shreds of innocence had been ripped away when I had seen the naked evil of the world and when I had killed the man who most of all embodied it. I felt no guilt, only distaste and disillusion. But I felt something else, too—a sense of possession and of permanence, as if I, the landless man, were now free of his own possession, as if I, the blind historian, had opened my eyes at last to see the wild wonder of the world and to know that I, too, was part of its turbulent history.

  A man is fully grown when he has learnt this truth: There is no mercy in the world, except the mercy of the Almighty. There is neither peace nor permanence nor secure possession until a man straddles his small standing-place and dares all comers to thrust him out of it.

  I stood up, trod out my cigarette and walked back to the cave. I picked up the empty water-bag, ripped open the top seam of the canvas and carried it into the big vaulted chamber. I turned over the huddled skeleton, surprised to find there was so little weight in it, and scooped the tarnished coins into the water-bag. They filled it almost to the top. Then I put my hand on the jewelled hilt of the dagger and drew it out of the sand and put it on top of the coins.

  The coins did not burn me. The dagger did not cut my hand.

  Men had died because of them. I had fought and survived to enjoy them. They were mine to use or misuse as I pleased.

  I straightened and stood a moment looking down at the pitiful bleached relics on the sand. They had nothing. to say to me, nor I to them. The gulf of two centuries lay between us and their voices were blown away long since by the desert winds of time.

  I snapped off the torch, picked up the water-bag, and walked out of the cave.

  I wakened Pat and lifted her to her feet. She gave me a wan little smile and said, “I’m sorry, Renn. It wasn’t very thoughtful of me, was it?”

  I kissed her and held her to me for a moment. Then I told her what we were going to do. I handed her the glasses and showed her the deck of the lugger, where the shouting men were quiet now, squatting in a small circle round the skipper, discussing the next move. The boats were still in the water, bobbing. She handed the glasses back to me.

  “Renn?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?’’

  “Do you think Nino’s still alive?”

  “Of course. We can’t see him because he’s probably still in the water. He’d be floating under the counter of the Wahine, saving the last of his air for the swim home. Nino’s done this sort of thing, before remember.”

  She nodded and said softly, “Renn, I wish it were all over.”

  “It will be, sweetheart,” I told her gravely. “It’ll all be over before sunset.”

  I stuffed the remaining clips of ammunition into my pocket, gave her the small parcel of food, then picked up the rifle and bent down for the water-bag that held the last of the Dona Lucia’s treasure. When Pat saw it she looked at me oddly, but said nothing. I answered her unspoken question.

  “Yes, sweetheart, I’m taking it. I’m taking it because we fought for it and we’ve won it. I’m taking it because there are debts to pay and a house and a life to build for both of us.”

  She shivered a little and said, “There’s blood on it, Renn.”

  “Yes, there is blood on it, sweetheart. There’s blood on the island, too. There’s blood on the decks of the Wahine. There’s blood on every acre and every doorstep where men have come, first in peace, and then have fought against those who have come, in violence, to destroy their peace. Do you understand?

  “Give me time, Renn,” she pleaded quietly. “Give me time and a little love. Then I will understand.”

  We walked down the goat-path where the body of Manny Mannix lay festering in the sun. We stepped over it and, without a backward glance, turned downwards through the trees.

  When we came to the last fringe of bush before the camp we dropped to the ground and pushed aside the leaves, looking out across the water towards the black lugger. One of the boats was already inboard. Two men were lashing it to its place on the deck. The other was just being hauled up.

  They were going away.

  For long minutes we lay there, hardly daring to hope.

  Then we saw the anchor pulled up and we heard the engines start. Slowly the black lugger nosed out towards the channel. We stood up and walked into the camp.

  Nino Ferrari was lying on the warm sand, smoking a cigarette.

  “I thought you would come,” he said blandly.

  The sublime effrontery of the man took my breath away.

  “What the devil . . .”

  He waved a slim brown hand.

  “I made better time than I hoped. I fixed the charges;
then I swam over to the Wahine for a breather. I heard one shot, then when I saw them running like cattle on to the beach, I guessed what had happened.”

  “I killed Manny Mannix.”

  “I know. I waited until they rowed out to the lugger. Then, while they were busy explaining what heroes they had been, I swam back to shore. I was tired. I needed a rest.”

  Then I showed him the water-bag with the gold coins and the dagger.

  He whistled softly.

  “Where?”

  “In the cave, behind the cleft. Pat found them . . . with two skeletons. They had killed each other.”

  “They always do in the end,” said Nino flatly.

  Then I saw that there was no laughter in his eyes. His face was grey. He looked tired and rather old. In the same flat voice he answered the question I dared not put to him.

  “Very soon now.”

  He heaved himself up from the sand and the three of us walked down to the water’s edge.

  The tide was running in strongly, and the black lugger was butting her way out through the channel. The men on her decks were looking back towards the island and pointing. The thought came to me that perhaps they intended to work the wreck again, or that, having seen us, they would put about when they had cleared the channel and return to the attack.

  But they did not. The lugger thrust out of the rip and into the wide water. The man at the wheel held her firmly on a southward course until she was out of the reef current, then he turned her eastward and the westering sun threw long shadows from her spars across the water.

  Then it happened.

  We heard the dull boom of an explosion, then another. Great spouts of water were flung into the air. The lugger seemed to heave itself up until we saw the line of her kelson. Then she settled again with a great gushing splash, heeling over as she hit the water. We saw the bodies of men flung, like dolls, high into the air to fall back into the boiling sea. Then she rolled clean over. Her spars dipped and her hatches were covered and we saw the gaping holes that had been blown in her timbers. Then the waters closed over her, heaving and bubbling and churning, while the bodies of the crew were tossed about like corks, and scraps of wreckage were flung like chips in the maelstrom.

  We saw the waters subside slowly and great waves spread out and come racing towards the reef. Some of the men were clinging to pieces of wreckage, others lay in the rocking water as if dead. Two or three were striking out with pitiful slowness towards the island.

  “It is not finished yet,” said Nino Ferrari.

  Seconds passed—long, inexorable seconds, while the three of us stood in silent horror at the water’s edge. Then, one after another, the depth-charges went off . . . four of them.

  Again there was the leaping and spouting of water and the spilling of bodies, like drops from a fountain, back into the sea. Sand and fish and weed were vomited upwards from the ocean bed. The water spewed and bubbled like pools of volcanic mud.

  There were no swimmers now, only bobbing helpless shapes in a waste of wild water. For hours it seemed—though it could not have been more than minutes—we stood like stone figures, looking out on the last, horrifying act of an ancient, bloody tragedy.

  Then the bubbling and the heaving subsided and the long waves spread out. The westering sun splashed gold and crimson on the open water. We saw the black fins of the sharks converging on the kill.

  Pat Mitchell and I turned away and walked slowly up the beach towards the tent.

  When I looked back I saw that Nino Ferrari was still standing, a lean, pitiless figure, at the water’s edge. His back was straight. His head was unbowed. He shaded his eyes with his hand and stared out across the blood-red water.

  His long, distorted shadow lay beside him . . . like a gallows on the sand.

  Epilogue

  BETWEEN the circling arms of the island, a house has been built. From its deep, shadowy veranda you look out across the lagoon to where the Wahine rides at anchor. There is a trailing of white trumpet flowers and a crimson burst of bougainvillea.

  There is a small brown smiling woman and a toddling boy who come down the coral path to the beach and wave me in from the channel, and wait for me while I drop the hook and loose the dinghy, and scull home at the end of an island run.

  We walk up the path, hand in hand, until we come to the small plot with its border of branched coral and its square white headstone. We stop. I pluck a scarlet hibiscus-bloom and drop it in front of the stone, while the boy watches, fascinated, the familiar ritual.

  The flower will wilt soon in the sun, but there will always be another and another, so long as we live on our Island of the Twin Horns. When my son is older I will teach him the meaning of the plot and the cemetery, and the words which are cut into the headstone. . . .

  In Memory

  Of a Great and Courageous Gentleman

  JOHNNY AKIMOTO

  This is His Island.

  We, His Friends, Hold it in Trust for Him.

  REQUIESCAT.