by Toombs, Jane
Chapter 13
Romell opened her eyes and looked up into Pieter's face. Confused for a few moments, she thought at first that she was in his tent, but then she felt the familiar roll beneath her and saw the sky darkening above her and knew they were at sea.
When she tried to sit up, her head exploded with pain and, moaning, she lay down again.
"I'm sorry if you hurt," Pieter said.
With that, she remembered the fight on the island, remembered Adrien rushing past her to go to Margitte, remembered seeing Pieter dressed like a sailor suddenly appear at her side. Then, nothing.
Her fingers felt rough wood and she knew she was on the raft. Moving carefully, she managed to sit up, though her head pounded and throbbed. She and Pieter were alone on the raft. When she strained to see the island she could not, for it had grown too dark. One hand went up to feel the back of her head where the pain centered, and her fingers found a soft swelling.
"I had to hit you," Pieter said. "Otherwise you'd have called to the Englishman."
So he'd struck her over the head and carried her aboard the raft. Romell's shoulders slumped. In the dark no one could sight them--by morning they'd be God knows where. She'd never escape from Pieter.
"Where are we headed?" she asked dully.
"We'll find an island where we can live together, just the two of us," Pieter said. "Not a barren strand like the one we were on, but an island with trees and water and animals."
"And, very likely, natives," she pointed out.
He ignored her words. "No man can take you away from me there. We'll be happy, Romellje."
The pain in her head made her stomach heave. Romell eased herself flat again and closed her eyes, too uncomfortable and sick to worry about what would happen. She slept, after a time, and dreamed she was in Virginia, walking with her father between the rows of tobacco plants.
"A good leaf this year," he said, bending to feel the leaves while she stared over his head at the dark figures in the woods beyond the field. She tried to warn him of the Indians lurking among the trees, watching, but couldn't speak, no matter how she struggled.
The Indians crept into the field, crouching to conceal themselves behind the plants. Closer and closer they came, tomahawks in hand, and still Romell stood unwillingly mute. Only when one grasped her by her hair, his hatchet raised, could she scream.
Romell woke with a start. She was lying with her head in Pieter's lap and he was stroking her hair. She caught his hand.
"Don’t," she said. "It makes the pain worse."
Above them, dawn streaked the sky with rosy fire.
He eased her onto the planks and stood up. "We're caught on a reef," he said. "We'll float out when the tide rises." He pointed. "I think that's Southland."
Romell turned and saw land so close it startled her—no more than half a mile away. She could see palm trees, a sand beach, rocky bluffs. Harmless looking, even welcoming. Where were the giant birds whose eggs would feed twenty men? The jumping beasts who had carrying pockets in their skin for the young? And, most frightening of all, the cannibals? Did black-skinned natives hide behind those rocks, watching? Romell shivered.
"Must we land there?" she asked.
Pieter shrugged. "We've little choice. The current and wind will push us in, once the tide is up enough to lift us off the coral."
She crawled to the edge of the raft and looked at the jagged coral barely breaking the surface of the water. A six-foot black and yellow seasnake undulated by. Pieter paid no attention to the seasnake, busying himself with prying limpets from the coral, which they ate raw for breakfast.
The water rose and the raft floated free, drifting toward the mainland. Romell stared at the bluff overlooking the beach, straining her eyes to see what might be hidden among the trees and rocks, but there was no sign of any living creature.
Overhead, two albatross wheeled and dipped. In the deep water beneath them a stingray flapped by on black wings, its deadly, pointed tail trailing behind. A gray fin cut the water to their left, circled the raft once and disappeared. As they drew closer, Pieter guided the raft with a long pole toward the sand beach. When the water became shallow, Pieter leaped overboard and pulled the raft onto the sand. Romell watched, knowing from experience that he wouldn't accept her help.
"This doesn't seem so bad," he said, once he was satisfied the raft was safe above the tide line. "I'm certain there'll be fresh water nearby. Once we locate that—"
"Cooo-ee!" The high, wavering cry, rising at the end, stopped him in mid-sentence. The call was repeated, and Romell and Pieter whirled to stare up at the bluff.
Three dark-skinned men, carrying spears, stood silhouetted against the sky. Panic held Romell motionless. Pieter glanced back at the raft, took a step toward it, then shook his head.
"We'd never make it," he said. "Wind's against us even if there were time."
"What—what can we do?" Romell asked, fighting to control her terror.
"Nothing. There's probably a camp of the black devils nearby. Run and we’d be hunted and killed."
Romell moved closer to Pieter as they watched the three men leap agilely down the rocks. The natives were naked except for narrow belts about their waists with what looked like fur tassels hanging down from them. The men were a darker color tan than the African slaves she’d seen in Virginia.
She’d expected they might look like African’s or Indian, but saw they resembled neither. All three had large ridged brows and deepset dark eyes. Their foreheads sloped back, but their jaws thrust out strongly.
She noted with shock that each had a bone or piece of wood thrust through the septem of his wide flat nose. Bushy black hair curled onto their shoulders.
"Coo-ee!" The eerie cry came again and more men appeared atop the bluff, then started the descent. All carried spears.
Romell reached for Pieter's hand and gripped it hard. "Goodbye, Pieter," she murmured. "May God forgive you for what you have done." She withdrew her hand, closed her eyes and began to pray.
When long minutes went by and nothing happened to her, she opened her eyes and saw that the first three men had stopped three feet away from Pieter and herself, the other men behind them. The spears they hefted had stone heads that looked sharp and lethal. Ugly scars showed on the men's arms and chests. Romell shuddered as she realized that the scars were patterned and so must have been deliberately inflicted. If they tortured one another, what could she and Pieter expect from them?
The middle native of the first three stepped forward and laid his spear on the ground before him, jabbering in a high, rapid voice. The men to either side of him also dropped their spears, although those behind them did not. Then all three men advanced.
Romell forced herself not to back away, though her legs quivered so badly she was afraid she'd fall. She heard Pieter take a rasping breath. The lead man reached out his hand and touched the faded red satin of Romell's dress. He seemed startled by the smoothness of the material. She stood very still. He fingered her hair, felt her bare arm.
Pieter muttered low in his throat. Don't anger them, she wanted to warn him, but was afraid to speak lest she alarm the native. So far he hadn't harmed her.
He touched the gold chain she wore at her waist, fingered it, then tugged at it. Since he obviously wanted the chain and she was afraid he'd tear it from her, Romell unfastened it and handed it to him. Murmurs arose from the watchers.
Another man approached, reaching for Pieter's shirt, and though Pieter scowled, he helped the man pull the shirt over his head. The two natives retreated to the larger group with the chain and the shirt, and everyone gathered 'round gesticulating and chattering. Romell saw Pieter eyeing the three discarded spears and knew he must be wondering if it would be any use to seize a spear and fight with so many against them.
The first man came back to Romell and grabbed her makeshift dress, pulling it up so her body was exposed.
"Damn you devils, no!" Pieter shouted and lunged at him, felling the m
an with one blow of his fist.
Immediately the natives jumped him. One grabbed Romell and dragged her away. She looked back to see Pieter buried under naked black bodies, then was jerked almost off her feet when the man who gripped her arm yanked her toward the bluff. She stumbled after him, afraid he'd drag her along the ground if she fell.
The other natives joined them atop the bluff, and Romell was escorted inland to a group of ten conical brush huts set beside a trickle of water. Her dress was stripped from her by her captors and she was pushed toward a group of dark-skinned women.
They gathered around her, some wearing absolutely nothing, some with a bark belt at the waist. Many of the women had long dangling breasts, like Indian squashes, and Romell blinked incredulously at the sight of one woman nursing a puppy. An old woman was the first to touch Romell, but soon they were jostling each other in their efforts to poke, pinch and prod her.
Clenching her fists, Romell stood still while they satisfied their curiosity about her face and body. The women didn't seem malicious, not even when they pulled her hair, giggling among themselves. At last they drew back, looking at one another and talking, with frequent glances toward Romell.
She waited, naked as they now, her head still aching and feeling little stabs of pain here and there where they had pinched her. Had Pieter been killed? What would happen to her? She was afraid to think ahead.
One of the women left the rest and, coming to Romell, peered into her face, then threw her arms around her. "Angwah," she said. "Angwah." Holding Romell's arms, the native woman stepped back and smiled.
Tentatively, Romell smiled too. "Angwah?" she said, trying to imitate the sound.
Instantly the other women ran up, chattering excitedly. The woman holding Romell slipped an arm around her waist and led her toward one of the bark and grass huts.
By the next morning, Romell was almost sure that they didn't plan to kill her. By that afternoon, she understood that "Angwah" was their name for her and she was expected to answer to it.
The woman whose hut she stayed in seemed to be named Mooli. She was kind to Romell, treating her like a sister. Mooli's husband ignored Romell, but then the native men paid little attention to any of the women, she observed, spending much of their time away from camp. There were more women than men in the tribe.
The only trouble was, Mooli wouldn't let Romell out of her sight. If Romell attempted to go anywhere except where Mooli indicated, she was pulled back firmly.
Where was Pieter? She hadn't seen him since their capture and the over-attentive Mooli prevented her from searching for him. As Romell accompanied the women on their food-gathering trips, she kept alert for any sign of Pieter—dead or alive.
The natives ate anything that lived—ants, grasshoppers, beetle grubs, roots, seeds. They fished and they caught giant sea turtles.
Unfortunately, Romell found, the men ate first and the women and children were thrown the scraps. Hunger soon taught her to scramble for these with the others.
She remembered one of the older women in Virginia telling her once that "hunger makes the best sauce." When fat white wichetty grubs, which at first had made her gag to think of eating them raw, became a sought-for prize, she realized the full meaning of that saying. Actually, the grubs had a nutlike flavor, and if she didn't think about what she was eating, they were quite palatable.
There wasn't a fat native in the tribe, and Romell knew that she, too, was losing weight.
Days passed with the same routine: gather food, prepare it for the men, squat by the fire on your haunches and wait for the scraps, sleep. Mooli had painted Romell with a mixture made from lizard grease and charcoal, to protect her skin from the sun. At least that's what Romell believed it was for. She thought she must look like a native herself—naked and painted black, her hair tousled.
Somehow she felt less naked with the paint on her skin.
Everyone went naked, and although Romell tried to avoid staring at the men, she couldn't help noticing that all the adult males had malformed private parts. The young boys looked normal enough, so Romell concluded it must be a deliberate disfigurement, like the welted scars on the men's arms, legs, chests and backs.
She found that time was hard to keep track of--had two weeks passed? Three? Since she had to work with the women, she was usually too busy to spend time worrying about her situation. Sometimes she thought of Pieter, wondering what had happened to him. It wasn't that she cared for Pieter, but he was more like her than her captors ever would be.
As for thinking of Adrien, he became a distant memory she hardly believed in. If she hadn't been so tired most of the time, she might have sunk into despair.
One morning, instead of the women going off as usual to find food, they gathered their gear: fire-sticks—slow-burning pieces of wood lighted all the time and carried for starting fires quickly, pointed digging sticks, crude mortars and pestles. Slinging woven grass dilly bags onto their backs, they carried all but the fire-sticks in these—plus anything the men didn't feel like toting, such as extra throwing sticks and boomerangs.
Children too small to walk sat on their mothers' shoulders and dogs raced about excitedly underfoot as the group moved off. Romell carried her share of gear and trailed after Mooli and the other women as they trudged inland, following the men. The women had a stately, graceful walk that Romell enjoyed watching, until she found that she was supposed to be gathering food along the way.
They ate poorly and slept in the open around tiny fires. Two days later they arrived at a sandy barrens with three domed hills in the middle. By evening, they were among the hills. Here the women moved to the left and the men to the right. Romell and the other women circled behind one of the hills and set up camp. By nightfall, the men hadn't joined them.
Romell, who'd become skilled at interpreting gestures, thought Mooli said the men were gathered for a ceremony from which the women were excluded. When darkness came Romell noticed many small fires dotted over the wasteland and took this to mean that more than one tribe had come to the hills.
"Corroboree," Mooli said.
The low, lugubrious notes of a digeridoo floated on the night breeze. Romell had seen and heard digeridoos before, long hollowed-out tree branches with holes the men blew into, but tonight the moaning sound made the hair rise on her neck. She was suddenly afraid of what might happen here.
She was lost here forever with these people who were so different, so strange. She'd never wear clothes again, or sit at a table, or even have enough to eat. She'd never be with her own kind again.
Where was Adrien now? Had the ship sailed safely to Batavia? Did he think of her sometimes and remember how it had been between them? Tears filled her eyes.
A shout startled her. Men ran into the firelight and dumped a strange-looking dead animal atop the flames. As tall as a man, it had the longest hind legs she'd ever seen, long ears that stood up, and a tremendous tail. The hair burned from its carcass, smelling terrible. When the hair was gone, the men hauled the body out and slit the belly open with stone axes.
The dogs— dingoes, she'd learned to call them—ran to the carcass, yelping, tearing at the discarded entrails. The women pushed hot stones inside the cavity; when they were finished, the men shoved the body back into the fire and the women raked sand and ashes over it. The mouth-watering odor of cooking meat arose.
"Kangaroo," Mooli told her, smiling and rubbing her stomach. Dutifully, Romell repeated the word. I must learn more of their language, she told herself. When I can talk to the women, I won't feel so alone. But the ache of loneliness in her throat refused to go away.
For some reason, one of Ben Jonson's verses came to her:
Say, are not women truly, then, Styled but the shadows of us men?
Certainly these Southland women were ... as she would be, eventually? In the darkness, Romell buried her face in her hands and wept.
Next morning the men, who had left after eating the kangaroo meat, came back. Mooli's husband, Kailo,
approached Romell, gesturing to her to stand. Mooli asked a question and when Kailo answered, Mooli seemed to object, but her husband spat out a volley of words and Mooli withdrew.
Kailo indicated to Romell that she should follow him. Romell looked at Mooli, who gestured that she should go. Apprehensively, Romell trailed after Kailo, and was not reassured by Mooli's anguished call of "Angwah, Angwah" as they rounded the domed hill.
She was led along a trail to a crude stage of bark set in a depression in the midst of the three hills. To the side of the stage a post had been driven into the ground. There Kailo left her after gesturing that she must stay.
After a time, a man with long grey hair approached her. In the front, his hair was tied in a tuft above his forehead; hanging suspended from this tuft, resting on the forehead, were five leaves. The old man's nose ornament was a stick almost a foot long with needle-pointed ends.
He was naked except for a pubic tassel of animal skin which Romell, remembering the beast roasted last night, identified as kangaroo hide. White emblems were painted on the man's chest among the scars.
The way he moved toward her, stepping high, reminded Romell of the Indian medicine men in Virginia, and she knew that's what he must be. A medicine man. The most powerful man in any tribe.
He sprinkled a thick gray liquid about her in a circle and added white feathers to the liquid, all the while chanting. Then he withdrew.
Something's going to happen to me, Romell thought. Maybe they've been waiting for this corroboree all along, and now I'll be killed and . . . and eaten. She looked about her, fighting the urge to run. She'd be caught within moments.
Five men appeared on the trail, two of them dragging a man between them, the others walking before and behind. They passed Romell to head for the post, and she turned her head to watch them tie the man to the post, seeing with disbelieving horror that his skin was white where the covering of charcoal and grease had worn away.
Pieter! She covered her mouth with her hand to keep from shrieking his name aloud. He sagged against his bonds when they finished, but she knew he was alive. His body seemed to be a mass of festering wounds, and he was so thin she scarcely recognized him.