Landfalls

by Naomi J. Williams

  It was unorthodox in every way, of course, but God forgive me, I consented. Which is to say I mumbled what I could remember of a service I have had no need to perform for years. Then I gave them my bread, as they looked famished.

  And now I am comfortably ensconced in a great mangrove tree, on a large limb shaped by nature into a perfect seat. I have discovered that the undersides of the mangrove leaves are gritty with salt. This remarkable species appears to excrete salt through its leaves; thus it survives the salinity of the water in which it grows. If only men could do this—shed from their bodies and their selves the things that would destroy them.

  TWELVE

  SKULL HOUSE

  Vanikoro, Solomon Islands, August 1791

  Captain Edward Edwards stands on the deck of the HMS Pandora, looking at a small island to the northwest. The island is steep and densely forested. Even the sides and summit of its one abrupt mountain are thickly covered with trees. The Pandora lies less than a mile from the reef that tightly girdles the island, but a low haze obscures the shoreline, and Edwards cannot make out anything like boats or houses. He knows it is inhabited, however, for a narrow plume of white smoke rises from the island’s western side. It rises over the haze, over the abundant trees, and into the hot tropical sky.

  Edwards wonders briefly about the smoke and whose fire it might be. He has fourteen prisoners on board—Bounty mutineers he captured in Tahiti—and more remain at large somewhere in this endless Pacific. But it has been three months since Tahiti, stopping at one island after another, and he has found no trace of the other mutineers. He can hardly stop at every speck of land rising out of the deep. If he needed wood or water, that would be different. But he does not. It is time to make haste. Time to return to England, to deliver for trial the mutineers he has. He directs one of his lieutenants to determine the island’s longitude and latitude and decides to call it Pitt’s Island, in honor of the prime minister. And then he orders the Pandora to proceed on its westerly course—toward, as it happens, shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef just two weeks hence; a terrible open-boat voyage to Batavia; court-martial back in England; criticism for his cruelty to the prisoners, most of whom are acquitted; and the rest of his life spent on land and the half-pay list.

  If only Captain Edwards had stopped at the island that day! He would have been astounded to discover a Frenchman there, a lone survivor of the Lapérouse expedition, missing for three years. If Edwards had rescued this man, if he had been the one to discover what had become of the voyage, he would be known today as more than the unhappy captor of Bounty mutineers. He might have been awarded a knighthood, or even the Légion d’honneur, and come down to us as Sir or Chevalier Edward Edwards. He would surely have received another command at sea. And he would figure more prominently in our tale. But he did not stop, and we must proceed on that basis.

  * * *

  Edwards did not see any people when he passed the island, but the islanders could see him—or rather, they could see the Pandora. They did not call their home Pitt’s Island, of course. They called it—they still call it—Vanikoro, and it is, in fact, two islands, one small and one even smaller, a fact not visible from the deck of the Pandora. The Vanikorans understood their island to be one of many that made up the world. Theirs was a half-day sail by canoe to their nearest neighbor, Utupua; a day’s sail to Ndeni beyond it; and two days to Tikopia, a trading neighbor in the direction of the rising sun. They rarely had the need or desire to sail out any farther. A three days’ sail was usually the result of bad weather or errors in judgment. Four days’ sail was their name for suicide.

  In the village of Paeu on the island’s western flank, the sight of the Pandora created a commotion. In fact, the smoke Edwards saw from the island—the smoke that told him it was inhabited, the smoke he briefly wondered about—had been set in order to attract his attention. That it failed to do so caused one person on the island to despair, brought relief to another, and gave the rest something to talk about for several days.

  The children had seen the ship first. Old enough to wander away from mothers but too young to help all day with chores, they spent their time fearlessly climbing for coconuts and diving for seashells, and one of them—there was considerable disagreement later as to which one of them—saw the frigate as it approached from the east. The older children knew what it was, for they could remember the last time they had seen a ship. Actually, it had been two ships, and their arrival had caused trouble, although the children did not know exactly what sort of trouble. Now here was another one. After a moment of silent surprise, the children raced from the beach to tell the others.

  Most of the men of Paeu were fishing on the north side of the island that morning and never saw the ship, only learning of it later, when they returned to the village. So when the children ran to spread the news, most ran to the women, who were inland, tending to infants or vegetable gardens or bead making. A few of the children ran to the chief elder, who was too old to fish and spent most of his time chewing betel nuts and bothering his wife. And Alu, who was the fastest boy, ran to get the man they called Vo.

  Vo was young enough and strong enough to fish with the other men, but had never been expected to and accompanied them only occasionally. He was the only man left on the island from the two ships that had come before. When Alu came running up from the beach, Vo was outside his sago-palm-thatched house, sharpening a knife while seated on a round stone that had come from his ship. His wife, Oriela, was frowning over a patch of taro plants that had unaccountably wilted overnight. Their child, slung to Oriela’s back, greeted Alu’s breathless arrival with an open-mouthed grin.

  “Vaso! Vaso!” Alu shouted. Vo set the knife down and looked up at the excited boy. He could not remember what vaso meant, but he liked Alu and allowed the boy to drag him away toward the beach. No doubt he was required for one of the children’s games. It happened often enough.

  Oriela knew it was no game, for she remembered what vaso meant. She straightened up and noisily exhaled, as if she had been holding her breath a long time in anticipation of this exact moment. She watched Alu take her husband away, then followed them down the same worn path toward the water.

  When Vo saw the Pandora lying just offshore, he remembered. Vaso was his word; he had taught it to them.

  “See?” Alu was shouting. “Just like your vaso.”

  Not just like, Vo thought, trying to make out the ship’s details through the hazy noon glare. But like enough. It was a frigate. Was it French? He squinted, trying to make out the flags and wishing, not for the first or last time, that he had managed to save a spyglass for himself.

  Not anything like, Oriela thought. This one sat tall and bold on the ocean as if it were king of all the vaso. It was so large it made the horizon look closer, as though the world had shrunk. Giant cloths billowed out from three great pillars, perfectly straight, that stood up from its middle. Along the side ran a line of black holes that seemed to stare across the distance like hard eyes. If she had not known better, she would have been afraid, she would have thought only a mighty spirit could command such a vessel.

  But she did know better; they all did.

  The two vaso that had brought Vo and the others had not looked proud at all. They had been thrown around in the big storm like uprooted huts, tossed horribly for half a day before collapsing on the reef, belching out their contents over half the island. Much of what washed ashore was wood—an entire forest’s worth, it seemed, wood of all sizes and shapes, jagged splinters and smooth planks, solid blocks and tall posts, some of them decorated with pictures and some so elaborately carved or impossibly bent that they could not have been made by ordinary people. The rest of the debris was even stranger—spoiled meat spilling from cracked earthen containers; small tools shaped from shiny, malleable rock; beads made of something harder than seashell that light passed through; hollow objects the height of a small child but so heavy they required two or three villagers to move. And then men, of course,
although at first the villagers didn’t recognize them as men. Pale, sodden men with wild hair and wilder eyes, men arriving in strange battered canoes or hanging to slabs of wood or flailing themselves through the surge, raging and moaning unintelligibly. And later, for days afterward, the dead, with their distended bellies, blue-gray skin, empty eyes, and bodies ravaged by reef and sharks and seawater.

  Now the other villagers—mostly women, drawn to the beach by children, grandchildren, and younger siblings—came to see the vaso. The head elder came too, hurrying to the beach with the help of a walking stick. He stood away from Vo and Oriela, and looked out at the ocean. His betel nut–stained fingers tugged at the grizzled hair on his chin. “They have come for revenge,” he said.

  “Revenge for what?” Vo said. He was staring at the vaso, so he did not notice the way everyone stopped moving or breathing. Even the wind died, as if the spirits themselves were listening for what would happen next.

  “Perhaps they have come to take you home,” the elder finally said, and the beach returned to life, everyone breathing again—in, out, stirring up the island breeze. Only Oriela remained still, breath held, till a restless kick from the baby surprised her into taking a step toward Vo.

  He had pinched his thumbs and forefingers together and was looking out through the tiny opening between his fingertips. “They’re not my people,” he said.

  “Who are they?” Oriela asked.

  He turned to her in surprise. “Oriela.” It sounded like an apology. He reached out toward the baby. She chirped at him, and he clucked back at her.

  “Who are they?” Oriela repeated.

  “On-lay,” he said, or something like it.

  “Are they friends of your people?”

  Vo laughed. “Sometimes.” He looked back at the vaso through his fingertip peephole. “They’re not sending anyone,” he said. His face grew blotchy with unhappiness. “Meh-du,” he muttered; it was a word he used when he was frustrated or angry.

  Oriela watched as his eyes darted from beach to horizon, back to the swaying tops of the palm trees, then out toward the midday sun, lips moving all the while. He looked as if he were chanting, calling a blessing or a curse down on the beach, and the villagers followed his movements, anxious that it be the blessing and not the curse. Oriela could guess what he was doing, for the great vaso was drifting away. He was looking for a canoe to take out and wondering if the wind and the tide would help or hinder him. He had told her once that he had been the one on his vaso responsible for figuring out where to go. She sometimes wondered how this could be; why would the others have left such an important person behind? But their house was filled with objects he had saved from the broken vaso, tools and parts of tools that he told her had once helped him measure the sun and the stars, so maybe it was true. Her people also looked at the sky for help in sailing around the island, and even to neighboring islands and back. But they had no need of these tools, so heavy and so breakable. Anyway, none of that could help him now. Most of the men were out fishing on the other side of the island. The only canoe on the beach was the head elder’s, a delicate, decorated vessel used only for ceremonies. It was never taken out past the reef.

  Vo looked around at the villagers. “I need a fire,” he said, “a big one. Maybe they’ll see the smoke.”

  Alu understood first and sprinted into the woods. The other boys followed, hollering in excitement, spreading the news to the rest of the village, that a vaso had come for Vo. They returned with armloads of sticks and leaves, friends who wanted to join the fun, and an old woman who brought a white-hot coal from her underground oven. In an instant the fire blazed skyward, the air around it watery with heat and acrid with the smell of burned pandan and banana leaves, the white smoke calling to the vaso to come back.

  The bustle around the fire separated Oriela from Vo, and then she found herself driven farther away by the heat. The baby, hungry and tired, began to fuss against her, so she retreated to the shade of a young palm and drew the baby around to her front. She nursed the child and watched Vo, struck by the way he expected the others to tend the fire while he stared out at the escaping vaso. He was used to giving commands and being obeyed. Had he always been like this, she wondered, or was it a habit he had grown into here? She knew he had not been a chief to his people. He had said so. But it had been obvious enough: here he remained, after the others sailed off in that shabby canoe.

  The baby’s suckling slowed, then stopped. Oriela tried gently to shake her awake, but the child’s mouth went slack, and she popped off the nipple like a sated starfish. Oriela frowned. Meh-du, she thought. She disliked the lopsidedness of having one breast empty and the other full, and had meant to switch sides before the baby fell asleep. She brushed a fly from the baby’s head and ran her fingers through her hair, soft brown ringlets tipped with sun-yellow. No one could resist touching it—not Oriela, not Vo, not the villagers. With that magical hair, her light brown skin, and dolphin-colored eyes, the child looked like neither Oriela nor Vo, but like something entirely her own, as if she belonged to no one.

  A cry came from the other side of the fire, and Oriela looked up to find Vo running along the beach, shouting words she did not know, calling out to the vaso as it floated away. He ran into the water, and for a terrible moment Oriela thought he might try to swim out to the On-lay, the sometime friends of his people. But he got in only to midcalf before falling to his knees, then sank back onto his heels. He struck at the water swirling around him and howled in grief, and Oriela could hear an answering cry leave her own lips. The baby’s eyes stayed shut, but her body started at the sound, short arms flying up as if to protect her own head.

  The villagers stopped tending the fire and looked at Vo. They were not used to seeing outbursts like this, not from grown men, not unless someone had died. They began to scatter, looking for a return to the ordinary—the head elder to his favorite shady spot, the few young men to the repair of fishing nets or traps, the women back to babies and vegetable gardens, with just a few children staying to poke at the shrinking fire. Waves broke over Vo’s bent and whimpering figure, buffeting his sorrow, wearing it down. By the time the last fingers of smoke drifted up from the blackened heap of sticks and leaves, he was silent. He lay down in the surf, looking nearly as he had when he first arrived, washed up on the beach after his vaso had destroyed itself on the reef. Not that Oriela remembered him from that day. They had all looked the same then, like beached jellyfish—monstrous, howling, storm-bringing jellyfish. It was not till later that she began to recognize Vo. He was one of the few survivors who ventured outside the enclosure they built for themselves from pieces of the wrecked vaso. He was the only one who tried to learn their language. And he was the only one she saw up close who did not repel her with his ugliness.

  The shrill rattle of a kingfisher overhead woke the baby. Oriela entertained her with a string of seashells and watched the tide start to draw in around Vo. With the vaso gone, the world seemed to spread itself back out, the deep blue of the ocean beyond the reef disappearing once more into the unseeable distance. Even the space between her and Vo—it could not have been more than twenty paces—seemed great and impassable. It was not until she saw the men’s canoes returning, threading their way through the openings in the reef, that she gathered up the baby and went to collect Vo.

  “Come, Vo,” she said. The canoes drew closer to the beach, and in a terrible flash she imagined the men coming ashore and finding him there, another great jellyfish spit out by the sea, and falling on him with their oars. She could still remember the terrible thudding of clubs against skulls and the doomed men’s screams. “Quick, get up,” she said now, jabbing Vo’s side with her foot.

  He looked up, his face swollen with sadness, his eyes pinched with aggrieved surprise that she had kicked him. Nevertheless he obeyed, getting up without a word and walking home after her like a tired child.

  There was no time for baking yam or grilling fish, so she split a small coconut, m
ashed some of its flesh for the baby, and arranged larger pieces of the fruit on a few broad leaves alongside pieces of banana and mango. She placed the leaves before her fishing spirit, a kauri-wood carving she kept on an altar against the back wall. Above the carving was a pair of sticks Vo had tied together with strips of bark and insisted on fixing to the wall over her altar. He had told her that it was a spirit more powerful than hers, but she did not believe it. Two sticks tied together, something the smallest child might manage—how could it have any power over her fishing spirit with his shell ornaments and headdress made of real hair? She bent her head and thanked the fishing spirit for their meal, then added: “Please keep the vaso away.” She hoped the fishing spirit heard her. He had thornlike hooks from his wrists and ankles, hooks that meant he was a skilled fisherman. “Take good care of him,” Old Talimba had said when she gave Oriela the carving, “and he will catch for you whatever you need.”

  Oriela called to Vo, then put the baby on her lap and tried to entice her with the mashed coconut. The baby opened her mouth eagerly for every morsel, but ended up pushing most of it back out with her tongue. Vo watched the baby and smiled at her efforts, but said nothing. Eventually Oriela wiped away the white mash that had collected on the baby’s chin and chest, set her down on the reed mat, and brought Vo the food from the altar. He shook his head and motioned for her to have it. Usually he left exactly half of his meal for her, a habit their neighbors found funny. “He spoils you,” they told her. “You get fat while Vo gets skinny.” It was true, she thought, eating up first all of the mango, then the bananas, and finally the coconut. She had been sticklike when she moved in with Vo, but now her arms and legs were fleshy and strong, and she had grown round and solid, like a young tree.