by Ferenc Máté
Father Murphy worked silently. When he was done, he rinsed the gash with iodine again.
The Finn laid candlenuts out around Testard. When Nello came and put the candle beside him, the Finn looked up and said under his breath, “She’s gone.”
“Who?” Nello said.
“The girl who’s not a boy.”
Nello turned. Darina was nowhere. The yard was empty except for the shark. He went to the gate and looked out at the long curve of the shore, now deserted in the moonlight. After a while, the singing rose again but distant now and fading somewhere in the canyon. It echoed until it melded with the wind and waves, and the muffled murmurs and soft groans of the night.
Chapter 33
The ground under her feet was soft with rain, and the great leaves brushed against her and drenched her with rivulets. The near-full moon had come over the crest, but it seemed to throw more shadows than light. She told herself not to be afraid because this was like Inishturk except for trees and bushes, and actually better without drunken fishermen staggering at you in the moonlight. There are no dangers here, she told herself, except for the odd shark swinging from a tree. If these people wanted to kill you, they could have killed you in the fortress. They could have killed all of you, but instead they played a joke; to humiliate you with laughter.
The sound of that bubbling, boisterous laughter still rang in her head. A laughter like Michael’s. He used to call it chortling. She had never heard anyone else chortle in her life.
The path at the bottom of the canyon narrowed and steepened. It became a creek bed with water around her feet, then swung uphill. She stopped. She closed her eyes and listened. She could no longer hear the sea behind her or the singing up ahead, only soft growls and screeches. She forced herself to concentrate, to drown out the night sounds and listen for voices. There were none. She went on.
At first she had watched her every step, but now she was propelled by yearning. Once in a while she stopped and whispered, “Michael?” Then she pushed on, full of hope. The bushes slapped her hard, and big roots tripped her, and she stumbled but kept from falling, and felt stronger for it.
Judging by the moon, she had been gone an hour, and she began to tire from struggling in the dark. She thought she’d have caught the singers by now—they moved at such languid ease when working on the beach—and it struck her that she might have completely lost the path. She stopped and looked up.
Crenellated spires towered all around her, some cracked, some splintered, but beyond them the mountains stood solid in the moonlight. Another half hour brought her to a saddle. Uphill, toward the moon, was a ridge of mountains, but to her right a slope of grass fell into the sea, where a narrow bay silvered in the moonlight. On one side of the bay, where black rocks backed the shore, a low house huddled, no bigger than a hut. Scatterings of palms fringed its sandy beach, a pond glowed behind it, and she could hear running water gurgling below. Its own world, she thought. Oh, Michael.
She saw movement. Off the point of land, the dark shape of a canoe swept across the sea. It came at great speed straight into the bay, and when it made a sharp turn she could make out the girl riding on her board.
Down a winding goat trail, Darina began the descent.
NELLO WALKED, FULL OF RUM, to the deserted village. He stopped and called out, “Darina,” but there was no reply. He circled to the waterfall, saw no one, then headed back to the fortress.
The Finn sat by the gate. “She wouldn’t have gone that way,” he said. “There’s nothing past the village but the Chinamen’s shack, and mine. Then a cliff. The only way out of here is the canyon. There is a single narrow path on the island, the rest is jungle.”
“And sea.”
“There’s no one on the sea.”
Maybe she went to find the skiff, Nello thought. Those blue eyes were capable of anything. “She likes to be alone,” Nello said.
“Who doesn’t?” the Finn said.
“How are things inside?”
“The father is stitching Testard like a stuffed goose.”
“Will he live?”
“The Father? I doubt it. He drank enough rum to kill the average horse.”
“I mean Testard.”
“Who knows?”
“I’d better go try to find her,” Nello said.
The Finn didn’t answer. He held the opium pipe out to Nello. “You can take this if you like. Helps you see in the dark. Helps you see things clearly that aren’t even there.”
Nello took the pipe, inhaled its smoke deeply, then handed it back.
“And you better take this for company,” the Finn said, handing him the rifle.
“Good company,” Nello said. He headed for the canyon.
“And if she comes back?” the Finn called.
There was no response.
DARINA STOPPED NEAR THE SHORE behind the palms. The moon lit the hut perched against the bluff, surrounded by low shrubs like a tiny cottage with a garden. The girl rode her board right onto the sand and stopped below Darina. The moonlight streamed off her graceful limbs and upturned breasts. She pushed her long drenched hair over one shoulder, and reached down into the foam and pulled out the tapered board. “Bonsoir,” her soft voice said.
Exhausted, Darina leaned back against a palm. “I don’t speak French,” she said hoarsely. “Do you speak English?”
The other hesitated, “A lil’bit,” she said. Then, with languid movements, she dragged her board up the beach into the shadow of the palms.
Darina sat heavily in the still warm sand. The salty breeze felt good against her face. She closed her eyes. The sounds faded, then blurred into one.
“DOES EVERYONE GO CRAZY HERE?” Dugger grumbled tiredly. “What the hell do you mean, they went off into the night?”
“I didn’t say they,” the Finn objected. “I said she vanished, then he went to find her.”
Jesus, Dugger thought. After a bloody month at sea, all I wanted was a good night’s sleep with no sails or waves to worry about. He thought of the ketch unattended in the swells.
“Will the natives be back?”
“Ah, the natives.” The Finn sighed and took a deep puff on his pipe but it had burned down. Patiently he stuffed it, lit it, puffed away, then handed it to Dugger. “Have some of this. It helps you understand the natives.”
Dugger puffed. The more he puffed, the more distant the Finn seemed, until, with his drawn face and deep-set eyes, he looked like someone from the world beyond. “The natives,” the Finn repeated. “The Kanakas. The brutes. The savages.” He raised his eyebrows as if in a shrug. “Who knows? They’re fickle. Sometimes as happy as children, then they get insulted and want war.”
“And now?”
“Now? They’re fed up now. Fed up with us all. The French marines, the Irish priest, the Portuguese sailors who come and shanghai them to dig bird shit for fertilizer in Peru, then send them back with smallpox; the Yankee whalers who come and have their way with the women, paying a nail a go. Sometimes there are no nails left in a whaling ship even to hang a hammock.” He went to the table and dug around in the rubble for something to gnaw. “And with the nails they leave their diseases: tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, the clap; you name it, they leave it. Half the women here are barren from the clap, the other half sick with it. Except for the pretty ones they hide in the valleys. They’re slowly dying out. There used to be some fifty thousand Kanakas in these islands. Now there’s a few hundred.”
There was a gurgling sound from inside the barracks, like someone trying to breathe through water.
“Poor dumb Testard,” the Finn went on. “He thinks all will be well when the Kanakas are like Frenchmen. With maybe a dance hall and a sidewalk café. So he had the poor buggers start building a sidewalk; from nowhere to nowhere.” He laughed a quiet laughter and shook his head. “And Father Murphy had them start on a cathedral made of coral. Can you imagine? In the middle of bloody nowhere. What minds! No wonder the Kanakas are fed up. Wouldn’t you be? They sp
end their strength on these imbecile creations, and have little left for fishing or making poi poi. So they weaken. Then the disease gets them . . . Fed up.”
He passed the pipe to Dugger.
“And the whites?” Dugger murmured.
“What whites? We’re it. Oh, there were a few dozen at one time: mutineers, ship-jumpers, some convicts who escaped from the prison on Eiao and made it across a hundred miles of currents and sharks. And a few dreamers. Some went crazy, the rest died.”
“Died how?”
“Knifed. Shot. Clubbed in the dark. Pushed off a cliff by a Kanaka or another white. Shark food.”
After a while Dugger asked, “And you?”
“Well, I don’t seem to be dead yet. Guess I might be crazy. Do you think I’m crazy?”
“You seem okay to me.”
“Pity. That must mean that I’m about to die.”
Dugger got up bracing himself against the wall, and pushed himself off toward the barracks. “You’re all right, Finn,” he said. He stopped beside the dead shark, watched its dead eye in the moonlight, then turned back to the Finn. “Will they attack?”
“I suppose so. They’ve been told the marines will come with the frigate. With a cannon. I doubt they’ll wait for that.”
Too tired to walk around, Dugger stepped over the shark and into the bunkhouse. The place reeked of blood and iodine and rum. Testard, pale except for patches of caked blood, lay in the candlelight. Kate was in a bunk, turned to the wall asleep, and Father Murphy sat snoring in a chair, an empty cup dangling from his hand. When Dugger passed, he stopped snoring and mumbled, “. . . and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment . . .”
Dugger sat down beside Kate and leaned against the headboard. He closed his eyes. Go crazy or die, he thought. It’s nice to have a choice.
Chapter 34
Guillaume lay high on a cone-shaped crag, looking down at the hillside village in the moonlight. Only a lone old man, graying but unbent, wearing a pareu, shuffled among the huts with a torch of woven pandanus flaming in his hand. The huts were on terraces encircling a clearing, with a creek running through it. The village was smaller than he remembered; the terraces seemed the same, but there were fewer huts, with wide gaps between them where old huts had collapsed and were never replaced.
From seaward came women’s voices, ringing off the canyon walls. He pulled his notebook from his pack, drew a quick sketch of the village, the creek, the biggest house atop a pae pae, a raised platform of stones that he remembered to be the chief’s, and the towering crags that surrounded the village—the high positions from which you could get clear shots. The French called this place La Vallée des Verges, the Valley of Phalluses.
Then he waited. He flipped to the back of the book to refresh his memory of the Marquesan phrases he’d scribbled there years ago: Did you miss me? You look as beautiful as ever. Did you wait for me? but the pages had gotten wet, the words were washed away.
He stirred nervously, remembering what else he was here for, so he pulled his pistol from his bag, checked the chamber, wiped the barrel dry, and set it out where the wind could blow over it. Madness, he thought. You’ll go mad trying to do both: kill and find love. Love is madness enough alone. Especially after all these years. All this time of trying to forget. Yet how the memories still flood over you: the dreams you dreamt together, the passion, the frantic lust. And those beautiful enigmatic eyes that left you helpless and defenseless. In love. Maybe they’re gone forever, those eyes. Perhaps dead. Buried, with all the others that died here whose huts collapsed and were not built again. Or maybe they’re back there with the singers in the canyon. Coming.
The old man hurried across the clearing and vanished in the jungle. A minute later Guillaume saw his torch on the rising path that wound between sheer cliffs.
He stashed the notebook in his pack but held on to his pistol and pushed his way through the bush and followed. With his arm extended to guard his face from branches, he clambered quickly through the patch of jungle to the mouth of the canyon.
How quickly you abandon the passion of the heart for the passion of the chase, he thought. Or maybe they’re the same? Or maybe the chase is better: once you get your prey, the struggle is over; with love it just begins.
The walls closed in so tight only one man could pass. The torch popped up far ahead and climbed steeply toward the moon. When it reached the crest it vanished. He climbed. He was out of breath when he reached the top. The wind blew harder here. He crouched and looked over the edge. Mon Dieu, he thought. This can’t be. They said it hasn’t existed for centuries.
A narrow grassy plateau hung between two peaks. Below one edge was the dark and sullen jungle; far below the other, the glittering swells of the sea. Great stone platforms lined the plateau—aglow in the flame of torches lit now by the old man every dozen steps. At the far end, a high altar loomed under a great banyan, and a long stone platform with a round black pit from which rose a whimpering plea; a cry. The wind brought the odor of decaying flesh. A place of sacrifice.
The old man lit the last torch near the banyan, came back to the altar, stuck his torch between two stones, and from a niche pulled a long white festive gown and slipped it over his head. He walked with slow grace to the plateau’s edge, stopped, and looked up into the dome of stars.
FROM THE BEACH AGLOW in the moonlight, Father Murphy came up and stopped beside the Finn at the fortress gate.
“What do we do now, Finn?”
“About what?”
“Jesus, Finn. About anything.” A wave crashed in a long thunder on the sand, and he didn’t speak again until there was silence. “About what to do when the frigate comes? It has to come. If they lose this island, they will lose them all.”
“So they lose them.”
“Then what will happen to us?”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure they’ll kill us; you know that, don’t you, Padre? The frigate will come and blow up a few shacks, slaughter some poor devils, and sail off; a job well done. Then the Kanakas will wait for the right time to take revenge; then we’re dead.”
“Jesus, Finn, you should get some sleep.”
The Finn sucked some cold smoke out of the pipe. “Have you ever eaten shark, Padre? They say eating a shark is in fact eating a man, because a shark will have eaten a man in its time.”
“It’s the opium, Finn. It’s turning your brain to mush.”
“To each his own savior, Padre.”
“I’m shutting the gate,” Father Murphy said in helpless anger. “Are you coming in or staying out?”
“Oh,” the Finn said, “I’ll come in. I miss that old dead shark.”
With a swing of his cassock, Father Murphy went toward the dark stench of the barracks. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” he mumbled.
“And the pipe,” the Finn added. “Don’t forget the maker of the pipe.”
DARINA SHUDDERED AWAKE, unsure whether she’d slept for minutes or for days. The moon lit the little world on whose edge she slept. She was leaning against the base of a palm, the moon overhead slashed by swaying fronds. The girl stood in the pond below her hut, naked, humming softly, distractedly washing her shoulders and long arms.
Darina kept looking at her in helpless fascination. The girl finished washing but remained in the pond, massaging her small breasts as she did every day, pumping gently just as the older women had showed her, when they were teaching her how to make them larger and more firm. After a while she reached for a broken coconut, crushed some of the white meat in her hands, spread her legs, and slowly rubbed the pulp in her shadowed regions, around and around, slightly up and down, to whiten the dark flesh, a cherished sign of beauty. She rubbed patiently until she breathed hard, her thighs and buttocks writhed, and her head fell forward as she gave a gentle moan.
She stood motionless awhile, then she rinsed off, dried herself, turned, and softly humming, walked into her shack. She lay down just b
eyond the opening of the door, brought an arm over her head to shade her eyes, and lay still, only her back heaving with long, even breaths.
NELLO HURRIED ALONG THE PATH. The growth overhead made strange patterns against the moon, and left torn and tangled shadows on his arms. He cursed, mixing saints with hogs and dogs. You are completely crazy, he told himself, chasing a mad-woman in the land of madmen at night.
He stopped and smelled the rum on his own breath and the stench of the shark still on his arms. You should be back there looking after Kate and helping Dugger, not chasing some chimera in the night.
But he walked on and didn’t stop until he reached the saddle.
Below him were the small bay and the hut and the pointed board lying under the palms. Through the open door he could see a naked form lying in pale light. He felt a rush of the heart.
Chapter 35
He had heard of these ancient sites. There were tales of sacred rites for warriors who had showed bravery in battle, for virgins initiated into womanhood by warriors, for the births of new chiefs, and for old chiefs when they died. And he had heard of human sacrifice, and the gruesome feasts that followed, heard Kanakas talk about it like fairytales from the past. At those times there were the dances and the “long pig” was still eaten. But the sites were said to have been overrun by jungle; no one knew where they were, or if they had been at all. But this was here: the grass of the plateau worn, the torches ablaze, readied for something.
Guillaume steadied his elbows on a rock and looked through the binoculars at the flat boulder before the altar and the banyan tree towering in the torchlight.
Something in the banyan’s roots caught his eye. The long roots of the banyan hung in cascades from the branches, some thick as a thigh, some so fine they danced in the wind. But on the thick roots there were lumps; rounded, bulging. At first he thought they were only an anomaly of nature, but when he refocused the binoculars, he saw the eyes. Most of the lumps were grown over by root bark, but some were not yet completely enclosed and showed yellowed foreheads, cheeks, the dark holes of the eyes. And off to one side was a fresh head with swarming bugs.