Casca 17: The Warrior

by Barry Sadler

  But it seemed that this was not a day to be remembered. Nor was Tepole to be remembered, neither his crimes nor his punishment.

  Sakuvi and Vuki and the departed Sonolo, on the other hand, were talked of at great length, and songs grew out of the conversations that recorded their lives and their deaths, carrying the moral that whiskey had brought about the end of all three.

  But Vuki's murderer was not mentioned by name. It was as if Tepole had never existed.

  And, too, it was as if Cakabau didn't exist. Casca strove with all the language he could muster, and with remarks in English to Semele and Mbolo, to make the threatened raid the topic of conversation, but without success. So far the attack had not happened, perhaps it never would.

  The villagers were heartily sick of the topic. Already the threatened raid had cost them their hundred best men, the whiskey casualties, and Sala's brother. Tepole was not counted as a loss.

  Frustrated, Casca withdrew from the conversation and sat back to relax and enjoy the kava, and later Vivita, or which other woman wound up in his bed for the night.

  He looked around at the likely contenders. There were half a dozen young women, all, at the moment, staying respectfully a little farther from him than Vivita. But Casca now knew that this might change in the course of the evening, that the game amongst the women never stopped. Through some process of communication, competition, and cooperation that he'd not been able to discern much less appreciate or understand, Casca was aware that the women might decide amongst themselves that he should spend the night with one of these young lovelies rather than with the gap-toothed Vivita.

  The kava was beginning to take hold. Casca felt the pleasant, numbing sensation spreading throughout his body, felt the tension and worry about Cakabau's raid seeping away. The soft light from the fire and the whale-oil lamps was becoming a golden glow.

  The little blue stones around Takuni's neck reflected the soft light very pleasantly. Casca watched the firelight glinting off the facets of the stones and wondered what they were. Surely not cut, he decided they must be some naturally occurring crystal.

  Suddenly he was on his feet, snatching at the little necklace, holding the stones in the palm of his hand and studying them intently.

  "Where do these come from?" he demanded.

  Takuni was taken aback. So was everybody else. It seemed that Casca was forgetting his manners.

  Takuni shrugged uncomfortably. "From the mountain. There are many, if you search for them."

  "And yellow?" Casca shouted. "Are there yellow ones too?"

  "Of course, yes." Takuni shrugged again. `But the yellow stuff crumbles in your fingers. These are much prettier."

  Casca whooped like a delighted schoolboy. He threw his clenched fists into the air as if to throw them away and stamped his feet and grunted and shouted. He grabbed Takuni by the waist and lifted her high above his head.

  Semele, Mbolo, Ateca, Duana, and even the imperturbable Vivita stared at him in amazement.

  He put down the girl, raced across to Semele, and lifted the astonished giant in his arms. He put him down and whirled about to do the same to Mbolo.

  "Gunpowder!" he shouted. "Gunpowder! Great balls of Mars, we've got gunpowder!"

  Semele looked up from where Casca had dropped him. A lesser man might have suffered a considerable loss of dignity.

  "What is gunpowder?" he asked politely.

  Casca whooped some more, shouted, "Gunpowder, gunpowder, gunpowder," stamped his feet, waved his fists, danced a sort of barbaric jig, and finally collapsed to the floor laughing.

  Semele, Mbolo, and the others waited patiently and politely for his outburst to pass.

  Lying on the floor, Casca made the gesture of an erection with his right arm and clenched fist. "Force," he shouted. He clutched his balls in his left hand and opened the right fist explosively. "Fire," he yelled. "Life for the muskets."

  When at last his hilarity diminished, Casca sputtered an explanation through his chuckles. "We can use the muskets. The men have not been wasted. Sonolo's mission will yet defeat Cakabau and save the village."

  In the morning Casca awoke to a breakfast of papayas and cooked bananas and coconut milk, prepared by Takuni. He held out his hand and she dropped the necklace into it. He grunted happily as the sight of the crystals confirmed his idea of the previous night.

  "You can find some more of these stones for me now?"

  "Of course, yes."

  "And the soft yellow stuff?"

  "Of course, yes."

  "Good, let's go."

  He gulped a mouthful of coconut milk, snatched up some bananas, and left the hut at such a pace that Takuni had to run to catch up with him.

  "We shall need a bag," she gasped.

  "Get one," Casca snapped, and kept right on heading for the lower slopes of the volcano.

  Takuni ran to her hut and returned with a tapa sack, trotting to keep up with Casca, who was striding along at the phenomenal speed that he had first learned in Caesar's legions, covering a full six feet every time his left foot hit the ground.

  They struck directly up the face of the mountain, ignoring the curving trail until the going got so steep that they had to use it.

  His pace didn't slacken. He climbed like a man possessed. After the several days of frustration and inaction he now saw the opportunity to do something, and luxuriated in the sweat streaming from every pore of his body.

  His little companion managed to keep up with him, but in some confusion. To move so fast under the broiling tropical sun was an absurdity to her. Did this blue-eyed madman fear that the mountain would go away?

  After some hours of climbing at Casca's frenetic pace they came at last to the lip of the volcanic crater. Casca stood on the edge and looked down across the expanse of black lava. Huge waves of molten rock racing from the core had hardened in place when the fires cooled, and they now formed a great, black, frozen sea.

  They climbed down into the crater and made their way across the lava, sometimes having to climb the arching face of a wave six to eight feet tall. Then the waves were smaller, only ripples, and then the frozen puddle of lava was flat.

  It was hot underfoot, and from time to time the surface crust broke away and they fell through the trapped bubbles of air, sometimes only an inch, but often a foot or more. Casca's heart was in his mouth at the thought that they might be crashing right through the surface lava and down into the fires beneath.

  They came to the crumbling inner edge of the crater and looked down. Far below them red fires glowed and sulfurous fumes drifted up to them.

  "The very halls of Hades," Casca muttered. "Where do we find the stones?" he asked Takuni.

  "Everywhere," she said, and smiled, "and nowhere. It is necessary to search."

  "Yeah," grunted Casca, "well, there's hours of light left, let's get to it." He moved to skirt the fire pit. "You go that way, and yell out if you see anything—blue or yellow."

  The sun burned down out of the clear blue sky. The lava underfoot was almost too hot to touch. Casca cursed that he had not brought some water. He seemed to be moving in small clouds of steam issuing in puffs from the hot ground.

  He plodded about on the hot, black stone, bored now with the tiresome task of searching for tiny flecks of color in the endless sea of black.

  Across the pit Takuni was capering about like a child at a picnic, darting first in one direction where she thought she saw some color, then disappointed, swerving away to run a few paces another way.

  Her scatterbrained mode of searching half annoyed, but also amused Casca, who was diligently quartering the area, carefully examining every tiny cleft and crevice. He was about to call to Takuni to search more carefully when she gave a shriek of unmistakable delight and Casca found himself bounding eagerly to her side.

  She had come to where the ripples of lava rose again into waves, and was looking up the back of a long rise of black dotted with tiny flecks of yellow.

  Casca sucked in his
breath in disappointment. It would take hours to dig out just one ounce of these tiny little dots of sulfur.

  Takuni was running up the back of the wave, to jump off its crest and race to the next one.

  Casca shrugged and took out his knife. "Well," he muttered, "maybe she'll find some bluestone while I'm winkling out this stuff."

  But another delighted yelp from Takuni had him bounding up the back of the wave and leaping from its face as she had. In the back of the next wave he could see a broad swathe of yellow where the lightweight sulfur had frothed to the top of the denser lava.

  Casca fell upon the vein of yellow and dug out great chunks of it, catching them in his left hand and gesturing to Takuni to bring him the tapa sack.

  Takuni did so, first taking out the two coconuts she had carried with her from the village. Casca looked at the little black girl in amazement.

  "What else did you think of that I forgot?" he asked as he opened a coconut and gulped thirstily from it.

  For an answer Takuni reached into the sack and brought out a small green-stone axe.

  Casca sheathed his knife and held out his hand. As Takuni handed him the axe he took both her hands in his and kissed her gently on the lips.

  She responded willingly. Casca looked around. In the entire expanse of the crater there was no grass, not even a patch of bare soil, nothing but the hard, black, hot rock with its broken, crumbling edges. To lay the girl down on the sharp rock was unthinkable; it would lacerate her back to strips.

  "I'd cut my knees to bits too," Casca grunted, handing Takuni the coconut and going to work with the axe. "This is enough of the yellow stuff. Look for the bluestones." He turned all his attention to his digging.

  For a moment Takuni stood looking at him as if disappointed, then she scaled the wave of lava, jumped off the edge, and ran skipping for the next rearing black wall.

  Casca wielded the little axe with a will, chopping away the brittle rock and scooping out handfuls of the soft yellow sulfur. He was coming to the end of the vein when he heard Takuni calling from a long way away.

  He clambered up to stand erect on the crust of lava, six feet or so above the general flow. He could see Takuni waving from a great distance, almost to the far side of the crater.

  Hurriedly he scooped all the free sulfur into the sack and set off at a half run, whooping exultantly as he went. When he got to Takuni she was down on her hands and knees, peering down into a tiny crevice in the rock. She moved aside to let him see.

  Tiny wisps of sulfurous steam issued from deep down in the crevice and condensed onto its walls on the way to the surface. The steam carried with it tiny traces of copper and sulfur that had been chemically welded together in the giant caldron below. Here and there on the sides of the crevice the condensed steam had deposited tiny blue crystals of copper sulfate.

  Casca seized Takuni and kissed her rapturously. She hugged him fiercely. "What the hell," Casca muttered, "this old hide can stand a few more scars." He lowered himself to the ground, and she was quickly astride him. He didn't even notice the way the broken edge of the rock sawed his back to a bloody mess.

  It was dark before they got out of the crater, but Casca was well satisfied with the day's prospecting. He had perhaps twenty or so ounces of pure sulfur and about the same weight of copper sulfate. He had also collected several long sticks of obsidian, the volcanic glasslike stone that formed in the intense heat of the fiery magma.

  They made their way down the mountain and back to the village, going directly to Takuni's house, where she quickly prepared a meal of cassava, taro, breadfruit, and bananas. Then they lay down together on the sleeping mat.

  It was mid-morning when Casca awoke. He had slept through the morning drums and all the hubbub of Takuni's household as they awoke, washed, breakfasted, and left the house to attend to the day's work.

  Casca and Takuni were alone in the house, and she brought him a breakfast of small fish in coconut cream as soon as she saw that he was awake. When he'd eaten she walked with him to his own hut, turning aside to go her own way when they were almost there.

  He set to work at once, pounding up the small blue crystals, sieving the sulfur through tapa cloth, and finally combining the two with some of the saltpeter that Larsen had left for pickling fish and some charcoal from Vivita's cook fire.

  Casca's homemade explosive worked as well as he could have wished. His first test resulted in wild shrieks of terror from all over the village, a general flight from the vicinity, and a great deal of confusion.

  But soon curiosity overcame fear, and for his next test he had an audience of the entire daytime population of the village. Casca added some torn strips of cloth to the mix, bundled the whole in banana leaves between two bibs wrapped in sharkskin and tied tightly with vines, and launched it, using for mortar a clay pot wrapped around many times in sharkskin.

  The pot disintegrated in all directions as the first charge exploded, but contained the blast long enough to hurl the bibs aloft, where they burst apart mightily as their charge detonated. The air was filled with blue smoke and prettily fluttering strips of cloth. The show was a huge success with the villagers, and Casca himself was mightily pleased.

  "Fuck Cakabau," he shouted, "we'll blow the bastard's balls off."

  His hundreds of years of rigorous self-discipline, frequent lapses into comfortable daydreams, and a drastic awareness of the seemingly inevitable results of such lapses put a stop to his celebratory mood. "Of course, if he strikes at dawn tomorrow, we'll be as defenseless as we were a week ago."

  There was no time to be lost. Ten musketeers had to be selected and trained tonight. Now.

  Casca went looking for the carpenter chief. He needed a lot of help before tonight's meeting. He found Watolo making a stone-headed club, and explained to him what he needed while he watched him work.

  Watolo had heated a stone over a slow fire of coconut shells, and using a length of split bamboo as a tongs, he now removed it from the fire and carefully dripped water on it, one drop at a time, chips of stone flying off. When the stone became too cool for his chipping to take place, he reheated it and repeated the process until he had formed a hole through its center. Forcing a tapered stick through the hole, he then hammered it on a large, hard rock until it was roughly rounded. Twirling the stick in his hands, he worked a saucer shaped dent in the rock till it was smooth.

  He fitted a new tapered handle of the tough, hard, black root used for wooden clubs, with a few inches of the fat end protruding through the stone like the handle of a mattock. He fixed the handle in place with gum from the breadfruit tree. In use, centrifugal force would progressively tighten the head further onto the handle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  In the chief's house Casca had no difficulty in getting the villagers' attention. The afternoon's demonstration had seen to that. But Casca was worried that tonight's demonstration might move the villagers to such transports of optimism that he would be unable to get the necessary urgency behind the training of the musketeers.

  So he opened the night's demonstration by taking one of the muskets, priming it with his homemade powder, ramming home a ball, the wad, and then shooting Semele's ceremonial war club into splinters.

  The clamor to be allowed to use the weapon was immense, and Semele's amused amazement ensured that he be the first to try.

  Mbolo was next, then his son, and finally Ateca, thinking that perhaps a woman's touch was needed. But none of them succeeded in putting even a scratch on the club they were shooting at.

  Casca took a considerably longer time to load the next musket, meanwhile calling upon all the watchers to observe how much of the precious gunpowder was consumed.

  He then blew to bits a second club, and pointed out that some training was needed, and called for competitors in a contest to select the ten musketeers.

  Every man and most of the women demanded to be allowed to compete, which suited Casca fine. If he could teach the whole village at once, so much the be
tter.

  Casca firmly believed that there is nothing quite so useless as an unloaded gun, and also maintained that even in the hands of an untrained idiot a loaded gun will at least make a frightening noise, so he first set to work to teach everybody how to load the weapons.

  Demonstrating with one musket, he quickly showed ten people how to pour in the powder, place the ball, ram home the wad, and set the cap. Within a few minutes each of the ten was giving a close demonstration to a dozen or so others, then more were trying and being corrected by Casca. Pretty soon everybody in the house knew what the loading operation looked like, and quite a number had tried it.

  Next Casca took away all the powder and shot and showed ten men how to aim their guns at the men of coconut palm and bamboo that Watolo had made for him earlier in the evening. Each man target had a large hole where the navel might have been, and the contenders were told to aim at this point. By crouching behind the target and sighting through this hole, Casca could tell which men might have some chance of keeping a musket trained on a man.

  An agreeably large number qualified on this rough test, and Casca soon had ten of them slowly squeezing off practice shots with the promise that whoever impressed him as being gentlest, slowest, and smoothest on the trigger would get to fire a live charge.

  As the finale of the evening Dukuni's son Lobo was awarded the privilege of actually firing at the target.

  To Casca's immense satisfaction he punched a hole through the target's belly just alongside the target hole. He was especially delighted at Lobo's lament that he had not succeeded in placing the ball exactly through the hole.

  By the time he and Vivita walked to their hut, Casca felt confident that the village was capable of giving Cakabau a very bad shock should he appear in the morning.

  But to Casca's delight Cakabau did not appear in the morning. Every day counted, and that day Casca made determined use of every minute that passed.

  He now had all of Sonolo's authority as war chief, and Semele and Mbolo willingly added all of theirs, but it was the novelty of playing with the muskets that provided him with the main incentive for the warriors to undergo his prescribed training.