Casca 17: The Warrior

by Barry Sadler

"Dammit it," he shouted in English, the way Clevinger used to when he was annoyed. "I never could understand anything of that after death business when I was alive. And now I'm dead, and I still don't understand it. Damn and blast."

  The memory of the forest of masts of the scores of ships in Levuka harbor brought him back to the arrival at Navola of the Reverend Clevinger's ship.

  The mad, defrocked parson had been a godsend for the village, for all the villages he visited. He robbed them of everything they possessed of any value, but it cost them nothing, for that was the value they put on all of it.

  They had been lucky. Throughout the South Pacific the names of the merchant-adventurer missionaries had become bywords for avarice, lechery, cruelty, ruthlessness, and hypocrisy: Burns, Philip, Clevinger, Savage, Boyd, Hedstrom, Bentley. They combined missionary zeal with slaving, trading, and exploitation on a gigantic scale.

  Clevinger cheated the natives like the rest, but he carried no Bible and no musket, and did not deal in slaves. He traded worthless baubles for priceless treasures, but unlike the others, he did not claim that he had been sent by God. Where his competitors handed out Bibles, the ex-parson handed out temperance and rationalist tracts, and taught English so that the natives might better appreciate the dire warnings of the evils of strong drink.

  When he sailed away he left behind rats, fleas, mosquitoes, a quite unwarranted belief in the efficacy of steel rather than stone tools, an intense interest in minors and bangles and beads, and an urgent craving to sample the proscribed honors of the whiskey bottle.

  Sonolo remembered his warning: "Man need not die to enter heaven or hell, he can find them here. And hell is always waiting in the bottom of the bottle."

  Sonolo looked glumly around the refuge. "I have found the hell I went looking for, and now what am to do?"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Consciousness returned slowly. Casca awoke from terrifying dreams of entombment to see the fuzzy outline of Mbolo's face floating above him. He gasped and sank back into unconsciousness as Mbolo again moistened his lips.

  When he woke again Mbolo's face was clear in his vision, but he could remember nothing. He sank back to sleep once more, this time into a quiet slumber.

  He woke again from nightmare, and in a frenzy tried to rise. Mbolo restrained him gently and calmed him, holding him like a child in his great arms and putting a bowl of thin fish soup to his lips.

  Casca sipped, then sucked greedily at the liquid, gulping it down. In a moment he vomited it all up and sank back to sleep again.

  When next he woke he was lying on a grass mat in what remained of Setole's house, Mbolo's face still above him. He eagerly drank another bowl of soup and motioned for more.

  Setole, Vivita, and Mbolo nursed him for several days, and at last he was able to sit up, then to stand. Finally, leaning on Setole's and Vivita's arms, he could walk.

  "Now," said Mbolo, "we know who you are. You are the great, white bearded one whose coming has been foretold for countless generations. You are Rangaroa, the man-god.

  "I sure as hell am not, Mbolo. You've seen me bleed. I'm no god. I don't even have a beard, and when I do, it ain't white."

  Mbolo smiled in quiet triumph. "Yes, I have seen that your wounds do bleed, but I have also seen that they heal very quickly, and I have wondered about that. You came to us in the hurricane that destroyed our old temple. Your ship bore your name, Rangaroa, the god of the sea. You were buried alive in the new temple and survived, and you survived the earthquake and the great wave. And not one of the many women you have lain with is with child, while many of our women are pregnant to the men who came with you. And you do have a beard. And it is white."

  Casca's hand shot to his face. There was a stubble of beard. Damn, of course his beard had continued to grow in the grave. But white?

  Yes. He knew of this too. More than once he had dug out men who had been buried alive, and their hair and their beard had turned stark white. He didn't need a minor to know that this had happened to him too.

  "We are very pleased to have you return to us as god and chief, now that Semele had gone."

  "Dammit, Mbolo!" Casca shouted desperately. "You're the biggest and the oldest and the most experienced man in the village—you should be the chief."

  Mbolo smiled tolerantly. "This is not possible, for I am above the chief."

  For a moment Casca tried to see the point of what he thought was a joke. Then he realized that Mbolo was not joking. While it was Semele who conducted all discussions, weighed information, and pronounced decisions, nothing was ever decided contrary to Mbolo's view.

  "Above the chief? What's your job anyway?"

  Mbolo's patient smile lit up his placid face. "Clevinger used to say that Semele was the king and me the pope."

  "High priest!" Casca exclaimed in confusion. "But I never see you about any priestly duties."

  "Duties?'

  "Yeah, like preaching at people, or praying to the gods, stuff like that."

  Again Mbolo smiled, and he spoke to Casca as he might have spoken to an intelligent but unobservant child.

  "My only duty is to see that we do not try to move the world in ways contrary to the way of the great spirit that moves all."

  "And this great spirit tells you that I should be chief?"

  "No. It is clear that you must be chief."

  Casca groaned. Why the hell hadn't he made his escape when he had it all organized?

  The contest of strength with the temple pole. His mania to show that he was the strongest man in the village had put him in this position. Again.

  Don't you ever learn, Casca? he asked himself. He shrugged. "Nothing to do but go with it," he muttered to himself. Aloud he said: "So I'm to be king and you the Pope."

  "No," said Mbolo. "That is what Clevinger said, it is not how it is. We are a family, and you are like the man of the family, and I like the woman."

  "With the woman above the man?"

  "Of course, yes."

  "Hmm. Maybe I am beginning to see. How much time was I in the ground?" he asked.

  "In the ground and in the sea twice a night and a day, and we found you today," Mbolo answered.

  Casca smiled. Then he saw Mbolo smiling back, and quickly mastered his features. But inwardly he was grinning happily. The sail canoe and his stash of provisions might yet be in place. He could escape tonight or tomorrow. Very well. For now he would go along with the game, playing the cards he had been dealt.

  He nodded to Mbolo. To himself he thought, So, I'm god. Well, it's not the first time!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Casca's coronation ceremony took up the greater part of a day and a night.

  Everybody, including a number of guests from Lakuvi, gathered at the chief's newly built house shortly after dawn. Mbolo sat in the place of highest honor, Casca next to him, the tabua on its long cord leading from Mbolo's feet to the huge bowl of kava.

  Mbolo accepted the first bowl of kava, draining it, clapping and pronouncing it empty. The young warrior accepted the bilo and returned to the bowl to refill it. Mbolo rose and moved aside, motioning for Casca to occupy the position by the whale's tooth.

  Casca sat and looked along the cord to the kava bowl, then around the great room at the entire population of the village. The bilo arrived and he clapped, accepted, and drank it.

  Every voice in the house said "matha" with him, and every pair of hands clapped three times with him. Again he looked along the cord to the kava bowl and then around the room.

  "I feel like a king on his throne," he muttered to himself in some amazement. His glance roved back around the room and came to rest on Mbolo, squatting beside him.

  "No, I don't. Dammit, I feel like the father of a family."

  A great wellspring of affection for his people filled his being, along with an all-pervasive contentment.

  "Maybe I'll just keep the job for a while and see what sort of a fist I can make of it. I don't have to move on just yet." He settled
down to enjoy the occasion.

  The bilo of kava passed back and forth to each of the minor chiefs, then their wives, then, to the whole of the rest of the tribe in some order that Casca could no way discern. Mbolo made a long, long speech, followed by Ateca. Then each of the minor chiefs made long speeches, too, followed by their wives, and then from all around the room speaker followed speaker, apparently at random, until virtually every villager, certainly somebody from every family, had spoken on the accession of the new chief.

  Meanwhile, banana-leaf platters of fish and taro and cassava and breadfruit passed around and around the great house. Just when Casca was convinced that he could not eat another mouthful, the supply of food would diminish and the bilo of kava would be passed again, the speeches continuing.

  After two or three hours of drinking kava more food appeared, now some huge crabs, papayas, mangoes, and bananas, then lobsters, eventually a giant turtle. Each successive course of the banquet followed a long interval of kava drinking and speech making.

  Casca enjoyed the occasion immensely. He was now very much bigger than the hard, lean railroad worker who had arrived on the island a few months earlier, and his appetite had increased accordingly. Without effort he put away everything that was placed before him. He had also become attuned to the effects of the kava and after a few bilos, passed into an enjoyable state of alert tranquility which grew more and more pleasant with each bilo he drank.

  Finally, very late in the night, the speeches came to an end and people drifted out of the house. The minor chiefs and their wives withdrew, and Casca found himself the only man in the room.

  Setole was nearby, her enormous bulk seated on a mat alongside Casca. Next to her sat Ateca, and there were also a score or more other women present, Vivita seemingly first among them.

  Setole went to the raised, private part of the room and prepared a sleeping mat, indicating that she was doing so for Casca. He watched in some amusement and a little amazement as she then prepared a mat for herself on the small floor close to the dais.

  On the other side of the room, and just as close, Vivita spread a mat. A little farther away Ateca laid out a mat, and then in some sort of unperceivable order, each of the other women did the same, keeping a respectful distance from each other so that they were distributed all around the room.

  Casca looked around. Except for Semela's widow, each of these women had slept with him at some time since he'd been in the village. He realized with a start that each of the girls he'd slept with in the village of Lakuvi was there, too, even the ones he'd forgotten that he had slept with during the orgy following Cakabau's defeat.

  "Great man-eating pussy of Venus," Casca groaned, "they surely don't expect me to service all of them tonight. I might be getting a bit too old for this sort of caper."

  As it turned out, he slipped into a blissful, kava-stoned sleep as soon as he lay on his grass mat and slept through the night undisturbed.

  In the days that followed, he found that the pattern of his life had been drastically altered. He was only safe so long as he stayed on his raised dais. As soon as he stepped down from it one or other of his wives—it seemed that all of them were now his—would assail him to sit with her, to allow her to prepare a meal for him and if it were night, to make love to her.

  And his wives were the least of it. It seemed that everybody in the village had a problem of some sort and an urgent need to lay it at Casca's feet. It even seemed to him that several villagers invented or resurrected old problems for the simple pleasure of presenting them to him.

  He discovered that wherever he went in the rebuilt village or in the recultivated farm patches or on the newly made fishing boats, there was work for him to do, advice to be given, problems to be solved, decisions to be made, quarrels and disputes to be arbitrated. And always there were children trying to trip him or frighten him or simply waylay him by forming a dancing chain around him. He would no sooner oblige them by stumbling over a stretched vine to their enormous delight, but would trip over a cunningly placed stick he hadn't seen, to their greatest glee. Whenever they jumped at him from concealment he would leap high into the air in simulated tenor, and their shrieks of joy would scarcely cease when another of them might succeed in actually startling him, the merriment bursting out afresh.

  Most nights either Setole or Vivita would usually lay claim to him, but every few nights they would yield to one of the other women. It irritated Casca immensely that even as supreme chief and god he still didn't get to choose his own bedmate.

  His irritation increased further when he noticed that his wives, including Setole and Vivita, and even the elderly Ateca, left the chief's house to spend the night with other men whenever it suited them.

  "Damn," he fumed, "I'm a hero, a war chief, supreme chief. I'm even God Almighty, but I don't get to choose who lays me, and my wives just lay anybody they please."

  A few days and a few nights and Casca was once more thinking of flight.

  He was sleeping with Vivita when it occurred to him that he preferred that she be the woman to whom he would bid good-bye, so he woke her gently and made love to her once more. When she fell back to sleep he snatched up his duffel, threw his few possessions into it, and crept from the house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  There was no moon, but Casca moved quickly and soon arrived at the place of refuge.

  He was halfway across it, toward where Tepole's remains lay, when Sonolo rose up from the ground in front of him as Casca's footfalls woke him.

  "Mbula, Casca," the ex-war chief greeted him. "Are you dead now too?"

  Casca laughed aloud as he stared through the darkness at the emaciated man.

  "No, Sonolo, I'm as alive as you are."

  "But I am dead, Casca."

  Casca reached out a hand and touched him on the chest. Sonolo started back as if burnt. His mouth dropped open in terror. Tentatively he stretched out one hand.

  "Touch me," Casca invited. "I am real, just as you are." Sonolo's trembling hand touched his shoulder, withdrew, then touched him again.

  "Then we are both alive?" Sonolo asked in wonder. "Then what has happened to me?"

  Casca sat down and motioned to hint to do the same. He took from the duffel some fruit and a coconut.

  "You eat, and I'll try to explain," he said. He then quickly told him how the muskets had accomplished the defeat of Cakabau.

  At this news Sonolo seemed to come to life. He hungrily munched the fruit thirstily from the coconut as Casca continued the story of the earthquake, Semele's death, his own return from the dead, and his chieftainship.

  "Then I am not dead, nor in exile?" Sonolo asked wonderingly.

  "Neither one," Casca answered. He saw opportunity and grasped it. "The village awaits you. I have come to tell you that you are to be chief."

  "But you have just told me that you are chief, that you are Rangaroa come to lead us."

  "Indeed," Casca replied, "but Rangaroa cannot stay for long in one village. There is much for me to do. The time has come for me to return to the sea, and you must take my place as chief."

  "I do not understand."

  Casca stood up. "Return to the village and consult with Mbolo. Tell him what I have said, and tell him the manner of my going, then you will understand. You will be a good chief. Good-bye. Mbula."

  He got up and strode quickly to the cliff. At the very edge he turned around. Sonolo had just gotten to his feet and was staring through the darkness toward him.

  Casca waved his hand and dropped down the cliff face, crouching under the overhang of rock.

  He heard Sonolo's startled shout, then he could hear him running toward the cliff to stop at the edge, shouting into the darkness: "Rangaroa, where are you? Casca, what has become of you?"

  The confused Sonolo stood a little while at the cliff edge. There was just enough light for him to see that Casca's body had not crashed onto the rocks below, nor had he heard any fall. He looked around at the night sky. Had the ma
n-god flown into the clouds where the Valangi came from? Perhaps Mbolo could explain.

  He turned and headed back across the refuge and toward the village.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Casca heard Sonolo leave, and continued his climb down to the broad, flat rock. He made his way around the edge of the small backwater and found the sail canoe, riding the quiet water at the end of the vines that secured it to several trees.

  He ran to where his provisions were hidden, and found, as he had hoped, that the tidal wave had not struck this side of the island. Everything was just as he'd left it.

  He quickly loaded the supplies into the small boat, untied the lines, and pushed it out beyond the rock into the open sea.

  From horizon to horizon all was one blackness, peppered with a few stars. Casca raised the sail and the offshore breeze carried him from the shore. Behind him he could just make out the mass of the cliff. Ahead there was an endless space, the few stars fading into the clouds that were gradually building toward a storm.

  The wind died to a calm, and Casca sat just offshore in the tiny sail canoe. Now the last of the stars had disappeared and there was no light. He could no longer distinguish the shape of the cliff from the sea or the night sky.

  It didn't matter. He just sat and waited, letting his destiny cast him adrift once more...

  Continuing Casca’s adventures, book 18 The Cursed

  In colonial China at the turn of the century, Casca is a British soldier with a choice – a suicide mission or the gallows. To avoid death by hanging, he must penetrate the heart of the mysterious land and bring back word of the impending revolution. Captured and tortured by a Warlord, his true identity is revealed. They call him Cas-Ca Sho – of long life – and proclaim him a Count…

  Now he must lead an army of a million subjects – into the slaughter of a revolt against the British

  For more information on the entire Casca series see www.casca.net

  The Barry Sadler website www.barrysadler.com