by Graeme Kent
‘Please take your places,’ cried Papa Noah to the crowd back at the feast, gesturing expansively towards the food.
The islanders surged forward eagerly. Within minutes, most of the men, women and children were eating without inhibition. Papa Noah sat on the mat at the head of the feast, beaming in an avuncular fashion on his guests. At his invitation Sister Conchita sat on his right. Brother John occupied the mat next to the patriarch on his other side. Florence Maddy sat farther down, next to the large Melanesian missionary, still simmering mutinously and only picking sulkily at her food.
As she ate, her eyes cast down modestly, Sister Conchita observed the situation around her without seeming to do so. She had consulted Father Pierre, the elderly priest in charge of her mission at Ruvabi, at some length before deciding to accept the invitation from the Church of the Blessed Ark.
‘It’s a breakaway cult, there’s no doubt about that,’ the old man had said. ‘However, it claims to be at least semi-Christian. We don’t want to close the doors on it too quickly. Go along and see what you can find out.’ Then Father Pierre had smiled, an increasingly uncommon event these days. ‘With your genius for investigation and getting to the heart of matters, that should be an easy task for you.’
Almost certainly the priest had overestimated her capabilities on this occasion, and probably on many others, thought the nun. So far she had discovered relatively little. She would have been better employed back at the mission. It needed a thorough spring-clean. She had heard several rumours over the past few weeks that Ruvabi was due for a visit from the bishop’s inspector, an ominous augury.
There seemed to be nothing here worthy of report to Father Pierre. Papa Noah appeared to be an innocuous, almost saintly man, concerned only with the stocking of his embryonic ark in an appropriate fashion. His followers were all ordinary Melanesians and Polynesians, with no obvious extremists among them. The Tikopian called Shem had seemed mildly resentful when Noah had ordered him to free the butterflies, but he had done as he had been told.
The only real problem lay in the looming presence of Brother John. Why had he bothered to attend the ceremony? Sister Conchita was there because her mission was situated in the area and her superiors needed to study and analyse the newly founded Church of the Blessed Ark in case it might impinge upon the work and numbers of the established church. But Brother John was an itinerant preacher, covering the whole northern section of Malaita, from coast to coast. What interest could such a shrewd, busy and knowledgeable man have in an insignificant splinter group like Papa Noah’s?
Conchita developed the line of thought in her mind. Not only had Brother John attended the feast; the normally taciturn missionary was actually at this moment attempting to initiate a conversation, a rare occurrence in her experience. He leant forward, almost anxiously, and addressed the still beaming Papa Noah.
‘You said that someone was coming from a distance to help you with your duties,’ said the big man. ‘I wonder who that might be.’
‘Can’t you guess?’ asked Papa Noah playfully, obviously enjoying the moment. ‘I thought you might be able to work it out from the subject of the entertainment just provided.’
‘Which part?’ asked Sister Conchita caustically, unable to restrain herself. ‘The naked girls or the war chant?’
Papa Noah laughed. He was teasing whitey and getting away with it, an event that would have been unheard of among the islands of his youth fifty years ago. ‘A little of both, Praying Mary,’ he chuckled, ‘a little of both.’
‘This visitor,’ persisted Brother John. ‘Who is it to be?’
‘A surprise,’ said Noah archly. ‘You must be patient, Brother John, like Job in the Bible. Soon we will be rich.’
The long-threatened storm arrived like a flustered overdue guest. Warm drops of rain the size of leaves began to fall. In a moment clouds screened the sky, sucking all the light from it. It grew steadily darker on the plateau. In the background, thunder roared sonorously, calling the always alert evil spirits of the area out of their hiding places behind the rocks and at the bottoms of the streams. Lightning crackled and sparked spasmodically over the trees and waterfall. As if to make up for lost time, the rain began to fall seriously and steadily. It came down first in jerking spasms and then in solid, stinging rods, and finally as an inescapable seamless, soaking sheet. A snarling wind toyed with the trees at the edge of the clearing. The food on the ground was scattered, hurtling across the plateau. The guests screamed in alarm at the unexpected velocity of the attack. Only Papa Noah was not cowed. It was almost as if he had been expecting such a hurricane. The old man staggered joyously to his feet, his frail body tottering a few paces forward at an angle into the wind. He raised his stems of arms.
‘Ala tagalangaini dafa fasui fasui fulas!’ he cried to his adherents.
‘The old fool’s telling them that it’s all over,’ Brother John shouted to Conchita. ‘He’s saying that the great flood is coming and they are all doomed! He even seems happy about it! Look at him!’
Sister Conchita was already contemplating the old islander with concern. Papa Noah’s eyes were closed in concentration. He was dancing again, like a poorly carved marionette. His thin legs whirled maladroitly through the air as he performed a series of pirouettes. He looked like a man vindicated in a course of action he had followed for too long. He performed one particularly towering final leap and fell to the ground in a clumsy concatenation of flurrying limbs. He lay still for a moment and then scrambled to his feet and scampered off into the driving rain as if late for an appointment.
By now most of the guests at the feast were on their feet and running screaming in terror down the slope towards the shelter of the village below. The rain clouds had obscured the sun and it was difficult to see what was happening in the sudden incongruous mid-afternoon gloom. Sister Conchita, standing up, was aware of the emaciated shape of Papa Noah disappearing in the distance, cantering awkwardly in the direction of his ark. She started to hurry after the old islander. Brother John loomed out of the darkness, seized her by the shoulder and shook his head.
‘Tabu!’ he shouted. ‘Women aren’t allowed in the ark.’
Obstinately Sister Conchita squirmed out of the big missionary’s grip and ran towards the vague distant outline of the simulated vessel. Soon Brother John was lost to sight in the rain-thrashed quarter-light behind her. She would have been unable to tell anyone why she was searching so determinedly for the patriarch of the Church of the Blessed Ark. She only felt that she had to find the old man before something dreadful happened to him.
On her concentrated self-imposed odyssey across the assaulted clearing she was vaguely aware of the outlines of dozens of milling, panic-stricken figures, bent double against the force of the tempest. Sheer resolve allowed her to continue to grope her way against the general tide of terrified humanity in the direction of the ark. Through the driving rain it almost seemed as if the twisted, tortured planks of the vessel were causing the shrine to move, grunting sluggishly, across the plateau.
In the general confusion she lost sight of Papa Noah. Several times she veered in the wrong direction and had to retrace her steps, feeling her way back towards the ark, avoiding the water-filled potholes in the ground. More than once she stopped to assist terrified disorientated women and children to their feet and send them on their way to safety. By the time she reached the vessel, Conchita was exhausted. She leant against the wooden side of the shattered edifice and gulped for air. There seemed to be fewer people in the clearing now. Presumably they were huddling for shelter in the village and in the caves at the base of the waterfall, a few hundred yards inland from the beach below. The nun forced herself to stand upright. Tentatively she began to fumble her way along the side of the ark, feeling for one of the doors. It was as dark as ever, and still the storm showed no sign of abating.
It took her five minutes, leaning into the wind with the rain whipping viciously into her face, to find an opening in the wall of
the ark. Someone had preceded her, because the door was banging arthritically on its hinges. She forced her way into the structure and stood inside the open doorway, clutching a swinging beam descending crazily from the roof, trying to accustom her eyes to the change in the light.
It was even darker inside than it had been out on the rain-swept plateau. Slowly her eyes adjusted to the darkness. In the gloom she could just make out a few cages containing small animals of indeterminate types. Their stench was devastating. Frightened by the storm, their howls and screeches merged into a discordant barking cacophony of terror.
Abruptly Sister Conchita felt that she was not alone in the ark. Take it easy, she told herself; this would not be a good time to disintegrate. A rod of lightning illuminated the far side of the interior. For a brief moment she was sure that she could see a tall, light-skinned islander, almost certainly a Tikopian, wearing only a loincloth. Clasped in his hand was a large knife. Then the lightning faded and the ark was in darkness again. She heard a door at the far end of the vessel open and slam shut. She peered through the gloom, but it was too dark to see.
She stood still. Once or twice already in her life Sister Conchita had been aware that she had been in the presence of God. Today she knew with sickening finality that in this dreadful, musty, warped facsimile of a Christian site of pilgrimage she was surrounded by an evil tangible enough to be touched. Her instincts told her to flee, that even the worst atrocities being wreaked outside by the storm on the clearing and trees would be preferable to this overwhelming claustrophobic malevolence. Whether he knew it or not, when Papa Noah had nailed the cursed warped slats and planks into place, somehow he had trapped within the ark the worst excesses of the anguished demons and devil-devils existing in the wood, determined to continue their fight against the one-God religion brought to the bush by the white visitors, and struggling precariously to continue its existence among the customs of the ancient time before.
She could feel her heart pounding. Sister Conchita had no doubt that such spirits, good and bad, existed in the island, intertwined with some of the teachings of her own faith, which had been implanted so far only in shallow soil. Father Pierre himself, after a lifetime on Malaita, was convinced of their presence and had even once sent her to encounter them so that she would be aware of their power. Her friend Sergeant Kella, sneered at as a witch doctor by some expatriates, was the only man she knew who walked in both worlds, somehow a rugged, untouched high priest of pantheism.
She reached out and touched one of the walls. It moved beneath her fingers, cold to the touch like the clammy skin and flesh of a living entity, then began to writhe sluggishly. Sister Conchita was reminded of the faint pulse of a patient struggling for life. She could tolerate the fetid atmosphere no longer. Almost with relief she turned back towards the open door and plunged out into the storm.
The rain was still hurtling down, making it difficult to see anything. Doggedly the nun groped her way forward. What had the man been doing inside the ark? Had it been the Tikopian called Shem? She could not be sure.
She had hardly gone a few yards when she stumbled over something soft and yielding on the ground. Almost physically sick with apprehension, she bent over and scrabbled with her hands. At first she thought that she was patting a wet sack. There was a staccato drumbeat of thunder, and then another searing shimmer of white light illuminated the plateau, and the nun saw that she was standing over the inert body of Papa Noah.
Conchita dropped to her knees and clutched the islander by his shoulders. The old man’s face was immersed in one of the now flooded rock pools scattered about the plateau. She seized his wrist and tried to feel a pulse, but there was no response. Gently she lifted the old man’s lolling head. Something dark and sticky stained her fingers. She could feel a large contusion at the back of Papa Noah’s skull. She blew air into the old man’s lips and started pounding at his chest with her small fists. The patriarch was soaking wet, to a far greater extent than could be explained even by his exposure to this hurricane. It was almost, she thought wildly, as if the islander’s whole body had been immersed in water.
A decade ago, long before she had contemplated taking holy orders, Sister Conchita had been a good enough college swimmer to secure a vacation post as a lifeguard at Boston’s Veterans Memorial Pool on the Charles River. On one occasion, still impressed irrevocably on her mind, she had helped secure the body of a youth who had got into difficulties in the water. She remembered the symptoms as the lifeguards had toiled to revive the boy: the blue cyanosis-induced lips, the complete lack of pulse and heartbeat. Another dart of lightning confirmed that these were all the signs that the old Solomon Islander beneath her was also exhibiting as the nun knelt over him, trying to force life back into his unresponsive, water-sodden torso.
After a few frantic, doubt-racked minutes, she recognized the futility of her endeavours and despairingly stopped attempting to revive the man. There was no doubt about it, she decided with increasing horror and incredulity.
Noah had drowned.
3
ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS
Sergeant Ben Kella of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate Police Force paddled his dugout canoe through the night past the artificial islands of the Lau Lagoon. He was puzzled. He had only returned to the islands from Hong Kong a few days ago, but already he had heard several rumours of the abduction of a white woman in his home area. The first had come from a wantok, a member of his extended family who was a customs official at Honiara airport, when Kella had descended from the inter-island plane from Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. Two days later, when he disembarked from a Chinese trading vessel at Auki, the government administrative centre on the island of Malaita, on the final stage of his journey home, he had heard the same disquieting information from an elderly Lau fisherman bringing his catch to the weekly market.
Neither of his informants had been specific. Even to have attempted to adopt such an unambiguous approach would have been impolite, spurning the customary oblique story-telling technique of Malaita, in which a few salient facts were enclosed as carefully in a web of tangents and embellishments as a succulent bonito fish in a palm leaf. Nevertheless, Kella had emerged from both encounters with sufficient knowledge to worry him, both as a policeman and as the island’s aofia. If he had understood his informants, both trustworthy men who owed him a duty of truth and were not given to gossip, a white woman had been abducted in the Lau Lagoon and was being held a prisoner on the tiny artificial island of Baratonga.
Kella found it difficult to believe what he had heard. As a rule, foreigners, especially white ones, were sacrosanct in the Solomons, unless they deliberately transgressed against island customs. To make matters worse, the Lau area was his own home. Who would dare lay a hand upon a neena, one of the unprotected, among the artificial islands, unless it was as a direct and deliberate challenge to his authority? Who would want to do that? Kella did not often get angry, but tonight he was simmering dangerously. This was what happened when he was sent overseas on useless courses! His authority on Malaita went to hell in a handcart! He increased the rate of his paddling as he headed for the strangers’ island at the northern edge of the large seawater lake protected from the ocean by a reef of coral.
All around him, lanterns swaying on poles illuminated the outlines of many of the fifty or so islands in the lagoon. It was late, so he could no longer hear the cries of playing children; these had been replaced with the whoops of young bucks as they prepared to paddle far out to sea on night fishing forays in their canoes or to try their luck with unmarried girls on other islands.
The reef water was high. The entire twenty-six-mile length of the lagoon, several miles wide, was constantly refreshed by more than a dozen rivers pouring down from the mountains of the main island and by the tides seeping through the protecting reef from the open sea. Over a period of a hundred years, the tiny islands had been built, stone by stone, by men and women from the mainland seeking to avoid the malarial mosqui
toes and the constant warfare between the saltwater dwellers and the bushmen of the interior. The closely knit Lau men and women, the too i asi, or people of the sea, spent much of their lives on these stone fortresses, going ashore only to hunt and tend their gardens.
Although he could hardly make out the details of any of the artificial islands in the gloom, Kella could recite the location and provenance of each one as its outline loomed before him. He was passing his own island of Sulufou, the largest of them all, eighty yards long and fifty yards wide, with fifty thatched huts and his own special beu, the traditional sacred home of the peacemaking aofia. According to custom, the island had been constructed in the nineteenth century, when the legendary chief Leo had paid labourers one porpoise tooth a day to ferry the foundation rocks out from the shore. He noticed that there seemed to be more canoes than usual moored at the long stone jetty. Perhaps some travellers from other islands outside the reef, fearing a storm, had claimed a night’s lodging at the custom sanctuary stone placed in front of the church.