by Graeme Kent
‘Don’t worry, I shall! We’ll see what the courts have to say about this!’
Kella studied the islanders surrounding them, checking them off and identifying some of them. ‘As you wish, Mr Boehrs, but I wouldn’t raise your hopes too much if you’re thinking of seeking compensation. Among the witnesses I could call from this assembly before us, in defence of any legal action, I can see four government-appointed headmen, two former scouts decorated for bravery during the war and a young man soon to embark upon a degree course at the University of the South Pacific. You, of course, will be free to summon Mr Schuman and your Guadalcanal toughs to give evidence on your behalf, should you require it.’ Kella paused. ‘Now, I don’t wish to speed the parting guest, but you really ought to be on your way, Mr Boehrs. If you start now, you’ll get a few hours of walking in before the sun rises.’
‘Is that your last word?’ asked Boehrs stiffly.
‘No, my last word is this: stay away from the dolphins!’
‘We’re going,’ said Schuman, starting to trudge up the track towards the cliff. Boehrs hesitated, and then hurried after the other man, stumbling over the great roots growing out of the ground in his haste. Neither man made any effort to pick up their weapons. At the top of the track Schuman stopped and looked back at Kella, while the German brushed past him heedlessly, his head lowered, lost in his bitter thoughts. The sergeant wondered under what circumstances he and Schuman would meet again. He was sure they would.
He walked over to the Guadalcanal men, who were sitting in an apprehensive circle on the ground, their hands on their heads. They were being taunted sadistically by a guard detail of Malaitan warriors. Every now and then one of the dolphin worshippers would drive the blunt end of a spear into the side of one of his prisoners with a loud smack, just to make sure that he had the captive’s undivided attention. Kella frowned disapprovingly. The last dolphin man to strike a prisoner grinned and took an exaggerated step back, lifting his free hand to show that he had only been playing. Kella cleared his throat and addressed the bowed heads of the utterly dispirited and resigned Guadalcanal mercenaries.
‘You have two choices,’ he said abruptly. ‘You can stay here in Kwaio territory and take your chances. Personally, after all that has happened, I would not recommend that option.’ The expressions on the faces of the Weather Coast men attested to their complete agreement with his remark.
‘Or’, he went on, ‘you can make your way down to Aio harbour and wait there. It should take you about two days’ hard walking. I guarantee your safe passage through the tribes on the way. You must not touch any gardens nor hunt any animals, but you may pick fruit from trees in the bush and drink from streams. In less than a week a ship called The Spirit of the Islands will put in at Aio. You will be offered a free deck passage on board back to Guadalcanal. After that you’re on your own.’
Kella need not have bothered with the last sentence. The Guadalcanal prisoners, hardly able to believe their luck, were already on their feet and jostling one another on their way across to the beach. Kella watched the relieved men shuffling away along the sand before he walked over to Solodia. The villagers were still industriously carrying goods out of the tents and huts and apportioning them among themselves with a minimum of squabbling. Not for the first time Kella marvelled at the sheer volume of items regarded as essential by expatriates on tour. There were piles of cooking utensils, sacks of tinned goods, bags of rice, several portable beds, sheets, blankets and pillows, fold-up chairs and tables, a shotgun and cartons of ammunition, a camera, a radio, clothes and even a pile of spare clothes hangers.
Solodia nodded. ‘I have decided,’ he said. ‘I shall spread the word. White men will no longer be welcome on my coast.’
‘There is a Catholic sister from the mission,’ Kella said. ‘Her name is Conchita.’
‘The one they call the Praying Mary? I have heard of her.’
‘I would regard it as a personal favour if you allowed her to come and go freely among your villages when she wants to do so.’
‘So be it,’ said Solodia, taking the sergeant’s proffered hand. ‘She will be welcome, as will you, aofia.’
‘Tell me,’ Kella said. ‘Those two dolphins who pushed my canoe around when I was talking to the reef god, were they trying to tell me about Boehrs and his trap?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Solodia. ‘Maybe. One day I’ll ask them for you.’ The high priest paused. ‘I have heard certain things as I walked up the coast to destroy the foreign hunters.’
‘What have you heard?’ asked Kella.
‘They tell me that Kella the peacemaker is looking for a Japanese warrior who is still in the bush.’
‘There is some truth in that. It is certainly true that I am looking into such a matter,’ said Kella, not wanting to go into the whole story.
‘In that case, I can help you,’ said Solodia. ‘I know where this Japani is. I can send a boy with you to show you the way. You won’t be the first to get there, but that doesn’t matter. The Japani doesn’t get many visitors.’
30
BUSH WALK
‘I take it that this is the famous Mr Abalolo that you have been at such great pains to conceal from us,’ said Sister Conchita, looking down at the tethered, abject Tikopian. The dejected figure did not look up.
‘This is Abalolo,’ said Brother John cautiously. ‘What makes you think that I’ve been hiding him?’
They were standing in the centre of the village. Scrawny dogs and pigs snuffled hopefully among heaps of rubbish. The men who had brought them up the track were standing a hundred yards away, watching them expressionlessly. Tendrils of smoke from a dozen cooking fires drifted out through the open doorways of the huts. Five minutes earlier, some old women had brought them coconut husks filled with brackish water. It was not much, but it was probably all they had, thought the nun.
‘It was pretty obvious that you were concealing something,’ she told him. ‘I’ve never known you late for a meal before, yet you only just got to Papa Noah’s last feast in time. You were obviously worried about something, so I suppose you had hidden Mr Abalolo in the ark for some reason. Then, when the storm started, you disappeared. Again this was out of character. Normally you would have been in the thick of the action, taking control. I can only assume that you were hurrying Mr Abalolo away from the ark to safety somewhere. Later, when Shem had a dispute with someone on the track outside the mission, it seemed likely that his assailant was Mr Abalolo.’
‘How so?’ asked Brother John
‘Shem was badly marked up in the fight. Apart from Sergeant Kella, very few Solomon Islanders would be big enough to hurt a Tikopian. I’m guessing that you were having one of your secret consultations with Mr Abalolo when Shem happened along. The two men fought over which of them should be taking over the Church of the Blessed Ark, or something of that nature, and you persuaded Abalolo to run away before anyone else came along. At the time it seemed to be too much of a coincidence that you should just happen be in the vicinity to break up the fight and allow Mr Abalolo to escape into the bush while you brought Shem to the mission, instead of pursuing his attacker, which would have been more in character.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Brother John.
‘I was interested in your actions when we reached Tikopia. You didn’t seem very worried about Mr Abalolo’s disappearance from his church on the island. This led me to surmise that you already knew where he was. Unluckily for you, Dr Maddy told us that Abalolo was supposed to be on Malaita.’
‘You don’t miss much, do you?’ asked Brother John.
‘Am I right?’ asked Sister Conchita.
‘More or less,’ said the missionary. ‘For some time it had been obvious that the Church of the Blessed Ark was attracting a lot of Tikopians into its ranks on Malaita. At the same time Abalolo was worried because the revival of the pagan faith on Tikopia was affecting his church numbers adversely. It was obvious that the Church of the Blessed Ark was being infiltr
ated by Tikopians on Malaita, who associated the ark with the big canoe icon of their pagan beliefs. Against my advice he came up to Malaita to persuade the new adherents of Papa Noah’s church to return to Christianity. To that end, he insisted on attending the feast before the storm. I managed to hide him in the ark, as that was a tabu place and I didn’t think anyone except Papa Noah would dare enter it.’ He sighed. ‘That was before you decided to gatecrash.’
‘That was why you asked me to attend Papa Noah’s funeral on your behalf, wasn’t it?’ she asked. ‘You had to get back into the bush to look after Abalolo.’
‘He wasn’t doing too well on his own,’ said Brother John. ‘There isn’t much bush country on Tikopia. He needed all the help he could get on Malaita.’
‘Why did you meet me on the beach today?’
‘I heard that you were coming up to teach at Bethezda this morning. I felt that I owed it to you to explain as much as I knew, so I left Abalolo here while I came down to meet you. As you saw, when we got back, he was a prisoner.’
Before he could say any more, six of the islanders who had escorted them up to Bethezda came over. One of them slashed Abalolo’s bonds with a knife and hauled the still silent Tikopian to his feet. The men gestured to their captives to follow the track leading up the mountain on the far side of the village. Obediently Sister Conchita and her two companions started walking. The islanders, armed with spears, fell in silently behind them.
‘Anything else you want to know?’ asked Brother John, looking over his shoulder as they left the huts behind them.
‘Yes: who is the killman?’ asked Sister Conchita.
‘I have no idea,’ said Brother John.
They walked for three hours before stopping at another small village, where they were given more water and some yams as they rested. When they set off again, Sister Conchita noticed that they had a fresh set of guards. It was almost as if they were being handed on from one group of escorts to another. This reinforced her conviction that she and the two men were being conducted somewhere specific, and that each set of captors would be glad when their part in the journey was over.
All the time they were climbing into the mountains. Occasionally they passed groups of women returning from their gardens down the path, carrying huge loads of bananas and firewood on their backs. Whenever they passed, the local women hurried off the track out of sight into the trees. Sister Conchita was reminded of the story of one of the last great inter-tribe battles that had taken place in this part of the high bush, as told to her once by Father Pierre. One village had invaded another and killed thirty of the men there, severing their heads with machetes. The weeping women had been forced to carry the heads of their husbands, fathers and brothers in their arms up to the village of the victorious clan, where they had been decapitated in turn.
By mid-afternoon it was raining steadily. The smell of decay was overpowering, as if the whole forest was in the process of rotting around them. Mist rose from the ground, obscuring the vegetation to knee height. They passed hovering hornets, wasps and bees all humming in different keys. Lizards lurked camouflaged on leaves, their long tongues flickering out to trap unwary butterflies and moths. Once they crossed a wide river with much deliberate splashing and shouting to deter predators. Downstream Sister Conchita could hear the steady pukpuk grunt of a crocodile, the sound from which the creature got its local name.
They passed another set of gardens enclosed by low fences consisting of tottering bamboo poles linked by jungle vines. The tilled soil within the enclosure was mainly devoted to the cultivation of yams. Each root had been buried in a separate hole scooped in the ground and marked by a short pole around which the vegetable’s wispy creeper could curl and grow.
They spent their first night in another small bush village. Just before it grew dark, Sister Conchita caught a glimpse of mountain peaks some distance ahead of them. They were encased in clouds and seemed as far away as ever.
Brother John and Abalolo were taken off under guard to the men’s house on the far side of the clearing. Sister Conchita was installed in a recently vacated hut. Judging by its size and the presence of a number of pig tusks tied to a wall with creepers, she guessed it to be the residence of the village headman. A fresh bed of leaves had been spread for her on the beaten earth of the floor, and she was fed with fresh coconut milk and bananas. Later, in the dusk, she was taken by a group of women to a stream to wash. She tried to engage them in conversation, but no one would respond. She noticed that unlike the wiry saltwater dwellers, these denizens of the high bush were small, stunted people, bearing on their almost naked bodies the unmistakable scars of yaws and ringworm.
She was taken back to the hut through the trees, utterly exhausted from her day’s climbing in the stifling heat. She fell asleep at once, despite the scurrying sound of rats on the ground near her bed.
31
JOURNEY’S END
The next morning, soon after dawn and a meal of pineapples, the three of them were walking again. Six new guards from the latest village were now in charge of them, as slight, silent and expressionless as the previous ones had been. As they moved out, Sister Conchita caught a glimpse of the escorts from the afternoon of the previous day hurrying back home with obvious relief down the track.
They walked for another six hours. The track was steeper than ever, and even the lithe and fit Sister Conchita found the going hard as they headed up the mountain path in the baking oven-like heat. It was soon raining steadily again. The nun had heard that 150 inches could fall in a year this high in the bush on Malaita. When at last the rain ceased reluctantly for an hour or so, dozens of birds used the respite to swoop down through the glistening golden foliage of the sodden trees and settle on the ground, pecking avariciously at the helpless caterpillars and worms that had been washed from the branches during the recent downpour.
Sister Conchita could tell from occasional glimpses of the sun through the crowded trees that it was almost noon when they stopped for the last time. The bushmen who had been guiding them stood in a straight line across the track behind them. For a heart-stopping moment Sister Conchita wondered if her surmise had been wrong all along and that the three of them had been brought to this remote area merely to be slaughtered and their bodies left to decompose. If that should be the case, it could be years before their remains were discovered.
To her relief, the nun saw that the islanders were making no attempt to fall on them. Instead they were pointing urgently with their spears up the track as a sign that their three captives should continue on their own. A foolhardy Brother John decided to ignore their implicit instructions and in a fit of bravado tried to shoulder his way back down the path in the direction from which they had come. Deftly two of the bushmen adjusted their grips on the thin, pliable spears and used them as whiplash rods, smashing them vigorously in concert against the big missionary’s body. The Guadalcanal man howled with pain and hurried ignominiously back to rejoin the other two. Again the bush warriors indicated with short jabbing movements of their spears that their prisoners should continue up the path alone.
‘I really think we should continue walking,’ said Sister Conchita.
Brother John ran his hands over his body with rueful tenderness. ‘Good idea!’ he said, taking the lead with a will up the track.
The path bent through the trees and undergrowth at the top of the current incline. As they turned, Sister Conchita glanced back over her shoulder. The bushmen were still regarding them intently from below.
The trees were beginning to thin out ahead of the three tired travellers. Sister Conchita was aware of an unexpected cool breeze coming from before them. By now they must be several thousand feet above sea level, she thought. After another hundred yards of hard walking they emerged from the trees and stopped in surprise. They were looking upon what could only be described as a freak of nature. Although the forested mountain peaks could still be seen looming in the distance, immediately before them was more than an
acre of flat land surrounded by dozens of blossoming banana plants. On the other side of the field of tough cropped grass, the steaming jungle started to flourish again on the way up to the cloud-obscured peaks. The sight they were witnessing with stupefaction was almost like an oasis in a desert.
A hundred yards away Sergeant Kella was sitting on a mound of grass in the clearing. A fire of small sticks smouldered beside him. He was eating a chunk of baked taro and the remains of a river slug. He greeted them with a nod as they crossed the grass in his direction. He removed some of the charred skin of the vegetable with his fingers and dropped it fastidiously to the ground.
‘I expect you’re wondering why I sent for you,’ he said.
32
THE MAE
‘I think you just got rounded up in the net almost by accident,’ said Kella. ‘I thought it was about time that I questioned this mysterious Abalolo, so I called in some favours, found out where he was and arranged for him to be brought up here to me. It just so happened that Brother John had already linked up with him.’
‘Are you actually apologizing to me, Sergeant Kella?’ asked Sister Conchita. ‘That’s a first!’
‘Not at all,’ said the sergeant. ‘I was just explaining the situation to you. The people who were helping me out didn’t know whether I just wanted the Tikopian or all three of you.’
‘Like we all look the same,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘A Tikopian, a Guadalcanal man and a Boston nun are practically indistinguishable. It was an understandable mistake. Anyone could have made it.’