Young Dick

by John Jarvis

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When they returned to the camp it was gone. The only indication that it had ever existed were areas trampled flat and newly turned earth to cover the holes dug for human waste. The party never broke pace and continued on deeper into the forest. Richard had been granted the honor of keeping his pistol and the supplies of powder and shot, and this was fortunate because he was unused to a prolonged march and would have struggled if burdened by a pack. The women had obviously gone on before and this had made the track more usable, and Richard enjoyed a further flattened surface by being at the rear of the column. The pace was relentless, and Richard was tired enough to venture a question during a rest period.

  “Why are we going so fast when our defeated enemy has not the capacity to pursue and engage us?” He asked an older warrior in fractured speech. The older warrior winced and then consulted others to deduce the meaning of the question.

  “We need to return to our Pa to strengthen its defenses; we have more than one enemy,” he replied. The march continued for a further three days, at the end of which Richard was totally exhausted. The forest thinned and then fell away, revealing rising ground with rocky outcrops. In the distance rose a steep hill surrounded by spiraling stockades of pointed posts; it was massive and dominated the surrounding areas. This was their Pa, their fortified village, and as they approached Richard paid close attention to its disposition and natural defenses.

  The sighting of the Pa had utilized natural defenses. On either side of the narrow track leading up to the Pa scalding hot pools steamed into the air and on occasion, erupted spouts of over thirty feet. Liquefied mud bubbled and spat and the rotten egg, smell of sulfur made Richard want to throw up like the liquid landscape. There was no gate at the foot of the fortifications; ladders were lowered by warriors shouting words of welcome and assisting the wounded to ascend. Richard looked up to see a second wall of sharpened logs overlooking the rising and circling track. Platforms had been built inside near the top to allow defenders to dominate any aggressors attempting to ascend the winding path. The concentric defenses would herd and harass attackers unable to deploy on a wide front, and Richard wondered if cannons would have any permanent effect given that the walls were flexible and could easily be repaired. Finally, they reached the summit to an emotional welcome; Richard saw children for the first time and they saw him from behind the protective grass skirts of their mothers and aunts. The meeting-house was massive, with carved wooden planks adorning the ends of the roof and walls overlooking an open porch. A huge carved figure of a man glared down from the top of a central pole overlooking the doorways; he sprouted a huge erection, and Richard looked away and into the smiling eyes of Pania. He turned as red as the ocher on the carvings. Other buildings crowded the summit, including what turned out to be food storage huts on top of long poles; Richard wondered if the precautions were for marauding animals, but he had so far not seen any. The ceremony over, Richard was taken by a young warrior to the unmarried men’s quarters; he would sleep with the warriors from that night on.

  On the morrow after morning food, Richard was left to his own devices and decided to explore the Pa from the summit down. It soon became clear that the whole mini mountain was a volcanic area and perhaps a not-so-dormant volcano. He followed some giggling girls carrying gourds to fill with water into a grotto complex that dripped water. Here he found the reason for the Pa’s sighting: Rainfall, always plentiful, filtered down through porous rocks into catchment pools large enough to supply the tribe with drinking, washing and irrigation water. The caves kept the water cool and free from pollutions. Richard hurriedly left the cave and the girls’ giggling echoes.

  Further down, boiling water too hot to use bubbled and steamed. Channels had been carved into the surrounding rock to channel and cool it in a series of holding pools. The original source had been logged off to prevent children from venturing too close. Richard wound down the spiraling track he had ascended the previous night and watched warriors digging trenches in front of the primary walls to make an assault more difficult. It was hard going, using stone grubbing tools on the rock filled soil, and this gave Richard an idea, based on his classical studies of Julius Caesar’s defensive strategies. He clambered up and over the lower wall and headed off into the jungle. No one attempted to stop him; perhaps because he had left his precious weapon behind. It did not take him long to find what he was seeking: inch thick hard wood growing straight from the forest floor towards light and life. He cut the wood into stakes a foot long using his sailor’s knife and sharpened one end. When he had a dozen he returned to the Pa and its bemused warriors. In the base of the ditch he bored holes using a defensive spear, planted his stakes and stamped down the surrounding soil. Finally he covered the tips with moss and leaves to conceal the trap.

  “When our enemies stamp on our erections, it will be they that squirt,” Richard declared. Delighted warriors laughed, slapped their legs and each other’s backs, and some even fell over. Richard realized that they shared a common sense of humor. Others came to see what all the mirth was about, looked at the stakes, and at Richard with respect. Women and children were sent into the forest to collect more. The warriors applied one nasty addition of their own to the trap: they smeared human waste onto the tips. Richard wandered around the base to the other side of the fortifications where he found that trenches would be impossible and unnecessary: it was impassable marshland.

  It was a similar situation to Richard’s repeated questions to the dock-workers in London. the difference being that Richard only understood one word in three. With Pania’s help they stitched the tribe’s situation together. Three other tribes allied to the one they had defeated would combine to attack the Pa and enslave its population. It was not a matter of usurping land, there was plenty of that available for everyone: it was a matter of utu, revenge. It would always be about revenge. There was another reason that made Richard uncomfortable: their tribe had used an outsider and his terror weapon to defeat conventional warfare and tactics, and this was an outrage to the Gods of the offended tribes; only the capture of this weapon and the slaying and eating of the outsider would appease them.

  “How many enemy warriors will come?” Richard asked an older warrior.

  “We have almost one hundred, and they will have and must need four times that number,” answered the older man.

  “Why so?” Richard asked.

  “When you look at a Pa you must ask how many men will I lose in taking this stronghold, and if the answer is too many you must decline battle. No tribe has warriors to waste, and if victory weakens it then it too will decline and be overcome by a stronger tribe. There is always a bigger fish in the sea.”

  Richard compared this logic to the slaughter on the European battlefields.

  “Will we win?” Richard asked, but this was too abrupt for the older man; he spat into the ground and walked away.

  The word spread around the Pa three weeks later: a large body of enemy warriors was converging on the area from at least two directions.

  The attack began without warning and the defending warriors barely had time to take up their positions. Enemy warriors poured out of the jungle and filed towards the lower stockade. Richard had been ordered to stay out of sight because his weapon would be of little use in a mass onslaught and his presence would only incense the enemy. He chose a site near the summit and covered himself in a cloak to protect him from the sun. The enemy deployed along the lower stockade and several backed into the trench to hoist their comrades over the stakes. Their screams caused the attack to falter and halt as they were dragged back out of the trench with lacerated and pierced feet. They were carried to the rear followed by jeers and insult from the defenders, many of them exposing their bums and genitals. The attack resumed later with fern logs being thrown into the trenches and the attackers swarming up over the stakes. Many were clubbed back down to earth by the defenders on the platforms but others penetrated past the first rampart. The attackers, believing all the mo
ss filled trenches contained stakes, wasted time filling them in. This defensive tactic would be the forerunner of the minefields used several centuries later.

  Defenders were added from the small reserve, and it looked like the lines would hold until the advent of the second attack. Richard saw them first and sent a boy down to alert the Chief, but the delay proved to be costly. A large number of enemy warriors paddled dugout canoes slowly across the marshes’ morasses to the far side of the Pa. There they unleashed vine and flax ropes over and around the stockade and began to paddle away. The stakes began to move and lean over in the boggy terrain until the defenders had time to harness and right them by tying their ropes to the second line of stakes. Some could not be brought back to the vertical and the enemy paddled determinedly towards the breach. The Chief used the last of his reserve to hold the enemy out, and the situation looked grim.

  If the enemy had pressed on with their attacks that day the Pa would have surely fallen, but for some reason, perhaps having several Chiefs in command, the assault was called off. Both sides attended to their wounded and planned for the following dawn. Richard was to be part of that planning. He had noticed that rainwater had scoured natural channels down the access tracks and that with more man-made channels he could link them up to the scalding hot pools and use them much as the medievals had used boiling oil in castle defense. A tired Chief gave his permission but no warriors to aid in the construction. Richard used women and young boys that night to complete the channeling.

  “See, Chief Rewi, you now command an army of female and boy warriors,” Pania teased, but Richard remained grim and worked them all night. Before dawn they had dug the last channel up to the edge of the boiling stone cauldrons; all Richard had to do was to use precious powder to blow a gap in the rock and let gravitation do the rest. He estimated it would take a complete powder horn to do the job and mentally thanked Guns for his instruction. Richard along with every other defender and attacker waited for the dawn.

  With the light came the attackers, who quickly stormed the lower palisades from land and marsh. The attacking warriors fired up by haka fought with a new ferocity that was only matched by the defenders’ desperation of those who had nowhere to go but their graves. Richard fired his hollow reed of fuse powder and prayed. The explosion caused both sides to pause and look at the column of smoke and stone splinters that spiraled into the air, then the fighting continued. Richard was so intent on assessing his success that he failed to hear a secondary rumble far beneath the surface or feel a slight tremor.

  The boiling gaseous water spilled out of the broken reservoirs, sloshed down the channels and then the trenches, cooling as it flowed. The defenders had already built cairns of stones on the tracks to slow any ascent, and the water hit these and sprayed into the air. It was the attackers’ turn to hurl insults and bare their bums in derision; some even pretended to bathe in the sprays of water. The water did have the effect of turning the track into mud and slowing the upward advance. The attackers’ insults changed to concern as the water grew hotter, and then to horror as they began to get scalded. The warriors leading the attack tried to turn around and run back, but the press of the men behind them prevented this and the defenders speared the writhing mass unmercifully. Only those near the marsh found the protection of the cool water. A conch horn sounded and the attackers withdrew, carrying their dead and burned with them. The defenders were too exhausted to harry them. The battle was over and the Pa stood intact.

  That night the air was rent by grieving relatives crying for their dead and the pain filled sobs of the wounded. Richard applied all his medical skills but with limited medicines and inexperience in dealing with wounds inflicted by clubs and spears could do little apart from setting broken bones.

  The dead were in their graves for less than a day when Papatuanuku, Goddess of the Earth, spat them out and achieved what man had failed to do: the complete destruction of the Pa. Richard was near the meeting-house when the first tremor struck. He had never heard of an earthquake and the heaving earth, the great rents in the ground and the rumbles from deep below filled him with primeval terror. The elevated food storage huts swayed in several directions before crashing to the ground. The meeting-house collapsed in a pile of splinters and dust and the boiling water caverns ruptured and swept into the fresh water cisterns, poisoning them forever. A massive rupture opened on one side of the Pa, throwing out sulfur clouds and swallowing up those trying to flee. Many families jumped into the marsh to avoid the tearing terrain, but the marsh churned into mud and sucked them below. Richard remained frozen in terror on the spot, and this saved him and others who remained near the summit. Then came a brief period of complete and utter silence; not even a bird had the audacity to call. Then came the human moans and screams on a scale far greater than after the battle. Richard found Pania bruised but alive, and together with other survivors, helped the wounded and the dazed out of the ruined Pa and into the relative safety of the jungle. Ironically, they reoccupied the enemies’ camp that had been hastily abandoned.

  Two days later Richard was summoned to the Chief’s temporary hut to receive a long and last speech from the great man. The Chief had aged over the last weeks: his face had become furrowed and black bags hung under his blood-shot eyes. His voice, however, remained as strong and deep as ever.

  “Generations ago our ancestors came to this coast so that our people could cook our food in salt water to prevent sickness and deformities, and we prospered. They came from a land of lakes and mist many cycles of the moon away beyond the sunset, and it is thereafter we have hidden and preserved those sacred carvings we cannot carry with us in the mud that we must now return. In my heart I would ask you to come with us for you have mana, the knowledge that would prepare us for the coming of others like you, and you have given my daughter Pania the gift of new life.” The Chief was choosing his words with such care that he did not see the shock on Richard’s face. “But I must make my decisions as a Chief, not as a friend, and I fear that if you journey with us with your weapon our enemies would follow us to the ends of the earth to gain its secrets and power. You see Rewi, the legend is already growing: the two shots fired at our enemy have become twenty. The distance it can kill at has become fifty paces, not five, and the power needed to fracture rocks is now equal to that of Papatuanuku herself. Indeed our Spiritual Elders have blamed your unnatural powder for insulting the Earth Goddess, for violating the tapu on our sacred burial sites and exposing us as a target for our enemies. Explain to me, Rewi, how is this powder made?”

  “It is made of natural ingredients, Sir: the yellow sulfur you can gather around the thermal areas, the charcoal from the residue of fires, but the third is mined from rock called Nitra and I do not know if it lives in this land.”

  “Rewi, if you travel with us, part of your heart will always be with your own people and you may never find peace. You must go to the villages of our enemy and gift them your weapon. Explain the rock they must find to make the powder and they will search for it forever rather than search for our people. I believe your people will return to our land and that you will be reunited with them one day; now come let us share our breath for one last time before we leave, and then you must find the strength to farewell Pania.”

  When they touched noses, Richard cried.