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by John Wyndham

  The Captain ordered the gun-crew to stations, and none too soon. A fusillade of shots broke out on the shore, but the range was long. A few bullets pattered against the ship’s side, most fell short. A small gun of some kind opened up with a couple of ranging shots, and then put one neatly through the funnel. The Frances Williams’ quick-firer replied.

  The battle of Tanakuatua was brief. Since the ship’s gun had hitherto fired only three or four rounds in practice, and none in anger, there may have been an element of beginner’s luck in its marksmanship, but after it had spoken thrice the shore gun was not heard again, and presently a white flag was seen to wave above the bushes close to its position.

  Firing ceased. The Captain ordered the boat lowered. The military warrant officer aboard embarked his party, and cast off. Before the boat had covered half the distance there were renewed sounds of rifle fire ashore. Since no bullets came near the boat, it was deducible that the Tanakuatuans, in either contempt for, or non-recognition of, the white flag, had launched an operation of their own. And, it turned out, with some success, for when the landing-party reached the scene they found only four men in German uniforms hemmed into a tight group still defending themselves. The rest of the platoon that had been landed two weeks before as an occupying force was dead.

  The Tanakuatuans were delighted.

  For one thing, though they had many songs and dances extolling the ferocity, valour, and fortitude of their warriors, these heroes were not, in fact the warriors of the moment, and some fifty years without actual battle experience may have caused them feelings of uncertainty. Thus, to have tradition so notably vindicated, at a cost to themselves of only five or six casualties, gave them an exhilarating sense of being men as good as their grandfathers.

  Moreover, they had taken a strong dislike to the German garrison party.

  The platoon had landed uninvited on their island, neglecting all proper greetings and formalities. It had then proceeded to erect its tents upon a handy open space – which happened to be clear only because it was a burial-ground. It had fired shots over the heads of a party of elders as they had approached to lodge a protest at the desecration. Thereafter, it had demanded to be supplied with fruit and vegetables, with no suggestions of payment; commandeered a number of young women, irrespective of whether they happened to be wives, or not – also without offers of compensation; killed, rather slowly as a warning to the rest, a young man who had tried to steal one of its rifles; and in general revealed itself as being composed of ill-mannered, offensive persons.

  The victory, however, more than compensated the Tanakuatuans for the damage the Germans had done to their pride; it restored their good opinion of themselves. The perfection of the memorable day was spoiled for them only by the warrant officer’s insistence that his men should remove the bodies of the German casualties – a measure he proceeded resolutely to carry out in disregard of all protest that by immemorial custom the only seemly way to deal with a vanquished enemy was to eat him.

  Tanakuatua was then formally declared to have been annexed to the administrative territory of the Midsummer Isles, and thus to be under the protection of His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Fifth.

  ♦

  It cannot be said that the Tanakuatuans ever showed any enthusiasm for their changed status, nor any awareness of their relationship to the great family of nations of which, they were assured, they now formed a part. They did, it is true, get along better with the new garrison than they had with the Germans. But they did not disguise their pleasure a couple of years later when, after the cause of the whole disturbance had been settled by a lot of talkers on the other side of the world in a place they had never heard of, the garrison was withdrawn.

  With that, island life could become normal once more. Almost the only things that prevented it reverting literally to the status quo ante bellum were the existence of an Agent who was rarely seen, and troubled no one very much when he did come, and, at lengthy intervals, a ceremonial visit from the Governor himself.

  On the latter occasions the Tanakuatuans played up tactfully. There was a formal feast followed by a dancing display, in the visitor’s honour. The Governor then responded with a speech of thanks and good wishes, mentioning a day, not too far distant now, he trusted, when it should become administratively possible for the inhabitants of this favoured island to enjoy the same educational and medical facilities which, it was hoped, would shortly be organized on the main islands of the Group. Meanwhile, they could rest assured that he, and, through him, the Colonial Office, were ever mindful of the best interests of this loyal and noble people.

  Thereafter, he would be escorted back to his ship by a small fleet of canoes, saluted with shouts and raised paddles, and depart, not to be seen again for another three or four years.

  Thus, another generation passed peacefully, with little interruption.

  Then, once again, there was a garrison on the island. This time it was more numerous, better armed, and stayed longer. But it was also better behaved, and kept better supplied.

  Major Catterman, the Commanding Officer, made a point from the first of treating the Tanakuatuans as the true owners of the island upon which force of circumstances had temporarily placed him. He took the trouble to learn something of their language, attempted to understand their customs, and did his best to respect their ways. His men were strictly forbidden to scrounge. All taros, coconuts, breadfruit, young women, potatoes, et cetera, had to be paid for; so that the islanders acquired a taste for baked beans, bully beef, and chocolate. He even ran a series of elementary classes with the purpose of disseminating some idea of the world beyond the seas. If with this, as with certain other of his projects, there was a discrepancy between intention and achievement, he nevertheless maintained a remarkably harmonious relationship throughout his garrison term.

  The C.O., for his part, thoroughly enjoyed his stay. There are only a fortunate few whom the currents of war carry into quiet, congenial backwaters, and he was grateful to be among them. By degrees, he came to think that he had probably been quite a loss to the Colonial Service. But even the ravel of war gets knitted, in time. The guns fell silent; the Japanese went home; Tanakuatua no longer needed protection.

  There was a farewell feast with four kinds of baked fish, sliced and flaked taro, roast sucking-pigs, breadfruit fritters, crabs in coconut sauce, curried sea-slugs, prawns in lime-juice, purple sea-snail soup, mango with syrup and coconut cream, bowls of salads, and also rum, which it would have been wasteful for the garrison to take away with them.

  The brown beauties of Tanakuatua danced and sang. The young men danced too. With oiled skins and bone ornaments gleaming in the light of fire and torches they performed a ferocious re-enactment of the great victory of 1916. The Commanding Officer, half-stifled by leis of frangipani, and the Chief Tatake happy with good rum and pride in his people, sat with their arms on one another’s shoulders and swore perpetual brotherhood.

  On the following night the island was the islanders’ own once more.

  Thereafter, for the next three years nothing much happened except a visit from a new Governor, undertaken to introduce himself to his furthest-flung charges. There was the usual ceremony and an address in which he assured them that they must not think themselves forgotten out here in the ocean. The King was always mindful of their interests and had them very much at heart. In fact, and in due course when the disorganization caused by the war had been tidied up – and that, he was glad to tell them, would not be very long now – they would be able to enjoy all the benefits of education and a medical service to which their loyalty to King and Commonwealth during the years of peril so richly entitled them.

  After the customary ceremonies he sailed away. It was thought that, like his predecessor, he might be expected to look in again in two or three years’ time.

  To everyone’s surprise he was back within a few weeks. This time to deliver a very different message.

  Something, something catacl
ysmic, he informed the islanders was about to happen. This thing would take place away out in the open sea to the east. Up out of the ocean there would come a great ball of fire, brighter than a hundred suns together, and so hot that even many miles away the bark would be burnt from trees, the skin scorched off men and animals, and the eyes of anyone who saw it, shrivelled up.

  It was improbable that the island of Tanakuatua would be harmed in such ways for the fireball would be far away, but after the fireball had flared and died it would leave poison-dust in the sky. This dust would bring an agonizing death to all on whom it fell.

  It was hoped, and might very well be so, that none of this dust would ever reach Tanakuatua. If, at the time when the great fire-burst took place, the wind were to be blowing from the west, and if it should continue to blow from the west for several days, the island would escape unharmed…

  But no one could control the winds. A man might judge, within limits, how and where they were likely to blow at certain seasons, but nobody could be sure that they would do so. Still less could anyone be sure that they would continue to blow steadily in one direction for several days. Moreover, everyone had seen clouds that seemed to move against the wind, showing that while it blew one way on the ground it could be blowing another way high up in the sky. Nothing in nature was more capricious than the wind…

  Wherefore, the King, concerned as always for the welfare of his loyal subjects, had given orders that the inhabitants of Tanakuatua and of Oahomu, too, should, for their own safety, be removed for a short time from their islands to a place where there was no chance of the death-dust falling upon them. He had further decreed that compensation would be paid to them for any losses of crops or property. The evacuation of Tanakuatua by every man, woman, and child of its people would therefore take place in exactly one month’s time.

  To the relief of the Governor, who had foreseen long hours of obstinate argument, the pronouncement was received quietly. It did not occur to him that the islanders were too stunned and incredulous to believe they had heard aright.

  They were still bemused when the Governor, with a final injunction to make the best of the time granted them for their preparations, re-embarked and sailed off to Oahomu to deliver the same message.

  ♦

  In the evening Tatake called a council of his Elders. The main body of the meeting did not have a great deal to contribute. The older men were vaguely uneasy, but still too bemused to appreciate the reality of the crisis. Consequently the floor was shared almost exclusively between the Chief and Nokiki, the head medicine-man, both operating from hastily prepared positions which they consolidated as the debate developed.

  The stands taken by both were clear from the start, however.

  “This interference is outrageous and intolerable,” proclaimed Nokiki. “We must call upon our young men to fight.”

  To which Tatake replied flatly:

  “The young men will not fight.”

  Nokiki challenged him:

  “The young men are warriors, the descendants of warriors. They are not afraid of death. They will wish to fight – to fight, and score a great victory, as their fathers did,” he said, and backed this up with a brief, if somewhat biased account of the glorious battle of 1916, as evidence that it could be done.

  Tatake explained that no one doubted the valour of the young men; it was good sense that was in question. Everyone had seen the recently departed garrison at shooting practice. What chance had even the most valorous of warriors against rifles and machine guns? The young men would all be slain, to no purpose. Worse than that, the islanders would be weakened, for what future is there for a people that has no young men? A weak people had no rights. The better course would be to stay their hands and preserve their strength in order that their voices should carry weight.

  The stronger they remained, the better placed they would be to press for an early return to Tanakuatua when this mysterious cataclysm should be over.

  Nokiki gushed scorn. He did not believe in this cataclysm, nor did he accept the talk about a return to Tanakuatua. The whole thing was all lies. A blatant stratagem. This King that the Governors talked about, and no one had ever seen – who was he? The truth of the matter was that the Governor coveted their island for his own purposes, so he had schemed to throw the rightful owners out, and then steal it. It was as simple as that. They were being told to hand over their land, their homes, the bones of their ancestors who had won it for them as a present to the Governor. Better far to lie dead on Tanakuatua than to live as cowards in exile.

  Tatake spoke of the compensation and the terms offered for re-settlement.

  Nokiki spat.

  Tatake proclaimed responsibility for the lives of his people. He would not see them thrown away in a futile battle, nor let them be sacrificed in useless defiance of the death-dust.

  Nokiki spat again. The death-dust was a myth. A tale invented for the purpose of frightening them out of their homeland. In all legend there was no such threat as this death-dust – lava, cinders, and ash from smoking mountains, yes – but nothing about death-dust. The expectation that they should believe this bogey story for children was an affront in itself. Chief Tatake might be timorously concerned for the lives of the people, but he, Nokiki, put their honour higher. It was for this honour, entrusted to them all by their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers, and their fathers before them, that he was concerned. Tatake, he said, spoke of life, but what sort of a life was it that must be dragged out amid the contempt of the ghosts of their ancestors? And with the knowledge, too, that when their time came to the Nakaa would bar their way to the Land of Shades and fling their unworthy ghosts into the pit of stakes where they would writhe, impaled for all eternity. Better, far better, to die now, and join the ancestors in the land beyond the western sea, with honour.

  As the debate wore on, each disputant gained greater certainty of his own conviction, and hammered the palisade of his position more firmly home. Comments came from the elders of the Council only rarely. For the most part they behaved as a silent chorus, turning their heads from one speaker to the other, nodding sagely from time to time in bewildered support of each.

  The light waned. The blood-red sun sank into the sea. The sky was pierced with spear-tips of polished steel. The rising moon set carbon shadows creeping. And still, far into the night, the great debate went on…

  There was no civil war on Tanakuatua, though only Nokiki’s realization that a waste of warriors now would mean fewer of them to meet the real enemy later on, restrained him from declaring a kind of jehad. He could see nothing in the course Tatake had chosen but decadence and the betrayal of hallowed traditions. Yet, though the temptation to defend the right was strong, his need to conserve his forces was stronger, and he decided with reluctance to postpone the punishment of sacrilege until the pale men should have been dealt with.

  The month of grace passed in an uneasy truce between the factions. Roughly three-quarters of the population stood by their Chief, the rest rallied to Nokiki. The discrepancy in numbers, however, was largely offset by the inclusion in the smaller group of most of the young men, and nearly all the fervour.

  Thus, though with a certain amount of side-swapping as minds swayed, the matter rode; and thus it was still riding when the Governor returned, this time in a far larger vessel, to preside over the exodus.

  He was gratified to find the Tanakuatuans prepared. The two landing-craft were able to run ashore close to the spot where Tatake with his people, and their household goods, and their canoes piled high with fishing nets, and their bales and bundles roped in matting, and the last crops from their gardens, and their squealing pigs tethered by one hind leg, stood glumly awaiting them.

  The Governor stepped briskly ashore, greeting the Chief affably. He was agreeably surprised to find the inhabitants of this off-the-map island, with their longstanding reputation for being ‘difficult’, taking it so calmly. He did not know, nor would he ever know, that without the efforts
of the wartime garrison’s commander to reach a better understanding with the people and teach them something of the facts of life in the outer world, and more particularly his influence over the Chief, the non-cooperation figure would most likely have been close to a hundred per cent.

  As things were, he was able to look round approvingly, (He did not, in fact, approve of much that the islanders intended to take with them. Privately he included the whole lot of it under the comprehensive term ‘cag’, but tact, he had impressed upon himself, must be the watchword for the day.) He nodded:

  “Good work, Chief Tatake. Fine bit of organization. No reason why we shouldn’t start loading at once, eh?”

  The people stood staring at the landing-craft. The men aboard called to them encouragingly. There was a long, long moment of hesitation. Tatake said something gently in the island dialect. Reluctantly they began to gather their possessions and carry them aboard.

  Tatake, unspeaking, almost unmoving, watched while the craft shuttled between ship and shore. When the job was three-quarters done the Governor strolled over.

  “Gone very smoothly, eh? Had the roll called, Chief? Made quite sure everyone’s here?”

  “Nokiki not here,” Tatake told him.

  “He ought to be. Where is he? Send someone to tell him.”

  “Nokiki not come. He swear it,” said Tatake, dropping into his own language, he added: “Nokiki has eighty of my people with him. They will stay on Tanakuatua. They swear it.”