by Opal Edgar
A shiver ran through me as my muscles were released. I could move again! I was freed! But for what? I flailed desperately. Large expanses of green appeared below. A forest unrolled itself like a carpet. In seconds the individual trees were visible. An unarticulated scream escaped my mouth.
Wide leafy branches cushioned the fall, they lashed and scratched all the way down. We bounced from one tree limb to the next. Fall, hit, graze the trunk, bounce, fall and splash!
We landed in a water tank. Almost the same kind as Bartholomew’s. Water sloshed everywhere. We hit the bottom glass sheet and kicked up, like a choreographed duo. I grabbed the rim of the tank, but my fingers were whacked out of the way by a bamboo cane. I fell back in. Alpheus didn’t get time to pull his face out. A solid oak lid dropped onto the tank. Caped people held it there. Alpheus punched and kicked, but there were too many of them holding it down. I strained up too, but to no avail. Clamps came down. The lid wouldn’t budge anymore. Alpheus squashed his face to it, searching for a pocket of air. But the oak pressed into the water: leaving nothing.
As long as Alpheus was under, no one would hear him scream. His voice was powerless.
They knew. Whoever had designed this, had planned it all specifically for him. And that meant they knew he was a manticore. They knew his voice gave orders no one could resist. We had walked right into their trap.
But how? Was there a mole in our team, leaking information? Or was it someone I knew leading all of this? A shiver trickled down my spine. That made so much sense. It explained why they were a step ahead all the time. Someone I knew and befriended was responsible for all of this.
About 12 power thieves hovered round the tank, knotting a complicated system of ropes round it. The tank had wheels – they intended to take us somewhere. From behind a tight bunch of willow trees came another tank. They had a third prisoner.
Seeing her face broke my heart. I was really like the lone medieval leper: causing the end of everyone in my wake. I couldn’t believe the power thieves had gotten her. Varhoura the mermaid floated dejectedly in her giant fish bowl. Her pearl threaded hair coated her like a protective shawl against this harsh world. Raw marks circled her wrists and tail where ropes held her. She had fought ... and lost. I’d forced her out of hiding and led the power thieves straight to her. Hot tears burned the back of my throat.
“I’m sorry!” I yelled, drowning in the tank. No sound came out of my mouth, but it didn’t matter. “I’ll free you!” I promised.
Varhoura shrugged. Whether she understood or not was a mystery. But if she did, she didn’t believe any of it. Her eyes were foreshadowing some horrendous captivity. She mouthed, “Tosho look after Tosho.” Then, she closed her eyes.
This, too, was my fault. I just kept breaking everyone's afterlife. I crushed dreams, goals and freedom. I had a burning pit in my stomach. My skin prickled and I could have just punched something until it was ground mush to feed worms. I hated myself, but most of all I hated power thieves with all my being. Their determined dogging of my footsteps was my curse. All the good people I crossed got hurt because I was passive, because I was weak. This was a luxury I couldn’t afford anymore. I had been naive. How could I think I could get away without fighting? That peace was a valid answer when faced with them? I flexed my fists and stared blistering holes into our captors. I would get them. All of them.
They were reordering into a neat formation, like soldiers. Our tank followed Varhoura’s. Deadly flowers shimmered out of our reach, popping out of the omnipresent forest. The place felt familiar: the tall trees, the colourful shrubbery and the ivy round the ageless trunks. I frowned and then it hit me. I couldn’t believe their nerve. This was Elise’s world.
Alpheus’s board hit me in the head. I turned to flashing white chalk printing: “You’re turning transparent.” And sure enough, through my fingers I could see the ferns. I was breaking down.
Chapter 25
Helping Ina Ni Luh Pande
I opened my mouth, but I had used the last air in my lungs already. I was losing tangibility every second. “Bye-bye,” appeared on Alpheus’s slate, and the power thieves screamed, throwing themselves at the tank.
I was gone.
Instead of the aquarium in the forest, I sat in a dark classroom. To be clear: I sat on the beaten earth floor of a classroom, while three students, girls wrapped in colourful fabric, were standing in a panic. There were some familiar things in this classroom: the wooden desks, the rolling blackboard, the cross hanging above the door and the calendar announcing we were in April 1962, but all the rest felt utterly foreign. There were no windows in the room – three of the walls simply didn’t go all the way up, stopping at waist level, and the roof was supported by tree trunk beams. That’s how I knew it was night-time. The charts on the tall wall were in an alphabet I didn’t know. Outside were exotic trees: palms and other ones I didn’t know.
I could feel my pulse beat in my wrist.
Please, please, please, don’t let him find me, a voice sounded in my mind.
It was one of the girls. She hadn't talked aloud, just in my head, but it was as if I’d caught her thought. Her language was soft and melodic. I noticed that I understood what the girls were saying even though they spoke a different language. What was happening now?
“This is the money Mama told me to give you, Ina.”
“Thank you!” the girl exclaimed, clutching the dry palm envelope to her chest.
Her hands trembled, but her eyes were dry and wide in the dark. Bats screeched. I got up, but none of the students saw me. I stepped closer and waved a hand between the three of them. They looked right through it. To them, I wasn’t there. What exactly could I do in this form? I walked round the room. My feet left no prints. I touched the chalk dust on the board, but it didn’t stick to my finger so I wrote nothing.
Please, ancestors, protect me from him. Let me go back home, Ina thought very hard.
I sighed. I looked at the printed name pulsing on my wrist: Ina Ni Luh Pande. So she was a schoolgirl. And I was supposed to help her. Thanks to her I wasn’t rotting or soaking in a power thief bath. I really wanted to help.
But how? No one could see me or hear me, and I couldn’t interact with anything. I had no power. What am I going to do?
“What are you going to do?” the question echoed out of my mind.
I jumped. Did I just communicate with them?
No. It wasn’t me. It was the first girl who had spoken. It was Ina’s little sister, I guessed, judging from her rounder face and smaller frame. She was probably 15 while Ina was between 16 and 18.
“If I make it to Denpasar, Grandfather and Grandmother will probably take me in. They didn’t want us to go, they’ll understand.”
“But how are you going to get back to Bali?” the third girl cried out.
“Nobody wants us here. The Papua think we’re all Javanese: stealing not only their lands, but their spirits too, trying to convert them to Islam. And the Javanese ...” Ina started.
The two other nodded emphatically. The friend wiped a tear from her face and said, “I know what you mean, they treat all the other settlers as inferior. If we’re not Muslims we’re on the same scale as Papuas. The other day they refused to let my mother use the main road with her cart. They blocked the way. They threatened her, and they even hit her. She got really scared. She’s talking about converting.”
The two sisters huddled close to her. I didn’t know who Papuas or Javanese were, but it all sounded painfully familiar. What was it with groups always acting superior? Did difference always lead to conflict?
“It was easy to find someone who wanted to get rid of us and to take me to the city in a canoe. He said to wait here,” Ina concluded.
The friend wiped her eyes again and she broke into an amazing smile, “I’m going to miss you so much!”
“It hurts just thinking about it,” the little sister added.
A crunching noise outside startled them. The insects went quiet.
The girls ducked down, looking confused.
“That sounded like it came from the direction of the settler cam—” started the little sister before being shushed.
Please don’t let it be him. Please, please, please, Ina prayed.
I walked through the half wall. The bats were quiet too. There were two paths: one going down towards a river and one leading deeper into the forest. A light danced a good distance away in the forest. There was more than one shadow flickering behind it.
“He’d never think to look for us here,” whispered the sister. “He can’t, not the Papua missionary schoo—”
“Shhh!!!”
I ran down. She was wrong. And the girls caught on quick.
Ina’s furtive shadow went round the school house. The sister and friend ran in the opposite direction, making as much noise as they could. And, wow, they didn’t look like it, but they sure sounded like escaping bulls right now.
“Hurry!” the light bearer called out. “Catch her!”
He was in his late thirties, pushing a teenage boy forwards. The teenager tripped, but rushed ahead anyway, barely throwing an embarrassed look back. He was hesitant in the dark, though. My eyes were a big advantage. I could see him race after the decoys, I could see Ina working her way carefully downhill, and I could see the light bearer frowning in the dark.
“Let her get away,” I said in the teenager’s ear.
He hesitated, glancing at the man following, and walked right through me. Now the question was knowing if I’d made him hesitate like that.
The teenage boy cried out, “It’s not her! It’s Nyoman.”
The man swore. The teenager came out holding on to the two decoys. Both pouted, but weren’t resisting much.
“Where is your sister, Nyoman?” the light bearer asked, grabbing her by the arm.
“I don’t know, father,” she said.
His grip tightened. His eyes hardened. She cringed in discomfort, her eyes cast down. “If I don’t find her, you will be the one to marry Suharto Arbi,” he threatened.
The two girls tensed up. So all this was about an arranged marriage. A wave of nausea rose in my stomach. Things like that still happened, of course they did. Poor girls. And there was no solution: if she got away the other sister suffered. All those names were getting me confused, but I still got the gist of it.
“You can’t!” Nyoman yelled out. “You already promised me to I Pudu Raka.”
“When his family is helping my elder daughter run away from me?” The father pointed his chin at the friend. “Bring shame to our family? To our cast! To our people! You think that such an insult can be forgiven? We are not liked. We are in serious trouble. The old gods haven’t followed us here. We have no friends. Three Balinese families does not make a village. If the Javanese don’t trust us, we will die. The harvest yielded nothing. We have no food, just mouths to feed. Where is your sister?”
The girls huddled together, fat tears running down their faces. The little sister was shaking her head. Just then, Ina stumbled over a root. She was at the bottom of the hill, but the river was still far away, I could see it shimmering in the distance. The father lifted his head and turned his head to the noise.
Help me get away, please make him deaf to my escape, please, Ina prayed.
Her plea sent shivers down my spine. I had to help her escape, by any means. But the father was sharp, he heard, he knew.
“She’s getting a canoe,” he said.
The little sister let out a howled sob.
He nodded. He pushed the girls towards the teenager. “Get them back home,” he instructed.
He was going after Ina alone. I trotted at his side, kicking his legs. It did nothing. It didn’t even make me feel better. His lantern was a pain, it created a ghostly light in my vision. But Ina was still well ahead. She left the main path. I lost sight of her behind the trees. The lianas looked like snakes. The ferns like giant spider legs. She was courageous.
“Is your family really going to starve?” I asked Ina’s dad. “Do you have no braver solution than to sell your daughters?”
The man kept his jog up. He was strong. Not big, not muscular, but he’d worked hard all of his life and it showed. His endurance was impressive. I guess he wasn’t that old. His face was serious. Of course, he had his reasons. Nothing was totally black or white. But whatever his reasons were, he was doing something evil.
“Do you realise? You might be destroying her life. Do you hate her?”
The man scratched his ear. He frowned at the darkness and looked up at the sky, but he didn’t stop. Had he heard me? Could I whisper thoughts to him? Could I influence him with the right words? My heart started beating faster. Of course, he might just have an itch, or maybe he was trying to figure out where Ina had gone. But what if he could hear me? I clenched my fists with renewed hope. I was going to repay my debt to Ina. She was going to be fine.
“Your daughter has a voice,” I said. “You know that. You love her. Don’t sacrifice her, or her sister for yourself. Think hard about what you are doing. It’s wrong.”
My face was hot. I was getting angry. He was making me so angry! I tried to grab him and some kind of ethereal filaments came out of him. He stumbled and I tried again. There was something of him I could interact with. Maybe whatever was left of us when we died. I yelled at him, “LISTEN TO YOUR DAUGHTERS! THEY DESERVE TO MAKE THEIR OWN CHOICES!”
He shook his head, confused. He was moving slower now, but still swerved into the jungle, right after Ina. I hit my forehead with a fist, damn it! The flattened grass pointed to Ina as blatantly as fluorescent road signs. She was struggling ahead, building a clear path for us. It was hopeless.
She screamed when he caught her wrist.
“Be the good guy here: let her go.” I commanded.
And maybe I was having an influence over him. His hand slipped off her wrist, holding her only loosely, almost pleadingly. She searched his face, but it was even darker under the vegetation. There was no moon to light his expression, only I could make it out.
“Do you hate your sister?” he asked Ina.
Was he taking some of my words and twisting them round? She didn’t answer.
“She loves I Pudu Raka. I blessed their union, but if you go, she’ll have to take your place. You know that, right?” he continued.
He didn’t see the horror freezing her face. The shock had muted her.
“You’re condemning all of us by running away. We’ll be shamed. Even if he wanted, I Pudu wouldn't be able to take you sister after your stunt. Her honour will be tainted by your free spirit. And we very well risk getting formally shunned by our own. He’ll have to hope for a match with a Javanese girl to differentiate his family from ours. And it would be hard for us, too, confirming to all Javanese that Balinese words mean nothing.”
“But, Papa, I don’t even know him. You didn’t even wait for us to meet before you told me you’d given me away.”
Complex emotions ran over his face. She had hit a nerve, and I was going to prod it till he gave. I yapped in his ear: Could he blame her when he was showing her no consideration? Wasn’t all this his fault? If it failed it would be because of him! He was the one to blame for bad decisions. His daughter wasn’t a bag of wheat to trade. Even his wife was against it and tried to get their daughter away from him. Maybe I could shame him into changing his mind.
“Your grandparents are traditional. They’ll marry you off too. At least here you will see your mother, sister and brother often. Don’t shame us tonight.”
“I know!” she screamed, but then she went limp.
He let her go. He had won. She clutched herself. I didn’t want to be powerless, but I had no idea what the solution was here. Tonight, one would win, and yet everyone else would hurt. It didn’t look good for Ina. But I wanted her to escape anyway. She dropped her head.
“I will shame you whatever I do,” she said. “I’m not converting to Islam because you’re a bad farmer. I didn’t lose faith
in the ancestors. You did.”
“The old gods stayed in the old country. We are all converting. Even the Raka are converting. Your little friend might not even know it yet, but we need to come together, all of us settlers, to become a real village.”
She shook her head, stepping backwards. But it was too late. Something was brewing in the night. Out of the rustling bush protruded a machete. Ina stifled a scream. A dark man with a thick curly beard and a loincloth followed the blade.
“Fathers who can’t keep their daughters in line only have themselves to blame. Come on girly, I want to be back home before the sun rises.”
“You’re not taking her anywhere,” the father said, pushing him.
The newcomer looked at the hand. In his own grip the machete glistened. “I said I’d take her. My word is law.”
The dad grimaced angrily, he’d been holding on to his resentment for too long, he couldn’t control himself anymore, “You will not! You think I’d let her leave in the hands of a savage!”
The newcomer’s shoulders tensed. He stood taller. If the dad looked healthy, this man looked like his machete was an extension of his arm. He was a warrior.
“What did you call me?” He lifted the blade.
Things were escalating fast. I said any crazy calming thing that passed through my mind, stretching my arms between them, like you would to stop a fist fight. No one saw me, but somehow I was holding them back. Just enough for Ina to do the bravest thing I’d ever seen.
She jumped between the two, clutching her tiny cloth bag against her chest. The machete gleamed above her head. I shielded her the best I could, unsure my body could physically block anything at all. She was not dying tonight! Not on my watch!
I grabbed the blade: perceiving the cold of the metal, but feeling no bite. I have no idea what I was hoping to achieve, I hadn’t thought it through. Slowly, the machete relaxed, resting on top of my hands. Disbelief ripped a cry from my throat. Was I really doing that? Had I saved Ina’s life?
