by Peter Tonkin
Beside the practical little dune-buggy that had brought Nurul there was parked a slightly more regal Mazda limousine. But the post-storm glory of the morning and the romantic inaccessibility of their destination - as well as the look his thoughtless frown had brought into the biologist’s eyes - put Sailendra at his most accommodating. ‘I will ride with the doctor, Parang,’ he said. ‘I should be grateful if you would follow in the Mazda so that I also have a ride home when I have seen what Dr Nurul has to show me.’
The road to Bandar Laut Bay ran in the opposite direction to the road that brought them here last night. After the junction with the road up to the palace, it ran away from the precipitous slopes of Guanung Surat and round along the tail of the teardrop-shaped island. The spine of the lower ranges loomed up against the sky on their right hand like a series of high green sharks’ fins and the downslope on their left began to gather into the great sea-filled, white-beached, palm-lined amphitheatre of Bandar Laut Bay. The wind whispered in off the ocean, gusting lazily southwards out of stultifying Pontianac, but cooled by the better part of five hundred kilometres of sea. The waves gathered and tumbled as the road sank under the first overhang of palms, with nothing but fifteen hundred metres of white sand between it and the lazy, low-tide surf.
‘It still amazes me, how the bay shelves down,’ he said conversationally, looking across her at the view. ‘The best of all worlds. Deep here - deep enough for visiting ships, though not as deep as the marina or the harbour, of course. Then shelving up to the plateau where the prawn fisheries are. Then coming up again into the shallows of the bathing beaches leading right down to the point.’
She nodded tersely, and gunned the motor, bringing enough of a headwind to stop his idle speculation, and to flatten her blouse across her chest in a manner that drew his gaze in from more distant horizons. That disturbed him; for the doctor was neither in her first blush of youth nor particularly attractive, and even had she been so, his taste in women tended away from the traditional teak-skinned, ebony-haired island beauties, of which Dr Nurul would have been a perfect example - had she held any pretensions towards beauty at all.
But then Sailendra’s introspection was disturbed by something in the middle distance. ‘That looks like an oil slick!’ he said, shocked. ‘What is that?’
‘That’s what I need to show you, Your Highness.’
‘An oil slick! And so near to the prawn fisheries! Has there been an oil spillage here? Has there even been any ship nearby?’ He suddenly remembered the radio signal the chopper pilot picked up last night. Could the ship that took their distress call have been sluicing out its tanks here? There was no sense discussing the possibility with the taciturn Nurul. Automatically, Sailendra glanced back at the Mazda speeding along in the white cloud of their wake. He had chosen badly. Riding with the doctor had told him nothing and had distracted him pointlessly at a time when he needed focus more than ever before. He undervalued Parang, he thought; took the faithful secretary for granted all too often. He was fortunate indeed to have such a faithful friend and confidant.
This thought too was brought to an abrupt stop as the beach buggy braked. The sand storm behind caught up with them at the same time as Parang in the Mazda. Then the two men ran across the burning sand to the rubber dinghy Dr Nurul had left tethered to the rudimentary landing-stage beside the neat little processing plant. There was room for the men to sit uneasily in the inflated little cockle shell as Nurul gunned the motor, sending the tiny vessel in an uncompromising line directly for the oily darkness of the slick above the precious fishery.
‘Where are the boats? Where are the workers? The plant was empty,’ Sailendra demanded suddenly.
And suddenly all the words she had kept so closely bottled up in the beach-buggy came tumbling out in an angry tirade whose ire seemed as much aimed at herself as at anyone else. ‘I sent them to join Councillor Kerian’s rescue teams in Baya City. There was no problem about leaving the fisheries for a day or two while they helped out there. And from what I gathered the need was pretty urgent, what with the landslide and the flooding. I stayed here and I thought I would be able to keep a safe eye on things. Remember,’ she shot a dark look at the prince, ‘I am not a medical doctor. I’m at home in an aquarium, not an emergency room. Pressure makes me nauseous. Stress makes me sick. The sight of even a little blood makes me go down like a club on the back of the head, Bugis genes and Bandar Laut ancestors or not. There was no doubt in my mind. The men and their boats were better with you in the city on the floods and up the river, while I was better here. But that was before I discovered this.’
As she uttered the last word - spat it, in fact - the bow of the little inflatable hit the edge of the grey-brown iridescent slick. She cut the motor and let the dinghy drift.
It was the smell that alerted Sailendra to the terrible truth. He had been expecting the stench of oil to be pushed into his face by the northerly breeze, but instead his nostrils filled with something else. Filled and flared. It was strange - almost like something half remembered from the school Shakespeare of his Western education. A sweetness that cloyed and sickened. Except that it wasn’t sweet. It was savoury. Fishy, in fact; almost as intensely fishy as the nam-pla fish oil they used in the palace kitchens.
Sailendra looked down.
The dinghy was drifting through a thick, lumpy soup composed of a million and more decomposing bodies. From the length of his longest finger to the size of a pin-head, curled like rotten brown flower-buds with their white legs clenched, all the prawns of the fishery floated dead on the tide.
‘What has done this?’ he demanded, turning on the woman as though the disaster were her fault after all.
‘I know what did it,’ she answered. ‘But I don’t know what caused it!’
‘What do you mean?’
Rather than answer him, she simply put her hand over the side and plunged it into the stinking waves.
Without further thought, Sailendra did the same. Only to jerk his fist back again, hissing in shock.
The water was hot.
And of course that explained another thing that had been bothering him, bothered him more now he thought about precisely what he had seen on the approach across the beach. The absence of birds. Usually a feast like this would have summoned a raucous cloud of gulls. But there was nothing. And, now he thought of it, looking down past the lumpy soup that had once been a successful enterprise, there were no predatory or scavenging fish either. Everything that could get away had done so. Leaving only the prawns trapped in their nets to slowly cook alive. But how? Why?
The two men stood on a balcony overlooking the distant prospect of Bandar Laut Bay several hours later. The sun was sinking with tropical abruptness into the sea away to their left and the stars were beginning to burst through the afterglow on their right as they looked over the foothill slopes and into the wind northwards to Kalimantan.
Even at this distance the evening breeze brought the sick-sweet fish-oil smell of the rotting prawns up over the restless heads of the palm trees to their nostrils.
‘What could make the water of Bandar Laut Bay hot enough to kill the whole prawn-fishery?’ The words were uttered in the most intense of speculation.
‘I don’t know, Your Highness,’ answered Parang. ‘Dr Nurul suggested some kind of global warming.’
‘Like the earthslide. That must have been due to global warming, when all is said and done.’
‘Or something like it,’ agreed Parang. ‘Certainly, the storms we have experienced recently would suggest some kind of disturbance in the natural order...’
‘Ah. Yes indeed. The natural order.’
The men fell silent, watching the sun fall like a severed head into the great blood-filled bowl of the western ocean.
‘The Westerners believe such misfortunes come in threes,’ observed Parang, almost dreamily as he surveyed the awesome view. ‘First the landslide, then the prawn fishery, then...’
‘And still no contact?
From the outside world? The East ... or the West? No offers of aid?’
‘No. Nothing.’
‘Well, let us speculate a little and see whether that might lead us on towards a plan. What might this third misfortune be?’
‘I would check the red-banana plantations as early as possible tomorrow,’ said Parang. ‘Indeed, beside them and the handling facilities where they are gathered, packed and prepared for shipment to market, there are the exotic-fruit farms, the refrigeration units and the canneries. It is all worryingly vulnerable to global warming. To any kind of disruption...’
‘Disruption in the natural order. Yes. Indeed.’
There was just the faintest glimmering promise of moonrise. The evening breeze attained the closest to a chill it was capable of.
‘But the council. What did the council decide in the end?’ asked Parang.
‘Nothing as yet. They remain hesitant. So much has happened in such a short time. They too remain hopeful of some kind of outside aid. And in the meantime, it is easier to take no grand decisions, to take no leadership role or responsibility. They are elderly. Weak. They wait to be led. They want to be led. And yet, when leadership is offered, they hesitate...’
‘I sometimes wonder if their blood has been tainted, diluted, weakened beyond all measure. They are no longer Bandar Laut. Certainly, no longer Bugis - if any of them ever really were.’ Secretary Parang turned his back on the moonrise and leaned back against the handrail. The huge bright disc outlined his head and shoulder as though he were one of the puppets of the shadow theatre. A shooting star fell across the sky like Icarus falling, but he did not see it; his dalang puppet-master saw it, but would never associate it with such a hated Western tale.
‘Come in, my son,’ said Chief Councillor Kerian - offering a great compliment to the young man, but claiming no real family ties. ‘We of the Bugis blood deserve to enjoy the old fruits. As lords of the natural order.’
And there in the sleeping quarters of Kerian’s house waited two women. They were young, scarcely more than girls. Their flowerlike fineness and wide-eyed nervousness made them seem even younger than they were. They were both naked, and bound as though snatched as booty in some recent pirate raid.
‘Choose one,’ hissed Councillor Kerian almost silently at Parang’s shaking shoulder, like a devil in the despised Western religious stories. ‘They are merely mountain girls, brought down here by some of my ... contacts. They are of no account. Indeed, after last night it is highly unlikely that they have either families or villages left up on Guanung Surat.’ He gave an evil, wolfish smile, exuding a disturbing amount of naked lust and power for a man approaching his mid-seventies. ‘Choose either one and take her in the full-blooded Bugis way. Then I will take the other.’
Chapter 15: Paddy
The south side of Pulau Baya was very different from the north. The north side of the island curved inwards in a long shallow bay. The south curved outwards precipitously. If the north-facing slopes of Guanung Surat were steep at their highest levels, they were still just gentle enough to support the burgeoning Baya City on the lower, river-widened foothills and plain. Before the landslide, that is. On the south-facing slopes there was no such hope. From the watershed that reached in a series of ridges along the whole spine of the island, the south-facing slopes at the higher, western end simply plunged in forested cliffs that tumbled almost vertically into the sea. What vegetation there was clung to the cliff-chopped sides, but such was the scale of the mountain that there was unsuspected depth to the outcrops, and men could come and go amongst them. It was here that the bitterest, most dangerous fighting had been centred in the 1940s, for the dizzy heights of Guanung commanded a view across the Baya/Java Strait that could monitor any marine or airborne activity along the coast of Java from Jakarta to Surabaya, although the great island itself lay just below the horizon, even when you stood at the old Japanese watch-tower right at the highest peak. Which nobody except the occasional inquisitive high-forest hunter had actually done for nearly sixty years. And, perhaps, the occasional fearful orang-utan escaping the attentions of a prowling clouded leopard.
Here the vagaries of the monsoon dictated that the greatest rainfall came, though the landscape seemed ill equipped to make much use of it. There were no big rivers - merely precipitous cascades which had never quite managed to cut into the rock. No more had the jungle and rainforest managed sufficient plant cover to make much thickness of soil. And the goodness of such soil as there was - especially at the steep-sided western end - was simply washed away by the relentless downpours. Downpours that ironically kept this side of the island poor while feeding the headwaters of the rich Sungai Baya River on the far side of the high watershed ridge, a few hundred metres further north.
But as the jagged peaks of the watershed fell away along the curving spine of the land towards the long spit pointing eastwards like a pirate’s cutlass at the end of Bandar Laut Bay, so the slopes also eased, even on the steep southern side. Eased enough to allow cultivation, if not much in the way of civilization as yet. Here beneath the relentless but reliable monsoons were the red-banana plantations, and the great soft-fruit farms, with the canneries conveniently situated between them. Here one or two island-people villages clung to jungle clearings, their men and women given gainful income by the agriculture Sailendra had brought here. Their children were given the rudiments of education by UNESCO, especially in the years since the last great tsunami brought the whole area to the attention of the charitable West.
Here a track wide enough for the passage of trucks led over the lower ridges to the docking facilities on the north coast. And another, smaller, down to the lesser facilities on the south coast itself, where the water was deep enough to accept big cargo vessels but the infrastructure was not yet advanced enough to make it worth their while calling. And here, clinging like vineyards to the recently cleared slopes, were the steps of the rice-paddies. Each season - and there were three a year - the farmers would bring their unique, increasingly popular and fantastically expensive Pulau rice down in ever greater quantities. At the same time, under the careful, ecologically sensitive direction of Prince Sailendra himself, they fought the rainforest back and back.
Sailendra himself remained involved because the forest clearance remained so sensitive. And yet, if properly handled, it too could yield enormous profit to the island. For every stand of mahogany and teak that fell to the requirements of the paddy fields was carefully logged, recorded and put on to the open market - though never yet via the rapacious Gargantua of Luzon Logging, which had deforested and denuded so many local islands large and small. And any protected species - the native orang-utans and the recently discovered clouded leopards - were carefully and sensitively moved. Usually into remoter island forests; occasionally to top-class zoos, which were also willing to pay enormous amounts of money for the creatures.
Given Sailendra’s personal interest in so many projects on the south side of the island it was almost surprising that it took him until the middle of the second day after the landslide to come here in person to check for damage. Especially as he knew, better than most, that if the downpour had been so dangerously overwhelming in the north, it must have been far more devastating in the south.
As Sailendra bumped along in the truck the cannery kept in Baya City for ferrying crates to and fro from the port, he really wondered at the way his priorities had been dictated by events. Even for a prince who kept himself calculatedly free of ceremonial and security, he had been worryingly circumscribed by events. He narrowed his eyes a little, never losing focus on the wide track of the part-metalled roadway that led up to a pass between two low shark-fin peaks on the backbone of the ridge. On either side of them the half-jungle was part-cultivated palm-groves, the nodding trees laden with coconut and dates, interspersed with breadfruit. They could have industrialized this part of the island more - but that would have undermined the wild timeless beauty of Bandar Laut Bay, which stretched dazzlingly from sid
e to side of his rear-view mirror. And what they gained in the production of all-too-readily available produce would have cost them uncalculated amounts in tourist dollars. Just what Johnny Depp’s film-production company was contracted to pay for the shoot at the bay behind him would go a long way to fixing the damage done by the storms. And then there were the tourist cruises due, and the dollars they would bring. But the simple fact was that the people’s prince felt cabined, as Shakespeare had put it. Cabined, cribbed, confined.
Sailendra had been active in the rescue work in New Baya City - what was left of it; uneasily aware of a pressure to match Councillor Kerian’s much-trumpeted, politically weighty work. He had faced Kerian head to head across the council chamber, not once, but three times now - twice as they tried to make plans after the landslide and again after the scale of the disaster at the prawn fisheries became clear.
Sailendra never doubted that he was doing the right thing. He had never doubted it since he had returned from his Western education to assume the throne after his parents’ all-too-sudden death. A simple plane crash had removed not only the ruling generation but everyone on whom they had relied - upon whom the young incumbent could have relied. He had done his best since his accession to bring the principality into the modern era, but things had been hard right through the whole of Indonesia. Since President Suharto’s death, seemingly only days before his parents’, the regimented system that they had all known, as subjects or as allies, had begun to come apart at the seams. It was like the collapse of the old Soviet Union. Now it was every man - or country, region or village - for himself, and no one held the whip hand any more except the great greedy cash-rich companies like Luzon Logging.
Sailendra had done his best to hold it all together. But such forces as held practical power on the island did not feel firmly in his grip. The council held more sway with the rudimentary civil service, the largely ceremonial armed forces and the emergency policing units. It wouldn’t take much more, thought the young prince wearily, to make Kerian the real ruler of Pulau Baya. And the chief councillor knew it. The question was, did he want it? The power, yes. But did the impatient old pirate see that with power ought to go responsibility?
