Red Sails

by Edward M. Erdelac

  “Khakhua!” she said, nodding her head. “Khakhua!”

  “Khakhua,” Timóteo repeated, and then said, “Devils! Ah…beast men! No—werewolves,” he said to the girl. “Khakhua! Werewolves!” It was best they settled on a single term if they were to communicate.

  She nodded vigorously and straightened. Then she pointed to the sun and slowly predicted its passage across the sky, until her finger indicated west.

  She spoke as she did so, her musical language tumbling out like the water over the nearby rocks. The only word they caught was ‘khakhua,’ in finality at the end.

  They nodded. At night they would come.

  She pointed in the direction of the creek and made a swiftly moving gesture with her hand. Then she started along the bank of the pond, gesturing for them to follow.

  “She’s going to help us, praise God,” Timóteo said, lumbering out of the pond.

  “Hang on, girl!” Jan called.

  The girl stopped and stared.

  Jan came to stand beside Timóteo and pointed out his bloody arm, saying, “Your khakhua are going to smell his blood, you see?” He pointed to his nose and sniffed. He pointed up the creek. “We can try to lose the scent in the water.”

  She shook her head and pointed off in a different direction, and motioned for them to wait. She went into the jungle again without waiting for an answer, the fronds closing around her bare back like emerald lips.

  By the time they waded to the edge of the pond, she returned with a bundle of leaves and other things tucked into the crook of her arm.

  She set aside her axe and motioned for Timóteo to sit down on a nearby rock. He did so. She set to plastering a broad leaf with mud from the banks, along with a handful of some plant matter she chewed to a pulp before applying to the wound.

  Jan sat on his heels and watched her apply the poultice, briefly admiring her lithe form. He hadn’t seen a woman in months. This one’s limbs bore the faint crisscrossed scars of jungle life, and her hands and feet were hard as shoe leather. There were a series of ornamental circular scars down both arms and across her flat belly. Her skin looked to be smeared in what smelled like animal fat to keep the insects from knotting her up. She was a full-bloomed woman nonetheless, and he was conscious of his own nakedness for the first time. He turned away his body and his thoughts, his eyes falling on her axe, lain aside. It was nothing more than a heavy stone wedge lashed with vines to a wood haft, but it could kill.

  He picked it up.

  Suddenly her fist darted out from behind her back with a sharp bone awl knife. She pressed its point beneath his chin.

  Her eyes were imposing, her lower lip tucked behind her teeth, drawing her face into a serious scowl.

  “Hold on, girl,” Jan said, chuckling despite his predicament.

  He didn’t relinquish the axe immediately, but reached down and traced a crude stick figure with a dog’s head in the mud.

  He drew another figure. A figure with a human head, wrinkled lines about the empty circle face.

  At first she drew her eyebrows together, but then her eyes widened. She met his look and nodded.

  “Laleo,” she said, using her hands to pull at her cheeks until the skin seemed to drag on her skull and the red rims beneath her eyes were exposed. “Laleo.”

  “Laleo,” he said, smiling now. She had put up her knife and he could relax. “Vigoreaux.”

  “Vee-ga-ro,” she agreed. She pointed to Timóteo’s bloody arm and pantomimed drinking from her cupped hand. “Laleo.”

  He pointed first to the Vigoreaux drawing. “Vigoreaux–laleo,” he said. Then he indicated the dog-headed drawing, in his mind, the red headed blackguard, Badham. “Werewolf–khakhua.” He sunk the stone axe in the midst of the mud scrawls and scattered the drawing. He looked at her.

  She smiled, gleefully as a child on Christmas morning.

  * * * *

  It was noon when Sampari stepped once more into the village. She had known what she would find even before she saw it, for the booming voice of her uncle and the wailing chants of the women to the tune of the rhythmic pounding on the tree trunks had told her.

  At the sight of her, the singing stopped and her uncle’s followers gave a great cry. She was seized roughly by the arms. She kept a look of half-lidded indifference as they dragged her to him.

  One of the village women, Maja, barred their way for a moment, and thanked her for returning.

  “Now that you are back, they will not give my son to the khakhua,” Maja blubbered, her old cheeks wet with tears.

  She was shoved aside, and Sampari saw three of her people, a girl her age, an old man, and Maja’s strong son, Bunop, kneeling in the clearing, bound.

  Then she too was driven to her knees. Her fat uncle loomed over her, his son Kilikili peering like a trained monkey over his greasy shoulder. At his left, Yakor, the khen-mengga-abül, regarded her from his bloodshot eyes. Those who did not bow to her uncle’s gods still feared Yakor, The Fierce Man’s strength and arrows.

  “You came back, once-my-daughter,” her uncle said.

  “Never your daughter!” she snarled.

  “No,” he agreed. “Never. You’re a witch, sired by an evil black boar that mounted your slut mother in the forest. She told me this, before she jumped from my house in shame.”

  There were awed sounds from some of the gathered under his spell. Others said nothing.

  Sampari only glared, then smiled and pointed to the tree line.

  “If I was a witch I would not need them.”

  Sampari’s entrance into the clearing had shocked the village, but the emergence of the two laleos so terrorized them, a handful of men and women dropped their things and ran headlong into the jungle.

  Those dull-witted ones who accepted her uncle’s new religion thought they were monsters, and fell to their faces. They were puzzled when her uncle and Kilikili and Yakor did not do the same, although Kilikili stumbled a few uncertain steps backward.

  Those who lived her uncle’s way only because they feared Yakor and the khakhua milled uncertainly.

  * * * *

  Timóteo muttered the Psalm of David in Latin as he and Jan entered the clearing. The village was encircled by a dozen or so rattan huts on platforms situated precariously high in the slim, green trees. There were families of pigs tethered to the vast roots, and wide-eyed children scattered like crows.

  Neither Jan nor the priest had ever seen such people. The small, dark men were well-muscled and garbed even more immodestly than Sampari, whose name at least they had come to know. Their naked unmentionables were ridiculously sheathed in outrageously displayed rolled palm leaves. String belts hung with stone knives, and similar necklaces of bead and bone were their only other coverings.

  Yet there was nothing exaggerated about the bows and the fistfuls of yard-long arrows some carried.

  Jan observed the varied reactions of the natives to their appearance. He immediately assessed the dark, lean figure who glared at them beside the two fat men standing over the kneeling Sampari as the greatest danger. This one was a killer, not so cowed by Vigoreaux’s men as the bloodsucker perhaps believed. He held an ash black bow and a clutch of wicked barb-headed arrows, one of which he surreptitiously nocked but did not aim at them. There were others here too who did not avert their gaze as fearful supplicants should, but still remained wary at the strange sight of two naked, seemingly unarmed white men in their midst. Good. If their plan were to succeed, they needed fighters, not cowering devotees.

  He turned his attention to the fat pair. One was a soft-looking boy, and he stood a little behind his elder, a silver-flecked, pot-bellied devil with an overabundance of savage finery—a resplendent headdress of bright parrot feathers, clanking anklets and an ugly, fat face fully riddled with native beads, bones, and studs.

  “The headman?” Timóteo ventured, after he finished his prayer.

  “I’d wager.” Jan nodded. “Let’s go parley.”

  They renewed their
approach, being careful not to meet any other of the curious looks.

  The fat old chief glanced down at Sampari and spat angry words at her, gesturing forcefully at them.

  “I don’t like his tone,” Jan whispered.

  “Nor do I,” Timóteo agreed.

  The air was tense as a line pulled to the breaking.

  The chief seemed to grow angrier, and thrust accusatory gestures at Sampari, who argued shrilly with him in their tongue.

  Jan glanced at the dark bowman. The arrow was fitted to the bow, but still pointed downward. The warrior’s deep set eyes went from Jan and Timóteo to the headman, as though awaiting an order.

  “I don’t know what’s happening, but I think it’s only going to go one way, padre,” Jan mumbled over his shoulder. “Stay low.”

  Timóteo nodded.

  Jan let the native girl’s stone axe slide down from where he had concealed it behind his forearm. Now he understood why she’d insisted on pressing it into his hand before they reached her village.

  “God help us,” Timóteo muttered.

  When they were within a few yards the argument between Sampari and the headman ended with a dismissive flip of the fat chief’s hand, directed at them offhandedly as he turned fully toward her.

  The archer’s bow came up to his shoulder and the string went taut in the same instant.

  Jan dropped to his knee and Timóteo to his belly. The arrow hissed over their heads and clattered into the trees behind them. At the same time, Jan drew back the axe and sent it flying end over end at his attacker. His aim was off, and instead of the imposing warrior, the fat youth at the chief’s side screamed and fell dead, his head split to the bridge of his nose.

  Well, he hadn’t thrown a tomahawk since Virginia, after all.

  Jan still had Badham’s dirk, and he scrambled to his feet and charged, flipping the blade across his chest into his left hand.

  The warrior managed another flight. The arrow tore the skin over Jan’s collarbone before they were upon each other, crashing to the ground. They rolled there, a furious tumult of kicking legs, thrashing limbs and biting teeth, contending with the maddened ferocity of dueling tigers for control of Badham’s flashing blade.

  Jan assumed he was on his own. He did not trust Timóteo to come readily to his aide in a fight, did not know if the native girl Sampari was alive, and expected the other armed aborigines would intervene any moment and he would feel their groping hands jerk him away from his opponent.

  Instead, the other warriors stood back, giving the fighting pair ample room to decide their contest. He gave the whole of his concentration to the matter at hand.

  The native was smaller, but tougher. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him, whereas Jan had spent months lazing in a Guantanamo dungeon and then sitting in chains in the bowels of first La Doña and then The Trivia. He was winded, but his blood was up, the blood of his grandfather, a winged Hussar who’d fought at Kircholm.

  It was a weird and twisting path, Jan’s life, from wood cradle to this patch of itching grass on some unnamed isle fighting naked with a man as alien to him as the far heavens to the earth. He saw, as he at last pressed the point of Badham’s blade between the native’s first and second ribs, this dark-skinned man felt the same.

  Jan didn’t know what roads this fellow had taken, but in the instant of his death, with both their eyes suddenly slipping from anxious desperation to slackening blue relief and fading brown acceptance, it seemed he acknowledged Jan, as if they were a pair of laced gentlemen wearing the same hat, stopping in the lane to remark mirthfully on each other’s good taste before parting ways.

  The knife sunk to the hilt, the native’s grip on his wrists eased, and his head fell back into the grass peacefully as Jan smelled his last, stale breath blow out from his quivering lips. Jan closed the hunter’s eyes with two bloody fingers and stood, bringing the knife with him, feeling the warm redness drip on his thigh as he drew it out.

  The gathered tribesmen weren’t even paying attention to him.

  They were staring at Sampari. The fat chieftain kneeled before her now, hunched over. As Jan watched, she lifted the fat man’s chin with the point of her jagged bone knife. As coolly as if she were slaughtering a pig for the table, she swept it across his throat. The blood splashed across her heaving belly.

  She turned to the others and held the knife high over her head, the red running in a stream down her trembling arm, over the swell of one breast to drip like red milk from the purple nipple. She didn’t even watch her victim fall to his side, clutching at the semicircle of swiftly growing red she had cut into his belly during their struggle. His glistening entrails spilled over her bare feet like fish from a net as the wound parted.

  She addressed the shock-still people gathered about, and she went on for a long time in their musical language.

  Timóteo knelt beside each of the men they’d killed and spoke benedictions in turn. Sampari went to a trio of people he hadn’t noticed before, bound and kneeling nearby. She cut them free, one at a time.

  A group of the villagers began to shake their heads and cry out, but she silenced them with a flourish of her bloodied knife.

  It wasn’t difficult to understand what was happening. Vigoreaux had spoken of the aborigines’ primitive adoration, but he obviously hadn’t taken into account the subtleties of native politics. Not everyone here gave their allegiance to the invading “gods,” at least, not without cajoling from the fat headman and his enforcer. Sampari had staged a coup with Jan as her main insurgent. Yet as he watched this feral, beautiful girl arguing with the people, he could see she’d not yet won them over.

  Timóteo was of the same mind.

  “They’re not all of them going to help us, are they?”

  “They’re scared, some of them,” said Jan. “The rest don’t trust us.”

  “I don’t blame them. They’ve never seen men like us, except for Vigoreaux’s crew.”

  “No,” Jan said. “Never men like us.”

  * * * *

  Sampari was aghast at the indecision of her people. Her hated uncle lay dead at her feet, as was Yokar, The Fierce Man. Who stood now to foster this shameful practice of appeasing the khakhua at every moon? She cut loose the victims her uncle had selected, but even they seemed hesitant to join her and the two laleo in killing the beast men.

  “Is there not a man left in this village?” she chided, flicking the knife clean of her uncle’s blood so it scattered across the faces of the onlookers. “I have avenged my mother and all who have been fed to the khakhua. Now I say we will honor our ancestors and return to the old ways. We should fight the khakhua tonight and purge our clan of the evil as we did in the days before they came!”

  “Who are you to do this?” screamed one of the women. “Your uncle spared us the wrath of the khakhua. Now you will bring it down on us again. Maybe you were too little to remember how it was? Do you forget your own father—”

  “I will never forget my father!” Sampari declared. “Have you all forgotten your own families who were killed and eaten on the first night? Have you forgotten the ones who were killed and eaten every moon since? This is not our way!”

  “Who are they?” shouted one old man, shaking a knotted hand at the two laleo. “That is what I want to know.”

  “They are nemayokh. Friends. They will be killed tonight along with our own if we let this moon pass again. They offer help.”

  “What do they offer,” said the old man, “except two more bodies for the khakhua? We should drive these back into the jungle or the khakhua will come here tonight and kill every one of us!”

  There was agreement among some in the crowd, fidgeting silence from others.

  “We will not bring the khakhua here unless they are dead,” Sampari shouted above the mumblers. “I ask one last time. Will none of you come along and help us?”

  Bunop stepped away from his mother’s side. She wailed her protest, but he shook his head and pushed her away. He
came to stand by Sampari.

  “Take Yokar’s bow and arrows, Bunop,” Sampari said. “The rest of you stay here and suckle the pigs.”

  * * * *

  “Just one,” Jan said, when Sampari and one of the men she had freed turned away and came to stand in front of them.

  “It’s better than nothing,” Timóteo offered.

  “Not by much.”

  “Bunop,” said the girl, indicating the youth. “Bunop.”

  They went the round of introductions.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Timóteo, then. “Despite his madness, our monster is a practical creature. He comes to this isle to appease his crew, he says. But why this particular island? There must be dozens of inhabited islands in the Pacific. Yet by his own admission he stays within little more than a month’s journey of this island if he can help it.”

  “Ease?” Jan ventured.

  “I don’t think so,” Timóteo said, shaking his head. “Remember the tale you told me that Welsh sailor told you about the ship that was driven out of Tortuga? About the wolf pups?”

  “I’m sure he was talking about The Trivia.”

  “As am I. But a ship can’t remain seaworthy without stopping for provisions. There are things a ship needs even with a crew that eschews typical nourishment for blood and flesh. Particularly a fighting vessel. Things need to be replenished, there are repairs. Timber, rope, fresh water, canvas, iron, ballast…”

  “Cannon,” Jan agreed. “And powder. They weren’t scanting on the powder when they sunk La Doña Marisol. Shooting all the sailors…You think they have a cache here somewhere?”

  “I would think they must keep an abundance of lead somewhere, by the frivolous way they spent it. If a port such as Tortuga will not have them, they must stockpile it. Why not here, where the inhabitants are too cowed and too primitive to know what to do with their supplies even if they happened to find them?”

  “It seems Vigoreaux would have another purpose other than simply letting his crew run loose…” said Jan, letting his eyes rove over the dead chieftain.

  “But how to find it?” Timóteo wondered aloud. “We ask if one of them has seen such a thing somewhere on the island?”