by Mandy Hager
She hung back still as she watched Aanjay assign the bunks to the mothers with babies, then proceed to place the other sleeping mats around the cell and mete them out according to each woman's need. As the chaos subsided and the women set about trying to settle their terrified children, Maryam found a corner and crouched down to inspect the contents of the bag.
As well as the promised antibiotics, bandages and rope—good rope, the kind the Territorials used, not made from woven pandanus like the ropes at home—she found several waterproofed boxes of candles and magical lighting sticks, as well as several shards of more familiar flint. Inside a small wooden box she found a dozen differently sized steel fish hooks, and a reel of translucent line that was so tough she couldn't snap it, even with her teeth. Whatever it was made from was truly miraculous, and she felt her mood lifting with excitement at such a precious haul. She would have been extremely grateful for these things alone, but now she realised dear Charlie had not stopped his thoughtfulness and generosity there. To her utter amazement, at the bottom of the bag she found a pair of leather boots just like the ones she'd seen on the shelves in the administration storeroom. She reached inside to haul them out, eager to try them on, when her hand connected with something hard at the very bottom of the bag.
She peered in, sucking back a gasp of surprise as she pulled back a wrapping of ragged blue fabric to reveal the glint of a robust steel machete and one small knife. Oh Lord! If the Territorials knew she had these beauties they'd seize them from her faster than she could blink. She rammed everything quickly back down into the bag, bundling the clothes from Ruth on top for good measure, and refastened its clasp. She was sure her heart was thumping louder than the engines, panic and excitement duelling for first place. Charlie, oh Charlie. What a gift! And not to be celebrated just for its practical implications but for the lift it gave to her spirits as well. No longer would she land on Marawa Island bereft of anything but a noble (and potentially fatal) plan…possession of the machete and knife handed her some sense of power and control.
She closed her eyes, clutching this amazing fortune to her chest, and pictured Charlie's face. Joseph and his mother Deborah could no longer be viewed as exceptions now Charlie had proved that goodness was all about intention, not the colour of one's skin. Thank you, she whispered to him, imagining how he'd brush her thanks aside in real life. Now she could tackle the building of a sailing raft with confidence. She could select and fell the very best of timber instead of having to rely on what had fallen to the ground. Charlie had handed her the gift of greater independence and possibilities, and for this she never would forget him.
The smell of vomit permeated every corner of the tiny room. The ship had been lolling through a sloppy sea for three full days while, one by one, the women and their children succumbed to its stomach-churning motion, and still the pitching did not ease.
Maryam and Aanjay had done their best to help support them, but, as the stench intensified and mingled with the fumes of the engines, the lack of air grew ever more overpowering and they, too, fell under the energy-sapping pall. Poor Aanjay found the heaving motion of the swell especially trying, and now she lay with her face buffeted in Maryam's lap as Maryam tried to shut her senses down and sleep. She hadn't vomited since yesterday—a blessing, she supposed—but just the thought of trying to swallow any kind of nourishment made her want to gag.
The crew seemed not to care about their plight. They were always late to change the overflowing buckets of stinking slop, and wrinkled up their noses with obvious disgust whenever they finally appeared. Yet they delivered inedible meals with ridiculous regularity before removing them again uneaten and cursing the women's wastefulness each time they did.
But worse than all this for Maryam was the way the confines of the cell seemed to revive her grief at Joseph's death. The first time she'd been here she'd been so shocked by his loss, she'd felt numb to the hostility of the Territorials, ensnared instead within a sheath of hopelessness and fury. Looking back on it now, she recognised how close she'd come to ending her own life. There'd seemed no point in trying to go on, when it felt like everything that mattered to her had been lost. It struck her now how little she had known. If she'd killed herself she'd never have discovered there was a cure for Te Matee Iai or had the chance to take this knowledge back to Onewēre as she was doing now. She'd not have known that Ruth was going to bear a child, nor come to realise that it was a person's heart—the choices they made—that dictated good or evil, and not their race, spiritual beliefs or place of birth.
Despite knowing all this and understanding its value as she did now, the one thing that had not changed was her pain at Joseph's loss. For the brief time their lives had crossed she'd come to recognise how precious it was to share the bond of gifted love, where out of nowhere came a person who felt as if his mind and body could be a perfect extension of her own—a love that would have seen her willingly change places and give her life for his if she'd had the power.
Now she faced this pain again by leaving Ruth. Although the love was different—they were sisters in every sense except shared parents—the bond ran just as deep. She even suspected that they, along with all the other Chosen Sisters, shared some kind of special quality in their blood. At Judgement times, when Father Joshua mixed his blood with the blood of all the toddlers within the native population to see if it would clot, he only picked out those Sisters whose blood still flowed when combined with his. It had to have some bearing on the transfusions that kept Te Matee Iai at bay, and if her guess was right then delivering a cure for the plague would remove the need for Judgements and transfusions from that time forth.
Now she was brought back to the present as, somewhere above them, men's voices rose and their footsteps reverberated down through the metal walls. Moments later the cell door was unlocked and a crewman entered, a rag tied around his head and over his nose, no doubt to block the smell. He paid no heed to the women as he replaced the overflowing buckets and topped up the water jugs with stale water from a tub outside the door. Then, just as he was about to leave, he addressed the group in an apathetic drawl: “We are approaching Tentara Allah. Those of you returning there should prepare to disembark.”
A murmur swept through the room like the first gusts of a storm. Aanjay stirred. The dark smudges under her eyes looked bruised and livid in the sunken crevices beside her nose, and she grunted as she slowly lifted her head from Maryam's lap. She looked older and more vulnerable than Maryam had ever seen her.
“Did you manage to get some sleep?” Maryam asked.
“A little. Yes.” Aanjay glanced about her. Two women were bustling their children and belongings together to make ready to depart. She sighed and turned her attention back to Maryam. “This is where I leave.”
Maryam's stomach nearly turned itself inside out. “We've reached your home?”
She shrugged. “We approach the island of my birth.”
“Please, it's not too late. Refuse to go ashore.”
“It is my karma. I pay for the sins of my last life in this incarnation. If I manage to atone and learn the lessons this life has handed me, the next will bring me ever closer to the eternal joy.”
“But you don't know this! Doesn't this just set you up to suffer, like our Rules at home? If you accept what these bad men—”
“This is what I believe, Maryam. Our teachings say that when defilements cause us to stumble and fall, we must not let remorse or dark foreboding cast us down. We must be of good cheer and, with this understanding, summon strength and walk on.”
“But you're walking into a trap!”
Aanjay's lips twitched with the hint of an ironic grin. “And you are not?”
“That's different. I'm—” Maryam stopped. “All right, that's true. But at least I'm still prepared to fight, while you're serving them up your life like it's a meal for them to eat.”
“What you do not understand is that I have no fear of dying—when I have proved myself faithful enoug
h I will no longer need to remain in this cycle of birth and death. The Buddha tells us that faith is like a lamp and wisdom makes the flame burn bright. Carry this lamp always, and in good time the darkness will yield and we will abide in the Light. Of this I'm sure.”
For all that the words were beautiful and inspiring, Maryam remained unconvinced. Surely part of being on the side of Right, or Light, or whatever Aanjay wanted to call the place of goodness, was standing up to the injustices that damaged people's lives? Just as the Apostles’ doctrines allowed atrocities to take place so long as one begged for forgiveness at the time of death, so too, it seemed, did the teachings of Aanjay's Buddha allow oppression with no come-back in this life. Merely believing that next time around all wrongs would be righted wasn't good enough, especially when it meant that the people who perpetrated such terrible crimes went unpunished and unchecked. This did not seem right.
There was a distinct shift in the clamour of the engines now, and it was clear the ship was starting to slow. The door swung open again and three crew members entered, two armed with guns. The third held a checklist and barked out names, Aanjay's among them. The tension was palpable as the women shepherded the children toward the door.
Maryam was first to farewell Aanjay, knowing there was nothing she could say now to stop her from taking her chances ashore. But Maryam, along with all the other women, owed Aanjay much. She had been the human face of the camp, the welcoming committee, the one who'd made the transition to detention a little easier. It was almost impossible to believe she was choosing to leave them now, and with so little fight.
“Peace be with you!” Maryam called as Aanjay and the others were led away. All she could hope for was that sometime in the future—no doubt soon—Aanjay would rest easy in the knowledge that her bones would lie at home beneath her native soil.
A brooding silence fell over the group. Even the youngsters seemed to sense the heaviness of the mood. They lay down again without the slightest murmur as the doors banged shut. There was no denying now that the deportations were real, and each of the remaining women seemed to sink into her own solitary battle with trepidation and despair.
Much later, as the day came to its end, Maryam was surprised to feel her own spirits lifting, thanks in part to the fact the ship had settled back to a more comfortable roll. She figured it could only be another day or so before she'd be dropped off on Marawa Island's bird-infested shore. Anything would be better than these cramped and cheerless conditions—even the prospect of spending weeks completely on her own. At least she would be free…and that, she'd come to realise, was a gift both rare and priceless—and one she'd fight with all her fiery passion to retain.
Two intolerably long days later, Maryam was summoned to the deck of the ship. She grasped Charlie's bag tight to her chest, praying no one would search its contents before they set her free. She felt such joy to breathe fresh air again and her heart lifted as she saw the familiar peak of Marawa Island dominating the skyline up ahead. It was haloed by a mass of swarming birds, just as she remembered, and even this far beyond the reef she could hear their discordant cries rising above the engine's throaty thrum.
Then all other sound was swamped by a terrible pulsing overhead. Maryam looked skyward, and nearly dropped her bag in fright when she saw what looked like an enormous black dragonfly swooping through the air to hover above the ship. She realised, in amazement, it was not a living creature at all, but mechanical—propelled by whirling blades atop its roof. Inside the bulbous glass eye she could see a helmeted man, who exchanged thumb signals with a crew member on deck before guiding the machine slowly down onto a raised platform midship, stirring the air with its spinning blades.
When the machine was still, the driver emerged like larva from an egg and hastened over to the ship's captain. His news spread quickly, whispered from crewman to crewman.
“…nothing. No sign of other life at all.” The speaker's gaze slid to Maryam, then shied away.
“No worries then,” another said.
“Unless you're her.” The crewman jerked his head toward Maryam. “Why the hell come back to this forsaken place? After a couple of weeks alone she'll go completely nuts.”
Maryam raised her chin defiantly. So, they had not believed her claim. Whatever that strange machine was, she had no doubt now it had been checking for other islanders. All she could hope was that they'd still set her free.
The ship began to inch up to the passageway between the coral shelves but stopped short of entering. It was clearly too large to pass through safely. Relief dizzied her as she realised what this meant: they were still going to let her disembark!
A crewman ordered Maryam to climb down a rope ladder to board a smaller boat which had already been lowered into the sea. She knew this boat, had been rescued from the water and hauled aboard it just as the beautiful sailing craft built by Joseph's father was consumed by flames. Today was very different; this time the only other person in the boat was the man who steered it through the passage toward the shore.
As the bottom of the boat scraped the gritty coral sand, she jumped into the tepid water with the bag held high above her head. Before she'd even reached dry land the small boat spun around and made its noisy retreat back to the ship. No speech. No words of advice, pity or even farewell. She waded up the beach and turned to watch the shark-like Territorial ship nose back out of the bay. How little they cared. Not even a few miserable provisions to see her on her way.
Maryam stood and watched the ship disappear behind the headland that protected the bay, its rumble lost beneath the clamour of the birds. The fusty odour of their droppings was intense as well—just as strong as the camp's phosphate stench, but so much less offensive, and somehow counterbalanced by the deep organic pungency emanating from the litter of the jungle floor.
Maryam closed her eyes, drawing in all the scents as if to erase the sensory memory of the toxic conditions of both ship and camp. Despite the overload of smells around her she felt cleansed, her body welcoming the oxygen-rich exhalations of the sea. With a laugh that startled the surrounding birds, she threw off her clothes and ran back into the water, diving under the translucent waves and revelling in the freedom as she washed away the last lingering stains of the Territorials’ claustrophobic world. The sun, rising toward its midway point, cut the facets of the sea into blinding sparkles of fractured light and Maryam floated face-up to greet it, as though resting amid a bed of jewels.
How long she spent there, supported on the sea's broad briny back, she wasn't sure, but slowly this eruption of relief and awe gave way to the accumulated grief she always carried inside. Now her salty tears mixed with the crystalline water and she let them flow unchecked until the reservoir, for now, ran dry. Finally, after her attempt to swim was cut short by weakness in her newly healed arm, she rose from the water—a dripping, naked creature of the sea—and turned her attention to the island's forested core.
Even though she knew the island was uninhabited, Maryam felt the eyes of its dead upon her as she peered into the tangle of trees. Once a sophisticated race had lived here, the tumbledown temple complex with its unearthly statues and chiselled reliefs clear evidence of that. She felt drawn toward it now, despite the terrible stack of human bones that lay brittle and deserted at the Buddha's feet. It was as if they called to her, demanding that she acknowledge them and seek their permission for her stay.
She rinsed her sweaty clothes, dressed quickly, then unearthed the boots from Charlie's bag. They fitted fairly well—a little large, perhaps—but they would certainly aid her progress through the snarled undergrowth without the need to assess every step. Spiders, beetles, snakes…she had no idea what poisonous creatures she might meet. They'd not encountered any last time, bar one harmless snake and the blood-thirsty insects that buzzed them in the night, but it was foolish not to be prepared. Besides, she knew the rocky ground was baked so hard it bruised the feet. She side-stepped through a noisy colony of brown boobies, keeping an eye o
ut for their strong white beaks, and soon found herself swallowed by the thick weave of vegetation at the jungle's edge. The colours struck at her—verdant greens of every shade, riots of red, soft silvers, rusty coppers, burnished blacks—everything so vivid and alive after the dusty monotony of the camp. The dark loamy smells whispered of a world secure within its own continuous life cycle, that never-ending process of birth, death and decay. It made her think of Aanjay's belief in rebirth: that everything cycled around time after time until it gained the ultimate state of grace.
When she reached the first tumble-down stone village, so overgrown and deconstructed that its crumbling walls were now as organic as the jungle itself, she recalled their discovery of this place—how, as she, Joseph, Ruth and Lazarus looked around, it had dawned on them that Marawa Island would not provide the refuge they sought. It was the first in a series of disappointments that led to growing disillusionment, and to the awful calamities that led to Joseph's death. In a real but totally unfathomable way, Maryam felt as though Joseph walked beside her now, spurring her on. There was nothing on this forsaken island that she feared as much as its restless dead, so to have him keep pace with her was comforting—and crucial, she realised, if she was to survive her time alone here without going insane.
It was not long before the crumbled village lay behind her and she started the slow uphill grind toward the plateau. She spied a banana palm off to her right and harvested a small bunch that had escaped plunder by the birds. The fruit was so sweet, saliva pooled in her mouth and washed the pulp down like a drink. It was such a relief to eat fresh food, she immediately peeled another and quickly disposed of that as well. Revived, she continued through the undergrowth, coming upon the stone stairway that led to the temple complex sooner than she expected.
