Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  In the middle of the open green was a great wooden bowl, the size and shape of a church font, supported on eight squat legs, the whole carved in one piece from a prodigious tree. A burly giant was mixing and straining a muddy-looking liquid into the bowl through a muslin. His actions, formal but strenuous, were those of a potter kneading clay. He wore a boar’s-tusk necklace and a skirt of leaves, with other leaves and vines draped over his body (not unlike the figure painted on the Wild Man Inn near Bramford). At length, he lifted the pulp on high and squeezed it mightily, forcing a cascade through clenched fingers to show that the liquor had reached full strength.

  Thakombau then dedicated the ceremonial drink as a farewell toast, wishing us a safe and pleasant voyage to England.

  Dalton was grinning from ear to ear, smiling on Eddy and George—but especially Eddy—like a proud father. It wasn’t hard to divine his thoughts: these unearthly islands with their race of courtly cannibals were the answer to his prayers. Here the Heir Presumptive was maturing like a tardy flower brought into sunlight. The necrotic countenance had quickened, the hooded eyes flashed, the mouth essayed reactions, opinions, even jokes. Each day in these enchanted latitudes seemed worth a year of normal life.

  The mixer walked slowly from his huge bowl to each drinker in turn, bearing a coconut-shell in outstretched hands. The Governor and Thakombau were served first, draining their cups in one draft. Eddy and George did the same. The crowd clapped as one, calling out matha and vinaka — “It is empty, it is good.”

  Having already sampled the drink in a grog-shop on the waterfront, I knew what to expect: a cool, earthy taste followed by a numbing of the mouth and a sensation of relaxed well-being. (On some islands missionaries have unwisely stamped kava out, only to find it replaced by the scourge of rum.)

  By the time the great bowl was dry, the light too had drained away, leaving a purple residue across the western sky above the blackness of the mountains. A man began to make fire in the old way, drilling a stick into tinder until a feather of smoke arose—a scene, remarked Dalton, from the Stone Age. This hard-won fire was used to light others; soon the greensward flickered with leaping flames. The purpose of the young men and women seated in companies now became evident. They were dancers, or perhaps actors is the word, for they performed epics of war, mythology and love.

  The scenes were wild and dramatic, impossible to convey. Men danced and ran in the fiercest and most abandoned figures, yet kept formation perfectly like shoals of fish, all turning as one, all landing on the same foot at the same beat, sending a shudder through the earth into ones spine. They wore fringes of grass and water-weed, kilts of leaves, bracelets and bandoliers of vines and ferns. Their faces were fantastically hued—some scarlet, some yellow, others blue; some were half one colour, half another, split vertically or horizontally; yet others were done in spots and stripes. One heard the dry flutter of leaves as they passed, smelled smoke and coconut oil, and were it not for the sable hue of their skins might imagine oneself transported back to the rites of Dionysus.

  The women sang and beat time with hollow tubes of bamboo. Their own dances were subtle, graceful compositions, many done while seated, movement being achieved only with arms, hands and fans, which wheeled like flocking birds and heaved like sea-anemone.

  A gibbous moon rose as if by command from the dark crest of Wakaya, pouring quicksilver over the waves beyond the warships. Food was brought briskly and efficiently, as always in Fiji, and eaten with little conversation. All heads were bent over heaps of fish, pork and yam served on glossy leaves. Frogs and crickets played their busy rhythms. The imperious woof-woof of a barking pigeon could be heard on a hillside, and the shriek of the laughing jackass, or kookaburra, rang in the woods.

  Dinner done, the crowd fell still and the old King advanced into the firelight with Thurston to say his goodbye. He looked tired, perhaps saddened by the parting, yet proud—proud that the political course he had embraced at the end of a long and changeful life had turned out as he’d hoped. Thakombau’s herald came forth with a whales tooth in his hand.

  “When you arrived,” the King said, “I welcomed the elder Prince with a tabua. We now say our goodbye by giving this tabua, younger brother of the first, to the younger Prince of England. These teeth from an ocean giant are the gift of Fiji, not of myself alone. They are yours so that your time among us here begins and ends in mana, and that they may guard you in your homeward journey across the seas.”

  George received the tabua with a graceful reply. He thanked Fiji for its hospitality and loyalty, for the many gifts that symbolized the great gift of the islands themselves, a gift that Britain would treasure and honour for evermore.

  The night ended with a war dance that eclipsed all others in energy and ferocity. It was a splendid, even frightening scene, the mock battle carried to the edge of woods and sea, war clubs whistling past our heads so close that those in front could feel their breeze.

  Clouds had begun to run before the moon, driven by a freshening southeast trade, and the fires had died to glowing heaps. The dancers were wings of battle rushing in the night. Suddenly, a brilliant ray seared out from the harbour, revealing one wing in silhouette, restoring the other to full colour, blinding us all to fire and moon. The lush vegetation around us came alive, every leaf and branch picked out. The sailors cheered and the Fijians, who never before had seen electric light, burst into yells of amazement. The dancers, however, neither skipped a beat nor showed surprise, except to greet the awesome beam with a great flourish of weapons, and to continue by its weird glare until their battle was done.

  I heard the Admiral boast to Thakombau, saying we British had succeeded in outdoing the moon, and it was only a matter of time before we should discover “how to make a light like the sun.”

  The King answered that though he was very old, he hoped he might live on for many years yet to see the great wonders Progress held in store.

  Eleven

  TAHITI

  Arue Prison

  THE WIND HAD DIED. Smooth water lay around the Tui like oil.

  A mandala of ripples, an empty flag.

  Not until later, near sundown, did Natalie speak about her labours at the doghouse table. She and Simon were standing together by the rail, reconciled. He seemed meek, his moods humbled by the girl.

  Natalie, rum bottle by the neck, was vacantly taking swigs as she gazed aft across the ocean, less at the sunset, I think, than at the waters we’d left behind, the place the body had appeared and disappeared. “That girl had had booze. And sex. I can’t stop thinking there might have been foul play. I know that sounds melodramatic. But bad things happen to young women travelling. I don’t know what we should do.”

  Simon had abandoned his theory about “Argies.” “She probably just fell overboard,” he offered warily. “During a party on some rich fart’s gin palace. Hit her head on something. Or a sea slammed her against the hull. I’m with Vatu—we don’t know a thing.”

  “We don’t know much,” Natalie said sharply. “But I found out quite a bit down there.”

  “Sorry, Nat. Didn’t mean to piss on what you did. You were amazing.” She smiled, as if to encourage his humility.

  “We may know too much.” Now Vatu sounded suspicious. “We have to think very carefully. Do we get on the radio with this? I don’t think so. Not here.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  The others exchanged glances.

  “Better reef now. Were in for another blow.” Vatu’s eye was on a charcoal stain in the southwest, blotting across the sunset. Cat’s-paws ran to meet us, fanning out. A warm rain emptied itself. Then the Tui Marama heeled suddenly, as if someone had struck the mast. Vatu at the helm. The Australians hauling in sail. I looked on helplessly, then went below.

  The storm drove us east all night. I lay in my bunk, braced against the corkscrew pitch and roll, sleepless with visions of a yacht (hers or ours?) crushed like an eggshell, snagged on coral, or sunk in an ocean trench, a place of
inconceivable pressures and endless dark with great luminous squid and blind translucent eels like whips of living ice. The dead girl wasn’t merely a shock; our lives seemed as precarious as hers, our boat stalked by every flaw and hazard.

  By the following noon the wind dropped to a steady breeze and the chop went down, the water heaving with the memory of last night’s seas. It was my turn on lookout, but Vatu relieved me. I didn’t argue. The strength had left my body; it had been all I could do to keep myself in bed last night. Natalie touched my arm (You okay?) and handed me a mug of coffee.

  Simon was absorbed in fishing, netting things and bottling them in jars. His neck and arms were badly blistered; he was too involved to take care with the sun, no matter how often Natalie urged him to cover up. Later, when I felt better, she gave me the wheel, my first time at the helm. I hung on like a child allowed to steer a car—the ship huge to me now—hoping the wind wouldn’t rise or shift, but pleased to be trusted.

  We stood together quietly, she thoughtful, as though wanting to talk but unsure how to begin. Then we heard a distant engine. It grew louder, the throb of a helicopter, racing low across the sea towards us. The machine—a large military chopper with twin rotors—hovered off our bow above a maelstrom of foam. The Tui stalled, her sails in a frenzy. Natalie seized the spokes. Simon gathered his gear and ran below. Their actions, the way the chopper behaved, the appalling noise after days of wind and water, all made it seem like an attack, though I’d little reason to think this was anything but a rescue mission looking for survivors of the wreck the girl had come from.

  “No worries,” Simon shouted, re-emerging. “No way the bastards can land!” He and Vatu sprang about, lowering canvas. The chopper circled several times, a side door open, one man taking photos with a long lens, another shouting at us over a PA. The words blew down as nothing but jagged shards of warning, or anger, embedded in the deafening pulse of the blades.

  The helicopter left. Our sails went up again. The ocean peace returned. But the remoteness I’d felt ever since leaving land was shattered. This seemed only an opening act, a prelude. I remembered a hike in the mountains a few years ago, when I’d startled a grizzly. The bear—far bigger and more powerful than I’d imagined—peered at me with its weak eyes, reared up, and sniffed. I saw its claws, long as my fingers. Do nothing, play dead, don’t run, a grizzly is fast as a racehorse. It had merely scratched at a tree and gone on its way. But the wilderness that had seemed so welcoming and calming was suddenly a place through which I moved in fear—like a cave woman, when other creatures owned the Earth and we were weak and few and hunted.

  “You wouldn’t have a gasper, would you?” Natalie said soon after we got under way.

  “Thought you didn’t.”

  “I don’t. Only other peoples. Give us one. I know you’ve got some. It was wafting under your cabin door. Smelt beaut. What are they?” I withdrew two Sobranies from my bag, leaving nine for the rest of the voyage.

  “Look, Liv. I’ve been meaning to say something. Should’ve levelled with you by now. Simons … headstrong. As you may have noticed.” She gave a nervous laugh. “It’s the best and worst of him.” She inhaled deeply, tilting her head back, closing her eyes against the sun. Then she admitted that we’d come further east than planned. Simon had manoeuvred us towards the Forbidden Zone, a great disc of ocean round the testing atolls.

  “Fact is, we’re not much nearer Nuku Hiva now than when we left Tahiti. If you were a sailor you’d have realized. Si can be a crafty sod. Often gets a storm to blow him where he wants to go. And not only at sea.” She chuckled again, mirthlessly. “I told him it’s not fair to you. I thought he’d accepted that. Believe me.” She blew a plume into the sail. “I should’ve known better. You’ve seen how he’s been lately.”

  “We’re still in international waters, aren’t we?”

  “More or less. Shipping is ‘advised’ to stay out of the Zone. Just a precaution.’ Naturally! What they’re really worried about is that we’ll find something, or do something. That chopper was here to put the wind up us.” She added that Simon had nobbled the radio. We were completely cut off, a good thing under the circumstances.

  “If they board us and find we’ve been keeping quiet about a suspicious death, we’re stuffed. And not just us. The frogs could use it to discredit the whole movement. I can see the headlines: ‘Greens Held in Tourist Death.’”

  Simon’s recklessness, his arrogance, infuriated me. This voyage was turning out to be a waste of my time. Worse, we could get held up, even deported. I might never reach Nuku Hiva. “Do you have to call them frogs? It’s as bad as nigger where I come from. I used to live in Montreal.”

  “Sorry. No offence. Don’t mean the people. Just the government.” She then told me something I half remembered from the news a few years ago: the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior by French agents in Auckland harbour, the killing of a man on board.

  I listened. She was right. Governments who regard themselves as world players are capable of anything. “What are his doubts?” I said. Simon, I’d decided, was more than an activist; he was a zealot. And zealotry feeds on doubt. It seemed to me that Simons doubts had to do with himself: whether he was worthy of, and equal to, his cause. This was the worm that gnawed him.

  A worm I knew myself. Was I good enough? Would I ever make a film that lasted? Had I whatever it would take to find the truth about my father?

  That evening we gathered round Vatu’s kava bowl, the first time in a week. Evidently Natalie had given Simon a talking-to, and spoken privately to Vatu. After a formal round, the Fijian took the initiative.

  “The girl changes everything. We have to report her death. If we hang about in the Forbidden Zone, we must report it here. On a military base. Perfect excuse for them to hold us as long as they like, pending inquiries.” He clapped lightly, handed me a cup of grog.

  “All right,” said Natalie. “We’ll change course after dark. To throw them off. We’ll report at Nuku Hiva. We can always come back here later. And it’s better for Liv.” She smiled at me. “You’re on my conscience.”

  The others agreed, even Simon.

  “What about the Tui Marama’s owner?” I said. “Does he know what you’re up to? Or is this really Lars’s boat?”

  “There is a benefactor. Anonymous. A wealthy sympathizer. Not Lars. I doubt Lars has pockets this deep. Officially the boat belongs to Fletcher Christian Tours. Of Panama.”

  “Whoever he is,” said Vatu after a pause to make sure everyone had finished speaking, “he has a sense of humour.”

  So we ran from the sea grave and the greater death at Moruroa, threading under power and sail through the Dangerous Isles. All the Tuamotus are low, a hundred paint-drops flung on a canvas the size of Europe, none higher than a mirage and as hard to find. But solid enough to grind a ship to pieces. Some were tiny cartoon islands tufted with a single palm, others great rings of land with huge lagoons inside, forty or fifty miles in diameter, draping over the horizon like Dalí watches.

  We landed on one of these to swim and stretch our legs, to get away from the ship, the lingering presence of the girl. I borrowed Natalies snorkelling gear and gloried in the lukewarm water, watching fish, surprised by how the fish watched me—intelligence in their eyes, a knowingness I’d not expected. I swam over gardens of light to where the coral wall dropped away into indigo depths and oceanic chill, saw sharks in the offing, and rays like sheets of newsprint on a wind.

  But still I felt her touch, her frozen-sausage fingers inked and pressed against a card. She was in my dreams, her empty belly stitched up like a sail. And in the dreams her face was yours. I’d wake with this lunging fear she might be you; that you had come looking for me somehow and fate had thrown your body in my path. A fear I’ve known for twenty years. I hear the news, or glimpse a headline, or see MISSING posters in shop windows, and always I read the details, the age, the description, to make sure.

  I took a stroll along the inner beach, a sc
imitar of sand. I could walk forever on this atoll and the land would never change. It was a place with no hills or streams, no stony trace of time, no escape from the scratching of the palms and the surf hush-hushing on the outer shore.

  Within an hour I felt imprisoned—I know this sounds quite mad as I write to you behind high walls—imprisoned in a vast panopticon watched by the eye of the sun.

  A feeling of confinement stayed with me on the boat. I saw what Johnson meant, how a ship is a jail with the chance of being drowned. I couldn’t wait to get off it.

  Leaving the Tuamotus astern, we crossed some of the deepest water in the world, the long striding swells rolling the old schooner this way and that. I remember the Tui Marama’s sounds: the trickle on her hull, the humming shrouds, the deep nameless notes her body made as she nudged across water-hills that raised her and hid her, and curled on her deck.

  It rained often and the winds were fickle. To raise the Marquesas took nearly a fortnight. When not on watch I kept below, alone inside wooden walls with their ingrained air of tar and old cargoes, behind a small brass-rimmed eye through which on one tack I’d see the clouds and on the other vitreous depths. Once I saw a turtle’s beaky face, wagging from side to side like a toothless old sadhu as he gazed into my shell.

  I thought of the turtle army Henderson describes. He’d seen hundreds; I saw one. The seas had teemed around Bacchante, but we sailed waters eerily lifeless and denuded. For Simon this was proof of nature’s dying, of the oceans’ rape by human appetite, of the poisons flushing in from every coast, and the measureless lesions of the weapon tests.