Long Way Place (Cannibal Country Trilogy, Book 1)

by Andrew Wareham

  The cooler hours of the morning were spent in the big go-down where he had set up his machine shop. He fired up his steam engine and ran power take-offs to a pair of derricks, one for loading wagons and quite small, the other to work the wharf and capable of a thirty ton lift, just in case he should ever be able to bring in a traction engine or a steam truck. Out of his own funds he bought a small generator and organised a regular delivery of a few gallons of petrol in drums. He was sure there was no other electric light within a hundred miles. He bought a paraffin refrigerator as well and carefully did not notice Hani giving drinks of cold water – a complete novelty – to the village children. She was a kind-hearted lass and took so much pleasure in her own generosity that he would never object to her costing him an extra shilling a month in paraffin.

  Afternoons were his own – most days fishing and learning to swim inside the reef, Hani amazed that a grown man should need to be taught the ways of the water. He told her a little of his early life in town, but she could not comprehend it. Everybody knew the whiteskins were rich and lived in huge houses which they obtained by their magic. Ned used magic, she saw him do so most days, so he must have been as rich as all of the others.

  She explained to Ned when he asked, pointed out, very reasonably, that when he wanted something – food from the boat, paraffin, clothes, machines for example – he sat down at his table with pen and ink and paper and ‘wrote’, that was what he called it. When he had made the correct marks he sent the paper off to Port Moresby and then the goods came back. He did not make anything himself, he did not work at all, in fact, he just said words to Zacharias. Ned was richer than every family in the village put together yet he did less labour than any – tell her that that wasn’t magic!

  Ned thought her words through, found her logic to be impeccable – from her knowledge everything was true. Jasper agreed, it was impossible to argue against magic and the cargo cult that went with it.

  “Just maybe, Ned, if you was to take them down south to see what happens to the copra and how it is paid for, then they might believe that you are actually working. But first you would have to explain why money is worth anything when it’s obviously valueless in itself, just bits of paper and unusable metal. When you’ve done that, explain it to me, because I’m buggered if I know why paper is money – I can see, just, that a gold sov is worth something, but paper notes? No way, cobber!”

  The Western version of the Cargo Cult, Monetarism, had not yet gained popular fashionability and Ned had never heard of it, could not offer it as an acceptable gloss on primitive magic.

  It was a problem – one that might serve to cripple all attempts to create a modern way of life in the Territory. Villagers would never take up Western ways of productive labour in a cash economy if they believed that their own magic could be made to serve equally well, with a little imaginative amendment.

  “Not my problem, mate – I don’t work for the Administration!”

  Those whose problem it was could not solve it, or pretended it did not exist, for if you once decried the existence of magic it then became very difficult to offer its alternative, missionary Christianity, as a viable option.

  For three years life was rich and the living was easy and Ned was able to step away from who and what he was. The hard choices of the gutter were so far behind him he had almost forgotten them. He worked and built up his little harbour and the wharf and warehouse that went with it, planted his trees in proper straight lines, set out flower beds and a shrubbery of hibiscus and frangipani and drew little pictures of the orchids and other, unnamed, blooms. Not great art perhaps but sufficiently accurate representations that a couple of visiting botanists were pleased with them and took some away for their universities and said that he would be named in a footnote to their learned papers. Hani stayed at his side and in his bed, happily it seemed, but flat – there was no child, which worried her, she would have liked Ned’s son, she thought. He was offered his leave but postponed it for a year or two, he did not need it, he said.

  A mission boat came in to the wharf mid-morning, early in the Dry Season, deposited two bedraggled lay brothers at the RM’s door. Jasper came at the run to Ned’s bungalow ten minutes later.

  “Police business, Inspector Hawkins! They’ve chopped the missionary down coast from us, and his family, the boys think – they ran, sensibly, but they don’t think any of them got away. The two boys got into the swamps and made their way along the shoreline, managed to wave down the schooner before it got to the station. Four days ago, so it’s not rescue, there’ll be none still alive. I’m sending a message to Moresby for a detachment to come down to us. That will take another four days and when they get here you will take command and bring them down to me. I’m going with my twelve this afternoon in my whaler, just to have a look, which I must do although it’s pointless. I’ll pull back when it’s clear there’s no reason to suppose there’s any survivors, and will expect to meet you at the edge of the swamp, about ten miles this side of the station.”

  The RM had an old ship’s boat at his disposal, single-masted but reliant as much on oars as wind power. He rarely ventured outside the reef in it.

  “Rations, Jasper?”

  “The detachment will bring their own bully and biscuit but will need drinking water. A couple of barrels would make sense. Otherwise, make sure the ammunition bandoliers are filled – and counted!”

  Hani had heard nothing, the village did not trade with the clan at the mission station, the old ways having lapsed. It seemed, she said, that they had used to send boats down to trade for greenstone to make axe blades, the villagers ‘down there’ being in contact with a clan of the Orokaiva up in the mountains and providing them with salt and shells in exchange for top-quality stone, but the missionaries had not approved of their people going away from the village for months at a time and consorting with wild heathens. There had been no contact for ten years. Besides that, the whiteskins’ steel axes and bush knives were much better tools, except for ceremonial use, which, again, the brothers had disapproved of.

  Victoria came in with forty police boys and a sub-inspector aboard. Ned gave his orders, taking command for the first time and finding it not unpleasant – he would rather trust his own judgement than that of one of the gentry he decided. The inspector was new in country, a clerk in the Administration at Konedobu, Clancy by name. He should have been a wild Paddy with that handle, Ned thought, but he looked much more like a scared schoolboy. No matter as long as he did his job.

  “Don’t know anything about the place we’re going to, Clancy, except that it’s supposed to be quiet, so Christ knows what’s gone wrong! The RM, Jasper, should have found out what’s happened by now. With any luck he’ll have tidied it all up already. If he hasn’t then it will be a shooting matter, almost for sure. Make sure you are loaded and watch the boys for carelessness – they’re buggers for forgetting which way to click the safety catch, or so I’m told. Don’t open fire except at my order, or Jasper’s, unless you are actually being attacked. Don’t let the boys burn down the village or gardens. Don’t let them get anywhere near the village women. Other than that, use your own common sense.”

  Clancy, already very pale, turned whiter and muttered that he would. Ned glanced at him, six foot tall, pale and skinny, eyes flickering uneasily, missing his mummy by the looks of him, decided to keep him well clear of any serious action. The boys deserved better than him at their front.

  They sailed with the moon in mid-evening and pottered down coast to arrive with the dawn. Too early, Ned hated activity before breakfast, but it would leave the whole day available for work.

  Jasper was waiting on the shore, camped up by a freshwater creek, a pair of eight foot crocodile skins pegged out to dry evidence of a profitable few days.

  “Sods came straight into camp, first night we were here, Ned – never been shot over, I suspect. Still, the boys cooked the tail meat and the skins are worth a fiver at least when I go down on leave next year
.”

  Ned introduced Clancy, waited for a briefing.

  “Couldn’t get into the station, Ned. At least thirty warriors with bows in the bush around the village, lost one of the boys, killed four or five of them and pulled back. Couldn’t talk to them, haven’t seen anybody else. The boys say they know we’re camped up here, so there’s no point to being clever, we’ll go straight in. Victoria can tie up at the wharf there, the water’s deep enough for her. You go in with three platoons of ten, push direct into the mission. Clancy takes Victoria’s boat with one platoon to the beach on the far side of the village, blocks escape there. I bring my lads in from this side. They won’t want to run inland, they’re coastals and the villages even five miles away from the salt will be hostile to them – different language for sure. Try not to shoot too many. Don’t let any get away – no successful criminals on this coast. Kill a whiteskin and you get chopped, no mistake!”

  Victoria tied up at the wharf in the midday sun, perfectly in view, but there seemed to be no audience. The open-sided go-down was empty and there was no sign of activity elsewhere.

  The village was situated to the east of the wharf, the mission station a couple of hundred yards west, a stretch of short-cropped, empty grassland between the two.

  Ned made a quick survey with the binoculars Jasper had lent him, saw nothing. The mission station was silent – no movement in the large bungalow or in the tin roofed schoolroom or around the aid post or chapel. He could see no damage, none of the buildings had been fired, the window glass in the bungalow had not been smashed. He turned to the village, saw where the women had been scraping and soaking cassava, had dropped their pots and run when Victoria had appeared. He turned to his senior sergeant.

  “Load the rifles, sergeant. You and your platoon hold the wharf. I’ll take the rest to the mission, first, see if the bodies are there. This ain’t cannibal country, is it?”

  The sergeant shook his head. The Orokaiva up in the mountains were man-eaters, as were all of the clans on the Gulf Coast to the west of Moresby, but this area down as far as Samarai generally wasn’t into longpig. Any bodies should have been left untouched, though they would be messy by now after a week in the sun.

  That point had occurred to Ned – he wasn’t looking forward to inspecting the corpses to report on signs of death and mistreatment.

  The family were all there, in and around the bungalow, the missionary and his son with heads battered but otherwise untouched, the wife and girls naked, their bodies left outside where they had been caught as they ran.

  “Raped, by the looks of it, even the little ones.”

  The sergeant shrugged, that went without saying, it always happened.

  As they approached the blackened, swollen corpses they saw that the land crabs and rats and carrion birds had been busy with the soft tissue. Ned spewed.

  “Burial party, sir?”

  “Not yet, sergeant – those bastards from the village can do that job!”

  A few minutes later rifle fire came from the RM’s direction. Five minutes after that there was a single volley from Clancy’s party and running men came out of the bush, stopped dead as they saw Ned’s platoons in line, rifles ready.

  “Are they likely to speak Motu, sergeant?”

  “Might be, sir, one or two could have picked some up from the mission. I’ll try it.”

  The sergeant shouted, a single voice answered.

  “Told him to drop the bows and axes, sir, then to walk forward and sit down on the grass.”

  “Where are their families?”

  “Hiding in the bush, sir.”

  “Tell him to call them in so that they can see what happens.”

  Half an hour and the fifty or so men had been joined by three hundred or so of women and children, many of them noisily keening their grief for their dead. The police party pulled the men to one side, tied their hands and feet, handcuffs too expensive to issue to bush stations.

  The RM took over, having first led his people on a search of the village and the immediate garden area, just to be sure that no party of warriors remained in ambush. Ned’s sergeant spent the intervening time interrogating the Motu speaker.

  “Normal thing, sir. Two of the missionary’s girls were down in the shower room he had put up behind the bungalow and half a dozen of the village boys, fifteen and sixteen year olds, grown-up but not men yet, were peering through the cracks in the wall, looking at them as they washed themselves. Probably they were, you know, sir, doing it to themselves, with their hands…”

  The sergeant was embarrassed, he came from a clan that never talked about sex, regarded doing so as the worst of ill-manners.

  Ned nodded, respecting the sergeant’s reticence.

  “The missionary saw them and came running with a big stick and the village men saw him beating one of their boys he had caught, and they came to stop him and then there was a big argument and his son came out with a shotgun and one of the men threw a stone at him and hit his head and the missionary shouted he would have him hanged for it, so another one of the men hit him with his axe, to stop him ever telling the RM. Then it was too late, and the boys broke into the shower room and pulled the girls out, without their clothes on, and the men went to the house and they all did what they wanted until they were dead. Then they left them and waited to find out what would happen.”

  “They can discover that right now, Ned.”

  “Take them to Moresby for trial, Jasper?”

  “No bloody way, Ned! Field justice for these bastards!”

  The chapel was a corrugated-iron roofed, open shed, its unwalled sides nearly twenty feet high, tall enough for practical use. They commandeered cordage from the Victoria and set nooses dangling all the way round the building and then stacked the pews three high underneath them before standing the village men and boys up, a rope to each neck.

  “How old do we take them, Jasper?”

  “Get them to lift their arms in the air – if they’ve got hair they took part in the rapes and they die.”

  “Fifty-three, Jasper?”

  “Count taken. You don’t look too happy, Ned?”

  “I ain’t, sir, but they’ve asked for it. They could have bashed the missionary and no great loss, but going for the woman and girls was plain wrong!”

  “Not how I might have put it, but you’re right.”

  Jasper nodded to the sergeant who had positioned a man at the ends of each stack of pews.

  “Right, sergeant!”

  The pews tumbled over and the men dropped in their nooses.

  A few died instantly, none lasted more than a few minutes. The village women and children wailed in horror.

  “Re-embark, Ned.”

  They counted the constables back onto the Victoria, making sure that none took the opportunity to get at the village girls.

  “What happens now, Jasper?”

  “The village is dead. The clans on either side and inland will have been watching from a safe distance and within a day of our leaving they’ll be there. They’ll kill all of the little boys and old women, the ones who are no use to them, and take the rest back to their villages. One or two of the girls might become wives if they are out of balance, more men than women in the village, but most of them will be kept as whores to the whole village until they die, even the little girls – they’ll be given to the unmarried boys to play with. They might harvest their gardens if they need the extra food, but the land will be left empty for a generation at least – unlucky, cursed, call it what you want.”

  “Will the mission come back?”

  Jasper shrugged, it all depended on whether they had the money and the men to hand. There was no longer a population to ‘tend’ to so they would have to build a boarding school or plantation or training college on the land, and that was expensive.

  “What about other sorts?”

  “Catholics won’t, it ain’t their manor, but some of the new Protestant sects might. The Yanks are keen on poking their
noses in at the moment, but Murray will stall them while it’s possible.”

  Ned thought long over the following few days.

  It seemed to him that he had spent the past years with his eyes closed, living on the surface of the Territory and making no attempt to look underneath. Sure, he had recognised the poverty and the diseases that were so common, but he had built himself a picture of a friendly, happy people, simpler but in many ways better than those he remembered in England. Now he smelt rotten flesh, saw violated bodies, and knew himself to be in the daily company of heartless killers. He was not sure that he could stay any longer. Perhaps a stoke-hold would be cleaner.

  Jasper gave him a week before visiting in the company of a rare bottle of whisky. Neither man was in the habit of drinking and a couple of glasses loosened their tongues and Victorian inhibitions, allowed them to discuss their personal feelings.

  “It got me that way, Ned, first time I came across a bad tribal fight. Orokaiva down from the hills for some reason – either a bad food time or a very good – maybe starving, maybe so well-fed they didn’t need to work or hunt for a few weeks. They found one of the small villages down coast from here, a dozen or so families, killed or wounded the men in their first attack. Unusual, that – normally the alarm is called in time and there’s a running fight, the weaker side getting away with very few deaths. Normal thing for the meris; they couldn’t take them back up to the mountains so they killed them when they were finished. The men, for once, got it worse – the Orokaiva are cannibals and they’ve got the habit of keeping their meat alive and fresh as long as possible. Cut slices off for cooking and slap a mud tourniquet over the wound – some of the men had lasted for three days when we got to them and disturbed the party.”

  Ned shook his head, carefully.

  “That’s filthy, Jasper!”

  “It ain’t good, that’s for bloody sure, Ned!”

  “Do they come raiding very often? They can’t be fifty miles away in a straight line.”