by Graeme Kent
‘Your point being?’
‘I’m saying’, said Buna, and he meant every word of it, ‘that if you take on Kella on his own territory, you’d better be prepared for a hell of a fight.’ For the second time that afternoon he resorted with some relish to outdated American idiom.
‘He might not beat you, but he’ll come in the best second you ever saw.’
‘Perhaps I should employ this paragon of yours,’ said Sanders. ‘You know what they say – if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!’
‘You couldn’t do it. There’s one big difference between Ben Kella and me.’
‘Oh, what’s that?’
‘He’s not corruptible,’ said Welchman Buna sadly.
21
WHERE WILL HE HIDE?
Sister Conchita stood with Kella and Brother John outside the hut of Atanga, one of the four paramount chiefs of Tikopia. Dozens of interested old Polynesian men sat on the white sand of the village around her, taking in every detail of her appearance and costume but making no attempt to talk to her. Many of them chewed betel nut or smoked pipes.
The visitors had landed on the island several hours ago. Before that, for three days and nights, Shem had sat stoically, without sleep, in the bows of The Spirit of the Islands, steering by the tides and stars. At last some of the seamen had seen coconuts floating in the water. At about ten o’clock that morning, the Polynesian had suddenly come to life and pointed, and the others had crowded to the rails for their first glimpse of their long-awaited destination.
At first Tikopia had been a mere child’s unformed pencil smudge on the flat far edge of the sea. As the ship drew nearer, the vague land form filled out to reveal sandy beaches, a thickly forested interior and a central volcanic mountain. The outline of a lake shimmered at the foot of the volcano. Flocks of grey ducks floated lethargically over its surface, while pied cormorants flapped watchfully overhead, looking for shoals of mullet in the brackish water. A guidebook had informed Sister Conchita that the whole island was only three miles long and about half that wide.
After the ship had anchored just outside the reef on the western side of Tikopia, there had been a surprisingly long wait before canoes had put out from the shore to take the visitors ashore. The islanders in the outriggers were silent. There were none of the customary excited, screaming children who had greeted The Spirit of the Islands at other stops on their journey.
The Melanesian crew members to a man sensed the unwelcoming atmosphere and refused sullenly to go ashore. Mayotishi had joined them in their caution.
‘Never go in anywhere unless you are certain of the way out,’ was all the Japanese would say as he watched Sister Conchita, Kella, Brother John and Shem descend a rope ladder to the waiting canoes. He was holding a rifle. ‘I’ll keep the engines running,’ he had called after them. ‘If you have to get back here quickly, we’ll be ready to weigh anchor.’
There had been a few Polynesians waiting for them on the shore, but they drifted apart expressionlessly to allow the visitors to enter the village at the top of the steeply sloping beach littered with coral pebbles and boulders. Shem had indicated the hut belonging to Atanga, the district chieftain. It was larger than the others, with a roof of woven coconut palm tiles. Sister Conchita had heard that the bones of the chief’s celebrated ancestors were buried beneath the floor. The most prominent feature of the dwelling was the front door. It was only three feet high and not as wide.
‘The chief is waiting inside,’ Shem had said. ‘Anyone who enters his house must approach him on their hands and knees like this.’
He had suited his action to his words and entered the hut on all fours, leaving the others outside. He was gone for almost an hour. Conchita had spent the time watching an industrious group of bare-breasted young women wearing only bark-cloth loincloths gathering molluscs out on the reefs. Some of them had hibiscus flowers behind their ears. She guessed that most of the younger men would be fishing somewhere in fleets of canoes among the great breaking waves far out at sea.
Once the nun heard a voice raised in anger from the hut. It did not sound like Shem’s. When the young Polynesian at last came out, his face was strained. Without looking at the others, he hurried out of the village along a track into the trees. From inside the hut a muffled voice barked out some sort of instruction to the waiting group.
Kella and Brother John moved forward to go in. Sister Conchita started to follow them. Kella put a hand on her arm.
‘Not you,’ he said with a shake of his head. She thought he had a faint triumphant twinkle in his eye. ‘Women aren’t allowed in the chief’s hut.’
Well, pardon me for living, thought Sister Conchita. She watched the sergeant and the missionary crawling through the low doorway. Both Kella and Brother John were rational, sympathetic men, but neither of them seemed to question for a moment the edict forbidding her to enter the presence of the chief. They lived in a different world, she decided, not for the first time. Still, she thought, there was one advantage of being an invisible entity. As long as she kept away from any tabu areas, no one would care what she did or where she went.
She followed the track taken a few minutes earlier by Shem, doing her best to appear to be strolling casually. Soon the trees were crowding in over her head, but the path at her feet had been well maintained, with only a dusting of goat’s-foot creepers to obstruct the scuttling hermit crabs intent on their tasks. Brown needles from casuarina trees had fallen in clumps. Springs of clear water gurgled happily as if sharing a common joke. Sister Conchita passed several squares of land that had been completely cleared to allow taro and sugar cane to be cultivated in tidy clusters. She thought that this would be one of the few parts of the island from which it was not possible to see the ocean. She remembered that Kella had told her that the villagers never used the terms left or right but preferred instead to mark the direction of objects as inland or seawards.
‘Christian?’ asked a woman’s voice from behind her.
Sister Conchita turned. An old woman wearing only a grass skirt walked out of the trees. Her grey hair was long and stringy. Deep lines furrowed her face.
She indicated the nun’s habit.
‘Mary bilong Jesus?’ she asked.
‘Him now. Mefella Praying Mary,’ Sister Conchita said.
The old woman nodded in satisfaction. She led the way through the trees away from the path. Ten minutes later she stopped in front of a solitary hut in an overgrown clearing. The hut had a neglected appearance. There were gaping holes in the woven walls and roof. Sister Conchita looked inside the dilapidated construction. The floor and walls were bare. Anything of value had been taken. In one corner she saw a heap of empty scallop shells. Without quite knowing why, she picked one up and put it in her pocket. The old woman gestured to her to leave the hut.
‘By’m by. Maybe tumera,’ she said. Almost as an afterthought she added: ‘Christian help.’
The woman led the puzzled nun back through the trees and pointed out a way past a sluggish stream and a regimented row of sago palms ahead of them before stepping once more into the shadows of the bush. Sister Conchita walked carefully past the palms until she rejoined the original track. After another twenty minutes she found Shem standing in a long hollow trench with smoothed-out sides. He was holding a long stick with a sharp shell point. His placid, gentle face revealed nothing of his thoughts.
‘You must be tired,’ said the nun. ‘You haven’t slept for a long time.’
‘It’s nice to be home,’ said the Tikopian. ‘There will be time enough for a long sleep later.’ He lifted the stick. ‘Tika,’ he said. ‘It’s a game we play here. Outsiders call it Tikopian darts. I’m good at it. Have you seen it played?’ The nun shook her head. Shem hefted the stick in his hand and held it close to his cheek, as if judging its weight. Then he took a short run along the trench and hurled the barbed stick with impressive, muscle-pumping strength. It struck the baked ground and hurtled in a series of bounces along the trench, s
lithering to a stop like a snake rigid with venom many yards away at the far end of the channel. The Tikopian looked up at Sister Conchita.
‘It would be nice’, he said, ‘to dance again with pretty girls and play tika and drink kava.’
The nun wondered what he was trying to tell her. ‘You can do all those things now that you have come home,’ she said.
The Tikopian shook his head so that the long hair brushed across his shoulders. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ he asked. ‘The Christians have stopped us growing the pepper plant with which we make our drink.’
‘Us?’ asked Sister Conchita. ‘You’re a pagan, then?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Shem. A faint twinkle coruscated in his eyes. ‘Like your friend Sergeant Kella,’ he added.
‘I wasn’t sure,’ said Sister Conchita, ignoring the reference to the policeman. ‘The Church of the Blessed Ark took some of its beliefs from the Christian faith and some from the old ways.’
‘And some from both,’ said Shem. ‘That is why it was so important – and so dangerous.’
‘How was it dangerous?’ asked Sister Conchita. She sensed that she was about to be told something important, if only she could work out its value. But Shem smiled sadly and shook his head.
‘Is that why you joined Papa Noah’s sect?’ she asked. ‘You wanted to belong to a pagan church that reminded you of the old ways here on Tikopia?’
‘Don’t you understand?’ asked Shem, chiding her gently. ‘I didn’t want to join any church. I still don’t. I was young. I wanted to sail on the Chinese ships and drink beer in the bars at Kira Kira and Gizo and pay to go with the Guadalcanal girls in the jig-jig houses in Honiara. And maybe, when I had done all that, when I had drunk much beer and had many women, I would have come back here and become an old tautai, a sea expert respected because he could still take his canoe as far as Anuta and Fatutaka and back.’
‘Then why . . .’
‘My father is Atanga, the high chief and priest of this district,’ said Shem, a harsh, almost metallic tinge to his voice. ‘He sent word to me that I must join Papa Noah’s church, so I did. I stayed with him for a year, learning all I could about the old man’s ways, according to my instructions. That meant that all the other Tikopians in the area came as well.’
‘So you wanted to take over the Church of the Blessed Ark after Papa Noah was killed?’ said Sister Conchita.
‘Don’t you see?’ asked Shem. ‘The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to take over any church! Papa Noah was a good and kind man. He wanted his church to help people, not to become a battlefield between the Christians and the pagans. I couldn’t use what he had built for sinful ends. I have just told my father that.’
‘What did he say?’
‘What I knew he would say. He told me to go to my land, the sea.’ A wry smile twisted Shem’s lips. ‘My people have a saying: “If a chief is angry with a man, where will he hide?” Even now he is waiting for a sign from the old gods. Sometimes, in times of great trouble, they visit Tikopia and appear on the top of Mount Reani. The lesser ones can take the form of animals and move among us bearing messages for those gifted with the sight to see them and ears to hear. Tomorrow my father will go to wait for the gods’ decision at Somosomo, the site of the ancient ceremonies.’
Abruptly, as if he could keep still no longer, the Polynesian started running gracefully along the trench. At the far end he stooped and without stopping picked up the pointed stick. Then he leapt up on to the track and soon became a blurred figure, mingling with the branches of the trees.
Sister Conchita wondered what to do. It was all very well being put in a position to garner all sorts of different experiences in the Solomons, but the down side was that it meant she was doing many things for the first time in her life and was never sure that she was doing them the right way. Right now she was convinced that something bad was about to happen. She hurried along the track in the direction taken by Shem. Some way ahead of her she heard a woman’s scream. Sister Conchita started running.
It took her several minutes to reach Shem. When she did so, he was sitting slumped against a tree. A group of weeping Tikopian women were standing around him. At first Sister Conchita thought that Shem was only resting. Then she saw the blood pouring down his throat and chest.
22
SWEET BURIAL
‘What happens next?’ asked Sister Conchita.
‘They will give Shem a sweet burial,’ said Kella.
‘What does that mean?’ asked the nun.
‘It’s the description given to any Tikopian who dies at sea,’ Kella told her. ‘It is the best sort of death possible for one of them. They will send Shem’s body out alone into the ocean.’
They were standing on a small headland overlooking the beach. Hundreds of men and women had gathered on the shore below them. The previous evening, canoes had taken Sister Conchita, Kella and Brother John back to The Spirit of the Islands. They had spent the night on board. In the morning, the ship’s dinghy had brought them as far as the reef and then pulled back hastily to the safety of the anchored vessel. Brother John had left them as soon as they reached the island, hurrying in the direction of Mount Reani.
‘So Shem killed himself?’ asked Sister Conchita.
‘No doubt about it,’ Kella said. ‘Soon after he left you he sat down under the tree and plunged the point of the tika dart into his throat. He was a strong man. The arrow would have gone a long way in. He died immediately.’
‘I had no idea that he was thinking of taking his own life,’ said the nun in a small voice.
‘He didn’t have much choice,’ said the sergeant. ‘He told you that he didn’t want to be a priest. He had already told his father Atanga the same thing. If he hadn’t killed himself, some of the marau, the pagan priests, would have murdered him instead.’
‘But why?’ asked Sister Conchita.
‘He told you,’ said Kella. ‘You just didn’t make the correct deductions. How could you? His father is the only pagan chief left on Tikopia. The other three paramount leaders have all been Christians for some time. I think that Atanga has been plotting for years to launch a coup to make Tikopia a pagan island again, maybe with himself as the sole chief and high priest. Shem was already working in the Solomons. For some reason Atanga ordered him to join Papa Noah’s sect and work his way up in the hierarchy of the Church of the Blessed Ark. Shem managed to do that and to persuade a lot of other Tikopians working on Malaita to join Papa Noah’s sect as well.’
‘Why?’ asked Sister Conchita.
‘I don’t know yet,’ said the sergeant. ‘What is obvious is that while Shem was working as Papa Noah’s so-called son, he discovered several things about himself.’
‘That he liked Papa Noah very much, and that he had no vocation to be a priest – pagan or otherwise,’ said the nun, relieved at not having to ask yet another question.
‘Exactly,’ Kella said. ‘Perhaps you have been paying attention after all. After Papa Noah was murdered, Shem decided to return to Tikopia to tell his father that he would not – could not – be a pagan priest. I suspect that Atanga gave his son an ultimatum – either to go through with his plans or be disowned as his heir.’
‘Atanga certainly quarrelled with Shem,’ said the nun. ‘Shem was very shaken when I spoke to him. He said something that I didn’t understand. He said that his father had told him to go to his land, the sea.’
‘That’s what happened, then, said Kella. ‘That’s the traditional Tikopian curse of disownment. If a chief tells any members of his tribe to go to sea, it means that the islander is banished from the chief’s land for ever. He has nowhere else to go but the great ocean.’
‘But that means death,’ said Sister Conchita.
‘Oh yes,’ said Kella, almost matter-of-factly. ‘It does. That’s why Shem killed himself. He’d already been sentenced.’
Sister Conchita shook her head in bewilderment. ‘Where’s Brother John?’ she asked, almost at random, as
she tried to marshal her thoughts.
‘He’s just started looking for Abalolo, the island’s Christian minister,’ said Kella. ‘No one seems to know what’s happened to him. Or if they do know, they’re not telling us.’
He craned his head forward. There was more intensified movement on the beach below. The crowd parted slightly to allow four islanders to carry an improvised stretcher bearing Shem’s body down to the water’s edge. They deposited the framework on the sand and stood to one side. Then the crowd swirled apart as a dozen men appeared over the brow of the beach pushing a large canoe down the incline towards the lagoon over a series of rounded tree trunks acting as rollers. The vessel was decorated with leis and garlands. Its guardians were big and strong, but the canoe was so solidly built that they could only inch it over the tree trunks.
‘Vaka tapu, the big canoe,’ said Kella. ‘I thought there was only one left, in a museum in Auckland. The pagans on Tikopia must have spent years making that replica down there. They were probably going to unveil it at the eyes of the wind ceremony to mark the resurgence of their religion on the island next week. But with Shem dead, all they can use it for is burying him.’
‘Why can’t Chief Atanga revive the faith by himself?’ asked Sister Conchita.
Kella said nothing, merely pointed towards the beach.
A second litter borne by half a dozen islanders was being lowered on to the sand. It was covered by a roof of sago palms, with fronds hanging down the sides. The fronds were brushed aside and a very big and extremely old man stepped painfully out. He stood trying to balance himself, brushing aside offers of help from his retainers. Then very slowly he hobbled with excruciating precision down to the bier, pausing every few feet to rest, swaying like a stricken tree in a gale every time he did so.
‘That’s Atanga,’ said Kella. ‘He’s too old to launch anything except his son’s final canoe journey. He’s probably only been keeping himself alive until Shem returned to take over as high priest. Yet all the time Shem didn’t want the job.’
