by Graeme Kent
‘I didn’t say that either,’ said Kella unhappily.
But Sister Conchita was only getting into her stride. ‘So you got us in a package deal. Good housekeeping! Did we come cheaper than way, Sergeant Kella? Is that why I’ve been climbing a mountain under duress for a day and a half?’
Sister Conchita was beginning to achieve a modified sense of enjoyment out of the obvious discomfiture of the police sergeant, but her heart was not really in it. After all, it was only sensible that Kella should want to interrogate the Tikopian who kept flitting in and out of his investigation in such a maddening manner. It was fairly obvious too that Abalolo would have needed a trustworthy fellow Anglican missionary as a source of contact on Malaita, and Brother John filled the bill there, which accounted for the Guadalcanal man’s inclusion in the party. As for her own role up here in the high bush, well, Ben Kella had not yet articulated it, but it was becoming fairly obvious to Sister Conchita why he needed her on this occasion, as he had at least once before.
‘Are you enjoying giving me a hard time?’ asked Kella.
‘Not as much as I’d hoped,’ Sister Conchita said.
They were standing on the field of rough batiki grass. At Kella’s request Brother John and Abalolo had gone back to the bush to collect branches with which to make lean-to huts for the night. Cool winds rolled across the unexpected haven provided by the smooth green plain, channelled refreshingly through the narrow fissures and valleys in the forested mountains above them. Behind them lay the jungle. The three sides of the flat field ahead of them were bounded by hundreds of green-leaved banana plants, each growing to a height of over twenty feet. It was an incongruous sight, a few hundred yards of rare open beauty somehow carved by nature out of the sweltering enclosed bush and dropped pristine and intact from the skies before the tangled wooded ground started rising steeply again.
‘Come with me,’ said Kella. ‘I want to show you something. I’d heard about this place, but I’ve never seen it before.’
They reached the plantation of banana bushes fringing the field. With their sturdy bases enfolded tightly in huge paddle-shaped green leaves and large clusters of fruit, they looked to Sister Conchita as much like trees as bushes. Kella skirted the bright walls of leaves, stopping occasionally to part the large fronds and peer into the hidden interior of the plantation. The nun began to grow impatient.
‘Father Kuyper will be worrying about me at the mission,’ she said.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Kella. ‘I sent a messenger down telling him that you had been delayed treating an outbreak of yaws at a bush village.’
They walked up an incline. The top of the slope had been flattened out.
‘There,’ said Kella, pointing. ‘I found it yesterday.’
Someone had dug a grave on the hillock and covered it with grass. Although there were no obvious sources of water, the mound had been well tended; the grass on it was a shining green in colour. It had been trimmed recently. Across the top of the grave were a number of military accoutrements. Sister Conchita saw a rifle, several bandoliers of ammunition and a hand grenade. At the head of the grave a couple of identity tags had been attached to a length of cord and placed on top of a closed biscuit tin. The nun could see that the characters hammered on to the discs were Japanese.
‘How did you find this?’ she asked.
At first she thought the sergeant was going to ignore her, but then he began to speak.
‘There are a number of drawbacks to being a Melanesian,’ said Kella, apparently following his own line of thought. ‘There’s the climate for a start, and the mountains and the mosquitoes. Worst of all, there’s the language, or rather the languages. We’ve got over eighty different dialects, you know. And most of them have dozens of words for the same thing. In my own tongue alone there are six different names for rock.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Also’, said Kella, ignoring the interruption, ‘we’re a devious lot. Even with the parcel of words and phrases at our disposal, we seldom say what we mean. That would be too easy.’ He picked up the rifle, examined it and put it down again. ‘That doesn’t make it easy for a detective. It doesn’t even make it easy for a man who simply wants to be told how to get from one end of a straight trail to the other. I can only put facts and rumours together and try to make deductions from them. I try to understand what I’ve been told, even when I haven’t been told anything.’
Kella regarded the tidy grave in silence. When he had been recounting his litany of disadvantages of living in the Solomons to Sister Conchita he had not mentioned the obverse side. It was the only place he had seen in his ever-increasing round of travels in which the spirits of every possible faith and belief could dwell together. It was true that sometimes they squabbled like vicious siblings, but every now and again they could put aside their differences and combine in the aid of a righteous cause. He had seen this happen a number of times since he had become the aofia, and he was convinced that on least one occasion on the top of Mount Austen on Guadalcanal, the sensitive and receptive Sister Conchita had experienced the same amazing coming together of spiritual forces to add to her own unshakeable faith.
‘For example,’ he said, ‘someone told me that I would find a Japanese soldier up here. He didn’t happen to mention that he was dead.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Another witch doctor,’ said Kella, almost smiling. ‘An unimpeachable source, naturally. Right now I’m asking you to go and fetch Brother John and Abalolo. They deserve to see this and make what they can from it. Hurry, please! Make sure that you go back exactly the same way that we came. I’ve been here for twenty-four hours and not a single islander has come near this field, so I think we can assume that there’s a very powerful tabu on this place.’
By this time the sister was halfway across the field, heading for the bush where Brother John and Abalolo were selecting dead branches. Kella walked down the hill and studied the gently waving barricade of plantains. There was the faintest of indentations between two of the adjacent bushes. He summoned up his resolve and stepped into the plantation. It was not as impenetrable as he had at first feared. After a few yards he even encountered a track leading through the banana bushes. He heard a noise behind him and turned. A woman was standing glaring at him. She was small and unkempt, extremely dirty and clad only in a skimpy loincloth. Instinctively Kella moved towards her. The woman hissed at him like a malevolent wild animal.
‘Plenty too much, plenty too much! No more come!’ she shrieked, and turned and ran off among the bushes.
Instinctively Kella went after her. ‘Come back!’ he called. ‘I can help you!’
33
THE PLANTATION
The dishevelled woman was running deeper and deeper into the banana plantation. Kella did his best to keep up with her, but soon she was out of sight. He could hear her bare feet pattering along the ground as she went. The shape of the plantation was beginning to change. What had seemed a lush green Elysium was altering its character even as he ran through it. The path was growing narrower and the plant fronds were darkening in colour and entwining in a squirming clasp only a few feet above his head. He was stumbling along a dark, narrow tunnel that seemed to lead nowhere. What had previously seemed idyllic was now dismal and threatening. Kella had heard of beautiful tropical flowers that lured insects and then devoured them. Could he be entering the same sort of grotesque, indescribably hazardous trap?
Although he had been convinced that there was at least an hour of daylight left this high up in the mountains, already he could hardly see more than a foot or so ahead of him as the track started taking abrupt and unexpected turns through the intimidating foliage. The knotted fronds of the bushes whipped at his sweating face. The proliferating drooping bunches of bananas lunged back at him as he disturbed them, as potent as the war clubs of a raiding party thudding against his bruised body.
Kella stopped to rest and collect his thoughts, his shirt and shorts p
ermeated with sweat, his feet and legs wet with slime. He leant for support against a tall bush, but found himself sinking into its languorous, soft embrace, welcoming him to rest there for ever if need be. He pulled himself upright and forced himself to move onwards. Ahead of him he could still hear the woman, stopping when he did and then moving forward again like an unseen shadow. With the brutish disregard to pain that had anaesthetized so much of his rugby football career, Kella would not stop. Either the woman was in need of his help or she possessed the answer to questions he wanted to ask. She would stand still eventually, he was sure of that, even if only to show him that she had won by leading him successfully away from his own gods into the lair of the spiteful mountain spirits. Briefly he wondered if the woman had transported herself into one of the Mae, the bush gods able to take the form of man or woman in order to prey upon travellers and conduct them on the agonizing journey to the pit of doom.
He blundered relentlessly on for at least half an hour, although he suspected that it was longer. Time seemed to be losing its shape, just as the bushes and insects around him no longer held set positions. The tiny insects that fed upon the banana plants were growing and changing shape before his eyes as they buzzed around him. Eelworms slithered over his squelching boots in huge clusters, like teeming mobile anthills, weighing them down. Aphids and spider mites stung his eyes. An amorphous square of almost transparent stick insects hovered in the air.
Kella followed the stick insects around a corner in the path. The trail seemed to end in a wall of fronds waving in a tentative breeze. The woman was waiting for him, her back to a bush. For a moment her face was obscured by the cloud of hovering insects.
He felt his strength dwindling. He fell to his knees, his senses dulled. He struggled to get up, but all his energy had gone. The woman glided forward smoothly, as if she had no legs. She thrust her malicious face into Kella’s. He tried to meet her gaze, but her red-rimmed eyes bored into his. Kella felt himself falling helplessly on to his side. So this was how it was going to end, he thought. He had carried his own magic once too often into the bush and it had been nullified by the power of the resident gods. Soon there would be nothing left but blankness, the dry, arid desert of oblivion. Even if his own gods were good to him and forgave him for his shortcomings on this last unsuccessful climb up into the mountains, there was nothing they could do for him here. Some of the more forgiving among them might feel that the actions of his life so far justified their transferring his spirit to the body of a hunting shark, but he was dying, defeated, too far from his saltwater home for that to be possible. Kella consigned his spirit to the waves and the reefs he had loved so much and waited for the Mae to strike. Through all the fatigue and desperation he found that his mind was concentrating on one thing. What had the woman said to him back at the grave? It was important! Considering his situation, it might also turn out to be irrelevant, he thought wryly as the energy seeped from him.
‘I exorcize thee, most vile spirit, the very embodiment of our enemy . . .’
The cool, calm voice came from behind him. Kella squirmed round. Sister Conchita, holding a miniature Bible in one hand, was pointing at the Mae with the other. The nun looked completely self-possessed. Kella gazed up at her, hope beginning to surge within him.
‘He commands thee, who commanded the sea, the winds . . .’ went on the young nun steadily.
A fragment of the litany of his own religion entered Kella’s mind. Still unable to stand, he looked up at the old woman standing before him.
‘Alu mwela,’ he croaked, condemning the woman to burn in her own hell.
‘Hear therefore and fear,’ said Sister Conchita, raising her voice.
‘Bouruuru, dalafa,’ whispered Kella, demanding that the woman fall down and strike the ground hard.
‘Why dost thou stand and resist?’ asked the nun.
Kella felt the strength returning to his legs. Clutching at a plant, he pulled himself to his feet.
‘Duge, fakalfi!’ he snarled, expressing his intention of seeing the old woman sink even lower and burst open her entrails.
He advanced on the woman, feeling the strength returning to his legs. He could hear Sister Conchita following him, still chanting determinedly. The old woman stood her ground stubbornly. Kella made himself keep moving. Suddenly the old woman was no longer there. Only a slight quivering of the wall of fronds stood testament to the fact that she had ever existed.
But had she?
34
THE BONE PICKER
The fire had burnt for four days and then the ashes of the skeleton had been allowed to cool for another three, assisted by a number of squalls of rain, before Mayotishi started to gather them and wrap them in a series of white silks. He then placed them in a box he had brought up from The Spirit of the Islands along with two members of the crew, who had dug up the remains of the Japanese soldier reverently and carried them to the deep pit prepared by the official in the open field.
He was being watched by Sister Conchita, Kella, Brother John and Abalolo. Earlier, Brother John had volunteered to walk back down to the coast and guide Mayotishi and the seamen back up to the tabu banana plantation. After one bad night Kella had slept well for the remainder of the week and was feeling better. He had insisted on witnessing the cremation ceremony with the others.
Mayotishi was wearing a blue kimono. He had chanted prayers, struck a small portable gong, burnt a vase filled with incense and scattered Japanese rice and salt over the pit.
‘Is he a priest?’ Sister Conchita whispered to Kella.
‘I’m not sure,’ said the sergeant. ‘During the war some Japanese warriors were allowed to become priests for special occasions. Perhaps this is one of them.’
He remembered the aftermath of the Battle of Ilu, erroneously called Tenaru by the Americans on Guadalcanal. On 23 August 1942, he had been scouting with Sergeant Major Vouza just before the Japanese, underestimating the strength of the Marine forces, had launched a full-frontal assault through the bush. Only a hundred out of almost a thousand troops from the Ichiki regiment had survived. Afterwards the Japanese prisoners had buried their own dead in a series of ceremonies like the one that Kella and the others were now witnessing. The ritual was called shokut, and it was supposed to bring a final peace to warriors who had died in battle.
Mayotishi issued orders to the seamen. Sister Conchita and Kella turned and walked away from the pit.
‘Thank you for coming in so far after me,’ Kella said. It was the first time he had referred to the matter. ‘I’m surprised that you managed to find me. I must have been running through the plantation for the best part of an hour.’
The nun looked at him curiously. ‘No, Ben,’ she said quietly. ‘You hadn’t moved more than a hundred yards from the spot where I left you to fetch the others.’
Kella nodded. He could remember little of the encounter. All he knew was that the young nun had shown great courage and resolve to come looking for him on her own. One day, when the time was right, he would tell her that.
Brother John and Abalolo joined them. ‘So that’s it then,’ said Brother John, shaking his head in wonderment. ‘You came up against one of the Mae and she almost devoured you, but when Sister Conchita joined you, your combined magic was stronger than the Mae’s and saved you.’
‘Something like that,’ said Kella, in a tone that discouraged further comment from the others.
Across the field Mayotishi finished supervising the loading of the silken parcels into the wooden box. The two seamen started carrying it carefully back down the bush track to the coast. The Japanese walked over to the others. He was holding the soldier’s helmet, dogtags, rifle and the tin box that had been placed on top of his grave.
‘He kept a diary in this box,’ said Mayotishi. ‘I’ve had time to go through it now. His name was Shimadu and he was a lieutenant. He fought at the Battle of Bloody Ridge on Guadalcanal, and after we withdrew from the island in 1943 he was taken on board a destroyer head
ing for Rabaul. Unfortunately it was intercepted at night by a US submarine and torpedoed off Malaita. Shimadu managed to get ashore but lost touch with the other survivors. Over a period of weeks he came inland through the bush up to the plantation here, where he made his home.’
‘Did the bush people attack him?’ asked Brother John.
‘There were one or two skirmishes at first, but Shimadu was a trained infantryman. He still had his Arisaka and a good supply of ammunition, not to mention a few grenades. After he had shown the bush people that he could protect himself, they pretty much left him alone over the succeeding years. They let him have the plantation for his home. It was supposed to be a tabu area dedicated to the gods anyway. He built himself a garden, shot a few wild pigs and lived off bananas, and fish from the rivers and lakes.’
‘And all the time he thought the war was still going on,’ said Sister Conchita.
‘What about the woman?’ asked Kella.
‘That’s the interesting part,’ said Mayotishi. ‘According to the diary, her name was Toiliu and she was a slave of the local bush people, captured by them on a raid on one of the saltwater villages. By this time Shimadu had started trading with the village. He bought Toiliu from them for two bandoliers of ammunition and she went to live with him on the tabu plantation. According to the diary they were very happy together. The last entry was made in June 1952, eight years ago. Presumably Shimadu died soon after that, and Toiliu buried him and went on living on her own on the plantation, looking after his grave.’
‘So she’s been up here on her own for years,’ said Sister Conchita. ‘The poor woman!’
‘She had no choice,’ Kella said. ‘The bush people wouldn’t take her back. She’d been living in a tabu place for too long. Even if she had tried to return to her old village they would have driven her away and made her an outcast.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Brother John. ‘Do you mean that after this woman Toiliu was forced to live on her own on the plantation she turned into one of the Mae?’
