by Cowley, Joy
The Silent One
Joy Cowley
PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Published in Puffin Books, 2000
Copyright © Joy Cowley 2000
The right of Joy Cowley to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.
Digital conversion by Pindar NZ
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ISBN 9781742288437
Contents
1 A Gift from the Sea
2 The Story of Old Luisa
3 The Turtle Returns
4 Friends and Enemies
5 Some Make Plans for Jonasi
6 Others Plot Against the Boy
7 A Trap Baited with Honey
8 The Fury of the Gods
9 Sad Journeys
10 Vueti Makes a Decision
11 The Arrival of the Redbeard
12 A Time of Farewell
Conclusion
Chapter 1
A gift from the sea
On the day of the pig hunt, Jonasi went out on the reef.
No one saw him leave the village. He ran through the trees to the beach where his bamboo raft lay, and as he dragged it along the white sand, water flooded his eyes. The sun melted and ran down the sky, and the coconut palms along the shore trembled as though in a strong wind.
Jonasi bent his head and wiped his face on his arm. He pushed the raft into the water, lying on top of it, kneeling, finally sitting with the paddle in his hand. He headed for the edge of the reef.
Beside him lay his new spear, a length of hardwood he’d cut from a raintree, carved, shaped, and polished until he’d come to know it as a friend. It was the best spear he’d ever made, and he knew from the way the other boys looked at it that they envied him. It was far better than the spear Samu had carved, better even than Aesake’s, a weapon as delicately balanced as a leaf on water, yet as powerful as lightning.
Now Jonasi looked at it with hate.
He was twelve, he was strong, and he had made himself a spear fit for a chief. Why, then, had they refused him his first pig hunt?
He looked back at the shore and the thatched bures clustered under the palms. With the men away, the village was wrapped in stillness, the beach empty except for a scavenging dog.
Behind the village rose the steep dark mountains, slopes covered in a jungle that hid waterfalls and beasts and many strange birds. Somewhere on those mountains, the pig-hunters were spreading their nets.
All his life, Jonasi had waited for this day. Year after year he’d watched the young men prepare their spears and nets for the long trek into the jungle. They would leave at sunrise with much energy and good humour and would return at the end of the day with their quarry, big pigs bleeding on poles, ready for the women’s fires, and small pigs writhing and trussed with vines. He had watched the dances of welcome and later sat behind the hunters at the feasting, sharing leftovers with the other children.
Every pig hunt he had dreamed of the day when he, too, would go to the green darkness of the mountains.
This should have been his day, but the men had gone without him. They’d taken his thirteen-year-old foster brother Samu, even though Samu was too small to carry his share of the kill. They’d taken Aesake. They’d even taken that foolish Etika whose spear arm was so weak he couldn’t hit a canoe at ten paces. But when Jonasi had rushed forward to join them, they’d pushed him back among the old men and women and children.
He didn’t know why.
Aesake, who was the chief’s son and more of a friend to Jonasi than the other boys of the village, had tried to explain. He’d put his hands over Jonasi’s ears, then his mouth. He’d pointed to the mountains, shaken his head with a small smile, and patted Jonasi on the shoulder.
Was it because Jonasi didn’t know the meaning of the mouth movements?
He hadn’t watched the hunters leave the village. Instead, he had gone back to the bure where he’d lain curled up on his sleeping mat, his mind full of pictures of pain and revenge.
But out here on the reef, the pain was easing. There was no place on the sea for bad feelings of any kind. He knew that whatever his pain was, the sea could always heal it. His paddle guided the raft with hardly a ripple as he studied the shapes that passed beneath him.
He was moving past the village and near the next bay where the fresh water from the river cut a deep path through the coral. He could see ahead the dark blue of the channel and to his right, the brilliant green of the mangroves that crowded the river mouth. Above the mangroves, herons flapped lazily, looking for food.
Today Jonasi was not fishing. He was content to move slowly over the dark glass surface, watching the red and green of the underwater jungle and the fish that flickered through branches of coral like flocks of tiny birds, blue, yellow, glistening bands of black and silver. On the shadowed side of some brain coral, two cowrie shells, spotted brown and white, moved slowly with their occupants. Higher up, a pink starfish spread its many arms in a patch of pink sunlight. Jonasi reached down with the paddle, flicked the starfish over on its back, and laughed. Let them hunt for pigs, he thought. Let them trip over Samu and sit on Etika’s spear and walk through thorny vines and nettles. One day he would go into the mountains by himself and bring back his own pig, but in the meantime he was still the best fisherman in the village. No one had his success with a line or a spear or a net. And not a man or a boy carried in his head such a detailed map of the reef. He knew all the shellfish beds, the holes that hid the largest crayfish, the places where fish fed at certain times of the moon, the currents, the tides, the changes that came with storms. The reef, rather than the village, was his home.
Jonasi had not discovered why he was alone in the village. Sometimes people had touched his ears or their own as though they were trying to make him understand something. But to Jonasi it seemed that the difference was with his mouth rather than his ears. He often watched as people moved their lips and jaws. They weren’t eating. They were making mouth-signs to each other. He’d tried to do the same, but no one took any notice of him. Yet his reflection in the lagoon showed him a mouth that was the same as theirs.
The village could be a hostile place. Jonasi thought that if only he could breathe like a fish, then he would never go back to the land. It would be so easy to slide under the surface and for ever
live in a clear, deep pool between two banks of coral. He smiled at the small things beneath his raft as though they were his family, fish like showers of blue sparks, fish as flat as yellow leaves, leather fish with purple snouts, black and white striped sea snakes with golden eyes, sea horses, parrot fish – he knew them all as well as he knew Samu and Aesake.
The sea was calm today, rising and falling gently as though it were breathing in an untroubled sleep. Beyond the reef there was deep water marked by a line of white breakers. He paddled towards it.
The pools out here were deeper, so deep in places that the sun barely touched the bottom and the coral grew like giant trees. Jonasi saw a barracuda, brown and yellow and as thick as his thigh, hiding under a coral plate. He pulled in his paddle and reached for his spear. Then he changed his mind. No, not today. He left the barracuda and went on, satisfied with the sun on his back and the movement of the sea beneath him.
Then, over his shoulder, he glimpsed something white in the water. It was in a pool some distance away, pale and glowing, and he thought at first he was seeing some enormous clam shell washed white by the tide. The object was floating an arm’s length below the surface, but clam shells didn’t float. He turned and paddled towards it. It would have to be something from a ship, he decided. But before he could get close enough to see what it was, it moved. Jonasi stopped paddling. The thing was swimming away.
He stared after it. There was no sea creature of that size and colour, at least none that he knew of, and he was acquainted with the reef better than men five times his age.
It moved without a ripple, a moon-white circle beneath the surface, and in a few seconds it was as far away as it had been when he first sighted it. Then it broke the top of the water. Jonasi gasped.
It was a turtle.
Now he could see flippers, a pale grey head, and the huge circle of shell as white as the flesh of coconut.
Jonasi rubbed his eyes, thinking perhaps the sun had weakened them. It was not unusual to find turtles feeding near the edge of the reef. Sometimes he speared one. More often than not, he would swim swiftly behind it, grab it by the shell, and turn it upside down so that it was helpless. Then it was an easy matter to tie it to the raft and take it back to the village.
But this was not an ordinary turtle. Nor was it a mirage. It stayed there on the surface, large and persistent, as white as foam or bone or sun-dried coral, and shining like oyster shell.
The creature stayed still for some time. So did the boy. Leaning forward, he stared without moving, disbelief giving way to a small fear. His skin went cold as it did when people gave him bad looks, or when something brushed against him in the dark. His heart flopped against his ribs like a dying fish.
There was no such thing as a white turtle!
His mind moved first. Tonight the men would return from the pig hunt and the women would dance in welcome. Samu and Aesake and Etika would be at the feast with the men, wreathed in flowers and drinking kava. He, Jonasi, would have to sit with the women and children. But what would happen if, at the height of the feasting, Jonasi brought forward a gift for Chief Vueti, something he had never seen before, a present that would make him the envy of every chief on the island?
His heart beat fast, but steady now, as he paddled closer, moving swiftly like a thief. He would leave his spear wedged under the lashings of the raft. That marvellous shell must not be pierced. The only way to catch the turtle was by stealth.
He got as close as he dared, then he placed the paddle with the spear and slipped over the side of the raft. Down he went, down through the blue-green sunlight, until he was swimming well below the turtle. He glided between outcrops of coral that rose in tall columns above him. Bars of light rippled over his body. His shadow slid across the bottom like a dark, flat fish. As he swam, he watched the turtle and counted each stroke between him and that priceless shell.
It had moved slightly and seemed to be feeding beside some coral a little below the surface. He could see the hovering motion of its rear flippers, the grey underside of its body. But it had not seen him.
Jonasi was amazed that he had got this close undetected. Because of the turtle’s strange appearance, he had imagined it might be possessed of powers that would give it special awareness. But it had not sensed danger at all. The turtle nosed along the coral, sensing nothing but the small life there. Its flippers turned gently without alarm.
Jonasi kicked forward and reached out. His hands closed on either side of the shell. He had it. The turtle was as big and real and strong as any turtle he’d caught. Its shell was as hard as a rock against his chest, not white as it had seemed from a distance but a mixture of pale colours, greys and creams and golds that formed a pattern on a blue-white background. The tough skin of its neck and flippers was of the palest grey. Its eyes were pink-rimmed, like those of a very old woman.
Another second and Jonasi would have turned the turtle on its back, but it moved before he did. Without warning, it plunged towards the bottom, the boy still clinging to its shell.
He had to let go. The pressure hurt his head, and he had run out of air. He saw the turtle beneath him, still going down like a sinking moon. Then his head broke the surface, and he was gulping to fill his lungs.
When he went down again, the turtle had gone.
Anger and disappointment grew in his chest, crowding his breath. It had been his own fault. He’d been far too slow in turning it over, too sure of himself. At the feast he would sit like a child with the women, remembering his failure.
The raft had drifted towards the shore. He swam to it, moving slowly, his arms made tired by his anger. He climbed up and lay face-down on the bamboo poles, resting, while the water washed back and forth under his cheek. When his breathing was calm again, he thought that perhaps it was right that the turtle had got away. It was a marvellous creature, a miracle. Surely there would be great evil in killing a beast so rare.
Then his mind brought him pictures of the morning, the men of the hunting party who had pushed him away with heavy blows, their moving mouths, the looks that touched him like poison.
If he’d caught the turtle, he could have placed it at Vueti’s feet and then watched all those faces crack open with surprise like so many split mangoes.
The raft rocked as he stood up and grabbed the paddle. He dug deep and with new energy, turning in a great circle over the lagoon. There might yet be a chance of finding the turtle.
The sun was still well above the horizon but already the air was clouded with smoke from the fires for the evening’s feast. Jonasi looked towards the shore and the long line of coconut palms that marked the village.
And he saw the turtle again.
It had not gone. It was swimming between him and the beach, its shell like a mirror reflecting the sun.
Jonasi shaded his eyes and stared at the shape in the water. Then his hand dropped from his forehead. His mouth opened in a smile, and a great warmth went through him.
It was following him.
The turtle was swimming slowly, its head half submerged, small, fan-shaped ripples breaking against its shell. When the sun caught the ripples, they flashed and sparkled so that the shell looked like a great white torch dropping fire into the water.
Jonasi watched. The turtle, aware that the raft was no longer moving, stopped swimming. It nosed the surface and Jonasi saw clearly the sharp, parrot-like jaws and the darkness of the eye. It, too, was watching.
Jonasi gripped the paddle and gently turned the raft. He tried to get closer. The turtle turned, began to swim away. Jonasi stopped. The turtle stopped. Its dark eye seemed to look inside the boy and search out the pictures he’d been carrying in his head. It was suspicious. But it didn’t dive.
If he threw his spear from this distance, he would likely get it, but Jonasi didn’t look at the spear by his feet. He had been right earlier. It would be a great evil to kill the creature.
He paddled again, but this time away from the turtle, wondering if it would f
ollow, afraid that it would disappear.
It followed. It put its head down and trailed the raft at a distance, the way a seabird followed a fishing canoe.
Land breezes brought the smoke from the cooking fires out across the water, a grey mist that hid the beach and reddened the sun. The turtle bobbed like some white beacon, and Jonasi watched it, head on shoulder, until his neck was stiff and aching.
All his life he’d fished in this lagoon. And always he’d taken his catch back to the village to share it with those same people who gave him bad looks and spat on him. But this he would not share. The turtle was a gift from the sea and for him alone.
Its discovery was a far greater thing than the pig hunt or any honours from a chief, greater than Vueti himself. It filled Jonasi with a power that made him feel a head taller than any man in the village.
No one had seen what he’d seen today.
It was his turtle, and he would not kill it.
Chapter 2
The Story of Old Luisa
The old woman Luisa came into the bure looking for Jonasi. She carried a present for the Silent One, a leaf full of river prawns which had been caught that morning, pink and tender, still warm from her boiling pot, and so sweet that they would surely heal the bitterness inside the boy.
‘Jonasi? Jonasi?’ She knew he never had, and never would, hear the sound of her voice, but that did not prevent her from speaking to him. ‘Jonasi? See what old Luisa has brought you.’
He wasn’t there. As Luisa’s eyes refocused in the dimness, she saw that the bure was empty, Jonasi’s sleeping mat bare. She put down the prawns and sighed. It was no use looking for him. He’d be out on the reef. She’d have to hide the prawns in a cool place until he returned.
Outside, the afternoon heat had brought silence, a stillness everywhere as though air had set solid around the village. No bird rustled in the leaves, no wind lifted the dust. A heap of coconut husks, burning to heat the feast oven, crumbled without flame, and its smoke went straight up to the sky. Even the hens scratching in the shade seemed to move in a dream.
