Casca 17: The Warrior (12 page)

Then Ateca was on her feet, Duana beside her, each of the old women with one of the ceremonial clubs in hand.

They charged into the thick of the lighting, laying to left and right as they went, every swing connecting with a head, every head crashing to the ground.

Vivita, Setole, and some of the other chiefs' wives grabbed clubs, too, and followed. Casca watched, half astonished, half amused.

Vivita smashed her club into the back of the head in front of her and the body fell, the opponent left facing Vivita with an axe in his hand. He raised it, but started back at the fury in the woman's face, and that was the last he knew for a long time as her club crushed his nose into a pulp.

In a few minutes there was nobody standing but the women and a handful of men who were not hopelessly drunk and had helped in separating the last of the brawlers.

The evening's celebrations were very definitely over.

Casca picked up what was left of his bottle of whiskey and headed for his hut.

Casca lay on his grass mat, looking into the darkness, taking an occasional sip of his whiskey and doing some bloody-minded thinking.

If Cakabau were to attack on the morrow, or anytime within the next few days—while half the village was recovering from its wounds—he would certainly be victorious.

Clearly Sonolo had no real idea of how to use the muskets. Ten musketeers and at least ten replacements must be trained to use the weapons. They would have to learn how to load the charge of powder, then the wad, ram home the ball, another wad, then the firing cap. Then they would have to learn how to aim, how to fire without losing aim, and how to reload. For any hope of real effectiveness they should also know how to dismantle, clean, and reassemble the guns.

Perhaps he could manage to train ten good men in a day—if Sonolo would let him. After the events of this evening he no longer had the same confidence in his fellow war chief. If he had so little self-control that he could be provoked into killing another chief over a slight to his role as war chief, how would he react when Casca attempted to take charge of the muskets?

And what if Cakabau now had more than the six muskets? And what if he did manage to join forces with the Lakuvi? Not too difficult, Casca reasoned. By now the Lakuvi might be interested in avenging their recent defeat rather than being frightened off by it, as Sonolo and the others so optimistically thought.

He had just had the right amount of whiskey and was sliding drowsily into sleep when Vivita slipped onto the mat beside him. He guessed she'd been tending to the wounded and cleaning up the mess.

He put one arm around her and nuzzled her neck. "Good wife for a chief," he mumbled.

He sat bolt upright. What the fuck was he saying? He didn't want to be chief of this tribe, didn't want to settle down here with Vivita and run this fucking little shanty village.
Gotta watch what I'm thinking.
He slid back down onto the mat, let his arm fall back around Vivita, and fell asleep.

In the morning Vivita was surprised when he refused to go to the chief's house. He was certain that there was an unavoidable confrontation with Sonolo coming up, and he preferred that Sonolo fuck up as much as possible before he was forced to make his move to take control of the use of the muskets.

Just at that moment Sonolo certainly was fucking up, but in a way that would bring no joy at all to Casca.

When they first landed in Levuka Larsen had gone with Sonolo to the gunsmith, had selected the weapons and negotiated their price. The gunsmith had explained that gunpowder could only be purchased from the government stores and was only supplied on receipt of a written order signed by a suitably respectable person.

"Such as a ship's captain?" And Larsen had made out the order for a keg of powder and given it to Sonolo.

The gunsmith had shown Sonolo how to charge the weapons and had also told him that he must buy the gunpowder from the government store a little farther along the waterfront. But on the way there Sonolo had been distracted by the gaudy prints in another store, and then by the axes and knives, and finally by the whiskey. And the matter of the gunpowder had quite slipped his mind until this moment when he realized that the powder horns were empty.

He sat down in consternation. He had a terrible hangover. Last night he had killed a good friend and a blood relative, and now he was confronted with the fact that he had sold a hundred of his tribesmen into slavery and death for nothing. The shiny new muskets were useless. They would not even make good clubs.

Sonolo got up and walked out of the chief's house. He walked across the square and past his house without stopping, without looking inside where his wife was playing with his youngest son. He walked out of the village and into the jungle.

In the chief's house Semele looked unhappily at the muskets. He did not need to be told that Sonolo had screwed up. He didn't know just what the problem was, but he knew it was a big one. He sat down beside the guns and waited for the problem to show itself.

Within a few minutes the news reached Casca's hut. He didn't understand what it was about, but it seemed that Sonolo had left the village forever and that Semele was left with a big problem with the new guns.

Casca went to the chief's house and saw the old man sitting unhappily beside the muskets. He picked up one, and then the powder horn that lay beside it. Semele saw the same shocked expression on his face that he'd seen on Sonolo's, and he winced as if in pain.

Casca sat down. He had expected a problem, but nothing like this. A hundred of the best men in the village had paid for these guns with their freedom. And they were useless, completely useless. Worse, the village was a hundred young men short for its defense. He looked around, but there was no whiskey in sight.

He looked at Semele. The old man looked deeply wounded, as if something had been taken out of him. He looked up at Casca, waiting to know what he already knew would be the very worst news.

Casca didn't know how to tell him, didn't quite know how to say it himself. He looked around the village for something he could use as an example—something that needed something else to make it work. Even a canoe without a paddle was far from useless.

He grasped himself by the balls. "Sometimes with a woman, you don't have fire inside for this woman, and nothing happens?"

Semele nodded.

"Is the same with this gun. It needs fire. The fire comes in a powder. No powder, no fire—no fire, gun doesn't work."

S
emele nodded again. He didn't understand, but he understood that the guns were useless. It had been his decision to sell men for guns. His decision to sell a hundred men for ten guns rather than ten men for one gun. One useless gun and ten men gone might have been bearable.

Casca searched his mind for some scrap of good news, anything that would go toward alleviating the gloom he could feel growing. It was useless. He felt within himself
a despair, a hopelessness that he hadn't felt when he had first faced the necessity to fight Cakabau's guns with wooden clubs.

He shrugged. "Well, we still have clubs."

"Yes," Semele said, "we still have clubs."

"And my .38," Casca added under his breath, "should be great against six muskets."

Semele turned around, and for the first time Casca became aware of the two bodies lying on the ground wrapped in tapa cloth. Obviously one would be Sakuvi. The other, it turned out, was a fine young man, one of the few who did not get drunk on the whiskey, but had stepped between two who did.

The cost of the muskets now stood at a hundred two men. And a few arms, several hands, countless fingers. The axes and knives had taken an enormous toll in the hands of people who had never experienced sharpened steel, and
drunk people at that.

Normally, men who had been killed in combat, even this sort of internecine combat, would be eaten, but S
emele literally didn't have the stomach for it and ordered that they be buried.

Casca was surprised to see how difficult it was to bury somebody on the island. To bury the bodies in the soft sand on the beach would be pointless—a high tide would uncover them and the whole task would have to be done again. But there was very little clear
land, every bit of it was used for farming.

At least a constructive use had been found for the implements that Sonolo had brought from Levuka. The burial party tackled a piece of jungle adjacent to a vegetable patch. They first hacked away all the vines and undergrowth, and then set about felling the several, mainly small trees, and eventually grubbing out the stumps and the roots. It took all the men in the village working for most of the day, but by late afternoon there was
a patch of freshly cleared ground and a hole about six feet deep.

The bodies were lowered into the hole on some vines, Mbolo said a few words, a few flowers were thrown in, and the hole was filled.

The people headed home, and it seemed to Casca the two dead men had been virtually forgotten by the time they reached the village.

Certainly they were not the topic of discussion in the chief's house that night. Perhaps that was because there was
a more pressing matter to discuss.

When Casca arrived at the chief's house he had already heard something of the matter from Vivita. In fact he had already heard all the details of the sorry story, including the background of Tepole, the
one accused of the crime, and about the closest thing to a moral degenerate that the village could boast of.

Tepole came from a respected family and his life had not been significantly different from that of any other young man in the village. Except that from early manhood he had been a nuisance and a menace to everybody, including himself.

Several times in battle he had disgraced himself. He'd stolen personal possessions from other men. And he had a lust for other men's women that repeatedly caused serious trouble, although marital relationships in the village were almost infinitely flexible and two consenting people could do just about whatever they wished. In one of his attempts at unwelcome adultery there had been a fight with the husband, who was killed.

The previous night he had gotten very drunk, but not in the chief's house with everybody else. He'd sneaked away two bottles of whiskey, to get drunk by himself in his hut. Then, this morning, badly hungover, he'd used what was left of the whiskey to get drunk again.

He'd then gone on a lustful rampage through the village, attempting unsuccessfully to get into bed with some of the women who were recovering from wounds received in the melee the night before. By the time he got to the hut of Sala's family, most of the adults in the village were away at the funeral on the mountainside.

He had taken the opportunity to rape Sala, a child of about ten. Her brother Vuki, a year or two younger, had come upon them and attempted to help his sister. In the fracas that followed Tepole had, more or less inadvertently, broken Vuki's neck. He had then tried to strangle Sala and clumsily tried to bury the two bodies in the sand at the top of the beach.

"Teeth of Sirius," Casca muttered, "is there no end to the price of these muskets?"

Sala, recovering while Tepole was digging the grave, escaped. But her brother Vuki was dead.

Tepole's chief accuser was himself. He sat before Semele, but with his back turned, and recited his story of the day's macabre events. Semele interrupted a few times with a searching question, but otherwise all the information came from Tepole of his own accord.

When he had completed his own indictment Semele picked up his great ceremonial war club and paced back and forth behind the seated man, reciting the story of his previous wrongdoings, all of which Tepole agreed with.

Semele then summed up, saying that Tepole was a disgrace, a nuisance and a menace to the village, and that he refused to modify his ways although he'd been given many opportunities.

Semele then pronounced sentence, which was that Tepole was henceforth exiled from the village to the place of refuge, where he must stay until his sins were exonerated. If he were captured before he made it to the place of refuge, or if he should return to the village before it was time, he would be executed.

Casca was incensed. His hut was close to that of Sala's family, and she and her brother Vuki were little rays of sunshine he liked to come across in the village. They were two of the merriest pranksters at spooking Semele unawares. Casca felt that he would gladly strangle Tepole if Semele would allow it.

Tepole immediately left the house, and the kava bilo began to pass. Casca inquired about the place of refuge and learned that it was a rock outcrop on the far western edge of the island, all but inaccessible and virtually waterless. If Tepole made it there he would have a very hard, lonely, uncomfortable time.

"But when he returns he will be forgiven?"

"Of course, yes."

"But if he returns too soon, he will be executed?"

"Of course, yes."

"How will he know when it is time?"

"He will know."

Further discussion revealed that Semele's sentence was not quite as lenient as it at first appeared.

Very few exiles made it to the place of refuge without being captured, and the few that did generally returned to the village after only a few days, thus sentencing themselves to death.

This behavior was quite incomprehensible to Casca, who was quite fond of extended periods of his own company, which for the islanders was a condition so extraordinary and intolerable as to make death preferable.