Child of the Dawn (29 page)

"Pehu-pehu has found another
tahu 'a
," the lodge chiefess whispered.
 

Tepua cried out in alarm and moved her hands protectively over her belly. "She will fail like the others."

'There will be more foul drinks," warned Aitofa. "Massage, treatments even harsher. If those fail, she will thrust a strong stalk inside you—"
 

"No! I have endured enough. Let the child be born, and then I will deal with it. That is what other women do."

"Ah, Tepua. Don't you understand? She wants to make an example of you. So the other girls are more careful. So no one tries to beg for an exception."
 

"Why single me out? Is this for my refusal to join Chipped-rock Lodge?"

Aitofa stared at her and did not reply at once. "Perhaps," the chiefess said sadly, "it is because of me. Pehu-pehu has spies of her own. She knows that you work against her."
 

"
Aue!
Then it is
me
she wants to destroy."
 

"I do not know for sure if it is you or the child. I cannot see what dark thoughts she holds in her bowels. In either case, how can I protect you? There is no one to keep watch day and night. You have to get away from her. Go inland and hide until the child is born."
 

Tepua tightened her fist. "Who will help you speak up against Land-crab if I am gone?"

"It does not matter now," said Aitofa. "The season is almost over. When the harvest festival is done, the troupe will disperse."

"But our lodge—"

"It will not die. When the next season turns, we will assemble again to prepare for the Ripening Festival. By then your belly will be flat. You will rejoin us, and Pehu-pehu will have no more excuses to harm you."
 

"My belly..." Tepua fell silent. Aitofa's unspoken assumption was clear. She expected Tepua to do away with the child at the moment of birth; that was how Arioi fulfilled their vows. Otherwise she could not return to the troupe.
 

"Go at once," said Aitofa. "Do not give Pehu-pehu another chance at you. She is occupied now. Take your cousin and slip away quietly."
 

Tepua's eyes began to sting. She embraced the chiefess.

"Do not disgrace yourself," said Aitofa. "We need you with the troupe. Next season, everything may change for the better. Carry out your duty and come back to us."
 

 

Matopahu sat in the cool shade of coconut palms and watched two girls dancing. One was plump and had a pleasantly languid way of moving—she reminded him of Fleeting-star. The other was thinner, an atoll girl, almost pretty. The more he looked at her, the more she made him think of Tepua.
 

'They both like you," said Stingray, the fisherman beside him. "That one is from my home island." He pointed to the slender girl. "What a nice morsel. Too bad she is my cousin, or I would have her myself."
 

Matopahu complimented the girl's dancing. He glanced sideways and saw other fishermen eyeing her performance with great interest.
When the dancing is over, she won't lack company
, he thought.
 

The drummers quickened their beat. From all sides, he heard cries of encouragement as a third dancer joined the pair. This girl he had not seen before. Her skin glistened with oil and her face was radiant. Her small, firm breasts were draped with a garland of tiny white flowers. Matopahu felt an unexpected stirring....
 

"
Aue
!" said Stingray. "My home atoll is too small. That girl is also my cousin!"
 

The
motu
where Matopahu sat among his friends was one of Tetiaroa's smallest. Here the fishermen lived in simple palm-leaf shelters, eating coconuts, local bananas, clams, and fish. Many of these people had come from the swarm of atolls to the east. Drawn by the lure of Tahiti, they had left home, but had found no welcome on the high island.
 

Matopahu understood why Tetiaroa attracted them. Here the surroundings were familiar, and they could continue to live in the manner of their ancestors. But they also had ready access to high-island goods from Tahiti—bark-cloth, sharp stone implements, as well as breadfruit and other desirable foods. Best of all, life was peaceful here, free of the pressures that often erupted into war on the main island....
 

Cries and shouts broke Matopahu's reverie. He saw the new dancer wildly undulating her hips. Sweat streaked the drummers' chests as they strove to keep up with her. The dancer gave a final flourish. She staggered, paused to catch her breath. Then she shook her hips once more, evoking a final round of cheering.
 

Later, as the shadows were lengthening, Matopahu found the girl beside him as he walked along the shore. This girl did not remind him of Tepua at all, except in her manner of speaking. Perhaps she even came from the same atoll.
 

"Everyone can see," the girl said boldly, looking up at him through glistening, dark lashes, "that you were not born to be a fisherman."
 

"Then what was I born to do?" he asked, smiling with pleasure at the sound of her voice. He paused to gaze out at the water, then once again faced his companion.
 

"You must be a nobleman in exile," she said. "Where is your
marae
? Where is your family's sacred point of land?"
 

"You ask too much," he said. Her soft hands rested against her arms. He leaned down and pressed his nose against her cheek. She had a warm scent, fragrant from the tiny blossoms in her wreath.
 

"How long will you stay here?" she persisted. "When all the fine people go back to Tahiti, will you go with them?"

"I...have no home there."

'Then you will stay with us when the weather changes," she said happily. "Don't worry. You will be safe here. If a bad storm comes, I'll show you how to tie yourself into a
tamanu tree
."
 

"Then I look forward to the storm season—just so I can have my lesson."

She put her arms around him and began gently stroking his back. "There are other things I can show you." Coquettishly, she pressed against him and rolled her hips once. "I can do that even lying down."
 

Only the thin material of his
maro
and that of her waistcloth separated them. He felt a throbbing of desire. "I heard a song once," he said, "about a lover bending like a fragrant fern. An atoll song. Do you know it?"

She took his hand, and began to lead him deeper into the privacy of the forest. "I do," she said softly.

"Then I will close my eyes and listen."

 

 

 

FIFTEEN

 

Tepua and Maukiri set out for the Tahitian highlands with no clear sense of where they were headed. Each carried a palm-leaf basket, the first filled with provisions that Aitofa had hastily gathered, the other holding extra clothing as well as a few tools and utensils. In addition, Tepua carried an ironwood spear with a long, serrated tip. If Pehu-pehu came after her, Tepua was ready to defend herself.
 

But she did not expect the Blackleg to pursue. Getting rid of Tepua had been her purpose and now she had achieved it. Tepua angrily imagined Pehu-pehu's smile of triumph as she bullied Aitofa's remaining supporters. There would be a score to settle when Tepua came back...
if
she came back. But, of course, she must do what Aitofa had ordered. She could not abandon her friends and her lodge leader.
 

Tepua sighed, and trudged on, up a little-used path that wound inland over red clay soil, slowly ascending through grass and low bushes. Here and there a hibiscus tree or a coconut palm shaded the trail. "
Aue
!" said Maukiri, pausing to catch her breath. "I—forgot. I was supposed to meet someone this afternoon."
 

"Be glad you missed him," said Tepua sourly. "It may save you some pains in your belly."

"Your trouble, cousin, is that you stuck with
one
man." Maukiri wiped her hand against her damp brow and squinted toward the high hills ahead. Resolutely she started walking again. "If you had listened to me and changed partners every night—"
 

"That old tale again!"

"How do you know that it doesn't work?" Maukiri retorted. "You never tried. And now what will I do for company in this wilderness? Swim in the river and hope for a friendly eel?"
 

"It will not hurt you to give up men for a few months," Tepua retorted.

"Men, yes," Maukiri grumbled. "And not only men. A dry mat, decent food—"

"Cousin, do you already want to go back?"

"I will stay with you," Maukiri answered in a subdued voice.

"Good. Then stop arguing and help me find a place to live." Aitofa had told her about hidden valleys where people dwelled long ago. One needed only to keep walking to locate them.
 

The two women continued awhile in silence, climbing ever higher. At last, stopping to catch her breath, Tepua looked back. She was still wary of pursuers, but saw none. The coastal plain lay far below, its dense stands of trees stretching toward the lagoon. Beyond the shore, the azure lagoon ended in a milky band of breakers.
 

Farther out, waves tossed on the dark surface of the Sea of the Moon. Tepua glimpsed a few distant sails of fishermen and imagined the cool wind at their backs. Here there was no breeze, only hot, humid air.
 

"I'm hungry already," said Maukiri. "Did you see the piles of food they were preparing for the festival? Because of you, I am missing the biggest feast of the season!"
 

"You'll eat when we stop."

"And when this basket is empty? I can fend for myself by the sea, but I know nothing of mountains."

'There will be plenty to eat. I'll show you how to live on wild foods."

Maukiri grimaced as she shifted the basket to her other hand. "When this is over, I'll be as thin as a
motu
woman again."
 

'Then think how much you'll like fattening yourself!"

Tepua glared at her cousin, who had never been slender. Then, tired of arguing, Tepua took the lead at a brisk pace. The trail ran over a crest, began to descend. In the distance she heard running water.
 

Here the forest canopy was so dense that only a muted green light reached the ground. The air grew dense, humid, and full of heavy fragrance. Ferns and other clinging plants dangled from branches or curled out of crevices in the bark of trees. The welcome sound of water became louder.
 

Soon the women approached a cataract that leaped and foamed over black boulders in its bed. From downstream, Tepua heard the roar of a waterfall. After pausing to drink at the bank and splash herself with cool water, she led her cousin upstream.
 

Here wild taro grew, spreading huge, glossy leaves that hung from slender stalks. The trail wound through a grove of
rata
, the Tahitian chestnut. The
rata
trunks looked as though smaller trees had been twisted and melded together, creating strange ridges and hollows where malevolent spirits might hide. The weird forms and the weathered bone-gray color of their bark gave the trees an unsettling skeletal appearance, even in daylight. Both Maukiri and Tepua kept well away from them.
 

The deep shade under the chestnut trees kept the ground damp. Tangles of surface roots crossed the muddy path, making the footing slippery. A dark red-and-brown carpet of decaying leaves was dotted with the yellow green of fallen chestnut pods. Tepua picked up a kidney-shaped pod. "You can roast and eat these," she said, stripping off the fleshy husk to show the nut inside. Maukiri glanced at it with only mild interest.
 

The trail continued along the river, skirted a pile of rock. A toppled hibiscus blocked the way; the women had to walk to the edge of the stream to get by it. Others trees had fallen, and each required a special effort to climb over or under it. At last, in disgust, Maukiri put down her basket and sat in a clump of ferns. 'This is where I am spending the night," she proclaimed.
 

Knowing from experience that nothing would move her, Tepua agreed.

 

By the time the sun was falling toward the valley wall, the two wayfarers had erected a crude shelter of branches covered with pandanus-leaf matting. Tepua speared two fish in a pool of the stream. She asked Maukiri to pick wild plantains while she got out the fire-making tools.
 

When Maukiri returned, Tepua was working with the fire plow and bed stick she had brought. The bed stick, held under her heel, had a narrow trough down its length. As she rubbed the pointed plow stick down the trough, she recited a traditional atoll chant.
 

 

Tukakahe, tukakahe!

Tupepere, tupepere
!
 

 

Maukiri laughed and began a different version of the chant.

 

The big stick rubs

Vigorously, strenuously

Back and forth it strokes.

 

The smell of hot wood dust tingled in Tepua's nostrils. She blew the sparks to a flame that caught on dry coconut husk, then spread to kindling. Finally she got a good blaze going, burning dry branches snapped from the upper sides of fallen trees.
 

"I'll teach you how people cook in the mountains," she told her cousin, pointing to green lengths of giant bamboo that she had cut with a shell knife. Tepua put pieces of fish into some bamboo sections, chunks of a breadfruit from her basket into others. After sealing the ends of each section with fresh leaves, she dropped it into the open fire. By the time the outside of the moist bamboo blackened, the food was cooked.
 

As darkness fell, she and Maukiri recalled the life they had abandoned. They sat under the shelter singing old songs of their distant atoll. What a pleasure, Tepua thought, to speak in the familiar way again, sounding the hard "k" and the nasal "ng" that Tahitians omitted. She remembered the people left behind, especially Ehi, Maukiri's mother. Tepua had grown up in Ehi's household, and Ehi's ample arms had always been there to comfort her.