Killman (3 page)

It took her five minutes, leaning into the wind with the rain whipping viciously into her face, to find an opening in the wall of the ark. Someone had preceded her, because the door was banging arthritically on its hinges. She forced her way into the structure and stood inside the open doorway, clutching a swinging beam descending crazily from the roof, trying to accustom her eyes to the change in the light.

It was even darker inside than it had been out on the rain-swept plateau. Slowly her eyes adjusted to the darkness. In the gloom she could just make out a few cages containing small animals of indeterminate types. Their stench was devastating. Frightened by the storm, their howls and screeches merged into a discordant barking cacophony of terror.

Abruptly Sister Conchita felt that she was not alone in the ark. Take it easy, she told herself; this would not be a good time to disintegrate. A rod of lightning illuminated the far side of the interior. For a brief moment she was sure that she could see a tall, light-skinned islander, almost certainly a Tikopian, wearing only a loincloth. Clasped in his hand was a large knife. Then the lightning faded and the ark was in darkness again. She heard a door at the far end of the vessel open and slam shut. She peered through the gloom, but it was too dark to see.

She stood still. Once or twice already in her life Sister Conchita had been aware that she had been in the presence of God. Today she knew with sickening finality that in this dreadful, musty, warped facsimile of a Christian site of pilgrimage she was surrounded by an evil tangible enough to be touched. Her instincts told her to flee, that even the worst atrocities being wreaked outside by the storm on the clearing and trees would be preferable to this overwhelming claustrophobic malevolence. Whether he knew it or not, when Papa Noah had nailed the cursed warped slats and planks into place, somehow he had trapped within the ark the worst excesses of the anguished demons and devil-devils existing in the wood, determined to continue their fight against the one-God religion brought to the bush by the white visitors, and struggling precariously to continue its existence among the customs of the ancient time before.

She could feel her heart pounding. Sister Conchita had no doubt that such spirits, good and bad, existed in the island, intertwined with some of the teachings of her own faith, which had been implanted so far only in shallow soil. Father Pierre himself, after a lifetime on Malaita, was convinced of their presence and had even once sent her to encounter them so that she would be aware of their power. Her friend Sergeant Kella, sneered at as a witch doctor by some expatriates, was the only man she knew who walked in both worlds, somehow a rugged, untouched high priest of pantheism.

She reached out and touched one of the walls. It moved beneath her fingers, cold to the touch like the clammy skin and flesh of a living entity, then began to writhe sluggishly. Sister Conchita was reminded of the faint pulse of a patient struggling for life. She could tolerate the fetid atmosphere no longer. Almost with relief she turned back towards the open door and plunged out into the storm.

The rain was still hurtling down, making it difficult to see anything. Doggedly the nun groped her way forward. What had the man been doing inside the ark? Had it been the Tikopian called Shem? She could not be sure.

She had hardly gone a few yards when she stumbled over something soft and yielding on the ground. Almost physically sick with apprehension, she bent over and scrabbled with her hands. At first she thought that she was patting a wet sack. There was a staccato drumbeat of thunder, and then another searing shimmer of white light illuminated the plateau, and the nun saw that she was standing over the inert body of Papa Noah.

Conchita dropped to her knees and clutched the islander by his shoulders. The old man’s face was immersed in one of the now flooded rock pools scattered about the plateau. She seized his wrist and tried to feel a pulse, but there was no response. Gently she lifted the old man’s lolling head. Something dark and sticky stained her fingers. She could feel a large contusion at the back of Papa Noah’s skull. She blew air into the old man’s lips and started pounding at his chest with her small fists. The patriarch was soaking wet, to a far greater extent than could be explained even by his exposure to this hurricane. It was almost, she thought wildly, as if the islander’s whole body had been immersed in water.

A decade ago, long before she had contemplated taking holy orders, Sister Conchita had been a good enough college swimmer to secure a vacation post as a lifeguard at Boston’s Veterans Memorial Pool on the Charles River. On one occasion, still impressed irrevocably on her mind, she had helped secure the body of a youth who had got into difficulties in the water. She remembered the symptoms as the lifeguards had toiled to revive the boy: the blue cyanosis-induced lips, the complete lack of pulse and heartbeat. Another dart of lightning confirmed that these were all the signs that the old Solomon Islander beneath her was also exhibiting as the nun knelt over him, trying to force life back into his unresponsive, water-sodden torso.

After a few frantic, doubt-racked minutes, she recognized the futility of her endeavours and despairingly stopped attempting to revive the man. There was no doubt about it, she decided with increasing horror and incredulity.

Noah had drowned.

Sergeant Ben Kella of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate Police Force paddled his dugout canoe through the night past the artificial islands of the Lau Lagoon. He was puzzled. He had only returned to the islands from Hong Kong a few days ago, but already he had heard several rumours of the abduction of a white woman in his home area. The first had come from a
wantok
, a member of his extended family who was a customs official at Honiara airport, when Kella had descended from the inter-island plane from Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. Two days later, when he disembarked from a Chinese trading vessel at Auki, the government administrative centre on the island of Malaita, on the final stage of his journey home, he had heard the same disquieting information from an elderly Lau fisherman bringing his catch to the weekly market.

Neither of his informants had been specific. Even to have attempted to adopt such an unambiguous approach would have been impolite, spurning the customary oblique story-telling technique of Malaita, in which a few salient facts were enclosed as carefully in a web of tangents and embellishments as a succulent bonito fish in a palm leaf. Nevertheless, Kella had emerged from both encounters with sufficient knowledge to worry him, both as a policeman and as the island’s
aofia
. If he had understood his informants, both trustworthy men who owed him a duty of truth and were not given to gossip, a white woman had been abducted in the Lau Lagoon and was being held a prisoner on the tiny artificial island of Baratonga.

Kella found it difficult to believe what he had heard. As a rule, foreigners, especially white ones, were sacrosanct in the Solomons, unless they deliberately transgressed against island customs. To make matters worse, the Lau area was his own home. Who would dare lay a hand upon a
neena
, one of the unprotected, among the artificial islands, unless it was as a direct and deliberate challenge to his authority? Who would want to do that? Kella did not often get angry, but tonight he was simmering dangerously. This was what happened when he was sent overseas on useless courses! His authority on Malaita went to hell in a handcart! He increased the rate of his paddling as he headed for the strangers’ island at the northern edge of the large seawater lake protected from the ocean by a reef of coral.

All around him, lanterns swaying on poles illuminated the outlines of many of the fifty or so islands in the lagoon. It was late, so he could no longer hear the cries of playing children; these had been replaced with the whoops of young bucks as they prepared to paddle far out to sea on night fishing forays in their canoes or to try their luck with unmarried girls on other islands.

The reef water was high. The entire twenty-six-mile length of the lagoon, several miles wide, was constantly refreshed by more than a dozen rivers pouring down from the mountains of the main island and by the tides seeping through the protecting reef from the open sea. Over a period of a hundred years, the tiny islands had been built, stone by stone, by men and women from the mainland seeking to avoid the malarial mosquitoes and the constant warfare between the saltwater dwellers and the bushmen of the interior. The closely knit Lau men and women, the
too i asi
, or people of the sea, spent much of their lives on these stone fortresses, going ashore only to hunt and tend their gardens.

Although he could hardly make out the details of any of the artificial islands in the gloom, Kella could recite the location and provenance of each one as its outline loomed before him. He was passing his own island of Sulufou, the largest of them all, eighty yards long and fifty yards wide, with fifty thatched huts and his own special
beu
, the traditional sacred home of the peacemaking
aofia
. According to custom, the island had been constructed in the nineteenth century, when the legendary chief Leo had paid labourers one porpoise tooth a day to ferry the foundation rocks out from the shore. He noticed that there seemed to be more canoes than usual moored at the long stone jetty. Perhaps some travellers from other islands outside the reef, fearing a storm, had claimed a night’s lodging at the custom sanctuary stone placed in front of the church.

On the other side, closer to the shore, was Funaofou, sheltered behind tall wooden palisades to guard the inhabitants from raids by their traditional enemies from the coastal village of Alite. Further out towards the reef was Liulana asi, which had been built in the time before close to the tideway by a man from Saua in memory of a beloved son taken at sea by a shark. Looming through the night was Ferasuba, once the home of the great warrior Marukua from the Morado clan on the mainland.

Kella stopped paddling and rested, taking stock of the situation. Floating ahead of him he noticed in the moonlight a coconut with a piece of flint embedded in its side. The sergeant clicked his tongue in annoyance. It looked as if another internecine blood feud had got under way in the lagoon his absence. Someone had coaxed a charmed piece of flint from a minor shark priest, hammered it into the side of the coconut and cast it into the water in the presence of his rival in love or a land dispute. His adversary was bound by custom to seek out the coconut at sea the next day, lean from his canoe and attempt to lift it from the water. If the second man’s
mana
should prove weaker than that of the islander with whom he was in dispute, then a shark would appear from nowhere to tear the trailing arm from his shoulder. If, however the second man stood higher in regard with the sharks, then nothing untoward would happen to him and it would be his turn to seek out his foe and issue a similar challenge.

Kella resolved to investigate the causes of the incipient feud the following day. He considered his immediate course of action as his dugout rested easily on the calm, moon-burnished surface. His destination was only a hundred yards ahead of him. Baratonga was one of the smallest of the artificial islands, its solitary one-roomed hut raised on stilts like the others in the lagoon to keep out the spring high tides. On its surface of compacted rock and soil, there was further room only for a palm tree and several banana bushes snuggled next to one another to provide a modicum of shade in the daytime. A galvanized-iron trough next to the hut was used to catch and store rainwater running down from the thatched roof of the dwelling. It rained often in the lagoon, and the trough was usually full, although the water had a bitter taste after coursing over the thatch.

Normally this did not matter, as Baratonga was uninhabited. It had once been used to keep pigs belonging to a neighbouring island, but now was occasionally hired out to overseas visitors, usually foreign academics carrying out research in the Lau area. They did not come often, and when they did, neither did they stay long. The inhospitable climate, bare terrain, underfoot pig droppings, poor water and basic standard of living usually restricted their sojourns to a week or so at the most before they scurried back to the tenured comfort of such establishments as the Australian National University, the University of Auckland and the University of Hawaii.

Kella had not even been aware that there was a
neena
in the lagoon at the moment. She must have arrived unannounced during his six-week absence in Hong Kong and secured the necessary permission to live on Baratonga from one of the lesser clan chiefs in need of a few quick Australian dollars. He wished that he knew more, but he had not yet landed on Sulufou to seek news and get up to date. By this time in the evening most of the elders whom he could trust would be asleep. He could not wake any of them up in his quest for information. By Lau tradition the soul left the body when a person slept at night. Should the sleeper be awakened roughly, there was a chance that this wandering
nunu
would not return and would be cast adrift eternally. This evening Kella would have to find out for himself what had been going on during his absence. In the meantime he sought protection from the spirits for what might lie waiting for him in the dark by muttering the common mantra of ancestor worship to his dead forebears: ‘Take care of your canoes and mine!’

The sergeant stood up, stripped off his uniform shirt, sandals and red beret, placed his paddle on the floor of the canoe and lowered himself over the side into the lagoon. The gently lapping water was warm, and he cut through it powerfully and quietly, using the universal island form of the crawl stroke that had been introduced by Alec Wickham from the Roviana Lagoon to Australia in 1898. Within ten minutes he was approaching the shore of Baratonga. He clutched at the lower reaches of the small stone jetty as he trod water and surveyed the strangers’ island. There were no signs of lights or life on the small man-made hump. Cautiously he pulled himself up on to the surface and tiptoed towards the hut, the water dripping from his muscular, scarred body. No guards had been posted outside the simple structure, which seemed strange under the circumstances.