Beyond Sunrise (27 page)

Chapter Thirty-four

Alex Preston stood up to his thighs in the gently lapping waters of Rakaia's broad lagoon, his hands braced against his hips as he bent over almost double. When he'd left his shoes and socks on the white sand and rolled up his trousers, he'd only meant to wade out a little ways. He'd felt vaguely foolish, even a bit guilty, doing it, but a quick glance around had reassured him that he was alone. It wouldn't have done for one of the men to catch their first lieutenant in such an undignified posture.

He'd been cautious at first, wading only in the shallows. But the lure of those impossibly clear, magic-filled waters had beckoned him on until a wave sloshed against the rolled-up legs of his trousers, wetting him to his knees. And then he thought, Well, since I'm already wet...

Sucking in a deep breath of air that puffed out his cheeks, Alex cinched his lips together tight, thrust his face into the water, and opened his eyes. He saw the spreading jaws of an enormous clam, a hundred years old or more, surrounded by a wonderland of corals in sapphire and yellow, crimson and orange, some high and feathery, others smooth and bulbous. He saw twinkling yellow and green tiddlers, and slow-moving parrot fish, and quick silver flashes of reef trout. Again and again, he plunged his face into the lagoon, raising his head only when he needed to take another breath. He had to step warily, of course, keeping to the narrow patches of clear sand. He longed to strip off his clothes and paddle out farther, to where new wonders beckoned. Instead, he straightened reluctantly, water dripping down his cheeks and off his nose, and headed back to shore.

The pounding of the surf against the island's fringing reef filled the air with an endless boom and crash that mingled with the wheeling calls of the seabirds and the seductive rustling of the coco palms. There was a still, white quality to the cloud-filtered light that told him the sun would be setting soon. Rolling down his wet trousers, he sat on a wave-smoothed rock and thrust his legs out before him to dry.

They had been here for three days now, and still the beauty of this place had the power to take his breath and leave him feeling restless and vaguely sad. The main island was fairly small, a steep-sided mountain cloaked in a velvety green mantle of giant rain-forest trees dripping with orchids and ferns and great pendent ropes of lianas. Along the gleaming white sandy beaches grew the coconut palms, their delicate fronds waving gently in the warm, fragrant breezes, while the narrow valleys abounded with oranges and pineapples, guavas and bananas and mangoes—an endless harvest of sweet fruit, free for the taking.

His trousers were still damp, but he put on his shoes and socks and walked along the sand. In the long, idyll days since the
Barracuda
had dropped anchor in the lagoon behind the island, Alex had avoided this part of the beach. Now he found himself oddly drawn to it. He walked past rows of pandanus-and-bamboo bungalows, standing silent and empty in the gentle evening light. A whisper of sound brought him jerking around, thinking someone was there, but it was only a loose corner of thatch, lifting in the warm breeze.

He walked on. A small chapel built of crudely cut coral blocks stood at the far end of the deserted village, and beyond that, a cemetery filled with row after row of silent mounds of freshly turned earth rapidly disappearing beneath a luxurious growth of running vines and softly waving grasses. Most of the graves were marked with simple wooden crosses. But in the older section of the graveyard, he could see a rough granite slab almost overgrown with creeping fig.

Intrigued, he tore away the vines and found himself staring at a deeply carved inscription, in loving memory of Titana and her unborn child, murdered by the british navy on september 10, 1874. Be- low that was something else he couldn't quite read. Alex had been making a study of the various Polynesian dialects, and as he traced the crudely incised letters with his finger, it came to him suddenly what it said.
Ari rangi.
Paradise is empty.

Sitting back on his heels, Alex stared at those painstakingly incised words. After so many months at sea, he more than understood the carnal urgings that could drive a man to couple with one of the beautiful, half-naked women with which these islands abounded. But raw sexual hunger didn't explain this, this tortured outpouring of grief and rage and love.

The gusting wind brought him a faint spray from the sea. Lifting his head, he stared off across the pale green waters of the lagoon, to where twin islets of golden sand studded with palms marked the site of the passage through the wave-pounded reef. Yet the position of the islets was deceptive, for instead of lying midway between them, the channel through Rakaia's barrier reef curved unexpectedly close to the western islet. On a calm day, when the lagoon lay smooth and undisturbed, one could clearly see the shelves of coral that rested just below the surface of the water, stretching out far beyond the eastern atoll. But with a storm churning up the sea, those jagged rocks would lurk unseen, a deadly graveyard for the unwary.

There was something about the brooding silence of a shipwreck that caught at a navy man's throat and twisted itself deep down into the guts of him. Alex found he had to force himself to stare at what was left of the
Lady Juliana,
looming up dark and ghostly now in the fading light of the day.

At some time in the past ten years, a storm had ripped the ship in two and carried the prow out to sea, where bits of her perhaps still floated, worn, unidentifiable. Now only the stern remained, the canted lower decks awash with the sea. One more bad storm, Alex thought, and there would be nothing left but that silent, deadly shelf of coral. Nothing to show precisely where the
Lady Juliana
had come to grief. Nothing to prove the guilt or innocence of the man accused of steering her to her death.

Not that Alex believed the man, of course. But Simon Granger must, he realized, or else they wouldn't be here, idling away the days, the
Barracuda
carefully anchored out of sight on the far side of the island, with seamen set to watch the single passage through the reef from sunrise to sunset. Or maybe the captain didn't believe in the existence of those old charts, either. Maybe he was simply counting on a father's love for his daughter to bring Jack Ryder back to this beautiful, deserted island.

Alex thought about those empty bungalows, and the mounds of turned earth. Someone had been left alive, obviously, to bury the dead. But there was no one here now, only a noisy flock of vivid red king parrots, feasting on the fruit of an old walnut tree, and a frigate bird that soared high and lonely above the lagoon turning rose and silver now with the dying of the day.

It was past time to be returning to the ship. Even the men Granger had set to watch the channel would have given up by now. And still Alex lingered, his gaze on the long lines of darkening breakers outside the reef. For a moment, he thought he saw something. The swelling waves of the open sea hid it from his sight, but then it reappeared, not an eddy, or a drifting spar, but a boat. A small, open boat hovering just off the island.

Alex stood very still, his eyes narrowed. At first, he didn't think the boat even had a sail, for there was no telltale flash of white, no billowing canvas to catch the last rays of the setting sun peeking through a break in the cloud cover. He was about to turn away, dismissing the small vessel from his thoughts, when he realized it did have sails. Sails that had been dyed.

It was an old pirate's trick, darkening a vessel's sails, but a trick that every officer in Her Majesty's navy knew, as well. It was said that Nelson himself had once used the tactic, to surprise a French warship on a moonless night.

Alex stood on the beach, the wind flattening his damp trousers against his legs. The glorious palette of gold-streaked vermilion and violet cast across the cloudy sky by the setting sun faded. And still the small boat held off, tacking back and forth just off the entrance to the passage. Alex watched it until he was certain there was no mistaking the vessel's intent. Then he turned away, loose sand flying up to stick to his wet trousers as he hurried along the shoreline to tell Simon Granger that his gamble had paid off.

Jack Ryder had come to them.

The echini had been right. Half an hour out of Waigeu, a brief squall set the jolly boat's short square sail to whipping furiously in the wind and dumped enough rain to soak them all to the skin. But then the storm passed, and though the cloud cover lingered, the sea calmed, and the wind blew light and easy.

By the time the rugged, heavily forested slopes of Rakaia appeared before them, the day had not yet begun to darken toward evening. And so they tacked back and forth off the sandy islets that marked the entrance to the passage through the island's fringing reef, close enough to keep their bearings yet hopefully not so close as to attract the attention of anyone who might be watching for a sleek, schooner-rigged yacht such as the
Sea Hawk.

But as the sky turned from gray to rose to purple, they had no choice but to draw in closer. There would be no moon that night, and while the darkness would help conceal them from any watching eyes, it would also make it easy to miss the passage entirely and run up onto the reef.

India shifted closer to the prow, her gaze roving over the island before them as the jolly boat came around, the water sucking and splashing against the sides. Even with the sky overcast and the light fading quickly from the day, the island was beautiful, its steep, dark slopes ringed by snowy white coral beaches that glimmered from out of the darkness, and palm trees that bent gracefully in the evening breeze. She could smell the island's sweet spiciness, mingling with the brine of the sea. And she had the most peculiar sensation, as if she were returning to a place she had known before, a place that was somehow more a part of her than what she had left behind.

She glanced at Jack, who sat silent and watchful beside his daughter. It couldn't be easy for him, coming back to this place where so much had happened, and from which he'd stayed away for so long. There was a brittleness about him, a wary tension, as if he were tamping down every emotion, every reaction. Emotions had a way of making a man uncomfortable, making a man feel weak. And so she supposed he had decided not to allow himself to feel anything. She couldn't begin to understand how he could do it, and she thought the costs must be terrible. As they drew closer to the surf-battered reef, even Ulani seemed tense, her eyes wide and still as she stared at the island that had once been her home.

"I don't see no masts," said Toby Jenkins, his eyes narrowing as he peered into the gathering gloom.

Jack shook his head. "If Granger is here, you can be sure he has the
Barracuda
anchored somewhere out of sight."

They were hauling in close to the reef now, and it was so dark India found it impossible to believe that anyone, even a native born and raised on this island, could possibly see the channel. And then, as she watched one of Titana's cousins lean over the side of the boat, his head tilted to one side, his expression one of fixed concentration, she realized she was right: he couldn't see the channel. But he could hear it; he could hear and identify every eddy and gurgle, every subtle nuance of rushing water and swirling tides, while around them, the air filled with the thundering cannonade of the surf hitting the outer reef.

There was no way of knowing if the
Barracuda
had made it here before them. And so they were careful not to speak, slipping silently past the ghostly hulk of what was left of the
Lady Juliana,
caught forever in her death throes on the edge of the reef. India looked up at the ship's shattered, twisted timbers, and felt her breath back up in her chest.

It was Jack's plan, she had discovered, to be away from Rakaia again before sunrise. But as the jolly boat glided smoothly across the empty lagoon toward the main island's beach and India stared at those dark, wooded slopes, such a scheme struck her as impossible.

"It's too dark," she whispered, leaning in close to Jack. "You'll never find that cave without a moon."

Beside her, Ulani kept her gaze fixed on the high mass of the island, rising up dark and beautiful before them. "I'll find it," she said.

Chapter Thirty-five

They drew the jolly boat up onto the sand beneath the spreading branches of a royal poinciana. The island waited hushed and dark before them, the only sounds the swaying of the fronds of the coconut palms along the beach, and the gentle slosh of the surf in the lagoon, and the melancholy cry of an 'u'upa, far off in the night. They were said to be the shadows of the ghosts that haunt the woods, the 'u'upa, and at the sound Toby Jenkins went utterly still.

"I reckon I'll stay here, with the lads," he said, his gaze sweeping the purple shadows of the acacia and mango trees. "Keep a lookout for trouble."

Jack glanced at Ulani, who stood at the darkened line of sand edging the lagoon, her attention fixed on the row of silent, deserted bungalows that stretched away down the palm-lined beach. "You don't need to come with me," he said softly. "You can just tell me where the cave is."

She turned her head to look at him, her eyes wide and still in the heavy darkness. "I'm not afraid."

"I didn't think you were. But this is why you wanted to come, wasn't it? To be here."

She hesitated, then said, "Uncle Revi told me you used to spend a lot of time up on the point, when you first came to the island. He said you used to sit up there for hours, just watching for a ship."

Jack swung about, his gaze lifting to the rocky bluff that rose high above the village to thrust out like a sheltering arm into the lagoon. In those first weeks after he'd been lost off the
Lady Juliana,
he'd spent every minute he could at the tip of that point, his gaze desperately raking the endless, deep blue waves for a glimpse of white sails billowing with the wind. But then one day Titana had come to him there, and the sense of urgency that had been driving him day and night to try to find some way off the island had melted away in the softly scented heat of her embrace.

Jack felt a shudder pass through him, and he wrenched his mind away from the memory. Too many memories, one leading to the other, until they all ended in that blur of hideously succeeding images that he couldn't revisit. Not here, where it had happened.

He'd been ignoring the pain in his head for a long time now, but it was getting harder and harder to do. He was used to the pain, he could deal with that. The problem was, it was starting to affect his sight. It was as if he were looking through rippling water lit from the side with jagged flashes of shadowed light.

His daughter peered at him strangely, her head tilting as she studied him. He wondered what she could see in his face. "Uncle Revi said you'd know where the cave was."

Jack nodded, his lips pressing together tightly. It was taboo, the cave on the point. He supposed Revi had figured the charts would be safer there because of it. "You stay here. It shouldn't take me long."

He started to turn away, but was stopped by the light touch of a hand on his arm.

"I'm coming with you," India said.

He was having a hard time focusing on her face. "You don't need to do that."

"I think I do."

And so he nodded, because he figured she was probably right.

Toby Jenkins leaned his back against the smooth trunk of a giant coconut palm and tried to get comfortable. From where he sat, the distant breakers smashing against the outer reef were only a vague silver line of curling foam, half lost in the blackness of the night. But he smiled at the familiar sight of it, his eyes half closing as he lifted his face to a gentle night breeze heavy with the scent of the sea and the jasminelike sweetness of the teatea-maowa, its blossoms glowing white and beautiful in the darkness.

They shouldn't have done it, he decided; they shouldn't have left the island. Nothing had been right since then. They'd all been cranky and short-tempered and dismal for months. They all wanted to be home, to be on Rakaia.

It had been Father Paul's idea, their leaving. Toby had been against the scheme right from the start, even when the fever was raging so fierce it seemed there wouldn't be any of them left alive at the end of it. But then the blackbirders had come, and the sight of his own wee lad caught fast in the clutches of some thieving Yankee bastard had rattled Toby more than he could begin to understand.

Yet now, as he stared off across the gently sloshing waters of Rakaia's darkened lagoon, Toby knew it had been a mistake. They never should have let those bloody blackbirders chase them away from here. This was their home. What they should have done was maybe got their hands on some old
cannon and
mounted it on one of them islets by the passage. Let everyone know they meant business and weren't to be trifled with. He'd put it to the others, he decided, as
soon
as he got back tomorrow. Put it to them that maybe the time had come to move back here, permanently.

It wouldn't be the same, of course. It would never be like it used to be. Too many were gone, and the islands were all changing, changing fast, in ways he didn't like. Twelve years ago, when Fate had taken a hand in Toby's life and swept him off the
Lady Juliana and
deposited him on this little speck of Paradise, the island had been so isolated that he and Ryder had gone for almost two years without seeing any outsider except for the old French priest. Now Rakaia was on the bloody
map.
The island was too small to ever attract a regular steamer, like Waigeu had, but two or three times a year they had sloops putting into the lagoon, fancy little yachts full of
tourists,
for Christ's sake.

Toby heaved a heartfelt sigh, feeling suddenly old and tired, and maybe a bit hungry, too. Rubbing his eyes against the threat of sleep, he lurched to his feet. The other lads had already nodded off, sprawled in the sand beside the beached boat, while Ulani sat at the water's edge, her arms wrapped about her updrawn knees, her gaze fixed on the darkly surging waters of the lagoon. He thought about going looking for a banana or something, but the unnatural emptiness of the island unnerved him. A vague rustling of the brush farther up the beach had him taking in a quick, startled breath.

They called them the tupapau, and they were the nasty ghosts of those who couldn't rest. Horrible things, they were, with tongues three feet long they used to rip a man's face to shreds. Toby took a step back, wishing he had a couple of bamboo sticks he could rub together and make the tupapau disappear. But then he realized bamboo sticks would be useless, because what he was seeing was not the tupapau, but a line of British bluejackets. The air filled with the metallic, deadly click of a dozen or more rifles being cocked, and a crisp, authoritarian voice that said, "Mr. Jenkins, I presume?"

Jack followed a painfully familiar trail that left the narrow valley floor and climbed steadily, through thickets of tall dripping ferns and dark brakes of giant bamboo canes. Memories kept crowding in on him, images sometimes sweet, sometimes savage that flicked across his mind like the flashes of jagged light that zigzagged across his eyes, nearly blinding him. He kept trying to push the memories away, but it wasn't working.

At the base of a rocky outcrop he stopped to rest, his back pressed against the hard stone, his chest lifting heavily with his breathing. India didn't say anything, just looked at him in that still, thoughtful way she had. But when they pushed on, she went ahead of him.

As they neared the top of the ridge, the path grew steeper, the
soft
stone crumbling under their feet until they were grasping at parau branches and the roots of giant ferns to help them scramble up. Through the jagged flashes of darkness and light distorting his vision, he could see the spreading limbs of the old screw pine that grew at the end of the point, its strange tufts lifted up dark and gaunt to the glowing sky. But it didn't occur to him that they were losing the protective cloak of darkness until he heard India whisper, "The moon is coming out."

His head falling back, Jack stared up at a patch of blue-black sky thickly scattered with stars. The cloud cover was breaking up, scuttling away on the fast-moving trades. By the time they came out on the steep, windblown bluff, the sky looked as if it had been scoured clean, leaving the edges of the moon as clear and sharp as a razor. "Well, hell."

She went to the edge of the precipice, where the land fell away sharply to the empty lagoon. "There's no one here," she said softly.

Jack went to stand beside her, his gaze on the still, moon-glazed waters below. "No one we can see."

He realized she was no longer looking at the lagoon, but at him. "Your head hurts, doesn't it?"

He turned away from her, to the jumble of volcanic rocks that marked the entrance to a low cave set into the hillside rising above the bluff. He'd brought what was left of India's tin of safety matches with him, and he lit one now, the light flaring up bright and golden to dance over the dark, rough stones that closed in around him. Here and there, propped up in crevices, or set in rows on low ledges like so many precious ornaments, were white skulls that seemed to glow at him from out of the gloom.

He heard India suck in a quick breath behind him. "How old do you think they are?"

"Old. Probably from before Cook's time." Jack lifted the match high, the flickering flame passing over a scattering of loose rocks to gleam dully on a curve of smooth, aged wood. Then the flame burned down to his fingers and he said,
"Shit,"
and let the match fall.

"Here, give me the matches," India said, her voice echoing in the sudden darkness.

He handed her the tin. He heard a scratching hiss, then the small, close space glowed again with light.

Hunkering down on his heels, Jack reached to grasp the old half barrel and felt it collapse in his hands, wood splintering, rusted hoops falling with a clatter against stone. But in that brief instant before the match went out again, he saw it, lying there beneath the shattered staves: a large bundle, wrapped up in an old oilskin tied with braided pandanus.

"Sorry," said India.

Another match flared, chasing away the suffocating blackness. With shaking hands, Jack pushed aside the half-rotten wood and lifted the awkward parcel toward him. His fingers slid over hard edges beneath the worn cloth, his heart pounding with a mingling of relief and a strange, horrified aversion. The images were pressing in on him again, too fast and vivid to push away. He stood abruptly, just as the light went out.

"There's only one match left," India said.

"It doesn't matter. Let's get out of here."

She went ahead of him, ducking her head as she passed through the low opening out into the silvery moonlight. He followed more slowly, the oilskin-wrapped bundle tucked beneath one arm, the other hand outstretched as he felt his way carefully, for he was almost blind now, the jagged flashes of dark and light dancing a furious crescendo of pain across his eyes.

At the entrance to the cave he paused, his outstretched hand flat against the rock face, his chest heaving as he drew the fresh, sea-scented air deep into his lungs and tried to will the memories and the pounding pain they brought to go away.

He wasn't sure what told him something was wrong. He heard the distant thundering boom of the surf hitting the reef, and the sighing of the grass bending in the wind. Slowly, he turned his head to where India stood bathed in the silver-blue light of the night, a gun barrel pressed against her right temple.

"Hello, Jack," said Simon Granger.