Casca 17: The Warrior (18 page)

The whole island trembled. The mountain steamed, sprayed out ash and sand, and finally spewed forth a great river of boiling mud and rock.

The stream of molten lava coursed down the mountainside to the sea, where it plunged in amidst tremendous clouds of steam.

By night the river glowed red and the mountain shot brilliant glowing colors into the sky.

The ocean raged and the waters of the lagoon heaved up and inundated the land, big waves rushing up the hillsides and swamping the village. Then it retreated back to the lagoon and beyond, back over the reef and into the ocean. It scoured out the village as it left, sucking along with it everything it encountered.

The wave retreated outside the reef, leaving most of the lagoon dry behind it. Huge fish, giant squid, and enormous rays such as the villagers had never dreamed existed, lay panting on the dry bottom.

Then another giant wave came booming over the reef, refilling the lagoon as it raced to the shore, where its towering height crashed down upon the village like a great hammer, flattening everything before it and then retiring again, sucking whole houses, people, canoes, even the sturdy palisades into the lagoon and beyond, over the reef and out into the ocean.

Over and over the cycle was repeated. Great sharks and groupers, never seen inside the reef, were dumped inside the remains of the village. For two days and nights the volcano spurted fire and lava; the island heaved and the ocean raged.

Then on the third morning all was quiet.

The village was devastated. Not a house was standing and all three palisades had disappeared, as had the great chief's house. Where the new temple had stood surrounded by its gods, there was now nothing but a great hole. The huge roof pole had disappeared along with most of the stone idols.

Semele had disappeared along with about a hundred others.
Ibolo moved about the ruins of the village, tending to the survivors, doing what he could for the many broken arms and legs and heads.

Suddenly the ruined village was filled with the excited shrieks of the children. Unconcerned with the death and destruction all around them, the little ones were gamboling about on the beach, marveling upon the wonders that had been washed up from the depths, when they came upon Casca.

Their yells brought the whole village running, to cluster about the dead man whose arms still obstinately clutched the carvings of the post, as he had in his last desperate attempt to heave himself free. Locked to the pole like this, the corpse had ridden the pole back and forth a dozen times from the village to the ocean and back to the beach.

Ibolo moved to gently pry loose the clutching fingers, and started back in alarm.

The rest of the villagers retreated several paces and waited.

Ibolo gingerly approached again and touched Casca's arm. It was unmistakable—the corpse was cold, but nowhere near as cold as it should have been. Fresh blood showed around the
body's many bruises and cuts. Ibolo laid his head to Casca's back and listened. There was no sign of breathing, but Mbolo thought he detected life. He turned and shouted.

"Fire, fire, make fire here.
Quickly, quickly. Big fire here. Another one here." He pointed to places on the ground to either side of Casca's body as he squatted beside him and commenced a powerful massage.

In the hole Casca's breathing had shut down as he exhaled his last lungful of air through his nose in his last conscious
act. His next attempt to breath blocked his nose and mouth with earth, and suffocation quickly followed.

Or rather, something between hibernation and suspended animation, as the curse of the dying Jesus took effect and the process of cell decay was arrested, the heart and lungs and other organs lowering their activity to virtually zero.

The first gigantic heave of the earth had thrust the pole up out of the ground, and the first of the tsunami waves had floated the pole and Casca out to sea. The many trips back and forth had sluiced out his nose and mouth with seawater, clearing the air passages.

Now Mbolo's vigorous massage and the heat of the fires reactivated his body's systems, and he drew a short, shuddering breath.

The watching villagers ran away in terror as Mbolo continued the massage, but crept cautiously back as Casca drew another, longer breath. The huge islander continued the treatment until Casca was breathing deeply and regularly. Then he moistened Casca's lips with water, covered him with tapa cloths, squatted beside him and waited.

The earthquake knocked over the squatting Sonolo, awakening him from his deep trance.

He picked himself up and looked around in wonder. The whole world was rocking back and forth, trees were crashing to the ground, there was deafening noise, and ashes and glowing cinders of rock were falling from the sky.

Sonolo watched in wonder. His wonder increased when he glanced down and saw his own body. His skin hung in empty folds, the huge muscles and the layer of fat having wasted away. Through the slack envelope of skin Sonolo could see his bones. He looked like a dead man.

How had this happened? Why was he here on the rock of refuge? Had he been exiled from the village? For what crime? What had he done?

Slowly, in tattered fragments, pieces of his experience came back to him.

He suddenly recalled the modem English city Levuka, with its paved roads, and great, four-legged beasts that men rode on, and other four-legs that ran at these beasts' heels making a fearful noise.

Then he remembered the only four-legged animals he knew, the rats casually imported in the holds of Clevinger's ship, and he recalled the days when he was a little boy and Clevinger had been trading from the island.

He had fond memories of the defrocked New England parson who had not only taught him to speak English, but also to read and write, and who had especially impressed upon him the evils of whiskey.

With an awful, wrenching shock Sonolo recollected his drunken murder of his life-long friend, comrade, and rival, his cousin Sakuvi. H
e looked down at his wasted body and assumed that he, too, was dead, and was glad of it.

A sweet memory came to him of his wife and his three children, and then of his old mother, and of his dead father.

He looked around. Clevinger, preacher turned rationalist, was right. There was no life after death, or else his father would be here to greet him.

He wondered how long he'd been dead, how old his children might now be, and whom his wife might have married?

He had no qualms about the welfare of his family. He did not even have a concept of need, nor of loneliness.

The awful thought struck him that, as there was no life after
death, he was stuck here forever by himself. Forever, whatever that was. But if there were no life after death, what state was he in?

"Dammit it," he shouted in English, the way Clevinger used to when he was annoyed. "I never could understand anything of that after death business when I was alive. And now I'm dead, and I still don't understand it. Damn and blast."

The memory of the forest of masts of the scores of ships in Levuka harbor brought him back to the arrival at Navola of the Reverend Clevinger's ship.

The mad, defrocked parson had been a godsend for the village, for all the villages he visited. He robbed them of everything they possessed of any value, but it cost them nothing, for that was the value they put on all of it.

They had been lucky. Throughout the South Pacific the names of the merchant-adventurer missionaries had become bywords for avarice, lechery, cruelty, ruthlessness, and hypocrisy: Burns, Philip, Clevinger, Savage, Boyd, Hedstrom, Bentley. They combined missionary zeal with slaving, trading, and exploitation on a gigantic scale.

Clevinger cheated the natives like the rest, but he carried no Bible and no musket, and did not deal in slaves. He traded worthless baubles for priceless treasures, but unlike the others, he did not claim that he had been sent by God. Where his competitors handed out Bibles, the ex-parson handed out temperance and rationalist tracts, and taught English so that the natives might better appreciate the dire warnings of the evils of strong drink.

When he sailed away he left behind rats, fleas, mosquitoes, a quite unwarranted belief in the efficacy of steel rather than stone tools, an intense interest in minors and bangles and beads, and an urgent craving to sample the proscribed honors of the whiskey bottle.

Sonolo remembered his warning: "Man need not die to enter heaven or hell, he can find them here. And hell is always waiting in the bottom of the bottle."

Sonolo looked glumly around the refuge. "I have found the hell I went looking for, and now what am to do?"

Consciousness returned slowly. Casca awoke from terrifying dreams of entombment to see the fuzzy outline of Mbolo's face floating above him. He gasped and sank back into unconsciousness as Mbolo again moistened his lips.

When he woke again Mbolo's face was clear in his vision, but he could remember nothing. He sank back to sleep once more, this time into a quiet slumber.

He woke again from nightmare, and in a frenzy tried to rise. Mbolo restrained him gently and calmed him, holding him like a child in his great arms and putting a bowl of thin fish soup to his lips.

Casca sipped, then sucked greedily at the liquid, gulping it down. In a moment he vomited it all up and sank back to sleep again.

When next he woke he was lying on a grass mat in what remained of
Setole's house, Mbolo's face still above him. He eagerly drank another bowl of soup and motioned for more.

Setole, Vivita, and Mbolo nursed him for several days, and at last he was able to sit up, then to stand. Finally, leaning on Setole's and Vivita's arms, he could walk.

"Now," said Mbolo, "we know who you are. You are the great, white bearded one whose coming has been foretold for countless generations. You are Rangaroa, the man-god.

"I sure as hell am not, Mbolo. You've seen me bleed. I'm no god. I don't even have a beard, and when I do, it ain't white."

Mbolo smiled in quiet triumph. "Yes, I have seen that your wounds do bleed, but I have also seen that they heal very quickly, and I have wondered about that. You came to us in the hurricane that destroyed our old temple. Your ship bore your name, Rangaroa, the god of the sea. You were buried alive in the new temple and survived, and you survived the earthquake and the great wave. And not one of the many women you have lain with is with child, while many of our women are pregnant to the men who came with you. And you do have a beard. And it is white."

Casca's hand shot to his face. There was
a stubble of beard. Damn, of course his beard had continued to grow in the grave. But white?

Yes. He knew of this too. More than once he had dug out men who had been buried alive, and their hair and their beard had turned stark white. He didn't need a minor to know that this had happened to him too.

"We are very pleased to have you return to us as god and chief, now that Semele had gone."

"Dammit, Mbolo!"
Casca shouted desperately. "You're the biggest and the oldest and the most experienced man in the village—you should be the chief."

Mbolo smiled tolerantly. "This is not possible, for I am above the chief."

For a moment Casca tried to see the point of what he thought was a joke. Then he realized that Mbolo was not joking. While it was Semele who conducted all discussions, weighed information, and pronounced decisions, nothing was ever decided contrary to Mbolo's view.

"Above the chief?
What's your job anyway?"

Mbolo's patient smile lit up his placid face. "Clevinger used to say that Semele was the king and me the pope."

"High priest!" Casca exclaimed in confusion. "But I never see you about any priestly duties."

"Duties?'

"Yeah, like preaching at people, or praying to the gods, stuff like that."

Again Mbolo smiled, and he spoke to Casca as he might have spoken to an intelligent but unobservant child.

"My only duty is to see that we do not try to move the world in ways contrary to the way of the great spirit that moves all."

"And this
great spirit tells you that I should be chief?"

"No. It is clear that you must be chief."

Casca groaned. Why the hell hadn't he made his escape when he had it all organized?

The contest of strength with the temple pole.
His mania to show that he was the strongest man in the village had put him in this position. Again.

Don't you ever learn, Casca?
he asked himself. He shrugged. "Nothing to do but go with it," he muttered to himself. Aloud he said: "So I'm to be king and you the Pope."

"No," said Mbolo. "That is what Clevinger said, it is not how it is. We are a family, and you are like the man of the family, and I like the woman."

"With the woman above the man?"

"Of course, yes."

"Hmm. Maybe I am beginning to see. How much time was I in the ground?" he asked.

"In the ground and in the sea twice a night and a day, and we found you today," Mbolo answered.

Casca smiled. Then he saw Mbolo smiling back, and quickly mastered his features. But inwardly he was grinning happily. The sail canoe and his stash of provisions might yet be in place. He could escape tonight or tomorrow. Very well. For now he would go along with the game, playing the cards he had been dealt.

He nodded to Mbolo. To himself he thought,
So, I'm god. Well, it's not the first time!