Casca 17: The Warrior (4 page)

Light winds stayed with them all the way to Tahiti, and Casca discovered another aspect of sailing in the tropics. Broiling sun burned down relentlessly out of a cloudless, bright-blue sky. The sea was a vast, flat, shimmering mirror of silver blue. The
Rangaroa
wallowed along, barely making steerage way, rolling and pitching until Casca's stomach shook and he felt queasy.

The crew grew daily more restive and querulous. The ill-natured Weston had been dismissed from duty, and the captain now stood his watch. Weston spent most of the sweltering days below in his cabin, occasionally coming on deck in the middle of the night. He ate alone and didn't speak to anyone.

One morning he was missing, and the shark's tooth hung on Sandy's chest. Larsen, who had kept the log blank, now brought it up to date, recording Weston as lost overboard and not mentioning anything of his offense or the fight with Casca.

One soft, moonlit night the lookout cried, "Land ho," and everybody raced onto deck.

Far off on the horizon a shapeless blur like a low cloud could be seen against the sky. Larsen nodded happily.

"Yeah, looks like land, for sure. Just keep your heading and call me if it moves." He went back to his bunk.

"If it moves?" Casca queried the helmsman.

He
grinned. "These are strange waters. Things are often not what they seem. Could be a cloud, could be nothing. Your eyes can play tricks on you in these latitudes."

Casca stayed on deck, enthralled at the mystery of the distant island. And so it proved to be, growing larger and larger as the hours passed.

But after a little Casca began to believe his eyes were indeed playing tricks on him. The island took on the shape of a voluptuous woman lying gracefully on her back, her legs spread, knees pointing to the sky.

He shook his head, but the vision persisted.

Liam was now at the helm and he grinned at Casca. "What do you see?"

"Well, I suppose it is an island, but..."

"A promising-looking island, wouldn't you say?"

Casca laughed. "So, it looks the same to you? I'm glad to hear it.
Thought maybe I was going crazy."

"It's Hua Wahine," the Irishman said. "
In the ugly language of the barbarians across the Irish sea, those lovely words translate into 'woman's cunt'."

"Mmm," Casca mused, "I like Hua Wahine."

Once ashore he like the island even better. It was an island that kept its promise. The women, wahines in the local language, were plump, with wide, long thighs and shapely, short lower legs; they had lustrous black hair that reached to their waists, large dark eyes, tiny, turned-up noses, wide mouths, prognathous chins.

The French soldiers and civil servants who controlled the island considered them ugly. The French missionaries, who were kept busy destroying their temples and trying to persuade these women to cover their breasts, considered them to be hopelessly depraved.

At first sight Casca was not sure whether he considered them beautiful or hideous. He quickly made up his mind and found them the most delightful women he had met in his life—lovely to look at, light-hearted, fun loving, playfully amorous.

They were welcomed into a village of thatch-roofed bamboo huts built around a wide open space entirely shaded by a single great teak tree.

There was a great chief's house—one enormous, open room without walls. The floor was of millions of tiny white beach pebbles, and the columns that held up the great thatched roof were whole trees stripped of their bark and elaborately carved and painted. Other trees, similarly decorated, formed the roof trusses that spanned an open space as wide as a European cathedral.

At one corner of the village there was a roofless stone temple containing a number of gigantic gods carved of stone, the biggest sculptures Casca had ever seen. But nowhere near the village, nor anywhere else that he traveled about the island, did Casca see such stones, or even stones of the size used for the temple walls. It was clear that it would take many men to lift even the smallest of these. The huge stone gods could not possibly have been moved without either horses or elephants.

Or, perhaps, steam engines. But neither horses nor elephants, nor engines of any kind had ever been seen on the island.

"Their ancestors built the temples," Larsen told him in reply to his questions.

"But how?"

"There is no explanation," Larsen replied. "Take my word for it. In a lifetime of questions and investigation you will get no closer to the secret. There is simply no explanation."

Casca shrugged. One more unexplainable mystery meant nothing to him. He went back to enjoying the local women, the fruits that fell ripe from breadfruit and mango and papaya and coconut trees, and the fish and crabs and lobster and turtles that the ocean provided in return for only the slightest effort.

He spent each of their three nights ashore with a different young girl. He would have been content with the first one, or the second, but it seemed that the girls themselves preferred to rotate amongst the crew.

When they talked enthusiastically of the children that they might procreate, he found it necessary to lie to them —recalling that afternoon when, startled by the voice from the cross, he had wiped his hand across his face. A few drops of the tortured preacher's blood had run down the haft of his spear and onto his hand, and when they touched his lips his body was seized in convulsions that threw him to the ground at the foot of the cross. From that day his own blood had been poisonous, his sperm lifeless.

He had never sired a child and knew that he never would, but he promised each girl a beautiful blue-eyed babe, and wished in his heart that it could be true.

As the
Rangaroa
prepared to sail, Casca and the whole crew were unhappy to be leaving this land where music and love and laughter never stopped, but they reassured each other that they would be just as pleasantly welcomed in Fiji.

"But surely the Fijians are cannibals?" he said.

"That they are," was the reply, "and the hungriest, if not quite the fiercest, cannibals in the whole Pacific—and the friendliest, funniest bunch of fuckers on the face of the earth."

"Eating people isn't funny," Casca said.

"Ah," sandy answered, "for the Fijians everything is funny, even hurricanes and earthquakes. And a dead man is only a piece of meat when all is said and done, and if he ain't eaten, he'll only go rotten. There's no other meat in these parts, do you see?"

"Then why aren't the Tahitians cannibals?" he asked. Everybody on deck laughed.

"But of course they are," Liam told him. "You don't see it every day, and no more you will in Fiji, but all the people of the Pacific eat people."

Casca thought of the three lovely, soft, feminine bodies that he'd held in his arms, of their gentle nature, sweet smiles, and affectionate lovemaking. It was hard to believe that these delightful creatures were greedy, bloodthirsty cannibals. He privately decided that the crew was joshing him, that it couldn't be so.

"We're going to be in Fiji for weeks," Liam said, "so you'll be sure to see some cannibal feasts."

Ulf broke out laughing, an event so rare that everybody looked at him.

"You might see it sooner," he spluttered through his laughter, "lookee, here comes the new hand."

Larsen was still ashore, seeking to hire a man to make up the crew shortage, and now he was approaching the ship, accompanied by a huge black man carrying a great, carved chest on one shoulder. Larsen was a big man, but his companion was much bigger.

Casca had never seen a man like him. His great mop of jet-black hair was like that of some Africans, but thicker, longer, and stronger. The face had high-set cheekbones, a finely chiseled nose and chin, a wide, generously lipped mouth, and eyes set wide apart in deep sockets. Features almost like a black European, Casca thought.

As the two men came aboard Casca saw that, in fact, the man was not black, but a deep, coppery brown like the stock of an old musket.

"Meet the new bosun," Larsen said as he came aboard. "Foster," he continued to an able seaman, "show the bosun around will you?" He hurried away to attend to his many concerns.

Foster came from Charleston, South Carolina, and before the Civil War his parents had owned a few slaves. He was not impressed with the idea of working under a black bosun.

"What about Liam?" he asked after Larsen.

"He's new second mate," Larsen threw over his shoulder as he descended the companionway
, "and Ulf's mate.''

The seamen on deck let out a cheer. Liam did a little comic jig, and Ulf smiled. Born at sea, he had started work on his father's boat at four, and it had taken forty-three more years to make it to the rank of first mate.

"So what are ye all waiting for?" he snapped at his crew, "we'll never clear port if you lazy bums don't shift your asses."

They moved quickly to ready the ship for sea.

"He's a glum son of a bitch," the irrepressible Sandy chuckled when they were safely forward, "but he's probably the best damn seaman on the planet."

There was a small chorus of ayes from the other sailors.

In the stern Ulf turned to the Fijian, who was grinning hugely and smiled even wider when Ulf pointed to the companionway.

"You'll find another heathen in the galley," Ulf said. "
He'll break out some blankets for ye."

"Yes, sir," the Fijian grinned, "but Kini not heathen. I'm Christian."

"The hell you are," Ulf snorted. "Christians are white." He turned away to his duties, and Kini went below to the galley.

The fine weather and light winds carried them into the Koro Sea, a small, island-fringed sea about the size of what European sailors call the Great North Sea, set within the planet-reaching proportions of the mighty Pacific. It was here they had run into the violent storm that nearly finished them off.

The storm had lasted for several days and nights, and now it seemed they were coming out of it. The seas were growing calmer by the hour, the wind now a steady, heavy blow, a good, roaring, following wind to sail with.

The damaged
Rangaroa
was way off course, somewhere south southwest of the fabled Fiji islands, discovered and named the Cannibal Isles by Captain Bligh on his way back to England after the Bounty mutineers had set him adrift in an open boat without charts or compass.

The British had ignored the Cannibal Isles until 1860, when they were annexed by the governor of New South Wales, Sir Hercules Robinson. Fiji then became nominally a British colony. But in fact it was the possession of the Australian descendants of the gang of military criminals who had stolen that huge island out of the real sovereignty of the British Empire by yet another mutiny against the same Bligh, when he was governor of the Australian penal colony.

With the end of slavery in the United States in the wake of the Civil War, the small clique that owned most of Australia saw the opportunity to further enrich themselves. By using slaves from the south Pacific islands, they grew sugar and cotton more cheaply than could be matched elsewhere in the world.

A gang of missionary traders armed Cakabau, the chief of the tiny ninety-acre island of Bau, and declared him king of Fiji. Cakabau then gratefully ceded the whole of Fiji to Britain, and Sir Hercules Robinson and the Whitehall government obligingly ratified the deal, legitimatizing the reign of the bloodthirsty cannibal chief. By 1867 his regime had become infamous for the killing and eating of his subjects and the enslavement of those whom he was too sated to eat.

The
Rangaroa
was carrying cargo for Levuka, the cannibal monarch's capital, and Larsen knew that it was safe to put into port there. There was no telling just what sort of reception they might get on any of the other Cannibal Isles.

But just now there was no telling where any such island might be.

Studying the navigation chart, Larsen looked irritable, and at the same time amused. "Look at this, will you?" he said, pounding the chart with a finger as thick as a small belaying pin. "It says here: 'Some reports of a small group of islands in this vicinity.' For Christ's sake, what sort of sailing direction do ye call that?"

"Things
is different in these parts," said Liam, who was studying the chart with him. "It was around these parts that Gulliver discovered Brobdignag, and not too far away he found Lilliput."

He spoke matter-of-factly, as if he would not be at all surprised to glance out the porthole and see a man standing in the sea and towering over the schooner, or another only a few inches tall, dancing on the head of a belaying pin.

"Bah, fairy tales," snorted Ulf. "ships have gone looking for dose islands and found nutting. Just fairy tales."

"Fiction anyway," said Larsen. "I've read Swift's book."

"Have ye now?" Liam chuckled. "Then read this." He laid on the chart table an open copy of the Pacific Islands Pilot of 1864. "These reports is not from a dotty old Irish priest like Swift, but from hard-nosed English insurance men."

Larsen picked up the book and read: "Lloyd's agent reported hereabouts the island of Tanakuvi, longitude 172 49 West and latitude 19 36 South. But HMS Vengeance, searching for the island, reported depth of fifty-seven fathoms."

Larsen slammed the book shut. "It's enough to make you believe in the devil himself."

"Then you're learning something at last," chuckled Liam, ducking as Larsen playfully swung a great fist near his nose.

"There's been islands appearing and disappearing in these parts ever since Magellan found the Tuamotus four hundred years ago." Ulf chuckled drily.

"The question is," Larsen said, "what is here now? This chart is no bloody help at all. There's a ship lost every week running into uncharted islands hereabout, and I don't intend for
Rangaroa
to be another one."

Liam opened the well-thumbed copy of the Pacific Islands Pilot and read: "In this vicinity the
Clara Bella
reported rocks in 1836, and the
Coyne
reported a group of small islands in 1842. However, in 1849 the
Carl Gustaf
found a depth of fifty-six fathoms."

"So?" the captain queried.

Liam closed the book and slammed it on the chart table in disgust. "That's all. Not another word."

"Jesus'" Larson shouted.

"Land ho," came a hail from the deck, and everybody scrambled for the companionway.

This time there was no doubt. The island was very clear on the horizon. Larsen looked at Sandy, who was on watch.

"How long has that been there?"

The Scot grimaced and shook his head.
"Just now, skipper. Just now. Even clear air hides things here, dammit."

Larsen looked up at the bright, cloudless sky, then back at the island and shook his head.
"Well, thank God, we saw it anyway. Let's get these sails down. There's sure to be a reef somewhere between us and the island." He shouted to the man out on the bowsprit. "How's the water?"

"Deep and clear," the seaman shouted back.

Under reduced sail the
Rangaroa
slowly approached the island. Larsen paced the deck restlessly. The whole crew was on the lookout—on the bowsprit, in the crow's nest, all over the rigging.

The man on the bowsprit called, "Changing water."

"Ready anchor," Larsen shouted, and the crew sprang to ready the forward anchor as Larsen himself went out onto the bowsprit.

Casca was as far forward as he could get without getting in the way of the crew, and he could see that the water had changed from deep blue to a dark green. As he watched it changed again, to a lighter green.

"Ready about, anchor over," Larsen shouted from the bowsprit, and came running back to the helm. The crew hefted the heavy anchor over the side and it hung there ready to drop.

Now Casca could see faint ripples ahead of the ship where an underwater reef disturbed the movement of the sea.

"Lee ho," Larsen shouted, and Sandy put the helm over. The sailors on the port side let go the ropes they were holding, and those on the starboard side hauled on theirs while others ran across the deck helping the light breeze move the sails to the other tack.

The
Rangaroa
came slowly around and the island was astern.

"Sail ho," one of the seamen shouted as he saw a boat put out from the distant island.

Soon they could see canoes coming from several points: sail canoes—two and three hulls lashed together with great, broad decks between and enormous triangular sails; single outrigger sail canoes—the outrigger a deftly shaped log, the canoe itself dug out of a log; and huge dugout canoes with twenty men at the paddles. The dugouts came racing through the water, passing the sail craft, the crews singing lustily in time with their strokes.

And rafts.
Rafts of bamboo poles lashed together with vines, a single, small sail on a short mast. These came out over the reef to the
Rangaroa
and surrounded her, their smiling crews shouting welcomes.

"
Haere mai, haere mai, Valangi. Bula, bula
. Welcome,
Valangi
, welcome. Bienvenidos," and some other words in Chinese and Japanese, or perhaps Malay. They shouted welcome in all the languages they knew.

"
Valangi
," Sandy explained, "means men from the sky." He jerked his head upward toward several seamen sitting in the crosstrees. "Looks to them like we climb down the masts out of the sky."

The islanders pointed to where the other craft were coming through the unseen opening in the reef.

Larsen glanced at Ulf. "The reef might be tricky, but we'll be a damn sight safer, inside than out here. We can't sail farther till we repair the rudder anyway."

All right with me
, thought Casca, who had already decided that he would feel more comfortable with the reef between him and the Pacific, rather than riding between the Pacific and the reef. "Yeah," he said, "I'll be happy to be inside the reef."

"Unless they decide to eat us," the dour Greenlander muttered flatly, giving Casca something to think about.

These people were very different from those they had left in Tahiti. They were darker, almost black, like Kini, but they wore their hair in great crinkly mops, as he did.

The first of the canoes had now reached the
Rangaroa
, and Larsen signaled to them that he would follow them back through the opening.

In a moment the crew had again shaken out
Rangaroa's
sails, and she was under way, guided by the flotilla of rafts that took up position between the ship and the reef, shepherding her to the opening, where canoes were coming out. Just beyond the rafts Casca could see the outline of coral rocks beneath the surface.

As the ship came to the opening in the reef the wind suddenly died.

"On the fucking doorstep, like always," Larsen shouted as he put the helm up, the ship responding slowly to the torn and splintered rudder.

"Like fuckin' always,"
Sandy yelled as he raced forward to hand the foresail across the foredeck.

All over the deck crewmen were handling rope and hauling sail as they sought to change tack in the suddenly slackened breeze, moving the sails to use what wind there might be to keep the ship clear of the coral.

The foresail filled in the light wind, the other sails bellied slightly, and the
Rangaroa
veered away from the hacksaw teeth of the reef.

Lines of intertwined vines were passed aboard and bent together with ropes on the
Rangaroa's
deck, and first one then several of the twenty-man canoes took up the tow, hauling the ship through the reef opening and into the safe waters of the lagoon.

As they glided through the reef Casca could see the
jagged coral only yards away from the side of the
Rangaroa
. Then they were inside.

In deep, calm water Larsen let go of the helm and Sandy dropped the slack end of the foresail sheet. Seamen were furling sail, and all over the deck the crew were belaying rope. The anchor chain ran out into the bottomless well of the old volcanic crater that formed the harbor.

Casca could see the hook dangling fathoms below, but nowhere near the bottom.

It was just sunset, and now a faint offshore breeze came to them, carrying with it the scent of frangipani blossoms. Casca felt very much at ease.

He looked at the others. They were smiling. He took a deep breath of the perfume-laden air. And he smiled.

Larsen addressed his crew on the deck. "There's no way to guess what we might be heading into here. Kini tells me he doesn't know these people, but they seem as friendly as Fijians—might be as bloodthirsty too. So keep your knives handy but out of sight. Steel is unknown in these parts, and I'll maroon any man who gives a girl his knife to play with."

"Not what I had in mind at all." Casca laughed as he patted his knife, concealed in its sheath in his inner jacket pocket. He wondered if Larsen had a revolver somewhere about him as he felt the weight of his own .38 and its shells in his jacket pockets.

He took a deep breath of the flower-scented air. And he smiled—a big, toothy smile.