Casca 17: The Warrior (9 page)

"Ah," said Semele, "this is wisdom. We will take the advice of your sage and bring the warriors of Bau to fight us here, where we are strongest."

The Chinese cook bowed. "Sun Tzu also say: `Close to field of battle await enemy from afar; at rest await exhausted enemy; well-fed troops await hungry ones’."

Semele smiled.
"More great wisdom. The men of Bau will be weary with travel. We can harass them on the beach and give them no peace, but retire here so that they must pursue us."

Chou bowed again. "Sun Tzu
say: `In early morning spirits keen, in day spirits flag, in evening thoughts turn toward home’.”

"Aha." Chief Semele grunted.
"Exactly. We shall bring the host of the enemy here with taunts, but during the day we will only harass them in hot sun while our host rests in the shade. And when they are tired and hungry and wanting to go home, then we shall attack."

Mbolo spoke to Chou. "What says your sage is the basis of war?"

Chou answered without a moment's hesitation. "All war is based on deception."

Sonolo's forehead creased in a worried frown.
"Deception? What of morality, fortitude, courage, wisdom, preparedness?"

Chou clapped his hands and accepted the
bilo
of kava he was being offered. He drained the cup, clapped three times, intoned "
matha
," and turned to Sonolo. "All of these are important. A wise and benevolent war chief who enjoys the confidence of his men will be strong in war; warriors who are well fed, prepared, rested, will fight well; strictness in discipline, fair reward and punishment will ensure that warriors will obey orders. All these are important, but they are but elements of war. The base of all war is deception."

M
bolo spoke to the others. "What do you think of this?"

Sakuvi spoke: "This sage is wise, and his advice is old and no doubt well tested. I think it is true."

"True?" Mbolo snapped. "How can it be true? That deception is stronger than truth? This is nonsense."

Silence spread quickly through the house. Even the chattering girls at the back of the room were quiet.

Finally Mbolo spoke slowly. "For us the truth is important. Truth is vital. Truth is paramount."

Sonolo nodded. "To go into battle against the truth is to ask for defeat."

There was another silence. Chou Lui bowed his head to his chest, his eyes closed. He sat there as if taking no further interest in the discussion.

Casca looked at the cook. He was himself a longstanding student of the Chinese master Sun Tzu and owed many of his victories to his advice. Yet he, too, knew what Sonolo meant about the need for respect for truth.

Chou's head snapped up and he spoke. "Let us consider the scorpion fish. It lies on the bottom of the sea and cannot be seen. Here is deception. But surely, too, there is truth, for is it not the true nature of this fish to lie thus waiting for its food?"

Several heads nodded in agreement, but the foreheads were creased in puzzlement.

"Comes a man seeking fish to eat, and the fish takes a deep breath of water, blows itself up to great size, projects its spines, floats on the surface so that it looks dead and repulsive and unfit to eat. More deception. And more of the true nature of the fish."

More heads nodded, but the puzzlement increased.

"But the man is not deceived. He is hungry. He takes the fish for he has heard that it is good to eat. He eats it and dies. His friends will never again eat this fish."

"The truth," Mbolo shouted, "see the truth."

"Yes," Chou Lui agreed, "the truth. The loathsome-looking fish is poisonous and none will eat it. But this truth is one more deception, for when this fish is properly cleaned it is safe to eat, delicious and fortifying. This fish survives by deception, yet always acts in truth."

Mbolo snapped his fingers. "I believe I see. Sonolo, do you see?"

Sonolo stroked his chin, scratched his shoulders, rubbed his belly. He pursed his lips and shook his head several times. "Perhaps," he said at last, "perhaps I do see. This is a new way to look at things, but perhaps I do see. Perhaps deceit can be of merit."

Semele rolled his head, raked his fingers through the thick, graying curls. "But we are strong in truth. In deception we are unskilled. How shall we learn? Who will teach us?"

Casca looked carefully at the floor. Larsen had told him that all the damage from the hurricane had been repaired and that he was ready to sail.

"Not me, old chief," he muttered to himself. "I intend to be well gone from here before Cakabau attacks."

That night, somehow, none of the young lovelies attempted to seduce Casca, and Vivita went home with him as if she had never done otherwise. He assumed that she had her own, probably physiological, reasons for staying away for a few nights, and so had allowed some of the other young women at the village to keep him company. In the morning he was surprised at how pleased he was to awake and find her ugly face next to his.

When Casca got to the chief's house he found that there was to be no work in the village that day. Instead all the strongest, bravest men in the village were to compete for the honor of being sold in Levuka in trade for the muskets that would be used to defend the village against Cakabau.

Casca and the crew of the
Rangaroa
were invited to compete in the games, but to a man they found a seven-year contract to work under the whip on Australia's sugar fields an unattractive prospect, and all of them declined to compete.

Casca was irritated by the whole idea of men competing to sell themselves into slavery, no matter how worthy the cause, and was delighted when Vivita suggested that they spend the day visiting her family in the village where she had been born.

They climbed the mountain, passing the recently acquired lands of the Lakuvi, and then descended into the enemy village.

Casca had not understood that Vivita had been born a mortal enemy of the Navola tribe, and had not realized that this was the village she had intended to visit. He was much reassured by the feel of the .38 in his pocket.

They were greeted rapturously. Vivita had been a favorite daughter of the village before her capture in a raid by the Navola men, and Casca was a famous hero.

All activity in the village ceased, and they sat in the chief's house and drank kava and feasted and talked until late into the night.

All the men wanted to sit close to Casca, and the women, it seemed, could not hear enough of Vivita's life amongst the enemy. Three or four young girls were especially keen to hear of life in the Navola village, and Casca learned that these girls were Navola who had been captured by the Lakuvi as Vivita had been taken by the Navola.

They seemed as happy to be captives in the enemy household as Vivita was in the Navola village, and it appeared to Casca that they could probably leave if they so wished and walk back across the mountain to their original homes.

But he was really surprised to meet two young warriors, one a few years younger than he himself appeared to be, the other not much more than a boy. These were men of the Navola who had seen and been captivated by Lakuvi women but had been unsuccessful in their attempts at capturing them, and so had themselves changed villages.

More and more it seemed to Casca that the historical enmity between these two villages was a great convenience to both peoples. It kept them sufficiently apart so that each maintained its identity, and
provided the rationale for the occasional much enjoyed wars and even more enjoyable cannibal feasts and orgies that followed them. And the raids to capture enemy women, together with the occasional voluntary intermarriage and the hospitality to visitors, ensured that neither village became inbred.

He was musing on this matter in the soft afterglow of many cups of kava when he realized that several young women were sitting close by him while Vivita, though still alongside, seemed remote.

He sat comfortably on his haunches and accepted another bilo of kava while he waited interestedly to see which of these young lovelies was to succeed in winning him for the night.

For the first time Casca felt something of what the islanders liked so much about kava. The pleasant, faintly numbing sensation that he felt in his lips and gums and tongue now seemed to spread throughout his body, so that he felt pleasantly at ease and unconcerned with the petty details of existence. An effect, he thought, perhaps somewhere between fine cognac and hashish, yet quite unlike either.

Life here in these cannibal isles was undeniably pleasant, and the drug's effect seemed to alert him to this pleasantness and to confirm it to himself. He wondered why this aspect of kava had not been apparent to him earlier, and assumed that the drug worked by some process of accumulation within the body.

Amidst all this pleasantness there were these lovely ladies who were playing some sort of game which he couldn't see or hear, and certainly couldn't understand, but in which he knew that he was the prize. When the game was over he found that he had been won by Lalonia, the prettiest of the girls, a lusty, busty belle of perhaps sixteen years.

As they crossed the village square he looked at her in the moonlight and wondered if he had played any part in the game. Perhaps, he thought, they kept some kind of score of his glances, body movements, sighs, gestures. Perhaps. Perhaps, too, he was not even in the game, but merely a toy to be won and played with for the night and discarded in the morning. He decided he must question Sandy about it. The canny young Scot had surely found out how the game worked.

Lalonia took him to a small empty hut, freshly swept clean, with a sleeping mat in a corner, fruits and coconuts beside it.

It must have been the effect of the kava. Their lovemaking seemed to go on forever. He awoke and was completely surprised to find Vivita beside him.

They lingered in the enemy village for several days, and each night Casca went to bed with a different woman, to wake each morning with Vivita. He guessed there was some matter of protocol and courtesy involved. As a visitor, and more, a celebrity, he was entitled to all the hospitality the village could offer. And Vivita yielded her place to those young girls whose role it was to extend a part of that hospitality.

He also thought that perhaps his prowess as a warrior was held to be of value in improving the bloodline of the tribe, and that one or more of these young women might hope to bear his child. Perhaps this was even the reason Vivita had suggested the visit.

Vivita, he guessed, returned to his mat before dawn each morning to assert her marital rights and to make it clear that Casca would not be staying in the village with any of these women.

Casca also assumed that she herself spent the greater part of the night with another man, since she didn't bother making love with him, which was most unusual for her.

Whatever the reasons for the arrangement, it suited Casca very well, and it came as a surprise to him when one morning Vivita jerked her head in the direction of the Navola village to indicate that it was time to return.

With only the briefest of good-byes they left the village where Vivita had been born and grew to womanhood, and set out for the village of her sworn enemies, where she lived placidly and happily.

They arrived back at the village to find that the
Rangaroa
had sailed, bearing away on her decks a hundred of the best men of the village to be sold as slaves in the marketplace at Levuka, the capital of Cakabau's new kingdom of Fiji.

Casca was more than a little unhappy when he learned that the
Rangaroa
had sailed without him, without even giving him a chance to say farewell to the crew, who had become such good friends. But then, he had farewelled enough ships, said good-bye to enough friends. He was also unhappy to find himself marooned on the island. If ever another merchant ship were to call at the island, it was likely to be the slaver savage, or Boyd or Bentley, or some other Australian just as bad.

He was especially uneasy about the fact that Sonolo had set out to buy the muskets on which his own liberty might depend without consulting with him. To be sure, any muskets would do, and there would not be many choices offered in the small town of Levuka. But the feeling of unease persisted.

Casca didn't know that in addition Semele had neglected to tell him that the
Rangaroa
might be returning. He wanted Casca's full attention given to Cakabau's imminent attack.

The games had lasted all day and much of the night, and included every test of strength, agility, skill, and courage that the mind of man could conceive using trees and mountains and coral reefs and underwater caves, pounding surf, calm lagoon waters, sharks and stingrays.

The drums called the whole village to the square, and the first event started then and there.

At one corner stood the great pole of the ruined temple, surrounded by its ruins and carved gods. At a signal from Semele every young man in the village raced for the pole, elbowing, pushing each other out of the way, tripping each other up, fighting to be first to get to the pole. One man might knock down half a dozen others, but would only just begin his climb when he would be dragged down and another would take his place, only to be dragged down in his turn.

Then there were three or four men on the pole, each trying to drag down the man above him and kick away those below him. One made it halfway up, to be seized from below by two others, so that all three crashed heavily to the ground.

Eventually one man did make it to the top, but fell when he attempted to stand erect. And at last there was one man standing on the forty-foot pole, kicking away the arms that tried to clutch at his legs and bring him crashing to the ground.

The drum sounded, and everybody cheered the one who had earned the right to be enslaved.

Another proved his worth by ducking, weaving, running around the square without being hit by any of the stones, sticks, fruit, and coconuts thrown by the villagers. The several contestants knocked unconscious were laid out alongside the groaning wrecks from the pole-climbing contest.

A little later in the morning Semele's son qualified for the trip to Australia by capturing a small shark with his bare hands. The feat was accomplished by diving onto the shark from a canoe, grasping it about the body, and hurling it into the boat. None of the other contestants managed to catch one, and miraculously none lost an arm or a leg to the several enraged sharks that they were after.

Spearing a stingray and maneuvering it in its death throes to the shore by riding on its
back, got another the right to end his life cutting sugarcane under the lash.

One of Mbolo's sons qualified by diving on the reef, staying down longer than anybody else, and coming up with the biggest basket of lobsters.

The biggest rock that could be found was rolled to the edge of the square. A contestant carried it until he collapsed in exhaustion. The next contestant carried it back to and beyond his starting point. Another managed to carry it farther, then another a little farther, until another slave was finally chosen.

The best wrestlers and runners and swimmers were selected. Men slapped each other's faces until one or the other collapsed. Some walked into the fires and stood on the hot stones amongst the coals until all others had fled the heat or collapsed.

Men knotted vines about their ankles to dive from the top of the temple pole, the winner being the one who best calculated the length and spring of the vines so that they stopped him just short of the ground. Those who cut their vines too short lost the contest. Those who cut them too long would never be any use as slaves, anyway, nor as much of anything else.

By the end of the day the cream of the manhood of the village had been selected for slavery; however, two were dead, some more dying, and
a score more gravely injured.