The Sun Is God (10 page)

“The famous Herr Engelhardt! We will get to meet him?” Miss Pullen-Burry asked.

“Of course!” Harry said cheerfully.

They walked along the track with Will lagging a little further behind. He tugged Kessler's arm, so that he could admonish him. “Why did you have to tell him that we'd come here to look into Lutzow's death?” Will whispered. “We could have drawn him out a little first.”

Kessler resented the tug at his shirt and gave Will a black look. “This is not some English colony where the population has been brow beaten into silence by generations of oppression by the Red Coats—these are free Germans; they will tell us everything we need to know with open hearts.”

Will nodded. “Open hearts, eh? We'll see about that.”

Kessler increased his pace to catch up with Miss Pullen-Burry and Harry, and after a minute's persecution by fat black flies Will reluctantly increased his pace too. When he got back to the triad they were quoting poetry at one another, something the Germans down the club did too, insufferable bastards.

“
Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt. Und ruhig fließt der Rhein. Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt, Im Abendsonnenschein
,” Harry said, which got a little round of applause from Miss Pullen-Burry.

“Sorry to interrupt, er, Harry. Can I ask, how many Cocovores—I believe that is the correct word—of you are there?” Will asked.

Harry shook his head sadly. “I am ashamed to say that there are less than a dozen of us left. Poor Max. August thinks as many as a hundred could live on this island.”

“A hundred here?” Will said skeptically.

“Oh yes, it is quite possible, Herr Prior, and it will happen sooner or later. Our pamphlets have been taken up all over Germany. Perhaps next year August will return for a series of lectures. And when we grow in numbers we will populate Kabakon and the other nearby islands.”

“Maybe the whole of German New Guinea,” Will said sardonically.

“Yes!” the handsome young man replied enthusiastically.

They had gone about three hundred meters from the beach now and were at the end of the little track through the coconut plantations.

“Welcome to the Augustburg!” Harry announced.

“Delightful,” Miss Pullen-Burry exclaimed.

Will looked at Klaus with mild astonishment. The settlement was a good bit more elaborate than he had been expecting. Not exactly a Polynesian fantasy but this was no Crusoe shack with a couple of goats tied up nearby in a pen. There were a dozen large dwellings in a near circle around a central piazza. The buildings were nothing like those of the Kanak or even the crudely built plantation houses over in Herbertshöhe. Some of them bore a peculiar similarity to Swiss chalets and all were thick-timbered with sturdy roofs made from corrugated iron, which had been painted a brilliant red. A well had been dug on the far side of the central plaza and a banqueting table, obviously of German manufacture, had been placed under the shade of a coconut palm for communal meals. There was a round gazebo with comfortable looking armchairs in it and a privy house on the edge of the trees. The oddest thing however was definitely the twenty-foot-tall totem pole fashioned from a single trunk and depicting a dozen fantastically carved heads in various states of agony.

“A veritable other Eden,” Miss Pullen-Burry exclaimed.

“Charming,” Kessler murmured.

“How do you like it, Mr. Prior?” Harry asked in English.

“It's impressive, but what in the name of Christ is that thing in the middle there?”

“I suspect that our Lord Jesus Christ is not what the Sonnenorden had in mind, Mr. Prior,” Miss Pullen-Burry said.

“That is a Malagan. You have heard of these things?” Harry asked.

Will nudged Kessler as Miss Pullen-Burry began sketching it in her book.

“Purely for my own memories,” she assured Klaus in a whisper.

“The Malagan is a conduit between this world and the word of the spirit.”

“Is it like the Duk Duk religion I encountered in Herbertshöhe?” Miss Pullen-Burry asked.

“A little but there are no fraudulent priests or so-called witch doctors,” Harry explained.

“Where did you get it?” Miss Pullen-Burry asked.

“August got it from a chieftain on New Ireland whom he helped in a small matter of a rebellion.”

They helped a chieftain on New Ireland deal with a rebellion?
Will thought and wondered if this could be considered an act of piracy. He would certainly mention it to Doctor Parkinson when they returned to Herbertshöhe.

“Each Malagan is different,” Harry was saying. “This one represents the gods of the sun and moon and the southern stars.”

“Where the spirits of the ancestors are said to reside?” Miss Pullen-Burry asked.

“Very good!” Harry replied, impressed. “In many ways the cosmology of the locals here is similar to that of our pagan ancestors in Germany. August believes that a common religion once covered the globe from the Americas to the Australias, a polytheistic religion of many gods that was superior to the Abrahamic faith foisted upon us by the Christians, the Jews, and the so called Prophet Mohammed.”

Harry folded his arms to allow this profound insight to sink in. “Come, I will show you everything,” he said, leading them into the central plaza.

Miss Pullen-Burry followed but Will seized Kessler's arm. “Could be a trap, Klaus. Get us in the middle, run out of the huts and chop us to bits with machetes and axes. Sacrifices for their gods, just like poor Lutzow,” Will hissed theatrically.

“Please stop grabbing my arm,” Kessler said, unable to tell if the Englishman was joking or not. He marched ahead and Will followed the others to the piazza area, which had been covered by pounded gravel and smooth river stones.

“Where is everyone else, Harry?” Miss Pullen-Burry asked.

“Oh they are all off bathing and sunning at Sol Island on the north shore,” Harry said.

“Why didn't you go with them?” Harry wondered.

“Someone had to stay and keep an eye on the Kanaks. Who knows what mischief they might get up to.”

“Ah, yes, about our luggage . . .” Miss Pullen-Burry began.

“Thank you for reminding me,” Harry said.

Harry went to a nearby hut and two natives went scurrying out the back of it in the direction of the beach.

“Your things will be here shortly,” Harry said.

“When are Herr Engelhardt and the others expected to return?” Kessler asked.

“Probably this evening. When the sun has gone down. We often sunbathe from morning until night.”

“This evening?” Kessler asked, put out. That would be an entire day lost.

“Perhaps we should go over there?” Will suggested.

“Yes,” Kessler agreed.

“You will have to swim it,” Harry said.

“Swim?”

“They've taken our only vessel: a rather splendid outrigger canoe.”

“I cannot swim,” Kessler said.

“You can't swim?” Will asked, surprised.

“No.”

Will looked at the German officer with affection. “Do you not find, Klaus, that that makes your journeys in small boats rather more exciting than is absolutely necessary? I understand the attraction of adding a certain frisson to our life in these islands, but surely swimming is a prerequisite.”

“I would say not,” Kessler replied stiffly.

Will rubbed his mustache. “Maybe you're right, better to drown than be eaten by the sharks I suppose.”

It was almost eleven now and Miss Pullen-Burry was swaying a little in the heat.

“Come, sir, a glass of water for the lady and that seat that we were promised,” Kessler insisted.

Harry bowed and led them to his own dwelling, which was just off the trail near the outhouse. It was a square hut made of heavy wood, utterly unlike the circular huts of the locals or the rude plantation dwellings of Herbertshöhe. A hammock had been hung from the roof beams although there was also a German, antiquated-looking, four-poster bed, a commodious, if somewhat strange thing to see in these climes. There was a dresser, a washbasin—with a drain leading outside—and an ornate writing table with chairs. Harry showed Miss Pullen-Burry to a leather padded sedan.

He took a crystal goblet from a cupboard, poured her a glass of water from a covered pitcher, and climbed into the hammock. Kessler sat on the other chair and Will made do with sitting on the bed.

“
We
are all swimmers here on Kabakon. We take as our model Goethe who swam every day of his life,” Harry said.

“And yet Shelley did not swim,” Miss Pullen-Burry replied, after she had taken a sip of the water.

“Oh?” Harry said, running his hand through his blonde, almost white hair.

“Lord Byron writes that when Shelley was cast into the sea on his final voyage, he resigned himself immediately to the watery element. He neither cried out or showed alarm but sank with equanimity.”

Harry looked upset, as if it was the latest news, and bad news at that. “Lord Byron, himself, however, was a famous swimmer, was he not, Miss Pullen-Burry?” Harry said, recovering a little.

“Indeed. He swam the Hellespont and the length of the Grand Canal in Venice. He thought his poems were nothing compared to his feats of swimming,” she replied. “He had plans to swim the English Channel and may well have done it before Captain Webb,” Miss Pullen-Burry said.

She took another drink. “This water is delicious.”

“We have our own spring. It is very deep. It is water from the very beginnings of the Earth, laid down before the corruption of our present times—its properties are quite incredible. You will see,” Harry said.

The ensuing conversation ranged over various health-giving waters, boats, Goethe, Shelley, Byron, and swimming before the two Kanaks appeared with the trunks.

Harry didn't seem to know what to do with them so Kessler suggested that Miss Pullen-Burry be given a hut temporarily to prepare her toilet.

“And we will need a place too if we're going to be staying here tonight,” Will suggested.

Harry sprung out of the hammock, oblivious to the fact that somehow his penis had become erect during this reverie about accommodation and the history of swimming. “I do not know where you should go,” Harry said and stroked his beard.

“The lady must go somewhere,” Kessler insisted.

After some humming and ha-ing, during which Harry's erection subsided, he suggested that Miss Pullen-Burry might share Helena's hut, while Will and Kessler could take Lutzow's old place.

“Helena?” Miss Pullen-Burry wondered. “You mean there are women here?”

“Oh yes.”

“How many?” Kessler inquired.

“Three. Helena: the Countess Höhenzollern, her companion Fräulein Herzen, and Fräulein Schwab,” Harry said to the astonished newcomers.

“Three women!” Kessler said, shocked.

“Anna has her own hut and Fräulein Herzen and Helena are together, but there is ample room in the dwelling of the Countess, so perhaps she would not be put out by the additional company. I will show you the way,” Harry said. He directed the two Kanak bearers first to the Countess's large hut, which it turned out had three chambers, two camp beds, a double bed, and a private commode.

“Remarkable!” Miss Pullen-Burry said and she would have been even more amazed had she not spent the previous week at Emma Forsayth's palatial home.

Harry then led the men to Lutzow's former dwelling, which had no bed or furniture save a solitary and rather rickety looking chair and table and a hammock hanging from the ceiling. “We stripped the place after Max died but when August returns, he will get something for you, I imagine,” Harry said.

“This is perfectly adequate. I have brought my own bed; Will can take the hammock,” Kessler said.

“Oh? Then I will leave you to it, gentlemen. You know where the well is, but I shall have some utensils brought in. If you will pardon me, I have writing to catch up with,” Harry said.

“One moment. I would like to ask you some questions about the circumstances surrounding Lutzow's death,” Will said.

Harry shrugged. “The person to talk to is Anna—Fräulein Schwab.”

“Why is that?”

“She was with him when he died. She comforted him as he breathed his last.”

“Miss Schwab was there when Lutzow died?”

“Oh yes. She held his hand. She was very upset, as you can imagine.”

“And Miss Schwab is where, now?”

“Sol Island with the others.”

“And how did she say that Lutzow died?” Will asked.

Harry seem puzzled. “Malaria! He died of the malaria.”

“Malaria? Are you sure?”

“Yes! Doctor Bethman diagnosed it. He was quite positive and August has seen many cases, of course. We knew immediately.”

“So you're saying that Lutzow died of malarial fever and that he held this Miss Schwab's hand as he died?” Will checked.

“Yes. Anna was quite distraught. Will that be all? I have my correspondence . . .”

“That will be all . . .
for now
,” Will said.

Harry bowed and departed.

“An agreeable young man,” Kessler said.

“You think so? He seems a little unhinged to me. I wouldn't be surprised if he killed Lutzow and all the others or if he tried to cut our throats as soon as we fall asleep. It'll be up to you to save us, Klaus; that hammock has death trap written all over it.”

Kessler was in no mood for English humor.

“He insists that malaria killed Lutzow.”

“He's lying.”

“I found him quite sincere.”

“How do you explain the water in Lutzow's lungs?”

“I do not know.”

Will stripped down to his trousers, sat on the chair, put his boots on Kessler's trunk, and lit a cigar. Kessler sat on the top of his trunk and loosened the top button of his trousers.

“Well, I suppose we'll find out who's lying and who's not when the others get back,” Will said, blowing out a ring of cigar smoke just as the heavens opened and a hard piercing tropical rain began to fall.