The Sun Is God (29 page)

Words from when all the languages were one.

Thunder rolled down from the highlands. Lightning stabbed at the conductors on the hospital roof.

The spirits tested her.

Again and again they tried and were repelled.

Her glyphs and incantations were powerful magic and they knew that she was not to be bested.

“You're too strong for them,” Will murmured.

“Yes,” she soothed, and she bathed his forehead.

Around two o'clock, Siwa saw the change under the oil lamp: Will's breathing deepened and his fever broke. But still she watched and waited until dawn was the golden rumor in the east.

Parrots.

A dog cart.

Men talking in Cantonese.

Will's eyes fluttered. This was not Kabakon. Or the dugout.

It was morning in Herbertshöhe, in the German colony.

And there beside him on the bed was Siwa, exhausted, drenched in sweat, curled like a question mark. He sat up, took the bandages from his face.

“Siwa,” he said and kissed her.

“How are you feeling?”

“A little better. You fought the witches.”

“Yes.”

Later that afternoon.

Siwa pretending to sleep.

Will sitting up in bed reading the German papers.

The click of a walking stick. Siwa opened one eye. Hauptman Kessler, dressed in a baggy uniform.

“Klaus!”

“They told me you were at death's door.”

“On the contrary,” Will croaked.

“You do not look well.”

“Look at you. You're skin and bones.”

Kessler sat. “How are you, Will?”

The men examined one another and a secret seemed to pass between them.

A party of German soldiers walked past beyond the hospital wall.

“New men?” Will asked.

Kessler nodded. “Engineers from Samoa.”

“A new road?”

“For a new harbor—Simpsonhafen to become the largest German base in the Pacific.”

Will nodded and sighed.

“Are you all right, Will?”

“What are you going to do about the Sonnenorden, Klaus?”

“Do not concern yourself with that now. You must take time to—”

“What are you going to do?”

“Probably nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“There is no proof of any wrongdoing.”

“Fräulein Herzen! She's the proof! She'll tell you everything !”

“I interviewed Fräulein Herzen earlier today. She knows nothing of a murder. She was sleeping when Lutzow died.”

“The photograph album?”

“Obscene pictures of women.”

“The autopsy?”

“A mistake, perhaps.”

“No murder? No murder you say! But they killed Bethman,” Will cried.

“Self-defense, Will. I saw it. You saw it. It is not worth the scandal of a trial.”

“They were going to sacrifice us.”

“We have no proof of anything, Will.”

“For God's sake man, they attacked us in the canoe!”

“
Their
canoe. I imagine that the German laws regarding defense of property will protect them there too, I regret to say.”

Will shook his head. “It's you, isn't it? You and Governor Hahl. You are going to cover it up. To avoid a scandal! If I tell Doctor Parkinson what I have seen he will have them evicted from the island for piracy!”

“You will say nothing to Herr Doctor Parkinson, Will.
Nothing happened on Kabakon
. Do you understand me?”

Another secret look between the two men.

“Oh, I understand you only too well.”

A nurse slid open the screen door to the veranda, where one could sit among the dahlias and crimson anthuriums and the palms full of butterflies.

“Well, I must away,” Kessler said. “I am late for an appointment with Governor Hahl.” He walked to the swinging door that led to the general ward and stopped with a fingertip on the door's brass handle. “Have you ever been to see the birds at the zoological gardens, Will?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“That is what Kabakon will become. An aviary for our more exotic Deutsch-Neuguineans.”

As Will considered this his face tightened. “A closed aviary, Klaus. No new specimens. We will insist upon that.”

Kessler stood utterly still for an instant then smiled. “Yes,” he agreed.

Siwa watched him walk through the general ward, exit by the side entrance, and go into the hospital flower beds to sniff the moth orchids.

“You must rest now,” she said to Will.

“All right,” he agreed.

She curled next to him. His breath was sweet. His skin no longer like parchment.

They lay in the bed together like prayer books in a vestry. She closed his eyes. And their breathing syncopated. And their heartbeats syncopated. And in that state of natural asepsis they slept the sleep of restoration.

AFTERWORD

I
n early 1907, the colonial authorities in Herbertshöhe concluded their official investigation into the deaths of Max Lutzow and August Bethman. No action was taken against Engelhardt or any of the Sonnenorden, although no more Europeans seem to have been given permission to live on Kabakon, and the community began to shrink by emigration and its alarmingly high death rate from malnutrition and malaria.

In 1908, Bessie Pullen-Burry published her New Guinea travelogue
In a German Colony
. A generous portion of the book was lavished upon the hospitality of “Queen” Emma Forsayth, Doctor Parkinson, and Governor Hahl. The Cocovores were mentioned only briefly.

In 1909, Doctor Richard Parkinson, Emma Forsayth's man of business, died shortly after publishing his own well-received book
Dreissig Jähre in der Südsee
. Following Doctor Parkinson's death, Emma Forsayth sold her estates in New Guinea for a staggering 3.57 million Marks, moved to Europe, and married a German playboy several decades her junior. She succumbed to diabetes in Monte Carlo in 1913. Her ashes were sent back to New Britain and buried in a lavish ceremony near her mansion, Gunantambu, in Herbertshöhe.

Later the same year, the capital of German New Guinea was moved a few miles up the coast from Herbertshöhe to Simpsonhafen, which was then renamed Rabaul—“mangrove” in the native Kuanua language. Rabaul's harbor was deepened for the German navy, and a coaling and radio station was established. Governor Albert Hahl was on a visit to Berlin in August 1914 when World War I broke out. He did not return to the Pacific, but he, too, wrote a lively memoir about his time in New Guinea.

The capture of Rabaul was the first successful action of the Australian armed forces in the Great War, the town falling on September 13, 1914. It remained under Australian administration for the next twenty-eight years until 1942 when it was taken by a marine detachment of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Rabaul became the primary Japanese staging-post for the entire Southern Pacific region with up to 120,000 troops stationed there, including a garrison on Kabakon Island. The mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Yamamoto, was on an inspection tour to the port when he was shot down and killed shortly after taking off from Rabaul Air Station on April 18, 1943.

In 1944, the United States First Marine Division landed in New Britain, in the Cape Gloucester area, and elements of the US Army occupied the southern portion of the island under the auspices of Operation Cartwheel. The Japanese ultimately abandoned Rabaul in August 1945. Australia resumed its Trustee Mandate over New Britain in 1946 and governed the province until the independence of Papua New Guinea in 1973.

On September 19, 1994, the population of Rabaul was evacuated shortly before the Tavurvur volcano erupted with devastating consequences. The town and much of the surrounding district were utterly destroyed and the regional capital was moved back to Herbertshöhe (which had been renamed Kokopo), where it remains today.

The strange history of the Cocovores is little known outside academia. The sole reference to August Engelhardt and Kabakon in the
New York Times
index leads one to a 1905 article that is almost entirely fallacious in content and ends with the claim that Engelhardt died mad and alone on Kabakon in September 1905. In fact Engelhardt lived with his few remaining followers on Kabakon until 1915, when they were interned by the Australians for the duration of World War I. After the armistice, Engelhardt returned to Kabakon and died there on May 5, 1919, followed four days later by Wilhelm Bradtke, the last surviving member of the Sonnenorden.

In the summer of 2013, as research for this book, I spent several days on Kabakon Island, camping in a clearing under the palm trees and eating only coconuts. The experience, even for so short a period, was not an entirely pleasant one. At that time I appeared to be the island's only human resident although I found ample evidence of previous occupation. There were a number of plantation buildings, several concrete pillboxes, a ruined jetty, and other detritus from the Japanese World War II defenses. I had been told that there was a small German colonial-era graveyard on Kabakon, but this, too, had been obliterated by Japanese military structures. A century after their heyday no traces at all remained of the “immortals” and their Order of the Sun.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A
drian McKinty is the author of many previous novels, including
Dead I Well May Be
,
Fifty Grand
,
Falling Glass
, and, most recently, the Detective Sean Duffy novels
The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street
, and
In the Morning I'll Be Gone
. Born and raised in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, McKinty was called “the best of the new generation of Irish crime novelists” in the
Glasgow Herald
.

Visit Adrian online at
adrianmckinty.blogspot.com
, and
Twitter: @adrianmckinty