Bright and Distant Shores (11 page)

T
hey came down from the caldera in the predawn fog, swift and quiet, their faces daubed with ash and vermilion, blackened pig grease in the hollows of their collarbones, a motley infantry in dog-fur pelts, bearing cutting rasps and rifles, makeshift weapons hewn from barrel staves and boar tusks. Their hair was oiled and clayed; they wore hornbill beaks as talismans against defeat and cowardice. Argus strode in front with a pin-fire revolver and a dagger, dressed in fresh flannels, leading them in the holy war against the shipwrecked and the damned. He could imagine the Kuk on horseback, mounted on sorrels with their flanks ribbed white, sabers and lances held aloft, something lifted from a rectory oil painting, a medieval battlescape and field of dying souls. Instead of an eastern foe it was a band of western drunkards and infidels waiting to be slain, barnacles on the hull of the British Empire. This was
comeuppance
—what a strange English word—not just for the death of his family but for a century's blood in the name of sandalwood and indigo. Did the Doctrine of the Elect extend to the haggard circles of the heathen wronged? Could a clansman kill in God's name without ever kneeling in prayer? Argus looked out from under his hat brim, willing himself forward. There was no turning back. Twenty women, his sister included, trailed behind with provisions, sharpened rocks, jugs of water, his scuffed portmanteau carried like a stone tablet. He had roused them with nothing but fire speak, intoning the dead reverend, trembling in his alpaca coat. He knew he wasn't much of a warrior—he'd never been in a fistfight but had a decent aim
from so many twilight pigeon hunts. The Kuk didn't look into each other's eyes the whole way down the volcano.

At the outskirts of the encampment they waited in the trees amid the screaming parrots and throbbing tree frogs. The Englishmen slept in weskits and native adornments, their faces and hands smeared with guano to ward off pollywogs and gall nippers. A fire pit smoldered with fish bones and an iron stewpot. The Poumetan girls were still tied to the divan with lengths of rattan, their grass skirts gone and their wrists welted and swollen. Argus could see Mr. Nibbles under the tattooed arm of a midshipman, the cat peering out, the only wakeful thing among them. They had found the rowboat. He whispered to his comrades to take up position in the trees and ten of them climbed tropical chestnuts with blowguns and single-barrels. He told the women to place the rocks in piles and retreat to the hillside. They cocked their rifles and waited for the sailors to waken; killing a man in his sleep would bring a thousand-year curse. Argus counted the Englishmen's guns, hatchets, and knives, tallied the boxes of ammunition. No doubt they had expected to be at sea for up to a year and it showed in their armaments. The element of surprise was all the natives had but then he saw another option lurking in the pandanus and underbrush.

He told the warriors to wait for him and took off running into the woods, weaving between the bracken ferns, back into the marshy hollows of his childhood. The volcanic soil turned to mud and soon it was a bog hemmed in by overgrowth, orchids and air plants perched above a riot of vines and leaves. He began collecting seeds and shoots, plucking plants that he knew by name and color and texture. Sometimes the poison announced itself in the iridescent vein-work of a leaf or a fiery berry or the foamy sap that bled from the severed ends, but mostly it was invisible and scentless, a plant venom that tasted no worse than burnt sugarcane. He carried the poisonous salad back to the warriors, who had expected him not to return. He dipped the shredded plants and seeds into
a water jug and squeezed them over a piece of curved bark. The tincture was blue-green and a hundred times more potent than anything used on fish. He carried it forward in the makeshift bark bowl like an offering. They watched him from the shadows, eyes dilated, skeptical, resting rifle butts against their greased shoulders, one man with his jadeite axe at the ready.

Argus rolled up his pants and went barefoot into the clearing, walking on the sides of his feet. The sailors slept on pieces of canvas, in tent doorways, on salvaged hammocks slung between trees. He looked at each ruddy face and huddled body in succession, not only to catch any sign of waking but to mark them off as dead. He thought of Scottish Highlanders with claymore swords keening the air, the ancestors of the Reverend Mister bearing down on English mongrels as bearded and barbarous as Vikings. The ground was strewn with shell casings and pig bristle and he had to step over several broken bottles. Beside the fire pit was a water barrel and he poured half the tincture into it and then the other half into the pot of charring stew. The girls on the divan were only a few feet away and he quietly threw a seedpod, making contact with one girl's ankle. She stirred, looked up, did not speak. He removed his hat so she could better see his face. He raised a finger to his lips then remembered this meant nothing to a Poumetan. He pointed to the water and the food, shaking his head vigorously, arms crossed at the forearms. The glazed and wounded look in her eyes affirmed nothing. Argus flashed her his tribal scar, turned, and headed for the trees where gun muzzles and spear points trained out of the foliage, providing cover. Mr. Nibbles squirmed from the arms of a murderer and began mewing just as Argus got to the edge of the clearing. One man stirred in a hammock, letting his mite-bitten and filthy feet dangle from the sides. Another man adjusted the slouch hat that was covering his face. The cat called out in hunger or recognition and a tree-dweller inhaled behind his blowgun and aimed at it. The cat quieted just as Argus walked free of the clearing and retreated into the woods.

After some time the Englishmen began stirring, stretching in the early light, hands on paunches and privates, dipping tin cups into the water barrel or scraping the caked stew out of the pot with stubby fingers. The girls were offered water and Argus was relieved when they refused. Not everyone imbibed the poison but within minutes a dozen sailors were racked with pain, bent and writhing on the ground. A couple more followed suit, retching on all fours then staggering off to shit in a bamboo thicket. Someone yelled
poisoned!
at the top of his lungs and this gave rise to bedlam, sailors reaching for their rifles and firing rounds into the air and the trees, someone hurling a shoe at a shipmate yammering obscenities from a hammock. Before long, men were wandering in circles like almshouse inmates, braying and wailing, limp at the knees, hands batting at their own heads. The men still standing spun and reeled with their shotguns, firing at will, while Argus and his fellow ambushers held cover in the dappled light of the woods.

A demented sailor lurched for the native girls, a tomahawk raised, and Argus uncoiled his little pinfire revolver, some keepsake no doubt bartered from a British sloop, and shot the man in the back of the head. The bullet felled the sailor, the hatchet still raised in one hand. He buckled, bowed, fell back into the fire-pit embers. Without Argus's say-so, the snipers opened fire, unleashing arrows and blow darts and buckshot. They burst screaming into the encampment, wielding crude truncheons and clubs at the stricken and shooting the able-bodied where they stood. Several dazed and wounded Britons ran for the black beach and the clansmen gave chase like swineherds, bringing the sailors down with barbed spears and iron bludgeons at the water's edge. A wrack of sea foam crimsoned with blood and Argus thought of the shark kills from his youth, the sound of gnashing teeth as the argonauts were noosed into shore, the villagers whooping as the giant fish drowned on air.

Argus came forward to cut the girls free of the divan. Bodies
lay everywhere, darkening the sandy dirt, the air thickening with the smell of human offal and excrement. He took up a knife and cut the rattan from the girls' wrists and ankles. Their lips were parched white and they could not speak. Their throats were bruised raw. He placed his alpaca coat over their trembling bodies and called to the women in the brush, who came into the clearing with water and taro cakes. Malini tended them, murmuring softly in Poumetan, dipping a finger into her water jug and running it over their lips. The warriors came back from the beach sated and out of breath. A few of them had been injured and they walked around the encampment and put the few living Englishmen out of their misery. Argus saw Mr. Nibbles's prone body lying in the bushes. Somehow he'd been caught up in the crossfire. Argus was relieved that he wasn't the direct cause of the cat's death and pitied the man who'd blown the stray dart or wielded the errant club.

They burned the bodies on the black beach, lighting a funeral pyre with thatch torches, the bodies piled three deep. Watch and trouser pockets, what was left of the marooned sailors' clothes, had been picked over, fobs taken, engraved teaspoons and locket photographs laid out on the sand for later dispersal, each warrior with a kill to his name laying claim to the specifics. Argus claimed a good pair of boots, size 11, from a dead man's feet. The flames bristled, billowed foul smoke, flared with bursts of cotton and hair. The warriors watched the cremation, grimly satisfied, while the village women retreated to the shelter of the forest to care for the Poumetan girls. A few of the Kuk punted out in canoes to the reefed ship, their strokes ungainly, and set the whole thing ablaze. It went up like a tinderbox. The forecastle plumed yellow then orange and the mizzenmast candled with flame. Shreds of sailthe brakemen watching for drifters-cloth flapped and came away from the mastheads in delicate, fiery tendrils, sending a spray of cinders downwind. The planking and hull went up next, the timbers splintering and the hobnails popping under pressure, debris hissing into the sea. The brig broke then fell apart, toppling into the shallows above the reef, her bell
clanging mournfully on the coral reef. The men returned to shore and took their torches to the village, burning what was left of the pile houses and leveling the men's longhouse to smoking stumps. They sang and called while they worked and it became clear to Argus that they intended to rebuild the village as their own. No longer pushed up the caldera where the sun had to be mined through the canopy, they would learn to fish and hollow out tree trunks for canoes.

When the commotion died down, Argus went in search of his rowboat and found it dragged into the woods. In the morning, after the victory feast, he would begin rowing, pulling himself between islands, looking for work in a mission school or house. Perhaps he would return to the Presbyterian island of Nimburea to see if a new preacher had arrived. He still had a complete set of clean clothes in his portmanteau and he would camp wherever the locals allowed him, reading Exodus and
David Copperfield
by candlelight. He saw his sister coming down the beach with her woven bag over her shoulder. He could tell from her determined step, from the way she swung her arms and held her head, that she was going to abandon her dying husband and avoid the penance of widowhood. There was no waiting until the morning. They would have to leave while the pile houses still burned.

O
wen and Adelaide were saying goodbye at the train station when Jethro Gray and his farewell party arrived with a caravan of luggage. Hale Gray and his wife, an entourage of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, all of them dressed as if for the races, fanned out behind a grumbling porter as he parted the crowds with a cart of kidskin valises. Jethro trailed behind, hands in pockets, walking under a straw kady with a red club stripe.

“That must be the heir,” said Adelaide, forcing a smile.

“God help us,” Owen said, glancing over.

They fell in behind the procession and made for the outbound platform. The air brimmed with steam whistles and the smell of burning coal. Passengers and well-wishers milled, waited, held hands, kissed, sang anthems, waved kerchiefs like tiny white flags. Owen and Adelaide walked toward the Union Pacific's
Enterprise,
a predominantly immigrant train that would change to Central Pacific rails in Utah, carrying hundreds of Europeans westward on wooden benches, toward the promise of California. Up ahead, Owen saw the Gray party stop beside a Pullman sleeper car that had been appended to the dining compartment at the rear of the train. The sleeper was funereal in its splendor, something lifted from a statuary yard—a chassis like greened copper, punched through with rivets, the sash windows opaline with the midday light. From what Owen could ascertain, there were a dozen first-class sleeper passengers and they gave each other curt nods as the porters, harried as coolies in a plantation field, scrambled to load their suitcases, tennis rackets, and fishing poles
into the baggage car. Hale Gray, smoking a meerschaum pipe in a fawn-colored peacoat, a train schedule rolled in one fist, turned on his heels and made eye contact with Owen. Jethro stood next to him, thin, tall, fingers idling beneath his raglan sleeves, following his father's gaze.