Casca 17: The Warrior (17 page)

When they came out of the water there were women waiting with vessels of fragrant oils. Once annointed and sweet smelling, Casca began immediately upon his new campaign of strut and swagger. But when he saw Vivita's glance of contempt and disgust, he modified the act a little. It was not part of his plan to make himself a figure for ridicule.

That night Setole sat opposite him, grinning pleasantly, and Casca reflected how much he enjoyed the company of this placid, jolly woman. She was a fountain of good
sense, and even among people as fun loving as the islanders, her happy enthusiasm for life was outstanding.

Now that he had some real command of the language, Casca found he enjoyed her company more and more. She had a fund of witty anecdotes about everyday life in the village, and was an unfailing source of wry and amusing stories.

But Casca was taken severely aback when he realized that Vivita had perceptibly withdrawn from their usual intimacy, that none of the younger women seemed to be trying for him tonight, and it looked as if Setole intended to take him home with her.

More than ever Casca felt like a pawn in this game amongst the women, and he cast about for some way to avoid being carted away by the fat woman like some fairground prize.

"Dammit," he said to himself, "I'm a fucking big wheel in this town, a hero, the war chief, damn near supreme chief. How come I get stuck with this fat old broad?"

But short of holding Setole off with his .38, Casca knew there was no way out. He considered rudely insulting her by brutally declining to accompany her, but he liked her too much to do that. She was honoring him, she had asserted herself to win him from Vivita, he had unwittingly gone along with that part of the game, and now he was stuck with the result. There was nothing for it but to put on the best face possible, suffer through the night, and be more careful in future.

Quite apart from these noble sentiments, Casca was also pretty sure that if he reneged on the deal, the game among the women might take a different turn, and he could find himself without a woman at all.

Setole proved to be as pleasant in bed as she was in conversation. Her enormous body was mainly muscle, and her agility and flexibility were really extraordinary. She was able to open her great legs as wide as any skinny little girl, and her superb musculature enabled her to use her sexual equipment as tightly, ingeniously, and excitingly as any of the thousands of women Casca had known.

Which was fine in the dark, but in the morning he awakened to a distinct shock to find himself lying like a pigmy alongside the huge upholstery of her body.

It was a further shock to discover that he had moved in.

Setole prepared his breakfast and gave him a fresh sulu, taking his other one to launder. She brushed his jacket, oiled his sandals, and most ominous of all, set aside almost half the hut for his exclusive use, laying fresh grass mats and spreading upon them Casca's personal possessions— his duffel, shaving gear, toothbrush, and comb, all of which had somehow materialized from the hut he had shared with Vivita.

"Great Hector's asshole," Casca cursed, "I don't want a fucking wife. And if I must have one, I'd rather have Vivita.
”

With the passing of each night the problem worsened. Neither Vivita nor any other woman now made any attempt to pry Casca loose from Setole. They were regarded like a married couple.

Casca still enjoyed the giant woman's company, and indeed enjoyed her in bed enormously. But he chafed at the situation and began to plan seriously toward his departure from the island.

He might wait for years before another ship called at the island, and then it might be a heavily armed slaver that would be difficult to capture and even more difficult for him to sail, with his more than likely reluctant crew.

Certainly none of the islanders knew anything of schooner sailing, and he felt sure that now that he was "married," they would vigorously oppose his departure. Clearly he would have to make his own way from the island which meant stealing one of the village boats.

So Casca began to bend his energies to learning everything he could about handling the sail canoes.

His sudden passion for fishing caused neither comment nor suspicion, even though he made a point of going out in all the worst weather to be encountered.

His status as war chief had been further exalted by his role as Semele's virtual deputy, and further again by his marital connection with Setole, a powerful woman herself in the village hierachy, and Mbolo's sister.

Even without these advantages he might not have been troubled much. Every villager virtually organized his own life, farming or fishing, building or diving, more or less as his own circumstances and whim dictated.

Casca became an expert sail handler, then a proficient helmsman, and then he set himself to learn all he could of navigation.

He especially liked to join those fishermen who worked in the depths of the night, and he questioned them endlessly about the way through the stars.

In time he came to know that he would be on course for the distant island of Lifou if he kept Orion—to Casca a Roman legionnaire, to the islanders a beautiful woman dancing—behind him. He should also steer between the Giant Shrimp, which he knew as Scorpio, and the Albatross, which sailors called the Southern Cross.

Casca decided upon the boat that he needed—a small sail canoe with a single outrigger, one triangular sail, and a small covered area protected by thatch and tapa cloth. He was confident that he could sail this vessel single-handed, and he seized upon every possible chance to practice with it.

As the fishermen became accustomed to Casca's presence among them they gradually lost interest in which boat he sailed in, where he went, and what he caught. Some days he would linger on the beach until all the fishermen had left, and then set out by
himself in whatever craft happened to be available. There were plenty of boats, and different ones were used on different days, according to the weather and the type fish being sought.

The small sail canoes were mainly used in the hunt for big-game fish way offshore, and when these fish were not plentiful Casca was often able to spend the day sailing alone.

A huge school of grouper arrived off the reef, and almost all of the fishermen preferred to hang by the reef in the paddle canoes angling for the large fish that bit readily on any sizable bait. A number of other fishermen worked inside the lagoon, seeking bait fish.

Several sail canoes were unused, and Casca took the smallest and sailed it to the western end of the island, where he ran it into the quiet backwater below the place of refuge.

He climbed the cliff and returned to the village, arriving about sunset.

In the chief's house that night Dukuni and a few other fishermen greeted him, boasting of their catches of giant grouper.

"Maybe I should have gone in your boat today," Casca responded. But he did not volunteer, and was not asked, just how he had spent the day.

Several days passed before the boat was missed, and then, as with all such events, the theft was blamed on a sneak thief from the enemy village of Lakuvi.

When he was not out sailing in the small craft Casca spent a great deal of time carrying coconuts, breadfruit, and sweet potatoes to the place of refuge.

He became very adept at racing along the narrow cliff path, juggling a heavy tapa sack on one shoulder as he looked down hundreds of feet to the rocks and waves below, or up the sheer face of the cliff to the peak above the refuge.

To get to the cliff edge above the backwater he had to pass Tepole's body, now a stinking, pulpy mass that would yet take some time for the benign jungle to consume. There were on the island no jackals or dogs or cats, and the only rats stayed by the villages, where they had come ashore from Clevinger's ships. It fell to the insects to clean up what was left of the mess that Tepole had made of his life.

Farther away he could see where Sonolo still sat in his self-imposed exile, waiting for death. Or was he already dead? Casca couldn't tell from this distance, and chose to ignore the stonelike man.

He enjoyed stepping down the near precipitous cliff face to where he stashed his supplies on the lee shore of the little backwater sheltered by the expanse of flat rock which rose several feet above the sea. The rock was always dry, and it seemed that only a freak wave ever broke across it to enter the little backwater.

In a week he accumulated a huge cache of food and coconuts, including a crock full of pickled grouper flesh and several more crocks of fresh water. He also cached a musket, a powder horn, shot, and his bottle of whiskey.

The moon was waxing fast, and Casca planned to sail on the night that it filled. He hoped to be off to the island of Lifou four or five days later.

He was, by dint of great experience, a capable navigator. He had already been practicing the craft, albeit mainly on land, for a thousand six hundred years, when the British Navy turned the craft into a science with Greenwich Mean Time, standard nautical tables, meticulously accurate chronometers, the sextant, and eventually the detailed Admiralty charts that showed almost every headland, cape, island, islet, reef, and known depth on the surface of the planet.

But now he was introduced to the practice of navigation as an art.

The islanders used only one instrument—song. There was
a song for every possible destination, including even the land where the yellow people live, although none of the islanders had ever sailed to China and only a few Chinese traders had ever visited the island.

Every islander knew every one of the songs, and at the appropriate times of the day, according to the season and the winds and the weather, they sang the appropriate verses of the song that recorded the way that led through the stars, the changes of wave patterns caused by islands and reefs, the sorts of landscapes to be looked for, the known dangers, and every other piece of information a seafarer could put to use.

And now Casca knew the song that would take him to the island of Lifou. He had learned the hard way—by doing—but he learned well.

The day finally arrived when the farmers of Navola had delivered the necessary materials to erect the temple.

Justly proud of the enormous strength that had won him the roles of pole lifter, Casca climbed into the new hole, the carvings on the pole providing footholds as he made his way down the length.

Standing on the bottom, he grasped the pole and hugged it to him, struggling to get it vertical. The task proved more difficult than he had expected. In the na
rrow confine of the bottom of the hole he could exert little purchase, and it took him some time to get it into the upright position.

As he did so there was a resounding cheer from above ground, and a slow chant commenced.

At the fourth beat Casca recognized the same chant that had launched the canoe, and an inkling of unease entered his mind.

At the fifth beat there was a mighty roar, within which Casca heard his own protesting voice, and a great cascade of sand poured into the hole from every side.

"Great Jupiter's balls," Casca shouted, "what the fuck's going on here?"

The rapid rain of sand continued falling and Casca could feel that it had already reached his knees. He strove frantically to move his legs, but could not even wriggle his toes.

Now the sand was rising a little more slowly as the taper of the hole widened, but inch by inch it moved up over his thighs. Buried to the crotch, wedged between the pole and the side of the hole, he could move nothing but his arms.

He reached as high as he could, found two handholds in the carvings, and tried to drag himself free of the imprisoning sand—a useless effort that accomplished nothing but his exhaustion.

He had been tricked.

Or had he?

He recalled the blunt answer when he had inquired about the stench at the bottom of the hole of the old temple. He had assumed some spiritual reason for the burial of a doubtless revered man with the pole of the temple. It had not occurred to him, as it did now, that a live man provided a very practical means of keeping the pole vertical while the hole was filled around it. And yes, he was doubtless considered worthy of the honor.

The sand was now up around his chest, and he was pouring forth every curse and oath and imprecation he could lay his tongue to.

Then his breath began to falter, his chest constricted by the pressure of the sand.

For one of the very few times in his long life Casca wanted to beg. But he quickly realized that it was pointless. Nothing he could say could possibly be heard through the chanting and drumming above ground. So he went back to cursing.

The sand continued to fall. Now only his head was free, uptilted along the pole toward the daylight.

The chanting stopped.

A single frangipani blossom came floating down to settle on his face, and he heard Vivita's voice: "
Vanaka, vanaka
—thank you, thank you."

Then a roaring chorus from the entire village: "
Vanaka! Vanaka!
" He gulped a great breath of flower-scented air, and a great rush of sand buried his head.

He would die once more—but for how long this time?