Devil-Devil (25 page)

‘There's one more thing,' he had said. ‘It's only something I've heard, and I may be wrong. But I believe that what you are looking for is in a cave. And that cave will be distinguished by the sign of the local dream-maker carved outside.'

‘What sign?' asked Sister Conchita.

‘A snake,' said the priest. ‘
Baekwa I Tolo.
Be careful in your dealings with it. It has very powerful
mana.
'

Now, three hours later, she was still plodding up the narrow track. Farther down, the hillside had been forested but now there was nothing but brown, spiralling vegetation on either side of the track. The mountainside bush was nothing like the lush damp greenery to which she was accustomed on Malaita. Here it was just as thick and impenetrable, but brown and wire-like in appearance, with great threatening thorns stirred into sudden sallies by the breeze. Sister Conchita could understand why the local Guadalcanal people did not want to live in such a remote and infertile place.

She turned a corner and saw the plateau of the summit ahead of her. It was covered with ramshackle buildings made of planks and boxes. Presumably there was no suitable wood for building houses in the area, resulting in the sprawling shanty-town lying before her. The inhabitants must have carried every scrap of material five miles up the mountain track from the main road. She could see no stream, just a series of man-made rock pools designed to catch rainwater.

There were the usual teeming groups of half-naked women and children outside the makeshift homes. As soon as they saw the nun they disappeared rapidly inside the dwellings, although Sister Conchita was aware of dozens of pairs of eyes peering out at her through the open doorways. She stopped, at a loss. This was so unlike the effusive welcome she would have received as a matter of course on Malaita.

Eventually a man appeared from the far end of the settlement. He was of medium height but tightly muscled. He wore a pair of tattered shorts.

‘I am Sam Beni,' he said abruptly in English.

‘Sister Conchita,' faltered the nun, extending a hand.

The man did not take it. ‘What can I do for you, sister?' he asked.

‘I'm not sure,' said the sister, trying to conceal her embarrassment at her total sense of misplacement. ‘Father Pierre from Ruvabi sent me up here — to look for something, I think.'

If her words made any sense to the islander he showed no sign of it. He shrugged scornfully ‘We cannot help you up here. Like you, we are exiles.'

‘Tell me, is there a path leading anywhere?' begged Sister Conchita. She was tired and thirsty, but determined not to turn back.

Beni shrugged briefly. ‘One track,' he said, indicating the direction from which he had appeared. ‘It soon disappears into the bush and cliffs. There is nothing for a white sister there.'

Sister Conchita thanked the man but nevertheless took the direction he had indicated. She soon left the settlement behind her and was aware that the ground was sloping gradually beneath her feet. The sun-browned vegetation grew thickly all around her and there were great outcrops of rock, some towering into the sky and many yards long. Presumably the cave Father Pierre had mentioned would be a fissure in one of the grey, looming outcrops.

Again and again as she struggled onwards Sister Conchita wished that she had never embarked upon such a quixotic and apparently unnecessary journey. She found herself resenting Father Pierre and the cryptic manner in which he had dismissed her with a mere passing reference to someone called a dream-maker. All right, so presumably he had wanted her to embark upon a voyage of self-discovery, but at least he could have given her some sort of clue as to what she was supposed to be looking for.

Then she remembered that he had. The old man had told her to look for a snake carved on the exterior of a cave. Doggedly Sister Conchita forced herself off the path in the direction of the great stone outcrops growing out of the undergrowth.

Cruel looping hooks of thorns tore at her flesh and habit but the nun forced herself to keep pressing towards the rocks. The sweat stung her eyes into paroxysms of blinking. Almost blindly she skirted piles of dead brushwood and crumbled stones at her feet, her bleeding hands fending off the creepers and canes lurking before her. Eventually she reached the first of the outcrops. Here it was cooler, sheltered from the sun, but greyer, casting macabre shadows to form a harsh, separate, unforgiving world of its own. Sister Conchita slumped breathlessly against the stone wall, grateful for the temporary respite it bestowed upon her tortured limbs. Then, almost sobbing with agony, she forced herself onwards in desperate search of the cave marked with the snake carving.

Small creatures making their homes among the rocks and undergrowth scuttled beneath her feet; lizards and bush mice paused in their activities to survey her before disappearing urgently. Somewhere muffled by the undergrowth she could hear the snorting of an angry pig.

Sister Conchita moved as fast as she could between the cliff faces. There were apertures enough worked into the face of the rock, of differing shapes and sizes, but none with any visible marking signs outside. She dragged her protesting body exhaustedly from outcrop to outcrop, pulling herself along the uneven sides of the rocks by her frayed fingertips when the creepers threatened to scale the walls to a height above her head.

Finally she almost literally stumbled across it. The outcrop was relatively small, granite-grey in colour, separated from the main range by a sea of knee-high springy rough grass. Sister Conchita reached the wall of rock by the exercise of main force and headed with little hope for the entrance to a cave she had noticed about a third of the way along the length of the rock growth. She pulled herself to the hole and stopped, wiping the perspiration from her eyes with initial disbelief and then a flood of triumph.

The snake was etched into the wall to a depth of several inches, long, curling, with large, angry eyes and a head reared back ready to strike. Sister Conchita took a deep breath and entered the cave.

After her initial misgivings the interior of the cave proved almost to be an anticlimax. It was small, remarkably light and simply furnished with various flat stones strewn about the floor. What caused Sister Conchita to pause abruptly was the sight of the occupant. Standing just inside the doorway, smiling approvingly, was a young girl. She could not have been more than twelve years of age, clad in a grass skirt, with her cropped hair bleached blonde. She was holding out half a coconut shell filled with some liquid.

‘Why, hello there,' smiled Sister Conchita, taking care to speak quietly, aware of the fearsome sight she must present after her recent battle with the undergrowth. Her habit was tattered and hanging in shreds, her face stained and sweating, her knees buckling with fatigue as she panted for breath, her hands bleeding profusely.

‘Is your mother here?' she asked hopefully. The girl continued to smile serenely but made no answer. Awkwardly the nun tried to repeat the question in a rough approximation of pidgin. ‘Mama bilong you?'

The girl giggled. Probably at her visitor's inexpert attempt at pidgin, thought Sister Conchita. Again the girl lifted her thin arms and proffered the coconut shell. The nun realized how thirsty she was. She nodded gratefully and drained the contents. The girl indicated one of the flat stones. Wearily Sister Conchita sat down on it.

Almost immediately she was drifting away. She was aware of her head slumping on her chest and then suddenly, through a haze that cleared slowly, she was in the company of her family in Boston once again. Her father was mowing the lawn while her mother was bringing a pitcher of lemonade out of the house. It was an idyllic scene and one that eased her heart to an amazing degree. But then as she watched it all started to go wrong. Her father deliberately steered the lawnmower off the grass and across a flowerbed, smashing it with force into the garden fence. Bewildered and horrified at such an act of random violence Sister Conchita turned to face her mother just as she turned the pitcher upside down and disgorged its contents on to the patio, laughing vindictively at her daughter. Sister Conchita goggled at the sight. She became aware of Ben Kella standing at her side in the suburban street. Both of her parents were staring meaningfully at the police sergeant.

The scene changed. Sister Conchita was in the cellar of her house now with her fifteen-year-old brother Jack. The basement was dusty, used as a storeroom. They were playing checkers on a board supported by an upturned box. Sister Conchita, or rather a ten-year-old version of the nun, was winning game after game. Jack stopped smiling. Suddenly he lunged across the board at his sister. He seized her by the throat and started choking her. Sister Conchita fell to the floor, screaming. The inexorable pressure on her neck did not cease. She could hardly breathe. In another moment she knew that she would be dead.

Sister Conchita woke up, her arms flailing. Curiously she no longer felt tired, although she was sure that she could not have slept for long. The child with the bleached hair was no longer in the cave.

The nun recalled her dream and shuddered. She had never received anything but love and care from her parents and brother. The sight of the three of them in the dream behaving in such an irrational and cruel manner was discomfiting. She tried to dismiss the affair from her mind. She told herself that she had been distraught after her exhausting search for the cave; the experience would have been enough to give anyone bad dreams.

She had no trouble finding her way back to the Lau settlement on the plateau. She walked with such certainty that it was almost as if an unseen force was guiding her footsteps. Sam Beni was waiting for her between the huts. He raised an eyebrow at the nun's abstracted approach.

‘Is everything all right?' he asked.

‘Fine,' replied Sister Conchita. ‘Except . . .' She hesitated and then continued, ‘There was a young girl playing in one of the caves. Is it safe for her to be so far from the settlement on her own?'

‘You met her?' asked Beni, appearing startled.

‘Why yes. Only I'm afraid I was so tired I fell asleep. Who is she, do you know?'

Beni muttered an apology and reached for the sister's wrist. Sister Conchita looked down. The outline of a snake had been painted with lime on her flesh while she slept.

‘You have seen the dream-maker,' said the islander, visibly shocked and impressed. ‘Did she summon up a dream for you?'

‘Yes, as a matter of fact she—'

‘I don't want to know about it,' said Beni sharply. ‘It is between you and the ghosts. You must have powerful
mana
to be accepted by them so quickly.'

‘I only stumbled across her by chance.'

‘No one meets a dream-maker by chance. They summon people when they have messages for them.' The now concerned Sister Conchita tried to say something but Beni waved her away. ‘It will soon be night,' he told her, clearly anxious to be rid of the white woman who had invaded his culture. ‘It is time you began your descent. Don't worry. Your footsteps will be guided all the way, I promise you. I will ask one of the magic men to tie a knot in a piece of custom grass. That will slow down time and allow you to get back.'

Sister Conchita stumbled down the track back towards the waiting jeep. What had been in the coconut shell she had accepted from the girl? Could her dream have been some sort of message? Perhaps there had been a drug in the drink and her dream had been the result of an induced hallucinatory trance. Was she meant to deduce something from the antagonistic nature of her parents and brother in her recent and so vivid dream?

It must have taken her several hours to get back to Father Pierre, but it seemed no time at all. She poured out her story to the waiting priest in a breathless cascade, leaving nothing out.

‘What does it mean?' she demanded wildly as she finished. ‘Was the dream a message? How could that young dream-maker know anything about my family?'

‘You've been accepted by the Lau spirits,' said the priest calmly. ‘That doesn't happen to many whites. What do
you
think your dream meant?'

‘Ben Kella was standing with me on my parents' lawn,' said the nun, breathing deeply and trying to force herself to work the matter out logically. ‘He saw my parents and brother behaving completely out of character. Jack even attacked me. The message was meant for Kella, I'm sure of it. The three people I love more deeply than anyone on earth were doing strange, irrational things that frightened me.' She thought for a moment. ‘The implication was that someone close to Kella is going to behave in an odd way, perhaps even to harm him.' She looked to the priest for confirmation. ‘Could that possibly be it? If it is, I must get a message to Ben, to tell him that he's in danger!'

‘My dear,' said Father Pierre quietly, ‘if the Lau gods have seen fit to warn you, assuredly they will get the same message to Sergeant Kella!'

35

KILLING GROUND

Kella lay behind a bush and watched the newly built house between the trees. Not far away he could hear the thunder of the great waterfall.

He had been at the killing ground for an hour. He had travelled from Pazabosi's village as quickly as he could. Hita would be looking for Professor Mallory as well. Kella would not put it past the old chief to tell Hita where he had put the American, just to make matters interesting.

What Pazabosi was doing had its antecedents in bush folklore. The pitting of two young warriors against each other was a staple ingredient of Kwaio legends. It would suit the old chief's sense of humour to set Kella and Hita at one another's throats, and at the same time ensure that one of the two men who had been annoying him would die in the process.

The police sergeant knew that if he was going to have any realistic chance of survival he would have to find Professor Mallory quickly and then link up with Inspector Lorrimer and his Roviana constables. If the Englishman kept to the route Kella had given him, the police party should be less than ten miles away down the track at the moment. On the other hand, if Lorrimer had decided to make his own way up into the bush he could be anywhere.

Kella studied the house again. It was the freshly constructed leaf hut he had seen on his last visit to the area. He had wondered at the time who it was being built for. It had gone up too quickly to be a family dwelling place. Many bushmen had worked hard together to erect this thatched building in such a short time. There had to be a reason for their urgency, and Kella believed that he knew what it was.

Still, it was a long shot to believe that the American academic was being kept inside the building. There were no guards, which was puzzling, and since Kella had been there no one had entered or left the long hut.

The police sergeant decided that there was only one way to find out. He got to his feet and started running through the trees as quickly as he could, zigzagging towards the door of the house.

He reached the entrance and flung it open, bursting in to the single room. He did not know what he had expected to find, but nothing had prepared him for the bizarre, writhing tableau that met his eyes.

Two naked young women and a man were squirming together in noisy ecstasy, on top of a pile of pandanus mats. A third naked woman was on all-fours to one side of the group, looking on with rapt concentration and issuing shrill cries of exhortation and encouragement to the others. In the main group, pumping brown and white limbs intermingled and then briefly separated with lascivious pleasure.

Kella relaxed, his initial amazement evaporating in sheer delight and amusement. A bald head and a long-jawed, satiated, bespectacled white face emerged momentarily from the mêlée at an impossible angle through a gap in the amalgamated, sweating bodies, and gaped up in exhausted concern at the watching police sergeant. Kella sketched an admiring salute.

‘Professor Mallory, I presume?' he asked.

***

‘How did you know I was here?' asked Professor Mallory.

‘It was just a guess really,' Kella admitted.

Thirty minutes had passed since the police sergeant had first hurtled into the hut. Elizabeth and the two other Sikaiana women who had been conjoined so enthusiastically with the American had hurried into their clothes with many cries of dismay and outraged decency, and had flounced out of the hut. Mallory had struggled reluctantly back into his slacks and shirt and was sitting on a mat opposite Kella. Within the American, a condition of offended embarrassment seemed to be struggling with a prolonged absorbing daydream.

‘I was here some days ago,' went on Kella, trying to give the American time to recover from his disquiet. ‘I saw that this hut had only just been built. It had been put in an odd place among the trees. Bush people tend to stick together in small communities. A place like this, some distance from the village, was probably meant for a guest — or a prisoner. Then there was the mosquito net. Bush people don't use them. It must have been brought up especially from one of the big saltwater trading stores. You were the only whitey — white man — up here, so I assumed it was meant for you.' Kella paused. ‘And then I noticed the coconuts,' he added.

‘Coconuts?' repeated Mallory. He seemed too tired to make logical connections. Judging by what had been happening to the academic for the last week or so, Kella was not surprised.

‘When I glanced in here that last time, a number of coconuts had been split in half and the milk collected in a bowl. That meant that at least one Sikaiana person was living here. Sikaiana and Ontong Java are the only islands in the Solomons which make their own alcoholic drinks, and the Ontong people seldom leave their island. The Sikaiana drink is a toddy fermented from coconut milk. I wondered if Pazabosi had left Elizabeth here to cook and clean for you. I hadn't realized that there were three of them and that they . . .' Kella's voice trailed off as he failed to complete the sentence.

The mention of the girl's name struck a chord with the other man. ‘You've met Elizabeth?' asked Mallory, coming back, as if from a long distance.

Kella nodded. A reluctant, admiring grin creased the American professor's pale, lined face. ‘You, too?' he cackled suddenly. ‘With Elizabeth? Congratulations!' He frowned judiciously. ‘I wouldn't like to live off the difference,' he said, ‘and I'm certainly not being judgemental, but I'd say she was the best of the three. Just by a tad.'

‘I wouldn't know,' said Kella stiffly, hoping to change the subject. ‘I mean I only met Elizabeth briefly.'

‘That one doesn't need much time, son. Only opportunity.'

‘What happened exactly?' asked Kella, trying with difficulty to keep to the main thread of his interrogation. ‘How did you get up here in the first place?'

‘I'm writing a paper on Kwaio custom carvings,' said the American. ‘I particularly wanted to see the
havu.
No white man ever has. One morning two bushmen appeared at the mission, offering to bring me up here and show me the carving.'

‘They were sent by Pazabosi,' said Kella. ‘He needed you as a hostage.'

‘Is that right? Well, when I got as far as the custom temple behind the waterfall, Pazabosi and some of his boys were waiting there for me. They told me that the
havu
had been stolen and they had to do something about it. Scared the crap out of me, I don't mind telling you. I thought I was a gonner.'

‘Pazabosi couldn't harm you. He's entered the
trochea
, the contemplative last period of his life.'

‘Now you tell me! It didn't seem so reassuring at the time, that's for sure! Then the old guy presented me with a kind of ultimatum. I had to stay up here in this hut, in case he needed me, but to make life easier for me, he'd arranged for Elizabeth and the other women to keep me company.'

‘Some ultimatum,' marvelled Kella.

Mallory closed his eyes in ecstatic contemplation for a moment. ‘Guys who look like I do don't get many offers like that, I can tell you,' he said frankly. ‘Not here, or anywhere else.'

‘That would be Pazabosi's notion of irony,' said the police sergeant. ‘You came up here looking for a carved representation of the sex act, and he offered you the real thing.'

‘In spades,' breathed Mallory.

It would also mean that Pazabosi would not have to post guards around the house, thought Kella. He found himself liking the American for his pragmatic acceptance of his situation.

‘Let me tell you, sergeant,' said Mallory, ‘after the first few hours with those Sikaiana women, I decided that they would have to prise me loose with a shoe-horn ever to get me to leave.'

‘I'm afraid that's why I'm here,' said Kella apologetically. ‘I have to get you back to Honiara and out of the Protectorate rather quickly.'

Mallory shook his head resolutely. ‘No way,' he affirmed. ‘Mrs Mallory's little boy knows when he's well off.'

‘I'm afraid that if you stay here another hour, you'll probably be dead,' said Kella. In a few words he told the other man about the attempts of Hita to usurp Pazabosi as leader of the Kwaio people.

‘At this moment Hita's out to make a name for himself by killing the pair of us,' he finished.

‘Shit,' mumbled Professor Mallory. ‘I knew it was too good to last.'

‘Stay here for the moment,' Kella told him, standing up. ‘I'll just go and take a look round outside before we leave.'

Elizabeth was waiting for him outside the hut. Complicitly she sidled up to the sergeant, murmuring endearments. Kella regarded the extroverted girl warily.

‘Are you really a schoolteacher?' he asked.

‘Trained and certificated, Sergeant Kella,' she confirmed. She grinned. ‘Mind you, that doesn't mean I can't do other things too.'

‘Just tell me one thing,' begged Kella, trying to hold her off. ‘Why did you encourage me to spend the night with you the last time I came to the village? Was that Pazabosi's idea to distract me?'

Elizabeth's limpid eyes widened at the mere suggestion. ‘Certainly not,' she said with hauteur. ‘Pazabosi knows nothing about you and me.'

‘Then why did you do it?' asked the bewildered Kella.

The girl snuggled up against him. ‘Can't you guess?' she asked softly. ‘I fancy you, Ben Kella.'

Kella blinked, flattered and alarmed. Elizabeth threw her golden arms about his neck and tried to drag him in the direction of the trees. Before they could get started, another of the Sikaiana women hurried towards them and addressed Elizabeth urgently in her own dialect.

‘What is it?' demanded Kella, disengaging himself with considerable reluctance.

Elizabeth looked concerned. ‘There is a war party coming through the bush towards us,' she translated.

Kella had shepherded Mallory and the three frightened women as far as the killing ground before Hita caught up with them. The three bushmen came out of the trees across the plateau at a brisk trot. Kella pointed to the bush track.

‘Follow that path,' he shouted to the others. ‘Keep going down towards the coast. If you're lucky you'll meet a police detachment coming up.'

‘What are you going to do?' asked the dishevelled Mallory. His eyes behind the thick lenses of his spectacles were worried and unfocused.

‘Never mind me! Just get the girls away from here.'

Kella whirled round to face the three bushmen. They were advancing across the bluff in a tight bunch, hoisting their spears speculatively.

Kella was not expecting anything subtle from his attackers. Hita was not a reflective man. The young warrior could have succeeded Pazabosi merely by waiting a short time for the elderly chief to die. Instead, he had insisted on challenging the old man. Any attack from the bush warrior now was likely to come from the front, in a sudden flurry of action.

One of the warriors outstripped his two companions and raced towards Kella. Drawing back his arm, the bushman hurled his spear with whiplash force. Instinctively Kella ducked. The weapon screamed through the air past his head and embedded itself quivering in the ground a few yards away.

Propelled by his own velocity the bushman continued on his run towards the police sergeant. Like his companions he was smaller and lighter than Kella. The sergeant braced himself and drove his right fist into the running man's face. The warrior's nose exploded in a spray of blood and his head jerked back sharply.

Kella stepped forward, bent his knees and punched the bushman in the kidneys with a scything left hook. The warrior doubled up. Kella seized him by the shoulders, straightened the man up and drove the top of his head with sickening force into the bushman's already blood-soaked face. The warrior crumpled to the ground and lay still. Kella scrabbled for the man's spear and held it before him as he faced Hita and the remaining bushman.

The two men had fanned out and were approaching Kella cautiously, making threatening circular motions and darts with their short spears. They knew that if they threw and missed, the burly police sergeant would then have an advantage over them. Hita snarled something to his companion. The two men ran with desperate courage at Kella.

The sergeant retreated to the edge of the cliff, the waterfall thundering just behind him. This would cut down the bushmen's angles of attack, but it certainly limited his scope for retreat.

Out of the corner of his eye Kella saw that Mallory and the three Sikaiana women were huddled together under the trees at the edge of the plateau. Again he shouted to them to run. Then the bush warriors were upon him, jabbing fiercely with their spears.

As the bushmen closed in on him, Kella launched himself forward in a rugby tackle on Hita's companion. Still clutching his spear in his right hand, he wrapped both arms around his adversary's scrawny thigh, pulling the man round and to the ground, so that he lay between Kella and the hovering and disconcerted Hita.

At the same time, with his left hand Kella grabbed the bushman's unprotected testicles. He pulled and twisted them viciously. The warrior screamed in agony. Kella released his grip on the man's thigh. In the same movement the sergeant rolled away and dragged the point of his spear across the tendons at the back of his fallen adversary's knee, severing several of them. The bushman yelled again and writhed helplessly on the ground.

Undeterred, Hita leapt over the fallen bushman to reach Kella. The police sergeant tried to scramble to his feet. He slipped on the wet grass and toppled backwards on the edge of the cliff. Hita's eyes glistened with triumph. The young warrior raised his spear to bring it down on Kella. Instinctively the sergeant shielded his face with his forearm and tried to brace himself against the fatal thrust that would surely follow.

He was suddenly aware of the pounding of running feet. Kella looked up. Behind Hita, the scrawny, middle-aged form of Professor Mallory was running clumsily but with enormous determination across the bluff towards them both, gathering momentumas he approached. The sun glistenedon his spectacles.