Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (36 page)

The youth looked up at the sky and sighed again. Dark clouds were buffeting each other across invisible terraces. He could make out the shapes of dogs amongst them, and wondered what that meant. A rain-wind was coming in low, through the treetops. He could see the shape of this broad wind running like a river over the foliage. Perhaps that was all it was? Rain coming?

Amongst the creased and withered elders, who puffed on their clay pipes, creating a dense fug in the debating
hut,
was a man of great standing. He was the most ancient of any of the tribal dignitaries, having survived disease, accident and the rigours of opium for an unprecedented half century, though a recent respiratory problem indicated that it was doubtful he would make his fifty-first birthday. Though this particular village was one of the poorest of a poor nation, this man was their most powerful shaman. It was to him that the youth had come running.

The village was on a tall place, the peak of long ridge, and the youth hopped from one foot to the other, staring out over the hardwood forests below thinking of the beauty of his bride. She was plump and round-faced, with large dark eyes, and when he had first taken her to the courting garden and offered to push her on the swing made of vines, she had accepted without hesitation. There had been problems with her father of course, who had not approved of the youth as a suitable husband, but the boy had obtained a magic egg and had enticed the girl into the jungle. Once they had cooked and eaten the egg together, without interruption, the father naturally had to consent to the marriage. The egg had cost the youth two piglets, but she was worth it. Her cheeks were like ripe fruits and she had strong fat thighs. The youth’s feet itched when he thought about those thighs.

Finally, though the debate was not yet at an end, the elders left the hut to perform their individual toilets. Clearly the exercise and fresh air were not good for them, because as soon as they were on their feet and out of the smoke they began to stagger. The messenger went immediately to the shaman, who was leaning on a portal attempting to catch his breath.

‘Great one’, cried the boy, ‘messengers have come from the big river to warn us of a coming!’

Red-veined eyes regarded the youth with little interest.

‘Coming?’ wheezed the old man. ‘Who is coming?’

‘Men. Men clad in clothes stained brown and green, and they have weapons, which shoot musket balls in great showers. They are as numerous as marching ants, and some of them come from the sky in whirling things, which fire thunderbolts. We are afraid they are coming to kill us all.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ whispered the shaman, coughing red flecks into the palm of his hand.

‘You must tell us what course of action to take. The headman of my village has sent me here to ask your advice. This is an evil which threatens our whole nation and you, as our greatest shaman, have been given the authority to consult the oracle bones.’

A light came into the shaman’s red-rimmed eyes.

‘The oracle bones?’ he breathed. ‘Aaahhh!’

The elders were recalled from their functions in the forest and told of the news. It was universally agreed that the shaman should consult the oracle bones and a woman was dispatched to fetch the last two bulls owned by the village headman. The corral where the cattle were kept was much closer than the village from which the young man had made his run, and the domestic beasts were in the hands of the shaman by nightfall. A ritual killing took place,
then
the flesh was stripped from the bulls and roasted over log fires. The old men put aside their pipes and feasted on the meat, which since the bulls had been slaughtered by the shaman in secret ceremony, was sacred and could therefore only pass the lips of an elder. All this was only right and proper.

The smell of the roasted bulls drove the young man mad and he went off into the forest to sleep. There under the moon-green roof of the world, he lay and dreamed of his fourteen-year-old bride. He had seen some of the girls in this village, as he had passed the spring where they filled their gourds, and none of them were as pretty as his own puff-cheeked wife. They had giggled as he ran swiftly past them, a stranger in their midst. It was true that there were probably several in the courting gardens that evening, waiting to see if he would appear, for there is no one more likely to cause turmoil in the hearts of local maidens than a youth from foreign climes. In his own village he might cause little excitement amongst the girls he had grown up with (his beloved being the one exception), but here he was a slim young god from exotic regions. There would be much speculation amongst older married women of seventeen or more about what his loincloth shielded, and concerning the tight roundness of his buttocks. The thoughts of the maidens, less direct, would be dwelling on his sinewy arms and thighs, and on the clarity of his eyes. Altogether, there would be little of his anatomy left untouched by the minds of the female population of this high village.

He slept fitfully, bothered less by the bark beetles and the spiders than by his own mental agitation. He went once to the spring for water, and interrupted an illicit meeting between a couple, married, but not to each other. The sounds of the elders feasting were disturbing the whole community, and there were few people in their beds. At dawn the women rose and began to pound the rice with foot-worked beam-hammers, and even the demons deep in the earth had their teeth rattled. The young man went and performed his ablutions, passing cleansed under the gate with the dogs’ skulls and wooden figures that guarded the village. Elders had told him that once he was old enough to smoke opium and be privy to the true nature of the universe, he would see those wooden figures dance on the ends of their poles. The young man was not certain he was looking forward to this privilege.

The elders rose at noon and found their instructions for scraping clean the bulls’ sternums had been duly carried out. A charcoal
oven which had been built beyond the village perimeter
was consecrated, and two large bones were heated in this makeshift kiln. The young man knew that the shaman would retrieve the bones, once they had been allowed to cool, and inspect the cracks caused by the intense heat. Reading these symbols, sent by the gods through the fire into the bones, the shaman could divine the future. One sternum bone represented peace and the other war, and by this method would he know how the tribe should treat with the hordes now crossing the big river.

The youth waited in an agony of loneliness and homesickness while this ceremony took place. He wondered what his beloved was thinking right at that moment, as she worked out in the fields under the blazing sun. Was she dreaming of him? Of course, she must be. And the hut, still only half finished! Perhaps if he made it smaller, it might be nearer completion, but then they had little enough room in which to romp as it was. Like most youths he wanted it large enough for her to be able to hold herself temporarily aloof, so that the eventual coming together would be that much sweeter. They needed to find each other in the darkness, not too soon, or the pleasure would be common and earthly. He anticipated going out on his first hunt, after their first union, and bringing home a tree squirrel or a fish for the pot. How her delighted cheeks would shine for him!
He had been told by the elders
that the pleasure of satisfying boy-girl desires was secondary to the wonders of the pipe, which he would be allowed to discover after his twenty-fifth birthday, but he could not believe such a tale. That was old men’s talk, for those whose loins had long since dried like seedpods under the sun. That was talk from those who could enjoy only dreams, whose passion had moved to their heads.

The following day he was summoned to the hut of the elders and the shaman gave him double-edged news.

The oracle bones had emerged from the charcoal without a crack on either of them. Such a thing had never happened before in the history of the tribe.

‘It means,’ said the shaman, ‘either the tribe has no future to record on the bones, or the invaders will pass over us without disturbing us.’

‘Should we risk it? Why don’t we all hide?’ said the youth. ‘Why don’t we run up into higher country still, where I have heard there are caves? We could stay there until these invaders have left our country, and then return and rebuild our villages. They would never find us up there.’

The shaman pursed his lips.

‘Would you have us defy the gods?’ he said.

‘Is it possible,’ asked the youth, ‘that the fire was not hot enough?
Or the bones too fresh?
I have seen hotter fires, bones that were drier.’

‘Leave us,’ said the shaman. ‘Go back to your village.’

The youth left readily enough and ran for three days, pausing only to drink from some broad-leafed plants that had formed basins for the rainwater during the last downpour. He arrived back at his home just as news reached his own elders that a village further down the valleys was already in flames. The elders took the youth’s message and fell immediately into grave debate, while the young people crowded round the youth and asked questions of one that had travelled the world outside, had journeyed to the unknown regions of another village.

The boy ate then slept after that and awoke to the sound of rapid gunfire. He snatched his own long-barrelled musket, powder and ball, and ran outside. His young bride was running towards him, having raced from the fields. Her round face was bright with fear

‘The enemy are coming,’ she gasped. ‘They are shooting and burning.’

The youth waited no longer. He grabbed her by the wrist and led her towards the first ridge. He would take her to the next village and try to persuade the elders that they should take action, prepare to resist the foe, or escape into the mountains. As he ran, pulling his frightened bride behind him, he called to his brothers, sisters and cousins to join him, but they merely stopped and stared as if he were mad, then turned their bemused eyes in the direction of the forest, from which plumes of flames emerged with crackling roars. The sound of whirling clatter came from the distant sky.

This time the youth took four days to reach the village where the great shaman lived, due to the weariness of his own body and the slowness of his new wife. On the way he stopped to shoot a domestic pig with his long rifle. The pig had not belonged to him but the young man argued with his bride that now the end of the world had come, private property had become public.

When the pair arrived at the great shaman’s village they found that the elders had just emerged from a long debate concerning the blankness on the oracle bones. These grave and pious elders took their duties extremely seriously. The opium was their link with their ancestors and it was the work of the elders to extract opinions from their hallowed forebears and impart these to their fellow debatees. Unfortunately, there were as many divine dead as there were men to question them. The fact that the old men could hardly stand when they left the Happy Hut, and frequently toppled over, indicated how long and hard the discussion had been.

They finally came to the conclusion that ‘blank bones’ meant the tribe had no future. The invaders, said the elders, would kill every man, woman and child in the tribe.

‘That’s true, that’s true,’ cried the excited young man, ‘they have already destroyed my village. Look, you can see the smoke from here...’ and pointed to the black vertical column which rose from beyond the southern ridges. There were other dark pillars of cloud visible further back.

The great shaman ignored the youth. The old man’s face was full of light and wisdom. He lifted his ancient hand, extended a bony finger and pointed dramatically towards the smoke in the south.

‘It was when we saw that sign from the gods,’ he told his people, ‘that we knew the tribe had no future.’

The young man nodded vigorously, and was about to remonstrate with the elders, to spur them to some kind of action, when they retired to the debating hut once more to decide whether their particular village had no future because of the presence of the invaders—who might indeed be satisfied with their conquest of the lower villages and come no further—or because the elders had killed its last two bulls and it could not survive without breeding stock.

The youth was disgusted with the old people. He and his young wife set out for the caves in the distant mountains, he explaining to her that there was no need for a bridal hut now, because their ancestors had been left back there in the village of their birth. She, not without a little pique, was explaining to him that if he loved her as much as he said he did, he would not forego her traditional rights just because they had been forced away from their roots. He was supposed to build her a pretty hut of bamboo poles and banana leaves. If he loved her, he would still do this little thing.