The Ghost Road (26 page)

In view of that chink of blade on blade, what
accounted for this sudden change of attitude? He was reasonably certain it was
Njiru who'd put Ngea's axe in the tent. He hadn't even pretended surprise when

Rivers offered it to him. And yet here he was, being
apparently helpful and co-operative, actually inviting him to be present at an
important ritual occasion. But then he was like this, one moment clamming up
completely, even ordering other people to withhold information, and yet at
other times easily the best informant on the island. Standing over them
sometimes to make sure they got every detail of a ritual, every word of a
prayer
exactly
right.

The inconsistency probably reflected Njiru's doubts
about the reality of his own power. Others were persuaded by it, but he was
capable of standing back and asking himself the hard questions. Why, if he
controlled the spirits, why, if the rituals did everything he claimed for them,
were the white men still here? Not Rivers and Hocart, whom he liked and
respected, but the others: the government that forbade the taking of heads
though the people lived for it, the traders who cheated them, the plantation
bosses who exploited them, and, most of all, the missionaries who destroyed
their faith. If you can't prevent such things happening, what is the actual
value of your knowledge?

And so he swayed to and fro: sometimes guarding his
knowledge jealously, sometimes sharing it freely, sometimes spitting it out
with a bitter, angry pride, sometimes almost with gratitude to Rivers, whose
obvious interest in what he was being told seemed to confirm its value. And
then again he would sheer off, ashamed of ever needing that confirmation.

A stormy relationship, then, on Njiru's side, and yet
the mutual respect went deep. He wouldn't kill me, Rivers thought. Then he
thought,
Actually
, in certain circumstances, that's
exactly what he'd do.

By the time they reached the turning off the coastal path,
the sun was at its highest point. Sweat tickled the tip of Rivers's nose,
producing a constant frenzy of irritation. His groin was a swamp. At first the
darkness under the trees was welcome, after the dreadful white glare, but then
a cloud of stinging insects fastened on the sweat.

Abruptly, they came out into a clearing, sharp blades
of sunlight slanting down between the tress, and ahead of them, rising steeply
up the slope, six or seven skull houses, their gratings ornamented with strings
of dangling shells. The feeling of being watched that skulls always gave you.
Dazzled by the sudden light, he followed Njiru up the slope, towards a knot of
shadows, and then one of the shadows moved, resolving itself into the shape of
Nareti, the blind mortuary priest who squatted there, all pointed knees and
elbows, snails' trails of pus running from the corners of his eyes.

The furthest of the skull houses was being repaired,
and its occupants had been taken out and arranged on to the ground so that, at
first sight, the clearing seemed to be cobbled with skulls. He hung back, not
sure how close he was permitted to approach, and at that moment a sudden fierce
gust of wind shook the trees and all the strings of votary shells rattled and
clicked together.

Njiru beckoned Rivers to join him and, without further
preliminary, began the prayer of purification, rubbing leaves down Nareti's
legs from buttock to ankle.

'I purify at the great stream of Mondo. It flows down,
it flows up,
it
washes away the poisonous water of the
chiefly dead. The thatch is poisonous, the rafters are poisonous, the creepers
are poisonous,
the
ground is poisonous...'

Among the skulls laid out on the ground were several
that had belonged to children. Children loved and wept over? Or children
brought back from Ysabel and Choiseul and sacrificed?

'Let me purify this priest. Let him come down and pass
under. Let him come down and step over. Let him not waste away, let him not get
the rash,
let
him not get the itch. Let him be bonito
in the sea, porpoise in the sea, eel in the fresh water, crayfish in the fresh
water,
vape
in the fresh water. I purify, I
purify, I purify with all the chiefs.'

Njiru's voice, which had risen in pitch, dropped on
the final words.

Always in Melanesia, the abrupt transition from ritual
to everyday life. Njiru was soon chatting and laughing with Nareti,
then
he summoned Rivers to follow him. A short path led to
Nareti's hut and there, squatting in the dust, having the remains of lunch
licked off his face by a dog, was the small boy whom Lembu had brought from
Ysabel.
Healthy, well-fed.
Unbruised, Rivers saw,
looking closely, not happy, but then that was hardly to be hoped for. He
watched him for a few minutes. At least the dog was a friend.

He was to assist Nareti, Njiru said. When he grew up
he would be a mortuary priest in his turn. An odd fate, to spend one's life
tending the skulls of a foreign people, but at least he would
have
a life, and perhaps not a bad one, for the mortuary priests became wealthy and
enjoyed considerable respect. This taking of captives had been the custom even
in the days of head-hunting, Njiru explained. He was in one of his
communicative phases. Some of the 'heads' taken on a raid were always brought
back alive, and kept for occasions when they might be quickly needed.
A sort of living larder of heads.
Such captives were never
ill-treated—the idea of deliberate cruelty was foreign to the people—and indeed
they often attained positions of wealth and honour, though always knowing that,
at any moment, their heads might be required.

On their way back across the clearing Njiru stopped,
selected the central skull from the middle row, and held it out to Rivers.
'Homu.'

Rivers took the skull, aware of the immense honour that
was being done to
him,
and searching for something to
say and the words to say it in. He ran his fingers round the occiput and traced
the cranial sutures. He remembered a time at Bart's, holding a human brain in
his hands for the first time, being amazed at the weight of it. This blown
eggshell had contained the only product of the forces of evolution capable of
understanding its own origins. But then for Njiru too the skull was sacred not
in or of itself, but because it had contained the spirit, the
tomate.

He looked at Njiru and realized it wasn't necessary to
say anything. He handed the skull back, with a slight inclination of his head,
and for a moment their linked hands grasped it, each holding the object of
highest value in the world.

The bullet
caused gross damage to the left eye as it passed backwards in the direction of
the temporal lobe. Left pupil fixed, cornea insensitive, eyelid droops, no
movement of the globe except downwards.
Eye blind because of
rupture of the choroid and atrophy of the optic nerve.
Yes.
A tendency to clonus at the right ankle joint...
All right.

Switching off the lighted screen and replacing the
notes in the file, Rivers glanced at the cover and noticed that Hallet was in
the 2nd Manchesters. He wondered if he knew Billy Prior, or whether, if he did,
he would remember.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

19 October
1918

Marched all day through utter devastation.
Dead horses, unburied men, stench
of corruption.
Sometimes you look at all this, craters, stinking mud,
stagnant water, trees like gigantic burnt matches, and you think the land can't
possibly recover. It's
poisoned.
Poison's dripped into it from rotting men, dead horses, gas. It will, of
course. Fifty years from now a farmer'll be ploughing these fields and turn up
skulls.

A huge crow flew over us, flapping and croaking
mournfully.
One for sorrow.
The men didn't rest till
they'd succeeded in spotting another.

Joy awaits us, then.

The unburied dead, though not cheerful companions for
a march, had one good result.
A boot for Wilson.
Getting it wasn't pleasant, but once the debris left by the previous owner
(of
the previous owner) had been cleaned out it did well enough. He looks happier.

Men very cheerful for the most part, a long singing
column winding tirelessly along (but we've a long way to go yet!). I found
myself thinking about Longstaffe. Not dead three weeks, and yet he rarely
crosses my mind. In Tite Street, three doors down from Beattie's shop, there
was an old couple who'd been married over fifty years and everybody thought
when one of them went the other would be devastated. But when the husband died
the old lady didn't seem all that upset, and hardly talked about him once the
funeral was over. In spite of all the young male vigour around here—and my God
it's bloody overwhelming at times—we're all in the same position as that old
woman. Too close to death ourselves to make a fuss. We economize on grief.

Later

Men bivouac in the open, but the officers are in
dug-outs, the remains of an elaborate German system. The dug-outs are boarded
off, but behind the planks are tunnels which reach back very deep. You can put
your eye to a gap in the boards and look into darkness and after a while the
eyeball begins to ache from the cold air. The extraordinary thing is everybody's
slightly nervous about these tunnels, far more than about the guns that rumble
and flicker and light up the sky as I write. And it's not a rational fear. It's
something to do with the children whom the Pied Piper led into the mountain,
who never came out again, or Rip Van Winkle who came out and found that years
and years had passed and nobody knew him. It's interesting, well, at least it
interests
me, that
we're still afraid in this
irrational way when at the same time we're surrounded by the worst the twentieth
century can do: shells, revolvers, rifles, guns, gas. I think it's because it
strikes a particular chord. Children do go into the mountain and not come back.
We've all been home on leave and found home so foreign that we couldn't fit in.
What about after the war? But perhaps it's better not to think about that.
Tempting fate.
Anyway, here comes dinner. I'm hungry.

20 October

Another mammoth march.
Lousy rotten stinking job too, rounding up the
stragglers. Forget leadership.

This is where leadership ends and bullying starts. I
heard myself hassling and chivvying like one of those bloody instructors at
Étaples. Except at least I'm
doing
what I'm bullying
other people into doing.

I turned on one man, mouth open to give him a really
good blast, and then I saw his face. He was asthmatic.
That
tight, pale, drawn worried look.
If you're asthmatic yourself you can't
miss it. He might as well have been carrying a placard. I fell in beside him
and tried to talk to him, but he couldn't talk and march at once, or creep
rather—he certainly wasn't marching. That's the thing about asthma: it creates
the instant brotherhood shared humanity routinely fails to create. I got him
into the horse ambulance, well propped up, gripped his wrist and said goodbye.
I doubt if he saw me go. When you're as bad as that nothing matters except the
next breath.

The curious thing is as soon as I saw his face, my own
chest tightened, just because I'd been reminded of the possibility, I suppose.
So far, touch wood, there's been no trouble. But I'm a bit wheezy tonight.

Singing very ragged by mid-afternoon, a lot of men
marching in silence, it had become a test of endurance. But then suddenly, or
so it seemed—we'd been marching half asleep—we found ourselves with green
fields on either side, farmhouses with roofs on, trees with branches, and
civilians. We'd marched right through the battlefields into what used to be
securely German-held territory.
Women.
Children.
Dogs.
Cats.
I think we were all amazed that the world had such creatures in it. A lot of
wolf whistling at the girls, and nobody inclined to be fussy. 'Girl' soon
stretched from fourteen to fifty.

I'm writing this at a kitchen table in a cottage.
Outside is a farmyard with ordinary farmyard noises.

Honking geese are a miracle.
Though
we move on again soon.
They're questioning civilians in the next room,
Owen's French coming in handy. And at this table, until a few weeks ago, a
German officer sat and wrote letters home.

22 October

Still here, but not for much longer.
We move on again later today. Not even the pouring
rain that puckers the surface of the pond—with its official ducks and
unofficial moorhens—can remove the feeling of serenity I have.
Chest a lot easier, in spite of the damp.