The Poisoned Island (15 page)

Banks is sitting in his great wheelchair in the same place as before, when he’d planted the little sapling from Otaheite. He is leaning forward as if looking for it, and Brown does the same as he approaches, but cannot see where the plant is just now in this dim light.

“Sir Joseph,” he says, and Banks does not look at him, but does reply.

“Brown. I thought you would be here earlier.”

“I had business to attend to in town, Sir Joseph.”

“What on earth kind of business would you have in town that could be more important than what is happening here?”

But the question is quiet and, as Brown takes it at least, rhetorical. Banks is not particularly interested in Brown’s business in town. He is, though, deeply and unaccountably interested in the shiny green tree close by where the sapling was planted. Brown looks at it, and in a snap judgment takes
it to be another type of breadfruit. It is perhaps four feet tall, its leaves oval and shiny green.

“Was there something you wanted, Sir Joseph?”

“Yes, Brown, there was. This tree here. What do you take it to be?”

“It appears to be
Artocarpus incisa
, Sir Joseph. The same species as was transplanted to the West Indies under your supervision. I do not believe one has been successfully grown in this country before now. I had no idea we had such a specimen at Kew. I’m astonished to have missed it, or not to have been informed of its presence here.”

“Indeed. But that is perhaps not the most interesting thing about this plant.”

“It is
Artocarpus incisa
?”

“Well, perhaps, Brown. Though if it is it’s like no other
Artocarpus
I’ve seen before.”

“Indeed, sir? What are its distinctive differences?”

“One of fructification, and one of habit. It only has female flowers. The
Artocarpus incisa
is hermaphrodite, as you know; the male flowers appear first, followed immediately by the female flowers. Yet this tree only has female flowers; male flowers may yet appear, or they may not. In either case, it is very different. But the difference in habit is even more distinctive.”

“Yes, Sir Joseph.”

“Brown, this is the sapling from the
Solander
I planted. It has grown four feet in two days.”

Oft have I wish’d, for such you love, that I

Were metamorphos’d to some curious fly;

Beyond the main I’d speed my eager way,

And buzz around you all the live-long day.

Nor would I be some ombrageous tree,

That shades thy grot, and vegetate for thee;

At thy approach I’d all my flowers expand,

And weave my wanton foliage round thy hand.

T. Q. Z. Esq., “An Epistle From Oberea, Queen of Otaheite, To Joseph Banks Esq.,” 1773

In the years which followed the death of the prince’s brother, the island changed. There were wars, a great many wars, between different groups and even between different islands. Europeans continued to arrive and leave, bringing iron, alcohol, and an ever-growing collection of new diseases, and as each year passed more and more of the islanders succumbed to whatever the Europeans carried with them, be it alcohol, guns, or the invisible substances that crawled into their lungs and choked them. The Christian missionaries grew in number, then reduced in number, then all but disappeared, fleeing to other places in the face of the wars. They returned in the lulls between fighting, and continued with the work of translating their texts into the island language. When the fighting on the island grew particularly bad, there were times when the only missionary that remained was the oldest, tallest, and fiercest of them. His sole companion was the young man who lived with him, who was shunned by
all the islanders because of his English father and his poor, doomed island mother.

But the most important thing that happened was that the prince stopped being little. He became a man. He was now the eldest son in his family, and (he supposed) a sort of chieftain. But his father endured and, whatever custom and tradition said about inheritance, it was his father who ruled the family and who paid tribute to the king, even while that king fought for his very existence against the forces ranged against him. The prince felt none of the ambition which had consumed his brother; he felt no desire to rule. His father was welcome to it, and in any case where was the future in ruling over a realm in which the subjects were, one by one, succumbing to death? Even the king’s father had taken his name—Pomare—from the island words which meant
night cough
, in memory of the daughter who was taken by whatever European poison filled her delicate lungs.

The woods were filled with the dead. Their spirits choked the skies and the gods, if they were still there, became angry with the phalanxes of deceased they were expected to accommodate. The
haiva
danced and danced, not just in the prince’s dreams, but throughout the living days and weeks and months, until even the men who took the role of
haiva
themselves died. The surviving islanders struggled on, in the face of war and disease, and as the years passed more and more of them began to find themselves attracted to the propositions of the Christian missionaries, who seemed to tell a tale which explained that this living world—which had once been so bounteous but was now so terrible—was in fact designed to be thus and was only an overture to the infinite pleasures of Paradise. The islanders, who had long been living
on Paradise but now saw it poisoned, began to understand what the Christians were talking about.

The old ways endured, though, even while the king intimated that he might, one day soon, become a Christian himself. The people kept the
marae
intact and tended them, they looked after their dead in the old ways, and the dark sect of
arioi
maintained their dancing, singing, sacrificing ways.

The prince himself had become attracted to a particular cult within the
arioi
to which he had been introduced by a young prince from a neighboring fiefdom. Indeed, this cult occupied almost all his thoughts and helped explain his lack of interest in maneuvering against his father. The cult convened at a
marae
high in the hills, where it was said the
tupapau
, the spirits of the dead, gathered for their own ceremonies. Given the thousands of deaths on the island, the prince sometimes thought, those ceremonies must be crowded indeed.

To reach the plateau where this
marae
was to be found, one followed a path along a river, where the rocks on either side grew and grew. You crossed the stream again and again to find the safest way, until eventually you reached an acre or two of nearly flat ground covered in fern. The air here was filled with a kind of dust, which some of the members of the cult believed was the effluence of the dead. When the prince asked his father what this stuff might be (without mentioning where he had seen it), he was told it was actually crumbling fungi blown from within the dead wood of trees.

On this flat ground, among the ferns, stood one particular tree. It was said by the cult’s adherents that the tree had been there for centuries, but that was impossible; the tree quivered with young life. It was a bristling breadfruit tree, but one from which no fruit had ever been harvested. Instead, the adherents of this little half-secret cult cut the useless flowers
and leaves of the tree and left them to dry down, which they did unfathomably rapidly. Using an old kettle which had been stolen from some visiting ship in the distant past, they then consumed the leaf of the tree as tea. No one knew who’d been the first to try this, but the technique was shown carefully to each new adherent, who learned how to boil the water, add the dried leaf, and then pour it out into the little wooden cups they fashioned for the purpose.

Under the influence of this leaf they saw visions and experienced wonders, benign wonders of such beauty that they had been drawn to adapt the
marae
there in the center of the island to celebrate the tree, its leaf and the wandering spirits which settled in that place. They promised each other not to tell anyone other than fellow
arioi
, and preferably younger
arioi
, of this magical place. They would meet there every seven or eight days, a group of up to a dozen young men and women, all of them
arioi
and island nobility of some kind. They would drink the tea and laugh and dance and sing, and the tree would quiver with delight and watch over them, far away from the beaches where angry men fired European guns at one another and European microbes hung patiently in the air, the malign spirits of distant islands.

Colby Potter is dreaming. His body is flat and quiet on a dirty bed in a Ratcliffe boardinghouse. His friend Elijah Frost is dreaming on a bed at the other side of the room. It is four days since the two men left the
Solander
with Jeremiah Critchley and the other men in his group.

Colby Potter has been dreaming for four days.

He is walking down a lane lined with trees. It is a familiar lane, one connected with his childhood. It runs like an undulating river through a tunnel of trees. This is Oak Lane, the road he walked down from his father’s cottage as a boy, trudging off to work in the school at the top of the hill, one of a small army of boys who cleaned and fetched and swept and dug around the grounds, invisible to the other children, more fortunate, who were busy learning to read and to write and to dispute.

Colby the boy is much as Colby the man will be: relaxed with his lot in life, a moderately well-fed child living with a moderately well-employed laborer in a house without women
and without disharmony. In his dream his stomach is full of the glutinous porridge his father would make on the fire, warmed by the strange-tasting tea from Otaheite. His father, in the dream, had boiled water in an old iron kettle, nothing like anything of the implements that had really existed in their little Sevenoaks cottage. The man Colby dreams of the boy Colby wondering where this kettle had come from, and why it had been vaguely unsettling.

It is a sunlit Kent morning, the kind of morning which England bestows on its people as if in confirmation of the nationality of God. Colby is tired, and is becoming disconcerted by the realization that Oak Lane is longer today than it has any right to be, stretching away into a green distance through a tunnel of leaves, the sunlight striping the road like the back of a tiger. He thinks of his father, and as soon as he does so a picture leaps into his mind: his father cleaning the old iron kettle, rubbing its now cool sides with a harsh cloth, and dropping the kettle onto the floor as smoke starts to pour impossibly from its ragged spout, filling the little cottage with gray impurities and the distant giggles of women.

The smoke disappears up the cottage chimney. Colby cannot see his father, because now he is watching the smoke as it streams up and out of the chimney. The head of the smoke peeks, dragonlike, from the chimney pot, sweeping across the forest trees in a full circle before locating what it is after, and then the head pulls the body of the smoke from the chimney and it rumbles the bricks as the house gives birth to it. A single smoke serpent now, it pours down the roof and along the ground and into the trees.