Bright and Distant Shores Read online

  The Kuk hadn’t known a word of pidgin when Argus lived in the village.

  “Malini,” Argus said. “Sisa Malini.”

  They ignored him and began touching his ragged clothes, prodding his trouser legs with the muzzles of their rifles. The Poumeta and the bushmen were no longer sworn enemies but had become reluctant traders of goods and brides. Nonetheless, they remained suspicious of each other’s coy houses and livelihood and weapons. They shared a dim but collective memory of the days of their forefathers, when villages were raided and burned, when kidnapped girls were taken into men’s clubhouses to be shackled and whored. Argus looked into their walled eyes, repeating his sister’s name. There was something between them he could not name, a need for atonement from generations ago. A few of the women and children began emerging cautiously from the trees, edging forward, clumping sago from coconut bowls, infants nursing and slung on hips. Malini approached slowly, blinking in the early sun, her hair dreadlocked and braided with flowers. It was clear she was embarrassed by having to lay claim to the vagrant who’d wandered up the caldera in stolen clothes. He studied her feet, avoiding the tenacity of her naked breasts. The reverend had taught him the tenets of Calvinist modesty like a string of phrasal verbs and now he couldn’t help but look away, slightly appalled but also annoyed by his own prudishness. She spoke softly to the four warriors and they took a few steps back, their weapons dropping to one side. She was a foot taller than the men, Argus noticed, clearly a Poumetan pureblood among the tree-dwelling pygmies.

  She led him to a fire pit and they sat cross-legged. The villagers gathered and circled at a distance of twenty feet. She spoke their childhood language, quietly at first and in the clipped style offered to vexing children. But then she warmed and brightened. He hadn’t spoken Poumetan for six years and it came in a halting rush, his mouth now slackened by English. He mispronounced forest and volcano while recounting his overnight ordeal, his sister’s eyes skipping a beat on each botched word. Despite her own years of absence, she spoke their native tongue perfectly. He’d spoken Poumetan in his mind every day for years, a locked room where not even the Reverend Mister could find him, but now it was a hash of half-words and ideas without names. He looked at his hands and tried to puzzle it out. The lack of distinction between he and she and it, the merged pronouns, the occasional and odd formality of thou art my brother and I am thou sister, something he heard now through the marching rhythms of Shakespeare, plucked from so many nights of Macbeth and Hamlet read aloud from the captain’s chair. But wasn’t there also affection in those elevated greetings, a sense of absolute kinship? Everything was stated roundside, drifts of words that died away, weakened into implication and repetition, again thou art my brother and I am thou sister, like a renewal of vows. He tried to tell her about the village and the dead children in the longhouse but she said: “Do you remember the time our father took us to harvest honey?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t tell lies.”

  “The wild bees living on a cliff face?”

  “Us girls at the bottom fanning a green fire to send up smoke. The bees were supposed to fall asleep.”

  He said, “I still don’t like the taste of honey. I like white sugar now.”

  “You came down with a dozen stingers in your arms and belly.”

  “And you and our mother pulled them out one by one.”

  She nodded once, drew a series of lines in the dirt with a twig. He watched her thin, bony fingers and wondered if she had ever held a pencil.

  She said, “They came from the ship, crawling across the coral with the swimming rats. We tried to help our cousins but then the sickness came and the fish were gone. People are dying in the trees from fevers and measles. We put them all up in one tree like a bigfella hospital. We give them blankets and water and wait for them to die with the devilment.”

  He looked off at a lone treehouse that was set apart and saw some of the fevered propped against branches and limbs, their skin sallow, eyes flatly regarding the siblings between walls of clay and reed. The yam and taro gardens smoldered in the background, swidden mounds and swales of smoking earth. He was brought rainwater and fried bananas and he listened to the story of the shipwreck. The bearded barbarians floated into the village on barrels and deck boards and were taken in. It wasn’t until they salvaged the ship that the weapons were brought ashore. They were given the beach to make camp and began organizing a rescue mission; a team of whaleboats rigged up with sails was going to make for New Ireland. But then the rum madness began and the pox and the fever. The bush villagers watched from the edges of the forest, deciding what to do, while the Poumetan elders hid the women and children in the mangrove swamps. The seamen began fighting with each other, voices pounding through the gun-smoke, and then something took up in their midst, a mangled fear of dying on the black beach or the native bloodthirst of Englishmen far from home. They promptly razed the village, raped the women and girls in the fronds and thickets, severed men’s arms, and bottled the shaman’s head in a glass jar as a testament. The men of the village fought to the last spear and bone-handled knife, fired what bullets they had, until everything went quiet and still. She was ashamed to say that some of the Kuk had stolen from the beach while the battle was going on, that instead of fighting for the fishermen they retreated into the forest with woolen blankets and tinned beef. And now a third of the Kuk were dying. Men woke in the middle of the night, their lips blue and trembling with plague and the reprimands of dead uncles. There had been so many bodies that they tossed them into the volcanic pit, amid the belching sulfur plumes. Argus listened and watched her scratch the dirt.

  “My husband is in that tree,” Malini said, pointing with her chin.

  “And your children?”

  Without looking up she whispered the Poumetan word marlok: barren.

  “What will you do?”

  She let out a sigh that ended in resigned laughter. “Learn to become a good widow. Carve wooden bowls all day like a leper. Wear breast bands and cut my hair. Hide from my mother-in-law. A terrible woman.”

  Argus laughed, too.

  She said, “Did you find a Christian wife?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Because you wear filthy rags. You look like you stole another bird’s feathers.”

  “I need to wash them.”

  “Burn them and put a lime gourd on your penis.”

  She said it matter-of-factly but they both blushed and looked off into the undergrowth.

  “Little brother . . .”

  “Sister.”

  “What will happen now?”

  “I don’t know, but I am going to pray to Jesus Christ and Mother Mary.”

  “Are they dead or living?”

  “Both.”

  The villagers looked on. Someone brought them some pepper leaf and they chewed it, sitting through long silences. Argus couldn’t stop thinking about the two girls on the beached divan, about the dead children in the clubhouse. He wanted to do more than pray. He wanted the fortitude of Celtic saints, the fury of crusading moguls, the bloodlust of headhunters in the Papuan highlands, anything except the timid watchfulness burrowed inside him. His desire to think and pray, to float clouds of possibility in his mind, felt like a weakness. Could something be done in God’s name? He looked at the warriors and imagined them in battle. There were a dozen guns in plain sight, a stash of tomahawks and spears and slingstones. They were lean, short, broad-shouldered, godless, but he would tell them it was better to die fighting than to die of fever and cholera and shitting blackwater up in a tree. He would tell them that the last two women of Pou-meta were being kept prisoner, raped by barking Englishmen, and that once they died the bloodline would vanish. No more coastal brides. He would stand in front of them and bring the Reverend Mister back from the dead, lean and call as if from the pulpit, evoke the catechism of fire and the blood of the lamb. He would speak of blinding vengeance, wound for wound, burning for burning, the Exodus code that right
ed all things for the Israelites. Never mind they’d think the Israelites were a fabled tribe on the Papuan mainland, out beyond the Sepik River. For three hundred Sundays Argus had watched the Reverend Mister fill with the demon-breath of his sermons, down a shot of whiskey after breakfast, mumble shitfire to himself when he thought the boy couldn’t hear, then march up the hill to the tin roofed church in his Inverness cape. The shoulders carried the message, the voice pitched like a zither in the rafters, and then came the offertory of pigs and breadfruit, an outpouring not just for tobacco but for protection from the wrath above. Six years of sitting in the front pew, lighting votaries and waiting patiently for the singing of hymns, he knew every sermonic rhythm cold. He got to his feet and took a step forward. The village circle moved in, sensing he was about to speak. The sick and dying looked down from their tree-line parapets as he made the sign of the cross, which to the Kuk seemed like an anointment before death.

  8.

  They came down from the caldera in the predawn fog, swift and quiet, their faces daubed with ash and vermilion, blackened pig grease in the hollows of their collarbones, a motley infantry in dog-fur pelts, bearing cutting rasps and rifles, makeshift weapons hewn from barrel staves and boar tusks. Their hair was oiled and clayed; they wore hornbill beaks as talismans against defeat and cowardice. Argus strode in front with a pin-fire revolver and a dagger, dressed in fresh flannels, leading them in the holy war against the shipwrecked and the damned. He could imagine the Kuk on horseback, mounted on sorrels with their flanks ribbed white, sabers and lances held aloft, something lifted from a rectory oil painting, a medieval battlescape and field of dying souls. Instead of an eastern foe it was a band of western drunkards and infidels waiting to be slain, barnacles on the hull of the British Empire. This was comeuppance—what a strange English word—not just for the death of his family but for a century’s blood in the name of sandalwood and indigo. Did the Doctrine of the Elect extend to the haggard circles of the heathen wronged? Could a clansman kill in God’s name without ever kneeling in prayer? Argus looked out from under his hat brim, willing himself forward. There was no turning back. Twenty women, his sister included, trailed behind with provisions, sharpened rocks, jugs of water, his scuffed portmanteau carried like a stone tablet. He had roused them with nothing but fire speak, intoning the dead reverend, trembling in his alpaca coat. He knew he wasn’t much of a warrior—he’d never been in a fistfight but had a decent aim from so many twilight pigeon hunts. The Kuk didn’t look into each other’s eyes the whole way down the volcano.

  At the outskirts of the encampment they waited in the trees amid the screaming parrots and throbbing tree frogs. The Englishmen slept in weskits and native adornments, their faces and hands smeared with guano to ward off pollywogs and gall nippers. A fire pit smoldered with fish bones and an iron stewpot. The Poumetan girls were still tied to the divan with lengths of rattan, their grass skirts gone and their wrists welted and swollen. Argus could see Mr. Nibbles under the tattooed arm of a midshipman, the cat peering out, the only wakeful thing among them. They had found the rowboat. He whispered to his comrades to take up position in the trees and ten of them climbed tropical chestnuts with blowguns and single-barrels. He told the women to place the rocks in piles and retreat to the hillside. They cocked their rifles and waited for the sailors to waken; killing a man in his sleep would bring a thousand-year curse. Argus counted the Englishmen’s guns, hatchets, and knives, tallied the boxes of ammunition. No doubt they had expected to be at sea for up to a year and it showed in their armaments. The element of surprise was all the natives had but then he saw another option lurking in the pandanus and underbrush.

  He told the warriors to wait for him and took off running into the woods, weaving between the bracken ferns, back into the marshy hollows of his childhood. The volcanic soil turned to mud and soon it was a bog hemmed in by overgrowth, orchids and air plants perched above a riot of vines and leaves. He began collecting seeds and shoots, plucking plants that he knew by name and color and texture. Sometimes the poison announced itself in the iridescent vein-work of a leaf or a fiery berry or the foamy sap that bled from the severed ends, but mostly it was invisible and scentless, a plant venom that tasted no worse than burnt sugarcane. He carried the poisonous salad back to the warriors, who had expected him not to return. He dipped the shredded plants and seeds into a water jug and squeezed them over a piece of curved bark. The tincture was blue-green and a hundred times more potent than anything used on fish. He carried it forward in the makeshift bark bowl like an offering. They watched him from the shadows, eyes dilated, skeptical, resting rifle butts against their greased shoulders, one man with his jadeite axe at the ready.

  Argus rolled up his pants and went barefoot into the clearing, walking on the sides of his feet. The sailors slept on pieces of canvas, in tent doorways, on salvaged hammocks slung between trees. He looked at each ruddy face and huddled body in succession, not only to catch any sign of waking but to mark them off as dead. He thought of Scottish Highlanders with claymore swords keening the air, the ancestors of the Reverend Mister bearing down on English mongrels as bearded and barbarous as Vikings. The ground was strewn with shell casings and pig bristle and he had to step over several broken bottles. Beside the fire pit was a water barrel and he poured half the tincture into it and then the other half into the pot of charring stew. The girls on the divan were only a few feet away and he quietly threw a seedpod, making contact with one girl’s ankle. She stirred, looked up, did not speak. He removed his hat so she could better see his face. He raised a finger to his lips then remembered this meant nothing to a Poumetan. He pointed to the water and the food, shaking his head vigorously, arms crossed at the forearms. The glazed and wounded look in her eyes affirmed nothing. Argus flashed her his tribal scar, turned, and headed for the trees where gun muzzles and spear points trained out of the foliage, providing cover. Mr. Nibbles squirmed from the arms of a murderer and began mewing just as Argus got to the edge of the clearing. One man stirred in a hammock, letting his mite-bitten and filthy feet dangle from the sides. Another man adjusted the slouch hat that was covering his face. The cat called out in hunger or recognition and a tree-dweller inhaled behind his blowgun and aimed at it. The cat quieted just as Argus walked free of the clearing and retreated into the woods.

  After some time the Englishmen began stirring, stretching in the early light, hands on paunches and privates, dipping tin cups into the water barrel or scraping the caked stew out of the pot with stubby fingers. The girls were offered water and Argus was relieved when they refused. Not everyone imbibed the poison but within minutes a dozen sailors were racked with pain, bent and writhing on the ground. A couple more followed suit, retching on all fours then staggering off to shit in a bamboo thicket. Someone yelled poisoned! at the top of his lungs and this gave rise to bedlam, sailors reaching for their rifles and firing rounds into the air and the trees, someone hurling a shoe at a shipmate yammering obscenities from a hammock. Before long, men were wandering in circles like almshouse inmates, braying and wailing, limp at the knees, hands batting at their own heads. The men still standing spun and reeled with their shotguns, firing at will, while Argus and his fellow ambushers held cover in the dappled light of the woods.

  A demented sailor lurched for the native girls, a tomahawk raised, and Argus uncoiled his little pinfire revolver, some keepsake no doubt bartered from a British sloop, and shot the man in the back of the head. The bullet felled the sailor, the hatchet still raised in one hand. He buckled, bowed, fell back into the fire-pit embers. Without Argus’s say-so, the snipers opened fire, unleashing arrows and blow darts and buckshot. They burst screaming into the encampment, wielding crude truncheons and clubs at the stricken and shooting the able-bodied where they stood. Several dazed and wounded Britons ran for the black beach and the clansmen gave chase like swineherds, bringing the sailors down with barbed spears and iron bludgeons at the water’s edge. A wrack of sea foam crimsoned with blood and Argus th
ought of the shark kills from his youth, the sound of gnashing teeth as the argonauts were noosed into shore, the villagers whooping as the giant fish drowned on air.

  Argus came forward to cut the girls free of the divan. Bodies lay everywhere, darkening the sandy dirt, the air thickening with the smell of human offal and excrement. He took up a knife and cut the rattan from the girls’ wrists and ankles. Their lips were parched white and they could not speak. Their throats were bruised raw. He placed his alpaca coat over their trembling bodies and called to the women in the brush, who came into the clearing with water and taro cakes. Malini tended them, murmuring softly in Poumetan, dipping a finger into her water jug and running it over their lips. The warriors came back from the beach sated and out of breath. A few of them had been injured and they walked around the encampment and put the few living Englishmen out of their misery. Argus saw Mr. Nibbles’s prone body lying in the bushes. Somehow he’d been caught up in the crossfire. Argus was relieved that he wasn’t the direct cause of the cat’s death and pitied the man who’d blown the stray dart or wielded the errant club.

  They burned the bodies on the black beach, lighting a funeral pyre with thatch torches, the bodies piled three deep. Watch and trouser pockets, what was left of the marooned sailors’ clothes, had been picked over, fobs taken, engraved teaspoons and locket photographs laid out on the sand for later dispersal, each warrior with a kill to his name laying claim to the specifics. Argus claimed a good pair of boots, size 11, from a dead man’s feet. The flames bristled, billowed foul smoke, flared with bursts of cotton and hair. The warriors watched the cremation, grimly satisfied, while the village women retreated to the shelter of the forest to care for the Poumetan girls. A few of the Kuk punted out in canoes to the reefed ship, their strokes ungainly, and set the whole thing ablaze. It went up like a tinderbox. The forecastle plumed yellow then orange and the mizzenmast candled with flame. Shreds of sailthe brakemen watching for drifters-cloth flapped and came away from the mastheads in delicate, fiery tendrils, sending a spray of cinders downwind. The planking and hull went up next, the timbers splintering and the hobnails popping under pressure, debris hissing into the sea. The brig broke then fell apart, toppling into the shallows above the reef, her bell clanging mournfully on the coral reef. The men returned to shore and took their torches to the village, burning what was left of the pile houses and leveling the men’s longhouse to smoking stumps. They sang and called while they worked and it became clear to Argus that they intended to rebuild the village as their own. No longer pushed up the caldera where the sun had to be mined through the canopy, they would learn to fish and hollow out tree trunks for canoes.