Devil-Devil (12 page)

‘Boat come!’ he said excitedly

Leaving the sprayer with Isaac, Sister Conchita and Jimmy ran down to the wharf. A government launch had anchored just outside the lagoon. A small rowing boat was pulling through the rocks of the reef, heading for Sulufou. Two uniformed seamen of the Marine Department were rowing, while a third sat in the prow, with several canisters at his feet. Most of the women, children and old men still left on the artificial island were streaming down to the wharf to greet the newcomers.

‘It’s Kovara, the medical orderly,’ said Jimmy as the rowing boat drew closer. ‘He’s come to take his monthly sick-call at the clinic.’

Sister Conchita’s heart sank at the news. She looked back at the open door of the clinic and thought of the medical supplies she had appropriated and used so freely that day, without permission, and of the diagnoses she had made without consultation. It had all seemed so right and proper at the time, helpful even. Now, with the bespectacled and rather
prim-looking
medical orderly being dragged in the dinghy up the beach by the two seamen from the government launch, the nun wondered if he would take the same free-spirited attitude as she had done to her random use of government medical supplies. Somehow she doubted it. It looked as if she was in trouble again.

Kovara, the medical orderly, was now splashing through the shallows towards her. As he approached he was staring
open-mouthed
over her shoulder at the line of would-be patients waiting outside the clinic. Inspiration struck Sister Conchita, as it so often did in times of trouble. She raced to meet Kovara, taking his hand and shaking it gratefully.

‘Oh, thank the Lord you’ve come, Mr Kovara,’ she gabbled, hoping that she was not overdoing the helpless little woman bit. ‘I don’t know what we would have done without you. One of the sprayers has been badly scalded. I’ve done what I can, but he needs to be taken back to the Auki hospital at once, under your expert care. Please, it’s urgent!’

‘I don’t understand,’ faltered the orderly. He gazed in dismay at the open door of the clinic and the table strewn with bandages and ointments. ‘Who—’

‘Please,’ begged Sister Conchita, ‘it may be a matter of death. Please turn the launch around and tend the poor man on your way back to Auki. I’ll make sure that your clinic is looked after.’

Kovara still looked reluctant. Jimmy broke the impasse. He issued rapid orders to his fellow sprayers. Two of them ran to the clinic and emerged carrying their scalded co-worker on the canvas stretcher. Without looking at Kovara they bore the stretcher to the rowing boat in the shallows and loaded it gently on board.

‘Get him to Auki now,’ growled Jimmy.

Still the medical orderly hesitated. Jimmy and the other malaria sprayers advanced on him menacingly. Kovara took a pace backwards. In a moment he had scuttled to the dinghy and, his healing instincts taking over, was bending solicitously over the man on the stretcher, as the two seamen rowed them back towards the launch.

‘Thanks again,’ Sister Conchita said to Jimmy.

‘Just take care,’ said the malaria sprayer. He shivered despite the heat. ‘This is a funny part of the Solomons. You never know what’s going to happen here.’

He issued orders to the other sprayers and they struggled into their backpacks and equipment before continuing with their work. Thoughtfully Sister Conchita walked back to her waiting patients. It seemed common knowledge that she was in danger. The only problem was that she still had no idea what it was or where it was likely to come from.

Kella reached the waterfall in the high bush by late afternoon, eight hours after he had left the plantation to start his ascent into the mountains. For the most part he made good progress up the steep and tangled paths beneath the trees. He was aware of being watched constantly from the undergrowth by many pairs of eyes. The hidden bushmen would recognize his police uniform and with luck would probably allow him unimpeded passage, as long as he did not transgress any of their customs.

The days of constant outright warfare between the bush people of the interior and the saltwater men of the coastal villages had passed, but there were still brawls between men of the two cultures when they met at the markets, where fish were exchanged for taro.

Sometimes, even today, a party of coastal warriors would raid the gardens of the interior. In return, bush fighters would attack and hole canoes left on the beach. Occasionally these fights would lead to a death or two, but they were seldom reported to the police authorities in the capital. Kella had always done his best to prevent such pitched battles. Until his recall to Honiara he had been having some success with his peacemaking endeavours.

He toiled through a solid wall of green vegetation. The thick grey trunks of the banyan and betel nut trees were almost obscured by trailing green vines and creepers falling in unlikely creases like stained and holed curtains. Bushes and tall grasses struggled for supremacy between the trees. Green snakes were inching their absorbed way up through the interlocked boughs in search of nesting birds.

Surely Peter Oro would never have ventured so far from the salt water? The youth was probably staying with
wantoks
down on the coast and would return to the school when he felt like it.

When he reached the waterfall he walked across the grassy plateau to a vine bridge leading to the sacred cave hidden behind the thundering torrent. He took a torch from his pack and dropped the pack on to the ground before starting to cross the swaying bridge, pushing his way through the booming avalanche of water to the dry calm of the cave beyond.

He switched on his torch. He saw the rows of skulls along the ledges of the
faatai
maea
. He knew that he was in the presence of a vast orchestrated slaughter. Once a great bush chief had been buried here. According to custom, fifty of his bodyguards had been slain so that they might accompany him into the next world, and their heads brought to the
faatai
maea
, as the Kwaio people believed that a man’s spirit resided in his skull. The remains of the bodyguards had stayed in the cave ever since, a memory of the bloody past.

Kella remembered, with no lessening of the pain, the last time he had entered the cave of death, six months ago, to recover the body of the murdered missionary. He drove the thought from his head and tried to concentrate on his surroundings. The beam of his torch scoured the walls and roof of the pagan shrine. It settled on a ledge at the back. The carved outcrop was bare. Kella directed the beam around the interior again before he was satisfied. There was no
havu
in the sacred cave.

Back in the sunshine of the plateau the police sergeant conducted a rapid search of the area. The only addition since his last visit was a large, newly constructed hut on the edge of the bush. Kella glanced inside. It was unfurnished. A dozen coconut husks were scattered on the floor. In a corner a bowl of liquid stood fermenting. A mosquito net lay, tidily folded, on the floor. Presumably the owners had not yet moved in.

He walked back out on to the plateau and lay down on the grass to dry off. If the
havu
was missing, along with Professor Mallory, it could mean that both the icon and the anthropologist were together somewhere.

Despite the laws forbidding their export, some very
distinguished
academic visitors to remote areas of the Solomons had not been above spiriting away precious relics and impregnating local girls at the same time. It was possible that Mallory had stolen the carving and was now hightailing it back to Honiara and a Solair flight out of the Solomons.

Yet how could Mallory have got past the guards of the sacred cave? Kwaio tradition decreed that anyone attempting to steal one of its relics would be slain and his body placed by the waterfall as a sign of payback. The fact that there was no corpse in evidence probably meant that Mallory was still alive somewhere.

Kella was roused from his reverie by the sound of a soft hiss, the Solomons way of warning someone courteously that a newcomer had arrived.

‘Good afternoon,’ said a woman’s voice.

Kella opened his eyes and looked up. A young woman was smiling shyly at him. She was light brown in colour, very beautiful, with long black hair. She wore a simple print dress. A Polynesian, judged Kella; she was probably from Sikaiana.

‘Hello,’ he answered, almost overwhelmed by the woman’s radiance, highlighted against the background of the waterfall and the trees far below. He held out his hand. ‘My name’s—’

‘Kella, Sergeant Kella,’ smiled the young woman, shaking his hand. ‘You lectured to us about law and order when I was a student at the British Solomons Teachers’ Training College in Honiara. We were all most impressed. You were the first big man who ever bothered to come and talk to us. My name is Elizabeth Adomea. I am the village schoolteacher. You don’t know how good it feels to be speaking English to someone again.’

‘I didn’t know there was a school in these parts,’ said Kella, puzzled. There were very few schools in the high bush area.

‘The Melanesian Mission sent me to open one,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I’ve only been here a couple of months.’

The Melanesian Mission was the Anglican Church in the Solomons. They must have thought highly of the young teacher to send her so far from home into such a wild area. It must be lonely for her, which probably accounted for her eagerness to greet him.

‘What are you doing here, sergeant?’ Elizabeth asked, frankly curious. ‘You’ve frightened the village people. All day they have been calling to each other about you, using their
kuku
talk.’

‘I heard them,’ said Kella.
Kuku
was the name given by the inhabitants of the Kwaio territory to the long-drawn-out cries they used to make messages travel for long distances.

‘Why didn’t you hide like the others?’ asked Kella.

‘Do I have anything to be afraid of?’ she asked softly. ‘You must be hungry and thirsty. Come back to my house.’

The deserted bush village was in a clearing about half a mile north of the waterfall. There were thirty or forty huts in two straight lines, facing one another. Cooking fires smouldered outside some of the thatched houses.

Kella looked on as Elizabeth deftly made a meal of taro pudding, mixed with ngali nuts, over her fire.

‘No meat,’ she joked. ‘I wouldn’t like the police sergeant to think that I was giving him long pig just because he was in the bush.’

Long pig was the name given to human flesh. Many saltwater people thought that bush dwellers were cannibals.

‘I would only eat someone I had killed myself,’ Kella informed the schoolteacher with mock gravity. ‘That way his
mana
would enter me and make me strong.’

‘Eating these people wouldn’t do you much good,’ said Elizabeth contemptuously. ‘They are ignorant and dirty.’

‘Not all of them,’ said Kella, choosing his words carefully and watching how they affected Elizabeth. ‘Pazabosi has great
mana
.’

‘He is an evil man who sups with the devil-devils,’ said the young teacher.

‘Have you seen him lately?’

She nodded reluctantly. ‘He was here with some of his men a few days ago. They slept for a night in the
faatai maea
. Then they went back up the mountains. I was in the school when they left, but everybody here seemed very excited about Pazabosi’s visit.’

‘He doesn’t often come this far down the mountain,’ agreed Kella. ‘It’s a long trek for someone of his age.’

‘It is time for his long rest,’ agreed the girl. It was plain that she did not want to discuss the feared magic man. Kella decided to try just once more.

‘Was there a white man with him?’ he asked casually. ‘A tall American called Mallory?’

‘I didn’t see a white man,’ said the girl. ‘The food is ready. Come inside and eat.’

They entered the tidy hut. Elizabeth cut the taro pudding in half and gave Kella his portion on a thick banana leaf. The sergeant was preoccupied as he ate, hardly noticing how good the taro was. He could hardly blame the teacher for being unwilling to answer his questions. She would still be living in the village long after he had left. He still decided to ask one more important question.

‘Do you know anything about the
havu
?’ he asked her. ‘It’s been taken from the killing ground. Perhaps Pazabosi took it with him when he left.’

The girl looked blank. ‘What’s a
havu
?’ she asked, chewing with a good appetite.

‘Oh, just a carving,’ Kella replied vaguely. He put down his empty banana leaf and refused a second helping of taro. Attentively Elizabeth handed him a bamboo container of water, from which he drank deeply.

‘What sort of a carving?’ she asked.

‘Nothing important.’

‘Oh, come on, Sergeant Kella,’ persisted the teacher, smiling. ‘Is it something naughty? The bushmen make many sex carvings. Is this one of them?’

‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact it is,’ replied Kella, embarrassed. Polynesian women were notoriously uninhibited, even the educated ones.

‘Oh, good! Tell me about it,’ she begged, giggling. ‘Have you ever seen it?’

‘Yes,’ said Kella. ‘I saw it the last time I was here, six months ago.’

A vision swam into his mind of the crumpled, bloody body of the missionary.

‘Well?’ prompted the girl, leaning forward eagerly, placing a hand lightly on Kella’s knee.

‘It’s very old,’ said Kella, returning his attention to her, conscious of the girl’s cool, gentle touch. ‘It was supposed to have been put in the
fatai maea
when the shrine was first built, hundreds of years ago. It is the sacred symbol of the Kwaio people. It represents the conception of their whole clan.’

‘Conception?’ asked the girl.

‘Beginning.’

‘Oh, you mean
fakim
,’ cried the girl, clapping her hands in delight. ‘Twofella jig-jig.’ She tried to look serious. ‘What position are they using, Sergeant Kella?’