Devil-Devil (8 page)

The moon drifted out from behind a cloud. Kella could just make out a figure pushing through the mud in his direction. The sergeant prepared to run again, in order to lead his pursuer into the densest part of the mangrove swamp, close to the river. Kella had spent much of his childhood digging for crawfish in the mud there. If necessary, he could lead the other man round in circles for hours, until he was so tired and lost that he would be begging for someone to come in and fetch him out.

At last the stalker found the ridge and hauled himself gratefully up on to the path. He was still too far away for Kella to be able to distinguish his outline properly. In order further to encourage the man, Kella stood up. The stalker let off another shot without aiming, firing so quickly that the bullet came nowhere near the sergeant. Kella dropped back behind the tree trunk.

Suddenly, to his alarm, he heard Sister Conchita calling his name. He could see the sister standing uncertainly among the trees on the ridge, her white habit standing out vividly against the dark background. She hesitated and then started running towards the sound of the last shot.

Kella shouted to her to go back. The sister continued to run. She thinks I’m in trouble, thought Kella. She doesn’t know where she is, or what is going on, but she’s coming to help me.

Sister Conchita was heading in the general direction of the elevated ridge path but in the darkness she misjudged the angle and floundered into the stinking swamp. She stopped, but then pushed forward again, almost waist-deep in the mud and brackish water. Crazy with courage, thought Kella. It was a pity about the complete lack of common sense.

The stalker was looking back in obvious bewilderment over his shoulder at the nun. To distract him Kella stood up again and started running along the ridge. He ran upright, in order to present the man with a target. No shots came. Kella stopped and looked round. The shooter had turned and was heading back purposefully towards the sister.

Kella swore softly. The stalker was now on the ridge and able to make good progress, while Sister Conchita’s movements were hampered by the all-pervading mud and ankle-deep water of the swamp.

Kella changed direction and sprinted back along the ridge towards the retreating man with the rifle, shouting meaninglessly as he did so, in order to distract him. The stalker looked back and hesitated. Realizing that the police sergeant would be on him before he could reach the nun, he turned and deliberately raised his rifle to his shoulder.

Kella hurled himself off the ridge into the swamp below. The rifle exploded. Kella felt as if he had been savaged in his right shoulder by a cornered wild pig. He sprawled on the ground, pain jolting through his chest and upper arm. His mud-soaked shirt turned even darker as blood started to pump out of the wound.

The moon scudded back behind a cloud. He could see nothing. Kella forced himself to his feet and staggered through the night in the general direction of the marksman. At the same time he shouted to Sister Conchita to go back to the dry high ground, where the trees grew thickly.

Waves of nausea swept over the sergeant. Once, he fell to his knees and had to drag himself to his feet again and reel onwards. He remained down in the swamp, trying to shelter in the shadow of the ridge, presenting as small a target as possible and listening intently for the sound of the stalker’s approaching footsteps. Kella was guessing that the man would come back to finish off the job, in case his last shot had not killed the policeman.

Tensely Kella waited beneath the ridge. After a few moments he heard the cautious shuffle of the man walking back along the ridge above him. Kella was too tired and weak to crawl up on to the ridge. Instead, he hauled himself along the side, squirming a painful few inches at a time, using his left hand to gain a purchase on the bank above. He stopped and used the same hand to take his penknife from his pocket. Opening it with his teeth, he waited until the stalker was directly above him. Kella gathered his remaining strength and propelled himself upwards, at the same time striking out viciously with his knife at the man’s leg.

He had hoped to sever the tendons of the stalker’s ankle, but he was too weak and tired. The blade entered the shadowy figure’s leg, just behind the knee. The man screamed. Almost fainting with the pain of his exertions, Kella dragged the blade down the man’s calf viciously, slicing it open for a length of six inches. The man yelped again and fell, in the same movement rolling over into the swamp on the far side of the ridge, almost instinctively putting the high land between himself and the sergeant.

Kella tried to crawl after him, but he could not move. He wondered how much blood he was losing from the wound in his shoulder. He lay panting for breath on his back on the slope of the ridge. When he heard footsteps pounding along the ridge he tried in vain to raise himself on to one elbow to defend himself, still clutching his knife.

He was dimly aware of flickering flares approaching rapidly above him. Then Sister Conchita was bending over him, accompanied by a group of solicitous crab hunters, bearing their flaming torches. Dimly he was aware of their awed voices, murmuring, ‘
aofia!
’

‘Lie still!’ commanded the sister tersely, taking command.

She pulled the shirt away from his bloodied shoulder. Gently she took the penknife from his hand and used it to cut the shirt away from the wound. She turned away. Kella heard tearing sounds. Sister Conchita turned back. She padded his wound with strips torn from her habit, tying it into place with more strips of the cloth. Kella drifted off into unconsciousness.

When he came round, he was being carried through the bush on a makeshift stretcher of stout branches bound roughly with vines. Sister Conchita was walking beside him, looking concerned.

‘These guys say they know your island and they’re taking us there,’ she told him. She saw the flicker of apprehension on the police sergeant’s face. ‘Things aren’t that bad,’ she assured him. ‘They taught me a little light nursing at the seminary.’

It was the opening Kella had been hoping for. He opened his mouth and tried to speak. The sister bent to hear him.

‘Please stay with me,’ begged Kella. ‘They could harm me with custom medicine. Promise you won’t leave me on my island until I’m better.’

He lay back exhausted. Sister Conchita looked surprised but touched by his unexpected display of dependence on her. She nodded reassuringly. ‘I won’t go, Sergeant Kella,’ she said. ‘That I promise.’

Kella let the men carry him towards the lagoon a mile or so away. He was conscious of his strength ebbing again. All the same, he felt oddly satisfied. At least by his stratagem he might have secured the sister’s safety, until he was well enough to look after her again.

There was no doubt in his mind that she needed protection. Back in the swamp earlier that evening, as soon as the stalker had seen Sister Conchita he had turned to go after her, leaving Kella. It looked as if all along it had been Sister Conchita he had been intending to harm.

The distant, familiar and much-loved sound of lapping water soothed his ears. A few minutes later, through the swirling mists of his mind, he was dimly conscious of being loaded carefully on to a canoe at the lagoon’s edge.

Suddenly a thought struck Kella. He tried to sit up to speak. Gentle but strong hands pushed him back on to his stretcher at the bottom of the canoe. As he floated into oblivion, the sergeant groaned.

He had assured the sister that no Lau man would ever harm him. That was true. But it did not mean that the same applied to Sister Conchita.

The gigantic
baekwa
, the man-eating crocodile, powered towards Kella through the waters of the lagoon, its massive tail thrashing violently, grotesquely swollen jaws opening and closing in heart-stopping slow motion. Kella turned to swim away, but his arms and legs seemed powerless. Screaming silently, he waited for the savage representative of the gods to devour him.

He woke up on the mat on the floor of his hut, trying to recall the details of his dream and the terrifying part that the menacing custom ghosts had again played in it.

Painfully he stood up and walked to a corner. He picked up a length of bark cloth. Carefully he unwrapped it and took out a string of Lau shell money. It was ten feet long, looped several times. The decoration consisted of alternate red and white shell discs strung along a length of bush vine. At each end of the string was a large grey mussel shell.

The necklace had been made by his mother before he was born. She had given it to him just before her death. She had hoped that one day he would use it as part of the bride price he would have to pay to the family of the woman he wanted to marry. Kella reckoned that it should be considered valuable enough even by the most demanding of the spirit people for his present purpose.

Kella carried the shell money to the door. His strapped shoulder still felt sore but after four days of drifting in and out of consciousness he was beginning to regain his strength. The bullet seemed to have passed through the fleshy part of his upper arm, doing no permanent damage.

He came out into the afternoon sunlight and walked down to one of the island’s stone jetties. As always, he felt comfortably at home in his village of Sulufou, the largest artificial island in the Lau Lagoon. Forty or fifty thatched huts were crammed together on top of the great stones which formed the base of the island, eighty yards long and thirty yards wide. Other houses on stilts surrounded the island.

In the small square in the centre of the village stood a stone church, painted green and white, with a galvanized iron roof. The church had three small towers with spires. Outside the door of the church was a wooden drum used for summoning the islanders to prayer every morning and evening.

Brown-skinned children were swimming in the sheltered lagoon or skimming in tiny canoes across its placid surface. Most of the women were on the mainland, working in their gardens. Out in the open sea, on the far side of the coral reef, the younger men shouted excitedly as they controlled their bobbing outrigger canoes against the crashing waves. Blue herons swooped over them, waiting for fish to surface. The men were beating the water fiercely with their paddles to drive into the lagoon sea-bass, snapper, mackerel and mullet through the narrow fissures in the coral walls.

Inside the lagoon, older men were treading water, spears in their hands, ready to impale the fish as they were frightened into the enclosed area, and then stuff them in floating wicker baskets.

Farther out to sea, the occupants of other canoes were fishing with crude kites. Each kite was floating in the air, attached to its canoe by a length of vine. Another piece of vine, with a shell hook, dangled in the water from the kite, attached to a small stick that acted as a float on the surface of the water. Greedy large fish often mistook the kite for a bird hovering in wait for a shoal of smaller fish, and would hurry over to impale themselves on the hook.

The entire length of the Lau Lagoon, two miles wide and constantly refreshed by more than a dozen rivers pouring down from the mountains of the main island, was dotted with smaller artificial islands, each with its collection of houses. Over a period of a hundred years they had been built, stone by stone, by men and women from the mainland seeking to avoid the malarial mosquitoes and the constant warfare between saltwater dwellers and bushmen. The closely knit, sea-going Lau people spent much of their lives on their stone fortresses, going ashore only to hunt and tend their gardens.

Kella wrapped the length of shell money around his hand and muttered a
ngara
, the prayer made when an object was surrendered to the ancestral ghosts. He hesitated and then hurled the shell money as far as he could out into the lagoon.

He was aware of someone standing behind him. He turned to find Sister Conchita staring in surprise at him. The nun had come out of the women’s hut in which she was living.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Making an offering to my ghosts,’ Kella told her.

‘For heaven’s sake, why?’

‘I must have offended them. Otherwise I would not have been wounded. Anyway, they’ve been entering my dreams, and I want them to leave.’

‘Do you really believe that?’ asked the sister.

‘Sometimes,’ said Kella. ‘It depends.’

Sister Conchita sank on to a pile of stones. She had washed her habit and sewn a patch over the piece she had used as a bandage for him. Her face was red from exposure to the sun. She was looking more relaxed than he had ever seen her. He found it hard to remember that less than a week ago she had been thrusting through the mud of the mangrove swamp, putting her life at risk in order to help him.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked, obviously deciding from the expression on his face that there would be no point in asking the sergeant about the resident gods and devils of the lagoon.

‘Good.’

‘I’m glad, because I’d like a word with you.’

‘Can’t hide from you for ever.’

‘I’m pleased you appreciate that. So, what have you got to say for yourself, sergeant?’

‘About what, Sister Conchita?’

‘You know full well what,’ said the nun calmly. ‘All that garbage you gave me about you needing me here to nurse you back to health. Telling me that you were afraid of custom medicine.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Kella.

‘Yes, that! What custom medicine? The morning after we arrived a guy came over from the mainland with a supply of penicillin and sulfa tablets for you.’

‘My brother Henry. He runs the government medical clinic at Atta.’

‘And the smart-looking guy who turned up in a speedboat with ointment, bandages and aspirin?’

‘My brother Samuel. He’s a mate on one of the government ships.’

‘Just how many brothers have you got?’ asked Sister Conchita.

‘Five. The other three live here on Sulufou with my father and work our land over on the main island of Malaita.’