Читать книгу Drums of Mer - Ion Idriess - Страница 11

The sun smiled on Mer. Insects hummed while frail adventurers from overseas flitted in splashes of ethereal beauty among the crotons and hibiscus and flame-striped soos-soos grass. Birds trilled and squawked and squabbled. The wee sunbird with breast of purest gold built her swinging nest with labour and song and love. The waters sparkled. Flying-fish glistened over the waves; fish of wondrous colours played in coral gardens. The big, snake-like head of a turtle rose from the depths to glory in the sunlight. An ominous fin clove the surface. The air was sweet as the laughter that echoed among the groves of Mer and in her valleyed glades and along the sides of grass-grown hills. Old women chuckled under the village palms as they wove their mats and fibre petticoats. Men, practically naked, lazed on the beach making fishing-nets, or loafed under the palms with their zoobs (bamboo pipes); often the men did not wear the grass skirt unless on duty. Groups of them squatted among the houses, spinning the kolap (the stone top) and wagering keenly on the result. Some men could spin their kolap for thirty minutes, and were very jealous of their toys.

The shrill treble of children, the intriguing laughter of girls, and the boisterous greeting of the men carried something exciting in it, something more than the ordinary joy of life.

For Kebisu was coming, Kebisu of Tutu, Kebisu the Conqueror. C’Zarcke had foretold that he would arrive on the third day. And arrive he would, with a handful of his warriors and women, even Eyes of the Sea. Kebisu, invincible Mamoose of Warrior Island – Eyes of the Sea, Lamar of little drowned Sea Maid, prettiest and sauciest girl of all the Western Islands, the wonderful dancer with cornflower eyes.

So the Miriam-le made ready for the feast, and the gardens of Eroob sent tribute.

Down the village path strode Jakara, warmly excited. Eyes of the Sea! He would see her at last, this sea-waif of his own colour, the first he had seen since the ship went down! A countrywoman of his own, perhaps even an Australian! A white girl who would be proud of it and have all the ambitions of the whites, and white desires and hopes, and white love, and the white man’s God.

How much would she remember of her home and civilization?

Their mutual remembrances would bring a flood of happiness to both. He would console and sympathize with her, and protect – yes, why not? He was valuable to C’Zarcke. Could he prevail upon this chief demon to allow the girl to remain at Mer under his protection? Certainly he must think of a way, but curse C’Zarcke! Would she be good to look upon? Would she be as pretty as the natives said? Not the slightest difference whether or no; she was a white girl with a white girl’s heart and mind. Her companionship would be pure happiness to him.

Near a profusion of flowering creepers, where a track led in from a garden, a bevy of Mer girls passed him bearing baskets of yams and manioc and huge bunches of bananas. Shapely and attractive of face, they were all in merry mood. Geedee was there, and Miriam – the sauciest flirt in all Mer. She giggled among her comrades, then with the happiest smile, raced across Jakara’s path and challenged him to deny that she was in every way a more desirable sweetheart than his Lamar girl to come.

But their skin was dark, so he joked with them smilingly, and detested them, taking no thought at all that they had been born to one of God’s moulds. With smiling nods and jokes he greeted single warriors and parties of guards on their way to the gardens and the fish-traps. Fine men all, with big chests and fierce independent eyes, armed with shark-tooth sword and stone club, sling, or bow and arrow. The going of a man along those jungle paths made no slightest sound; his tread was noiseless as that of a wary panther; every pert bird twittering upon a creeper made far more noise than he, and often did not hear when man passed directly below. Neither did man cast any betraying shadow within the green gloom.

The track meandered down to a shingly beach, where upon a black rock sat crouched what seemed to be the carving of a witch, only blacker than the stone and as moveless, but alive, with bones like knobs stretching the skin, and breasts like skinny bags sagging to the rock! Scraggy arms clasped bony knees upon which the chin rested. Her hair drooped like the tail of an old grey horse, matted with the neglect of years. Jakara paused. A fellow-feeling made him sorry for old Sasowari, the mad one, lonely in her hopeless mourning. From this spot years ago, on another such sunlit morning, her daughter, Gareeb, fairest of all Las, had laughingly paddled away in a fishing canoe and never returned.

Jakara patted her shoulder. “I wish you comfort for your lonely heart, Sasowari,” he said kindly. “Why not go into the village and watch the preparations for the feasting? Forget, in the joy of others.”

The face, a maze of wrinkles, turned to him; bleared but shrewd old eyes peered towards his: “Does Jakara forget – in the joy of others?” she added quietly, then patted the man’s hand while her eyes smiled. “Jakara has always understood another’s troubles and is selfishly lonely in his own. Jakara the Lonely, but Jakara of the Understanding Heart! Friend Jakara, you are luckier than you know, in that you have youth as a comforter. Why not seize the happiness of youth and forget in the arms of joy?” And her trembling hand pointed to the track ahead disappearing among the palms.

Jakara smiled. “Those same arms that would caress my neck might well bring it to the bamboo knife,” he answered grimly; “the joys of forgetfulness often forget to awake.”

“You are a fool, Jakara the Wise,” replied the old woman, sharply. “Joys to the ready come often, death but once, and death can well be the greatest joy of all. Oh, Jakara, she is coming back!”

Expectancy quivered upon the shrunken face, so pitiful in its forlorn age. Her eyes grew bright as a snake’s. “You do not believe,” she hissed; “you think that her spirit has long since flown to Boigu, Isle of the Blest, but I speak truly. Gareeb, my Lily of Las, is coming; even now she flies to me before the wings of death.”

Jakara soothed the hot old brow. “I wish you peace, mother,” he comforted, “and hope with all my heart that your daughter brings you happiness untold.” He walked a little unhappily across the shingly beach; then, shaking off depression, strode more briskly up the path that wound among the shadowed trees. From them the Pretty Lamar stepped before him, and her face was radiant.

Jakara smiled, pleased despite himself. “Why, croton girl, you are as pretty as the sunbird: why such a gay face this morning?”

“And why, Jakara,” answered the soft voice, “are you striding with head and shoulders braced? And for whom is your smile this morning?”

Jakara’s smile broadened. “Whisper me your secret,” he parried, “and I will tell you mine.”

“Needless for either to tell,” flashed back the answer. “Jakara awaits Eyes of the Sea, and I await Jakara.” His smile disappeared. She returned him stare for stare, aggravatingly attractive in her defiant poise, her big dark eyes in startling contrast to the almost olive skin – Jakara could hardly resist touching it.

And she was so obviously his for the taking!

Such, outwardly, was the Pretty Lamar, fairest of the Las girls since the going of Gareeb. And now her movement seemed a caress, as she whispered pleadingly: “Why be angry, Jakara? Am I not fair to look upon? Am I not desirable?”

Jakara’s heart thumped. Imperceptibly, she leaned towards him, her lips sweet with invitation. He whispered urgently: “Pretty Lamar, you are lovely, a woman a man might die for; but I am a Lamar proper – we can never love. Stick to Beizam! If you persist in playing with me, we shall lose our heads – on the Sarokag pole!”

All Eve beckoned in the girl’s smile, as she twined an arm round his neck, caressing him with touch, and looks and words. Her body was scented with the kerakera.

“Nay, Jakara the Wise,” she whispered, lingeringly; “Beizam is a mud shark – you are lord of all the Islands, if only you will! Nothing then could say us nay. We—”

He gripped the firm warm shoulders as she clung to him the more. “Pretty Lamar,” he hissed, “you are a chief’s daughter! Forget not the custom of your people – Death! Or else I must marry you—”

Her hair touched his cheek while her lips came warmly to his. “Would that–be–very hard?”

He crushed her to him and she kissed passionately; she would have given him her life, this fierce wild thing born under an unhappy star. By the banyan-tree they were when C’Zarcke came along and for the first time in his life gazed down into eyes which blazed back hate unabashed – the eyes of the Pretty Lamar. Jakara turned as he felt that awful sensation at the base of his skull, even while his arms clasped the girl. C’Zarcke, giant among big men, walked noiselessly down the path. Softly the seconds passed. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers: the silence shouted tragedy. The girl clung desperately for dread of losing him – but she had lost, the hair was bristling at the base of his skull. He sprang erect, and in cold fear he forced her arms away.

On the third morning after, with his back comfortably warmed against the big black rock of his Lookout, Jakara lazed away time, smoking the zoob, and occasionally picking up the telescope to gaze over the deep blue of a tumbling sea. The zoob was a bamboo about two feet long, a smoke-cylinder with carvings burnt upon it, simply the native pipe. Jakara loved his zoob, and had often wondered that these savages should be growing tobacco and understanding how to cure it, centuries before Sir Walter Raleigh found its solace.

The Zogo-le had developed the knowledge, of course. The great majority of the people lived away their lives in an atmosphere of ignorance and superstition, only those men who of right could cluster around the Zogo-le being taught to understand things. Jakara’s musing gaze rested on a flat rock bottom swept clear by the outgoing tide. The sea had churned out little circular pools in that floor-like rock, and in his last bath sat Ramu. Ramu had been a promising young warrior, until his indiscretion outstripped his ambition. Consequently, while he slept, he had been made to breathe of the “Flower of Death.” Jakara knew that this was an extraordinarily fine, perfumed powder, blown across a person’s nostrils from a long tapering reed. One puff meant everlasting sleep for the body. And now Ramu sat in his salt bath, very quiet, right up to his neck. At long intervals an attendant unceremoniously dipped the warrior’s head under water.

For Ramu was undergoing mummification. Jakara often wondered. Some of these people had Egyptian names even. Their huge war canoes, too, with the tall stern and arrogant – often beaked – bow, their barbaric decorations reminded him of prints of old-time galleys of the Nile which in his boyhood days he had seen in books.

Dreamily he turned his eyes away from Ramu, sitting down there in his last bath, picked up his telescope, and gazed away out to sea. He sat up straight, fully alert, stared hard for a while, then hurriedly hid his telescope and with a smile sprang up and ran like a man in the pink of condition down the long winding path that disappeared towards the sea-shore villages.

So Jakara spread the news that the sail of Kebisu was in sight. Always careful was Jakara not to prophesy himself; he merely confirmed C’Zarcke. There were three vessels, and Jakara added that the great war-canoe of Kebisu sported a new sail.

C’Zarcke, sitting, thinking within the Zogo-house, was told all. To each message he said nothing, but merely looked wise; but he was wise, too, and puzzled himself again as he had done for years past to understand this power of Jakara. Although he knew that the vessels were coming, C’Zarcke could not visibly see any sail, much less three, nor could he see that the canoe of Kebisu possessed a new mat sail! Yet Jakara never told falsely. Often he had raised the cry, “Lamar-Nar! Lamar-Nar!” (A spirit ship! A spirit ship!) Throughout the years, often long before the ships were in sight, he had foretold their passing, distinguishing between the fighting-ships of the Lamars, those other vessels which were like fat pigeons ready for the plucking when haply they struck the reefs, and those little hornets of the seas that Jakara called “blackbirders,” filled with fighting-men – little ships always looking for fight and always a fury to tackle. Also there were distant sails growing ominously frequent of late when the fool Lamars searched for pearl-shell and combed the ocean-floor for slugs of the sea; and occasionally the clumsy, queerly-shaped boats of those sea-nomads, the little brown Malay men, who always made great sport in fighting to the death, but luckily were not armed with such deadly fire-weapons as the white Lamars.

But Jakara had never told of a Lamar ship in distress, or of one obviously slewed among the many reefs, and C’Zarcke knew full well that he must have seen numbers in that plight. What was this power that Jakara possessed, and what other knowledge did he possess? C’Zarcke had watched him for years in the effort to learn. In his younger days C’Zarcke had really believed that white men were spirits of the dead, until he had thought over the strange fact that they and their women fear death even more than the Islanders. Then he had wondered if Lamars might be spirit people who, after death, lose the memory of their earth lives. As a young man he had thought that the Lamars might be like his own people, among whom only the priests and chiefs have knowledge. Jakara had boasted of a great land filled with knowledge which the Lamars themselves owned. C’Zarcke now believed him. He knew the vast world of the stars, and he did not believe that the horizon of the sea dropped into space. He knew that as far to the south as the most adventurous canoes had voyaged there lay a great land. True, the people seen were black in colour, but they were very different from the Islanders. Might not a land of Lamars lie farther away still? If so, then what learning their wise men must have! But what ineffable knowledge they must possess if they were really the spirits of people come back to earth!

With his brooding face almost likeable in its pathetic yearning, C’Zarcke stood up within the darkened Zogo-house, and, sliding open an aperture, gazed steadily up towards Jakara’s Lookout.