Kundu, page 7
Sonderfeld was startled, but only for a moment. Then he smiled, looked down at the twitching body and knew with absolute certainty that he had only to walk away and the sorcerer would crawl to the nearest bush and lie there, without food or water or speech, until he died. Kumo had killed others in the same way. Now the sword of the spirit, the terrible two-edged weapon of fear and belief, had been turned against his own unarmoured flesh.
For Sonderfeld it was a moment of pure triumph. Alone he had joined battle with the dark and secret rulers of the valleys. The evidence of his victory lay dusty and abject at his feet. He stooped and hauled Kumo upright by his thick, greasy hair. Then he propped him against a tree and stood, arms akimbo, mocking him.
“Now do you believe me, Kumo?”
“Yes.” It was a drunken nod.
“You know that I am the Red Spirit with life or death in my hands?”
“Yes.”
“You know that I can bum you with fire, or crush you with stones, or have the ants devour you even as you walk?”
The sorcerer’s face twisted in hypnotic agonies.
“Yes … yes … yes.”
“You know also that I can preserve your life if I wish it?”
Kumo opened his eyes. There was no hope in them, only an animal pleading.
“I know.”
“If you serve me, I will preserve it.”
“I will serve.”
“If you serve me well, then one day, perhaps, I will give it back to you.”
Kumo tried to speak, but no words came from his slack and babbling mouth. The impact of even this small hope robbed him of human speech. Satisfied with his little comedy of cruelty, Sonderfeld walked up to him and slapped him hard on both cheeks.
“Stand up!”
Kumo stood up.
“Your life is safe, so long as you do as you are told.”
Kumo nodded vigorously, still without the power of speech.
“Now,” said Sonderfeld quietly, “you will listen to me. You are a great sorcerer. You understand how a man may be killed so that none can tell who struck him?”
Kumo found tongue at last.
“I understand.”
“Good. There is a man in my house whom you know. He is the one who lives in the village and sits with you by the cook fires and asks questions of the women.”
“I know him.”
“Today he goes back to his own house in the village. Tonight you will kill him—but so that the Kiap Curtis will think he died in his bed. Can you do that?”
The man’s eagerness was horrible.
“I can do it. There is a powerful magic that—”
Sonderfeld cut him off with a gesture.
“I do not want to hear. Do it and tell no one. Come to me when I send for you but not before—and, Kumo—” His voice was a silken thread. “When the Red Spirit appears at the pig festival, will you proclaim him to the tribes?”
“I will proclaim him.”
“Good,” said Kurt Sonderfeld in his own tongue. “Good and good and—wunderschön!”
He threw back his head and laughed and laughed while the birds rose fluttering and squawking from the thicket, and Kumo the Sorcerer watched him with the fear of death in his heart.
Down in the Kiap house, Patrol Officer Curtis was groaning in the grip of a hangover. His head throbbed, his eyes were full of gravel, and his mouth was parched and foul. His stomach heaved at the first taste of the bitter tea brought to him by the police boy.
Theodore Nelson scooped the sugary pulp from a paw-paw and grinned at him across the yellow rind.
“Try some of this, my dear chap. Cleans the palate, settles the digestion. Wonderful stuff.”
“Go to hell!”
“Drink your tea then. You’re as dry as a chip. You won’t feel better till you get some liquid inside you.”
Curtis groaned and gagged over another mouthful.
“Dunno why I drink whisky. It always hits me like this.”
“It was a very good whisky.” Nelson chewed happily on the soft fruit. “I’ll say this for Sonderfeld, he’s a perfect host.”
“I think he’s an arrogant swine.”
Curtis buried his nose in the tin pannikin while Nelson studied him with shrewd and twinkling eyes. There was truth in whisky, and it was one of his subtler pleasures to pry out the truth in other people’s lives and savour its folly or its tragedy without involving his own transient person.
“Arrogant, yes. But a swine? You know him better than I do, of course.”
Curtis rose like a trout to a well-cast fly.
“Any man who treats a woman the way Sonderfeld treats his wife is a swine for my money.”
Nelson hid his smile with another spoonful of fruit. He nodded gravely. His eyes were full of sympathy for the bruised and knightly spirit of youth. Curtis took another mouthful of tea and wiped his lips with a stained handkerchief.
“Sonderfeld’s as cold as a fish. Gerda’s a warm person, full of life, hungry for affection.”
“I gathered she was getting at least half a meal,” said Nelson dryly.
Curtis’s chin came up defiantly.
“What do you mean?”
“Lansing’s the man of the moment, isn’t he?”
For a moment Nelson thought the boy was going to strike him, then quite suddenly the anger went out of him, his face crumpled childishly, his eyes filled with tears of self-pity.
“I suppose he is. But I don’t blame Gerda. She’s alone up here. Lansing’s close and—well, I don’t begrudge her what she gets from him.”
“Why should it matter to you one way or the other?”
There was a queer pathetic dignity about him as he raised his head and looked Nelson full in the eyes.
“Because I’m in love with her myself.”
Theodore Nelson sat transfixed, the spoon halfway to his mouth, the great yellow fruit held precariously on his open palm. The blunt admission shocked him. A mild flirtation, a casual accommodation, would have amused him, but the grand passion was a different matter altogether.
“God Almighty!” he swore softly. “You are in a mess, aren’t you?”
Curtis nodded miserably.
“That’s why I got drunk last night. Never touch the stuff usually. Can’t afford to when I’m on the round. Never know when you’re liable to wake up with an arrow in your guts or a hatchet in your skull. But … to sit there at the table with her. To hear her laugh. To know that when we were gone she’d …”
He buried his face in his hands as if to shut out a tormenting vision.
Nelson scooped out the last mouthfuls of fruit, laid the empty skin on the floor of the hut, wiped his hands and lit a cigarette. Then he stood up.
“It’s none of my business, of course, but if you’d take a word of advice from an old stager—”
“Yes?” Curtis raised his head slowly.
“Get out of the valley today. Finish the patrol, go back to Goroka and ask for a transfer to another area. If you don’t, you’re going to be in trouble—up to the neck.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
Nelson looked down at the boy’s face, yellow with hangover, ravaged by the grief and torment of young passion. Pity touched him rarely, but he felt it now—pity and scorn and distaste for the folly from which his own cautious nature had preserved him.
“If you know it, why stay ?”
“Because there’s trouble brewing and it’s my job to find out what it is and put a stop to it.”
My God, thought Nelson, there’s the makings of a man in him. He’s flabby with puppy fat still, but there’s a sound, stiff core underneath.
“Trouble? You said last night there was no trouble. You laughed at Lansing and that little parson fellow.”
“I was drunk last night,” said Curtis slowly. “I made a fool of myself in more ways than one. But I sobered up after I was sick. I lay awake for hours thinking about it, trying to fit things together”
“What did you make of it?”
“Nothing definite—except that Sonderfeld’s involved. That means Gerda’s involved, too. I’m going to stay around for a few days, visit a few of the other villages and see what information I can pick up.”
“From whom?”
“From the luluais, from the tribal gossip and”—he hesitated a moment—“from Lansing and Père Louis.”
Nelson grinned, savouring the irony of the situation.
“I thought you didn’t like either of ’em.”
Curtis frowned.
“I don’t. But this is Administration business. My love life doesn’t come into it, nor my religion. Lansing’s got information that I want. The missioners live closer to the tribes than any other people in the Territory—especially the R.C.s, because they don’t marry and they have to share the tribal life or live like hermits.”
“Why don’t you like the missionaries?”
Curtis shrugged.
“We’re not ready for ’em. Make a man a Christian and you tell him that all men are brothers in Christ. His next question is, why can’t I sit at a table with my brothers and marry the white women and say my piece in the Kiap councils and earn the same money as a white worker? It’s too early for that—half a century too early.”
Nelson was puzzled. This was no longer the braying youth of last night’s dinner party. This was a sober young official who knew his job and was prepared to do it at some cost to himself and some damage to his heartstrings. Give him confidence and polish, teach him the art of silence among his elders, the boy would make a good administrator—provided Delilah didn’t shear him of his strength and bed him down to messy marital scandal.
The boy’s face broke into a rueful smile.
“Don’t worry, Nelson. I’ll get you back to Goroka in one piece. Take it easy and enjoy yourself. You’ll probably find it very interesting.”
“I wasn’t thinking of myself,” said Nelson soberly. “I was thinking of you.”
Curtis’s eyes darkened.
“You mind your business. I’ll mind mine.”
“And Mrs. Sonderfeld’s?”
“Go to hell!”
He stalked out of the hut and Nelson heard him shouting angrily to the police boys. When he looked out of the doorway, he saw Curtis standing naked in the bright sun while a pair of grinning fuzzy-wuzzies doused him with water from canvas buckets. His skin was shining. His muscles rippled as he gasped and danced and swung his arms. His belly was flat and hard as a board.
Nelson was filled with sour admiration for his youth and his vitality and his resilient, glowing strength. He wondered what would happen if Gerda Sonderfeld should fall in love with them.
Chapter Six
•
IN THE WARMTH OF THE RICH MOUNTAIN MORNING, Max Lansing walked home to his village. It lay in a deep saucer-shaped depression between Père Louis’ community and the Lahgi Valley. To reach it, he had to make a wide traverse westward of Sonderfeld’s property and cross two steep saddles before he struck the path that led over the lip of the crater and downwards into the taro plots and the banana groves and the dancing park. He would not reach it till the middle of the afternoon.
He had a water bottle hooked to his belt and a canvas knapsack filled with food from Gerda’s kitchen and a bottle of Sonderfeld’s best whisky. By midday he would have crossed the first saddle and he would rest and eat by the swift water that came singing down over the rocks from the high peaks. Then he would push on, with neither joy nor impatience, to the small bamboo hut on the outer edge of the village—his home for the years of his subsidized exile.
As he topped the rise that overlooked the plantation, he halted a moment and looked back. He saw the blaze of Gerda’s garden, the nestling of the bungalow under its thatched roof, the long, serried lines of the plantation trees. He saw the work boys moving about like leisurely ants and the tall white figure of Sonderfeld standing at the head of the first grove. He saw them all as a symbol of permanence and possession, a mockery of his own rootless, pointless existence.
Long, long ago he had been fired with zeal for knowledge—knowledge for its own sake, knowledge without thought of gain, profitless except in human dignity and spiritual enlargement. But the fire had burnt out years since, and he saw himself, not great among the solitary great ones, but a poor and tattered pedant, piling his dry facts like children’s blocks, while the laughing, weeping, lusting, suffering world rolled heedless past his doorstep. Without faith in himself and in his work, he found himself without strength for dedication. He could no longer walk happy among the scholars, and he had forgotten the speech of the marketplace. Even his love was a pedantry, dusty and dry beside the welling passion of Gerda.
When Sonderfeld had left the house, he had sat with her at breakfast on the veranda and had tried to recapture the brief warmth of their night’s embrace. But Gerda refused to match his mood. She had talked, cheerfully enough, about the dinner party, the guests, the plantation, the news from Goroka. But when he had urged her to discussion of their own relationship, she had refused, gently but with finality.
“No, Max. All that can be put into words has been said between us. I am here, whenever you care to come. I will be with you as I have always been. But I will not talk—talk—talk! Better to kiss or make love, or simply walk among the flowers together. But why rake our hearts with words that mean nothing?”
To which, of course, there was no answer. Take it or leave it. He had not courage to leave it and he lacked the wisdom to take without question. He must itch and scratch and itch and scratch again, until the warm and willing heart was scarred into a running sore.
He had risen abruptly from the table and gathered his things to leave. She had come to him then and kissed him with that maddening maternal gentleness.
“Don’t be angry with me, Max. I am as I am. I cannot change. But before you go, let me tell you one thing.”
“Yes?”
Let her tell him she loved him and he would be happy again. Let her give him one small hope and ambition would soar again, mountains high.
“Be careful, Max, I beg of you. Be careful!”
“Careful of what?”
Her hands made a helpless, fluttering gesture.
“I don’t know. I wish I did. But after what you said last night, my husband—”
“To hell with your husband!”
He caught her to him, crushing his mouth brutally on hers. Then he released her, picked up his knapsack and without a backward glance strode off, a lost and angry man, storming up the hillside.
When he came to the river, he was sweating and exhausted. It was a long walk at the best of times, but for a lonely and unhappy fellow, it was twice as tedious. He plunged down to the water and felt the humid air close round him like a curtain. A cloud of insects enveloped him. He beat at them irritably with his handkerchief and by the time he reached the sandy hollow near the ford he was free of them.
He slipped off his knapsack, took a long pull at the water bottle and flung himself down at the edge of the clear singing water. He was too tired to eat, so he lay sprawled on his back, head pillowed on the knapsack, looking up into the dappled green of the jungle overhang through a cloud of bright blue butterflies. He saw the flash of brilliant scarlet as a bird of paradise made his mating dance on the branch of an albizzia tree. A tiny tree kangaroo peered cautiously between two broad purple leaves. A lizard sunned himself on the rock beside him, and in the undergrowth he heard the scurrying of small animals, rooting for food.
The thought struck him that in his four-hour walk he had seen not a single human being. This was unusual, for the mountain paths were the highways of the tribes. Since the white man’s law had abolished war and killing raids, there was a modest traffic between the villages in canes and birds of paradise feathers and gum and galip nuts and pigs and the produce of the gardens.
This traffic had been increased of late by the movement of the tribes for the approaching pig festival. Yet today he had seen no one. Because he was tired, the thought nagged at him uneasily. He fumbled for a cigarette, lit it and watched the blue smoke spiral up towards the green canopy.
Then he heard it, distant but distinct—chuff-chuff-chuff—the unmistakable beat of a running cassowary. The sound was unusual enough to interest him. The cassowary bird was native to the high valleys, but the breed was being thinned out by killing and the survivors were retreating into the less populated mountains.
The footsteps carne closer, thudding like the muffled beat of a train on steel rails. Lansing sat up. The bird was corning down the same path that he had followed. He wondered if it would break out onto the beach. He was not afraid, only interested. The big, ungainly bird was easily frightened and would not attack a human being unless it was angered or cornered. The footsteps carne closer and closer. Then they stopped.
He judged the bird was probably a dozen yards away, hidden by the dense screen of undergrowth. He could hear its rustling among the leaves and low branches. Then the rustling stopped, and after a moment Lansing lay back drowsily against the knapsack. He thought he would sleep a little, then eat before he continued his walk. He worked a hollow for his hip in the warm sand and turned comfortably on his side.
Then he saw it.
A yard from his face was a small white snake, dappled with black spots. In the suspended moment of shock he saw the trail of its body in the white sand. It had come from the bush at his back, the deadliest reptile in the whole island. If it struck him, he would die, paralyzed and beyond help within two hours. Cautiously he moved his hand to get purchase on the sand, then, with a single movement, he thrust himself to his feet. In that same moment the snake moved, fast as a flicker of light, to the spot where his head had lain. Its jaws opened and it struck at the stiff canvas of the knapsack. Before Lansing had time to snatch up a stick or stone, it was gone again, a dappled death, slithering into the fallen leaves at the fringe of the bush.
Sick with terror, he stood looking down at the knapsack and the tiny dark stain of the ejected poison. Then he shivered, snatched up the bag and plunged across the ford, heedless of the water that swirled about his knees and hidden stones that sent him half sprawling into the icy current.
