He could see new Stars, and was saddened to think how many more had studded the sky each night since the arrival of the men who wore the clothes that others’ claimed to have seen before, those considered infirm or too young to understand the meaning of the spirits they had encountered. The elders said they were mistaken in thinking they had seen actual men, for other people could not enter their land.
But now the boy knew different. He had not known before that it was possible for his people, including his mother, to be wrong. Until now everything he had been taught always proved to be true. The way to hunt boar, the type of soil to wear to avoid insect bites, how to catch fish with his bare hands, even what moment the Moon would talk to the Sun, one eclipsing the other. All knowledge effortlessly acquired through elders and parents; friend’s parents and society. Life had been easy, naturally flowing and balancing his world, but now it was very difficult to be a boy on this island and he could not decide what to do. No story had been told to him that might help.
It was forbidden to travel over water, and so the presence of the bad-men puzzled him. They had come in huge boats carrying strange things that by day killed his land Ancestors while the Stars and the Moon slept. Did She sleep easily, he wondered, surrounded by the souls of his forefathers – of his male Ancestors – while bad-men destroyed the female: his grandmother, his great grandmother and her mother before that? Stealing away the ancient Mothers of the land in their big boats. Surely She must see by night what had occurred by day?
And the Sun? Although the boy loved the Sun dearly, there were days when hopelessness took him and he wished it would never rise again. The terrible bad-men might then go away and all could be as it was. Maybe the Moon was right, the Sun could be more trouble than it was worth, for bad-men only ever destroyed by day.
He poked the sand with a stick, drawing the face of his mother, his dead father’s face long since faded from memory. He knew that even if the bad-men left, the world could never be as it was. His brother looked down on him from high above and the leaves of his little sister rustled in the breeze. The fact was, if the bad-men left, it would not give back those two children their Time.
The last he had seen of anyone else was seven Moons ago, when his mother had sent him to learn the First Way; to finish living as a boy and cast aside childish pranks. It was an honour to take this first Step toward manhood, and six more tests would follow although they would all focus on creating the man rather than losing the boy entirely. But he wondered why she had decided to send him at all. He and his mother were the last; the evil unseen sickness having taken everyone else one by one shortly after the bad-men arrived. And as the last, there was no mate to share in his maturity, to share in his life. But his mother had insisted, telling him that he must follow the correct path to becoming a man just in case he should live to be one, for if he wished to rise and join the others after his Time here was finished he must know as much as he was able to learn. She said that if his Time should finish soon he must not worry because the all-seeing Moon would already have understood his intent, and that he was blessed, having been so ill yet living when others died. And so he had left his mother, played games amongst the trees and in the sea, requested and took the life of an animal with gratitude and thanks, survived alone with ease, and on his return could not find her. It seemed she had gone the way of them all. He missed her, her warmth, her laugh, but he knew that the next step to manhood would have eventually taken her from him anyway, for the Second Step marked the start of a slow separation, directing boys to emotional independence, although he was not to know that it should not be for another year or more hence.
But no matter what his own destiny, he did not want her Time to be finished so soon. Sitting beneath the Stars remembering, hot tears rolled through the dirt on his face, clenched fists jamming into his cheeks. He knew all Seven Steps for he had heard them described so many times, and was determined to follow the path alone and become the man she had wanted. But he was a still a boy.
One great pity was that he had begun to think he would like to mate one day. This is how his mother had known he was ready to begin. But now there was no one left to mate with. He hoped that somewhere he would find a girl, hidden away from the intruders, and life could begin again. He had to hope. He held onto it, a lifeline.
Already he had searched for any sign of her – of anyone else – and found nothing. It wasn’t easy because searching, hunting, everything, had become difficult since the bad-men had arrived. And it had suddenly got worse, for just as he had found a place he felt he could be, a fresh piece of ground that pleased him, more strangers had appeared.
He mistakenly thought the language of these new people was the same as the bad-men, the sound of his own guttural but lyrical tongue far removed from the clipped tones of English and the strum of Malay. But he could not miss the difference in skin. At a distance the brown men were no great surprise to him, until they rolled up their sleeves or removed their shirts, but the new ones were extraordinary. He decided there were several possibilities to account for such white skin: either they were ill, were ghosts, or they painted themselves with a pale mud, perhaps to protect against the swarms of mosquitoes that troubled the island. He felt sure the two groups were linked somehow, firstly that they were here at all, secondly the common tongue he believed they shared, and thirdly the skin, for whether brown or white it was as plain as sand, and with the exception of one brown man who had an entire arm bearing the most intricate markings the boy had ever seen, their skin bore no obvious pattern at all. The boy could not begin to imagine what it meant.
If the boy had stayed away then things may have turned out differently, but the chance of company proved an irresistible draw for a lonely child, and more and more of his time was spent near the shore watching the camp of the white people, often lingering far longer than his instincts urged. He frequently followed two men, one white, one brown, and a white girl as they trekked into the jungle, or waited on the cliff for their return on the occasions they disappeared by boat. Sometimes, many nights passed by before they came back and he would smile at the sight of them, his longing for the company of another child rewarded with her nearness.
He also watched the peculiar activities of the others as they lay long lines on the ground, threw strangely formed sticks in the air and heaped soil into small bags that had no colour; bags so similar to those frequently washed up that he found it incredible. Is this what they are used for, he thought, for putting earth in? He always put special things in his own bags. What did it mean?
Despite in his mind connecting the two invading groups, the boy recognised that there was a noticeable difference between these people and the bad-men, for these people seemed peaceful in a manner that the other intruders were not, destroying very little of what they touched. Of the six it was the bald man, seeming older and rounder than the others, that made the boy truly uneasy; apprehension equal to that roused by the bad-men stealing trees.
Raised amongst hunters as a hunter, the boy had learned from an early age to read the subtleties of movement and sound. The bald man had a vocal tone unlike the others, and it seemed to rise in pitch with the rapidity of his words, always followed by a sound that should have been laughter but was not. The man’s body language showed he considered himself superior, a separate entity from those around him, but it was not the distinction of an innate leader, more of a monkey that had failed to fit in with the bachelor group but could not conquer it either. And the movements of the others, especially the girl, said that they did not like him anymore than the boy did. This made him especially wary. His people did not act like that towards one another, and if ever they experienced feelings of hostility the warring parties moved apart, remaining together within the band but becoming quite separate. This man was too close to everyone else for the emotions he roused.
He assumed the real leader of the group was the one he felt to be the girl’s father and the younger, brown man his second. Both had very
little to do with the bald man or the other two, but still the boy could sense authority. It was the leader who visited the wicked bad-men tearing out the heart of his sacred home, the only association not fitting with everything else he had seen. Maybe he was in charge of the theft? But he could not make the connection between this leader-man and the three endlessly picking over plants and creatures. Did the leader – the Chief – intend to take the whole island tree by tree; the others bag by bag?
Two stout wooden huts had appeared a little while after the people, brought in not by the Chief, but by the bald man and the woman. They had left the whitest man with black hair by himself and returned later that day with wood, assembling the structures just inside the forest edge, driving thick posts deep into the sandy soil. The boy supposed it was the heavy rain that drove them to create such substantial refuges, for plain white people became angry when their possessions got wet, and they seemed frightened of the storms. Once the huts were complete, they took in the big black bags and strange beds, leaving only a few items stowed in the tents outside. It was strange for the boy to see people hide away each night, but he knew they were not like him and he pitied them for it; he thought they must be very frail.
The Chief, his second, and the girl, never used the huts or the tents. By night they either left or slept on the beach, and each evening before the boy settled off to sleep he silently bade the girl goodnight, wherever she was, looking up to the Stars and asking his Ancestors to protect her.
*
Before too long the life he had known was taken from him forever.
The girl had left the island again and so the boy was feeling lonely. He was lying amongst thickly woven foliage high in a tree, a little way inland from the camp, watching as the three hut-dwellers prepared for the day ahead. The woman emerged from the larger hut that also contained all the bags, the two men from the smaller. Several times it had occurred to the boy that he could steal into the camp by night and cut their throats, and without too much difficulty he could do the same to the bad-men. But he was not a murderer and had no intention of suffering the shame of dying as one, especially considering the punishment that would be meted out in the next life for such an offence. Even murderers of murderers never adorn the night sky but are condemned to perpetually drown in the darkest depths of the ocean, while the dead victim wails and clutches at their feet; different, of course, had the Elders decreed it and the masses agreed. No chance of that now.
One sunset long ago on a ceremonial beach to the west of the island he had witnessed the driving into the sea of a man who had raped and murdered his own wife. Stones were strapped to his legs and penis, his right arm tied to his side as a symbol of his wife and the role she had taken in life. It was terrifying to watch and the man’s mother was forever shamed. What happened to shamed people, he always wondered, once their Time had finished? Did they find peace? No one had ever told him.
Aside from the uncomfortable memory of the man weeping desperately whilst being driven to his death by the crowd, the boy himself had nearly drowned in the chaos. No, murder could not be for him. Sometimes, though, he hoped the intruders might come and attack him, for killing in the defence of your people or your own life was usually honourably acknowledged in both this life and the next. He thought of those now dead from sickness, who had fought and killed some of the first bad-men. They would now be so close to the Moon that they would eternally bathe in Her Magnanimous Glow. Then he remembered there was no one in this life left to honour him no matter what he did, and for a moment all thoughts of killing passed.
The soil stealing trespassers followed the same routine each day, and the day the boy’s freedom was taken began no differently. Once awake, the three always washed in the sea although they were never naked, before ritually spreading pale cream over their arms and faces. The boy wondered if it was this cream that made them so white, perhaps taking colour from skin that should be brown, although he could not imagine why. Then they stoked the fire as they always did, drank from young coconuts and ate peeled cassava root steamed within the leaves of banana and pandan.
The boy had watched the Chief’s second in command teach them how to create this simple food, and ever since it had been their first meal of the day. Cassava was a valuable gift from the Ancestors of the Middle Age although the boy had forgotten the story, and smelling the fragrance of pandan he wished that he too could enjoy a meal just like it. Perhaps he would risk the smoke and create something as tasty for himself, and for a treat find something sweet to add. He’d climbed from the tree and set about gathering ingredients, quietly digging for the starchy roots, wondering whether the second in command had thought to warn the three against undercooking. He hoped not.
The breakfast was every bit as delicious as the boy hoped it would be, and he’d decided that, like the strangers, he too would eat it everyday as long as it was safe. Instinctively, he had cleared away evidence of the fire and returned to his tree to watch the beach. It seemed the girl had not yet come back and the others had gone elsewhere, presumably digging and probing and filling their bags. The day before, the bald man had taken some of the bags of soil away in the boat, arriving back with a single much larger bag that was colourfully patterned and bulging. The bag had not been emptied in view, but taken into the bald man’s hut leaving the boy wondering what curiosity it contained.
Once certain beyond all doubt that the camp was deserted, the boy had climbed back down from his perch and gone to the beach for a closer look, a full belly softening normally sharp senses, nostrils still filled with the aroma of pandan. This was not the first occasion he had stepped into the space that had become more their world than his, and so he felt comfortable exploring their extraordinary belongings, even looking into the huts with the casual interest of a practised opportunist, although he never went inside. Until this day, for this day he forgot reason.
Rather than just peek inside he entered the bald man’s hut because he had spotted the colourful bag, flattened on the top of a table. On it was a squared banana leaf, on top of that a deep pile of pinkish red fruit. At first glance the boy assumed it to be rambutan, at the same moment realising there were none of the familiar soft spikes. The fruit was too small, anyway, and it was not the season. No. This was something else entirely, something he had never seen before and he stepped a little closer. Smooth, fat berries clustered on short stems. He reached and touched one, fingers marking the bloom. Confident from the evidence of discarded stalks that the fruit was edible, he plucked a single grape from the bunch, just as the door closed behind him.
OLD MEN AND FIGHTING
The argument started the moment Bee and her grandfather stepped ashore and at first the girl felt frightened, although soon she was drawn into the mood of the fight, finding entertainment in two grown men behaving as they did, shocked to discover yet more hidden truths about adults and their ways; about Giles and her grandfather.
As they rowed she noticed that Giles did not swear. For the first time she wondered if foul language had any bearing at all on the moral standing of the user, as her mother so often suggested it did. This was not a view shared by her grandfather, she knew, for he always claimed swear words were useful. There on the beach, as he turned the air blue, Bee’s store of profanities grew tenfold.
‘So what the fuck are you going to do now, Giles? Eh?’ Felix was standing over Giles as he gathered charred chunks of driftwood scattered during their scuffle, diligently remaking the cold remains of the fire.
Despite a bloody nose, the sweaty scientist seemed upbeat rather than troubled; repeatedly stating that it was all as groundbreaking to biology as splitting the atom was to physics. But Felix was not interested. He didn’t want to hear excuses. He wanted only to know what Giles planned to do next and this he kept on asking.
Bee and her grandfather had returned to Pulau Tua late that morning to collect a book Bee had left propped against a tree, a precious gift detailing the wildlife she might encounter, forgotten in a
distracted moment. Felix’s assignment finally completed, the long morning sail back to the island had doubled as a proper farewell to what had been a spectacular part of their holiday.
Approaching the beach, Bee was waving madly to shore when her grandfather remarked that he thought something was wrong. The three scientists looked awkward, random and fidgety rather than roving about doing their usual work. The boatman, under threat of non-payment should he depart without them, dropped Bee and her grandfather in the shallows before anchoring as close to land as his courage would allow.
As the pair approached, Giles was sheepish and when pressed on how things had been became far more defensive than even his usually defensive self. Lydia was obviously startled to see them and was clearly nervous. Mark appeared disturbed; rings of grey under his eyes made his white skin seem even more transparent.
At first nothing noticeable could account for the peculiar atmosphere shrouding the camp. It was not until Bee followed Lydia’s line of sight to one of the huts, barricaded with a wooden drawbar, that the events of the morning began to unfold.
Bee innocently asked Lydia what was in the hut and Lydia looked to Giles for an answer. In turn, Giles glanced uneasily away. Felix marched up to the hut to see for himself. Peering through the narrow gaps that sufficed as ventilation, he expected a wild animal, perhaps a rare cat, and at first assumed this was what he could see curled up in the dark, settled in the sand. But then he recognised the shape for what it was. Without saying a word, he began tugging at the tightly jammed drawbar. Giles attacked him from behind. The strike, too sudden for Bee to shout a warning, had not been sufficient to knock Felix out and the two men had begun thrashing their way across the beach. Finally the blow was landed that would force Giles to back down.