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WEE GEORGIE WAS MUSTERING the plantation boys. It was seven-thirty in the morning and they came loitering up from the village, torpid, red-eyed, scowling, to squat in little groups outside Wee Georgie’s hut.
Stripped of their finery, their skins dull and dusty, their teeth stained and their mouths drooling with betel juice, they were an unpromising crew.
Wee Georgie surveyed them with regal contempt and spat in the dust before them. He was leaning against the big casuarina tree, an obscene and rumpled figure, with bleary eyes and the sour taste of hangover on his tongue. His shirt flapped raggedly outside his breeches, his belt hung precariously below his navel. His hair was a towy mess and his bare feet scuffed irritably in the dirt of the path. One trembling hand held a cigarette, the other scratched constantly under a sweaty armpit.
His two girls peered out of the doorway behind him and giggled softly. Their lord was in a fouler mood than usual. The performance would be worth watching.
The last stragglers arrived and stood shuffling uneasily under Georgie’s baleful eye. He took a last long drag at his cigarette, coughed till he was purple in the face and spat again.
Then he started.
“On your feet, you black bastards! Get into line. Jump to it!”
Slowly they heaved themselves up from their haunches and moved into file in front of him. His ugly face twisted into a grin; he took a deep breath and began to curse them, softly and fluently. He cursed them in pidgin and place-talk and bawdy Billingsgate. He cursed them for the colour of their skins and the lechery of their women; he cursed them by the names of birds and beasts and crawling things ; he cursed them as eaters of the dead and crammers of offal. They were a stink in his nostrils, an offense to his sight, an obscene pollution of the mountain air. They coupled with pigs and brought forth monsters. Their fingers were a black blight on the coffee and when they died, even the ants would reject their foul carcasses.
By the time he had finished, they were grinning all over their dark faces. Their ill temper was dissipated and they nodded to one another, approving this intoxicating eloquence. But this was only the beginning, the overture to the comedy.
Wee Georgie hawked again. A great gob of spittle landed at the feet of a tall buck and threw up a puff of dust as high as his ankles. The boys guffawed happily. The girls squealed with shrill delight. Georgie eased himself away from the tree bole and lurched over to his target. Slowly he surveyed him, from his frizzy crown to his scrabbling toes, and began his gallery speech.
“This is Yaria. This is Yaria, who talks like a taro root and performs like a bud of bamboo.”
The boys hooted with laughter. Yaria was a well-known boaster, whose girls were never satisfied. The white man was a clever fellow who knew all the gossip of the village. Wee Georgie grinned happily. His play was running well.
“This Yaria was at the kunande last night. He changed partners three times—and still couldn’t find a girl to sleep with him.”
There was laughter and jeering while Yaria hung his head and scuffed his feet in embarrassment.
“Yaria wants to get married and have a son. But he can’t find the bride-price—and even if he did, he’d need another man to help him—”
And so on, through the cheerful ritual of obscenity and insult until the sullen workers were bubbling with good humour and filled with gossip enough to last them through the working day. When he had finished with Yaria, Georgie moved to the next man in the line, and the next, spitting at their feet, parading them like hacks in the knacker’s yard, spreading his ridicule so that no man escaped and none could feel resentment or loss of face.
It was a canny performance that guaranteed him the goodwill of his labour force and gave him leisure to sit in the shade with his straw hat tipped over his eyes, while the boys moved up and down the lines of trees, cultivating, spraying, clearing the irrigation ditches and chewing the spicy cud of the morning’s entertainment.
He was nearly at the end of the line when he saw Kumo. The big fellow was standing a little apart from the others, arms folded on his chest, his face a blank mask, his eyes full of cold hatred.
Wee Georgie shivered and his tirade limped to a close.
Hurriedly, he set them their tasks—these to the sprays, these others to the new clearing, half a dozen to the drainage ditches from the upper pond, two to rake the paths and clip the lawns, the rest to weed and mulch the coffee rows.
Grinning and chattering, they dispersed to pick up their tools and start work. Kumo stood aloof and impassive as if challenging the fat man to assert his authority. Wee Georgie was too shrewd to engage the sorcerer.
“You wait there, big boy. The boss wants to see you,” he snarled.
Then he spat contemptuously and lurched back to the hut where the girls were making his breakfast.
Kumo squatted at the foot of the casuarina tree and waited for Sonderfeld to come to him.
The big man walked slowly down the path, flicking at his calves with a thin switch of cane. It was a gesture that, in another time and another country, might have betrayed him. It recalled the shining jackboots and the trim black uniform of a discredited elite. Here in the bright mountain morning it was as meaningless as brushing away flies.
As always, his arrival was carefully timed to coincide with the end of Georgie’s oration and the dispersal of the boys. They would see him coming the full length of the path, and they would stumble over one another in their eagerness to get to work and avoid the disapproval of his cold stare. Their fear flattered him and fed the fires that consumed him.
This morning his entrance was staged with even greater care. When he saw Kumo on his hunkers in the dust, be stopped and spent long minutes examining the big coleus plants that bordered the path. He took a cigar from his pocket and lit it with care and deliberation before he resumed his walk.
As he walked, he rehearsed the scene he was about to play. He would not use pidgin, which was the language of subjection, or English, which was the language of equality. He would speak to Kumo in his own tribal tongue, and this would say more clearly than words: “I know you. You cannot deceive me with a double tongue or with the blankness of ignorance. I share your secrets and yet I am greater than you.”
He would speak privately, in the shelter of the tangket trees, so that the sorcerer would not be humbled and lose face with his fellows. His influence must be preserved, while his will was bent and his spirit humbled to the service of Sonderfeld. He would rebel, of course. He would rear against the yoke, because he was a proud man. Because he was an intelligent one, he would try to bargain, shrewdly, deviously, with the threat of betrayal to the patrol officer and the Administration. But Sonderfeld would reject the bargain and break the rebellion.
He grinned crookedly and fingered the bamboo tube in his pocket. He wondered what Kumo would do when he saw it for the first time.
The sorcerer did not stir when Sonderfeld came up to him. He remained squatting against the tree, eyes downcast, his jaws champing on the cud of betel nut. Sonderfeld stood a moment, watching him, then he flicked the cane switch sharply across his cheek. Kumo’s head came up with a jerk. His eyes blazed.
“Get up,” said Sonderfeld softly. “Come with me. I want to talk to you.”
Then he turned away and walked into the shelter of the trees out of sight of the hut and of the house. Slowly Kumo got to his feet and followed him.
In the dappled shadow under the purple leaves they faced each other, black man, white man, each master in his own domain.
Sonderfeld smiled comfortably.
“Kumo, we have talked before. We talk again. I offered you friendship. Are you ready to accept it?”
Kumo’s eyes were full of sullen anger.
“No. You take everything, you give nothing. That is not friendship.”
“I told you I would make you chief of all the valleys.”
Kumo’s head came up, defiantly.
“Already I am chief of the valleys.”
Sonderfeld laughed in his face.
“There is a luluai in every village appointed by the Kiap in Goroka. These are the chiefs. You are still a work boy, eating the offal of the lowly.”
Kumo grinned with cunning and contempt.
“The luluais do as I tell them. But you are still the servant of the Kiap. How can you do for me what you cannot do for yourself?”
Sonderfeld shook his head.
“You do not believe that, otherwise you would not have told the tribes of the coming of the Red Spirit. I am no man’s servant. I am the Red Spirit, who is the ruler of all—of the Kiaps and of the Pig God himself.”
Kumo squirted a stream of betel juice at a passing lizard.
“You say so. But you do not speak in the councils of the Kiaps. Among the tribes you do no magic.”
“Because I am not yet ready?”
Now it was Kumo’s turn to laugh, a deep throaty chuckle that welled and gurgled behind his scarlet teeth. Sonderfeld flicked up the cane and struck him viciously on the cheek, raising a long, thin weal from mouth to ear. Kumo yelped and clapped his hands to his face.
“Now,” said Sonderfeld calmly, “you will listen to me.”
The sorcerer glared at him in helpless fury.
“You are a fool, Kumo. But I am prepared to forget your folly and make you my friend.”
“No! You are not my friend. Does a brother strike his brother? The Kiap’s law says the white man shall not strike the black man. I shall tell the Kiap and you will be punished.”
Sonderfeld shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture of indifference.
“Tell the Kiap. But first listen to me.”
“No.”
He turned and made as if to go. Sonderfeld’s next words stopped him dead in his tracks.
“Last night, after the carry-leg, you lay with a woman in the grass.”
Slowly, fearfully, Kumo turned to face him. Sonderfeld grinned in mockery.
“When the elders made you a man, Kumo, did they not tell you that he who puts his seed to a strange woman puts his life in great danger?”
“This was no stranger. She was a woman of my village.”
The words were defiant, but there was uncertainty in his voice.
“The woman was my woman,” said Sonderfeld calmly. “Her name is N’Daria. She serves the Red Spirit.”
A gleam of confidence showed in the red, sullen eyes of Kumo. He remembered the protestations of the girl, her passion and her desire for him.
“Does the Red Spirit share his women then?”
“No. He does not share them. He uses them to do his work. Look!”
The bamboo tube was in his hand. He thrust it under the nose of the sorcerer. Kumo drew back, startled and puzzled.
“What is that?”
Sonderfeld’s voice rose to hieratic thunder.
“You lay with a woman, Kumo. Your spittle was on her lips and your blood was under the nails of her fingers … and you lay with her. I hold your life in my hands before you.”
Kumo’s reaction was sudden and horrible.
His spine arched backwards, his head fell back. His eyes rolled upwards. A bubbling imbecile sound broke from his lips. Then, as if he had been kicked in the belly, he doubled forward, retched and crumpled, trembling and gibbering, at Sonderfeld’s feet.
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.