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LATE IN THE AFTERNOON Oliver came to the high ridge of the crater where Curtis and Père Louis were waiting for him.
They were camped in a circle of towering rocks looking southward away from the valley in which the tribes were assembled. They ate dry rations and slept huddled together against the cold, lest the smoke of a cooking fire betray them to the people in the valley. All day long one or the other of them sat perched between two great tors with field glasses trained on the village, watching the ritual preparations for the great moment of the festival, and in the evening Père Louis’ catechist would come up, furtively, to report on the doings among the sorcerers and the elders.
When Oliver arrived, he went immediately to the observation post with Curtis and Père Louis and sat a long time staring through the glasses at the green sweep of the valley and the sprawling grass huts between the checkerboard squares of the farm patches.
All round the village and along the valley paths white poles were set up to signify that the pig festival was near at hand. In the center of the compound two new huts had been built—one large and one small.
The larger hut belonged to the fertility spirit. Its uprights were cut from a sacred tree by a man who held the office by hereditary right. When the hut was built and thatched, four carvers began to ornament the twin poles with a crude geometric pattern in which the repeated motif was the long diamond, which represented the female cleft. They killed a pig to consecrate the house and hung its fat from the rooftrees as a propitiation to the spirit who gave increase to pigs and gardens and women.
The smaller hut was the dwelling place of the Red Spirit. It was circular in shape and its center pole was a long phallic projection which was kept from festival to festival, buried in a secret place. In front of this hut a large tree had been set up. Its branches had been stripped of leaves, and in their place were hung the plumed headdresses that the men would wear at the festival. It was like a tree full of birds of paradise, scarlet and gold and purple and green, fluttering and swaying outside the house of the greatest spirit of all.
The village itself was an eddy of movement and sound and colour.
There was a continual procession of women to and from the garden patches. They came, singing and shouting and gossiping, and they returned laden with taro and kau-kau and sugarcane and clusters of yellow bananas, which were piled in long rows in front of the spirit houses along with the offerings of the visiting tribes.
The unmarried girls were excused from this service. This was the meeting time, the wooing time, which a girl remembered all the years of her married life as the symbol of her lost youth and freedom. Bright with feathers and clattering shell ornaments, girls and youths moved about the village, preening themselves, playing the drums, making kunande in the huts, and love-play wherever there was privacy enough to enjoy the consummation of the erotic rituals.
In the sunlight the wigmakers were putting the final touches on their gaudy confections, while in the shadowy burial grounds the sorcerers and the elders held communion with the ancestor spirits on the secret details of the festival.
George Oliver sat a long time watching the threads of colour weave themselves into a primitive but complex harmony—novel to the white man, but older than the panoply that was Solomon’s welcome to the dark queen of the south. The oppression of the centuries was heavy on his shoulders, and the fear of the centuries’ dark secrets fluttered like a bird in his belly. He put down the glasses and set the fuzzy-wuzzy back on watch. Then he turned back to Père Louis and Curtis and jerked his thumb down the slope.
“Let’s sit down somewhere. I want to talk to you.”
They squatted in the open to catch the last warmth of the sun, for it was late and the shadows were lengthening. Oliver and Curtis lit cigarettes while Père Louis filled his pipe and nursed it carefully to life in the thin mountain air. Then the old man spoke.
“I take it you have been told all that has happened with Sonderfeld?”
Oliver nodded. “Most of it, I think. ‘Where’s Sonderfeld now ?”
Curtis jerked his thumb vaguely towards the valley.
“Down there somewhere—we think. We haven’t seen him and we don’t think anybody else has.”
“Would you know if they had?”
Père Louis waved his pipe in a Gallic gesture.
“You must understand that my people are down there also. My catechist came up to report to me last night. He will be here again soon after dark. He says Kumo has been seen conferring with the elders and the other sorcerers. But there is no sign of either Sonderfeld or N’Daria.”
“Are you sure he hasn’t been killed?”
“Oh, yes. There is still talk of the corning of the Red Spirit. And besides, these people have a sense of theater. Kumo will wish to stage-manage the entrance of the Red Spirit. I believe he will proclaim him at the moment of climax, which is at the great slaughter of pigs outside the house of the Red Spirit.”
“So that’s where he is!” Oliver snapped his fingers as if at a sudden revelation.
Père Louis shook his head slowly.
“No, my friend … no, I do not think so. Sonderfeld is too clever to sit in a cage like a bird waiting for the fowlers. He will be hiding somewhere on the slopes of the valley, in the caves perhaps, or in one of the smaller villages. When all the preparations are made, Kumo will bring him down under cover of darkness.”
Curtis broke in, as if anxious to have his own part in the discussion.
“The important thing seems to me to be that Sonderfeld is still master of the situation. According to Père Louis’ boy, lots of the ceremonies are being telescoped, while others are being left out altogether, to bring the big ceremony forward. That means Sonderfeld is directing operations and not Kumo.”
“He’ll continue to direct ’em so long as he holds Kumo’s life in his hand.”
“He holds it no longer,” said Père Louis in smiling triumph.
“What?”
Oliver and Lee Curtis stared at him in gaping amazement. Grinning like a conjuror at a children’s party, the old priest held under their noses a small bamboo tube.
“Mrs. Sonderfeld will have told you that she found the brother to this in her husband’s pocket.”
Oliver nodded. “That’s right. She did. She also told me that you’d given her orders to replace it.”
“But what she did not tell you, because she did not know, was that I had removed the contents and substituted another piece of cotton wool, soiled with spittle and blood and tobacco juice to resemble the one I have here.”
“We’ve got him!” said George Oliver with sudden triumph. “We’ve got him!”
He threw back his head and laughed and laughed till the tears ran down his face. Then he looked up and saw the face of the old priest, and the laughter died in him like a match flame. Père Louis was smiling no longer. His eyes were grave and his old face was lined with fatigue and with sorrow for the follies of the world in which he had lived too long.
“As you say, my friend, we have got him. The power he holds now is an illusion, because we, in our turn, have come into possession of the vital essences of Kumo. It falls to us—you and me—to decide how we shall use it.”
“So—so this is what you meant by your stratagem?”
It was Curtis who asked the question. George Oliver was chewing the cud of a new and unpleasant thought.
“That’s right, my son. This is my stratagem.”
“But—but you said-”
“I said that its use would involve the life or death of a man.” He gestured with his pipe. “Ask your superior officer. He will tell you that it is so.”
George Oliver looked up and nodded in weary assent.
“It’s time enough.”
“But I don’t see—”
“You tell him, Father.”
He heaved himself up from the ground and walked a little way down the slope, where he stood backed against the rock looking down into the green emptiness of the valley approach. Père Louis turned his old eyes on the puzzled youth squatting on the ground in front of him.
“To understand what is at stake in this, you must realize that we can do nothing until the great moment of the festival. You could go down now into the valley, you and Oliver and the police boys. You could demand that Sonderfeld and Kumo be handed over to you. You would be met with blank stares and hostile murmurs, but you would achieve nothing. They would be there. You could beat the valley and still you would not find them—and all the time the people would be laughing at you.”
“I know. It’s happened to me before in the villages. I’ve been looking for a man wanted for a tribal killing. I might as well have saved my boot leather.”
“Exactly. So now …” Père Louis took another long draw at his pipe. “So now we are back to the big moment of the festival, the moment when Sonderfeld is revealed as the Red Spirit and proclaimed to the people by Kumo. It is a wild moment, remember. The people are drunk with the slaughter of the pigs, their skins are smeared with blood, the smell of blood is in their nostrils, their memory is full of the old bloody frenzy of the wars. We are there, too. We watch as spectators from the shadows. But we do nothing, because there is nothing to do—nothing at all until the moment of proclamation.”
“And then ?”
“Then George Oliver—or I, myself—steps forward with this tube and proclaims that Sonderfeld is not the Red Spirit but a liar and an impostor.”
“It’s one thing to proclaim it,” said Curtis dubiously. “The point is, can you prove it to Kumo?”
“That’s the least of our worries,” said Geroge Oliver bluntly. “The Kiap and the priest—two men who have never lied to the tribes! We’ll convince him all right.”
“So!” Père Louis took up his theme. “So, if Kumo is convinced as we hope, he is released from his bondage. No matter that he enters into a new one. He is released from Sonderfeld. What happens then?”
“Then,” said Curtis slowly, “then, I think, somebody’s going to get killed.”
“Exactly,” said Père Louis softly. “But who? Kumo or Kurt Sonderfeld?”
“God knows,” said Curtis lightly. “I don’t see that it matters so very …”
Then he saw George Oliver leaning against his rock in an attitude of dejection and utter weariness, and the truth hit him like a smack in the mouth.
“The poor bastard!” he whispered. “The poor, tired bastard.”
“I know,” said Père Louis softly. “Love is a terrible burden—and the burden of justice is more terrible still.”
Shortly after dark Père Louis’ catechist came up to join them on the ridge. He was sweating with fear and exhaustion and his eyes were rolling in his head. Oliver gave him a cigarette to soothe him, then he squatted in front of them and, in a mixture of pidgin and place-talk, embellished with many gestures, he told them:
Tonight, in the village, they were making the preparatory magic. Already the first pigs had been taken to the burial ground to be clubbed to death in sacrifice of the ancestor spirits. Their blood would be collected in bamboo tubes and smeared on the house poles and on the lintels of the spirit houses. Tonight the people would eat their meat and feed some of it to the living pigs to fatten them for the great sacrifice.
Then they would sit in silence round the cook fires while, inside the spirit huts, the sorcerers played the spirit flutes so that ancestor spirits would hear them and would know that they, too, were invited to the big festival. The women would huddle together and clasp their children close to stifle their crying, and if any of them asked what the flutes were, they would be told that they were the voice of a great bird whose name was Kat and whose wings they heard beating in the wind and in the storm.
When the flutes stopped playing, there would be a mock battle between the clans. They would shout and stamp and charge each other, stopping in the second before impact. They would rehearse old wrongs and cover each other with insults in memory of the time before the white man came, when there was enmity and killing between the clans.
Then they would sit down together and eat the pig meat and the taro and the kau-kau wrapped in banana leaves and cooked in the ashes of the fire pits. They would sing together and tell stories and the young ones would make kunande and carry-leg until, at the rising of the moon, the sorcerers would drive everybody into the huts to wait for the coming of the Red Spirit. The flutes would play all night, and on the morrow there would be the great slaughter of the pigs and the Red Spirit would show himself to the people.
When the catechist had finished, Oliver handed him another cigarette and the four of them sat smoking in silence, listening to the small creaking noises of the night and the shuffling murmurs of the police boys settling themselves to sleep. It was George Oliver who broke the silence.
“When will the great killing be made?”
The catechist swept up his arms in a double quadrant so that they met at the zenith.
“Tomorrow, when the sun is high.”
“Daytime,” Oliver grunted laconically. “That makes it awkward.”
“There is a way.”
Père Louis took the pipe out of his mouth and pointed eastward along the jagged rim of the crater.
“It means that we rise early and make a half-circuit of the ridge. There is a steep fall into the basin, but if we follow the creek that begins there, we can come down through the jungle and the kunai without being seen.”
“How close can we get?”
“A hundred meters perhaps.”
“Good enough. Curtis, warn the boys to be ready to move at first light. Then we’ll al turn in. Tomorrow’s going to be a very busy day.”
Lee Curtis nodded and walked over to the police boys to give them their orders. Père Louis dismissed the catechist with a word and a pat of encouragement and watched him melt quietly back into the shadows. Then he turned to face George Oliver. Oliver held out his hand.
“If you don’t mind, Father, I’ll take possession of the evidence.”
“It’s more than evidence, my friend,” said Père Louis soberly. “It is a man’s life.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I am sure you do. I should like to be equally sure that you understand your responsibility in the matter.”
For a moment it seemed as though Oliver would break into anger, then his mouth relaxed into a rueful grin.
“And what is my responsibility, Father?”
Père Louis shrugged.
“To keep peace among the tribes. To administer justice without fear and with favour to none—not even to yourself.”
“Easy to say. But how can one be sure where justice lies?”
“One can never be sure. When in doubt, one is free to accept the most expedient course.”
“That doesn’t help much, either—afterwards.”
“No. Therefore—” Père Louis seemed to hesitate. He bent down and knocked out the dottle of his pipe on the heel of his boot. Then he straightened up. “Therefore, if you wish, I am prepared to keep this—this thing in my possession to do what we both know must be done, and to accept the full responsibility for what comes out of it.”
“That makes you the scapegoat for me.”
Père Louis smiled a wise, tired old man’s smile.
“I am a priest of God. My life is barren of love and my loins are without issue. Why else but to be a scapegoat for my brethren and my friends? It is a little thing, believe me. I am too old to fret and the mercy of God has long arms. Well, my friend?”
“No!” said George Oliver bluntly. “No! I’m grateful, but I can’t do it.” He held out his hand. “Give it to me, Father”
Without a word the little priest handed him the bamboo tube that held the life of a man. Oliver looked at it a moment, then thrust it into his pocket.
“Thanks, Father.”
The old man’s eyes were soft with compassion.
“You are a hard man, George Oliver, Hardest of all, I think, to yourself. I shall pray for you tonight.”
“Pray for both of us, Father,” said George Oliver simply. “Pray for both of us.”