DEBACLE
When the fighting men of Karolin began their assault on the woods, they
broke into two companies, one under Laminai and Ma, the other under
Utah, a son of Makara, once chief of the southern tribe. When the
southern tribe had been destroyed Utali, a boy of some fourteen years,
had been spared—he, and a few old men, and several women past
childbearing. He had grown up with the northern tribe, become one of
them, fought in their wars and fished in their waters, and forgotten and
forgiven. He knew that Makara had been slain by the followers of Uta
Matu, and slain on Palm Tree beach. That did not matter a bit to him; he
bore no grudge. He had always been well treated by Uta, and his father,
as he remembered him, had been a brute—“a mouth to shout, a foot to kick
and a hand to strike.”
He had bravely set off with the others, thinking of nothing but the work
in hand; as the finest and most powerful man after Laminai the command
of the second division had been given to him, and, leading it, he went
off through the trees by the bank of the left arm of the lagoon, whilst
Laminai’s men struck due west.
Now, Utali carried no love for his father, but he carried still the fear
of him, a much more enduring possession if a parent gives it to his
offspring, and it was not till the woods of Palm Tree surrounded him
that Utali remembered that Makara was a ghost and that he had been made
a ghost here, on this island, by the chief whom he, Utali, was now
serving.
A nice complication!
“Suppose,” thought Utali, “my father were to appear at the head of his
men armed as of old and thirsting to kill!”
His mind drew the picture and cast it aside as he drove forward,
trampling the ground lianas and shouldering the branches aside.
Suddenly he bolted. The boom of the great wave that Katafa had heard
came through the trees, followed by the garrulous chanting of the gulls.
He stood listening. He knew every sound of the sea and the meaning of
each. A storm of some sort was approaching and his first thought was of
the canoes.
Then he heard Laminai giving tongue, and the sound of the chase as it
swept to the hill-top, and, turning, leading his men, he began to climb.
Laminai had evidently taken no heed of the warning from the sea.
It had been arranged that the two divisions should join up should the
illusive enemy give battle to either; each division considered itself
all-powerful and ready to meet any contingency, and it was right, for
the spears were poisoned with angara, a species of oap, deadly and
instantaneous in its effects. So Utali did not hasten his steps unduly,
keeping his men fresh for whatever might be to do, and going cautiously
with an eye and ear for surprises.
The shouting suddenly ceased as if cut off by a closed door, and Utali,
holding up his hand in the green twilight, halted.
The cries he had heard had been the sounds of pursuit, not of battle.
Why had they ceased so suddenly?
He listened and waited—not a sound. He stood still listening, his mind
filled with wild conjectures, whilst up above, Laminai, spear in hand,
stood fronting Dick, touching his breast with the spear-point, flinging
back his arm for the thrust.
A yell split the night above as Laminai’s division caught sight of
Katafa, and Utali, taking it for the shout of battle, charged upwards
through the trees, followed by his men, to the assistance of Laminai.
They had not gone twenty paces when they found that they were being
charged. Down through the trees, towards them, a host was pouring—there
was only one instantaneous solution: Laminai’s division had been utterly
and silently destroyed and the destroyers were coming, ghosts and evil
spirits, no doubt, led by the ghostly Makara.
“Makara’s men are coming! Makara’s men are coming! Death! Death!”
shrieked Utali, not daring to turn and run as he might have done from a
living enemy. Then thrusting with his spear at a dark form that sprang
at him out of the gloom ahead, he missed and fell, pierced to death,
whilst the form, yelling with fright and rage, pressed over him.
The whole of Laminai’s followers, stampeded by the vision of the ghost
of the girl who had been eaten by sharks, charging down through the
trees of a place now filled with ghosts, only wanted the cry that
Makara’s men were coming to finish them—Makara, that terrible chief who
had been slain here by their fathers and brothers.
The yell of the new-risen wind from the south, the dashing about of the
trees, and the great alternating splashes of moonlight and shadow raised
their rage and terror to dementia, and as they saw Utali and his
warriors, and charged them and were charged in turn, imaginary ghosts
attacking imaginary ghosts, nothing on earth could be compared to the
fight, and nothing in dreamland.
Twenty men alone escaped from that psychological battle, twenty of
Laminai’s men, spearless, daggerless, torn by brambles, gasping and
running for the canoes, whilst the trees roared above them and tossed
them out to the shouting beach where three of the canoes, dragged from
their anchorage, lay broken and ruined.
One canoe alone remained straining at its rope, the fellow in her waving
his arms and shouting, screaming as he saw the survivors taking the
water. “Karaka! Karaka! Karaka!” “Sharks! Sharks! Sharks!”
The lagoon was full of sharks driven in by the storm, but the survivors
neither heard the cries of the anchor watch nor would they have heeded.
Worse things were behind them than sharks. Makara and his ghostly
followers were on their heels. They struck out across the tossing water,
the moonlight steady on the bobbing heads that vanished one by one till
ten only were left, saved by the number and rapacity of the sharks.
Thick as women at a bargain counter, the brutes foiled themselves by
getting in each other’s way, and the ten survivors, scrambling on board,
some over the outrigger gratings, some over the side, cut free from the
anchor rope, seized the paddles, and headed for the break.
No sooner had they cut the rope and struck the water with the paddles
than they saw their blunder.
The tide had caught them. The full ebb tide, rushing from the two arms
of the lagoon, had them in its grip, bearing them to the break, beyond
which the out-boiling water had set up a terrible cross-sea.
The heavy canoe was undermanned. They could do nothing but steer and
shout as they went, swept as a toboggan on the sheeting foam, stern
lifting, bow lifting, shooting through the break into the lumping sea
that turned them turtle.
A wave took the canoe and smashed it on the coral, destroying the
outrigger, and a great king wave festooned with foam took the remains
and hove it onto the reef high and dry, stern stuck in a cleft and bow
in air, a last touch of the fantasy of the sea, that sister of Fate.
So, at a stroke, went the navy of Karolin and all her fighting men,
destroyed by their own imaginations and the child of the woman they had
slain long years ago.