THE DEATH OF A SEA KING
On the morning when Laminai and all his host set out, never to return,
Uta Matu, sitting where his women had placed him on the sand of the
beach, watched the canoes depart.
It was a glorious morning and the waters of the lagoon, stirring to the
first of the ebb, were sweeping towards the break beyond which lay the
outer sea like a vision of shattered sapphires.
He saw the paddles flashing, and the sheening foam of the outriggers; he
watched the mat sails take the wind. Gulls followed the canoes,
escorting them, wheeling, sweeping and clanging on the wind. Then the
gulls passed away and the sails vanished beyond the reef, and Uta found
himself alone.
Alone with the women and the children and the crabs of the beach, he who
had always led the fight and directed the rowers and dispensed the laws
of Karolin for sixty long years! Alone, and useless as the smallest
child! Uta had been a hard and stern ruler, merciless to enemies, yet
just according to his lights. He had known three gods—himself, Nanawa,
the shark-toothed one, and Nan of the cocoanuts.
He had only worshipped the first.
Just as a clever man believes in ghosts without letting the belief
interfere in the least with his renting a house supposed to be haunted,
Uta believed in his co-gods without letting his belief worry him much.
Even if the verdict of Le Juan had been against the expedition, it is
highly probable that he would have sent it off all the same; his
fighting instincts had been roused and the death of his grandson, Sru,
had vexed his soul.
Having sat for a while contemplating the ripples breaking on the sand
and the gulls flighting above the water, the king of Karolin called to
his women to carry him back to his house.
That night the great hot wind from the south blew, and whilst Laminai
and his men were slaughtering each other and the waves were roaring on
the reef of Karolin, Le Juan, full of kava and the fear that Nanawa had
taken it into his head to play them some dirty trick, instead of running
straight, was clinging to a tree before the house of the king, shouting
that Karolin was triumphant and her enemies slain, that Nanawa was
riding the great south wind, hastening to fight with the men of Karolin.
Then came the peaceful morning, and after that came the next day, and
the next, and a week passed, and a fortnight, and still the men of
Karolin did not return, and still another fortnight.
Uta would cause himself to be carried on his litter down to the canoe
houses and there, resting and reviewing things, he would gaze into the
great half-lit interiors of the houses where the long canoes had once
rested. He could see the ridge poles and the thatch of the roofs, the
rollers and the tackle that had once held the canoes. The great hot
wind, broken by a cocoanut grove, had left the houses almost undamaged,
but the canoes—where were they? “Of what use are the houses without the
canoes?” Uta would say to himself. “Or of what use is life without the
men who made the life of Karolin—and my son, Laminai, and my grandsons,
where are they?”
He ordered three women to take a fishing canoe and start for the north,
find Palm Tree, and see what they could see, but never to come back
unless they brought news of the missing ones; and the three women he
chose were the wives of Talia, Manua and Leopa, the three men who had
been with Sru and who had brought the news of his death to Karolin.
The three wretched women started with food enough for four days and they
never came back. Weeks vanished, the days flighting from east to west
like gorgeous birds, born in purple dawns and vanishing in amber
sunsets, but no word came—nothing but the voice of the bearded sea
mumbling on the reef, and the wind in the coco-palms, and the challenge
of the gulls.
Uta lost touch with life. For days he would neither speak nor eat. Then,
one morning, he called for Le Juan, and she came, her knees knocking
together.
“Well,” said Uta in a voice suddenly grown strong again, “what have you
done with my men? What have you done with Laminai, my son, with his son
and the men who went with him? Speak!”
The wretched creature stood without a word. She had been honest; born of
a priestess to Nanawa, and brought up in the faith, she had always
served faithfully her belief and her god.
She knew his trickery, his capriciousness; how sometimes he would answer
a wish favourably and sometimes he would do exactly the reverse of what
was desired. He had let her down now once and for all. She could tell
that by the light in Uta’s eye, which meant death to her.
But though honest, her heart was wicked, and her wicked heart came now
to her assistance and she found her voice.
“It is not my fault, O Uta,” said Le Juan, “nor the fault of him who
speaks through me. Last night in my dreams he revealed his form, and his
voice was like the voice of the reef when the great waves come in. The
men of Karolin are held by Nanawa, the shark-toothed one, nor will he
let them go till a woman of Karolin is given to him, O Kai O fai kanaka
[to be staked out on the reef for the sharks to eat].”
“And the name of the woman?” asked Uta.
“It has not been told to me yet,” replied the wretched creature,
fighting for time in the presence of imminent death.
But Uta had suddenly failed and lost interest. The spurt of energy had
passed and the light of rage had faded from his eyes. Perhaps in his
inmost heart he knew that nothing availed, that his men had gone where
the dead men go, and that all the women of Karolin staked out on the
reef for the servants of the shark-toothed one to devour would be a
sacrifice offered in vain.
He moved his hand as if dismissing Le Juan. “To-morrow,” said Uta. Then,
turning on his side, he seemed to forget things, and Le Juan took her
departure, saved for the moment.
But the king’s women had heard, and in an hour there was not a woman of
Karolin who did not know that their men were held by Nanawa and that
nothing would free them but the great sacrifice which might fall to the
lot of any one of them.
Never for a moment did it occur to any of these unfortunates that, since
Nanawa wanted a woman and since Le Juan was a woman, the simplest way
out would be to stake Le Juan on the reef.
Not a bit. She was sacred, being a priestess. On Karolin there was not
enough morality to divide in two pieces, but there was enough religion
of a sort to furnish a world.
By sunset, from Le Juan sweating in her hut, word went forth that the
victim had been revealed to her. Nalia, the wife of Leopa, and failing
Nalia, her daughter Ooma, a half-witted girl of fourteen.
Never was fox cuter than Le Juan. Nalia was one of the women sent in the
canoe to scout for the lost expedition; she had not come back, but she
might still come back, so nothing would be done for a while, and in the
meantime Uta might die and, Uta once dead, she would have no fear of
anything. Having sent this pronouncement abroad, Le Juan set to work
whole-heartedly to light a fire and wish Uta dead, and dead quickly.
She might have saved her fire. Uta was dying. The king of Karolin’s time
had come, and by midnight the fact was known.
It was the night before the new moon, a hot breathless night, and round
the king’s house the air was filled with the piping and whistling of
little shells, tiny varieties of the conch, blown to keep away evil
spirits. The surf on the reef sounded low and its respirations were
long-spaced, like the breathing of the dying man.
Not a soul was in the house with him, though the whole population of
Karolin, every woman and every child, was seated outside in rows and
rings beneath the stars.
The chief wife sat by the right doorpost listening, waiting to signal
the fact of death, and though not a breath of wind stirred, a vague
whispering came and went like the sound the sand makes when the wind
blows over it. It was the whispering of the women.
All Uta’s life was running about that night outside his house from lip
to lip, from memory to memory. The battles he had fought, the children
he had begotten, the men he had executed with his own hand or caused to
be killed. The fight with the Spanish ship people and the people of the
Paumotus. Katafa’s name was mentioned—the child whom he had saved from
Laminai and who had been drowned and devoured by the sharks. And as they
whispered and talked, the lagoon water whispering on the beach seemed
telling also of the deeds of the departing one, and in the far rumble of
the reef the voice of the outer sea seemed joining in.
If Uta had never loved a human being, he had loved the sea, as the gulls
love it, and the fish. It was part of him.
Then suddenly the whispering ceased. The chief wife had risen and was
standing erect and motionless, like a brown statue, by the door.
Deceived by a cessation of the breathing in the house, she gave the
signal that her lord and master was dead, but scarcely had she raised
her arm to lower it again when a voice from the house made her jump as
though she had received a slap behind.
The king of Karolin was not the man to depart from this world like a
sickly child. He who had entered it shouting eighty-one years ago was
not the man to leave it without saying good-bye.
He was calling for his women, calling them to carry him down to the
water’s edge. “It is hot here,” cried Uta. “I wish to be cool. I want
the wind.”
There was no wind, but they carried him, four women, one at each
shoulder and one at each thigh, and lo! as they reached the lagoon edge
and placed him on the sand facing the water and propped in their arms,
the air stirred with a breath that shivered the star reflections on the
lagoon.
The wind of dawn had begun to blow, and in the east beyond the break the
dawn itself showed a dubious light that brightened and burned as though
day were hurrying to greet Uta and crown him for the last time with the
only crown he had ever worn. With the strengthening light the tide could
be seen sweeping into the lagoon. It had turned half an hour ago and was
coming strong, sweeping past the coral piers from the dim violet sea
above which the high flying gulls showed bright with the day.
Uta watched. He was not the man to go out with the tide. The full flood
was the time for him when, bravely swimming, his soul might go fearless
to the God who made the sharks and the gulls and the kings and peoples
of the sea.
He watched the light break on the water, and the brow of the sun rise
from the ocean. Then, as the morning lit the lagoon in the whole of its
forty-mile stretch, Uta, straightening in the arms of the women, gave a
shout.
“They come!”
Past the piers of the break they were coming, the whole fleet of
Karolin, sailing against the wind and with all the paddles flashing,
gulls wheeling and crying above them, and the flood tide boiling in
their wake.
Rising like a young man and swift as a boy, he ran where, curving
inwards, they made to beach on the cream-white sand. Laminai, shouting
his name, sprang on the outrigger gratings to meet him—and as he sprang
on board and they grasped each other, the great canoe, turning, shot up
into the eyes of the sun.
But the women saw nothing of this—nothing but the monstrous dead body of
Uta that had fallen together, supported in the arms of his wives.