Hawaii Page 6

  “Why should so many of our men be given to Oro?” another asked.

  Teroro listened to the complaints and then said, “I have been willing to run the risk of getting you here, because it doesn’t matter whether there’s a spy among us or not.” He stared at each of his men and continued: “If one of you is a spy, inform the High Priest, because that will scare him from carrying out what I think is his plan. If no one betrays us, we’re even better off.”

  “What is your plan?” Mato, from the north side of Bora Bora, asked.

  Teroro held a small length of sennit, which he twisted and untwisted, saying slowly, “I think the High Priest intends to offer our king as a supreme sacrifice to Oro. He wants to impress the other priests with his control over Bora Bora. But he’s got to give the signal himself, because if he kills by stealth, where would be his political advantage? So we must watch the High Priest constantly.”

  The young chiefs sat silent, because whatever Teroro divulged as his plan was bound to involve maximum danger. Then a lesser noble pointed out: “It isn’t today we have to worry about.”

  “That’s right,” Teroro agreed. “Today they’re occupied.” And he indicated the ghastly circle of dead men dancing in trees.

  “But what about the general meeting tomorrow?”

  Teroro untwisted the sennit and nodded judiciously. “If I were the High Priest,” he said, “with his plans, I’d strike tomorrow.”

  Mato was in reckless mood, for during an awful moment that morning he had felt sure that the High Priest was going to nominate him as the skull-split guardian of the canoe. He said sternly, “I think that if the priest even begins to point at Tamatoa, we must surround the king and fight our way to the canoe.”

  “I think exactly the same thing,” Teroro said abruptly.

  There was a long silence as the other twenty-eight men contemplated what such a bold step involved, but before any could turn away in cowardice Teroro threw down the sennit and spoke rapidly: “To succeed we must insure three things. First, we must somehow move our canoe to the top of the hill so that we can rush it into the water without cutting down our speed.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Hiro the steersman promised.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Teroro liked his honest answer but nevertheless pushed his face to within a few inches of the steersman’s. “You know that if the canoe is not in position, we will all die?”

  “I do,” the young chief said grimly.

  “Next,” Teroro said, “we must have two very determined men sitting on the rocks at the temple exit.”

  Brash Mato cried, “I’m one, and I want Pa for the other.”

  A wiry shark-faced man with no chin, Pa, the Fortress, stepped forward and announced: “I’m the other.”

  “You may not escape,” Teroro warned them.

  “We’ll escape,” Mato swore. “Men of Havaiki have never …”

  “The third requirement,” Teroro said impatiently, “is that each of the rest of us be prepared to kill instantly anyone who moves toward Tamatoa.”

  “We know the executioners,” Pa growled.

  “And once we make a move, we must sweep Tamatoa up and with an unbroken rush get him to the canoe.” He paused and then added softly, “It sounds dangerous, but once we are seaborne, Wait-for-the-West-Wind will be our safeguard.”

  “They will never catch us,” the steersman promised.

  “And if they did, what could they do?” Mato boasted, and as the men talked it was apparent that all wished they were in the certainty of the canoe and not in the temple grounds of Oro, which were alien and unknown.

  “This will be the signal,” Teroro said. “You will watch me, and the moment I move to defend the king, the steersman must dash for the canoe and you men must see that he gets through the exit.”

  “Who will disarm the executioner?” Mato asked.

  “I will,” Teroro said coldly. Then, to inspire his men, he boasted, “No club will fall tomorrow swifter than my arm.”

  The men appreciated this assurance, but Mato killed their ardor by stating, “There is one grave fault in this plan.”

  “What?” Teroro asked.

  “Yesterday, before we sailed, Marama took me aside and said, ‘My husband is sure that the High Priest plans to kill the king. But I am certain that Teroro himself is the target.’ I think your wife is right. What do we do if she is?”

  Teroro could not reply. He could see only his patient, worried wife moving among the men, enlisting their promises to protect him. He looked at the ground, recovered the sennit he had been twisting, and placed it in his belt. It was shark-faced Pa who spoke. “Marama spoke to me, too,” he said, “and our duty is clear. If they strike at the king, everything goes as planned. But if they strike at Teroro, you, Mato, with your men save the king and I with mine will rescue Teroro.”

  “I am not the important one,” Teroro said honestly.

  “To us you are,” his men replied, and they proceeded with their plans.

  But there was a mind at work that night much keener than either Mato’s or Pa’s, and it belonged to the High Priest. During the most solemn part of the convocation he had been thinking, and when great Oro was returned to the ark, the High Priest called his assistants to him, and they sat cross-legged in a shadowy corner of the great temple, with the bodies of men dancing above them in the night air.

  “Have you noticed anything today?” he began.

  “Only that you are right,” a young priest reported. “Teroro is our mortal enemy.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “As you directed, I studied him constantly. Four separate times I caught him struggling against the will of Oro, terrible be the name.”

  “When?”

  “Principally, when the king’s courtier was slain. He drew back, markedly.”

  “I thought so, too,” the High Priest agreed.

  “And when one of his crew was sacrificed to guard the canoe.”

  “He did?”

  “And it seemed to me that when it came time for Teroro to lead the king away from the temple, while we came in, he acted joyously rather than in sorrow.”

  “We thought so, too,” several priests chorused.

  “But what confirms it is that this afternoon Teroro must have held some kind of meeting with his men.”

  “Is that correct?” the High Priest snapped.

  “I can’t be sure, because as you know, I had to leave him when we entered the temple, but immediately after Oro was returned to the ark, I slipped out to check on our men.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Nothing. They had vanished.”

  “How could they?” the High Priest demanded.

  “I don’t know, but they had vanished.”

  “Was the king with them?”

  “No,” the spy reported. “He sat properly with the other kings.”

  “Can we be sure that Teroro held a meeting? If we were sure …”

  “I searched everywhere,” the young spy insisted, “and in my own heart I am sure.”

  For a long time the High Priest contemplated this unwelcome news, fingering his staff and driving it into the ground. Finally he mused: “If we could be certain that a meeting was held, we could eliminate the entire canoe. We would …” But when he weighed all consequences he apparently decided against this, for he suddenly turned to his burly executioner and said softly, “Tomorrow I don’t want you at any time to stand either near the king or near Teroro. Keep completely away. You, Rere-ao,” and he addressed his spy, “are you as swift of club as you once were?”

  “I am.”

  “You are to place yourself inconspicuously so that at an instant’s signal you can kill Teroro. You are to watch him constantly. If he makes even the slightest move. Anything …”

  “Do I wait for a signal from you?” Rere-ao asked.

  “No, but as you strike I will point at him, and his dead body will
be sacred to Oro.”

  The High Priest moved on to discuss their roles with others, but he soon returned to Rere-ao and asked, “You understand? You don’t wait for a signal. You kill him if he moves.”

  “I understand.”

  The High Priest concluded his meeting with a long prayer to Oro, at the end of which he told his men, “One way or another, tomorrow will see Bora Bora finally delivered to Oro. The old gods are dead. Oro lives.”

  His assistant priests breathed deeply with excitement, for their struggle to implant their new god on the backs of Tane and Ta’aroa had not been easy, and for several months they had longed for some positive event of magnitude to assure them that they had won. Their leader, sensing this desire for the spectacular, cautioned them: “There are many roads to ultimate victory, my brothers. Oro has many paths by which he can travel to triumph. Tomorrow one of them will result in his final capture of Bora Bora, but you must not anticipate which one. That is up to Oro.”

  With this the High Priest folded his hands, took off his skullcap, and inclined his head toward the inner sanctuary of Oro. His fellow priests did likewise, and in the deep silence of the night, dimly lit by distant fires and the glow of shimmering stars, the holy men prayed to their all-powerful god. It was a solemn moment at the end of an exciting day, a moment sweet and meaningful, with the essence of immortality hovering above the assembly, the sacrifices in place, great Oro brooding over his faithful, and all the world subdued in silent reverence to him. At such a moment, with the greatness of Oro pulsing in the night and throbbing in the veins more powerfully than the beat of a drum, it was incomprehensible to the priests that anyone should cling to old gods when the new deity was so powerful, so rational and so benevolent.

  Next morning Hiro the steersman was up early, and with a sharp rock hidden in tapa he slashed several of the sennit strands that bound Wait-for-the-West-Wind together, shuddering with regret as he did so, then burying the rock and hurrying to the priest in charge of the canoe’s welfare to announce: “We must have scraped coral.”

  The priest hurried to the canoe, which rested under the surveillance of the dead crewman lashed to the stern, and studied the broken sennit. “It can be mended with fresh cord,” he said, hoping to get the accident repaired before the High Priest blamed him for it.

  “Yes,” the crewman agreed, “and we ought to do it while we are all under the protection of Oro.”

  Such sentiment charmed the priest, and he was therefore receptive when Hiro suggested, “Wouldn’t it be easier to drag the canoe out here, where the sun can tighten the new sennit?” And they edged the canoe into the exact position Teroro required.

  “Will the mending take long?” the priest asked.

  “No,” Hiro assured him. “I mustn’t miss the convocation of Oro.”

  “You must not,” the priest agreed, recalling the High Priest’s assurances of the night before that on this day Oro would consolidate his victory over Bora Bora, and it seemed a good omen that Hiro, one of Teroro’s prominent supporters, had thus voluntarily signified his affection for Oro.

  The convocation began with a startling scene, so that all who later reviewed the day agreed that it had been doomed from the beginning, although at the time that was not apparent, since the priests had quickly converted an error into a blessing. The assembly had seated itself on rocks stretching out from the main altar, and the first two pigs were being disemboweled when a boy of seven came running into the temple, crying for his father who sat near the altar.

  “Father!” the lost little child shouted.

  The man, a lesser chief of Havaiki, looked in horror at the approach of his son, for the boy had committed so vast a sin that no excuse could pardon it. No woman, or child, or animal had ever strayed into the temple, and the father’s arms trembled as he gathered the handsome little fellow to his heart.

  “I was looking for you, Father,” the lost child whimpered.

  In austere silence the priests at the altar, their sacrifices to Oro interrupted, stared at the offending child. His father, aware of the tabu his family had broken, rose haltingly with the boy still in his arms. Suddenly, in an act of total dedication, he thrust his son toward the altar, the child’s hair falling over his father’s strong left arm.

  With anguished but unfaltering conviction the man spoke: “Take this child and sacrifice him to Oro! For the consecration of the temple has been broken by him, the thread of our union with Oro has been entangled. He is my son. I begat him. But I do not weep in losing him, for he has outraged Oro.”

  At first the priests ignored the man and left him standing with the boy in his arms while with haughty indifference they finished slaughtering the pigs. Then, with fresh blood for Oro on their hands, two priests picked up a pair of stout bamboo rods. Holding one pair of ends rigidly together, they opened the others and formed a giant pincers which they deftly dropped over the child’s head, one bamboo catching him at the nape of the neck, the other across the throat. With remorseless force they closed the pincers and held the little boy aloft until he strangled. Then, with one swift slash, the High Priest laid open the child’s stomach and ripped out the entrails, placing the body reverently on the highest altar, between the pigs.

  “This father does well,” the priest droned. “All do well who honor Oro. Great Oro, bringer of peace.”

  The incident unnerved Teroro, because he recognized it as an omen for this faithful day, but how to interpret it was beyond him, and for a moment in his perplexity he forgot his brother whom he had come to protect. “What could such an omen signify?” he asked stubbornly, but no answer was forthcoming, so he breathed deeply and attended to his business; yet when he looked across the temple square toward the steersman Hiro, to check the man’s position, he came upon a second omen which had to be interpreted as ominous: the present steersman sat directly under the swaying body of the earlier steersman who had been killed at the whim of the High Priest, and the corpse’s distended belly, already disintegrating in the tropical heat, hung heavy over Teroro’s accomplice.

  In confusion Teroro dismissed all omens and watched first the High Priest and then the king, for he was totally resolved to defy Oro, even if it had to be done in the very seat of the red god’s omnipotence. But he was not prepared for the High Priest’s strategy, for while Teroro was anticipating an entirely different tactic, the priest suddenly whirled and pointed his staff at one of the least offensive members of Teroro’s crew, and one of the finest warriors.

  “He ate of the sacred pig of Oro!” the accuser shouted, but the young chief did not know why he died, for the burly executioner had anticipated the charge and had already crushed the man’s skull.

  Priests from other islands, gratified that Oro was being protected from apostasy, chanted: “All-powerful is Oro, the peace-giver, Oro of the united islands.”

  As they continued their droning, Teroro sat stunned. The young chief had been his special friend, an unassuming warrior who could not possibly have eaten sacred pig. Why had he been sacrificed? Teroro could not focus upon the problem. He had a fine plan to protect King Tamatoa, and he knew that if he himself were menaced, Mato would save him. But he had not foreseen the High Priest’s clever assault upon lesser members of the Bora Bora community.

  In dismay Teroro looked at the steersman, who stared with equal dismay at him. No answer was available there, so Teroro tried to catch the eyes of Mato and Pa, at the exit, but they were obsessed by the altar, where the body of their companion now lay. The other members of Teroro’s plot were equally stunned, and in mounting confusion their leader stared at the polished rocks which formed the platform on which they had convened.

  Of the Bora Bora contingent, only one man saw clearly in these awful moments. Tamatoa, like many successful kings, was gifted not with marked intellectual ability but with a powerful, stolid insight; and he realized that the High Priest had determined not to assassinate Tamatoa and his brother, but to drive them from the islands by irresistible pres
sure, constantly applied. “He will avoid a direct confrontation,” the king reasoned. “There will be no battle. Patiently and with cunning he will alienate and terrify my people, and we will have to go.”

  Tamatoa was confirmed in his analysis when the High Priest whirled his staff of death at another member of Teroro’s crew, and the terrible club of death descended once more. Sick at heart, King Tamatoa looked at his younger brother and saw Teroro befuddled and distraught. The king thought: “He probably had some grandiose plan to save my life today, and probably the High Priest had spies who told him the whole plot. Poor young man.”

  In his compassion, the king kept his eyes fixed on his brother until, bedazed, the latter looked up. Almost imperceptibly the older man shook his head, cautioning his brother not to act, not in any way. Teroro, catching the message, sat numb in fury.

  It was at this moment, in the sacred temple of Oro, with the bodies of his finest men dangling before him and strewn upon the altar, that King Tamatoa whispered in his heart: “Oro, you have triumphed. You are the ultimate god, and I am powerless to oppose you.” When he had said these words of contrition, a great peace came over him and he saw, as if in a revealing vision, how foolish he had been to combat the will of the inevitable. New gods were being born, and new gods conquer; but what Tamatoa did not realize was that the contentment of soul which his confession induced was merely the prerequisite for a decision toward which he had been fumbling for some months, but from which he had always hitherto retreated. Now that he had accepted the obvious—that Oro had conquered—the next obvious conclusion was easy to reach, and in the stillness of the morning Tamatoa said the fatal words for the first time, and in uttering them an enormous burden was lifted from his heart: “We will depart from Bora Bora and leave it to you, Oro. We will go upon the sea and find other islands where we can worship our own gods.”

  During the rest of the convocation, King Tamatoa did not confide his decision to anyone, not even to Teroro. In fact, he avoided his hotheaded younger brother, but he did summon Mato, to whom he spoke harshly: “I hold you responsible for my brother’s life, Mato. If he has plots afoot, I am sure you are part of them. He must not die, even if you have to tie him to the canoe. He must not die. I need him now more than ever.”