EXCERPT 10: (from CHAPTER 16)
The
men on the brigantine had estimated the cove to have been uninhabited so the new
attack came as a complete surprise. The first spear: right through the back of
the sentry’s neck, coming out through his mouth. The charge. The harquebusiers
did not even have time to take aim. Swords had to be unsheathed:
“Rip their bellies, Lads!”
Blood - lots of blood. The Islanders pulled back, but from their distance
they hurled spears. One smashed a Spanish head, another pierced a thigh. The
Islanders charged again. Now the harquebuses were ready - exploded. The
attackers retreated - some badly wounded. More spears were hurled. One, well-aimed,
hurtled through a shield - terrible scream. Inspired, they charged. The
defenders’ swords slashed, guns popped. More blood. A febrile Gallego screamed
the order to retreat. They staggered, heavy with blood and sand, lurching into
sea, through darting white fish, swimming groggily to the brigantine, struggling
to pull themselves up, out. The Islanders dragged out their own canoes, paddling
to the Europeans, surrounding them. A prickly-pear fleet. Spears shivered while
the starving and exhausted Spaniards contemplated their end, but nothing was
thrown. Enough, they had all sacrificed enough. The Spaniards left - never to
return. And the Islanders could roar victory...
EXCERPT 11: (from CHAPTER 16)
Yet,
despite the weakness of Fr. Gálvez, the days of genocide had been more
therapeutically good for the Spaniards than morally damaging. Thus the men who
returned – the explorers from the sea, the prospectors from the mount –
though exhausted and infirm, were able to sustain their battle-weary souls with
images of their dead enemies. There was no need for these men to devour the
flesh of their victims, sustenance was drawn from the vengeful act itself, they
did not even have to be a killer themselves, the mere idea that their own kind
had murdered a dozen savages for each one of their dead friends was
enough. The fact that the whole island was trembling in fear of them added to
the compensation. For the first time in months Alvaro de Mendaña slept soundly.
His dream of the headless chickens had ceased.
As for the Sanban boy, Mahnu, although he felt no particular sympathy for
the dead Melanesians, he was starting to question the nature of the Europeans’
power. He began to quiz Mendaña:
“If this gulf you have crossed is really so big, why did you cross it?”
“We are looking for something we no longer believe in at home... that
we believe can no longer be found at home... the further we voyage, the more
likelihood there is that we will find this... elusive
thing.”
“And did you find it in Sanba?”
“No.”
“Did you find it here... in Guadalcanal?”
“No.”
“So, why are you leaving again?”
“Because we are tired... and the people here do not want us to stay.”
“So you will not come back?”
“Oh no, we will be back.”
“Why?”
Which drew a pathetic smile from the general, who was happy to splash in
the shallows of his own tyronism:
“To finish what was started... To make the King of Spain, and our
beloved Pope, the Kings of the World...”
This made the boy think carefully. But before he deserted the ship, he
sought one more opinion to his question, and approached Sarmiento:
“Why did you come, Captain?”
The alchemist, who was drawing a sidereal chart, was deep in thought. The
question only managed to poke at his depth:
“What?”
“Why did you come?”
Stirred, Sarmiento turned to him. For a moment he was going to say
something about gold and the Philosopher’s Stone, but his tongue seemed to
suddenly thicken in his throat. He thought again, and then the more terrible
reason gurgled out:
“Rage,” he croaked: “Rage, and ambitious envy.”
Which Mahnu appreciated more by the images created by the tone than in
the meaning of the words themselves. It made him shiver: - As
if he had spat a malaria at me – he thought, and that same night he
stopped considering and stripped himself of his European rags, returning himself
to his naked culture and clambered away, dropping into the warm sea where all
the infirmities of Spain were washed away, oozing from his pores into the liquid-womb,
and, although he could not appreciate it intellectually, he knew that it
was his nakedness that sustained him. If he had had boots he would have drowned...
EXCERPT 12: (from CHAPTER 17)
Mendaña
sucked his finger before thrusting it into the wind. That had changed, east-north-easterly.
But hardly had he registered this before it gusted and blew his cap off. Gallego
was roaring into the gale:
“We’ve a head-wind, lads... We’ll have to tack!”
Ten days later they were still tacking. Continuous, desperate, turns, a
monotonous drudge, and futile, all the time losing ground, all the ground they
had gained the days before.
Then, thunder and lightning:- God’s
wrath - they thought - The end of the
world.
They had to draw in the sail. So futile. Half a metre of water slapped in
the hull. Always half a metre, no matter how hard they worked to empty it.
They undid the spritsail and attached it to the foremast, and for a while
they ran with that until a south wind blew so hard it ripped it away.
“More blankets!”
Their only hope. A north-easterly course, drawn by billowing blankets.
More wind. More rain. They whirled around, were pushed around, reaching an
altitude of twenty-nine degrees. Then a fierce north-easterly shoved them south-west:
“Back from where we’ve come!”
Seven days, to twenty-six degrees. Eventually a westerly, pushing north-northeast.
They erected a pole as a mainmast, a fluttering blanket-mainsail, and rose to
twenty-seven degrees, a new wind blowing up:
“From Hell!”
Pushing them back, the whole thing a waste. Starving men, thirst and
exhaustion. A quart of stinking water and eight ounces of putrid ship’s
biscuit. Mendaña looked seaward:- If only
they had listened to me. His consolation - that he was right. They had not
listened. They had forced him to change course, made him cross the equator. The
fatal mistake was theirs.
The men groaned, feeble, half-dead, many had gone blind. No-one had the
slightest idea where they really were. Only latitude could be measured. Despair
inspired risk. The emaciated men gambled their rations and the decks echoed with
the moans and pleas of starving losers.
They sailed up to thirty degrees, into a north-easterly that brought
intense cold and enveloping fog, forcing them to drop down again. Some soldiers
shivered and moaned and cried out to make an emergency call at the Philippines,
as if they were anywhere near the Philippines! But any idea in times of
tremendous crisis brings infectious hope - anything had to be better than the
course they were on. Mutiny was in the air. Thick and stifling. Men coughing
complaint to clear phlegm clogged lungs. Mendaña, now skeletal hard, received
admonishment with a calcium tenacity:
“As if this route were my fault?!” he complained back before ordering
the chaos with the comfort of calculation. He had proclaimed his own computation
that the half a quart of water that remained could be rationed out for twenty
days, and that this would be long enough to reach land.
The mutinous minds were dulled, too heavy with misery to verify the
general’s arithmetic, further muted by the contenting thought that they had at
least tried to change their destiny.
And then real hope...
The wind changed and they drifted against a pole made of pine. There were
indications of land - strong currents, seagulls, even ducks. The wind came from
the north. It started to rain and they gathered enough water for three days. The
weather cleared, but with their shabby sails they moved at a snail’s pace. The
currents were strong, but not strong enough. Each day seemed like a year. The
storms stopped, the wind picked up again. Waves. All night they sailed and at
dawn they were between two islands, and on the horizon they could see an
enormous streak of grey mass. The continent. The Californian coast...
Sarmiento
smiled as he stared into the pages of Canches’ book - scabrous pages,
corrugated by ocean atmosphere – he flattened surfaces then took a deep breath
and lifted himself back. The fire in his soul cooled and he felt lighter, more
smoke than flame: - “God is cruel” –
he remembered Catoira had said: - No –
he thought – not cruel, because he does
not exist. He has to evolve – The resurrection was an end-of-universe
future when all men would be reborn in God: - But
a God that we will make – his drugged mind affirmed: - That I will make – and he clutched the flask around his neck, to
tilt it and let drip three drops into another mixture of oil, sperm and blood in
a golden goblet, combining it with a stirring dagger: - The profit of my intoxication – and then: - I have a thousand arms, and my face is more terrible than the storm
around it – Thoughts that burnt like a phoenix.
As he drank the potion it bubbled in his mouth and oozed from his lips
like blood from a punctured lung.
To his imagined eternal soul the material universe was a dream state: - Nothing
ends – he told himself, and then: - The
next time I return I will come alone – even: - Perhaps
I should kill them all and turn the ship back... return to the Terra Australis
on my own...-
The magic in front of him roared and in his madness he actually whispered
back to it:
“Demons, soon you will all bow to my will.... You have the power, but
you need a guide...”
Canches book was full of seals, symbols that were demon-trapping prisons.
Prisons that could only be opened by a chant, a chanted key. Sarmiento began to
flick through pages, opening, mumbling, reaching for the half-formed faces of
more spirit-slaves.
The form of a woman, her face veiled in blue, came to him and wrapped her
arms and legs around him, tightening the fingers of one hand around his throat,
while the other dropped to his groin, releasing a tempest. Scream of ecstasy: - I
am torn asunder – he thought: - Nerve
from nerve, vein from vein, atom from atom, and at the same time we are crushed
together – A line of thought which was quelled before it had time to
gather, first by the cold heat of the clamping caress, and then by the sweet
sounds of his captor’s delicious voice – husky: - “Drown
your rapturous voice in mine... let your sublime eternal matter drown in my
eternal-soul... drink from me, and love me... your destiny, eternity...”
But then he was looking down in horror at his own umbilicus-sprouting,
wavering arms. Thin, pale and naked arms, stretching calamar-tentacle fingers,
reaching for Canches’ book. And when it was caught the pulchritudinous digits
scooped under the cover, pinching it with index and thumb, the delicate wrist, a
pink, silent hinge, lifting leather, to drop it, a thud, dull... and the magic
was shut...