A Place Called Home (Cannibal Country Trilogy, Book 2) Read online

  “I will show you the way, sir. You will go first.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Lapule. You are very good.”

  Lapule grinned, showing a fine collection of reddened, betel-chewer’s teeth.

  “The Inspector, sir, has told me of the ‘white man’s burden’; it seems to me to be a very good thing, sir.”

  Ned laughed, slung his rifle over his shoulder, put the shotgun in the crook of his arm. The twelve-bore was loaded ball, a sphere of lead the better part of an inch in diameter; any man hit by that at a range of twenty yards or less was dead.

  “Where are the seven leaders?”

  “Two in the same village as the puri-puri man, sir. The rest are one each in the other five villages they have taken.”

  Ned thought a moment, decided he was not chasing the men through the bush where they would have every chance to ambush him.

  “I will take the magician, with your aid, Sergeant Lapule. Three men to each of the other two. Four men to stand back at the edge of the village, rifles ready. Two constables to stay here with your men. Have you a lock-up here?”

  “No, sir. We have got chains and padlocks, sir. They go on their ankles and wrists, sir, so that they cannot run away.”

  “Can they walk even?”

  “Oh yes, sir. We hit them with sticks if they stop and they can walk for miles, sir.”

  Ned shrugged; it was their land and one day, he was sure, it would be their country. It was not for him to argue.

  “Bring three sets of chains and padlocks and keys with us.”

  Ned knew that if he did not give the order in detail he would give the opportunity for innocent disobedience. The constables might be wholly loyal, but why take chances?

  “Show me the way, Sergeant Lapule.”

  Down the hill from Toma, following a narrow track through the rain trees, half dark even in the afternoon sun, and out into a narrow river valley, the water low at this season, the grass no more than waist high. There were banks of shingle exposed, many of the pebbles and small rocks showing veins of quartz. Ned wondered if they were rich, whether they contained gold, or copper perhaps; he did not know and would not be coming out fossicking for riches himself. He would mention the possibility in Rabaul and leave them to it.

  Two miles along the river and they came to lower land and gardens, the valley suddenly broadening, two or three miles wide, flat and rich in the soil.

  “Over there, sir, they live up on that bit of higher land, where it don’t ever flood, sir. We can go through the banana gardens, sir, out of sight.”

  A village of twenty or so huts appeared as they stepped out of the cover of the great banana leaves.

  Lapule ordered his three parties into action – four men bringing their rifles up to the ready position and the two groups of three breaking into the oblong huts he pointed to. Ned ran into the small, brightly painted round hut of the puri-puri man; he was taking his afternoon sleep, next to two of his women, one of them a very young girl. A quick boot and he was awake; Ned rapped the shotgun barrel across his ear as he stumbled up, dazed him, grabbing his arm and throwing him out onto the ground outside, next to a large cooking pit. Ned had seen and recognised the bones blackened in the ashes, was in no mood to be gentle.

  “Chains, Lapule!”

  The ankles were linked together with two feet of loose chain; his hands were tied behind his back with a loop down to the ankles. The two other men pulled out of the huts were joined up to him.

  “Get some cloth – a lap-lap will do.”

  Ned sorted through the cooking fire, pulled out a pair of thigh bones, neither more than six or seven inches long, the blackened remains of a small child.

  “These men will be taken before a judge in Rabaul. He will be shown these bones, and he will order them hanged by the neck from a high tree. You will be lucky if he does not then order me to come back and hang every one of you! You!”

  Ned pointed to the oldest of the village men, all of whom were watching, mouths open in horror, waiting for a bush demon to appear to strike Ned down for laying hands on their magic man.

  The man stepped forward, unwilling but knowing exactly what a rifle could do.

  “Bring me fire, now!”

  The man ran behind his hut to the banked over cooking fire; he grabbed a dry coconut frond and twisted it together then pushed it into the coals. It flamed almost immediately and he trotted carefully back to Ned.

  “Give it to me!”

  Ned turned to the magic hut; he shouted the women to get out and thrust the flaming brand into the roofing. Dry Season and it took instant fire.

  The watching men screamed in panic, waited for Hell, literally, to arise and descend upon Ned, and probably every other person in sight. Nothing happened, except that the walls of the hut took fire and fell in, consuming everything inside.

  “I hear of this again and I will come back with one hundred rifles, and I will kill every last man here. Do you understand?”

  There was a shout, unwilling and strangled but unmistakably of agreement.

  “Five men!” Ned pointed to the five who seemed to be oldest. “You will go, each to one village, and you will tell the big man to come to me at Toma tomorrow morning. If they will not come, then you will order the men of their village to tie them and carry them to me. If they do not, I will come with policemen and rifles – and I shall be very angry. I shall go soon to the Fathers at Vunapope and will tell them what has happened, and they will send a letter to Master Pope himself; then you will be in trouble!”

  They had all been converted, more or less, and their mission Catholicism sat uneasily on top of their knowledge of the existence of bush-demons and magic. The combination made most very willing to accept the existence of the Devil but much less certain about God. Ned’s threat was appallingly real; the Pope in person could certainly call the torments of Hell upon them.

  Ned grabbed two men and ordered them to carry the wrapped bundle of bones and led the little procession back up the valley to Toma. He heard the crack of a flexible length of cane and muted howls quite frequently, but he kept to full march pace.

  The other five came into Toma in the morning, three walking, two bound and dangling from poles carried between two men’s shoulders.

  “Write their names for me, Sergeant Lapule.”

  The sergeant took clean sheets of paper and headed each one with the village names of the eight captives.

  “On each, sergeant, note that they are charged with murder and with cannibalism.”

  The sergeant wrote out the charges, in full. He had been carefully taught by his Australian inspector, knew the exact wording.

  “The three who walked in are to have their hands chained loosely in front of them, Sergeant Lapule. The other five are to be manacled hand and foot.”

  Ned left four constables, all single men, on temporary attachment to the station at Toma, returned with the other eight next day.

  He led them to the kiap’s office, showed him the bones.

  “I’ll put them on the cart to Rabaul in the morning, Ned, and ride in with them. Are those charge-sheets, mate? Well done!”

  The eight were unchained and pushed into the common cell of the lock-up.

  The kiap had a word with the station inspector, who set a double guard upon the cell, warning them that they would go in to take the place of any who escaped.

  Ned sat down and wrote his report, seeking instructions from the Administration on what was to be done about the six villages up in the Bainings. He then rode down to Vunapope and gave a full account of the whole business to Father Joe, left him alternately praying and swearing and promising to send a priest and a dozen of lay-brothers within the day.

  Ned turned the horse’s head for home, needing comfort himself.

  “What is to be done, Ned?”

  “Hang the leaders – that much is a certainty. For the rest, love, I do not know, not for sure. The best idea would be to allocate the unused land, so much to each
of the Tolai villages down on the coast where there is a shortage, then make them clear and use the land they are given. If they are kept short of land then they will want the plantations back – and in the end they would get them, there’s a damned sight more of them than of us, and the Australians won’t send up an army to protect a few planters. Nor should they, thinking on it.”

  “Then what is there for us, and for George?”

  “In the end? I don’t know. For the next twenty years or so, I think we are right here. I will put much of our money into safety, down in Cairns and Brisbane. I think that we should buy a place down South - Australia, so that if it happens in our lifetime there’s somewhere to run to, and plenty of cash to live on. I ain’t going to be poor, never again! Nor are you and George!”

  To Ned’s relief the Administration and the judge were horrified by the cannibalism. They sentenced the men to death and carried out the executions – no last-minute reprieves at the pressure of the Australian government.

  Gerry, the kiap, was present for the whole of the trial and knew why the judge had been so urgent for death.

  “The exhibits, mate! Those bones really shook the old bastard up! Old Tolai customs and habits sound good on paper when the bullshit artists from the universities talk it up, but burned bones from the cook-fire look bloody vile when they’re under your nose, especially when you can pick out tooth marks!”

  The Governor sent Ned a letter, thanking him for his part in subduing the outbreak of savagery. He had, he said, given consideration to Ned’s proposal for the use of the empty land on the edge of the Bainings; he had decided that the best course was to bring it into the ownership of the Administration and then permit Tolais to rent it.

  Ned shrugged – the old fellow might be right. Whatever he did, it was no longer Ned’s problem – he had a letter saying that the Administration had taken action. He wrapped the letter in greaseproof paper and tucked it away in a file – it must not be lost.

  “What next, Ned?”

  “Build a bigger fermentery for the cocoa and pass the word that we have room for cocoa beans from other plantations. We will buy fresh-podded beans or charge a few pence a pound to process other people’s stuff. It will get the other plantations to start growing as well. Got to get some sort of insecticide as well – bloody leaf-borers are starting to hit the crop. Make the gardens bigger as well – grow more of our own vegetables. The ships up from South aren’t as regular as they used to be.”

  The world recovered from the years of the War, except in Russia where the fighting did not stop, and turned to peace-time production, and an economic boom built up, particularly in America where mass-production became the norm, Fords setting an example, producing cars by the million. Well-paid factory hands ate chocolate and the demand for cocoa soared, and its price rose from an already respectable level.

  Ned made money, coined it in, and invested all he could down South. He did not trust the boom to last unchecked, growing every year, and he kept some of his wealth in gold bars as well as an amount in paper money, but most went to purchases of land on the outskirts of Cairns and Brisbane. It seemed to him that the numbers of people in Australia were rising and that sooner or later they would build more houses in every town; suburban land could not go wrong in the long term.

  The Boom had one other advantage – the tax income of the Australian government rose, they actually had cash to spare, and they spent some of it on their responsibilities in the Islands.

  The mid-Twenties saw a few schools and teachers and a hospital in Rabaul and the building of all-weather roads. As the reliability of aircraft improved there was a push to build airstrips at every large village and mission station and the Administration began to search out uncontacted clans. To the surprise of the Australians, and to the displeasure of most, the inland of islands on the New Guinea Side was found not to be an empty desert but to contain valley after valley full of villages – mostly small but adding up to a large population.

  Walking inland to make contact was not easy. The terrain was mountainous and virtually on the Equator, was covered in rain forest up to about ten thousand feet and wet scrub thereafter. Men cutting a trail rarely made five miles a day, often much less – they would struggle up a few hundred feet, often at the incline of a steep-pitched roof, then they would make the even more difficult descent into the next valley and work their way through swamps to garden land on the valley sides. Having got that far they would typically have to persuade a group of warriors that they were not enemies, often with little success.

  Where there had been trade with the coast making contact was easier; sometimes there were men who spoke a known language. It was not uncommon to be greeted indignantly with a demand to know what had kept them – the valley had been waiting years for the whiteskins to come with medicines and tinned fish. Many of the valleys, however, had traded with nobody and knew that the outside world contained only demons and enemies, both of whom were better dead.

  The Bainings, though close to long-settled Rabaul, proved particularly difficult to contact; the mountains were not particularly high, but they were very rugged, the valleys steep and narrow and covered in primary bush. They seemed, at first, hardly to be worth the effort of forcing a passage into them. That changed suddenly.

  The messenger boy, a grown man now, appeared at Vunatobung, handed over his summons from the kiap.

  "Uniform, Master Ned, they got troubles up the hills again."

  "Are they eating people again?"

  "Nogat, Master Ned, not since last time when you killed the demons."

  "Me?"

  "You got to have, Master Ned. They don't kill you, got to be you killed them."

  Ned had been aware that he was treated with even more respect these days, but had thought little of it. He was not entirely unhappy to know that no magic man would willingly cross him or his family.

  "What is it?"

  "Digger masters, Master Ned. They paying kanakas to do work, and bringin' in rum."

  "Bastards!"

  "Bad buggers true, Master Ned. The Mission preachers told them they bad men, and they got axed, Master Ned."

  Ned shouted for a horse and ran for his guns.

  He sat on the kiap's verandah, a bottle of beer in his hand, and asked for the latest information from the Bainings.

  "Prospectors, Ned. Came in through Rabaul last year, made their number with the Administration, was told the rules and then worked up inland from Toma. They found a bit of colour in the stream beds - not much, but enough to push inland, uphill, looking for the source of the alluvial nuggets and dust. The old story. Probably no more than a tiny pocket washed downhill, but they went hunting for Eldorado. I knew they were there; no harm in it. They were paying Bainings men to dig for 'em - bit of money in their pockets, all to the good. Then I got a complaint, maybe two months back. Said they was allowing the kanakas to get hold of booze. Couldn't see how it would come in, so I ignored it. If you listened every bloody time the missionaries hollered, Ned... You know how it is!"

  Ned did. The missionaries were a nuisance at their best.

  "Last week one of their boys came in with an empty bottle of Bundaberg Rum. Can't argue with that sort of evidence. I sent word to Rabaul and asked if they knew of any way the stuff could be coming in. They said a couple of cart loads of 'supplies' had come in last month, been taken out of Rabaul by an island boat down coast to the mouth of the river rather than brought by road through Kokopo and up the track to Toma."

  "Happens, Gerry. I'll take a patrol up and arrest them. What about the mission boys getting chopped?"

  "Lay-preachers. Samoan lads, I think. Protestant, London Missionary Society, I should imagine. Let them holler - I'll tell them in Rabaul they was buggering the little boys and didn't pay all they had promised. They probably were - you know what that lot are like - but it'll keep the mouths in Canberra quiet."

  Ned nodded - too many missionaries were predatory on the children for him to care very much
what happened to them.

  "Always the same, those bastards. It's why most of them run away from England or America, I reckon."

  There was still no motor truck for police use - despite several promises from the Administration - but they did have a two-horse wagon now, able to make the plod up to Toma in a single day.

  They were two days walking the hills to the gold mine. There was a lot of mine, they discovered, but very little of gold.

  An area of hillside, perhaps a quarter of a mile square on the edge of a small valley leading up into the uncontacted mountains, had been cleared of all vegetation - mostly rain trees surrounded by thin grass. The rock was close to the surface and the growing had been poor. Trenches had been cut through the rock in a dozen places, presumably following veins of quartz. Some of the diggings were thirty or forty feet deep.

  Half a dozen shacks had been built on the edge of the clearing.

  Ned waved his constables to either side, two parties with rifles at the ready; he walked slowly up the slope with Sergeant Lapule at his shoulder and watching.

  "Twenty or so of bush monkeys working in a hole over there, boss!"

  Ned glanced across to the single active digging, nodded. "Got 'em, Lapule."

  The door of the largest hut opened and a white man came out; he was emaciated and shaking, well gone in either fever or booze. He stank of rum, which was not proof of the absence of illness.

  "You right, mate?"

  "Bloody scrub typhus. Jacky and Bob both karked it last week."

  It was one of the risks: cause unknown, cure possible in a hospital but killing more often than not in the bush.

  "Are they buried?"

  "Put 'em in one of the trenches."

  "What about the mission boys?"