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.