? ? ?
WE WERE ON HIS TRAIL—and yet still he eluded us. The soldier told us where he believed Belial had ultimately been taken after being carried by the soldiers. So we rode on. But our guess was that Belial was moving every couple of days to stay ahead of us. I kept a close eye on Vao to try to observe whether her resolve had wavered. Hers were the eyes of youth—easily swayed toward excitement and despair. She was becoming more determined even as our joint quest increasingly seemed hopeless.
I did not find any hesitation on her part, but her earlier talk of needing to be free and liberated from her keepers gave way to looking to me for commands and direction. The truth was, she had always had a protector and with or without her rifle and warrior costumes and her command of languages, part of her had not learned what to do without one.
The next section of jungle where we found ourselves was so thick it was pitch-black. I could hardly see in front of my face. Despite the covering of trees, there was no shelter from the fierce heat, and the mud baked in the high temperatures and oozed with noxious gases. My eyes stung, my other senses rebelling in equal measure.
When we reached a slight clearing in the trees, I was more relieved than I would have admitted. But in the bush, relief is transitory. The ground was bubbling and sinking in; the horse bucked and I was thrown forward. I had to keep leaping until I was on rocky but solid surface inside an even smaller clearing, strangled above and on all sides by heavier woods. But I had lost Vao, and my heart sank. I began calling for her.
Then I heard the first sets of noises. They sounded like short bursts of air, or low menacing whispers. I was almost certain they were human sounds even though they were unlike any I’d heard. I could not go back through the sinking ground, but this clearing offered no room to hide from an attack.
Then there was a shout. A word. Not Samoan. I still could not see anything through walls and walls of trees and vines. I tilted my head back very slowly, dreading what I might find and whether—whatever it was—it could be the last thing I’d see. There was the point of a blade inches from my face, held there by a man perched in an impossible position in one of the trees. I started to reach for a cutlass given to me by Vao, before noticing that the trees were filled with men and boys, each armed with deadly, handmade weapons. Their skin was darker than that of Samoans. All the men were physically powerful, statuesque, and poised for a strike.
I knew these were the feared and famed runaways—men and boys like Nobolo—escaped from the plantations of the Firm. To challenge this posse would be suicide.
I was marched into a different part of the woods and made to stand for what might have been hours, until my knees were about to buckle. A newcomer, who carried an ornate spear, seemed to be the group’s leader. His bleached hair glowed with light even in the absence of sun. I went quietly in defeat as I was forced onward. In sight came a small village of mud huts with brown grass roofs that were barely distinguishable from their surroundings. Another white man, wrists tied behind his back, was pushed into our path.
“Hines!”
His face, streaked with mud, turned toward me with an expression of horror. “How on earth do you know me? Who are you?”
I realized only then how the time surviving in the mountains and wilderness must have changed me. I had lost twelve or fifteen pounds, my face was drawn and haggard, my skin as darkened by sun and dirt as a shriveled Egyptian mummy. “Edgar Fergins. From our passage together on the man-of-war. How did you get here?”
“I was on one of my excursions to negotiate a deal for land, until these black devils grabbed me. Why, you’re the blasted bookworm!”
“I cannot understand you, Hines. You risk your life in order to try to trick natives into selling or trading for land?”
“Of course you can’t understand! You have a damned poor brain for business. The Firm will pay through the clouds for those lands once they’ve gotten this whole place under their fist.”
“I suppose you put up a fight, which is why they tied you.”
“You’d better try to do the same. Savvy? We’re both about to be stewed, chopped, and cooked by these flesh eaters unless we do something, you damn fool!”
“Rope or not, we’d have no chance by fighting,” I replied.
“You keen on becoming dinner, is that it?”
I gave a little shrug of contempt to my adversary from the Colossus. There had been no sign of Vao. Even if she had seen what happened to me, she would be powerless against this ferocious group. I had one prayer left: that Nobolo had reached the cannibal village by now and would see me and protect me. But my heart sank again as we were steered ahead and I could make out a pair of the runaways digging in the ground. A fire nearby suggested this was their current camp. There was a body next to them. The body of my former companion.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Hines could sense my grief and fear.
I ran ahead and flung myself down at the side of the body, cradling the head and hair I had so recently trimmed with my own hands. Nobolo had a hole in his chest, in his heart. I was dragged away, now my wrists tied, before being brought back to the procession.
“They’re out for blood,” I said to Hines, recovering my composure long enough to explain.
“What?”
“The Germans shot down one of the runaways from their labor farm,” I said. “Back there. His name is Nobolo.”
“How could you possibly know the name of one of these cockroaches? Anyway, one less black pig to contend with.”