It was ironic, and a fact remarked by all, that in the storm when fresh water was plentiful, the sails did most of the work, whereas now, when men sweated and strained endlessly with the paddles, there was no water. The king ordered it to be doled out in ever-decreasing portions, so that the harder the men worked, the less they had to drink.
The women, with scarcely any water, suffered miserably, while the slaves were near death. The farmers had an especially cruel task. Tenderly they would hold open the mouth of a pig and drop water inside to keep the animal alive, whereas they needed the fluid more than the animal; but the death of a farmer could be tolerated; the death of a pig would have been catastrophe.
Still the canoe bore on. At night Teroro, with his lips burning, would place on the platform near the prow a half coconut, filled with placid sea water, and in it he would catch the reflection of the fixed star, and by keeping this reflection constant in the cup, he maintained his course.
At daybreak, red-eyed Teura would sit in the blazing heat, her old body almost desiccated by the sun, and speculate upon the omens. Hour after hour she muttered, “What will bring rain?” The flight of birds might indicate where islands were, and water, but no birds flew. “Red clouds in patches in the eastern sky bring rain, for certain,” she recalled, but there were no clouds. At night the moon was full, brilliant as a disk of polished Tridacna, but when she studied the moon she found no ring around it, no omen of storm. “If there were a wind,” she muttered, “it might bring us to a storm,” but there was no wind. Repeatedly she chanted: “Stand up, stand up, the big wave from Tahiti. Blow down, blow down, the great wind from Moorea.” But in these new seas her invocations were powerless.
Day followed day of remorseless heat, worse than anyone in the canoe had ever previously experienced. On the seventeenth day one of the women died, and as her body was plunged into the perpetual care of Ta’aroa, god of the mysterious deep, the men who were to have been her husbands wept, and through the entire canoe there was a longing for rain and the cool valleys of Bora Bora, and it was not surprising that many began to deplore having come upon this voyage.
Hot nights were followed by blazing days, and the only thing that seemed to live in the canoe was the dancing new star as it leaped about in the coconut cup which Teroro studied; and then late one night as the navigator watched his star, he saw on the horizon, lighted by the moon, a breath of storm. It was small at first, and wavering, and Mato whispered, “Is that rain?”
At first Teroro would not reply, and then, with a mighty shout, he roared into the night, “Rain!”
The grass house emptied. The sleeping paddlers wakened and watched as a cloud obscured the moon. A wind rose, and a light capping of the sea could be seen in starlight. It must be a substantial storm, and not a passing squall. It was worth pursuing, and everyone began to paddle furiously. Those with no paddles used their hands, and even the king, distraught with hope, grabbed a bailing bucket from a slave and paddled with it.
How desperately they worked, and how tantalizingly the storm eluded them. Through the remaining portion of the night, the canoe sped on, its men collapsing with thirst and exhaustion, in pursuit of the storm. They did not catch it, and as the blazing day came upon them, driving the clouds back to the horizon, and then beyond, an awful misery settled upon the canoe. The paddlers, their strength exhausted in the fruitless quest, lay listless and allowed the sun to beat upon them. Teroro was of no use. Old Tupuna was near death, and the pigs wept protestingly in the waterless heat.
Only the king was active. Sitting cross-legged on his mat he prayed ceaselessly. “Great Tane, you have always been generous to us in the past,” he cajoled. “You have given us taro and breadfruit in abundance. You brought our pigs to fatness and birds to our traps. I am grateful to you, Tane. I am loyal to you. I prefer you above all other gods.” He continued in this way for many minutes, hot sweat upon his face, reminding the deity of their close and profitable relationships in the past. Then, from the depth of his despair, he pleaded: “Tane, bring us rain.”
From a short distance forward, red-eyed Teura heard the king praying and crept back to him, but she brought him terror, not assurance, for she whispered, “The fault is mine, nephew.”
“What have you done?” the king asked in spittle-dry tones.
“Two nights before we left Bora Bora I had a dream and I ignored it. A voice came to me crying, ‘Teura, you have forgotten me.’ ”
“What?” the king rasped, catching his aunt’s withered arm. “That was my dream.”
“A voice crying, ‘You have forgotten me!’ Was that your dream, too?”
“No,” the king replied in ashen tones. “Two stars, combing the heavens, looking for something I had forgotten to put into the canoe.”
“Was that why you unpacked everything at the last?” Teura asked.
“Yes.”
“And you discovered no lack?”
“Nothing.” The two wise people, on whom the success of this voyage now depended, sat despondent. “What have we forgotten?” They could find no answer, but they knew, each now fortified with substantiation from the other, that this voyage was conducted under an evil omen. “What have we forgotten?” they pleaded.
In bleak despair they stared at each other and found no answer, so Teura, her eyes already inflamed from watching the merciless sun, went out to the lifeless platform and prayed for omens, and as she gave her whole being to this duty, the great blue shark came beside the canoe and whispered, “Are you afraid that you will die, Teura?”
“Not for myself,” she replied calmly. “I’m an old woman. But my two nephews … Isn’t there anything you can do for them, Mano?”
“You haven’t been watching the horizon,” the shark admonished.
“Where?”
“To the left.”
And as she looked, she saw a cloud, and then a disturbance ruffling the ashen sea, and then the movement of a storm, and rain. “Oh, Mano,” she whispered, afraid to believe. “Is the rain coming toward us?”
“Look, Teura,” the great blue shark laughed.
“Once before it looked the same,” she whispered.
“This time follow me,” the blue beast cried, and with a shimmering leap he splashed into the sea, her personal god, her salvation.
With a wild scream she cried, “Rain! Rain!” And all rushed out from the house, and dead sleepers wakened to find a storm bearing down upon them.
“Rain!” they mumbled as it marched across the ocean nearer and nearer.
“It’s coming!” Tamatoa shouted. “Our prayers are answered.” But old Teura, laughing madly as the benign water struck her face, saw in the heart of the storm her own god, Mano, his blue fin cutting the waves.
Almost as if by command, the near-dying voyagers began to throw off their clothes, their tapa and their shells, until each stood naked in the divine storm, drinking it into their eyes and their blistering armpits and their parched mouths. The winds rose, and the rains increased, but the naked men and women of Bora Bora continued their revel in the slashing waves. The sails came down and the mast of Ta’aroa was almost carried away, and the dogs whined, but the men in the canoe swept the water into their mouths and embraced each other. Into the night the storm continued, and it seemed as if the sections of the canoe must break apart, but no one called for the storm to abate. They fought it and drank it and washed their aching bodies with it, and sailed into the heart of it, and toward morning, exhausted in sheer joy, they watched as the clouds parted and they saw that they were almost under the path of the Seven Little Eyes, and they knew that they must ride with the easterly wind that had brought the storm. Their destination lay somewhere to the west.
IT WAS A LONG leg to windward they took. For nearly two thousand miles they ran before the easterlies, covering most days more than a hundred and fifty miles. Now the fixed star remained at about the same height above the horizon, on their right, and they followed close to the path of Little Eyes. At sunset Ter
oro would tilt his coconut cup backward to catch the bright star that stood near Little Eyes as they rose in the east. Later, as the constellation which men in the deserts had named the Eagle sank into the west, he would steer by its bright star, shifting back and forth between it ahead and Little Eyes to the rear, thus keeping always on course.
It was on this long westward leg that King Tamatoa’s earlier insistence on discipline preserved the voyage, for now food had run perilously low and for some perverse reason the numerous fish in these strange waters would not bite; Tupuna explained that it was because they lived under the influence of the fixed star and that the Bora Bora fishhooks had not been adjusted to this new consideration. Every woman and all men who were not paddling kept lines, long and short, in the sea, but to no avail.
There was a little coconut left and a small amount of breadfruit, but no taro. Even the pigs, absolutely essential to the success of the journey, were famishing. But in this extremity the thirty paddlers, who worked constantly, survived amazingly. Their stomachs had long since contracted into hard little fists, shrunk to nothing under tight belly muscles. Their strong shoulders, devoid of even a trace of fat after nearly a month’s steady work, seemed able to generate energy from nothing. With neither food nor adequate water, the men sweated little; through sun-reddened eyes they constantly scanned the horizon for omens.
It was old Teura, however, who saw the first substantial sign; on the twenty-seventh morning she saw a small piece of driftwood, torn away from some distant tree, and Teroro avidly directed the canoe toward it. When it was pulled aboard it was found to contain four land worms, which were fed to the astonished chickens.
“It has been in the ocean less than ten days,” Teura announced. Since the canoe could travel five or six times faster than a drifting branch, it seemed likely that land lay somewhere near; and old Teura entered into a period of intense concentration, clutching at omens and interpreting them hopefully by means of old prayers.
But West Wind was not to be saved by incantations. It was Mato, a trained sailor, who late one afternoon saw in the distance a flock of birds flying with determination on a set course westward. “There’s land ahead. They’re heading for it,” he cried. Tupuna and Teroro agreed, and when, a few hours later, the stars rose, it was reassuring to see that the Seven Little Eyes confirmed that they were near the end of their journey.
“A few more days,” Teroro announced hopefully.
And two days later, aching with hunger, Mato again spotted a bird, and this one was of special significance, for it was a gannet, poised seventy feet in the air; suddenly it raised its wings, dropped its head toward the waves, and plunged like a thrown rock deep into the ocean. It looked as if it must have split its skull on impact, but by some mysterious trick, it had not, and in a moment it flew aloft with a fish in its beak. Deftly it flipped the food into its gullet, then plunged again with head-splitting force.
“We are surely approaching land!” Mato cried. But many on the platform thought of the gannet not as a harbinger of land, but rather as a lucky bird that knew how to fish.
In the early morning of the twenty-ninth day a group of eleven long black birds with handsome cleft tails flew by on a foraging trip from their home island, which lay somewhere beyond the horizon, and Teroro noted with keen pleasure that their heading, reversed, was his, and while he watched he saw these intent birds come upon a group of diving gannets, and when those skilled fishers rose into the air with their catch, the fork-tailed birds swept down upon them, attacked them, and forced them to drop the fish, whereupon the foragers caught the morsels in mid-air and flew away. From their presence it could be deduced that land was not more than sixty miles distant, a fact which was confirmed when Teura and Tupuna, working together, detected in the waves of the sea a peculiar pattern which indicated that in the near distance the profound westerly set of the ocean was impounding upon a reef, which shot back echo waves that cut across the normal motion of the sea; but unfortunately a heavy bank of cloud obscured the western horizon, reaching even to the sea, and none could detect exactly where the island lay.
“Don’t worry!” Teura reassured everyone. “When the clouds do lift, watch their undersides carefully. At sunset you’ll see them turn green over the island. Reflections from the lagoon.” And so convinced was Teura that they were approaching some small island like Bora Bora with a lagoon, that she chose the spot from which the wave echoes seemed to be generating and stared fixedly at it.
As she had hoped, toward dusk the clouds began to dissipate, and it was Teura who first saw the new island looming ahead. Gasping, she cried, “Oh, great Tane! What is it?”
“Look! Look!” shouted Teroro.
And there before them, rearing from the sea like an undreamed-of monster, rose a tremendous mountain more massive than they had ever imagined, crowned in strange white and soaring majestically into the evening sunset.
“What a land we have found!” Teroro whispered.
“It is the land of Tane!” King Tamatoa announced in a hushed whisper. “It reaches to heaven itself.”
And all in the canoe, seeing this clean and wonderful mountain, fell silent and did it reverence, until Pa cried, “Look! It is smoking!” And as night fell, the last sight the men of Bora Bora had was of a gigantic mountain, hung in the heavens, sending fumes from its peak.
The vision haunted the voyagers, for they knew it must be an omen of some proportions, and in the quiet hours of the night old Teura dreamed and woke screaming. The king hurried to her side, and she whispered, “I know what it was we forgot.”
She went aft with her nephew, to where no one could hear, and she confided: “The same dream returned. I heard this voice crying, ‘You have forgotten me.’ But this time I recognized the voice. We have left behind a goddess whom we should have brought.”
King Tamatoa felt a sick quaking near his heart and asked, “What goddess?” for he knew that if a goddess felt insulted, there was no restriction on the steps she might take in exacting revenge; her capacity was limitless.
“It is the voice of Pere, the ancient goddess of Bora Bora,” the old woman replied. “Tell me, nephew, when your wandering stars were searching the heavens, were they not attended by specks of fire?”
The king tried to recall his haunting premonitory dream and was able, with extraordinary clarity, to conjure it, and he agreed: “There were specks of fire. Among the northern stars.”
They summoned Tupuna and told him the burden of his wife’s dream, and he acknowledged that it must have been the goddess Pere who had wanted to come on the voyage, whereupon his nephew asked, “But who is Pere?”
“In ancient days on Bora Bora,” the old man explained as the thin-horned curve of the dying moon rose in the east, “our island had mountains that smoked, and Pere was the goddess of flame who directed our lives. But the flame died away and we supposed that Pere had left us, and we no longer worshiped the red-colored rock that stood in the temple.”
“I had forgotten Pere,” Teura confessed. “Otherwise I would have recognized her voice. But tonight, seeing the smoking mountain, I remembered.”
“And she is angry with us?” the king asked.
“Yes,” Teura replied. “But Tane and Ta’aroa are with us, and they will protect us.”
The old seers went back to their places, and the king was left alone, in the shadow of his new land now barely visible in the misty moonlight. He was disturbed that a man could take so much care to satisfy the gods, and that he could nevertheless fail. He could study the omens, bend his will to them, and live only at the gods’ commands; but always some small thing intruded; an old woman fails to recognize the voice of a goddess and disaster impinges upon an entire venture. He knew the rock of Pere; it had been retained in the temple for no known reason, both its name and its properties forgotten; it was no longer even dressed in feathers. It would have been so simple to have brought that rock, but the facts had eluded him and now he felt at the mercy of a revengeful godde
ss who had been deeply insulted, the more so because she had taken the trouble to warn him. He beat his hands against the poles of the grass hut and cried, “Why can we never do anything right?”
If the king was perplexed by his arrival at the new land, there were other passengers who were terrified. In the rear of the left hull, the slaves huddled in darkness, whispering. The four men were telling the two women that they had loved them and that they hoped the women were pregnant and that they would bear children, even though those children would be slaves. They recalled the few good days they had known on Bora Bora, the memorable days when they had chanced upon one of the king’s stray pigs and had eaten it surreptitiously, for to have done so openly would have meant immediate death, or the days when the high nobles were absent from the island and they had been free to breathe. In the fading darkness of the night, for a day of great terror was about to dawn, they whispered of love, of human affection and of lost hopes; for the four men knew that when the canoe landed, a temple would be built, and when the four corner post holes had been dug, deep and sound, one of them would be buried alive in each, so that his spirit would forever hold the temple securely aloft, and the doomed men could already feel the taste of earth in their nostrils; they could feel the pressure of the sacred post upon their vitals; and they knew death.
Their two women, soon to be abandoned, could taste worse punishment, for they had come to love these four men; they knew how gentle they were, how kind to children and how alert to the world’s beauty. Soon, for no ascertainable reason, the men would be sacrificed, and then the women would live on the edge of their community, and if they were already pregnant, and if their children were sons, they would be thrown under the prows of canoes to bless the wood and to be torn in shreds by it. Then when they were not pregnant, on strange nights men of the crew, their faces masked, would rudely force their way into the slave compartments, lie with the women, and go away, for if it were known that a chief had had contact with a slave woman, he would be punished; but all had such contact. And when the children of these unions were born, they would be slaves; and if they grew to manhood, they would be ripped to pieces under canoes or hung about the altars of gods; and if they grew to comely womanhood, they would be ravished at night by men they never knew. And the cycle would go on through all eternity, for they were slaves.