Jakara the Wise,” she whispered, lingeringly; “Beizam is a mud shark – you are lord of all the Islands, if only you will! Nothing then could say us nay. We—”
He gripped the firm warm shoulders as she clung to him the more. “Pretty Lamar,” he hissed, “you are a chief’s daughter! Forget not the custom of your people – Death! Or else I must marry you—”
Her hair touched his cheek while her lips came warmly to his. “Would that–be–very hard?”
He crushed her to him and she kissed passionately; she would have given him her life, this fierce wild thing born under an unhappy star. By the banyan-tree they were when C’Zarcke came along and for the first time in his life gazed down into eyes which blazed back hate unabashed – the eyes of the Pretty Lamar. Jakara turned as he felt that awful sensation at the base of his skull, even while his arms clasped the girl. C’Zarcke, giant among big men, walked noiselessly down the path. Softly the seconds passed. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers: the silence shouted tragedy. The girl clung desperately for dread of losing him – but she had lost, the hair was bristling at the base of his skull. He sprang erect, and in cold fear he forced her arms away.
On the third morning after, with his back comfortably warmed against the big black rock of his Lookout, Jakara lazed away time, smoking the zoob, and occasionally picking up the telescope to gaze over the deep blue of a tumbling sea. The zoob was a bamboo about two feet long, a smoke-cylinder with carvings burnt upon it, simply the native pipe. Jakara loved his zoob, and had often wondered that these savages should be growing tobacco and understanding how to cure it, centuries before Sir Walter Raleigh found its solace.
The Zogo-le had developed the knowledge, of course. The great majority of the people lived away their lives in an atmosphere of ignorance and superstition, only those men who of right could cluster around the Zogo-le being taught to understand things. Jakara’s musing gaze rested on a flat rock bottom swept clear by the outgoing tide. The sea had churned out little circular pools in that floor-like rock, and in his last bath sat Ramu. Ramu had been a promising young warrior, until his indiscretion outstripped his ambition. Consequently, while he slept, he had been made to breathe of the “Flower of Death.” Jakara knew that this was an extraordinarily fine, perfumed powder, blown across a person’s nostrils from a long tapering reed. One puff meant everlasting sleep for the body. And now Ramu sat in his salt bath, very quiet, right up to his neck. At long intervals an attendant unceremoniously dipped the warrior’s head under water.
For Ramu was undergoing mummification. Jakara often wondered. Some of these people had Egyptian names even. Their huge war canoes, too, with the tall stern and arrogant – often beaked – bow, their barbaric decorations reminded him of prints of old-time galleys of the Nile which in his boyhood days he had seen in books.
Dreamily he turned his eyes away from Ramu, sitting down there in his last bath, picked up his telescope, and gazed away out to sea. He sat up straight, fully alert, stared hard for a while, then hurriedly hid his telescope and with a smile sprang up and ran like a man in the pink of condition down the long winding path that disappeared towards the sea-shore villages.
So Jakara spread the news that the sail of Kebisu was in sight. Always careful was Jakara not to prophesy himself; he merely confirmed C’Zarcke. There were three vessels, and Jakara added that the great war-canoe of Kebisu sported a new sail.
C’Zarcke, sitting, thinking within the Zogo-house, was told all. To each message he said nothing, but merely looked wise; but he was wise, too, and puzzled himself again as he had done for years past to understand this power of Jakara. Although he knew that the vessels were coming, C’Zarcke could not visibly see any sail, much less three, nor could he see that the canoe of Kebisu possessed a new mat sail! Yet Jakara never told falsely. Often he had raised the cry, “Lamar-Nar! Lamar-Nar!” (A spirit ship! A spirit ship!) Throughout the years, often long before the ships were in sight, he had foretold their passing, distinguishing between the fighting-ships of the Lamars, those other vessels which were like fat pigeons ready for the plucking when haply they struck the reefs, and those little hornets of the seas that Jakara called “blackbirders,” filled with fighting-men – little ships always looking for fight and always a fury to tackle. Also there were distant sails growing ominously frequent of late when the fool Lamars searched for pearl-shell and combed the ocean-floor for slugs of the sea; and occasionally the clumsy, queerly-shaped boats of those sea-nomads, the little brown Malay men, who always made great sport in fighting to the death, but luckily were not armed with such deadly fire-weapons as the white Lamars.
But Jakara had never told of a Lamar ship in distress, or of one obviously slewed among the many reefs, and C’Zarcke knew full well that he must have seen numbers in that plight. What was this power that Jakara possessed, and what other knowledge did he possess? C’Zarcke had watched him for years in the effort to learn. In his younger days C’Zarcke had really believed that white men were spirits of the dead, until he had thought over the strange fact that they and their women fear death even more than the Islanders. Then he had wondered if Lamars might be spirit people who, after death, lose the memory of their earth lives. As a young man he had thought that the Lamars might be like his own people, among whom only the priests and chiefs have knowledge. Jakara had boasted of a great land filled with knowledge which the Lamars themselves owned. C’Zarcke now believed him. He knew the vast world of the stars, and he did not believe that the horizon of the sea dropped into space. He knew that as far to the south as the most adventurous canoes had voyaged there lay a great land. True, the people seen were black in colour, but they were very different from the Islanders. Might not a land of Lamars lie farther away still? If so, then what learning their wise men must have! But what ineffable knowledge they must possess if they were really the spirits of people come back to earth!
With his brooding face almost likeable in its pathetic yearning, C’Zarcke stood up within the darkened Zogo-house, and, sliding open an aperture, gazed steadily up towards Jakara’s Lookout.
CHAPTER V
THE COMING OF KEBISU
The sun gleamed brightly on Maiad Bay with its beach like a crescent moon clouded with palms. An expectant throng waited, all shining eyes and laughter and singing. Everywhere strong men and lithe women and rollicking children and excitement. Even the trees on the hill-sides whispered it! For Kebisu was coming; Kebisu the Brave, who led in war and the larger tribal raids; Kebisu who had looted Lamar ships; Kebisu the Undefeated.
Reverberations boomed over the sea to a tattooing of the drums of Mer. For Kebisu’s sail was sighted, and a mighty shout arose. Again boomed the welcome of the drums, vigorous yet queer of note, like thunder muffled by the beat. The canoes sailed prettily upon the blue of the sea, picturesque in their barbaric strength. As their tall bows foamed through the surf, the people plunged towards them and rushed the big vessels high up on the sands, while the women pelted the laughing warriors with hibiscus and russet blossoms. The song of the clans echoed the throbbing of the drums.
Then the chief Mamoose of the Island nations stepped ashore, and Mer thundered to roars of “Kebisu! Kebisu! Kebisu!” Far above the din, within the crater-top in welcoming crescendo came the sound of the drums of Mer, while the Miriam-le and the emissaries of Eroob and of Ugar massed around the war Mamoose and waved the cruel shark-tooth swords and spun their killing clubs to the frenzied sway of bodies. It needed but a spark to set these inflammable savages at one another’s throats in a bacchanalian riot of clannish feuds. The women, crushed, yet not to be denied, fought their way into the crowd, shrieking adoration of Kebisu’s proud warriors while their gestures and voice inflamed the blood of their own. Then called the harsh voice of the Mamoose of Mer. “C’Zarcke! C’Zarcke awaits.”
Instant silence: a sigh arose as if from some vast animal. Grudgingly they stood back, light badinage broke out, and from heaving chests escaped laughter as animals became human again.
Kebisu stood out big even among the striking men there, his stature emphasized by enormous shoulder muscles; his limbs long and powerful, his bearing sheer untamed arrogance, his face unexpectedly pleasing because of a boyish happiness which occasionally lightened the grim jaw and broad, savage cheeks. The full brow was