Outlaw. Part 7

"How long have you been here?" I asked quickly.

"What date is it?"

"August. Nineteen sixty-three."

He stared at me. "They only put me in the hole when they think I'll be a problem."

"You've been free here?"

"No. Yes. Not without a guard. But..." He kept looking at the moonlit opening and now whispered what seemed to be a great secret to him. "I don't think I can leave the valley."

"Why not?"

He tugged at my arm and struck out toward the opening, suddenly and fully alive.

"Hurry!"

I hurried after him as he quickly hobbled toward the exit.

The sounds of the night exploded in my ears as we rushed from the structure they'd imprisoned us in. Tall trees, many meters high, blotted out the stars above and blocked any view of the houses in the main village I knew to be near.

"This way! This way!" Michael ran in a half crouch, back hunched, straight up a jungle path that quickly ascended a hill. I followed on his heels, not daring to say a word. He seemed to know where he was going and I was so relieved to be free of the hole that I didn't think about what lay ahead.

It took us ten minutes to reach the k.n.o.b of a barren hill that rose above the surrounding canopy. Michael doubled over, hacking, hands on knees.

I was more worried about pursuit than my lungs. He saw me searching the jungle behind us and waved it off.

"We're good." Pant, pant, cough. "Trust me, if anyone saw us leave we would be back in the hole by now."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure." Cough, cough. "I'm going to die." Cough. "How did you get out?"

"Someone cut me loose," I said. "They brought my clothes and untied my bonds."

"Cut you loose?" He straightened. "They intentionally set you free?"

"They must have. Yes, why else would they untie me?"

He stared back at the section of the jungle we'd fled. "Hmm."

"So what do we do now?" I asked, gaining my breath.

He turned to me. "Eh? Not we. You. I can't. I'd die before we reached the sea."

I stared down into the dark valley, toward the lowlands. Moonlight glinted off patchwork swamp water miles distant. The screeches of a million creatures daring me to enter the black tangle of jungle sent shivers down my spine. Thoughts of trying to navigate the rivers alone filled me with dread. Surely I stood no better chance than he.

"Are you sure you can't make it out?" I asked. "Whatever the risk, it would be better to die trying to escape than to die here."

He scratched at his head and paced, considering the matter as if tormented by the choice set before him. What was I missing?

He made for a boulder to our right. "Just let me rest a second."

I felt naked on that hill under a bright moon. "Are we safe here?"

"There is no safe place," he said, waving his hand about. "We would have to get to the cliffs and get down to the swamps. Roughly ten miles that way." He pointed westward. "The tidal surge reaches all the way in and reverses the flow of the river currents each day. Hundred miles in places. The alluvial coast makes one heck of a swamp...nothing but mud and mangroves for hundreds of square miles." He was babbling. "I'm not sure if this is one of the Catalina tributaries that eventually meets the lower Balim River, or if we're farther west. I've been trying to figure it out by the stars ever since I got here, but it's near impossible without my gla.s.ses."

"Slow down." He was dumping details on me that might be invaluable. "You're speaking too fast. How am I supposed to remember any of this?"

Michael stared at up me. I wrapped my arms around myself and paced in front of him, sure that at any moment the Warik would appear at the clearing's edge. But he didn't seem to share my concern, and I was desperate for more information about where I was, so I pressed him for more.

"Michael? Michael who?"

"Stevenson. I'm an anthropologist."

"How did you get here?"

He spoke quickly. "I was on a trip to collect carvings and skulls. My boat was swamped by a tidal flood. I made it to sh.o.r.e but was stuck in all that mud by the river. They took me."

"Where? Which river where you near?"

"The Eilanden. Along the Casuarina Coast in the Arafura Sea. They had a bag over my head most of the way and I was handed off twice but I'm pretty sure we traveled northwest." He paused. "If you ever make it to the swamps, you'll have to stuff your ears and nose with something when you sleep to keep the bugs out. That's primarily why they use the head bags when they take slaves. When your hands are tied, you can't swat them away."

I knew then that there was no way I was going out alone.

"The rivers are a meandering maze of mud and silt, changing-"

"And I'm supposed to do this alone?" I said. "With cotton in my ears and nose?"

"I can't go," he answered without a missing a beat, shaking his head. "They would hunt me down."

It was nearly hopeless-he caught in his own fear; I still frantic from my ordeal. So I drew deep breaths and tried to still my hammering heart.

A comment he'd made when he first stumbled out of his cell returned to me and I turned to him. "You asked if I'd finally come. If I was her. What did you mean?"

He studied my eyes, thinking. "I'm not sure. Are you?"

"Am I what?"

"I've been having dreams," he said, voice so very quiet. "I was meant to come. So is she."

Dreams? My mind was filled with the dream that had haunted me in Atlanta. But by now I was so loath to accept its validity that I rejected any serious consideration. If my captivity and Stephen's death were party to that vision, it had come from h.e.l.l.

And what if that was true? What if I had died on that white sailboat and was now paying for my failure as a daughter? Was G.o.d like my earthly father, capable of such torturous abandonment?

I shivered and shifted my stare. I think the final doorway to that dream closed then, with the terrible fear that I had been lured into h.e.l.l, not figuratively, but literally. I simply could not hold that thought in mind without breaking down.

So I didn't. I blocked it out.

"Whoever she is, it's not me," I said.

Michael gazed at me for a few long moments. "Don't know." He grinned, baring dirty teeth. "Just crazy dreams. I know that I was meant to find Tulim. This is my home now. Somehow my wanton mind calls for a woman." He shrugged. "Not for me. For this valley. Something much bigger than me or you. And I'm not saying it's you or anybody, for that matter. But I've learned some things."

He sounded like he looked-unhooked.

I made a conscious decision then never to regard the absurd dream that had first persuaded me against good judgment to leave Atlanta. The foolishness of my navete angered me.

"What have you learned?" I asked.

He nodded, suddenly in his element, and I listened as Michael told me "some things."

He'd been taken captive by the Tulim, a previously unknown tribe who lived a hundred miles inland, just north of the better-known Asmat people whom he was studying. The valley system we were in contained several small peaks within a ma.s.sive depression bordered on three sides by cliffs, and to the south by a swamp.

He began to speak in more lucid terms now. There seemed to be two parts to his psyche, one that dipped into his academic prowess, and one that had been broken by his imprisonment.

He was well versed in the entire region, having already spent several years traveling all of Irian Jaya. Did I know that all early attempts to make contact with the indigenous people along the south coast had failed miserably? Captain Cook had met with death and disaster when he tried to land in 1770. Even though Dutch missions had been set up along the coast long ago, the inexplicable ways of the Asmat deeper inland were hardly known.

"So then the Tulim are from these Asmat?" I asked.

"No. Heavens, no. Not alike at all. Well, in many ways, yes, I suppose they are similar to an unstudied observer. But the Tulim ancestry is a mixed bag. Influenced by crossbreeding with their slave trade over the centuries, which, to my knowledge, is unique to the Tulim in this part of the world. They are ethnically distinct from other tribes in the region. Taller, darker than the Asmat. Even some of their customs and names have been influenced by far reaches. It's extremely rare. Staggering, actually. Hidden away here north of the Asmat live an undiscovered people that would deliver any anthropologist to heaven."

He coughed.

"But they don't accept change easily," he said. "They reject most notions suggested by the outside. Whether it was the j.a.panese soldier they took during the Second World War, or a Chinese merchant, they judge most new ideas of advancement as the foolish talk of wam. And frankly, they might be right."

"This is all good, but we need to talk about how to get out."

"Just hear me out, you'll see," he said, lifting his hand to calm me. "You'll see. You need to know what you're up against if you expect to survive. There's nothing but hundreds of square miles of Asmat territory between here and the coast."

I sat and let him continue, though it was clear that the anthropologist in him was more interested in sharing his rare discovery than in discussing an escape he clearly thought was impossible.

While the Asmat were certainly fierce survivors, they lacked the natural resourcefulness that had allowed the Tulim to grow into such a formidable group. The people here were hidden not only from the Western world but from their Asmat neighbors, who consisted of nearly a dozen ethnic subgroups that spoke several languages.

Did I know that there were well over eight hundred distinct languages in New Guinea?

No, I did not. Neither did I care. But he was adamant that I hear him out.

Only a handful of the languages had any alphabet or written form. He was certain that he was the only Westerner who spoke Tulim. Many tribes had lived in complete isolation for centuries, particularly the peoples of the south coast, where the terrain was too forbidding for humans less skilled than the Asmat or the Tulim to navigate.

There were three other factors that kept the Tulim hidden from the world, he said, holding up as many fingers.

The first was that, in addition to the treacherous swamps to the south, the terrain leading into the mountains to the north was as impossible to traverse as the swamps.

Had I seen the doc.u.mentary The Sky Above, the Mud Below, he wanted to know. It was the fascinating and detailed account of a joint Dutch-French attempt to cross this very territory by any means possible. Disastrous. Seven months and numerous deaths later, all but a few of the party were finally airlifted out.

He told me that 80 percent of soldiers involved in campaigns here during the war had perished, not at the hands of the j.a.panese, but at the hand of the greater enemy, the land itself. Crossing mountains such as these was, as the army engineers had learned, the ultimate nightmare.

The revelation only deepened my anxiety. The man seemed bent on making my case unmistakably certain: I was hopelessly trapped between the mountains that towered against the night sky to my right, and the impa.s.sable swamps to my left. I had the distinct feeling he was out to persuade me that I, like him, should just accept my fate here, in the Tulim valley.

He didn't know me. I hadn't been raised in privilege to die so far from home.

But then I saw another reason for his presentation. He was an anthropologist paying homage to the land and those who had conquered it. In some respects these included him, and he found some measure of pride in that fact. He could not hide the wonder in his eyes and the slight curve of his lips as he touted the land's threats.

In some ways Michael was finally giving his report to the only Westerner he believed would ever hear it. This was his opus.

A second factor in the Tulim's isolation, Michael continued, had to do with their animistic beliefs, which demanded they stay hidden from the evil spirits above. It was forbidden to build any structure under an open sky. They lived under the jungle's thick canopy and avoided open s.p.a.ces.

"Clearings like this?" I asked.

"Oh no, they would never build a path directly through this clearing. They would follow the tree line."

"But the council-"

"You were there?"

"I...my trial, or whatever that was."

"Neutral s.p.a.ce," he said, waving it off. "But the court is built under trees, yes? And they only meet at night."

It explained why he wasn't as eager as I to leave this knoll. We were under open sky, hunkered down among the rocks.

"And the third reason?" I asked.

"All these questions drove me crazy, you know. Why these people have remained unknown. You would think they could have been observed from the air, or that the surrounding tribes would spin rumors of their existence. I eventually understood why that couldn't happen. But what surprised me more was that no one had ever escaped this valley and lived to tell."

"No one?"

"No man, woman, or child, once entering the valley, may leave alive. It's at the heart of their law. They believe they're the only true descendants of the first humans, created here in this valley. Their protection from evil spirits is limited to this valley. The belief is so ingrained that no one dares try, and any who do are quickly hunted down and killed to appease the spirits."

"What about the traders who took me?"

"Ah yes. But you were taken by traders who consumed tawi in a ceremony that protects them from certain death if they leave-up to ten days at most. Only Sawim, the old shaman, knows the ingredients taken during a ceremony. And only those among the Warik tribe are allowed to ingest it. It's part of the intricate balance of power among the three tribes that make up the Tulim. So you see, I can't go."

"You're not making any sense. That's only folklore."

"Still, they would hunt me down. I would be dead."

"And so would I if I tried to go alone."

He stared at me, then nodded. "Yes, there is that."

"Then there's no way out for either of us?"

He thought. "No. No, come to think of it, there isn't."

He had surely known that from the beginning. This had just been his own way of making it clear to me.

"So I'm stuck. And I will be killed."