The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales Part 4

"'What matters it if they claim? There was a letter once came to us from the Spanish Governor in Tolo. That man was a fool. He gave us warning that by order of the Government at Manila he would send a hundred men to build a fort inland and set up a garrison. Ha.s.san and I took counsel together. 'He is a fool,' said Ha.s.san; 'but we must answer him.' So we answered him thus. 'Send your men. To-day they come; to-morrow they die--yet trouble not; _we_ will bury them.'

"'Were they sent?' I asked.

"'They were not sent. He was a fool, yet within bounds. Nevertheless a time may come for us--not for Ha.s.san and me, we shall die in our beds--but for our sons. Even for this we are prepared.' He would have said more, but checked himself. (I learned later on that the islanders kept one of the craters fortified for emergency, to make a last stand there; but they never allowed me to see the place.) 'We have G.o.ds of our own,' said Hamid slily, 'who will be helpful--the more so that we do not bother them over trifles. Also there are--other things; and the lake Sinquan, and another which you have not seen, are full of crocodiles.' He stamped his foot. 'My son, beneath this spot there has been fire, and still the men of Cagayan walk warily and go not without their spears. For you it is different; yet when you come upon aught that puzzles you, it were well to put no questions even to yourself.'

"'Not even about this?' I asked, and showed him the purse and stone which Aoodya had tossed to me.

"'You are in luck's way,' said he, 'whoever gave you that.' He pulled a small pouch from his breast, opened it, and showed me a stone exactly like mine. 'It is a cocoanut pearl. Keep it near to your hand, and forget not to touch it if you hear noises in the air or a man meet you with eyes like razors.'

"I wanted to ask him more, but he started to walk back hastily, and when I caught him up would talk of nothing but the sugar and sweet-potato crops, and the yield of cocoanut oil to be carried to Kudat at the next north-east monsoon. I noticed that the fruit-trees planted along the sh.o.r.e were old, and that scores of them had ceased bearing. 'They will last my day,' said he. 'Let my sons plant others if they so will.' He always spoke in this careless way of his children, and I believe he had many, for an islander keeps as many wives as he can afford; but they lived about the villages, and could not be told from the other inhabitants by any sign of rank or mark of favour he showed them.

"For a long while I believed that Aoodya must be a daughter of his.

She always denied it, but owned that she had never known her mother and had lived in Hamid's house ever since she could remember. Anyhow, he took the greatest care of me, and never allowed me to join the expeditions which sailed twice a year from the island--to Palawan for paddy, and to the north of Borneo with oil and nuts and panda.n.u.s mats.

He may have mistrusted me; but more likely he forbade it out of care for me and the music I played; for the _prahus_ regularly came back with three or four of their number missing--either capsized on the voyage or blown away towards Tawi-Tawi, where the pirates accounted for them.

"Though I might not sail abroad he allowed me to join the tuburing parties off the sh.o.r.e. We would work along the reefs there in rafts of bamboo, towing with us two or three dug-outs filled with mashed _tubur_-roots. At the right spot the dug-outs would be upset, and after a while the fish came floating up on their sides, or belly uppermost, to be speared by us; for the root puddles the water like milk, and stupefies them somehow without hurting the flesh, which in an hour or so is fit to eat.

"We had been tuburing one afternoon, and put back with our baskets filled to a spit of the sh.o.r.e where we had left an old islander, Kotali by name, alone and tending a fire for our meal. Coming near we saw him stretched on the sand by his cooking-pots, and shouted to wake him, for his fire was low. Kotali did not stir. I was one of the first to jump ash.o.r.e and run to him. He lay with his legs drawn up, his hands clenched, his eyes wide open and staring at us horribly. The man was as dead as a nail.

"I never saw people worse frightened. 'The Berbalangs!' said someone in a dreadful sort of whisper, and we started to run back to the raft for our lives--I with the rest, for the panic had taken hold of me, though I could see no sign of an enemy. I supposed these Berbalangs, named with such awe, to be pirates or marauders from Tawi-Tawi or some neighbouring island, and the first hint that reached me of anything worse was a wailing sound which grew as we ran, and overhauled us, until the air was filled with roaring, so that I swung round to defend myself, yet could see nothing. To my surprise a man who had been running beside me dropped on the sand, pulled a sigh of relief, and began to mop his face--and this in the very worst of the racket. 'They are gone by,' he shouted; 'the worse the noise the farther off they are. They have taken their fill to-day on poor old Kotali.'

"Suddenly the noise ceased altogether, and we picked up courage to return and bury the body. We had a basket of limes on the raft, and these were fetched and the juice squeezed over the grave; but no one seemed inclined to answer the questions I put about these Berbalangs.

It seemed that unless they were close at hand there was ill-luck even in mentioning them, and I walked back to the village in a good deal of perplexity.

"I should tell you, sir, that by this time I was the father of a fine boy; and that Aoodya doted on him. When she was not feeding him or calling on me to admire his perfections, from the cleverness of his smile to the beautiful shape of his toes, he lay and slept, or kicked in a basket slung on a long bamboo fastened across the rafters, Aoodya would give the basket a pull, and this set it bobbing up and down on the spring of the bamboo for minutes at a time.

"Now when I reached home with my string of fish, I walked round to the back of the house to clean them before going in. This took me past the window of our room, and glancing inside--the window was unglazed, you understand--I saw Aoodya standing before the cradle and talking, quick and angry, with a man posted in the doorway opening on the verandah.

"I was not jealous. The thought never entered my head. But I dropped my fish and whipped round to the doorway in time to catch him as he turned to go, having heard my footstep belike.

"'Who the something-or-other are you?' I asked. 'And what's your business in my private house?'

"The man--a yellow-faced fellow, but young in figure--muttered something in a gibberish new to me, and made as if excusing himself. It gave me an ugly start to see that his eyes were yellow too, with long slits for pupils; but I saw too that he was afraid of me, and being in a towering rage myself, I out with my _kris_.

"'Now look here,' I said; 'I don't understand what you say, but maybe you understand this. Walk! And if I catch you here again, you'll need someone to sew you up.'

"I watched him as he went across the compound. The guard at the gate scarcely looked up, and if the thing hadn't been impossible, there, in the broad daylight, I could have fancied he saw no one. I turned to Aoodya and took her hands, for she was trembling from head to foot.

At my touch she burst out sobbing, clung to my shoulder and begged me to protect her.

"'Why, of course I will,' said I, more cheerfully than I felt by a long sight. 'If I'd known you were frightened like this, I'd have slit his body to match his eyes. But who is he, at all?'

"'He--he said he was my brother!' she wailed, and clung to me again.

'I cannot--I cannot!'

"'I'll brother him!' cried I. 'But what is it he wants?'

"'I cannot--I cannot!' was all she would say; and now her sobs were so loud that the child woke up screaming and had to be soothed. And this seemed to do her good.

"Well, I got her to bed and asleep early that night; but before morning I had a worse fright than ever. Somehow in my dream I had a feeling come to me that the bed was empty, and sat up suddenly, half awake and scared. Aoodya had risen and was standing by the cradle, with one hand on its edge; in the other was the lamp--a clam-sh.e.l.l fastened in a split handle of bamboo, and holding a pith wick and a little oil. The flame wavered against her eyes as she held it up and peered into the baby's face--and her eyes were like as I had seen them once before, and devilish like the eyes I had seen in another face that afternoon.

"A man never knows what he can do till the call comes. There, betwixt sleep and waking, I knew that happiness had come to an end for us.

Yet I slipped out of bed very softly, took the lamp from her as gentle as you please, set it on a stool and, turning, reached out for her two wrists and held them--for how long I can't tell you. She didn't try to fend me away, or struggle at all, and not a word did I utter, but stood holding her--the babe asleep beside us--and listened to her breathing until it grew easier, and she leaned to me, weak as water.

"Then I let go, and lifting the child's head from the pillow pulled Aoodya's charm, the cocoanut pearl, from my neck and hung it about his.

'That's for you, sonny,' said I, 'and if the Berbalangs come along you can pa.s.s them on to your father.' I faced round on Aoodya with a smile which no doubt was thin enough, though honestly meant to hearten her.

'It's all right, old girl. Come back to bed,' said I, and held her in my arms until I fell asleep in the dawn.

"But of course it was not all right; and after two days spent with this dismal secret between us, and Aoodya all the while play-acting at her old tricks of love for me and the babe--as if, G.o.d knows, I doubted they, and not the horror, were her real self--I could stand it no longer, but did what I ought to have done before; sought out my master and made a clean breast of it.

"I could see that it took the old man between wind and water. When I had done he sat for some time pulling his beard and eyeing me once or twice rather queerly, as I thought.

"'My friend,' said he at last, 'I suppose you will be suspecting me; yet I give you my word--and the Hadji Hamid is no liar--that if Aoodya is a Berbalang, or a daughter of Berbalangs, the same was unknown to me when I married you.'

"'I'll believe that,' I answered; 'the more by token that I never suspected you.'

"'She had no known father, which (as you know) is held a disgrace among us; so much a disgrace that she grew up without suitors in spite of her looks and my favour. Therefore I seized my chance of giving her a husband, and in that I am not guiltless towards you; but of anything worse I was ignorant, and for proof I am going to help you if I can.'

He frowned to himself, still tugging at his beard. 'Her mother was of good family, on this side of the island. Therefore she cannot be pure Berbalang, and most likely the Berbalangs have no more than a fetch upon her'--he used a word new to me, but 'fetch' I took to be the meaning of it. 'If so, we must go to them and persuade them to take it off.

They owe me something; for though, as we value peace and quiet, Ha.s.san and I leave them alone in their own dirty village and ask no tax nor homage, we could make things uncomfortable if we chose. Yes, yes,' said he, 'I think it can be done; but it will be dangerous. You are wearing your cocoanut pearl, of course?'

"I told him that I had given it up to the baby.

"He nodded. 'Yes, that was well done; but you must borrow it for the day. Run and fetch it at once; we have a long walk before us.'

"So I ran back, and without telling Aoodya, who was washing her linen behind the house, slipped the pearl off the child's neck and returned to Hamid. I found him, with two spears in his hand, waiting for me.

He gave me one, and forth we set.

"The Berbalangs' village stands on a sort of table-land in the hills which rise all the way to Mount Tebulian, near the centre of the island.

After the first two miles I found myself in strange country, and Hamid kept silence and signed to me to do the same. In this way we sweated up the slopes until, a little after noon, we reached a pa.s.s, and saw the roofs of the village over the edge of a broad step, as it were, half a mile above us. Here we sat down, and Hamid, drawing a couple of limes from his pocket, explained that I must on no account taste any food the Berbalangs set before us unless I first sprinkled it with lime juice.

It might look like curried fish, but would, as likely as not, be human flesh disguised, the taste of which would destroy my soul and convert me into a Berbalang; a touch of the lime juice would turn such food back to its proper shape and show me what I was being asked to eat.

"We now moved forward again, very cautiously, and soon came to the village. The houses, perhaps a dozen in all, were scandalously dirty, otherwise pretty much like those in Hamid's own village. But not a living creature could be seen. Hamid, I could tell, was puzzled, and even a bit frightened. He put a good face on it, all the same, and began to walk from house to house, keeping his spear handy as he peered in at the doors. Still not a soul could we find, barring an old goat tethered and a few roaming fowls. The stink of the place sickened us, and I wanted to run, though we came across no actual horrors. In one room we found a pan of rice lately boiled and still smoking, and sprinkled it with lime juice. It remained good rice. Out into the street we went, and Hamid, growing bolder, raised a loud halloo.

The noise of it sent the fowls scudding, and the hills around took it up and echoed it.

"He looked at me. 'They must be out on the hunt,' said he.

"'Good Lord!' I gasped. 'And the child at home--without the pearl!'

I turned and plunged for it down the slope like a madman.

"What to do I had no idea; but I hadn't a doubt that the Berbalangs were after Aoodya or the child, or both, and I headed for home with the wind singing by my ears. At the foot of the pa.s.s I looked back. Hamid was following, skipping from one lava stone to another at a pace that did credit to his old legs. He waved a hand and called--as I thought, to encourage me; and away down I pounded.

"I must have reached the edge of the plain in twenty minutes (the climb had taken us more than two hours), and, once there, I squeezed my elbows into my sides and settled into stride. Luckily the season was dry, and a fire, three weeks before, had swept over the tall lalang gra.s.s, leaving a thin layer of ash, which made running easy. For all that, I was pretty near dead beat when I reached the compound and ran past the sentry. The man cried out at sight of me as I went by; but I thought he was just pattering out his challenge, being taken unawares; and knowing he would not let off his musket if he recognised me, I paid no attention.

"I had prepared myself (as I thought) for anything--to find Aoodya dead beside the child, or to find them both unharmed and flourishing as I had left them. But what happened was that I burst in and stared around an empty room. _That_ knocked the wind out of my sails. I called twice, leaned my head against the door-post and panted; called again, and, getting no answer, walked stupidly back across the compound to the gate.

"The sentry there was pointing. I believe he was telling me, too, that Aoodya, with the child in her arms, had pa.s.sed out some while before.

But as he waved a hand towards the plain I saw a figure running there, and recognised Hamid. The old man was heading, not towards us, but for the seash.o.r.e, and, plain as daylight, he was heading there with a purpose. I remembered now his cry to me from the head of the pa.s.s.

So I pressed elbows to side again and lit out after him.

"He was making for a thick patch of jungle between us and the sea, and though I had run at least a mile out of the way I soon began to overhaul him. But long before I reached the clump he had found an opening in it and dived out of sight, and I overtook him only when the growth thinned suddenly by the edge of a crater, plunging down to a lake so exactly like Sinquan that I had to look about me and take my bearings before making sure that this was another, and one I had never yet seen.