Rich Man's Coffin (21 page)

         
Black Jack stood in a cold sweat, unable to move.
 
He retched at the carnage, staring wildly at the scene in fear.
 
Robulla and his gunmen fired another round, shooting down countless more.
 
The hand-to-hand combat on the front line strongly favored Robulla’s numbers. Only Ruaoneone and a handful of his young warriors remained in a circle of flailing arms and mere.
 
Robulla gave the signal, and his men stopped fighting.
 
The gunmen and the foot soldiers surrounded Ruaoneone and his men.
 
Robulla yelled a command up the hill.
 
Black Jack recognized several men from the smaller boats that had passed before.
 
They forced the surviving women, among them Ruaoneone’s wife and Kumari, to trudge back down the hill.
 
Black Jack was torn.
 
Several of the men kicked children along.
 
One of the men carried a round stone, a Patu Aruhe.
 
Black Jack recognized it as the fern pounder from his first day.

         
Robulla ordered all the remaining women, children, and men to be lined up along the beach on their knees.
 
He waved all of his men back into the boat as he climbed in behind them.
 
He looked at Black Jack huddled on the bow in shock.
 
He called out to the warriors from the smaller boats. They brought Ruaoneone to the forefront.
 
Robulla raised his hand, and his men launched the big boat into the water.
 
He held his hand up for a moment, taking in the scene on the beach.
 
The man with the stone held it high above Ruaoneone’s head.
 
Ruaoneone’s wife and daughter began to sob, along with the other women in the pa.
 
Robulla dropped his hand.
 
The executioner brought the stone down swiftly upon the Chief’s head, proudly exclaiming, “Robulla!”

         
As the boat moved out into the bay, Black Jack managed to glance back long enough to see a man swinging his mere methodically down the line. Kneeling bodies fell into the surf one by one.

         
Robulla stepped up to Black Jack holding a bloody scalp. He scooped out the remaining matter and shoved it in his mouth. He licked his fingers and smacked his lips.
 
“Sorry we had to eat and run, Black Jack.
 
I promise a better supper.”

                                                         
VI

         
“People often warn that hating someone is the fastest way to become exactly like them.”
 
Arpur said to the Judge.
 
“Of course, it is only looking back now that my mind has healed from that moment.
 
If it is true that an angry man sees red, and a coal which burns hotter than red is white; then I surely turned white-hot that day with hatred for Robulla.
 
In my hatred, I did not realize what was happening. I lost my head and became like him.
 
I think it was my own way of not going completely insane with rage.”
 
The Judge and his family continued to eat their supper, transfixed.

         
For days the killing went on.
 
Robulla and his men were like piranhas on land, murdering and feeding on flesh ravenously and ruthlessly, without apparent method, purpose, or thought.
 
Black Jack and Robulla worked like blood brothers. The Chief issued no orders, his new prodigy needing none.
 
It was mass killing by instinct and any available means. Once it gained momentum, it all came naturally to those involved.
 
Black Jack became like an entire British regiment, threshing through body and limb with the combined skills of several infantry soldiers.

         
The mob swept south from Pukatea, following Robulla’s previously planned campaign path.
 
They ambushed unsuspecting pas at intervals faster than any messenger, thereby heading off any word of their onslaught.
 
They sailed day and night, killing entire tribes as they sat down to eat, or slaughtering them in their sleep.
 
Their timing was unselective.

         
To reduce risk to his army, Robulla thinned the opposition with several rounds of musket fire before proceeding with his ground attack.
 
At one point he grew so bold in his ways that he waited for one
hapu
to complete its
wero
, yawning arrogantly as they danced, before blasting the third warrior while he lay the feather down.
 
The tribe did not even have time to respond before they were shredded.

         
The army gorged itself on human flesh as it went.
 
Robulla would order the vanquished tribe’s hangis cleared of food, and the dead people chucked in.
 
While the bodies cooked to his taste, Robulla would rape several of the surviving women.
 
When he was finished with them, he would treat them to the ceremonial scalp slice with his mere and use their brains as garnish for his human meat.
 
What pleased Robulla the most, however, was experiencing the flowering of his new understudy.
 
He liked the way that the boy from Mississippi had become a promising young warrior virtually overnight.
 
Looking at him now from a recumbent and satiated position, he offered his young friend a hand.
 
Black Jack refused.
 
Despite all his slashing, raging and killing, Black Jack still had not tasted of human flesh.

         
“You must,” insisted Robulla, “if you are to become a true Maori warrior.
 
You must eat people and plenty of them.
 
They are the enemy, and they deserve it.”

         
Black Jack, charged with blinding anger, suddenly became tired.
 
He had raged for three straight days, never eating or sleeping.
 
He was exhausted.
 
His mind told him that he was enjoying it, that he could go on killing forever without rest.
 
He was intoxicated with the smell of blood.

         
Robulla continued with his persuasion.
 
He told Black Jack that the killing was necessary, that it was a cleansing of the entire Maori soul; and that he had been chosen to carry out the work.
 
He didn’t really enjoy all the rampaging, he explained to Black Jack; it just had to be done for the good of all.
 
Besides, he told Black Jack, he was very proud of him; and he was impressed with his performance.
 
There was only one thing preventing Black Jack from totally joining the brotherhood, he told him; and that was the eating of the enemy’s flesh.
 
He further explained to the young man that it wasn’t just the act of eating another person; it was a very deep and profound symbol of the warrior’s respect for his fallen foe.
 
It was a perfect circle, the killing and the eating, he explained.
 
He rambled on about the significance of the ritual, and the actual honor that it bestowed upon the defeated tribe.
 
It was a good thing, a purification, a necessary evil.

         
Robulla went on and on, as he gnawed on a young lady’s neck bone and sucked his fingers.
 
His talking mesmerized Black Jack as his agitation abated.
 
Arthur felt cold, tired, hungry, and bewildered all at once. Robulla droned on about the merits of cannibalism. Finally, Black Jack reached out cautiously for a portion of human meat.
 
There beneath the clear Kaikoura night sky, at the base of the majestic, craggy, green mountains by the magical sea, Black Jack sampled his first morsel of fellow man.
 
Robulla talked as Black Jack chewed, never mentioning that the flavors of final insult and humiliation of the slain foe were his favorite.

                                               
VII

         
Weeks went by without Black Jack’s awareness of time or season.
 
He became a hardened man. The business of decorated genocide did not permit the luxury of thought. One night as Black Jack sat around a large bonfire on the beach, he experienced an odd sensation.
 
He was sitting with a group of warriors and Robulla, laughing and talking.
 
The fire was warm; and Black Jack was surprised to find himself enjoying the food and the company.
 
It was all quite jovial.
 
As he went to place a dead man’s arm in the fire, he began to hallucinate that the arm was actually his.
 
It did not burn. It alternated in his mind between being his arm and the dead man’s.
 
Suddenly Black Jack was besieged by shadowy figures that tapped his chest like diving birds as they swooped.
 
He was popped several times.
 
He began to flail his arms, which were both on fire now, as the mysterious objects continued to pelt him.

         
Black Jack suddenly awoke on the cold, dark beach.
 
The coast along Kaikoura was starkly different from Cloudy Bay.
 
It was straight and rocky for as far as the eye could see.
 
And now in the still darkness, Black Jack struggled to shake off sleep and focus his eyes.
 
There was no fire.
 
What he saw were the dimly lit carcasses of hundreds of people, partially cut up and decomposed, strewn randomly up and down the beach.
 
His war party was camping in among the remains, while the seagulls and wood hens roved and picked around them in the moonlight.
 
Black Jack was used to the stench.
 
He was startled, however, by a pair of eyes glaring back at him.

         
The figure stared at him, as its outline gradually became visible.
 
It was Robulla, sitting up next to him.
 
His agitation cut through the night.
 
“You were having a bad dream.
 
Go back to sleep.
 
We have a busy day tomorrow.”

         
Black Jack lay there, watching the clouds stream past the moon and listening to the waves wash the shore.
 
He was numb and on edge at the same time.
 
His nerves were raw, and his senses were fuzzy.
 
His head felt dull and his memory was foggy. A blinding light shone into his tired eyes from somewhere in the back of his mind.
 
He squinted.
 
It was as if he were awakening from a night of too much grog.
 
He knew where he was, but he felt no connection to the place.
 
He knew the sequence of events leading up to his being there, but he knew not why.
 
He was experiencing an educated amnesia.
 
His reality was a nightmare. The narcotic effect of his prior fury was fading fast, and he was suddenly faced with a painful and difficult feat:
 
Clear-headed thought.

         
His mind reeled back up the coast, racing over rocky cliffs and battlefields still full of rotting bodies. The image of one face floated like a feather over the furlongs.
 
Like a flag unfurled on the landscape of his memory, he flew toward her fleeting image, faster and faster; until at last he felt he was standing at the feet of his forgotten flame:
 
Kumari.

         
Black Jack’s gut wrenched and his eyes burned as he stifled his tears among the warriors.
 
The pain of that fateful moment suddenly caught up to him:
 
The instant of his separation from her, suppressed until now, slamming him like a cold stone.
 
He felt like the torn, bleeding arm of a wounded body that was begging for reattachment.
 
He agonized over whether she were alive or not.
 
Oddly, his obsession for her now was the only thing keeping him sane.

         
How would he get away from Robulla? He wondered.
 
He thought back to the nights that he lay awake plotting his escape from the plantation Master.
 
There was no comparing his past to the present situation.
 
The two were vastly different, yet they shared one thing in common:
 
The courage to be successful against all odds, he realized.
 
Lying in the oppressive, stale confinement of squalor, or lying among human carrion and callous cannibals; it made no difference:
 
He knew now that he possessed the character to overcome.
 
But how far and how difficult would it be this time? He asked himself.