He had not gone a hundred yards before he discovered his first obstacle, a secondary creek separating the clearing where he had landed from the rising ground upon which the Dyak stronghold was located. Some trick of the twists of the creeks obscured the point at which he came upon it from the main landing, though he could see clearly the hard line of the parapet set dimly against the velvet sky.
It took him half an hour to work his way slowly and as silently as possible upstream over the tangle of roots, fallen trees and hanging vines that strung themselves like malevolent ropes across his path. The night was filled with the steaming of the rain forest, the stink of rich blooms, of humus and decay, of fungus and the rancidly sharp stench of excrement. Rustlings and sudden, startling flappings marked his disturbance of the unseen denizens of this foliated habitat. He thrust his mind away from thoughts of serpents. Ballantyne had spoken of the hamadryad cobra, of enormous lizards, of bats that drew blood from men ...
But the second scream turned his thoughts to Morris waiting for him on the hill beyond the creek.
He made the crossing at a spot where overhanging branches obscured him from all but an observer opposite. The slime of the muddy banks covered the white linen of his shirt and the calico of his breeches. Taking his shoes from between his teeth and rearranging the parcel of powder and arms he had held above his head, he found his bearings and moved slowly uphill.
In the direction of Morris.
Ever since his boyhood when his father had been thrown from a bolting horse and killed, Nathaniel Drinkwater had believed in fate. His thirty years' service as a sea-officer, subject to the vicissitudes of wind and weather, of action, of orders, of disaster, victory and defeat, had only confirmed his belief. Although paying formal respect to the Established Church and owning a vague acknowledgement of God, he privately considered fate to be the arbiter of men's destinies. Fate was the Almighty's agent, prescribing the interlocking paths which formed the lives of the men and women he had known. These men and women had marked him for better and for worse: the gentle constancy of Elizabeth, the friendship of Quilhampton, the haunting loveliness of the Spanish beauty at San Francisco, the patronage of Lord Dungarth and the devoted loyalty of Tregembo who now endured God knew what horrors on his behalf...
And the enmity of Morris ...
Drinkwater only half acknowledged that it was perverse love that bound him to Morris. The passion, unrequited by himself, had twisted the heartless young Morris into a cruel, vicious and domineering character whose forbidden vice gained greater satisfaction from the infliction of pain upon those who came under his influence. Unresolved emotions, unsatiated lusts, lay like unseen strands of circumstance between them, exerting their own ineluctable influence like lunar gravity upon the sea.
A third scream froze the sweat on Drinkwater's back as he stumbled suddenly into the edge of a small, steeply inclined plantation. It was Tregembo's fate to have drawn these men together.
Drinkwater moved with infinite caution now. Hunger sharpened his awareness and he dug from his body the reserves that the sea-service had laid there. Movement stimulated an irrational, feral thrill, a compound of fear and nervous reaction that acted on his spirit like a drug.
Making his way round the perimeter of the standing crops, he knew himself to be climbing, climbing up the northern or left flank of the stronghold as viewed from the river. It was the shoulder of the hill and he guessed, from the rising vastness of the sky ahead of him, that he was nearing the summit. Somewhere hidden beyond the crops and the shoulder of the hill, the rampart projected. Behind and below him, the dense jungle stretched in a monotonous grey, partly hidden under its nocturnal mantle of mist.
On the hillside a faint breeze stirred, striking his damp body with a chill, and bearing too the bark of a dog, suddenly near, and the sound of men's voices.
The small cultivated patch gave way to a steepening of the gradient where an outcrop of rock thrust through the soil. He edged under its cover and took stock. If there were guards they watched the river, for below him rolled the jungle running north to the sea, south and east interminably, a grey, mist-streaked wilderness under the stars, impassable to all but the Malay Dyaks who were bred to its secrets.
Cautiously he edged round the rock.
The elevation he had achieved surprised him. He had supposed the rampart was constructed on the hill's highest point and knew now that this was incorrect. The rampart was formed on a natural level commanding the river; the summit, hidden from the observation of an attacker, was set back a little.
But there was someone on the rampart below him, a long figure, dark against the lighter tone of the river. The man moved, a leisurely, unhurried gesture like a stretch. Drinkwater considered the wisdom of attempting his murder and decided so positive a proof of his presence would do him little good. Instead he was distracted by laughter, a rising cadence of voices and then again, only much louder now, loud enough for him to hear it start with a series of sobs and end in the terrible gasps of a man fighting for air, came the scream.
Withdrawing behind the summit Drinkwater wriggled backwards then moved to his left, eastwards and upstream so that when he next crossed the skyline he should, he estimated, have a view of the native village, for the scent of wood smoke was strong in his nostrils, mixing with the subtle-sweet reek of humanity.
He had not miscalculated. The flattening of the hill that had formed a narrow terrace behind the rampart before rising to the rocky summit, was here wider and further widened by the artifice of man. Beyond his sight the atap roofs of the huts stepped down the hillside to the landing place he had seen earlier. But immediately below him, on the flattened area, the low wooden istana stood, the palace of the chieftain, thatched with the atap leaves of the nipah palm. Before the istana extended an area of beaten earth illuminated by four blazing fires. Men wearing sarongs hitched like breech clouts squatted around the flames, eating and drinking. Some wore short, red jackets and head-dresses of bright cloth. The flickering light reflected from the sweat on their brown bodies and glanced off the rings they wore in their ears. Outside the gaping entrance of the istana were three chairs. In these sat the leaders of these men: a native chieftain dressed in yellow silk; a lesser Dyak conspicuous, even at fifty yards, by the quantity and size of the rings in the pendant lobes of his ears; and Morris.
Morris too wore yellow silk, and sat like the jade and soapstone images of the Buddha Drinkwater had seen offered for sale at Whampoa. So vivid was the firelight and so animated the scene below him that it was some seconds before Drinkwater noticed the three timbers of the tripod that rose above the area, its apex in the dark.
As he directed his attention to this central contrivance, allowing his pupils to adjust, he saw something square hanging from a heavy block. It seemed to sway slightly of its own volition, though the light from below made it hard for his tired eyes to see ...
A wave of excited chatter rose and Drinkwater was distracted from his speculation by a group of women emerging from the istana. Their arrival was accompanied by a sudden drumming and they moved amongst the men in an undisciplined but arousing dance that induced the warriors to stamp their feet in time with the pounding rhythm. One or two leapt to their feet and joined the women, others did the same and a jostling throng of wild and lasciviously abandoned Dyaks was soon dancing to the insistent drum. Cries and whoops came from the mob and Drinkwater was aware that this was no native ritual and that many of the men below him were not Sea-Dyaks, but half-breeds, Tamils and Chinese, Mestizo Spaniards from Manila, miscegenate Portuguese from Macao, bastard Batavians and degenerate Britons from God knew where.