Chapter 4
MAN TANNA
THE PEOPLE OF TANNA have always, even in the days before the Exodus, been fiercely independent. The island of Tanna, wide, mountainous and remote, weathered, in days long gone, the misrule of missionaries, blackbirders and the British Empire. It was an island of strange beliefs and even stranger truths, heavily-populated in a region where population density was nearly non-existent. When the time came, the people of Tanna, first from that remote corner of the world that was once called the New Hebrides and later Vanuatu, went out into space, to seek work with the mining corporations in the Asteroid Belt. From one archipelago of distant islands, each isolated from the other, each with its own languages, its own kastom and beliefs, they were the first to seek out that other tranquillity, that other isolation that is space. The others followed: Man Efate and Man Epi and Man Malekula, they came too, shipped off-Earth by the giant Malay and Chinese corporations. When the time of the Exodus came, the people of Tanna were instrumental in acquiring the Hilda Lini.
In the event, it was decided that Kal would be exiled. It seemed a reasonable enough decision, in light of what happened.
The decision was reached, as was kastom, and as was right, in the nakamal.
The nakamal was located just outside the village. Its hub was a giant nambanga tree, the first planted on New Epi, by the men and women of old Earth. Around the tree the ground lay bare, open to the sky. The people of Epi gathered there before sunset. The clouds, soft and white, glided against the dimming blue horizon. The first star appeared in the sky. Kava, that most precious of roots brought back from old Earth, was brewed into a sour brown drink and handed out in shells. Everyone drank. As the kava took effect a silence settled over the nakamal.
‘The boy,’ said Toro, who was chief of Kal’s village, and a second or third (Kal had never been sure which) cousin to Kal’s mother, ‘has become a liability.’
He said it without malice. Kal was a problem. There had been a death. Worse, tabu had been broken. And the clouds … if clouds were capable of anger (which was still, centuries after landing, open to debate), then they had shown anger. Kastom had been ignored.
With fatal results.
Vira’s father, John Zebedee, stood up. He was a short man, running to fat, and his face was fatigued. ‘I do not ask for justice,’ he said, and there was a murmur of approval at his words. ‘I do not ask for justice, because justice is often cruel, and never dignified. We have learned that long ago.’
Again, a quiet murmur of approval.
‘I ask only for peace,’ John Zebedee said. His left hand massaged his brown, balding scalp. ‘Peace must be maintained.’
At this, Toro nodded. ‘Peace must be maintained,’ he said.
‘There can be no sori seremoni,’ John Zebedee said. ‘The boy is young. His guilt is strong. But it cannot change what has happened. Olgeta we oli i stap long skae—’ those who live in the sky, he said ‘— have been offended. My daughter—’ here he stopped, and his shoulders seemed to shake before he recovered ‘—my daughter is gone. The … the plane she and Kal built, it too is gone.’ He spread out his arms. ‘Only the boy remains.’
‘Yes,’ the chief murmured.
‘The boy must go,’ John Zebedee said, and he seemed to shrink into himself. ‘Mi sori tumas.’ I am very sorry.
And he was. Kal was a nice young boy. But he could no longer stay. At that time, by reasons fortuitous or otherwise, the island of Tanna passed close by to Epi. It was … it could be said it was not kastom, that island, yet this was, after all, a new world, with new kastom alongside the old. In any case, the majority of people felt that whatever the Tannese did, it was, in the last count, up to the Tannese themselves.
Tanna was a floating island.
Where Man Efate and Man Epi and all the rest had merely found themselves suitable islands, hardy underwater mountains with their peaks peaking—as it were—out of the sea, the Tannese had preferred to construct their own abode. The story of the making of New Tanna—a story spanning just under a century, several violent deaths, at least one famous love affair, and recorded in several well-known songs and over one hundred sand-drawings, several of which were still secret and known only to the Tannese themselves—that story belongs elsewhere. Suffice it to say that, at the time of Vira’s death and the breaking of the kite—the time, therefore, of Kal’s exile from Epi—the island of Tanna passed close by, for reasons fortuitous or otherwise.
In the nakamal, Kal’s grandfather, his face twisted in sorrow, was the first to propose it. ‘I have, as you know,’ he said, his voice wavering only slightly, ‘relatives on Tanna.’
Several people murmured at this. The cloud cover that had hung over the island for over three days broke at that moment, and the moon’s white light shone briefly through. ‘My uncle’s second cousin, on my mother’s side, has married a Tannese man. I will speak to her family. Kal has offended olgeta blong skae—and Man Tanna, I think, understand their ways better than we do. They will take him.’ He stopped, looked at the silent, assembled people. His people. He was a grandfather, but he was Man Epi also, and had to do what was right for his people first. ‘Peace,’ he said heavily, ‘will be maintained.’
‘Peace will be maintained,’ his people replied.
Kal’s future, then, and his journey to the tower (neither of which he knew anything of at that moment), were decided then, in the nakamal, the way matters had been for thousands of years, born out of a desire for peace. Kal, at that moment, was lying in bed. He had cried when Vira fell from the sky. But he did not cry now. Remorse mixed inside him with anger, and overwhelming both was simple fear. He did not know what would happen to him. He lay in bed and looked out of the window into the dark, cloudy sky.
For a second moment, the cloud cover broke, and the moon shone through.
It no longer rained. After three days of heavy downpour, a thick ropy rain that brought with it nightmares and unease, the rain had stopped. The air was still, unmoving, suffused with a dampening humidity that brought, on contact with one’s skin, the remnants of bad dreams.
Kal’s dreams had been particularly bad.
In his dreams, he was falling. The fall seemed never to end, as if he were falling from a great, great height—as if he were from the moon, and falling down towards an impossibly-distant ocean. He fell not like rain, but like a bird. In the dreams, he had wings instead of arms, or what felt like wings, yet he could not manoeuvre, could not rise or ride the air that came rushing at him. He fell, then, perhaps, like a wounded bird: unable to slow down, unable to straighten, aware only of its final, inevitable destination and the consequences of meeting it.
Behind him rose a black tower.
There was a path to his fall. It was not a random selection of the images of falling. It began in a black emptiness that was full of stars. As he descended, the black tower rose behind him, glimpsed as he twisted around, solid and smooth and impregnable. He fell from the place of stars and into blue, into the sky, and down, always down, yet so high that even the clouds—even olgeta blong skae!—were below him.
In his dreams, he fell. The fall lasted for as long as he was asleep. The tower was always there, behind him, enormous and guarded.
Always, as he fell, Kal screamed.