Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [25]
Head hunting was now a thing of the past in the region around the shanty town, and with the bravery of people like Father Tomas, the Kirowai region further along the south coast would be next to succumb to the benefits of civilisation and Christianity.
The hell of the south. The Kirowai. The most savage and unrepentant cannibals in Papul. He’s not coming back and you know it.
He poured himself a glass of red wine and sat back in his armchair. He could see the populace of Agat trudging past his window, the boards trembling beneath their myriad feet as they went about their daily callings. Men, women, children, all dressed in at least some items of Earth origin – T-shirts or trousers, shorts, skirts – even if they were a little ragged and torn. And all contributed by those indefatigable soldiers of God, Fathers Tomas and Pieter.
They had achieved oh so much in those thirty years. Father Pieter could afford to sit back and take it easy now, if only for five minutes. Relax, drink his wine, his report on Sabit completed, and ready for shipment to the Church on Earth.
But God, he felt alone.
He could see his reflection in the window across the room.
Grey hair, thinning at the top, grey beard. An earnest, strong face, but one lined with worry and loneliness. Life among the cannibals could do that to a man.
His reflection was obscured. A figure was leaning against the window. A bulky figure, the head obscured by something.
The glass abruptly flew inwards, scattering across the floorboards. Father Pieter was scrambling up from his armchair as the figure groped its way through the shattered window, but the shock of what he saw pushed the missionary back in his seat.
The man was wearing the hemp tunic from the Agat museum, although now it was smattered with blood. The head-piece masked the features, alien and horrible with its gaping circle of a mouth and pierced mini-shields sewn over the eye holes. Kassowark feathers nodded from the pointed apex of the hemp hood. Around the neck, the figure wore a human jawbone necklace, dirty and stained with age.
The figure was naked below the waist-length body-piece, and in the right hand, a stone axe, also plundered from the museum, like the necklace and the tunic. In the left, a severed head swung by its hair, the neck oozing blood that pattered onto the boards. The figure was silent, apart from its husky breathing.
Pieter tried to form words in his throat but all that he could produce was a frog noise. He tried again, while the figure waited for him to grope his way through this nightmare.
The missionary could see the man’s white teeth behind the mouth piece, and a glimpse of bird-mad eyes behind the pierced tiny shields, but nothing else.
‘What... what do you want?’ he finally managed, fear locking him in his seat. He felt gripped by the knowledge that he was going to die, and felt that it was all so meaningless and inexplicable, and of course, oh so horrible. To die like this. To die at the hands of the godless, when he had lived with them for thirty years, matured as they matured, suffered with them, felt their pain, their joy, their...
It was all so horrible to die like this.
The head was flung at him. It struck the arm of his chair and rolled at his feet. Pieter gaped at it speechlessly. He recognized the man (the man? the head!): an Indoni trader whose name escaped him. The figure was moving again, approaching Pieter who pushed himself back in his chair, still semi-paralysed by shock and fear.
‘We are free,’ the figure whispered and stopped again, no more than three yards away from the missionary. And now Father Pieter was reeling from more shock, because he knew the voice, knew the man to whom it belonged, and that was even more inexplicable, even more godless, because it belonged to a man Pieter trusted, respected, loved.
‘Julius?’
His voice was small, like a child’s.
This could not be.
This could not...
‘Free to kill. Free to regain what we