Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [46]
This was troubling, both for the traders’ minds, and their pockets.
‘Hey, Baccha, you fat tree-creeper!’ Elan made for the darkened doorway of the thatch and sapling-constructed hut rearing up on stilts from the river’s edge. Although Baccha had no children, his plump, huge-breasted wife should be in there at least, cooking some delicious repast for the weary traders.
The door was open. Elan stepped up to the threshold. And Baccha was there, emerging from the darkness of the hut. Or at least his huge black hand was there, reaching out towards them, clutching a stuffed bag of wood chips.
They couldn’t see the rest of him. This odd coyness on the part of their usually jovial and straightforward contact moved even the laconic Soley to speech.
‘Come out and play, Baccha. You want your money, come out and play.’
So Baccha came out to play.
All the preceding night and half the next morning, Wayun had sharpened his femur knife. He said nothing, concentrating on the long Kassowark bone like it was his world and nothing else mattered. He spoke to no-one. The other guerrillas in the temple left him alone, respecting his grief. Now and again his friends would glance at him, then resume playing cards, drinking what little whisky they had left. Some cleaned their old and barely useable rifles patiently. Others hunted. They were all waiting.
Waiting.
Wayun stood up. The others in the large central chamber turned at the abruptness of the movement.
Wayun looked at them, clutching the femur knife in his hands demonstratively. He was done with waiting. His eyes, small by Papul standards, moved to the ladder that led up through a hatch in the low ceiling. His intention was obvious.
He began walking towards the ladder even as one of his friends rose to intercept him.
‘No,’ he said simply, pre-empting his friend’s words. The guerrilla opened his mouth to speak again, and again Wayun said the one word.
‘No.’ His young face had matured more in one night than in all the seven months he had been living and fighting with the OPG. He was ready.
For seven months he had obeyed orders from the Krallik; attacked military nests, raided trading posts, sabotaged mining equipment in the mountains. Yes, even killed. But only Indoni.
He had never really understood what war meant until now. All the barriers had crashed. Naked whore war, bare to the bone, and he could stare right into her fleshless eye sockets and recognise the bitch for what she was.
This was evil. Unnatural. False.
This had to be cut out and burned.
This was cancer.
He put his foot on the first step of the ladder.
Baccha was wearing the best in cannibal chic: human jawbone necklace – very old, belonged to his grandfather – animal grease war-paint on his face, Babi tusks distorting his nostrils, leaves gummed around his penis. Baccha the jovial farmer and river station trader was gone. The past had taken him away.
The new Baccha felt like a man for the first time in his life.
A warrior.
Beside him, squatting on the floor of the hut, his wife: huge pendulous breasts swinging over her busy hands as she stripped their meal, naked but for a skirt of grass.
Baccha raised his elaborately carved wooden axe with its sharpened green quartz ‘blade’ – this a hand-down from his father – and brought it down hard a few times until the sinewy bits rolled away from the round object he was balancing in the dirt before him. Then, pleased with his work, he pushed the axe away, stood up and signalled to his wife to help him. She promptly positioned a flat oval-shaped stone with a hole in its centre on top of the object. Baccha lifted a spear down from the wall of the but and, measuring force and resistance, slammed the spear down repeatedly so the wickedly sharp flint head passed through the hole in the