Hawaii - James Michener [19]
Teroro, robed in yellow and wearing a warrior's helmet of feathers and shark's teeth, took his place in the prow, while the king, in precious yellow robes which covered his ankles, stood amidships. Silence resumed, and the High Priest announced that he was ready to accept the sacrifices.
Servants of Oro came forth with palm fronds which they spread in careful patterns, aft of the temple, and on these were laid strange gifts: a large fish from the lagoon, a shark caught at sea, a turtle taken on a special island, and a pig that had from birth been dedicated to Oro. These four dead sacrifices were not placed side by side, but about eighteen inches apart, and were promptly covered with additional palms.
Now, at the last moment, priests led forth the eight human sacrifices, and the people of Bora Bora, in awful silence, watched their neighbors depart for the last time. They saw the steersman who had been trapped praying to the old god Tane. And the man who had dozed in the temple. And the tardy lookout, and the sleepy young courtier. With grief the citizens watched them go. They were followed by four slaves, those unspeakable, untouchable things, known even in life as foul corpses.
As the intended victims were shoved aboard, the wife of one of the slaves, if a slave's woman could be so dignified, uttered a piercing scream. "Auwe! Auwe!" she lamented, reciting that heart-tearing word of the islands that has always been reserved for moments of supreme anguish.
Her outcry was such an appalling breach of discipline, especially on the part of a slave, that all in the canoe shivered with apprehension at such an evil omen. Teroro thought: "Now our island is truly disgraced. The king will surely be sacrificed." King Tamatoa thought: "The High Priest will have a right to be outraged. My brother is doomed." The thirty paddlers thought: "They may have to sacrifice two of us tomorrow."
The High Priest thought nothing. He was too astonished by this infraction of the tabu to do anything but point his staff at the offending woman, whereupon four priests grabbed her, rushed her to the lagoon, and pinioned her head under water. But with demonic strength the slave broke loose from their grasp, got her head free, and wailed prophetically: "Auwe! Auwe, Bora Bora!"
A priest struck her in the face with a rock, and when she staggered backward, two other priests leaped upon her and held her under the water until she died. But this did not compensate for the broken tabu, and the High Priest cried, "Whose woman was she?" Someone pointed to one of the slaves in the canoe, and the High Priest nodded slightly.
Swiftly, from the rear of the platform a burly priest, custodian of this job for many years, stepped forward and with a mighty swing of a knobbed war club crushed the skull of the unsuspecting slave. The body slumped, but before its blood could stain the canoe, it was pitched head-first into the lagoon, where the swimming priests gathered it up as a sacrifice for their local altar. Automatically, from the shore, a substitute slave was whisked aboard, and amid such disasters and ominous portents, Wait-for-the-West-Wind headed out to sea. This time, as if sharing the guilt that had settled upon the passengers, the canoe did not spring lightly toward the reef but moved reluctantly, so that by the time the stars had risen for Teroro to steer by, Wait-for-the-West-Wind had covered only a small portion of its gloomy journey to the temple of Oro on the island of Havaiki.
Toward dawn, when the constellation which astronomers in other parts of the world had long since named the Lion was rising in the east, the seers whose responsibility it was to determine such things, sagely agreed that the time was near. The High Priest was consulted, and he confirmed the fact that the red-tipped hour of dawn, sacred to Oro, was at hand. He nodded, and a huge, slack-headed drum was struck in slow rhythm, sending its cry far out to sea.
The rest of the world was silent. Even the lapping waves and birds who customarily