Hawaii - James Michener [21]
King Tamatoa's thoughts were different. To be sure, he felt no regret or responsibility for the death of his tardy lookout and his one-time courtier. They had failed, and death was customarily the penalty for failure. Nor could he lament in any way the four foul corpses; slaves were born to be sacrificed, but he was personally ashamed that one of his slaves had been so weak as to cry out merely because her man was being taken to Oro. Tamatoa looked upon a reasonable number of sacrifices as the simplest way of obtaining a steady flow of mana, but he nevertheless felt considerable uneasiness over the fact that the total of sacrifices for any given convocation had now been established as nine, plus more perhaps according to the chances of the day. Bora Bora was not a large island. Its men were numbered, and if in the past they had maintained their freedom it was because of their superior courage. The king wondered: "Is this sudden conversion to Oro a device by the wise men of Havaiki whereby they can depopulate my island and thus accomplish by guile what they have always been unable to do by battle? He was deeply perplexed by a further haunting possibility: "Do you suppose the priests at Havaiki are teasing our High Priest along with promises of promotion only until such time as he has disposed of Teroro and me?" Then, for the first time he expressed in words his real perplexity: "It is very difficult to be king when the gods are changing."
Teroro saw things more simply. He was outraged. His thoughts were forthright and purposeful. The death of slaves he could condone, for that was the law of the world, on every island. But to execute for trivial reasons the best fighters on Bora Bora, merely to appease a new god, was obviously wrong and disastrous. "Look at the body of Terupe, lying there between the shark and the turtle! He was the best steersman I ever had. And the High Priest knew it. And Tapoa, useless beside the shark. He was wise and would have made a good counselor." Teroro was so furious that he did not trust himself to look either at his brother or at the High Priest, lest he uncover his thoughts. Instead, he contented himself with staring ahead at the impressive canoes and listening to the mournful drums, speaking of death. He thought: "Unless we settle the High Priest now, these drums are the requiem of Bora Bora." He saw clearly that the death of eight or ten more key warriors would lay the island open to assault. "I'll work out a plan," he swore to himself.
The minor priests looked with some satisfaction upon the sacrifices already consummated and those about to occur. With the advent of Oro, each priest had faced an inner struggle: "Shall I go over to the new god, or shall I remain faithful to Tane?" It was gratifying to know that one had chosen the winner. The priests acknowledged that there remained some dissidence in the island, but they had observed that after each convocation, adherence to Tane weakened. "Sacrifices help us attract the attention of Oro," they rationalized, "and then he sends us mana." Their conclusions were influenced perhaps by the fact that as priests they could be reasonably sure that they would not be sacrificed to obtain mana; their role in the upcoming ceremonies was simple and known: to hoist the sacrifices into place, to eat the sacrificial roast pig, also the boiled bananas, the baked taro and the salted fish. And when the convocation ended, they had to throw the human bodies into the sacred pit. There was an exhilaration about Oro that other gods did not have, and they felt gratified that they had been among the first to join his side.
The thirty rowers had only one thought: "Will it be I?"
And the three remaining slaves had no thoughts . . . none, that is, that would have been remotely comprehensible to the non-slaves in the canoe; for curiously, these three men, even though each had known from birth that he was doomed, had exactly the same fears, the same sick feeling beneath their hearts, and the same