Hawaii - James Michener [58]
Suddenly, and with dazzling clarity, Teroro saw an entirely new system of navigation based on Tane's gift, the fixed star, and he thought: "Life must be sweet indeed for sailors in these waters!" For he knew that northern sailors had what southerners did not: a star which could tell them, at a single glance, their latitude. "The heavens are fixed!" he cried to himself. "And I shall be free to move beneath them." He looked happily to the west where the Little Eyes blinked at him prior to dawn, and he whispered to them, "The new land you lead us to must be sweet indeed if it exists in such an ordered ocean beneath such an ordered sky."
And for the rest of the voyage, through the terrible days that lay ahead, Teroro alone, of all the canoe, knew no fear. He was sure. He was secure in his conviction that Tane would not have hung that fixed star where it was except for some high purpose, and he, Teroro, had divined that purpose. Up to now he had given no one cause to think that he merited his name, the Brain; certainly he could never be a knowledgeable priest like his uncle Tupuna, and that was a pity, for priests were needed. Nor had he wisdom in political counsels like his brother; but on this night he proved that he could do something that none of his companions could: he could look at the evidence planted in the universe and from it derive a new concept, and a greater thing than this no mind can accomplish. On what Teroro foresaw that night the navigation of the islands ahead would be built and their location in the ocean determined. In his joy of discovery Teroro wanted to sing, but he was not a poet.
Yet in his very moment of triumph, he experienced an emptiness that had been with him for many days and which apparently was not going to dissipate. When he finally grasped the significance of the fixed star, he wanted to discuss his concept with Marama, but she was absent and there was not much use talking about a thing like this with Tehani, for whereas Marama would have grasped the idea at once, beautiful little Tehani would have looked at the heavens and asked, "What star?" It was curious the way in which Manama's last cry persisted in Teroro's ears: "I am the canoe!" In a most strange way, she was, for she was the on-going spirit of the canoe; it was her grave face that Teroro often saw ahead of him on the waves, and when Wait-for-the-West-Wind in its swift flight overtook the vision in the waters, Marama smiled as the canoe swept past, and Teroro felt that all was well.
Into the arid heat of the doldrums they plunged. The sun beat upon them by day and the rainless stars mocked them at night. Now not even distant squalls passed with the tantalizing hope that rain might come. They knew it would not.
Teroro planned so that Mato and Pa, the two sturdiest paddlers, would not work at the same time; also, after an hour's stint in the right hull, which tore the muscles of the left shoulder, the paddlers would shift sides and wear out their right shoulders. At each shift six men would drop out and rest. But onward the canoe went, constantly.
From time to time the stronger women would take paddles, whereupon the shift was shortened to half an hour; while in the bottom of each hull the artisans and the slaves worked constantly bailing the water that seeped in through the calked cracks where the pieces of log which formed the hull had been tied together.
It was ironic, and a fact remarked by all, that in the storm when fresh water was plentiful, the sails did most of the work, whereas now, when men sweated and strained endlessly with the paddles, there was no water. The king ordered it to be doled out in ever-decreasing portions, so that the harder the men worked, the less they had to drink.
The women, with scarcely any water, suffered miserably, while the slaves were near death. The farmers had an especially cruel task. Tenderly they would hold open the mouth of a pig and drop water inside to keep the animal alive, whereas they needed the fluid more than