‘Mautu will make sure it’s all right!’ she said. He shifted closer to her. ‘Go to sleep now,’ she whispered.

  They woke early but Mautu had left already. They ran to Barker’s house. He was gone too.

  It drizzled again all day. Everything smelled of mould and dampness. Even the sun refused to leave its bed of black cloud. While Peleiupu and Arona worked around their home and, in the afternoon, attended their mother’s classes, they waited anxiously for Mautu to appear out of the rain.

  Wet and grim-faced he came, bathed, conducted the lotu, ate quickly, and then disappeared into his side of the fale behind the curtain. Peleiupu went to ask if they were having an English lesson that night. She peeped through the gap in the curtain. He was sitting cross-legged, arms folded across his chest, eyes shut firmly, praying. In the gloom she saw a bright aura of sadness surrounding him like a second skin.

  When the other children were in their mosquito nets, Lalaga called her and Arona.

  ‘What happened yesterday?’ she asked them.

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Peleiupu, gazing straight into her mother’s face.

  ‘Arona?’ Lalaga demanded. Arona, who had been sitting with head bowed, glanced up at Peleiupu. ‘Arona?’ Lalaga repeated. He bowed his head again and picked at the edge of the mat. ‘Your father is in pain. I must know why.’

  ‘Perhaps it was something that happened today,’ Peleiupu offered.

  ‘I am waiting!’ Lalaga said. ‘Arona, do you love your father?’ Arona nodded. ‘Then you must tell me.’

  Arona looked at Peleiupu, who nodded once, finally.

  ‘A skull,’ he said, without looking at Lalaga.

  ‘We found a skull and his bones,’ said Peleiupu.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Way upriver. Arona found it with his shovel. Barker dug it up. Then the rest of the skeleton,’ said Peleiupu.

  ‘Mautu did not want Barker to dig it up,’ Arona continued.

  ‘Mautu was angry when Barker refused to stop, and he brought us back. Barker continued to dig for more bones.’

  ‘You must not tell anyone else about it,’ Lalaga instructed them. They nodded. She reached over and caressed Arona’s shoulder. ‘There is no need to be afraid.’

  Later when Lalaga went to bed she knew that Mautu was only pretending to be asleep but she decided not to question him. She lay down beside him.

  In her dreams she heard his desperate cry for help. Waking, she found him sitting beside her in the darkness. His muted weeping was an incessant low stirring into which she reached, found his face, and held it between her warm hands. His tears washed over the backs of her hands.

  ‘They are here all around me,’ he murmured. ‘They filled my sleep with their cries, their awful dying!’ He paused and, when she took her hands away, wiped his face with a corner of his sleeping sheet. ‘We searched for gold and found them!’

  ‘So there is more than one?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. We spent all day yesterday clearing the ground and finding them clinging even to the roots of the trees as if they hadn’t wanted to die.’

  ‘An old burial place?’

  ‘If only it was that, I would be less disturbed. They were all killed — slaughtered!’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ She was satisfied that his gruesome discovery had shocked him back to the realities she knew, and she hoped he would remain there.

  ‘There are more to be dug up. Once we have done that, we will bring them down and give them a Christian burial.’

  ‘We must tell our village and they will help you.’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘When we have found all of them I will tell Satoa and we will all go up and bring them down and bury them beside the church.’

  ‘How did they die?’

  ‘Barker says it was a battle. Up at the top of the nearest hill under the vegetation we have found the remnants of an ancient village. Barker thinks the village was invaded, conquered, burnt to the ground, and most of its inhabitants killed and left there.’

  ‘But is there a story of that in Satoa’s history?’

  ‘Not that I know of. It must have happened a long time ago and been quickly forgotten. Or that unfortunate village was destroyed even before the original Satoa village was founded.’

  At dawn when Peleiupu and Arona got up to go with Mautu, Lalaga told them not to. They obeyed when they saw the weight of pain on their father.

  Every day for a week Barker and Mautu went up into the hills. Mautu’s hair was suddenly freckled with grey, his physical fragility became more pronounced, his conversations were no longer laced with that spark, he moved like a creature caught in a self-destructive dream. Conscious of the sadness they saw each day in their pastor, the Satoans stopped joking about the expeditions. Their pastor (misled by that insane papalagi) in his incredible search for gold had discovered a new pain, and they were waiting for him to reveal it to them.

  The following week Barker and Mautu went up twice. The second time, on a Thursday, Mautu insisted that Peleiupu and Arona accompany him.

  ‘But why?’ Lalaga asked.

  ‘Arona found the first person. Peleiupu was there too. Now they must come and see the rest of them before we bring them down.’

  ‘I still don’t understand!’ she insisted. ‘Our children are still too young to be near — near those things!’

  ‘They must learn what death is; they must see the people. They will not frighten them.’

  Again she couldn’t comprehend him.

  The area where they had found the first skeleton was now a fairly large clearing, basking in bright sunlight. All the undergrowth had been cleared away; some of the trees had been cut down, chopped into short pieces, and stacked by the water. In the clearing, among the boulders, was a scatter of shallow graves, about sixty in all. In them, lying in grotesque postures, were the skeletons. Many of them were badly broken, shattered, scattered; many skulls and bones were missing; some of the graves were occupied by more than one skeleton.

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ Mautu encouraged Peleiupu and Arona. ‘After being with them for this length of time, I know they won’t harm us.’ He walked around the graves. ‘Come and see them.’

  Barker, who was standing back, called in Samoan, ‘Go, they only harmless bones!’ Peleiupu saw her father wince at Barker’s remark. ‘I not know why your father tell me help dig up all that useless bones!’ Barker looked away when Mautu glared at him, sat down on a log, and started scraping the mud off his boots.

  ‘Come on,’ Mautu invited his children.

  Arona moved protectively against Peleiupu as they walked into the midst of the people. ‘It’s all right!’ she whispered, trying to control her own trembling. They both refused to look down at the skeletons, feeling as if they were at a great height and would tumble to their death if they looked down.

  ‘Look, no harm!’ Mautu called, holding up one of the skulls.

  Gold, Peleiupu heard Barker repeat in her head. Gold. Gold. Gold. She gazed down and the heap of bones in the grave in front of her looked golden in the sunlight. All around a golden luminosity was bursting up from the mouths of the graves, and inside her the bones transformed themselves into huge pua blossoms, and she was floating through a garden of white magic flowers.

  She broke from her delicious wandering when Arona said, ‘Mautu is right. They will not harm us.’

  ‘No, they are our friends,’ she said.

  After their inspection Mautu motioned to them to follow him. A narrow track, which Barker and Mautu had cut, led up the hill from the clearing and disappeared into the bush. The slope was steep and slippery and they had to hold on to nearby branches as they clambered up the hill. Disturbed by their noise, gnats, butterflies and other insects fluttered up from the undergrowth.

  The top of the hill was covered by huge trees matted together at their heads by creepers and lianas, which allowed little light to penetrate to the ground.

  ‘This is where they lived,’ Mautu said, pointing at the creeper-covered mounds that lay under the trees and spread out ahead into the vegetation. ‘Those were the paepae of their fale. That is all that is left. It was a fairly large village.’

  ‘But why did they live up here?’ asked Peleiupu.

  ‘It was always safer to build your village in a well-protected place. Up here the people could see who was coming. They built a palisade around their village. The river was their source of water.’

  ‘What was it called?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps an old person in Satoa can tell us.’ Their voices sounded unreal in the enclosed vegetation. ‘Are you still frightened?’ Mautu asked Arona, who shook his head and smiled. ‘You will remember them and their village for the rest of your lives, carrying them as part of your dead, in your blood.’

  Right then Barker broke noisily through the undergrowth and, confronting Mautu, his face red with exertion and sweat pouring off him, said in English, ‘And what, my pastor friend, are you going to do with all our mountain of bones and skulls?’

  ‘You never going to understand, eh?’ Mautu said in English.

  ‘No, he not understand!’ Peleiupu heard herself say in English. Surprised, she glanced up at Mautu, then at Barker, who were both looking at her in amazement because it was the first time she had ever spoken English to them.

  ‘Graveyards and dead villages produce wonderful surprises!’ Barker laughed.

  ‘Yes, the dead can open the minds of innocent children to wisdom,’ Mautu said in Samoan, and with pride.

  Later, as they made their way down, Arona asked Peleiupu what she had said in English. That Barker would never understand, she replied.

  ‘Understand what?’ he asked.

  ‘What Mautu told us about the dead and how important they are.’

  ‘I didn’t understand Mautu either,’ Arona sighed. ‘I’m too young!’

  ‘Someday you will understand,’ she consoled him, but immediately experienced a twinge of guilt for deliberately implying that she herself had understood.

  ‘I want … I want so much!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘So much what?’

  ‘Everything! To know everything!’

  ‘But no one can do that!’

  ‘Someday I will!’ At his determination she felt a more abundant love for him. ‘I want to be grown-up, now!’

  By the river, as they wandered once again among the graves, they experienced no fear, as though they had left it up on the hill in the village snared in the choking tentacles of the bush. Arona even stopped at one of the graves, sat at the edge and dangled his feet down until they were only a few inches above the skull. His feet looked like large fish-hooks seeking the mouth of the skull. Peleiupu sat down beside him and remembered how the graves, the bones, had burst with a golden light.

  That Friday and Saturday the young men of Mautu’s school dug a series of graves beside the church. Most of the men of Satoa, when they heard about it, joined the work. At the Sunday morning service Mautu described from the pulpit his expedition and what he and Barker had discovered. He asked that their village give ‘the People’ (his phrase) a Christian burial. The church buzzed with questions. During to’ona’i Mautu answered all the elders’ questions. None of them knew anything about the village on the hill.

  Sao, the ali’i of Satoa and Barker’s father-in-law, called a meeting of the matai at his fale on Monday morning. After weighty discussion concerning the burying of so many strangers in their village, they organised a party to go up to the hills with Mautu on Tuesday and bring down ‘the People’.

  The large party was led by Mautu and Sao, who wore ties and their white Sunday suits. All the other elders and their wives were in their Sunday best too. The untitled men, who were to carry ‘the People’, wore only black ie lavalava. No children were allowed to go.

  They reached the graves just before midday. Immediately Mautu conducted a service. A hymn was sung; he read from the Bible; then prayed. Standing at the perimeter of the clearing in their best clothes and caught in the bright stillness of the hills and mountains, they seemed incongruous, strangers visiting another village for the first time.

  After Mautu’s prayer the old men moved into the shade while the women worked in groups, oiling the bones with coconut oil and wrapping them in tapa cloth. No one spoke. No one was afraid.

  When all ‘the People’ were clothed in tapa the young men picked them up and, carrying them on their shoulders, followed Mautu and the elders down towards Satoa. Beside them the river ripped and swerved and danced and fingered its way towards the sea.

  Awaiting them around the graves beside the church were the rest of the Satoans.

  Again no one spoke. A hush lay over the village.

  The young men lined ‘the People’, eighty bundles, in a row below the church steps. Gradually, like a rising tide, the old women started the customary funeral wailing, and their sound was that of the morning sea. Many of the people wept. Peleiupu and Arona, who were standing beside Lalaga, cried too.

  His white suit dazzling the noonday sun, Mautu stood on the church steps. ‘Let us sing hymn 129: God be with us now in our sorrow!’ The powerful singing broke up to the crystal-clear sky and sent the heat retreating into the shade.

  ‘Lord, we gather here today to send to You people we never knew,’ prayed Mautu. As he prayed, Peleiupu saw thin lines of tears trickling down his cheeks, and she wept some more.

  Another hymn, then Mautu’s sermon. ‘The dignity of Satoa, from the youngest to the most noble, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of brothers and sisters who died before Christ’s message reached our shores. We never knew them but up in the wilderness they have been waiting for us to come and find them with love, to rescue them from the Darkness in which they were dwelling, to save their wandering souls and send them peacefully to God …’

  His words were a steady healing comfort in the heat. Once again he was their pastor with the spark, the fire, to make them believe. In his foolish but God-determined search for gold, he had lost the fire until he had discovered ‘the People’, who had brought him back to them. And many more of them wept.

  ‘… In one of the kingdoms of South America there lives to this day a creature called the Webbed Light. It has no body and yet it can become anything it wants. It lives in the air above the highest peak of the Andes and watches over all the creatures in the kingdom. Every year before the season of death, usually associated with winter when ice and snow kill everything, this wonderful creature pierces its throat and, assuming the shape of the eagle, flies over the barren land crying the cry of a newborn lamb. Its rich blood gushes from the wound in its throat and on entering the soil makes it strong enough to endure the winter and, in spring, burst forth again with new life. This creature, people of Satoa, is like our God who, with His blood, saves us every year, every minute of our lives, so that we can save others for our God, the souls of our sisters and brothers who have endured a winter in the wilderness … They died a pagan death in the days of Darkness. Today we mourn their deaths and, at the same time, celebrate their waking to God’s brilliant Light and Love …’

  In groups the men took ‘the People’ and lowered them into their graves. Then Mautu said, ‘Dust to dust, earth to earth,’ and they scattered the rich grains of earth over ‘the People’.

  They sang hymns while the men filled the graves.

  After everyone else had gone home, Peleiupu, Arona, Ruta and Naomi and a small group of friends lingered in the shade of the pua trees beside the graves.

  ‘They were killed, weren’t they?’ Ruta asked Arona, who looked at Peleiupu, who nodded.

  ‘In a war?’ Naomi asked. Peleiupu nodded again. The mounds of earth were drying quickly in the heat.

  ‘Their aitu will haunt our village!’ Naomi remarked.

  ‘No,’ said Peleiupu. ‘Because we have saved them, they will not harm us.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Ruta asked.

  ‘I am sure,’ Peleiupu replied, turning to go.

  As they followed Peleiupu, Arona said, ‘Barker didn’t come?’

  ‘No, he didn’t come,’ Peleiupu said.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Naomi.

  ‘You ask too many questions!’ she said.

  ‘Yes, she’s always asking about this and that and this and that!’ said Ruta.

  ‘So are you!’ Naomi accused her. An argument erupted. Peleiupu ran off, Arona followed her and their friends dispersed too, leaving Naomi and Ruta to the twitching heat and sun.

  From their fale, at mid-morning the next day, they observed Barker and Poto and their whole aiga arriving at the graveyard, with shovels and picks and baskets of river stones and pebbles. They started piling the stones and pebbles neatly onto the graves. Mautu went out to them.

  ‘So you believe in our bones, eh?’ Mautu asked Barker in English.

  ‘I never said that!’ Barker replied. Mautu chuckled. ‘I suppose being human beings like us they needed to be buried decently.’ He paused, then, turning and focusing his smile on Mautu, said, ‘And after all, we found them and are therefore equally responsible for them. You can say we are now their family!’ They laughed together for a long while, and the others were puzzled by it. ‘You can even say we struck gold!’ And their laughter continued to echo around the graves and ripple through the church and dance across the malae and dive mischievously into every Satoa home, bringing all the Satoans running, skipping, hobbling, scuttling to the graves and ‘their People’.

  While the old people and Mautu and Barker sat joking in the shade, everyone else built up the graves with the sleek black stones and pebbles that the young people had brought in baskets from the river.

  Mautu’s aiga and other nearby aiga made umu and cooked a delicious variety of food. When the work on the graves was finished, they invited everyone into Mautu’s home and ate heartily and laughed at Barker’s and Mautu’s exaggerated stories about their futile, mad, ridiculous prospecting for gold up-river, up-valley.

  It was the first time Barker had been in Mautu’s home.

  As the sun was setting, after Barker and the Satoans had left with their infectious laughter, Peleiupu cut some branches from the pua trees and started planting them between some of the graves. Arona observed her for a while, then dug up some shrubs and flowers from around their fale, took them and, without saying anything to Peleiupu, replanted them around the centre grave. Ruta and Naomi and a frisky gaggle of friends got more plants from the neighbouring area and planted them around some of the other graves. Yet more children came with more flowers, shrubs and plants.