Read by Nicky Diss
They followed Tenabi through the rainforest for eight days before they glimpsed the first mountain. The flesh on their feet remained raw and their faces were striped with earth and perspiration. They carried as much as they could manage, their belongings trailing behind them like the tail-end of a runaway kite.
After the third day, the echo of foreign voices gave way to the song of the cicadae. In the newfound quiet, the children vocalised their losses without restraint. It would take time before they would learn why the adults did not look back.
They raised a village from the ground using what they could find. The children collected palm leaves and bamboo, which the huntsmen packed into branch huts elevated on high wooden posts. In the mornings, the people of the village seeded millet and rice, and in the evenings they smoked catfish and barb on fires as the sun fell over the river.
On the hundredth day, an elder from the Bandar clan came to Tenabi with a vision. Her mouth was a crimson tunnel in a face scrunched with age and endurance. She spoke of a creature with the head of a dragon and the hind of a snake. Its name was Makura and its jaws were filled with the blood of Kalimantan.
Tenabi fastened his eyes to the door as she spoke, his fingers flexing along his palm, as though brushing off sand. When the old woman finished speaking, he thanked her and sent her home, dismissing the vision as a nightmare with prongs made sharp by the potency of the betel nut.
*
That night, as Tenabi reached his hut, he saw a young girl by the banks of the river. She wandered close to the water, hovering along its edge as though in sleep. Tenabi scooped her up and carried her back to her mother. He spoke at length about the dangers of the water and returned home late, sinking into a deep sleep.
In the morning, he awoke to a great commotion. The girl was gone.
Tenabi summoned the group of young warriors and divided them in two. They searched the banks for many hours, going all day without food. Only when nightfall set in did Tenabi order his men to return to the village. A weight of silence met them there. Something had passed between the women in the absence of the men.
Tenabi’s wife stepped forward into the firelight and told Tenabi what she knew. The young girl was restless in sleep, restless in waking. A number of women had seen her walking the riverside at dusk. The girl’s mother was unable to accept the explanation offered by the actions of her daughter. The girl had run away.
Tenabi was uneasy. He watched the mother’s face, drawn taut with anxiety, and felt by osmosis the woman’s desperation. He did not sleep well that night. In his dream, the mouth of the old woman became a red-headed snake which coiled itself tightly around his neck. He choked himself awake, his wife rising from sleep beside him, startled.
His head was still rife with the pestilence of his nightmare, and his wife rose to fetch him some water to wash his face. When she returned, her urn was empty and she held something small in her left hand. She placed the object in his upturned palm.
It was a wooden doll, turned smooth to the touch by many years of handling. Its edges were fringed rust-red. He recognised it. It belonged to his niece. She had vanished in the night.
He knew, rather than feared, that there was something out there. The certainty of it sat in his stomach like a flat rock in a gravel bed. He convened the elders, sending the message that a hunter was preying on the children of the village.
As he walked past the bank of huts towards the meeting point he felt light-headed, like he was a shadow walking behind himself. From the corner of his eye, he saw the villagers huddled in threes and fours, staring fearfully at the river. Children sat shackled to the ankles of their parents by invisible tethers, as though the mothers worried that a lack of caution would invite the monster to pick their child over the others.
When Tenabi arrived, the council of the elders sat solemnly. Some nodded, some banged their walking sticks to acknowledge his presence. He told them everything. The girl by the river, the search, his niece. Two disappearances in two days. The children unsafe, the villagers worried. Through his words, the creature responsible grew into a beast of myth and legend, as permanent and mighty as the river itself.
It was Meratus, the head of the council, who reminded him that, though the river had taken many lives before, Tenabi would not speak of it in this way. The river was just a river. It did not know how to be anything else.
The council decided that the village must lay a trap for the creature. Many ideas were suggested: a wooden cage, a wall of spears, an adult put out to tempt it whilst all children were stowed away.
The old woman from the Bandar clan stood. Throughout the meeting, her eyes had not left Tenabi’s face.
“It must be a child,” she said, “and it must be your own.”
There was a globule of silence which dispersed around them. Tenabi put a question to the council and one by one they slowly raised their hands.
His subsequent nod was more of a shrug of the head. When he walked back to his wife, his feet felt cloven, like muddy hooves.
*
That afternoon, he sat down beside his eldest son and explained the plan. The boy had Tenabi’s jaw and he set it as he listened, steeling his mouth in a single expression of determination. He would do it, of course he would do it. His cousin was among its victims, his father was their leader, it was his duty. In the pauses, he forced himself to push his lips together, so they would not tremble.
When darkness fell, the boy sat on the banks of the Burak river. He thought of how his mother, unable to look him in the face, had combed his hair with a hundred strokes.
When the creature came, he heard rather than saw it. The chirps and vibrations of the insect chorus gave way to the movement of the water. At first a careless sloshing. He sat with his back to the rising shadow, his legs crossed and his head upright. The noise ratcheted up until it sounded like the roar of a waterfall, and the boy was unable to discern one droplet from another.
When he could bear it no longer, he swivelled his neck to behold the surface of the river. He squinted in disbelief at the creature ascending before him. Its head alone was the length of three men lain head to toe. It was neither dragon nor snake. Its nostrils were ridged and prominent and its eyes flat and fishlike, with slits at the centre that widened at the sight of him. In the moonlight it looked silver, but in days to come, the warriors would say it was a deep brown.
The last Tenabi’s son saw of Makura was its throat. Its nostrils flared and fired water at such a pace that the shots to his face and stomach left him in another consciousness.
Rage made men reckless. Tenabi commanded the warriors not to slay the creature on the riverbank. All afternoon the villagers had whittled the ironwood trees into the spears and axes of war. Now the warriors alternately brandished and clutched their weapons as they moved through the trees, following the creature’s descent down the river.It swam like a snake, propelling itself effortlessly as it clutched Tenabi’s son in its jaws. Tenabi could not meet the eyes of his men as they searched his face. He thought of the Gua Payau cave and the deer who went there to lick the salt-bearing rocks and find shelter.
After a time, the beast led them to a cavern perched on the banks of the Burak river. A muddy slope ran up to the mouth of the cave and Tenabi thought he could see silhouettes moving inside. As Makura ascended the entrance of its den, a guttural cry came from within. It sounded like murder and it sounded like joy.
Tenabi raised his spear and led the charge of Dayak warriors over the threshold. Three of the men brought with them sticks of fire and they went in first, setting alight the cave’s interior in a flare of brightness.
Tenabi’s son was sprawled on the floor of the cave next to a small creature unlike any the villagers had seen before. In the corner, Makura used its body to shield another beast almost as large and magnificent as itself.
Tenabi stepped forward and held up his hand. The warriors formed a semi-circle behind him. Something passed between the snake eyes of one and the almond eyes of the other. Then Tenabi raised his spear and plunged it into the creature’s side.
Its screech filled the cave and ricocheted off the walls. It flailed as it fell hard against the ground. Tenabi raised his hand again and beckoned the warriors forward.
The second creature sniffed its fallen mate and lowered its head as if to strike. The warriors raised their weapons and ran forward, thrusting and hollering as they brought the creature down.
Tenabi knelt at the side of his son, who was drifting awake. The boy opened his eyes and Tenabi cradled his head, helping him to sit up.
The warriors looked to the little creature. In the firelight, its soft yellow belly trembled as it cowered against the wall. Its scales were a kaleidoscope of colours, like the skin of a rainbow.
One of the warriors found a stack of skeletons in another chamber of the cave. He counted eight small skulls. The warriors called for no mercy. This dragon child would one day grow into Makura. The village would not be safe until it was dead.
Tenabi’s son rose to his knees and crawled over beside the dragon. Its neck was the width of a coconut palm and he put his arms around it, refusing to move despite entreaty. He said that both sides had made sacrifices and that Dayaks did not take the life of the guiltless in war. He said that this night was a promise and neither would now harm the other for as long as each survived.
The cave fell quiet, all eyes turning to Tenabi. As leader, he decreed that his son spoke the truth. The ancient tradition of headhunting would be upheld as a token of this agreement.
As his son sat with the little dragon, the carcasses of the great creatures were dragged outside and their heads removed and tethered. The rest of the bodies they gave to the river. Eight warriors were selected to carry the bones of the victims back to the village and ten more to haul the monsters' heads.
With a gentle squeeze, Tenabi’s son took his father’s hand and left the cave. Dawn was coming and the water on the Burak river was tinged pink in the early light. The warriors, their faces striped with earth and perspiration, started down the river, the heads of the two Makura trailing behind them. Tenabi paused, and raised his son up to the mountain. Kalimantan was still home.
(c) Lisa Beyt, 2015
Lisa Beyt is actually called Lisa Marie after the daughter of the legendary hip-shaker, Elvis. By day, she works with foster carers and young people. By night, she reads in the shower, cooks best without a recipe, wages Scrabble wars against her husband and starts many stories she rarely finishes.
Nicky Diss (left) trained at The Bridge TTC. Credits include: The Railway Children (Image Musical Theatre); Two (Dispense Theatre); Arthur of Camelot (Place Theatre, Bedford); Romeo and Juliet (Ashcroft Theatre); Caucasian Chalk Circle (The Space); A Midsummer Night's Dream, Sense and Sensibility, A
Christmas Carol and Cranford at Christmas (Chapterhouse Theatre Company).
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