“My lord is very gracious,” Ula made answer, in a soft, low tone, pretending to caress him. And for some minutes more she continued to make much of him in the fulsome strain of Polynesian flattery.
At last the kava had clearly got into Tu-Kila-Kila’s head. Then Ula bent forward once more and again attacked him. “Now I know you will tell me,” she said, coaxingly, “why you make them Korong. As long as I live, I will never speak or hint of it to anybody anywhere. And if I do—why, the remedy is near. I am your meat—take me and eat me.”
Even cannibals are human; and at the touch of her soft hand, Tu-Kila-Kila gave way slowly. “I made them Korong,” he answered, in rather thick accents, “because it is less dangerous for me to make them so than to choose for the post from among our own islanders. Sooner or later, my day must come; but I can put it off best by making my enemies out of strangers who arrive upon our island, and not out of those of my own household. All Boupari men who have been initiated know the terrible secret—they know where lies the Death of Tu-Kila-Kila. The strangers who come to us from the sun or the sea do not know it; and therefore my life is safest with them. So I make them Korong whenever I can, to prolong my own days, and to guard my secret.”
“And the Death of Tu-Kila-Kila?” the woman whispered, very low, still soothing his arm with her hand and patting his cheek softly from time to time with a gentle, caressing motion. “Tell me where does that live? Who holds it in charge? Where is Tu-Kila-Kila’s great spirit laid by in safety? I know it is in the tree; but where and in what part of it?”
Tu-Kila-Kila drew back with a little cry of surprise. “You know it is in the tree!” he cried. “You know my soul is kept there! Why, Ula, who told you that? and you a woman! Bad medicine indeed! Some man has been blabbing what he learned in the mysteries. If this should reach the ears of the King of the Rain—” he paused mysteriously.
“What? What?” Ula cried, seizing his hand in hers, and pressing it hard to her bosom in her anxiety and eagerness. “Tell me the secret! Tell me!”
With a sudden sharp howl of darting pain, Tu-Kila-Kila withdrew his hand. She had squeezed the finger the parrot had bitten, and blood began once more to flow from it freely.
A wild impulse of revenge came over the savage. He caught her by the neck with his other hand, pressed her throat hard, till she was black in the face, kicked her several times with ferocious rage, and then flung her away from him to the other side of the hut with a fierce and untranslatable native imprecation.
Ula, shaken and hurt, darted away toward the door, with a face of abject terror. For every reason on earth she was intensely alarmed. Were it merely as a matter of purely earthly fear, she had ground enough for fright in having so roused the hasty anger of that powerful and implacable creature. He would kill her and eat her with far less compunction than an English farmer would kill and eat one of his own barnyard chickens. But besides that, it terrified her not a little in more mysterious ways to see the blood of a god falling upon the earth so freely. She knew not what awful results to herself and her race might follow from so terrible a desecration.
But, to her utter astonishment, the great god himself, mad with rage as he was, seemed none the less almost as profoundly frightened and surprised as she herself was. “What did you do that for?” he cried, now sufficiently recovered for thought and speech, wringing his hand with pain, and then popping his finger hastily into his mouth to ease it. “You are a clumsy thing. And you want to destroy me, too, with your foolish clumsiness.”