Diaspora

Hou woke to the cool touch of the freshening breeze. It was night again. The black ceiling above him was devoid of cloud cover, and the uncountable stars, like a pail of milk cast across the skies expanse, pulsed with a timeless light.

'No clouds again', he thought, 'not a good sign. No rain tonight.'

He climbed over Lui's sleeping form and raised the inadequate sail up the makeshift bamboo mast. How many days now since the last squall, he mused? How long since the main mast was torn away? Time had taken on a narcotic, deceptive quality. Minutes seemed to stretch into hours, while hours themselves could fleet by unnoticed in their hunger-induced delirium.

With the cross-boom fixed Hou moved carefully to the boat's stern and eased young Khai's slumbering body from the tiller, taking the bleached, wood helm himself. He craned his neck to stare at the stars until he could select a course-line to steer on through that night. His mind was lucid again, now, and he truly knew the stars had not shifted from their immutable positions. Yet in the thirsty and feverish delirium of that previous day he was convinced the gods had tricked him, and moved the stars to doom their journey toward freedom's embraces.

He smiled slightly and shook his head. No, not the stars, they hadn't moved. It was the squalls of these past weeks that had driven them far from their proposed course, and the shipping lanes of prayed salvation.

The breeze freshened further, and a slight chop patted the old wooden hull as the boat cut steadily across the dark waters. A young night yet, Hou estimated, the moon is not yet arisen, it being only two hours past the sunset.

He tipped a twenty litre jerry can standing by his leg. Still three-quarters full, Hou reckoned. Taking a plastic mug, he poured a small measure from the can with diligent care. His gnarled fingers of the right hand dipped their tips into the water then patted the moisture onto his parched lips. Lips swollen and cracked by exposure to sea-salt and tropical sun.

Diesel! The water still tasted of diesel fuel. A taint only, but the oily essence was there. Damn the last storm, it had swept their sealed water barrel overboard, and they had been forced to using the empty fuel cans to collect the infrequent and precious rain water to sustain their miserable lives. Hou sipped from the cup slowly. It tasted as though diesel fuel made half the contents of the fluid, but he drank nevertheless. The jerry cans had been flushed repeatedly with sea-water before they attempted to fill them with the rains. Yet still that evil taint remained. Perhaps that smell, that taste, would linger alike some haunting spectre even if the cans were flushed with boiling water a thousand times a thousand.

The sticky mucous in his throat eased and parted with the water's passage. He breathed deeply, then exhaled until his lungs were devoid of all carbon dioxide, then inhaled again. He hawked loudly, and spat over the boat's side.

Hou stared again at the star-ceiling and trimmed the tiller, then allowed his mind to ponder their predicament. Can it be ordained by Buddah that we shall die before our journey is complete? To flee Sa Oui, their village on Cambodia's southern coast, in the hope of freedom. To exchange an ideological prison there for another hopeless prison upon the South China Sea?

By now each of them had made his or her peace with the eternal spirit, and accepted the fact that Destiny's wheel had set them on a course of action from which there was neither deviation nor return. Either success or failure - life or death. A path without cross-roads, and only Fate could decide what would lie at that path's end.

As the harsh light of the day's sun would torture them, the light of salvation would burn dimmer in their brave hearts as the days lumbered slowly by. If only Mon had been spared, and not wounded by the soldier's bullet as they fled Sa Oui. Oh Buddha, why was Mon not spared? Is this Your test of tests? With Mon their voyage would have had at least some modicum of success. Mon was a master mariner, and knew all the nuances of the south sea. All of its islands, currents, tides, and winds. He knew each star by name: names that were given to them by navigators of the once-great Greek race. Hou knew the Greeks were once a famed sea-faring race, at a time when history was first recorded.

Yet Mon had died in agony. His wound gangrenous and stinking. Died before he could complete Hou's education in the rudimentary navigation of these waters. Captain Hou. Master Mariner Hou. Neither of these titles could he ever fulfil with competence or honour. He was a school teacher become peon. A teacher of elementary grades, hiding his education and training within the guise of a grubbing peasant to avoid persecution and death at the hands of Pol Pot's idealist, maniac army.

Now he was in command of this voyage into madness. A voyage aboard an inadequate vessel. A vessel so narrow-hulled that the only stability was provided by a single bamboo outrigger. A boat still overcrowded even though nine of it's original passengers were now dead, and committed to the sea's depths as a dubious grave.

Yes, the taboos and traditions of death and burial had been put aside. No provisions for cremation here. The women had wailed, but dehydrated bodies had been reluctant to part with the precious fluid of tears. Before this journey is completed, or draws to a premature conclusion, we will all consider those already gone as the fortunate among our ranks. They will have begun the cycle of rebirth once more, as we survive in our private agonies - hungry and thirsty, and praying for the harsh sun to set.

Hou checked the tiller's course then his mind was taken by a morbid muse once more. Was it the same sun he remembered from his youth? A warming sun that followed dawn and dissipated the mists that had settled in the valleys? The sun of splendid dusks? The sun of poet's minds and artist's eyes? No, this was a sun of malevolent spirits, set above them each day to chase away protective, comforting clouds. To blister the skin and sear the retina. To torture and taunt its victims trapped below, to languish upon a vast sea of no redemption.

Hopelessness and despair washed over his flagging spirit. Every day and night they fished, but their infrequent catches served no more than to tease the ravenous hunger that racked them all. Nine of them gone already, and still the boat was overcrowded. Thirteen left. Thirteen to share the sparse food and water. If Hou had any concept of Occidental superstitions, then that remaining number would have portrayed a significant omen. An omen holding little hope for the refugee boat and its apathetic cargo of emaciated bodies.

Hou slipped the jury line onto the tiller arm: to hold it steadily on course, then turned his attentions to the four lines trailing the boat. In turn he hauled each one to the stern and inspected it. Each was still complete and baited. Baited with the flesh of the last to die. The flesh of his own wife, Tran.

Yes, the austere taboos of death definitely took second place in their battle for survival upon this cruel sea of relentless struggles. Perhaps they would yet resort to the consuming of human flesh. I pray this will not be, Hou thought. Let us be sighted by some ship, or strike landfall before the abominable becomes reality. Let us not commit the ultimate sin and be stricken with the stigma of cannibalism. Pray let us die with some element of dignity remaining, lest this loathsome, unspeakable horror materialises into a bitter truth.

One of the women groaned in her sleep. It was Un, curled in a childish foetal position. Un who had such a fresh and clear complexion. Whose face was now lined and cracked by salt water blisters and the burn of the sun's ultra-violet rays. Dried to the texture of hung tobacco leaves, ready to drop away as dust if she ever smiled again, and disturb its surface with laughter lines.

Hou shifted his squatting position in the boat's stern to one of sitting: his knees drawn up beneath his whiskered chin. Was it three days or four since the last squall? Since they last feasted avidly on the torrential, albeit refreshing, rains. The pain had returned to his kidneys, and he tried to remember when he had last urinated. Yes, it was on that night: three or four days ago. Hou was no doctor, but he realised the dangers of kidney failure due the lack of a regular intake of fluids.

Little Choi had died from this, he reasoned quietly. Choi had passed blood in her urine before she died. A stinking black blood, the harbinger of imminent death accorded by their hopeless predicament. All the children were gone now, even after the adults sacrificing their water rations for them, and their meagre food too. Yet they had still died - victims of this 'other' sun. This sun sent from some dimension of perpetual wickedness, by demons who hungered for tortured souls to harvest. A filthy, inhuman act lacking compassion. A harvest ripening to the point of mental and spiritual putrefaction. A harvest of physical bodies blighted and diseased. No nourishment left, except for demons.

How had Mon lived his life upon this forbidding sea, Hou speculated? To willingly commit himself to such repeated privations. Perhaps to the ascetic and experienced mind of Mon the sea was a tolerable bed-partner. Understood and sharing. Taking yet giving. Yet Hou lack Mon's years of sea-faring experience, and knew nothing of how to draw sustenance from its empty vastness.

Oh, Mon, please let your spirit guide us now from its sanctuary of Nirvana. Reach out and touch us with celestial light. Hou shook his head to clear it of such dreams of divine salvation and looked up to the skies. The moon had risen now, its luminescence predominant over the glimmering of the stars. Over the suns of other worlds.

Hou gazed long at the lunar body. A quarter moon, a lazy moon. A moon that lay on her back. A moon that caught the rain. Perhaps a few nights more and she would grow and tip enough to empty her sweet, aqueous bounty upon the thirsting prisoners of the sea.
His drifting thoughts were returned to stark reality as one of the four trailing lines snapped taut and veered away to the port aft quarter of the boat. He grasped the line and kneeled tensely, bracing himself against the low bulwark as he slowly drew the thrashing filament line aboard.

The captive fish dived, tearing the green nylon through Hou's hands, until its escape was drawn short by the line's extremity. Hou shook Khai awake, and they jointly began to retrieve the line once more.

Time after time the fish would dive, the nylon line searing pain through their hands. And time upon time again they hauled the line and its hooked bounty back towards the stern of the boat.

At last the fish tired and gave up its mortal struggle, and resisted with spasmodic, apathetic bouts of defiance as they eagerly pulled it on board.

A gray snapper! Six kilos at least! The superb fish flapped slowly on the bilge boards, its upward gill beating a steady, silent tattoo to mark mortality's end.
"Quickly, wake the others," Hou instructed the teenage Khai. "Oy has some vinegar left in her possessions. We shall prepare the fish and eat."

The boat rocked in a dangerous and unstable manner as its sleeping passengers awoke and crawled to the stern to catch some glimpse of the fish Hou had managed to bring aboard. He ordered them all back to their allotted positions before they turned the boat over, then passed the large snapper forward for the women to prepare for their meal.
Their chatter was lively and enthusiastic concerning the forthcoming feast, for a veritable feast it would be to these people who had not eaten in days. Hou carefully passed around each person's water ration for that night, and once their parched throats were wetted, the conversation increased to a cacophony with the noise of their shrill language.

The fish was stripped of its flesh with such scrupulous care that only a filament-like skeleton remained. Vinegar was added, and a mash made of the whole affair in a large plastic bowl normally used to bail out the boat's leaking bilges. Again, as with all things on board, it was left to Hou's discretion to divide the bowl's contents equally among the passengers, before finally consuming his own equal portion with quiet gusto and relish.

A round of gaseous belches announced the meal's completion, and Hou sucked each finger of his eating hand before washing them in the moonlit water. Clouds had started to gather now, and lay in banks to what Hou speculated was the south-east. He trimmed the tiller until the steady breeze propelled their boat on that heading.

His companions settled again, the night air serene and cool. The sail flapped gently, and the chop of wavelets patted the boat's hull. Occasional belches and farts were emitted from the slumbering bodies lying on the deck boards forward. A sign that they replenished some of the nourishment stolen by the daytime's evil sun. Perhaps a sign they would all live that one day longer.

Hou was dozing at the helm when the wind dropped momentarily, then came from the north-east with added vigour. He eased the cross-beam around on its securing lines until the vessel tacked smoothly on its south-east course, a slight list causing the single outrigger to run just above the surface of the water.

Then unexpected cool rain fell in large drops, to beak up the moon's light on the dark waters until it resembled gold coins being cast onto a table of the blackest ebony. Hou turned his face upward, mouth opened wide, and drank of the fresh, unsalted elixir. The downpour held no taint of diesel fuel, and it plastered Hou's thin black hair to his head as it fell.

All his companions were awake again, and the women spread their one remaining small canvas sheets to gather the rain waters, funnelling the veritable torrent off one corner of the sheet into the now-opened jerry cans. Within minutes all the cans were filled to capacity, and the rains subsided and passed. The men folk were still busy frantically bailing out the bilges of the downpour's residue, before this most welcome deluge saw them sunk.
Their freeboard was dangerously low at the best of times, and bailing a day and night necessity when they first left Sa Oui with a full complement on board. Even now, with their reduced number, and too reduced weights, the bailing was scrupulously maintained when the waves were less than kind, and swept into the boat in an effort to swamp them.

"The gods smile on us tonight!" Hou called to his saturated friends. "First they send us our meal, and now the sweetest of all wines to quench our thirsts and bathe our tired bodies. Perhaps now our joss will change. Perhaps we shall reach the islands of Malaysia or the Philippines safely, and not perish here on the open sea!"

Indeed it was a fortuitous omen Hou mused as he took the tiller arm, and silently mouthed prayers to his God as the breeze pushed them on through the night.

As the false dawn cut the darkness with slim blades of orange light, Hou gazed intently at the cloud mass that lay to the south-east. Its shape changed slowly, the cloud tips circulating, but the main body remained in it's relative position.

It must be an island, he thought. Only land holds the cloud in that way.
Stratocumulus clouds: low and static. Perhaps hanging onto a mountain-top? He decided to keep his own counsel and remain silent until a more certain judgment could be made, until they drew closer.

Khai's stare eventually fell along the same line as Hou's, and he proclaimed loudly, "Land.! It is land! I can see the greens of the hills!"

A hubbub of excitement broke out amount the occupants of the boat, and Hou had to implore them: nay order them to sit still and not attempt to stand, lest the boat overturned. A single outrigger was no guarantee of stability in his opinion.

The morning's young hours passed, and the sun arose as a shy yellow orb behind the covering veil of white cirrus. By the time the land sighting had become a certain reality, Hou steered the boat on a direct course for the green-hilled mass that lay before them. The light breeze swept them across the calm, blue sea towards their goal, their prayed-for salvation.

Hou's rheumy eyes strained at the approaching green before them. It was an island, an island of lush greens. The topography was one of rolling contours and no doubt there would be ample fresh water plus an abundance of wild fruits growing. Alike the Promised Land that the Christian's holy book spoke of.

"A boat is coming out from the shore," Khai called from the bows, perched atop the vee-joint of the bulwarks with practiced poise and balance. "It moves fast – a boat with an engine!"

Hou strained his eyes again, and could eventually make out the shape of a narrow craft moving rapidly towards them.

As it drew closer they could hear the whining pitch of its high-speed diesel engine, propelling the sleek prahu through the water at a swift rate of knots. Then the engine's pitch slackened off as the boat closed and came alongside their own .

The crew of the prahu were stood upright, five men in all. They were a darker brown than his people, all sporting moustaches and dressed in camouflaged fatigue pants, and a variety of tee-shirts. Speaking a language of which he had no understanding. Not Malay, nor Indonesian. These he could recognise from his travels of years past. All were armed with automatic rifles, the American rifles: the M16's.

The women huddled together as the prahu's hull came alongside their own boat. Hou stood and spoke to them in his native Khymer, until common-sense told him to change to the international medium of English.

"We are Camboadians. We escape Cambodia for freedom. We have no weapons, no guns. We mean you no harm. Please we wish to come ashore on your island to rest."

The apparent leader of the prahu's crew stood amidships of their boat, ignoring Hou's statements, yet gazing intently over the ravaged hull and its contents and passengers. He turned to him men and spoke rapidly in a Sulu dialect that Hou could not comprehend.

"These are boat-people. Refugees from the Vietcong. Look at their women: dried-out old hags, shrivelled by the sun. They are of no use to us." His dark eyes fell on the engine cover set towards the boat's stern.
"Lito," he called to one of his crew. "Check to see what engine they have in this pitiful wreck."

A lithe Filipino stepped agilely across into the boat of Hou's group, and threw the engine cover aside.

"Yanmar diesel" he called back. "Looks to be in good condition. Probably they ran out of fuel and fell back to using the sail." Practiced hands and eyes ran over the power unit that had become redundant during their second week of the voyage.
The Moro leader spoke again in his rapid tongue, chambering a round into the breech of his assault rifle as he did so.

"Kill them all. We'll take the boat ashore and salvage its engine."

A wave of nauseous intuition swept over Hou, and he grabbed for the Moro's rifle as he turned. The sun's bright rays reflected off something to his left, and he caught sight of a bolo's blade rushing down. The razor-edged weapon mirrored the mid-morning light as it cut through the air and severed Hou's left hand at the wrist.

He howled and stared with disbelief at the blood-gushing stump of his arm, stark shock holding him erect on the deck, until the Moro's rifle butt connected with the side of his head. He plunged into the water, striking the outrigger of the boat as he fell, his consciousness victim to alternating spasms of bright lights and darkness.

The Moro pirates hacked with swift accuracy at their weak, emaciated prey. The bolos soon quieted the hysterical screams, and the surrounding sea turned a deep scarlet as the bodies were evicted overboard.

Returning to their prahu, the Sulu Muslim pirates looped a rope around the bow post of the refugee boat and sped away towards the shore: their meagre prize in tow.

The shrill engine sound of the departing prahu brought Hou back into the pained conscious reality of his predicament. He sobbed bitterly, and held the severed stump of his forearm against his chest, treading water with reluctant, tiring legs. His right arm moved in a pathetic, gestured motion of swimming. The water around him was stained red. Not only from his blood, but from that of his poor companions too. Their bodies bobbed in the wake of the departing prahu, quite close to his.

Are they all dead, he ventured to think? Surely not all of them? Not Khai? Then he saw the silver-gray profile cut through the gore-stained waters, a few meters from him, and one of the bodies was dragged beneath the surface without ceremony nor respect. More hideous shapes moved in: scimitar fins heralding the predatory jaws.

Hou screamed, and continued screaming - a final gesture of supplication to his wayward gods, perhaps. Then a tiger shark took him midriffs in its feeding frenzy. For Hou, the pain only lasted seconds, and wa