Chapter Fourteen
Faithful
The feast along with the entertainment was in full swing. Literally!
At least forty or more beautiful island girls of my heritage were shaking their hips to a fast tempo beat in front of us. The girls were all topless and I hated each and every one of them!
Talk about plenty enough eye-candy to go around from a male’s perspective!
The dancers before us were an endless smorgasbord of tempting delights, fit to drive any man wild with desire. I was getting madder by the moment as the girls before me worked hard on gaining Colt’s attention solely upon them. Everyone of them wanted to lay with the big man fallen from the sky.
I had to refrain from screaming out, “Back Off!!! He’s mine!”
Out of not wanting to see Colt’s interest in the readily available nubile youth displayed before us I hadn’t looked at him since the dance had begun, but I had to know. I glanced toward Colt only to see that he was gone!
When had he left the feast?
Was he even now with an island girl in the bushes somewhere?
Jealously burned through me, but some measure of reasoning caused me to reject such a notion, but doubt lingered.
My gaze caught sight of the old chief who winked at me. He didn’t mean anything lascivious by it and in fact he was quite the dear. I scooted over to him and spoke in my native tongue loud enough in order to be heard over the drums, “My friend, he left?”
The old chief chuckled and shook his head, “Why is it that I who am old and have lost most of my sight can still see better that which is plain to see than those who are yet in their youth?”
I found myself blinking repeatedly. What was he getting at?
The old chief gestured out to the dancers and said, “Hard to turn down yes?”
Yes it was a tempting sight for a man to turn down and hide away from and yet that was what Colt had done apparently. Something else then occurred to me that rocked my framed consciousness of self to the core. All these beautiful women everywhere and I hadn’t even so much as had the notion of considering one as a lover. Instead I’d been bound up with jealously over the overtures being made to my man.
My man. A man who’d turned his back on temptation.
I took in the old chief’s smiling eyes once more as he held up two fingers and twisted them together before gesturing to me with them and saying, “Rare man! You be a fool not to be his, when he save himself for only you!”
The old chief then pointed off to the side at a path that led off into the jungle. I said my thanks and quickly got to my feet and left the clearing filled with smoking torches and the shifting hips of island girls keeping time to the rhythmic drum beats.
*****
Colt was standing with his face to the sea.
I stepped up beside him and took his hand. He glanced down at me somberly and I said, “Thank you for not staying to watch.”
He nodded and glanced back out to sea.
I looked around the beach only to see that it was clear and with the feast going on it wasn’t likely to be visited soon.
I wanted him. He was faithful to me and I would be his for life.
Gathering my courage I stepped in front of Colt ready to take the next and final step. I was nervous, but I was also beyond excited. Life had suddenly become exciting at the prospect of being with this man.
He wasn’t even looking at me!
Oh how I hated being short!
“Colt I……”
“Those lights?” Colt breathed out in a mystery of meaning.
Those lights?
“Colt I……”
“Get down!!!”
The next thing I knew I was thrown flat onto the sands of the beach with Colt over top of me. What was going on?
I was about to protest, when the ground shook beneath me repeatedly. Oh God, what was happening?
Trees were falling and the sand of the beach was flying up into the air everywhere. I couldn’t see anything and my ears echoed with the sound of explosions.
“It’s that cursed scroll! I should’ve left it!” Colt said in a self-deprecating monologue as he screamed out his fury directly into my ear, but despite comprehension of his words I was completely in the dark as to what was going on.
“What’s going on Colt?” I screamed.
“It’s that bloody scroll! I think they’re tracking it. We led them right to us!”
The blown up sand all around us cleared enough for me to see the blinking lights further out to sea. The Japanese Navy from a bygone war was firing on us from offshore. Why would they want to destroy something that could be of such great technological value?
Off to the east of the blinking lights there was a sudden flurry of more lights on the distant horizon. We were so dead!
Strangely though the heavy barrage upon the island abruptly ceased. Colt got up and helped me up to my feet. The entire horizon was now lit up with the blinking lights of what appeared to be two navies at war with each other.
“Are they firing on each other?” I asked unbelievably, because that was how it appeared.
Who could the other fleet be comprised of in this sunken world?
Colt and I looked at each other in sudden comprehension and said in unison, “No way!”
It couldn’t be, but the unexpected was to be expected down here.
Colt abruptly left my side to run down to the shore and into the surf. What on Earth was he up to?
I saw him pull the scroll out of his belt. He tied a rock off to it and then he chucked both the rock and the scroll out into the ocean an impressively far distance.
Colt came back to me then and grasping my shoulders tightly he roughly said, “You’ve never seen or heard of an old scroll, got it!!!”
I nodded numbly unsure of anything right now.
“Why Colt?”
He looked off for a moment and then back to me, “I studied the scroll some.”
“How could you do that it’s in some script that I’ve never seen before?”
“I’m not sure how, but the words turned to English and I could read it. I stopped within a few sentences though. It was bad! I mean bad in the dark evil variety kind of way!”
“What did it say?” I asked anxious to know.
“It was basically a treasure map for something old. Something better left buried going by what little I read. I stopped reading because it was like something was overcoming me the more I read the scroll. Like something within the scroll was compelling me to continue reading. It was almost hypnotic in the force that it exerted on me! When I realized how I was being drawn in I threw the scroll into the fire, but it wouldn’t burn! Instead it started flashing. Now that I think about it I think it was flashing out an alert beacon.”
“Why would it do that?”
“I guess because it couldn’t control me. I rejected it and now it’s looking for a new master. Look! They’re coming! Whatever you do don’t breathe a word about the scroll Kim!”
I nodded, as I watched the not so foreign looking boats plow into the sand of the beach. We were suddenly surrounded by American clothed Marines from a different century.
Feature wise the men had elements of mixed heritage, a testament as to how their forefathers must’ve intermarried with the indigenous Polynesian peoples that seemed to have arrived to this sunken world first. The Japanese were likely no different in how they had maintained their numbers.
These two warring factions were far removed from the instigations of a bygone war on the surface, but down here they were still apparently locked in a bitter proverbial war. Would the surprises of this place never end?
We were prodded at gunpoint down to the water where we were roughly pushed into boats, which were then shoved out into the surf.