A Dusky Messenger (Seeking Mana - Tome 1)

SEEKING MANA

Tome 1

A DUSKY MESSENGER

by William Hyllside

How did I come up with the idea of the Seeking Mana Series?

It really started at the end of 2012, when I was living in Fiji islands, where I was working in international cooperation while studying screenwriting with a Canadian school.

For the Christmas holiday, I went to the island of Taveuni. I was working on an old book project, musing my days between coffee, cigarettes, kava sessions and some kayaking and walking around during the day. I heard about the history of the island and its cross uphill, about the alliance with the Catholics and the Tongans in the second half of the 19th century.

When I came back home in Suva, I started looking for more information on these events. Time passed and one research led to another, hopping from site to site, from book to book, discovering the joys of Google Books and all the old digitised newspapers and copyright-free journals and essays and novels.

With time, I realised the Indian presence in the Fiji islands was anterior to the blackbirding colonial era, when the British had Indian indentured workers come to sweat on the fields in the 1870s. I discovered that many Indians were manning the western ships that crossed the South Pacific in the late 18th and early 19th century, especially aboard British East India Company vessels. One of these 'early Indians' particularly drew my attention, a man known as 'Lascar Joe', cited by Peter Dillon in his tales of the 1813 crisis in Vanua Levu over sandalwood and later on in the 1820s, when looking for the wreckage of the La Pérouse’s expedition.

It was 2013. Exactly two centuries after that crucial event in Vanua Levu. The account written by Peter Dillon in Calcutta Gazette was significantly different from the first one published in the Sydney Gazette. This construction of history, with these two versions of the same event, led me to seek out other sources of information, to compare and get closer to what might have really happened. I started to notice that the authors of many a source could not be trusted so much, and I realised the sources always came from white men... leaving out or giving few credit to women and non-western people.

I decided I had to pour in fiction through characters in order to be truer to History, as weird as it may sound. First, I had had the idea to write the sole story of this Indian lascar... but I needed to do more research in order to be as accurate as possible. So I kept researching and researching... always keeping in mind that crucial event in 1813 as a central point of attention, trying to see how the fates of so many different people could converge through time, space, historical events and emotion.

Eventually, after about 3 years of research, on and off, I started to focus entirely on the literary project and finished the preparatory work and main research so that I could start to write the story down, as I was living in Ecuador, South America, after the end of a teaching job.

So here we are! In the Seeking Mana Series, we find characters I have been following since the start, such as Ganesh (Lascar Joe), Peter Dillon, Kalle Svensson (Charles Savage) or Seoifaa (Saoo), as well as other characters out of historical sources, my imagination, or a mix of it. As for the events, most of what happens in the Series is clearly documented. I just wanted to make it all come alive for you all to enjoy.

I hope you will get to share my addiction for History through these novels.

- William Hyllside

Quito, Ecuador, 25 February 2016

This story is based on historical facts, lies and silences...

SEEKING MANA

Episode 01

THE RED COMET

PROLOGUE

The silence was perfect.

Back then.

The year 1800 was yet to come. It would do so less than a year after. Of course, he didn't know anything about that. He had no calendar but his own eyes and ears.

Far away from the world unknown to that island lost in the middle of the southern ocean, up in the sacred mountain ranges of the north, near the entrance of an obscure cave, a dark and ageless man was seated on a rock, crosslegged, his head covered by a white turban, his groin concealed by a white skirt. The snakish skin of his chest was free from clothes, offered to the rays of the fierce sun.

An eerie wind started to blow from the west.

Uto frowned as the breeze grew stronger and stronger amidst the branches of the trees nearby. He eventually stood up, irritated by the noise provoked by the phenomenon. He glanced backward at the entrance of the cave, increasingly worried. He turned around repeatedly, sweeping the place for a sign that would reveal the nature of what was really happening.

Yet the wind kept on climbing on its strength and the trunks of the trees started to dance. The mockery was becoming unbearable as the dancing joined the profane whistling. Pressure was building up in his head, but he knew it had nothing to do with the turbulences of the sky. The pressure became so hard that he had to close his deep dark eyes.

… all was black and silent and good.

Until the timid appearance of a light, a red light, that was growing and growing and growing. Approaching. A red comet.

A comet that would try and destroy their world.

A comet that would oppose the king of silence, sleeping in its cave.

All was red and raging and chaos …

Uto blinked. He was still sweating from the vision. He found himself clueless about what was expected of him. Yet he knew he had to act. He moved toward the trees and grabbed a branch fallen to the ground, still covered with its leaves. He balanced its weight in the palm of his hand, musing over the next step.

Uto sighed. He knew what he ought to do to get answers. He would enter the cave and ask 'Ndengei's guidance.

As he was about to disappear into the cave, he felt there was something more to see, to understand, and so he closed his eyes once more, and he let the images come.

… he was flying.

Up in the sky above the world. Above everything. Seeing all. And the first thing he would see was the roof of the whole world, far away from his island, but he knew what it was at the first glimpse.

Imprisoned in their eternal ice, the white peaks loomed over lands extending in all directions for distances his mind could barely grasp. Instinctively, he flew southward, where the mountain skirts gave way to vast valleys of what seemed to be the main crossroad of mankind.

He was following a river, swelling so much it would look like a sea, flowing down the lands until it would jump into the ocean and finally reunite with its waters. Along the way, people gathered. Many people. From many years, seemingly. So many years it looked like people and river could not be inspected separately. The river was them and they were the river. It runned into their bodies and their food. They washed, drank and shat into the sacred waters of the Ganges, falling from the Himalayas down to the thriving Bay of Bengal.

He was still floating above the lands of the Indian subcontinent, gliding southward, still, and gradually losing altitude, curious about what the vision would let him see. He knew it wasn't a dream. It was as if the wind had taken him from the ground to throw him at the top of the world. The real world, and at the same moment.

In the middle of the immersed lands, thousands of men were moving like a herd of stupid animals. Rather, two herds intertwined like twigs in a parasited tree. He didn't have to fall much lower to understand what it was all about.

It was all about war.

The sun was high, shining on a bloody and hot day.

4 May 1799.

Uto was observing the fights as the Bristish and their allies were breaching Mysore's defenses, after having crossed the River Cauvery, water to their hips. But the vision didn't want him to see the fall of the fat sultan, killed by a bullet in the left cheek. He was circling above a white man.

Just like any other European man, about one hour before noon, George Wilson, a sandy-haired man of thirty-five, had drunk his whiskey and eaten his biscuit, thus knowing it had finally been the time. The columns had quickly formed, they had been ordered to fix bayonets, and they had begun to move forward.

George was leading a group of men of the Nizam of Hyderabad, who had eventually decided to side with them. The Nizam was the kind of ruler who would choose the winning side, and the British armies led by the General Arthur Wellesley seemed to be that side, not the assieged city of Tipu Sultan and his French allies, more concerned at that time by the movements along the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea.

George knew it. The fruit was ripe to be collected. And he was part of the gathering.

Uto wondered why he was made to follow that man. Yet he knew there had to be a reason, so he let his mind's wings flutter above the man's head.

George and his men were entering a small wood to confront some of their enemies. The red and the blue of their uniforms melted in the grey-green of the trees, while bullets whistled through the air.

Before he could understand anything, George realised his legs were giving up on him. He had been hit by something, and it didn't seem to be a fellow soldier that would have run into him. As a matter of facts, the men of Hyderabad were rushing away, as he fell to his knees. He was looking at them, getting smaller and smaller in his sight. He was engulfed by a conquering sadness right as he realised not one of them would come back to help him and fight by his side. Not even one would turn back just to check on him.

At that precise moment, George felt so much envious of that Frenchman, Monsieur Raymond, Misu Rama as they had called him in Hyderabad. Who was he to them, compared to such a shining figure of bravery, simplicity and compassion? Just a nobody to return to dust? What had he accomplished in all those years in India? He had risen to the position of pay master and had become a garrison store keeper in Vizagapatam … yes. It wasn't like he had improved the lives of the people or had done anything of importance for the crown, though.

They had given him the command of the men of Nizam not out of merit but for the last name he bore, the name of a legendary Commodore …

Pain was flowering into his brain.

George was slowly integrating the fact he had been shot – and that explained the blood gushing from his agonizing thigh. Alarmed by the situation, his eyes proceeded to a quick forecast of the peril. A dozen yards to his right, he spotted an enemy aiming a musket at him. Without a second thought, nor even any first one, he gathered his strength to raise his own weapon so that he may shoot first.

Click, his musket seemed to say in its own sarcastic way.

You bloody junk, he muttered just as the bullet hit him in the shoulder and something appeared in the corner of his eye.

It was a sabre. Hell no, he thought. And it was already being thrust into his belly, through his ribs. And he screamed and then he lost consciousness – or the other way around, he couldn't be sure.

When he came back to himself, George found out he was sitting against the trunk of a tree. The sunlight entered almost horizontally into the wood. Beside him, there was a man crouching. It took him some time to remember those features and to whom they belonged. It was the face of another European, just like him. Well, quite like him. He had that typical look of the Scottish people with freckles on his cheeks and auburn reflects in his brown hair. His eyes were of a penetrating wolf-like greyish blue.

Anthony …? Here? You should be with others.

The Scot gave him a melancholic smile. We've won. Tipu Sultan has fallen and his castle with him. That war is over. So I'm here.

Oh, is that so? George replied in a tired voice.

He coughed and realised he was not tired. He could see it too by the way his friend was staring at him. He was dying.

The usually thin lips of Anthony Burnside were totally sealed as he tried to say something without finding the right words. George sighed and let his mind wander into the past trails of his conscience. Something nice came up on which he lingered.

Yes, I know …

Anthony remained silent.

I guess it is a good time to ask you a favour, my friend.

I guess it is. What can I do?

George couldn't repress a quick and painful snort of amusement. It will sound silly to you.

Whatever, Anthony shrugged. Just say it and consider it done.

Uto blinked, frowned, and entered the dark cave.

CHAPTER 1

It was a poor village, lost in the woods, like an age away from the civilisation of Madras, even though the city was not so far. Between the golden beds of dried up rice paddies mushroomed a few family houses, made of brick and wood and sweat and prayers.

A woman, in her thirties, dressed in a sari having lost most of its colours with the passing of time, was seated on the floor, in a small kitchen. Durga was crashing vegetables for a meal to come with that kind of concentration characteristic of the people who need to focus in order to refrain old tears to flow back. She had those darkened eye sockets crowned by that gaze of barely controlled despair.

A dozen feet from