when he saw a light coming over the water. His feet became as heavy as stone and he could no more move them than if he had been bewitched. He tried to remember the incantation his father had taught him when he was a child to protect him if he encountered lejaks or spirits. But his head was as empty as a pot with a hole in the bottom. The light came nearer and he heard the sound of a laden boat grating on the sand. Pak was relieved to see a man get out of the boat and come towards him with a light in his hand: it was at least nothing supernatural. It was just an ordinary lantern, a wick in the hollow of a bamboo stem, covered with a dried pisang leaf. Pak waited. At first he thought it was Sarda, but when he recognized who it was he began to feel afraid once more.
The man with the light was Bengek, the husky fisherman. He was a hideous man with a bad throat which prevented him speaking out loud, though he was not dumb. On the contrary he had a quick and bitter tongue. His mother was reputed to be a witch, with the power of turning herself into a lejak, and for that reason people avoided her son as far as possible. Yet no one dared to offend Bengek, for all feared him and his mother.
“Peace on your coming,” Pak therefore said with trembling lips, and Bengek stood still and shading the light with his hand peered into the darkness.
“Is that you, Pak?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “Are you not on your sawah yet, you industrious neighbor?” he asked again. Pak decided not to notice the sarcasm, but to behave as though this encounter at the edge of the sea in the last hour of the night was nothing out of the common.
“Where are you coming from?” he asked therefore—the usual question on meeting anybody.
“From my mother’s house,” Bengek replied.
“Were you not on the sea? I saw your light on the water,” Pak said.
“Why do you ask, then, you clever Pak?” Bengek said.
“I was told to keep watch over the ship,” Pak said. It sounded more imposing than he had meant it to. Bengek came close up to him and shone the light in his face.
“And have you kept good watch to see that no one stole the ship and went off with it in his sirih pouch?” he asked hoarsely. Pak stood his ground in the odor of garlic and felt fairly safe.
“Had you been to the Chinaman’s ship?” he asked.
The fisherman made no answer. He turned back to the shore, where the outline of his boat grew slowly more distinct. Soon he returned with a wet box on his head as though he were a woman. As he passed Pak he remarked casually, “And if I had been to the Chinaman’s boat, what would you do then?”
Pak caught him up, for he felt his liver grow hot with anger.
“I should denounce you to the punggawa,” he said breathlessly. “No, no, my brother, you would not do that,” Bengek replied. Pak felt for the knife in his girdle, and standing in the husky fisherman’s path he commanded, “Put the box down. I must see what is in it.” “Fish I have caught,” Bengek whispered in a sing-song. He put the box down at Pak’s feet contemptuously, as though to say: I dare you to open it. Pak did in fact feel that poisonous sea-serpents and things with prickles might bite his hands as soon as he groped under the lid. “Take up the box and follow me to the punggawa,” he said all the same, trying to speak in Krkek’s authoritative manner. Bengek caught sight of the knife in Pak’s hand and squatted down beside the box. “Come, brother, let us consider the matter,” he said. “I tell you it would be very mistaken if you denounced me to the punggawa. And you know why, too.”
“Why?” Pak asked with a tremor, for he knew the answer already. “Because it would do you and your family no good. If I choose, your cow will fall sick, your fields will dry up and your children die.”
Pak raised his hands in horror and shut his eyes. He knew how Bengek and his mother got power over people and money from them by such threats and how some who had not given way had suffered for it. He did not know what to say and he wished his father was there, for he had the wisdom of the evening of life.
“You have seen me come from the sea with a basketful of fish I have caught,” Bengek said. Pak considered this and said nothing. What were the Chinese foreigner and his miserable ship to him that he should put his family in peril?
“I have seen you come from the sea with a basket of fish you have caught,” he said obediently.
Bengek laughed and caught hold of his hand to pull him down to the ground beside him. “Wait a moment,” he said. “As you are my friend I’ll show you what I have caught in my net.”
Pak could not resist his curiosity. He crouched down and watched open-mouthed while the fisherman opened the case. Bengek lifted out three bundles of seaweed from which he slowly and carefully unwrapped three plates. Then he held his lantern close to them and let Pak see the treasure in all its splendor and beauty.
What he saw was white plates with a garland of roses on them, so life-like that you felt you could take hold of them. Pak put out his forefinger and touched the flowers timidly. The plate was cold and smooth and the roses were painted or rather, in some magic way, united with the white porcelain.
Pak had seen plates before. The Chinese, Njo Tok Suey, had two hanging on the wall of his house and it was said in the village that they were worth more ringits than could be counted a thousand times over on the fingers of one hand. Plates like these were let into the base of two shrines of gods in the Temple of the Sacred Wood. And the lord of Badung had had the back wall of the large balé, where he received important guests, adorned with them. Pak had heard of them first from Meru, and then he had himself gone with many other men from Taman Sari to Badung to marvel with open mouth and round eyes at this priceless treasure. But plates like these three had never been seen by anyone in Bali.
“Have you any more?” he asked incredulously as he looked into the box.
“No,” Bengek answered, and shut down the lid. But with that one fleeting glimpse Pak had seen the gleam of silver, as though of fishes’ scales or of many ringits. Bengek lifted the case on to his head and turned to go. “The plates,” Pak called out. The fisherman did not look round or pause.
“The plates are for you because you are such a good watchman. And the fish I caught are for me,” he said, and his hoarse whisper mingled with the sound of his bare feet on the sand.
Pak stayed crouching over the plates. My soul is wandering in a dream and sees things that are not real, he thought. Then—how long after he did not know—the kulkul beat the first hour of day. Daylight had come without his knowing. He cautiously put his hand out to the plates. He was wide awake and they were real. The birds sang and soon the road would be full of the people of Sanur. Pak snatched up his treasure in a panic and hid it within his dew-soaked kain and then took the nearest path that led to the rice-fields. It skirted the village and not a soul was to be seen. It seemed to him that a whole year had passed since he left his sawah the day before. He did not know yet what Bengek’s present portended. Squatting down at the edge of his sawah he took the plates carefully from his kain and breathed on them and polished them. The rising sun was reflected in them and the roses looked like real flowers. Only the raja possessed anything like it. His chest throbbed and thudded like a gong, as he turned the plates about in his hands. There were some marks on the back which he examined closely, straining his eyes and wrinkling his forehead. They had no resemblance to the letters in the lontar books he had learned to read. Probably they were characters of great magic power. Otherwise how could such delicate and fragile ware have come whole and unbroken to Bengek’s net, when a great ship like the Chinaman’s burst asunder and broke up? He did not know whether the powers of good or of evil dwelt in the plates.
