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When we have eaten, the chiefs of Atuona will come to Taaoa, and then you will fight! "'Make ready with dancing. Polish spears and gather stones for the slings. Koe, who is my man, will be obeyed while I am gone. I have spoken, said Tomefitu.
Seven valleys we counted, the distant ones mere faint shadows in the expanse of varied green, divided by the rocky headlands. To the right, as we faced the sea, was the point of Teaehoa jutting out into the great blue plain of the ocean, and landward we looked down on the Valley of Taaoa. This was the middle place, the scene of Tufetu's violent end.
A superstition that he was protected by the gods, combined with his strength and desperate courage, made him immune from vengeance by the islanders. These were incidents Le Brunnec knew from witnesses, but it was Many Pieces of Tattooing who told the ancestry of Great Night Moth. "He was one of the biggest men of these islands, and the strongest in Taaoa. He lived for a while in Hana-menu.
A week later I met her one evening at Otupoto, that dividing place between the valleys of Taaoa and Atuona, where Kahuiti and his fellow warriors had trapped the human meat. I had walked there to sit on the edge of the precipice and watch the sun set in the sea. She came on horseback from her home toward the village, to spend Sunday with the nuns.
Many children were adopted, and Taaoa men took women from Atuona, and Atuona men from here. Some of these women had two or three or five men. One husband was the father of her children in title and pride, though he might be no father at all. The others shared the mat with her at her will, but had no possession or happiness in the offspring.
Mouth of God and Malicious Gossip owned a popoi pit dug by his grandfather, who was eaten by the men of Taaoa, and near the house of Vaikehu, a descendant of the only Marquesan queen, there was a uuama tehito, or ancient hole, the origin of which was lost in the dimness of centuries.
Also the women of Atuona among us said that there should be peace, and the women of Taaoa who had taken as their own many children from Atuona. Therefore we begged the most high gods to excuse us." "Women had much power then," I said. Kahuiti chuckled. "The French god and the priests of the Farani have taken it from them," he commented. "I have known the day when women ruled.
"Then came Tomefitu from Vait-hua. He was chief of that valley, having been adopted by a woman of Vait-hua, but his father and his mother were of Taaoa. He had heard of the slaying of Beaten to Death, his kinsman, and he was hot in the bowels. Aue! The thunder of the heavens was as the voice of Tomefitu when angered. The earth groaned where he walked. He knew the Farani and their tricks.
We met them at the Stinking Springs, and there I killed Tufetu, uncle of Sliced and Distributed and Man Whose Entrails Were Roasted On A Stick. I pierced him through with my spear at a cocoanut-tree's length away. I was the best spear-thrower of Taaoa.
I slept eight hours, and when I awoke I saw, in the bright oblong of sunlight outside the open door, Kivi squeezing some of the root of evil for a hair of the hound that had bitten him. A journey to Taaoa; Kahuiti, the cannibal chief, and his story of an old war caused by an unfaithful woman.
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