The Cursed Ruins of Pōmaikaʻi

Chapter 10

The Teo and the Pele were victorious. But it was not a glorious victory.

Scores of warriors lay on the field, either dead or wounded, joined by scores of fallen Exiles, whose only crimes—aside from the actual criminals—were following a madman who wanted power.

They would sing of this victory, but only how they stopped the madman from escaping the island and doing possible irreversible damage to the outside world. They would mourn their dead and the dead of the Exiles. They did not deserve this treatment, after all the suffering they had to go through. Perhaps the Gods would show them the kindness they didn't get in life and let them live out eternity in the upper afterlife.

The battlefield was littered with bodies and the stench of death had already begun to settle in. Scavengers were drawn to this soon-to-be sacred location to pick on flesh of the dead, or at least the ones who were not picked up by Teo and Pele tribesmen immediately following the battle. The ones the scavengers did get to had to be reclaimed from the hungry scavengers so as they could receive the proper funerals and not suffer further humiliation as to being picked apart by these scavengers.

The exception, of course, being the poacher Phillip, whom everyone rightfully believed, even just looking at him, that he was a complete and utter bastard. He'd encroached and poached on nature, and so he must return to nature in the most humiliating way his dead body and soul could receive. No one bothered to chase away the buzzards that were already picking at him.

The clean-up took several hands of time to complete. The wounded were carried away first to be treated, both by the medicine men, and the palemen doctors, who came with the researchers. Some of them moaned in their death throes, others moaned because they were in pain. But they did let the medicine men and doctors tend to them, even though there were far more wounded than doctors.

The dead were simply picked up and placed on carts to be taken away for cremation or burying. They would get first-class funerals celebrating their lives.

Julie hadn't seen such a sad aftermath of a victory in her entire life. Most of the time, victories were celebratory occasions, with a lot of partying, cheering and taunting the opponent. Then again, most of the victories she had been a part of were sports victories. This wasn't sport, this is war. And NOBODY wins in a war, especially when nobody should have fought that war in the first place.

But she did also remember the term "pyrrhic victory", and it was pretty much agreeable that this may have been the case right here.

And Gina seemed to concur, what with the way she looked around at the remains of the carnage, shaking her head and watching one of the doctors tend to a wound Julie received without knowing it, and ignored because of the flowing adrenaline. "Wow," she said. "This is..."

"Hard," Julie replied.

The both of them had to acknowledge their middle-class Western privilege, in this sort of event. The closest people from say, Auckland or Palo Alto can get to this kind of brutal warfare is watching Gladiator or Black Hawk Down.

Or maybe they could just do what one of Julie's professors did and take them to the streets of certain Oakland neighborhoods where this kind of violence happens way too fucking often, only with guns and gang wars, not because of the spirit of some sorta-fascist-ish evil sorcerer manipulating the wretched of the island into following him.

She winced when the doctor sewed her up. "Take it easy, Julie!" said Gina.

"Sorry," Julie replied.

"I'm just glad things worked out," said Gina. A glance over to Manti, Kawa, Kame and Kainak kinda made that a little moot, and just looking at them she could tell they were pretty unhappy about what just happened.