With banging and with horn blasts and whooping and screams, the beaters came on, the ones at the rear leaping up from the grass, which was shoulder high, and blowing depraved notes on those horns of green and russet metal. Shots were fired in the air, maybe with my own scope-sight H and H Magnum. And at the front the spears were stitching and jabbing in disorder.
“Did you see that, Mr. Henderson—a mane?” Dahfu leaned forward on the pole, holding the rope, and the rock weights banged together over his head. I couldn’t bear to see him balanced there on a mere kite stick, with that fringe of stones clattering and wheeling inches above him on the circular contraption. Any one of them might have stunned him.
“King, I can’t stand this. Be careful, for Christ’s sake. This is no machine to horse around with.” It was enough, I told myself, that this noble man had to risk his life on that primitive invention; he didn’t have to make the thing more dangerous than it was. However, there may have been no safe way to do it. And then he did look very practiced as he balanced on the narrow shaft. The rock weights circled with spasmodic power at the king’s pull. This intricate clumsy rig clattered around and around like a merry-go-round, and the netted shadow wheeled on the ground.
For the count of about twenty heartbeats I only partly knew where I was or what was happening. Mainly I kept a fixed watch on the king, ready to hurl myself down if he should fall. Then, at the very doors of consciousness, there was a snarl and I looked down from this straw perch—I was on my knees—into the big, angry, hair-framed face of the lion. It was all wrinkled, contracted; within those wrinkles was the darkness of murder. The lips were drawn away from the gums, and the breath of the animal came over me, hot as oblivion, raw as blood. I started to speak aloud. I said, “Oh my God, whatever You think of me, let me not fall under this butcher shop. Take care of the king. Show him Thy mercy.” And to this, as a rider, the thought added itself that this was all mankind needed, to be conditioned into the image of a ferocious animal like the one below. I then tried to tell myself because of the clearness of those enraged eyes that only visions ever got to be so hyperactual. But it was no vision. The snarling of this animal was indeed the voice of death. And I thought how I had boasted to my dear Lily how I loved reality. “I love it more than you do,” I had said. But oh, unreality! Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled but eternal life. But now I was blasted away from this practice by the throat of the lion. His voice was like a blow at the back of my head.
The barred door had dropped. Small creatures were still escaping through the gaps in streaks of fur, springing and writhing, frantically coiling. The lion rushed under us and threw his weight against these bars. Was he Gmilo? I had been told that Gmilo’s ears had been marked as a cub, before he was released by the Bunam. But of course you had to catch the animal before you could look at his ears. This might well be Gmilo. Behind the barrier the men prodded him with the spears while he fought at the shafts and tried to catch them in his jaws. They were too deft for him. In the front rank forty or fifty spear points feinted and worked toward him, while from the back there flew stones, at which the animal shook his huge face with the yellow corded hair which made his fore-quarters so huge. His small belly was fringed, and also his forelegs, like a plainsman’s buckskins. Compared with this creature Atti was no bigger than a lynx.
Balancing on the pole in his slippers, Dahfu released one turn of the rope from his upper arm; the net bucked, and the motion and the clacking of the stones caught the lion’s eye. The beaters screamed up at Dahfu, “Yenitu lebah!” Ignoring them, he held fast to the line and turned around the rim of the net, which was now level with his eyes. Stone battered stone as the contraption spun around; the lion rose on his hind legs and threw a blow at these weights. Foremost among the beaters was the white-painted Bunam’s man, who darted in and knocked the animal on the cheek with a spear butt. From top to bottom this fellow was clad in his dirty white, like kid leather, his hair covered with the chalky paste. I now felt the weight of the lion against the posts that held up the platform. They were no thicker than stilts and when he hit them they vibrated. I thought the structure was going to crash, and I clutched the floor, for I expected that I might be carried down like a water tower when a freight train jumps the tracks and crashes it to splinters, with a ton of water gushing in the air. Under Dahfu’s feet the pole swayed, but he rode out the shock with rope and net.
“King, for God’s sake!” I wanted to cry. “What have we got into?”
Again a thick flock of stones flew forward. Some struck the hopo wall but others found the animal and drove him under the circling weights of that cursed net of vines. God curse all vines and creepers! The king began to sway out as he pushed and maneuvered this bell of knots and stones.
I was freed for one moment from my dumbness. My voice returned and I said to him, “King, take it easy. Mind what you’re doing.” Then a globe arose in my throat, about the size of a darning egg.
That I could see was almost the only proof I had that life continued. For a time all else was cut off.
The lion, getting up on his back legs, struck again at the dipping net. It was now within reach and he caught his claws in the vines. Before he could pull free the king let fall the trap. The rope streaked down from the pulley, the weights rumbled on the boards like a troop of horses, and the cone fell on the lion’s head. I was lying on my belly, with my arm stretched out toward the king, but he came to the edge of the platform unhelped by me and cried, “What do you think! Henderson, what do you think!”
The beaters screamed. The lion should have been carried to the ground by the weight of the stones, but he was still standing nearly upright. He was caught on the head, and his forepaws spread out the vines and he fell, fighting. His hindquarters were not caught in the net. The air seemed to grow dark in the pit of the hopo from his roaring. I lay with my hand still extended to the king, but he didn’t take it. He was looking downward at the netted face of the lion, the maned belly and armpits, which brought back to me the road north of Salerno and myself being held by the medics and shaved from head to foot for crabs.
“Does it look like Gmilo? Your Highness, what’s your guess?” I said. I didn’t understand the situation one bit.
“Oh, it is wrong,” the king said.
“What’s wrong?”
He was startled by a realization of something I had so far missed. I was stunned by the roars and screams of the capture, and watched the terrible labor of the legs, and the claws black and yellow which issued like thorns from the great pads of the lion’s feet.
“You’ve got him. What the hell. What now?”
But now I understood what was the matter, for nobody could approach the animal to examine his ears; he was able to turn beneath the net, and, his hindquarters being free, you couldn’t get near him.
“Rope his legs, somebody,” I yelled.
The Bunam was below and signaled upward with his ivory stick. The king pushed off from the edge of the platform and took hold of the rope which had been stopped in the pulley by a knot. The overhead pole was bucking and dancing as he got hold of the frayed tail of the rope. He hauled at it, and the pulley started to scream. The lion was incompletely caught, and the king was going to try to work the net over the animal’s hindquarters.
I called to him, “King, think it over once. You can’t do it. He weighs half a ton, and he’s got a solid grip on the net.” I didn’t realize that only the king could remedy the situation and no one could come between him and the lion, as the lion might be the late King Gmilo. Thus it was entirely up to the king to complete the capture. The pummeling of the drums and the bugling and stone-throwing had stopped, and from the crowd there was only a shout now and then heard when the lion was not roaring. Individual voices were commenting to the king on the situation, which was a bad one.
I stood up saying, “King, I’ll go down and look at his ear, just tell me what to look for. Hold it, King, hold.” But I doubt whether he heard m
e. His legs were wide apart in the center of the pole, which bowed deeply and swung and swayed under the energetic movement of his legs, and the rope and pulley and the block made cries as if resined, and the stone weights clattered on the planks. The lion fought on his back and the whole construction swayed. Again I thought the entire hopo tower would collapse and I gripped the straw behind me. Then I saw some smoke or dust above the king and realized that this came from the fastenings of hide that held the block of the pully to the wood. The king’s weight and the pull of the lion had been too much for these fastenings. One had torn, that was the puff I saw. And now the other went.
“King Dahfu!” I yelled out.
He was falling. Block and pulley smashed down on the stone before the fleeing beaters. The king had fallen onto the lion. I saw the convulsion of the animal’s hindquarters. The claws tore. Instantly there came blood, before the king could throw himself over. I now hung from the edge of the platform by my fingers, hung and then fell, shouting as I went. I wish this had been the eternal pit. The king had rolled himself from the lion. I pulled him farther away. Through the torn clothing his blood sprang out.
“Oh, King! My friend!” I covered up my face.
The king said, “Wo, Sungo.” The surfaces of his eyes were strange. They had thickened.
I took off my green trousers to tie up the wound. These were all I had to hand, and they did no good but were instantly soaked.
“Help him! Help” I said to the crowd.
“I did not make it, Henderson” the king said to me.
“Why, King, what are you talking about? We’ll carry you back to the palace. We’ll put some sulfa powder into this and stitch you up. You’ll tell me what to do, Your Majesty, being the doctor of us two.”
“No, no, they will never take me back. Is it Gmilo?”
I ran and caught the rope and pulley and threw the wooden block like a bolo at the still thrusting legs; I wound the rope around them a dozen times, almost tearing the skin from them and yelling, “You devil! Curse you, you son of a bitch!” He raged back through the net. The Bunam then came and looked at the ears. He reached back and called authoritatively for something. His man in the dirty white paint handed him a musket and he put the muzzle against the lion’s temple When he fired the explosion tore part of the creature’s head away.
“It was not Gmilo,” the king said.
He was glad his blood would not be on his father’s head.
“Henderson,” he said, “you will see no harm comes to Atti.”
“Hell, Your Highness, you’re still king, you’ll take care of her yourself.” I began to cry.
“No, no, Henderson,” he said. “I cannot be… among the wives. I would have to be killed.” He was moved over these women. Some of them he must have loved. His belly through the torn clothing looked like a grate of fire and some of the beaters were already giving death shrieks. The Bunam stood apart, he kept away from us.
“Bend close,” said Dahfu.
I squatted near his head and turned my good ear toward him, the tears meanwhile running between my fingers, and I said, “Oh, King, King, I am a bad-luck type. I am a jinx, and death hangs around me. The world has sent you just the wrong fellow. I am contagious, like Typhoid Mary. Without me you would have been okay. You are the noblest guy I ever met.”
“It’s the other way around. The shoe is on the other foot…. The first night you were here,” he explained as a fellow will under the creeping numbness, “that body was the former, the Sungo before you. Because he could not lift Mummah…” His hand was bloody; he put thumb and forefinger weakly to his throat.
“They strangled him? My God! And what about that big fellow Turombo, who couldn’t pick her up? Ah, he didn’t want to become the Sungo, it’s too dangerous. It was wished on me. I was the fall guy. I was had.”
“Sungo also is my successor,” he said, touching my hand.
“I take your place? What are you talking about, Your Highness!”
Eyes closing, he nodded slowly. “No child of age, makes the Sungo king.”
“Your Highness,” I said, and raised my weeping voice, “what have you pulled on me? I should have been told what I was getting into. Was this a thing to do to a friend?”
Without reopening his eyes, but smiling in his increasing weakness the king said, “It was done to me….”
Then I said, “Your Majesty, move over and I’ll die beside you. Or else be me and live; I never knew what to do with life anyway, and I’ll die instead.” I began to rub and beat my face with my knuckles, crouching in the dust between the dead lion and the dying king. “The spirit’s sleep burst too late for me. I waited too long, and I ruined myself with pigs. I’m a broken man. And I’ll never make out with the wives. How can I? I’ll follow you soon. These guys will kill me. King! King!”
But the king had little life left in him now, and we soon parted. He was picked up by the beaters, the end of the hopo was opened and we started to go down the ravine among the cactuses toward that stone building I had first seen from the platform at the top of the wall. On the way he died of the hemorrhage.
This small house built of flat slabs had two wooden doors of the stockade type which opened into two chambers. His body was laid down in one of these. Into the other they put me. I scarcely knew what was happening anyway, and I let them lead me in and bolt the door.
XXI
At one time, much earlier in this life of mine, suffering had a certain spice. Later on it started to lose this spice; it became merely dirty, and, as I told my son Edward in California, I couldn’t bear it any more. Damn! I was tired of being such a monster of grief. But now, with the king’s death, it was no longer a topic and it had no spice at all. It was only terrible. Weeping and mourning I was put into the stone room by the old Bunam and his white-dyed assistant. Though the words came out broken, I repeated the one thing, “It’s wasted on dummies.” (Life is.) “They give it to dummies and fools.” We are where other men ought to be.) So they led me inside, crying my head off. I was too bereaved to ask any questions. By and by a person rising from the floor startled me. “Who the hell is that?” I asked. Two open, wrinkled hands were raised to caution me. “Who are you?” I said again, and then I recognized a head of hair shaped like an umbrella pine and big dusty feet as deformed as vegetable growths.
“Romilayu!”
“Me here too, sah.”
They hadn’t let him get off with the letter to Lily, but picked him up just as he was leaving town. So even before the hunt began they had decided that they didn’t want my whereabouts to be known to the world.
“Romilayu, the king is dead,” I said.
He tried to comfort me.
“That marvelous guy. Dead!”
“Fine gen’a’man, sah.”
“He thought he could change me. But I met him too late in life Romilayu. I was too gross. Too far gone.”
All I had left in the way of clothing was shoes and helmet, T-shirt and the jockey shorts, and I sat on the floor, where I bent over double and cried without limit. Romilayu at first could not help me.
But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn’t last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? There is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven.
I never took another death so hard. As I had tried to stop his bleeding, there was blood all over me and soon it was dry. I tried to rub it off. Well, I thought, maybe this is a sign that I should continue his existence? How? To the best of my ability. But what ability have I got? I can’t name three things in my whole life that I did right. So I broke my heart over this, too.
Thus the day passed and the night passed, too, and in the morning I felt light, dry and hollow. As if I were drifting, like an old vat. All the moisture was on the outside. Inside, I was hollow, dark, and dry; I was sober and empty. And the sky was pink. I saw it through the bars of the door. The Bunam’s black-leather man, still in h
is coat of white, was our custodian, and brought us baked yams and other fruit. Two amazons, but not Tamba and Bebu, were his staff, and everyone treated me with peculiar deference. During the day I said to Romilayu, “Dahfu said that when he died I should be king.”
“Dem call you Yassi, sah.”
“Does that mean king?” That was what it meant. “Some king,” I said, musing. “It’s goofy.” Romilayu made no comment whatever. “I would have to be husband to all those wives.”
“You no like dat, sah?”
“Are you crazy, man?” I said. “How could I even think of taking over that bunch of females? I have all the wife I need. Lily is just a marvelous woman. Anyway, the king’s death has hurt me too much. I am stricken, can’t you see, Romilayu? I am stricken down and I can’t function at all. This has broken me.”
“You no look so too-bad, sah.”
“Oh, you want to make me feel better. But you should see my heart, Romilayu. I have a punchy heart. It’s had more beating than it can take. They’ve kicked it around far too much. Don’t let this big carcass of mine fool you. I am far too sensitive. Anyway, Romilayu, it’s true I shouldn’t have bet against the rain on that day. It didn’t look like good will on my part. But the king, God bless the guy, let me walk into a trap. I wasn’t really stronger than that man Turombo. He could have lifted up Mummah. He just didn’t want to become the Sungo. He faked himself out of it. It’s too dangerous a position. This the king did to me.”