The Blood-stained Belt

by Brian H Jones

  Sharma stared at me icily while I was speaking. When I finished, he said curtly, 'Curse you, Jina! I thought that I could trust you but now you're also turning against me. I wouldn't be surprised if you're in cahoots with the priests.' He poked a finger at me and roared, 'I'm giving you twenty-four hours to leave Keirine. If you haven't left within that time, I'll have you arrested.'

  'You're ordering me to leave Keirine? You can't do that!'

  'I'm the king. I can damn well do what I please!'

  'Twenty-four hours, eh? Is that payment for a lifetime of --?'

  'You heard me! Twenty-four hours! That's all you've got!'

  'Twenty-four hours? Arrested? Oh, Sharma, Sharma, will you have your old comrade hunted like a common criminal? Now wouldn't that be a fine show of royal gratitude for services rendered?'

  Sharma looked at me narrowly. Something flickered in his eyes – something from the long tunnel of memory – before he pounded the table and roared even louder. 'All right, I'll give you time to get your affairs in order. But, damn it, if you haven't left within a week, I will have you arrested for sure.' He pounded the table again and roared, 'Get out, damn you! Get out! I never want to see you again!'

  I said with real sincerity, ‘The feeling is mutual.’

  Two days later, I travelled to Durgenu's territory disguised as a trader. However, when the old man heard that I had fallen out of favour with Sharma, he told me plainly that he wanted me out of his territory as soon as possible. In fact, he was so nervous that he immediately arranged for me to take passage on a ship that belonged to one of his trading partners. As I left the room, Durgenu clasped my arm – his hand was trembling – and muttered, 'You see, my friend, we must maintain good relations with Keirine. It's not for me, you understand, not for me at all – but I have to think about my people. I can't risk doing anything that will place my people in jeopardy.' He pressed my arm and whispered, 'Go quickly. Go quietly. Sharma mustn't know about this affair. You understand, eh?'

  ‘You wouldn’t want to be treated the same as Ferewala, eh?’

  ‘Indeed not! No, my dear fellow, indeed not! All the more reason to keep this business quiet!’

  The ship sailed the next morning, heading eastwards across the Endless Ocean. I stood at the stern, watching the land recede from view and trying to get used to the unfamiliar feel of the ship. It seemed to me to be like a living thing with its own nature. Its life was manifested through its dipping and swaying motions, and through its characteristic set of sounds – the creaking of timbers, the swish of the water down its sides, the whistling of the wind in the rigging and the flapping and snapping of the sails. As I leaned on the rail, I remembered how Dana and I talked about floating with the clouds eastwards over the Endless Ocean. I remembered saying to Dana that we would see islands in the ocean, laid out like pearls against the neck-piece of a gown. Well, I wasn't floating like a cloud and from this vantage point I wouldn't see the islands laid out like pearls. However, if I turned around and looked up at the great mainsail that loomed and billowed above me, it could well be a cloud. I closed my eyes and, with the image of the sail still in my mind's eye, I thought, Yes, this could have been what Dana and I envisaged that day on the hillside outside Koraina. Yes, the sea is like the great expanse of the sky and the ship with its great billowing sails is like a cloud following its scudding sky-companions eastwards in pursuit of our youthful fancy.

  Before the ship sailed, I was tempted to send my belt to Sharma. Then I thought, No, I won’t do that. I will wear it as an eternal reminder of how he’s treated me, as a reminder of the ephemeral nature of even the oldest relationships. I also thought, if I don’t send it to him, he’ll wonder why I haven’t done so and what I’ve done with it. Have I sold it in the bazaar? Have I thrown it away? Have I burned it? As I stood at the rail, stroking the buckle with a thumb, running a finger across the embossed pattern of intertwined struggling beasts, I thought, Let him wonder and worry. Let the great King of Keirine know that there are many things in this world that are beyond his ken and beyond his reach.

  As I stood with my eyes closed and my face upturned to the sail and the wind, I thought about Dana. She came to me in an image that was so immediate and so close that I moved a hand along the rail, reaching out to touch her – so real was she at that moment. She stood right there, looking up at me with her luminous eyes, smiling with the secret of her enjoyment of life. Then I opened my eyes, cursed under my breath, and turned around to look out over the ship's wake. God, what a fool I was! Dana was gone, killed next to the Great River – and, in any case, she wouldn't be fresh-faced and youthful now if she had lived. But what of it? Whatever her age, wouldn't she have stood next to me here at the stern of the ship, graceful in her maturity, invigorated by the experience, laughing with excitement at the thought that at last we were scudding eastwards towards the pearl-like islands of the Endless Ocean?

  With that thought enveloping me, I felt loneliness and desolation greater than I had ever known. I thought bitterly that Dana wasn't here to share the moment, Sharma had failed me, Zaliek was dead, and as for Keirine – well, now I had abandoned my share in that dream to which we had climbed so purposefully. Leaning on the rail, I wept. Yes, I wept. My desolation was all the greater because I knew that nobody cared whether I laughed or wept – or, come to that, whether I lived or died.

  On board there was a trader named Reshaja who came from one of the islands. He was a small, rotund man with a bald head, beetling eyebrows, and an earring whose gleam matched that of the gold inlays in his front teeth. He reminded me of the Dornite trader whose donkey we killed below Gandonda so long ago, except that the trader wore threadbare clothes and carried hardly anything of value whereas Reshaja was a man of substance who traded in gemstones. When I told Reshaja that I intended to make a new life for myself, he looked at me speculatively and remarked that he had one or two suggestions to make if I didn’t mind him doing so. Soon he was teaching me how to assess and value precious stones. Daily, as the ship swayed and dipped its way eastwards, we sat in Reshaja's small cabin poring over stones laid out on a cloth. I learned as much as he could teach me and we formed a partnership before the ship reached its first landfall. We agreed that I would travel amongst the outer islands, buying gemstones and looking for new sources of supply, while Reshaja would travel amongst the inner islands as well as market our wares on the mainland.

  After eight days the ship reached the island of Terfillere. As we approached land, I marveled at how this massive place of rock and earth rose abruptly out of the fluid depths of the surrounding ocean. I was excited at the sight of the cloud-skirted mountain peaks, the rocky cliffs, the golden strips of beaches and the green valleys that seemed to have been poured into the folds between the mountains. It was strange, novel and exhilarating. I needed an experience like this to alleviate my despondency. I needed to see and know that the world could still offer sights and experiences that were as spectacular as they were unexpected.

  Terfillere was Reshaja's home. He gave me a small apartment in his large, log-built house that stood on the outskirts of the island's main town. This would be my base when I returned from my commercial expeditions and it would be the place where we would meet to exchange money and wares.

  For five years I travelled amongst the islands of the Endless Ocean, buying gemstones and looking for new sources of supply. Although the islands varied in size and shape, most of them were inhabited by the same race of people. Only the people of the easternmost islands were different. They were a tall and willowy race with slender noses, gentle eyes, and pale skins who claimed to have inhabited all of the islands of the ocean until the new people with their iron-making skills and larger, more maneuverable ships forced them ever eastwards.

  These people of the furthest isles assured me that the Endless Ocean was indeed endless. No one had ever sailed eastwards from their islands for more than two weeks. After a week of sailing, the sea started to become thick with weed while an ever-g
rowing encrustation of barnacles slowed a ship so much that it became sluggish in the water. After a few more days, if it could still move, a ship would enter a realm of perpetual fog and deathly calm where the wind hardly ever blew – and when it did blow, although it was ice-cold, it carried a whiff of fiery sulphur. In spite of the calm, the sea broke with whitecaps as if there was shallow water underneath even although depth soundings could not find a bottom. In this realm, at night sailors would hear howls and moans that made them think of demons in the grip of unbearable pain and anguish. Strangely, one man might hear the sounds while another might hear nothing. Those who heard the sounds said that they were so dire that they could only be warnings that human beings should not proceed any further, upon pain of death. To prove the point, I was told that once a ship did go further and never returned. About a year later, on the edge of the weed belt, sailors found timbers from the ship. The wood was scorched, twisted into fantastic shapes, and shattered as if some huge and monstrous force had breathed on the planks in fiery anger before crushing them as easily as a human hand crushes an egg.

  Often, as I sailed from island to island, I watched the clouds scudding across the sky and envied them. I still had many questions and the answers that I got didn't always satisfy me. Howls, moans, and scorched, shattered timbers floating on the ocean? Perhaps it was true – in any case, was it more fantastic than some of the things that I had seen? -- or perhaps it was just a reflection of our unspoken human terrors. I knew that unlike us fragile, crawling human beings, the clouds would know for sure whether or not the Endless Ocean was indeed endless. They would know the shape and appearance of every island – something that I still didn't properly know even after five years of sailing the ocean. They would know why, once, when the wind blew a squall from the north, it dumped onto our ship thousands of small frogs, still alive and twitching. The sailors said that it was the work of the gods. But why would the gods – whichever gods they were – dump a heap of frogs on sailors who were minding their own business in the middle of the ocean?

  Often, I recalled that Dana said that the clouds asked the questions. If the clouds knew so much then what sorts of questions did they ask? Perhaps one of the questions they asked was this: Why do you chase after such small and petty things when you see how you are situated within infinity between the great stretching sky and its earthly counterpart, the Endless Ocean? Perhaps they asked me: Why did you invest so much in the cause of Keirine, when for you it has come to nothing? Why were you so short-sighted that you couldn't read the end into the beginning? Perhaps that was what Dana meant.

  Twice every year, Reshaja and I met in Terfillere. From him, I got news of the outside world. I learned that Sharma's and Shani's child did die within a week of its birth but that Shani had produced two more children since then. I also learned that, more than ever before, Sharma's wives and children were being troublesome. Of course, rivalries and resentments had been brewing ever since Sharma took a second wife, not to mention a third one. However, matters really came to a head when Mecolo's oldest son, the ironically named Bedaxili -- 'Beloved of Vaxili' – took a fancy to his half-sister, Roda's oldest daughter, who was only seventeen at the time. When the girl rejected his advances, he took her by force. In retaliation, Roda's oldest son attacked Bedaxili, who killed him. Overcome with shame, Roda's daughter committed suicide. Distraught and almost powerless in the face of such familial passion and intrigues, Sharma banished Bedaxili to a small village near Osicedi. The grieving Roda, now more of an enemy of Mecolo than ever before, pressed the claims to the throne of her surviving son, Isegala. Of course, Shani was waiting in the wings with claims of her own. Her sons were still pre-teens but who knew how long Sharma might live and what changes there might be in the interim? To add to Sharma's troubles, after lying low for a while, Bedaxili was trying to gain popularity by travelling around dispensing charity and suggesting that now that his father was old and tired he, Bedaxili, should take over the throne. Bedaxili was violating the terms of his banishment but Sharma, enervated in a web of his own making, didn't have the heart or the courage to bring his son to heel. In any case, everyone knew that he had always had an especially soft spot for Bedaxili, his first-born and the heir to the throne.

  What did I care about these tales from a far-off place? I told myself that I had relegated Keirine to a small corner of my mind where it was sequestered along with all the other memories and experiences of my life before I took ship and sailed eastwards across the ocean. Keirine could stay in its remote corner of my mind, immobilised and embalmed, gradually shriveling up until it intruded upon me as much as a pebble in a barn full of grain would trouble a farmer. Then, perhaps, I would be happy again. Then, perhaps, I would roam the Endless Ocean with a spirit as free and unencumbered as I once roamed the hills near Osicedi.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: MENDING FENCES

  One day, during my sixth year in the Endless Ocean, Reshaja arrived from the coast with a sealed letter and gave it to me with a knowing glance. Immediately, I knew who had sent it: the seal was Sharma's. I cursed and threw the letter onto the table. Reshaja looked at me incredulously and asked, 'Aren't you going to open it?'

  'Why should I?'

  'It looks important.'

  'Important to whom?'

  Reshaja shrugged and replied, 'My friend, you should read the letter.' The letter lay on the table between us like an unanswered question while we caught up on news and discussed business. After our conversation, as I was leaving the room, Reshaja asked, 'Aren't you going to take the letter?'

  'Take it? No! I wish I'd never seen the damned thing.'

  'My dear friend, do you know who it's from?'

  'Of course I do. That's Sharma's seal. That's why I wish I had never seen it.'

  Reshaja thrust the letter at me, saying, 'Do with it what you want but please don't leave it here. It's your business, not mine.'

  I stuffed the letter into my tunic, annoyed that I even had to acknowledge its existence. At the door, I stopped and asked, 'Who gave it to you?'

  Reshaja replied, 'I was at a port in Durgenu's territory when a man knocked on my door one evening and asked if I knew you.'

  'And, of course, you said that you did.'

  'He knew that I knew you. Anyway, my friend, why should I have lied to him? You have nothing to be afraid of, do you?'

  'I guess not. If they wanted to get me, they would have done so a long time ago.' However, even as I said it, I wondered how Sharma knew where I was. Had Reshaja been talking? Had they tracked me without my knowing it? I checked my speculations, thinking that the trail could lead anywhere – after all, sailors, traders, and the rest of the people I came into contact with every day could talk as freely as anyone else could. Damn it! I wished that the past had stayed where it was, neatly packed away. Now it was stirring again like a hibernating animal beginning to twitch after the winter. I would have to put it back into its corner as soon as I could, and do so as firmly as possible.

  I sat in my room holding the letter. I weighed it in my hand, turned it around, weighed it again, and put it down. I told myself that it probably concerned some mundane matter such as the property that I had left behind in Koraina. But, if so, why would the letter carry the royal seal? I stretched out my hand to grasp the letter and then withdrew it. What if the letter invited me to become involved again with the affairs of Keirine? Damn, damn, damn! Finally, I gave in to curiosity and opened the letter.

  The letter was from Sharma himself, written in his own hand. He invited me to return to Keirine and take up the position of commander of the army. In fact, he did more than issue an invitation – he practically begged me to return. Sharma concluded by writing, 'Let bygones be bygones, Jina. As you cared for me that night when I heard about the death of my parents, so I ask you to have a care for me now.' Included with the letter was a document that granted me safe passage from the coast to Koraina.

  What lay behind Sharma's request? It was late but I knocked on Reshaja's do
or anyway. Rubbing his eyes sleepily, he invited me into his room. I sat down, thrust the letter at him, and asked, 'What do you know about this?'

  'My friend, I know nothing except that I was asked to deliver it.'

  'You don't know what the letter says?

  'By all the gods and by the tomb of my father – may nothing that I do or say disturb his peace – I swear that I don't know what is in the letter.' Reshaja protested his innocence so vehemently that it was almost comical. Anyway, what difference did it make, whether he knew or not? I told him about Sharma's request and then said, 'You've just come from the mainland. What's going on in Keirine that might explain why Sharma wants me back as commander of the army?'

  'Sharma is facing a revolt. Don't you know that?'

  'How should I know about it? I returned just yesterday after six months of travelling around the outer islands. A revolt, eh? Who's leading the revolt?'

  'Bedaxili.'

  'Tell me about it.'

  'There's not much to tell. Everyone knows that Bedaxili has been champing at the bit ever since Sharma banished him to Lower Keirine. During the last two or three years, he’s started to act like an alternative ruler, going around settling disputes, making promises and exploiting grievances. Now he’s come out into the open and declared that Sharma should either abdicate or be removed, to be replaced by a younger, fitter man.'

  'And that's Bedaxili himself, of course.'

  'Of course. Who else?'

  I sat back and thought about the matter for only a moment. Then I crumpled the letter into a little ball and got up to leave. I said, 'Thank you for the information, Reshaja. I'm sorry that I woke you.'

  Reshaja rose and put out a hand to restrain me. He asked, 'You will be going to Keirine?'