Ras was startled. He opened his mouth to ask Gilluk how Bigagi had been caught and also why he had not said anything about this. Gilluk pointed at Ras and ordered the guards to put him in a cage. Since they surrounded Ras, the tips of their spears only a foot from him, he did not resist.
After he was encaged, Ras asked Gilluk why he had done this.
"It's a matter of justice," Gilluk said. "You kept me in a cage for six months, so..."
"And when the six months are up?"
"I don't know. You're a problem."
"Why am I?" Ras said. "Why can't I live with you Sharrikt as a Sharrikt? I mean you no harm."
"Well, I don't know what attitude to take toward you," Gilluk said. "You can't be treated as a divine Sharrikt. On the other hand, you're too dangerous to be a slave. You'd run off into the jungle and wage the same kind of war against us as you did against the Wantso. You can't be a freeman, since you'd never work a farm or take orders from us.
"Yet, you haven't harmed me or threatened the Sharrikt. And I do like you, in spite of your being a savage. So, I don't know at this moment what I'll do when the six months are up. Meantime, you must pay for having kept me a prisoner."
Gilluk smiled and said, "You'll be treated well, just as you treated me well. That means, of course, you'll get no women. I asked you for women, you know, and you wouldn't get me any."
"Not wouldn't. Couldn't."
"Oh, you could have. You didn't want to."
Ras gestured at Bigagi.
"I have to kill him, since he killed my parents. What about him?"
"I'll think about him," Gilluk said. "He was caught the night before I went to the Great Swamp. He was trying to get a slave woman to run off with him, but she didn't want to. She had a husband she liked--the Wantso born here aren't circumcised, you know--and Bigagi had nothing except danger and starvation to offer her. She turned him in, and he killed the woman and a soldier before he was captured. He is a mad hyena. Normally, he would be tortured as a public example. Now, I don't know. It would be interesting to pit him against you. We sometimes match captured Wantso warriors against each other. They don't want to fight, but they do, because both would be killed if they didn't. In this case, however, each would like to kill the other, so it would actually be more gratifying to you than to us if you fought to the death."
Ras asked what the winner's fate would be.
"Well, if the Wantso knew that he would be tortured if he won, he might let you kill him to escape it. So, I'll promise him that he'll live if he wins, although he'll have to be blinded. If you kill him, you'll be tortured. It's only just. You will have cheated us out of torturing him."
Ras said that he did not see the logic. Gilluk replied that he could not be expected to do so, since he was only a bleached-out savage. However, he should not complain, because he would be given six months of easy living--except for the lack of a woman, of course.
"I may not have you fight the Wantso," Gilluk continued. "Who knows? I may allow you to live, even to go free."
"With my eyesight?"
"Who knows?" Gilluk's smile showed that he knew that this uncertainty was to be a six-months' torture.
"I don't want to do this," he said. "I do like you. But a king has to see justice done, no matter how it grieves him personally. Now, what can I do for you?"
"Bring me food," Ras said. "I'm hungry. And then go away, so that seeing you won't spoil my appetite."
15
ONE DEAD, ONE DYING, ONE ALIVE
"What is it you want now?" Gilluk said.
Ras could not tell him in one word, because Sharrikt had no "squirrel-cage." He described in detail what he wanted and how it could be built.
"I've already built you a larger cage with bars in it for you to exercise on," Gilluk said. "I've installed troughs and pipes and a water wheel and assigned slaves to work the wheel so you can drink and bathe any time you feel like it. That took much material and labor..."
"You found it interesting, didn't you?" Ras said. "It kept you from being bored, didn't it?"
Gilluk clucked, frowned, and said, "True. I've been thinking about building a water system for my quarters. But this rotating cage! Why do you want it?"
"I don't have enough space to exercise properly. I need to run and run fast, mile after mile. I can't do it in this narrow box unless I have a rotating cage. Of course, you could build me a cage a half mile long, then I'd have enough room."
Ras laughed. Gilluk said, "Why don't I just build a cage over the entire land? Would that satisfy you?"
"I'd still be in a cage," Ras said.
"All right," Gilluk said. "I'll do this for you, since you treated me fairly well when I was your prisoner. But don't ask for more. Don't ask for the moon."
"Could you get it?" Ras said. "I understand that one of your titles is Tamer of the Moon."
"As chief priest, I do have jurisdiction over it," Gilluk said. "Sometimes, I think you're poking fun at me. You don't seem to realize how serious your situation is. I may torture or kill you at any moment."
"You promised me six months. Is your word no better than a slave's?"
"Sometimes considerations of state force a king to go back on his word. The welfare of the people comes first."
He interrupted Ras's protest. "You haven't yet removed your leopardskin. I know I told you to keep it on, but I've changed my mind. My people are confused about this."
"Tell them that I am the son of God, hence, divine, and entitled to wear leopard."
"They wouldn't understand that, because you're a non-Sharrikt. And I reject that reasoning because it's not for the good of my people."
"Oh, then you admit that I could be the son of God?"
"Not in the sense that He was your immediate Father. Of course, all creatures are the sons of God in that He created them. And the Sharrikt are indeed His sons in the sense that He lay with the divine mother, Earth. But you, by your own admission, are the child of a female ape. This seems to indicate that you are a bleached-out Wantso, since they are descended from a hyena and a female chimpanzee."
"The Wantso don't--didn't--think so. They claimed to the only true men. In fact, Wantso means 'Real Men.'"
"The jackal would like to be a leopard," Gilluk said. "Enough of this bindybandy. Are you going to give me your leopardskin?"
"If I don't?"
"I'll cut off your water and your food."
"I didn't deprive you of anything," Ras said. "Did I threaten you if you wouldn't take off your silly-looking white robe?"
"There was no reason for you to do so."
Ras hesitated. To give in seemed to be surrendering a principle. On the other hand, he did not care about the skin, and Gilluk was certainly stubborn enough to let him die of thirst. Yet, he would lose Gilluk's respect--and his own--if he agreed. But--he wanted to live so that he could escape.
Gilluk said, "Well?"
"You'll have to take it off me," Ras said. "Send in your men; let them try."
Gilluk smiled slightly. "You'd like to kill some, if you could? You probably would, too, before they subdued you. No. Hand the skin through the bars."
"Then you admit that I am superior to the Sharrikt warriors," Ras said. "If that is so, I must be divine, too, even more divine than you Sharrikt. Hence, I'm entitled to the leopardskin."
Gilluk scowled and said, "It's difficult to find flaws in your logic. However, I have an argument stronger than your logic. That is my power. I'll see how resistant or logical you are when your tongue swells in your throat and your body weeps dust because of its thirst."
Ras quivered with his struggle. He gritted his teeth and, after several minutes, said, "Here. You can have it."
He extended the skin through the bars and dropped it. Gilluk, smiling, gestured at a female slave to pick it up. Gilluk's three wives, standing a few paces behind him, giggled and whispered to each other. Gilluk quit smiling. Dark of face, he barked at them to leave.
Ras said, "I told you so." He gripped a bamboo bar in
each hand and put his face between them.
"You may have my leopardskin. Yet, I am still wearing it."
Gilluk was startled. He said, "What do you mean?"
Ras tried to think of the Sharrikt word for "spiritual." Perhaps the Sharrikt had no such word. He said, "You have taken my material skin. Nevertheless, I am still wearing the idea of a leopardskin. A ghostly skin, as it were."
Although Gilluk snorted at this, he was intrigued. He asked Ras to explain.
"You can strip me of my leopardskin. You can kill me. But you can do nothing to strip me of the idea that I am worthy of wearing the leopardskin. Even if I am killed by you, I still have not agreed with you. And there is the idea, the idea that I am wearing the skin. It still exists, though I am dead."
"But..." Gilluk said. He stopped to frown. His eyes seemed to turn inward. "I'll have to think about that some more," he said. "You make my brain itch, and the more I scratch it, the more it itches. It was the same when you had me in your cage. Now, you are in my cage. Yet you are doing the same thing to me."
"The idea of my freedom still exists even when I am locked up," Ras said.
Gilluk, shaking his head, walked away. Ras was glad that he had not stayed to talk. He was not sure what he had meant. The "idea" had come to him like a ripened fruit falling off a tree.
Ideas were shadows. They appeared as suddenly as a shadow appeared when a man stepped out of his house into the sun.
Ras was excited. Were "ideas" beings with a life of their own? Were they like ghosts, or demons, that could possess a man, then move on when the man died or when the "ideas" were exorcised? If this was true, they must have a sense of discrimination, otherwise every man would have the same ideas. Why had this "idea about ideas," for instance, come to him but not to Gilluk?
The next day, the artisans arrived to get instructions from Ras on building the squirrel-cage wheel. Gilluk and two spearmen stood by to make sure that the artisans did not get close to Ras and that he talked only about the project. Later, when the artisans returned with bamboo and set to work, they were cautioned to keep their tools, the copper knives, saws, adzes, gougers, planes, drills, and axes well out of his reach. A small annex was built to the cage, and the wheel was installed in this. Artisans extended saws on the ends of long handles and cut through the bars of the big cage where they formed one side of the smaller cage. Ras was politely asked to throw the sawn wood out of the cage. He politely obeyed.
The construction took a week. During this time, Gilluk's mother and wives came often to watch the work. The wives spent more time observing Ras than they did the artisans, though they did this when Gilluk's back was turned. Gilluk would not allow them to talk to Ras, and he did not want his mother to do so. She paid no attention to his requests. Her life was painful and boring, and she was not going to miss this entertainment. For some years, she had suffered from swelling of the joints and a rigidity of the hands and feet. The conversation of her daughter and nieces was insufferable, and the trivialities of the conversation of the slave women irritated her. There was little of interest in the court life, and so she was delighted when Ras was captured. At first, she was content to sit on a cushion on a wooden chair and watch while two slaves fanned her and swatted the flies away. She listened to Gilluk and Ras talk. But after a while she began asking Ras questions.
He took a liking to the old woman, especially when he found that she had as keen a mind as her son's. She also had a sense of humor, when she wasn't being twisted with pain.
It was through her that he managed to get back his antelope-hide bag and most of its contents. Beginning with the second day of imprisonment, he had complained to Gilluk that he needed to shave. Gilluk had refused to give him the bag, saying that he would not permit him to have the razor or the mirror. The razor could be used to cut the rawhide rope that tied the door of the cage. As for the mirror, it was an evil thing. It would capture a man's spirit if the man looked into it long enough.
Ras said that he would return the razor each morning after he had shaved. And he needed the mirror to shave. What did Gilluk care if Ras's spirit were caught in the mirror? Gilluk continued to deny him. Ras's face itched as the stubble grew. He became irritable. Moreover, he planned to use the mirror for more than an aid in shaving.
Shikkut, Gilluk's mother, was fascinated by his beard and also repulsed. Ras explained to her how he could get rid of it and how uncomfortable it made him and how his parents had told him that daily shaving was a religious duty. The next day, Gilluk, looking sour, threw the bag through the bars. He left orders that Ras was to return the razor each morning as soon as he was through with it. He could keep everything else in the bag.
He walked away without answering Ras's question about why he had changed his mind. An hour later, Shikkut came down to tell him what had happened. She had pleaded with Gilluk to let Ras have the shaving equipment. When she had seen that gentle arguments were useless, she had given Gilluk a tongue-lashing. Her son always became uncomfortable, even distressed, when she did this. Finally, he had surrendered.
Ras thanked her and then continued talking with her. He learned much of the construction of the palace and the topography of Sharrikt land from her. Nobody else except Gilluk was given permission to talk to him except in the line of business.
Despite this, he talked to the two guards at night.
He had also tried to talk to Bigagi, but the Wantso would not speak to him, or to anybody. He squatted at one end of the cage and seldom moved.
One day, the Bird of God flew over the castle. Ras could not see it, because the top of his cage was roofed over. The Sharrikt, screaming, ran inside the building. Only the daytime guard and Gilluk stayed outside. The guard had been told he would die if he left his post for any reason. Gilluk, the defender of his people, had to demonstrate that he was ready to die for them. Waving his sword and shouting defiance, he stood in the sunshine outside the great square doorway. Soon, to everybody's relief, the Bird went on down the river. It came back about a half hour later, and the same scene was repeated.
Afterward, Gilluk said to Ras, "Do you think it was looking for you?"
"I don't know," Ras said. "I've never talked to it."
He knew that Gilluk was worried and that he was thinking of what the Bird had done to the Wantso.
Two days later, Gilluk announced that he was leading an expedition up-river. He wanted to examine the site of the Wantso village. Also, he hoped to capture or to kill Janhoy. Ras's description of the lion had intrigued him.
Ras said nothing. Gilluk said, "I've given instructions about you. Don't think you can escape."
Ras just grinned.
However, he found that he had no chance to try his plan. During the day he was surrounded by too many people, and at night three guards, not two, stood watch. He turned his attention again to Bigagi in an effort to rouse him. Bigagi sat like a gigantic ebony frog carved in the posture of just preparing to leap. His hunched shoulders and large mouth and seemingly unblinking eyes added to the frog image. The flies crawled over his face, across his nose and lips, and even across his eyelids. He rose only a few times each day to drink water, to eat, or to use the cucking jar. At nights he fell asleep while squatting. Four days had passed since the king had gone northward before Ras noticed that Bigagi was eating almost nothing. The fifth day, Ras saw him empty his bladder without getting up. It was not laziness or even indifference. Bigagi just did not know that he was relieving himself.
It was then that Ras saw that Bigagi was allowing himself to die. His people were dead, but he had made an effort to start the tribe again with the Wantso woman slave. Defeated, he had given up. Now, his life was evaporating from him as surely as a creek, cut off from the source of water, slowly disappears into the sun. His dying was a state into which the Wantso fell when they were bewitched or when exiled. Numb, pressed under heavy shadows, they let the soul slip out of them while the grip of mind and body grew weaker and weaker.
When he realiz
ed this, Ras became angry. He shouted taunts at Bigagi and threatened him with tortures. He reviled him and compared him to a snail, a jackal, a hyena, a stinkbug, a baboon. Bigagi gave no sign that he heard him.
"Your people died, yes!" Ras screamed. "But my people died, too! Yusufu and Mariyam, the only ones I ever loved besides Wilida! And she is dead, too! You worm, dweller in and eater of the anuses of dead vultures, why did you let them kill Wilida! Spineless, gutless, ball-less, prickless, why didn't you stand up and fight for her? And why did you kill my mother and father? They had never done anything to you! You did not have to kill them, my Yusufu and my Mariyam!"
Ras wept with grief and rage.
Gilluk's mother, sitting nearby under her parasol, called out. "Why do you do this? Can't you see that he is gone--or going--his ghost is halfway to the Land of Shades!"
"I do not want him to die yet," Ras said. "I want him to be fully alive and fighting to live when I kill him. I am being cheated!"
"I do not think that is why you are calling him back from the ghosts," Shikkut said. "I think that you still love him, or would like to love him, and so you do not want him to die."
Ras was so startled that he could not reply for a minute. He said, "Why should I love the man who killed my parents and allowed Wilida to be killed? I want to kill him!"
"You loved him once?"
"Very much," Ras said. "But he turned against me."
"Then you still love him, even though you also hate him."
Ras thought much about this remark in the following days. At no time could he see that she was telling the truth. He hated Bigagi; that stated everything.
Bigagi continued to thin out. The skin fell in between his ribs, and his skull pushed out toward the air. When he dirtied himself, he only moved away for his keepers to clean the cage when they shoved him over with a long pole. Silently and unflinchingly, he endured the bucketsful of water thrown on him. Then, for three days, he did not empty his bowels, perhaps because there was nothing to get rid of, but he did make some water. His eyes retreated deeper from the light into his head.
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