‘Shah Shan, you are the first man to bring tears to my eyes.’
‘Let us hope that I am also the last. I know nothing of the new god-king. He has been found already, and is being instructed. But I know nothing of him. It may be that he will be more—what is the word I want?’
‘Orthodox?’ suggested Paul.
‘Yes, more orthodox. Perhaps he will insist on tradition. You will have to be careful.’ Shah Shan laughed. ‘Remember what happened when you introduced us to the wheel?’
‘Three men died,’ said Paul. ‘But now your citizens are able to use carts, wheelbarrows, rickshaws.’
Shah Shan took a deep draught of the kappa spirit. ‘No, Paul, your arithmetic is wrong. I have not told you this before, but Enka Ne was forced to execute one hundred and seventeen priests—mostly of the blind order—in order to preserve your life and to permit the building of carts. It was a high price, was it not?’
Paul Marlowe looked at him, appalled.
SEVENTEEN
It was a grey, cool morning. Winds blew erratically and disturbingly from the forest, filling the city of Baya Nor with strange odours—musky intimations of mortality.
Death had been very much on the mind of Paul Marlowe. It was the prospect of death—and, perhaps, the recent spate of English lessons—that had caused a reversion to type. Poul Mer Lo, the pseudo Bayani, had given way to Paul Marlowe, an Englishman of the twenty-first century of Earth. A man who was depressed and revolted by the fact that his only friend on this alien world would be joyfully going to his death in six more days.
He had grown to love Shah Shan. Love on Earth, reflected Paul bitterly, was suspect if not obsolete. And love for a man was more than obsolete: it was perverted. But here on this other fragment of dust on the other side of the sky, love could be admitted. There need be no justifications, no feelings of guilt, no sense of shame.
But why did he love Shah Shan? Was it because, as Enka Ne, the boy had spared his life when it would have been so much safer, so much easier to have given thumbs down? Was it because, back on that other burnt out particle of fire, he Paul, had never had a brother? Or a son…
No matter what the reason, the fact remained. Shah Shan was going to die. Or, rather, Enka Ne, the god-king, was drawing close to the bosom of Oruri. And the brightest mind in the whole of Baya Nor was going to be sacrificed to the senseless traditions and superstitions of an ignorant little tribe that had not changed its ways for hundreds of years.
What was that Bayani proverb? He who is alive cannot die. Paul Marlowe laughed. God damn Oruri! Then he laughed again as he realized that he had only called on one god to confound another.
Because of his sadness he had wanted solitude. So he had left the small house and Mylai Tui and had wandered slowly along the bank of the Canal of Life until he came to where the kappa fields met the heavy green perimeter of the forest. And now he was sitting on a small mound, watching the women toiling in the muddy fields as they tended the new crop.
They were singing. The words came to him faintly, intermittendy across the indecisive gusts of wind…
Yes, thought Paul savagely, God damn Oruri! Oruri was the millstone round these people’s necks, the concept that kept them in a static, medieval society with a medieval technology and medieval attitudes that would hold them back for a thousand years.
God damn Oruri!
Suddenly, his silent monologue, his reverie of exasperation was broken by a long-drawn high pitched cry. He had never heard such a cry before. He didn’t know whether it was animal or human, whether it was close or distant.
The cry came again, this time ending in a gasp. It was close—so close that he was briefly tempted to believe he had made it himself.
It came from somewhere on the other side of the mound.
He scrambled the few steps to the top of the hillock and looked down. There at the base on the other side a small Bayani woman squatted over a hole in the ground. It looked as if she had scooped the hole out of the rich soft soil with her fingers, for it was arranged in two neat piles on each side of her; and her hands were buried in the fresh, moist earth— presumably supporting her as she squatted.
She had not seen him. Her gaze was fixed directly on the ground ahead of her. As he watched, fascinated, the cry came once more.
It was not a cry of pain, nor was it a cry of fear. For no reason at all, the word keening came into Paul’s mind. He had never heard real primitive keening; but this, he supposed, was how it must sound.
Oddly, he felt that he was intruding upon something intensely private. Yet, consumed with curiosity, he wanted to stay and watch. He lay down on the top of the mound, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. For a moment, the woman stretched, raising her head to the sky and sweeping the long hair from her face with a soil-stained hand. Then she fell back into the squatting position and let out another weird cry.
He saw that she was big with child.
And he understood that, for reasons best known to herself, she had come to this desolate spot to give birth.
He witnessed the entire operation. It did not take long. The woman began to pant and bear down rhythmically. Soon the crown of the baby’s head had been forced past the lips of the vagina. Presently, its tiny body slid like a small dark fish into the hole that had been prepared for it.
The woman rested for a time—still in the squatting position. Then with a movement that could not have been emulated by any European woman, and probably not by any woman of Earth, she bent expertly down, her head and shoulders low between her knees, and bit through the umbilical cord.
Having done that, she knotted the length that was still attached to the baby’s stomach and then lifted the tiny body out of the hole, resting it on one of the piles of soft earth, where it began to cry lustily. It was not long, then, before the afterbirth came. The woman uttered one more cry—softer this time—then stood up and stretched herself. The wind from the forest blew, catching her long hair and streaming it behind her. She looked for a moment like a small black statue, cut from living rock, courageously defying time and the elements.
Then the moment was gone for ever as, with a matter of fact gesture, she scooped up the new-born baby and with her feet swept the soil back into the hole on top of the steaming afterbirth. When the operation was finished, and still clutching the baby possessively to her breast, she stamped the earth flat. Then she sat down cross-legged to examine the child to whom she had just given birth.
Paul Marlowe stared at her, obsessed with the notion that the entire incident was all part of some bizarre dream.
Suddenly, she began to keen once more. This time the sound was shrill and desolate. It was a cry from the soul, a cry of anguish. And he knew that the dream was real.
He stood up. The woman saw him. The sound died in her throat. She held the baby to her apprehensively, almost as if she were trying to deny its existence. For the first time there was fear on her face.