“King,” I said.
From the determination with which I began he understood me and he said, “Mr. Henderson, you are entitled to any explanation within my means to make. You see, the Bunam felt sure you would be strong enough to move our Mummah. I, when I saw what a construction you had, agreed with him. At once.”
“Well,” I said, “okay, so I’m strong. But how did it all happen? It seems to me that you were sure it would. You bet me.
“That was in a spirit of wager and nothing else,” he said. “I knew as little about it as you do.”
“Does it always happen like that?”
“Very far from always. Exceedingly seldom.”
I looked my canniest, greatly lifting up my brows because I wanted him to see that the phenomenon was not yet explained to my satisfaction. Meanwhile I was trying also to make him out. And there were no airs or ostentations about the man. He was thoughtful in his replies but without making thinker’s faces. And when he spoke of himself the facts he told me matched what I had heard from Prince Itelo. At the age of thirteen he had been sent to the town of Lamu and afterward he had gone to Malindi. “All preceding kings for several generations,” he said, “have had to be acquainted with the world and have been sent at that same time of life to the school. You show up from nowhere, attend school, then go back. One son in each generation is sent out to Lamu. An uncle goes with him and waits for him there.”
“Your Uncle Horko?”
“Yes, it is Horko. He was the link. He waited in Lamu nine years for me. I had moved on with Itelo. I didn’t care for that life in the south. The young men at school were spoiled. Kohl on their eyes. Rouge. Chitter-chatter. I wanted more than that.”
“Well, you are very serious,” I said. “It’s obvious. That was how I sized you up from the first.”
“After Malindi, Zanzibar. From there Itelo and I shipped as deckhands. Once to India and Java. Then up the Red Sea — Suez. Five years in Syria at denominational school. The treatment was most generous. From my point of view the science instruction was most especially worth while. I was going for an M.D. degree, and would have done it except for the death of my father.”
“That’s just remarkable,” I said. “I’m only trying to put it together with yesterday. With the skulls, and that fellow, the Bunam, and the amazons and the rest of it.”
“It is interesting, I do admit. But also it is not up to me, Henderson-Henderson-Sungo-to make the world consistent.”
“Maybe you were tempted not to come back?” I asked.
We sat close together, and, as I have noted, his blackness made him fabulously strange to me. Like all people who have a strong gift of life, he gave off almost an extra shadow-I swear. It was a smoky something, a charge. I used to notice it sometimes with Lily and was aware of it particularly that day of the storm in Danbury when she misdirected me to the water-filled quarry and then telephoned her mother from bed. She had it noticeably then. It is something brilliant and yet overcast; it is smoky, bluish, trembling, shining like jewel water. It was similar to what I had felt also arising from Willatale on the occasion of kissing her belly. But this King Dahfu was more strongly supplied with it than any person I ever met.
In answer to my last question he said, “For more reasons than one I could have wished my father to live longer.”
As I conceived, the old fellow must have been strangled.
I guess I looked remorseful at having reminded him of his father, for he laughed to put me at ease again, and said, “Do not worry, Mr. Henderson-I must call you Sungo, for you are the Sungo now. Don’t worry, I say. It is a subject which could not be avoided. You do not necessarily refresh it. His time came, he died, and I was king. I had to recover the lion.”
“What lion are you talking about?” I said.
“Why, I have told you yesterday. Possibly you have forgot-the king’s body, the maggot that breeds in it, the king’s soul, the lion cub?” I recalled it now. Sure, he had told me this. “Well, then,” he said, “this very young animal, set free by the Bunam, the successor king has to capture it within a year or two when it is grown.”
“What? You have to hunt it?”
He smiled. “Hunt it? I have another function. To capture it alive and keep it with me.”
“So that’s the animal I hear below? I could swear I was hearing a lion down there. Jupiter, so that’s what it is,” I said.
“No, no, no,” he said, in that soft way of his. “That is not it, Mr. Hcnderson-Sungo. You have heard a quite other animal. I have not yet captured Gmilo. Accordingly I am not yet fully confirmed in the rule of king. You find me at a midpoint. To borrow your manner of speaking, I too must complete Becoming.”
Despite all the shocks of yesterday I was beginning to comprehend why I felt reassured at first sight of the king. It comforted me to sit with him; it comforted me unusually. His large legs were stretched out as he sat, his back was curved, and his arms were folded on his chest, and on his face there was a brooding but pleasant expression. Through his high-swelled lips a low hum occasionally came. It reminded me of the sound you sometimes hear from a power station when you pass one in New York on a summer night; the doors are open; all the brass and steel is going, lustrous under one little light, and some old character in dungarees and carpet slippers is smoking a pipe with all the greatness of the electricity behind him. Probably I am one of the most spell-prone people who ever lived. Appearances to the contrary, I am highly mediumistic and attuned. “Henderson,” I said to myself, and not for the first time, “it’s one of those luth suspendu deals, sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne. And you saw yesterday what savagery can be if you never saw it before, throwing passes with his own father’s skull. And now with the lions. Lions! And the man almost a graduate physician. The whole thing is crazy.” Thus I reflected. But then I also had to take into account the fact that I have a voice within me repeating, I want, raving and demanding, making a chaos, desiring, desiring, and disappointed continually, which drove me forth as beaters drive game. So I had no business to make terms with life, but had to accept such conditions as it would let me have. But at moments I would have been glad to find that my fever alone had originated all that had happened since I left Charlie and his bride and took off on my own expedition-the Arnewi, the frogs, Mtalba, and the corpse and the gallop in vine leaves with those giant women. And now this powerful black personage who soothed me-but was he trustworthy? How about trustworthy? And I, myself, hulking in the green silk pants that went with the office of rain king. I was smarting, harkening, straining my ears, my suspicious eyes. Oh, hell! How shall a man be broken for whom reality has no fixed dwelling! How he shall be broken! So I was sitting in this palace with its raw red walls, and the white rocks amid which the flowers flourished. By the doors were amazons, and, more particularly, this fierce old Tatu with big nostrils. She sat dreaming on the floor in her garrison cap.
All the same, as we sat there talking I felt we were men of unusual dimensions. Trustworthiness was a separate issue.
At this time there began a conversation which could never be duplicated anywhere in the world. I hitched up the green pants a little. My head was swayed by the fever but I demanded firmness of myself and I said, speaking steadily, “Your Majesty, I don’t intend to back down on the bet. I have certain principles. But I still don’t know what this is all about, being dressed up as the rain king.”
“It is not merely dress,” said Dahfu. “You are the Sungo. It is literal, Mr. Henderson. I could not have made Sungo of you if you had not had the strength to move Mummah.”