“Well, that’s okay then-but the rest, with the gods? I felt very bad, Your Highness, I don’t mind telling you. I could never claim that I led a very good life. I’m sure it’s written all over me …” The king nodded. “I’ve done a hell of a lot of things, too, both as a soldier and a civilian. I’ll say it straight out, I don’t even deserve to be chronicled on toilet paper. But when I saw them start to beat Mummah and Hummat and all the others, I fell to the ground. It got to be pretty dark out there and I don’t know whether you saw that or not.”
“I saw you. It is not my idea, Henderson, of how to be.” The king spoke softly. “I have far other ideas. You will see. But shall we speak only to each other?”
“You want to do me a favor, Your Highness, a big favor? The biggest favor possible?”
“Assuredly. Why certainly.”
“All right, then, this is it: will you expect the truth from me? That’s my only hope. Without it everything else might as well go bust” He began to smile. “Why, how could I refuse you this? I am glad, Henderson-Sungo, but you must let me make the same request, otherwise it will be worthless if not mutual. But do you have expectation as to the form the truth is to take? Are you prepared if it comes in another shape, unanticipated?”
“Your Majesty, it’s a deal. This is a pact between us. Oh, you don’t understand how great a favor you’re doing me. When I left the Arnewi (and I may as well tell you that I goofed there-maybe you know it) I thought that I had lost my last chance. I was just about to find out about the grun-tu-molani when this terrible thing happened, which was all my fault, and I left under a cloud. Christ, I was humiliated. You see, Your Highness, I keep thinking about the spirit’s sleep and when the hell is it ever going to burst. So yesterday, when I became the rain king-oh, what an experience! How will I ever communicate it to Lily (my wife)?”
“I do appreciate this, Mr. Henderson-Sungo. I intentionally wished to keep you with me a while hoping that exchanges of importance would be possible. For I do not find it easy to express myself to my own people. Only Horko has been in the world at all and with him I cannot freely exchange, either. They are against me here …”
This he said almost secretly, and after he spoke his broad lips closed and the room became still. The amazons lay on the floor as if asleep-Tatu in her hat and the other two naked save for the leather jerkin articles they wore. Their black eyes were only just open, but watchful. I could hear the wives behind the thick door of our inner room, stirring there.
“You are right,” I said. “It’s not just a question of expecting the truth. There’s another question, too, of solitude. As if a guy were his own grave. When he comes forth from this burial he doesn’t know good from bad. So for instance it has been going through my mind for some time that there is a connection between truth and blows.”
“How is that again? You thought what?”
“Well, it’s this way. Last winter as I was chopping wood a piece flew up from the block and broke my nose. So the first thing I thought was truth!”
“Ah,” said the king, and then he began to speak, intimate and low, of a variety of things I had never heard before, and I stared toward him with my eyes grown big. “As things are,” he said, “such may appear to be related to the case. I do not believe actually it is so. But I feel there is a law of human nature in which force is concerned. Man is a creature who cannot stand still under blows. Now take the horse-he never needs a revenge. Nor the ox. But man is a creature of revenges. If he is punished he will contrive to get rid of the punishment. When he cannot get rid of punishment, his heart is apt to rot from it. This may be-don’t you think so, Mr. Henderson-Sungo? Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also against son. And moreover it is a continuity-matter, for if the father did not strike the son, they would not be alike. It is done to perpetuate similarity. Oh, Henderson, man cannot keep still under the blows. If he must, for the time, he will cast down his eyes and think in silence of the ways to clear himself of them. Those prime-eval blows everybody still feels. The first was supposed to be struck by Cain, but how could that be? In the beginning of time there was a hand raised which struck. So the people are flinching yet. All wish to rid themselves and free themselves and cast the blow upon the others. And this I conceive of as the earthly dominion. But as for the truth content of the force, that is a separate matter.”
The room was all shadow, but the heat with its odor of vegetable combustion pervaded the air.
“Wait a minute, now, sire,” I said, having frowned and bitten on my lips. “Let me see if I have got you straight. You say the soul will die if it can’t make somebody else suffer what it suffers?”
“For a while, I am sorry to say, it then feels peace and joy.”
I lifted up my brows, and with difficulty, as the whiplashes all over the unprotected parts of my face were atrocious. I gave him one of my high looks, from one eye, “You are sorry to say, Your Highness? Is this why me and the gods had to be beaten?”
“Well, Henderson, I should have notified you better when you wished to move Mummah. To that extent you are right.”
“But you thought I would be the fellow to do the job, and thought so before I laid eyes on them.” Then I cut out the reproaches. I said to him, “You want to know something, Your Highness, there are some guys who can return good for evil. Even I understand that. Crazy as I am,” I said. I began to tremble in all my length and breadth as I realized on which side of the issue I stood, and had stood all the time.
Curiously, I saw that he agreed with me. He was glad I had said this. “Every brave man will think so,” he told me. “He will not want to live by passing on the wrath. A hit B? B hit C? — we have not enough alphabet to cover the condition. A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow. No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition. So, a fellow throws himself in the sea of blows saying he do not believe it is infinite. In this way many courageous people have died. But an even larger number who had more of impatience than bravery. Who have said, ‘Enough of the burden of wrath. I cannot bear my neck should be unfree. I cannot eat more of this mess of fear-pottage.’
I wish to say at this place that the beauty of King Dahfu’s person prevailed with me as much as his words, if not more. His black skin shone as if with the moisture that gathers on plants when they reach their prime. His back was long and muscular. His high-rising lips were a strong red. Human perfections are short-lived, and we love them more than we should, maybe. But I couldn’t help it. The thing was involuntary. I felt a pang in my gums, where such things register themselves without my will and then I knew how I was affected by him.
“Yet you are right for the long run, and good exchanged for evil truly is the answer. I also subscribe, but it appears a long way off, for the human specie as a whole. Perhaps I am not the one to make a prediction, Sungo, but I think the noble will have its turn in the world.”
I was swayed; I thrilled when I heard this. Christ! I would have given anything I had to hear another man say this to me. My heart was moved to such an extent that I felt my face stretch until it must have been as long as a city block. I was blazing with fever and mental excitement because of the loftiness of our conversation and I saw things not double or triple merely, but in countless outlines of wavering color, gold, red, green, umber, and so on, all flowing concentrically around each object. Sometimes Dahfu seemed to be three times his size, with the spectrum around him. Larger than life, he loomed over me and spoke with more than one voice. I gripped my legs through the green silk trousers of the Sungo and I am sure I must have been demented at that time. Slightly. I was really sent, and I mean it. The king treated me with classic African dignity, and this is one of the summits of human behavior. I don’t know where else people can be so dignified. Here, in the midst of darkness, in a small room in a hidden fold near the equator, in this same town where I had struggled along with the corpse on my back under the moon and the blue forests of heaven. Why, if a spider should get a stroke and suddenly begin to do a treatise on botany or something-a transfigured vermin, do you follow me? This is how I embraced the king’s words about nobility’s having its turn in the world.