I took off my helmet, baring the huge welts and bruises on my nose and cheeks, left over from the rain ceremony. My eyes must have been a little crazy with solemnity for they drew the notice of the black-leather man, who appeared to point at them and said something to the Bunam. But I put the old queen’s hand on my head respectfully saying, “Lady, Henderson at your service. And I really mean it.” Over my shoulder I said to Romilayu, “Tell her that.” His tuft of hair was close behind me, and under it his forehead was more than usually wrinkled. I saw the Bunam look at the cards and printed matter on the bed, and I scooped them all behind me, as I didn’t want the king’s property exposed to his scrutiny. Then I told Romilayu, “Say to the queen that she has a fine son. The king is a friend of mine and I am just as much his friend. Say I am proud to know him.”
Meantime I thought, “She’s in very bad company, ain’t she?” because I knew it was the Bunam’s job to take the life of the failing king; Dahfu had told me that. Actually Bunam was her husband’s executioner-and now the queen came with him late in the afternoon to pay a social call? It didn’t seem right.
At home this would have been the cocktail hour. The great wheels and all the sky-marring frames would be slowing, darkening, and the world, with its connivance and invention and its load of striving and desire to transform, would relax its strain.
The old queen may have sensed my thought, for she was sad and troubled. The Bunam was staring at me, evidently meaning to get at me in some way, while Horko, with his low-hung, fleshy face, looked gloomy at first. The purpose of this visit was two-fold-to get me to reveal about the lioness and then also to use any influence I might have with the king. He was in trouble, and very seriously, over Atti.
Horko did most of the talking, mixing up the several languages he had picked up during his stay in Lamu. He used a kind of French as well as English and a little Portuguese. His blood gleamed through his face with a high polish and his ears were dragged down by their ornaments almost to his fat shoulders. He introduced the subject by saying a little about his residence in Lamu-a very up-to-date town, as he described it. Automobiles, café and music, many languages spoken. “Tout le monde très distingué, très chic,” he said. I shut off my defective ear with one hand and gave him the full benefit of the other, nodding, and when he saw that I responded to his Lamu Afro-French, he began to liven up.
You could see that his heart belonged to that town, and for him the years he had spent there were probably the greatest. It was his Paris. It gave me no trouble to imagine that he had promoted himself a house and servants and girls and spent his days in a café in a seersucker jacket, with a boutonnière maybe, for he was a promoter. He was displeased with his nephew for having gone away and left him there eight or nine years. “Go away Lamu school,” he said. “ Pas assez bon. Bad, bad, I say. No go away Lamu. We go. He go. Papa King Gmilo die. Moi aller chercher Dahfu. One years.” He lifted a stout finger to me over the bald head of Queen Yasra, and from his indignation I took it he must have been held responsible for Dahfu’s disappearance. It was his duty to bring back the heir.
But he observed that I didn’t like the tone he took, and said, “You friend Dahfu?”
“Damn right I am.”
“Oh me, too. Roi neveu. Aime neveu. Sans blague. Dangerous.”
“Come on, what is this all about?” I said.
Seeing me dissatisfied, the Bunam spoke sharply to Horko, and the queen mother, Yasra, gave a cry, “Sasi ai. Ai, sasi, Sungo.” Looking upward at me she must have seen the underside of my chin and the mustache and my open nostrils, but not my eyes, so that she didn’t know how I was receiving her plea, for that is what it was. She therefore began to kiss my knuckles over and over again, somewhat as Mtalba had done the night before my doomed expedition against the frogs. Once more I was aware of a sensitivity there. These hands have lost shape a good deal as a result of the abuses they have been subjected to. There was, for instance, the forefinger with which I had aimed, in imitation of Pancho Villa, at that cat under the bridge table. “Oh, lady, don’t do that,” I said. “Romilayu-Romilayu-tell her to quit it,” I said. “If I had as many fingers as there are hammers to a piano,” I told him, “they’d all be at her service. What does the old queen want? These guys are putting the squeeze on her, I can see it.”
“Help son, sah,” said Romilayu at my back.
“From what?” I said.
“Lion witch, sah. Oh, very bad lion.”
“They’ve frightened the old mother,” I said, glowering at the Bunam and his assistant. “This is the sexton-beetle. Not happy without corpses or putting people away in the grave. I can smell it on you. And look at this leather-winged bat, his sidekick. He could play the Phantom of the Opera. He’s got a face like an anteater-a soul-eater. You tell them right here and now I think the king is a brilliant and noble man. Make it very strong,” I said to Romilayu, “for the old lady’s sake.”
But I could not change the subject no matter how I praised the king. They had come to brief me about lions. With one single exception, lions contained the souls of sorcerers. The king had captured Atti and brought her home in place of his father Gmilo, who was still at large. They took this very hard, and the Bunam was here to warn me that Dahfu was implicating me in his witchcraft. “Oh, pooh,” I said to these men. “I never could be a witch. My character is just the opposite.” Between them Horko and Romilayu made me finally feel the importance and solemnity-the heaviness-of the situation. I tried to avoid it, but there it was: they laid it on me like a slab of stone. People were angry. The lioness was causing mischief. Certain women who had been her enemies in the previous incarnation were having miscarriages. Also there was the drought, which I had ended by picking up Mummah. Consequently I was very popular. (Blushing, I felt a kind of surly rose color in my face.) “It was nothing,” I said. But then Horko told me how bad it was that I went down into the den. I was reminded again that Dahfu was not in full possession of the throne until Gmilo was captured. So the old king was forced to be out in the bush among bad companions (the other lions, each and every one a proven evildoer). They claimed that the lioness was seducing Dahfu, and made him incapable of doing his duty, and it was she who kept Gmilo away.
I tried to say to them that other people took a far different view of lions. I told them that they couldn’t be right to condemn all the lions except one, and there must be a mistake somewhere. Then I appealed to the Bunam, seeing that he was obviously the leader of the anti-lion forces. I thought his wrinkled stare, the stern vein of his forehead, and those complex fields of skin about his eyes must signify (even here, where all Africa was burning like oceans of green oil under the absolute and extended sky) what they would have signified back in New York, namely, deep thought. “Well, I think you should go along with the king. He is an exceptional man and does exceptional things. Sometimes these great men have to go beyond themselves. Like Caesar or Napoleon or Chaka the Zulu. In the king’s case, the interest happens to be science. And though I’m no expert I guess he’s thinking of mankind as a whole, which is tired of itself and needs a shot in the arm from animal nature. You ought to be glad that he’s not a Chaka and won’t knock you off. Lucky for you he’s not the type.” I thought a threat might be worth trying. It seemed, however, to have no effect. The old woman still whispered, holding my fingers, while the Bunam, as Romilayu addressed him, doing his best to translate my words, was drawn up with savage stiffness so that only his eyes moved, and they moved very little, but mainly glittered. And then, when Romilayu was through, the Bunam signaled to his assistant by snapping his fingers, and the black-leather man drew from his rag cloak an object which I mistook at first for a shriveled eggplant. He held it by the stalk and brought it toward my face. A pair of dry dead eyes now looked at me, and teeth from a breathless mouth. From the eyes came a listless and finished look. They saw me from beyond. One of the nostrils of this toy was flattened down, the other was expanded and the entire face seemed to bark, this black, dry, childlike or dwarfish mummy which was gripped by the neck. My breath burned like mustard, and that voice of inward communication which I had heard when I picked up the corpse tried to speak but it could not rise above a whisper. I suppose some people are more full of death than others. Evidently I happen to have a great death potential. Anyway, I begin to ask (or perhaps it was more a plea than a question), why is it always near me — why! Why can’t I get away from it awhile! Why, why!