“Well, what is this thing?” I said.
This was the head of one of the lion-women — a sorceress. She had gone out and had trysts with lions. She had poisoned people and bewitched them. The Bunam’s assistant had caught up with her, and she was tried by ordeal and strangled. But she had come back. These people made no bones about it. but said she was the very same lioness that Dahfu had captured. She was Atti. It was a positive identification.
“Ame de lion,” said Horko. “En bas.”
“I don’t know how you can be so sure,” I said. I could not take my eyes from the shriveled head with its finished, listless look. It spoke to me as that creature had done in Banyules at the aquarium after I had put Lily on the train. I thought as I had then, in the dim watery stony room, “This is it! The end!”
XVIII
That night Romilayu’s praying was more fervent than ever. His lips stretched far forward and the muscles jumped under his skin while his moaning voice rose from the greatest depths. “That’s right, Romilayu,” I said, “pray. Pour it on. Pray like anything. Give it everything you’ve got. Come on, Romilayu, pray, I tell you.” He didn’t seem to me to be putting enough into it, and I flabbergasted him altogether by getting out of bed in the green silk drawers and kneeling beside him on the floor to join him in prayer. If you want to know something, it wasn’t the first time in recent years by any means that I had addressed some words to God. Romilayu looked from under that cloud of poodle hair that hung over his low forehead, then sighed and shuddered, but whether with satisfaction at finding I had some religion in me or with terror at hearing my voice suddenly in his channel, or at the sight I made, I couldn’t be expected to know. Oh, I got carried away! That withered head and the sight of poor Queen Yasra had got to my deepest feelings. And I prayed and prayed, “Oh, you … Something,” I said, “you Something because of whom there is not Nothing. Help me to do Thy will. Take off my stupid sins. Untrammel me. Heavenly Father, open up my dumb heart and for Christ’s sake preserve me from unreal things. Oh, Thou who tookest me from pigs, let me not be killed over lions. And forgive my crimes and nonsense and let me return to Lily and the kids.” Then silent on my heavy knees and palm pressed to palm I went on praying while my weight bowed me nearly to the broad boards.
I was shaken, you see, because I now understood clearly that I was caught between the king and the Bunam’s faction. The king was set upon carrying out his experiment with me. He believed that it was never too late for any man to change, no matter how fully formed. And he took me for an instance, and was determined that I should absorb lion qualities from his lion.
When I asked to see him in the morning after the visit of Yasra, the Bunam, and Horko, I was directed to his private pavilion. It was a garden laid out with some signs of formal design. At the four corners were dwarf orange trees. A flowering vine covered the palace wall like bougainvillaea, and here the king was sitting under one of his unfurled umbrellas. He wore his wide velvet hat with the fringe of human teeth and occupied a cushioned seat, surrounded by wives who kept drying his face with little squares of colored silk. They lit his pipe and handed him drinks, making sure that he was screened by a brocaded cloth whenever he took a sip. Beside one of the orange trees an old fellow was playing a stringed instrument. Very long, only a little shorter than a bass fiddle, rounded at the bottom, it stood on a thick peg and was played with a horse-hair bow. It gave thick rasping notes. The old musician himself was all bone, with knees that bent outward and a long shiny head, tier upon tier of wrinkles. A few white weblike hairs were carried in the air behind him.
“Oh, Henderson-Sungo, good you are here. We shall have entertainments.”
“Listen, I’ve got to talk to you, Your Highness,” I said. I kept wiping my face.
“Of course, but we shall have dancing.”
“But I’ve got to tell you something, Your Majesty.”
“Yes, of course, but there is dancing first. My ladies are entertaining.”
His ladies! I thought, and looked about me at this gathering of naked women. For after he had told me that he would be strangled when he couldn’t be of any further service to them, I took kind of a dim view of them. But there were some who looked splendid, the tallest ones moving with a giraffe-like elegance, their small faces ornamented with patterns of scars. Their hips and breasts suited their bodies better then any costume could have done. As for their features, they were broad but not coarse; on the contrary, their nostrils were very thin and fine, and their eyes were soft. They were painted and ornamented and perfumed with a musk that smelled a little like sweet coal oil. Some wore beads like hollow walnuts of gold, looped two or three times about themselves and hanging down as far as their legs. Others had corals and beads and feathers, and the dancers wore colored scarves which waved flimsily from their shoulders as they sprinted with elegant long legs across the court and the basic scratching of the music went on as the old fellow pushed his bow, rasp, rasp, rasp.
“But there is something I have got to say to you.”
“Yes, I suspected so, Henderson-Sungo. However, we must watch the dancing. That is Mupi, she is excellent.” The instrument sobbed and groaned and croaked as the old fellow polished on it with his barbarous bow. Mupi, trying out the music, swayed two or three times, then raised her leg stiff-kneed, and when her foot returned slowly to the ground it seemed to be searching for something. And then she began to rock and continued groping with alternate feet and closed her eyes. The thin beaten gold shells, like hollow walnuts, rustled on this Mupi’s body. She took the king’s pipe from his hand and knocked out the coals on her thigh, pressing down with her hand, and while she burned herself her eyes, which were very fluid with the pain, never stopped looking into his.
The king whispered to me, “This is a good girl-very good girl.”
“She’s certainly gone on you,” I said. The dancing continued to the croaking of the two-stringed instrument. “Your Highness, I’ve got to talk …” The fringe of teeth clicked as he turned his head with the soft, large-brimmed hat. In the shade of this hat his face was more vivid than ever, especially his hollow-bridged nose and his high-swelled lips.
“Your Highness.”
“Oh, you are very persistent. Very well. As you claim it is so urgent, let us go where we can talk.” He stood up and his rising caused a great disturbance among the women. They began to spring back and forth, loping across the little pavilion, crying out, and making a clatter with their ornaments; some wept with disappointment that the king was going and some attacked me with shrill voices for taking Dahfu away while several shrieked, “Sdudu lebah!” Lebah-I had already picked the word up-was Wariri for lion. They were warning him about Atti; they were charging him with desertion. The king with a big gesture waved at them, laughing. He seemed very affectionate and I guess he was saying he cared for them all. I was waiting, standing by, huge, my worried face still stiff from the bruises.