“We got knife, sah,” said Romilayu, and he showed it to me. It was his hunting knife, and he had slipped it into his hah when the Bunam’s men came after him on the outskirts of the town.
“Oh, good man,” I said, and took the knife from him in a stabbing position.
“Dig, bettah,” he said.
“Yes, that makes sense. You’re right. I’d like to get hold of the Bunam,” I said, “but that would be a luxury. Revenge is a luxury. I’ve got to be canny. Hold me back, Romilayu. It’s up to you to restrain me. You see I’m beside myself, don’t you? What’s next door?” We began to go over the wall, and after a minute examination we found a chink high up between the slabs of stone and we began to dig at it, taking turns with the knife. Sometimes I held Romilayu up in my arms, and sometimes I let him stand on my back while I was on all fours. For him to stand on my shoulders was impracticable, as the ceiling was too low.
“Yes, somebody tampered with the block and pulley at the hopo,” I kept saying.
“Maybe, sah.”
“There can’t be any maybes about it. And why did the Bunam grab you? Because it was a plot against Dahfu and me. Of course, the king let me in for a lot of trouble, too, by allowing me to move Mummah. That he did.”
Romilayu dug, revolving the knife blade in the mortar, and he scraped and scooped out the scrapings with his forefinger. The dust fell over me.
“But the king lived under threat of death himself, and what he lived with I could live with. He was my friend.”
“You friend, sah?”
“Well, love may be like this, too, old fellow,” I explained. “I suppose my dad wished, I know he wished, that I had gotten drowned instead of my brother Dick, up there near Plattsburg. Did this mean he didn’t love me? Not at all. I, too, being a son, it tormented the old guy to wish it. Yes, if it had been me instead, he would have wept almost as much. He loved both his sons. But Dick should have lived. He was wild only that one time, Dick was; he may have been smoking a reefer. It was too much of a price to pay for one single reefer. Oh, I don’t blame the old guy. Except it’s life; and have we got any business to chide it?”
“Yes, sah,” he said. He was keenly digging, and I knew he didn’t follow me.
“How can you chide it? It has a right to our respect. It does its stuff, that’s all. I told that man next door I had a voice that said, I want. What did it want?”
“Yes, sah” (scooping more mortar over me).
“It wanted reality. How much unreality could it stand?”
He dug and dug. I was on all fours, and my words were spoken toward the floor. “We’re supposed to think that nobility is unreal. But that’s just it. The illusion is on the other foot. They make us think we crave more and more illusions. Why, I don’t crave illusions at all. They say, Think big. Well, that’s baloney of course, another business slogan. But greatness! That’s another thing altogether. Oh, greatness! Oh, God! Romilayu, I don’t mean inflated, swollen, false greatness. I don’t mean pride or throwing your weight around. But the universe itself being put into us, it calls out for scope. The eternal is bonded onto us. It calls out for its share. This is why guys can’t bear to be so cheap. And I had to do something about it. Maybe I should have stayed at home. Maybe I should have learned to kiss the earth.” (I did so now.) “But I thought I was going to explode, back there. Oh, Romilayu, I wish I could have opened my heart entirely to that poor guy. I’m all torn up over his death. I’ve never had it so bad.
“But I will show those schemers, if I ever get the chance,” I said.
Quietly, Romilayu chipped and dug, then he put his eye to the hole and said, low, “I see, sah.”
“What do you see?”
He was silent and dismounted. I stood, rubbing the grit from my back, and put my eye to the hole. There I saw the figure of the dead king. He was wrapped in a shroud of leather, and his features were invisible, for the flap was down over his face. At the hips and feet the body was tied with thongs. The Bunam’s assistant was the death-watcher and sat on a stool by the door, sleeping. It was very hot in both these rooms. Beside him were two baskets of cold baked yams. And to the handle of one of these baskets there was tethered a lion cub, still spotted as very young cubs are. I judged it was two or three weeks old. The fellow’s sleep was heavy, though he sat on a backless stool. His arms were slack and pressed between his chest and thighs, the hands with their gorged veins nearly dropped to the ground. With hatred in my heart I said to myself, “You wait, you crook. I’ll get around to you.” Due to the peculiarities of the light, he appeared as white as satin; only his nostrils and the furrows of his cheeks were black. “I’ll fix your wagon,” I promised him in silence.
“Well, Romilayu,” I said. “This time let’s use our heads. We won’t do as we did the first night here with the body of the other fellow, the Sungo before me. Let us plot. First, I am in line for the throne. They wouldn’t want to hurt me, as I’d be a figurehead in the tribe and they would run the show to please themselves. They’ve got the lion cub, who is my dead friend, so they are moving along pretty fast and we have to move fast, too. Boy, we’ve got to move even faster.”
“Whut you do, sah?” he said, growing worried at my tone.
“Bust out, naturally. Do you think we can make it back to Baventai as we are?”
He couldn’t or wouldn’t say what he thought of this, and I asked, “It looks bad, eh?”
“You sick,” said Romilayu.
“Hah. I can make it if you can. You know how I am when I get going. Are you kidding? I could walk across Siberia on my hands. And anyway, pal, there’s no choice. Absolutely the best in me comes out at times like this. It’s the Valley Forge element in me. It’ll be tough, all right. We’ll pack along those yams. That ought to help. You won’t stay behind, will you?”
“Wo, no, sah. Dem kill me.”
“Then just resign yourself,” I said. “I don’t think those amazons sit up all night. This is the twentieth century, and they can’t make a king of me if I don’t let them. Nobody can call me chicken on account of that harem. But, Romilayu, I think it would be smart to act as if I wanted the position. They wouldn’t want any harm to come to me. It would put them in a hell of a fix to hurt me. Besides, they must figure that we’d never be fools enough to go through two or three hundred miles of no man’s land without food or a gun.”
Seeing me in this mood, Romilayu was frightened. “We have to stick together,” I said to him, however. “If they should strangle me after a few weeks-and it’s likely; I’m in no condition to boast or make big promises-what would happen to you? They’d kill you, too, to protect their secret. And how much grun-tu-molani do you have? You want to live, kid?”
He had no time to answer then, as Horko came to pay us a visit. He smiled, but his behavior was somewhat more formal than before. He called me Yassi and showed his fat red tongue, which he might have done to cool himself after his long walk through the heat of the bush; however, I thought it signified respect.
“How do you do, Mr. Horko?”
Greatly satisfied, he bowed from the waist while he kept his forefinger above his head. The upper part of him was always much crowded by the tight sheath, his court dress of red, and he was congested in the face. The red jewels in his ears dragged them down, and as he grinned I looked at him, but not openly, with hatred. As there was nothing I could do, however. I converted all this hatred into wiliness, and when he said, “You now king. Roi Henderson. Yassi Henderson,” I answered, “Yes, Horko. Very sorry about Dahfu, aren’t we?”
“Oh, very sorry. Dommage,” he said, for he loved to use the phrases he had picked up in Lamu.