“Now we go, sah?”
I looked under the cowl. The face was swelled and lumpy, very much distorted. Owing to the effects of the heat, despite the love I felt for him I was obliged to turn away. “Good-by, King,” I said. I left him.
But then I had an impulse as we were going. The tethered cub was spitting at us and I picked him up.
“Whut you do?”
“This animal is coming with us,” I said.
XXII
Romilayu started to protest, but I held the creature to me, hearing its tiny snarl and pricked in the chest by its claws. “The king would want me to take it along,” I said. “Look, he’s got to survive in some form. Can’t you see?” The moonlit horizon was extremely clear. It had the effect of making me feel logical. Light was released over us from the summits of the mountains. Thirty miles of terrain opened before us, the path of our flight. I suppose that Romilayu could have pointed out to me that this animal was the child of my enemy who had deprived me of Dahfu. “Well, so look,” I said, “I didn’t kill that guy. So if I spared him … Romilayu, let’s not stand here and gab. I can’t leave the animal behind and I won’t. Look,” I said, “I can carry it in my helmet. I don’t need it at night.” As a matter of fact the night breeze was doing my fever good.
Romilayu gave in to me, and we started our flight, leaping through the shadows of the moon up the side of the ravine. We put the hopo between ourselves and the town, and headed into the mountains, on a straight course for Baventai. I ran behind with the cub, and all that night we did double time, so that by sunrise we had about twenty miles behind us.
Without Romilayu I couldn’t have lasted two of the ten days that it took to reach Baventai. He knew where the water was and which roots and insects we could eat. After the yams gave out, as they did on the fourth day, we had to forage for grubs and worms. “You could be a survival instructor for the Air Force,” I told him. “You’d be a jewel to them,” I also said to him. “So at last I’m living on locusts, like Saint John. ‘The voice of one that crieth in the wilderness.’ ” But we had this lion, which had to be fed and cared for. I doubt whether any such handicap was ever seen before. I had to mince grubs and worms with the knife in my palm and make a paste, and I fed the little creature by hand. During the day, when I had to have the helmet, I carried the cub under my arm, and sometimes I led him on the leash. He slept in the helmet, too, with my wallet and passport, teething on the leather and in the end devouring most of it. I then carried my documents and the four one-thousand-dollar bills inside my jockey shorts.
From gaunt cheeks, my whiskers grew in various colors, and during most of the trek I was demented and raving. I would sit and play with the cub, whom I named Dahfu, while Romilayu foraged. I was too simple in the head to help him. Nevertheless, in many essential matters my mind was very clear and even fine or delicate. As I ate the cocoons and the larvae and ants, crouching in the jockey shorts with the lion lying under me for shade, I spoke oracles and sang-yes, I remembered many songs from nursery and school, like “Fair do-do,” “Pierrot,” “Malbrouck s’en va-t’en guerre,” “Nut Brown Maiden,” and “The Spanish Guitar,” while I fondled the animal, which had made a wonderful adjustment to me. He rolled between my feet and scratched my legs. Although on a diet of worms and grubs he could not have been very healthy. I feared and Romilayu hoped that the animal would die. But we were lucky. We had the spears and Romilayu killed a few birds. I am pretty sure we killed a bird of prey that had got too near and that we feasted on it.
And on the tenth day (as Romilayu told me afterward, for I had lost count) we came to Baventai, sitting parched on its rocks, but not so parched as we were. The walls were white as eggs, and the brown Arabs in their clothes and muffles watched us arise from the sterile road, myself greeting everyone with two fingers for victory, like Churchill, and giving a cracked, crying, black-throated laugh of survival, holding out the cub Dahfu by the scruff to all those head-swathed and silent men, and the women who revealed only eyes, and the black herdsmen with sunny fat melting from their hair. “Get the band. Get the music,” I was saying to them all.
Pretty soon I folded, but I made Romilayu promise to look out for the little animal. “This is Dahfu to me,” I said. “Don’t let anything happen, please, Romilayu. It would ruin me now. I can’t threaten you, old fellow,” I said. “I’m too weak, and I can only beg.”
Romilayu said I shouldn’t worry. At least he told me, “Wo-kay, sah.”
“I can beg,” I said to him. “I’m not what I thought I was.
“One thing, Romilayu … ” I was in a native house and lying on a bed while he, squatting beside me, took the animal from my arms. “Is it promised? Between the beginning and the end, is it promised?”
“Whut promise, sah?”
“Well, I mean something clear. Isn’t it promised? Romilayu, I suppose I mean the reason-the reason. It may be postponed until the last breath. But there is justice. I believe there is justice, and that much is promised. Though I am not what I thought.”
Romilayu was about to console me, but I said to him, “You don’t have to give me consolation. Because the sleep is burst, and I’ve come to myself. It wasn’t the singing of boys that did it,” I said. “What I’d like to know is why this has to be fought by everybody, for there is nothing that’s struggled against so hard as coming-to. We grow these sores instead. Burning sores, fertile sores.” I held the lion on my breast, the child of our murderous enemy. Because of my weakness and fatigue, I was reduced to grimacing at Romilayu. “Don’t let me down, old pal,” was what I tried to say.
Then I let him take the animal from me and I slept for a while and had dreams, or I didn’t sleep but lay on the cot in somebody’s house, and those were not dreams but hallucinations. One thing however I kept saying to myself and telling Romilayu, and this was that I had to get back to Lily and the children; I would never feel right until I saw them, and especially Lily herself. I developed a bad case of homesickness. For I said, What’s the universe? Big. And what are we? Little. I therefore might as well be at home where my wife loves me. And even if she only seemed to love me, that too was better than nothing. Either way, I had tender feelings toward her. I remembered her in a variety of ways; some of her sayings came back to me, like one should live for this and not for that; not evil but good, not death but life, and all the rest of her theories. But I suppose it made no difference what she said, I wouldn’t be kept from loving her even by her preaching. Frequently Romilayu came up to me, and in the worst of my delirium his black face seemed to me like shatter-proof glass to which everything had been done that glass can endure.
“Oh, you can’t get away from rhythm, Romilayu,” I recall saying many times to him. “You just can’t get away from it. The left hand shakes with the right hand, the inhale follows the exhale, the systole talks back to the diastole, the hands play patty-cake, and the feet dance with each other. And the seasons. And the stars, and all of that. And the tides, and all that junk. You’ve got to live at peace with it, because if it’s going to worry you, you’ll lose. You can’t win against it. It keeps on and on and on. Hell, we’ll never get away from rhythm, Romilayu. I wish my dead days would quit bothering me and leave me alone. The bad stuff keeps coming back, and it’s the worst rhythm there is. The repetition of a man’s bad self, that’s the worst suffering that’s ever been known. But you can’t get away from regularity. But the king said I should change. I shouldn’t be an agony type. Or a Lazarus type. The grass should be my cousins. Hey, Romilayu, not even Death knows how many dead there are. He could never run a census. But these dead should go. They make us think of them. That is their immortality. In us. But my back is breaking. I’m loaded down. It isn’t fair-what about the grun-tu-molani?”