Outlaw (10 page)

I watched in amazement as the hills emptied, leaving only Kirutu, Wilam, and four guards each alone with Lela and me. Both of the princes had their eyes fixed on the crest.

When I looked back up, the man was walking toward us with even strides, spear held lightly in his hand. No other weapons, no body paint or adornments, just that one spear made of wood and bone.

The air seemed to still. Even the birdcalls stopped. I couldn’t know whether the princes saw the man as a threat or whether this was Isaka, their chief, but there could be no doubt that he commanded a respect they dared not challenge.

The man walked toward us in no hurry, eyes not on the two princes but on me. My heart hammered and I found myself wondering if he’d come to execute me.

But as he drew within ten paces, I saw that he didn’t have the eyes of a killer. His were a deep brown and brimming with mystery. I found myself immediately put at ease.

When I looked up at Wilam and Kirutu, my hope surged. They were clearly uncomfortable. Which meant the stranger held some power over them, and any man with such an understanding gaze might be a benefactor.

Beside me Lela was trembling. Not Isaka, then, I thought. She’d spoken of the chief with pride, not fear.

The man stopped five feet from me and for a minute he searched my eyes. He shifted his gaze first to Wilam and then to Kirutu.

He stepped up to the prince of the Warik. Slowly lifted his right hand and laid his fingers on the man’s scar. He slid his hand up, tracing the scar,
tsk
ing softly.

His back was to me so I couldn’t see his face, but I watched Kirutu’s reaction. Saw the bitterness in his dark eyes. The trembling in his fingers.

The man’s hand left Kirutu’s chest and rose to his face. Followed the lines of the prince’s cheek to the back of his head. The stranger’s strong hands gripped Kirutu’s neck and pulled his head forward so that they were cheek to cheek.

He whispered something into Kirutu’s ear and I watched the prince’s face quiver as if he was resisting and terrified at once.

The man slowly drew back from Kirutu, gave him a barely perceptible nod, and, without ceremony, turned from us and walked back the way he’d come, in no hurry.

I watched him go, stunned by the strange exchange, struck by how little I understood of what was happening in this mysterious dark valley.

Only then did I see the silhouette of a lone figure behind Kirutu on the slope. I couldn’t mistake the man coated in black. The shaman I’d seen at the council, Sawim. The one who’d struck such fear into my soul.

Two shamans? If so, they were not of the same character.

The black one
, Lela had called him.

The fur-clothed stranger paid him no mind. He simply walked away as if he had no care in the world.

When I looked back to where Sawim stood, he’d already turned and was walking away, beyond the hill’s crest.

Michael had said there was a war brewing in the valley, but it was a contest for more than Isaka’s throne, I thought. There was a deeper struggle at hand—one that stirred the same unspoken cry to God that I had been uttering since waking in the bottom of that canoe.

Save me. Please, I beg you. Save me!

A cry that he had not yet heard. If he was even listening.

“So be it,” Kirutu said.

He turned his back on us and walked south with his guards.

“So be it,” Wilam said. He nodded at his guards and headed west, toward the Impirum village.

Two of the men who’d remained by his side hauled Lela and me to our feet. Shoved us down the path.

“Who was that?” I asked, hurrying to keep pace. “What’s happening?”

“This Kugi,” she said. “Evil spirit man.”

“A shaman?”

“More maybe.”

But her face was lit with hope.

“We’re free?” I asked, hurrying to keep pace.

“No, miss,” Lela said. “This Wilam our master now. But we not die, I think.”

I prayed that she was right. That whereas Kirutu had not been able to hold me captive, Wilam would now show the whole valley that he could.

He’d kept me to spite Kirutu publicly. Kirutu had just as publicly called for my death. What this Kugi had said to Kirutu, I didn’t know, but I wouldn’t argue with the outcome.

A new hope swept through my mind.

And then I remembered where I was.

I remembered the people I was with—the nakedness of their bodies, the savagery of their ways.

I remembered that I was still in hell, and my heart sank.

I LEARNED that night who the stranger was, and my confusion deepened. Not because of what Lela shared with me, but because of what she didn’t.

They called him
Kugi Meli
, which means “evil spirit,” a name they gave to many things of a spiritual nature, I learned. The man had appeared from the mountains two years earlier and walked into the chief’s hut without being seen by the guard. He’d told Isaka that he would be dead in less than three years’ time. The valley would embrace a new king who would tear down all that was sacred. And then he’d left.

Filled with fear, the Tulim had immediately set out to kill him, but the man had proven impossible to track down. Why? Because he was an evil spirit—there was no other explanation.

Word spread that killing the man would anger the evil spirits. The man was untouchable. No one knew where he lived or came from. After that he was seen every few moons, usually at a distance, watching. Then vanishing. Like a ghost.

“What about the shaman?” I asked.

“Sawim,” she whispered. It was clear that she wasn’t comfortable speaking of these matters.

“Is Sawim evil as well?”

She grabbed my arm, eyes wide. “No, miss! You must not say this evil!”

“They are enemies?”

“This is not for me to say. These prince very afraid of both.”

It was all she offered me. Neither of us had any idea what words the stranger had spoken to shift Kirutu’s position, convincing him to leave me with Wilam, unharmed.

I set aside my attempt to understand their myths. Of more importance was my new status among the Tulim.

I was to be a free woman.

Truly my guard—Momos, the same lanky man who’d watched over me earlier—was only there to ensure my safety, knowing that I was at risk of being taken captive by any of Kirutu’s more ambitious warriors. The Impirum placed no restrictions on where I might go or whom I might talk to, excepting their Kabalan, which was reserved strictly for the
muhan
, or lords, as Lela called the class connected to the chief and his bloodline.

But when I was set free to live among the Tulim, the reality of my situation rose up and swallowed me whole. My eyes were opened to the terrifying prospect of actually living among them.

It began that first night of freedom, when Lela took me by the hand and excitedly led me to her hut. “Come see, you live with me!” As darkness claimed the jungle, we wound our way to the south side where the lowest and poorest lived.

I could understand Lela’s excitement as she stepped into her home—she was proud of her dwelling, and even prouder to have proven so useful to me and her prince. But when I stood up in the hut I saw only darkness. The fire was out, the air smelled like smoke and mildewed dishrags, and I felt desperately alone.

Lela was already on her knees, bending over the fire pit, blowing at the coals still smoldering there. With a few splinters and some dried bark she coaxed up flame, then heaped up some wood.

“We are very good, miss! It is very special.”

I stood by the door, at a loss, consumed by a simple question that had not presented itself to me until that moment.

Now what?

Enslaved in a hut awaiting execution was one thing, but living freely in a smoky hut with only straw for a floor and charred poles with cracks for walls…

It was not me.

The food wasn’t me. The stench wasn’t me. The dress, the language, the insects, the snake-infested bushes calling to my bladder…none of these were even remotely me.

I can’t adequately describe the hollowness I felt as I stood there watching Lela. I can still see it all: the rough-hewn poles, the mounds of ash in the fire pit, the bare ground showing beneath the straw, the dirty sparseness of the hut. I should have been grateful for the incredible risk she had taken in saving me.

I should have hugged her and danced around the fire in celebration. But all I wanted to do was curl up in a gunnysack and let sleep shut down my mind.

The only reprieve from my misery was Lela’s announcement that I was forbidden to have contact with any man but Wilam, and then only if and when he called.

My memory of the next week among the Impirum tribe of the Tulim is still somewhat clouded. I managed to survive, but my mind was under a savage and alien sea, struggling to rise out of deep hopelessness, thinking always that there had to be a way home but knowing all the while that there was not. The strange sights and sounds pummeled me into a kind of oblivion that left me too stupid to think properly and too numb to cry. I slowly began to shed the layers of my own identity.

I was terrified of going outside where every eye would turn to me, but I had no choice when needing to relieve myself. I cannot tell you how disagreeable each experience proved to be. Lela suggested that I bathe in the nearby creek, and I needed to wash, but after trudging down to that creek I took one look at the muddy, infested water and demanded we go back to the hut. The children who’d discovered us leaving the village found my behavior amusing. I only found it mortifying.

The village was relatively clean, in part because of the Tulim’s pervasive boardwalks built among their small garden plots. When the pigs outgrew their place as pets, they were tied up in small corrals outside the village. Still, there is no way to keep pigs clean. Their nature is to root in soft soil and mud. The children treated them like babies and the adults chased them from the gardens with sticks.

I could not eat anything but plain sago cakes and the vegetables from their gardens, which consisted mostly of squash. Lela preferred sago mixed with meats, but the moment I saw the makeup of their protein, I blanched. She took great pleasure in making a meal with cooked sago worms, baked insects, cooked lizards, snakes, rodents of all kinds—anything that squirmed, crawled or flew, none of which seemed remotely edible to me.

No more was said of the stranger, this evil spirit who’d apparently facilitated our release.

I spent most of the days thinking of Stephen and my home in Georgia. Strange thoughts crisscrossed my mind, daydreams of the simplest pleasures. What I would have done for one glass of milk or one bite of an oatmeal cookie. How far I would have walked for one pair of clean underwear. In those dreams I would be a queen and Stephen would be at my side. Our servants would bring us a tray of cookies and milk, and we would relish each bite as the court watched. Then we would throw a party with milk and cookies for all.

At night I listened to the distant sound of chanting as the natives beat on hollowed carvings skinned with crocodile hide. Then Lela would lie beside me in the dark and stroke my long hair, telling me not to be afraid because it would all be nice. Soon we would both make babies.

But I had a hard enough time getting used to their nakedness, much less any thought of making babies. Even after living among so many men bared for all to see, I found the sight unnatural.

It all amounted to me staying in the hut, alone. More than once I dreamed of wandering out into the jungle at night, knowing that I wouldn’t last until morning. Perhaps I was better off dead.

My entire existence was consumed with only
I
. I this, I that, I the other. Not once did I truly think of
them
. In the world of I, they hardly existed except as savages who were hardly human. I was wam to them and they were all wam to me. The only exception was Lela, but she was only a teenager who couldn’t possibly understand my world. Truly I was awash in self-pity.

And then, a little more than a week after I was put under the protection of Wilam, my world began to change.

I had taken to sleeping late and Lela usually let me sleep, using a stick to ward off any curious onlookers who might want to poke their heads in and take a look at the white wam. She’d become a woman of status in her own right, being the keeper of me, a position she held with great pride and delight despite having to put up with my melancholy.

On this morning, however, she shook me awake, chattering excitedly about bathing in the river. Not just any river, but the Konda, which fed into the Tulim valley two miles upstream. Lela had received permission from Wilam to take me so that I could bathe.

“Bathe?”

“You must go to clean water and make this smell goes away.”

I sat up, horrified. “Smell?”

“The people say this smell, miss.” She indicated my clothes.

I sniffed at my underarm. Musty, yes, but not half as smelly as the Tulim, at least from my perspective. But what about from their perspective?

I held out my arm. “I smell?”

Lela took a polite whiff and covered her small nose. “This skin very bad smell, miss.”

“Just today or always?”

“Always, this white skin very smelly. You must clean.”

I had not thought about what the world looked or smelled or tasted like from the Tulim’s perspective. But the very idea that I was walking around smelling like a cesspool was enough to offend my sensibilities even in my state of despondency.

Their distaste of me extended to the color of my skin. And my long straight hair. And the fact that I wore dirty clothes. And my strange language. In Georgia I was considered a beautiful woman; in that jungle I was hardly more than a pig.

Unless I could give them a child.

“Is it safe?”

“It is very safe, miss.”

Half an hour later we were making our way through the village with Momos, my lanky, broken-toothed guard.

At first sight of me, the children came running, whooping and hollering their delight.
The wam is coming, the wam is coming
! By the time we skirted the grassy slopes with the lone tree under which Lela and I had been set free, no fewer than twenty children were in tow. I tried to tell Lela to send them back, knowing that they wouldn’t be bashful about watching me bathe, but she only shrugged.

“No, miss. This children not go away.”

Momos stayed at my right heel, also ignoring the children. I looked back at him and he offered me a crooked grin. Despite his earlier frustration over my refusal to urinate as instructed, Momos seemed somewhat enchanted with his charge.

We walked on like that, Lela and I abreast, with Momos a step behind to my right, followed by twenty chattering children who hushed and smiled wide the moment I glanced back.

A flock of white cockatoos took flight overhead, eliciting a few cries of delight from several of the children, who mimicked their calls with remarkable precision. Others chimed in with lower calls and within seconds, like a pipe organ, they were performing an ethereal yet melodic tune in perfect harmony.

When I looked back, I saw that the girl who led them with her high-pitched call was hardly more than three feet tall, idly dragging a thin branch behind her as she hooted with pursed lips.

The moment she saw that I was watching her, she broke off her birdcall and offered me a face-splitting, toothless smile. I could not look at such an innocent vision and not return a simple smile.

When I turned and trudged on up the path, the children broke out in a chorus of excited voices. Clearly my smile had made an impression.

“What do they say?” I asked.

“They like this teeth, miss,” Lela said. “This children like you very much.”

Then Lela did something that took me off guard. She placed her hand in mine and we walked hand in hand. Something deep in my spirit began to break, but I could not recognize it, not yet.

The sound of so many feet pattering behind me on the hard-packed path still resonates to this day. Birds were calling above us, reptiles and small creatures rustled in the brush on either side, and here I was, walking down the middle of it all like the pied piper, leading a band of dark-skinned children.

For several minutes I walked with Lela’s hand in mine, unsure why her simple gesture stirred up so much emotion.

Then I felt small fingers slide into my left hand, and I looked down to see that the child with the pure, high voice had caught up and followed Lela’s example. She grinned up at me, barely able to contain her joy at my acceptance of her.

“Yuliwam,” she said.

Yuliwam. It took me only a moment to hear my name. Julian had become Yuliwam.

The little girl said my name again, beaming. “Yuliwam.”

I nodded. “Yuliwam.” The fact that
wam
was in my name mattered not to me.

I walked on, holding her hand tightly, aware that the small girl was looking back at her siblings and friends, glowing with pride. My world started to cave in on me as I walked. Where I was seen by the adults as an ugly wam, I was the object of fascination and pride among the children.

We’ve all seen the pictures of children making mud pies in the middle of a concentration camp, oblivious to the terrible suffering around them.

In that moment the Tulim children became, to me, the same picture of innocence in the midst of savagery. I walked for a hundred yards, treasuring both hands in my own, when it suddenly all became too much.

I remember the moment clearly. We had just come to the edge of a clearing that Momos insisted we skirt, but I couldn’t think to turn right or left. My heart was breaking.

I glanced down at the little songbird who beamed up at me with big brown eyes and rounded cheeks, and I began to sob. My grief and regret and desperation settled over me and I sank to my knees under their weight. I threw my arms around the child and clung to her tightly, surely terrifying her, although I can’t be sure because I could not stop sobbing long enough to look.

There for the first time I pressed innocent Tulim flesh against my own as if it were my own, because in that moment the little girl became living, breathing hope to me. For a long time I wept on my knees, and none of them—not Lela, not Momos, not the children—made any attempt to discourage me. They stood still, silent, watching.

If I had not broken down, and they had not gone so silent, they might not have heard the drone of an aircraft flying far above us. I certainly wouldn’t have, crying or not. My ears were not trained to hear such a distant, abstract sounds.

There was a mumble of questions and then a cry of alarm:
Woruru, woruru, woruru
! The children scattered back into the forest, led by Momos, who was running and yelling at Lela to bring me.