The Blood-stained Belt (40 page)

After a few
minutes, I was summoned into the chamber. Sharma embraced me in
such a perfunctory manner that in spite of my blade-cold anger I
stood back and asked, 'What's wrong?'

Sharma's left
eyelid was flickering and the flecks in his eyes were glowing with
anger. I could sense that he was quivering with passion even
although his bearing was outwardly controlled. For the first time
in a long while, I glimpsed the old cat-like Sharma, deceptively
composed even as he readied himself to pounce. Sharma licked his
lips and said in a steely voice, 'That man has just tried to
provoke me!' I raised my eyebrows. Sharma continued, 'He says that
our child will die within seven days of its birth.'

'Why would he
say that?'

Sharma's lips
curled in distaste. 'He says that it will be Zabrazal's way of
punishing me for marrying Shani. What do you think of that,
eh?'

I had other
things on my mind so I just shrugged and replied, 'It depends on
whether or not you believe in soothsayers and predictions.'

Sharma snarled,
'Well, I don't! But who is he, the meddling fool, to think that he
can scare me with such a cock and bull story? What if Shani hears
about it?'

I shrugged
again. I really didn't have any interest in the matter. I said,
'Look, Sharma, I didn't come here to discuss Isahile and his
predictions.'

That stopped
Sharma. He took a step backwards, looked at me coldly, and asked,
'You don't think that a prediction about our unborn child is worth
discussing?'

'I didn't come
here to discuss that.'

'No? You have
something more important on your mind?'

'I do.'

'Well, then, my
dear Jina, don't let my affairs stand in your way – by no means.
Let's hear about this supremely important matter that's pressing on
your mind.'

I steeled
myself inwardly and then told Sharma what I thought about the fact
that he had seduced another man's wife and then sent that man to
his death to get rid of him. Pricked by the cold steel in my soul,
I told him that he would be fortunate if the only retribution that
came upon him was the death of his unborn child. Finally, I told
him that I was resigning my commission immediately.

Sharma stared
at me icily while I was speaking. When I finished, he said curtly,
'Curse you, Jina! I thought that I could trust you but now you're
also turning against me. I wouldn't be surprised if you're in
cahoots with the priests.' He poked a finger at me and roared, 'I'm
giving you twenty-four hours to leave Keirine. If you haven't left
within that time, I'll have you arrested.'

'You're
ordering me to leave Keirine? You can't do that!'

'I'm the king.
I can damn well do what I please!'

'Twenty-four
hours, eh? Is that payment for a lifetime of --?'

'You heard me!
Twenty-four hours! That's all you've got!'

'Twenty-four
hours? Arrested? Oh, Sharma, Sharma, will you have your old comrade
hunted like a common criminal? Now wouldn't that be a fine show of
royal gratitude for services rendered?'

Sharma looked
at me narrowly. Something flickered in his eyes – something from
the long tunnel of memory – before he pounded the table and roared
even louder. 'All right, I'll give you time to get your affairs in
order. But, damn it, if you haven't left within a week, I will have
you arrested for sure.' He pounded the table again and roared, 'Get
out, damn you! Get out! I never want to see you again!'

I said with
real sincerity, ‘The feeling is mutual.’

Two days later,
I travelled to Durgenu's territory disguised as a trader. However,
when the old man heard that I had fallen out of favour with Sharma,
he told me plainly that he wanted me out of his territory as soon
as possible. In fact, he was so nervous that he immediately
arranged for me to take passage on a ship that belonged to one of
his trading partners. As I left the room, Durgenu clasped my arm –
his hand was trembling – and muttered, 'You see, my friend, we must
maintain good relations with Keirine. It's not for me, you
understand, not for me at all – but I have to think about my
people. I can't risk doing anything that will place my people in
jeopardy.' He pressed my arm and whispered, 'Go quickly. Go
quietly. Sharma mustn't know about this affair. You understand,
eh?'

‘You wouldn’t
want to be treated the same as Ferewala, eh?’

‘Indeed not!
No, my dear fellow, indeed not! All the more reason to keep this
business quiet!’

The ship sailed
the next morning, heading eastwards across the Endless Ocean. I
stood at the stern, watching the land recede from view and trying
to get used to the unfamiliar feel of the ship. It seemed to me to
be like a living thing with its own nature. Its life was manifested
through its dipping and swaying motions, and through its
characteristic set of sounds – the creaking of timbers, the swish
of the water down its sides, the whistling of the wind in the
rigging and the flapping and snapping of the sails. As I leaned on
the rail, I remembered how Dana and I talked about floating with
the clouds eastwards over the Endless Ocean. I remembered saying to
Dana that we would see islands in the ocean, laid out like pearls
against the neck-piece of a gown. Well, I wasn't floating like a
cloud and from this vantage point I wouldn't see the islands laid
out like pearls. However, if I turned around and looked up at the
great mainsail that loomed and billowed above me, it could well be
a cloud. I closed my eyes and, with the image of the sail still in
my mind's eye, I thought, Yes, this could have been what Dana and I
envisaged that day on the hillside outside Koraina. Yes, the sea is
like the great expanse of the sky and the ship with its great
billowing sails is like a cloud following its scudding
sky-companions eastwards in pursuit of our youthful fancy.

Before the ship
sailed, I was tempted to send my belt to Sharma. Then I thought,
No, I won’t do that. I will wear it as an eternal reminder of how
he’s treated me, as a reminder of the ephemeral nature of even the
oldest relationships. I also thought, if I don’t send it to him,
he’ll wonder why I haven’t done so and what I’ve done with it. Have
I sold it in the bazaar? Have I thrown it away? Have I burned it?
As I stood at the rail, stroking the buckle with a thumb, running a
finger across the embossed pattern of intertwined struggling
beasts, I thought, Let him wonder and worry. Let the great King of
Keirine know that there are many things in this world that are
beyond his ken and beyond his reach.

As I stood with
my eyes closed and my face upturned to the sail and the wind, I
thought about Dana. She came to me in an image that was so
immediate and so close that I moved a hand along the rail, reaching
out to touch her – so real was she at that moment. She stood right
there, looking up at me with her luminous eyes, smiling with the
secret of her enjoyment of life. Then I opened my eyes, cursed
under my breath, and turned around to look out over the ship's
wake. God, what a fool I was! Dana was gone, killed next to the
Great River – and, in any case, she wouldn't be fresh-faced and
youthful now if she had lived. But what of it? Whatever her age,
wouldn't she have stood next to me here at the stern of the ship,
graceful in her maturity, invigorated by the experience, laughing
with excitement at the thought that at last we were scudding
eastwards towards the pearl-like islands of the Endless Ocean?

With that
thought enveloping me, I felt loneliness and desolation greater
than I had ever known. I thought bitterly that Dana wasn't here to
share the moment, Sharma had failed me, Zaliek was dead, and as for
Keirine – well, now I had abandoned my share in that dream to which
we had climbed so purposefully. Leaning on the rail, I wept. Yes, I
wept. My desolation was all the greater because I knew that nobody
cared whether I laughed or wept – or, come to that, whether I lived
or died.

On board there
was a trader named Reshaja who came from one of the islands. He was
a small, rotund man with a bald head, beetling eyebrows, and an
earring whose gleam matched that of the gold inlays in his front
teeth. He reminded me of the Dornite trader whose donkey we killed
below Gandonda so long ago, except that the trader wore threadbare
clothes and carried hardly anything of value whereas Reshaja was a
man of substance who traded in gemstones. When I told Reshaja that
I intended to make a new life for myself, he looked at me
speculatively and remarked that he had one or two suggestions to
make if I didn’t mind him doing so. Soon he was teaching me how to
assess and value precious stones. Daily, as the ship swayed and
dipped its way eastwards, we sat in Reshaja's small cabin poring
over stones laid out on a cloth. I learned as much as he could
teach me and we formed a partnership before the ship reached its
first landfall. We agreed that I would travel amongst the outer
islands, buying gemstones and looking for new sources of supply,
while Reshaja would travel amongst the inner islands as well as
market our wares on the mainland.

After eight
days the ship reached the island of Terfillere. As we approached
land, I marveled at how this massive place of rock and earth rose
abruptly out of the fluid depths of the surrounding ocean. I was
excited at the sight of the cloud-skirted mountain peaks, the rocky
cliffs, the golden strips of beaches and the green valleys that
seemed to have been poured into the folds between the mountains. It
was strange, novel and exhilarating. I needed an experience like
this to alleviate my despondency. I needed to see and know that the
world could still offer sights and experiences that were as
spectacular as they were unexpected.

Terfillere was
Reshaja's home. He gave me a small apartment in his large,
log-built house that stood on the outskirts of the island's main
town. This would be my base when I returned from my commercial
expeditions and it would be the place where we would meet to
exchange money and wares.

For five years
I travelled amongst the islands of the Endless Ocean, buying
gemstones and looking for new sources of supply. Although the
islands varied in size and shape, most of them were inhabited by
the same race of people. Only the people of the easternmost islands
were different. They were a tall and willowy race with slender
noses, gentle eyes, and pale skins who claimed to have inhabited
all of the islands of the ocean until the new people with their
iron-making skills and larger, more maneuverable ships forced them
ever eastwards.

These people of
the furthest isles assured me that the Endless Ocean was indeed
endless. No one had ever sailed eastwards from their islands for
more than two weeks. After a week of sailing, the sea started to
become thick with weed while an ever-growing encrustation of
barnacles slowed a ship so much that it became sluggish in the
water. After a few more days, if it could still move, a ship would
enter a realm of perpetual fog and deathly calm where the wind
hardly ever blew – and when it did blow, although it was ice-cold,
it carried a whiff of fiery sulphur. In spite of the calm, the sea
broke with whitecaps as if there was shallow water underneath even
although depth soundings could not find a bottom. In this realm, at
night sailors would hear howls and moans that made them think of
demons in the grip of unbearable pain and anguish. Strangely, one
man might hear the sounds while another might hear nothing. Those
who heard the sounds said that they were so dire that they could
only be warnings that human beings should not proceed any further,
upon pain of death. To prove the point, I was told that once a ship
did go further and never returned. About a year later, on the edge
of the weed belt, sailors found timbers from the ship. The wood was
scorched, twisted into fantastic shapes, and shattered as if some
huge and monstrous force had breathed on the planks in fiery anger
before crushing them as easily as a human hand crushes an egg.

Often, as I
sailed from island to island, I watched the clouds scudding across
the sky and envied them. I still had many questions and the answers
that I got didn't always satisfy me. Howls, moans, and scorched,
shattered timbers floating on the ocean? Perhaps it was true – in
any case, was it more fantastic than some of the things that I had
seen? -- or perhaps it was just a reflection of our unspoken human
terrors. I knew that unlike us fragile, crawling human beings, the
clouds would know for sure whether or not the Endless Ocean was
indeed endless. They would know the shape and appearance of every
island – something that I still didn't properly know even after
five years of sailing the ocean. They would know why, once, when
the wind blew a squall from the north, it dumped onto our ship
thousands of small frogs, still alive and twitching. The sailors
said that it was the work of the gods. But why would the gods –
whichever gods they were – dump a heap of frogs on sailors who were
minding their own business in the middle of the ocean?

Often, I
recalled that Dana said that the clouds asked the questions. If the
clouds knew so much then what sorts of questions did they ask?
Perhaps one of the questions they asked was this: Why do you chase
after such small and petty things when you see how you are situated
within infinity between the great stretching sky and its earthly
counterpart, the Endless Ocean? Perhaps they asked me: Why did you
invest so much in the cause of Keirine, when for you it has come to
nothing? Why were you so short-sighted that you couldn't read the
end into the beginning? Perhaps that was what Dana meant.

Twice every
year, Reshaja and I met in Terfillere. From him, I got news of the
outside world. I learned that Sharma's and Shani's child did die
within a week of its birth but that Shani had produced two more
children since then. I also learned that, more than ever before,
Sharma's wives and children were being troublesome. Of course,
rivalries and resentments had been brewing ever since Sharma took a
second wife, not to mention a third one. However, matters really
came to a head when Mecolo's oldest son, the ironically named
Bedaxili -- 'Beloved of Vaxili' – took a fancy to his half-sister,
Roda's oldest daughter, who was only seventeen at the time. When
the girl rejected his advances, he took her by force. In
retaliation, Roda's oldest son attacked Bedaxili, who killed him.
Overcome with shame, Roda's daughter committed suicide. Distraught
and almost powerless in the face of such familial passion and
intrigues, Sharma banished Bedaxili to a small village near
Osicedi. The grieving Roda, now more of an enemy of Mecolo than
ever before, pressed the claims to the throne of her surviving son,
Isegala. Of course, Shani was waiting in the wings with claims of
her own. Her sons were still pre-teens but who knew how long Sharma
might live and what changes there might be in the interim? To add
to Sharma's troubles, after lying low for a while, Bedaxili was
trying to gain popularity by travelling around dispensing charity
and suggesting that now that his father was old and tired he,
Bedaxili, should take over the throne. Bedaxili was violating the
terms of his banishment but Sharma, enervated in a web of his own
making, didn't have the heart or the courage to bring his son to
heel. In any case, everyone knew that he had always had an
especially soft spot for Bedaxili, his first-born and the heir to
the throne.