Outlaw

Chapter Nineteen

MELINO AND her servants swarmed around me the moment we entered the upper courts. She tended to me like a mother hen, snapping orders for hot water and herbs to speed my healing, muttering her curses at the Warik and the spineless purum Kirutu, who would feel the wrath of Wilam as no living being had yet felt it.

She kept asking me if I was OK, was I sure that I was OK, and I could only reassure her that I was, though my words were undermined by my own conflict.

I could not bring myself to speak of what had happened in Kirutu’s hut. I dared not speak a word of Stephen. The thin roll of poison lay against my skull, a haunting reminder that I’d imagined none of what I had seen or felt.

My son was alive. I had seen his face, had felt his arms around my neck, had heard his cry for me. My need to save him coaxed desperation from my heart like a winepress.

A woman who has been violated only wants to withdraw to a safe place in hope of recovering her dignity. But memory only withdraws with her, smothering her with every detail.

The true savagery of Kirutu’s violation had nothing to do with my body.

When Melino had finished cleaning me, she demanded one last assurance from me that I was resting comfortably, then hurried the servants from my hut with the strictest orders that I be left alone to sleep.

The moment she was gone, I ripped the poisonous leaves from my hair and shoved them behind the thatched wall. Then I lay down, curled up into a ball, and cried. Exhaustion pushed me into a deep sleep full of horrible nightmares.

It was late afternoon when I awoke in a haze to find Melino sitting on the floor beside my mat. Only when sharp pain flared through my belly as I tried to stand did I recall the events of the previous night. I gasped as much from the memories that flooded me as from pain.

“No, you must sit,” Melino demanded. “You must not move quickly if this wound is to heal. And it must.”

I leaned back against a bundle of sago leaves. Her eyes searched mine and then fell to my abdomen. “You are sure the child is still with you?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m sure.”

“Wilam questions, but I’ve assured him. What do men know of these things? A woman knows. And if the child doesn’t grow, we will know.”

“No,” I said. “The child will grow.”

“Yes. Of course it will.” She offered an empathetic smile, then spat to one side and mumbled a curse.

“That beast will pay with blood. To kill the child of any prince is punishable by death.”

Any child? I had to verify Kirutu’s representation of their law.

I saw the opening and asked my question.

“Have any of the prince’s wives given birth to children from other men?”

“This is impossible,” she said. “No woman would be so foolish. The child would have to die.”

I hadn’t really expected any other answer.

“A prince would choose only a pure vessel, not a woman who has any living children,” she continued.

I recalled her questions of me before Kirutu’s wedding ceremony. She’d asked if my son was dead. The question was a part of her vetting.

“No, of course not,” I said.

Melino poked the embers with a stick.

“I’ve never seen Wilam so distraught,” she said. “He’s thrown everyone but his three ranking warriors out of the Muhanim. He refuses to speak to even me.” She paused. “I fear the valley will be filled with the blood of all the Warik. They underestimate the full wrath of my husband.”

And this was the man I was to kill. My great defender, who would rend the heavens to save me and the child he had placed within me.

For a moment any thought of harming him fell from my mind. I wanted my warrior to rip the enemy limb from limb for what he had done to his cherished bride! I wanted him to descend on the Warik with a roar and sever Kirutu’s head from his body with a single stroke. I wanted him to save my son and defend my honor.

But I knew that none of this was possible. I wasn’t his cherished bride any longer—he just didn’t know it yet. And he couldn’t save my son—Stephen was a stain upon his honor. He just didn’t know that either. Not yet.

Mistaking my anguish for self-pity, Melino placed her hand on my knee and offered me a faint smile. “You will heal and give Wilam a beautiful son, Yuli. You must not worry.”

“How can you know that Wilam will defeat Kirutu?”

She studied me for a moment. “No one can know all things. But my husband would level these mountains to save his people. If Kirutu thought he could defeat Wilam, he would have tried many times. Many will die, but Wilam cannot be killed so easily.”

I lay on the mat for hours after Melino’s departure, drowning in a sea of misery. I tried to think of a way out for my son, but I couldn’t. And as day gave way to dusk, my despair set its hooks into my mind, like a vicious cancer.

Wilam did not visit me. No, he would not, Melino said. His mind was on war. Lela did not visit me. No, she could not, Melino said. I was to remain sequestered with the lords.

I must heal. I must keep pure. I must not endanger myself in any way.

But how could I heal Stephen’s broken heart?

How could I keep pure what was torn?

How could I remove myself from danger when I was already dead?

That night I could not eat. I could barely sleep, and then only when exhaustion drew me under.

The next day the village filled with the sounds of warriors running, eerily crying out the call to war. Where the sound of children’s laughter and soft songs had once filtered through the jungle, I could hear only death’s haunting voice.

It wasn’t merely my own disposition, though I knew I was seeing through a dark glass. Fear had settled in the valley, so thick and heavy that no sound of joy could penetrate it.

And I alone held the truth secret in my heart, where none of them could know.

I was to blame. I was the stain. I was the ruined heap huddled in my hut, a fruitless bride who held no true value. A failed mother who’d delivered her own innocent children into the arms of a fiend.

There in that hut I cursed God, because any promise I had once clung to had proven false in this valley of death.

Three days, Kirutu had said. I had three days to kill Wilam.

Two of those passed, and as each hour crawled by, my heart slipped deeper into the abyss. I tried to smile when they brought me my food, and at times I think I may have, but their minds were on war and my deep melancholy was understandable, so they paid me little attention. I was only recovering from a terrible brutalizing.

The only way to save Stephen was to kill the man who’d saved me. I tried to tell myself that he hadn’t saved me, only the person that he thought me to be: a pure vessel who carried his child. I was neither.

But my reasoning offered me no desire to kill him. I could not bring myself to murder another human being.

Wilam was, in fact, my only hope. He was the one who could kill Kirutu before my son was discovered. He was the one who might then offer me mercy and allow my son to live. He was the one who might yet find a love for me that extended beyond the laws that governed their beliefs.

I clung to that terrible hope alone, knowing deep in my soul that it was insanity. Wilam would not step beyond the beliefs and laws that had guided his understanding of all that was right, any more than I could rise up and walk on water.

By the time night had fallen, even that thin thread of hope had darkened. I lay alone in my hut long after silence had swallowed the village, and slowly settled into what can only be described as a living death.

Sleep.

And in that sleep, the dream that had first lured me from distant shores visited me once again, for the first time since I had left Atlanta.

Once again I was looking down at a large valley filled with a tangle of trees, with vines the size of my forearms running all the way to the ground. Flocks of red-and-blue parrots took flight and flapped over an endless swamp at the valley’s far end. The landscape was both savage and idyllic at once.

Once again a single sweet tone reached out to me, wooing me with its unbroken, haunting note. I looked around, wondering where the song could be coming from, but I could see no one. The singular, evocative tone grew in volume, and birds from all corners of the jungle took flight toward the sound, far before me.

And then I too took flight, sailing above the trees, up the valley. A low tone joined the higher one then, a deeper note that seemed to reach into my bones. I wasn’t afraid—on the contrary, I found the sound exceedingly comforting. It seemed to wrap itself around my whole body and pull me forward.

Once again in that dream I was rushing, faster and faster, headed directly for a barren hill. It was there on that hill that I saw the figure who had so often stood there, calling to me. A nameless one. An exotic creature from another world, calling out to me in a voice that was deeply comforting.

Come to me, it sang without words. Find me. Join me. Save me…

And once again, before I could see the singer’s face, the dream faded, leaving me to darkness.

I awoke with eyes wide open.

The morning had come, and with it a deep stillness. Still gripped by my memory of the dream, I wondered if I might still be sleeping.

And then the events that had delivered me into that hut deep in the jungle crashed into my mind. Wilam. Kirutu. Betrayal.

Death.

The reality of it all crushed any lingering memory of the dream.

I jerked upright from my mat and listened for any sound. But there was none. They had gone?

My heart hammered as I lurched toward the door, quickly removed the slats, and stepped into the sunlight for the first time in three days.

Distant birds called. Smoke coiled to the sky from several huts, and if I’d used my imagination I might have heard the sound of crackling fire. Otherwise the village was silent.

Empty. I was alone?

I hurried along the upper boardwalk, looking for anyone. But there was no one to be seen. Not even the elderly loitering near the doorways to their huts.

“Melino?”

My call was hollow.

I began to run along the boardwalk. I needed someone to shatter the illusion that I had been abandoned.

But there was no one. So I ran faster, calling out Melino’s name, oblivious to the pain in my abdomen, all the way to the far end of the upper courts, which overlooked the massive clearing with the lone tree at its center.

I pulled up by the railing there and stared out at the sight that greeted my eyes.

The women, children, and elderly had gathered at the north end, near the trees, looking south. A sea of black men, Impirum all, filled the grassy slopes—thousands of warriors bearing spears and bows and axes, dressed in red bands and blackened pig grease that glistened in the dawn light.

The sight took my breath away. There were no guns or horses or tanks, only flesh and blood and bone. But the raw power and savagery amassed on that grass struck me as more threatening by far, for what are metal and bullets compared to feral muscle and sinew and honor and rage?

Wilam stood facing his army, dark and strapping, bands of red and blue and yellow on his biceps, thighs, and head. Stripped down for war, strapped with taut muscles.

My heart surged at the sight of him. My warrior, who had saved me and loved me.

My husband, who would kill my son and betray me for a throne.

It was their way.

Wilam thrust his spear into the air and cried for the heavens to hear. “The enemy of my seed must pay with blood! For law, for honor, for glory, we war!”

Then he turned and loped into the jungle.

The massive sea of dark bodies moved as one behind him, surging forward with a roar that rattled the leaves. I could feel their pounding feet in the soles of my own as they swept into the jungle, close on Wilam’s heels.

In a matter of moments the field emptied of warriors, like a huge bowl spilling its wrath into the jungle, leaving only a vacuous silence to keep the women, children, and elderly company.

Would Wilam have gone if he’d known I was worthless?

I, the violated one with a bastard son—an outcast without value—had sent them to their deaths with my lie.

A deep and terrifying panic swarmed me. The die was cast. Kirutu would engage them with his dark ones. Michael had warned me that a struggle for power would rip the valley apart. I had never imagined how central my role would be. Truly I was only a pawn in their eyes. A wager, a pledge, a piece of property that would soon be thrown over the cliffs with my son.

I could not remain in the upper courts. Melino could not see me in such a distraught state. You see, even then I was clinging to the impossible hope that somehow, some way, I would wake from a horrible nightmare.

I spun and ran, not caring where I went. I only had to get out of the village, to a hiding place where no one could find me.

I let misery swallow me whole. The dream that had returned to me while I was asleep only stood in mocking contrast to the reality that faced me now. I had never found love, not from a father, nor a mother, nor a husband. The only great gift the world had ever given me was Stephen.

I had followed an absurd dream and now my son would go to an early grave for a second time, innocent as a dove.

Why? Because I was not worthy. Not as a daughter, not as a wife, not as a mother.

I ran up the path that led from the Kabalan into the jungle, and I did not stop when my abdomen screamed for mercy. It deserved none, for it had failed me.

I did not stop when I could no longer see the path through my tears. They streamed down my face like a river freed from its dam.

I slowed like a stumbling, lurching cow prodded to the slaughter when my legs began to give way, but I refused to stop.

I had to get out. Just out. It no longer mattered that the jungle would swallow me or that I would be killed by a wild beast. The jagged peaks to the north would accept my resignation. The swamps to the south would drink me like an offering.

It was over. I was nothing.

But the body has its limitations, and my weakened muscles found them. I don’t know how long I managed to keep moving. Only that I had reached a grassy knoll topped by several craggy boulders that overlooked the valley when my strength finally gave way.

I sank to my knees facing the boulders, lungs heaving, vision blurred. It occurred to me then that I had run north while Stephen was south. I had run away from him because in going to him I would only ensure his death. But I had still run away.

Even in this I was a failure. Powerless.

I gripped my hair with both fists, allowed my head to sag backward, and wailed as my tears wet the dust at my knees.

And there I made my outrage known to God in no uncertain terms, not sure he cared.

The rage ran its course and left me defeated. At the end of myself, my cries became a whimper.

I begged. I pleaded. My tears were my blood offering—I had nothing else.

Please…

There was no more to say.

Only please…please… over and over.

And then nothing, because I was sure that God wasn’t listening to this lone soul on a hill in the middle of the jungle so far from home.

I slowly settled to my side, curled up in a ball, and lay like a dirty, disposed-of rag.

The wind blew gently over my skin, unaware of its mocking caress. Birds called in the jungle, unmindful of the pain on the earth beneath them.

For a long time I was dead to the world.

It was then that I heard the gentle voice, like an angel from a dream.

“Wake up, my child,” it said.