MY FIRST thought was to run, but before I could properly consider where I might run to, three men stepped in, hastily shoved the bag over my head, and marched me out of the hut. I was confused, I was in shock, and I was terrified.
But another thought gave me a hint of hope as they steered me down the path. Although the hole they"d thrown me into was its own muddy h.e.l.l, I"d found some solace there. Now without the gag, I could speak to the man who"d called out to me.
And yet they weren"t taking me to my hole. That much became clear five minutes later when we began trudging up a steep incline that I couldn"t remember.
I had difficulty walking on the stony path barefoot, but I wasn"t exactly in a position to complain, so I stumbled forward as best I could. When I tripped on a rock that sent me to the ground with a sharp cry, the men argued for a few seconds, then pulled off my hood.
"Naneep." They motioned up the path. This could only mean "go" or "walk."
I could see the trail well enough by moonlight to avoid most sticks and rocks, but the bottoms of my feet were already bruised. The underbrush on either side was thick and the trees a tangle of branches. After three days I"d seen only brief glimpses of the land itself, and I imagined the worst. It didn"t matter that I had yet to see a snake; I was sure they were there, just out of sight, as were crocodiles and lizards and every other kind of crawling creature. Truly, I was surprised that I hadn"t been attacked.
I struggled on, panting and sweating.
It took us at least an hour to reach our destination on a barren hill that overlooked two draws, one on either side, just visible by a three-quarter moon. Now I could see more of the terrain. We were nowhere near the river, which I a.s.sumed lay far behind us where this sweeping valley met the swamps we had crossed in the canoes. Beyond each draw, tall mountains eclipsed a starry sky.
Ahead, under a grouping of ma.s.sive trees, stood a large shelter without walls, perhaps forty feet to a side. Firelight cast a glow into the surrounding foliage.
I could see dark forms silhouetted there as we approached, but my escort stopped under the closest tree. They tied a rope around my neck and secured the other end to one of a dozen posts. I was obviously not the first to be brought here, and fears of what awaited returned my mind to a state of frenzy.
I couldn"t shake the feeling that I was a goat about to be slaughtered.
One of my escorts wagged his finger in my face, uttered a stern warning, then motioned at something to my right before leaving.
When I first laid eyes on the girl who waited in the moonlight twenty paces away, I thought we"d been followed by the woman who"d helped me undress. But as she approached I saw that she was much younger, perhaps twelve or thirteen. The simple bands around her arms and neck were fashioned from woven vines, and she wore no colored accessories.
Something else caused me to wonder if she was of a lower cla.s.s than the three women I"d met earlier. The split skirt hanging from her waist was made from some kind of woven gra.s.s or thin bark rather than from dyed fabric, as the others had worn. And as she walked toward me I saw something even more distinctive about her. Her skin was a milk chocolate, not the near-black of the others". Her hair wasn"t as curly. In fact, she looked altogether racially divergent, from her tiny stature to the roundness of her face.
She stopped a few paces off and looked at me with round brown eyes. After a moment she addressed me.
"Are you English?"
I was too stunned to answer. Her accent was heavy, but I refused to believe I"d misheard her words.
"I am Lela," she said. "I will speak for you."
"Speak for me?" My voice was hoa.r.s.e.
"I will speak for this trial." She shoved her chin toward the square structure.
Tears flooded my eyes. "You speak English!"
The girl named Lela stood still. "What is your name, miss?" she asked.
My breathing was heavy. "Julian."
"Yulian?"
"Julian. I"m an American."
"I attending English school. A long time past. I forgetting this words."
"No, no, you speak perfectly!" I cried. Then, eyes darting in fear that I"d been overheard, I lowered my voice. Words rushed from me like water from a spigot. "You have to help me! This is all a mistake! My boat...I was taken but I"m an American. We have to leave before they kill me! This is a mistake, I don"t belong here!"
"It cannot leave this place, miss. Anyone leaves this place, they will be sick and die. It is the way, this purum. This evil spirit."
"No, that"s only what they tell you." Her earlier words caught up to me. "What do you mean, trial?"
"This lords. It is the way of wam who come to Tulim. This three tribes will decide if you will be with a man."
I couldn"t process what she meant.
Lela looked at the council just out of earshot, then back at me. "You must make pretty or I think you will die."
Oddly enough, the girl"s suggestion that this tribunal had gathered to decide if I would be married or taken or whatever with meant, unnerved me more than the possibility that they might kill me. My life had already been s.n.a.t.c.hed from me. My child had drowned. What was left for me?
"I..." Words couldn"t keep pace with the revulsion flogging my mind. "They will force me?"
By her expression I could see that she still didn"t comprehend. But of course she was hardly a woman who could understand such things.
"They will hurt me?"
Slowly a smile nudged her mouth. "No, miss, you do not understand. They will not hurt you if you are beautiful," she said. "It is great honor to be with this great lords. This are princes of this Tulim."
"I don"t want to be with these lords!"
She looked shocked. "But you must, miss!"
I was nearly hysterical. There on the hill my circ.u.mstances became too much for me-the leeches crawling up my legs, the stench of mud and rotting river, the sweating black flesh. An image of Stephen sinking below the waves flooded me with anguish. I felt I couldn"t breathe.
"No! No, I will not be taken by any man, you tell them that!" My breath came hot and heavy as I marched in front of the astonished girl like a red-faced schoolteacher.
"You tell them that I will cut it off and feed it to the crocodiles if one of them even touches me!" I thrust my finger toward the gathered council. "Tell them that!"
Her eyes went wide and her lips tried to form a response but she was too shocked to voice it. I lowered my face into my hands and tried to regain my composure, but I couldn"t stop my tears.
"No, miss, this is not a good thing," Lela said. "You must not cut this off. They cannot make baby if you cut off this."
The sincerity in her voice shocked me out of my fear. I lifted my head and stared at her.
"You must make yourself beautiful and try to make a baby or you will die," she said.
I realized then that I was seeing the world through a completely different set of lenses from this young girl. My head was abuzz with this simple thought: being taken by any man who gathered around that tribunal fire would be a great honor for Lela. In this context, being forced did not compute in her mind.
Lela was trying to help me. This young girl was a friend who spoke my language. English! If the men who"d taken me captive were G.o.ds in their world, then I was their slave and this girl was my only angel.
Shaking, I sank to my knees and pressed my palms together as if praying to her. "Please...please help me. I"m sorry. Please help me."
She glanced over at the council, quickly stepped up to me, and pushed my hands down. "You must not do this. I am not this lord."
I quickly lowered my hands.
"You must ask the spirit to help you look beautiful to this lords, miss. If you can make baby, then you will be safe."
"My baby died," I whispered. I"d become like a little girl myself.
"You already make baby?" she asked, surprised. The revelation seemed to impress her more than anything I"d yet said. "What you are saying is true? You can make this baby?"
"Yes...but my child is gone."
"You can make more baby?" she asked.
"I don"t want to make another baby!"
She lowered her voice. "No, you must! I will say and this will save you." The excitement in her voice was infectious. "There is little possible to make baby in this place. A woman who make baby is much good! You must make yourself pretty and I will tell them you make a baby."
She seemed to be implying that pregnancy among the Tulim was not easily achieved.
Lela grabbed a handful of gra.s.s, wadded it up, and began to rub my skin. The heat and humidity coated my body with moisture, and the black soot that the women had applied earlier smeared. She shoved the gra.s.s into my hands and grabbed more.
"Quickly. You must clean. It is very important to clean if you want to make a baby."
My every instinct told me to rub more dirt on my skin, to make myself as offensive as possible, but reason dictated that staying alive was, at least for the moment, the higher value. So I followed her lead and tried to wipe the soot off my belly and arms as well as I could without the help of soap and water, which hardly amounted to more than moving the stuff around.
Lela squatted and worked on my legs, smearing the soot over my exposed skin rather than cleaning it, a fact I quickly pointed out.
"You"re making me dirtier."
"No, miss. You must not look ugly."
Clearly they did not prefer white skin. The older women in the hut had made as much plain when they"d heaped soot upon me in the first place. This was only the jungle"s version of a good tan.
I nearly reverted to my impulse to look as ugly as possible. Instead I followed her lead.
"Are you sure they will like this?"
"It is better," she said. "I will tell them you will make a baby."
To hear Lela, children were the most precious commodity in that valley. I shoved from my mind any notion of how I might actually go about making a baby and a.s.sisted her in her attempts to spread the dirt on my skin. My arms, my legs, my belly, my chest, my back, my face-all of it was soon tinted brown.
"I will too soon make a baby," she said, working on my feet.
"You"re too young!"
She stood and grinned wide. Two of her bottom teeth were missing. "No, miss. I already give this blood. I will be chosen." She said it as if nothing could possibly make her more proud. I wasn"t sure whether to reprimand her or cry for her.
It was then, standing under the tree as I awaited my trial, that the raw humanity of the inhabitants in the Tulim valley first overshadowed my fear of them, if only for a few moments. Lela was only a girl doing her best to belong, like any girl her age in any social circle anywhere in the world.
I a.s.sumed that she, like me, had been brought in from the outside. What was more, she seemed to have come to terms with her place in this world.
She lifted a slender hand to my mouth, pulled down my lower lip, studied my teeth, and ahhed.
"It is very pretty," she said, and released my lip. "It is very healthy, this teeth. I will tell them."
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"I am from this Tulim."
"But where did you come from, before this Tulim?"
She hesitated. "I am wam, miss. I come from this Indonesia. It is where I learn English."
"What is wam?" I asked.
"This is offspring of animal and Tulim, many years past. You are wam, miss. Only this lords and this people are not wam."
A voice called to us from the council, and Lela hurried to untie me from the tree. "They call. We go. I will tell them, miss. You will make this baby."
Chapter Seven.
THIS LORDS, as Lela called them in her broken English, were positioned around a ma.s.sive rectangular slab of gray slate about a foot thick set upon four stumps. I say positioned because I immediately saw that each side of the table hosted a unique group.
These were the leaders of the three tribes that occupied the Tulim valley, and as a group they looked as imposing as the scarred man who"d plucked me from the sea.
I couldn"t shake the certainty that I was walking directly to my death. The script was already written and I was only following the same path many others had taken before their demise.
I should run now. I should spin and flee into the jungle to face whatever fate awaited me there, beyond their reach.
And yet I walked confidently. One foot in front of the other, captive already in a world that offered no escape.
I stopped at the edge of the thatched roof. To a man, they stared back at me. It was as if I were not only in another world but in another dimension altogether, a newcomer to an alternate reality.
My head swam with a sense of dej vu and my heart, beating quickly already, slowed to heavy beats.
Maybe this was all a horrible nightmare. An illusion that was swimming through my head as I slept peacefully in the white sailboat, still in calm seas. Perhaps at a single prod from the captain, or at my son"s fussing, I would wake to find all well.
Lela gave me a gentle nudge. I looked at her. The plain reality of my predicament returned, free from illusion. But of course I"d known the full certainty of it already. My mind, so strained by terror, had offered me a moment"s reprieve, however absurd.
She gave me an encouraging smile and glanced at the one side of the table that was unoccupied. I faced the council and edged forward into a yellow glow provided by the fire pit in the middle. Smoke drifted up to the blackened ceiling high above.
Each group consisted of five men, four of whom stood on the ground or sat on rocks behind their spokesman. Another twenty or thirty warriors from each tribe stood idly in the dark beyond the structure, peering in with interest.