King Rat

Seeing the King, he remembered the camp and the wire and the radio and the diamond and the camp and the war and the camp and the radio and the guard they had to pass and would they get back in time and what was the news and how happy Mac would be with the three hundred microfarads and the spare radio that worked. The man-heat vanished. But the pain remained.

He stood up and walked for his clothes.

“You got a nerve,” the King said.

“Why?”

“Walking about like that. Can’t you see Sutra’s girl looking at you?”

“She’s seen plenty of men without clothes and there’s nothing wrong with that.” Without the heat there was no nakedness.

“Sometimes I don’t understand you. Where’s your modesty?”

“Lost that a long time ago.” He dressed quickly and joined the King in the shadows. His loins ached violently. “I’m glad you came along when you did. Thanks.”

“Why?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“You scared I’d forgotten you?”

Peter Marlowe shook his head. “No. Forget it. But thanks.”

The King studied him, then shrugged. “C’mon. We can make it easy now.” He led the way past Sutra’s hut and waved. “Salamat.”

“Wait, Rajah. Won’t be a second!”

Peter Marlowe ran up the stairs and into the hut. The radio was still there. Holding it under his arm, wrapped in the cloth, he bowed to Sutra.

“I thank thee. It is in good hands.”

“Go with God.” Sutra hesitated, then smiled. “Guard thy eyes, my son. Lest when there is food for them, thou canst not eat.”

“I will remember.” Peter Marlowe felt suddenly hot. I wonder if the stories are true, that the ancients can read thoughts from time to time. “I thank thee. Peace be upon thee.”

“Peace be upon thee until our next meeting.”

Peter Marlowe turned and left. Sulina was at her window as they passed underneath it. Her sarong covered her now. Their eyes met and caught and a compact was given and received and returned. She watched as they shadowed up the rise towards the jungle and she sent her safe wishes on them until they disappeared.

Sutra sighed, then noiselessly went into Sulina’s room. She was standing at the window dreamily, her sarong around her shoulders. Sutra had a thin bamboo in his hands and he cut her neatly and hard, but not too hard, across her bare buttocks.

“That is for tempting the Englishman when I had not told thee to tempt him,” he said, trying to sound very angry.

“Yes, Father,” she whimpered, and each sob was a knife in his heart. But when she was alone, she curled luxuriously on the mattress and let the tears roll a little, enjoying them. And the heat spread through her, helped by the sting of the blow.

It was a kind night, and the Java skies swam with stars, huge sparks of light in a carpet of ravened sea. The village was sparse with light. A fire flickered sleepily in the dusty campong. Around the doorways and verandas the men and women sat and talked or listened or contemplated. The children were mostly in bed asleep.

But over the men and over the women there was a waiting, a somberness. Their minds reached towards one hut, and they prayed, each in his own way.

N’ai writhed on the sleeping mat in agony. The pain was centered in her loins, and the fire of it spread through her entrails and through her veins and through her nerve channels, into her brain and eyes and hands and feet and into every molecule of her.

Now the pain was like an ocean within and over her, a placid sameness to the depth of it; though far beneath the surface there were peaks and valleys, plains and chasms, the surface stretched smooth the agony.

This pain was bearable, when the pain itself was part of the whole, the life of the body, the essence of it. But no ocean stays forever placid, storms come, winds claw the surface and tear the seas to highs and lows, tormenting. Storms are birthed in the bowels of wind and sky and cold and heat, and then, full-fledged, the storm takes the sea and shakes it and makes it monstrous. Thus was her pain, for now her pain moved jagged. It moved from ocean into storm, and the agony built from her loins and raced the paths of her and she twisted, ripped by its violence, spread by its violence. Her cries broke from her mouth and sped through the space of the stilted hut, over the hut and village quiet, out into the night, into the jungle, to mix delicately with sibilance of wind and hum of cricket and drone of mosquito, to rest at last in the sigh of surf pounding reefs of Java coast, south but a little way.

The sweat poured from her body and wet the mat, and she lay naked, her legs clawed wide by the pain, and she cursed men and all men and most the man who had done this to her, hating men with a hatred of monumental size, but most the one who had hurt her so, hurt her to this teetering death that took so long, so long.

“Tuan Allah,” she whimpered as the storm-pain blew its violence to a peak, “give me death, I beg Thee, give me death.”