King Rat

Ayee, Buluda told herself in wonder, is it possible that only a few short years ago, this mother-to-be was yet a babe I held up from the womb and smacked life into, only a measured time ago? She counted the seasons and the girl’s count became sixteen years of life, and she remembered too that even the mother of this woman she had brought into life as well. I am old, old, she muttered, and she became a little sad. But not so old, she chuckled, that I cannot get a little warmth from the sight of a young buck caressing his love, nor yet a twitch of envy at the sight of a young virgin, or a young woman, or a young widow, or even a middle-aged widow; and not so old that I cannot feel excitement from the mating dance, and not so old that I cannot remember the time of my youth and my children, and the time, for instance, that I and Tuan Abu had down at the shore, when my husband was in Surabaya, and Tuan Abu yet a boy who knew not. Buluda laughed and laughed and the tears ran down her cheeks as she remembered her life. Ayee, thou art not yet ready for the earth, old woman, she told herself.

As the pains increased and pulsated quicker and more vast, Buluda held the girl’s hands to give her strength to push, push, push little one. Then she took her right hand away, and probed gently deep within and finger-touched the head, and she nodded to herself and knew that soon, what was to be, would be. She took her hand away and washed it, then sat once more beside the girl and held her hands, forgetting the ache in her own back or the oldness of her bones.

“Push, push again, little one,” she crooned encouragingly, “push for thy life and the life of thy child.”

The pain no longer ran like the ocean, but only came and went as the typhoon comes and goes—sudden, shocking, gone. Sudden, vicious, here. Sudden, killing, gone.

And the tide of pain hammered at the gate of brain, fulfilling the function that was required of it. It unlocked the door and let the spirit soar free, beyond the pain, leaving only muscles to the will of pain, leaving them free to stretch and split and move to open up the path of birth. A wave of pain crashed into her and her body bent to its will while her spirit rose above it.

Now N’ai was floating on a zephyred sky under a silken moon. She was serene now, no longer fearing death, no longer fighting it. She only felt regret, regret for her son, for her child to be, for her husband, regret that she would no longer be there to care and worry and cook and mend and plant and work and love the three of them.

“Truly I have no wish for death,” she murmured, unafraid, “but there is nothing I can do against it. So I will let death come, gently or terribly as is her wish. But I am sorry that I have to die—but there is nothing I can do, nothing.”

“Thou art wise, child,” a benign voice said.

She looked and smiled, and then a puzzled frown crossed her brow. “Tuan Abu! But thou art dead, Father! Thou art dead for two years now. Am I already dead?”

“No child, not yet.”

She was no longer in the sky, for the sky had become a chasm, and the path of the chasm was deep and dark and the thread of path was lit by fireflies, the steep walls of the chasm shutting out the sky and the light above. She was walking in the chasm, part of it, yet not a part of it, and now she walked out of the shadow into the sun.

“Ayee,” she sighed happily, “truly the sun is good.”

“How is he?” Tuan Abu asked gravely.

N’ai was puzzled for a moment and then she understood. Tuan Abu’s ears were old and tired, and where she had said sun, he had only heard “son.”

“He is growing and growing and he will make a fine man,” she said proudly, not wishing to embarrass him by saying “I but said the sun feels good.”

“I still can be proved right, my child,” Tuan Abu said sadly.

“I know, Father, but that is in the hands of Allah.”

She smiled confidently at the old man, loving him. “I would want the same to happen as it happened.”

It had happened when her first husband had left the village, and though she knew that she had been given to the stranger to make his sleep calm and not as a wife, even so she felt a wife to him. She had waited two weeks after he had left, and then she had bowed low before Tuan Abu, the Headman of the village, and said: “I am with child, Father.”

The Headman had looked at her astonished. “Did not the women tell thee what to do, what herbs to use, that thou should not have a child by him?”

“Yes, Tuan Abu, assuredly. But I wanted his child.”

Then Tuan Abu had become angry and had said: “This is a bad thing, N’ai. The blood of East and blood of West should not mix, for thou would have a tormented child that is half of our world and half of his. Neither of each, neither of both.”

“I know, Father. But I want his child, I want his child.”

“Thou hast done a bad thing,” Tuan Abu had said angrily. “You will go to Buluda and tell her to give thee the drink that will take away the child.”

“This I will not do,” she had said firmly.