The Blood-stained Belt (26 page)

After a few
minutes, someone shouted an order and the guards withdrew. Sharma
shouted, 'Comrades, you are free! You can go home!'

Once the
excitement died down and we were on our way home, Sharma told me
the story. After he and Mecolo eloped from Koraina, they tried to
live together in a hamlet near Osicedi. This arrangement didn't
last for long because when the town elders heard that a detachment
of soldiers was on its way to capture Sharma and Mecolo, they
requested them to move on. The elders didn't like the fact that
Vaxili had outlawed Sharma and they didn't like the vendetta
against soldiers from Lower Keirine but they also didn't want to
provoke royal anger.

Sharma and
Mecolo fled over the border to seek refuge with Durgenu, the ruler
of a Dornite city-state that had good relations with a number of
towns in Lower Keirine and that steadfastly refused to join the
Dornite military alliance. When Vaxili demanded that Durgenu should
hand over Mecolo, Durgenu just laughed and asked whether Vaxili
thought that he, Durgenu, was a vassal of Keirine. Vaxili then
changed tack and sent messengers to negotiate directly with Sharma.
Finally, an agreement was reached: Mecolo would be returned to her
father if Vaxili released all of his prisoners who came from Lower
Keirine. The result was that we were on our way home as free men
while a reluctant Mecolo was being returned to her father.

While Sharma
was telling me the story of how he made a deal with Vaxili and why
he felt compelled to do so, his face looked as if it was covered by
a thundercloud. He finished by crying in an agonised voice, ‘She's
carrying our child.' What could I say? I laid a hand on Sharma's
arm. He said bitterly, 'I will never forgive Vaxili for this!
Never!'

Within a few
weeks, Sharma had even more cause to be bitter. Vaxili announced
that Mecolo's marriage to Sharma had been dissolved and that Mecolo
was going marry someone called Thuxto. In so doing, Vaxili piled
insult upon insult. Firstly, Vaxili had no right to annul a
marriage. Only the high priest could do that. Secondly, Thuxto was
a disreputable non-entity, an elderly widower who worked in the
forge at Koraina by day and was a notorious frequenter of taverns
for the rest of his waking hours.

After hearing
Sharma’s story, surrounded by the chatter of men who were free at
last and were excited at the prospect of seeing their homes for the
first time in many months, I thought somberly that probably not one
of them knew the real extent of the price that had been paid for
their freedom.

Abozi joined us
and observed grimly, 'They won't leave us alone, comrades. We will
be hunted like outlaws in our own land.'

Sharma said
quietly, 'You're right, comrade. Vaxili will never leave us in
peace. We'll have to defend ourselves.' He nodded grimly and said,
'The kingdom is dead. Vaxili has killed it.'

Abozi cursed
and said, 'Whatever the future holds, one thing is for sure -- I'm
not going back into one of Vaxili's prison cells. I'll die before I
allow that to happen.'

Sharma burst
out, 'Damn Vaxili! He could have had the whole of Keirine behind
him. Now it's much worse than it was before. Damn him!'

I said, 'He's a
small man'

'Then curse him
for taking on a task that he can't handle!'

Sharma
addressed the men before they dispersed to their home towns. He
told them that Vaxili would never leave them in peace and invited
them to join him in the mountains of the wilderness where they
could defend themselves. Some of the men responded to Sharma's
invitation while others were reluctant to do so. They thought
naively that Vaxili would forget about them now that they were
free. It wasn't long before they learned that they were wrong.

On the day
after we reached Osicedi, the town elders asked Sharma, Abozi and
me to meet with them. It was a sombre gathering. In the first
place, the elders were enraged at the fact that Vaxili had insulted
Lower Keirine by imprisoning so many of its sons. They said frankly
that Vaxili had destroyed the dream of the united Kingdom of
Keirine. Furthermore, they agreed that Vaxili would soon be hunting
for his former prisoners. Everyone at the meeting, including Sharma
and me, knew what had to be done, namely that the former prisoners
had to leave Osicedi as soon as possible.

Next day,
before we left town, one of the elders quietly gave us a wallet. He
said, 'Sons, don't let anyone know who gave this to you and don't
ask where it comes from. It's better that no one should know.'
Later, we learned that the money came from the town treasury. Much
later, when we were established in Orihedrin, we were able to repay
the money as unobtrusively as we received it.

As soon as we
found a base in the mountains, we used the money to buy arms from
Durgenu. At first, there were only about twenty-five of us, all
from Osicedi, hiding out in the mountains. However, during the days
that followed our numbers swelled as former prisoners streamed in
from towns all over Lower Keirine. The elders' councils had been
talking to each other and most of them agreed that their towns
would be targets for Vaxili's vengeance as long as they harboured
his former prisoners. Some of the councils shrugged off the threat,
thinking that the danger was exaggerated. However, soon enough,
when Vaxili's men began raiding the towns and villages of Lower
Keirine, they regretted that they had done so.

When a
messenger from Vaxili arrived a few days later, demanding that
Sharma and I should be handed over, the elders of Osicedi could say
truthfully that they didn't know where we were. The messenger
replied ominously that they would soon be hearing from Vaxili. Five
days later, a detachment of about two hundred troops arrived in
Osicedi. They set up a cordon around the town and began a
house-to-house search. When they found no one, they assembled all
the inhabitants in the town square and demanded to know where we
were. Finding that no one would give them any information, they
dragged Sharma's father onto a table and, in front of the whole
town -- men, women and children -- they stripped him naked. This
was an insult so terrible that it was almost unimaginable. However,
Vaxili's men weren't content with that. With sword points pressed
into the old man's back, they ordered him to stand motionless
facing his fellow townspeople. Next they ordered everyone -- once
again, every man, woman and child -- to walk past him and to spit
at his genitals. When Sharma's mother and brothers refused, they
seized Sharma's youngest brother and threatened to pull out his
fingernails at the rate of one fingernail for every refusal. When
the family again refused, the soldiers pulled out the first
fingernail. Sharma's mother rushed at the sword of the nearest
soldier and threw herself forward with such force that the sword
passed right through her body. Mercifully, she died instantly.
Sharma's father collapsed in a coma, falling off the table and
striking his head on the cobbles. He died two days later without
regaining consciousness.

Sharma nearly
went mad when he heard the news. His grief was so acute that we had
to hold him down to prevent him from dashing his forehead against a
rock. Later, when he calmed down a little -- more from nervous
exhaustion than from any other cause -- I made him walk with me in
the desert, which was silver and luminous under the full moon.
Zaliek's words kept running through my head: 'Forget about revenge.
Forget about resentment. They get in the way of clear thinking.’
However, I couldn't speak those words to Sharma. True as the words
were, profound as they were, they were small and hopeless when set
against what Sharma was suffering. And so we just walked and
walked, our boots crunching in the soft gravel of the plain, our
shapes tiny against the darkly mercurial expanse of the
wasteland.

After a long
time, somewhere far out on the plain Sharma turned to me and cried,
'I cannot take it any longer.' He hurled himself onto the ground
and, lying on his back, thrashed like a man with a convulsive
fever. I threw myself across his chest fearing that he would injure
himself and -- I must admit it now -- because I was terrified of
the passion that energised his thrashing, writhing form. I pressed
down onto Sharma saying urgent things to him -- soothing words,
comforting words, words of dumb and hopeless consolation -- while
he howled and thrashed under me.

Much later, we
headed back towards our base. Stumbling like a man recovering from
a fever, Sharma asked me weakly, 'Jina, Jina, what is to be
done?'

I replied with
more confidence than I felt, 'We have to pick ourselves up,
consolidate, and then start climbing again.'

'Climb? You
think so? Climb? I don't have the heart to do anything at all.'
Sharma stopped and sat down with his legs crossed, his arms folded
across his chest, and his head drooping. Rocking backwards and
forwards, he cried out, 'I want to die! I want to die right here!
Leave me, Jina. I can't go on.'

I kneeled next
to him and, with my arms around his shoulders, said some things to
him -- something about having courage, something about how all
things pass, even the most terrible and vile atrocities, and
something about how we would be victorious if only we could pass
this test. While I was murmuring these words of stupid consolation,
Sharma began to sob. I took him in my arms and held him tight with
his head pressed to my chest, caressing him and murmuring more
helpless words. His cries subsided gradually and, as he leaned back
on his elbows, he looked at me, his face taut and wretched, tears
glinting in the moonlight, and said in a strangled voice, 'It's all
gone, Jina. It's gone. It's gone.'

'Have courage,
Sharma.'

'My parents are
dead! The kingdom is dead! Mecolo and my child have been taken from
me! We're hunted like animals!' Sharma cried out again, 'It's all
gone, Jina.'

'Courage,
Sharma, courage.'

'Courage! I
can't even face tomorrow. I would rather die. Courage, you say?'
Sharma lay back, outstretched on the ground, while I hunched next
to him, guarding against any desperate move that he might make.
Gradually his breathing became easier and more regular and I
thought that he had fallen asleep. However, after about ten minutes
he asked in a tight but steady voice, 'Dana said that the clouds
ask the questions, didn't she?'

'Yes, she
did.'

'Do you see any
clouds up there, Jina?' I shook my head. Sharma said shakily,
'We'll have to ask the questions ourselves, won't we?' He sat up
with his arms around his legs and his chin resting on his knee. He
asked, 'What are the questions, Jina?'

I said, 'That's
easy to answer, Sharma.'

'Is it? Tell
me?'

'There's only
one question that concerns us right now.'

'What is
it?'

'It's simple --
how do we survive? In time, there might be other questions but
right now there’s only one.'

Sharma
muttered, 'You'll have to answer the question for us, Jina. I'm
useless. Do you hear me? I'm useless! I’m useless, I say –
useless!'

When we got
back to our base just before dawn, I took over command while Sharma
slept all of that day and half of the next. After that, he was
alert and refreshed and, as he resumed his daily duties, it looked
as if he had weathered the crisis. However, the corners of his
mouth were tight and there was a sharp wariness in his eyes that
never left him for the rest of his life. Also, those who knew him
well, like me, could see that something had died in him while
something new -- something harder, heavier, and blunter -- had
emerged from his crisis. I noticed something else, as well: Sharma
had shut the door on the events of that night under the desert sky.
Shut the door? It would be more correct to say that he had
obliterated them. He never again referred to his desperate despair
and in all the time that I knew him after that, he never again
mentioned his parents.

By now Lower
Keirine was in an uproar. Vaxili responded by establishing
garrisons in the major towns of the region. To do so, he had to
increase the size of his army. This inflated his expenses so he
levied a further tax on Lower Keirine. He called it a Home Security
Tax, saying that the inhabitants of Lower Keirine would appreciate
the fact that they were being provided with better protection
against the bandits and desperadoes who had evaded royal justice.
Of course this measure only increased resentment and opposition
throughout Lower Keirine and that swelled our numbers so much that
within a month we had a force of nearly five hundred men. Most of
them were former soldiers, either former prisoners or men who fled
from the army to escape Vaxili's vendetta.

Secure in our
base in the mountains, we harassed Vaxili's forces’ supply lines
and launched attacks on garrisons and outposts. We had the
advantage and we enjoyed success. Our men moved easily and openly
through a friendly countryside gathering supplies and information
wherever they went while Vaxili's forces occupied isolated islands
in a sea of hostility.

Sharma took the
moral high ground right from the start when he ordered that
captives should not be harmed. Instead they should be disarmed,
escorted as close to the border with Upper Keirine as possible, and
set free. Many of our men, enraged at what they and their families
had suffered, vehemently disagreed with this practice. However,
Sharma refused to rescind his order. He explained, firstly, that
Vaxili's soldiers were our compatriots who were also victims of
Vaxili's weaknesses. Secondly, the practice would encourage our
adversaries to surrender more quickly, rather than to continue
fighting out of sheer desperation. Finally, leniency on our side
would result in the occupying forces treating civilians less
harshly than they would otherwise do.