Authors: Craig Gehring
God, my eyes burn, too.
“Water. Drink. You drank nothing for a sun and moon.” Tomy grabbed the
bowl
and enthusiastically
pressed it against
Edward’s mouth.
Edward
sipped suspiciously. No Onge would ever attend a white man in such a way.
Then again,
Edward
was suspicious of even being alive. By all
logic
, he should be dead. Instead, it appeared he was resting in a chieftain’s bed attended by an Onge in a monumental hut. His predicament defied all
reasoning
.
Edward felt a frantic urge to get up, to leave his bed, to somehow escape, but he couldn’t even sit up. He felt trapped in his pain-wracked skin.
He forced himself to calm down and took a few minutes to drink, the cool water’s soothing action on his throat temporarily distracting his mind’s probing.
Gradually, the events of the night came back to him, like bits of flotsam netted from a river. He remembered it all.
Mahanta
, the drug, the variance in the coming of age. The panther.
A muscle in his head cramped that he didn’t know he had.
Nockwe’s foot.
I remember now.
He reviewed each piece of the puzzle in his mind.
H
e was still missing quite a bit of
jigsaw. Once he ran out of the past to examine, he looked over the present.
Such odd surroundings.
He hadn’t yet ruled out delusion.
Next to the bed was a sitting mat made of a velvety fabric that probably represented a tenth of the tribe’s total wealth. It must have come from their underground cache.
He pulled his head up slightly. It hurt tremendously but he needed to see.
Far across the hut was some sort of chair.
A throne?
I
t certainly had a grandeur that seemed other-worldly in an Onge setting.
Its wood was freshly ca
rved and lined with red fabric.
The roof
of the hut
actually arched to some degree over the chair area
.
D
ecorative strings with shiny metal and beads hung from the ceiling down to
the floor, framing the “throne.”
He
rested his head back on the bed.
It hurt too much to keep it up.
Edward’s delusion hypothesis couldn’t overcome the fact that in the final analysis, the straw felt real and the space looked real. His head and body ached realistically. These factors taken together lent credence to his alternate hypothesis that he had not the foggiest clue what was going on.
The mystery ached nearly as bad as his injuries.
He shifted his head for comfort
, waiting
for the merciless throbbing in his skull
to ease
before once more addressing the boy.
Tomy
still hadn’t answered up.
“Story,” Edward
gently prom
pted him
.
The boy had been staring at him the whole time. Edward hoped
the reason for Tomy’s rapt attention wasn’t because Edward’s brain was exposed or something else equally gruesome.
“Nockwe kicked you,” said the boy slowly.
Yes, the flashing foot.
Edward grimaced and then immediately regretted that he did so. His attitude
had
provided new muscles to join in the aching.
“Yes, yes…” p
rodded Edward. It even pained him to vibrate his own vocal chords
. Speaking was a necessary evil.
“
A lot of people
kicked and hit you. Medicine man and Dook wanted to roast you.”
But I’m here.
“Manassa said no.”
“Who is Manassa?” asked Edward.
The boy scrunched his eyebrows. He sighed, then started his story over again as though to a child. “Mahanta had his
ret’nal’u
two nights past. You sneaked to watch it, you silly white man. But only he didn’t kill the pig. He left the village to kill a panther, and Mahanta died.”
He died?
Edward’s mind scanned again through the night.
He died?
There Mahanta stood before his mind’s eye, hefting the panther over his head. Edward would never forget that moment. He saw it as clearly as if he were still there, hiding in the grass. The incident was unbelievable but certainly a reality.
“What happened when I passed out?” Edward asked.
“I just told you,” said Tomy, obviously frustrated. Before Edward could say anything else, Tomy tapped his forehead with his palm. “Oh! I forgot! Manassa told me to get Bri’ley’na as soon as you wake, if you do.”
He ran out of the hut.
Edward attempted to further assess the damage to his weary body
without moving
.
He didn’t want to
stir up the pain again.
He had no visible wounds, save for some scratches from the jungle brush
and
syringe marks in his arm.
He dared not touch his head. His legs
felt
numb, presumably from
lying
in the same position all day and night.
Sun and moon
. He gave them a try and got no response.
He would need to shift his body up to get his circulation going, but he didn’t want to risk that without assistance. It had been hard enough just lifting his head to an upright position.
It felt like he’d had his head
amputated, used for a football game, and then screwed back on.
What is this hut? Manassa’s? Who is this man?
Edward
speculated that Manassa was an elder from outlying tribe. In Edward’s other missions, there were always
respected outsiders coming in and out
. These primitive opinion leaders had always been his key to getting
any
work done. Being roamers and travelers, they were more open to new ideas. Often they’d already been introduced to Christianity, and were at least familiar with the concept of missionaries
and Western advances
.
Unlike the Onge, any
travelers’ great-grandparents and entire descendancy didn’t all live and die within a thousand yards of an old tree.
Perhaps this Manassa is such a traveler. Perhaps he can help me.
Immediately Edward dismissed his own thoughts. It was pointless speculation, as his position on the island was untenable. Even with the support of this outsider, Nockwe had to follow the laws of the tribe.
As evidenced by my aching head.
If he couldn’t bend the rules for Mahanta, he certainly couldn’t do so for a white man. Both the medicine man and Nockwe’s main adversary wanted Edward dead. The best Edward could
hope
for would be a return to Sri Lanka,
and from there back to London.
He kept at examining his surroundings as though the dust motes floating near the rafters of the hut might suddenly give him answers.
There was nothing else he could divine by looking. Tomy had not yet returned.
For the second time in less than a week,
Edward pray
ed. This time he started with one
his father had drilled into him from the
first day he could say the words
.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
Then Edward added:
I hope somehow Mahanta’s still alive. And if he isn’t, I’m sure you’re taking care of him. It’s a shame, though.
Whenever Edward did really pray, he just talked to God. He didn’t even throw in an
“amen” at the end.
“You’re crying.” A female’s soft voice, in Onge.
“Hmm?” Edward mumbled. He opened his eyes. A woman stood over him. He recognized her at once as Nock
we’
s young wife, Bri‘ley‘na.
“Water?” she asked.
“No, Tomy helped me with that,”
he answered.
Bri’ley’na
was
twenty-five years old.
Edward had never seen an Onge woman with hair even slightly cared for, but hers was washed and combed that day.
Her thick black hair ran straight down the sides of her dark face and swept back and forth gently as she moved. She was full-figured and quite beautiful, by any standards.
He suddenly felt excruciatingly aware that she was topless. It must have been something about her hair.
“What happened?” Edward asked, keeping his eyes on her face. He ignored the tears that had collected on his cheeks. He didn’t want to wipe them and make the pain worse again.
“Nockwe kicked you. Manassa saved you.” Her voice carried a kind tone. Her eyes assessed his injuries. It seemed
Bri’ley’na
actually cared how Edward was doing.
I must look terrible if I’m getting sympathy from an Onge woman
. Their society was patriarchal; so was
American
society, and that didn’t mean anything in either case. The Onge village ran on the hardened backs of the women.
Here was a woman who didn’t seem so hardened, and yet he knew that she was probably the toughest of them all. Edward had heard that one fool challenged Nockwe after he had become chieftain. She had killed the man personally rather than have her husban
d be troubled with the duel
.
They’re quite a match
, Nockwe and she
.
She ran the village work crews from sun up to sun down as
the chieftain’s wife
.
“Yes, but what happened to Mahanta?” Edward asked.
“Mahanta died,” she said.
I’ve heard this before.
“Yes, but how?” he asked.
“You have many questions, Ed-ward.” She peered at him for approval on her pronunciation. He nodded with his eyes and she grinned slightly. “Now you must sleep. You must rest and you must heal.”
“But I have so many questions,” he insisted.
“And so does Manassa. But first you must be well.” She knelt down on the ground beside him. “Your skull seems broken. Nockwe kicked you hard, but I am told two others got in blows and almost killed you. My husband stopped them.” He heard her open a box. “Manassa told me to give this to you. This is your last shot. He showed me how to do it. It will heal you.”
Edward glanced down as far as he could manage. In his lower periphery vision he saw her fiddling with a syringe.
“What is that?” he asked.
I’m not going to let them inject mud into my veins or something.
Her warm hands
pulled his arm open
to expose
the
vein. She answered with a sing-song voice. “Nectar of the gods, that only Manassa and his chosen may drink. Magic medicine, he said.”
A doctor. Perhaps this Manassa is not a tribesman at all. No wonder I’m still alive.
“Is Manassa a doctor?” he asked.
Maybe he has painkillers…
She looked at him quizzically for a moment and then gave him the injection. It hurt; her nursing skills left much to be desired. Edward wondered why Manassa hadn’t administered the medicine himself.
“Now, Manassa told me to tell you this, in these exact words.” She breathed in deep and looked up, reciting mechanically what he had told her. “Something strange is about to occur. Don’t do anything except fix your head. Fix your head. Fix every part of your head. Fix your body and don’t move your body. You will have the power to heal your body but if you move your body you may die.”
Edward’
s stomach turned somersaults. This was not a doctor; more like another
“
medicine man
”
. For all he knew, she might have injected peyote or worse.
Certainly something was happening.
He felt as though he were swimming at the bottom of the ocean, with all its crushing pressure bearing down, and every time he stroked in one direction he was spun completely around.
He was not losing consciousness, but it was certainly being altered.
“Just fix your head.” She said again. “Just fix your head.”
The last time she said that, it took her a full two minutes. It was at the end of these two minutes, as she turned to walk away in slow motion, that Edward noticed something was wrong inside of him.
The rushing sensation stopped, as though he were plunging off a cliff and had frozen in mid-air at the
onset
of free fall.