Chapter Six.
“Much I misdoubt this wayward boy,
Will one day work me more annoy.
I’ll watch him closer than before.”
Byron.
When I look back now to the first two, or even three, years that I spent in Otakooma’s country, among Otakooma’s savages, I wonder that I was not bereft of reason, or that, knowing escape by death to be in my power, I did not have recourse to the deadly poison berry that grew in abundance in many a thicket. Our goats ate freely of this berry, by-the-bye, but it seemed to have no other effect upon them than to make them lively.
But even at this date, strange to say, there are certain sights and sounds that never fail to recall to me not merely my life among those savages, but the very feelings I then had. For instance, in the county in England where I now reside, the cow-boys, or sheep-herds (I will not call them shepherds), have a peculiar way of calling to each other; it is a kind of prolonged shrill quavering shout, and it bears some faint resemblance to the howl of Otakooma’s savages, as heard by night in the forest. Again, anyone drumming on the table with his finger-nails will sometimes bring to my mind the feelings I used to have on hearing the beating of the horrid tom-toms. The beating of tom-toms and the howling, combined now and then with a shriek as of some poor wretch in mortal agony and dread, even when I was not present, but probably a prisoner in my hut, used to tell me as well as words could, that a human sacrifice was progressing somewhere in the vicinity of the royal palace.
The smell of weeds burning in a field only yesterday depressed me; the savages were constantly burning fires of different kinds of dried roots and weeds.
Just one more instance. I would not have a rockery in my grounds or garden; it would remind me of Otakooma’s terrible piles of skulls on which weeds grew green, and flowers bloomed, and lizards—sea-green lizards with crimson marks on their shoulders, and lizards the colour of a starling’s breast, that is, metallic-changing colour—used to creep.
If ever at that time I spent a happy hour it was in studying and wondering at the tricks and manners of the many strange denizens of the forest. Monkeys, mongooses, and even chameleons I managed to tame.
You see, then, I could not have been very happy. How could I? For at least two years I lived in constant dread of a violent death, and I never knew what shape it would take. I might die by the spear of some angry savage; I might be sacrificed to please some sudden fancy of the king; I might be burned at the stake or die by the torture.
My enemy—and he ought to have been my friend—was the boy Jooma. He was jealous, no doubt, of my influence with the king. I tried my best in every way to please this lad, because he could talk English, but in vain. He belied me one day after I had been a whole year in the country, belied me to the king in my presence—he pointed his hand at me. I struck the hand.
Then, as he threatened to kill me with his knife, I squared up in good English fashion and let my enemy have one straight from the shoulder. He went down as if he had been shot.
The fat old king shouted for joy. That boy Jooma had never had a proper British bleeding nose before in his life, I expect. And he did not like it. He kept lying on the ground, because he saw me in the attitude to give him another blow. But the king made him stand up, and for fear of offending the king I had to put him down again. Then he refused to rise. The king told him that a cock and a goat and two curs were going to be carried in procession to the execution ground that afternoon, and that if he, Jooma, did not fight “the foreign boy” he should head the procession and finally lose his head. So Jooma had to fight as well as he could, and although I did not punish him willingly, he was paid out for many an ill turn that he had done me.
I was a favourite with the king for fully a month after this. He brought boy after boy for me to thrash. Indeed, three or four times a day I was fighting. I suppose every boy about the king’s village had a set-to with me. I cannot say I blacked their eyes because they were already black, but they must have felt my knocks, and I know they did not love me any the better for it.
I did not know how all this would end, but my heart leaped to my mouth when one day the king himself, valiant through the rum he had drunk, stood up and announced his intention of trying conclusions with me himself.
What could I do?
What would you have done, gentle reader?
I knew I could have thrashed him, for though not old I was very hardy and wonderfully strong for my years, but I did not want to figure in a procession. So I submitted to be knocked down. Then I had to get up and be knocked down again and again. It didn’t hurt very much, but there was indignity attached to it.
The king had found a new pleasure, and every afternoon or evening I was summoned to the palace yard or grounds, and first I had to fight the king, then a boy of my own standing. Well, I am afraid that if I suffered in body and mind from my encounter with the king, I took it out of the smaller savage to follow. There was some satisfaction in that.
But one day, to show his own wonderful powers of fisticuff, the king summoned a crowd of his warriors to his palace, and made them form a great ring. Then I was ordered in and pitted against an Indian boy bigger than myself. I never cared how big they were, they held their arms wide and hit downwards as if thumping a piano.
After one or two boys had been disposed of, to the wild delight of the warriors, the king took a drink of rum and handed the leather bottle to his chief executioner; then he took off his extra garments—his one boot and his crown, an old tin kettle without a bottom to it—and stood up in front of me. I went down several times according to my own programme, and the savages shook their spears and rattled them against their shields of buffalo hide, and shouted and shrieked to their hearts’ content.
Then the king hit me rather hard, and I suppose my English pride was touched, for the next thing I remember is—horror of horrors!—the sacred person of his Majesty King Otakooma sprawling on the dusty ground and his nose bleeding.
A silence deep as death fell on all the crowd.
Then there was a rush for me. Spears were at my breast and I expected only instant death, when the king sprang to my rescue and all fell back.
If I had knelt to him and begged his pardon, even then I might have been forgiven.
But an English youth to sue on his knees for mercy from a savage! Nay, it was not to be thought of.
The king sat down.
The king was silent for a space of time. The king took more rum.
Then he ordered ropes of skin to be brought, and I was bound hand and foot and taken away to a loathsome dungeon.
I knew I was to die next day, and I longed for sunrise to have it past, for I suffered excruciating agony from the tightness of the cords that bound me.
The time came. I was to form part in a procession, and did; I was carried shoulder-high, lying on my back on a kind of bark tray, amid tom-tom beating, howling, shrieking, and a deal of capering and dancing that at any other time I should have laughed most heartily at.
At the execution ground goats and cocks were killed, then it came to my turn.
The king came to have a last look at me. The cords were undone, and I stood up staggering because my feet were swollen. The king looked at my hands: they were swollen double the size.
The king rubbed his nose.
The king was thinking.
“Now,” he must have thought, “here is a hand (meaning my swollen fist) that couldn’t hurt anybody. What a chance to redeem my lost honour!”
The king took more rum.
Then he started from his throne and shouted. What he said matters little. At the conclusion of his speech I was again dragged up to fight the king. If I could have hit him then I would have done so. But with such hands, how could I? So it ended in my being fearfully punished.
Then there was such shouting and yelling as I had never before heard in my life. But I was free.
The king took more rum.
For a whole year after this I was kept under almost constant surveillance, but there was no more fighting.
Sometimes the king and his savages went away on the war-path, for many weeks together. When they did so, I was confined in a dungeon, and had no other companions except frogs, lizards, and centipedes. All the food they gave me was a piece of dried cassava root (the root from which arrowroot is made), daily, and I had very little water.
But in spite of my hardships, I grew strong and robust. Probably, if I had not been a friendless orphan, if I had had a mother for instance, or a father, or sisters, or brothers, in a far-off home to think about, my misery would have been greater; as it was I had no one, for I believed that Roberts and all the people of the Niobe had been slain in that terrible fight at Zareppa’s fort.
Amelioration of my sufferings came at last, and in a strange way.
The king fell ill.
The king took more rum.
The king grew worse, and all the sorcery of his medicine men could not cure him, so I was sent for.
I had seen Jooma putting poison into the rum, and I told the king he had been poisoned. Who had done so? he asked: the culprit should die. No human being, I was determined, should die on account of anything I said. I told him, however, that next day I should fetch the evil creature who had destroyed the health of the king. Meanwhile the rum was poured on the ground, and I made him a pill of the poison berry, and a little scraped cassava root. He saw me mix it. His medicine men assured him it would be death to take it; I took a pill myself, and when he saw I did not die, he followed my example, and took two or three. For I had found out that in small doses this poison berry was medicinal. The king slept, and awoke refreshed.
Then he called for the culprit who had dared to poison his rum.
I went and found Jooma. I told him that his guilt was discovered, and that his life was in my hands; that a word from me would march him to the execution ground. He knelt and prayed for mercy. I told him he needn’t trouble, that Englishmen were far too honourable to harbour revenge. Then I made him bring a very old and savage billy-goat, and together we brought it to the king.
The king was greatly pleased. He said he never had liked the looks of the billy-goat, and he had no doubt that it had worked some deadly spell upon his rum. So the billy-goat—poor beast—was slain, and after a few more pills the king got better, and I was chief favourite among all the tribe.