Pandaras whispered to Yama, “If they have changed, then it can’t have been for the good. They seem a poor kind of people to me.”
“Do not be quick to judge,” Yama said.
The Mighty People spread out in a ragged line beneath a stand of cotton trees. A gang of children chased about, shouting or throwing stones or clods of earth at the adults, dodging stones thrown back at them. Men and women and children wore only loincloths, like those which the forest folk had put on. They were all bald, and the women had withered dugs which hung to their bellies.
When the forest folk drew near, the Mighty People ran forward, brandishing whips and clips and rifles. They shouted sharply at the forest folk and at each other. As the forest folk were quickly separated into groups of five or six, one of the men went up to Yama and Pandaras and stared at them with unconcealed cupidity before turning and shouting to the others that these strangers were his. “I am the Captain! You all remember that!”
The Captain’s voice was shrill and grating. He had small, red-rimmed eyes and a sharply pursed beak of a mouth. When a small child toddled too close, he screamed, “Get away or I’ll shoot,” and aimed a blow with his rifle at the child. It bared its teeth and hissed, but backed away slowly, staring at Yama and Pandaras.
“Don’t you worry,” the Captain told Yama. “I’ll make you my guest, and your slave here will be looked after by my slaves. As long as you have my protection the others won’t dare touch either of you. I’m their Captain, the richest and most powerful of my people. They try and kill me many times for my power and wealth, but I’m too clever and too strong.”
Yama introduced himself and Pandaras.
Pandaras said, “I am not a slave, but the squire of my master.”
The Captain spat at Pandaras’s feet and said to Yama, “Your slave is insolent, but you have the look of a fighter. That’s good.”
Yama said, “Are you at war, then?”
“Our young men have gone to fight in the great war of liberation,” the Captain said. “Meanwhile, we look after what we have, as is only natural. We are all of us rich here, and other families scheme to take our wealth from us, but we will defeat them. We will grow richer and more powerful than any in the Valley.”
Yama said politely, “I have heard much of you from the bandar yoi inoie, but it is interesting to see for myself what you are.”
“Where did these clots of filth find you? Yoi Sendar! Yoi Sendar, you ugly tub of guts! Come here!”
The Captain snapped his whip above the heads of the cluster of forest folk he had rounded up. Yoi Sendar stepped forward, his heavy head bowed. He said in a small voice, “All we have gathered, master, we give with open hands and open hearts.”
The Captain struck him back and forth across his broad shoulders with the stock of the whip, raising bloody welts. Yoi Sendar stepped backward, still staring at the ground.
“Filth,” the Captain said. He was breathing heavily. A muddy stink rose up from him. “They cannot change. Everything is always the same for them. They do not realize how we have been transfigured. They are a great burden to us, but we are strong and bear it.”
Yama looked around. Most of the skinny gray Mighty People were driving their groups of forest folk into the tunnels of clay-plastered wicker which led through the tall thorn hedge. Even the gang of children had four or five of the oldest of the forest folk, and were fighting over the single pack of caterpillar meat which had been brought to them.
Several of the Mighty People shouted at the Captain, complaining that he could not keep the strangers to himself. “Watch me do it!” the Captain shouted back. “You don’t think I’m strong enough?”
The Captain seemed to be in a permanent rage. He turned suddenly and fired his rifle in the air, and an old woman who had been creeping toward him stopped and held out her empty hands. “I know your tricks, mother,” the Captain screamed. There were flecks of foam at the corners of his mouth. “Try and take what is mine, and I’ll kill you. I swear it!” He turned to Yama and Pandaras and said, “She could not keep her slaves and tries to steal food from honest folk. You will be safe with me. I give you some of my own food and water, and you will help me.”
Yama said, “We are strangers, dominie. We have come to visit your temple.”
“Temple? What has this filth been telling you? They are the fathers and mothers of lies. They lie so much they no longer know what is true. You come with me. I will keep you safe.” The Captain snapped his whip at his group of forest folk. “Bring your tributes. Poor, rotten stuff it looks, and not much of it. You’ve all been lazing about in the forest instead of working hard. But now you’ll work. I’ll make sure of it. Hurry or I’ll make you bleed!”
The compound of the Captain’s hut was enclosed by a high mud-brick wall topped with briars and broken glass. It was ankle-deep in red clay kept wet by a leaking standpipe. A few pygmy goats were penned in one corner, whisking at flies with their tails while they cropped in a desultory way at a pile of melon husks.
The Captain supervised the unloading of the smoked caterpillar meat with brutal impatience. When the last string of meat had been hung on the rack outside the hut, he dismissed the forest folk and told Yama to send away his slave.
“Find out what you can,” Yama whispered to Pandaras.
“I think I have the best of it,” Pandaras whispered back. “This is as bad a place as I have ever seen.”
The hut was mean and cramped, with no furniture but a little three-legged stool. A sleeping platform was cut into the thick wall. A solar stove gave out dim red light and an iron pot of maize porridge bubbled on its hot plate. The beaten earth floor was strewn with dry grass in which black beetles rustled; there was a nest of banded rats in the thatch of the roof. Everything was dirty and stank of goat and the Captain’s stale body odor, but gorgeous portraits of dignified elders of the family stood in niches here and there, meticulously rendered in oil pigments and framed in intricately worked metal, and the bowl into which the Captain scooped a meager measure of maize porridge had been lovingly carved from a dark, hard wood.
When Yama commented on these things, the Captain was dismissive. “These are old works from the old times. A few trinkets from all the worthless stuff we had then. We are much wealthier now.”
The maize porridge was unsalted and unflavored pap, and the portion no more than three spoonfuls, but the Captain expected fulsome acknowledgment of his generosity. It seemed that he had great expectations of Yama, and as he boasted and blustered, Yama soon learned more than he wanted to of the way the Mighty People lived now that they had been changed by the heretics. Each adult had his or her own hut and strip of arable land, jealously guarded from all the others. As in the quarters of the Department of Indigenous Affairs in the Palace of the Memory of the People, husbands lived apart from wives. As soon as they could walk, children were abandoned and had to join the half-wild pack which lived outside the village fence. Those who survived to sexual maturity were driven out of the pack, and had to find or build their own hut and their own field strip, or else live in the grassland as best they could.
Every man or woman was a nation of one, and spent most of their waking hours hoarding their scant possessions. They had discarded their old names—the names from the time before the change—and if they had new names they told them to no one. There was no love, no pity, no mercy. All these things were regarded as signs of weakness. There were only lust, jealousy and hatred. The old and sick had to fend for themselves, and were usually killed by the pack of children or by an adolescent who wanted their hut.
The Shadow gloated over this. We will make all men like this, it whispered inside Yama’s head. Slaves to the things they desire most.