within your mercy toward him." "He took me up when I was less than a grain of sand, a soldier with falsified papers, and set me at his side. He made me a son, when he had fifty sons already. I would sooner spill the blood of my true father, a Nubian raider whose face vanished with the wind, than this old tyrant who forgave me everything, and still forgives." "What have you done to forgive?" "I was born of a rape. And now I govern a starving land." "Why were your papers falsified?" "Because the truth would have done me no good, nor will it benefit you." Her sable eyes, that seemed to strain for focus, slid toward me, seeing that she had presumed. Her tongue moved on, more humoringly. "We must locate the center of the evil that makes the sky avoid the earth. They are lovers, the earth and the sky, and in the strength of their passion fly apart as quickly as they come together. They are like one of the white men's mighty machines; a single speck of evil will bring it to a halt. Now a demon does not occupy the entire body, but a pinhead point within it, for a demon has no necessary size, and must be small to fly. It may enter by a nostril or the anus, and take up residence in the gizzard or the little toe. Have you tortured the king, to find a spot where there is no pain? There the demon likely resides, and a heated dagger, thrust smartly in, will drive him out. But the surgery must be exact. Fingers make favorite burrows for the bad spirits; a reasonable precaution would be to slice off the old king's hands. I see you do not like that plan." I had said nothing, merely attempted to visualize the event- the wrist veins pumping like the mouth of a jug, the eerie Dasein of the severed hand, still bearing its fingerprints, and the life-lines of its palm, though lifeless as wax. Kutunda's head disappeared in her new green coussabe, one of several that had replaced the rags in which I had found her. Golden stitching of ecstatic concentricity stiffened its sleeves. Clothed, she became flirtatious and slimmer, and her gravely politic air dissolved into suggestions that were plainly malicious and jealous; she was jealous of my love for the king. "Cut off his testicles," she suggested, "and display them in the scales of the statue of Justice above the main portal of the Palais. Wanjiji" she scornfully pronounced. "There has been no Wanjiji since my grandfather's time, and even then its men were famous for their cowardice and gluttony. In war they waited till the men of the other village were gone and then came in and butchered the children. Tear out his eyes and stuff them up his rectum, so they can spy out where his demon lives." "A demon has come to live in you," I observed, grabbing at the gaudy cloth as she swirled by. Her ankle-rings of bronze and silver tintinnabulated. "God has nowhere to alight in Kush!" She dodged me, her lips snarled back from her inturned teeth. "On the highest peak there sits a wrinkled old man in a cell, guarded by a soldier in khaki who wishes to hide in the dust. So the Compassionate One flies on, His river flows on, the sky remains bright, and Kush remains barren. You need to make a show, Colonel Ellellou, so Allah will notice us all. We are easy to forget. There must be blood. Blood is spirit, it draws down spirit. Dismember the king; tie his limbs to four stallions and give them the whip. His shrieks will dislodge the atom of evil and happiness will descend." She exposed her childish teeth in a grin, tilted her round head, and began to do up her greasy braids. "Your plan has something to it," I heard myself concede, though at the thought of my patron's dismemberment my own limbs, their stir of lust ignored and dissipated, felt leaden. Not that, at this stage of his disintegration, the colonel conspicuously neglected his official duties. He was generally at his desk, military green steel in his fanatically austere office on the corner of the Palais d'Administration des Noires overlooking Also-Abid-the
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