Story: An Oriental Tale

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1

As many as one thousand years ago, a small village of shepherds, salt traders, and barley farmers lay sheltered in a high and narrow Himalayan valley. The heavy wooden huts of the village, the fields to the East and West, the sheep and goat herds in the foothills, and the twisting paths to the salt lakes in the North were all controlled by the several ruling families of the valley people. The family elders remained inside their smoky, log-and-hide lodges more and more as they grew older, as the wealth and power of succeeding generations increased, until the oldest men seldom saw one another, after braving the harsh winds of the long winter and the weak sunlight, even though their low and dark lodges were but several hundred yards apart. Their true interest lay in their land, their herds, and their serfs who tilled and tended them; in the horses strung together that wound through the mountain passes to the South, laden with hides and wool and great chunks of gritty salt.

The traders who led the pack trains did not belong to the ruling families, nor to the serfs who lived in the fields in sod houses or in caves in the foothills just north of the village. Their families too lived in log huts within the village itself, not far from the Pootsonng River which flowed through the valley. The ruling families knew of the traders' exotic stories of other lands and peoples. They knew also of the traders' noxious and blasphemous desires to dig the glittering, heavy stones from under the mountains' hide. But the pack trains moved on to the South and returned in due time, with cotton and tea, and the trader families were quiet and the young men of the ruling families dealt with them fairly.

The ruling elders ignored the traders' petty blasphemies and ignored too the exotic lands and peoples from which their tea and cotton and fine brassware came.

By coincidence there were born at one time to both a ruling family and to a trader, sons of especial ability and intelligence. When these two sons were of age, they began to work together overseeing the fitting-out of the pack horses, sewing the hides into salt bags, weaving the goat hair cords or leather thongs. The trader's son was called Ha-Mul, and the ruler's son was called Amuthswahti. They knew each other by name.

Ha-Mul found that by asking his father and older brothers a day ahead, he could learn what share of the work the rulers would allot to the young master Amuthswahti and could join him. Only when Amuthswahti was sent into the barley fields or the vegetable gardens or into wide storage barns would Ha-Mul be left behind.

By the time Amuthswahti was old enough to move out of the elders' lodge, where his father lived now with the ancient family patriarch, and to take a wife from one of the other families, the other members of the ruling class already looked to him as a extraordinary individual. It was noted among the traders and the domestic serfs that the lodge constructed for Amuthswahti and his bride was not the usual square hut with a flap of hide at the door and mud from the Pootsonng smeared between the logs. It resembled instead the long, dark elders' lodge, oblong, with the fire-hole at one end, goat hides tacked on all walls, and split and polished logs tied into the entrance way as a door.

By the time Amuthswahti had two sons, a third having died at birth, and a new daughter, the other villagers already revered him as other peoples would revere a king or high-priest. Ha-Mul also had prospered, having by this time taken no fewer than six pack-trains of hides across the highland trail toward Sikkim and Bengal and having returned far sooner than the other traders, braving the harsh winds and the deep snows and bringing with him the finest ivory and brassware, the most delicate silk and cotton, the richest, dark teas. Even the ruling elders knew of his explorations far across the giant salt lakes in the North, toward Cathay, the huge shapeless Chinese empire far away there. But they made no stirring or protest so long as the village life remained undisturbed, all the more secure now for having Amuthswahti to oversee their interests and to insure the stability of their world.

Ha-Mul had not married until a year before Amuthswahti began constructing a new lodge, which was destined to become the center of village life, by village standards almost a palace for himself and his family elders and, for all the villagers, including traders, a market and meeting place. Ha-Mul had two wives and two young serving women living with him in a plain but spacious trader's hut near the new central lodge by the time it was completed. But he was denied a son. Even the several daughters his women bore him were not well and died before reaching womanhood. At first, Ha-Mul spent many months away from his people, living in the caves far to the North or leading trains across the mountain trails, but as Amuthswahti matured and prospered and began, like the elders, to remain quietly in the central lodge supervising the others' work, Ha-Mul also came to still his own wanderlust. He invited his brothers to live with him, and he spent many hours within sight and hearing of Amuthswahti, speaking when Amuthswahti asked him about his business or about his trading successes in the cities in the South. As the years passed, the two men became again as accustomed to each other's ways and to each other's company as they had been as boys, weaving goat hair ropes or sewing together the salt bags of hide.

2

Amuthswahti had become a thoughtful man.

He had always been a decision-maker, a leader. He had from his youth an extraordinary ability to organize working projects and domestic life as well, but as he reached maturity, he developed a greater sense of humanity, a deeper interest in the individual people with whom he lived, their peculiarities and their good sense. He found more and more that his greatest pleasures came from observing the simplest actions of the simplest folk around him, the serfs from the fields who brought in the produce for barter in the long open wing of his central lodge, the ancient peasant woman who had served his family as a domestic since long before he was born, his old parents and his youngest children. He liked men of his own age and class somewhat less, feeling that perhaps he should communicate with them more of his thoughts about such things, not confining himself to matters of wealth and tradition and trade. Ha-Mul, Amuthswahti sensed, was different from the others but different still from himself. These impressions made him uneasy, and sent his attention back once more to the activity in the marketplace or the kitchen and the nursery.

Once an incident threatened to disturb the deep calm of the village life. An old trader, whose wives had not prospered and had died or had been taken back to their families, was discovered abusing his youngest son. The two of them lived separately from the servants and the several other children and the elder family members. The boy appeared with the others at play first, and in later moths at his chores, with bruises on his arms and sometimes around his eyes. He was a quiet child who stayed somewhat detached from the rest of his brothers and from the other traders' sons. But, for years, this was not noticed by the villagers. The older man was like the others, packing the trains and tending the horses who made them up, taking his turn on the journeys to the South. Amuthswahti and the other men of the ruling families scarcely knew of his existence.

By accident one night, a trader's wife, slipping quietly to the river for water she'd forgotten to fetch before, heard from the old trader's hut a stifled yelp, and then a slap and a second tiny cry.

Next day her husband observed the youngster holding his shoulders unnaturally stiff and on raising his tunic found the welts and swollen, red stripes of a harsh beating on his back and what might have been scars. The other lads laughed sheepishly and the traders joked among themselves at the youngster's having been so disciplined, recalling their own youth. But this man, who had discovered the welts, continued to watch for several weeks, noting how frequently the boy was bruised or cut, and how often he walked stiffly or unnaturally, favoring one foot or not swinging one arm freely. This man and his brothers and another old trader quietly watched the hut for three nights, finally rushing in as the old man stuck the lad's buttocks with a worn leather-covered board and pinched the inside flesh of his thighs beneath his wood-soled boots.

The matter was brought to the attention of all the men who gathered each day at the central lodge. Ha-Mul and the other traders did not hesitate to order that the youth be placed with the other children of the family and the old man was cautioned that his behavior could not be continued. Amuthswahti did not speak at first, but after several weeks, when Ha-Mul happened to mention to him that the old man's work had been failing and that the others expected him soon to fall ill or die, Amuthswahti finally bared his mind to his companion.

"I am not surprised, Ha-Mul," he said. And when Ha-Mul questioned his meaning, he went on. "The boy too will be suffering."

The conversation ended here, as almost all exchanges did after two or three remarks, but the trader thought of his friend's comment and felt after several weeks that indeed one could observe in the young lad's bearing a despondency, a lifelessness that had not been present before.

"But how can this be?" he wondered, "now that his beatings have been stopped?"

One evening when he and Amuthswahti sat together alone before the fire, Ha-Mul asked him what measure he would have proposed himself. "Surely," he thought, "Amuthswahti would not allow the punishments to continue."

His companion replied slowly, after a silence, "It is a hard question," and then did not continue.

Ha-Mul stirred uncomfortably after moments of silent meditation had passed.

Amuthswahti then said, "Both the old man and the boy together must be considered. Both to be restrained, and both pitied."

Again the conversation ended here, but the next evening Ha-Mul suggested that perhaps the old man should be invited to live once again with all his family, so that the two would not be entirely separated but so that their nefarious deeds could not be repeated.

"That," Amuthswahti said, "would have been my proposal."

This was done.

The following winter, Ha-Mul learned from the old man's next eldest brother that he and the young son had disappeared, taking one horse with them and some food.

Amuthswahti knew that he and Ha-Mul had acted wisely, yet their solution had failed. From then on, he found the incident returning often to his mind. He felt that a certain tragedy had transpired, and he wished deeply he had known the old man and his son.

3

One afternoon after many years, Ha-Mul did not join the other traders in the wide meeting room at the central lodge. By this time, when few masters remained older than Amuthswahti himself and when Ha-Mul was among the oldest in the class of traders, the leading men of both groups came together on most days to speak of their crops and their commerce. Family and personal affairs were still discussed only among members of the one group or the other, but most other matters came to be discussed by all. A kind of informal government had evolved there in the meeting room, over which Ha-Mul customarily presided, although he and the others deferred to Amuthswahti's judgment when it was offered.

Ha-Mul's absence was felt, surely, before the day had far progressed. It was not mentioned, however, and as no matters of moment were introduced into the several languid conversations here and there about the hall, many of the others drifted one by one back to their own homes, before the servants had rightly begun to bring in the tea to them. Amuthswahti himself was at first not concerned at missing his old friend, but as the hours glided slowly toward evening (it was now almost summer, and the evenings were long, light, and warm), he began to grow uneasy. And finally he became quite unsettled.

He spoke to one of his sons returning from the building site of a new storage barn, asking if perchance the old trader had taken advantage of the lovely warm weather to go share his own experience with the younger men working there. But the son had not seen or heard of Ha-Mul since the evening before in the lodge at twilight. Amuthswahti had been thoughtful that night and had not taken special notice to his old companion's behavior, but now as he reflected upon the quiet tranquillity of that earlier scene, he thought he could sense a slight restlessness in the old man's deportment, an abstracted air about his remarks, perhaps an unusual inattention to Amuthswahti's elder son, a favorite with both.

Amuthswahti called for a traveling robe and walking boots. His servants left the tea and their meal preparations in surprise, scurrying to find which of the sons' boots would be suitable for their master and to present for his selection one of the family's fine, heavy robes. He chose instead a simple, hooded skin one of the traders had left behind, exchanged his slippers for the first pair of hide boots they brought to him and strode, alone, out into the empty market space and directly across the village. A few children did not hide their astonishment to see the tall old man walking by himself among the lodges and wooden huts, but the others who recognized him went on with their chores or their meals without appearing to see him or appreciate who he was.

At the lodge of Ha-Mul's family, Amuthswahti was received graciously and invited ceremoniously to join the circle seated comfortably outside along the high, wooded bank of the Pootsonng at one entrance to the hall. But the old leader was scarcely courteous as he greeted Ha-Mul's brothers and their sons. When he spoke at last with Ha-Mul's elder wife, he learned that his old companion had left the village at dawn, by himself, leading a single supply horse behind him, heading--his nephews added later--heading north toward the caves above the wide salt flats he had once explored as a younger man. Amuthswahti found himself growing irritated at the family's complacent composure. As if Ha-Mul went off alone into the hills to the north every day! As if this was not an unusual and a portentous sign of hidden motives or unsuspected plans!

Ha-Mul was away hardly a month, but the changes in the village elders in such a short time seemed remarkable to him on his return. Amuthswahti had followed his surprising behavior on the evening after the other's departure by spending all the next morning out of doors, first in the market nodding to the traders' wives when he could recognize them and later observing the progress of the storage barn. In a few days he ordered the household domestics to serve the evening meal at the benches and tables in the market space, left vacant by that hour. When Ha-Mul returned to the gathering at the central lodge late one afternoon, he found his old companion Amuthswahti and the others seated on the rugs and cushions in the open air between the wings of the lodge, shaded from the sun by a loose canopy of goat hides stitched together with thongs and tied to poles. Amuthswahti said that he had himself helped to select the hides.

Later in the evening, after the others had returned home from their main meal and Amuthswahti had invited Ha-Mul inside once more and had shared with him his best barley-wine, Amuthswahti suddenly chuckled out loud.

"You see, Ha-Mul," he said, "I too grow restless in this season." And then he added, "And perhaps before now as well; I am not certain."

Ha-Mul discovered at that moment, for the first time, that he had made his long journey and had pursued his little adventure for one reason only. So that he would be able to tell Amuthswahti of what he had seen and what he had learned of the world in the North.

The brief summer on the high plateau soon ended, and the village life returned to its accustomed ways for all. Never had Ha-Mul and Amuthswahti felt so close. The old trader arrived at the central lodge now before the market place had emptied of peasants and serfs. He stayed late into the dark, cold night. He told his friend slyly that he now expected to discover that the young serf who stayed with him to help him across the village in the darkness, slipping on the hard, dry ice, would ask permission to take one of Amuthswahti's cooks for his woman. The two old men often joked of this possibility in their slow conversations after the evening meal.

When he had left the village that summer, Ha-Mul had not tarried long in the caves in the rocky hills. As he remarked to Amuthswahti, they had not changed since their boyhood. The younger traders, like Amuthswahti's own sons, did not explore there now, preferring to steal away to the South to hunt stray ponies or wild goats in the less barren passes toward Bengal. Ha-Mul himself had moved on farther North, picking his way as he found it, not remembering how he had journeyed as a young man into Cathay. Perhaps the land was the same; the people he found were not.

First, on the other side of the rocky hills bordering the valley on the North, he had crossed a wide trail moving east along another plateau. Ha-Mul had considered following it himself, as a possible trade route which itself might finally bend down toward Sikkim and the cities in the South, perhaps providing an easier journey for the valley peoples' traders to enter the Pootsonng Valley themselves, bringing their own goods. But this dream failed to inspire Ha-Mul's desire, the simpler man he had used to be or ought to be. He told this to Amuthswahti last, after telling many other things. The other man had merely smiled sympathetically, shaking his head.

So Ha-Mul, the old man now that he had become, had chosen instead to follow the trail away to the North and the West, to find what peoples had settled now in that land and to find how they lived there. He had met almost immediately a small group of trappers, heading east with furs and fine silver jewelry. They were smaller men than some of the valley people, stocky and wide-faced more like the country serfs and a few traders than the taller, leaner, dark-skinned ruling families and Ha-Mul himself; but their language was not so foreign that the old man from the Pootsonng could fail to understand and to make himself understood. He tried to remember seeing such men trading thick, dark furs in the southern cities he had visited, and thought perhaps he did remember seeing them but briefly and only infrequently. These travelers told him of a small settlement at the western end of the trail where the lord of a strong kingdom still far away beyond the mountains had ordered some of his dependents and their peasants to build a city not many years before. The ruling families had already returned to their own lands, but the serfs had remained in the new city to continue the trade the foreign rulers had originally intended.

Ha-Mul almost left the trail then, to go on directly into the mountains, hoping to cross them and to find on the other side a true kingdom or a new city, disappointed to find his trail led only to a small, uncivilized outpost of peasants and traders not so different from himself. One of the party he met, however, an older man like Ha-Mul whose role among the others remained obscure to the Valley traveler, had spoken to him as the camp was broken up that morning to suggest he might stay with his family in a certain lodge. Many travelers, he said, visited there and they might be a curiosity of some note to a man of Ha-Mul's standing and years.

The old trader did not know what to think of this, suspecting a blurring of his language or an unusual unctuousness in the form of the older man's invitation, but though he remained disappointed in his desire for exotic, fine places, he decided to follow the trail westward toward the older man's settlement.

"It was a small adventure." Ha-Mul might have said, during the long winter months, to his old companion Amuthswahti; "it was a rather curious household I was permitted to visit in their village." The older trader had not knowingly planned to describe his travels and he was not accustomed to speaking his mind at length, so his account was filled with indirection and interruption. He seemed to Amuthswahti almost exasperatingly preoccupied with the material circumstances of his visit, the disorderly cluster of huts and lodges, the food he was served, and so on, while the old ruler was himself eager to hear of the people Ha-Mul had met and especially of the one other traveler from the distant frozen lands and beyond his imagination's reach.

"He was light-skinned and fair-haired," Ha-Mul might have said of this man, had his story over the weeks been pieced together; "he wore furs on his head and feet as well as on his back. He laughed often for no visible cause and quickly became quite drunken on the rice wine we were offered. He was too unsettled for a man of mature years, and his flashing, sparkling eyes in the fires at night were disturbing to me."

Ha-Mul did not recognize at first the significance of one of the fair stranger's anecdotes. He did not at this time discern that in it lay the seeds of his own approaching doom.

Amuthswahti, after several weeks, found his mind often returning to the savages far to the North mentioned by Ha-Mul's fellow traveler in the outpost beyond the salt flats. "Did he say," Amuthswahti asked again, "that they ate human flesh? Was this true, Ha-Mul?" The old trader in fact had to recollect for a moment that evening--his companion had intruded suddenly on his description of the journey across the mountains home again to ask his question--before he remembered telling of this inhuman practice earlier. "They were,” Ha-Mul replied, "a small tribe of uncivilized beasts. But very docile to all appearance, the teller also said."

Amuthswahti often questioned his old friend on this one portion of his narrative, so that eventually Ha-Mul too found the cannibalism of this obscure northern tribe deeply disturbing, feeling inside as he contemplated such an action a peculiar kind of revulsion. At the same time he observed in Amuthswahti what he sensed was a strange sort of excitement. As the long winter drew on, the two old men discussed every possibility that could lead even a primitive people to such horror: the promptings perhaps of a savage religion or even the tribal memory of severe shortages of other meat or an ancient custom of war or perhaps punishment. As he reflected, Ha-Mul decided--though he had not carefully attended at the time--that the stranger had distinctly ruled out the latter two possibilities. Visiting travelers were not threatened by the grotesque ritual, and the wandering tribe had no real enemies, living as they did in the frozen waste lands.

Amuthswahti grew more and more fascinated by the notion of eating human flesh. How could they, he asked himself, how could such a people know someone, a person with speech and with a mind, and yet do that? The village on the Pootsonng was unaccustomed to violence of any sort committed by one man upon another. Perhaps this fact explains why the old ruler soon found that the murder which would precede the ultimate, barbarous action did not disturb or even interest him. The social ritual, he would say to himself, the obscure tribal traditions might make such a thing possible. His own people, on the other hand, had almost no public life.

4

Ha-Mul was known in the village as a skilled surgeon of sorts. From his earliest maturity he had been able to lash broken bones in such a way that they might grow usably back together, or to remove with a sharp blade a festering sliver or cut out a sickening growth. He had all his life followed the lead of Amuthswahti, his old friend, not questioning his superior wisdom and his subtler understanding. By the time the winter days were gradually growing longer that year, it had been decided between the two old friends that Ha-Mul would use his skill in this line to realize an uncharacteristic, insane plan of Amuthswahti's. Killing or harming another was unthinkable to the old ruler. Ha-Mul was engaged, on a day before summer under conditions of the strictest secrecy, to administer the usual sleeping drug to Amuthswahti in the depths of the night and, while he slept, to remove from his left hand his last two fingers and the fleshy outside portion of the palm. After he had been allowed to recover from the operation and from the sleeping draft, Amuthswahti himself, using only his right hand as the other arm would be bound tightly to his chest so that his bizarre orgy would not be alloyed with pain of any sort, roasted over the fire and ate in the darkness of his sleeping chambers the portion of his hand that Ha-Mul had removed.

Later, of course, Amuthswahti could not explain to himself why he had felt so driven to such a perverse and terrible deed. But he knew until he died that he has been so driven, that had he tried he could not have resisted the overwhelming attraction of the idea once it had come to him, and that, far within--even though the very thought now revolted him to the point of actual nausea--he was glad he had gone ahead.

But alas for poor Ha-Mul!

5

When the old trader disappeared after the days had become long and warm, no one was disturbed. Amuthswahti was at first pleased, in fact, to have some time alone with his thoughts, examining his feelings as he gazed at his slowly healing, misshapen hand. But soon the other men of the village observed Amuthswahti's growing uneasiness. Questioned again about Ha-Mul's departure, the trader's elder wife and his nephews reported that again he had traveled to the North, as though this was now already an accepted matter of routine. Scarcely a month passed before Amuthswahti, in what seemed to the others an almost feverish anxiety, sent a party of ten men after his old friend, led by his eldest son. On the third day out, the party found Ha-Mul's body outside one of the caves north of the salt flats.

The earth beneath him was stained dark and under his right arm was a bundle of sticks for the fire. Under his left arm, which was missing below the elbow, was a broken staff he had used for a crutch. His left leg was severed from the knee and had bled copiously. At the entrance to the cave was what was left of his fire, and in the cold ashes lay the remains of two charred bones.

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