The Journeyer - Jennings Gary - Страница 244

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I nodded. “So he tried to multiply what little he had. He resorted to the halls of games of chance.”

“Yes. And, as is well known, misfortune likes to dog the already unfortunate. The king played at dice and, over a matter of some few days only, he lost every last thing he owned. Gold, jewels, wardrobe, belongings. Among them, I imagine, that sacred tooth you are chasing, Elder Brother. His losses were profligate and promiscuous. His crown, his old servants, the relic you speak of, his royal robes—there is no knowing which were won by residents of Akyab here, and which by mariners who have since sailed away.”

“Vakh,” I said glumly.

“At last the King of Ava was reduced to his own person, and the clothes in which he stood in that hall of games, and one wife waiting forlorn in their waterfront lodgings. And on that last desperate day of play, the king offered to wager himself. To become, if he lost, the slave of the winner. I do not know who accepted the wager, or how much wealth he staked against the winning of a king.”

“But of course the king lost.”

“Of course. All in the hall were already despising him, though he had enriched them no little, and now they despised him even more—they must have curled their lips—when the desolate man said, ‘Hold. I have one last property besides myself. I have a beautiful Bangali wife. Without me, she will be destitute. She might as well chance having a master to care for her. I will stake my wife, the Lady Tofaa Devata, on one last throw of the dice.’ The wager was taken, the dice were rolled, and he lost.”

“Well, that was that,” I said. “All gone. A misfortune for me, too. But where was there any cause for dispute?”

“Bear with me, Elder Brother. The king asked one last favor. He begged that, before he surrender himself into slavery, he be let to go and tell the sad news himself to his lady. Even wagering men are men of some compassion. They let him go, by himself, to the waterfront inn. And he was honorable enough to tell the Lady Tofaa bluntly what he had done, and he commanded her to present herself to her new master at the hall of games. She obediently set forth, and the king sat down to table, to have one last meal as a freeman. He gorged and guzzled, to the amazement of the innkeeper, and kept calling for more food, more drink. And finally he turned purple and toppled over in an apoplexy and died.”

“So I had heard. But what, then? That was no ground for dispute. The man who won him still owned him, whatever his condition.”

“Bear with me still. The Lady Tofaa, as ordered by her husband, presented herself at the hall. They say the winner’s eyes lighted up when he saw what a choice slave he had won. She is a young woman, a fairly recent acquisition of the king’s, neither a titled queen nor yet mother of any heirs, so she is hardly a valuable property just for her innate royalty. And this city’s standards of beauty are not my own, but some men call her beautiful, and all call her cunning, and with that I must agree. For when Tofaa’s new master reached to take her hand, she withheld it, long enough to speak to all in the hall. She spoke just one sentence, asked just one question: ‘Before my husband wagered me, had he first wagered and lost his own self?’”

Shaibani finally fell silent. I waited a moment and then prodded, “Well?”

“Well, there you are. That was the start of the dispute. Since then, the question has echoed and reechoed all over this misbegotten city, and no two citizens can agree on the answer to it, and one magistrate argues with the next, and even brother has turned against brother, and they fight in the streets. I and my troops marched in not long after the events I have described, and all the litigants keep clamoring at me to settle the contention. I cannot, and frankly I am sick of it, and I am ready to put the whole foul city to the torch, if you cannot resolve it.”

“What is to resolve, Sardar?” I said patiently. “You already said the king had wagered and lost his own person before he put his wife up at stake. So they both were fairly lost. And dead or alive, willing or unwilling, they belong to their winners.”

“Do they? Or rather—since he already went to his funeral pyre—does she? That is what you must decide, but you must hear all the arguments. I took the lady into custody, pending resolution of the case. I have her in a room upstairs. I can fetch her down and also send for all the men who were gaming in the hall that day. If you will consent, Elder Brother, to be a one-man Cheng this once, it will at the same time give you your best opportunity for inquiring into the whereabouts of that tooth you seek.”

“You are right. Very well, bring them on. And please send in my man Yissun to interpret for me.”

The Lady Tofaa Devata, though her name meant Gift of the Gods, was not beautiful by my standards, either. She was about Hui-sheng’s age, but she was ample enough to have made two of Hui-sheng. Shaibani had called her a Bangali, and evidently the King of Ava had imported her from that Indian state of Bangala, for she was typically Hindu: an oily brown skin that was almost black, and indeed was black in a semicircle under each of her eyes. I thought at first that she had misapplied her al-kohl eyelid-darkening cosmetic, but I was later to see that almost all Hindus, men as well as women, naturally had that unsightly discoloration of each eye pouch. The Lady Tofaa also had a red measle of paint on her forehead between her eyes, and a hole in one nostril where presumably she had worn a bauble before it was lost by her dicing husband. She wore a costume that appeared to be (and was, I discovered) a single length of cloth wound several times about her amplitude in such a way that her arms, one shoulder and a roll of unctuous dark-brown flesh around her waist were left bare. It was not a very seductive baring, and the cloth was a garish fabric of many blatant colors and metallic threads. The lady and her attire gave a general impression, besides, of being somewhat unwashed, but I gallantly attributed that to the hard times she had suffered lately. I might find her unappealing, but I would not prejudge her case on that account.

Anyway, the other claimants and witnesses and counselors in the Sardar’s main room were considerably less prepossessing. They were of various races—Mien, Hindu, some Ava aborigines, maybe even some of the higher-class Myama—but hardly choice specimens of any. They were the usual assortment of layabouts that wait to prey on seamen in the waterfront alleys of any port city. Again I felt almost sorry for the pusillanimous King Who Ran Away, having pitched himself from a throne down among such base company as this. But neither would I prejudge this case because I found all the participants so unappealing.

I was acquainted with one rule of law in these regions: that a woman’s testimony was to be far less regarded than a man’s. So I motioned for the men first to have their say, and Yissun translated, as one ugly man stepped forward and deposed:

“My Lord Justice, the late king wagered his person, and I hazarded a stake he accepted, and the dice rolled in my favor. I won him, but he later cheated me of my winnings when—”

“Enough,” I said. “We are concerned here only with the events in the hall of games. Let speak next the man who played next against the king.”

An even uglier one stepped forth. “My Lord Justice, the king said he had one last property to offer, which was this woman here. I took that wager and the dice rolled in my favor. There has since been much foolish argument—”

“Never mind the since,” I said. “Let us continue with the events in sequence. I believe, Lady Tofaa Devata, that next you presented yourself at the hall.”

She took a heavy step forward, revealing that she was barefoot and dirty about the ankles, just like the nonroyal waterfront denizens in the room. When she began to speak, Yissun leaned over to me and muttered, “Marco, forgive me, but I do not speak any of the Indian languages.”

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