“Go on, Vai. You have friends who have missed your company.”
He left.
After the door closed behind him and the fire spurted up with a flicker and licked along the wood with gathering strength, I leaped out from my corner. I gulped down the last of the cold porridge before I set the bowl down on the chest at the foot of her bed and let her see the sword; although out of courtesy, I kept it in its sheath.
“I thank you for the food, Grandmother, and your kind words, but I have to leave. I’m sorry for his troubles and for yours. I am quite sure that it is wrong for an entire village of people to be held hostage and in such an indenture for so long with no recourse, but I will not offer up myself just because—”
“Why does the mansa want you dead?”
Her question compelled me. It was as if she had ensorcelled my tongue. “Andevai married the wrong woman. He was sent to the Barahals to marry Bee, but he was tricked by Bee’s parents into marrying me to save Bee.”
“You were party to this deception?”
“I knew nothing of it! The Barahals deceived me, too. They lied to me, just as they lied to him! I am expendable, to the Barahals and to the mansa.”
“So you mean to run for the rest of your life, never able to rest?”
The weary, horrible prospect unrolled before me like a path overgrown with vicious brambles. I would run and run and be torn until at last I collapsed with the wolves at my throat breathing death into my face. And yet even so, I could not accept defeat.
“If I can survive until the winter solstice, then they might still wish to kill me, just for the revenge of it. But as soon as Bee reaches her majority, the contract expires. So she has a chance if I can find her before they do. I’ll never let them take her. Never.”
The door opened. I whirled while pulling the sword half out of its sheath. Three elderly women entered, and by the time I accepted that these were not the mansa’s soldiers, several older men had entered as well, including Mamadi. I retreated to the foot of the bed with my back to the wall as the men set out the benches. Eight men and seven women of advanced years took a place, men on one side, women on the other. Last, Duvai entered, supporting a bent and frail man who could barely walk. He looked as old as the tiny woman in the bed, yet I guessed he was her son. He wore about his neck and had pinned to his clothing many amulets, and in his rheumy eyes I saw blindness.
Duvai brought him to me. He traced the air around me without touching me, and a shiver of power crawled along my skin. Duvai helped him sit on the first bench. Still holding on to his nephew, the old man spoke to the assembly in a voice as hoarse as a frog’s spring croak. “The spirit world is knit into her bones. But she is not a spirit woman. Hers is true human flesh. Therefore, she did not deceive us in asking for guest rights. It is a serious matter to consider handing over one we have promised to shelter.”
“The mansa will punish us,” said one of the women, “if we do not turn her over.”
“Give her to Andevai,” said a man, “and let him do what he must.”
“To kill in the village on Hallows Night,” said Mamadi, “is a very dangerous thing. Spirits will flock to her blood. That they would enter this village would be a very ill thing for the village.”
“Then hold her prisoner,” said that first man, “until Hallows Day has passed. Let her be taken back to the House, or have her throat slit beyond the stockade. We’ll be rewarded.”
“Rewarded as we were before,” asked another woman, “to see our noble son snatched away by the mansa?”
“Will we be rewarded for offering guest rights to a traveler who asked properly and then breaking our word?” demanded another woman. “What troubles will rain over us in the years to come, because we have done a wrong thing? She must be released to go on her way. If the mansa’s hunters track her down later, then it will not be on us that she is dead.”
“If we do not tell Andevai,” said another man, “then how will he know she was here? If he does not know, the mansa does not know.”
They discussed the matter while I stood there pressed against the wall, amazed so many spoke in my favor. Or not in my favor, precisely—I never felt they cared much for me one way or the other—but in favor of a code that safeguarded guests. This was not about me, but about the integrity of the village.
When all had made their arguments, the old hunter spoke again in his frog’s whisper. “If she has been offered guest rights, then we risk a worse thing if we turn her over to the mansa. If other villages should hear—and they will hear, you can be sure—then how can we expect them to greet our hunters and our women out gathering if they are caught betimes needing shelter? The mansa may fine us, add to our burden, even kill some among us, but his power is limited to this world. If we go against what the ancestors and the gods have told us is right behavior, then we offend a deeper power. And trouble will come down much harder on us, and on our children and on their children.”
Last of all, Andevai’s grandmother spoke. “If we prosper only through the suffering or death of another, then that is not prosperity.”
It was agreed by a nodding of heads, some resigned, some reluctant, but in the end no one objected.
Duvai said, as briskly as if he had been waiting eagerly just for this opportunity, “Vai cannot leave the village until dusk tomorrow. If I set her on her way at dawn, we can fairly be said to have given her shelter and not left her vulnerable or tried to trick her into being trapped by him later. After that, it is out of our hands.”
Silence followed his words.
Torn equally by shame, gratitude, and suspicion, I whispered, “My thanks to you.”
I did not know what reaction I would receive for these paltry words, but to my surprise, after Duvai left to make his preparations, they invited me to sit among them. They were curious about who I was and where I came from. They asked nothing about Andevai or how I had fallen into the trouble that currently engulfed me. Being an inland village, they had not heard of the Kena’ani, not even to call them Phoenicians, but they were interested to hear I was city born and raised, and they asked questions about where I came from and what life was like in a city. Duvai’s uncle, the best traveled among them, had been once to the city of Havery, when he was a young man, and he had never desired to repeat the experience. They might have kept me in the smoky little house all night had Andevai’s grandmother not intervened.
“Let the guest be fed and invited to the celebration,” she said.
The elders took their leave.