Ted Dekker - Outlaw

She stopped a few paces off and looked at me with round brown eyes. After a moment she addressed me.

“Are you English?”

I was too stunned to answer. Her accent was heavy, but I refused to believe I’d misheard her words.

“I am Lela,” she said. “I will speak for you.”

“Speak for me?” My voice was hoarse.

“I will speak for this trial.” She shoved her chin toward the square structure.

Tears flooded my eyes. “You speak English!”

The girl named Lela stood still. “What is your name, miss?” she asked.

My breathing was heavy. “Julian.”

“Yulian?”

“Julian. I’m an American.”

“I attending English school. A long time past. I forgetting this words.”

“No, no, you speak perfectly!” I cried. Then, eyes darting in fear that I’d been overheard, I lowered my voice. Words rushed from me like water from a spigot. “You have to help me! This is all a mistake! My boat…I was taken but I’m an American. We have to leave before they kill me! This is a mistake, I don’t belong here!”

“It cannot leave this place, miss. Anyone leaves this place, they will be sick and die. It is the way, this purum . This evil spirit.”

“No, that’s only what they tell you.” Her earlier words caught up to me. “What do you mean, trial?”

“This lords. It is the way of wam who come to Tulim. This three tribes will decide if you will be with a man.”

I couldn’t process what she meant.

Lela looked at the council just out of earshot, then back at me. “You must make pretty or I think you will die.”

Oddly enough, the girl’s suggestion that this tribunal had gathered to decide if I would be married or taken or whatever with meant, unnerved me more than the possibility that they might kill me. My life had already been snatched from me. My child had drowned. What was left for me?

“I…” Words couldn’t keep pace with the revulsion flogging my mind. “They will force me?”

By her expression I could see that she still didn’t comprehend. But of course she was hardly a woman who could understand such things.

“They will hurt me?”

Slowly a smile nudged her mouth. “No, miss, you do not understand. They will not hurt you if you are beautiful,” she said. “It is great honor to be with this great lords. This are princes of this Tulim.”

“I don’t want to be with these lords!”

She looked shocked. “But you must, miss!”

I was nearly hysterical. There on the hill my circumstances became too much for me—the leeches crawling up my legs, the stench of mud and rotting river, the sweating black flesh. An image of Stephen sinking below the waves flooded me with anguish. I felt I couldn’t breathe.

“No! No, I will not be taken by any man, you tell them that!” My breath came hot and heavy as I marched in front of the astonished girl like a red-faced schoolteacher.

“You tell them that I will cut it off and feed it to the crocodiles if one of them even touches me!” I thrust my finger toward the gathered council. “Tell them that!”

Her eyes went wide and her lips tried to form a response but she was too shocked to voice it. I lowered my face into my hands and tried to regain my composure, but I couldn’t stop my tears.

“No, miss, this is not a good thing,” Lela said. “You must not cut this off. They cannot make baby if you cut off this.”

The sincerity in her voice shocked me out of my fear. I lifted my head and stared at her.

“You must make yourself beautiful and try to make a baby or you will die,” she said.

I realized then that I was seeing the world through a completely different set of lenses from this young girl. My head was abuzz with this simple thought: being taken by any man who gathered around that tribunal fire would be a great honor for Lela. In this context, being forced did not compute in her mind.

Lela was trying to help me. This young girl was a friend who spoke my language. English! If the men who’d taken me captive were gods in their world, then I was their slave and this girl was my only angel.

Shaking, I sank to my knees and pressed my palms together as if praying to her. “Please…please help me. I’m sorry. Please help me.”

She glanced over at the council, quickly stepped up to me, and pushed my hands down. “You must not do this. I am not this lord.”

I quickly lowered my hands.

“You must ask the spirit to help you look beautiful to this lords, miss. If you can make baby, then you will be safe.”

“My baby died,” I whispered. I’d become like a little girl myself.

“You already make baby?” she asked, surprised. The revelation seemed to impress her more than anything I’d yet said. “What you are saying is true? You can make this baby?”

“Yes…but my child is gone.”

“You can make more baby?” she asked.

“I don’t want to make another baby!”

She lowered her voice. “No, you must! I will say and this will save you.” The excitement in her voice was infectious. “There is little possible to make baby in this place. A woman who make baby is much good! You must make yourself pretty and I will tell them you make a baby.”

She seemed to be implying that pregnancy among the Tulim was not easily achieved.

Lela grabbed a handful of grass, wadded it up, and began to rub my skin. The heat and humidity coated my body with moisture, and the black soot that the women had applied earlier smeared. She shoved the grass into my hands and grabbed more.

“Quickly. You must clean. It is very important to clean if you want to make a baby.”

My every instinct told me to rub more dirt on my skin, to make myself as offensive as possible, but reason dictated that staying alive was, at least for the moment, the higher value. So I followed her lead and tried to wipe the soot off my belly and arms as well as I could without the help of soap and water, which hardly amounted to more than moving the stuff around.

Lela squatted and worked on my legs, smearing the soot over my exposed skin rather than cleaning it, a fact I quickly pointed out.

“You’re making me dirtier.”

“No, miss. You must not look ugly.”

Clearly they did not prefer white skin. The older women in the hut had made as much plain when they’d heaped soot upon me in the first place. This was only the jungle’s version of a good tan.

I nearly reverted to my impulse to look as ugly as possible. Instead I followed her lead.

“Are you sure they will like this?”

“It is better,” she said. “I will tell them you will make a baby.”

To hear Lela, children were the most precious commodity in that valley. I shoved from my mind any notion of how I might actually go about making a baby and assisted her in her attempts to spread the dirt on my skin. My arms, my legs, my belly, my chest, my back, my face—all of it was soon tinted brown.

“I will too soon make a baby,” she said, working on my feet.

“You’re too young!”

She stood and grinned wide. Two of her bottom teeth were missing. “No, miss. I already give this blood. I will be chosen.” She said it as if nothing could possibly make her more proud. I wasn’t sure whether to reprimand her or cry for her.

It was then, standing under the tree as I awaited my trial, that the raw humanity of the inhabitants in the Tulim valley first overshadowed my fear of them, if only for a few moments. Lela was only a girl doing her best to belong, like any girl her age in any social circle anywhere in the world.

I assumed that she, like me, had been brought in from the outside. What was more, she seemed to have come to terms with her place in this world.