Ted Dekker - Outlaw

“Have any of the prince’s wives given birth to children from other men?”

“This is impossible,” she said. “No woman would be so foolish. The child would have to die.”

I hadn’t really expected any other answer.

“A prince would choose only a pure vessel, not a woman who has any living children,” she continued.

I recalled her questions of me before Kirutu’s wedding ceremony. She’d asked if my son was dead. The question was a part of her vetting.

“No, of course not,” I said.

Melino poked the embers with a stick.

“I’ve never seen Wilam so distraught,” she said. “He’s thrown everyone but his three ranking warriors out of the Muhanim. He refuses to speak to even me.” She paused. “I fear the valley will be filled with the blood of all the Warik. They underestimate the full wrath of my husband.”

And this was the man I was to kill. My great defender, who would rend the heavens to save me and the child he had placed within me.

For a moment any thought of harming him fell from my mind. I wanted my warrior to rip the enemy limb from limb for what he had done to his cherished bride! I wanted him to descend on the Warik with a roar and sever Kirutu’s head from his body with a single stroke. I wanted him to save my son and defend my honor.

But I knew that none of this was possible. I wasn’t his cherished bride any longer—he just didn’t know it yet. And he couldn’t save my son—Stephen was a stain upon his honor. He just didn’t know that either. Not yet.

Mistaking my anguish for self-pity, Melino placed her hand on my knee and offered me a faint smile. “You will heal and give Wilam a beautiful son, Yuli. You must not worry.”

“How can you know that Wilam will defeat Kirutu?”

She studied me for a moment. “No one can know all things. But my husband would level these mountains to save his people. If Kirutu thought he could defeat Wilam, he would have tried many times. Many will die, but Wilam cannot be killed so easily.”

I lay on the mat for hours after Melino’s departure, drowning in a sea of misery. I tried to think of a way out for my son, but I couldn’t. And as day gave way to dusk, my despair set its hooks into my mind, like a vicious cancer.

Wilam did not visit me. No, he would not, Melino said. His mind was on war. Lela did not visit me. No, she could not, Melino said. I was to remain sequestered with the lords.

I must heal. I must keep pure. I must not endanger myself in any way.

But how could I heal Stephen’s broken heart?

How could I keep pure what was torn?

How could I remove myself from danger when I was already dead?

That night I could not eat. I could barely sleep, and then only when exhaustion drew me under.

The next day the village filled with the sounds of warriors running, eerily crying out the call to war. Where the sound of children’s laughter and soft songs had once filtered through the jungle, I could hear only death’s haunting voice.

It wasn’t merely my own disposition, though I knew I was seeing through a dark glass. Fear had settled in the valley, so thick and heavy that no sound of joy could penetrate it.

And I alone held the truth secret in my heart, where none of them could know.

I was to blame. I was the stain. I was the ruined heap huddled in my hut, a fruitless bride who held no true value. A failed mother who’d delivered her own innocent children into the arms of a fiend.

There in that hut I cursed God, because any promise I had once clung to had proven false in this valley of death.

Three days, Kirutu had said. I had three days to kill Wilam.

Two of those passed, and as each hour crawled by, my heart slipped deeper into the abyss. I tried to smile when they brought me my food, and at times I think I may have, but their minds were on war and my deep melancholy was understandable, so they paid me little attention. I was only recovering from a terrible brutalizing.

The only way to save Stephen was to kill the man who’d saved me. I tried to tell myself that he hadn’t saved me, only the person that he thought me to be: a pure vessel who carried his child. I was neither.

But my reasoning offered me no desire to kill him. I could not bring myself to murder another human being.

Wilam was, in fact, my only hope. He was the one who could kill Kirutu before my son was discovered. He was the one who might then offer me mercy and allow my son to live. He was the one who might yet find a love for me that extended beyond the laws that governed their beliefs.

I clung to that terrible hope alone, knowing deep in my soul that it was insanity. Wilam would not step beyond the beliefs and laws that had guided his understanding of all that was right, any more than I could rise up and walk on water.

By the time night had fallen, even that thin thread of hope had darkened. I lay alone in my hut long after silence had swallowed the village, and slowly settled into what can only be described as a living death.

Sleep.

And in that sleep, the dream that had first lured me from distant shores visited me once again, for the first time since I had left Atlanta.

Once again I was looking down at a large valley filled with a tangle of trees, with vines the size of my forearms running all the way to the ground. Flocks of red-and-blue parrots took flight and flapped over an endless swamp at the valley’s far end. The landscape was both savage and idyllic at once.

Once again a single sweet tone reached out to me, wooing me with its unbroken, haunting note. I looked around, wondering where the song could be coming from, but I could see no one. The singular, evocative tone grew in volume, and birds from all corners of the jungle took flight toward the sound, far before me.

And then I too took flight, sailing above the trees, up the valley. A low tone joined the higher one then, a deeper note that seemed to reach into my bones. I wasn’t afraid—on the contrary, I found the sound exceedingly comforting. It seemed to wrap itself around my whole body and pull me forward.

Once again in that dream I was rushing, faster and faster, headed directly for a barren hill. It was there on that hill that I saw the figure who had so often stood there, calling to me. A nameless one. An exotic creature from another world, calling out to me in a voice that was deeply comforting.

Come to me , it sang without words. Find me. Join me. Save me …

And once again, before I could see the singer’s face, the dream faded, leaving me to darkness.

I awoke with eyes wide open.

The morning had come, and with it a deep stillness. Still gripped by my memory of the dream, I wondered if I might still be sleeping.

And then the events that had delivered me into that hut deep in the jungle crashed into my mind. Wilam. Kirutu. Betrayal.

Death.

The reality of it all crushed any lingering memory of the dream.

I jerked upright from my mat and listened for any sound. But there was none. They had gone?

My heart hammered as I lurched toward the door, quickly removed the slats, and stepped into the sunlight for the first time in three days.

Distant birds called. Smoke coiled to the sky from several huts, and if I’d used my imagination I might have heard the sound of crackling fire. Otherwise the village was silent.

Empty. I was alone?

I hurried along the upper boardwalk, looking for anyone. But there was no one to be seen. Not even the elderly loitering near the doorways to their huts.

“Melino?”

My call was hollow.

I began to run along the boardwalk. I needed someone to shatter the illusion that I had been abandoned.

But there was no one. So I ran faster, calling out Melino’s name, oblivious to the pain in my abdomen, all the way to the far end of the upper courts, which overlooked the massive clearing with the lone tree at its center.