Ted Dekker - Outlaw

Destitute, I lay still and tried to shut down my mind. In the wake of my son’s death, filled with fear and anger, I began to believe that no distant God who would allow such suffering would rescue me.

I had left my home in good, obedient faith, eager to discover and offer wholeness and light. And I had found only wretched anguish and darkness.

It was the first time that I’d dared curse God for my misfortune.

“Hello?”

My eyes snapped wide.

“Is anyone there?”

The voice was male. Raspy. It spoke English. My mind refused to process the sound as a reality. I was hallucinating.

But then it spoke again, in a hushed tone from another cell that seemed not so far from my own, this time in a broken form of the language the natives spoke. I knew then that the man was not a figment of my imagination.

I cried out, but I couldn’t form any words around the gag.

The prisoner must have assumed I was a native, because he mumbled something in their tongue before falling silent. I cried out again, and then again, until my throat was raw. All to no avail.

But I was no longer alone.

My body began to tremble with hope. I lay there, bound like a cadaver awakened from death, flooded with life. Waves of elation washed over my mind.

I was not alone!

I was alive.

Even more, the man spoke their language, which could only mean he’d been alive long enough to learn it.

They say that once broken, a person often willingly subjects himself to the master who has broken him. My ordeal had shattered my strongest resolve. The men who had taken me had become my gods, and I their slave. But now I had heard the voice of another slave.

I wanted to rush out and throw myself into his arms. I wanted to kiss him and beg him to tell me that everything would be OK, that this small interruption in my life would soon fade into the distant past, that my son was still alive and my sisters eagerly awaited my return, that my family and friends were preparing a sprawling lawn party for our reunion on the far side of the world. I would tell them of my most magnificent adventure and they would all cry and hug Stephen and me. Then they would beg me to sing for them.

I refused to listen to the other voices whispering in my mind. The ones that asked why, if the man had been here long enough to learn the language, he was still captive in this pit. The ones that wondered if these gods would treat a woman as kindly as they had treated a man.

I tried to rouse the man’s attention again. And yet again. It was pointless. Maybe his voice had been a hallucination after all.

THEY came for me several hours later and woke me from a heavy sleep full of indecipherable dreams. Two men pulled me from my hole, then hefted me over one of their shoulders. The realization that they were taking me away from that place of safety near the man who spoke English jolted my mind. I made a pathetic protest into my gag and tried to kick, but I was nothing but a squirming pig in their grasp.

It was dark outside, and a chorus of insects announced my passing. Bare feet slapped at the earth as I bounced over my carrier’s shoulder. No rain—that was new. Night had always seemed to bring rain.

Even then my mind was beginning to register perceived facts about my new life. Such as that I was a pig. That it rained most nights. That the man’s shoulder under my waist was powerful and his stride strong under my weight.

We must have traveled a mile before the man ducked through a doorway and set me in a sitting position on a hard floor. Soft voices were exchanged, and the men who had brought me left.

A fire crackled. The air was hot, but a chill tickled my flesh with anticipation—of what, I could not know.

When I didn’t think I could hold still in that silence for a moment longer, the bag was lifted off my head and I found myself staring up at a man I immediately recognized by the long scar on his left side: the tall leader on whom my eyes had first fallen in the ocean fog. His skin looked even blacker by the dancing flames. The fire pit was at the center of a round hut with a low, charred ceiling. His dark eyes studied me, still emotionless.

He was dressed more stately and his skin glistened clean now. But when I say dressed, I mean only as the gods can dress, naked except for what could be called jewelry. Thatched golden arm- and thigh bands. A yellow-and-red collar nearly an inch wide wound around his neck. Two white bone hoops through his earlobes. No longer covered by the furry headdress, his hair was longer than I’d imagined, and wet with some kind of oil. The orange light cast deep shadows between his muscles. I was sure that this man could snap my neck with a simple, quick twist if he was so inclined.

I found it difficult to breathe in his presence.

He wasn’t alone. Behind me hands carefully unwound the wide lengths of woven fibers that that had secured me for the last three days. The yellow of my sleeveless blouse had turned brown, and my canvas shoes were gray with mud. My black capris were torn at one knee.

I sat on a bark floor surrounded by thatched walls lined with no fewer than thirty human skulls.

I turned my head to see who was behind me. A woman, perhaps in her late teens, knelt at my back. I could not see her face in the shadows.

Like the man, she wore bone earrings and woven bands around her neck and arms. She was naked except for a lap-lap, flaps of red- and yellow-dyed fabric that hung from a string around her waist.

Having completed her task, the woman stood up, squared her shoulders, and stepped to one side.

“ Mitnarru .” She motioned for me to stand.

I slowly pushed myself to my feet and stared at the woman’s face, struck by her beauty. Her dark cheekbones rose high, brightened by two streaks of a light blue paste or mud that wrapped around her brown eyes and rose like wide, pointed vines on her forehead. Her shoulders and breasts were accentuated by woven bands of blue and yellow.

Both she and the man were clean despite the environment. From what I could see, other than the hair on their heads, both had either plucked or shaved every strand from their bodies.

The man nodded at the woman. “ Bo purack .”

She motioned for me to remove my blouse. When I stared back, unsure, she repeated the man’s order.

“Bo purack.”

To say that I was not given to public displays of nudity would be to grossly understate my disposition at the time. Even in the face of terrible danger, human pride is not easily sacrificed, at least not among those with refined character. Being made to disrobe in front of them suddenly struck me as inhumane.

The man mumbled a short word and spat into the fire. When I still did not move, the woman stepped up and began to pry at the buttons on my blouse.

I hated myself in that moment. I hated that I stood trembling with neither the strength nor the resolve to resist. I hated being forced to disrobe.

It’s strange how the simplest things, like nakedness, can be so debilitating. How the fear of being seen for what she really is can render a person so powerless. We humans protect what is ours to the bitter end, and when it’s forcibly taken from us, we no longer feel human. This is an absurdity.

Even so, I was given a small gift in the hut. The woman trying to undress me was as unfamiliar with buttons as I was with public nakedness. Before she or the man resorted to more strenuous means, I made the decision to help her. I would undress for them, of my own free will.

Pushing back my anxiety, I lifted my hands and unbuttoned my blouse for her. She slipped my shirt off, then stepped back and stared at my bra, blinking.

The man’s eyes settled on my chest. It was as if neither of them could quite believe that I was encased in yet another layer of protection.