“I think it’s called a fark-fark.”

“In the middle of the night you got to be scholarly.”

The bird flew off, still squawking. Softly she said, “You could have been killed, you know that? You were pretty damned gutsy.”

I shrugged. I hadn’t thought much about my performance. I was too worried about having to do it again.

“You saved my ass. Literally.”

“What I did, it had nothing to do with valor, or anything like that.”

“I think it did,” she said. “You’re a valiant fool.” She pulled me to her.

“That’s the best kind,” she added. “Thanks.”

She curled herself around me like a sweet-smelling cocoon, and we slept.

TWENTY-EIGHT
CUSTOMS OF THE COUNTRY

She was still asleep in the morning when I walked out of our hut into a solid mass of heat, weaving a little under the havelock I had improvised to ward off the sun.

The path was straight and narrow, and led through a stand of droopy trees to the town a quarter mile away. Yet the topography was such, with its successive twists and turns, that the human eye couldn’t penetrate more than a fragment of the total distance.

So it was that I heard the keening before I saw the keener. She squatted where the street began, her long gray hair under the hejab. The brown teeth drooled betel juice on her schmatte as she chanted an incantation over a pubescent youth. He knelt before her, foaming at the mouth, trembling in an ecstasy of stress as she cut three slits like frown lines in his forehead, rounded them with a twist of the stone blade, and rubbed dirt into the wounds, making a paste with the oozing blood. Then she ate the surplus paste.

Before her was spread a lacework of interwoven palm fronds and on them was laid out a pharmacopoeia of magic potions and elixirs. She smiled up at me through the emulsion of blood and betel juice, making obscene gestures not as a sexual enticement but to make clear that she was pushing aphrodisiacs. And all the time we were attended by a skulk of yellow dogs, sniffing and scratching and pissing, with nothing better to do, just hanging loose. Then a big hand shot out from behind me and grabbed me firmly by the balls. I jumped a good three feet, straight up, twirling in the middle of the air to face my assailant.

Hashim Pachachi stood there with a warm smile, but by the time I returned to earth the smile had vanished; he looked shocked and aggrieved. His abusively attentive right hand I had in my flight managed to free from its assault. His injured eyes found mine, seeking a clue to my erratic behavior. I too groped for an explanation that could rationalize his.

“Don’t grotz me. Back the hell off,” I snarled, discarding caution and diplomacy in one fell swoop.