When he recovered—which every boy so operated upon didnot do—he was tested as a singer. One of the results of the operation was to preserve whatever voice a boy possessed, and a slave who could sing and play some instrument was of enhanced value. Balthazar proved to have no ear, nor any potential skill as a potter or a painter which, after singing, were regarded as the employments most suitable for the truly black, woolly haired slaves brought from far inland.
“You have no skills,” the owner of the slave-school told him, not angrily, but as a plain statement of fact.
“I see nothing for you but to be a guard and escort for women.”
By this time Balthazar had acquired a smattering of several languages and had talked to many people and learned a good deal; he knew that the life of a harem attendant was not an enviable one. It was tantamount to being a human watchdog, and who cares for a watchdog? Women, he had been told, were profoundly cunning and deceitful, and when a deception was discovered, who was beaten? The watchdog who had failed to be watchful enough. Also women quarrelled amongst themselves, and who must step between them lest they come to blows and damage one another’s looks? Again the watchdog. Women, again, seemed, from the tales he had heard, to bear a curious, deep-rooted enmity against his kind. Some of the tales he had heard were quite horrifying; and although amongst his tribe he had been regarded as a courageous boy, courage seemed to have left him with his manhood. He was very sensitive now, both to pain and to mockery.
All the things he had heard were not horrible, however; there were many tales about slaves who had been clever, risen to positions of trust, managed to save money somehow and had purchased their freedom, or so endeared themselves to their owners that they had been set free. There was one whole layer of society which consisted of freed men. Some of these even owned slaves themselves. It was, however, generally agreed that once the harem curtains had closed upon a half-man, he would. stay there, like the other inmates, for life.
So, timid as he had become, Balthazar thought he must risk making one suggestion. Bowing his head, he said : “Master, I am worthless. But I think I could learn the abacus.”
The slave-trainer looked at him with astonishment. The arts of reckoning and of penmanship were regarded as too intellectual for slaves from far inland who could sing, make pleasing patterns with colours, mould pottery, mime amusingly and play the clown—all physical things, extensions or refinements of what came naturally to them, of what they would have been doing if left in freedom in their own homeland. The use of the mind was a different thing altogether; some people doubted whether they even had minds. Dubiously the old slave-trainer cast an experienced eye over the boy; a good lively eye, he reflected, and a promising forehead.
“We can but try,” he said.
“Fetch an abacus.”
Eighteen months later he was able to put upon the market a property practically unique; a young, neutered slave who could read and write and reckon accurately; who was docile and teachable and reliable; and black, with the black’s well-known powers of endurance and ability to eat almost anything. Most slaves who could read and write were Greeks or Semites or half-breeds who resented their condition and were shifty or sickly; often they were men who had fallen into slavery on account of debt and tended to be followed about by hungry families, which made them attempt to be dishonest.
To the Greek merchant from Tyre, in Alexandria on business, and astonished by the price asked for Balthazar, the trainer said:
“Within three months you will think it too little.”
And within three months the Greek was almost of that opinion; for in addition to all his other qualities the boy proved to be completely honest. The Greek, himself a profoundly dishonest man, subjected Balthazar to the most subtle and cunning temptations his wily mind could devise and Balthazar never cheated him of a penny. And when a trader—bribed by the Greek to do so—offered him a bribe, Balthazar refused it, with the extraordinary excuse that there was no column for such things in his accounts book.
At the end of a year—it took so long to convince the merchant completely—he was able to say to his wife:
“Now, when I go on business there is no need for you to godownstairs and dull your pretty eyes checking the accounts. Balthazar is quite honest, or he has such a mania for accuracy that it amounts to the same thing.”
In his work Balthazar was happy; but within himself he was always aware of a yawning emptiness. The sense of loss which he had felt after his mutilation had increased rather than diminished through the years. His sleep was haunted by dreams, pleasant in themselves but dreadful to recall when he woke because he would dream that he was a whole man again, back in his home by the great river, hunting and fishing with the men by day, and at night snug and happy in his hut with a woman who was always—this was the shocking part—the sister whom N’Zana had taken.
He was now enlightened enough to see the Great God of the Crocodiles for what he was, something that men in their fear of the ordinary crocodiles, and their impotence, had invented for their own comfort.He had lost his faith in N’Zana at the same time that he had lost his freedom, but deep inside himself he had a hankering for the comfort which only faith in something outside himself could supply. As he grew older and his need for an emotional-outlet grew, he began to think about other gods, the gods worshipped by all these clever busy people who had no fear of crocodiles.
In Tyre there was no lack of them; the flourishing polyglot port had much to offer to anyone seeking a god or a goddess. There was the Phoenician Baal in his many forms; Baal Tamar of the Palm Trees, Baal Perazim of the Wells, even Baal Zebub, Lord of the Flies. His groves were everywhere. For the convenience of visiting Egyptians there were temples to Isis and Osiris; for Greeks temples dedicated to Zeus, Aphrodite, Artemis and a dozen more; the Romans had reared temples to Jupiter and Venus; the Babylonian goddess Ishtar had her sacred place, and so had the god recently brought from Persia, Mithras.
They all had one thing in common with one another, and with N’Zana, Balthazar discovered; they all liked presents; and presents he was prepared to give and able to give. On certain days of the year it was customary for masters to give trivial sums of money to their slaves; females spent these sums on finery for themselves and whole men spent them on finery for their women. Then, occasionally, after some particularly profitable transaction, the Greek would toss a coin or two to Balthazar; open-handed merchants would do the same. And he earned money too, by writing letters or making a reckoning for some unlearned fellow. Many slaves, commanding such resources would have brought delicacies to eat, but Balthazar, often hungry in childhood, was quite content with the food in the Greek’s kitchen, simple, monotonous, but sufficient. Nor had he any need to spend his little income on clothes, the Greek took pride in his slaves’ appearance, and Balthazar, in the counting house, in the public eye, was better clad than most. And women, those ever avid, never satisfied creatures who made such demands upon a man’s pocket, meant nothing to him.
So, bearing gifts, he made a slow round of the groves and temples and underground shrines; looking at first for a place to rest his heart; for something to fill the great emptiness caused by the loss of freedom, of manhood and belief in N’Zana. It was much to ask, and he never found it. After his twenty-fifth year he asked something else, something simpler, of the gods. In his twenty-fifth year his right hand had begun to trouble him.
Laying down his pen one afternoon, he had stretched his fingers as usual, and they had resisted the stretching movement and remained cramped, as though still clutching the pen he had laid aside. It had been a long day and he had written small, paper being expensive and the cramp did not cause him much concern. In an hour it was gone and his fingers were as flexible as ever. But day by day the condition grew worse until there came a time when he went to bed with his fingers still bent about an invisible pen. In the morning, for a long time, his hand was better; and then one morning he woke to find his fingers still contracted, and in the centre of his palm a curious bony bump. After that, offering his flowers, his doves, his expensive spices, he had asked of the gods not a resting place for his heart but a cure for his fingers, and the answer to the one request matched exactly the answer to the other. Nothing.