Devil's Rock - Chris Speyer [60]
We arrived in Ceylon, or Serendip as the ancients called it, soon after Una and I had celebrated our ninth birthday, and we remained there for a little over five years. While our father and mother were engaged in ‘civilising the natives’ and ‘steering them away from their dark superstitions’, the natives were engaged in steering us, their children, towards those very same dark beliefs and practices. Our chief instructor in this was the local Edura (or ‘idolatrous witch doctor’ as our father called him), a kindly old man who, when not driving out demons, cast bronze statues of gods and goddesses and of all the local saints, and made bells and cymbals for ritual dances.
It is the belief, in those parts, that there exists a host of different demons and that every illness and misfortune is caused by a particular one of them. It is the Edura’s duty to determine which demon is the cause of each affliction and then, through the terrifying Yakum Natim or Devil Dances, in the disguise of that very demon, to persuade it to leave the body of the sufferer.
Every day, as soon as our mother had finished giving us our morning lessons, my sister and I would scamper off to the Edura’s. There we would squat in the heat and semi-darkness, watching him work and listening, wide-eyed, to his tales of the Yakka, or demons, and the many tricks and ruses he had used to overcome them. All around us, on the walls, lit by the red, flickering glare from the hearth, hung the masks of the Yakka, their faces twisted and distorted in cruel reflection of the diseases they caused: Naga Sanni Yakka, bringer of nightmares; Kori Sanni Yakka, the paralyser; Amuku Sanni Yakka, green-faced inflictor of stomach ills; Dala Sanni Yakka, causer of whooping cough; Riri Yakka, the fearsome blood demon; Kola Sanni Yakka, leader of the devils, and all the rest of his ghastly retinue.
The Edura worked stripped to the waist, his old skin, like creased leather, moving over the protruding bones of his arms and ribs as he shaped an image in wax or fanned the coals to a white heat to melt metals for casting. From time to time he would pause and point a finger at one of the masks, cackling as he recounted the ways in which he had outwitted this or that demon.
Best of all was to watch as the Edura cast a new god or goddess; the hot, smoking wax pouring out; the molten metal pouring like liquid fire from the crucible into the mould and then the miracle of the moment when the lithe, beautiful, dancing body of the god broke from its clay shell. What chance had my father’s dry sermons and crucified God against this astonishing marriage of heaven and hell?
Some days when we went to the Edura’s hut we would find him beneath his favourite tree, legs crossed, face serene, deep in meditation. We would settle ourselves on either side of him, copy his pose and see which of us could sit for the longest. Una always won. I would begin to yawn, then to fidget, and soon I would run off to find something else to do.
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Who knows how long we would have remained in Ceylon had we not fallen ill? Always doing everything together, Una and I succumbed to fever on the same day. My mother nursed, my father prayed, but our condition rapidly worsened. Our bodies seemed on fire one moment and frozen the next; one moment the sweat poured from us, soaking the bed sheets, the next we were seized by such shivering that our teeth rattled in our heads. We could eat nothing and soon we sank into delirium. Our father, fearing the worst, set out on the three-day overland journey to the coast in the hope of finding a doctor, but each day he was away we grew weaker until finally, in desperation, our mother turned to the Edura. The old man came and stood at our bedside. He bent low over each of us and smelt our breaths, then nodded; he knew this devil