The Knight and His Shadow by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628951325
Publisher: Michigan State University Press

A WHOLE LIFETIME WOULD NOT BE ENOUGH, MASTER, TO TELL you about all the exploits of Dieng Mbaalo. But here is how it all started, very early one morning, near the Main Market.

It was on an empty street in the center of town. The first passengers who got off the bus at the Main Market found a corpse on the pavement and went to inform the police. The man, who had been murdered during the night, must have been mentally ill, to judge from his appearance and his far from normal clothes. The police took the body away, and no one thought of bothering to arrange an inquest.

A few days later, however, the statements of a nocturnal wanderer were carried by the press, and the incident had a surprising development.

This person claimed that on the night of the murder, in the same place, he had met a man on horseback, going straight in front of him, quite slowly at a gentle trot. He was in the clothes of one of those historic warriors. The passerby was intrigued by his appearance and followed him at a distance. “I thought at first that he was talking aloud to himself, then I realized that he was having a furious argument with someone else. It all seemed unbelievable, and I started to wonder if I wasn’t going off my head. What the man on the horse was saying was a series of grumbles, which I couldn’t hear properly, but I could follow clearly what the other person was saying, although I couldn’t see him.” This other person, according to the passerby, said that he owed nothing to anyone. “On the contrary,” he argued, “I was the person who made you out of nothing. Without me, you would have remained a useless block of stone for vultures to shit on at Bilenty.” The passerby said he found it all very puzzling, because the two men seemed to have views about a certain Princess Siraa. “They also talked about the King of Dapienga and some other things, which I’ve got to admit, meant nothing to me. I heard them talking about all sorts of peculiar names, and they kept on arguing about this Princess Siraa. At any event, after a few minutes, the argument became much more fierce. Finally, the Knight and his shadow started fighting violently. Blood was spilled. I saw a human form, er . . . that is to say another knight in fact come out of nowhere, who plunged a curved dagger into the stomach of his opponent, and then pulled it out and wiped it on the covering of his horse, without saying a word. The person witnessing all this had proof that the two people fighting were the same beings. It was difficult for him to say, at this point of his account, whether he had been present at a murder or a suicide. The warrior who spoke clearly then seemed to stand over the inert form of his own

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