All those who did try to escape were cut down or rounded up to be slain later. The king who’d once made fun of Frog tried to bargain with the demons. They stripped and paraded him before his people to destroy the will of Mankandikha. His money and property were taken from him. The leader of the demonic army rode around in the king’s fine palanquin, forcing eight naked women to carry it. They were whipped if the carriage went too slowly; sometimes they were whipped anyway.
While all this was happening, the avatar of Gopurbh appeared to Shumyzin in his mother’s house, cloaking them both in mist, so that not even Yemin knew he’d appeared. The avatar said, “This is your day, and I am your father. Here are the means to defeat the fiends.” The clever god gave his son a fine scimitar and shield, and golden armor.
Once Shumyzin had put the armor on, his father told him, “You can’t be harmed today, nor seen in that armor by your enemies.”
When the demon soldiers reached the street where Shumyzin and his mother lived, the smell of her bread enticed them. They entered the shop, intending to steal its goods. They saw only Yemin at her oven, unarmed and helpless. They drew their swords to kill her.
Not one of them left the bakery alive.
Like a wave of heat Shumyzin slipped unseen through the enemy’s midst, slaughtering them one after the other. With each he killed, his tusks grew larger.
Demons on the streets suddenly clutched at themselves and doubled over, spilling their life into the dust. Their limbs dropped off; their legs were slashed out from under them. The survivors fled in terror from the lethal phantom. They knocked over their leader’s stolen palanquin, smashing it as they clambered over the sides, kicking their king in their haste to get away. The whipped maidens scattered before them, shrieking.
When the demon king pushed himself out the window, Shumyzin glided invisibly over and cut off his head. Then he ran through the streets, shaking the gory trophy at the enemy. All they saw was the gaping, dripping head itself floating upon the air. Some of them jumped to their deaths in the sea. Others raced to put a thousand spans between them and that phantom. They heard a raw voice shout after them: “Tell everyone that Shumyzin, son of Gopurbh and Yemin, guards this place and will take all your heads if you come back again.”
After that Shumyzin’s heroic deeds fell upon the span like drops of monsoon rain. He became a legend, the defender of his city, the slayer of a thousand foes. Grateful for his protection, the citizens rejected their king—the same one who had belittled Shumyzin years earlier—when he tried to take back his office. They placed Shumyzin on the throne in his place. The hero proved to be a generous ruler. He married the maiden Kyai, daughter of the sun. Although they’d humiliated him for so long, he exacted no penalty from the people…save for one episode.
One afternoon he was alerted that Cabor the Drunk was causing trouble. He found Cabor in a narrow side street. The new king’s self-proclaimed father was whipping a dwarf with a bamboo rod. Beside him lay a maiden whom he’d beaten unconscious. Shumyzin flung Cabor against a wall hard enough to knock him senseless. He had his soldiers arrest the villain, and for a week Shumyzin exhibited him in a cage hanging outside his own house. He confiscated all of Cabor’s property and wealth and gave it to the two people who’d been harmed. When the week was up, Shumyzin cut off Cabor’s nose and ears, and threw him out of the city, off the span.
Thus did the hero save Mankandikha and exact retribution on the cruel Cabor.
“And that is the tale of how Shumyzin the Sufferer, once called Frog, gained renown, but not how he and Kyai found bliss, which is another tale altogether.” Leodora concluded with the traditional ending, the promise of the next story, spontaneously. She had become so caught up by it that she’d forgotten herself. Her hands were extended, fingers pressing together, as if she’d been maneuvering her puppets. She supposed that she had. Self-consciously she glanced at the demigod. He had tears on his cheeks.
He said, “I haven’t heard my beautiful Kyai mentioned in a very long time.”
“It’s better with puppets,” she responded, and when he growled she thought she’d angered him, but realized after