Lord Tyger (12 page)

They had been always gentle and loving and happy-voiced when he was young, or so it seemed to him. But as the years went by, as their companions, the other adults, died, and they were left alone with each other, they seemed to find it more difficult to endure each other. Ras could understand this somewhat. But when they had a third person to talk to, they lessened their arguments only slightly. Often, they both turned on him when he entered. It seemed that they were, somehow, blaming him for their being in this predicament, but what the predicament was, they would not, or could not, explain.

There were other things he did not understand about them.

"You think you're not an ape?" Yusufu would say. Yusufu, tiny man with the big head, long body, and short, bowed legs,
legs not much longer than Ras's arm from elbow to wrist, would reach up to Ras. His woolly, white hair and frizzly, white beard, brown-skinned, smudged face with pushed-in nose and nostrils like a gorilla's, his thick lips (not as thick as the Wantsos) would rise as high as tiptoes would carry them.

"Bend down, son of a camel," he would growl. "Bend over, djinn, so that I, your father, begetter of a gorilla, to my everlasting shame, may switch you properly and painfully and so teach you better manners."

Ras would remain upright. He would grin down at him. Yusufu, dark face twisted, beard flying, would jump up and down. He would curse in Swahili, Arabic, English, and Amharic.

"Must I punish you, O
Lord
Tyger, whip you into the trees you love so much, like the true monkey you are? Bend down; do as I, your father and disposer of your body, command you. O droppings of a camel, accidentally formed as a man, bend down!"

"What is a camel?" Ras would say, although Yusufu had described the beast to him many times.

"It is your true father, that son of Shaitan, that stinking, spitting, humped thinker of evil thoughts! And you, your father was a camel and your mother was an ape!"

"But you once told me you were my father and that you were an ape!" Ras would say.

"And he is an ape!" Mariyam would scream. "But he is not your true father! He is your stepfather, and he would do well to remember that! That monster hatched from a raven's egg!"

The two seemed lately to act as if they blamed him for being in this world. What was wrong with this world? Where else could they be?

Looking past the hut, through the openings between the branches of the trees of the forest, he could see the black cliffs that walled the world.

"Black as the tongue of the devil," Mariyam had said of them.

"Black as a vulture's anus," Yusufu had said. And in saying this, both revealed the cast of their minds and the course of their speech.

"Six thousand feet straight up," Yusufu had said in answer to Ras's question.

"Feet?"

How long was a foot? Yusufu said it was as long as one of Ras's feet. But Ras remembered that his feet had been shorter at one time.

"A child's foot?" he had said.

"O my beloved, banana of my eye," Yusufu had said. "You are teasing me, an old man with white hairs and many wrinkles, gotten from worrying over you. Do not mock me or I will strip the skin off you and make from the skin a whip to whip you to death."

"What is a foot?" Ras had said. "I know how long my feet are now. But I am growing. What if I keep on growing, and the walls of the world, now six thousand feet, become only half as much? What if I grow, the world shrink, and I become as tall as the pillar in the middle of the lake?"

Yusufu would laugh at this picture, and he would be happy for a while.

Ras stopped when he was fifty feet from the house and hallooed, since it would be dangerous to burst into the house on Yusufu, who was nervous and might throw his knife before he
realized at whom he was throwing it.

The quarreling voices stopped, and then the door swung open and Mariyam ran out. Yusufu followed her. Mariyam's head was no higher than Ras's hip. Her head was huge in proportion to her body, and her legs were short and bandy. She wore a white robe that came to her calves. She was smiling and weeping at the same time. He took her in his arms and lifted her up and cuddled her while she kissed him and her tears were smeared over his face.

"Ah, son, I thought that truly I would never see you again!"

Mariyam always said this if he were gone for more than a day, and while she did not fully mean it, yet her words did mean that she had missed him. He had never tired of receiving this greeting.

Finally, he put her down and patted her white, black-speckled head and waited for the scolding that always came because he had grieved her by staying away so long.

Yusufu, who was perhaps an inch taller than his wife, whose head-hair was all white and whose long beard was gray with black threads, waddled on stubby, curved legs to Ras and said, "Bend down, you taller-than-an-ostrich, that you may kiss me as a respectful son does his father."

Ras did so, and the old man kissed him on the lips in return.

Ras waited until they had entered the house, where a fire burned in a mortared-stone fireplace in the middle of the room. The room had many odors: monkeys, monkey excrement not yet removed, birds and bird excrement, a sweat-soaked shirt of Yusufu's overdue for washing, and, most powerful, the odor of smoke. The chimney of the fireplace was faulty, and any adverse
breeze was likely to blow down the chimney and spread smoke around the room. One of Ras's earliest memories was of Mariyam nagging at Yusufu to repair the chimney and Yusufu replying that he would certainly do so when the weather permitted. When Ras was older, he had offered many times to repair or completely rebuild the fireplace and chimney. Yusufu had resented the implication that he would never do the job. No, by Allah, he would get the work done at the first chance. But he never did.

Ras coughed and then said, "Look!" and pulled the letter from the antelope-hide bag. Mariyam and Yusufu grayed under their dark skins, but their faces expressed only puzzlement. Mariyam said that she could not read the writing. Yusufu took a long time going over the letter and then said that most of the words were unknown to him.

Ras felt that Yusufu was acting. His comments and his facial expressions had something controlled about them. And Mariyam's reactions had also been more restrained than they should have been. Both were too silent.

Ras became angry and said that they knew much more than they were telling him. They became indignant and began to shout abuse. They were overacting. But nothing he could say could get them to admit anything. Mariyam said that she was of the opinion that the paper was a letter from Igziyabher, that is, a message, to the Virgin of the Moon, or perhaps Igziyabher was writing the story of the history of the world from creation to the present.

"Why don't you ask me where I got the letter?" Ras shouted. "Isn't it strange that that was not the first thing you asked me about it?"

Neither of the two would admit that this was strange. Nor
did they then ask him where it came from. Nevertheless, Ras told them about the stiff-winged bird, its fiery encounter with the Bird of God, the yellow-haired creature, and the dead brown man.

Mariyam cried, "Of course, the yellow-haired thing was a demon! She was flying in a demonic bird, one of Satan's, and so attacked the Bird of God! The dead man must be one of her fellow demons, struck down by Igziyabher!"

"You have said many times that Igziyabher is all-powerful," Ras said. "How, then, could the bird of Satan take the Bird of God along with it in its fall? And why did not Igziyabher kill the yellow-haired demon, too, if He killed the brown one?"

"Who knows why Igziyabher does this or does that?" Mariyam said. "His ways are many and devious and ones that we, his creatures, cannot understand. But truly I am happy that you did not come across the yellow-haired demon, because she would have destroyed you or, worse, taken you back to hell with her!"

"How do you know that the demon is a she?" Ras said.

Mariyam stuttered for a minute and then said, "Because it is likely that Satan would have sent a female demon to entice you the more easily to hell."

Ras had always been more curious than frightened by her stories of devils and Satan and hell in the cave at the river's end. Besides, he now had heard the stories of the evil spirits of the Wantso and of the Sharrikt, and no one of the three versions agreed with any other, yet the Wantso and Gilluk, the Sharrikt king, had been as convinced as Mariyam that their stories were the truth.

That Yusufu and Mariyam did not press him for details was proof that they were concealing knowledge from him. Raging,
repressing the desire to shake the truth out of them, he left the house with a mighty slam of the door behind him. He strode through the forest and then along the lake shore for hours. Finally, he realized that he had wasted his time by coming home. He would have to return to the area into which the yellow-haired being had fallen and search for her.

That, however, would be done later. In three days, Wilida would be let out of her cage by Bigagi, who would conduct her over the bridge to the village, where the all-day wedding ceremony would start. Ras would sneak onto the islet late tomorrow night and take Wilida away. When he had her safely hidden away, he would take up the search for the angel or demon or whatever she was.

It was an hour before dark when he came back to the house. Mariyam was baking bread in the brick oven on the veranda. Yusufu walked in a few minutes later with a hare he had killed with an arrow. Both his parents greeted him, but they were unusually quiet. Ras wanted to talk, but forced himself to be silent. After a while, Mariyam and Yusufu became nervous and started talking about this and that, quarreling over trifles but saying nothing about the letter or the two birds or the yellow-haired creature.

6

LIGHTNING TURNS TO STONE--AND A KNIFE

He watched Mariyam bring a few glowing coals of wood from the hut. She started a fire in the brazier on the veranda and stuck the hare on a rod of iron and set it over the fire.

Iron, Ras thought. Where had she gotten iron? As far back as he could remember, the brazier and other articles of iron had been here. But not until recently had he questioned their origin.

"What did you eat?" Mariyam said.

"Some pig that I killed several days ago. And a tree rat I caught yesterday."

Mariyam and Yusufu looked disgusted. Mariyam, he knew, did not care about the pig, but she was upset about the rat. Yusufu was sickened by the thought of eating either animal.

And that was strange, strange. When he was a child, he had been encouraged to eat anything that could be eaten: worms, spiders, bamboo shoots, mice, everything except carrion. Yet his parents had refused to eat much of what he ate. They had managed to conceal their disgust then, or else he had not noticed it. But he
was seeing much now that he had taken for granted then.

"I am going swimming," he said suddenly. "Maybe I'll go fishing. I'll be back in time to eat."

They did not object. He walked away but turned once to look back. They were squatting on the veranda, face to face, their noses almost touching, their mouths working, their hands flying. So, they were even more upset than he; yet, for some reason, they had not wanted him to know. His story and the letter had disturbed them.

Ras shrugged and walked on through the gloom of the great trees and the shriek of monkeys and birds. At the lake, he swam for a few minutes. When he came out of the water, he saw Kebbede, a chimpanzee, running off with his leopardskin belt with the sheathed knife. He gave chase, but the chimpanzee, hooting madly, scampered up a tree and became lost in the higher levels of the forest. All Ras could do was to howl curses and promise vengeance in many languages but mostly in Arabic. This had a vast and beautiful range of oaths, obscenities, exquisitely described tortures, and insults.

When he returned to the house, he told his parents what had happened. Mariyam said that, doubtless, Igziyabher would furnish His son with another just like the one stolen. Perhaps very soon, since clouds were forming. Igziyabher was wrathful about something, and when He became angry, He sweated clouds and, after a while, cursed thunder and then threw down His knives, which looked like lightning while descending.