Lord Tyger (13 page)

Before sundown, the clouds, big-browed, black, and swirling, sped over the western edge of the mountains, bringing with them the chill of the cold stone sky. Ras, his parents, and
the animals huddled around the central brick fireplace. They coughed when the wind blew down the chimney and spread the smoke through the hut. Yusufu hacked and swore; he spat in the fire, and the odor of burning saliva mingled with that of the smoke.

Ras was not as cold as the two old ones, since he had been used to sleeping outdoors even in winter with little covering. But he was shaking inwardly; the ice of the unknown and the threatening future was a lump in his belly.

"Where do the knives come from?" he said suddenly.

Yusufu growled and said, "We have told that tale a thousand of a thousand times, O witless."

"A thousand of a thousand lies," Ras said. He looked through the smoke at the old man's reddened and weeping eyes. "If the Devil is the Father of Lies, you are the Devil."

"And you are an impertinent, ungrateful, son. If you were not such an elephant, and I so enfeebled by my years and by the sickness brought about by worrying over you, I would thrash you until you howled louder than the storm."

The wind increased until it was a shrilling. Thunder boomed as if great pieces of the cliffs were falling off. Lightning smashed deafeningly nearby, and the smoky air was whitened. All three jumped.

Ras said with unconcealed sarcasm, "O mother, tell me again the story of how Igziyabher hurls knives to the earth, and every knife is a lightning stroke."

Mariyam looked up at him through the smoke with misery on her face. "O son, it is true. Would I, your mother, lie to you? When it storms, it is because Igziyabher is wrathful. He
rages because His creations have been sinful, and He wishes to frighten them back into a state of grace. And sometimes He kills the especially sinful as an example to the others.

"You, my son, and it grieves me to say it, have been lying with the black women of the Wantso. Igziyabher does not like this."

Ras, panting with repressed rage, stood up, looked around, and then kicked the door with the flat of his foot so hard that the bamboo bar securing it broke. The door banged open outward. The wind and rain rushed in. Lightning exploded and whitened the air. Yusufu and Mariyam yelled in terror.

"I haven't been evil!" Ras shouted. "What have I done that nobody else does? Why should I suffer when Yusufu and the Wantso men and every male beast in the world have a female? Why?"

He shook his fist at the howling blackness outside. Mariyam screamed and ran to him and wrapped her tiny arms around his thigh.

"Igziyabher is saving a white woman for you! He wants you to take to wife a woman of your own kind. That is why He forbids you to whore around with those blacks!"

"And how do you know that Igziyabher has a white woman for me?" he bellowed. "Does He whisper His secrets to you?"

Mariyam, her brown, eaglish face upturned, clung fiercely to his leg.

"Trust me, my son! I know!"

"How do you know? When have you talked to Him?"

Tears ran down her cheeks, and she said, "Believe me, my son, I know!"

"Let loose of me, mother! I am going out there where He
can see me, and I will dare Him to strike me! I haven't been evil! He is evil, because He wants to kill me for doing what He made me do."

Mariyam shrieked, released her hold, stepped back, and held her ears.

"I won't listen to such talk! He will kill you!"

Yusufu took a long drink from a goatskin bag. He wiped his lips and growled, "Let the simpleton go out and get struck down, Mariyam. It won't be your fault."

He took another drink of the wine, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, belched, and said, "It won't be Igziyabher's doing, either, if Ras gets killed. It'll be nothing but an accident caused by his foolishness."

"Shut your mouth, you...!" Mariyam yelled, but Ras did not hear the rest. He ran out into the rain and wind. He ran and ran toward the hills, slipping many times on the wet grass or mud and almost falling. By the frequent flashes of lightning, he could see where he was going and so avoid most of the obstacles, the bushes, fallen trees, and the creek. Up the hill he charged, up the slope into the jungle, where the gorillas lived.

"Strike me; you big hyena up there!" he screamed as he shook his fist. "Hurl your knives of fire; see if you can stab me with hot white death!"

On and up he ran, slowed down now by the steepness and the slipperiness of the hill. Several times he went down to his knees or fell on his chest, but, each time, he leaped up and charged on.

"I'm not afraid of you! Mariyam, my mother, has tried to make me scared of you! But I don't scare! Mother, did I say? That
brown, misshapen, little thing is not my mother! She lied when she told me she was an ape, and she lied when she told me she was my mother!

"How could I, I, come out of a thing like her! I am not her son!"

He stopped to raise both hands, more in question than in defiance.

"Whose son, then, am I?"

It was a strange thing that followed. He should have been knocked unconscious instantly. He should have had no idea of what struck him.

But, afterward, he swore that all did not become black and empty. Not for a part of a second, anyway.

The world became luminous. He was in the heart of fire. Moreover, the arms held upward became full of light. He could see through their skin and to the bones. He was a skeleton fleshed in flame.

Lightning enveloped him, danced down the tree trunk on his right, undulated along the ground, slithered down a hole in the ground as if it were a snake.

A small globe of fire--ember of the lightning--was somewhere inside him. The globe expanded, and he could see that part of the world he remembered best inside its glow. But it was very tiny. As if the world had been recreated inside his head. There, three threads: the cataracts. A blue smudge: the lake. Rearing out of the lake, like the outstretched arm of a black giant going down for the last time; the pillar. By the lake shore, the old cabin. Dancing around it, seven minute and naked black figures.

These would be Mariyam, Yusufu, Abdul, Ibrahimu, Sara,
Yohannis, and Kokeb. He remembered Kokeb well, but the others, except for his parents, of course, he remembered dimly. Now many things about them came back.

Abdul had died of pneumonia. Sara had been murdered by Ibrahimu, who had cut his own throat afterward. Yohannis had drowned in the lake. Kokeb had disappeared when Ras was nine. Supposedly, a leopard had carried him off.

Now they danced around the glare inside Ras, leaped, cavorted, ran on all fours sometimes like the apes they had said they were. Dance, little black apes, dance!

He saw himself, a tiny boy, the sun flashing whitely off him. He was throwing knives, hour after hour. He was shooting arrows; he was flipping into the air backward, walking on a tightrope, swallowing fire, doing all the tricks the little men and women knew so well and insisted that he know also. The globe of fire grew even more swiftly. Now he saw the band of gorillas with whom he and his parents and Kokeb had sometimes lived. Now he was climbing the trees, speeding along branches, leaping like a young gorilla, he was better at this than the hairy, long-armed teachers, agile, sure, unafraid. And he was happy because of his superiority at this.

For a long time, he had been convinced that he was a gorilla freak, hairless and funny-faced and weak and inferior except in racing through the trees. And, of course, so much more intelligent!

The fiery ball rushed up from him at him. It was a big heart of white pushing through flesh of black. It drove back the shadows within him and outside him.

From the top of the pillar rose the big Bird, screaming and
squawking. God, Igziyabher, sat on its back. God was a white man. Hence, he looked much like Ras himself. But his face, when it got closer, was vague and kept changing shape.

Then two faces floated by Igziyabher's. One was a young white man who had Ras's face. The other was a young white woman who had Ras's face.

Seeing them, he remembered that he had dreamed of these faces when he had been much younger.

When he awoke, he could move only his eyelids. It was dawn; the sky was blue above and yellow-red on the lower sides. He was lying on his back on the hillside and must have spun around before falling, because he was now looking down the hill. Water dripped from the branch above and fell a few inches from his head. A small, yellow bird with scarlet tail feathers passed overhead. Something grunted nearby.

He was cold, yet he could feel nothing outside his skin. The cold moved from within. The ball of fire had become cold, heavy stone and was rolling through the rut of his body.

He tried to struggle, to break loose from the chains of himself, but he could not move. He grew afraid, but after a while he became angry. The cold within became heat. Who had done this to him? Igziyabher?

"You have no right to do this to me!" he shouted silently. "What have I done to you? Nothing! Oh, if only I could get my hands on you! I'd kill you!"

The fury closed to a small, hot fist for a while. Feeding on its warmth, he studied his situation as best he could. By moving his eyes he could see the top of the pillar above the trees. Also, he could see part of the hillside and the country beyond that was
not hidden by the trees and the bamboo.

Nothing moved except the leaves. He hoped he would see nothing else move. Unless it would be his parents looking for him. But why should they? He went away whenever he felt like it and returned when he felt like it. They would think that he was off on an adventure or perhaps punishing them by staying away.

However, they could be worried because of the lightning and might come looking for him.

Something grunted near him, and he was startled inwardly, but outwardly was as calm as a rock. Had he heard a pig? He hoped not, although it would not make much difference if he stayed out here long. Soon enough a jackal, a leopard, or ants would come along.

A shadow fell on him. It was followed immediately by a long-legged bird, five feet high at the shoulder, with blackish wings and a white lower tail. The neck was long; the head, naked; the bill, long and sharp. It stank of excrement and long-dead flesh; it strutted as if it were all-important.

Its bearing was not incongruous. Eaters of carrion were important.

"Oh, marabou," Ras said soundlessly. "I am not yet carrion! But if someone who loves me does not come soon, I will be carrion."

Oh, God! he thought. I am buried in my own flesh!

He wanted to scream. If only he could, he might frighten it off for a while. Only a little while. Then it would come back. Those dead eyes, dead from having seen so much death, would soon be looking down that long, sharp beak at his own eyes. The beak would stab down, and one of his eyes would be plucked out.

With the other eye, he would be able to see the big head on the long neck rise, the bill tip upward so that the marabou could swallow. Then the dead eyes looking at him, then looking around quickly, because the marabou had enemies, too. Then, a flashing stab, and the knifelike beak would be the last thing he would see in this world. But it would not be the last thing he would feel.

The marabou gave a harsh sound and lurched away, its wings half spread. Another shadow fell on his face. The caster of blackness had a black face. Its nose was two enormous nostrils, like two blind eyes. The jaws thrust out, and the open lips revealed large, yellow canines. Below the bulge of bone covered by coarse hair were two large, russet eyes.

"Nigus!" Ras tried to say. "Nigus! Help me!"

Nigus, Amharic for emperor, was Ras's name for the gorilla. The five-hundred-pound monster was chief of the little band now, but he had been Ras's playmate eight years before. He had been a good-tempered little fellow. Ras had used to wrestle with him all day long and chase him around or be chased. But one day, Ras, leaping upon Nigus from ambush and roaring like a leopard, had been astonished when Nigus, instead of screaming and running away, had turned on him. A big scar on Ras's shoulder would always show how deep a startled gorilla could bite.

Nigus grunted and bent over to look into Ras's eyes. His breath was pleasant with bamboo shoots. He passed a huge, wrinkled, black thumb over Ras's eyes, pushing them in a little, and then rocked Ras back and forth as if Ras were a log.

"Do something!" Ras tried to shout. "Go after Yusufu and Mariyam!"

But he knew that even if he could voice his desperation, he could not make Nigus understand. And even if he could understand, he probably would not have gone for help. He tolerated Ras now, and that was all.

"You ungrateful mass of brainless hair!" Ras thought. "I saved you from a leopard only two years ago. I scared it off. If it weren't for me, you'd be scattered bones under a tree. Help me!"

Nigus moaned, and Ras wondered if he was mourning his death or just puzzling over the mystery of death. If so, he was not much disturbed. Presently, his head moved out of sight and the sound of his jaws vigorously chewing, of his lips smacking, came to Ras.

Other sounds told Ras that there was more than one gorilla nearby. There were muffled grunts, chomp-chomps, a belch. Once, slapping of open palms on a great chest.

Then, he heard a yap-yapping that thrust cold through him.

He waited, because there was nothing else he could do. The jackals would be on him in a minute. They would not be scared off by the presence of the gorillas. He had seen jackals run in behind a leopard over his kill, tear off a strip of meat, and run away just out of reach of slashing claws. They were not cowards; they went after what they wanted.

Suddenly, another face was above his, and he felt the pressure of two paws. A brownish, sharp-snouted head was grinning down at him, the tongue hanging out of one side of the mouth. Two bright, black eyes looked into his, and he smelled the sharp stink emanated by the gland at the base of the jackal's tail.

Ras wished he could scream. He would feel better, if only
briefly so, if he could utter some of his desperation.