Lord Tyger (3 page)

"Most of all, I love you, Wilida, because you are the most beautiful and because you are guarded from me."

He stopped singing to play on his flute the music that a Wantso man plays on his wedding night for his bride, who sits in her prison on the islet. The flute was loud and shrill.

The river, flowing west, began to make a great sweep to the south at the point where the village stood. The river ran south for about a mile and then abruptly cut back to the east. For three quarters of a mile it continued straight east, swerved north, and then arced back to the south. At the point where it turned southward, a man could run north from that part of the river across the neck of land to the river again in a minute. Here the Wantso had built a wall of twenty-foot-high sharpened logs to defend the peninsula.

To the west of the wall were the fields, where the women grew yams, teff, millet, barley, cabbage, and bush banana. Between the fields and the riverbank was the village. It was ringed with a double row of poles cut from tree trunks and sharpened at the upper end. Thorns crowned the poles.

Within the walls were fourteen buildings. The Great House, the communal council-house, worship-house, chief's-house occupied the exact center of the circle formed by the double palisades. The Great House was round and had a diameter of about seventy feet. The main structure was of bamboo. The triple-coned roof was thatched with long grasses and elephant's-ear leaves. It was raised, on many thick logs, about four feet from the ground. There was one broad entranceway, before which a folding bamboo staircase was placed.

Eight huts formed a circle around the Great House, and four more an outer circle. All were small and round, and each had one high, conical roof, and was based on a single tree stump that raised it three feet above the ground. Folding bamboo steps led to the single doorway.

The fourteenth house broke the symmetry. It was near the north gate of the palisades. It was the spirit-talker's house. The tip of the roof was only four feet below the thick branch that projected over the wall from the huge tree just outside the wall. Leopards sometimes used this branch to drop in for a meal, and Ras had used it several times.

Ras thought it was stupid to build a wall and then leave the branch as a bridge for invaders. When he was a child, he had asked his Wantso playmates why the branch was not chopped off. The children replied that the tree was sacred. A very powerful spirit lived in it. Shabagu, the great chief who had led the Wantso into this world, lived there.

When a Wantso died, and the mourning over the corpse in the Great House was over, the body was carried into the spirit-talker's house. Here, after the ceremony of release was over,
Shabagu lifted the dead person's ghost up by the hair and took him into the tree. Ras's playmates had been vague about what happened after that.

This, however, explained why Wantsos grew their kinky hair long and then plastered it into an upright double cone with goat's butter mingled with red clay. Shabagu could get a good grip with both hands when he lifted the ghost from his perch on the branch.

This interested Ras. On six occasions, when a Wantso had died, he had spent a night high on a branch of the sacred tree. Once, he thought he saw Shabagu flitting across the branch on his errand. Ras had been so excited, and scared, he had almost fallen out of the tree. But the ghost of Shabagu was only his imagination, plus his wish to see it, plus the mingling of moonlight and fluttering leaves.

Now he played on his flute and quivered with delight as he watched the panic. Men were running into houses to get their war dress, spears, bows and arrows, and clubs. The women in the fields had dropped their hoes and diggers, picked up their babies, and were shooing the older children ahead of them as fast as the children could go.

The red-and-black, long-tailed chickens, the blue-and-white, long-horned goats, and the orange hogs were adding to the racket. The chickens squawked and ran this way and that. The goats baaed and dodged away from the running men and women. The hogs grunted and squealed. Men shouted; women screamed; children squalled.

Tibaso, the chief, and Wuwufa, the spirit-talker, stood in front of the Great House. Nose to nose, they yelled at each
other while their hands flew in all directions, like a flock of rock pigeons attacked by a hawk.

Presently, twelve men had gathered before Tibaso and Wuwufa. Two men stood guard on the platform above the wall across the neck of the peninsula. Three old men, too feeble to count as warriors, sat in the shade of their houses. After counting, Ras knew that there were six out hunting.

Four boys, not quite old enough for the initiation into manhood, sat in a group behind the warriors and gestured with their slender spears.

Sewatu and Giinado, middle-aged men, put down their spears and went into the Great House. They staggered out, with the Chief's chair between them. They set it on the big, round stone before the House, where it glistened redly in the late-afternoon sun. It was mahogany smeared with palm oil and carved all over with the snarling faces of tall spirits.

Tibaso covered his graying hair with a feathered headdress shaped to fit over the double cone of his hair. He took the eight-foot-high wand from Wuwufa and sat down in the chair. The others had put on their feathered headdresses, their only clothing besides the square, bark-cloth fore-and-aft aprons. They squatted down before the chief and painted each other's faces. Two old women, Muzutha and Gimibi, stumped out of the Great House, carrying between them a large earthenware pot painted with geometric symbols. They placed it near Tibaso and then ran back into the House as fast as their creaking bones and stiff muscles could take them.

The men rose and lined up, according to their rank, before the chief. Sewatu dipped a gourd of beer for the chief
and Wuwufa and then for the others. The men returned to their places to squat down and drink the beer. They looked up at the tree in which Ras sat, but looked away quickly.

Ras, knowing he was visible, grinned and played more loudly. He would be in no danger for a while because they would have to hold a long conference before taking action--if any. Meanwhile, they would be drinking much beer to keep their throats moist during the furious disputes and long speeches and to prime their courage. To attack what they believed to be a ghost would take much courage.

Ras stopped playing the flute and began singing loudly in the direction of the islet. Bigagi stood on the islet end of the bridge from the mainland. He was the tallest man of the Wantso, though a head shorter than Ras. A very handsome man, too, although his face was hidden at the moment with the great spray of pink flamingo feathers that fell down past his face. It was, Ras thought, peculiar to half blind a man who was guarding his bride. But Wantso custom demanded it. Bigagi also wore a leopardskin cape. He was naked elsewhere, although his penis was painted red and a long cord with a feathered tassel hung from it to his knees.

Bigagi, understanding the song even at his distance from Ras, pushed aside the feathers, shook his spear, and shouted angrily. The copper spearhead flashed dull red in the sun.

There was one tree on the islet. It had one branch, the rest having been chopped away. A crocodile-hide rope was tied at one end to the middle of the branch. From its other end a bamboo structure hung about ten feet above the grass and mud of the islet. The rope was attached to the middle of the center pole of
the platform, and other ropes, one at each end of the platform, ran up to the central rope to provide an unsteady balance for the structure.

Wilida sat by the central rope, one hand clinging to it. She could not move around much without tipping the structure to one side. She was hidden from the view of anyone standing below her by a bamboo railing plaited with vines and leaves and interspersed with carved wooden images of spirits. She sat on a little stool. A huge, conical hat of plaited straw with a broad, floppy brim shaded her whole body, and she also wore a straw mask. Her breasts were full and cone-shaped, with a slight upward tilt of the nipples, each as large as the end of her thumb. The nipples were painted white, and her breasts were painted with three concentric circles of red, white, and black. Her buttocks were painted crimson, and her shaven pubes was also painted scarlet. This was, however, covered with a white bark-cloth triangle.

Wilida lifted the mask, and her teeth flashed whitely at Ras before she quickly replaced it.

The loglike snouts and knot-eyes of crocodiles patrolled the channel between the peninsula and the islet. The long jaws of one lay half-sunk in the mud at the south end of the islet. Usually, the Wantso kept this part of the river cleared of crocodiles by monthly hunts. During a bride-guarding, however, the crocodiles were enticed back. A goat or hog, throat spurting blood, was hung upside down, and the crocodiles were drawn in by the blood floating from upstream. Thereafter, the villagers threw their food scraps into the river, or, if a baby was born dead, or one of the many miscarriages occurred, these
were thrown to the crocodiles.

"But you have thrown your spears at me, at me, the white ghost, Lord Tyger, who would be your friend. So, Wantso men, I return snarl for snarl, I throw the spear back at you. And I come to your women at night, O men; I send the great white snake whose tail grows from between my legs. It crawls through your village at night, and it sniffs at doorways, and it smells your women, O men with scarred and limping dongs. It smells your women, and it follows their odor with blind, bulging head and it takes root in them as they lie by your side, O men.

"And two great beehives that dangle below the branch, from the branch of the tree of my body, they fountain forth honey on honey, O men whose gourds rattle dry in the night of the python and the honey.

"I am lightning that burns the flesh of your women, O Wantso men, and you are as sparks that fall on leaves after a rainstorm. I, Lord Tyger, have taken vengeance on you. And tonight, despite your crocodiles and spears, I will fly to beautiful Wilida as the bat to its cave, and she shall know me."

Bigagi screamed and threw his spear, though he knew it had no chance of coming near Ras. The men in the village shouted. But some women were laughing.

Tibaso, the chief, jumped up from his chair, shook his wand, and yelled at Ras. Wuwufa, the spirit-talker, flopped on the ground like a fish just hauled out of the water.

They would not come running out of the northern gate at him. They wanted more beer, and they had to discuss the matter fully. Ras knew them well. Though the chief had the final decision on any important matter, he had to hear every man's
opinion. And when a man stood to talk, the speaker had to argue his points afterward with every man who disagreed.

Nevertheless he watched the bushes and trees along the riverbank. A hunter returning home might try to sneak up on him. If the hunter were an older man, one who had not known Ras as a playmate, he would avoid him. But if the hunter were in Ras's age group, he might not sincerely believe that Ras was a ghost.

"O Wantso youths, truly I loved you, and most of all, I loved you, Bigagi. You were beautiful; you loved me then, I know you did, and you know it. We were closer than the rosettes to the leopard, and we were as beautiful together. But now, the leopard and his rosettes have flown apart, and the rosettes are nothing and the leopard is ugly. The leopard is ugly and he mourns. The rosettes are sad, and they mourn. But they, leopard and rosettes, now hate, hate, hate, hate! And I weep, I weep! But I also laugh, I laugh. Because this world is made for tears, but Ras is not made for tears. He will not dissolve himself in tears. This world is made for tears and hate, but this world is made also for laughter, and Ras laughs, and Ras mocks you and will return hate for hate.

"O men and women, you share the secret and the guilt, and yet you open not your mouths, because you would all be thrown to the crocodiles if every man and every woman confessed the guilt. And that is why Wuwufa dares not hunt out the witches among you. Crazed old man, he himself would feed the crocodiles.

"I, Ras Tyger, know this. I, the outsider, the demon, the pale ghost, know this. I have come as stealthily as the leopard, as silently as a ghost, into your village of nights, and I have
crouched in the shadows, a shadow myself, and watched and listened. And I could name names, and the crocodiles would grow fat and happy, they would belch Wantso and pass Wantso, and your children would weep and have no one to feed them nor defend them against the leopard, nor give them love.

"O Wantso men, your women feared me as a ghost, but they swallowed their fear with desire for the python and the honey that Ras brings them from the jungle, from the Land of the Ghosts. They have desired and known me, O men; even your aged crones have desired me and have wept that they were no longer beautiful. And I, Ras Tyger, have crept into the shadows where your wives and daughters have sneaked away into the bushes, and there they know that Ras Tyger is no pale ghost, Ras Tyger is the flesh of flesh, blood of blood, flesh unscarred, uncrippled, unblocked. And..."

This time, he had gone too far. Bigagi, screaming, forgetting that he was not to leave his post under any circumstances, ran across the bridge, another spear in his hand. Sewatu fitted an arrow to the string and loosed it at Ras. It went wide and fell into the river, where a crocodile dived after it. Tibaso led the roaring men through the northern gate and toward the tree in which Ras sat.

An arrow thunked into the bark of the trunk near Ras. He stood up and went around the trunk to shield himself. Not wanting to be encumbered by the flute, he put it in a shallow depression where a branch and trunk met. He put his knife between his teeth and ran out along the branch. It was a very large one and extended out over the river far enough for him to get at least forty feet from the bank before it bent so much he
could no longer keep from sliding off it.

A spear sailed by him. An arrow whistled so close he decided he had better make haste. He dived out and fell thirty feet and struck the water cleanly. He swam up as quickly as possible but did not break the surface. The river was still clear enough so that the Wantso could see him under water; it had not gotten dark with mud. He would have to stay under until he could come up at an unexpected point, and the Wantso would have to shoot or throw quickly.