Lord Tyger (38 page)

The copter came around the bend with a flashing of sun and a roar. The crocodile bellowed, rose up on its legs, its decision made for it, turned, and ran toward the water. Ras clung to it for reasons that he was able to analyze only later. He could have fallen off and then jumped up and run for the shrubbery, but the men in the copter would surely have seen him. If he stayed on the back of the beast, he might not be seen. Or, if seen, not believed. The men in the machine would surely think they were mistaken, that the sun had played tricks on their eyes. What would a man be doing riding the back of a crocodile?

Stronger than this was the stubbornness and hunger of Ras. If he let the crocodile get away from him now, it would not be back. And he and Eeva had to eat.

The crocodile went into the water with a lurch and splash that almost unseated him with its force. It went under the surface and dived deeply at once, but, just before the waters collapsed over his head, Ras saw the machine dropping toward him. Then he was hanging on most comradely to the reptile, with one arm around its neck. This situation lasted for perhaps ten seconds, after which he slid around and under the body and began to drive his knife into the belly. It was not easy, because the water softened the blows; he had to overcome the resistance of liquid and armor-plate hide. But the knife did go in, and now the beast rolled over and over in an effort to throw him off. Presently, it had succeeded; despite all his frenzy, Ras could not hang on and was lost in water that was black with absence of sun and with blood from a dying reptile.

He did not believe the Wantso story that the crocodile could smell its prey under water, but it must be able to hear through water. For this reason, he stroked slowly, not away from the beast, though he had no way to know which direction was which, but toward where he hoped the beast would be. A little fright was near him but not touching him, and panic was even more distant. He was angry because he had lost his food, and he did not intend to let it go. Nevertheless, he felt as if the beast were moving toward him from his rear or coming up from the blackness below or perhaps even from the blackness above. He had to restrain himself from turning around and around, one arm extended as a feeler to detect the crocodile or perhaps the movement of water pushed ahead by its body. Six strokes, and he touched with the fingertips of his left hand the knobbled hide. He broke the sweep of his hand to bring it back into touch, but it
went unopposed. The beast had gone to left or right, up or down. A sweep around and a slant down or up (he did not know which) touched only more water.

By then, he had to have air. After a few strokes, his ears hurt; he turned and went in what he hoped was the opposite direction. If he were going at only a slight slant, and not directly at right angles to the river bottom, he would soon drown.

It seemed that he would have to breathe and so die, when he saw the black become brown. A few more strokes and kicks brought him through brown to yellow and then to the white of the sun, bright blue of sky, harsh green of trees on the brownish-yellow mud. And a reddish-brown cloud drifting to the surface from that black world below. The copter was out of sight around the bend, its chutter becoming fainter. The kingfisher was on a branch about thirty yards upstream and braying indignantly. The river smelled fishy and reptilian and clayey, and faintly of dead wood and soaked leaves. There was also a very weak scent, ghost of a puff of stink, of reptile blood, and of bird crap in the water. Ras had always thought--no one had told him--that birds and reptiles were somehow linked closely. The monstrous, heavy-armored crocodile and the light, beautiful-feathered kingfisher were cousins and could claim as grandfather some squat cold-blood living in the days just after Creation. Now he knew it even more strongly. The bird crap was assuredly not only that of a bird; it was the crocodile's as much as the blood was the crocodile's. But it was also a bird's.

Presently, as Ras trod water, floating downstream, and regained his breath for a second dive, he saw the blood boiling a few feet upstream become even darker. Then whiteness showed
in the heart of the black, and the belly, pale as the eyeball of a man, lifted water and blood aside as it heaved up from under. The four legs stuck a little in the air, as if the crocodile were indicating that it had given up--do with me what you will.

Ras had to work hard to row the beast into the bank and harder to drag the two hundred and fifty or so pounds up onto the mud and then into the bush. He was weakened by the blow on the head the night before, by lack of food, and the excitement and stress of the fight with the beast. While he was heaving and hauling and puffing, he heard several bellows from down-river. They became stronger as the reptiles followed the liquid winds of blood.

Always, every moment, he had to make a choice. Deciding which way to go, which thing to take, actually created time. Without the necessity of picking this or that course of action above others, he would not know time. He would be suspended in forever.

Now he either had to drag the crocodile with much labor through the jungle to higher land, where he could butcher and cook it in relative comfort and safety, or he could prepare it here, where leopard, crocodile, or scavenger could approach him in any direction and where, if he built a fire, the smoke might bring the Sharrikt, who were only a few miles away, or might attract the copter.

He wanted to eat a big meal now and smoke enough meat to keep them going for several days. The large animals, crocodiles, buffaloes, elephants, hippos, and leopards were not as easy to kill as they were to find. And they were not easy to find.

The bellows and rumbles became closer, and soon the
brown-gray snout of a bull crocodile appeared, and then the long, tapering bulk suspended on the four short legs moved slowly into view from the brush. Ras did not expect any of the great reptiles to attack him, but it was possible that one might lose its fear when the odor of blood from the butchering became too much for it. He shrugged and began the task of hoisting the body onto his shoulder, preparatory to walking off with it. Once on his shoulder, it sagged before and after him, the snout digging into the mud before him and the tail dragging in the mud behind him. He had to lift it so he could get the snout clear, and this required an effort that he knew he could not keep up for long. Moreover, branches of trees, vines, and bushes seemed to want the carcass even more than he did. After a few yards of stopping to tear the body loose and twice almost falling down with the heavy body on top of him, he eased it to the ground. Thereafter he dragged it by the tail.

Eeva was sitting on a decaying, punky tree trunk and weeping. At her feet was a mass of white worms and grubs, still squirming, half-squashed beetles with kicking legs, a pale-green-and-bright-red-spotted tree frog whose bulging eyes looked as if she had choked it to death, and a brownish lizard on its back, its legs sticking up, its belly whitish. It looked like a miniature and short-snouted version of the beast Ras was dragging into the little clearing.

"I'm crying because I feel sorry for myself," she said. "To be in such a pitiable state that this disgusting mess almost looks appetizing. To eat this... this!"

Her shoulders shook with her sobs.

Ras said, "You ought to be crying with joy because you were
lucky enough to get all this. I'm happy. If I'd come back without this, we would have had to eat your catch and we would've been glad to have it."

He let the tail fall with a flop on the wet earth. Eeva quit weeping and asked him what had happened. Although she could see the bloody wounds on its belly, she seemed to think that he had found it dead on the riverbank and that it might be in the last stages of decay. She said that she had heard the copter, of course, and had been terrified that he might be seen. But when it had kept on its course without hesitation, she had known that he was safe.

"Safe!" Ras said. "I rode that crocodile into the river and went to the bottom with him, and then he dislodged me, and Igziyabher only knows what would have happened after that if I had not been lucky! I kill a crocodile with a knife in dark and deep waters, and you say that I was safe! All this meat, good meat, and you think nothing of it!"

"I'm really sorry," she said, but she did not sound as if she meant it. "I know that it must have been a heroic feat, and any other time I'd want to hear all about it. But I'm so tired and hungry that nothing but food excites me."

"Then you ought to be coming with joy," he said. "There's enough meat here to ground a flock of vultures for weeks."

He had changed his mind about dragging the beast up to the foot of the hills and there butchering it. He would cut out as many steaks as both could carry, wrap them in the leaves, and then walk to the hills. While he cut and sawed with his knife, she staggered off to collect the leaves. From time to time, he sliced a thick piece of the dark meat from a steak and ate it raw and
bloody. By the time he was finished, he was stronger than when he had started.

Eeva, to his surprise, did not refuse to eat the raw meat he offered her. She had some trouble chewing it to her satisfaction and made several faces, but when she had downed the first piece, she asked for more.

Ras put the tree frog and lizard in leaves, and they started off toward the hills. By noon they were at the foot of the hills, and a half hour later they were on a ledge of rock halfway up a cliff. Pieces of fur and excrement and the chewed and cracked bones of small animals, plus a hangover of stink, told Ras that baboons used this place at night. The thrust of rock overhead made a shelter that could be leopard-proof if the baboon sentries were brave enough, and they usually were.

Eeva, hearing this, became worried, but he told her that the place could just as well be defended by two humans against baboons, and that they wouldn't be likely to try anything anyway, especially with a fire going. Besides, baboons did not make bad eating.

Ras had hesitated about building a fire, because the Sharrikt might be searching for him. But it seemed to him that it was unlikely that Gilluk and the others would be out in force after him. He did not think that they had enough men left after the battle near the river's mouth. What their casualties had been he did not know, but they must have been relatively devastating. The machine-gun fire from the copter had hit every boat, or almost every one. The total number of male Sharrikt, the divine ones, the aristocracy, was about twenty, and he had killed two before he escaped from the castle. Surely, at least half of the
eighteen had been killed or wounded. The survivors would think of vengeance, of course, but they would be in no position to do much about it at this time. The burning of the castle and the town, and the deaths of so many Sharrikt males, would present problems demanding all of Gilluk's energies for some time. He was the king, the keeper of his people, and as such he had to take care of them.

Besides, even if there was a chance that they would be in this neighborhood and looking for the refugees, Ras wanted to build a fire and cook the meat. He just did not feel like putting in another cold and shivery night, and he seemed to have lost his taste for raw flesh.

Eeva had been sitting with her back against the stone, her head drooping forward. She looked up now and then through the dirty yellow hair fallen over her face. He thought she was dozing off from time to time, but when he got closer to her while he was building the fire, he saw that her eyes were wide open and tears running down her cheeks. They were washing away the dirt in stripes and leaving pink stripes beside the black ones. The coloring of the clean stripes resembled that of the crocodile's heart, which lay on the broad, flat rock beside the other chunks of meat and her catch of lizard, mouse, and insects. The heart was long and arrowhead-shaped and pulsed slowly and irregularly.

Ras got down on his knees and put his arm around her shoulders. She placed her head against his chest and warm tears trickled over his chest, ran down his belly, and wet his pubic hairs. She must have opened her eyes then, because she stiffened and tore herself loose from his arm. She crawled away before turning to face him.

"Is that all you think about?" she said. "Can't I even touch you without your... ?"

She struggled for speech, made some gargling sounds, and then spat many unintelligible words, which he supposed were Finnish.

Ras said, "It's been a long time." He left her to climb back down the cliff. After a few minutes, he came back with an armful of wood. Using the lighter, which she had carried in her pants pocket, he soon had a fire going. Eeva had said nothing during this, but she seemed to feel reassured by his deflation and moved closer to him and the fire. The world below the cliffs fell into darkness, and within a few minutes the sky darkened enough for a few stars to appear. Ras held a skinned leg on a hardwood stick over the fire until the juices began to drip in the flames and a black crust formed over the red flesh. Eeva sniffed deeply and came closer. Ras put the leg down and split it into even shares. The meat was so hot that she dropped it, giving a low cry at the same time. But she picked it up and ate without even trying to brush off the dirt.

Ras held his piece of leg with one hand while he held the liver over the fire at the end of the stick. When they had finished the leg, he offered her part of the liver. By now, the blood ran down her mouth and neck and stained some of the yellow hair. She did not seem to mind the blood now but licked it off hungrily and even wiped some of it off her breast and licked it off her hand.

The crocodile heart, lying near enough to the fire to absorb its heat, was still pumping, although not as vigorously. Ras wondered how long it would continue to live if he swallowed it
whole. He could not do this, of course, because it would choke him, but he could feel it swelling and shrinking within him. The thought of its beating next to his heart was exciting, and the thought had its effect.

Eeva, looking down, suddenly stopped chewing. Then she swallowed loudly, and she said, "Don't!"