Lord Tyger (44 page)

It was while he was squinting against the sun that panic seized him for a second. The notch in the top of the cliff to the east seemed to be moving, and he felt that the world was sliding away from him. Then he realized that the notch was not moving back and forth. He was moving. Rather, as Yusufu had told him years before, the pillar of stone was moving, swaying, pushed by the wind as far as it could be pushed, perhaps a foot, and then springing slowly back to its original position, only to be pushed northward again. It was incredible that such an enormous and solid mass could respond to the weak and invisible air. But it was. It had been doing so since it first became a thousand-foot-high column, and would continue swaying until the movement cracked it somewhere and the upper part fell off.

He let himself into the room, stretched, bent, and then began to explore. Yusufu had said that this room had been chiseled out of the rock a year before Ras had been born. It was a general storeroom. He tried the big door, which was made of
thick wood, and found it locked. He would have to wait until someone unlocked it. According to Yusufu, a cook would open it shortly after dawn to get food for breakfast.

There were many things piled here, all labeled. He wanted some ointment for his fingers and then some food. He found the ointment after a few minutes' search, opened a jar, and smeared it on. He had to pry open a box with a small crowbar to get a can of meat. After puzzling over the directions printed on the label, he pulled the little key from the bottom of the can, and inserted the tab in the slot of the key. The process was so novel and delightful that he had to restrain the impulse to open all the cans. The meat tasted cold, greasy, and too spicy, but he ate all of it, and he felt much better when his belly was on the way to being full.

After eating a can of peaches, which he had to open with a can opener and therefore took more time to puzzle it out, he examined the armory. There were boxes of ammunition of all sorts, cases of revolvers and automatic pistols, several submachine guns, and a variety of rifles in racks. Ras took an M-15, which was the same type that Eeva had shown him how to handle after they had gone to Yusufu's hiding place. He inspected it for cleanliness, loaded it, and got a canister of clips to take with him. Then he sat down near the door and waited.

The sun's rays entered the window at a steeper angle and brightened a machine that had been a dim, many-angled bulk. The machine was taller than he and three times as long as its height and had many toothed wheels and a huge cylinder on which white rope was wound and a long, metal neck on which were little wheels and more ropes. The entire machine was on a platform with wheels and could be pushed to the window, where
the neck would stick out for about six feet. The rope around the spool was attached at one end to a big coil of rope on the floor, and this coil to another, and so on until twenty great coils formed a connected series.

This was the machine Yusufu had described, the "donkey," which was run by petrol and which could let down a thousand feet of rope from the window to the surface of the lake. Boygur had prepared this for the day when he might be stranded on top of the pillar without helicopters. Near the donkey were several fish-gray metal boats attached to frames and hooks, which would support the boats while they were being lowered to the water.

Without leaving his post, Ras looked at the machine to pass the time. Then he forgot about it to think of other things, past and present and future. A fish-eagle slashed the air outside the window with two screams. There was no sound after that until, so suddenly that his heart lurched, he heard a key in the lock. He ran to a large pile of wooden boxes and hid behind it. A short, fat Negro wearing a brown shirt and shorts and a clean, white apron entered. He locked the door behind him and put the key in his pocket and went on by the pile of boxes. He stopped before a waist-high stack of boxes and leaned over it and came up with a bottle half full of some dark liquid. It was tilted to his lips when Ras hooked an arm around his neck from behind. The bottle fell on the boxes and was still gushing out the stinking amber liquid when the man's neck cracked. Ras dragged the body behind the boxes and threw the bottle onto the body.

He wiped the ointment from his fingers, because he would need friction if he had to handle his knife. After unlocking the door with the key from the man's pocket, he passed through it,
locked it again, and stuck the key in his shirt pocket. Before him were ten steps cut from the rock. He went up them and found himself in a hallway the ceiling of which was only a few inches above his head. The hallway ended abruptly a few feet on his right; he had to go to the left. A few steps down the hall and to his right was a doorway flush with the floor, and about twelve steps farther on was another door to his right. Both were locked, and his key fitted the locks of neither. At the end of the hallway was a stairway of stone to his right, and on his left, just opposite the stairway, was a thick, wooden door with a small window in it.

Ras looked through it and saw a window with three bars of iron at the other end. Inside the small room was a stand with a metal washbowl, a pitcher, and a cup, and a white pot with a lid in one corner, and a wooden bed with some blankets and pillows. A woman lay on her side on the bed. She was dressed in brown clothes similar to those Eeva had worn when he had first seen her. The woman was thin, her yellow hair was tangled, and her face, as much as he could see, was gaunt. This woman would be his jane, the woman brought here against her will and now starving herself.

While he was standing outside her door and wondering what--if anything--he should do about her, he heard the faint, far-off chuttering coming down the stairway to the outside. So many times, like the beats, of the wings of a demon, it had excited and frightened him. Now he knew it only heralded the approach of a dead thing, a machine, and some--but not all--of the mystery and terror was absent. Hearing this one, he felt eagerness more than anything. If it was the big copter that carried fuel and supplies, it could be used to bring consternation, panic, and death to his enemies.

He decided to let the woman stay in the room undisturbed. She would be safe where she was, and she could not accidentally betray him or get in his way. He left the cell door and stood by the wall just outside the entrance to the hall at the bottom of the staircase. He could hear men talking near the entrance at the top of the steps and others shouting at a distance. Then he heard the rattle of metal against metal. Somebody was coming down the steps. He ran down the hallway and hid in the stairway leading to the storeroom, but, a few seconds later, he stuck his head out far enough to see with one eye. A short, thin, white man dressed in brown clothes was just straightening up from a tray of dishes and pots on the floor. He unsnapped a key from a ring around his belt and inserted it in the lock to the cell door.

The man was intent on looking through the window in the door, so he did not see Ras, who walked silently and almost leisurely down the hall, until he was within knife-throwing range. The man whirled then, and his hand went to his belt, but he had no weapon and he could not have gotten it out in time if he had. The knife drove almost to the hilt into the solar plexus. The man staggered back and slumped against the wall and started to slide down. Ras leaped to him and dragged him back down the hall out of view of the man standing at the top of the stairway. The man held a rifle, but he was looking into the sky at the moment--perhaps at the copter--and he did not see Ras or the dead man.

Ras laid the body down and pulled the knife out and wiped it on the corpse's shirt. Then Ras heard the guard calling down in an English that he could only half understand. The guard had seen that the man with the tray was not there and the door was
unopened. Perhaps he thought that the man was inside the cell and doing something to the woman. Or perhaps he knew that he had not looked away long enough for the man to open the door and go inside. Whatever his reason, he was alarmed. His boot heels clattered, and he leaped out into the hall and started to turn to face down the hall.

Ras threw the knife again; it went straight into the man's throat. He fell backward, his rifle clanking against the floor. Ras pulled him out of view of anybody passing by the stairway entrance, and then he looked into the cell. The woman had not moved, and her color was as gray-blue as a corpse's.

The roaring became louder outside, and then it lessened, and the blades chopped the air weakly and collapsed. Ras could hear the voices of men clearly now, though they seemed to be at a distance. He checked his rifle again and went up the steps and looked around the corner of the entrance. It was walled around and roofed--to keep out the rain, he supposed. There was a small, dome-shaped house on his right. Four wires attached to the central part rayed out to metal hooks imbedded in the stone. These, he had been told by Yusuf, were to keep the "quonset" huts from being blown off the top of the pillar by the big winds. There were several more at irregular intervals and close to the rim of the top. The rim was walled to a height of four feet with mortared slabs of stone cut from the pillar. Several stone enclosures, like the one in which he stood, were visible. These must be above entrances to other rooms carved out of the stone. At the far end, less than a quarter mile away, was a wide space partly occupied by a huge copter with a bellying body. Around it were hoses and pipes, and devices he supposed were pumps.
Four men were attaching hoses to the copter, and two men inside the copter were handing boxes and sacks through an open wall to two outside.

A tiny thing, glittering in the sun, was another copter approaching.

Ras looked the area over as fully as he could without exposing more than his head. He did not see anyone fitting Yusufu's description of Boygur. The men working around or in the big machine were either whites or the dark but straight-haired and eagle-nosed men Yusufu called Ethiopians. Before the doorway of a "quonset" house with several poles and many crossarms projecting from its roof, halfway between Ras and the far end, stood a short, light-skinned man with a bald head. He was smoking a cigarette, but when one of the men near the machine gestured at him, he ground the cigarette out under a shoe. The man started to turn toward Ras, who withdrew behind the wall of the enclosure.

He had no way of knowing where Boygur was or how many more men were here or where they were. He would have to make his move and then act accordingly.

When he looked around the corner again, he saw a fat-bellied, red-faced-white man leaving a large, domed building about thirty yards away. The man had a tall white cap and a white apron. He was probably on his way to find out what had delayed the first man.

Ras grabbed him as he came around the corner, choked him with an arm around his neck, and dragged him down the steps. He backed him against the wall and held the edge of the knife against his throat. The man was gray under the pinkish
skin; his eyes were huge; he shivered.

"Where is Boygur?" Ras said in English.

The man chattered in a language Ras did not recognize as English until he made him repeat his words slowly. The language was still only half-intelligible, but Ras could understand enough of the stammering. Boygur was in the radio shack, the building outside which the bald, light-skinned man, the radio operator, had been smoking.

"How did you get up here, Ras Tyger?" the man said.

"I climbed up," Ras said.

He whirled the man around to face the wall and cut his jugular vein open and then stepped back to avoid the jet of blood. Whatever doubt he had had that the others were as guilty as Boygur was gone. This man had known his name and presumably all about him and also must have known about Mariyam's murder.

He dragged the corpse a little way down the hall to the other bodies and returned to the top of the stairway. The hoses still linked the big copter and the pumps and several raised iron discs, which must be the caps over the fuel tanks, which were placed in pits in the stone. The crew of the copter was in sight now. One was a tall, black-mustached white man, another was a shorter, brown-haired white man, and a third was a stocky black man. All three were walking toward the radio shack.

The other copter, a much smaller one, was nearer and apparently was going to pass over the big copter and land close to the radio shack.

Ras checked his rifle again and stepped out of the enclosure. He carried the gun in one hand and walked leisurely toward the
shack. The black-mustached man slowed and turned his head to say something to the others, who were a few paces behind him, but none showed any alarm. Ras continued walking until he was almost to the door of the shack. He stopped, and for a moment was caught. The music swelling from out of the shack was like nothing he had ever heard before. It came from many unknown instruments the individual sounds of which thrilled him, and it had a complexity and a magnificence that shot him through with ecstasy. It spoke of the greater glories in the world beyond the sky, and it made him wonder what kind of men could create such music.

Then he shook himself and brushed his hand across his face as if he were removing spider webs. The smaller copter was settling down; its transparent body revealed a pilot and another man.

Ras brought the rifle up and triggered off the spray of bullets. The weapon barked, and chips of stone and stone dust danced along and caught the three men near the shack. They had stopped, their faces pale, their mouths black holes, and then they were knocked down and back, and he brought the rifle barrel up and played the stream across the transparent body of the small copter. The pilot had taken the machine up and away as the three men died, and the other man was behind the twin machine-gun barrels and swinging them toward Ras. But the pilot jerked at the impact of bullets, and the copter slid sideways and downward. It struck the rim of the pillar, tore out some of the slabs on top of the wall, and rolled over and disappeared.

Ras continued to shoot, hoping that the rifle would not jam, as Eeva had warned might happen. The men tending the machinery near the big copter and the four men unloading the
copter were crouched as if bewilderment pressed them down with a big hand. Then some threw themselves on the stone. One fell as bullets caught him running.