Tikkipala (12 page)

The Coarsechild came with them willingly at first, but then as though sensing what was going to happen, suddenly began to snatch at tree trunks and dig its legs into the ground as they dragged it to the offering place.

At the place of sacrifice they smacked away pale giant moths lured by the sweetness and washed the cringing Coarsechild with beer and honey. They decorated its naked body with drawings of flowers, mangoes, purple mouths, sharpened black teeth and scarlet glaring eyes. They rubbed holy lines of magenta, sacred symbols in blue and saffron onto its cheeks. They tattooed its buttocks with designs of diamonds and dark green fish. Zig zags and spots began to blaze around the Coarsechild's sobbing mouth. And around its pleading tear-filled eyes appeared peacock tails and monkey heads, created from the juice of tree bark and the distillation of seeds, the essence of petals. And when the child was as colourful and bright as a sunset, they polished its hair with the oil of the tea tree till it shone nearly as brightly as the skin of one of their own luminous children. They rinsed its eyes with oil, polished its finger and toe nails with tree tar and its eye lashes with charcoal powder. Then finally they hung strings of perfumed forest night flowers round the Coarsechild's neck and when at last they felt satisfied that the sacrifice was good enough for the Tikki, they tied the decorated child to a golden post and told it, ‘Shout out, Coarsechild, and summon our Tikki.' When they tried to leave it, though, it clung to their hands as though it loved them and they had to push it off. As they walked away, leaving the Coarsechild tied to
its golden post, it tried to run after them, letting out shrieks and screams, till it was brought up short by the ligament.

After that they returned to their homes in the trees where the light was green and the air was treacle thick and waited hungrily while the jungle boomed with the creatures of the night, the screams and weeping of the tied up child.

Until the sacrifice was taken, no one would eat. No matter how hot the night no one would drink water. If hungry babies seemed about to cry, their mothers and fathers would hold their hands across the little mouths to stifle the sound. Even when the breast milk, stimulated by the babies' cravings, began to pour out of its own accord, running warm and sticky down the women's ribs and chilling by the time it reached their hips, the mothers would not let their children suckle. Milk dribbling between women's breasts till it reached their thighs like the semen of their husbands, babies moaning ravenously, the sobbing of the doomed child, the occasional call of a peacock, the distant boom of a monkey, the trill of cicadas down on the ground and the stinging sound of wind in the wings of a hunting night jar were the only sounds. No one slept and if anyone spoke it was to whisper magic mantras into children's ears. The mothers pinched their children to stop them sleeping, and when the little ones began to slump against their father's breasts the parent shook them back awake. Even the new born babies, sleeping exhausted by their hungry desires, were pinched awake.

It was moonless dark. The people wore the rarest and the brightest of their body stones. Thighs and midriffs, navels and cheeks, ear lobes and knuckles, glittered and glowed with the gaudiest of minerals the earth could provide. Except for the Mawa, whose body had to be perfect, the members of the tribe had all their lives kept adding piercings so that by the time people became old, their appeared to be totally clothed in jewels.

By eleven the child, that had been running round and round in circles trying to escape the ligament, began to stumble. It fell on its knees, its glittering decorations became dusty. When the women climbed down to it and tried to wipe it with a dampened tree sponge, the child clung to their hands and let out sounds of, ‘Please, please, please.' They had to struggle hard to pull their arms away.

After a few hours, the sobbing of the child became very hoarse and low and fearing that the Tikki might not hear it, the people of the tribe took out instruments and began to play the music of the jungle, sometimes quiet like the soft beat of a heart or the gentle sighing of lungs breathing, sometimes roaring with the fury of an outraged tiger. Sometimes they played the sound of pouring water and sometimes the screaming of a wounded jackal, but most often they played the music of the anguished Coarsechild.

Sometimes the child would regain a little energy and begin to run round again till it was brought up short and tight against the wooden post. When it was trapped there, throttling, the women's flutes began to play the sounds of gentle strangling. The men and the children who waited in the darkness of the tree high huts kept saying to each other, ‘Tikki will come soon' but when morning came the child, half strangled now, stood gasping by the post and the people felt despair because the Tikki had refused their sacrifice.

The Tikki had heard the crying child and through her hazed mind went the thought that she was starting to be beloved again just as she had been three hundred years before. Hazy rememberings of sliding down the trunks of trees, of swinging in the hairy hammocks would sometimes flicker through her mind in the way that little flecks of light sometimes make their way among the leaves, and briefly light up
darkened places. Then she had swung from tree to tree, clinging to the ligament, laughing, carefree, letting the light bathe her warmly. But a hundred years ago she started turning white, first her skin, then hair then even eyes. Light began to feel like acid on her skin and now she could not bear the touch of it. Even moonlight burnt her and she feared that one day she may be scalded by the light of stars. A terrible sluggishness had overwhelmed her and she could not find the energy to rise. She heard the screaming child that the people had put out for her, but could not find the energy to come and get it. If they had given her an animal first, she thought, then her blood might have become a little warmed again. She needed something like that to help her walk. To enable her jaws to chew. To permit her heart to hurry. She was not ready yet for human spirit, though. She could not take it yet. She would have liked to tell them, ‘Bring me a baby buck first. Even a monkey. But at present the creature you have laid out for me is too heady and too dark. Only when I am a little recovered will I become able to digest the strong spirit of the human soul.'

‘We will keep the child for a year,' the elders said. ‘Then offer it again. We had offered it too soon. The Tikki could still smell Coarseones' vileness on it.' So they untied the Coarsechild, which by now was smeared with tears and dirt and shaking as though it had caught a fever.

It held their arms tightly and pressed its face against their hands as they hauled it back to its place and they had to drag it off before being able to get the ligament round it. As they climbed up into their tree places again leaving the creature alone on the ground, it kept calling up to them with the same sound of ‘Please, please, oh please.'

Even after the beloved dark and silence returned to the high jungle some weeks later, showing that the Coarseones had gone away, the people could not feel happy because they had lost the Ama and because Tikki had refused their sacrifice. The tribe could think of nothing else to do but keep working on the Coarseones' child, making it good enough for the Tikki, so that perhaps next time she would accept it. ‘This time she did not want it because it had so many of the bad characteristics of the Coarseones,' said the elders. ‘We must give it more training.'

A year later there were still no suitable male children born to the tribe.

‘If only we had the Ama,' mourned the subtle ones. ‘We might have found a way of creating a suitable male offspring or even of making the Mawa pregnant without such a person.' However, just as despair was starting to overwhelm the tribe, a suitable baby son was born and the tribe rejoiced because they had been saved. ‘Tikki looked on us with mercy,' they said. ‘Even though she did not want the Coarseones' child, she has saved us.'

The people strung their bodies with their most glittering stones then sang, danced, drank soma, smoked paka and played shrill and triumphant music on the ancestor instruments to celebrate. Even the new born unsuitable babies were given sips of soma. A great vat of this frothing pale green liquor swung by ropes from a branch and people dipped their leaf cups in and drank all night long. The smallest babies tried to duck their heads away at first and struggle to get at the mother's breast instead, but ignoring their children's sobbing protests, the fathers and the mothers forced the soma down till the babies began to laugh and sing as well and forgot all about their mother's milk. And after a while they began to beg and plead for more. And more. Till in the end the crying was because the parents were denying them instead of forcing them to
drink the intoxicating liquor. ‘This is not frog water from the trees like you usually drink from our hands, so not too much and not too fast, my little maggots,' the mothers told their children. ‘If you drink a little, you will meet Tikki babies and the kisses of honeybees but if you drink too much of this, you will meet frogs so big that they can swallow you, and lizards the size of tigers and with poison on their tongues.' The sound of the tribe's music, that mimicked every jungle sound, began to confuse the cicadas and set them strumming out of time. Even the tiger paused, startled, because he could clearly hear the call of another male that he did not know existed.

The people fluted, through their parents' and their grandparents' heel bones, expressions of the suitable newborn glory. Drawing from dead thoraxes the booming sound of distant monkey, breathing a shout was like a waterfall out of the hip of a woman who died two hundred years before, winkling from the skull of a baby that had died in childbirth, the people of the tribe celebrated hope.

There came some talk, next day, when the people had recovered from their headaches, of getting rid of the Coarseone now that it was no longer needed. But, though at first it had seemed useless with every task required of it, during the year it had been found to be capable of some small and simple chores. It could not climb the trees, of course, so was useless at bringing nuts and small reptiles and when they tried to teach it hunting, it was unable to connect its mind with the Animals. But it had turned out to be good at weaving ligament with which the tribe's walkways and catching ropes were made. Now daily they would put before it the long hairs, tree fibre, animal sinew and other necessary materials and the creature would squat there all day, on the end of its tether, twirling the bark fibre and long tribal hair. They continued to keep the creature tied because otherwise they felt sure it would run away. Although they no longer needed to offer it for sacrifice, by now they had invested so
much time, effort and food in it that they did not want to waste it. As it grew older and stronger it became able to perform other chores for the tribe such as cutting wood, and every now and again, when the tribe needed fuel, a group of the men would lead the Coarseone into the jungle on its ligament tether and set it to cutting branches. They had to teach it everything about the trees. It did not even know basic things such as which way a cut branch would fall or how to bend the wood for a snare or bow. The tribe, to whom trees were life itself, continued to be shocked at the Coarseones' ignorance of wood.

When the Coarsechild was about thirteen years old, the suitable male child, on whom the tribe had pinned all their hopes, died suddenly.

The people were aghast. ‘Now once again we have no male to mate with Mawa and we are truly doomed for she will soon be past the age of bearing children.'

Then one of the subtle ones came forward. ‘Our situation is now so desperate,' he said, ‘that we must do something we have never done before. The Coarseones' child is now nearly mature. We must mate the Mawa with it.'

A gasp of horror arose. ‘This solution is more dangerous that the problem,' they whispered.

‘We have spent all these years purifying the creature,' said the subtle one. ‘It is not so vile anymore.'

The tribe turned to look at where the Coarseone stood, ligament tied around its waist. It was still. It made no sound. It no longer cried out, ‘Please, please, please,' whenever they came near it. It stopped grimacing its mouth entirely. ‘It has turned out better than we expected,' said the people. But one of the mothers objected saying,
‘Although its face is as still as unmoved water and it does not swing its arms around like a tree top monkey, in its eyes I see something terrible called hatred.'

‘Its seed will not know about the hatred,' said a subtle one. ‘And that is all we need from it.' And because these were the only ones in the tribe who knew about seed, the others were unable to argue with him.

‘But surely the Mawa will refuse it,' said the elders. But then they remembered how, when all the rest of the people had stopped giving gifts to the Coarsechild because of its unpleasant grimacing, the Mawa had continued as though her pity for it had remained undiminished. Sometimes, the people would say to each other with amazement, it is almost as though our Mawa has some fondness for this Coarseones' child.

And, it was so. ‘You may bring it to me,' the Mawa said. ‘And I will prepare it then teach it what to do.'

Hope rose in the hearts of the tribal people when she said it and they untied the Coarsechild from its post and carried it to the Mawa's place.

The child was afraid at first, as though thinking they were once more going to offer it to the Tikki. The elders had to drag it, as though it was a newly caught jungle animal.

They laid it on the floor of the Mawa's place and unbound its ligament.

‘Now you may leave it with me,' she said. ‘And I will teach it everything.'

After the elders had gone, she took milk and the juice of soma and bathed the child as though it was her husband. She oiled its body with sweet oils and when she had combed its hair, she perfumed it with the juice of her orchids. And when she had finished she stood back and gazed at the child, and saw that, if it had not been for the large size of its feet and that its hair was only two feet long, it would had been nearly
as beautiful as a tribal child. The child looked back at her and a gentle softness filled its gaze. Then the Mawa dressed the child in the waist stones of a prince and laid him upon her body.