Transfigurations (8 page)

The chieftain's huri flew up from his shoulder and flapped in the air like a small, wind-collapsed umbrella. I had never seen it fly before, and was surprised that it was capable of flight. Its ungainly flapping excited the already well-aroused population of the clearing, and together we watched the huri rise above tree level, circle back, and dip threateningly toward the branches of the trees on the western perimeter. The old man continued to vomit, but now every pair of color-stalled eyes followed the uncertain aerial progress of the huri, which, at one point, plummeted toward the perch where The Bachelor sometimes sequestered himself.

But The Bachelor wasn't there, and I had no idea where he could be.

Crashing downward through the branches, the huri caught itself up and returned with blind devotion to the airspace over its master. An ugly joke, it sardonically defied gravity.

I thought that at last the huri was going to feed, that its sole diet might well consist of Eisen Zwei's vomitings. I expected the starved creature to fall to earth upon these—but it did not.

Somehow it kept itself aloft, flapping, flapping, waiting for the old man to finish.

Finally, it was not the huri that waded into the vile pool of vomit, but the old man's shameless conspecifics. My curiosity overcame my revulsion, and I watched the Asadi carry away their portions of the half-digested mess as if each semisolid piece were an invaluable relic. No fighting, no elbowing, no eye-searing abuse. Each individual simply picked out his relic, took it a short distance into the jungle, and deposited it in some hidden place for temporary safekeeping.

During the solemn recessional, the huri quickened the air with its wing beats and an anonymous Asadi supported Eisen Zwei by clutching—tenderly clutching—his mane. When everyone had taken away a chunk of regurgitated flesh, the chieftain's attendant laid him down in a dry place, and the huri descended to squat by its master's head.

I should mention that The Bachelor was one of those who appeared in the mourning throng to select and depart with some memento of Eisen Zwei's illness. He came last, took only a palm-sized morsel, and retreated to the clearing's edge. Here he climbed into the tree above which the huri had flown its nearly disastrous mission only minutes before. Until sunset The Bachelor remained here, observing and waiting.

On Days 121, 122, and 123, Eisen Zwei continued in his illness, and the Asadi paid him scant attention. They brought him water twice a day and considerately refrained from stepping on him. The huri sat by the old man's head. It seemed to be waiting for him to die. It never ate.

At night the Asadi deserted their dying leader without a glance, and I was afraid he would die while they were gone. Several times, looking out at his inert silhouette, moonlight dripping through the fronds, I thought he had died, and a mild panic assailed me. Did I have a responsibility to the corpse?

But the old man did not die, and on Day 124 another change occurred. Eisen Zwei sat up and stared at Denebola as it crossed

the sky—but he stared at the angry sun through spread fingers, hands crooked into claws, and he tore impotently through the blur of light that Denebola must have seemed to him. The huri sat smug and blindly knowing, as always. But the Asadi noticed the change in the old man and reacted to it. As if his writhing dissatisfaction with the sun were a clue, they divided into two groups again and formed attentive semicircles to the north and south of Eisen Zwei. They watched him wrestling with the sun's livid corona, tearing at its indistinct streamers of gas with gnarled hands.

At noon the old man rose to his feet, stretched out his arms, sobbed, clawed at the sky, and suddenly sank back to his knees. A pair of Asadi from each group went to his aid. They lifted him from the ground. Others on the clearing's edge selected large, lacquered palm leaves and passed these over the heads of their comrades to the place where the old man had collapsed. The Asadi supporting Eisen Zwei took these leaves, arranged them in the shape of a pallet, and then placed the old man's fragile body on the bed they had made.

The second cooperative endeavor I had witnessed among the Asadi, the first having been the shaving of The Bachelor's mane. It was short-lived, though, for aimless shambling replaced chieftain-watching as the primary activity within the two groups on either side of his pallet. Denebola, finally free of the old man's gaze, fell toward the horizon.

I walked unimpeded through the clearing and bent down over the dying chieftain, careful to avoid the huri that eyed me with its uncanny, eyeless face. I looked down into the genuine eyes of its master.

And experienced a shock, a physical jolt.

The old man's eyes were burnt-out, blackened holes in a hominoid mask. Utterly dead they were, two char-smoked lenses waiting for the old man's body to catch up with their lifelessness.

And then the diffused red light that signaled sunset in the Wild came pouring through the foliage, and the clearing emptied.

Alone with Eisen Zwei and his huri, I knew that it would be during this night that the old man died. I tried to find some

intimation of life in his eyes, saw none, and withdrew to the cover of the Wild and the security of my lean-to. I did not sleep. But my worst premonitions betrayed me, and in the morning I looked out to see Eisen Zwei sitting cross-legged on his pallet, the huri once again perched on his shoulder.

And then, filtering through the jungle, the tenuous, copper-colored light signaling sunrise and rejuvenation on BoskVeld. The Asadi returned, once again taking up their positions to the north and the south of their dying chieftain. Day 125 had begun.

I call the events of Day 125, taken as a cumulative whole, the Ritual of Death and Designation. I believe that we will never fully understand the narrowly "political" life of the Asadi until we can interpret, with precision, every aspect of this Ritual.

The color of the eyes of every Asadi in the clearing—only The Bachelor's excepted—declined into a deep and melancholy indigo. And stalled there. Profound indigo and absolute silence. So deeply absorbent were the eyes of the Asadi that Denebola, rising, could throw out scarcely a single dancing, shimmering ray. Or so it seemed. The morning was an impressionist painting rendered in flat pastels and dull primaries. A paradox.

And then the Asadi's heads began to rock from side to side, the chin of each individual inscribing a small figure eight in the air. The heads moved in unison. This went on for an hour or more as the old chieftain sat nodding in the monumental morning stillness.

At last, as if they had inscribed figure eights for the requisite period, the Asadi broke out of their groups and formed several concentric rings around the old man. The members of each ring began to sway. The inaudible flute I had once believed to be in the Wild had now certainly been exchanged for an inaudible bassoon. Ponderously, the Asadi swayed, their great manes undulating with a slow and beautifully orchestrated grief. And The Bachelor—all by himself, beyond the outermost ring—swayed also, swayed in lugubrious cadence with the others. The rhythmic swaying lasted through the remaining hours of the forenoon and on toward the approach of evening.

I retired to my lean-to, but thought better of just sitting there

and climbed the tree in which The Bachelor had often perched. I forgot about everything but the weird ceremony in the clearing. I gave myself up completely to the hypnotic movements of the grey, shaggy-headed creatures that a bewildering universe had given me to study. . . .

I nodded but I did not sleep.

Suddenly Eisen Zwei gave a final sob, maniacal and heartrending, and grabbed the beast clinging with evil tenacity to his mane. He grabbed it with both palsied hands. He exerted himself to what seemed his last reserve of strength and, strangling the huri, lurched out of the dust to his feet. The huri flapped, twisted, and freed one wing. The old man squeezed his hands together tind attempted to grind the life out of the creature who had imprisoned him even as it did his bidding. He was not successful. The huri used its tiny hands to scour fine crimson wounds in Eisen Zwei's withered cheeks and buckled forehead. Then it flapped out of the old man's grasp and rose to tree level.

I feared it would dive upon me in my borrowed perch, but it skirted tlie perimeter of the clearing, dipping, banking, silently cawing. Its imaginary screams curdled my blood. Meanwhile, Eisen Zwei fell sideways across his pallet and died.

The Asadi chieftain was dead. He died just at sunset.

I waited for his people to flee into the Wild, to leave his brittle corpse for an Earthman's astonished scrutiny. They did not flee. Even though the lethal twilight was gathering about them, they stayed. The attraction of the old man's death outweighed their fear of exposing themselves in an open place to the mysteries of darkness.

In my arboreal lookout I realized I had witnessed two things I had never before seen among the Asadi: Death and a universal failure to repair.

DESIGNATION

The Ritual of Death and Designation had passed into its second stage before I truly comprehended that stages existed. I ignored my hunger and put away the thought of sleep.

The Asadi converged upon the old man's corpse. Those of smallest size were permitted to crowd into the center of the clearing and lift the dead chieftain above their heads. The young, the deformed, the weak, and the congenitally slight of stature formed a double column beneath the old man's outstretched body and began moving with him toward the northern end zone.

Arranged in this fashion, they forced a new revelation upon me. These were Asadi whose manes were a similar texture and color: a stringy, detergent-scum brown. They bore the corpse of Eisen Zwei with uncomplaining acquiescence. The larger, sleeker specimens of Asadi—those with luxuriant silver, silver-blue, or golden manes—formed single columns on each side of their lackluster counterparts; and together these two units, like water inside a moving pipe, flowed toward the north—

—The one direction that Eisen Zwei had not entered from on the day he brought those three dressed-out carcasses into the clearing.

Driver ants in Africa use just this sort of tubular alignment when they wish to move great distances as a group: the workers inside the column, the warriors without. And nothing on that immense dark continent is more feared than driver ants on the march. With, of course, the singular and noteworthy exception of Humankind.

Almost too late I realized that the Asadi would be out of the clearing and beyond my reach unless I got out of The Bachelor's tree. Nearly falling, I scrambled down. As if viewed through a photographer's filter, the foliage through which the mourners marched gave off a soft gauzy glow. I ran. I found that I could keep up with very little effort, so cadenced and funereal was the step of their procession. I slowed to a walk behind it.

Tradging in the wake of the mourners, incorrigibly hangdog in his pariahhood, was The Bachelor. Meanwhile, the twilight reverberated with the footfalls and leaf nudgings of a host of single-minded communicants.

I saw the huri flying above the part of the procession where its master was being borne fonvard on the shoulder.s of the smaller Asadi. Avoiding branches, the huri turned an inadvertent cartwheel in the air, righted itself, and landed on Eisen Zwei's bony chest. Here it did a little preening dance, for all the world like an oil-coated rooster wooing a hen. Then the column snaked to the left, the Wild closed off my view of the marchers, and darkness began drifting in like black confetti.

How long we trudged, I have no idea. An eternity of infinitesimal moments. I won't attempt to estimate. Say only, quite a long time. Finally our procession flowed into another clearing.

There in the clearing, rising against the sky like an Oriental pagoda, loomed the broad and imper\'ious mass of something built, something made. All three moons were up, and the solid black bulk of this structure was spotlighted in the antique-gold claret shed by the three moons together. Even before those of us at the end of the procession were out of the jungle, we could see the lofty, winglike roofs of this sudden artifact and its high, deep-violet windows. Was I the only one whose first inclination was to plunge back into the nightmare forest? I don't beUeve so.

As we approached, members of both the inner and the outer columns began to sway from side to side, marching and swaying at once. The Bachelor's head, in fact, moved in wide arcs; his whole marching body trembled as if from the paroxysms of ague. If he had been punished for once leading me to this place, perhaps he trembled now from fear. On the other hand, if the Asadi wished this temple kept inviolate, wouldn't they somehow punish me if they discovered my presence?

I almost bolted back the way the Asadi had led me, but the pagoda had captured my imagination and I resisted the impulse to run. However, I did have the good sense to climb a tree on the

edge of the clearing fronting the pagoda. From this vantage I watched the proceedings in relative safety.

Grey shadows moved in the deep shadow cast by the Asadi temple. And suddenly two violently green flames burned in the iron flambeaux on either side of the top step of the immense tier of stone steps leading to the temple's ornate doorway! The torchlight-ers—formerly the moving grey shadows—came back down the steps. Once again I was stunned with wonder and disbelief. This sophisticated use of both flambeaux and a starting agent I couldn't even guess at destroyed a multitude of my previous conclusions about the Asadi. Fire! They understood fire!

By this time the four columns of Asadi had ranged themselves in parallel files before the stairway of the ancient pagoda, and six slightly built menials bore the corpse of Eisen Zwei—now an uncanny apple green in the torchlight—up the broad stone steps to the stone catafalque before the door. Here they set the corpse down and lined up behind him, staring out over their waiting kinspeople, facing the cruel ambivalence of the Wild, three on each side of the old man. Unaccustomed to such tawdry grandeur, I began to think that Placenol, or something more sinister, was flowing through my veins. Surely this was all hallucination!