Jane (31 page)

He’d long suspected it was his stunted proportions and pale hairlessness that had forced Kala’s nest and that of her two children to be built at the farthest edge of the clearing. That he was a shame to his race. To Kerchak, their leader, the boy was an affront, an abomination.

Nevertheless, Kala loved him. He had never known a time when her strong, brown-furred arms had not tended his many scrapes and bruises. He could not remember when her deft fingers had not tenderly groomed him. When she had not uttered soothing words of mother love and kissed his one puny patch of fur on the top of his head.

Kerchak plagued Kala with threatening displays, pounding his massive chest, baring his teeth, sometimes lashing out, even striking her. But where other females cowered, Kala stood tall. The boy would watch amazed as she held Kerchak’s eyes, mad and flashing with unreasonable fury—amazed that his menacing did not frighten her. Finally he growled, and with one last pounding of his chest turned away and climbed to his nest, twice as high as all the others.

There were words to describe the rages into which Kerchak would sometimes fly. He was
“gumado b’nala,”
Kala told her son, “sick in head.”

Tarzan could hear, before he could see, the circular grove of giant trees that was the Mangani bower. He knew by the commotion of sound, excited hoots and howls, the calling of names and instructions that something was afoot. All of the bower’s members were on the ground and gathered tightly around something Tarzan could not yet see. They did not know of his arrival.

He thought to surprise them. Enter the clearing with no warning calls that the Mangani used to announce their coming. But just as this thought crossed his mind, the head of a female snapped back, her flared nostrils twitching.

It was Kala, his mother. She had smelled him, perhaps sensed him in that strange way all mothers felt their children’s presence. How simple of him to think he could take her by surprise.

“Tarzan!” Kala cried, her rich, throaty call resonating beyond the bower clearing.

His heart bursting with joy, he darted from the bush toward the gathering of Mangani. Some looked up at his approach, others fixed too intently at their feet to care. He sprinted in Kala’s direction, saw her smiling eyes and teeth bared in a happy grin. He was proud of his mother—the strongest and most beautiful of the Mangani females. But before he reached her long outstretched arms, the boy was knocked off his feet by the furred projectile that was Jai, his sister. They rolled and tumbled together, wrestling and pummeling as they had since their earliest youth. She was as strong as he and enjoyed biting his hairless neck with a soft, playful mouth. He liked to tickle her to hear the grunting laugh, so different from his own. Suddenly he felt a strong hand on the scruff of his neck. Kala pushed her children apart and Jai tumbled away to let their mother embrace him.

Ah, those arms, the clasp of affection that had, from earliest childhood, been the soul of his world, the web of safety, warmth, and the purest love. He sank his face onto her shoulder and inhaled the rich scent of female musk, her fur suffused with fragrances of all the leaves and mosses through which she had moved.

She pushed him to arm’s length to observe his face, learn by his expression how he had fared on his solitary adventure. It was then she noticed the skin of
histah
tied around his forehead. She recoiled in a moment of unguarded reflex.

“Bundolo histah,”
he said. I kill snake.

Her look demanded to know how this had been accomplished, and with care, so as not to further alarm her, Tarzan withdrew the blade from its sheath. Jai came close and stared openly at the terrifying adornment on her brother’s head and the strange stick he held in his hand.

“Boi-ee,”
he said, naming it. The word came to him unbidden in that moment, surprising him. It was the merest fragment of a memory, and he was unsure from where it had come.

“Boi-ee,”
Kala repeated and moved to touch it. He stayed her hand.

“Uta,”
he said. Danger. Now he had attracted the attention of several of the huddled group. They stared at the shining object of a shape and material they had never before encountered. Now, too, the boy could see the locus of the crowd’s interest.

On the ground lay the body of a
pacco.
It was quite dead, a fresh kill, yet there were but two puncture holes in its neck. No mangling or mauling had been visited upon the animal.

“Pacco,”
Jai said.

“Numa Bundolo. Ho tantor b’zeebo numa.”
A lion had attacked the zebra, but before it could be eaten, a family of elephants had come stampeding and the cat had been trampled to death.

“Dako-za rut,”
said Kala. The flesh is tough. Tarzan could see there was no way to extract the meat. The many sticks the Mangani had been using to tear at the hide had broken, the puncture wounds too small to allow even the sharpest stones to rip them open.

Tarzan felt an upwelling of assurance. He stepped to the center of the gathering, well aware that all eyes, suspicious and contemptuous, were on the puny Mangani. Without a word, he knelt beside the
pacco
and raised the blade high over his head. There was awed silence at the sight of its point, dangerous as the fang of
histah
and so much larger. But as a ray of sunlight struck the metal shaft, its glinting fire wrenched from every Mangani’s throat a cry of terror.

Then with all force he could gather into both hands, shoulders, and arms, Tarzan brought the blade down into the haunch of the zebra. Now the boy, using the sharp edge, cut the hide from the leg, exposing the dark pink flesh and white sinew. Working with precision, he removed the muscle and cut it into pieces, handed one first to Kala, one to Jai, and then to the other suddenly admiring Mangani.

Without looking up from his work, the boy could feel the warm pride of his mother, the delight of his sister, and the begrudging and bewildered murmurings of respect for Kala’s hairless runt … or at least the dreaded weapon he now possessed.

Then, without warning, a seething storm of rage roared down upon them, fists and feet flying, great fanged mouth snapping, eyes fixing with murderous intention on all and any that did not flee the might of Kerchak.

Most did run, mothers snatching up their little ones, all making for their nests, cowering in twos and threes, teeth chattering.

Jai, too, had fled for the trees. Tarzan and Kala alone stood their ground, she with eyes blazing, and he, back straight, clutching the blade with white-knuckled terror. The rank smell of fear hung above the neatly butchered carcass.

The
tar-zan
had received more blows from Kerchak than he could remember. Even at the distance Kala’s nest was set away from the clan’s and from their leader’s nest high above, any and all chance encounters between the two would end with a clout of a fist to the head, a blow to an arm or leg or torso with the shaft of Kerchak’s favorite weapon—a stout branch—or a tear to the flesh with its ragged end.

These attacks, much as Kala raged against them, could not be avoided. They had begun before the boy could remember and continued till the day he had left on his most recent journey to Zu-dak-lul.

“
Kagado balu-den
Kerchak.” The great beast, three times the boy’s size, weight, and strength, was demanding the blade, what he called a stick, to be surrendered to him.

“Tand,”
Tarzan said. It was the word for refusal, never ever spoken to Kerchak.

“Tand kagado?”
A sound came from deep in the creature’s throat. It was a rumbling growl and, as it grew, the expression on Kerchak’s face became more frightening than anything the boy had ever seen.

“Kagado balu-den!”
Kerchak roared in Tarzan’s face, the stench of his breath fouling the air around him.

The boy raised his arm and put the knife in Kerchak’s palm. The moment the beast’s face settled into satisfaction and his long furred fingers closed around the blade, Tarzan, his own fist tight on the grip, drew it backward with swift force.

Kerchak howled with surprise and pain, as the razor edge sliced through the thick pad of his hand.

The boy could see the pupils growing black, the whites red veined, and the face beginning to twitch with fury. Kerchak raised the bloody hand, but before he could strike, the boy, with a defiance he never knew he possessed, sent the blade flying end over end through the still, silent air. It sailed for so great a distance that it disappeared into the thicket of the far boundary of the bower’s clearing.

He could see, however, that Kerchak had raised his uninjured hand into a fist nearly the size of the boy’s head. In a moment it would come down into the center of his face. The blow would certainly kill him.

But suddenly, there at Kerchak’s back was Kala with a rock held in both her hands.
No, Mother!
Tarzan thought.
The rock is too small. Its blow will only anger him further!
But in the next moment the rock found its mark—the side of Kerchak’s skull above his ear. This deception by the runt and now this adding of insult to injury was more than Kerchak could bear. The eyes, already black with rage, transformed into that madness that all Mangani most feared.

The blow to the boy’s head came rapidly and with such force that he was suddenly sprawled supine across the
pacco,
his ears ringing and his body paralyzed.

But Kala had, as Tarzan vaguely realized, accomplished her intended purpose. Diversion.

Cut and tricked by the
tar-zan
runt, then battered by the most unmanageable of females before every member of his tribe, a humiliated Kerchak now watched Kala race across the clearing. Deranged by frenzy and forgetting the boy, he took chase.

Kala began to climb the tree farthest from where Tarzan lay, still struggling to rise. She was strong and nimble, but massive as Kerchak was, the power in his limbs made him fast. Once high above, her foe in close pursuit, Kala shouted down to her son.

“Boi-ee!”
she cried.
“Boi-ee!”

He understood at once. She had drawn Kerchak away so he could retrieve the blade. Now, fighting pain and dizziness, he rose to his knees and finally his feet. He scrambled best as he could and, blotting out the sound of Mangani screeching above him, crossed the clearing and dove into the thicket into which he had thrown his knife.

He pushed aside branches and leaves, scouring the ground with his eyes. Where was it? With the knife in hand he could face Kerchak. Save his mother. There! The handle was barely visible among the woody stalks, but the moment it was in his hand he felt power returning to his body, clarity to his mind.

He ascended the closest tree and emerged on high with a view of the bower—the screeching, cowering Mangani, and the only movement to be seen in the whole canopy: Far across the central clearing his mother evaded her enemy. She was running on her long straight legs along thick boughs, arms outstretched for balance. She leaped over voids where thin branches would not hold her, knowing all the time that Kerchak was gaining, knocking terrified Mangani from the forks and nests in which they cowered, unable or unwilling to come to the aid of the female of renown. Now, for Kala, there was no way out.

Tarzan, too, was gaining on Kerchak. He had learned well from his mother the art of upright limb running and was as fleet on his feet as she.

Kala had stopped and stood in a nest of fresh cuttings. Here she turned to face her pursuer. The end had come for her. Running was futile.

Kerchak came slowly now, his eyes altogether mad, every muscle straining and pulsing. Keeping sight of his prey, he reached out and snapped off a thick branch. Weapon in hand, he advanced. There was terror in Kala’s eyes as she backed away, back from the nest. He followed her into the matting of woven leaves and branches.

He felt his mistake at once.

The nest was newly built, a first attempt of a young male recently gone from his mother’s bower. It had easily held Kala’s weight, but it was far too flimsy for Kerchak’s.

The nest collapsed and Kerchak fell straight down, the leaves and twigs falling after him, raining on his head and shoulders.

There were hoots of Mangani laughter, but not for long. For the final trickery, the unconscionable humiliation of the leader by a female, was nothing short of a death sentence.

Kala began swinging arm over arm amid the branches that hung over the clearing. It was then she saw, to her horror, that the boy she had risked her life to save had not retrieved his
Boi-ee
and fled from the fury of the insane beast she’d drawn away from him.

No, Tarzan was running along a branch high above Kerchak—Kerchak, who had found footing on limbs below ones through which Kala now swung. He was thrashing upward with his club, trying to break her legs. She did not stop. Just moved, finding handhold after handhold and pulling up her feet to avoid his blows.

Yet her eyes searched for her son. She wanted to cry out that he should save himself. Now she lost sight of the boy and slowed to find him, stopped for the briefest moment and hung by both arms far above the forest floor.

She was not, therefore, aware that Kerchak had found an angled limb and deftly climbed it. At the moment she found sight of her child, she sensed Kerchak suddenly above her and knew without seeing that the club was rising above his head. Tarzan’s expression told her as much.