Lord Tyger (22 page)

A good thing for me, he thought. If they had not been so afraid of me, and so afraid of the night, I would never have been able to kill so many. It was their... what was the word? Superstition! That had killed them, or helped me kill them, anyway. Of course, I am easily a match for any three of them at once, far stronger, far swifter, deadly as a leopard. Nevertheless, if they had thought with their brains instead of their entrails, I would not have dared to attack the whole village. And if they had not had that senseless circumcision, maybe their women would not have been so eager to betray their men.

Eeva was irritated. "Vhy don't you answer me?"

"Bigagi must die," he said. "I think he knows I won't stop until I've found him and killed him. Of course, he was terrified by the Bird of God and wanted to get away from it. I think he's gone south; he'll go to the land of the Sharrikt. He can't reveal
himself to them, because they'll kill him or enslave him. But he'll hang around the Sharrikt, just as I did around the Wantso. He'll have to, even if he might get caught. Just seeing other human beings or hearing their voices, even if they're his enemies, will be better than silence, the mouths of the dead. He might even surrender to them and become a slave. The Sharrikt have slaves, descended from the Wantso. Bigagi might think it's better to be a slave than a man with nobody to talk to or care about him."

He was silent for a minute. He pushed the raft away from the south bank, toward which it had been drifting. Then he said, "If it wasn't for you, I'd have nobody to talk to. Except the Sharrikt. But I wouldn't be a slave. I'd go into the Many-Legged Swamp--Gilluk will be there now--and I'd kill him and so become the king of the Sharrikt. Only... I liked Gilluk, even if he was... arrogant? I wouldn't want to kill him. But how else could I be king? You know, Eeva, things are sometimes hard to figure out. Anything you do, you have to give up something or do something you don't like to do."

"I ton't... don't... understand all you're saying," Eeva replied.

Abruptly, he asked her a question that left her puzzled. She said, "Vhat? Vhy von't I let you do vhat to me?"

"You don't know the word? All right then. Why won't you let me make love to you?"

Tears ran from her eyes. She said, "My husspant... husband... died only tree veeks ago. Anyvay, I don't love you."

That seemed to explain everything to her satisfaction. It certainly did not satisfy or explain anything to Ras. He could understand her grief and how it might rob her of desire. But that
had been three weeks ago, and surely she must be feeling a return of some desire. She was alive, and what better way to celebrate being alive? What better way to drive away the ghosts? He loved Mariyam and Yusufu and Wilida, and he would be feeling sorrow at various times for a long time to come. He was sure of that. But, in between times, he would remember that he was alive. Had she stopped eating because her husband had been killed?

Not that making love was the same as eating. But both were things that must be done if you wanted to live.

He and Eeva were silent for a long time and only talked of matters that seemed safely remote from his question. When the sun was two hands broad above the cliffs, she said, "A pygmy hippo!"

The beast came waddling and snuffling and snorting out of the bush river and onto the bank. Ras knew it was a hippo. Yusufu had never told him that it was a
pygmy
hippo.

Janhoy, growling, got to his feet.

"You are hungry," Ras said in Amharic. He spoke in English to Eeva. "Kill the hippo with your thirty-two."

"No. I vant to save my pullets for emerchencies," she said.

He looked puzzled. She continued, "Emergencies. Dangers vhich vill apsolutely require I use the... bullets."

"Emergencies? Like me?" he said.

"Yes. And like the Syarrikt."

They nudged the raft onto the soft mud. Ras tied one end of his rope to an upright adz-head he had wedged between two poles of the raft, and the other end to a bush. The three then followed the hippo tracks until, hearing gruntings and snortings, they crept slowly toward the source of the noise. There were four adults and a baby, all feeding.

Janhoy stalked them while Ras circled widely to the north, stopping before he was upwind of them. Eeva remained behind a bush. Ras fitted the nock of an arrow to the bowstring, and, crouching, inched forward. Presently, Janhoy raced from behind a bush.

The hippos fled. Ras put an arrow into the leg of a bull and then another into its belly as it floundered on the ground. Janhoy caught the baby, but shortly afterward wished that he had not. Its mother charged the lion, opened her mouth, and clomped down on him. Janhoy tore loose at the price of two deep gashes. Abruptly, one of the fleeing males, no longer fleeing or else on the leg of a panicky zigzag, burst out of the bushes and thundered toward Janhoy. The lion dodged him and then had to run to get away from the female. Squealing, the two adults and the baby trotted off toward the river. Janhoy followed them but retreated whenever one of them turned and made a short charge at him.

"He'll be back in a moment," Ras said. He began hacking at the dead hippo's left rear leg. "We'll have steaks tonight, and Janhoy will fill his belly. Enough here for him for a week--if he can keep the leopards, jackals, hyenas, and vultures off. And while he's stuffing himself, we'll be going on. I don't intend to put up with him any longer."

That night, as they ate meat by a small fire, Eeva said, "Is it true you have never been out of this valley?"

Ras's ear was quick to shape itself to the shapes of her words, so quick that he now heard them as if they were "correctly" pronounced.

"If you mean, have I ever been beyond the cliffs--that is what you mean, isn't it?--no. I've tried to climb them--although
my parents said that Igziyabher would kill me if he saw me. I couldn't get more than halfway up anywhere. And I can climb like a baboon. Mariyam said there wasn't anything beyond, anyway. The sky is a ceiling of blue stone. It is all stone, the rest of the world. But where does Igziyabher live? Where does the Bird go? Where did you come from? What are you? Woman, angel, demon, animal of some kind? Ghost?"

"Being a woman, I am all of them, except the ghost," she said.

They talked some more, with the result that Ras was more confused than before. He put the fire out and they walked until he thought they were far enough away from the hippo carcass. He built a small platform on two branches, and they tried to sleep. The racket from the area of the dead hippo seemed to go on all night. Several times, Eeva said, "Aren't you afraid that Janhoy will be killed by the leopards?"

"He can take care of himself," Ras said. "At least, he had better do it. I can't stay up all night shooting leopards."

"Don't you worry about him?"

"Yusufu said Janhoy was king of the beasts. Of course, if enough leopards ganged up on him..."

He started down the tree. She said, "Where are you going?"

"To shoot some leopards," he said. "That'll drive the rest off, or keep them so busy eating the dead ones they won't bother Janhoy."

"But you might get killed!"

"That's true."

"Please don't go."

He climbed back up onto the platform and lay down. He
said, "You want me, but you only want part of me."

"You didn't intend to leave!" she said. "You were threatening just so I..."

She was silent. He said, "Think about how you will feel if I leave you."

She still did not answer. He waited for a while and then, suddenly feeling tired, he fell asleep.

In the morning, they left while Janhoy was still sleeping. Ras gave him a silent farewell and walked off, leaving the lion behind a bush, on his back, his legs half up in the air, his belly a solidly packed hump. Ras felt guilty again, although he assured himself that Janhoy would not starve. There was enough hippo, river buffalo, river hog, for Janhoy, and, if he had to, he could catch and kill the crocodiles or even the leopards.

He untied the rope from the bush and pushed the raft down the bank from the slight mound onto which he had shoved it before cooking the hippo. He sat down in the middle of the raft and let Eeva do all the poling. She looked quizzically at him but said nothing. The rising sun warmed the air and greened the trees. The water was a soft brown from the mud it was beginning to pick up.

Ras hunched down and looked up only when a raven shot over his head like a black thought. He brought the flute out of the bag and played a gentle but melancholy piece that he had composed during his adolescence, when occasional moods of sadness fell on him like the passing shadow of a cloud. The riverbanks flowed by with Eeva thrusting the pole now and then to keep the raft from grounding. After a while, Ras quit the flute.

Eeva said, "The river winds back and forth across the valley
as if it's crazy. The valley must not be more than thirty-five miles long, but the river must be sixty miles long, at least."

"It's like a snake looking for a female in mating season," Ras said. He did not seem to have fully heard her. More minutes of silence passed. He began to beat on the raft with the palm of his right hand. Two light beats and then a heavy. Two more light beats and a heavy. A pause, and then the pattern was repeated.

Still pounding on the wood, he said, "Sometimes, I feel good. Sometimes, bad. Then I take wood and carve a figure to show how I feel. Now, I have no wood. But the flute can carve a figure of music for me. And sometimes I can carve a figure of words."

He wet his lips, and, beating on the raft, chanted,

"White is the skull in the green,

Green is the grass in the white.

White is her ghost in the light,

Light as her voice in the blue,

Blue of the grief in the black,

Black of the pain in the night,

Night of the worms in the red,

Red of the scraps on the white.

White is the skull in the green,

Green of the grass in the white."

His palm beat: DOOM! do do DOOM! do do DOOM!

For a while, after he had stopped, both were silent The banks of the river wriggled by and curved in and out. A brilliant green and red and white kingfisher shot by like the exclamation
of a god who speaks birds.

Finally, Eeva said, "That is your poem? You made it up?"

"Just now," he said. "I prefer to make up my poems in Amharic, which I know best, but if I had done so this time, you wouldn't have understood it. I need someone to listen who can listen with the heart."

Tears trickled down his cheeks. He looked up at her and saw that she was weeping, too. He said, "You cry for your husband."

"And for me, too," she said. "I don't know how to get out of this trap. From what I could see when we flew in, the river goes into the mountains at its end, and it must go for many, many miles before it comes out on the other side."

Ras said, "I don't understand you. Explain."

He listened, and now and then had to interrupt her to ask that something be clarified. Even then, he could not believe some things.

She said, "If I had been raised in this valley and I had always thought this was the entire world, the sky was a dome of blue stone, and God lived down at the end of the river, on the edge of the world, and all those other things you've told me--well, I wouldn't understand, either. As for you, I don't know how you came here or why you're here. I can tell you, though, that I am amazed. And I was shocked when we were attacked by the copter."

"The Bird of God is only a... a machine? A canoe that flies? And you're not an angel or devil?"

"You don't believe me," she said. "You feel as I would feel if somebody told me that this universe was an illusion, a papier-mache stage-prop."

"Universe? Illusion? Papier-mache? Stage-prop?"

Eeva had trouble defining these.

"The Birds... the copters... You saw them? I would like to get up there and see their nest. But Mariyam told me that Igziyabher lived at the end of the river."

He stopped. If even a small part of what Eeva said was true, then Mariyam had lied even more than he had suspected.

Eeva asked him about Igziyabher. He explained, and then said, "When you came over the mountains, did you see Igziyabher?"

She shook her head and said, "No. No one has ever seen God."

"He is my father," Ras said.

Eeva said, "Who told you that?"

"My mother. She should know."

"I really don't know where to begin with your education," she said. "You're a unique. I think you've been victimized--horribly. I think that those papers--the ones you call Letters from God--were from a book this... person... was writing. He was describing his... what would be the correct word?... experiment? Project?"

"Prayect?"

"Project," she said slowly and carefully.

He did not understand the word in either pronunciation. Again, she entered a seemingly endless labyrinth of explanations, of explanations that had to be explained.

He learned something of her, too. She was a Suomailinen, or, in English, a Finn. She was born in the city of Helsinki, where she had spent most of her life. Her mother was of Swedish
descent and a Lutheran. Her father came from a Jewish family that had emigrated from Germany two hundred years before. Her father's father had been converted to Swedenborgianism, but her father was an atheist and so was she. She had gotten a doctor's degree in anthropology at the University of Stockholm, in Sweden.

It took an hour to clarify these few statements. Ras had to know the definition of every unfamiliar word, and the definitions led both of them into labyrinths. The sun burned through the last of the blue and let darkness in. They put into shore and found a place where they had an overhanging cliff to their back and a fire in front. Ras shot a monkey and roasted it as well as he could for Eeva, who was disgusted by the raw arm he first offered her. At the same time, she asked if they had to have a fire. Couldn't Bigagi be in the neighborhood?