Lord Tyger (25 page)

He returned to the bank. At least, he had not left the bag and the two Wantso axes on the raft. He took these from behind a bush, where he had tossed them when he had gotten off the raft. Searching for and then chopping down and trimming poles of the desired length and thickness took him well past noon. He bound the poles together with vines. There was more delay while he hunted. An arrow brought down a parrot, and plucking feathers and building a fire and cooking took another hour. By then it was too late to start out.

Despite which, a half hour later, he knew he was too impatient to put off the trip until morning. He pushed the raft away from the bank, and the river carried it gently around several bends for a mile. The channel narrowed; the current increased; the raft picked up speed. Suddenly, the banks veered away from each other. Neighbors for so long, they had come to a parting. There was no river any more. The swamp, the Many-Legged Swamp, spread before him, and the pole with which he pushed went only a few feet into the brown water before being sucked into the mud. He had to push gently to keep it from being swallowed.

The sun was down behind the mountains now. The sky, seen in patches through the leaves and branches, was still bright blue. Under the branches, a gloom thickened. Vines hung down everywhere, as if a city of snakes lived here and were hanging by their tails to sip the water. Clusters of broad, flat pads parted reluctantly before the raft. A large insect, its wings near enough to his cheek for him to feel the air of its passage, fluttered by. A black thought in a black place.

The water sloshed over the deck of his raft and spread warmly over his feet. Something thin and sticky fell on his face, and he crouched down and wiped it away. He looked up to see a spider as large as his head scuttling down its web toward the disturbance. It was black now, though he had seen enough of them in the daylight during his first trip here to know that it was purple, with tiny yellow crescents over its body, and its eight eyes were crimson.

The Wantso said that a bite from the yellow-lined mouth would make a man scream until he drowned himself to put an end to the agony. Although Ras was not sure that he could believe the tales he heard, he did not intend to test their truth. Certainly, the spiders looked venomous.

Something slipped by in the water near the raft, curving silver behind it. Ras yanked the pole up and brought its end down against the blacker blackness. The pole struck something solid. Something thrashed in the water. Ras pushed the raft onward while the old wound in his foot burned with the ghost of the adder's bite.

A few seconds later, something hard and cold brushed against his shoulder. He gave a low cry and threw himself flat on the raft. The raft moved on. Trembling, Ras lay face down for a while. When he got to his knees and began poling again, he hunched down and kept looking to right and left. A web enfolded his head. While brushing it off, he pulled some more of the sticky strands down. His hand closed on the dried, sucked-empty shell of a large butterfly, and he threw it into the water. Cross-shaped, it floated away, turning slowly.

The night was still warm, but his skin prickled. He felt as
if water bugs from the cold depths of a mountain spring were crawling over him. The feeling was so vivid that he could not restrain from brushing his shoulder just to make sure. This was far worse than being in a jungle full of leopards. There was nothing of beauty here. The spiders and snakes were dyed in the black of night, dressed in silence and poison. The archways formed by the low, thick branches and the dark, squat trunks seemed one door after another to death. Webs caught at him with weak but insistent hands. He was being covered with the gray, sticky stuff, wrapped up, wrapped around, wound into a shell as if he were a big butterfly for the spiders. Even the upper end of the pole had become gray with webs now; it was like a long, thin ghost itself--like the ghost of a snake, he thought, and then wished that he could not-think of snakes.

When would the moon rise? There would be light up there in the leaves and lianas, some of which would trickle down here. Then he could at least see the great spiders as spiders. He would not be taking a large knot on a trunk as a spider waiting to spring on him, or every vine as a reptile.

He started. A lump of darkness raced across the branch ahead of him. He hit at it with the pole but missed. The raft slowed down and bumped against a tree trunk. He could hear only his own breathing. Then... a scrape of something on wood.

He turned around but could see nothing except a glimmering, far off at the end of row upon row of ragged arches of branch and trunk. He sighed deeply. There was much in this place to cause fear, but why should he be afraid? Was it the tales of its terrors that Mariyam had filled him with ever since he was old enough to talk? Or was it his own near-death from the bite of the
adder? Or was it something else, something as old as death itself?

The swamp stank. The flowers of the water plants were invisible now, but they gave off an odor as of a rat two days dead. Decaying, water-logged wood and the dead worms in it added an undercurrent of stench. The water moved slowly, but it nevertheless moved, and so it should not have the odor of stagnation. Nevertheless, it stank. Thick with mud, it moved as slowly as the blood of a dying man. It even had the odor of blood. It had the odor of many unpleasantnesses.

This is my nose thinking with wild, scared, odorous thoughts, he said softly to himself. The water does not stink like blood. I just think it does. The spiders are not waiting to drop on me. They are frightened of me. If one should drop on me, it would be an accident. And the snakes! They will come near only by accident. They won't attack me; they can't eat me, and they know it. But accidents can happen.

When he had entered the swamp the first time, six years before, he had gone only a few yards under the branches before he had been bitten. It had seemed at the time that the adder had been waiting for him. It had been sent there by Igziyabher to bar him from the swamp.

So now, if Igziyabher did not want him to cross the swamp, He would drop a giant spider on him.

"Drop it on me, then!" Ras said loudly. "I will crush it, and I will go on!"

Nothing happened. He poled onward. Finally, the moon, as if it had been reluctant to stain its glory with the evil of the swamp, arose. Beams danced on the leaves of the uppermost branches, fluttering in the slight breeze there. Below, the air was
as still as a beast lying in wait for its prey. Some light snaked through the leaves and patched the water here and there with moonshed, or cast a hummock into gray-green, or spread a decaying green over a pad, and once showed him a long, thin, drooping stalk with a dead-yellow flower sticking out from a crevice in a tree trunk.

The moonlight touched webs as if they were harpstrings; the twang was noiseless, but heard by Ras. A round object with twelve long legs ran across a web, flashed dark purple, and was gone. The web itself was asymmetrical, lopsided, with strands clustering thickly in crazy diamond shapes in some areas and only a few, widely separated strands in others. The spider that had spun this web had been sick or insane, Ras thought.

What starved and diseased thoughts could possess a mad spider? Tiny, red things hobbling on absurdly crooked crutches across the black, spongy floor of the minute mind? Hobbling toward a mote of a glow, the cracked diamond in the heart of the fleck-sized brain, to worship there or to warm their claws before its crystalline blaze? Overhead, jagged fissures through which light fell from each eye, light filtered by the webs within the stalks which held the eyes?

Something splashed. Ras jumped and swore in Amharic. Then he laughed, as the head of a large frog appeared in a pool of light. A gurrook-gurronk started up nearby. Others joined it. The swamp at once became less menacing. Ras pushed the raft on. The frog was ahead of him, swimming toward its goal, whatever that was. Probably a female or a meal of some kind, Ras thought.

Abruptly, the frog went under water. It did not dive. It had reared up, its webbed paws clutching upward, and then had slid
backward and under. Briefly, the black, flat tail of some animal showed, and then there were only ripples and one big bubble that took a long time bursting.

More webs spanned the archways ahead of him. Now that he could see them in the light, he broke them with his pole, wiped the pole off, and pushed the raft until he came to the next web. The spiders ran down toward the thing they thought was caught in the strands, then stopped when the web was destroyed. Ras reached up with the pole to knock the spiders off or poke them so they would retreat. Once, a spider fell on his raft and almost caused Ras to tip the raft over in his efforts to get away from it and at the same time smash it with the pole. It scuttled back and forth before it sprang at him. The pole caught it in midair and swept it out into the water and the darkness.

This went on all night. By dawn, the webs were few and scattered. The trees were not so close together. The water became more shallow, and finally the raft bogged down in the mud. He had to leave it and walk in water that came no higher than his ankles, or in mud. He supposed that there were waterways for the raft, since the Sharrikt and the Wantso crossed the entire swamp in boats when they raided. To find them would take too much time. It seemed best to go ahead on foot, although he squirmed inwardly at the idea. The vegetation coming up from the water was thick enough to hide snakes. He used the pole to prod the growth before him. This made for a slow and nervous progress.

The mud gripped him up to his ankles sometimes and other times up to his calves. His feet came out with a sucking noise as if the swamp were trying to mouth him down. The grass had a tough, saw-toothed edge that cut his legs raw. He was
bitten once by a small insect. The pain caused him to jump up into the air with a cry. After a while the pain ceased, but the bite left a purple mark the size of his thumb-end on his leg.

After a mile of this, he was able now and then to cross on slightly higher ground. He went on even more cautiously, since it seemed to him that he might be getting near the end of the swamp. A snake about four feet long, its head a shiny black, its body a dull scarlet, tried to evade his pole. He broke its back, cut off its head, stripped its skin, gutted it, and ate it raw.

He had not quite finished eating when he heard shouts ahead of him. He threw the body away and crept as quietly as he could in the mud. A waterway lay before him, and the low hill--or islet-from which the noise came. The water came up as far as his waist before it began to shallow. The islet was covered with trees, and the brush was thick between the trunks. Here the trees were close enough to allow him to travel from one to the other on the branches, if he proceeded cautiously.

Up in a tree close to the edge of the islet, he looked across a flat stretch of black, sandy-looking land about twenty yards long. On the other side was another islet not quite as high as the one he was on. Although the trees were also thick there, they did stand far enough apart so that he could glimpse two men now and then. Both wore white robes. Both were thin men, over six and a half feet tall. They had dark-brown skins and long, skinny legs. They hopped about, shouting or grunting, while one jabbed with a spear and the other slashed with a sword.

The man with the sword was Gilluk, king of the Sharrikt.

13

CAPTOR, WHO'S THE CAPTIVE?

Three years before, one of Ras's periodic visits to the Wantso village had coincided with the third day after the capture of Gilluk. From his observation post on a tree across the river from the western gate, Ras had seen the cage in front of the Great House. The bamboo cage had been about seven feet high and four feet wide. It had hung by a rope from a horizontal bamboo log suspended at each end on three hardwood legs. Both the cage and the support had been specially built for the occasion, as Ras had learned when he had moved in closer to eavesdrop.

He had listened to the women weeding in the fields and to the guards on the northern gate. The whole village had been swinging between exultation and apprehension. The capture of the king of the Sharrikt would be talked about, sung of, for generations. The Wantso had captured other Sharrikt--the last one four years before--but never had they caught a king. He would be treated royally; his torture was to last a month, if not more, before he would be burned alive in the cage.