Lord Tyger (33 page)

16

THE DESCENT

The black pool under Bigagi had been small at first. It spread slowly while the soul dripped from his body, drop by drop, like water from the edge of a roof after a rain. The drops were eyeball-shaped, and black and soundless as a shadow falling. With every drop and stain, some of Bigagi's flesh turned to steam under the brown skin and jetted from the pores. The skull and skeleton burrowed their way outward, as if eager to bathe in the sun and to undarken. His eyes cowered back into the bone, crowding the brain. Each new sun spread a light that seemed weaker in its grasp on Bigagi.

"Bigagi!" Ras called. "Do not die! You will cheat me! I must kill you with my own hands, break your neck!"

Bigagi did not seem to hear. His mouth hung open while flies crawled in and out of it. A fly traveled over his eyeball, and he did not blink.

"What did you say?" Gilluk asked. Ras told him, and the king smiled. He said, "All right. You can kill him."

He clapped his hands and shouted orders. Spearmen formed a semicircle around the door to Ras's cage. A slave tried to untie the leather ropes binding the door to the cage. Impatient, Gilluk commanded him to step aside, and he cut through the ropes with his sword. After swinging the door out, Gilluk stepped back behind the spearmen.

Ras walked slowly out of the cage. He felt numbed; he could not quite grasp the idea that he was to be free to kill Bigagi.

Gilluk said, "You don't look happy, now that you can have your revenge."

"It's so unexpected," Ras said. "And Bigagi... he won't know! I mean, I thought he'd be fighting for his life and that he'd know he had to pay... but now..."

"Don't you want to kill him?"

"I should," Ras said.

Gilluk laughed loudly and rolled his eyes.

"It's not even like killing a leopard that has eaten your mother," Ras said. "You kill the leopard, but you don't hate it. It's an animal, and what it did, it did blamelessly. Now Bigagi isn't even an animal. He is nothing."

"Why didn't you tell me this before I ruined good leather ropes?" Gilluk said. "Why did you tell me how much you lusted for revenge?"

"It's like starting to walk down a steep, muddy bank," Ras said. "You might change your mind about going down, but by then, even if your legs quit moving, you continue to go on down."

Gilluk frowned and bit his lower lip. Then he smiled. He gestured for Ras to get back into the cage. Ras did so, and the door was secured with another rope. The bystanders, including
Gilluk's mother and wives, looked disappointed. The king spoke through the bars to Ras.

"It's too late now to change your mind again, because I gave you your only chance. It seems to me that you should have killed him if only to satisfy the ghosts of your parents. You have let them down. But if you won't fulfill your duties, I'll do it for you."

Gilluk gave an order, and two men entered Bigagi's cage.

Ras said, "What are you going to do?"

"Baastmaast isn't hungry yet," Gilluk said. "It was only three days ago that he ate Tattniss. But if we wait too long, the Wantso will die."

"You're going to throw Bigagi into the pool?" Ras said.

"Tomorrow. Before the sun touches the western peaks. In the meantime, we have certain ceremonies to perform, and Bigagi must spend one night chained to the platform above the pool so that Baastmaast can see what we are giving him."

A chair carved out of lemonwood was brought in from a room off the yard. Four of the king's relatives carried it, two in front, two in back, each holding the end of a pole inserted through carved holes in the chair. The chair was covered with carved crocodiles.

Bigagi was set in the chair, in which he lolled, one arm hanging out, his head on one shoulder. Drums beat; bagpipes shrilled; spears clashed. In a short time, a parade was formed. The king's herald led the march out the great door with the king twelve steps behind him and holding the sword with both hands straight up before his face.

Behind the king was Bigagi. When his chair was only a few paces from the doorway, he suddenly jerked his head up and
then sat up. His shout was so loud that it startled the drummers and fluters and bagpipers, and the music slid off into silence. Gilluk spun around.

Bigagi's voice was weak after that great call. But Ras could hear him.

"Lazazi Taigaidi! Can you hear me?"

Bigagi's head was bent back now, its top against the high back of the chair. He stared straight upward into the sun.

"I hear you, Bigagi!" Ras shouted.

The voice of Bigagi was faint. It could be heard only because the Sharrikt were as silent as if they thought that a ghost was speaking.

"I did not kill your parents! No Wantso killed your parents! You have..."

"Who killed them?" Ras shouted. "Bigagi! Who killed them?"

There was no answer. Bigagi fell in on himself and sighed as if he were a collapsing bagpipe. The wail raised the eyelids of the Sharrikt and caused them to shudder. The men holding the chair-poles started, but they did not drop the chair.

Gilluk walked back to Ras and said, "He had no reason to lie."

"He must have lied," Ras said. "He had to."

Gilluk laughed and said, "You killed all the Wantso for something that they did not do."

Ras stared at him through the bars. Gilluk's face, and everything behind Gilluk, was as dark as if the sun had suddenly been eclipsed. There was a roaring in his head, and his chest was clenching.

"I will kill you for laughing," Ras said.

"Haven't you done enough killing?" Gilluk said. He laughed again and signaled for the parade to restart.

Only Gilluk's mother paid any attention to Ras. Her head was turned to look back over the chair at him until she disappeared down the hill.

There was silence then except for a distant roar from the town at the foot of the hill.

Eeva said, "What was that all about?"

Ras gestured for her to be still, since he wanted to think about what Bigagi had said. But she insisted that he tell her.

Eeva said, "Don't feel so bad! If you were tricked, you can't help it! You didn't know! What else could you think, with the evidence you had?"

"I killed them all," Ras said. "I killed even those that my hand did not kill."

He looked down at his feet for the black pool he expected to form there. There was nothing but the sunshine and the shadows of the bars. Nevertheless, he felt as if his soul had gushed out.

"Now Bigagi will die, too. Because of what I did."

He added, "Who did this? Who shot my mother with a Wantso arrow? Why?"

Eeva said, "Only one person could have done it, though I don't know why. It was the person who wrote those pages you call Letters from God. I think he did it because he wanted to deceive you into thinking that the Wantso had killed your mother, so that you would take revenge on them. But I don't know why."

"You mean Igziyabher did it?"

Eeva shook her head and said, "No, not God. A man.
Whoever brought you here and caused you to be reared as a Tarsan."

"Tarsan?"

Eeva repeated the word carefully and this time voiced the
z
. "Tarzan. The hero of a series of novels about..."

"Hero? Novels?"

Eeva explained as best she could without wandering off to elucidate the background for "hero" and "novels."

"It's difficult to tell you anything at all about the outside world because you don't have a frame of reference. And I'm handicapped explaining this because I've never read a Tarzan book. I saw a movie when I was a child--my mother didn't know about it--but I understand there's very little relation between the book Tarzan and the movie Tarzan. Actually, I know little about Tarzan except for the movie and occasional references in newspapers and books. He was a white man who was brought up by some kind of gorilla-like apes in the African jungle. He's a sort of archetype of freedom from civilized inhibitions and irritations and tabus. A Noble Savage."

"What does all that mean?"

"It means that the writer of those pages, the man who is responsible for your being raised here, is psychotic. That is, crazy, mad, deranged, insane. You were kidnapped as a baby and brought here to play the role of a Tarzan. Only events didn't work out the way they were intended."

Ras was silent for a long time. Even if he had not been numbed by Bigagi's revelation, he would have had difficulty understanding her. As she had said, he had no "frame of reference."

Suddenly, he howled, and he beat the bars with his fists.
The guards shouted at him, but he paid no attention to them.

"I'll kill him!" Ras yelled. "I'll kill Igziyabher!"

"It wasn't God," Eeva said. "It was a man."

"I'll kill him!" Ras screamed, and he began to weep and sob.

Eeva waited until he was quiet. She said, "This man has to be on top of the pillar in the lake."

Ras gave a long, shuddering sigh and turned away from her. The guards, Tukkisht and Gammum, were side by side, their spears pointing at him, their knees and bodies bent, their eyes wide.

"If you have a plan to get out," Eeva said, "now is the time to use it. Everybody has gone to the island. At least, you told me they do when anybody is to be fed to Baastmaast."

Ras mumbled.

She said, "What?"

He replied, "I meant to do this some night when there was a storm and it would be dark and raining."

He opened the antelope-hide bag and removed the mirror and whetstone. He rapped the end of the whetstone against the center of the glass of the mirror, which cracked into seven triangular pieces. Since his fingernails could not separate the shards, he hammered one piece until it broke away. With a sliver from it, he pried loose an intact triangle. The others followed easily.

Gammum stepped closer to the cage and said, "What are you doing?"

Ras looked up, grinned, and said, "I'm making magic to let me loose."

Gammum's eyes rolled. He took one step backward but forced himself to come near again. "Stop it, or I'll kill you!"

"You can try to," Ras said. He used the whetstone to hone the edges of the glass shard. Then he began to saw on the leather rope securing the door to the cage.

Gammum jabbed his spear through the bars to force Ras away. Expecting this, Ras seized the shaft of the spear just behind the head and threw himself backward. Gammum tried to hold on but was yanked so hard against the bars that his eyes crossed, his nose bled, and his knees loosened. The spear left his grip. Tukkisht yelled and ran up to the cage and thrust his spear through the bars. Ras had reversed his; he threw it between two bars. It drove into Tukkisht's arm. Tukkisht fell backward with the spear still in his flesh. He was up at once, jerked the spear loose, reversed it, and raised it to cast through the bars. Blood spurted over his arm and side.

Ras had picked up Tukkisht's spear, which he had dropped halfway into the cage. Gammum staggered back but not in time to escape entirely. Ras did not want to lose the spear, so he jabbed with it and stuck a half inch of copper into Gammum's thigh.

Gammum screamed and whirled and lurched across the courtyard toward the big doorway. His hands flapped, and he crowed.

Ras used the edge of the spearhead to saw through the leather rope. By the time it was severed, Gammum had disappeared down the hill.

Tukkisht called out to Gammum, but seeing that he was going to be deserted, advanced upon Ras. Ras kicked the cage door so that it swung outward, and he was out in a bound. Tukkisht was brave and a skilled spearman, but he was facing a man he believed to be a ghost, a man who had escaped in a few
seconds from a seemingly escape-proof cage, and he was also bleeding heavily and weakening fast. Ras parried his few thrusts, drove him backward, and then knocked the spear to one side and sent his into Tukkisht's stomach. Tukkisht fell on his knees and doubled over while he clutched at his stomach. Ras knocked him out with the butt of his spear on his head and left him.

He ran out through the doorway. The seven-foot Gammum was lurching halfway down the hill like a sick stork. The town at the foot of the hill was deserted except for some small children playing in the street and a white-haired woman watching them. There were boats on the shore of the island and white-clad figures in a column the head of which had entered the tall, dark doorway of the building in the center of the island. The last boat was a few feet away from landing on the island. It was filled with slaves clad only in white skirts.