Lord Tyger (36 page)

"I did it myself. I didn't use a machine!"

"Your bow is a machine! So is your spear! And your knife!"

"There's a difference," he said. He went into the building, she following. She looked through the dead man's pockets and found three clips of 7.5-millimeter bullets--so Eeva called them--and she took these for the rifle. There were also twenty .32 cartridges in his pocket for the revolver. Eeva also put on the belt with sheath and knife.

Her search found a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and an envelope. Ras examined it and then removed a letter. It was in handwritten English. Ruth Bevans, a woman in Liverpool, England, had written a love letter to Al Lister, who now lay dead in the temple of Baastmaast and would soon go to feed a five-hundred-year-old crocodile. Ruth longed for the day when her lover would return, although she hoped that he would not be as jealous and angry as the last time he came home. He could trust her; she loved only him and would not even think of looking at another man.

The letter disturbed him because, for the first time, he
felt
that a world could be outside the cliffs, somewhere in the blue. There
had
to be another world.

Eeva said, "The letter was mailed from England a month ago and delivered at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It must have been picked up there."

She snapped the lighter, causing Ras to jump when the flame leaped up. She lit the cigarette and drew in deeply with an ecstatic look, which she quickly lost when she coughed. Grimacing, she threw the cigarette down. "It tastes terrible! Just as well, because when I'd smoked them all up, I'd have had to go through the same withdrawal symptoms again."

She tossed the package of cigarettes away and said, "The pilot must have radioed in, and I'm sure that our unknown enemy must have more than one copter left. He wouldn't want to chance being marooned on that pillar. We have to get out now."

Ras dumped the body into the pool. It went under with a splash and disappeared into the darkness. The great crocodile was now under the surface. Ras examined Bigagi again. He was convinced that Bigagi was dead or was so close to death that he would soon be dead. He carried him to the edge of the pool and said, "Forgive me, Bigagi! I truly thought that you had killed my mother and father. I will kill the man responsible for this; I will kill him even if he is not a man but a god!"

He raised the limp body above his head and cast it into the waters. Bigagi went under immediately but rose again, floating face upward, as if he wanted to take another look at Ras. Then he sank. A few seconds later, Baastmaast emerged at the other end of the pool, flicked his tail to drive him a few feet forward, and sank.

Outside the temple, Ras picked up the dugout to carry it to the east shore of the island. Eeva carried the rifle and the revolver. The two paddles were in the dugout. Gilluk was aware of their departure, but he only stood and stared at them. They went around to the other side of the building, picked up the spears, and soon were paddling across the lake to the east shore. Here Ras carried the dugout inland for a half mile before hiding it in a ravine. They pushed on through the extremely thick growth until they reached a tall hill. Eeva gathered firewood while Ras hunted. He came back an hour later with a pangolin. Eeva asked him if he had seen the copter. He said that he had not seen it, but he had heard it. It must have been searching around the island and lake shore for them.

Eeva lay down and snored while he butchered the anteater, dressed it, and then, using the lighter, set fire to the pile she had prepared. He was delighted with the lighter but stopped after igniting it a few times. The fire smoked somewhat, but he did not care. He cooked the meat and then put the fire out and wakened Eeva. They ate. Afterward, she took the first watch, and he slept.

Darkness fell. The stars were out, but the moon would not rise for several hours. They ate some more, and one slept while the other did guard duty. The night animals had taken up the strain that the day animals had slackened with dusk. They returned to the dugout, which he carried to the shore. There was no sign of fire across the lake. Either all the houses had burned themselves out or the fires had been put out.

Most of the passage across the lake to the river mouth was by starlight. The sky was pale in the east, betraying the stealthy climb of the moon near the horizon. Ahead, the trees
at the northern edge of the lake clumped to form an unbroken, uprearing blackness. In its middle was a gap that Ras sensed but could not as yet see. This gap was his first goal, the widening and treelessness of the river flowing from the roots of the swamp a few miles northward.

He sat in the front of the dugout. His paddle strokes were slow but powerful. The wind from the west had almost died out. He felt--or thought he felt--a fish brush against his paddle. Something scaly, gape-mouthed, goggle-eyed, had touched his paddle and whisked itself away. Down there, cold and dark reigned. But no tears rained. It was too cold and wet for tears. When you lived in the midst of tears, breathed tears, moved in tears, you did not weep.

Eeva, whose gasps had been getting louder, said, "Stop a minute so I can rest! I can't lift my arms any more, and my back is crystallized; it's going to shatter in a moment!"

Ras could have kept on paddling while she rested, but he took advantage of the chance to sit still and listen. The boat slowed, stopped, and then began to creep backward, pushed by the current, and its nose began to turn as if it were sniffing for the scent of eastward. Ras listened. Loudest was the breathing of the woman. Between that and the lake shore was a zone of silence, and on the shore was the subdued kul-kul-gurruking of a bird. Faintly, far off, a crocodile bellowed. And, almost as indistinguishable under the bellow as a print in the mud below a just-lifted foot, was an almost familiar noise. Before it could be identified, it was gone. Its memory left him with an unease that quickly went away.

He leaned over, carefully so he would not tip the unstable
dugout, and got his ear as closely as possible to the water. He could hear only the gentle slap-slap of the little waves against the wood of the boat. The wind carried no sound to him now. It carried only the odor of moldy wood, of mud that was partly flesh returned to mud, stench of rotting fruit, a green odor of some unidentifiable night bloom, and a tendril, quickly lost, as of a crocodile egg that had held a dead fetus until the shell was broken open by expanding gases.

He returned to his sitting position. Eeva said she could resume paddling--for a while. Again, the dugout slid ahead, and soon the shield of darkness parted to reveal a paler darkness between two masses. The boat resisted his urgings with the paddle more strongly now. It was close to the river's mouth. When they were about forty feet from the gap, two things happened at once. The moon pushed its shiny, gray-yellow arc above the top of the cliff, and its light ricocheted from a metal object rising into the air. The shining object was the head of a spear, and the arc it was describing would end in the water, in the wood of the dugout, or in his flesh or Eeva's. He yelled at the same time the ambushers yelled. The spear knocked off splinters from the dugout nose, and the shaft, deflected sidewise, banged against the side of the boat, and then the spear had slid into a gulp of water.

Five dugouts and a big war canoe poked out from the shadows of the trees on both sides of the river mouth. The moonlight was strong enough now for him to make out four figures in each dugout and nine in the canoe. Twenty-eight paddles were rising and lowering as if the arms that held them were on a string jerked by the king. Gilluk stood up on a little platform aft while he balanced another spear above his shoulder.
He was probably reprimanding himself for not waiting until Ras had gotten closer. But the sudden emerging of the moon had made him fear that Ras would see the Sharrikt.

Eeva said, "Turn the boat broadside! Broadside!"

Metal snicked behind him. She was getting ready to use the weapon against the Sharrikt. Gilluk yelled and at the same time hurled the spear. And immediately afterward, the sound that Ras had thought he had heard earlier became evident. Then the rifle erupted in his ear. He could hear nothing but it, and he felt heat from the belled muzzle. Long white lines appeared in the air from behind him, ghosts of the little greeters of death in the weapon's belly.

Eeva had called them tracers.

The moon sparked on the head of the spear, which did not come as close as the first. The spear made its own target in the water, created its bull's eye and concentric silvery circles out from the center.

The sound he had heard before became a chuttering, and then it ate up the voices of the men and was the only noise to be heard, since Eeva had quit firing the rifle. A light appeared at the same time. It was a great eye casting a beam of light as bright as the wrath of God. It flew about twenty feet above the surface of the river and came from around the bend of the river. It illumined the trees on both banks; it swung back and forth on the branches and trunks, and then on the green-brown river itself. The eye shot down the avenue formed by the trees on both sides of the river and then was out of, the river's mouth and over the lake and the Sharrikt in their boats.

The eye suddenly halted, still twenty feet high, and it
brightly fingered the area below it. It touched the dugouts and showed the bodies sprawled in them, the black-brown bottoms of dugouts that had been overturned when men had fallen dead into the water or had stood up and leaped out, and the floating bodies of the dead and the splashing of the living.

"Down!" Eeva shrilled. "I'm going to shoot! Down!"

Ras bent forward. Once again, so close that it was louder than the roar of the Bird's wings, the rifle bellowed in his ears. Fire flew over him; streaks of white painted the face of night; the streaks climbed up and up and swung, as they climbed, toward the right. Toward the Bird, the copter.

Suddenly, the eye winked into blackness and did not wink back into light again. A chattering was just barely audible below the chuttering. From the black body of the copter, fire streaked out; slashes of white raced across the surface of the lake, poofing silver in the moonlight, toward Eeva and Ras.

The streaks from the lake and the streaks from the air crossed. Immediately thereafter, like an evil thought too long held in, fire globed outward. The wind of the explosion chopped off other sounds, even his own cry. The glare blinded him for just a second. By the time he came out of the water, into which he had leaped without thought, he could see again. The copter was under the water, but its blood burned brightly in a pool only a few yards away.

The Sharrikt--those who still lived--had had enough. Most of them had jumped into the water. Gilluk's boat was the only one to still hold men; of these, all were dead or wounded except Gilluk. He stood on the little platform and stared out over the fire toward Ras. Abruptly, he ceased to be stone, jumped
down from the platform, and seized a paddle. He dug the paddle into the water, but he was unable to turn the boat swiftly.

Eeva was beside Ras. She panted as she spoke in her native language, and then, when she spoke in English, she confirmed his guess. She had been swearing.

"I lost the rifle! Oh, damn, damn, damn!"

Their dugout was bottom up.

Gilluk's war canoe, heavied by the dead, was approaching as slowly as an elephant over unfamiliar mud. Gilluk was working frantically as he thrust the paddle in on one side and then on the other side to make the boat steer straight. He saw that he was coming too close to the fire, and he bent down and stabbed the water to get away from the blaze. Ras saw a paddle drifting before him, shoved it toward Eeva, told her to hang on to it, and swam to another. This he also sent to Eeva before uprighting the dugout again. Gilluk yelled once at them when he saw this and was thereafter silent.

Ras pulled himself into the dugout, took the paddles from Eeva and then got her in without flopping the boat over again. By then, the fire had spread out as if it were a wound, and the lake was bleeding. There was still no wind, so the smoke gathered over the fire, plumed up a little, and spread out. Gilluk was hidden. Ras sat for a minute to catch his breath and his thoughts. He could steer to the right and escape to the shore of the lake and thence up the mouth of the river. He could go to the left and confront Gilluk, perhaps surprise him as he came out of the smoke and so get to him before Gilluk could use his spear. Or he could circle the fire to the right and so try to come up on Gilluk from behind.

He turned around and told her what he might do. She said, "There might be another copter along very soon to find out what happened to the first. I think we had better get out of the lake and hide some place. As soon as possible. Why worry about Gilluk?"

The blaze, pushed by the current of the nearby river, was drifting toward them. Its heat was drying the water off their bodies and making them turn their faces away from it. A forerunner of the main cloud of smoke caused them to cough. Ras tried to pierce the smoke and the flame with his eyes to see Gilluk on the other side, but he had to turn his face away once more.

"More than anything, I want to kill the man or the god or whoever it was that killed my mother and caused me to kill the Wantso," he said. "But Gilluk killed Janhoy, and he has tried to kill me, and if I let him live now, he will be after me and will always be a danger behind me. He is near at hand now. I would be foolish if I let him get away. We will surprise him by attacking him directly. We will come out of the smoke and the fire and be on him before he knows what is going on."

Eeva groaned and said, "You're stubborn, stubborn, you ass!"

Ras was puzzled by the epithet. It had only one meaning for him and he could not imagine why she called him that now. But now was not the time to ask questions. He pushed the paddle against the water and drove the dugout along the expanding front of the fire. In a few seconds, he was forced to steer away from it to keep from being burned, but he did try to cling as closely as possible to its brush of fire and smoke for concealment. Gilluk should be coming around its corner soon.
The last thing he would expect would be his enemy advancing against him.