Lord Tyger (37 page)

Or would he? He had had enough to do with Ras by now to know that Ras would try for the unexpected. Could Gilluk be waiting for him around the corner?

Or perhaps he might have come around the other way to take Ras from behind?

Ras was too busy thrusting the paddle to shrug his shoulders, but he did so mentally. The future was the present come into being out of many possible beings. The future lay hidden in smoke like this smoke that was unrolling out across the lake, obscuring the moon, making him want to cough. Then he would be in the smoke and he would see. He would see...

18

THE CROCODILE'S HEART

Blackness rolled back to reveal light and pain.

His head hurt. His back hurt where something sharp thrust into it. His mouth was dry, and the back of his throat was clogged. He coughed and sat up or tried to sit up, and his head pained him worse. The stuff in his throat came up and gagged him. He spat it out while he leaned on his left elbow. He was on mud and under a low bush. Above the bush and around him were tall trees interconnected with vines.

Eeva said, "Lie back down."

He did so, groaning, and then said, "Well?"

His legs were in damp mud, and his back and arms were on rough, tooth-edged grass. When he put his hand just behind the right temple, he touched dried blood on the hairs and a shallow trough of skin. He also touched off lightning of pain.

He groaned and again said, "Well?"

"A spear hit you in the head," she said. "It came flying out of the smoke--I don't know how Gilluk saw you, maybe he didn't,
maybe he just threw it and was lucky, though it doesn't seem likely he'd waste a spear."

"He must have seen me," Ras said. "I didn't see him. I didn't see the spear, either."

"If it had hit you straight, it would have gone through the bone into the brain," Eeva said. "But it came in at an angle and bounced off your head. It almost got me; it went over my shoulder by an inch. It fell into the water. I couldn't get it."

"Where are we now?" he said.

After he had been knocked unconscious and was bleeding heavily--there was blood all over him and the front part of the dugout--she had turned the dugout and gone south. The fire was spreading; she did not know when Gilluk might come through the fire, and she would have been almost helpless against him. So, with many backward glances, she had fled as swiftly as she could. But Gilluk had never appeared. Under the bright moon she had paddled as far as she had been able, past the island opposite the town of the Sharrikt and to a point about two miles south. They were out of the lake and on the left bank of the river, in far enough to be hidden from the sight of anybody on the river or in the air.

Groaning, he lay back down. He was weak. But despite the pain in his head he felt a little hungry.

She slapped at his head to drive a buzzing fly away.

"Where's the dugout?" he said.

"Under a tree just over there. I had a hard time dragging you here and then getting the boat there. And I had to smooth out the tracks. It was hard work, and I was scared, too. I heard a leopard coughing somewhere near."

She was telling him this, he knew, because she wanted to be told what a good job she had done. He told her so, and she smiled and took his hand.

"I'm awfully discouraged," she said. "And I'm so tired! And I was so worried about you. If you had died..."

There was no need for her to finish the sentence. She was weeping now, anyway.

Ras waited until she was through and squeezed her hand and then said, "As soon as I can get some food in me, I'll be strong enough to paddle. And we can go north again."

There was a chuttering sound then, faint at first and later so loud that it seemed directly above them. They lay on their backs under a bush and looked upward through the green at the blue. The copter never came into their sight, but they knew it had to be close. After a minute the roar became less, and presently it faded away to the south.

Ras said, "We'll have to wait until night before we try for the swamp. But we can hunt in here; the jungle's so thick it will hide us."

She did not seem to be encouraged by this. She was pale and thin and shivering with nervousness and the cold of the night, which still had not been thawed by the rising sun.

Eeva's manner and expression told him that she did not want him to leave her, but she said nothing. She knew they had to have food and that he was the one who had the best chance of getting any. Even in his condition, he could function far better in this world--his world.

Ras set her to looking under rocks and fallen trees for insects and rodents and small snakes, for anything that could be
eaten. She was to keep herself busy while he was gone, and she was not to regard her work as mere time-serving. She might have more for them to eat than he would by the time he returned. She shuddered and said that, being an anthropologist, she had eaten some repulsive food, but she had not liked it. However, she was almost hungry enough--almost--to relish beetles and worms, uncooked and living. She stood beneath a tree and watched him as he walked away. His one glance behind took in the tangled hair, yellow and dirty, the smudged face with the eyes that seemed larger because of the fatigue-stained bows beneath them, the almost naked, raw-skinned torso, the torn pants through which some white skin, some sunburned skin, and some dirt-covered skin showed, and the aura of loneliness and dependence.

Then he brushed at the flies trying to land on his gashed head, and he was into the green maze. But not for long. It struck him after a few minutes that he was not going to catch anything here except through sheer luck. He did not have the strength or patience now to look for a long time and, having found, to wait, to creep up slowly, to hurl himself, or his knife, at the last moment. He did try to entice a few curious monkeys close enough to him to throw his knife, but they refused to be attracted, even though he went through all sorts of antics to draw them near.

He went back through the jungle toward the river and once stopped to listen to a strange sound. Then he realized that it was Eeva moving about in the brush near the point where he had left her. He went on and presently was squatting behind a bush and peering out at the mud of the gently sloping riverbank. If the season had not already ended, he would have gone out to look for buried crocodile eggs.

The only life in sight was a kingfisher on a branch projecting from a tree near the water on the opposite bank. Ras called out softly,
"O mamago, mamago, mamago!"
This was the Wantso word for crocodile, which Ras hoped would go out over the waters and to the flesh-buried ears of a crocodile and so bring him to the caller. But when, after a half hour, no saurian appeared, he began to use the Sharrikt word. This was Sharrikt territory, and it was to be presumed that crocodiles would respond better to a familiar language.

"Tishshush! Tishshush! Tishshush!"
he said softly. After a while, he left his hiding place and went down to the water. He dipped his hand in the water and cupped it up and poured it over the wound on his head. When the blood was leaking again, he bent his head into the water and let some of the blood flow out into the river. It was dissolved swiftly, but he knew that it was being carried downstream, and that even this dilution would not be weak enough to sieve unnoticed through the nostrils of a crocodile within half a mile or perhaps more. After a few minutes he raised his head from the river and let the sun dry out the hair and the wound. Flies buzzed around his head as if he were dead or dying, and when they found that he did not swat at them, they settled down on the wound as if he were dead. He lay on his front with his head turned so he could see downstream, and his right hand held the knife by his right thigh. When the stinging of the flies in the raw flesh seemed unendurable, and he was considering giving up, he saw the water at the bend of the river bulge brownly, divide, and slide off in two directions. The nostrils, like emptied eyes, and the knobs, like nostrils containing the eyes, were briefly broadside, and then he could
see only the blunt, almost square, snout thrusting through the water straight toward him.

He watched it through half-closed eyes and, knowing crocodiles, was not surprised when it was suddenly gone, as if dissolved into the water. If intelligence was a firmament, and a man's skull housed many stars, the skull of a crocodile was a dark, dull arch containing only a few tiny, coldly flaming stars. But there were enough to shed some light, and the crocodile was not dumb enough to charge straight at the seeming corpse on the bank. It would approach stealthily, under water, suddenly emerge at a point so close that the human, even if playing dead, would be surprised and would, soon enough, be not playing. Or so it seemed to Ras.

He shifted enough so that he could see the crocodile when it would come up out of the water, knowing that, if he could not see it in the brownish waters, it could not see him while he was moving. So it was that he did not start when the water a few feet from him boiled and then reared up and hurtled in two parts down the head and back of the crocodile. He did not move until the long snout and many teeth were only three feet away from him. They moved swiftly; old Mamago looked slow as butter on a cold winter morning, but he was not slow when he was warm, and the sun was hot at this moment. He came up out of the water as if the river were suddenly rejecting a diseased portion of itself, as if it were vomiting the loathsomeness. Through his half-closed eyes, Ras saw the darker brown of the crocodile hump out of the lighter brown. Then the bellow followed, and, immediately thereafter, a shadow fell on him. Hot on the tail of the shadow was the bulk of the reptile. Water cast by the beast splashed and
fell coolly on his arm and head. The jaws, which had been a few inches above him, lowered as the beast drove them into the mud with the intent of digging them in and under so it could catch Ras's arm or shoulder between the two jaws.

Ras moved then. He rolled away just a little; the jaws slammed shut with a clinking almost like that of metal. The left eye was even with his head; its lidless, slit-pupiled fishbelly-fleshed eye slid by. He rolled back then toward the crocodile, because he did not intend to let the tail break his bones. The five-toed paw hissed as it went by his nose and slammed into the mud, spraying mud on his chin. The crocodile bellowed again as it began to turn away from him and then at once turned toward him. Its snaky motion may have been designed to act as a brake. Whatever its reason for writhing, it continued on in the mud, digging a main trough with its body and four smaller ones, two on each side, with its paws.

As the foreleg went by, Ras continued his roll and brought his right arm, the knife in the right hand, up and over the back of the animal. He clamped down on it and then was dragged forward. His other arm came up and squeezed down on the juncture of leg and body. This grip enabled him to pull himself up to the point where he could throw his right leg up over the body. By then, the crocodile had managed to halt its forward motion.

It was possible that the animal did not know where the dead-meat-suddenly-come-to-life had gone. Ras did not think so. Though the hide on the upper part of a crocodile looks as dead and unfeeling as any armor, it must be sensitive to pressures. But it was possible that the beast did not feel Ras on it because it did not think of such a possibility.

Whatever the reason for its immobility, it remained still for perhaps thirty seconds. Ras waited like a fly that has settled down on a fresh wound but expects the swatting hand. He expected anything, including an effort to roll over on its back and so crush him. And what might have happened then was up to chance or to the behavior the beast had established, although that might not have governed it, since it was in a situation new to it.

New to Ras, too, who knew that he wanted to get the beast on its back so he could stick the knife into the relatively soft underpart, but at this moment did not know how he was going to do it.

Ras could hear his own breathing, a faint rasp, and the loud grumble of the crocodile and the yayaya of the kingfisher, now a blur of dark blue against light blue and ascending upward and at a tangent, a stone from the sling of terror. Then he heard the chuttering, which he would have heard long before this if the crocodile and kingfisher had not been so noisy.