Lord Tyger (41 page)

They finished the wreckage by toppling over Wizozu and ripping off the soft padding over the wooden frame beneath and smashing that and the machinery inside.

Ras stepped outside to attack the statues, but he never reached them. A sound as of a giant tree breaking startled him. He looked up to see that the sky had become fire-red. The sun was a black ball against the fire. A head, larger than the full moon, thrust up above the top of the cliffs. It was the head of a white-haired, old white man with a long, white beard. It was Igziyabher as described by Mariyam.

Ras cried out because he was sure that Igziyabher was coming after him. His boasting and his sureness melted from him. What could he do against anything so monstrous?

The sky-filling head glared at him with eyes as pale and malevolent as a crocodile's. A hand that seemed as large as a quarter moon came up from behind the cliffs and seized the edge of the sky and yanked it down as if it were a curtain pulled from a window in Mariyam's house. The sky behind the blue sky was so many swirling colors that Ras could see only a chaos of glory. Then the hand opened, and the fire-red sky snapped back up to cover the many-colored, swirling sky.

Ras knew that he was shaking with awe, but he seemed not to be entirely connected with his body, so that the awe was only a shadow of awe.

The island, which was shaped like the back of a giant turtle, became, for a moment, flesh. It arched, and he rose up with it, and then it slumped back and became rock and dirt again.

But lumps formed here and there in the earth; the lumps grew upward and shaped themselves into the figures of men and women and animals and birds. Foremost were Mariyam and Yusufu and Wilida. Behind them were the other little black people he had known when he was a child. And behind them were Bigagi and all the Wantso. And the Sharrikt he had killed. And the leopards, the monkeys, the river hogs, and crocodiles, the deer, antelope, and civets. Behind and above them were the birds he had killed. These flew about as if tied by strings from their bellies to the earth. Strings of earth did attach them to the world; they could fly only in circles.

Soon Janhoy pushed through the animals and the Wantso and walked majestically to Yusufu and crouched down beside him. His green eyes shone.

Ras wept with joy and ran toward them, but they moved away from him. Their feet did not walk on the earth; their feet were buried ankle-deep; their legs seemed to sprout from the earth; rather, to be sunk into the earth, and they seemed to have to fight to keep from sinking entirely back into the earth. They looked as if they were riding waves of dirt, and some sank as far as their necks before they began to rise again.

"Stay away, son!" Mariyam said. Her little, dark face was twisted with agony. "We cannot touch you, although we long to hold you and kiss you. We are dead. You are alive."

"If I can see you, why can't I touch you?" Ras said.

"Because the distance between the living and the dead is
farther than that between sun and stars," Mariyam said. "It is the greatest distance in the world."

"Wilida!" Ras cried, hoping that she might not say the same thing. But Wilida moved away from him.

"Forget about her, son," Mariyam said. "She is dead, and you have a live woman to love. Forget about all of us."

"But I can't!" he said. "I grieve for you night and day."

"Don't do that, son," Yusufu said. "Or you will soon be with us, or might just as well be."

"What can you tell me?" Ras said. "If you can't touch me, you can talk to me. Tell me something I want--need--to know. You are dead; you have now seen the truths behind the walls of the world. You know the answers to my questions. Tell me!"

Yusufu grinned with the ghost of his living grin. He looked, at that moment, evil. Wilida, who had been staring at the ground, raised her head and looked at him as if she hated him.

Mariyam said, "The dead have nothing to tell you that they didn't tell you when they lived."

"And that is all they have to tell you," Yusufu said.

Ras heard Eeva calling him from a long way off. He looked around but could not see her. When he turned toward the ghosts, he saw them all sinking back into the earth. Mariyam was up to her neck, Yusufu was up to his chest, and Wilida was waist-deep. They struggled soundlessly but desperately. Janhoy tried to rise to his paws, but his body continued to descend, and soon only his maned and noiselessly roaring head was visible.

Ras rushed forward to pull them back out, but the earth seemed to spin them away faster than he could run. And when, suddenly, he found that he was making progress, he reached
empty ground. They were gone under. He fell on his face and dug into the earth with his fingers and felt the coarse thick hair on the top of Mariyam's head, and then it was gone. He wept and moaned and called on them to come back, and after a while he seemed to have gone asleep.

Blackness succeeded blackness.

20

THE HUNT

He was in a place so quiet that he could hear only the hum of no sound. He was standing on stone and in water not quite ankle-deep. His outsweeping hands felt nothing.

He moaned, wondering if he were dead, too, and if the ghosts had taken him with them.

A click made him jump, and the tiny flame that followed made him gasp. By the light, he saw a hand holding the cigarette lighter and the pale, anxious face of Eeva. Beyond were rough stone walls, a boulder in the shadows ahead, and more darkness. The water was a shallow stream about two feet across.

Eeva snapped the flame off. He felt her move against him. She spoke softly, as if the darkness and quietness subdued her. "Are you all right now, Ras?"

"I don't know. Where are we? How did we get here? What...?"

"First, you tell me what happened to you," she said. "You ran out the door, and the next I knew you were acting crazy; you
were talking to yourself and groveling on the ground."

Ras told her what had happened. She still did not understand how it could have come about until he mentioned drinking the water from the stone bird within the opening boulder.

Eeva said, "That drink must have contained LSD, or some kind of psychedelic drug. That's the only explanation I have for your hallucinations and your blacking out afterward. That also explains what happened to the Wantso and Sharrikt who dared face that thing so they could get religious revelations and power.

"This man that set all those statues and equipment on that island... I don't know why he did it. Unless he had something in mind for you eventually. Or maybe he wanted to play God with the natives and also wanted to keep anybody from trying to get out of the valley by the river, although anybody who tried that would have to be out of his mind.

"Anyway, he gave it to you so you would be in a suggestible state, easily handled. People that take LSD are often fantastically suggestible, you know. No, you wouldn't know. Anyway, he intended to tell you to kill me after you'd come under the influence of the drug. He suggested the ghosts to you, so you saw them. They all existed in your mind, Ras. But you fooled him by attacking before you were affected by the drug.

"I knew that this--this man--must be watching us through TV cameras... he's probably on the stone pillar in the lake... and he'd undoubtedly send a copter after me as soon as he knew we were on the island. He had us trapped, or so he thought.

"After you passed out--withdrew, I mean, because you could walk and would do what I asked you to--I got you into the boat. But you wouldn't co-operate very long; you'd paddle for
a minute and then stop, and I couldn't paddle the boat back up the river against the current by myself. In fact, even if you'd tried your best, I don't think we could have gotten back up.

"It didn't matter, because I heard the copter coming. There was only one thing to do. I didn't want to do it, but at least that way we just
might
get but alive. If we stayed on the island, I'd get killed for sure, and I didn't know what the men in that copter had in mind for you. Maybe they had different orders now.

"So I just let the current carry the boat, and I shoved hard to help it along. I steered it into the cave just as the copter came around the bend. The men in it must have seen us, because it came straight after us. It didn't come into the cave--the entrance was big enough to let it in but not big enough so they'd have a margin of safety--but it shone a searchlight on us. It was terrible. The river rushed and boiled, because the channel suddenly got narrower. Then we went around a bend and almost capsized when we hit the side. The boat began to toss more than ever, and I couldn't see a thing. We were almost washed off by the waves.

"I prayed--even though I don't believe in God and still don't--and then the boat hit something and we were rolled right off it into water. But the water was shallow, and I got us up on higher ground, a rock reef, that is. I used my lighter, it was in your bag, luckily, and I saw that we were at the entrance to a side tunnel, a big one. It must be the bed for another river, dry now. The boat was gone, carried off. I didn't care about it, because I didn't intend to get back on it. We got lucky; at least, I'll think so until something bad happens. We can follow this old river bed on up to... who knows?"

Her voice trembled as she ended, and suddenly she was
crying and hugging him. He held her for a while and then said that they should go on. He felt as if he had been weakened, but he was still strong enough to go for a long way.

"Tell me if you start to see or hear or feel anything unusual," she said. "Sometimes a psychedelic drug has a recurring effect."

He still felt somewhat dislocated, but any man who had seen what he had seen could expect this for a while.

His arm went around her shoulders, and they set off into the darkness. She could not stop shivering, she said, because she was so cold, cold not only from the cold of the wet stone but from fear. Every once in a while, she snapped on the light so that she could reassure herself there were no pits ahead, or to identify some obstacle that usually turned out to be a large boulder that the violence of the now-dead river had carried along its bed.

They walked for a time, the length of which they could not estimate, and occasionally drank from the little stream, which seemed to be pure. Ras said that their situation could be worse. At least, they did not have to worry about dying of thirst. Eeva did not laugh.

The time came when she insisted that she had to sleep. Despite the cold and the hunger pangs, she was so exhausted that she could no longer stay awake. They lay down on a rough, hard shelf of stone that seemed drier than the rock near the stream, and, though both awoke frequently, they did sleep. When neither was able to go back to sleep, they untwined from each other, rose stiffly, and began their tiresomely slow progress. However, they were able to proceed more swiftly than if there was no stream. As long as they were walking in water, Ras said, they did not have to worry about falling into abysses. Their feet were numbed
by the water and their legs ached with the cold, but it was the safest road to travel. Moreover, the water was moving slightly, hence was flowing downhill, and the fact that they were going uphill encouraged them. They had no logical reason to believe so, but they did believe that the uphill direction would end in their coming out above the ground. And they had only one route to follow.

To himself, he said that they couldn't
get
lost, yes, but they could
be
lost. If the source of the stream turned out to be a small hole in the stone wall, and they could go no farther... well, he would wait until this happened. He did not really believe that it would happen.

They shuffled on until Eeva said that she had to rest again. She stopped and snapped on the lighter again for a quick look around before much of the almost-expended fuel was gone. She gave, a cry and shrank back into Ras's arm. A few feet away, on top of a boulder, looking at first like a giant skeleton hand, were the bones of a bat.

Ras whooped with joy, and, shouting to her to keep the light on, ran ahead and around the corner. As he did so, he heard the distant roar he had hoped for. He called to her, and they walked for perhaps a hundred yards more. The roar increased, a faint light appeared ahead and grew larger and brighter, the air became so damp it was a cloud, and soon they were on the edge of a hole about forty feet wide and thirty feet high. The source of the stream was a number of trickles down the wall that converged to form a pool just inside the entrance. They were in the midst of a deafening roar and almost in solid water.