Lord Tyger (47 page)

"Where did you get her?"

"She was on a safari in Kenya with her father, who is, by the way, a professor. But he's not absent-minded or old. You can't have everything, however; you have to compromise. I was happy to get a girl who seemed to be very close to the specifications."

Ras did not know what he was talking about unless he meant that the abducted girl was similar to the girl in The Book.

Boygur said, slowly, "So you climbed up the side of the rock? Who would have believed that it could be done? Yet, The Hero would have done it, so why not you? Really, I haven't failed, after all. You have done everything The Hero has done, or at least you could do it if you had to. I regret that you've never had a chance to fight a lion with just a knife or make friends with an elephant or killed a gorilla in hand-to-hand combat. But you're young..."

Ras got to his feet and said, "And you are old, and have lived long beyond your time. You should have died at birth. You have killed, or caused to be killed, my oldest brother, and you have caused my other brother to become an idiot and to live sick and cold and wretched--oh, how wretched and lonely he must have been!--and then you killed him. You caused my true parents to die of grief. You killed my second mother, Mariyam,
whom I loved dearly. You made me kill many innocent Wantso, and your men killed the rest. You robbed me of my true life with my true parents. You have made me into something modeled after a thing that never existed. You are as evil as a man can be."

Boygur shouted, "What are you talking about? I love you! I have always loved you! Believe me, I grieved because I couldn't take the place of Yusufu and personally direct you in every move, see you made no mistakes and became as heroic a man as the man The Master wrote about! I made you into a man like no other!"

"Yusufu was right," Ras said. "There is no use talking to you. You do think you are God."

He jerked Boygur to his feet and grabbed the ropes binding his feet. He dragged Boygur all the way to the rim while Boygur screamed, "No! No! No!"

Then Ras picked Boygur up and raised him above his head. Boygur stopped screaming and said, "You have to understand, Ras! My son, my son, let me explain!"

"You are no god, and I am not your son," Ras said. "I would like to make you pay for all you've done. But you can't make people pay for their evil. You can't do anything with evil people except stop their evil forever."

"I'm not evil!" Boygur screamed. "I'm not evil! You can't make a dream come true without some suffering, and..."

Ras growled and said, "Shut up! Would you foul the air even as you die!"

His muscles were tensed for the heave, but he waited. A fish-eagle, dark and claw-beaked and with eyes like arrow-points, was gliding downward toward a point directly below
him. Ras waited, although he did not know why. He must have been unconsciously estimating the speed and angle of the fish-eagle's descent and the speed with which the old man would fall, because, suddenly, still not knowing why he had waited and now acted, he tossed the old man outward. Boygur screamed. The eagle screamed and banked away, but it was too late. The old man, trailing a shriek as if it were fire streaming from him, fell onto the eagle and at the same time seized it. His hands were tied together before him, and when he had put his arms out, he had slipped the rope over the head of the eagle and pulled it into his breast as if he were making love to it. The eagle fought with beak and claws; its wings flapped as if it would carry itself and Boygur across the lake to the shore and safety. But both fell swiftly, feathers flew, the shrill scream of Boygur and the harsh scream of the eagle mingled and became fainter. The two bodies became one, and then the one was a spout of water and widening circles afterward.

23

THE PASSPORT

The plane bumped as its pontoons struck waves, and then the bumps were gone and the lake was dropping away.

Ras was in a seat next to the window. The wing, just ahead of him, bisected the waters below and cast a shadow ahead of it on the glittering waters. The plane turned, and the sunbeams spun off the whirling tip of the propeller like a jackal shaking off water after a swim.

Below, getting smaller with each second, were five planes, three with pontoons and two amphibians. By the beach, half-hidden now by the big trees, were the tents of those who had come in on the airplanes. On the beach was a helicopter, and down the valley a flash of white revealed another airplane.

The people had invaded his world as if the sky had been uptilted and poured them in. There were anthropologists, zoologists, military and civil service men from Ethiopia, policemen from Ethiopia and South Africa, reporters from many lands, publishers' agents, movie people from the United States,
England, and Italy, and others whose business was unstated and may have been nothing but curiosity.

It had happened so swiftly, and so many men and women, all talking at once, had arrived. He was confused. However, he enjoyed it, and he did not let them hurry or push him. He knew, even when he did not really understand their reasons for being here, that most of them regarded him as a block of wood to be carved into an image that would give them access to some power or spirit they desired. Or perhaps they wanted to ride him to goals of their own, as he had ridden that crocodile into the river. If they
were
thinking this, they would find their knives turned in peculiar ways by the block of wood, and the riders would find that the crocodile had become a python coiling around them.

Others did not regard him so much as an inanimate object or wild beast as a man of whom they were jealous. His body, his face, his ease of manner, seemed to make some of the men envious. However, many of the women did not conceal their admiration of him. One, a beautiful young redhead, had given him a look that he had at once recognized, and he had returned the look in kind. Eeva had seen this exchange and had, for the first time, shown jealousy. Perhaps it was this that had caused her to tell Ras that they should get married as quickly as possible. She did love him now, and that was reason enough to get married. She was older, but that would be advantageous for them, since he needed an experienced woman to guide him in that bewilderingly complex world outside.

She was his agent and personal manager now, and she would protect his interests better if she were his wife. The legal reasons were, like everything else outside, difficult to understand, and she
could explain only a few at this time. But he could trust her.

Ras had nothing definite to back his feeling that she was also protecting her own interests by marrying him. He did not care. If she wanted to marry, they would marry.

Eeva had a contract to write a book about her adventures in the valley and another to write Ras's "life." She also was "dickering" with some producers' agents about a film based on his life, with him playing the lead.

She had told him that the books and the movie would pay enough to enable them to live more than comfortably for a long, long time, perhaps for the rest of their lives. Even after "the government" took its lion's share of the money. She explained about taxes, and he felt for the first time a rage against "civilization." She tried to cool him off and said that if they hired some good, that is, expensive, that is, learned, that is, tricky, lawyers, they could get some of the share back from the lion.

"If you have to pay 'the government' an increasingly larger share the more you make," Ras said, "why not just make enough money to get what you need to enjoy life?"

"That's good common sense, and many people have talked about doing just that," Eeva said. "But hardly anybody ever does this. Almost everybody works hard to make as much as they can even if they know they'll only get a small part of it."

She added, "It's the custom," and Ras became happy again on hearing these magic words. Other people had to obey their customs; he would work within them when he had reason to do so and outside them when he wished.

Now the plane was wheeling again. They were above the dark fish-eagles and the white-flashing pelicans and the pink
smoke of the flamingos on the shore. They rose above the top of the rock pillar, and he could see the skeleton of the great helicopter and the blackened and smashed quonsets and the white rope still dangling from the window, like a worm crawling from a corpse. Or like white blood from the wound of a black ghost.

The body of Boygur had gone under the blue surface and never appeared. The fish-eagle had floated in to shore and Ras had buried its body beside the grave of Mariyam without knowing why he did so.

Eeva had come to him after that and told him that they could have waited a few days and by then Boygur would have been arrested. He had evaded exposure for years, but he had done too much to get away with it any longer. His sons had found out about the enormous sums taken from his personal fund and the holdings. Helicopters were toys that only a billionaire or a nation could afford to buy in quantities. Moreover, investigation by Boygur's sons and his ex-wife had disclosed the money being spent on the private army he used and the bribes he spent to ensure being left alone. Several governments had learned about some of his activities in the past. For instance, he had stocked the valley with gorillas and chimpanzees, which were not naturally found in Ethiopia, and with zebras and other animals that the valley had lacked. He had also imported leopards, because the Wantso and Sharrikt had killed off almost all the native leopards. He had taught the foreign leopards to be man-eaters and had overstocked the valley with them:

His activities over the years and his recent efforts to keep others out of the valley, especially the disappearance of the Rantanens, had been the final blow to fell his empire. Thus, Ras,
Eeva, and Yusufu could have hidden for a few days, and the world, pouring into the valley, would have taken care of Boygur.

Ras was glad that he had not waited.

He looked out the window to the south. The green forest and the green-brown plains ran between the black cliffs for some miles. The river writhed bluely, its head white with spume and smoke where it looped over the edge of the plateau.

Beyond and below was the land where the Wantso lived--had lived. And then the valley and the river curved together around the black cliffs, and he could not see as far as the Many-Legged Swamp.

On the other side of the swamp, Gilluk, the Sharrikt king, was being visited, inspected, explored, and pried into by several of the newcomers who called themselves "anthropologists." One had already declared that the divine sword of the Sharrikt was a Crusader's and that it had somehow fallen into the hands of the Sharrikt before they had come into the valley, but another man disputed this. Zoologists were prowling the land. One said that the crocodiles were a new
species,
perhaps a representative of a new
genus,
whatever those words meant. The valley had harbored many kinds of animals that had died out elsewhere or perhaps existed only here.

The man who had said this had also said that Ras was the only living member of the species
Homo Tarzanus.

He shifted in his seat and sighed and thought of the ashes of Wilida, and the grave of Mariyam, and Bigagi in Baastmaast's belly, and Janhoy's head on a pole.

Then the plane rose above the tops of the cliffs. He gasped and squeezed Eeva's arm so tightly that she cried out. It was true!
The sky was not blue stone that bounded the valley.

Something happened. He heard it plainly. It was the breaking of the strand of flesh that tied him to the valley. Or it was the sky unrolling like a scroll to show him the vastness and glory of the world beyond the cliffs. Mariyam had described the sky unrolling and described a scroll, and now he saw what she meant.

His eyes drifted in tears. A sob swelled his chest.

Eeva patted his hand.

Yusufu, in the seat across the aisle, called in Amharic, "This is only the beginning, O son! You will see many marvels, and perhaps the most wondrous of all will be that great city at the end of our journey--Los Angeles."