Lord Tyger (5 page)

And then the four parts, the five parts, of him faded to become one, and this one, down to the darkest, deepest part of him, flesh and ghost, was wholly part of that before his eyes.

He had made no attempt during the first day of spying to approach the Wantso. During his next ten visits, he had stayed hidden. A week had separated successive visits, because Ras had not wanted to upset his parents. Even so, the Wantso were far away for him to travel from his home to their village, observe them for several hours, and then travel as swiftly as he dared and reach home before dusk. He always found Yusufu and Mariyam looking out the windows or over the veranda of the tree house. He was always scolded, and he always tried to put off the whipping with a story of being treed by a leopard or delayed because he was stalking game which, unfortunately, got away. He always got whipped, and if he flinched or yelled when the whip struck, he was given extra lashes.

Then, suddenly, on his eleventh birthday, Yusufu and Mariyam had said that he could stay out all night or as long as he wished. He had not understood why they had changed their minds. Mariyam had finally told him that Igziyabher had allowed this.

Mariyam seemed to talk directly to God. Ras spent much time spying on her, because he hoped to see her and God talking face to face. He was always disappointed. She talked only to
Yusufu or to herself, when Ras was not around.

Thereafter, when he felt like it, which was frequently, he would be gone several days, sometimes a week. He explored all the country south of the plateau as far as the point where the river became the Many-Legged Swamp. He built a raft to carry him through the swamp, but, just before he launched it, he was bitten on the ankle by a viper.

He almost died there. He lay on the raft, onto which he had jumped, and suffered pain as if ants were crawling through his veins and arteries and stinging him with every other step forward and they had crawled into his head and were eating his brain. After a while, his heart beat out agony as a drummer beats out a message of horror. Paralyzed, he could think only of the pain, of what might come to eat him while he was defenseless, and of how his parents would suffer if he never came back.

The sun and the stars shone on him four times. Various insects took great liberties with him, but the ants did not find him, the crocodiles missed him, the vultures and ravens did not see him, and finally he was able to drag himself off the raft and under a tree on the islet. After two more days, during which he managed to eat enough to give him some strength--his turn to eat the insects, after they had covered his body with bites and stings--he made his way slowly homeward. It took him three days and half a night to do this.

For some time thereafter, he contented himself with staying close to home or going up into the hills to play with the gorilla young. After he got his full strength back, he became footloose again, but decided to put off trying the Many-Legged Swamp for a while.

Besides, the Wantso so intrigued him that he forgot about the swamp.

Just by eavesdropping and observing, he was able to understand some of the Wantso language. It was a curious speech. It used four levels of pitch to distinguish the meanings of words that had the same sounds. It also used pitch to indicate whether something had happened, was happening, would happen, or took place in the Land of the Ghosts.

The Land, he came to understand, was the plateau where he lived. This explained why the Wantso never went any farther north than the foot of the cliffs on top of which was the plateau.

Making the first direct contact with a Wantso was not easy, because he wanted to speak to one his own age. The men carried spears and clubs and looked as if they would use them without hesitation. The women seldom left the village except to dip water from or wash in the river or to work in the fields. The fields were walled off at one end and were always guarded. The children would sometimes go with the women when they went into the jungle to dig for roots or to pick fruit and berries. Then the children were watched too closely by the mothers or by the men who accompanied them as guards.

However, the children did play along the banks of the peninsula. There were many trees and thick bushes on the banks, and it was in the bush that Ras hid to spy.

Here Ras surprised Wilida. She was an attractive and happy little girl who was very active in the games that the children played in the bushes. Ras, having made up his mind to make friends with them, waited until they were playing hide-and-seek and Wilida had run off toward a bush near which he was hiding.
Grinning so that she would know he was friendly, he rose and stepped out to bar her path. She stopped suddenly. Her hands went up and out before her, as if she would push, not him, but the vision of him, away. She turned gray under the brown, her eyes rolled, and she fell to the ground.

Ras was distressed. He had not known that anyone could be so frightened of anything, and especially of him.

He squatted by her, and when he saw her eyelids flutter open, he raised his finger to his lips. Her mouth worked silently. He was forced to clamp his hand over her mouth to kill the scream churning to get out. She rolled her eyes but did not struggle. She listened to him say the few phrases of Wantso he knew. The gray faded away. Presently, she nodded when he asked her if she would keep quiet if he removed his hand, although she could not move her head much because his hand was pressing it into the dirt.

He took his hand off, and she screamed loudly. Ras fled, and in his panic he plunged into the river and swam to the other side. Luckily, no crocodiles were around at that time. As soon as he was hidden by a bush from those on the other bank, he watched. Men were running up and poking in the bushes with their spears. They talked loudly to each other and did not seem eager to uncover anything.

At home, Ras was so silent and inactive that Mariyam asked what was troubling him. He answered that he was thinking, that was all. And so he was, but his thoughts hurt him. Why would Wilida, or any of the Wantso, be so frightened of him? Was he truly ugly or monstrous? He did not think so. If he were, would he be loved by Yusufu and Mariyam so much?

When he came back six days later, he saw that the children were again playing in the bushes. Ras crossed the river and waited until he could catch Wilida alone again. This time, he held his hand close to her mouth after her promise to keep quiet. Wilida did not scream.

They talked, or tried to talk, for some time. She stopped shivering like a monkey trying to pass a big seed. Before they parted, she even managed to smile. But once she was out of his reach, she ran off swiftly. However, she did not cry out or tell anybody of him, as far as he could determine. And she did meet him behind a bush at the promised time. First, he scouted around carefully to make sure that she was not setting an ambush. They talked with less difficulty this time, and during the next five times they met, he progressed rapidly in Wantso.

The sixth meeting, Wilida brought a friend, a girl named Fuwitha. Fuwitha would not come close the first meeting, or even speak to him. But, the second time, she lost her fear and joined in helping him learn the language.

It was three weeks before Ras met some of the other children. They came silently, except for Wilida and Fuwitha, who were very proud of their friendship with the white ghost-child. By then, Ras understood that he was supposed to be the spirit of a dead boy. This was why Wilida had fainted when she first saw him and why the others had been so apprehensive. But their curiosity, plus the assurances of the two girls, had brought them.

They squatted down to talk to him, to giggle nervously at his strange mouthings of their speech, and to reach out after many hesitations to touch him. He smiled and talked softly, saying that he would not harm them and that he was a good ghost.

This was the day he met Bigagi, who was supposed to be Wilida's husband when they came of age.

Later, he began to play their games with them, although he was hampered because he had to keep out of sight of the adults and older children in the fields. He became more proficient in Wantso. He wrestled with the boys, all of whom he bested easily. They did not seem humiliated. A living person could not expect to outwrestle a ghost.

He entertained them with his stories of the Ghost-Country and of his ape mother and ape foster father. His insistence that he was the son of Igziyabher, or Mutsungo, as the Wantso called the chief spirit, the Creater-Spider, awed them. At first.

Bigagi asked him why he wasn't dark-skinned and woolly-haired. Mutsungo had made the First People, from whom the Wantso were descended, out of spider webs and mud, and they had all been brown-skinned, thick-lipped, and kinky-haired. The Shaliku, who lived on the other side of the Swamp, were the offspring of Wantso and crocodiles. But if Mutsungo was indeed the father of Ras, why wasn't he like the Wantso? Or at least half spider?

Ras was a match for his mother when it came to making up stories on the spot. He replied that he wasn't the son of Mutsungo but of Igziyabher, who had kicked Mutsungo from the chair of godhood and seated himself thereon. And Ras was white because Igziyabher had washed the brown out of his skin as a sign that he was, indeed, Igziyabher's only son.

This upset the children, not so much that Ras was the son of God as his statement that Mutsungo had been kicked out as chief spirit. Ras added that Mutsungo now dwelt in the Many-Legged Swamp, where he was king of the spiders.

But when he saw that they were disturbed and that they might question their parents about it and so might reveal where they got this idea, he laughed and said that he had told all this merely to entertain them. He was the son of Mutsungo, but he did not look like a spider because Mutsungo had wanted him to look like his mother. She was an ape, and that was why his lips were thin and his hair was straight. And he was white because his mother had conceived by a lightning stroke sent by Mutsungo, and everything in her womb had turned white. The thin nose resulted from Mutsungo grabbing him too hard when he had pulled him out of the mother's womb by his nose.

The story of the lightning stroke was Mariyam's; the other details, Ras's.

Bigagi said that this could all be true, but Ras, whom he called Lazazi, to fit the sounds and structure of Wantso, was still a ghost-child.

Ras bristled and had to control himself to keep from violently arguing with Bigagi. Wilida smoothed out their tempers then by saying that perhaps this spirit-father of Ras's was chief spirit in the land to the north (she tactfully avoided saying Ghost-Land) while Mutsungo was chief spirit in this land. Just as Basama, the Crocodile-Spirit, was chief spirit of the Shaliku, and so on. The whole question could be settled when they grew up, and then they would be able, if they had the courage, to go south on the river, through the Swamp, through the land of Shaliku, and to the end of the river and the world, where the river plunged into the land beneath the earth. Here, on an islet just before the entrance to the land beneath the earth, lived Wizozu.

Wizozu was a very very very ancient man who knew everything and who would answer a question--for a price. He had lived forever and would live forever, and he was a terrible old man.

Ras was to hear more of Wizozu, and eventually he decided that when he became a man he would journey to the end of the river and the world and ask Wizozu several questions that no one seemed to be able to answer.

He was going to question his parents about him, but since neither had ever mentioned anything like Wizozu, he thought he would keep silent. They would suspect that he had been talking to the Wantso, and he did not want that. Although they no longer tried to keep him from wandering, they still warned him against the wicked and dangerous Wantso. Igziyabher would not like it if He knew that Ras went near them. When Ras became older, then he could approach them.

Sometimes, Ras would pack six of his rubber balls in his antelope-hide bag and take them to the meeting-place. The children were amazed. They knew nothing of rubber, and asked him where the balls came from. He said that they had appeared mysteriously in the tree house one morning. His foster father had said they were a gift from Igziyabher. Allah, rather, since that was the day scheduled for Arabic to be spoken.

Ras showed the children the juggling tricks with the balls that he had learned from Yusufu. He also performed backflips and somersaults. He showed them how he could hit a small target at forty feet with a knife.

Sometimes, Ras performed tricks on the tightrope three feet above the ground between two trees. He wanted to put the
rope much higher to impress them, but he did not want to be exposed to the view of the women in the fields or the guards on the wall across the neck of the peninsula. He chose a place where the ground sloped down to the river. There, while the children squatted to watch, he walked back and forth from tree to tree and then stopped in the middle and backflipped, turning over once and landing on his feet on the rope.

The wide-eyed children would clap their hands over their mouths to keep from making so much noise they would attract the women or older children.

Ras would cap all his tricks by walking on his hands across the rope while he bounced a ball between his feet. The Wantso children wanted to try ropewalking, of course. Some were eventually able to get from one tree to the other. Many fell, and some hurt themselves, and then Ras was worried that they would run screaming to their parents.

No one ever told. Ras was their secret. Though they must have swelled almost to rupture with the desire to talk, they managed to keep silent for several years. Ras, not their own self-control, was mainly responsible for this. He told them that he would take any betrayer to Ghost-Land with him. Moreover, Igziyabher, his Father, would destroy the village and kill everyone in it with lightning.

The children turned gray and speechless at this threat. Wilida, however, managed to say, "But if we're all killed, we'll be ghosts anyway, and we'll all be with you in Ghost-Land."

"No, you won't," Ras said quickly. "I'll send the one who talks to the underworld, in the big cave into which the river empties, and he'll be tortured forever by demons and monsters
and won't ever get to see his friends or parents again."