Stand on Zanzibar (62 page)

The monster laughed. “If I eat you, when will the day come which finds you so hungry you must eat your pet?”

“I don’t know,” answered Begi. “Any more than you know when the day will come when the giant whose back you ride on will need to eat you.”

“I don’t ride on anybody’s back,” declared the monster.

“In that case,” said Begi, “whose are the jaws I see closing on you? Whose is the voice I hear making the welkin ring?” He raised his blunt spear and pointed.

The monster looked out to sea and saw the black clouds looming down on the village and the waves rippling like the tongue of a hungry beast licking its chops and heard the sound of thunder like the grumbling of hunger.

“There is the giant whose back you have been riding on,” said Begi. “It’s called the sea. We men are like fleas compared to it, so we are usually safe—we would not even make a mouthful for such a colossus. Even so, sometimes it hurts us when we annoy it and it scratches. But you are as much bigger than I am as I am bigger than this bird on my head. And by the sound of it the sea is
very
hungry.”

The monster saw the flash of lightning like the gleam of white fangs in the mouth of the ocean, and he jumped up howling and ran away. He was never heard of again.

When the people came back to the village from where they had been hiding in the bush, they asked Begi, “Are you not a mighty warrior, to have driven away that horrible monster?”

So Begi showed them his blunt spear and the shield with a hole in it which he always carried, and they said, “What does this mean?”

“It means,” he explained, “that you cannot use a spear to kill a flea which is biting you, and a shield is no use against a monster that could gobble you up shield and all. There is only one way to win against both a flea and a monster: you must think better than either of them.”
4

BEGI AND THE GHOST

Once the people were much troubled by a
tlele-ki
(ancestral spirit) which terrified the women going to fetch water and made the children have bad dreams.

Begi’s father the chief called together the
kotlanga
(council of adults), and Ethlezi (lit. “sorcerer, medicine-man”) told him, “It is the spirit of your father, Begi’s grandfather.”

The chief was very upset. He asked Begi, “What can grandfather want with us?”

Begi said, “There is only one way to find out what a ghost wants. We will go and ask him. Or if you won’t, I will by myself.”

So he learned from Ethlezi the right way to speak politely to a ghost and went out at night to the dark lonely place where it had been seen. He said, “Grandfather, I have brought you palm-wine and goat’s blood. Eat if you will but talk to me.”

The ghost came and drank the wine and took the blood to make itself strong. It said, “Begi, here I am.”

“What do you want with us?” Begi asked.

“I keep watch on the village. I see that everything is going badly. The law-suits are not judged as I would have judged them. Young people are disrespectful to their elders. The girls go with boys they do not intend to marry. There is too much food so that people grow fat and lazy and there is so much palm-wine that they get drunk and sleep when they should be hunting.”

“My father the new chief judges law-suits differently because he is dealing with different people,” Begi said. “The young people learned how to talk to their elders from their parents, who were taught by you. The girls choose their own husbands now and when they marry they are happier than their mothers. As for being lazy and sleeping, why not, when we know that spirits like you keep watch over the village?”

The ghost had no answer to that and it went away.
5

BEGI AND THE WICKED SORCERER

Begi came to a village where everybody was afraid of a sorcerer called Tgu. He could make cows and women miscarry, he could set huts on fire without going near, he could make witch-dolls and if he stabbed with his special knife the footprint someone left in a muddy path the person would fall sick or die.

Begi said to Tgu, “I want you to help me kill a man whose name I cannot tell you.”

The sorcerer said, “Pay me. But you must bring something of his—a hair or a scrap of nail or some of the clothes he has worn.”

“I will bring you something of his,” said Begi. He went away and came back with some excrement. Also he gave the sorcerer a mirror and some valuable herbs he had gathered.

The sorcerer made a witch-doll and roasted it at the fire singing powerful magical chants. When it was dawn the people of the village came to see because they were afraid to come at night, the magic was so strong.

“The man will die,” said the sorcerer.

“Now I can tell you his name,” said Begi. “It is Tgu.”

The sorcerer fell on the ground in a fit, shrieking that he had been tricked. He said he was sure to die at once.

Begi took the chief of the village apart and said, “Wait one more hour. Then you can tell him the excrement belonged to a friend of mine called Tgu in another village. I am going away to laugh with my friend at the foolishness of the sorcerer.”
6

BEGI AND THE STEAMSHIP

(
Author’s note: this must be a very late accretal to the mythos.
)

Begi went to the seaside and there he saw a big ship with smoke coming out. A white man from the ship met him on the shore and talked with him.

Begi said, “Welcome. Be my guest while you are here.”

The white man said, “That is a foolish offer. I am coming to live here.”

Begi said, “Then I will help you build your hut.”

The white man said, “I will not live in a hut. I will live in a house of iron with smoke coming out of the top and be very rich.”

Begi said, “Why do you wish to come here?”

The white man said, “I am going to rule over you.”

Begi said, “Is it better living here than where you come from?”

The white man said, “It is too hot, it rains, it is muddy, I do not like the food and there are none of my own women.”

Begi said, “But if you want to come and live here it must be better in some respect. If you don’t like the weather, the food or the women, then you must think it is better governed than your own country, and my father the chief rules us.”

The white man said, “I am going to rule you.”

Begi said, “If you have left your own home you must have been sent away. How can a man who has been sent from home into exile rule better than my father the chief?”

The white man said, “I have a big steamship with many strong guns.”

Begi said, “Let me see you make another.”

The white man said, “I cannot.”

Begi said, “I see the way of it. You are good at using what other people have made and nothing else.” (
Author’s note: it is an insult in Shinka to say that a man cannot make anything, as a self-respecting adult is expected to build his own house and carve his own furniture
.)

But the white man was too stupid to see Begi’s point and he came and lived here anyway.

However, after a hundred years he learned better and went home.
7

continuity (29)

I BEG TO REPORT

The doctor in charge of Donald wanted to keep him in the hospital overnight. It took him an hour’s arguing and the threat of reporting to his agency that he had been incarcerated before they reluctantly sent him back to his hotel in an official car, with escort. By now, scores of reports based on rumour must have been circulated telling how Sugaiguntung had been rescued from the mucker; Engrelay Satelserv might well have had the story from Deirdre Kwa-Loop. He didn’t care. On the first day of his mission he had succeeded more completely than those who sent him—let alone he himself—could ever have dreamed. What counted was not getting the story on the beam, but his discovery that the man on whom the whole Yatakangi optimisation programme pivoted was afraid as much of its possible success as of its probable failure.

For fear that his identity and rôle in saving Sugaiguntung might have become widely known, he insisted on being sent up to his room by a back route avoiding the main lobby. They found a baggage elevator and no one saw him except an incurious porter. Having got rid of his escort, he made sure that the door between his room and Bronwen’s was bolted on his side, and opened his communikit.

One of its circuits could be adjusted to detect bugging devices. He found one sunk in the wooden surround of the closet. Not caring about subtlety, he played the flame of his pocket lighter on it for a minute or so. A cautious reporter, he reasoned, would be expected to want to keep his exclusive stories to himself. There was also a tap on the phone, but that he didn’t worry about; it was inactive except when the instrument was in use.

Effortfully, he composed two messages, one in writing, to be read over the phone, the other whispered into the hidden device which would impose it, scrambled, as a parasite modulation on the phone signal. The former badly recounted that a mucker had attacked Sugaiguntung and he had dealt with him. The latter said that if anybody cared the scientist was riper than a plum and ought to be picked.

He put in for a call to the nearest available relay satellite and was told he would have to wait. He waited. Eventually the connection was made and he sent the double message. While he was thus occupied he heard Bronwen’s door open and shut and the door between the rooms was tried, very gently.

The job done, he shut off the phone and put the communikit away. They had fed him at the hospital before letting him go; he wasn’t hungry. He thought about a drink or a joint, and lacked the enthusiasm. He undressed and climbed into bed.

Lying in the dark, ambushing him, was a young man with his throat bleeding a river.

In a short while he got up. There was a rim of light around the door to Bronwen’s room. He unbolted it and pushed it open. She was sitting on the bed, naked, in the full lotus posture, as composed as if she had been waiting for him.

“Forgive me,” she said. “I was very rude to you earlier.” She began to unfold her limbs like a flower opening its petals to the sun. “You must have sensed that you were needed.”

Donald shook his head blankly. By now she was off the bed and approaching him with a slight sway of her hips.

“Is it true what I’ve been told—that you saved Dr. Sugaiguntung from a mucker?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“You sensed that you were needed for that, didn’t you? It was why you left me all of a sudden. You have the power we call”—he didn’t catch the word, which was long and assonantal, more likely to be Sanskrit than modern Hindi.

“No,” Donald said. Standing unclothed in the middle of the floor, he began to shake. He had thought it very hot tonight, but he was chilled to his marrow, shivering and shivering. “No,” he said again. “The only power I have is the power to kill, and I don’t want it. It makes me terribly afraid.” His teeth came together after the last word and started to chatter.

“It is always like this when you are used as the channel for a divine force,” Bronwen said, as though she had spent her entire life studying the question. “It overloads the body and mind. But you are lucky. It could have burned you out.”

Not burned, frozen. Wouldn’t it have been better if the mucker had killed Sugaiguntung, perhaps me too? What am I going to make him do?

But that had passed out of his control.

Bronwen was reaching up with professional detachment to place her palm on the crown of his head. After that she touched him lightly on the forehead, throat, heart, navel, pubis and coccyx: the seven chakras. She said, “The force has gone from your belly to your head. You are thinking of things that never happened. Let me draw it back.”

She dropped gracefully on one knee and addressed his body with her mouth.

*   *   *

Eventually the phone’s buzz, which at first he did not recognise, it being shriller and shorter than its counterpart at home, dug him from the sleep into which Bronwen’s violent love-making had driven him. He clambered out of bed and stumbled into his own room, hand groping for the switch.

Muzzy, he looked at the instrument blurred in darkness and waited for the screen to light. It was long moments before he realised there was none, and he should have said something to indicate the connection had been made.

“Uh—Hogan,” he muttered.

“Delahanty!” an excited voice exclaimed. “Congratulations, Hogan! Engrelay Satelserv never expected anything like this big a story!”

“Christ, was that all you wanted to say? It’s two-thirty anti-matter here.”

“Yes, I realise that. Sorry. But I thought you deserved to be told at once how delighted we are. Of course, what you filed will require some editing, but…”

He paused. Donald waited passively for him to finish.

“You got that? I said it’ll require editing!”

Oh.
Donald made a long arm and picked up his communikit, setting it alongside the phone. There would be a message coming through blipped and scrambled, which the machine would play back afterwards in comprehensible English. But things like the code phrases he had been taught seemed childish and irrelevant in the wake of the mucker’s death.

“I catch,” he said. “Sorry. I’m exhausted.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Delahanty said. “Taking on a mucker—it’s incredible! And of course it was a complete beat for us because the day’s official releases haven’t included it. Gone to top level for a decision, probably. All we had was a third-hand rumour before your story hit. We’re playing it for all it’s worth—and you will be too, naturally.”

“I asked for a private interview,” Donald said absently.

“Excellent! Make sure you get film, too—our regular stringer will set that up for you, I’m certain.” He wandered off into a welter of fulsome praise until eventually he cut the circuit.

Relieved, Donald altered the controls of the communikit and listened to the clear-language version it had automatically deciphered from the incoming signal.

Delahanty’s voice, reduced to bare recognisability by the frequency-chopping effect of the blip process, said, “Hogan, I took it straight to Washington to be computed and the verdict is that he must be got out as fast as possible. There’s never been a whisper of disaffection concerning him before, and he might change his mind.