Stumpf looked round at the third man. Cherrick's eyes were starting from his head.
"It's a curse," he said to Stumpf.
Locke laughed, unmoved by Cherrick's apprehension. He pushed Stumpf out of the way so as to face the old man, whose song-speech had now lowered in pitch; it was almost lilting. He was singing twilight, Stumpf thought: that brief ambiguity between the fierce day and the suffocating night. Yes, that was it. He could hear in the song the purr and the coo of a drowsy kingdom. It was so persuasive he wanted to lie down on the spot where he stood, and sleep. Locke broke the spell. "What are you saying?" he spat in the tribesman's crazy face. "Talk sense!" But the night-noises only whispered on, an unbroken stream.
"This is our village," another voice now broke in; the man spoke as if translating the elder's words. Locke snapped round to locate the speaker. He was a thin youth, whose skin might once have been golden. "Our village. Our land." "You speak English," Locke said.
"Some," the youth replied.
"Why didn't you answer me earlier?" Locke demanded, his fury exacerbated by the disinterest on the Indian's face. "Not my place to speak," the man replied. "He is the elder."
"The Chief, you mean?"
"The Chief is dead. All his family is dead. This is the wisest of us -”
"Then you tell him -”
"No need to tell," the young man broke in. "H e under stands you."
"He speaks English too?"
"No," the other replied, “but he understands you. You are… transparent."
Locke half-grasped that the youth was implying an insult here, but wasn't quite certain. He gave Stumpf a puzzled look. The German shook his head. Locke returned his attention to the youth. "Tell him anyway," he said, “tell all of them. This is our land. We bought it."
"The tribe has always lived here," the reply came.
"Not any longer," Cherrick said.
"We've got papers -” Stumpf said mildly, still hoping that the confrontation might end peacefully,"- from the government."
"We were here before the government," the tribesman replied.
The old man had stopped talking the forest. Perhaps, Stumpf thought, he's coming to the beginning of another day, and stopped. He was turning away now, indifferent to the presence of these unwelcome guests. "Call him back," Locke demanded, stabbing his rifle towards the young tribesman. The gesture was unambiguous. "Make him tell the rest of them they've got to go-”
The young man seemed unimpressed by the threat of Locke's rifle, however, and clearly unwilling to give orders to his elder, whatever the imperative. He simply watched the old man walk back towards the hut from which he had emerged. Around the compound, others were also turning away. The old man's withdrawal apparently signaled that the show was over.
"No." said Cherrick, "you're not listening." The colour in his cheeks had risen a tone; his voice, an octave. He pushed forward, rifle raised. "You fucking scum!"
Despite his hysteria, he was rapidly losing his audience. The old man had reached the doorway of his hut, and now bent his back and disappeared into its recesses; the few members of the tribe who were still showing some interest in proceedings were viewing the Europeans with a hint of pity for their lunacy. It only enraged Cherrick further. "Listen to me!" he shrieked, sweat flicking off his brow as he jerked his head at one retreating figure and then at another. "Listen, you bastards."
"Easy…" said Stumpf.
The appeal triggered Cherrick. Without warning he raised his rifle to his shoulder, aimed at the open door of the hut into which the old man had vanished and fired. Birds rose from the crowns of adjacent trees; dogs took to their heels. From within the hut came a tiny shriek, not like the old man's voice at all. As it sounded, Stumpf fell to his knees, hugging his belly, his gut in spasm. Face to the ground, he did not see the diminutive figure emerge from the hut and totter into the sunlight. Even when he did look up, and saw how the child with the scarlet face clutched his belly, he hoped his eyes lied.
But they did not. It was blood that came from between the child's tiny fingers, and death that had stricken his face. He fell forward on to the impacted earth of the hut's threshold, twitched, and died.
Somewhere amongst the huts a woman began to sob quietly. For a moment the world spun on a pin-head, balanced exquisitely between silence and the cry that must break it, between a truce held and the coming atrocity. "You stupid bastard," Locke murmured to Cherrick. Under his condemnation, his voice trembled. "Back off," he said. "Get up, Stumpf. We're not waiting. Get up and come now, or don't come at all."
Stumpf was still looking at the body of the child. Suppressing his moans, he got to his feet.
"Help me," he said. Locke lent him an arm. "Cover us," he said to Cherrick.
The man nodded, deathly-pale. Some of the tribe had turned their gaze on the Europeans' retreat, their expressions, despite this tragedy, as inscrutable as ever. Only the sobbing woman, presumably the dead child's mother, wove between the silent figures, keening her grief.
Cherrick's rifle shook as he kept the bridgehead. He'd done the mathematics; if it came to a head-on collision they had little chance of survival. But even now, with the enemy making a getaway, there was no sign of movement amongst the Indians. Just the accusing facts: the dead boy; the warm rifle. Cherrick chanced a look over his shoulder. Locke and Stumpf were already within twenty yards of the jeep, and there was still no move from the savages.
Then, as he looked back towards the compound, it seemed as though the tribe breathed together one solid breath, and hearing that sound Cherrick felt death wedge itself like a fish-bone in his throat, too deep to be plucked out by his fingers, too big to be shat. It was just waiting there, lodged in his anatomy, beyond argument or appeal. He was distracted from its presence by a movement at the door of the hut. Quite ready to make the same mistake again, he took firmer hold of his rifle. The old man had re-appeared at the door. He stepped over the corpse of the boy, which was lying where it had toppled. Again, Cherrick glanced behind him. Surely they were at the jeep? But Stumpf had stumbled; Locke was even now dragging him to his feet. Cherrick, seeing the old man advancing towards him, took one cautious step backwards, followed by another. But the old man was fearless. He walked swiftly across the compound coming to stand so close to Cherrick, his body as vulnerable as ever, that the barrel of the rifle prodded his shrunken belly.
There was blood on both his hands, fresh enough to run down the man's arms when he displayed the palms for Cherrick's benefit. Had he touched the boy, Cherrick wondered, as he stepped out of the hut? If so, it had been an astonishing sleight-of-hand, for Cherrick had seen nothing. Trick or no trick, the significance of the display was perfectly apparent: he was being accused of murder. Cherrick wasn't about to be cowed, however. He stared back at the old man, matching defiance with defiance.
But the old bastard did nothing, except show his bloody palms, his eyes full of tears. Cherrick could feel his anger growing again. He poked the man's flesh with his finger.
"You don't frighten me," he said, “you understand? I'm not a fool."
As he spoke he seemed to see a shifting in the old man's features. It was a trick of the sun, of course, or of bird shadow, but there was, beneath the corruption of age, a hint of the child now dead at the hut door: the tiny mouth even seemed to smile. Then, as subtly as it had appeared, the illusion faded again.
Cherrick withdrew his hand from the old man's chest, narrowing his eyes against further mirages. He then renewed his retreat. He had taken three steps only when something broke cover to his left. He swung round, raised his rifle and fired. A piebald pig, one of several that had been grazing around the huts, was checked in its flight by the bullet, which struck it in the neck. It seemed to trip over itself, and collapsed headlong in the dust.
Cherrick swung his rifle back towards the old man. But he hadn't moved, except to open his mouth. His palate was making the sound of the dying pig. A choking squeal, pitiful and ridiculous, which followed Che
rrick back up the path to the jeep. Locke had the engine running. "Get in," he said. Cherrick needed no encouragement, but flung himself into the front seat. The interior of the vehicle was filthy hot, and stank of Stumpf s bodily functions, but it was as near safety as they'd been in the last hour.
"It was a pig," he said, "I shot a pig."
"I saw," said Locke.
That old bastard He didn't finish. He was looking down at the two fingers with which he had prodded the elder. "I touched him," he muttered, perplexed by what he saw. The fingertips were bloody, though the flesh he had laid his fingers upon had been clean.
Locke ignored Cherrick's confusion and backed the jeep up to turn it around, then drove away from the hamlet, down a track that seemed to have become choked with foliage in the hour since they'd come up it. There was no discernible pursuit.
The tiny trading post to the south of Averio was scant of civilisation, but it sufficed. There were white faces here, and clean water. Stumpf, whose condition had deteriorated on the return journey, was treated by Dancy, an Englishman who had the manner of a disenfranchised earl and a face like hammered steak. He claimed to have been a doctor once upon a sober time, and though he had no evidence of his qualifications nobody contested his right to deal with Stumpf. The German was delirious, and on occasion violent, but Dancy, his small hands heavy with gold rings, seemed to take a positive delight in nursing his thrashing patient. While Stumpf raved beneath his mosquito net, Locke and Cherrick sat in the lamp-lit gloom and drank, then told the story of their encounter with the tribe. It was Tetelman, the owner of the trading post's stores, who had most to say when the report was finished. He knew the Indians well.
"I've been here years," he said, feeding nuts to the mangy monkey that scampered on his lap. "I know the way these people think. They may act as though they're stupid; cowards even. Take it from me, they're neither." Cherrick grunted. The quicksilver monkey fixed him with vacant eyes. "They didn't make a move on us," Cherrick said, “even though they outnumbered us ten to one. If that isn't cowardice, what is it?"
Tetelman settled back in his creaking chair, throwing the animal off his lap. His face was raddled and used. Only his lips, constantly rewetted from his glass, had any colour; he looked, thought Locke, like an old whore. "Thirty years ago," Tetelman said, “this whole territory was their homeland. Nobody wanted it; they went where they liked, did what they liked. As far as we whites were concerned the jungle was filthy and disease-infected: we wanted no part of it. And, of course, in some ways we were right. It is filthy and disease-infected; but it's also got reserves we now want badly: minerals, oil maybe: power."
"We paid for that land," said Locke, his fingers jittery on the cracked rim of his glass. "It's all we've got now." Tetelman sneered. "Paid?" he said. The monkey chattered at his feet, apparently as amused by this claim as its master. "No. You just paid for a blind eye, so you could take it by force. You paid for the right to fuck up the Indians in any way you could. That's what your dollars bought, Mr. Locke. The government of this country is counting off the months until every tribe on the sub-continent is wiped out by you or your like. It's no use to play the outraged innocents. I've been here too long…"
Cherrick spat on to the bare floor. Tetelman's speech had heated his blood.
"And so why'd you come here, if you're so fucking clever?" he asked the trader.
"Same reason as you," Tetelman replied plainly, staring off into the trees beyond the plot of land behind the store. Their silhouettes shook against the sky; wind, or night-birds.
"What reason's that?" Cherrick said, barely keeping his hostility in check.
"Greed," Tetelman replied mildly, still watching the trees. Something scampered across the low wooden roof. The monkey at Tetelman's feet listened, head cocked. "I thought I could make my fortune out here, the same way you do. I gave myself two years. Three at the most. That was the best part of two decades ago." He frowned; whatever thoughts passed behind his eyes, they were bitter. "The jungle eats you up and spits you out, sooner or later." "Not me," said Locke.
Tetelman turned his eyes on the man. They were wet. "Oh yes," he said politely. "Extinction's in the air, Mr. Locke. I can smell it." Then he turned back to looking at the window.
Whatever was on the roof now had companions.
"They won't come here, will they?" said Cherrick. "They won't follow us?"
The question, spoken almost in a whisper, begged for a reply in the negative. Try as he might Cherrick couldn't dislodge the sights of the previous day. It wasn't the boy's corpse that so haunted him; that he could soon learn to forget. But the elder – with his shifting, sunlit face – and the palms raised as if to display some stigmata, he was not so forgettable.
"Don't fret," Tetelman said, with a trace of condescension. "Sometimes one or two of them will drift in here with a parrot to sell, or a few pots, but I've never seen them come here in any numbers. They don't like it. This is civilisation as far as they're concerned, and it intimidates them. Besides, they wouldn't harm my guests. They need me."
"Need you?" said Locke; who could need this wreck of a man?
"They use our medicines. Dancy supplies them. And blankets, once in a while. As I said, they're not so stupid." Next door, Stumpf had begun to howl. Dancy's con soling voice could be heard, attempting to talk down the panic. He was plainly failing.
"Your friend's gone bad," said Tetelman.
"No friend," Cherrick replied.
"It rots," Tetelman murmured, half to himself.
"What does?"
The soul." The word was utterly out of place from Tetelman's whisky-glossed lips. "It's like fruit, you see. It rots." Somehow Stumpf's cries gave force to the observation. It was not the voice of a wholesome creature; there was putrescence in it.
More to direct his attention away from the German's din than out of any real interest, Cherrick said: "What do they give you for the medicine and the blankets? Women?"
The possibility clearly entertained Tetelman; he laughed, his gold teeth gleaming. "I've no use for women," he said. "I've had the syph for too many years." He clicked his fingers and the monkey clambered back up on to his lap. "The soul," he said, “isn't the only thing that rots."
"Well, what do you get from them then?" Locke said. "For your supplies?"
"Artifacts," Tetelman replied. "B owls, jugs, mats. The Americans buy them off me, and sell them again in Manhattan. Everybody wants something made by an extinct tribe these days. Memento mori." "Extinct?" said Locke. The word had a seductive ring; it sounded like life to him.
"Oh certainly," said Tetelman. "They're as good as gone. If you don't wipe them out, they'll do it themselves." "Suicide?" Locke said.
"In their fashion. They just lose heart. I've seen it happen half a dozen times. A tribe loses its land, and its appetite for life goes with it. They stop taking care of themselves. The women don't get pregnant anymore; the young men take to drink, the old men just starve themselves to death. In a year or two it's like they never existed." Locke swallowed the rest of his drink, silently saluting the fatal wisdom of these people. They knew when to die, which was more than could be said for some he'd met. The thought of their death-wish absolved him of any last vestiges of guilt. What was the gun in his hand, except an instrument of evolution?
On the fourth day after their arrival at the post, Stumpf's fever abated, much to Dancy's disappointment. The worst of it's over," he announced. "Give him two more days' rest and you can get back to your labours." "What are your plans?" Tetelrnan wanted to know.
Locke was watching the rain from the verandah. Sheets of water pouring from clouds so low they brushed the treetops. Then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, the downpour was gone, as though a tap had been turned off. Sun broke through; the jungle, new-washed, was steaming and sprouting and thriving again.
"I don't know what we'll do," said Locke. "Maybe get ourselves some help and go back in there." "There are ways," Tetelman said.
Cherrick,
sitting beside the door to get the benefit of what little breeze was available, picked up the glass that had scarcely been out of his hand in recent days, and filled it up again. "No more guns," he said. He hadn't touched his rifle since they'd arrived at the post; in fact he kept from contact with anything but a bottle and his bed. His skin seemed to crawl and creep perpetually.
"No need for guns," Tetelman murmured. The statement hung on the air like an unfulfilled promise. "Get rid of them without guns?" said Locke. "If you mean waiting for them to die out naturally, I'm not that patient." "No," said Tetelman, "we can be swifter than that."
"How?"
Tetelman gave the man a lazy look. "They're my livelihood," he said, “or part of it. You're asking me to help you make myself bankrupt."
He not only looks like an old whore, Locke thought, he thinks like one. "What's it worth? Your wisdom?" he asked. "A cut of whatever you find on your land," Tetelman replied.
Locke nodded. "What have we got to lose? Cherrick? You agree to cut him in?" Cherrick's consent was a shrug. "All right," Locke said, “talk."
"They need medicines," Tetelman explained, “because they're so susceptible to our diseases. A decent plague can wipe them out practically overnight."
Locke thought about this, not looking at Tetelman.
"One fell swoop," Tetelman continued. "They've got practically no defences against certain bacteria. Never had to build up any resistance. The clap. Smallpox. Even measles."
"How?" said Locke.
Another silence. Down the steps of the verandah, where civilization finished, the jungle was swelling to meet the sun. In the liquid heat plants blossomed and rotted and blossomed again.
"I asked how," Locke said.
"Blankets," Tetelman replied, “dead men's blankets."
A little before the dawn of the night after Stumpf's recovery, Cherrick woke suddenly, startled from his rest by bad dreams. Outside it was pitch-dark; neither moon nor stars relieved the depth of the night. But his body-clock, which his life as a mercenary had trained to impressive accuracy, told him that first light was not far off, and he had no wish to lay his head down again and sleep. Not with the old man waiting to be dreamt. It wasn't just the raised palms, the blood glistening, that so distressed Cherrick. It was the words he'd dreamt coming from the old man's toothless mouth which had brought on the cold sweat that now encased his body. What were the words? He couldn't recall them now, but wanted to; wanted the sentiments dragged into wakefulness, where they could be dissected and dismissed as ridiculous. They wouldn't come though. He lay on his wretched cot, the dark wrapping him up too tightly for him to move, and suddenly the bloody hands were there, in front of him, suspended in the pitch. There was no face, no sky, no tribe. Just the hands.