Olkeloki chanted something in a language older than Maasai. The smoke rising from the clay pot thickened. Then he turned to Oak and extended a hand.
"We are nearly done. Now the triangle is ready to be completed." He was having a hard time standing, Oak noted. A tear showed in the blue fabric of his toga and there was a flash of red beneath. "The seal lacks only the final ingredients."
Oak anxiously scanned the forest for signs of the senior warrior. "What ingredients? I'm not carrying anything."
"The most important three, of course. The points of the triangle. Why did you think I insisted you come with me, Joshua Oak? Because of your strength and cunning? Because of your good looks? Why do you think you were made known to me?" His voice had changed somehow, Oak thought. Not for the first time it struck him that Mbatian Olkeloki was something more than a man and something less than a deity.
Hell, maybe he was almost eight hundred years old.
"Give me your eye, Joshua Oak. The false eye you have made part of you, the eye of glass you showed me that night when we sat and talked together on the banks of the Great Ruaha. It is imbued with all you have seen, with the knowledge of all the days you have struggled to help your fellow man. With the brilliance of day, for only the right sort of light can seal in the Out Of." He uncurled his fingers.
Without hesitating, Oak reached up and carefully removed his right eye. Hadn't the old man said once that Oak would be on his right when he needed him? He felt the cool air swirl into the vacant socket and wondered what Merry must be thinking, how she must be reacting inside. He would improvise a patch to cover the cavity as soon as he could and he had replacement eyes back home.
"I don't know what the hell you're talking about, old man, but here."
At that moment Mbatian Oldoinyo Olkeloki looked Oak straight in the eye. Once before he'd looked at him like that. Once before, back on E Street, after the riot. Had looked into Oak's right eye, just as Oak had imagined looking back out of it. He'd known, Oak suddenly realized. Way back then, he'd known!
As Oak looked on speechlessly the old man took the glass orb and rubbed it between his palms, murmuring softly to himself with his eyes closed. Then he dropped it into the smoking pot. Oak heard it shatter when it struck bottom and winced instinctively.
But if the old man's first request had been unexpected, it was nothing compared to the second. He turned slowly to face Merry. She was staring at Oak and the vacant socket in his face. That was understandable. There'd been no reason for him to mention the prosthesis previously.
Just as there'd been no reason for her to mention hers to him. As he stood and gaped dumbly at her she lifted her right hand and calmly plucked her beautiful left eyeball out of her head.
She handed it wordlessly to Olkeloki. "He knew," she whispered, not to Oak but he heard anyway, "he knew about my eye, and he knew about yours. I saw a shetani on the road. It disguised itself to look like a dog but I saw it as it really was. It tried to run me off the pavement, tried to kill me." She turned to face him. "Because it knew I had something, Josh. Just as Mbatian knew. It tried to stop me but it didn't." She looked back at the old man. "And then," she murmured in wonder and amazement, "I decided to go to Washington."
The old man just smiled at her. He must have repeated the rubbing chant and dropped the second orb atop the first, but Oak didn't see him do it. He was too busy staring at Merry, the man with the good left eye gazing silently at the woman with the good right one and neither of them knowing whether to laugh or cry.
"Thank you, Merry Sharrow," Olkeloki was saying softly, "for your false eye, the eye of glass that I saw as I lay in the street outside your chiefs house. It is imbued with all you have seen, with all the knowledge of all the nights you have struggled to help your fellow man. With the knowledge of the dark where you have chosen to live, for only the right sort of light can seal in the Out Of."
Merry ignored him. She was talking to Oak, answered the question that did not need to be asked. "I was five years old. We were vacationing in the Cascades. I tripped and fell facedown on a log with a broken branch sticking out of it. That's all there was to it. I know how to use the muscles that surround the glass so well that people can't tell it from my real eye, but I still think it's one of the reasons I've always been so shy." Her voice rose slightly. "But you—you never…"
"No, I never told you. Just like you didn't tell me." Then a new thought made him turn from her to Olkeloki. "Wait a minute—there are three points to a triangle."
The old man nodded. "One has come from you, Joshua Oak, and the second from Merry Sharrow. Only the last remains to be added." So saying, he reached quickly upward with his fingers extended.
"No!" Both of the old man's eyes were real—he was sure of it. But even as he lunged at the laibon he knew he couldn't reach him in time.
Mbatian Oldoinyo Olkeloki's fingers did not touch his good right eye. They did not touch his good left eye. Instead they passed between and slightly above. As Oak and Merry stared, those long, limber digits penetrated an inch, two inches, a full three deep into the old man's forehead.
When he withdrew them they were cradling a third eye. The third eye that is more rumored than real, the extra eye that some people are thought to possess but which is never seen. He held it easily in his hand and as Oak stared at it he swore it winked back at him, for all that it had no eyelid.
Chanting softly, the old man rubbed it between his palms.
Then he stepped forward and with great dignity deposited it in the smoking clay vesicle. This time there was no echo of breaking glass. Oak found himself unable to turn away and barely able to breathe.
Something was coming out of the pot.
The smoke gave way to pure white radiance, and then to a milky, opalescent glow. The air shimmered around it as it intensified and strengthened and finally became too bright to look at directly. It faded a little and Oak found he could squint at it through slitted eye. A Lilliputian thermonuclear bomb had gone off inside the pot, producing a minuscule mushroom cloud only a few inches across. Undoubtedly it was something else entirely, but he was using the only frame of reference he had.
The cloud expanded and filled with laser-intense color: blue and purple, green and red, orange and yellow and gold. And something else, a hue so distinct and unique Oak had no word for it. It paralyzed him with its beauty. He and Merry might have stood there staring forever had Olkeloki not taken them gently by the hand to guide them back into the four-wheeler.
"Look away now, my friends. It is time to leave before it concludes itself."
Merry spoke as though she'd been drugged. "B-e-f-o-r-e w-h-a-t h-a-p-p-e-n-s-?" Oak was struggling with the ignition.
"Paasai Leleshwa."
She was about to ask him what it meant when movement in the trees caught her attention. "Look! It's Kakombe!"
That snapped Oak out of his haze. An eerie resonating hiss was coming from the glowing clay pot, which somehow had not yet disintegrated under the impact of all that brightness. Olkeloki didn't have to tell him not to look at it; he could feel the heat on the side of his face and knew it didn't come from the shrunken sun overhead.
Kakombe had burst free of the woods and was racing toward them, waving his ebony spear over his head. The sweat was pouring off him in streams.
Flooding out of the forest behind him were more shetani than even Olkeloki could imagine.
There were big shetani and small shetani, lanky gangling shetani and squat muscular shetani. The grossly fat waddled forward among columns of the anorexic, the top-heavy strode shoulder to shoulder alongside the faceless. They covered the earth like a blanket, crushing bushes, grass, trees, and anything else in their path. This was the horror of the Out Of in all its relentless power. There was no end to it. Oak tried not to stare but couldn't help himself. The tide of terror held its own hypnotic fascination.
There must have been a million of them, and every one was after Kakombe.
He let out a yell, one of tho
se high-pitched Maasai war whoops, and it galvanized Oak into action. Olkeloki piled into the back seat next to Merry. As soon as the old man's feet left the ground Oak slammed the car in gear and shot forward, the open door banging like a cymbal against the jamb. He swung around sharply until they were racing parallel to the sprinting senior warrior. The big trees were going down under the shetani now as the Spirits of the Earth lumbered out of the twilight. The ground shook under their weight. Dozens of smaller shetani, chittering and gesticulating, rode atop each narrow-bladed skull or dangled from those shovellike jaws.
No hope of fighting back anymore. All they could do was run and hope the four-wheeler didn't give out on them. Kakombe grabbed hold of the swinging door, timed his jump, and leaped into the seat next to Oak even as his ilmeet brother rammed the accelerator pedal into the floor. Sand and dirt flew in the faces of the nearest shetani, blinding them as Oak swerved out of the path of the onrushing wave and headed for the river.
Clutching the back of her seat to steady herself, Merry turned on her knees to stare out the back window. Her gaze was caught by a tower of intense colored light which was reaching for the sky like a tornado straining to break free. The tide of shetani parted to spill around the smooth-sided spire that was climbing heavenward from the belly of Olkeloki's little clay pot, those in back running over and trampling the ones up front.
Merry bounced off the ceiling once as Oak sent them careening wildly down the steep bank. As soon as they hit the sand he wrenched the wheel hard right. Swerving and sliding and picking up speed, they began to retrace their path back downriver.
"How far?" Oak asked Olkeloki. He had to yell in order to make himself heard over the stentorian hiss of the spire of light, which by now had climbed higher than the tallest tree, and over the hysterical babble of the shetani horde.
"Not far." The old man had joined Merry in looking out the back window. Now he spun and squinted forward. "It cannot be far. We do not have much time. I did not get the chance to thank all of you for rescuing me."
"Save it until the job's finished." In the rear-view mirror he saw the shetani spill into the sand river. Dozens were crushed by the weight of their fellows. Thousands more came skittering and running in mad pursuit of the fleeing car.
And something huge, something that dwarfed even the Spirits of the Earth, was coming after them under the sand.
He forced himself to focus on the river ahead. If they struck a hidden rock or concealed log now it would be fatal. Where the hell was the weakness, the tear in the fabric? The sand river seemed to stretch on to infinity, heat shimmering above the granular horizon. Some of the shetani were starting to gain on them, including the gargantuan unseen shape that was tunneling its way beneath the sand.
Abruptly the way was blocked. There was something in front of them. It was part shetani and part real and part something else, and it stood directly athwart the old tire tracks Oak was following. Even if he'd had the inclination to try to go around it, he didn't have time. It had emerged from beneath the sand directly in their path.
It was at least as big as the four-wheeler. Massive paws sought purchase in the bed of the river. The magnificent black mane seemed fashioned from smoke. The wind whipped at it, tearing off bits and pieces and making its owner appear as though he were on fire. Eyes that were red-rimmed coals glared at them. When it roared Oak could feel the sand shift beneath the wheels and when it snarled it showed fangs the length of the blood-stained wrench bouncing on the floor of the car. The sound chilled his blood and turned his muscles to jelly, but somehow he held on to the wheel.
Muscles went taut beneath titanic shoulders. Oak heard a weak voice whisper behind him: Mbatian Olkeloki.
"Keep going. Do not stop now, do not turn away, or we are finished."
The blockading figure loomed larger and larger, until it blotted out the sky and sun and sand river altogether. Oak's last words were, "The son of a bitch is as big as a house!"
Then it leaped at them, its mane blotting out the horizon, claws reaching for the hood, jaws agape. A long black tongue licked out to wipe away the windshield. The glass went without a sound, not so much shattered as vacuumed away. Oak threw up his hands to protect his face. As he did so an impossibly bright light filled his eye all the way back to his brain.
The last voice he heard was Olkeloki's sighing, "Ahhh—Paasai Leleshwa," and then, "This is my lion…"
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29
Oak awoke to the sight of flames, but contrary to his first thoughts it wasn't the world that was on fire. He tried to sit up, decided it would be better just to lie still for a few moments. No endless wave of giggling, taunting shetani was trampling him underfoot. No drooling half-faced abomination was chewing on his feet.
Furthermore, the flames were a reassuring red-orange instead of indigo-blue. They gave off warmth instead of cold. Smoke rose into a pale-blue sky and the sun shining down was an old friend newly won.
Eventually he decided to try sitting up. It worked, but it cost him. It felt like unseen thugs had worked him over from head to toe while he'd lain unconscious. Every muscle, every tendon and ligament in his body had been pounded like taffy, until the ache was something solid he felt he could spit out if only he knew how. His bones had been kneaded like dough.
The fire he'd seen was rising from the corpse of the four-wheeler. It lay twenty yards away in the middle of the sand river, its windshield gone, the frame bent and broken, a blackened, burned-out hulk the same color as its tires. Oak knew exactly how it felt. Those of their supplies that hadn't been cremated lay scattered all over the river. What had happened? He tried to remember.
The lion. The great black-maned lion. Olkeloki's lion, the old man had claimed. And the light, a wonderful, incomparably bright light the color of—the shade of—he was damned if he could remember. Olkeloki had called it something in Maasai.
No fanged colossus bestrode the sand now, and the only light was the gentle light of the real sun. He was alone on the riverbank with only the smoking Suzuki, bits and pieces of their personal possessions, and Africa for company. No shetani. Where were the shetani? In the Out Of.
Whatever that crazy, wonderful old man had done had worked.
Rising painfully, he brushed dirt from his pants. A long groove in the sand led from the burning skeleton of the four-wheeler to where he was standing. It occurred to him that his body was the missile which had cut the groove. Something had thrown him out of the car with tremendous and yet carefully controlled violence, to fetch him up against the riverbank. Several small bushes had further cushioned the impact.
There was something near his left foot. Ignoring the protests of his back, he bent to pick it up. It was a tan polyurethane bottle with a white cap and a familiar legend:
SOLARCANE SUNSCREEN
Too tired to laugh, he tossed it into the shrubbery. A couple of young male impala were pacing the far bank, nibbling at the fresh green grass that grew in the shade of the trees. Healthy grass, healthy trees. He wanted to kiss the one standing next to him. As he stared, one of the impala raised its delicate doelike head to give him the once-over before returning to its grazing. The burning four-wheeler they ignored. Oak watched them until they disappeared into the forest.
There ought to be a wake for the car, he mused. It had carried them in safety to places its builders had never dreamed of. Its death meant a long, hot walk back to the river camp.
Better look for the others. Could he walk? He put one leg in front of the other without falling down. Not bad. He tried again, steadying himself by holding on to a low-hanging branch that reached out over the river. The branch was already occupied by an agama, a bright turquoise blue and red lizard a foot long. It bobbed its head at him a few times before whirling to vanish back among the leaves. Its proper prey consisted of insects, not people.
He was debating whether to try sliding down the sandy bank when the bushes off to his right began to rustle as something big came towar
d him. All he could do was watch its approach, be it lion, leopard, shetani, or some other toothy antagonist. He was too tired to run and too weak to put up any resistance.
"We made it," Merry said as she saw him. He almost collapsed with relief. "We got through and the shetani didn't. Hey, you look terrible."
"Then I look exactly the way I feel." Kakombe was right behind her. He carried the shaft of Nafasi's miraculous spear. Oak wondered what had happened to the blade. His own knife and spear were probably contributing to the blaze in the four-wheeler.
She sat down on a fallen log. "I feel like I've swum to Vancouver and back." One hand kept brushing her hair out of her eyes. It kept falling back. "Ever have the feeling you've been dead and buried and just dug up by a pack of dogs?"
Oak looked out at their immolated vehicle. "Anybody seen Olkeloki?"
"We were hoping to find him with you." Merry followed his gaze. "Maybe—maybe he didn't make it through."
Kakombe made a face, spat out a bloody fragment of tooth. "The laibon said it was his lion."
"Yeah. I heard him say that too." To his great surprise, Oak found he was starting to choke up. An unaccustomed tenseness threatened to force tears from his eyes. He hadn't cried even when his father had died a few years back. "He always said everyone had their lion. I guess the size of the lion matches the size of the individual."
Merry sniffed. "I don't see any shetani."
"It is done," Kakombe said with finality. "The laibon did what had to be done. Paasai Leleshwa. He was the wisest among the Maasai. He will be missed in council."
Oak held back his own tears while Merry shed hers. Kakombe looked down at her disapprovingly. "The laibon would not have liked for you to cry over him."
"How the hell do you know?" Angrily she got to her feet, glared up at him as she wiped at her eye. She barely came up to his ribs. "My tears are between me and whoever I'm bawling about." Turning away from him, she walked over to Oak and sobbed into his chest.