"Nigus!" Ras tried to say. "Nigus! Help me!"
Nigus, Amharic for emperor, was Ras's name for the gorilla. The five-hundred-pound monster was chief of the little band now, but he had been Ras's playmate eight years before. He had been a good-tempered little fellow. Ras had used to wrestle with him all day long and chase him around or be chased. But one day, Ras, leaping upon Nigus from ambush and roaring like a leopard, had been astonished when Nigus, instead of screaming and running away, had turned on him. A big scar on Ras's shoulder would always show how deep a startled gorilla could bite.
Nigus grunted and bent over to look into Ras's eyes. His breath was pleasant with bamboo shoots. He passed a huge, wrinkled, black thumb over Ras's eyes, pushing them in a little, and then rocked Ras back and forth as if Ras were a log.
"Do something!" Ras tried to shout. "Go after Yusufu and Mariyam!"
But he knew that even if he could voice his desperation, he could not make Nigus understand. And even if he could understand, he probably would not have gone for help. He tolerated Ras now, and that was all.
"You ungrateful mass of brainless hair!" Ras thought. "I saved you from a leopard only two years ago. I scared it off. If it weren't for me, you'd be scattered bones under a tree. Help me!"
Nigus moaned, and Ras wondered if he was mourning his death or just puzzling over the mystery of death. If so, he was not much disturbed. Presently, his head moved out of sight and the sound of his jaws vigorously chewing, of his lips smacking, came to Ras.
Other sounds told Ras that there was more than one gorilla nearby. There were muffled grunts, chomp-chomps, a belch. Once, slapping of open palms on a great chest.
Then, he heard a yap-yapping that thrust cold through him.
He waited, because there was nothing else he could do. The jackals would be on him in a minute. They would not be scared off by the presence of the gorillas. He had seen jackals run in behind a leopard over his kill, tear off a strip of meat, and run away just out of reach of slashing claws. They were not cowards; they went after what they wanted.
Suddenly, another face was above his, and he felt the pressure of two paws. A brownish, sharp-snouted head was grinning down at him, the tongue hanging out of one side of the mouth. Two bright, black eyes looked into his, and he smelled the sharp stink emanated by the gland at the base of the jackal's tail.
Ras wished he could scream. He would feel better, if only briefly so, if he could utter some of his desperation.
At this moment, and the thought seemed irrelevant, he became aware that he could feel the paws of the jackal. Some of his senses were returning to him.
There was a roar. The ground under him trembled. The sharp face disappeared with a yelp and a bark; a bushy tail nicked over his face as the jackal whirled and ran.
A leopard? No, the roar had been too deep, unless it had been an unusually large cat. Whatever it was, it had frightened not only the jackals but the gorillas. They screamed, and the bamboos broke under their stampede. Nigus' huge, reddish body soared over Ras.
Janhoy! he thought. Another face appeared. It was topped by a tangled, thorn-studded mass of brown-yellow hair. Below the mane were two large ears, a pair of large, golden eyes, and a bulbous nose. And the biggest, sharpest teeth in the world.
"Janhoy!" Ras tried to say. Tears ran down his cheek, and even in the ecstasy of relief he noted that he could feel them. Immediately after, the lion put both paws on Ras's chest, and the great weight pressed him.
His throat was full of stopped-up words. "Janhoy! Go home! Get my parents!"
The beast moaned and licked his face, and Ras was almost sorry that he could feel. The tongue rasped him; if Janhoy kept up the licking, the tongue would soon wear the skin off his face.
A tremendous purr vibrated Janhoy and was transmitted through Ras.
"Don't be so happy, you bumbling idiot!" Ras thought. "Do something! Oh, you brainless cat, you big-nosed lack-of-wits!"
But he was happy in his anger. At least, nothing was going to eat him while Janhoy stayed with him. But how long would he remain here?
The lion rubbed his big head against Ras. He quit purring and stood up and whined and extended one paw to shake Ras. Getting no response, he licked Ras on the chest.
"He's trying to dig me up out of my own body," Ras thought. "Keep it up, Janhoy, and soon I'll be able to spring free of my flesh and bones. I'll go to that place on the other side of the sky that Mariyam talks about so much. And you, my big, lovely, brainless lion, will be down here without anyone to take care of you because you tried to lick me back to life but licked off my skin and flesh instead!"
Janhoy began to roar. He glared down between roars as if angry because Ras would not awaken. The skin around the black ball of his nose wrinkled back.
"Roar!" Ras said to himself. "Roar until the whole world shakes with fear of you!"
And he visualized the great voice of Janhoy flying out over the world. A shadow-lion, it was palely golden, it had big teeth and claws, and it spread out and out. It darkened the world between the cliffs, and every living thing shivered with dread. Except for Mariyam and Yusufu, of course, who would come running.
Presently, he heard shouts. Janhoy roared back, but he stopped when the two human beings were near. Mariyam's wizened, brown face was over Ras, and her tears fell to mingle with his.
"Oh, son, we thought you were dead!"
***
It was three days before Ras could fully move his legs and arms and bend his fingers to hold anything. After staggering out of the house to breathe the clean, sweet air and see the blue sky again, he said, "How weak I am, coming back from the land of the dead. There is no strength in the Land of the Ghosts, mother."
"Have you truly been to Heaven?" she said. Her eyes were wide.
He laughed and said, "If that was the Heaven you talk about, mother, give me the Hell you talk about."
'Truly, it was Hell you saw, not Heaven. Otherwise, you'd not be so blasphemous and mocking."
Yusufu growled, "The lad was scared shitless. Or would have been if his bowels had not also been paralyzed."
Ras was not listening. He was feeling the burn of the lightning stroke. About the width of his little finger's tip, it started just below the hairline above his right temple, followed the hairline as the beach followed the lake's edge, shot straight down his left cheek and the side of his neck, angled across his chest, cut back to zigzag down his left ribs, wriggled across his belly and dived into the pubic hairs, reappeared below the hollow inside the thigh, coursed down the inside of his thigh, turned right to come out below his knee, fell straight above his shinbone, swerved to circle under the anklebone, and ended on the back of his left heel.
Yusufu also examined the red streak. "It's not so bad. It should heal within a week, maybe sooner, you're so healthy. You have all the luck of the young and the stupid. I knew a man once got hit by lightning and lived. But he was always a little silly afterward. With you, how can one tell the difference?"
"Keep your insults to yourself, dirty little bighead," Mariyam said. "I thank Igziyabher that He spared my son."
"Where's the knife?" Ras said.
"What?"
"The knife. I saw no knife."
Yusufu went into the house and returned with a shiny knife just like the one that the chimpanzee had stolen. He handed it to Ras and said, "Here. We found this near you."
"You did?" Ras said. "It's strange that you can always find a knife after a storm, and I can't."
7
THE ARROW
Not until the next day did Ras think about Wilida. Her face awoke him just before dawn. She had been married yesterday!
He could do nothing about it. Although he was able to move his arms and legs and turn his head and sit up for a while, he was too weak and uncoordinated to stand without support by Mariyam and Yusufu.
He raged. If only he had not gone out into the storm to challenge Igziyabher! And Igziyabher had met his challenge. No doubt, if He ha
d wished, He could have killed him instead of burning him a little and paralyzing him.
Ras hoped that the weakness was temporary. What if it lasted for the rest of his life?
He became angrier instead of frightened. Igziyabher was punishing him unjustly and was cruelly depriving him of the chance to steal Wilida away from Bigagi. When he regained his strength, he would take her away from Bigagi and the Wantso. He would love her so much that she would not be sad to leave her people and would be happy for as long as they lived. Together, they would look for the yellow-haired creature, because that was a mystery he just could not ignore. Whether or not they found her, they would then go on down the river to river's end to confront Igziyabher. There Ras would receive the answers to his questions, and then he and Wilida would return to this forest, and he would build a house near this house. And everybody would be happy.
First, he had to become as strong as he was before the lightning stroke. This took longer than he had expected. Two weeks passed before he was able to run swiftly again, to swarm up a tree like a chimpanzee, to throw a knife accurately, to swim to the pillar in the middle of the lake and back again at top speed without stopping, to lift Janhoy above his head to the full extent of his arms.
"And now I am going again," Ras said the morning of the fourteenth day after the lightning. "I am going to the end of the river to the home of Igziyabher. And there we will have it out."
He did not think he should say anything about Wilida at this time.
Mariyam screamed and said that he was insane. The lightning had cooked his brains. He would be killed when Igziyabher realized how truly disrespectful and impertinent--even blasphemous--he was. Had Ras forgotten what happened to the people who built the tower to storm Heaven?
"Igziyabher will punish you!" Mariyam cried behind him. Then her dark, fish-eagle's face shot out over the railing. "You cannot disobey Him! Remember the lightning! He has struck you with his fiery knife and marked you! Next time, you will die! My beautiful, beloved baby, do not die!"
He looked up at her wail and almost stopped climbing down the rope. He felt anguished, as he always did when she was truly sorrowing and not acting.
The black, pushed-in face of Yusufu appeared beside her, and his long, black-and-gray beard hung over the railing like the moss on the branches of the swamp trees.
"O son, your mother usually chatters like a brainless monkey. But now she speaks wisely! Do not leave this place and go in search of Igziyabher!"
"Why shouldn't I go?" Ras shouted. "You are not father of me, nor is your wife my mother! I am not the child of apes!"
He reached the ground and let loose of the rope, but he could not walk away. They seemed so frightened for him. And he loved them, even if they were greater liars than the Wantso hunters.
Yusufu shouted down, "You should not go, because you will die! Moreover, it is not yet time!"
Ras was silent for a moment. Then he spoke quietly but loudly enough to be heard.
"Time for what? Answer me this!"
Mariyam screamed, "It is not time! Not time, I tell you! Igziyabher has said so!"
"Oh! Igziyabher!" Ras yelled. "May He thrust His head up His anus and sneeze!"
He laughed loudly and then said, "Igziyabher! I will find Him and talk to Him myself! I will get answers to my questions!"
Mariyam screamed as Ras walked away between the tree trunks, each of which was thicker than the distance he could make in a running broad jump. Her wails became weaker, as if they were getting tired as they darted from trunk to trunk, and soon they were shouldered off by the trees. Their massive branches met each other, and vines grew from branch to branch, and there also grew flowers scarlet as the wrath of a leopard and black as a gorilla under a tree in a rainstorm and as warm, soft, pale red as the insides of the lips of the vagina of a Wantso virgin. Monkeys, large and black, with silver side whiskers and stormcloud-blue-gray eyes, raced over the vines. They called to him, but he did not answer. A stick hit the ground near him, and he did not look up. He knew it had been thrown by the chief pest, the young male with leopard-claw scars on his face and back. Ras had been hit too many times by sticks and rotten fruit and sometimes globs of stinking, sticky, watery, yellow-green monkey shit. He quickened his pace while his tormentor howled his disappointment at him.
It was a mile from the house to the edge of the forest. Beyond this, the ground sloped at a gentle angle for two hundred yards and then met the lake. Ankle-high grass, toothed and rasping, covered the downsloping earth from the forest until close to the lake. Something or somebody--Mariyam said it was Igziyabher--had piled up round stones ranging in size from his fist to boulders large enough for Ras to take two steps from one edge of the top to the other edge.
He leaped onto one and stood for a while, looking out across the waters. He had learned to swim here at so early an age that he could not remember learning. The waters were so cold that he could not stay in long without turning blue and chattering like a frightened monkey. Then how wonderful the blanket of the sun and the delicious warmth as the cold-pimples smoothed out.
North of the lake the cliffs reared abruptly from the water. They were black and whorled, contrasting with the white of the three cataracts. The closest cataract was a mile and a half away. Ras had often paddled in his dugout as close as he could get to the roaring, misty waters and had found that the cliff receded at the base. He could get behind the falls and scoot the boat over the whirling waters and through the almost-rain mist. And that was one of his favorite secret places.
Now he looked down from the boulder at the shallow water near the edge. A fish whipped back and forth through the weeds. Old Kimba was about four feet long and had huge, staring eyes with a horn over each eye and one sticking straight up from the top of his head.
"Don't tease me today, Kimba!" Ras said. "I have fished for you for many years, and some day I may catch you. But not today. I have more important matters, though I do not say this to hurt your feelings!"
To his left, flamingos were a throbbing pink cloud, half on the beach, half in the lake. Ducks and pelicans swam a few hundred yards away. Ras wondered if he would ever see the lake again. How many times he had run down here, Mariyam or Yusufu following. It seemed to him that he was closer to the breast of the world then.
"I pecked my way out of night's shell each morning," he murmured. "There was a feeling then that I can't now shape with words. It all seemed so glorious, so pulsing with beauty and the unknown. Now, it's still beautiful and the unknown cries to me with a voice that... that what? It calls to me, and I must find it. But it is not quite the same as when I was naked to the glory, and the world was a living thing.
"Yet, if I'd stayed that way, I'd never have known what it feels like to be in a woman."
He remembered the day that Yusufu and Mariyam greeted him at the shore as he swam out.
"O son, you are no longer an innocent child. You must clothe your nakedness," Mariyam had said. She had held out a leopardskin loin-covering.
"He has not been so innocent for a long time," Yusufu had growled. "I have seen him thrusting into a gorilla female--that one he calls Keyy--from behind, as a beast."
Mariyam had given a little scream.
"O wicked one! Sodomy! Surely you were hidden from the eyes of Igziyabher when you committed this hideous deed! Otherwise, He would have burned you like that roast duckling your foster father ruined the other day when he was sleeping drunkenly instead of watching the little bird!"
Yusufu had been trying to maintain his scowl. Now, grinning slightly, he said, "Moreover, I saw him and his chimpanzee friend--that mocking son of Satan--jacking each other off."
Mariyam's scream was louder, and she shook the leopardskin at Ras. "You are evil, a perverted child of a clapridden buggerer! At least the gorilla was female; but this chimpanzee is a male! O Igziyabher!"
"I am getting sick of hearing that name," Ras had said. "Must I wait until the old liar sends me the beautiful white woman you say He
has promised me? I can't wait. Does the leopard wait for permission from Igziyabher before he mounts his female?"
"Put on the loin-covering," Yusufu had said sharply. "Your dong is enormous, truly like a bull elephant's. Your hairs are sprouting like grass after a rain. You are a man now and must clothe your nakedness. Otherwise, you will offend and anger Igziyabher."
Ras had not felt like taking a beating or arguing, so he had put the leopardskin on. Though he had not admitted it to his parents, he had felt a thrill in doing so. This marked an important day in his life.
Later, he wore the loincloth only when he felt like it, which was not often.
But he had not been able to resist asking them why he had to wear clothing and they went as naked as apes, more naked, because they had no hair to cover their sex.
"Because we are apes," Yusufu had said.
It had been then that Ras had had a thought that shocked him. His parents were not apes. They did not look like apes, and they talked. No ape could talk. Only he and his parents, and the Wantsos, who also were not apes, could talk.
His parents were lying to him. Why? Or did they really believe they were apes? The Wantso children believed they were descended from two creatures made from mud and spider webs by Mutsungo. Maybe they were the children of two mud people. Ras did not think so. Then he had looked at the black stone that pillared from the center of the lake. It was about a quarter mile wide and thrust up to at least a thousand feet. It was smooth at the base but not so smooth that he could not, somehow, if he were determined enough, climb up it. This pillar was the only unhappy, dreaded thing about the lake. Since he had first understood words, he had been warned by his parents to stay away from it. It was horrible and dangerous. It meant certain death for anyone to try to climb it.
"The original people, those whom Igziyabher first created in this world, built that," Mariyam had said. "They built a tower to reach the skies. At that time, there was no lake there; the land was as dry as that which you now stand on. The people built a tower to reach to the skies. And when Igziyabher saw this, he said, 'If they can do this, what next? They will be climbing from the top of the tower to Heaven, and we will be thrown out of our palace in Heaven.'"