Force. She had said something about evil men forcing unwilling women. That had been one of the many puzzlers. He had never forced a woman or even known of the idea. Perhaps, though, that was not quite true. When he had surprised the Wantso women at night, he had used their fear of him as a ghost to get his way. At the time, he had not, however, expected a refusal or even thought of refusal on any ground except that he was a ghost.
"I don't understand why you don't want me," Ras said. "It has been weeks since you have had a man, and you have not been sick. Am I ugly? My parents and the Wantso women told me I was beautiful. And I am not like the Wantso men. No stone knife has made me unable to get more than a half erection. My temper is not that of a half-starved leopard; I laugh and joke, and I like to talk and to listen. I love to caress, to love. I love laughter and fun and the feel of flesh. If you don't love me, you don't hate me, either, and you haven't said you didn't like me or told me I'm repulsive. So I don't understand."
"You're hurt," she said. "I suppose you think you have reason to be. But don't be hurt. My background is alien to yours. I am from a different society, so different that you can't imagine. So don't be hurt. Just take my word for it that I have good reasons for saying no."
Ras sighed and said, "No is a short word but a wide one. There can be a whole world behind it."
"A world you'd be better off never to know," Eeva said. "Unfortunately, the world isn't going to let you alone. It's growing smaller every day, and its humans have less and less room, and they're going to spill over into this valley. There will be others to follow my husband and me. Then... I don't know. I hate to think of it. What will they make of you; what will they do to you?"
Her words made him uneasy. Something enormous and black and deadly was over on the other side of the mountains. She spoke so convincingly. Perhaps the sky was not blue stone.
"Just go to sleep and forget about it while you can," she said.
He said, "What am I supposed to do? Jack off?"
Eeva said something in what he presumed was Finnish. It sounded as if it were a curse.
"I don't care what you do! Just don't try to force me! Now--go to sleep!"
The moon was up when she awoke again. She sat up, the gun in her hand, and said shrilly, "What is it? Ras! What's shaking the branches? Ras! A leopard!"
Ras did not stop. The shadows of branches and leaves dappled most of him, but a shaft of moonlight struck him in the center of the body so that she could see what he was doing. Silver spurted.
"Jumala!" she said disgustedly. And then in English, "You filthy beast!"
Ras said, panting, "It's better than suffering."
She was silent for a while and then spoke, "Who were you thinking of?"
He groaned and said, "Wilida!"
Eeva made a sound of disgust. She said, "And you want me to make love to you, so you can pretend that I am your black woman. Ugh! I can smell that foul stuff. Go down to the river and wash."
"Does it excite you?" Ras said.
"I ought to shoot you!"
"Does it excite you?"
There was no answer. Ras closed his eyes and presently was asleep. In the morning, Eeva said nothing for a long while. Her eyes were red and had bluish bags under them. She moved stiffly, as if she had been in a cramped position all night. Ras grinned at her and said that she looked as if she were a hundred years old. He had expected her to snarl or strike out at him, as his parents had sometimes done when he had teased them too much before they had had breakfast.
Instead, she wept. He put his hand on her shoulder to tell her he felt sorry for her, but she jerked away.
Then, on seeing him send a high arc of urine over the top of the branchy wall, she screamed at him.
"Don't you have any shame at all? I hate you! Are you a man or a baby? You make me want to vomit, the way you act, think, eat! Especially your eating manners! You grunt and gobble and dribble and slobber like a pig! That's what you are, a pig!"
She began to weep again. Ras said, "I think I'll go on alone. You make me angry all the time. Anyway, I can go much faster without you. And, also, when I'm not angry with you, then I want to lie with you, and that is hard on me. I don't like that."
Eeva cried even more loudly. Between sobs, she said, "I am so scared. And I'm lonely!"
"Why should you be? You're with me. You're safe. And you have me to talk to, to make love to, if you weren't so crazy."
"I'm the one that's crazy?" she yelled. After a while, she stopped snuffling, and she dried her eyes. "I always thought I was so strong. I am very capable. I've never been in a situation I couldn't handle. You should see me on a field trip. I'm as capable as any man. I'm not a coward, either. Only... this... it's all so sudden, so savage, so utterly strange. And so hard. I don't think I can get out of this valley, and it may be a long time before anybody comes looking for me. And somebody wants to kill me; why, I don't know."
"You be my woman, and you'll be safe."
"I can take care of myself," she said.
Ras laughed.
"I just had a moment of weakness," she said. "I'll be all right. I feel much better now."
"You look like a red-eyed hyena."
"Jumala! What do you expect? I don't have any make-up, I've been half-starved and never sleeping for more than a half hour at a time, I'm dirty, my clothes are torn and almost rotted off, my hair is a mess, and..."
Ras said, "Yusufu told me once that Igziyabher had promised that the white woman who would be my woman would have golden hair. She would be a blond jane. You have golden hair. Are you a jane? You don't act like my woman, you act more like the demon that Mariyam said you must be. Certainly, you don't act like any woman Igziyabher would send me, unless He hated me."
Eeva stared a long time before speaking. "I think jane is an English slang word for a woman. It's out of date now, I think. What do you mean, you were promised her?"
Ras explained. But she did not fully understand what he was saying. And now that he considered his explanation, neither did he fully understand. Talking seemed to help her, however. She even smiled at something he said, and then she disappeared into the bushes for a while. He went in the opposite direction and finally flushed out a golden rat and pinned it to the earth with an arrow. She was waiting somewhat apprehensively when he returned. She had bathed and washed her hair as best she could in the muddy water. She looked doubtfully at the rat, but helped him build the fire, and after the rat was cooked enough so that it could not be called raw, she ate hungrily enough. After he put the fire out, he asked her to look at the gash in his head.
She said, "It doesn't seem to be infected. In fact, it's healing amazingly fast. You must have tremendous recuperative powers." Then she explained what recuperative meant.
Ras shaved at the river. She watched him sharpen his razor with the whetstone, soften the bristle with water and the sliver of soap remaining, and scrape off the hairs while he squatted before the fallen tree on which the mirror was set.
"Who taught you to shave?" she said.
"Yusufu. He said that I should shave every morning because The Book said so. The Book says many things I don't pay attention to, but I like to shave. I hate these bristles on my face. I think I hate whiskers especially because Jib has them. He never learned to shave; he's as stupid as a gorilla. He has a long beard down to his belly, and it's always dirty and tangled with thorns. It stinks."
"Jib?" she said.
"Jib means hyena in Amharic," Ras said. "He lives with a band of gorillas up in the hills. Not with Nigus' band. With Menelik's. Jib is a white man, too. In fact, he's my brother. That's what Mariyam and Yusufu said. Mariyam said Jib has the brain of a gorilla because he made Igziyabher angry. She used to tell me that I'd be like Jib if I didn't do what Igziyabher wanted--until I pretended to be scared and cried, and then she quit. Besides, Yusufu told her that, if she didn't quit, he'd beat her silly."
Eeva looked puzzled and was thoughtful and silent for a while. But, by the time they
launched the raft, she was in a good mood. She had coiled her long hair into what she called a "psyche knot," which she spelled out for him. He told her she looked much prettier, and this seemed to make her happier. She talked much, sometimes gaily. She told him about skiing in the mountains of Europe. Ras thought it would be great fun to hurtle down the slopes and fly off the hills. She pointed to the east, to a white-streaked mountain, and she described how snow felt in the hand and the face and between the toes. Ras knew the word, since Yusufu had told him what the white was on the mountains.
"You are sniffing down the back track of my life like a fox after a hare," he said. "You seem so amazed at everything I tell you."
"I said before that you were a unique. I don't think there's ever been anyone like you."
Ras went as far back as memory would carry him. He could describe some things that happened not too long after he had learned to walk.
"Remarkable!" Eeva said. "Very few people can recall so many things so early in such detail. If only you could remember before then! Mariyam's face is the first thing you can see? Nothing, absolutely nothing, before?"
Ras wept a little when he thought of Mariyam. He would never see that dear little brown face again, never feel her hugs, her kisses, hear her scolding, berating, laughing, loving.
Eeva looked embarrassed, but she continued to question him.
"You couldn't have been born in this valley. At least, I don't think so. Certainly, the dwarfs that raised you--they were dwarfs, stunted humans, not apes--didn't originate here. The things they told you--let slip, I should say--show they knew the outside world well. But why did they pose as apes? Why that cabin by the lake, the books, and all that stuff? And what about this other white boy, Jib? He really lives with the gorillas? But then you said that you and your parents did, too, for a while. But Jib couldn't talk? Perhaps he was mentally retarded? Or a deaf-mute?"
"He could hear better than I could," Ras said. "And he was able to repeat four or five words I taught him. Water. Eat. Hurt. Man. And my name. But that took a long time. I used to play with him, although Yusufu said I shouldn't. Yusufu didn't agree with Mariyam about why Jib wasn't able to talk. He said Jib couldn't talk because the gorillas couldn't talk. Yusufu never wanted to talk much about Jib. He always got angry, or sad, when I asked him about Jib."
Eeva took her letters from the pocket of her shirt and asked to see his. She read them over again and said, "They make a little more sense now, though not much more. There was a third baby, too. He must have been the first. God! What a monster!"
"The baby?"
"No, you simple... sorry! I became so angry, I... never mind. I mean the monster who did this to you and the other two. You all must have been kidnapped. The writer of this was a businessman in South Africa, but he came from North America. That's evident, anyway. Who is The Master he mentions? What is The Book?"
"I don't know," Ras said. He shoved hard against the pole and sent the raft ahead in a spurt that brought water sloshing over its edges. Her talk made him angry, as if someone were gouging holes in a statue he had carved or had made fun of one of his drawings.
The morning and the afternoon had been stimulating and enjoyable. Now, all the questions and her certainty that something was wrong with his world soured him. He was about to tell her of this when he heard the chop-chop of the Bird coming down the green walls of the trees on the banks of the river. Eeva gasped, stood frozen for a second, and then dived into the river. She swam ten or twelve strokes, stood up, and waded to the slope of the bank, where she ran into the jungle.
Ras decided against following her. He did not have to hide. The Bird had never tried to hurt him. In fact, it had helped him when it thought that he was in danger. He had no reason to think that its attitude had changed. Despite this, he felt uneasy when it appeared, roaring and flashing sunshine, a few feet above the treetops to the north, and then swung toward him. There were two men in it. One was at the controls, as Eeva had called them. The other was behind the pilot and looking out over the barrels of his twin machine guns, which Eeva had also described and named. Both men--Eeva had said they were men--were dressed in brown clothes and wore white masks.
The Bird--the copter--passed over him so closely that the air struck him, frothed the waves, rocked the raft, and deafened him. It went on down the river for about twenty-five yards while Ras turned to watch it. Then it stopped, the body turned, and it came back. The man behind the machine gun was pointing at the tracks Eeva had left in the mud of the bank. The Bird swung around again so that the guns were facing the jungle. Fire spat out of them. He could hear them through the bellowing of the copter. Leaves and bushes jumped.
Ras cried out, "Stop! Stop!"
The copter suddenly lifted, and then, only a man's height above the treetops, disappeared. But it came into view again, because it was climbing straight up. It was perhaps a hundred yards, perhaps a hundred and fifty, in from the river. Something about the size of a man dropped from the belly of the copter; it was a gleaming, tear-shaped thing. There was a roar, a red leaping upward, smoke, the leaves and bushes going outward with the suddenly created wind. Then there was heat, and the leaves and bushes were going inward with the wind. He smelled a strange reek. The heat increased. The jungle became a wall of heat.
Ras poled the raft to a place fifty yards downward, jumped onto the bank, pulled the raft upon the mud so that the current would not carry it away, and thrust himself into the jungle. He plowed through the brush as swiftly as he could on a course parallel with the flames. A bird, screeching, its feathers on fire, slammed into a tree and fell to the ground. The smoke from the burning feathers made Ras cough.
The fire was a circle about a hundred yards across and a hundred feet high. It grew outward as it ate up the trees and bushes around it, then died out on the wet vegetation, soaked by the heavy rain of two nights before. It was many hours before Ras could approach it, and even then the ashes were too hot for his bare feet. By dawn, it had cooled enough for him to walk through the desolation. The bushes were gone. The larger trees still stood, but they were leafess, branchless, and eaten away. The stumps were gnawed away by the teeth of the flames.
Near the edge of the dead land was a lump that might have been a monkey. Its hair was burned off, the tail, hands, feet, ears, and nose were gone, and blackened bone showed through, the chars of the head. Ras was sick and scared. It did not seem possible that Eeva could have escaped. Although the people in the Bird might only be men, as Eeva claimed, they had the powers of a god.
His probing uncovered a few more lumps of cooked meat, also near the outer part of the fire. If Eeva had been anywhere near the center of the fire, she would have burned entirely away. Even the bones would be ashes.
At dawn, the Bird returned to ferret back and forth over the area. Ras hid until it flew away and he could no longer hear it. Numbly, he went back to the raft.
It was not there. For a moment, he felt joyful, because he thought that Eeva had escaped the flames and then taken the raft. There were, however, no prints in the mud except his. He had not dragged the raft far enough up the bank, and the river had pushed at it until it had swung one end around, dislodged it, and carried it off.
Ras crouched behind the bush for a long time. Even in his rage, he was conscious of his imagery. He knew that his thoughts were like the sun when it begins to sink below the horizon. The red ball was his anger; the blackness approaching because of the disappearance of the sun was the gloom threatening him. He felt that he was sinking into the night and drawing after him all the beautiful colors: the pink of the underside of a cloud, the deep blue of the sky just above the east horizon, the small, smokeless fire-blue of the heart of a cloud, a splash of pale frog-green and a band of parrot-beak-yellow wavering in the dust to both sides of the sun. If he sank down, the lovely bands of life would go with him. All would be as black as a jackal's eye, as black as a leopard's intent.
The death of Eeva Rantanen was the final push to send the sun
into the abyss.
12
THE MANY-LEGGED SWAMP
He had not loved the pale woman as he had loved Mariyam, Yusufu, and Wilida. But his fondness for her had been increasing, even if she had frustrated, angered, and puzzled him.
Now, his rage was like the cooling, but still red, sun, and he would not allow it to sink into chill, numbing gloom. That sun in the sky had to set; his inner sun did not have to set. He wanted revenge. He wanted to kill Bigagi for what he had done, and he wanted to kill Igziyabher, because He had sent the Bird to kill Eeva. So he would follow Bigagi now and get that duty over with as soon as possible, and then he would go on to the river's end and make Igziyabher pay, and then he would return to the lake and somehow get to the top of the pillar, and the Bird and the men in it would die.
The red ball on the horizon of his mind--he could see it clearly--rose. The colors on the inward vault became brighter. The sun within could go backward, from west to east, bringing day again and shedding night as a snake its skin. This was the difference between the inexorable world outside his skin and the world inside.
He returned to the bank. At least, he had not left the bag and the two Wantso axes on the raft. He took these from behind a bush, where he had tossed them when he had gotten off the raft. Searching for and then chopping down and trimming poles of the desired length and thickness took him well past noon. He bound the poles together with vines. There was more delay while he hunted. An arrow brought down a parrot, and plucking feathers and building a fire and cooking took another hour. By then it was too late to start out.
Despite which, a half hour later, he knew he was too impatient to put off the trip until morning. He pushed the raft away from the bank, and the river carried it gently around several bends for a mile. The channel narrowed; the current increased; the raft picked up speed. Suddenly, the banks veered away from each other. Neighbors for so long, they had come to a parting. There was no river any more. The swamp, the Many-Legged Swamp, spread before him, and the pole with which he pushed went only a few feet into the brown water before being sucked into the mud. He had to push gently to keep it from being swallowed.