Gilluk's mother said, "My son will not be able to torture him. If he does not get back soon, he won't be able to feed him alive to Baastmaast."
"If he dies, he will stay in the cage to rot and stink until Gilluk returns?" Ras said.
Gilluk's mother shrugged. "I don't have the authority to do anything else, either. There was a time when women ruled the Sharrikt, and there were no priests, only priestesses. Then the great Tannus, who was at the time only the consort of the queen Fakkuk, killed the queen and became the ruler, with the backing of a small number of men. That was a long time ago, before the Sharrikt came through the hole in the mountains from the underworld to live here. The Sharrikt have been going to hell ever since."
This last phrase was, literally, "eaten by jackals," and could also be translated in English as "going to the dogs."
"That's interesting," Ras said. "But what can be done for Bigagi?"
"Nothing."
"I don't understand him. My loss and my grief are great also, but I won't just lie down and die."
"You are not a Wantso," Shikkut said. "Nor are you a Sharrikt. I think you'll get out of that cage, and when you do, woe to the Sharrikt. Especially to my son, Gilluk."
"That makes two of us," Ras said. "Tell me, do you love Gilluk?"
"I love him very much."
"I think you also hate him very much," Ras said. "He killed your husband, his father, and he also killed your younger son, his brother."
Shikkut was startled, but she recovered swiftly. She said, "You may be right. Nevertheless, he had to kill them. It is the custom. But, as I said, I think you will, somehow, get out of that cage. My son made a mistake when he didn't kill you at once."
Ras, grinning, said, "Would you help me to get out?"
She cackled and said, "Never! But I will take great interest in watching how you manage your escape. I say this because I am the descendant of queens and of priestesses. We have a knowledge beyond knowledge. We can see what hides behind the flesh of men and the shell of things."
Ras said nothing. He was thinking that she had delivered into his hands, over her son's resistance, a possible means of escape. Did she know this or did she perhaps just have a feeling that she was an instrument of events? A feeling that was rooted in wish more than foreknowledge? He doubted that she had known what she was doing when she had browbeaten her son into returning the mirror and the whetstone to him. Yet, she may have been aware, somewhere in her, that she was causing her son's ruin.
Eight days after Gilluk had left, he returned. His arrival was announced to Ras by far-off drums, harps, flutes, bagpipes, and marimbas. A few minutes later, a soldier dashed into the courtyard and shouted what everybody knew. The servants, slaves, the three wives, and Shikkut, carried on a chair, hurried down the hillside to greet the king. The only ones left in the palace were Bigagi, Ras, and two guards. One guard ran to the big doorway to look down the hill and call back to the other a description of the parade. The other did not move from his post. He did, however, turn his back on the prisoners to hear better.
Ras thought about using this moment to put the first step of his plan into action. After some hesitation, he decided that the situation was far from ripe. He closed his antelope-hide bag and went to the side of the cage nearest the entrance. After a while, the herald marched into view, followed by Gilluk, holding his sword upright with both hands, the hilt on a level with his face.
A head appeared behind Gilluk. It was huge and maned with brown-yellowish hair. Its eyes were as lifeless as green stone, and its red tongue hung out from its open jaws. Then the pole on which the head was transfixed became visible.
Ras cried out with grief and clutched the bars of his cage.
Behind the man staggering under the weight of Janhoy's head were the other young men of the expedition. Four carried a corpse among them, a man at each foot and arm. The two behind them carried the skin of the lion. The guard of honor trod on their heels. One of them held a rope the other end of which was around the neck of a prisoner. She was ragged and dirty and staggering with fatigue. Her face was splotched with the red marks of insect, bites. Her eyes were ringed and baggy with black. The once-blond hair was a dirty brownish color.
Ras, seeing the woman he had thought burned alive, went numb.
Shikkut, borne in her chair, was next in line, and behind her were the three wives and Gilluk's uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, and nephews. The band was close behind them with the freemen trailing them and a number of slaves behind them.
Gilluk stopped before Ras's cage. He said nothing until the courtyard was jammed, but his expression was triumphant.
"Your beast was huge and ferocious-looking," he said. "But when we came onto him, we found him sleeping on his back with his belly distended from hippo meat. He did not even wake up until we were a few feet from him. He got to his paws just in time to receive three spears. And I finished him off with the divine sword. That was the great cat that you said was king of the beasts."
Ras pointed at the corpse, now lying on the ground. "Janhoy didn't kill him?"
"No! She killed him!"
Gilluk pointed at Eeva Rantanen.
"Tattniss stumbled over her while we were looking around the Wantso village. She was hiding behind a bush. Tattniss tried to spear her, but he was in a panic. I've tried to convince my people that you aren't a ghost, but my mother is the only one who really believes me. Tattniss didn't have his heart in the attack, and so the woman managed to grab his spear. She threw herself backward and tore the spear out of his hand. Tattniss didn't get away fast enough. She speared him in the back. Then we had her surrounded, and though she obviously didn't understand us, she saw that I wanted to capture her, not kill her. So she surrendered."
"That makes good sense," Ras said. "For a woman."
"You didn't try to fight your way out," Gilluk said. He smiled maliciously.
"There were too many too close," Ras said. "However, if I had been in her position, I would have fought. But, as I said, she acted correctly--for her."
"It's better to live and take a chance that you can escape later; is that it? Forget it. You're going to be in this cage for six months. After that..."
Tattniss' body, accompanied by his wailing wife, mother, father, and brother, was carried off to the House of Baastmaast on the island. Eeva was put into an empty cage. Gilluk sat down on leopardskin cushions on a huge mahogany chair. He drank beer while the band played. The guard of honor drove the slaves and the freeman farmers out through the doorway, leaving only the Sharrikt and the artisans in the courtyard. When space had been cleared, the Sharrikt danced and the freemen and slaves clapped their hands in rhythm with the music.
Janhoy's head and skin were laid at Gilluk's feet, and two slaves fanned away the flies attracted by the dried blood and decaying flesh. After a while, the stench and the flies got too much for Gilluk, and he ordered the trophies taken away. Two tanners, who did not seem happy to have to leave the festivities, carried the head and hide down the hill. Ras watched the bobbing head on the pole disappear below the curve of the hill.
"I suppose you plan to get revenge for the lion!" Gilluk shouted at Ras above the noise.
"I will get it!" Ras shouted back.
Gilluk laughed and drank more beer from a goose-necked gourd. He said something to his wives that caused them to grin and look at each other and move their hips forward and backward. Gilluk, seeing Ras take notice of this, grinned at him. Ras scowled back.
Beer was brought up from the storeroom in one building and also from the town below the hill. After several hours, the king's relatives quit dancing to sit on chairs and drink beer. The freemen danced, breaking loose now and then from the dance to dash over to the king and kiss his knees. Gilluk's mother became tired and was carried up to her quarters. Bigagi squatted motionless, his head drooping. Eeva sat on the cage floor and tore meat from ribs of pork and drank water from a jar. She looked at Ras occasionally as if she would like to talk when she could
be heard.
The beer washed away the fear of the crowd for the two whites. Some men came close to the cages of Bigagi and Eeva and shouted insults and made sexual gestures. Bigagi noticed them no more than he did the flies crawling over him. A man made water on Bigagi. while everybody except the other two prisoners laughed. Another man reached through the bars for Eeva. She bit his hand. All except the man who was bitten laughed. Some men and women tried to lay hands upon her. A woman shrieked as Eeva twisted her hand. Gilluk rose up from his chair to shout at them to get away. He was too late. A man had backed into the bars of Ras's cage. Before he realized where he was, he was seized from behind, his head banged against the bars, whirled around, and brought forward against the bars. Unconscious, nose bleeding and probably broken, he was dragged away. After that, the crowd did not need Gilluk's orders to stay away from the prisoners.
Ras felt better after that. The king did not seem angry. The crowd, except for the injured, were in even a better mood, since some blood had been spilled. The music and dancing continued until the moon came up. By then, Gilluk had had enough. Unsteadily, he arose, shouted at the band and the dancers to go home, and, supported by his wives, went upstairs to his bedroom. Ras was glad that the racket was ended, but he envied the king.
"Leave one down here for me!" he shouted, but the king did not hear him.
The moon rose to a dying-away noise of the castle and of the town settling down to sleep. Except for the distant howling of a jackal, silence lay thick in the courtyard. The guards, who had drunk some beer also, leaned waveringly upon their spears. Eeva was a black-and-silver figure in the cage. She was so quiet that Ras thought she had fallen asleep.
He said, "Eeva!"
She stirred, sat up, and said in a tired voice, "Yes?"
"I had thought you were dead."
"I came close to being killed," she said. "I thought you'd been killed. It seemed to me that that napalm bomb had caught you by accident. Or perhaps on purpose. I don't know what those people in the copter were trying to do."
She told him what had happened after she had fled into the jungle. To get as far away as possible from the machine-gun fire probing through the trees and brush, she had run, fallen, crawled, and then run again. Despite the heavy undergrowth, she had covered perhaps a hundred yards when the napalm was dropped. She had not been inside the area of explosion, but she had been close enough to be knocked onto her face by the blast. She had fallen on the other side of a ridge into mud, but the heat had seared her hair and made her clothes smoke. The backs of her arms and hands and her ears had been sore and red for several days afterward. Luckily, she had been breathing out at the first near-enfoldment by fire. Otherwise, her lungs might have been seared. She had held her breath long enough to run out of immediate danger, although she had wanted to scream. Possibly, she had been so far away that this precaution hadn't been necessary, but she had taken it anyway.
And she had dropped her gun sometime after the bomb had gone off.
A mile from the fire, she had come to a small brook. She had immersed herself to the neck and splashed the cold water on her face. She had done-this to cut down the degree of whatever burns she might have had. At the time, she had not known whether or not she had been badly burned. She had not thought she had been, but there had been the possibility that she had been in shock and had not yet been able to feel the burns. Certainly, she had been in some kind of shock, although it had been her reaction to near-death and not to burns.
The copter had come over her hiding place several times. Once, a stream of bullets had fingered the bush a few yards from her. She had not moved, since she knew she could not have been seen. They had been firing blindly just on the chance that she could have been flushed into sight if she had escaped the bomb.
"I don't know why they're so bent on killing me," she said. "I'm no danger to them, and my chances for getting out of this valley are very small. It seems to me that they don't want me to be with you, for some reason. Why not?"
"Perhaps Igziyabher will tell us when we see Him," Ras said. Eeva snorted disgust or disbelief.
She had not returned to the place where she had left the raft until two days later. Although she had looked for her gun, she had not been able to find it. She had supposed that Ras had floated on down to the swamp or else the raft had floated away by itself.
Eeva had returned to the site of the Wantso village by the direct route, walking where there was land and swimming across the river whenever she had come to it. Several times she had detoured because of crocodiles. She had dug up some crocodile eggs and sucked out the yolk and later had killed a small python with a stick. The eggs and the raw snake meat had sustained her until she had reached the Wantso fields, where she had hoped to eat the vegetables in the fields. Monkeys, civets, hares, birds, and insects had gotten there first. The fields had been stripped.
While searching the jungle around the site, she had found a hare caught in a Wantso trap. Though the body had started to stink, she had eaten it. She had been sick for three days after that and had thought she was going to die. Then she had killed a young pig with a stick, only to be forced to climb a tree to get away from the enraged mother. Her hopes to eat the piglet after the herd left had disappeared when the herd ate it.
"It seemed as if I were the only one starving," she said. "Everywhere I looked, animals and birds were eating or about to eat. I was getting thinner and weaker, so weak that soon I would be eaten. Then I found a baby antelope with a broken leg. I had to drive off the mother--she was brave but a tiny thing--and also chase off two jackals. I put the poor little thing out of her misery and cooked her. I was so sick of raw, bloody meat that I didn't give a damn if anyone saw my fire or not. After that, I ate some fruit I saw some monkeys eating, and I caught a hare in the same trap in which I'd found that stinking animal.
"I went back to the Wantso site to look for spearheads and tools. I was going to arm myself, build a raft, and try to go across the swamp. I thought that you might be hanging around the Sharrikt country if you were still alive, and, in any event, I meant to look for an escape route at the end of the river. It didn't seem likely that I would succeed, but I was going to try. Then, the Sharrikt got me. And here I am."
She yawned and was asleep before Ras could ask any more questions. He said goodnight to the guards, who had been listening uneasily to the unintelligible conversation. He awoke at dawn and waited for breakfast, which was late because the slaves were as hung over as their masters. Eeva, awakened by the flies, got up several hours later. She used the cucking jar in one end of the cage without the embarrassment she had shown when they had been alone in the jungle. She seemed pleased to get a full meal, and the black rings around her eyes paled a little.
Ras said, "Gilluk hadn't had a woman for some days when he found you. He's very horny, if what he says is true. Did he lie with you?"
"No. I don't understand Sharrikt, of course, but I got the impression he was discussing me with his men. I didn't think they'd bother me, because they were too scared of me. But I forestalled any ideas Gilluk might have by making sure he knew that I was menstruating. I couldn't be sure, of course, but it seemed probable that the Sharrikt, like most preliterates, had a menstruation tabu. I was right. It was evident that they all regarded me as unclean, which I was, because I was using part of my shirt as a pad. In fact, I got the impression that he put himself and the others through a cleansing ritual at the end of each day. And they all took pains to touch me as little as possible."
16
THE DESCENT
The black pool under Bigagi had been small at first. It spread slowly while the soul dripped from his body, drop by drop, like water from the edge of a roof after a rain. The drops were eyeball-shaped, and black and soundless as a shadow falling. With every drop and stain, some of Bigagi's flesh turned to steam under the brown skin and jetted from the pores. The skull and skeleton burrowed their way outward, as if eager to bathe in the sun and to undarken. His eyes cowe
red back into the bone, crowding the brain. Each new sun spread a light that seemed weaker in its grasp on Bigagi.
"Bigagi!" Ras called. "Do not die! You will cheat me! I must kill you with my own hands, break your neck!"
Bigagi did not seem to hear. His mouth hung open while flies crawled in and out of it. A fly traveled over his eyeball, and he did not blink.
"What did you say?" Gilluk asked. Ras told him, and the king smiled. He said, "All right. You can kill him."
He clapped his hands and shouted orders. Spearmen formed a semicircle around the door to Ras's cage. A slave tried to untie the leather ropes binding the door to the cage. Impatient, Gilluk commanded him to step aside, and he cut through the ropes with his sword. After swinging the door out, Gilluk stepped back behind the spearmen.
Ras walked slowly out of the cage. He felt numbed; he could not quite grasp the idea that he was to be free to kill Bigagi.
Gilluk said, "You don't look happy, now that you can have your revenge."
"It's so unexpected," Ras said. "And Bigagi... he won't know! I mean, I thought he'd be fighting for his life and that he'd know he had to pay... but now..."
"Don't you want to kill him?"
"I should," Ras said.
Gilluk laughed loudly and rolled his eyes.
"It's not even like killing a leopard that has eaten your mother," Ras said. "You kill the leopard, but you don't hate it. It's an animal, and what it did, it did blamelessly. Now Bigagi isn't even an animal. He is nothing."
"Why didn't you tell me this before I ruined good leather ropes?" Gilluk said. "Why did you tell me how much you lusted for revenge?"
"It's like starting to walk down a steep, muddy bank," Ras said. "You might change your mind about going down, but by then, even if your legs quit moving, you continue to go on down."
Gilluk frowned and bit his lower lip. Then he smiled. He gestured for Ras to get back into the cage. Ras did so, and the door was secured with another rope. The bystanders, including Gilluk's mother and wives, looked disappointed. The king spoke through the bars to Ras.