The letter disturbed him because, for the first time, he felt that a world could be outside the cliffs, somewhere in the blue. There had to be another world.
Eeva said, "The letter was mailed from England a month ago and delivered at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It must have been picked up there."
She snapped the lighter, causing Ras to jump when the flame leaped up. She lit the cigarette and drew in deeply with an ecstatic look, which she quickly lost when she coughed. Grimacing, she threw the cigarette down. "It tastes terrible! Just as well, because when I'd smoked them all up, I'd have had to go through the same withdrawal symptoms again."
She tossed the package of cigarettes away and said, "The pilot must have radioed in, and I'm sure that our unknown enemy must have more than one copter left. He wouldn't want to chance being marooned on that pillar. We have to get out now."
Ras dumped the body into the pool. It went under with a splash and disappeared into the darkness. The great crocodile was now under the surface. Ras examined Bigagi again. He was convinced that Bigagi was dead or was so close to death that he would soon be dead. He carried him to the edge of the pool and said, "Forgive me, Bigagi! I truly thought that you had killed my mother and father. I will kill the man responsible for this; I will kill him even if he is not a man but a god!"
He raised the limp body above his head and cast it into the waters. Bigagi went under immediately but rose again, floating face upward, as if he wanted to take another look at Ras. Then he sank. A few seconds later, Baastmaast emerged at the other end of the pool, flicked his tail to drive him a few feet forward, and sank.
Outside the temple, Ras picked up the dugout to carry it to the east shore of the island. Eeva carried the rifle and the revolver. The two paddles were in the dugout. Gilluk was aware of their departure, but he only stood and stared at them. They went around to the other side of the building, picked up the spears, and soon were paddling across the lake to the east shore. Here Ras carried the dugout inland for a half mile before hiding it in a ravine. They pushed on through the extremely thick growth until they reached a tall hill. Eeva gathered firewood while Ras hunted. He came back an hour later with a pangolin. Eeva asked him if he had seen the copter. He said that he had not seen it, but he had heard it. It must have been searching around the island and lake shore for them.
Eeva lay down and snored while he butchered the anteater, dressed it, and then, using the lighter, set fire to the pile she had prepared. He was delighted with the lighter but stopped after igniting it a few times. The fire smoked somewhat, but he did not care. He cooked the meat and then put the fire out and wakened Eeva. They ate. Afterward, she took the first watch, and he slept.
Darkness fell. The stars were out, but the moon would not rise for several hours. They ate some more, and one slept while the other did guard duty. The night animals had taken up the strain that the day animals had slackened with dusk. They returned to the dugout, which he carried to the shore. There was no sign of fire across the lake. Either all the houses had burned themselves out or the fires had been put out.
Most of the passage across the lake to the river mouth was by starlight. The sky was pale in the east, betraying the stealthy climb of the moon near the horizon. Ahead, the trees at the northern edge of the lake clumped to form an unbroken, uprearing blackness. In its middle was a gap that Ras sensed but could not as yet see. This gap was his first goal, the widening and treelessness of the river flowing from the roots of the swamp a few miles northward.
He sat in the front of the dugout. His paddle strokes were slow but powerful. The wind from the west had almost died out. He felt--or thought he felt--a fish brush against his paddle. Something scaly, gape-mouthed, goggle-eyed, had touched his paddle and whisked itself away. Down there, cold and dark reigned. But no tears rained. It was too cold and wet for tears. When you lived in the midst of tears, breathed tears, moved in tears, you did not weep.
Eeva, whose gasps had been getting louder, said, "Stop a minute so I can rest! I can't lift my arms any more, and my back is crystallized; it's going to shatter in a moment!"
Ras could have kept on paddling while she rested, but he took advantage of the chance to sit still and listen. The boat slowed, stopped, and then began to creep backward, pushed by the current, and its nose began to turn as if it were sniffing for the scent of eastward. Ras listened. Loudest was the breathing of the woman. Between that and the lake shore was a zone of silence, and on the shore was the subdued kul-kul-gurruking of a bird. Faintly, far off, a crocodile bellowed. And, almost as indistinguishable under the bellow as a print in the mud below a just-lifted foot, was an almost familiar noise. Before it could be identified, it was gone. Its memory left him with an unease that quickly went away.
He leaned over, carefully so he would not tip the unstable dugout, and got his ear as closely as possible to the water. He could hear only the gentle slap-slap of the little waves against the wood of the boat. The wind carried no sound to him now. It carried only the odor of moldy wood, of mud that was partly flesh returned to mud, stench of rotting fruit, a green odor of some unidentifiable night bloom, and a tendril, quickly lost, as of a crocodile egg that had held a dead fetus until the shell was broken open by expanding gases.
He returned to his sitting position. Eeva said she could resume paddling--for a while. Again, the dugout slid ahead, and soon the shield of darkness parted to reveal a paler darkness between two masses. The boat resisted his urgings with the paddle more strongly now. It was close to the river's mouth. When they were about forty feet from the gap, two things happened at once. The moon pushed its shiny, gray-yellow arc above the top of the cliff, and its light ricocheted from a metal object rising into the air. The shining object was the head of a spear, and the arc it was describing would end in the water, in the wood of the dugout, or in his flesh or Eeva's. He yelled at the same time the ambushers yelled. The spear knocked off splinters from the dugout nose, and the shaft, deflected sidewise, banged against the side of the boat, and then the spear had slid into a gulp of water.
Five dugouts and a big war canoe poked out from the shadows of the trees on both sides of the river mouth. The moonlight was strong enough now for him to make out four figures in each dugout and nine in the canoe. Twenty-eight paddles were rising and lowering as if the arms that held them were on a string jerked by the king. Gilluk stood up on a little platform aft while he balanced another spear above his shoulder. He was probably reprimanding himself for not waiting until Ras had gotten closer. But the sudden emerging of the moon had made him fear that Ras would see the Sharrikt.
Eeva said, "Turn the boat broadside! Broadside!"
Metal snicked behind him. She was getting ready to use the weapon against the Sharrikt. Gilluk yelled and at the same time hurled the spear. And immediately afterward, the sound that Ras had thought he had heard earlier became evident. Then the rifle erupted in his ear. He could hear nothing but it, and he felt heat from the belled muzzle. Long white lines appeared in the air from behind him, ghosts of the little greeters of death in the weapon's belly.
Eeva had called them tracers.
The moon sparked on the head of the spear, which did not come as close as the first. The spear made its own target in the water, created its bull's eye and concentric silvery circles out from the center.
The sound he had heard before became a chuttering, and then it ate up the voices of the men and was the only noise to be heard, since Eeva had quit firing the rifle. A light appeared at the same time. It was a great eye casting a beam of light as bright as the wrath of God. It flew about twenty feet above the surface of the river and came from around the bend of the river. It illumined the trees on both banks; it swung back and forth on the branches and trunks, and then on the green-brown river itself. The eye shot down the avenue formed by the trees on both sides of the river and then was out of, the river's mouth and over the lake and the Sharrikt in their boats.
The eye suddenly halted, still twenty feet high, and it
brightly fingered the area below it. It touched the dugouts and showed the bodies sprawled in them, the black-brown bottoms of dugouts that had been overturned when men had fallen dead into the water or had stood up and leaped out, and the floating bodies of the dead and the splashing of the living.
"Down!" Eeva shrilled. "I'm going to shoot! Down!"
Ras bent forward. Once again, so close that it was louder than the roar of the Bird's wings, the rifle bellowed in his ears. Fire flew over him; streaks of white painted the face of night; the streaks climbed up and up and swung, as they climbed, toward the right. Toward the Bird, the copter.
Suddenly, the eye winked into blackness and did not wink back into light again. A chattering was just barely audible below the chuttering. From the black body of the copter, fire streaked out; slashes of white raced across the surface of the lake, poofing silver in the moonlight, toward Eeva and Ras.
The streaks from the lake and the streaks from the air crossed. Immediately thereafter, like an evil thought too long held in, fire globed outward. The wind of the explosion chopped off other sounds, even his own cry. The glare blinded him for just a second. By the time he came out of the water, into which he had leaped without thought, he could see again. The copter was under the water, but its blood burned brightly in a pool only a few yards away.
The Sharrikt--those who still lived--had had enough. Most of them had jumped into the water. Gilluk's boat was the only one to still hold men; of these, all were dead or wounded except Gilluk. He stood on the little platform and stared out over the fire toward Ras. Abruptly, he ceased to be stone, jumped down from the platform, and seized a paddle. He dug the paddle into the water, but he was unable to turn the boat swiftly.
Eeva was beside Ras. She panted as she spoke in her native language, and then, when she spoke in English, she confirmed his guess. She had been swearing.
"I lost the rifle! Oh, damn, damn, damn!"
Their dugout was bottom up.
Gilluk's war canoe, heavied by the dead, was approaching as slowly as an elephant over unfamiliar mud. Gilluk was working frantically as he thrust the paddle in on one side and then on the other side to make the boat steer straight. He saw that he was coming too close to the fire, and he bent down and stabbed the water to get away from the blaze. Ras saw a paddle drifting before him, shoved it toward Eeva, told her to hang on to it, and swam to another. This he also sent to Eeva before uprighting the dugout again. Gilluk yelled once at them when he saw this and was thereafter silent.
Ras pulled himself into the dugout, took the paddles from Eeva and then got her in without flopping the boat over again. By then, the fire had spread out as if it were a wound, and the lake was bleeding. There was still no wind, so the smoke gathered over the fire, plumed up a little, and spread out. Gilluk was hidden. Ras sat for a minute to catch his breath and his thoughts. He could steer to the right and escape to the shore of the lake and thence up the mouth of the river. He could go to the left and confront Gilluk, perhaps surprise him as he came out of the smoke and so get to him before Gilluk could use his spear. Or he could circle the fire to the right and so try to come up on Gilluk from behind.
He turned around and told her what he might do. She said, "There might be another copter along very soon to find out what happened to the first. I think we had better get out of the lake and hide some place. As soon as possible. Why worry about Gilluk?"
The blaze, pushed by the current of the nearby river, was drifting toward them. Its heat was drying the water off their bodies and making them turn their faces away from it. A forerunner of the main cloud of smoke caused them to cough. Ras tried to pierce the smoke and the flame with his eyes to see Gilluk on the other side, but he had to turn his face away once more.
"More than anything, I want to kill the man or the god or whoever it was that killed my mother and caused me to kill the Wantso," he said. "But Gilluk killed Janhoy, and he has tried to kill me, and if I let him live now, he will be after me and will always be a danger behind me. He is near at hand now. I would be foolish if I let him get away. We will surprise him by attacking him directly. We will come out of the smoke and the fire and be on him before he knows what is going on."
Eeva groaned and said, "You're stubborn, stubborn, you ass!"
Ras was puzzled by the epithet. It had only one meaning for him and he could not imagine why she called him that now. But now was not the time to ask questions. He pushed the paddle against the water and drove the dugout along the expanding front of the fire. In a few seconds, he was forced to steer away from it to keep from being burned, but he did try to cling as closely as possible to its brush of fire and smoke for concealment. Gilluk should be coming around its corner soon. The last thing he would expect would be his enemy advancing against him.
Or would he? He had had enough to do with Ras by now to know that Ras would try for the unexpected. Could Gilluk be waiting for him around the corner?
Or perhaps he might have come around the other way to take Ras from behind?
Ras was too busy thrusting the paddle to shrug his shoulders, but he did so mentally. The future was the present come into being out of many possible beings. The future lay hidden in smoke like this smoke that was unrolling out across the lake, obscuring the moon, making him want to cough. Then he would be in the smoke and he would see. He would see...
18
THE CROCODILE'S HEART
Blackness rolled back to reveal light and pain.
His head hurt. His back hurt where something sharp thrust into it. His mouth was dry, and the back of his throat was clogged. He coughed and sat up or tried to sit up, and his head pained him worse. The stuff in his throat came up and gagged him. He spat it out while he leaned on his left elbow. He was on mud and under a low bush. Above the bush and around him were tall trees interconnected with vines.
Eeva said, "Lie back down."
He did so, groaning, and then said, "Well?"
His legs were in damp mud, and his back and arms were on rough, tooth-edged grass. When he put his hand just behind the right temple, he touched dried blood on the hairs and a shallow trough of skin. He also touched off lightning of pain.
He groaned and again said, "Well?"
"A spear hit you in the head," she said. "It came flying out of the smoke--I don't know how Gilluk saw you, maybe he didn't, maybe he just threw it and was lucky, though it doesn't seem likely he'd waste a spear."
"He must have seen me," Ras said. "I didn't see him. I didn't see the spear, either."
"If it had hit you straight, it would have gone through the bone into the brain," Eeva said. "But it came in at an angle and bounced off your head. It almost got me; it went over my shoulder by an inch. It fell into the water. I couldn't get it."
"Where are we now?" he said.
After he had been knocked unconscious and was bleeding heavily--there was blood all over him and the front part of the dugout--she had turned the dugout and gone south. The fire was spreading; she did not know when Gilluk might come through the fire, and she would have been almost helpless against him. So, with many backward glances, she had fled as swiftly as she could. But Gilluk had never appeared. Under the bright moon she had paddled as far as she had been able, past the island opposite the town of the Sharrikt and to a point about two miles south. They were out of the lake and on the left bank of the river, in far enough to be hidden from the sight of anybody on the river or in the air.
Groaning, he lay back down. He was weak. But despite the pain in his head he felt a little hungry.
She slapped at his head to drive a buzzing fly away.
"Where's the dugout?" he said.
"Under a tree just over there. I had a hard time dragging you here and then getting the boat there. And I had to smooth out the tracks. It was hard work, and I was scared, too. I heard a leopard coughing somewhere near."
She was telling him this, he knew, because she wanted to be told what a good job she had done. He told her so, and she smiled and took
his hand.
"I'm awfully discouraged," she said. "And I'm so tired! And I was so worried about you. If you had died..."
There was no need for her to finish the sentence. She was weeping now, anyway.
Ras waited until she was through and squeezed her hand and then said, "As soon as I can get some food in me, I'll be strong enough to paddle. And we can go north again."
There was a chuttering sound then, faint at first and later so loud that it seemed directly above them. They lay on their backs under a bush and looked upward through the green at the blue. The copter never came into their sight, but they knew it had to be close. After a minute the roar became less, and presently it faded away to the south.
Ras said, "We'll have to wait until night before we try for the swamp. But we can hunt in here; the jungle's so thick it will hide us."
She did not seem to be encouraged by this. She was pale and thin and shivering with nervousness and the cold of the night, which still had not been thawed by the rising sun.
Eeva's manner and expression told him that she did not want him to leave her, but she said nothing. She knew they had to have food and that he was the one who had the best chance of getting any. Even in his condition, he could function far better in this world--his world.
Ras set her to looking under rocks and fallen trees for insects and rodents and small snakes, for anything that could be eaten. She was to keep herself busy while he was gone, and she was not to regard her work as mere time-serving. She might have more for them to eat than he would by the time he returned. She shuddered and said that, being an anthropologist, she had eaten some repulsive food, but she had not liked it. However, she was almost hungry enough--almost--to relish beetles and worms, uncooked and living. She stood beneath a tree and watched him as he walked away. His one glance behind took in the tangled hair, yellow and dirty, the smudged face with the eyes that seemed larger because of the fatigue-stained bows beneath them, the almost naked, raw-skinned torso, the torn pants through which some white skin, some sunburned skin, and some dirt-covered skin showed, and the aura of loneliness and dependence.