The second crocodile was now heading toward the source of blood. Ras swam away, dived again, swam, came up for air, dived, swam, came up for air, and then stayed on the surface. He could still be hit by an arrow, but it would be by chance, and he did not really believe that death could touch him.
He climbed up the bank and then jumped into the cover of the bush. An arrow buried itself in the dirt near him, leaving a ragged hole in an elephant's-ear plant behind it. Laughing, Ras crawled swiftly behind a tree. There was a little sun inside him, warming him and tickling his nerves. This was delicious; this was living.
2
ON THE EDGE OF HUMANITY
By the time Ras was nine, Mariyam and Yusufu had given up trying to restrain him. Until then, at least one of the two had insisted that he never get out of their sight. Ras used to get away from them anyway, although he knew he would be whipped when he returned. He chafed at their supervision, and he believed that he knew enough about leopards and poisonous snakes to take care of himself. If he was on the ground, he just ran away until Yusufu's short, bowed legs and wind gave out. If he was in the trees, he could not outdistance Yusufu as swiftly, because Yusufu was every bit as agile as he.
However, since Yusufu would not take the chances Ras would, he soon gave up. He would scream out oaths and threats in Amharic, Arabic, and Swahili, which Ras ignored. Ras would feel a little guilty, because he loved his parents and did not want to distress them. But he wanted more to be free. Yusufu was always telling him not to do this or that, don't go near there, be careful of this or that. Ras felt that the whippings when he returned canceled any guilt he felt. Certainly, the joy from his solo quests was greater than the pain of the whip.
Ras wandered all over the country between the cliffs and lake to the north, the cliffs east and west, and the edge of the plateau. At that time, however, he never climbed down from the plateau. The jungle down below looked as sinister as Mariyam and Yusufu said it was. Moreover, the one time he had given in to his curiosity and had started down the cliffs, the Bird of God had stopped him.
The Bird had been around ever since Ras could remember. This was the first time, however, that it had shown any close interest in him. It had always either flown high over him on some mysterious errand or had hovered high up above him for a while.
The Bird of Igziyabher, or, in English, God, was like no other bird, although the other birds had also been created by Igziyabher. This Bird was especially created, long after the world was created, if Ras was to believe his mother, Mariyam. It watched over the world, and especially over Ras, for Igziyabher. Indeed, it contained in its belly an angel, or so Ras had been told.
It was larger than fifty fish-eagles put together, and its body was shaped something like a deformed fish. Part of the body reflected sunshine; the rays bounced off it as they did off Ras's mirror. Its legs were rigid, hanging below the belly and held out a little to both sides. Its claws were very strange; they were round and never opened.
Its wings were attached to a bone that projected above the Bird, and the wings went around and around so fast, with a chop-chop-chop, that Ras could see them only as a blur.
It appeared high in the sky that day when Ras was about a quarter of the way down from the edge of the plateau. Ras glanced at it and then ignored it, but presently the Bird was hovering below him and then rising toward him. Its noise deafened him, and the wind from its wings was strong. Ras clung in terror to the face of the cliff while the Bird hung about forty feet out from the cliff.
The body of the Bird was hollow--it seemed to lack a heart and lungs and guts--and two angels were inside the body. Both had scarlet faces which looked like masks. Their bodies were covered with some kind of brown material, but their hands and necks were pinkish. One sat in the front of the belly, and the other, standing up farther back, was pointing a black box with a blind eye at him.
Then the angel with the box put it down and gestured at Ras to go back up the cliff. Ras was too scared to defy him. He went back up so fast he almost slipped once. The Bird followed him, staying high up, until Ras had run all the way home.
He had intended to say nothing about the Bird to his parents. But they knew all about it, and it was then that Ras wondered if Igziyabher did not truly speak to them, as they claimed.
On his ninth birthday, he was told that he could go down below the plateau. He must not, however, go so far away that he could not return home before nightfall. "Why am I now permitted to do this?" Ras said.
"Because it is written."
Yusufu was always saying this. Because it is written. Because it is not written.
"Written where?"
"In The Book."
Yusufu would never say any more than that.
The morning he left on his first trip, Mariyam wept and hugged him and pleaded with him not to go. He was her beautiful baby; if he died, she would die. He should stay home and be with her always, where he was safe.
Yusufu growled that the boy must become a man. Besides, It Was Written. Yusufu had tears in his eyes, however, and he insisted on accompanying him as far as the edge of the forest. When they got to the plain, which ran for several miles before losing itself in the thick growth of trees, Yusufu checked out Ras's weapons. These were the big knife Ras had found in the cabin on the lake, a rope, a quiver with ten arrows, and a bow. Ras also carried on his belt an antelopeskin bag that held a small mirror, a whetstone for sharpening the knife, and a tortoise-shell comb.
"Now I could have allowed you to find the Wantsos yourself, and I should have," Yusufu said, scowling. "But you have encountered no other human beings--you are the only human you know and you do not know yourself--and so I have to warn you: The Wantso are dangerous; they will try to kill you. So do not go openly to them, expecting them to love you as your mother and I love you.
"Go through the jungle softly as if it were full of leopards, which it is, by the way. You will hear the Wantso from far off, and you will hide yourself and sneak up on them. Observe them as much as you wish, but do not ever let them know of your presence. They would kill you or worse if they should capture you alive.
"You have one advantage. The Wantso may believe you to be a ghost, since they have never seen a white person. They think that ghosts are pale, and indeed they may be right, since I have never seen a ghost myself. But you are no ghost. They do not know this, so if they run away if they see you, do not follow them."
Yusufu embraced him. Ras was touched, though he could not help noting that his father was no longer as tall as he. How small he would be when his son was full grown!
Ras kissed him and then ran away, feeling the tears choke him. He went through the jungle and then climbed down the cliffs. This time, there was no Bird of Igziyabher. The river split into two cataracts here, and then merged again at the foot of the cliffs. Ras followed the river in its meanderings until night fell. He slept in a nest he made in a tree, shot a small monkey, and ate it after cooking it over a small fire. He went on and, several hours later, heard voices.
This was a thrill he always remembered, his first hearing of strange voices. He went cautiously until he saw the walls of the village across the river. He climbed a tree and observed the Wantso for a while, then came down and swam across the river, where the slope of bank and heavy bush growth would keep him hidden. He climbed another tree and watched the women working in the fields, and their children.
His amazement and curiosity, threaded with a little fear, made him shake. Although he had been told by his parents that the Wantso were black and had kinky hair and were horrible monsters, only half human, he had visualized them otherwise. They were not "as black as a vulture's asshole"--his father's expression--but were a deep brown. Mariyam, Ras's mother, was as dark as they, though she had straight hair and a nose like a fish-eagle's and lips as thin as a leopard's. The Wantso hair was fascinatingly twisted in on itself--as crooked and intertwined as their sinister character as described by Yusufu. Their noses were broad and pushed-in,
with nostrils flaring as if they were gasping for their last breath. Their lips were fat.
Yusufu looked something like them. But he was much shorter than any Wantso, except the children, of course. And the Wantso did not have the relatively huge heads of Yusufu and Mariyam, nor their short arms and tiny, bowed legs. Moreover, Yusufu had a black, very wavy beard that reached to his knees, but the Wantso had no hair on their faces.
Ras had a slightly brown skin, which was as pale as a fish on the neck, under his shoulder-length hair. He had seen his face in the mirror his mother had given him a year before, and so he knew he did not look at all like his parents. In fact, he had been frightened and disgusted the first time he had seen himself in the mirror. He had always thought of himself as looking like Yusufu, except for his skin, and beard, of course. But those large, gray eyes and thin nose and thin lips!
Later, he reconciled himself to some of his features, because, thinking about it, he knew that his nose was something like his mother's--although straight, not curved--and his lips were like hers, although not as thin.
This day--the mirror day, as he called it later--was the day that he had begun to doubt seriously that he was the child of Yusufu and Mariyam. At the same time, he had begun to doubt that they were apes. If they were, they were not apes like the chimpanzees and gorillas. He had begun to question Yusufu and Mariyam; he would not shut up despite their evasions and threats, and, after six months, Mariyam had given in and answered some of the questions. She had told him that Yusufu was not his real father. Yusufu had become her mate after Ras was born.
She never admitted that Ras was not her son. Despite all the verbal hammering she took from Ras, she maintained that she had conceived, carried, and borne him. But, one night, while Yusufu was out fishing, she confessed that Igziyabher was Ras's father.
Ras had never understood how God could be his father. Mariyam had told him so many contradictory stories of how she became pregnant that Ras had given up trying to get a logical, consistent, believable story. For the time being, anyway.
As for Yusufu, he would only say that he was not the begetter of Ras. But he loved Ras more than he would have loved his own son, because Ras was tall and had a head the proper size and arms and legs the proper length and was beautiful. But he wished that Igziyabher had taken Mariyam home with Him and not wished her on Yusufu.
"Even God could not stand that woman's never-quiet tongue. And her temper! Like that of a constipated she-camel fenced off from bulls during mating season!"
Much of the effect of this simile was lost on Ras. He had never seen a camel in the flesh, though he remembered a picture of it in a book in the cabin by the lake. Yusufu said that there had been camels in this world, but they were all dead now.
"And lucky for you, my son, because you will never have to smell one."
Ras, hiding in the grass, watching the Wantso, had thought of all this while he quivered with curiosity and fear. One part, the larger, was concentrated on the Wantso; a small part was listening and sniffing and watching the jungle behind and on both sides for dangers; the third was with his parents, and he could see them and hear their voices just as if they were with him now. And a fourth speculated briefly on this three-part Ras, on how his world folded in on itself so that what had happened was happening at the same time as several other happenings were moving outside and within him.
And then the four parts, the five parts, of him faded to become one, and this one, down to the darkest, deepest part of him, flesh and ghost, was wholly part of that before his eyes.
He had made no attempt during the first day of spying to approach the Wantso. During his next ten visits, he had stayed hidden. A week had separated successive visits, because Ras had not wanted to upset his parents. Even so, the Wantso were far away for him to travel from his home to their village, observe them for several hours, and then travel as swiftly as he dared and reach home before dusk. He always found Yusufu and Mariyam looking out the windows or over the veranda of the tree house. He was always scolded, and he always tried to put off the whipping with a story of being treed by a leopard or delayed because he was stalking game which, unfortunately, got away. He always got whipped, and if he flinched or yelled when the whip struck, he was given extra lashes.
Then, suddenly, on his eleventh birthday, Yusufu and Mariyam had said that he could stay out all night or as long as he wished. He had not understood why they had changed their minds. Mariyam had finally told him that Igziyabher had allowed this.
Mariyam seemed to talk directly to God. Ras spent much time spying on her, because he hoped to see her and God talking face to face. He was always disappointed. She talked only to Yusufu or to herself, when Ras was not around.
Thereafter, when he felt like it, which was frequently, he would be gone several days, sometimes a week. He explored all the country south of the plateau as far as the point where the river became the Many-Legged Swamp. He built a raft to carry him through the swamp, but, just before he launched it, he was bitten on the ankle by a viper.
He almost died there. He lay on the raft, onto which he had jumped, and suffered pain as if ants were crawling through his veins and arteries and stinging him with every other step forward and they had crawled into his head and were eating his brain. After a while, his heart beat out agony as a drummer beats out a message of horror. Paralyzed, he could think only of the pain, of what might come to eat him while he was defenseless, and of how his parents would suffer if he never came back.
The sun and the stars shone on him four times. Various insects took great liberties with him, but the ants did not find him, the crocodiles missed him, the vultures and ravens did not see him, and finally he was able to drag himself off the raft and under a tree on the islet. After two more days, during which he managed to eat enough to give him some strength--his turn to eat the insects, after they had covered his body with bites and stings--he made his way slowly homeward. It took him three days and half a night to do this.
For some time thereafter, he contented himself with staying close to home or going up into the hills to play with the gorilla young. After he got his full strength back, he became footloose again, but decided to put off trying the Many-Legged Swamp for a while.
Besides, the Wantso so intrigued him that he forgot about the swamp.
Just by eavesdropping and observing, he was able to understand some of the Wantso language. It was a curious speech. It used four levels of pitch to distinguish the meanings of words that had the same sounds. It also used pitch to indicate whether something had happened, was happening, would happen, or took place in the Land of the Ghosts.
The Land, he came to understand, was the plateau where he lived. This explained why the Wantso never went any farther north than the foot of the cliffs on top of which was the plateau.
Making the first direct contact with a Wantso was not easy, because he wanted to speak to one his own age. The men carried spears and clubs and looked as if they would use them without hesitation. The women seldom left the village except to dip water from or wash in the river or to work in the fields. The fields were walled off at one end and were always guarded. The children would sometimes go with the women when they went into the jungle to dig for roots or to pick fruit and berries. Then the children were watched too closely by the mothers or by the men who accompanied them as guards.
However, the children did play along the banks of the peninsula. There were many trees and thick bushes on the banks, and it was in the bush that Ras hid to spy.
Here Ras surprised Wilida. She was an attractive and happy little girl who was very active in the games that the children played in the bushes. Ras, having made up his mind to make friends with them, waited until they were playing hide-and-seek and Wilida had run off toward a bush near which he was hiding. Grinning so that she would know he was friendly, he rose and stepped out to bar her path. She stopped suddenly. Her hands went up and out before her, as if she would push, not him, but the vision of him, away. She tu
rned gray under the brown, her eyes rolled, and she fell to the ground.
Ras was distressed. He had not known that anyone could be so frightened of anything, and especially of him.
He squatted by her, and when he saw her eyelids flutter open, he raised his finger to his lips. Her mouth worked silently. He was forced to clamp his hand over her mouth to kill the scream churning to get out. She rolled her eyes but did not struggle. She listened to him say the few phrases of Wantso he knew. The gray faded away. Presently, she nodded when he asked her if she would keep quiet if he removed his hand, although she could not move her head much because his hand was pressing it into the dirt.
He took his hand off, and she screamed loudly. Ras fled, and in his panic he plunged into the river and swam to the other side. Luckily, no crocodiles were around at that time. As soon as he was hidden by a bush from those on the other bank, he watched. Men were running up and poking in the bushes with their spears. They talked loudly to each other and did not seem eager to uncover anything.
At home, Ras was so silent and inactive that Mariyam asked what was troubling him. He answered that he was thinking, that was all. And so he was, but his thoughts hurt him. Why would Wilida, or any of the Wantso, be so frightened of him? Was he truly ugly or monstrous? He did not think so. If he were, would he be loved by Yusufu and Mariyam so much?
When he came back six days later, he saw that the children were again playing in the bushes. Ras crossed the river and waited until he could catch Wilida alone again. This time, he held his hand close to her mouth after her promise to keep quiet. Wilida did not scream.
They talked, or tried to talk, for some time. She stopped shivering like a monkey trying to pass a big seed. Before they parted, she even managed to smile. But once she was out of his reach, she ran off swiftly. However, she did not cry out or tell anybody of him, as far as he could determine. And she did meet him behind a bush at the promised time. First, he scouted around carefully to make sure that she was not setting an ambush. They talked with less difficulty this time, and during the next five times they met, he progressed rapidly in Wantso.