by Wole Soyinka
“Sure they knew. Didn’t we have posters all over the place?”
“Aristo had been trying to sell her to that gross Cross-river quad of the Cartel. I know he took the news of my last session with the Corpse to him—in person. By air. The trouble-shooter entrusted him with the report.”
Zaccheus looked at him as if he now suspected his reason. “So you think Amuri set up the whole thing, shot up the town and extended it all over Cross-river just for one dame? Look man, I know Celestial does funny things to men….”
“Iri was just a personal bonus. So was what was done to your band. They were after the men of Aiyéró everywhere. But they have to disguise it by unleashing death on a far wider scale.”
* * *
—
The moth caress of Iriyise’s scented room had not stopped the dreams of Anubis, the jackal-headed one, once he had absorbed the scope of the Cross-river event. He had fallen asleep thinking, this is the fifth face of the Apocalypse, the eighth plague that the Judaic sorcerer had omitted to include—the plague of rabid dogs. Cramped half-asleep between the bed and wall he watched the thousands and thousands of the slavering bare-fanged creatures emerge out of the corner of the floor and rush him. He turned and fled but his feet were trapped beneath a boulder. Struggling in vain to free himself he hit on the only salvation and bared his teeth, pronged and flaring just like the swarm whose spear-point snouts were aimed in unison at his throat. Miraculously he found that his teeth were no longer human, that his jowls dribbled the dirty-ash, crimson-blotched spittle of a recent bestial banquet. His neck grew warm at the back as hairs rose on them in defiance and, most wonderful of all, the sound that came from his throat was a perfected howl, fiercer than their prey-scenting wail. Kicking his leg furiously he woke and found it wedged between the bedpost and the wall.
Was this the truth of man-wrought plagues, and was it the secret of their confidence, those men who unleashed such terror on the innocent? Was it the certainty that once the pack began to hunt, after the first selective base of a night of Long Knives the instruments achieved a transformation in their own nature and even innocents donned a mask of the jackal to ensure safety from the hunting pack? In turn becoming one with the nature of bestial transformations of the human mind. How else explain the thorough, undiscriminating measure of the mob infection, the unholy glee on the faces of women, even children. He knew what games they played with victims whom their men had left half-dead, could see clearly those who even filled the role of beaters for the hunt, flushing out half-crazed fugitives from their hiding-place. And even participating in the day-long games of mutilation.
“Do you think it is over?” he asked Zaccheus.
Zaccheus shrugged. “Last I heard the forces of law and order had taken charge. But they said that the very first day.”
* * *
—
Thirty miles north of his question Ofeyi flung himself suddenly sideways away from the window against Zaccheus, taking the car to the other side of the road, one arm instinct-flung against the hurtling blur from nowhere. The car side-swiped a shea-butter tree and was partly hurled back onto the road, one set of wheels churning the sides of a runnel in a prolonged fight for control. Rear bumper and undercarriage finally brought the car to a stop after scraping a ten-yard furrow in the road shoulder facing the direction from which they had come. They leapt out in panic, half expecting the car to burst into flames. The springs still danced madly as Ofeyi took a step towards the object that had caused it all, a brown matted bundle that now lay motionless in the middle of the road.
Zaccheus joined him and they stared at the bundle. “Is it a monkey?”
“Looks like it.”
It was quite some distance back. The engine was still ticking and neither of them had thought to turn it off. Ofeyi said, strangely, “We’ll drive slowly towards it.”
“Why, do you think it will bite. It’s dead.” And began to walk towards the body when Ofeyi pulled him back.
“Wait. That monkey is wearing clothes.”
Zaccheus blinked repeatedly, shook his head. “You are seeing things man.” And he moved again towards it.
“Stop Zack! Get in the car! We’ll drive towards it.” Laughing, Zaccheus refused to budge. “There has been no circus in these parts to the best of my knowledge, but come on let’s go see.”
Between his teeth Ofeyi muttered, “I hope the car isn’t crippled.” Zaccheus waddled round the vehicle to inspect the wheels, returned to announce that they were free of the mudguards.
Ofeyi shushed him, eyes still riveted on the object. Then he pointed to the side of the road where the object lay. A man had emerged from the bush, followed by another. Ofeyi said, “If we’ve hit one of them then there is no stopping. In these parts there is no word for accident, they simply deliver summary judgement. A life for a life.”
Zaccheus bellowed out a loud laugh. “I told you it was a monkey. Look at them, they are hunters.”
The men carried bows and arrows, daggers strapped to their upper arms. Two more emerged from the bush and soon they totalled eight. As they emerged they stood still, doing nothing, merely staring at their quarry on the road. Zaccheus sighed, “Ah well, to think I had always fancied a monkey skin. But they look too many for us.”
Ofeyi asked, “So why are they standing there, just looking. Have you ever known hunters do that?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The normal hunter would rush the wounded animal at once or send one or two more arrows into it just to make sure. He wouldn’t simply stand and stare at it.”
The tableau held some moments longer. The two travellers had become part of it, immobilized by the strangeness of the sight, expectant also, wondering what was the meaning of the hunters’ silent attitude. Ofeyi wondered if their car had been observed by the hunting group.
The monkey’s skin took clearer definition as the sun broke through the trees briefly and shed a bright patch on the road. It began to look like a much lacerated skin, browned with grime and matted with burrs and twigs. At that moment also the hunters moved. They bent over the kill and one of them prodded it with the end of a bow, moved its head from side to side. From the distance where the travellers watched, it took on the appearance of a head-shrinker’s handiwork.
“I could only see with the corner of my eye, and it happened too suddenly, but there was something about the way that creature flung itself at the car….”
That, and the mystification of hunters who emerged from the forest not as avid pursuers but rather with the leisurely, relaxed motions of herdsmen who confidently followed the spoor of stray cattle, certain that the wanderer would be found within the stretch of pasture, unworried by the passage of time. And now, examining the casual cloak flung over their shoulder and the nomadic sandals, even the standard dagger strapped to their arms, Ofeyi became confident that they were herdsmen. They looked sweatless, as if they had participated in the chase in the certainty that they could not be outdistanced, that the victim was destined by its nature to remain within the circle of recapture. Ofeyi’s mind reverted to that leap yet again, recovering details of the landscape of the road bank little before the leap. And now he was certain of large hunted eyes, waiting, certain also of a distinct flap of rags albeit mud-caked and burr-ridden and a head that, for all its skull-tightness was decidedly human.
A scene of stalking had surely preceded this. It took animation from the disintegrating tableau on the deserted road: the measured pace of beaters on their own grounds in pursuit of a quarry that went round in circles. They would herd him patiently, beat the sparse growth on the perimeter of successive lairs towards the waiting line of hunters, primed for the despatch. The group had listened to his self-deluding cunning, his furtive breaks and exhausted crawl on all fours among the stunted camouflage of this scrubland. Feeding on roots, leaves, worms, retching as he ran, convulsing f
rom unaccustomed juices and poisonous barks…how many days had they pursued this game? It grew clearer every minute, the passage of this fugitive who had sought safety in an isolated village, untouched (so he hoped) by the madness that had broken in the cities but in truth alerted for the prospect of such diversions where the cities had left off. From one arid death then, to this other, in a forest which cushioned its betrayal with springy earth, decaying wood and leaves that deadened the hunters’ footsteps.
Finding the road at last, listening to the roar of cars and leaping madly towards that sound of safety and encountering only the real line of his killers, had he in desperation flung himself in the path of a far more humane death? For the moment continued to clarify, ceased to be a mere impression. A forceful trajectory danced before Ofeyi’s eyes, emaciated claws that fought to clutch, even in that fractional moment….
A movement from the stunned creature, a stirring in the matted rags, a twig, a tubercular arm scrabbled on the tar…again all was still. Only for an instant. The eyes of the watching group were suddenly alerted to the evidence that life still existed in him. Again the claw moved on as if it sought to smooth down the protruding pebbles. His elbow sought a feeble leverage on the ground and the head, a matted trap of seeds, berries, insect life, pollen and earth rose a little way from the ground. And only then was there animation in the eyes of his hunters who had waited, since their emergence it seemed, just for this moment. As if this flicker of life was a sign, a sanction and a command that must be fulfilled before it again petered out they swept him up, bore him onto the grass verge and held him by his wasted limbs to earth. The varnished skull of one—he seemed to be the oldest among them—rose above the others and his mouth moved, shedding what seemed to be a brief devotional fragment on the scene. Then someone unsheathed a dagger, placed it in his hand. It rose, glinted briefly in the sun and the old man stooped and drew it across the throat of the prostrate figure.
His hand moved again, this time down the body, the knife-tip drew a swift, practised circle on the crotch and his other hand held up the victim’s genitals. He passed it to one of the many eager hands which also uselessly held open a jaw that had opened wide to thrust out pain. Into that mouth they stuffed his penis with the testicles. Then they all stepped back and looked on the transformation they had wrought.
Their faces betrayed neither thought nor feeling.
The blood had spouted briefly, there seemed to be little blood in him. As the mouth was held open to receive its obscene fodder it dried out, a weakened gurgle and red froth accompanied a final spasm of the limbs. His eyes stared unblinking at the sun. The men had vanished as silently into the forest as they emerged. Numbed by the scene and locked on the lifeless principal of the nightmare spectacle, neither Ofeyi nor Zaccheus had seen them go. They stood riveted to the enlarged emptiness in the stare of the dead man, incapable of motion or will. Zaccheus was the first to grow coherent, now that he had fought and controlled the bilge that rose to his throat.
“Pity he didn’t die when he hit the car.”
“Yes. Maybe he was trying for just that death.”
“Look Ofe, these people, they never even cared to watch out in case a car came along. We were here, they never even looked our way.”
“They saw us though.”
“You think so?” His voice betrayed alarm. “I never saw one of them look this way.”
“They saw us, that’s why they waited such a long time, to see what we would do. They never stopped taking note of our presence.”
Zaccheus felt cold eyes on him which he had earlier viewed as dispassionate, indifferent to his existence. Now with no other distraction, the eye-ridden bushes were turned on him and his exposed presence on that road. He began to turn nervously round when Ofeyi placed a hand on him and spoke softly.
“Don’t move too suddenly Zack. I am going to start fiddling with the nearside of the car. Get in as if you were going to check something. Make it casual Zack and don’t speak at all. Move!”
Zack obeyed him. He was no sooner seated in the car than Ofeyi leapt in beside him, shaking free of the paralysis which slaughter and mutilation had laid on him. A rustle in the undergrowth to the immediate rear of the car had clarified the unease in the roots of his scalp and he realized at once why the butchers had vanished so silently into the bushes. Thoughtless, or simply forgetful of the car’s mechanical potency, one of the stalkers leapt in front of the car just as Ofeyi released the clutch. Zaccheus shut his eyes but Ofeyi watched the form sail over the bonnet and crash into the roadside shrubs. When Zaccheus opened his eyes again, forced against one side of the vehicle’s unexpected centrifugal exertion, he found that Ofeyi instead of heading straight in the direction the car had been facing was doing a U-turn on the road so as to head back in their real direction. He began to voice his protests when he found that they were once again in the midst of the herdsmen who had poured in from the bush to help their wounded comrade. They scattered as the car roared upon them, its torn mudguard scraping the gravelly tar surface with the paralysing din of an infernal engine. The last moments, before they turned and fled, Zaccheus perceived with an air of wonder, the transformation of their impassive faces to one of disbelief, then fright and open terror. The approach of the vengeful wraith had made them human after all, responsive to fear, responsive to a superior force which held in its impersonal space a thousand possibilities that ranged from quick extinction to a lingering agony.
What he had not bargained for was the frenzy that seemed to have mounted Ofeyi in the head. He rounded the next bend in the road, stopped, swept through another U-turn that nearly landed the wheels in a rut and crept slowly back round the corner leaning out of the window to see as much as he could before the car revealed itself beyond the line of his vision.
“Steady on Ofe, what’s the matter with you?” What he read on his face was a fanatic resolve to drive through again and again whenever the killers found the nerve to attempt the removal of their comrade. Zaccheus crossed himself, snapped out of his passivity and screamed at him, “Suppose the car stalls, have you thought of that. Suppose the car stalls just when we are right among them—snap out of it man! Stop taking chances and get us out of here!”
The sense Zaccheus made penetrated his cold, homicidal hate, restored him to a measure of normality as he turned the car round again after letting his head hang over the steering for what was, to Zaccheus, an interminably long time. But he was not so far restored to humanity that his eyes failed to scan the surrounding bushes as he drove slowly, hoping that some overweening folly would prompt some others of the killer group to challenge the passage of his chariot of wrath.
Zaccheus remained thoughtful. “Are you sure you ought to be going into this thing? It isn’t going to be healthy for us if you intend to ram every single murder crowd that we happen on in the city.”
“I’m sorry.” He stepped on the throttle and tore out of the neighbourhood. Zaccheus pointed at the speedometer to slow him down.
He began to drive with more harmonic concentration, bringing his mind into flow with the functioning of the engine, washing his rage, then his over-responsive skin through air-stream, fumigating his psyche through the invisible exhaust. The captive body of wind within the car framed its own world among capricious elements, and that went also for the metal that defined it, a capsule in alien winds obedient to the touch of his fingers. Calmness returned, and with it a sense of exultation.
They drove through catland, the high grass expanse interspersed with shrub shaded waterholes, pocked by anthills, thorn trees, baobab and the locust bean trees. Beyond the vultures and a few hidden hyenas, nothing moved in these grasslands but the cats, and he came gradually to feel the existence of one, even of the advertizing variety right beneath his bonnet. It was a soothing sensation. Nothing filtered through into the saloon but the purring contentment of the sleek-furred creature coiled among the maze of
wires, cylinders, bolts and knots. It defied the outer furnace of a sun that burnt fiercer as they moved ever northwards, passed a feral tingle into his fingertips which became sensitive to road surface, wind-drag, to sun haze and the shadow flash of passing vultures. His bare toes on the pedals traced the course of fuel atoms from the source of combustion, felt the easy rhythms of pistons in their cylinders. Leaves blew in his hair, the catwind sniffed his tyre spoors, he experienced again the oiling of his viscera as when he watched the mechanic slurp the dark viscostatic fluid—patronized by all the major firms sir, all those who have to depend on efficient transport—relaxing fully, he admitted that when the car spun seemingly on only two wheels he distinctly sensed the heavy colloid hold the vehicle in a maternal ease.
“I am all right now” he said to Zaccheus.
“B-Sharp, dead-on!” Zaccheus said. “I felt it the way you been handling this baby.”
Through circuits of radiated calm and into the narrow rain-belt of Shage. The landscape turned deciduous. Heavy lianas tangled treetops close to the sky, braided by the leaps of monkey clans through dense, seemingly impenetrable ceilings in the forest. The silence had long died that accompanied them on the last hundred miles; suddenly the air was filled with the caterwauling crashes in this misplaced kingdom of Rana. Only Tarzan was missing, the ultimate primate of colonial fantasies, seated astride a trumpet advance and the flap-ears of pachydermous faithfulness. But nothing broke through the dense branches, nothing but the shrill escort of the long-tailed tumblers of Rana’s court; they pursued them on their skyways of lianas into the rain belt, furious twilight demons shrieking execrations to the last. Ofeyi braved the unwanted escort as long as he could, then turned to Zaccheus who still remained in a semi-torpor from reaction to the last visitation: