I used their preoccupation with the warriors, blasting them in rapid succession, my sweaty hands slippery on the bolt but sure in my aim. As the other Maasai fell, so too did the watusimba, in my sights.
Now the largest and last of the lionmen had reared up on its two legs, pinning the bloodied Sabore’s arms to his side in a bone crushing embrace that made him scream and drop his weapon. I sighted him in the same instant that his great head swiveled on his muscular shoulders and his big yellow eyes saw me.
I fired, and the smoke was thick at the end of the barrel. Too thick to see through. Then the thing plunged right through the cloud at me. It had closed the distance in a matter of seconds, discarding Sabore for the greater threat.
I managed to drop my Express and turn, its broad shoulders smashing through the doorway of the hut, its claws sinking into the earth instead of me.
I pulled my knife and jabbed it into the thing’s bristling shoulder. It yowled and rolled over on me, pressing me down with its bulk, and proceeded to drag the fabric and flesh from my torso with quick, vicious strokes of its terrible claws. In answer, I drove my knife into it again and again, striking furiously, with no regard to target, no thought but to stop its burrowing into me. It became a race of sorts, a race to see which of us could do enough damage to kill first. I could only hold its snarling maw back with my left hand and strike and slash with my right.
I tried to draw my legs up to protect myself, but I couldn’t lift my attacker. Our blood mixed, and our struggle brought the flimsy straw structure down around us, the mud crumbling and the thatch collapsing as our flailing limbs and my kicking feet battered the walls.
* * * *
“I don’t know just how I killed it,” I said, gripping the arms of the chair. Sometimes the old wounds pained me when I thought on them, like a burnt finger sings near the stove that afflicted it. “But I know when it died as the face sagged against mine, and my hand, my hand that had been gripping its jaw, felt the bones shifting and popping. The hair began to shed through my fingers, and the face became like the girl’s, and then wholly a man’s.”
I noticed that my knuckles were white on the arms of the chair. Damn, why didn’t they bring me something to drink? Talk about something else. Anything else.
“Sabore bore me back to the horses, the two of us dying, leaking so damn much we thought any normal cat in the forest would set upon us soon.”
I chuckled nervously. Did they believe a word of it?
“After that, I recuperated at Lord Delamere’s. That was the end of Kenya for me. Spent months at his spread at Soysambu, got clean of the drugs and the company I’d kept...”
“That’s enough, Captain Howe,” said Bertrand, and he reached over and pulled the chain on a small lamp on a marble table beside him. The light cast a shaft down that illuminated only him.
I noticed there was a small bell on the table, such as a schoolmaster might use to call his classroom to order.
Bertrand took it and rang it. A tinkling little sound like a girl’s giggle.
To his right, where the scarred woman who had asked me about my exchange with the servant sat, a second light snapped on. The woman sat revealed, if one could call it that. She was well dressed, and as I thought, quite beautiful but for the disfigurement only partially hidden by her head scarf.
She picked up an identical bell and rang it.
The process was repeated for each of the shadowy listeners.
They turned on their lights, and rang their bells, citing their silent, unanimous approval of my candidacy.
The bells and the loss of the dark eased me somewhat.
The sweat that had been building up at the base of my back dried. The light changed the previous mystery and gloom, complimenting the cheery hearth light. Kenya and the watusimba were far away as I contemplated the interesting visages of my new companions. Some, like the fetching scarred woman, bore the marks of their personal ordeals plain on their bodies, in missing limbs or wheelchairs.
I found myself wondering about each of them in turn, and when I would hear their tales and if they held a candle to mine.
Then the time came for the last corner of the room to be lit, for the last member of the Bell Club to ring his bell and put aside his mask of shadow. It was the young man who had spoken to me.
But now he said nothing, and he did not ring his bell or make any sound.
“Cyril?” Bertrand prompted after an awkward moment.
“Do you wish to raise some concern?”
This Cyril said nothing. I found myself a little perturbed.
“Do you doubt my veracity, sir?” I snarled.
No answer.
“Is it proof you want? I have my scars, but maybe this will settle things for you.”
Bertrand had told me I didn’t need to bring any proof, that despite the weirdness of my story I would be believed, but I’d brought it as insurance anyway. I’d only ever told Lord Delamere the story of what really happened in the bush that day, and he’d attributed it to my addictions. Even when I showed him the tail I’d cut from the big lion man, the strange, hairless tail flattened and dried and beaded by the Maasai, a trophy of a great hunter, he’d only smirked.
I remembered that damnable smirk now. Superior, aloof, like a father listening to his son’s wide-eyed embellishments. Was this pampered fool now smirking at me in the dark?
I took it from my pocket now and held it up for them all to see, but especially for this pup Cyril.
“Well go on,” I said. “Take a good look. You know what this is?”
The only answer was a deep chuckle from the dark.
That put me to the boiling point. How dare this upstart question me! I flung the watusimba tail down on the rug.
“Laugh at me? Step into the light you wetnosed little punk, and I’ll show you what for!”
The figure rose from the chair, still chuckling, and emerged from the covering dark.
It was the Negro manservant in the fez and tuxedo.
I was too thrown off by his cheek to be angry just then.
Besides, there was something about his eyes. They were bright yellow, luminous as the sun through a dollop of honey.
“Forgive me, b’wana,” he said, without a trace of obeisance. “But I do well know what that is,” he said, gesturing to the tail lying on the rug as he advanced.
“It belonged to my elder brother,” he hissed, and his teeth were feral and sharp, and even as he spoke quivering whiskers slid like knives from his cheeks. “And when you took it, you made me king. But a king without a people. It took me some time find your scent. I chased your Maasai lackey across Africa. He fought bravely, yet in the end he was but the morsel before the meal. Longer and farther have I sought you, O great hunter.”
The next instant he was leaping at me.
I thought to back off and reach the poker in its stand.
I think I started to, but my eyes were fixed on the Negro as he came across the carpet, the tails of his jacket flying behind him.
For his fez fell away, and his shaven head sprouted lustrous hair before my eyes; wavy, tawny hair. The same sort of hair burst the buttons on his shirt, and sprang from the cuffs of his jacket. His hands swelled like a pair of balloons, hair flowing across the backs, the big fingers curling over, the nails lengthening to claws, the claws catching the light of the room in an obsidian gleam as they came at my throat.
He let out a fearsome roar, deafeningly close. It filled the parlor, drowned out the shrieks of the Bell Club members as they knocked over their chairs and flew from the room. In that surreal instant I saw a lamp tip over and reveal the body of a well-dressed young man in the corner, lying in a pool of blood.
The real Cyril, I presume.
My hand found the poker behind me, but it was too late.
He moved faster than belief. My eyes filled with blood, my ears with roaring and my own screaming. I was on my back and I couldn’t move and I saw him smashing through the drapes and the big windo
w and loping off over the grounds, the whole thing upside down. There was blood running across my eyes.
No, I was standing on the big veranda at Clouds in my uniform, and Lady Idina and the rest of the party were singing In The Good Old Summertime in the parlor. I was thinking of a nursery rhyme from my youth.
Something about cats.
The African sun was full of blood. It was bleeding into the Anhoji River waters, and the dust kicked up by the red robed Maasai driving their cattle in the road was red with it, as though the earth had soaked it up and each billow of the stuff plumed like a new head wound, and Kiki’s lips were fine and red with it..
This was part of a shared world anthology called Monster Earth put out by Mechanoid Press whose central conceit was that the discovery of giant monsters had altered the course of history after World War II so that the proliferation of nuclear arms had been subsumed by mega sized creatures. Every nation fielded a giant monster to defend its sovereignty. I loved the idea, and turned this one out after having returned from a trip to Alcatraz Prison and learning of the Native American occupation of the island in the late 60’s.
Mighty Nanuq
Hal Anawak shook hands with Lt. Governor O’Dea and smiled for the cameras, the bulbs popping off like a chain of lightning among the gathered crowd on the lawn in front of Governor’s House. Luckily his hooded eyes were naturally thinner than a white man’s. Nobody would know he was closing them.
George LeDuc would have thought that was hilarious.
But George was dead.
When the afterimages finally faded and he was thanked once more for his timeless service and ushered down a chain of wringing hands, Hal’s nephew Matthew’s scowling face was the first he saw at the bottom of the stage steps.
The kid couldn’t even be bothered to dress for the occasion. He wore his hair long and unbraided, his forehead covered by a broad red headband. His chin was weasely and unshaven, with beaded plains-style moccasins under the cuffs of his ragged jeans.
Somebody had convinced Matthew to trade in his dad’s army jacket for a borrowed navy blue sport coat over the t-shirt he’d carefully selected, a plain white shirt with red letters that said RED POWER.
He’d purposefully left it unbuttoned during most of the ceremony.
When Hal reached the bottom of the steps Matthew took the jacket off in full view of the popping cameras and tried to place it over Hal’s shoulders, ostensibly to ward off the early morning Labrador air. Hal shrugged it off. He was Inuit. He could walk St. John’s stark naked in January and call it brisk.
The jacket fell to the ground and the cameras followed it down.
Matthew let it lay for whichever member of the governor’s staff had given it to him to pick up.
Hal took him by the elbow and forced a smile for the cameras, then marched to the waiting limousine as Matthew flashed a peace sign.
He practically threw the kid into the waiting car before he climbed in himself.
“What the hell’s your problem, boy?” Hal snapped, loosening his constricting necktie when the chauffeur shut the door and walked around to the front.
“I got no problem, Uncle Hal,” Matthew said. He reached out brazenly and held the Order of Merit hanging from the older man’s lapel between two fingers. He snorted and let it fall contemptuously.
“Pretty. So who’s got a better handshake? O’Dea or the Queen?”
The chauffeur got behind the wheel and shut the door.
“Take us to the airport,” Hal said.
The chauffeur glanced in the rearview mirror, then shrugged and nodded.
“Ain’t we going to the big soiree?” Matthew said, watching as Governor’s House swung away and the Lincoln headed down the long drive.
“Boy,” Hal sighed. “I wouldn’t let you eat in the kitchen dressed like that.”
“I guess I’m an embarrassment to you and all your white friends.”
“What the hell do you know about my friends? Or me? Or yourself, even?” Hal said. “Look at yourself. You got a goddamned pair of what, Cheyenne moccasins, and an Apache headband? And your hair. What nation’s that? Haight-Ashbury Tribe? Yeah. With a handful of cigars you could make a nice livin’ standing outside a dime store.”
“Leave off, old man,” Matthew said, scowling and turning to the window.
“Oh, what? Am I touchin’ a nerve? That was disgraceful, what you did back there. To yourself and me, and to your people.”
“What the hell do you know about our people? Right now nearly a hundred brothers and sisters are legally holed up on Alcatraz Island and the US government is shippin’ Jolly Giant Johnson out to Frisco to kick down the walls and drag ‘em out in a sack. In a sack! And you’re off at Rideau Hall gettin’ a medal from the Queen, and shakin’ hands with the Man and goin’ all over Canada on your grand tour, posin’ for pictures. And what’d you even do?”
“You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Matthew. I’m one of the reasons our people are better off than any other tribe in North America.”
“Our people?”
“Yeah, Matthew. Our people. The Inuit. Maybe if your mama hadn’t dragged your little ass down to the States, maybe if you spent more time here learnin’ about your own culture than soakin’ up the sun and smokin’ pot down at Berkeley, you’d know somethin’ about your own people.”
“Maybe if my daddy hadn’t died for the white man six thousand miles from home, somebody would’ve been around to teach me.”
Hal bit his lip. Matthew’s father, Hal’s only brother, had stopped a Chinese bullet in Kapyong Valley back in ‘51 when Matthew was only a year old. His mother had moved them down to California for a teaching job and stayed. He’d only seen them maybe five times in the past eighteen years.
The kid was right. It had been his responsibility in the absence of his brother to teach Matthew. He’d been so caught up in his government work, he’d never seen to his familial duties. And now here they were, end of the line, and the kid was all he had, last in the chain. And he was angry, hotheaded. He could break generations of tradition and duty just by lighting up a joint, sticking his middle finger in Hal’s face, and heading back to the States.
Hal had spent a lot of time on the phone with his sister-in-law to get Matthew up here. They were two of the same, mother and son, all for tearing down everything. Power to the people in nineteen sixty nine. Dubious that G-man Eskimo poster boy Uncle Hal had anything worthwhile to offer. But what did he expect? She had raised him alone, tough broad that she was. She had a right to raise him to be the man she wanted him to be. If Matthew’s father had lived, who knows?
Eighteen years. A long time. Eighteen years ago Hal had only just begun to speak English. Now he was getting chauffeured back and forth from the governor’s house.
They didn’t say anything more to each other till they got to the airport.
Hal put his hands in his pockets and watched Matthew light up a cigarette as the chauffeur emptied the trunk of bags, the tinny voice of the announcer calling out arrivals and departures in French and English.
He couldn’t get used to calling the place St. John’s Airport. It was still Torbay to him.
“Guess this is it,” said Matthew, slinging his father’s old OD green rucksack over his shoulder after the limousine pulled away.
“The first thing you need to know,” Hal said, “is that all things have aniriit.”
“Huh?”
“Breath. Souls. Men, animals, hawks, seals, fish, bears. Even white men, believe it or not.”
Matthew took a long drag on his cigarette.
“There’s no corn on the tundra, no bread,” he went on. “You hunt and you fish. There’s an old saying that goes, ‘the peril of our existence is that our diet consists entirely of souls.’
Souls look to be avenged when they die. So to avoid the anger of the aniriit, the Inuit have to live by certain rules and customs. In this way, we atone. Like, when we kill a seal. A seal swims in salt water. He’s alw
ays thirsty. So we spit clean water down the seal’s throat, after a kill, so it will tell its brothers and sisters we were hospitable.”
“Yeah so how do you know all this?” Matthew ventured, blowing smoke.
Hal grinned. Because of his short hair and his suit, the kid thought he was one of these Apple Indians, like they called ‘em down in the States. Red on the outside, white on the inside.
“My father taught me. I’m an angakkuq.”
“What’s that?” the kid asked, dragging down to the filter.
“Whyn’t you skip the plane back to California? Come on up with me to Kangiqsualujjuaq. I’ll tell you all about it.”
He blew the last of the smoke, threw down the butt and ground it beneath his heel.
“Mom’ll be pissed,” he said.
Hal shrugged.
“So let her be pissed.”
* * * *
They chartered a twin engine to take them up to his place in Kangiqsualujjuaq.
The kid slept most of the way, and they didn’t speak much till they were over the small airstrip, just a gray slash of gravel and some low buildings.
“Where are we?” Matthew mumbled, squinting out the window at the miles of snow covered granite hills.
“This is home, Matthew. You’re looking at autonomous Inuit land, ceded to us by the government goin’ on ten years ago now. You see, we Inuit don’t have to park our dog sleds up on Parliament Hill to be heard. We mostly get what we ask for.”
“Why? Why’s it different here? ‘Cause the white man don’t want this land?”
“There’ve been attempts at removal and relocation. Oil companies, the fishing industry, NATO even wanted it for strategic purposes. But they get stopped at the highest level, before people even hear about ‘em.”
“You gonna tell me you stop ‘em?” Matthew smirked.
Hal looked at his nephew meaningfully.
“C’mon,” said Matthew. “Why would the Queen of England listen to you? What makes you so special? What do you even do? I mean, I read about you at all these rich parties, cuttin’ ribbons on museums and breaking ground on cultural centers. But what do you really do?”
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