Rather her son and husband were dead than food for fat Bakwaniri oafs. Despair came upon her briefly then, but rather than weep, Harkon growled, and as she rose to her feet, her eyes blazed with hatred and desire for Bakwaniri blood.
She had stalked out of the ruin of her people, eyes searching for a trail.
She followed the track for many days until she came upon the strange Bakwaniri village but immediately understood that there was no frontal attack a sole warrior could make upon its high walls. The best Harkon could manage was to climb into the trees that grew around the clearing and peer over the palisade there to watch the distant figures move within.
Slaves and Bakwaniri she saw aplenty but she could not identify her child.
For a time she despaired because her quest looked hopeless. How could she help Anim from outside the walls?
And so, she did the only thing she could do and vented her impotent fury on any Bakwaniri she found hunting gazelle in the high plateau, setting snares for monkeys in the jungle near the village or collecting fruits that grew along the river.
Also, she targeted the small groups of masked men that crossed the river to hunt in the west. There from each dead Bakwaniri she killed by spear or knife, Harkon would cut a lock of hair and scalp to make a belt of vengeance that would remind her of the things that she had lost—that she was unlikely to ever find again.
Yet there was some hope, for Harkon knew that behind the palisade Bakwaniri life continued—and the diseased reavers kept their captives as slaves until it was time to eat them.
There was a chance her boy lived still, and so she continued hunting Bakwaniri, and searching for some means to know if Anim could be rescued.
And if it did turn out that her son was dead? The thought was colored crimson, and what mother could think it and not contemplate bloody murder.
If the question even entered her head, a Bakwaniri would lose his hair.
Harkon hunted the masked men, and came to know their habits so well that she read some of their history in their spoor. These reavers were alien to her world there was not doubt, and in their looks, behavior, clothing and tools she recognized the shadow of white slavers blended with the blood of long lost native tribes.
This added passion to her quest, and such a thing was useful for her prey was difficult to catch. They rarely left the area of their village alone, and even in groups seldom slept outside its walls, a condition perhaps of their inherited weaknesses. A disease inflicted each of them that slowly ate their flesh and twisted their limbs, and must have made prolonged excursions outside their walls exhausting for any but the youngest.
They feared something else also, for it was plain in the way they guarded their people as they bathed, or drew water or performed any chore outside the wall.
But what they feared, she did not know.
Harkon was yet to be woven into their nightmares, because her victims were usually found after jungle scavengers had left few remains, and so, the losses were credited to the greater jungle of which they were already terrified.
It was in the jungle where Harkon did her best work. Its dense surrounds allowed her to pick at the hunters from concealment, and with her spear or knife come to terrify her prey. If any man wandered from his fellows or lagged behind, she would close with him and he would die.
She was pleased to hunt them in this way, for her kills were many and such losses within the jungle preyed upon the Bakwaniri minds.
As they trembled, Harkon puzzled over ways that she might save her son, and bring about the release of other captives.
Yet never did a rescue seem possible when there was but one person to make the attack, and so she wracked her brain for a plan involving something more than vengeance.
As the dilemma grew frustrating she released her anger in her hunt upon the clumsy Bakwaniri, terrorizing them as they moved along the game trails for they were unused to the jungle west of the river, and she had been born to it.
As had another whose presence Harkon would soon come to see as a boon.
For there was a white man who lived with the apes and he liked to kill Bakwaniri, too.
CHAPTER 28 – Lurking Vengeance
Harkon had seen him first and then watched from afar, often while hidden high in the trees. She would marvel at this strange sight of a man interacting with a large tribe of apes like he was one of them.
Other than his loincloth and possession of a knife and sheath, he behaved like an ape in every other sense. He did not appear to speak but made monkey-like chattering that allowed him to communicate with those beasts.
Harkon had seen him move about on all fours, scampering quickly in a gait similar to the knuckle-walk that was natural to the apes around him. While still at other times, he’d stand upright, and walk or run with back arched, and shoulders and arms wide.
He did seem to believe he was an ape, and Harkon had thought he was an imbecile left behind by slavers that had somehow been adopted by the intelligent beasts.
Or so she had believed until she met him face to face, and then she’d seen intelligence in his gaze, and curiosity and a grasp of language that far exceeded his hairy family’s greatest expectations.
She’d been hunting a Bakwaniri at the time on a western course through the jungle, and found him dead beneath a tree.
The ape-man had been his killer.
Despite some initial reservations, in that exchange he’d given her a look steeped in yearning and shaded by loss. There was a sadness in the ape-man that underlay his excitement and desire to know more about her.
His expressions conveyed a great loneliness within him. While Harkon did not trust the creature for there was also a coolness behind his heated gaze; she had hoped he would kill many more Bakwaniri—as attested by the anger she’d seen flaring in his eyes.
Afterwards each night that Harkon lay awaiting sleep in her place of hiding, she dreamed that a partnership might be formed with the ape-man and with his help, she could attack the Bakwaniri village and rescue her little Anim. With many of the healthiest hunters away there were few left who were not too old or infirm to adequately defend its walls.
The thought brought an ironic grin to Harkon’s strong features, because she knew it was this same weakness that the Bakwaniri had exploited to destroy her life.
Ever since Harkon had first seen the ape-man, he had appeared occasionally on the trail before her with a wry grin on his handsome features, or she’d hear a sound behind her and she’d whirl around to see him standing there, smiling again, obviously pleased that he had stalked her so closely without her knowing.
He did not seem to mean her any harm, and was somehow gaining great pleasure from the joke.
Proof of this benevolence came when she began finding fresh food upon her trail: a bushpig or small antelope laid upon a plate of broad green leaves. The meat had always been partially prepared, bled out through the throat, but Harkon had always met the gifts with gratitude for often her obsession to kill Bakwaniri drowned out her stomach’s cry for food.
She wondered if the ape-man understood this somehow, and she accepted the possibility that he might at any time be lurking near. He had the strength and skill to hunt her, so if he had wanted to kill her, she would be dead before she knew it. So, she accepted his gifts and curiosity without attributing some darker purpose to this attachment.
He was lonely, and lethal, that was all.
Occasionally, he would leave a dead Bakwaniri hunter out for her to find along the path, or hung upright in branches, as if the man was still alive, and she would be startled, and cast her spear, only to realize it was a corpse that she was killing. Then she would wonder if the ape-man was off somewhere in concealment watching her and laughing at his jungle joke.
Regardless of the position in which he left the dead bodies, their throats were always cut or torn out and judging by the pale skin all the blood had been drained away.
It was clear that the ape-man’s hatred of the Bakwaniri w
as as ferocious and unabated as her own, and Harkon hoped that he would continue to focus his hunting and killing powers to achieve their destruction.
He was unlike anyone or anything Harkon had seen before.
After their one attempt to communicate, the ape-man had never again offered her that kind of close proximity for long. He had clearly understood her attempt to speak previously, and even made a crude, but intelligible response.
So since it seemed that he would only communicate with Harkon through action and gesture, she suspected that he might be mute.
When she saw him during the day, he appeared much like other men, though he was very white of skin beneath a film of mud that he layered upon himself as camouflage, at times even drawing decorative lines in it resembling fish scales, sun shapes, or jagged waves like fur.
He looked to be 20 years of age, and was well-muscled and like any young man despite his behaviors. The eyes were dark beneath pointed eyebrows, and a long scar marked his forehead at the hairline.
The ape-man had long, sharp canines hidden behind full red lips that were framed by dark sideburns growing down and along the underside of his lower jaw. A band of rawhide kept his long black hair from his face and channeled it back over his swelling shoulders.
He had no obvious unnatural qualities other than the company he kept, the sometimes eerie intentness of his gaze and the profound feelings he could convey with it.
But Harkon had seen him at night, and the effect had been the opposite.
She always stayed well hidden during the dark hours, but on occasion her hiding place had allowed for a view of the surrounding terrain. Harkon had once seen the ape-man climbing into a tree and hauling with him a full grown antelope that looked too heavy for a normal man to lift—but up he’d moved like it had no weight at all.
And at another time she’d seen him in the trees outside her hiding place. Then he’d been little more than a shadow in the branches, but he had smelled of blood, and his eyes had shone like crimson flames as he watched her.
That had sent her scrambling for her weapons to guard the doorway to the little cave where she had made her bed, but he had shown no aggression toward her and she had seen no more of him that night.
Once just past sundown she had witnessed him scrambling high into the trees overhead with a speed that no ape could have matched and when he reached some 150 feet he leapt to the next tree that stood 60 feet away.
She knew that the jump was impossible, so she had convinced herself that what she had seen was a trick of the eye. The growing dark and shadow must have hidden a swinging vine or some other mode of transport.
Harkon rarely crossed paths with him as his life with the apes took him to the farthest reaches of their range many, many miles along the coast and at least as many inland north and south—but never to the east as far as where the Bakwaniri lived.
And her life concerned the stalking and killing of Bakwaniri wherever she could find them.
So their nomadic lives put many weeks between their meetings, though there was a ubiquitous quality to the ape-man for at a distance day or night, Harkon had heard his terrifying call thunder through the trees. It came like the challenging roar of a bull ape, but with something distinctly cold and reptilian echoing at its base.
Harkon had wondered how the man had come to be with the tribe of apes, and thought that perhaps he was of the Bakwaniri since their skin was also pale compared to hers, but his perfectly formed limbs and flesh refuted that. More likely they had kidnapped him for slavery, and after his escape the man-like apes had adopted him.
That would explain his war on the masked men, and why he derived such pleasure from their deaths.
Harkon knew that life in the jungle was fast-paced and death came quickly. The fact that the ape-man had not attempted to kill her suggested he would not—unless that was to be another one of his grim jokes.
Regardless, Harkon cultivated a positive relationship with him when she could and whatever his history, play to their one connection: an insatiable hatred for the Bakwaniri.
If the worst happened, and he ever fell upon her with eyes gleaming and canines flashing, then she would have to hope his lack of knowledge for weapons beyond his own knife would give Harkon an opening to sink a spear or blade.
Being the child of a massacred people kept her from too much optimism, and on a certain level she was expecting an attack. It was still possible that the ape-man would grow tired of playing, and his hunger for killing would override their mutual respect.
Time would tell.
The night ape watched Harkon as she moved stealthily through the thick undergrowth beneath his hammock of vines.
He had only recently returned from lands near the southeast border of Goro’s territory after searching for some sign of Magnuh. In the years since his mother’s death, the night ape had resisted the foolish notion of tracking the bull-elephant down and winning vengeance against the giant in battle, for there could have been but one outcome.
Yet in that time, he had not seen the beast, or come across any recent track, so Magnuh had likely met a deserving end.
Gazda shuddered to think of the creature that could have slain his old enemy, and the thought always left him feeling chill, and rather curious, so from time to time he looked for the behemoth’s trail.
A satisfied smile twisted Gazda lips as the female stalked below him unaware. He had not communicated with Harkon face to face since their first meeting, preferring to stalk her as any predator might. He had no wish to feed upon her, but he was fascinated by the skills she used to stay alive in the predator-filled jungle.
He was also embarrassed that he was unable to engage her in speech because of the limited ape language he knew.
But whenever he came across her trail, he’d follow quickly, and if possible overtake her. Not to slay her, but to show that he could if he so desired. It was a predator’s way to kill, and for one to spare another was a sign of power and mastery. That way he felt she would trust him more, if they ever did come to meet again, and try to exchange more than awkward sounds and looks.
He had also taken to leaving meat upon the trail after he had consumed its blood; certain that the woman hunted more Bakwaniri than food, and also because he knew from his experiences with the young apes that such a gift would make her view him more favorably.
She rewarded him by showing that she had mastery over fire when she summoned some of the hot, yellow creatures from a small pile of wood simply by striking some objects together.
He had been unsettled by this casual display of power, and then appalled by her brutal treatment of the meat that she burned over the flames before chewing up charred strips of it.
She was a powerful fighter, indeed, to have that skill, and Gazda would have to steel his nerve if he ever wished to learn more about inviting the fire.
At other times, if he were lucky enough to smell her trail after he had slain a Bakwaniri, Gazda would retrieve the corpse and hurry to get ahead of Harkon where he’d leave it for her to collect her trophy. When he’d first done it, he hid nearby to watch, and had been pleased to see the woman freeze before warily stalking toward the body like it was alive.
That gave Gazda such delight that he began positioning the corpses in lifelike positions, and each time he had been rewarded by Harkon’s cautious reaction.
He found this funny to watch, and it gave him an opportunity to study her reactions and it was from this that he had come to understand how she used the long sharp stick she carried.
It flew from her hand with incredible power and accuracy.
So for jokes and information, Harkon was a never-ending source of pleasure to him.
And he liked to look at her. He had come upon the woman in various states of undress, and while her skin was dark all over and her body shaped differently to his own, there was no doubt that she also hailed from the night ape tribe. He was pleased to see that she had no lesions or wounds on her body like the bone-faces, an
d that there was no hair growing around her nose.
Gazda would find a hidden place and watch if he was lucky enough to find her as she bathed, squatting there in a stream and lifting parts of her clothing to wash what was beneath—but always with her eyes vigilant and spear in hand.
Still he found her gentle actions alluring, and they caused some unfamiliar passion to rise within him, a yearning similar to his craving for blood grew, but this enflamed other parts of his mind and body.
Thoughts of Harkon also came to him when he was far away with the tribe and at other times when he rested in the day. Gazda would think of her body, and be unable to quash the feelings that rose up in him.
He was glad to have found her in the jungle, and if ever he came upon a dead Bakwaniri with a missing chunk of scalp, a tender feeling would pass up through his chest, and Gazda would quickly find Harkon’s track and follow, there to watch in secret as she made her way through the forest landscape.
Sometimes he would ferret out her hiding places in the night, and hunt nearby so that he could watch over her as she slept, much as Eeda had for him.
Though never again would he let Harkon see him at this task.
Word of Gazda’s and Harkon’s various attacks upon the Bakwaniri hunters had reached Capan Seetree and the crew. Survivors blamed the deaths and disappearances upon the River Demon that was hunting them within its own borders—and that thought kept many a Johnnie from sleeping sound at night, or wanting to go on the hunt at all.
The sir-jon screamed about these grim tidings, and augured a dark future if the River Demon had summoned others of its kind as the old tales of the first fathers and dead Capan Sparsall had warned!
Some returning Bakwaniri said they’d seen a man-sized terror with blazing eyes and long sharp fangs gripping a fellow hunter by the neck before lifting him easily into the trees.
Naught was ever seen again of a man so engaged and it was an oft-repeated tale that any to see that fire-eyed creature only told the story because he hadn’t been seen in turn.
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