Her ears were filled with their screams as the show began.
The mans in the cage slapped their hands over their ears so that they would not have to hear. Mans do not take pleasure in the suffering of anyone, not even their own tormentors.
* * *
“Hey, Red. Have you any food for a man who has lost his way?”
She turned. The funny-looking little man was back.
“What do you want now?” she said to him.
From outside, there came the whoosh as of a heavy chain being swung, followed by a soul-searing scream. The little man in the little oafen shoes smiled like music to his ears, then shot both hands into her bowl of grains.
“Food. That’s the first thing,” he said, swallowing fistful after fistful. Then he rubbed his stomach. “Better. Much better.”
Without invitation, he opened the sack of silver on the cot next to her, reached in, and stuffed his pockets greedily with coin, and then said, “That’s the second thing, and that’s it for me,” and dashed toward the opening at the back of the cave.
She shouted after him—shouted, but none of the ailing oafs on their cots took note of it because of the entertainment of the screams from outside. She shouted: “Who are you stealing that money for? He’s going to get in trouble with the authorities, you know?”
His answer surprised her: “I’m stealing it for myself.”
And he disappeared through the hole in the bottom of the cave wall.
She pondered this answer as the torture outside the cave continued. It lasted all day, for oafs are skilled at torture and can make it last all day.
At the end of the day, she assumed the traitors were dead because of the absence of screams, but she still did not have an understanding of the odd little man’s strange answer to her question.
A man who steals for himself.
* * *
That evening, to celebrate the death of the traitors, the one called Gen’rl assembled the host of oafs outside before the fires and bid the two oafs of talent play their colored flutes, and the colors were blue for sky and red for blood and gray for hope.
And they played the Life Song of Great Lord Gerwargerulf.
And the one called Gen’rl came and sat beside the red-haired female man as she played on her small singing harp along with the poet and the players of the colored flute.
And the one called Gen’rl put his arm around the female man. She looked up at him and he looked down at her with fever in his eyes.
And the one called Gen’rl ordered that the large cage be emptied of mans.
The cage contained a hundred mans, and they emptied it. And then they emptied the mans of their lives through the brutish methods of the bashing of heads against stone and wood, as they had done the night before, and they did devour the mans with much noise and revelry.
She played through the monstrous festival of blood on her small singing harp the songs she used to play for the boy and his family when she was free, and it helped, though not a lot.
That night after it was all over, she lay on the cot with the one called Gen’rl, and he kissed her as though he were the oafen husband and she were the oafen wife, and that was the beginning.
He ripped off her tunic of war and had his way with her.
She wept all through it.
* * *
After his fever for her had been sated, he said, “You know how it ends, don’t you?”
She knew, for she had seen it many times in the mines. Oafs always eat the mans they have ravished.
“I do not want to die. I want to live,” she cried out. “Let me live, I pray, oh master. Oh great master, let me live.”
And the oaf called Gen’rl did chuckle in his amusement. “But what is the life of a man?”
The red-haired female man pleaded for her life. “Is there no mercy in your heart?”
“You are beautiful, and I desire you in a way that is obscene. If I allow you to live I place myself in peril. I have committed a sin against earth and heaven.”
“I will not tell.”
“Hahaha. And what about these good oafs? Will they keep our secret too? Soldiers cannot keep such a secret.” He held her close to his mouth and told her, “We are not the first, and we shall not be the last. There are oafs who have had offspring with mans. No one talks about it, but it is true and it does happen. I would not deceive you. I think we are the same species—we are just bigger, but I am not a scientist so I cannot swear to it, and the ones who have done this thing were put to death or banished and the offspring of their union sold for food. It is an especial meat and expensive. The poor cannot afford it, but I have eaten it many times, this offspring of oaf and man.”
He touched her and she wept a large tear at his touch.
“It is delicious,” he said.
He touched her again and she sobbed loudly.
“Yes, yes. This is indeed regrettable. Soldiers know of this. Soldiers do this all the time, but we do not talk of it. I am an old soldier, and it is a shameful act that I have committed. Tomorrow, after the victorious battle, I will slay and eat you. Don’t think me cruel, for it is better than eating your own children, is it not? It will save us both the embarrassment.”
And he rose up and bound her with rope next to him so that she could not escape. Then he lay back down.
Soon his lips were snoring against her weeping eyes.
* * *
That night, her mother came to her in a dream.
Her hair was red like a forest of fires. Her face was brown like the bark of a strong tree in the middle of the forest. And she was smiling a great and triumphant smile.
On her feet were shoes small enough for even a man to wear.
Then her mother, with the triumphant smile upon her face, climbed a great ladder and into the clouds disappeared from sight.
Despite all that had happened, the little female man was comforted by this dream because she understood it to mean: The time has come. Their world shall pass away.
9
Their World Shall Pass Away
In the morning the one called Gen’rl said to those gathered around the map, “Today we go to final victory. There is no turning back. This is the day we have been longing for. We are outnumbered, but we are not undone. Let us pray! Oh great creator, protect us as we do your will. And if we fall in battle, remember us evermore in your kingdom to come!”
And they said, “Verily in your name!”
And he said, “Verily in your name! To arms, great oafs!”
The female man was bound in rope on his cot. She was the last man alive in the cave, all the others having been devoured.
One of the ailing oafs was put to watch her, but he slept for most of the morning and then gasped loudly and finally on his cot, and he was dead.
She knew that he was dead because his chest was no longer wheezing. He was dead, but not from his ailing.
From behind the dead oaf appeared the strange little man, and the blade in his hand was red with blood. She looked again and saw that the oaf’s throat had been cut clean through.
The strange little man wiped the blood from his blade with his shirt, and then he used it to saw through the rope that bound her. He told her, “Come with me if you want to live.”
Brushing back tears, she said, “I want to live.” And they raced to the hole at the back of the cave.
“Don’t forget your harp,” he told her.
She went back and got her harp and then he showed her how to flatten her body so that she could fit into the hole at the back of the cave, and then she followed him through the hole, and just in time.
She heard the soldiers loudly chanting their victory as they came back early from the battle that they had won: “Fe! Fe! Fe! Victory!”
She heard the one called Gen’rl cry hysterically, “She’s gone! She’s gone! Where has my little red-haired female man gone?”
As she ran ever deeper into the dark vault of space behind the cave, she heard one of the ail
ing ones say, “She went through a hole at the back of the cave, sir. There! See?”
She heard the tremendous hammer blows against the rock. She heard them breaking through the rock. There were harsh cries as the oafs came through the cave wall—coming after them.
“Fi! Fi! Fi! Die! Die! Die!”
She ran and she ran. There was no time to think or even to breathe. She raced after the little man through the winding recess at the back of the cave, and then, finally, there was light.
There was a hole in the hard ground and a light came up through it.
When she looked down into it, she saw a never-ending series of steps, a stairway that went down, down, down. But down to where?
“Fi! Fi! Fi!” sang the oafs behind them.
“Let’s go!” urged the little man.
But despite the noise of huffing, puffing pursuit behind her, she refused to take a step down the lighted hole.
She was much too afraid.
“Fi! Fi! Fi!” sang the oafs.
The little man took her hand and spoke to her gently, and his voice had a calming effect on her fear. “It’s okay. Don’t be afraid. This is a hole in the firmament. You will be safe.”
“What is a firmament?” she asked.
“Uhm, er,” he said, “that’s an explanation that will have to wait for a later date. Hurry, let’s go!”
Holding her hand, he steadied her, and down she went.
She stepped into the hole in the firmament and stood stock still on a plank, a step that was as firm as solid ground. When she looked down, all she could see were stairs going downward, on and on. And below that, at the lowest level, the stairs were hidden in what looked like clouds.
It was a strange sensation staring down at clouds below her feet.
Then the little man also stepped into the hole with the stairs that led down to the clouds, and she watched him as he reached back up and pulled the cover into place and secured it from below.
“Fi! Fi! Fi!”
She cowered at the noise above their heads, but he told her, “Don’t be afraid. Once that cover is pulled back into place, the portal becomes impossible to detect. They’ll be marching over rocks and stones for hours, seeing nothing. It’ll all look like rocks and stones to them.”
They stood beneath the firmament and listened as the oafs lumbered over the hole, now hidden by its latched cover. They passed over it like thunder. And over it and over it and over it, they thundered.
“Fi! Fi!”
She pressed the heels of her hands against her ears to block out the noise of it. The terror of it. In time, the thunder stopped.
The end of it was a relief to her, and she said to him, “What if they had come through?”
He shrugged. “It has happened before.”
“And?”
“I dealt with it.” From inside his shirt, he withdrew an object such as she had never seen before in her life. It was a shiny black thing of peculiar shape, a kind of machine that he held in his fist the way a child holds a toy. “This is a pistol,” he said. “It is a surefire giant killer. The last one that followed me through that hole went tumbling down those stairs after I slew him with this.”
She nodded, though she did not understand how a toy could kill an oaf, and she imagined that he was boasting, for he did seem a boastful little man as well as an unsavory little sneak thief.
As she followed the sure-footed little man down the stairway to the clouds, down, down, down to she knew not where, she wondered again, Who is he?
As if reading her mind, he turned to her about two and a half zlazla hla-cubits down the stairs and he told her, “My name is Rufus.”
“Oh.”
“But you can call me Jack.”
And down they stepped, down the winding and infinite stairs, until they reached the clouds, and beneath the clouds there was another firmament, and scattered over the broad plane of the lower firmament were the dead and broken bodies of several large oafs.
There were at least four dead and broken bodies that she could see.
Rufus who was called Jack laughed an embarrassed laugh as he explained, “I shot them with my little pistol and they came a-tumblin’ down.”
“This is carnage! I thought you said that you had killed but one!”
He blushed. “I lied.”
“Obscene,” she said. “You are no better than they are, Rufus who should be called Jack the liar!”
Rufus shook his head at her childish ideas as he reached down into the clouds and grabbed hold of a small ring, which he pulled. Up came the door in the floor, revealing another hole. But there was no bright light coming through this hole, only darkness.
Rufus said, “Here it is. This is the door to my world.”
“But it is so dark,” she said.
Rufus laughed at her ignorance.
“It is nighttime in my world, and we are entering it through the sky. We are high atop a great mountain, whose peak is hidden by clouds. Of course it is dark down there, but you are going to love it.”
“But what is this? How is this?”
A thoughtful look settled upon his face. “God, I think. I think God did it—or as you say, the great creator. I think they were gods, once upon a time, maybe angels, and we built a tower to join them. But God—uhm, er, your great creator—put an end to it, and all that is left is this portal, these thousands and thousands of stairs.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said.
He shrugged. “Well, it’s just a theory.” Then he scratched his chin and added, “You know, Red, I’m not just a world-class adventurer and explorer. In my world I am a professor, a teacher at a university—what they would call in your world the great school—and I hold degrees in many subjects, including history, religion, and linguistics.”
She said, “You’re a sneak thief and a rascal is what you are.”
He muttered under his breath an unheard thing: “Just like a human. Free for less than a day, and already she takes her freedom for granted. Already she has forgotten the one who brought her out of bondage. She will do well in my world.”
“What’s worse,” she continued, “you have no respect for life.”
“The life of an oaf?” he said. “They enslaved you and would have eaten you as food.”
“All life is life,” she said.
“Even that of your enemies?”
“Even that of my enemies. There is much good in them too,” she said, remembering her boys. The one who risked his life to rescue her. The one she so longed to see.
He muttered under his breath another unheard thing: “We will see, Red. We will see.”
And then once again he took the hand of the barefoot red-haired girl and steadied her as she stepped down into the dark hole that led to his world.
Thus did the female man enter the world of man.
10
Mans of the Snow
And if the man has dreams, these dreams be of oafen bliss and visions of heaven.
—Great Scripture
When I was a little boy, my mother and father took me to the zoo. They took me to see the lions, and that was okay. They took me to see the tygas, and that was okay. They took me to see the great serpents, and that was okay. They took me to see the olyphants, and that was okay. They took me to see the mans of the snow, and that was the best because every time I went to the zoo, I wanted to see what new kind of mans they had brought in because I love mans. In my opinion, man is the greatest animal on earth and everybody should have one as a pet.
Now, the mans of the snow I saw in the zoo that day were different from all the other mans I have ever seen before, and I have seen a lot of mans. There are mans who live in the forest, and they are really small and their skin is a very dark color to blend in with the leaves. There are mans who live on the plains, and they have almost no hair on their bodies. There are mans who live in the mountains, and they have long colorful body hairs, long legs, and tiny light-colored eyes. Amazing as these mans are, the m
ans of the snow are different from all of them.
The mans of the snow are not as tall as most other mans, and they are fairly plump. My teacher says the extra fat is to keep them warm and their pale color is to help them blend in with the snow so that other predators as well as prey can’t see them coming. Unlike other mans, the mans of the snow make actual clothes. They hunt the great white beos and use their hides to protect against the freezing cold. On their feet, they wear the hide of beo like primitive shoes to protect from the snow. And when they remove their shoes, you notice that their feet are different from all other mans on earth—they cannot grasp with their feet, for their feet have no thumbs. In that respect, their feet are similar to our own.
The other thing that makes the mans of the snow different from all other mans is that they are the greatest hunters of all. The people at the zoo brought in a great white beo and we watched as the mans of the snow hunted it. The people in the zoo did not let them actually kill the beo, but we got to see them preparing their tools for the hunt, setting up in attack formation, and then launching their spears. One spear hit the beo and he growled a mighty growl and then they brought down a wall between the two cages so that the mans couldn’t hurl any more spears at it. The mans of the snow are very exciting to watch at a zoo, and it would probably be great to own one as a pet, but they are very expensive.
Even though my parents are not wealthy, I am fortunate that I have owned three mans in my life. My first man was not really mine and I had to give him back. My second man was a musical man and a fighting man, and I loved her very much, but she died. Now I own the best man of all. She has red hair, she is musical, and I know this will be hard to believe, but she is a talking man. Sometimes she and I argue over things because she has strong opinions. I have only had her for six months, but we do everything together and go everywhere together. We are best friends. We will be best friends forever. I never knew I could love anything so much.
Every Boy Should Have a Man Page 10