Lord Tyger

by Philip José Farmer

  Ras crossed the river above the village, where the water rose no higher than his chest. There were no crocodiles here, because the water was too chilly. Nevertheless, he thought his heart would stop when a fish brushed against his leg. When he came to the wall across the neck of the peninsula, he put Gubado's head down and went back into the bush. There were two torches on the platform behind the wall. In their light, Thikawa, a middle-aged man, and Sazangu, his juvenile nephew, were visible from the waist up. Their faces gleamed as if smeared with oil. Thikawa wore a white-feathered headdress, and his face was streaked with white paint. He leaned on a huge spear while he murmured to his nephew.

  Ras strung his bow, fitted an arrow to the string, and took careful aim. The twang of the string made both guards jump, and Sazangu gave a little yell. Thikawa straightened up and then fell backward with the arrow sticking out of his breastbone. Sazangu yelled louder and ducked behind the wall before Ras could draw another arrow from his quiver. Ras placed the bow over his shoulder and climbed a tall tree. It was awkward work with the bow, but he took his time and presently was above the platform.

  Sazangu was crouching down against the wall and still yelling. He was paying no attention to the big drum, which he was supposed to beat to sound the alarm. Thikawa was not in sight; he must have fallen off the platform. Ras fitted an arrow to the bow and called out Sazangu's name. Sazangu stopped yelling, jumped up, and then launched himself out from the platform. The arrow hit him in the lower back just as he cleared the railing.

  The torches above the east gate of the village across the fields were bright enough to reveal that the gates were opening. Other torches appeared within the gateway, danced around, and then started across the fields toward the peninsula wall. Ras came down from the tree, went back to Gubado's head, and then into the river by the wall. He managed to hold the head, spear, bow, and quiver above the surface with one hand while he swam on his side. It was only a few yards of semicircle from the bank on one side of the wall to the bank on the other side. Back on the land, he went through the trees and brush until he came to a large tree. Here he retrieved a rope from its cache in a hollow and slung its coil over his left shoulder.

  Now there were torches burning above each of the four gates of the village, with a man or boy on guard at each. Torches were fixed to the posts just below the branch from the sacred tree, and there was probably a guard below it. The eastern gate, however, had been left open while the noise at the peninsula wall was being investigated.

  Ras walked close to the village wall along its eastern front until he was almost to the gate. He called, "Chufiya! Chufiya!"

  The chief's son leaned out over the wall to look into the darkness.

  "Who is it?"

  "Lalazi Taigaidi!"

  The arrow hit Chufiya between the shoulder and neck. He was spun around by the impact and then fell down behind the wall onto the platform floor. Ras ran forward with a cone of hair of Gubado's head clutched in his left hand. He placed the head at the gateway and ran away. A woman screamed, and men shouted. Ras stopped outside the northern gate. Kufuna, the guard, was looking toward the commotion. Ras called his name and, when Kufuna turned, he received the arrow in his solar plexus. Without a sound, he fell back off the platform.

  There were more shouts, near where Kufuna must have struck the earth. Ras went along the wall to the western gate. Bigagi was no longer standing on the bridge, and the cage was gone. Shewego, an elderly man, was the guard above the western gate. Always nervous, he was even more jittery now. Like a bird, he looked everywhere. He saw Ras's white skin in the blaze of the torches, yelled, and dived across the platform railing without thought of the twenty-foot drop to the earth. The arrow missed him.

  Ras cursed in Amharic and ran on around the wall to the western gate. Pathapi, one of his childhood playmates, was the guard here. Somebody must have warned him, or he had deduced what was happening from the sequence of events. He turned and threw his spear at Ras and then deserted his post.

  Ras whirled around and ran back into the shadows of the walls on the west side. He stopped at the bridge to hack away with the knife at the cables on the land end of the bridge. Then he ran to the islet across the bridge and cut into the ropes there until a few threads held it. He gave a long, wavering scream. There was silence inside the village except for some children crying, hogs squealing, and chickens squawking. A minute passed. Wuwufa's voice, a high-pitched gabble, suddenly arose. Soon, bars creaked and the western gates swung slowly open. Six men, holding torches, peered into the darkness.

  "Here I am!" Ras cried, and he stood up at the end of the bridge. "Here I am! I, Lord Tyger!"

  Wuwufa danced behind the six warriors and screamed at them to kill the ghost. None of them moved. Tibaso waddled up and shouted at them. They shifted from one foot to the other and glanced at each other. Tibaso tore a spear from a man. He advanced onto the bridge and threw it at Ras.

  Ras ducked to one side, jumped back, and slashed at the half-severed rope. It parted with a twang, its end slashing into his cheek. He ran to the opposite side and slashed the rope holding it. Tibaso yelled with consternation. The bridge fell at the islet end; Tibaso slid headlong down the bridge and into the water.

  By then, Ras had seen the three heads of crocodiles stuck on poles in the banks. This meant that the crocodiles had been cleared out of the area as part of Wilida's wedding ceremony. The bodies of the animals had probably been the main course during the wedding banquet.

  Tibaso was safe from being eaten alive. He had swum back to the bank and was heaving himself up its steep incline like a hippo. The six men had fitted arrows to their bows and were about to deliver a covering fire for the chief. Ras had to take refuge behind a tree while the shafts thunked near him or whistled by.

  Immediately afterward, he stepped out from behind the tree and shot at Tibaso. The dim light and his haste marred the shot; the arrow went through Tibaso's left thigh instead of the center of his back. Tibaso screamed and reared up from all fours to his feet. He staggered up the bank and limped through the gates while six men sent another volley at Ras, who had jumped back behind the tree. Then they ran back through the gateway and shut the gates.

  Ras threw his spear across the channel to the bank and swam across to the bank. He climbed the tree in which he had sung that afternoon two weeks before. The entire population was milling about in front of the Great House. Tibaso was face down on the chair on the earth platform. His hands were gripping the arms, and his two wives were holding him down or trying to, while Wuwufa was drawing the arrow out. The shaft had gone all the way through the fleshy part of the thigh and come out in front. Wuwufa had removed the arrowhead and now was slowly pulling the shaft out. Tibaso was uttering no sound; a wounded man, if he was to be thought a great warrior, must not cry out when being treated for wounds.

  The bodies of the men that Ras had killed were laid out side by side near the chief. The crowd kept a respectful distance from the corpses; even the loudly mourning women did not go near them. Children were crying; the goats, pigs, and chickens, disturbed by the commotion, were adding baas, squeals, and clucks to the racket. The light from the many torches shone on glistening black skins, and reddish two-coned hair, on reddish copper spearheads, and on the white, zigzag warpaint on the men's faces.

  There were corpses and Gubado's head on the ground. Ras counted them and was puzzled. There should only have been four, but there were five. At this distance and in the shifting torchlights, the identity of the extra body was uncertain. Ras knew intimately the features, body form, walk, gestures, and voice of every Wantso, but the body had the flatness and lumpishness of a dead man. Ras had to name the living and then the dead before he could identify the extra corpse. It had to be Wiviki, husband of Shuthuna and father of Fibida, a six-year-old girl. Wiviki must have died earlier in the day. He should, therefore, be lying in the Great House now. Why was he out on display with the others?

  Now Bigagi was standing in front of t
he chief. He was waving his spear and shouting something. The other men had quit talking, and the women and children had become subdued in their grief and terror. Bigagi was evidently urging them to some kind of action. At the end of a long speech, the men clashed spears and yelled something in which Ras thought he could hear his own name.

  Bigagi had taken control; he seemed to have become larger and heavier and more powerful. He was the man who could be the most danger to Ras. He knew Ras well, and he did not have the horror of Ras that possessed the others. He also was ambitious. Ras had often heard him say that he would like to be chief, although Ras had interpreted Bigagi's desires as childish dreams of greatness, just as Ras had dreamed of being Igziyabher. But Tibaso, the chief, had lost control. Tibaso could think of nothing but the agony of the wound in his thigh.

  Bigagi turned away from the crowd and walked to the chief 's chair and seized the wand of the chief, which was leaning against the side of the chair. Tibaso half rose and then fell back into the chair, his head lolling to one side. Bigagi shouted something, and Tibaso's two wives lifted him up and supported him between them as they staggered into the Great House. Wuwufa, the old spirit-talker, and Bigagi talked loudly at each other, and presently Wuwufa fell to the ground and began to roll back and forth.

  Ras waited for a while to watch developments before leaving. He wanted to find out where Yusufu was being kept, but it looked as if he was going to be disappointed. He had no chance of sneaking into the village now. Yusufu was not going to be tortured, because the Wantso had more urgent business. Bigagi would be organizing a party to search in the area around the village.

  He decided to retreat across the river and get some sleep before dawn. The Wantso could tire themselves out beating up and down in the bush of the peninsula and perhaps on the banks across the river, though he doubted that they would dare that. He climbed down from the tree, swam the river, and walked a mile and a half to a tree that offered him a nest for the rest of the night. He slept uneasily, awakening several times, once thinking that he had heard Janhoy roaring in the distance.

  By the light of dawn, he took from the bag the papers that Gubado had found, and read them. They were still wet; the print had run, and many letters were blurred. He could, however, distinguish most of the words:

  --139--

  only place where Africa is as it was before the white man. And unlike most of pre-Caucasian Africa, it's a healthy place. There are no mosquitoes, because there are no stagnant pools. Even the water in the great swamp is continually moving. Hence, there is no malaria. There are also no tsetse flies, no bilharziasis, no smallpox, no venereal diseases. Colds don't exist among the Wantso and Sharrikt. The main causes of death are warfare, accidents, man-eating leopards, snake bites, crocodiles (among the Sharrikt), and infection from cuts or wounds. The circumcision rites of the Wantso, besides rendering the men half-impotent, also result quite often in infection and death. The Wantso are well aware of this; they, like people everywhere, persist in continuing a custom even if it's non-survival. The custom has, however, in a broader sense, a survival value, since it keeps the population at a certain level (50 +- 5), although the Wantso knowledge of birth control really doesn't make the high death rate among males necessary for population balance.

  I may as well admit right here that I loathe the Wantso--with good reason, as my readers will see. They're a depraved people, and they've pulled Ras into their circle of wickedness. Somehow, he's become fond of these nauseatingly base Yahoos. He's subscribed to their evil sexual play, which I won't describe here because of the sensibilities of my readers, who won't read this, of course, until after I'm dead and I really shouldn't care, but to me morality is for the dead as well as for the living and

  The second sheet was numbered --230--:

  my sons, the ungrateful swine, take after their mother, wretched shrew, who left me long ago. But she knew better than they. She didn't try to get much of my money; she knew what would happen to her if she did try. My sons have permitted their greediness to overcome their sense of what's good for them. They tried to oust me from my own business, the great industry that I built up from a thousand dollars (loaned to me) to its present thirty million gross. My business, for which I worked like a slave, suffered privation and lack of sleep, which I made into a vast enterprise for one end only: this valley, this Ras Tyger, so that I could make The Book real, and could some day show the scoffers what ignorant, brainless, shallow-souled hyenas they are! If I have spent more than three million on this project, that is my business and mine only! They (my sons) demanded that I tell them where the money had gone; they hired detectives to find out where I went when I disappeared from Johannesburg. But I thank God I had some loyal servants to look after my interests and to warn me--very well-paid servants, of course, servants who knew what would happen to them if they betrayed me. And so the detectives dropped out of men's sight forever when they tried to follow me, and serve them right, too. They met the same fate as others who've tried to balk me or, not knowing of me or my prior claim, tried to get into this valley.

  The existence of this place has been known for a long time, of course, but nobody except me--and my helpers--know its nature, what it contains, what is being done here. Nor will

  Ras did not understand much of what he read. There were many words the meanings of which he did not know: Africa, malaria, bilharziasis, depraved, venereal, Johannesburg, detectives, and so forth. If the dictionary in the cabin by the lake had not been burned along with the cabin, he could have tracked down the meanings of the words. Yusufu might know them--if Yusufu were still living and could be found.

  Ras folded the papers up and put them back in the bag with the other one. He stuffed the bag into a hole in the trunk just above the butt of the branch and jammed the hole with leaves and twigs. He returned to the river at a point close to the southern end of the peninsular wall. There were no guards on the platform above the gates in the wall. Drums were beating in the village, the bull-roarer was throoming, and gourds were rattling. Ras took a station in a tree near the bank to the south of the village. From there, he could see all taking place inside the stockade.

  The corpses and Gubado's head were still arranged side by side on the ground in the center of the village. There was a body at one end that had not been there the night before. Its enormity made it easily identifiable as Tibaso. The wound in the thigh must have been his death, unless, perhaps, Bigagi had killed him, although this did not seem likely. The entire population was massed before the chief's chair, in which Bigagi sat. Tibaso's two wives, and Wilida, stood behind him. Wuwufa, his face and shoulders hidden inside a conical tower of wood and straw, was dancing before the crowd. He held a fly swatter made of the tail from a river buffalo. He waved it up and down, shook it at the crowd, and now and then stopped to crouch and lean to one side as if he were listening.

  It was some time before Ras understood what was happening. The silence of the crowd, their squatting stance, and their wide eyes, intent on Wuwufa, their obvious dread, and the fly swatter, gave him his clue. Though he had never witnessed this event, he had heard descriptions of it from Wilida. Wuwufa was smelling out a doer of evil.

  The Wantso had suffered a catastrophe. Half the adult males had been killed; great evil had been done to them. Someone was responsible, and that someone would be sniffed out before more evil was worked among them. All were evil, men, women, and children, but one was more evil than the others, one had so much evil that it had leaked out of him and caused death among the Wantso. Someone must be caught before more evil could bite like a snake.

  Wuwufa stomped up and down before the crowd and shook the buffalo's tail. He danced before the first row of men and women and waved the tail in their faces, and they cowered and shrank back. Wuwufa went up and down the rows, bringing horror with him and leaving relief behind him. He passed through the rows without touching anyone with the swatter, and then he stomped and ducked and leaned this way and that as he worked toward Bigagi,
Thiliza, Favina, and Wilida.

  Bigagi was the only one not to show fear. He glared at Wuwufa as if daring him to touch him with the buffalo's tail. The three women shrank back and tried to keep the chair between them and the approaching spirit-talker.

  Ras wondered if Bigagi and Wuwufa had opposed each other last night. Had Wuwufa protested at Bigagi's seizing of the chief's chair? Did Wuwufa think to get rid of Bigagi by sniffing him out as the secreter of evil? Or did he have one of the women in mind?

  Wuwufa paused before the chair, waved the swatter before Bigagi, who clenched his wand but would not stop glaring at Wuwufa. The spirit-talker stomped back and forth and leaned the conical structure to one side. Then he went by Bigagi and waved the swatter in front of the women. They turned to face him, as if they feared to be touched upon the back if they did not look at him. Their heads jerked back as the buffalo tail whipped at their faces. They held their hands before them, and Thiliza went to her knees with terror.

  Wuwufa passed her by and went back to Wilida. He approached her from her right and then from her left. He cocked his body this way and that, posing for a long time. He shook the swatter above and around her and once between her legs. He held the swatter close to his mask as if smelling it.

  Ras gripped the branch. He knew now who the witch would be. Logically, she would be the causer of evil. She was the first to meet him; she had been the best friend, and, later, the greatest lover of the Ghost-Boy. The Ghost-Boy had gotten access to the people of the village because she had not run away from him. The Ghost-Boy had bragged before the entire village that he loved her most of all. The Ghost-Boy, Ras Tyger, had caused the deaths of half the men. So, Wilida must be the guilty of the guilty.