"It's too late now to change your mind again, because I gave you your only chance. It seems to me that you should have killed him if only to satisfy the ghosts of your parents. You have let them down. But if you won't fulfill your duties, I'll do it for you."
Gilluk gave an order, and two men entered Bigagi's cage.
Ras said, "What are you going to do?"
"Baastmaast isn't hungry yet," Gilluk said. "It was only three days ago that he ate Tattniss. But if we wait too long, the Wantso will die."
"You're going to throw Bigagi into the pool?" Ras said.
"Tomorrow. Before the sun touches the western peaks. In the meantime, we have certain ceremonies to perform, and Bigagi must spend one night chained to the platform above the pool so that Baastmaast can see what we are giving him."
A chair carved out of lemonwood was brought in from a room off the yard. Four of the king's relatives carried it, two in front, two in back, each holding the end of a pole inserted through carved holes in the chair. The chair was covered with carved crocodiles.
Bigagi was set in the chair, in which he lolled, one arm hanging out, his head on one shoulder. Drums beat; bagpipes shrilled; spears clashed. In a short time, a parade was formed. The king's herald led the march out the great door with the king twelve steps behind him and holding the sword with both hands straight up before his face.
Behind the king was Bigagi. When his chair was only a few paces from the doorway, he suddenly jerked his head up and then sat up. His shout was so loud that it startled the drummers and fluters and bagpipers, and the music slid off into silence. Gilluk spun around.
Bigagi's voice was weak after that great call. But Ras could hear him.
"Lazazi Taigaidi! Can you hear me?"
Bigagi's head was bent back now, its top against the high back of the chair. He stared straight upward into the sun.
"I hear you, Bigagi!" Ras shouted.
The voice of Bigagi was faint. It could be heard only because the Sharrikt were as silent as if they thought that a ghost was speaking.
"I did not kill your parents! No Wantso killed your parents! You have..."
"Who killed them?" Ras shouted. "Bigagi! Who killed them?"
There was no answer. Bigagi fell in on himself and sighed as if he were a collapsing bagpipe. The wail raised the eyelids of the Sharrikt and caused them to shudder. The men holding the chair-poles started, but they did not drop the chair.
Gilluk walked back to Ras and said, "He had no reason to lie."
"He must have lied," Ras said. "He had to."
Gilluk laughed and said, "You killed all the Wantso for something that they did not do."
Ras stared at him through the bars. Gilluk's face, and everything behind Gilluk, was as dark as if the sun had suddenly been eclipsed. There was a roaring in his head, and his chest was clenching.
"I will kill you for laughing," Ras said.
"Haven't you done enough killing?" Gilluk said. He laughed again and signaled for the parade to restart.
Only Gilluk's mother paid any attention to Ras. Her head was turned to look back over the chair at him until she disappeared down the hill.
There was silence then except for a distant roar from the town at the foot of the hill.
Eeva said, "What was that all about?"
Ras gestured for her to be still, since he wanted to think about what Bigagi had said. But she insisted that he tell her.
Eeva said, "Don't feel so bad! If you were tricked, you can't help it! You didn't know! What else could you think, with the evidence you had?"
"I killed them all," Ras said. "I killed even those that my hand did not kill."
He looked down at his feet for the black pool he expected to form there. There was nothing but the sunshine and the shadows of the bars. Nevertheless, he felt as if his soul had gushed out.
"Now Bigagi will die, too. Because of what I did."
He added, "Who did this? Who shot my mother with a Wantso arrow? Why?"
Eeva said, "Only one person could have done it, though I don't know why. It was the person who wrote those pages you call Letters from God. I think he did it because he wanted to deceive you into thinking that the Wantso had killed your mother, so that you would take revenge on them. But I don't know why."
"You mean Igziyabher did it?"
Eeva shook her head and said, "No, not God. A man. Whoever brought you here and caused you to be reared as a Tarsan."
"Tarsan?"
Eeva repeated the word carefully and this time voiced the z. "Tarzan. The hero of a series of novels about..."
"Hero? Novels?"
Eeva explained as best she could without wandering off to elucidate the background for "hero" and "novels."
"It's difficult to tell you anything at all about the outside world because you don't have a frame of reference. And I'm handicapped explaining this because I've never read a Tarzan book. I saw a movie when I was a child--my mother didn't know about it--but I understand there's very little relation between the book Tarzan and the movie Tarzan. Actually, I know little about Tarzan except for the movie and occasional references in newspapers and books. He was a white man who was brought up by some kind of gorilla-like apes in the African jungle. He's a sort of archetype of freedom from civilized inhibitions and irritations and tabus. A Noble Savage."
"What does all that mean?"
"It means that the writer of those pages, the man who is responsible for your being raised here, is psychotic. That is, crazy, mad, deranged, insane. You were kidnapped as a baby and brought here to play the role of a Tarzan. Only events didn't work out the way they were intended."
Ras was silent for a long time. Even if he had not been numbed by Bigagi's revelation, he would have had difficulty understanding her. As she had said, he had no "frame of reference."
Suddenly, he howled, and he beat the bars with his fists. The guards shouted at him, but he paid no attention to them.
"I'll kill him!" Ras yelled. "I'll kill Igziyabher!"
"It wasn't God," Eeva said. "It was a man."
"I'll kill him!" Ras screamed, and he began to weep and sob.
Eeva waited until he was quiet. She said, "This man has to be on top of the pillar in the lake."
Ras gave a long, shuddering sigh and turned away from her. The guards, Tukkisht and Gammum, were side by side, their spears pointing at him, their knees and bodies bent, their eyes wide.
"If you have a plan to get out," Eeva said, "now is the time to use it. Everybody has gone to the island. At least, you told me they do when anybody is to be fed to Baastmaast."
Ras mumbled.
She said, "What?"
He replied, "I meant to do this some night when there was a storm and it would be dark and raining."
He opened the antelope-hide bag and removed the mirror and whetstone. He rapped the end of the whetstone against the center of the glass of the mirror, which cracked into seven triangular pieces. Since his fingernails could not separate the shards, he hammered one piece until it broke away. With a sliver from it, he pried loose an intact triangle. The others followed easily.
Gammum stepped closer to the cage and said, "What are you doing?"
Ras looked up, grinned, and said, "I'm making magic to let me loose."
Gammum's eyes rolled. He took one step backward but forced himself to come near again. "Stop it, or I'll kill you!"
"You can try to," Ras said. He used the whetstone to hone the edges of the glass shard. Then he began to saw on the leather rope securing the door to the cage.
Gammum jabbed his spear through the bars to force Ras away. Expecting this, Ras seized the shaft of the spear just behind the head and threw himself backward. Gammum tried to hold on but was yanked so hard against the bars that his eyes crossed, his nose bled, and his knees loosened. The spear left his grip. Tukkisht yelled and ran up to the cage and thrust his spear through the bars. Ras had reversed his; he threw it between two bars. It drove into Tukkisht's arm. Tukkisht fell b
ackward with the spear still in his flesh. He was up at once, jerked the spear loose, reversed it, and raised it to cast through the bars. Blood spurted over his arm and side.
Ras had picked up Tukkisht's spear, which he had dropped halfway into the cage. Gammum staggered back but not in time to escape entirely. Ras did not want to lose the spear, so he jabbed with it and stuck a half inch of copper into Gammum's thigh.
Gammum screamed and whirled and lurched across the courtyard toward the big doorway. His hands flapped, and he crowed.
Ras used the edge of the spearhead to saw through the leather rope. By the time it was severed, Gammum had disappeared down the hill.
Tukkisht called out to Gammum, but seeing that he was going to be deserted, advanced upon Ras. Ras kicked the cage door so that it swung outward, and he was out in a bound. Tukkisht was brave and a skilled spearman, but he was facing a man he believed to be a ghost, a man who had escaped in a few seconds from a seemingly escape-proof cage, and he was also bleeding heavily and weakening fast. Ras parried his few thrusts, drove him backward, and then knocked the spear to one side and sent his into Tukkisht's stomach. Tukkisht fell on his knees and doubled over while he clutched at his stomach. Ras knocked him out with the butt of his spear on his head and left him.
He ran out through the doorway. The seven-foot Gammum was lurching halfway down the hill like a sick stork. The town at the foot of the hill was deserted except for some small children playing in the street and a white-haired woman watching them. There were boats on the shore of the island and white-clad figures in a column the head of which had entered the tall, dark doorway of the building in the center of the island. The last boat was a few feet away from landing on the island. It was filled with slaves clad only in white skirts.
Ras caught Gammum in the back with the spear. Gammum slid down a few steps and did not move thereafter. As Ras pulled the spear out, he heard a scream from below. The white-haired woman was looking up at him, her mouth open. Then she turned and ran down the street toward the lake shore. Some of the infants toddled after her. Some continued to play.
She was too far away for him to hope to catch her. Within a few minutes she would have rowed across the quarter mile of lake to the island and given the alarm. There was nothing else he could do except run back up the steps and to Eeva's cage. He slashed the rope on the door of her cage with a copper knife taken from Tukkisht.
"What do we do now?" she said. Her skin was pale beneath her tan, but her gray eyes were bright.
"I want my knife," he said. "And since Gilluk burned down the fine cage and house I built for him, his cage--and his building--will burn."
"We haven't got time!" she said. "If we left right now, we could get ahead of them and escape through the swamp!"
He shook his head, whirled, and ran to the nearest doorway.
The stairway was quartz-shot granite blocks, the edges of the risers worn down by generations of feet. It twisted up to a hallway between the rooms on the outside wall and those on the rooms overlooking the courtyard. The light in the hall was dim. Sunlight came through the open windows of the inner and outer rooms, but it was choked by the grass-and-bamboo curtains covering the entrances to the rooms. Unlit torches were stuck at 45-degree angles into holes bored into the granite walls. Ras removed several and told Eeva to get some for herself. Pushing aside a curtain, he entered a large room. There were several beds of carved mahogany frameworks, grass mattresses, and pelt coverings. Stone shelves rose against one wall from floor to beamed ceiling. These held at least three hundred skulls, Gilluk's ancestors, direct and collateral, and a number of broader, rounder, more prognathous skulls, Wantso victims of Sharrikt raids. There were also gorilla and leopard skulls.
Beside the great window was a tall-backed chair with arms and seat covered with crocodile-hide. A wooden rack held spears and war clubs and Ras's belt, sheath, and knife.
The only other furniture was a small copper brazier in the center of the room. It contained some hot coals of a heavy wood.
Ras strapped on the knife belt and applied the torches to the coals in the brazier. Eeva lit torches from his torches. She said, "Why do you insist on wasting time?"
"Because Gilluk must realize that I am no ordinary prisoner. Because Gilluk must pay."
He told her what she should do. They tore down the curtains, set them in a pile by a huge, upright beam, and piled the wooden beds on top of the curtains. Ras set the curtains to blazing and then raked the skulls off the shelves with his spear. He threw the skulls on the fire and watched the flames curl around them.
After that, he and Eeva raced around the building, downstairs, and around the second and first floors, where they started other fires. Before he returned to the courtyard, he looked out a window toward the island. White-clad figures were streaming out of the temple toward the dugouts and bamboo boats on the island beach.
While Eeva stacked a few curtains and mats against the sides of the cages, Ras hammered with a large, three-legged copper brazier at the bars of his cage. The bamboo poles gave way, and he soon had an opening for the great exercise wheel.
"What are you doing now?" Eeva said. Her hair and face were black with smoke, and her gray eyes, wide with excitement, the whites reddened with strain and smoke, stared at him.
She recoiled at his savage expression and said, "Never mind! I give up! You're mad!"
He ignored her to run though the door of his cage, past the crackling flames, and into the annex that held the wheel. He lifted it off its support, although it had taken four men to carry it between them, lowered it, and rammed it through the open space he had made by knocking the poles out.
Smoke was beginning to fill the courtyard. It curled around them and made them cough. Ras rolled the wheel out through the great doorway, turned it a little, and halted it a few feet from the crest of the hill.
By then, three dugouts and one war canoe, Gilluk's, were drawn up on the mainland shore, with others coming in. The giant white figure of the king, the sun-glinting sword raised above his head, was running through the street. Behind him was his bodyguard, their spears flashing. Freemen armed with spears followed the king's relatives.
Ras turned the wheel once more and rolled it to a position near the northeast corner of the building. When smoke enveloped them, he and Eeva lay close to the ground and looked over the edge of the hill.
"I'd ask you what you're going to do," Eeva said, "but I'm afraid to."
"I moved the wheel over here so it wouldn't carry us into the houses," Ras said. "It'll get a straight roll down to the lake. And bring us near the dugouts."
Her nails sank into his biceps, and she said, "You mean...?"
He grinned and said, "We'll get a good head start on them that way. They'll all be almost up the hill before we start down. We can get across the lake and up into the hills, and from there we'll get back to the swamp. We could take the boat up to the mouth of the river, but they could go faster on land and be at the river before we got there if they knew we were going that way. But in the hills, they won't find us. I'll make sure of that."
She almost wailed. "But we could have gone out the back way and been in the hills on that side, too, long ago."
"No. That way, there are three miles of flat land before we could get to the hills. I could outrun them, but you..."
He paused, then said, "Besides, I want to do it this way."
"All right."
She withdrew her nails from his arm, and she laughed.
"Jumala! If my colleagues could see me now! They'd never believe it! Nobody will ever believe it!"
Through the smoke, Ras saw Gilluk striding up the steps, his guard and male relatives below him a few steps, and the freemen spreading out on both sides of the stone steps to form two lines across the face of the hill. Ten ran around the hill on one side and seven on the other, apparently to come up on opposite sides of the hill. And also to look out across the country on that side for him if he were escaping that way.
At the foot of the hill, just leaving the town to start up the steps, was a mob of slaves and artisans, some freeman farmers, and the Sharrikt women. The chair of Gilluk's mother was supported at an angle on the shoulders of slaves. She was holding her parasol herself as she bent her head back to look up.
"For God's sake, how long do we have to wait?" Eeva said.
Ras grinned again and stood up.
"Now."
The smoke was so thick that there were times when she could not see him although she was only several feet away. Coughing, she got down on her belly and crawled forward until her hand touched a wooden spoke. He was already inside and coughing violently.
"Hurry up!"
She slid through the opening between two spokes on the side of the cage. She gasped, "I can hardly see you!"
He was suspended in the cage, his hands around a spoke on either side and his feet braced against the spokes. Between coughs, he said, "It isn't going to work this way."
He lowered himself until his back was against the curved walk, after which he braced himself again.
"It'll be a hard ride," he said. "Whatever happens, don't let go."
Seeing that she was set, he eased himself up the walk so that his weight would roll the wheel forward. It moved a little, then stopped. Again, he climbed, his feet on spokes higher up. The wheel rotated slowly because Eeva's weight was holding it back.
Ras gave a shout that ended in a cough. He bent forward, his hands gripping spokes, his insteps hooked around spokes, and then he threw himself backward. The wheel rolled again, slowed, seemed to stop, and suddenly went over the edge.
Eeva shrieked. Ras continued to cough, even as he went down and then up and over in a forward motion. He gripped harder as his body sagged down and pressed against the walk. Shouts and screams came up the hill. Ras turned his head just in time to see Gilluk, about forty yards to one side, standing on a step, staring at him, the sword slowly sinking. Then Gilluk was upside down, the sun was below Ras, rightside up, upside down, and out of sight. A shrill squawk was slashed by the spinning spokes; a white-clad figure with a black face, white-rimmed eyes, and white teeth and black gullet flashed by. The wheel bumped as it hit a small mound, shot into the air a little way, and banged down, almost tearing Ras from his position on the upper part of the wheel.
Lord Tyger Page 24