They were sitting upon the dry grasses that he had gathered for their beds. King sat now in silence, looking at the girl. For the thousandth time he was impressed by her great beauty, and then the face of another girl arose in a vision between them. It was the face of Susan Anne Prentice. With a short laugh King turned his gaze down toward the stream; while once again, upon the opposite cliff-top, the little eyes of the great man watched them.
“Why do you laugh, Gordon King?” asked Fou-tan, looking up suddenly.
“You would not understand, Fou-tan,” he said. He had been thinking of what Susan Anne would say could she have knowledge of the situation in which he then was — a situation which he realized was not only improbable but impossible. Here was he, Gordon King, a graduate physician, a perfectly normal product of the twentieth century, sitting almost naked under a big rock with a little slave girl of a race that had disappeared hundreds of years before. That in itself was preposterous. But there was another matter that was even less credible; he realized that he enjoyed the situation, and most of all he enjoyed the company of the little slave girl.
“You are laughing at me, Gordon King,” said Fou-tan, “and I do not like to be laughed at.”
“I was not laughing at you, Fou-tan,” he replied. “I could not laugh at you. I—”
“You what?” she demanded.
“I could not laugh at you,” he replied lamely.
“You said that once before, Gordon King,” she reminded him. “You started to say something else. What was it?”
For a moment he was silent. “I have forgotten, Fou-tan,” he said then.
His eyes were turned away from her as she looked at him keenly in silence for some time. Then a slow smile lighted her face and she broke into a little humming song.
The man upon the opposite cliff withdrew stealthily until he was out of sight of the two in the gorge below him. Then he arose to an erect position and crept softly away into the forest. Ready in his hands were his bow and an arrow. For all his great size and weight he moved without noise, his little eyes shifting constantly from side to side. Suddenly, and so quickly that one could scarcely follow the movements of his hands, an arrow sped from his bow, and an instant later he stepped forward and picked up a large rat that had been transfixed by his missile. The creature moved slowly onward, and presently a little monkey swung through the trees above him. Again the bowstring twanged, and the little monkey hurtled to the ground at the feet of the primitive hunter. Squatting on his haunches the man-thing ate the rat raw; then he carried the monkey back to the edge of the gorge, and after satisfying himself that the two were still there he fell to upon the principal item of his dinner; and he was still eating when darkness came.
Fou-tan had not broken King’s embarrassed silence, but presently the man arose. “Where are you going, Gordon King?” she asked.
“There is some driftwood lodged upon the opposite bank, left there by last season’s flood waters. We shall need it for our cooking fire tonight:”
“I will go with you and help you,” said Fou-tan, and together they crossed the little stream and gathered the dry wood for their fire.
From Che and Kangrey the American had learned to make fire without matches; and he soon had a little blaze burning, far back beneath the shelter of their overhanging rock. He had cleaned and washed the fish and now proceeded to grill them over the fire, while Fou-tan roasted two large tubers impaled upon the ends of sticks.
“I would not exchange this for the palace of a king, Gordon King,” she said.
“Nor I, Fou-tan,” he replied.
“Are you happy, Gordon King?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “And you, Fou-tan, are you happy?”
She nodded her head. “It is because you and I are together,” she said simply.
“We come from opposite ends of the earth, Fou-tan,” he said, “we are separated by centuries of time, we have nothing in common, your world and my world are as remote from one another as the stars; and yet, Fou-tan, it seems as though I had known you always. It does not seem possible that I have lived all my life up to now without even knowing that you existed.”
“I have felt that too, Gordon King,” said the girl. “I cannot understand it, but it is so. However, you are wrong in one respect.”
“And what is that?” he asked.
“You said that we had nothing in common. We have.”
“What is it?” demanded King.
Fou-tan shuddered. “The leprosy,” she said. “He touched us both. We shall both have it.”
Gordon King laughed. “We shall never contract leprosy from Lodivarman,” he said. “I am a doctor. I know.”
“Why shall we not?” she demanded.
“Because Lodivarman is not a leper,” replied the American.
10. LOVE AND THE BRUTE
From the opposite side of the gorge the brute, gnawing upon a leg bone of the monkey, watched the two below. He saw the fire kindled and it troubled him. He was afraid of fire. Muddily, in his undeveloped brain, it represented the personification of some malign power. The brute knew no god; but he knew that there were forces that brought pain, disaster, death, and that oftentimes these forces were invisible. The visible causes of such effects were the enemies he had met in the jungle in the form of men or of beasts; therefore, it was natural that he should endow the invisible causes of similar effects with the physical attributes of the enemies that he could see. He peopled the jungle accordingly with invisible men and invisible beasts that wrought pain, disaster, and death. These enemies he held in far greater fear than those that were visible to him. Fire, he knew, was the work of one of these dread creatures, and the very sight of it made him uncomfortable.
The brute was not hungry; he harbored no animosity for the two creatures he stalked; he was motivated by a more powerful urge than hunger or hate. He had seen the girl!
The fire annoyed him and kept him at bay; but time meant little to the brute. He saw that the two had made beds, and he guessed that they would sleep where they were during the night. On the morrow they would go out after food, and there would be no fire with them. The brute was content to wait until the morrow. He found some tall grass and, getting upon his hands and knees, turned about several times, as bedding dogs are wont to do, and then lay down. He had flattened the grasses so that they all lay in one direction, and when he turned upon his bed he always turned in that direction, so that the sharp ends of the grasses did not stick into his flesh. Perhaps he had learned this trick from the wild dogs, or perhaps the wild dogs first learned it from man. Who knows?
In the darkness Fou-tan and King sat upon their beds and talked. Fou-tan was full of questions. She wanted to know all about the strange country from which King came. Most of the things he told her she could not understand; but her questions were quite often directed upon subjects that were well within her ken — there are some matters that are eternal; time does not alter them.
“Are the women of your country beautiful?” she asked.
“Some of them,” replied the man.
“Have you a wife, Gordon King?” The question was voiced in a whisper.
“No, Fou-tan.”
“But you love someone,” she insisted, for love is so important to a woman that she cannot imagine a life devoid of love.
“I have been too busy to fall in love,” he replied good-naturedly.
“You are not very busy now,” suggested Fou-tan.
“I think I shall be a very busy man for the next few days trying to get you back to Pnom Dhek,” he assured her.
Fou-tan was silent. It was so dark that he could scarcely see her. But he could feel her presence near him, and it seemed to exert as strong an influence upon him as might have physical contact. He had recognized the power of that indefinable thing called personality when he had talked with people and looked into their eyes; but he never had had it reach out through the dark and lay hold of him as though with warm fingers of flesh and blood, and Kin
g found the sensation most disquieting.
They lay in silence upon their beds of dry grasses, each occupied with his own thoughts. The heat of the jungle day was rising slowly from the narrow gorge, and a damp chill was replacing it. The absolute darkness which surrounded them was slightly mitigated in their immediate vicinity by an occasional flame rising from the embers of their dying fire as some drying twigs of their fuel ignited. King was thinking of the girl at his side, of the responsibility which her presence entailed, and of the duty that he owed to her and to himself. He tried not to think about her, but that he found impossible, and the more that she was in his mind the stronger became the realization of the hold that she had obtained upon him; that the sensation that she animated within him was love seemed incredibly preposterous. He tried to assure himself that it was but an infatuation engendered by her beauty and propinquity, and he girded himself to conquer his infatuation that he might perform the duty that had devolved upon him in so impersonal a way that there might be no regret.
In order to fortify this noble decision he cast Fou-tan from his mind entirely and occupied himself with thoughts of his friends in far-away America. In retrospect he laughed and danced again with Susan Anne Prentice; he listened to her pleasant cultured voice and enjoyed once more the sweet companionship of the girl who was to him all that a beloved sister might have been; and then a little sigh came from the bed of grasses at his side, and the vision of Susan Anne Prentice faded into oblivion.
Again there was a long silence, broken only by the murmur of the tumbling stream.
“Gordon King!” It was just a whisper.
“What is it, Fou-tan?”
“I am afraid, Gordon King,” said the girl. How like a little child in the dark she sounded. Before he could answer, there came the sound of a soft thud down the gorge and the rattle of loose earth falling from above.
“What was that?” asked Fou-tan in a frightened whisper. “Something is coming, Gordon King. Look!”
Silently the man rose to his feet, grasping his spear in readiness. Down the gorge he saw two blazing points of flame; and quickly stepping to their fire, he placed dry twigs upon the embers, blowing upon them gently until they burst into flame. At a little distance those two glowing spots burned out of the darkness.
King piled more wood upon the fire until it blazed up bravely, illuminating their little grotto and revealing Fou-tan sitting up upon her bed of grasses, gazing with wide horror-filled eyes at those two silent, ominous harbingers of death fixed so menacingly upon them. “My Lord the Tiger!” she whispered; and her low, tense tones were vibrant with all the inherent horror of the great beast that had been passed down to her by countless progenitors, for whom My Lord the Tiger had constituted life’s greatest menace.
Primitive creatures, constantly surrounded by lethal dangers, sleep lightly. The descent of the great cat into the gorge, followed by the sounds of the falling earth and stones it had dislodged, brought to his feet the sleeping brute upon the opposite summit. Thinking that the noise might have come from the quarry in the gorge below, the creature moved quickly to the edge of the cliff and looked down; and as the mounting blazes of King’s fire illuminated the scene, the brute saw the great tiger standing with upraised head, watching the man and the woman in their rocky retreat.
Here was an interloper that aroused the ire of the brute; here was a deadly enemy about to seize that which the brute had already marked as his own. The creature selected a heavy arrow, the heaviest arrow that he carried, and, fitting it to his bow, he bent the sturdy weapon until the point of the arrow touched the fingers of his bow-hand; then he let drive at a point just behind the shoulders of the tiger.
What happened thereafter happened very quickly. The arrow drove through to the great cat’s lungs; the shock, the surprise and the pain brought instant reaction. Not having sensed the presence of any other formidable creature than those before him, My Lord the Tiger must naturally have assumed that they were the authors of his hurt. This supposition, at least, seemed likely if judged by that which immediately occurred.
With a hideous roar, with blazing eyes, with wide distended jaws, revealing gleaming fangs, the great cat charged straight for King. Into the circle of firelight it bounded like a personification of some hideous force of destruction.
Little Fou-tan, on her feet beside King, seized a blazing brand from the fire and hurled it full into the face of the charging beast; but the tiger was too far gone in pain and rage longer to harbor fear of aught.
King’s spear-arm went back. Through his mind flashed the recollection of the other tiger that he had killed with a single spear cast. He had known then that he had been for the instant the favored child of Fortune. The laws of chance would never countenance a repetition of that amazing stroke of luck; yet there was naught that he could do but try.
He held his nerves and muscles in absolute control, the servants of his iron will. Every faculty of mind and body was centered upon the accuracy and the power of his spear-arm. Had he given thought to what might follow, his nerves must necessarily have faltered, but he did not. Cool and collected, he waited until he knew that he could not miss nor wait another moment. Then the bronze skin of his spear-arm flashed in the light of the fire, and at the same instant he swept Fou-tan to him with his left arm and leaped to one side.
Not even My Lord the Tiger could have acted with greater celerity, calmness, and judgment. A low grunt of surprise and admiration burst from the lips of the brute watching from the summit of the opposite cliff.
The charge of the tiger carried it full into the fire, scattering the burning branches in all directions. The dry grasses of the beds burst into flame. Blinded and terrified, the tiger looked about futilely for his prey; but King had leaped quickly across the stream to the opposite side of the gorge, having learned by experience that a creature near the fire can see nothing in the outer darkness. The great cat, clawing and biting at the spear protruding from its chest, rent the air with its screams of pain and growls of rage. Suddenly it was quiet, standing like a yellow and black statue carved from gold and ebony; then it took a few steps forward, sagged, and slumped lifeless to the ground.
Gordon King felt very weak in the knees, so weak that he sat down quite suddenly. He had rung the bell twice in succession, but he could scarcely believe the evidence of his own eyes. Fou-tan came and sat down close beside him and rested her cheek against his arm. “My Gordon King!” she murmured softly.
Almost without volition he put his arm about her. “My Fou-tan!” he said. The girl snuggled close in his embrace.
For a time they sat watching the tiger, hesitating to approach lest there might remain a spark of life within the great form, each knowing that one little instant of life would be sufficient to destroy them both were they near the beast; but the great cat never moved again.
The dissipated fire was dying down, and realizing more than ever now the necessity for keeping it up, King and Fou-tan arose and, crossing the stream, scraped together the remaining embers of their fire and rebuilt it with fresh wood.
From the cliff above the brute watched them, and once again grunted his admiration as he saw King withdraw his spear from the body of the fallen tiger. Placing one foot against the breast of the great beast, the American was forced to exert every ounce of his weight and strength to withdraw the weapon, so deeply was it embedded in the bone and sinew of its victim.
“I am afraid that we shall not get much sleep tonight, Fou-tan,” said King as he returned to the fire.
“I am not sleepy,” replied the girl; “I could not sleep, and then, too, it is commencing to get cold. I would rather sit here by the fire until morning. I would rather have my eyes open than closed in the night when My Lord the Tiger walks abroad.”
Once more they sat down side by side, their backs against the rocky wall that had been warmed by the heat of the nearby fire.
The brute, realizing that they had settled themselves for the night, returned to his primitiv
e bed and settled himself once more for sleep.
Fou-tan cuddled close to Gordon King; his arm was about her. He felt her soft hair against his cheek. He drew her closer to him. “Fou-tan!” he said.
“Yes, Gordon King, what is it?” she asked. He noted that her voice trembled.
“I love you,” said Gordon King.
A sigh that came in little gasps was his reply. He felt her heart pounding against his side.
A soft arm crept upward to encircle his neck, drawing him gently down to the sweet face turned toward his. Eyes, dimmed with unshed tears, gazed into his eyes. Trembling lips fluttered beneath his lips, and then he crushed her to him in the first kiss of love.
The flower-like beauty of the girl, her softness, her helplessness, combined with the exaltation of this, his first love, enveloped Fou-tan with an aura of sanctity that rendered her almost an object of veneration in the eyes of the man — a high priestess enshrined in the Holy of Holies of his heart. He marvelled that he had won the love of so glorious a creature. The little slave girl became an angel, and he her paladin. In this thought lay the secret of King’s attitude toward Fou-tan. He was glad that she was small and helpless, for he liked to think of himself as her champion and protector. He liked to feel that the safety of the girl he loved lay in his hands and that he was physically and morally competent to discharge the obligations that Fate had reposed within him.
Despite the fact that she was soft and small, Fou-tan was not without self-reliance and courage, as she had amply proved when she had run away from the palace of Lodivarman and risked the perils of the savage jungle; yet she was still so wholly feminine that she found her greatest happiness in the protection of the man she loved.
“I am very happy,” whispered Fou-tan.
“And so am I,” said King, “happier than I have ever been before in my life, but now we must make our plans all anew.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“We may not go to Pnom Dhek now. We must find our way out of the jungle so that I can take you to my own country.”
Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26) Page 473