Their attitude toward his supposed godhood made any intimacy or warmth difficult. Awina was the only exception. She regarded him with awe, but she also had an overwhelming warmth and humour.
Not even a god could be immune to that nor could Awina overcome it. She was continually saying that she should not have said such and such and would Wuwiso forgive her? She did not mean to be so nosy or so chummy and so forth. Ulysses would then assure her that he found nothing in her attitude that needed forgiving.
Awina was seventeen years old and should have been married a year ago. But her mother had died, and her father, forty years old and the chief priest, had put off forcing a marriage. He was exerting his authority close to the breaking point, because the unwritten law was that all healthy females should be mated by sixteen at the latest. Aytheera was a pleasant enough man when he got his way and was well-liked for a priest, and he succeeded in keeping his daughter in his house. Nevertheless, he could not have done so for much longer. She would have had to accept a mate and then have moved out to his longhouse. Though the chief priest had many privileges, he could not marry again. Why, no one knew. That was the custom, and custom was not often broken without immediate punishment.
Now, though he could not keep his daughter close to him all the time, Aytheera had another excuse for objecting to her marriage. She was the stone god's handmaiden, and as long as the god wanted her to serve him, she would. Did anyone in the tribe object?
No one did openly. So Awina stayed with the god until bedtime and then returned to her father's house. She sometimes complained that her father kept her up late talking and that she did not get enough sleep. When Ulysses said he would put a stop to that, she begged that he not say anything.
After all, what was a little loss of sleep compared to keeping her old father happy?
Meanwhile, Ulysses became more proficient in the Wufea speech. Its sound combinations were easy for him to master except for certain slight vowel variations used to indicate tenses "and attitudes toward tenses. He also took lessons from the Wagarondit captives in their language. This was entirely unrelated to Wufea as far as he could determine, though a scholar with access to written records (which did not exist, of course) might have traced them back to a common ancestor. After all, what tyro would suspect that Hawaiian and Indonesian and Thai were descended from the same parent? But Wagarondit contained a number of difficult phones for him. Its structure reminded him of the Algonquian languages, although of course this was only a superficial resemblance.
The trade language, Ayrata, seemed to be unrelated to either of the other two. Its sounds were simple for him, and its syntax was as uncomplicated and as regular as Esperanto. He asked Awina where it came from, and she said that the Thululiki had introduced it. Gutapa was the Wufea pronunciation of the word used by the Thululiki; she could not pronounce this. The Thululiki's own speech was beyond her; they had introduced Ayrata "all over the world." Everybody could speak some Ayrata, and trade and war councils and peace treaties were all conducted in Ayrata.
Ulysses listened to her description of the Thululiki and decided that they were beings out of her mythology. Such things could not exist.
He had also found out by then that the Wagarondit were being saved for the great annual
festival of the confederacy of the Wufea. Then the prisoners would be tortured and finally sacrificed to him. For the first time, he learned where the blood on the disc below his throne had come from.
"How many days until the festival of the stone god?" he said.
"One moon exactly," she replied.
He hesitated and then said, "And what if I forbid the torture and the killings? What if I said that the Wagarondit should be let loose?"
Awina's eyes opened widely. It was noonday, and her pupil was a black slit against the blue iris. She opened her mouth then and ran her pink rough tongue across her black lips.
She said, "Pardon, Lord. But why would you do that, what you said?"
Ulysses did not think she would understand if he tried to define concepts of mercy and compassion. She had those traits; she was very tender and empathetic and compassionate, as far as her own people went. But to her the Wagarondit were not even animals.
He could not despise her for that attitude. His own people, the Onondaga and the Senaca, had felt the same way. And so had his other ancestors, the Irish, the Danes, the French, the Norwegians.
"Tell me," he said. "Is it not true that the Wagarondit also claim me as their god? Were they not making that great raid so they could carry me off to their temple?"
Awina looked slyly at him. She said, "Who should know better than you, Lord?"
He waved his hand impatiently and said, "I've told you more than once that some of my thoughts were changed to stone, too. I do not remember some things as yet, though doubtless it will all come back to me. What I'm getting at is that the Wagarondit are as much my people as the Wufea."
"What?" Awina said, and then, in a lower tone, "My Lord?"
She was shaking.
"When a god finally speaks, he does not always say what his people expect to hear," Ulysses said. "If a god said only what everyone else knows, why have a god? No, a god sees much farther and much more clearly than mortals. He knows what is best for his people, even if they are so blind they can't see what will be good for them in the long run."
There was silence. A fly buzzed in the room, and Ulysses wondered that that pest had survived. If mankind had been intelligent enough, he would . . . and then he thought, well, mankind wasn't intelligent enough. Even in 1985 it looked as if starvation and pollution, mankind's progeny, would kill off man. It looked now as if all of humanity might be dead, except for one accidental survivor, himself. Yet here was the common housefly, as prosperous as his distant cousin, the cockroach, which also infested the village.
Awina said, "I do not understand what my Lord is getting at, or why the ancient sacrifices, which seemed to satisfy my Lord for so many generations, and against which he never once opened his mouth . . ."
"You should pray that you will be able to see, Awina. Blindness can lead to death, you know."
Awina closed her mouth and then ran the tip of her tongue over her lips. He was finding out that cloudy statements threw them into a panic, that they imagined the worst.
"Go tell the chiefs and the priests that I want to hold a conference," he said. "Within the time it would take a man walking slowly to go all the way around the village. And tell the workers to quit hammering away on this building while we are holding the conference."
Awina, shouting, ran out of the temple and inside five minutes every official who was not out hunting was inside the temple. Ulysses sat on the hard, cold granite throne and told them what he wanted. They looked shocked, but none dared object. Aytheera did say, "Lord, may I ask what you eventually intend to do with this alliance?"
"For one thing, I intend to stop this useless warfare. For another, I intend to take both Wufea and Wagarondit, the best warriors of both peoples, on an expedition against Wurutana."
"Wurutana!" they murmured in awe and no little dread.
"Yes, Wurutana! Are you surprised? Did you not expect the ancient prophecies to be fulfilled?"
"Oh, yes, Lord," Aytheera said. "It is just that, now the time is here, we find our knees shaking and our bowels turning to water."
(To the Wufea, the seat of courage was in the bowels.)
"I will be leading you against Wurutana," Singing Bear said. He wondered just what Wurutana was and what he was supposed to do to combat it. He had tried to get as much information as he could about it without letting them know how ignorant he was. He did not think that he should be using his excuse of "petrified" thoughts in the case of Wurutana. That was permissible with other, lesser, things, but Wurutana was so important that he would not have forgotten the slightest detail about it. That, at least, seemed to be the attitude of the Wufea.
"You will send a messenger to the nearest Wagarondit village and te
ll them that I am coming," he said, leaving it up to them to work out the practical method of approaching a deadly enemy. "You will tell them that I am coming to visit and that we will be bringing the Wagarondit prisoners, safe if not exactly unharmed, and will release them there. And the Wagarondit will release any Wufea prisoners they might have. We will hold a big conference and then go to the other Wagarondit villages and hold meetings there. Then I will pick out the Wagarondit warriors I want to accompany us, and we will go across the plains against Wurutana."
There was plenty of light inside the temple. Both big doors were open, and a big hole at one end had not yet been closed. The light showed the expressions beneath the short sleek fur on their faces and their sidewise glancing at each other. Their eyes, blue, green, yellow, orange, looked sinister and cat-like. Their tails thrashed from side to side, additionally betraying their agitation.
They had expected him to lead them in a war of extermination against the Wagarondit. Now he was proposing peace, and, worse, they would have to share their god with their ancient enemy.
Singing Bear said, "Your real enemy is Wurutana, not the Wagarondit. Now go and do as I have ordered."
A week later, he walked out through the northern gates on the hard-packed path between the fields of corn and the gardens. The old people, the younger warriors left behind to guard the village, the females and the cubs followed them, shouting and waving. Behind him were three Wufea musicians—like the spirit of '76, he thought—a drummer, a flutist, and a standard-bearer. The drum was made of wood and hide. The flute was hollowed out from the bone of some great animal. The standard was a tall spear with feathers sticking out at right angles to the shaft and the mounted heads of an eagle-like bird, a big lynx-like cat, a giant rabbit, and a horse. These heads represented the four clans, or phratries, of the Wufea. The clans resided in every village, and it was the clan system which had bound the various Wufea tribes together. As he understood it, the treaties of peace and union were between the clans of the villages, not between each tribe. Thus, for a while, the rabbit clans of each village had not fought against each other, but the lynx and the horse clans had. Then these had made peace, and the eagle clans, which had been neutral, had also agreed to join the others. Only then had the Wufea villages presented a united front against the Wagarondit. Ulysses did not understand the system; it seemed very complicated and actually non-survival, but the Wufea thought their system was the only natural one.
Behind the standard-bearer and the musicians, who played atonal music, were the chief priest and two lesser priests. These wore feathered bonnets, massive beads, and brandished wands. After them came a group of twenty-five young warriors, also decked out in feathers, beads and with chevrons of green, black, and red painted across their faces and their chests. Behind them was a band of sixty older warriors. All warriors were armed with stone knives, tomahawks and assegais, and carried bows and quivers of arrows. They were aching to try their new weapons on the Wagarondit. That is, the younger warriors were. The older ones only concealed their scorn for the new weapons when Ulysses was within hearing distance. But he heard better than they thought.
To one side, parallel with the younger warriors, were the dozen Wagarondit. They carried weapons too, and looked very sullen for men who should have been happy. They had been assured by Singing Bear that their people would not disgrace them because they had allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. At first, the prisoners had protested. They said that they would not be allowed to go to the Happy Warground (Ulysses' interpretation of a subtle phrase).
Ulysses had told them that they had no choice. Moreover, things were different now. He, the stone god, had decreed that they could go to the Happy Warground after they died. That is, unless they persisted in their stupid protests. They shut up but still could not emotionally accept the new order of things.
The procession walked swiftly across the rolling hills, following a path which war parties and hunting parties had used for generations. There were many huge evergreens and birches and oaks along here but not so many that they constituted a forest. There were birds: bluejays, crows, ravens, sparrows, an emerald-and-honey hummingbird; the fox-red or sable-black winged squirrels; a flash of grey which was a fox; the pointed bright-eyed head of a weasel-like creature looking around the trunk of a tree fifty feet above them; a red rat scuttling across a fallen log; and, high on a hill some fifty yards to their right, a brown colossus that sat up and stared. This was a bear that was totally vegetarian and would not bother anybody as long as he was left alone. He ate corn and the produce of gardens if these were left unguarded, but he could be run off easily enough.
Ulysses breathed in the cool blue sky with his eyes and the cool fresh air with his lungs. The great healthy trees, the healthy bird and animal life, the green everywhere, the absence of polluted air, the feeling of having plenty of elbow room, these combined to make him happy for the moment. He could forget the ache of knowing that he might be the only human alive. He could forget . . . and then he stopped. Behind him, the standard-bearer yelled out an order, the drumming and fluting ceased, and the warriors quit their murmuring talk.
He was missing something. What?
Not what. Whom?
He turned and spoke to Aytheera. "Awina, your daughter. Where is she?"
Aytheera's face was expressionless. He said, "Lord?"
"I want Awina to come with me. She is my voice and my eyes. I need her."
"I told her to stay, my Lord, because females do not go on important trips between villages, neither on peace nor war expeditions."
"You will have to get accustomed to change," Ulysses said. "Send someone for her. We wait."
Aytheera looked strangely at him but obeyed, lisama, the fastest warrior, ran back to the village, a mile away. After a while, he came trotting back with Awina a few paces behind him. She wore a four-cornered cap with three feathers and had a triple loop of massive green beads around her neck. She ran as a human female runs, and when she slowed down to a fast walk a hundred yards away, she swayed as a human female sways. Her black ears and face, tail, lower arms and legs shimmered in the sun with an undercoat of pale red, and her white fur glowed as if it were snow under a bright spring sun. Her great dark blue eyes were on him, and she was smiling, showing the widely separated stiletto teeth.
When she got to him, she went down on her knees and kissed his hand, saying, "My Lord, I wept because you had left me behind."
"Your tears dried fast enough," he said. He liked to think that she had cried, but he could not be sure if she was exaggerating or saying what she thought he would like to hear. These noble savages were as capable of dissimulation as any civilised peoples. Moreover, should he want her to become so emotionally attached to him? Such a bond could lead to a more intimate feeling, the consequences of which he had fantasised. The images both stimulated and repulsed him.
She took her place at his right and was silent for a long time. Then she began to talk hesitantly, and, after a while, she chattered along as amusingly and as informatively as ever. He felt much happier; the sense of loss had evaporated into the clear air and bright sun.
They marched all day, stopping now and then to rest or to eat. There were enough creeks and small rivers to furnish them all the water they needed. The Wufea, though they may have been descended from cats, bathed whenever they got a chance. They also licked themselves all over in true cat fashion. They were a clean people as far as their own bodies were concerned but were indifferent to the pests in their villages, the cockroaches, flies, and other bugs. And, though they buried their refuse, they were not neat about cleaning up after their dogs and pigs and other animals they kept for pets or for food.
In the late evening, Ulysses, hot, sweaty and fatigued, decided they would camp for the night by a creek. The water was fairly cool and was so clear that he could see the fish scooting along its bottom twenty feet deep. He lay on a fallen tree that stuck out over the creek and watched the fish for a long while. Then he
took off his clothes and went swimming while the Wufea and Wagarondit watched him closely as they always did when he was nude. He wondered if they were secretly repulsed by his general lack of fur and the distribution of hair elsewhere. Perhaps not. He could not be expected to be as they, since he was, after all, a god.
When he came out, all others, except for posted guards and Awina, bathed. She dried him off with a piece of fur and then asked permission to go in also. When they had all come out, he looked down into the water from the log. The fish were scared away. But a hundred yards up, he found them again. He used a telescoping pole of some unfamiliar lightweight wood, a line composed of gut, and a bone hook with a worm which Awina dug up for him. It was a thick-bodied creature, as long as his hand, blood-red and with four great false eyes composed of three concentric circles of white, blue and green.
He cast twelve times with no success. On the thirteenth, a fish struck. Thereafter, he had to play it by the gut itself, since the line threatened to tear loose from the pole. The fish was only ten inches long, but it was very powerful and fought savagely. It took him at least twenty minutes to tire it out. When he pulled it in and saw the silvery body with scarlet and pale green spots, staring yellow eyes and short cartilaginous "whiskers," he felt even happier. According to Awina, who carried it off to cook it, the iipawafa was delicious. And it was.
The Stone God Awakens Page 3