A Feast Unknown

by Philip José Farmer

  The foot soldiers and the half-track reached a line of trees and stopped. They were out of my sight when they were behind the trees. Four dark figures ran out from the trees towards the cover of other trees near the village. They were scouts.

  By then, the Kenyans had discovered that their cannon was missing. Four men followed the wheel tracks towards the smaller hill and soon were hidden by its bulk. The flames from the village were searing the skies. There were many bodies, men, women, children, sprawled between the burning huts. Machine guns were still shooting, but the rifle fire had died down.

  5

  Suddenly, all firing ceased. The soldiers began to regroup on the east side of the village. I supposed that the officers had sobered up enough to bring the men under control. They were beginning to realize the consequences of their actions. It might be possible to get the government to consider this just an unfortunate incident, but justified, because the mission had been successful. It had obliterated me. But if the other Bandili villages revolted because of this massacre, the government might shoot them to satisfy the Bandili.

  On the other hand, they might be re-forming for another attack on the Bandili survivors, entrenched in the woods on the west side of the village.

  The newcomers were moving back. Their haste gave me the impression they intended to remove themselves at a great distance from the Kenyan army. It was evident that they were surprised to find the soldiers. I supposed they had come to attack me. For Revenge. For Wealth. For the Secret of Immortality. Perhaps for all three.

  Their appearance here at the same time as the army attack was one more of the many coincidences which some readers of my biographer’s novels have found incredible. These people do not know that some men are not only endowned with “animal magnetism,” but some men also have what I call a “human magnetic moment.” That is, some men, of whom I am one, are the focus of unusual events, of mathematically unlikely coincidences. They radiate something—a quality, a “field,” which pulls events together. The field slightly distorts, or warps, the semifluid structure of occurrences, of space objects intertwined with the time flow. Whatever the reason for their being here, the newcomers were now leaving. I could, however, directly influence them now. I picked up the tailpiece of the carriage, turned the cannon, unconsciously estimating the distance and trajectory as if I were firing an arrow. I depressed the muzzle and then got down off the operator’s seat and jerked the lanyard.

  I had been vaguely aware that I was sexually excited. Now, as the cannon Went off, so did I.

  The orgasm, however, was not nearly as intense and ecstatic as when I had thrust my knife into Zabu’s belly.

  Thereafter, I was all action, intent on the “red business,” as Whitman so appropriately and beautifully phrases it. If I had a hard-on or came during the next few minutes, I did not know it.

  My first shell landed about ten feet ahead of the half-track. It stopped, backed up, and then turned to the left. My second shell landed on its right and drove it still more leftwards so that it was heading towards the village again. The third shell exploded in the middle of a group of the newcomer foot-soldiers, which had hit the ground when my first shell struck. The three survivors got up and ran. About eight bodies were on the ground.

  At this time, as I had expected, the four trackers came over the smaller hill. My rifle fire got two, because they were such fine silhouettes against the fires. The other two dived back behind the hill and began firing at me. I ignored the bullets, although some hit the cannon and some spurted dirt near me. My fifth shell blew up the top of the hill. The two men may not have been hit, but they were discouraged, because they quit firing. Perhaps they were working around the hill to flank me.

  By this time, the Kenyans had seen the half-track and were firing at it from behind the line of trees. The vehicle replied with shell and three machine guns. The other newcomers turned and advanced across the field towards the Kenyans.

  My next three shells went down the line of Kenyans on the left, middle, and right, and put, an indeterminate number out of the fight. They ran away then, some towards the distant forest to the north and some towards me. The half-track went at full speed to the north end of the line of trees and caught a number of the soldiers trying for the forest. The newcomers on foot cut towards my hill.

  I turned the cannon and fired two rounds to the right on the lower slope of the smaller hill. This was to discourage the Kenyans from coming around that side.

  I was working furiously and sweating and beginning to feel tired because I had had almost no food or liquid for 20 hours. I was loading the shell, slamming the breech block shut, turning the cannon by lifting the tailpiece of the carriage, revolving the wheel to depress or elevate the barrel, and yanking the lanyard, though not always in this order. I had glimpsed the two soldiers scuttling across the level ground between the two hills, one on each side of me. I had to take care of them before I got rid of the last two shells.

  One emerged from the shadows into the moonlight briefly, and I tossed a grenade his way. It fell a few feet from him; he froze; then he dived away from it. The explosion caught him in mid-air. He did not get up. I ran a stream of rifle fire across him to make sure he stayed down.

  The other soldier was a brave man. He came up the hill at a run, zigzagging, and firing. I shot once; he fell backward. I approached him warily and put a bullet through his head.

  With each death, I was numbly aware of my swelling penis and the rising tide of seminal fluid.

  During this fight, the other soldiers came around both sides of the little hill and started up the big one towards me. They were desperate to get the cannon. With it, they could decimate the newcomers. They would, however, have to get me first and then bring up other caissons, because there were only two rounds left. I did not have time to fire these. I pushed the cannon over the lip of the hill and had the satisfaction of seeing a number running and screaming to get out of its way. Then I lobbed five grenades down the hill and took off down the other side with a BAR, a magazine belt, and three grenades.

  Ten minutes later, I came up from behind one of the soldiers looking for me. I slit his throat, cut out his liver, and ate while I walked away from the others.

  The cutting out of the liver finally evoked the orgasm that had been threatening, if I may use such a word. It was exquisite, but it was also disturbing.

  (Those who have not read Volume I of my Memoirs, but who are familiar with the first of the romanticized biographies, will object that I am not a cannibal. My biographer, when describing how I had killed the first human I ever encountered, said that I had first thought of eating him. Then I had rejected the idea because of an instinctive horror of cannibalism. This is one of the several cases of romantic nonsense and genetic misinformation that he believed in. The truth (which he did not know) is that I devoured the killer of the only being I had greatly loved. I did not like the taste, but I ate him as a matter of revenge. I have eaten other human beings since, but only when I could get no other food.)

  Strengthened, I set out to torment the soldiers. These had pulled the cannon back up onto the hill and brought another caisson of shells up. The half-track, meanwhile, had taken a station behind a tree. The artillery duel began. A number of shells exploded around the vehicle, and one blew the tree in half. But eventually the recoilless .88 succeeded in hitting close enough to the Kenyan cannon to kill its crew and to blow up the other shells. The vehicle waited a moment, and then, probably receiving orders via walkie-talkie, started across the level ground towards the hill.

  At that moment, I threw a grenade onto the platform. The crew died, but the shells failed to go off, as I had expected. Two men fell out of the cab and staggered away. I shot one and stunned the other with the butt of my rifle. It was easy to catch up with the vehicle, which was still rolling, and stop it. I put the two unconscious men on the platform and drove across the plain and as deeply as I could into the forest.

  One man looked as if he would not rec
over. The other gained his senses with nothing but a headache from the blow. He was a muscular Arab, black-haired, clean-shaven, eagle-nosed, with two large but close-set eyes. He seemed to be about 30 years of age. He was dressed in khaki but wore no military insignia. He looked bravely enough at me, but he was shaking and was pale under his sallow skin.

  The cannon and the grenades had again deafened me. However, I am an excellent lip reader in French, English, Arabic, Swahili, and a number of Bantu languages and dialects (if the latter are not tone languages).

  I questioned him in Egyptian Arabic. He replied in Syrian Arabic. He said his name was Ibrahim Abdul el Mariyaka. He did not know what he was doing here or anything else. He felt brave enough to call me a dog of a Nasrani.

  He ran his gaze up and down me and then licked his drying lips. He was standing with his back against a tree, both of them gray in the dawn. He was about six feet tall, but I was three inches higher and outweighed him about eighty pounds. I was naked, and my skin was smoke-blackened, but my gray eyes must have gleamed palely and wildly out of my dark face. Dried blood covered my mouth and chin and splotched my chest and hands, and there was dried blood and spermatic fluid on my belly and genitals. In addition, as I gestured at him with my knife, my penis rose slowly like a leech swelling with sucked blood.

  Being an Arab, he must have been sure I was going to sexually assault him. In a way, he was right.

  I kicked him in the stomach, and while he writhed, retching drily on the ground, I drank from a canteen of water I had taken from the cab. Then I removed some rope from the platform and tied him up. After propping him against the tree, I dragged the other man from the platform and sat him up against a wheel. He was gray-blue and breathing shallowly, but his blood pressure was high enough to drive a geyser into my face when I cut off his penis. I stuck it in his mouth and then drove his knife up through his chin to keep his jaw from falling open. Eyes open, limp bloody penis protruding from his mouth, he sat opposite the other man.

  I cut out the liver, chewed off a piece, and swallowed it.

  The Arab by the tree turned as gray-blue as the dead man when he saw me ejaculate on slicing into the man. He tried to retch but was unsuccessful. I waited. I had made no threats. None were needed. When he had quit trying to throw up, he leaned his head against the tree. His black eyes were dull below the half-closed lids. A snake of spittle ran down his chin.

  I said, “I will ask. You will reply.”

  He knew, probably from experience in torturing others, that very few men can hold out against prolonged torture. He was willing to settle for a quick death. He answered my questions fully, and his information seemed to be valid.

  The leader and organizer of this expedition was an Albanian. He went under the Arabic name of Muhmud abu Shawarib. His real name was Enver Noli. The others were mostly Arabs, although a few were Bulgarians who had fled to Albania because of their Red Chinese sympathies.

  Noli had promised every man in his army that he would have enough gold to support him and four wives for the rest of his life. That is, if the Englishman, John Cloamby, Lord Grandrith, were captured alive.

  “He talked only of gold?” I said.

  “Yes. Was there anything else?”

  Noli was not likely to promise his men the secret of prolonged youth, even if he believed that I possessed it. They would think him crazy and would not follow him. It was possible that he had no thought of the elixir, but I have encountered other men, all dead now, who believed, with good reason, that I had an elixir and were prepared to do anything to get the secret from me.

  The Arab said, “You can kill me, Nasrani. But Noli will find you and inflict great pain upon you until you tell him where your gold is hidden. He is a very determined man, very cunning, and very strong.”

  “That may be,” I said. I stabbed him in the solar plexus. Now I failed to have a sexual reaction, and I hoped that the aberration was, for some reason, gone. I doubted it. The truth was that I had only so much jism, and it had been used up for the time being.

  I booby-trapped the vehicle with some wire and grenades so that three shells—one by the gas tank—would go off if the cab doors or the hood were opened. Then I went into the woods and up a tree and waited. The sounds of battle had died out. Presently, as I knew they would, the invaders came on the track of the vehicle. Two jeeps drove up; behind them straggled a mob, the survivors of the battle with the Kenyans.

  6

  Enver Noli was a huge man with a large belly, a shaven head, and great drooping moustaches that fell to his chest. His nose was immense, curved like a scimitar. He wore green coveralls and paratrooper’s boots. He held his kepi in one tremendous fist and whacked it across the palm of the other hand. When he gave an order, he bellowed.

  A soldier ran out from the main body of the troops and warily approached the vehicle. When he looked into the cab, he saw the wires I had gone to some pains to hide. He reported this to Enver, who stood up in the jeep, which was about seventy feet from the half-track. The soldier raised the hood to check the motor for traps there, and the grenade exploded and then the three shells. The vehicle and the soldier disappeared in smoke and flame. Noli was knocked off the jeep, but he bounded up and ran away with the rest. Unfortunately, nobody was hit by the shells or splashed by the gas. I did shoot two during the noise and panic.

  Noli stopped running and managed to halt the twenty or so of his men. He got them to line up and to begin firing with two machine guns and fifteen rifles into the woods. While the bullets were flying around me, whipping the leaves and knocking off chunks of bark, I shot two more Arabs. Immediately after, I descended the tree and ran off in the direction opposite the invaders and then curved around until I was some distance behind them. The field, where the main fighting between the Kenyans and newcomers had taken place, was now being held by the jackals, hyenas, and vultures.

  The two hills yielded more dead. The wounded had either been taken away or put out of their pain. The carrion eaters were busy here, too.

  The village was entirely burned down, and of the survivors there was no sign. I knew they were hiding in the forest. They had fled to the forest more than once from Arab slave-raiders, though not until after great losses. I had been the one who had led them to victory against the Arab invaders and then led them across the country to terrorize the slavers so much that they never again dared enter Bandili country. I had led them against the Germans in World War I. I had led them in a great raid into Gekoyo. Now they were hiding again, and if they came out once more and fought, they would do it without me.

  For 60 years I had been a Bandili and the great father, the elephant who charges, for the Bandili. Now, I was truly exiled. This was no temporary loss. It was forever.

  I wept then. I had loved these people as much as I could any group of humans. I was far more Bandili than I was English. I had had true friends among them. But all that was ended. Although this village was the only one of the ten Bandili villages that had betrayed me, the others would be no better. The young were too hating and the old too feeble and too few.

  Moreover, the Kenyan government had made it plain that I could no longer live in this country. Not in the open, at least.

  I made a sentimental gesture. I waved my rifle at the ashes of the village and then at those hidden in the forest. It was the only good-bye I could give, and doubtless no one saw it.

  Then I turned and began to trot across the savanna, towards the hills to the west.

  My destination was the mountain range that lay far beyond the hills, approximately a hundred and fifty miles away, and twenty miles into Uganda. I trotted all night. The false dawn, the wolf’s tail, was graying the savanna when I began to think about holing up for part of the day. The acacia trees in the distance looked like black cutouts of the monsters of Bandili myth. Then the sun leaned against the night and swung it away, and day padded in. A lion roared in the distance. The air was cool, moving gently from the mountains in the west. A wart hog trotted o
ut of the tall grass, his tail held stiffly up. The sun gleamed on a yellow tusk.

  I ran along easily with the savanna on my left and a clump of hills to my right. I carried the rifle in my right hand. I stopped for a moment because I saw the grasses move against the wind. Something big enough to be a lion or a man was approaching through the cover about thirty yards away.

  The rifle soared up out of my hand, torn away by a blow like that from a crocodile’s tail. It spun off, and then the sound of the shot came from the hills.

  7

  My arm was paralyzed by the transmission of shock through the rifle, but I did not find that out immediately. I dived towards the tall grass and rolled towards it. Dirt and grass flew up so close they fell over me. There were four gouts of earth and flocks of tiny pieces of grass, each followed by a shot ringing across the savanna.

  I jumped up, and, zigzagging and bending low, ran. There was a growl, and a big yellowish brown body moved away from me. I smelled a lioness. She was gone, and I had the grass to myself except for the brief company of two bullets which cropped stalks only a few inches from me. I dived once more, and I stayed where I was.

  Several minutes passed. My arm lost its numbness. More shots. More stalks cut in half, falling on me. The bugger had superb vision. I started crawling, though slowly. It was impossible to keep the grass from signaling my progress. More bullets slashed the grass.

  When I had crossed about 35 yards, I was at the edge of the grass. I leaped up and ran away, still crouching. There were no more shots. Not for a second had I thought that the sharpshooter was a member of the Kenyans or of the band of the Albanian, Noli. A third party had dealt himself in.

  I heard a roar behind and looked over my shoulder. A male lion was charging after me. I did not know how he could be in this neighborhood or why he was chasing me. He must have been very near but somehow hidden from me. The stimulus of seeing me run away from him had evoked the reaction of running after me. I knew every lion for 40 miles in any direction from my plantation. This one was a stranger and should not have been here out of his own territory.