He turned away from her and took a step, and then stopped again. He felt even colder, and the hairs on his neck became stiffer, if that were possible. The gorilla-faced frog statue had been looking down toward the end of the island when he had passed it. Now it was facing him.
The body had not moved, but the head had swiveled.
He stood for a minute without moving, and then walked on toward the hut. He had expected strange and wonderful and frightening phenomena, so why should he hesitate?
But he heard Eeva calling him and turned around. She was running to him and shouting something. He angrily waved her back, but she kept on coming. When she was twenty feet from him, she said, "That statue's head turned, Ras! It turned!"
"I know it!" he shouted. "I know it! Go back before Wizozu kills you!"
"But you don't understand! It..."
The voice that roared from the hut was as he had imagined Igziyabher's would be. It bellowed louder than Baastmaast; it carried up the canyon and was bounced off a rock wall and came back at him. It seized him with terror; it numbed him.
It spoke in a tongue that he did not recognize for a minute. It was as different from Eeva's English and his, as his was from hers.
"Ras Tyger! Kill the woman! I, Wizozu, command you to kill her!"
Ras came out of his numbness as if he had just left the cold waters of the lake. He turned toward the hut and the huge, dark presence within it. He shouted, "Wizozu! Why should I kill the woman who has saved my life and whom I love?"
The voice was silent for a moment. Eeva said, "Ras! This whole thing..."
The voice carried her words away as if they were chips of wood on a cataract.
"Ras Tyger! Do you want to see your foster parents again, your Mariyam and Yusufu? I, Wizozu, can bring up their ghosts and you can see and talk to them again!"
Eeva screamed, "Ras! It's all a trick! Look up at the top of the cliff up there! You can see the television tower up there! The statue must have a TV camera in its head, and there must be other cameras! And that voice is coming over a loud-speaker! Ras!"
He did not know what she meant by television or TV or loud-speaker. But, looking at the edge of the cliff at which she was pointing, he could see a tall, branchless tree with long, stiff arms poking out of the top.
The voice bellowed, "Do not delay, Ras! Kill her at once! She is not the woman for you! Another woman is to be your true mate, a beautiful virgin! She has been prepared for you; she is worthy of you! Kill this slut, this vessel of impurity! Kill her at once!"
Ras shouted back, "What do you mean, Great Wizozu, when you say that another woman is to be my true mate, that she has been prepared for me? And what do you mean when you say that this woman, Eeva, is a vessel of impurity? She isn't diseased. I know, because I have lain with her. When she's had a bath and gotten some food in her belly and some sleep, she is sweet indeed! Although a crocodile's heart in her helps a lot!"
Wizozu roared angrily, "Do not talk such obscenities, Ras! Or I will kill you, too! Do as I say! I know what is best for you! Do not argue! I know! Kill that woman!"
"And if I do not kill her?" Ras yelled.
"Then I, Wizozu, may kill you! I will punish you in some way, you may be sure of that! For instance, if you do not kill her, I will not let you see and talk to the ghosts of your foster parents!"
"What do you mean, you won't let me talk to their ghosts?"
Even in the shock from Wizozu's statement, he noticed that Wizozu had called both Mariyam and Yusufu his foster parents. Was Mariyam, then, not his true mother? If she was not, who was?
"Can you really summon the dead from the underworld?"
"I do not talk idly!" the voice boomed.
"Show me. And then I will kill Eeva, if you can do what you say!"
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Eeva, breast-deep in the water, hanging on to the rocks along the island's edge. She put a finger to her lips, and she waded slowly on by him. Apparently, she was going to try to attack Wizozu from the rear with her bare hands. Her courage was admirable, certainly, but her common sense was lacking.
Ras said, "O Wizozu! Let me see Mariyam and Yusufu and Wilida, and then I will say whether or not I will kill Eeva! I must make sure that you can do what you promise!"
Wizozu was silent for a long time. His shadowy bulk did not move behind the curtains. Eeva was out of sight now. He wished that he could tell her to return to the dugout. He would take care of Wizozu--one way or another.
He sweated in the sun while he waited for Wizozu to answer. The white rocks of the island and the nearby black walls of the canyon seemed to intensify the midday heat. A slight wind was at his back, but it did not cool him. The silence became difficult to bear, and finally he opened his mouth to speak. He had to say something. However, before he could get a word out, he was stopped by Wizozu's roaring.
"Very well! It doesn't matter whether she dies now and by your hand, or later! You shall see your beloved dead! And then you shall know that I tell you the truth, and that I am so powerful that no one can oppose me!"
"Not even Igziyabher?"
Wizozu paused a few seconds and then said, "Igziyabher has given me power to do as I wish! I am His representative here!"
"I want to see Him!" Ras said. "I have many questions!"
"Ask the dead!" bellowed the voice. "Look, Ras!"
"Look where?"
"To your left! At the big boulder!"
Ras turned toward the nearest boulder, thirty feet away. It was of granite and about eight feet high and ten feet wide. It had appeared to be solid, but now a vertical seam split it in half, and then the two parts swung outward until they fully exposed the hollow interior. This contained a smaller boulder, on top of which was a granite cup carved in the form of a bird. Behind the boulder was a tall, curved, gray spout, still dripping. The spout sank back and slid downward and disappeared behind the small boulder.
"Drink from the stone bird, Ras!" Wizozu said. "Drink, and in a short time you will see your beloved dead!"
Ras did not hesitate. He walked to the boulder and picked up the stone bird by its outstretched stone wings. Its hollowed back contained water. Ras lifted the cup so that the water ran out of the hollow down a channel carved on top of the neck of the bird. The water shot down the channel and into a hole in the back of the head and poured out through the open beak and into Ras's mouth.
He had expected some strange taste, but the liquid seemed to be only water. He drank the bird dry, set it down on the flat top of the boulder, and then, as directed by Wizozu, stepped back. The two parts of the greater boulder swung toward each other until the boulder seemed a solid rock again.
Ras waited. He felt nothing except some apprehension and, after a few minutes, disappointment. Wizozu, however, thundered at him to be patient. Meanwhile, he should think about the ghosts of those he wished to see, and soon enough they would come.
He waited while the sun began to slide downward toward its black bed. Soon, he saw a patch of yellow to his right, beyond Wizozu's hut, on the edge of the back of the island, where it suddenly curved off. The yellow rose, and it was followed by Eeva's forehead, eyes, and nose. Ras wanted to wave her back but did not dare. He was in an agony because he was sure that Wizozu would soon see her and then all would be over for her. The heads of several of the statues had been moving, but now they centered their gaze on Eeva.
Suddenly, the barrel of a machine gun stuck out of an opening on the side of the hut toward Eeva. Ras could see its extreme end as it lowered.
He shouted at Eeva and ran forward.
Wizozu boomed, "Back, Ras! You are forbidden to come any nearer!"
Ras continued to charge. Sections of the bamboo wall on both sides of the doorway fell back, and a machine-gun barrel poked out of each opening. The great, dark bulk of Wizozu did not move behind the curtains, but the voice became even louder and its tones were more urgent.
"Back, Ras! I don't want to kill you! You don't know what you're doing!"
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Then the machine guns on the side nearest Eeva--he could see two sticking out now--exploded, and fire leaped from them. Dust and chips walked across rocks toward Eeva's head as if an invisible giant with iron-hard bird-feet were striding across the island.
Eeva withdrew her head. Ras kept on running, although he expected the guns pointed at him to start firing. He cast his knife, and it went through the narrow opening between the curtains, and plunged into the great body of Wizozu, seated upon a huge metal chair. He was close enough now to see the head of the sorcerer. It was four times as large as his, black, eared with wings, benosed with a forked horn, eyed with purple glass, mouthed with knives.
Ras wrenched his knife out of the soft, cloth body, and jumped into the center of the hut. The machine guns were no longer a danger; they had turned inward as far as they could go and now looked cross-eyed at each other. They had not fired once.
Wizozu bellowed so loudly that Ras's ears hurt. "Get out! Get out! I'll kill you! Aren't you afraid of anything?"
The voice came, not from Wizozu's mouth but from a big, metal horn-thing attached to a curved metal bar above the doorway.
The unknown controller, whoever he was, wherever he was, was powerless to hurt Ras now. Ras could not hurt him yet, but he was determined to destroy the trickery of the man who had deceived him into thinking that the Wantso had killed his parents.
He examined the hut, understood little of what he saw, but found a chest containing some devices he did understand. These were a large sledge hammer and a crowbar. With these he first wrecked the machine guns still firing at Eeva or at where she had been. He tore down the other machine guns--two on each side of the hut, and he smashed in the blind, glassy eyes on all the metal boxes inside the hut. The first one exploded, spraying glass all over the hut, but he was standing to one side when he smashed it and so was not touched. Thereafter he took care not to be in front of the one-eyeds. Eeva, entering the hut then, stopped him when he was going to cut a cable with a pair of bolt cutters.
"There is lightning in that cable," she said. "It kills as surely as lightning in the sky."
She searched until she found a trap door, and went down into it. Ras watched her, saw her light up the cellar with a flick of a button, saw the big, metal whirring things, smelled an unpleasant odor that she said was petrol, then watched the whirring metal things die as she pulled down on a thing that shot sparks when it came loose from another thing of metal.
They finished the wreckage by toppling over Wizozu and ripping off the soft padding over the wooden frame beneath and smashing that and the machinery inside.
Ras stepped outside to attack the statues, but he never reached them. A sound as of a giant tree breaking startled him. He looked up to see that the sky had become fire-red. The sun was a black ball against the fire. A head, larger than the full moon, thrust up above the top of the cliffs. It was the head of a white-haired, old white man with a long, white beard. It was Igziyabher as described by Mariyam.
Ras cried out because he was sure that Igziyabher was coming after him. His boasting and his sureness melted from him. What could he do against anything so monstrous?
The sky-filling head glared at him with eyes as pale and malevolent as a crocodile's. A hand that seemed as large as a quarter moon came up from behind the cliffs and seized the edge of the sky and yanked it down as if it were a curtain pulled from a window in Mariyam's house. The sky behind the blue sky was so many swirling colors that Ras could see only a chaos of glory. Then the hand opened, and the fire-red sky snapped back up to cover the many-colored, swirling sky.
Ras knew that he was shaking with awe, but he seemed not to be entirely connected with his body, so that the awe was only a shadow of awe.
The island, which was shaped like the back of a giant turtle, became, for a moment, flesh. It arched, and he rose up with it, and then it slumped back and became rock and dirt again.
But lumps formed here and there in the earth; the lumps grew upward and shaped themselves into the figures of men and women and animals and birds. Foremost were Mariyam and Yusufu and Wilida. Behind them were the other little black people he had known when he was a child. And behind them were Bigagi and all the Wantso. And the Sharrikt he had killed. And the leopards, the monkeys, the river hogs, and crocodiles, the deer, antelope, and civets. Behind and above them were the birds he had killed. These flew about as if tied by strings from their bellies to the earth. Strings of earth did attach them to the world; they could fly only in circles.
Soon Janhoy pushed through the animals and the Wantso and walked majestically to Yusufu and crouched down beside him. His green eyes shone.
Ras wept with joy and ran toward them, but they moved away from him. Their feet did not walk on the earth; their feet were buried ankle-deep; their legs seemed to sprout from the earth; rather, to be sunk into the earth, and they seemed to have to fight to keep from sinking entirely back into the earth. They looked as if they were riding waves of dirt, and some sank as far as their necks before they began to rise again.
"Stay away, son!" Mariyam said. Her little, dark face was twisted with agony. "We cannot touch you, although we long to hold you and kiss you. We are dead. You are alive."
"If I can see you, why can't I touch you?" Ras said.
"Because the distance between the living and the dead is farther than that between sun and stars," Mariyam said. "It is the greatest distance in the world."
"Wilida!" Ras cried, hoping that she might not say the same thing. But Wilida moved away from him.
"Forget about her, son," Mariyam said. "She is dead, and you have a live woman to love. Forget about all of us."
"But I can't!" he said. "I grieve for you night and day."
"Don't do that, son," Yusufu said. "Or you will soon be with us, or might just as well be."
"What can you tell me?" Ras said. "If you can't touch me, you can talk to me. Tell me something I want--need--to know. You are dead; you have now seen the truths behind the walls of the world. You know the answers to my questions. Tell me!"
Yusufu grinned with the ghost of his living grin. He looked, at that moment, evil. Wilida, who had been staring at the ground, raised her head and looked at him as if she hated him.
Mariyam said, "The dead have nothing to tell you that they didn't tell you when they lived."
"And that is all they have to tell you," Yusufu said.
Ras heard Eeva calling him from a long way off. He looked around but could not see her. When he turned toward the ghosts, he saw them all sinking back into the earth. Mariyam was up to her neck, Yusufu was up to his chest, and Wilida was waist-deep. They struggled soundlessly but desperately. Janhoy tried to rise to his paws, but his body continued to descend, and soon only his maned and noiselessly roaring head was visible.
Ras rushed forward to pull them back out, but the earth seemed to spin them away faster than he could run. And when, suddenly, he found that he was making progress, he reached empty ground. They were gone under. He fell on his face and dug into the earth with his fingers and felt the coarse thick hair on the top of Mariyam's head, and then it was gone. He wept and moaned and called on them to come back, and after a while he seemed to have gone asleep.
Blackness succeeded blackness.
20
THE HUNT
He was in a place so quiet that he could hear only the hum of no sound. He was standing on stone and in water not quite ankle-deep. His outsweeping hands felt nothing.
He moaned, wondering if he were dead, too, and if the ghosts had taken him with them.
A click made him jump, and the tiny flame that followed made him gasp. By the light, he saw a hand holding the cigarette lighter and the pale, anxious face of Eeva. Beyond were rough stone walls, a boulder in the shadows ahead, and more darkness. The water was a shallow stream about two feet across.
Eeva snapped the flame off. He felt her move against him. She spoke softly, as if the darkness and quietness subdued her. "Are you all right no
w, Ras?"
"I don't know. Where are we? How did we get here? What...?"
"First, you tell me what happened to you," she said. "You ran out the door, and the next I knew you were acting crazy; you were talking to yourself and groveling on the ground."
Ras told her what had happened. She still did not understand how it could have come about until he mentioned drinking the water from the stone bird within the opening boulder.
Eeva said, "That drink must have contained LSD, or some kind of psychedelic drug. That's the only explanation I have for your hallucinations and your blacking out afterward. That also explains what happened to the Wantso and Sharrikt who dared face that thing so they could get religious revelations and power.
"This man that set all those statues and equipment on that island... I don't know why he did it. Unless he had something in mind for you eventually. Or maybe he wanted to play God with the natives and also wanted to keep anybody from trying to get out of the valley by the river, although anybody who tried that would have to be out of his mind.
"Anyway, he gave it to you so you would be in a suggestible state, easily handled. People that take LSD are often fantastically suggestible, you know. No, you wouldn't know. Anyway, he intended to tell you to kill me after you'd come under the influence of the drug. He suggested the ghosts to you, so you saw them. They all existed in your mind, Ras. But you fooled him by attacking before you were affected by the drug.
"I knew that this--this man--must be watching us through TV cameras... he's probably on the stone pillar in the lake... and he'd undoubtedly send a copter after me as soon as he knew we were on the island. He had us trapped, or so he thought.
"After you passed out--withdrew, I mean, because you could walk and would do what I asked you to--I got you into the boat. But you wouldn't co-operate very long; you'd paddle for a minute and then stop, and I couldn't paddle the boat back up the river against the current by myself. In fact, even if you'd tried your best, I don't think we could have gotten back up.