A few moments later, Mrs. Rasp bustled into the room. A plump shy woman with graying hair, she averted her eyes as she spoke.
“So sorry about the embarrassment,” she said. “You see, we have strong taboos against women in, ah, your condition. Very strong. It is silly, I know, and so does my husband, but it is our way and we cannot help it. If you will please get your things together, I will escort you immediately to the Pool of the Bleeding Ladies. You’ll be quite comfortable there, lots of other ladies to talk with, plenty of time to rest and read. Clickrasp said you could take any books you wanted from the library, if you promise to bring them back. Now please, hurry.”
“Be right with you,” Dawn said.
Kricket wound around her ankles, purring joyfully.
28
ON THE RUN
“Only about an hour of moonlight left,” Winjah said as they stopped for a breather. “But we’re nearly there now.” He looked to the rear, into the tall grass that glowed bone-white under the night sky.
“Still behind us?” Donn asked.
“Bloody yes, they are.” The hunter cursed. “Six or eight of the bastards.”
The hyenas had picked up their scent just out of the Nordquists’ camp and stuck tight for two hours now, all the way to the edge of the rain forest. They kept well out of gunshot range, but their heavy awkward shapes showed every now and then in the near distance. Occasionally a whiff of them blew past on the vagrant breeze—sour swampy rot.
“They’ll leave us when we go into the forest,” Winjah said. “That’s the best place to lie up for the rest of the night. All the predators are out on the veldt right now, as I hope the Tok are too. Come morning we’ll look for Tok sign and trail it back to their camp. Then, by God, we’ll bust your Fair Dawn Lady loose, and Bucky too if he’s still amongst the living, and cut the hell out of this godforsaken country. Clout us a few Tok headhunters along the way. Hey, Bwana?”
“Yeah,” said Donn. “You bet.”
If we live through this mad-ass run, he added to himself. It was spooky to run through the African night, even with a heavy rifle in your hands. Everything had teeth. The thorns, barely visible under even so bright a moon as this. The rocks, leaping out to nip at your shins. The animals—hundreds of them, it seemed—that slunk away at the pounding approach of their boots. Silver-backed jackals that yapped and scuttled, then turned to stare back with the light encasing them in liquid steel. The small spotted cats—servals, sand cats, the ubiquitous African wildcat with its blurred spots and long striped tail. At one point they ran past a pride of lions, heard the low groaning growls, then the resumption of teeth slicing through bone and muscle of a kill. Mainly, though, the damned hyenas hulking everywhere, standing slope-backed and gazing with those big stupid eyes, their heavy jaws hung open, tongues lolling limp over brutal teeth.
“Otiego says we should pop one of the damned fisis,” Winjah said as they rested. “Then the other ones would stay back to clean him up. What you you say?”
“Wouldn’t a shot draw the Tok?” Donn asked.
“Perhaps. But we’re only a hop, skip, and a jump from the woods right now. A shot would also spook off anything that’s lying up between us and the trees, and that edge there is really the most dangerous part of the journey.”
“Okay by me.”
Winjah took the .375 and waited until one of the dim shapes circling in the grass stepped into the clear. The shot sounded flat, like the slap of a giant hand. The hyena leaped and began to run in circles, snapping at the hole in its paunch. Donn saw a fat white tube emerge from the wound. The hyena swung its thick wedge-shaped head and the tube became a length of hose. Other hyenas emerged from the grass, cackling gleefully, and dove on the wounded one.
“Let’s move out,” Winjah said.
They ran for the jungle, listening to the raucous, gut-ripping racket behind them. Otiego was giggling as he ran. It was quite a joke, the fisi devouring its own guts. Better than TV, Donn thought.
Thorn, gullies, more thorn and tall grass that cut the forearms. More creatures of the night fleeing their approach. Once a hoarse, angry grunt—a bulbous shape that Winjah said was a bush pig. Donn would have sworn it was a buffalo, or maybe even a rhino. Then they were into the forest, walking easily on the open, spongy turf beneath the impenetrable canopy. The mammoth tree trunks shone dully through the dark, like the pillars of some Olympian temple, Donn thought. Yes, it’s a church in here, a cathedral to some ancient, awful god.
They lay up finally, half a mile into the rain forest, under the trunk of a fallen giant. The trackers scampered up a huge juniper and cut boughs for them to use as mattresses. Donn unrolled his sleeping bag and pulled the bandoleers from his shoulders.
“We daren’t light a fire, I’m afraid,” Winjah said. “But there’s really no need to. A bit chilly in here, under the gloom, but the bags should keep us cozy enough. I’ll have the lads take turns at the watch. Take a turn myself, right now, I suppose. You get some kip, Young Gavern. I’ll wake you at first light.”
Donn slid into the bag and tucked his boots under his head as a pillow. He lay on his back, staring up into the canopy. His eyes, adjusted now to the dark of the forest, saw the trees in fine detail. The leafy sky, shot through in spots by pricks of starlight, shifted rhythmically to a high wind. Like the sea, he thought. The rain forest has its own tides and currents. The trunks, thick and gray, smooth where they were not wound with shaggy vines, seemed to nod, one toward the other. They’re alive, he thought. As alive as I am. And sentient, too, but in ways I can’t begin to perceive. A faint horripilation moved up his spine, up his neck. I wonder if they think. His eyes slid closed and he slept in the temple.
Donn dreamt that he and Winjah had gone north to Alaska. They were sitting in a saloon on the banks of a roaring salmon river. Cold gusts blew through the knotholes in the log wall. Donn was interviewing a boy who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Jack London. He was a short, blond, wide-shouldered young man with acne and tan teeth, and he claimed his name was Sam London. He had just come off a king-crab boat out of Kodiak and was using the money he’d saved to buy a trapline from an old Indian whose legs had gone bad. An ancient jukebox, its lights winking pale and pastel, played in the corner—Johnny Horton songs. Donn doubted the boy’s veracity but was afraid to say so. The kid looked tough. When he finally screwed up enough courage to ask him about Jack London, the kid leaped to his feet and swung….
Something hard and heavy smacked Donn across the bridge of his nose. He sat up in the sleeping bag and cursed. Sure, the rain forest. Overhead, a strong wind arched the canopy into a chaos of ripping leaves and groaning branches. Deadwood fell among the leaves—whole branches as big as the trees back home. A hunk of wood had bounced off Donn’s face.
“You’d better get over here,” Winjah yelled above the moaning of the wind. “In the lee.” The hunter was crouched near the roots of the downed tree under which they had slept, coaxing a small wood fire over which a pan boiled. He was singing to himself as he fed sticks into the flames. “North to Alaska.”
“You’re in good voice this morning,” Donn said, rubbing his skinned nose.
“Just so bloody glad to get shut of those damnable Texans,” Winjah said. “I can’t stand that sort of thing. All that bloody boasting and one-upping and playing so bloody tough when all they really are is a fragile membrane of scum on the Great Pond of Life. Yellow scum at that. Ah, well, it all evens out in the fullness of time.” He pointed to the fire. “Care for some brekkers?”
Buffalo ribs roasted in the coals at the edge of the blaze. Donn noticed that the trackers were hunkered back under the tree trunk out of the wind, eating and watching him. Back there in the shadows, their eyes and teeth flashing from the gloom, they appeared to be chewing on three-foot-long spareribs—Harlem gone berserk. Donn took a rib and whittled the meat from it with his Gerber lock-blade knife while Winjah poured him a cup of coffee. It began to rain.
“Perhaps we�
��d best lay low today,” the hunter said. “’Tain’t a fit day out for man nor beast.”
“Yeah, but that means the Tok will probably be lying low, too,” Donn said. “I don’t mind the weather if you don’t.”
“Done,” said Winjah, finishing his coffee. “Let’s get packing.”
They followed the game trails at the edge of the forest, finding old Tok sign everywhere but nothing very fresh. Here and there they came on the skeletons of monkeys and other small game, all of the bones distinguished by an absence of skulls. This was the Tok hunting ground, all right. The storm grew more furious, with lightning snapping high to the east of them and fierce blasts of rain slashing the upper canopy. They continued moving north. Out on the plain, they saw a mixed herd of wildebeests and zebras stampeding in panic at the constant bowling-alley roar of the thunder.
“Everything’s moving because of the pyrotechnics,” Winjah said. “We might keep our eyes peeled for the Big Bogo. He could well be charging around out there with the others. Oh, I’d dearly love to shoot him out from under those Texicans!” He sniffed the air, sharp with the taste of ozone. “I feel lucky today, Bwana. Bloody lucky!“
Toward midday, with the storm at its peak, they spotted a herd of buffalo milling on the prairie beyond the edge of the forest. A lobe of the jungle extended westward just here, running out into the grassland up a long shallow valley, then dwindling to thick brush. The buffalo were some three hundred yards out into the plain from the wooded edge. Rain slashed sporadically, obscuring their vision.
“I don’t know if he’s with them,” Winjah said, “but I’m sure that’s the herd we’ve seen him with. I recognize one of the askari, the one with the broken right horn tip.” He scanned the herd thoroughly through the four-power scope. The rain abated briefly. “Wait a minute … Yes, he’s in there, Bwana! Yes. I see his great bloody diamond winking at us. Like the bloody lightning itself. Yes.” He turned and looked at Donn, his eyes shining. There’s the real lightning, Donn thought.
They circled back into the deep woods and ran, low, out along the extension of the forest, their passage covered by the racket of the storm and the wild tossing of the foliage. When Winjah figured they were parallel with the herd, they eased back out to the jungle’s edge. The herd was still there, milling in a circle, bawling under the howl of the wind. It sounded to Donn like Gregorian chant, in counterpoint to a mad organist. A Kyrie, he thought. A Dies Irae.
“They’re still too far for a shot,” Winjah said. “A good three hundred yards. And the Big Bogo’s masked by the others. We’ll have to belly on out there. I think I see a way.” He spoke to Lambat and took the .458. Donn already was carrying the .375. “I want the lads to stay here while you and I make the stalk,” Winjah said. “That way, if the herd breaks before we get close enough, the lads can follow them out for us. Let’s go.”
They crawled on elbows and bellies through the wet grass, Winjah in the lead, Donn a body length behind. Just like a war movie, he thought. Stalking the wily Nips. After about a hundred yards, Winjah stuck his head up behind a thornbush and looked ahead. He turned to Donn and nodded, smiling. Still there. They were in a shallow depression that snaked out toward the herd. Rainwater lay clean and cold in the lower spots. Donn sipped some. He was very dry.
Winjah crawled to the top of the depression and slid the rifle barrel out in front of him. With his hand flat, he signaled for Don to crawl up beside him. The herd was barely seventy-five yards ahead of them, huge in the blued-steel light of the storm, heads and horns tossing in stark silhouette against the bone-white rage of the sky. The wind, from herd to hunters, carried the scent of wet cow dung and the sound of the bovine fear. Donn saw the Diamond Bogo, looming above the others. The great stone flashed. He was nearer the edge of the herd now, the milling of the others having carried them somewhat apart from him. Any moment now the shot would come clear.
“Line him up,” Winjah whispered. “Point of the shoulder, the way he’s standing now. We both shoot at once. When I say so.” Donn put his eye to the scope and waited. His balls felt tight against his crotch. But the cross hairs did not waver.
They barely heard the pop. It sounded like a twig snapping, against the bellow of herd and storm. The Diamond Bogo leaped and tossed his huge head angrily, fell to his knees, and then turned to bolt with the rest of the herd straight for the woods.
“What the fuck?” said Donn. He hadn’t shot and neither had Winjah. Then they heard it.
“Ah hit ’im, Ah hit ’im! By Gawd, Ah hit ’im!”
It was Nordquist. He stood with his ducklings at the edge of the forest, some three hundred yards from them, waving the. 17-caliber Weatherby over his head, his voice thin and tinny over the loud distance.
“God-bloody-dammit-to-bloodyell,” Winjah said. He looked to where the herd was disappearing into the heavy cover of the valley. “He did hit him, too. Oh shit, oh dear.”
29
CRUSADER
“I can’t!” yelled Bucky. “Can’t, can’t, can’t! I need a vacation, Clickrasp. I’m too pooped to pop.” They stood in Clicky’s study. Outside the storm was breaking up. The garden dripped and shone in the aftermath of the rains, the blue skies blazed behind the flowering trees. Clickrasp stood leaning on the haft of a heavy two-handed broadsword, his chin just resting on the worn steel pommel.
“But you were doing so well,” he lamented.
“Yeah,” Buck said bitterly. “Eight, ten, twelve times a day. I’m worn to a frazzle, a nubbin, and my nerves are going fast. It’s all that dope you’re sticking in my chow.”
“Now wait a minute,” Clickrasp said angrily. “I’ve put nothing in your food. No stimulants, no aphrodisiacs, nothing. I want you for the long term, my lad. Do you think I’d risk good breeding stock on harmful drugs, for nothing but a brief, flashy performance?”
“You mean …”
“Yes, you did it all on your own.” Clicky smiled. “Didn’t know you had it in you, eh?”
“No,” Bucky grumped, blushing nonetheless, “it’s not that. It’s just that I need a break now and then. You’ve heard the phrase ‘too much of a good thing’?”
“Certainly, certainly. Well, I suppose, in light of your good record to date, a spot of holiday would not be out of order. How long had you in mind?”
“Oh, just a day or two. I thought maybe you could spare me a couple of your warriors—you’d want them with me as guards anyway, I suppose—and I’d head up into the mountains, maybe do a bit of fishing or bow-hunting. I notice you’ve got bows and arrows around”—he gestured to the walls of the study, on which hung arms of all nations—“and I reckoned maybe I could shoot me a bit of game.”
“I don’t know,” Clickrasp said. He rubbed his heavy chin. Could Buck be planning an escape? He had had the strong feeling that Buck was enjoying it here, actually liked the Tok, and Clickrasp foremost among them, perhaps was even glad to be helping the cause. But you never could tell with these subhumans. Their minds worked in devious, inexplicable ways. “Say, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you join me on an elephant hunt? Dawn told me the other night that she would like some ivory, killed by yours truly, and I’d dismissed the idea just then. But perhaps we could go together—kill two tusks with one stone, as it were.”
“Great,” said Bucky. “How is Dawn, by the way? I’ve been too busy, thanks to you, to look in on her. You two, uh, hitting it off okay?”
“Swimmingly,” Click replied, looking away and gritting his teeth. “Just swimmingly. She needed a bit of holiday, too, and I’ve sent her up to a little spa we maintain in the foothills. A natural hot springs. Something of a health resort for the ladies of our people.”
“Good,” said Buck. “Well, when do we hit the trail of the tuskers?” He took a short, recurved bow from the wall. It was backed with bone and sinew, impeccably wrapped, with a well-waxed string that seemed to be woven of muscle fiber. He placed the tip to whose end the string was tied on the outside of his right foot, stepped thro
ugh between bow and string with his left leg, and bent the bow to slide the looped end of the string into its notch. The bow was powerful. With it strung, he held it at arm’s length and drew. Christ, he thought as his forearm quivered slightly, that’s a good eighty pounds of pull.
“Right now,” said Clicky. “That’s why I’d taken down this sword. I’ve never killed an elephant with a sword and was thinking about giving it a try. This weapon belonged to a Crusader, a German who wandered into our country some seven centuries ago on a futile quest for the lands of Prester John. He slew many of us before our people subdued him. And all for nothing. Legend has it his brains were too sour even for stew. Well, that’s neither here nor there. Let’s go hunting.” He bellowed orders in Tok to the guards who lolled outside the study. They sprang to their feet like bird dogs at the sight of a shotgun.
An hour later, trotting behind Clickrasp and the rest of the Tok hunting party, Bucky felt like a kid on the day school lets out. A full quiver of arrows bounced on his hip and the bow felt heavy, solid in his hand. Poking through Click’s collection of cutlery as he armed himself, he had come on a sheathed Buck knife—property of the late suicidal Philadelphian—and the Tok chieftain had given it to him as well, a memento of the hard days and nights just past. It flopped against his opposite hip.
They were running through the rain forest southeast of the city, along the fast white-water arm of the upper Kan, where the river debouched from the snow-topped mountains. Click’s hunters had been watching a small herd of elephants that had fed for the past few days in the bamboo stands not far from town. Elephants were protected under Clickrasp’s regime but the hunters were always aware of their proximity, if only for safety’s sake. Many a Tok had gone into heavy cover after wounded small game only to be stomped flat by hiding elephants he had foolishly failed to notice. This particular herd was notorious for its ferocity, especially that of the dominant bull, whose ivory Clickrasp estimated must go over one hundred pounds the side. Not gigantic, but big for nowadays.
The Diamond Bogo Page 18
