Silva, as always, sat beside the cairn. Kinross tried to talk to the old man, patting him on the shoulder, but Silva repulsed him with an incoherent wailing about devils. Kinross shrugged and went back down the valley.
It was beautiful early in the day with birds and flowers color-spotting the green through which the cleanlimbed, scantily clad villagers moved in twos and threes. Smoke rose above clean, red flame before Mary’s hut. The air was perfumed with flowers, musical with birdcalls and spiced with woodsmoke. Kinross tried to feel good, but a restlessness drove him.
He walked back and forth, jerkily, sat down and got up again, driven to random action that he would not shape into the action demanded of him. He picked fruit and threw it away, drifted toward the dark grove and walked resolutely away from it. At last he decided to make the fight in his hut. He went inside and wove burrawang fronds into a barrier across the door.
For hours, pacing or lying prone with clenched fists in the gloom, Kinross strove with his rebellious muscles and reproachful viscera. Finally the familiar silvery voice, long unheard, spoke to him out of the air.
“Kinross, I am hungry and thirsty. Bring me fruit.”
“No. You have it from a hundred others.”
“I need it from you, Kinross. We have a relation. I gave you back a lost life. You dragged my body here with your own strength. You owe me a duty.”
“I deny it. If I ever did, I repudiate it.”
“I have power, Kinross. Silva and Kerbeck bring no fruit. Would you be as they?”
“You lie, Kruger. You have not even the lesser power to command my muscles.”
“I don’t wish to command them directly. I wish to command you, with your consent, in this one small thing.”
“No. I have tested your power before now.”
“Not to the full, Kinross. Not to the full. I have been reluctant to hurt you.”
Silence extended itself into Kinross’ abrupt awareness that the tension was gone. He felt as tired as he had on the days he had fought the reentry barrier. He lay back to rest.
“Round one is mine,” he thought comfortably.
Distant thunder rumbled. “Round two?” he thought uneasily and unbarred his door. Black clouds were boiling up over the great ridge above the cave mouth. ,Black storm devils sifted down from the hillsides and gray women danced singly and in groups on the tops of things. Kinross brought wood into his hut, also stones to bank a fire and a brand to kindle it, working rapidly.
The storm built up fast, with tremendous thunder and jagged bolts of lightning. Kinross shielded and tended his fire, unheeding. The drumming rain changed into a drizzle and set in cold. The day became night without a perceptible sunset. Kinross shivered through the long night, burrowed under sweet grass and with his belly pressed against the warm rocks that banked his fire.
Morning was cold and clear. Frost rimed the grass, flower petals drooped and tree leaves twinkled with silver. Kinross was standing in his hut door, shivering and stamping his feet, when he heard the frosty crunch of footsteps. It was von Lankenau, not yet shaven for the day.
* * * *
“Good morning, Mr. Kinross,” von Lankenau greeted him. “Please pardon my more or less forced intrusion on your privacy.”
“That’s all right. It’s not an intrusion.”
“Oh? I had thought that you were deliberately keeping to yourself these last weeks. But I would like to discuss this cold. . .”
“If you can’t take it, grow a beard like me.”
“I am inured to cold, Mr. Kinross. At the moment I entered this world I had been stopped on a ledge at sixteen thousand feet for about thirty hours. My arms and my legs were frozen. The Seeings had begun . . . you touch my pride, Mr. Kinross, excuse me.”
Kinross said nothing.
“How long are you prepared to go on with this defiance of the Herr Kruger?” von Lankenau asked.
“Maybe till hell freezes over.” Kinross laughed harshly, adding, “No. Until Kruger agrees to let me through the reentry barrier. Me and Mary Chadwick.”
“He will never let you go, Mr. Kinross. And Miss Chadwick does not wish to go.”
“The thing this damned Krugerworld has made of her may not so wish. But if Kruger would give her back to herself—”
“She has never ceased to be herself, Mr. Kinross. We talk increasingly of late and I know her well, in time will know her better still. But I do know what you mean .. .”
“Skip what I mean. Did Kruger send you here?”
“Oh no. It is my curiosity, I am afraid. You interest me, Mr. Kinross, and in studying you I learn much about the Herr Kruger. Tell me: you know the villagers are suffering from cold and will soon be hungry: do you feel any responsibility for their sufferings?”
“No. Kruger’s responsible. Let him ease off.”
“He will not, I am sure. What then?”
“Then we shiver and we starve. When those lobotomies of yours in the village get desperate enough maybe they’ll help me break through the reentry barrier and get their minds and their own world back.”
“They will not. That I know. But let me congratulate you on your efforts to break the barrier, Mr. Kinross. Did you know that you had pushed it outward a good way and permanently distorted that corner of Krugerworld? You are a strong and resolute man, sir. I wish you would consent to take your rightful position among us.”
“I’ll take my rightful departure or die trying.”
“Mr. Kinross, the villagers also have a right to live. I will not prompt them nor will Mr. Garcia. We have agreed on that. But if the Herr Kruger can reach them directly through dreams and inspired counsels, and if the collective will moves to act upon you, we will stand aside also.”
“Fair enough,” Kinross grunted.
“One other thing, Mr. Kinross. I fear you may be moving blindly toward a treason of the light. I will say no more.”
Kinross did not answer. Von Lankenau half smiled and saluted him, then turned and left in silence. Within a minute other footsteps approached, light and rapid ones.
It was Mary Chadwick and she was in a fury. Her shirt was half unbuttoned and she clasped in her bosom a dozen or more of the white nutmeg pigeons with black wing and tail tips.
“Down with ice on their poor wings. Half-frozen. You stringybark jojo—” she stormed, face twisted with pity and anger.
“I’m sorry—” Kinross began.
“Then stop it, you fool! Stop it at once! Take that silly fruit to that stupid altar and put an end to this nonsense!”
“Did Lankenau or Kruger put you up to this?”
She stared a scornful denial. Kinross swallowed and felt his face burn under his beard.
“Why blame me and not Kruger?”
“Because I can’t come at the Herr Kruger and I can come at you, of course. Hop, now!”
“All right,” Kinross said. “I’ll do it for you, Mary. Will you understand that I do it for you and not for Kruger, Mary? Will you accept?” He took hold of her hand among the rustling pigeons and looked into her blue-violet eyes murky with waning anger.
“Of course for me,” she said. “That’s what I came to tell you, idiot.”
“Glory!” Kinross gasped and walked away rapidly. When he came back through the grove the frost had already melted under a warming sun.
“Round two is at least a draw,” he thought, “but I kind of think I won it too.”
* * * *
Weeks passed into months and the land smiled. Kinross left fruit at the cairn each morning, whispering under his breath, “For you, Mary.” Also each morning he laid flowers on a quartz boulder he had carried up from the creek and placed by Mary’s hut. The flowers always disappeared, although he never saw her take them.
Stragglers continued coming into Krugerworld by ones or twos every few days and the population of Krugertown approached three hundred. Kinross talked amicably with Garcia and von Lankenau from time to time. Von Lankenau discussed the expansion of Krugerworld with an in
creasing population. He thought that at some critical point it would expand enough to accommodate another village and perhaps be dumbbell-shaped rather than elliptical. Garcia told Kinross pridefully that Pilar was carrying a child, he hoped a son.
Sometimes Kinross talked with the villagers. They had lost all memory of their origin. They believed they had come from underground, shaped of earth’s substance at the bottom of a great pit, and that sometime they might go back there to sleep again. They had no clear notion of death.
Kinross no longer wandered aimlessly. At a site a mile down-valley from the village, he built a stone hut. He built it massively, bedding large stones from the creek in clay and rammed earth, giving it several rooms beamed with ironwood and heavily thatched with nipa fronds. He built a stone fireplace and crude furniture.
Mary passed by several times a day, taking little interest in his work. When the house was complete she would not come in to look at it.
“It is a waste of strength and good living time,” she said, laughing. “Allan, Allan, walk under the trees again.”
“Will you walk with me?” he asked.
She laughed and turned away.
Kinross built a walled garden around the hut. He brought water into it with a raised ditch, pierced for drainage, taking off from above a low dam he built in the creek. It fed a bathing pool and turned a small waterwheel. He threshed out grass seeds and spread them and berries on the flagstones of his garden. Birds came and ate, but Mary would not come in.
“You don’t paddock me with anything cold as stone, not by half,” she said.
He saw her more often with von Lankenau and gradually tended to avoid them both, nagged by a question he dared not ask for fear of an answer. The black moods came back and he neglected his house to roam the hillsides as of old. Sometimes he met Kerbeck, vacant-eyed and enormous, wild and shaggy as a bear, and cursed Kruger bitterly while Kerbeck buzzed and hummed. He did not fail to leave his token of fruit each morning on the cairn.
Then one day, leaving Kerbeck and the Kabeiroi on the hillside, he came into the valley and saw a village woman tending grapevines alone at the foot of the hill. She was young, supple and brown and wore only a short paperbark skirt. She stopped working and bowed her head, waiting for him to pass. He stopped and searched in his mind for his limited Spanish.
“Cómo te llamas?”
“Milagros, señor.” Her voice was very low and she would not look at him.
“Bueno. Tu estáas muy bonita, Milagros “
“For favor, tengo que trabajar ... el Señor Kruger...”
“Vert conmigo, Milagros. Yo te mando por el nombre del Señor Kruger.”
She flushed darkly, then paled. She looked up at him with beseeching eyes shiny with tears.
“Por favor, por gran favor, no me mande usted...”
“Quién te manda?” asked a new voice from behind the screen of vines, and then, “Oh. You, Kinross?”
Garcia came into view around the vines. Like Kinross, he was barefooted and wore only stagged-off dungaree trousers.
“What’s it all about?” he asked.
“I was trying to talk to her...”
Garcia spoke rapidly in Spanish and the woman answered in a fearful voice. The thickset Mexican turned back to Kinross, fists knuckling hipbones.
“Take the name of Kruger back off of her, Kinross!”
“I remove the name, Milagros,” Kinross said. “Garcia, I—”
“Take it off in Spanish,” Garcia interrupted. “You put it on in Spanish.”
Kinross garbled out a sentence in Spanish. Garcia was still angry. He sent the woman away.
“Kinross, I can’t take away your power to use the name of Kruger. But if you use it wrong, I can beat you half to death. Maybe all the way to death. You get me?”
“Don’t judge me so damned offhand. How do you know what I intended?”
“Milagros knew. She knew, all right. I believe her.”
“Believe what you like, then.”
“Listen, Kinross, stay away from the villagers. I command you in the name of Garcia and his two fists. You can outtalk me and outthink me, but—” The stocky Mexican struck his right fist into his left biceps with a solid thump.
Kinross clenched his teeth and breathed deeply through flaring nostrils. Then he said, “Okay, Garcia. I appreciate your position. The only man I really want to fight doesn’t have a body.”
“Good,” the Mexican said. “No hard feelings, then. But you still stay clear of the villagers, a kind of agreement between you and me. Okay?”
“Okay,” Kinross said and walked away.
When he came into his walled garden he saw nutmeg pigeons pecking at overripe mangoes he had placed there for them. Fearless, they hardly made way for his suddenly slowed feet. The two fluttered briefly when he, unthinking, bent and seized them. They quieted in his hands and he carried them inside, wondering why.
For hours after nightfall he sat before his fire and stared into the red coals. So he could outthink and out-talk Garcia, could he? Well, yes, he could. But the act? How act? How get at a man without a body?
Where was Kruger vulnerable? What force could he align against Kruger? He had touched Kruger once only, and that was by a refusal to act. That was negative. Now what was the positive side? What act, what unthinking, nameless act . . . and the fit stole over him and he took up the pigeons and left the house and walked through the dark grove to the cairn where Silva moaned in sleep and did what there was to do and returned and slept, to wake unremembering.
* * * *
Day was advanced when Kinross came out of his house. He walked up the valley, crossing over the little stream to avoid the village, and picked two overripe mangoes, which he carried through the grove to the cairn. Silva was rocking and wailing thinly in an extremity of woe. To the right a knot of silent villagers clustered.
On the cairn he saw the headless pigeons with blood-dabbled feathers and the black, sticky blood on the stones. Fingers tugged at his memory and he frowned, refusing to think what this strange thing might mean. He flung down his mangoes into the blood spots with force enough to burst them and said aloud, “For you, Mary.” Then he stared arrogantly at the knot of villagers and strode away. But he was reluctant to emerge from the grove, prowling its tangled shades far from path and stream for upwards of an hour. Then he walked back toward the village.
A strange silence held the land. No air moved. The villagers were drifting toward the grove in small groups, without the customary singing and talking. He heard no birdcalls. Then, as he neared the village, he heard a woman’s voice strident with grief and anger. It was Mary.
“What kind of Kelly rules do you keep here, you and your Kruger, you smooth-faced blood drinker?”
Then von Lankenau’s voice, soothing and indistinct behind the huts, and then Mary again, agonized, “Oh, my lovely white sea pigeons! Poor dears, poor dears, I’ll take them all away with me. You’ll pay! You’ll pay!”
She broke into a loud humming and came into view, running toward the hillside. Her long hair streamed behind her and her once lovely face was frightfully twisted and gaping with menace. Kinross noticed with another start that the black grotesques from the hillside had invaded the valley floor and were all about the village. They gave way before the infuriated woman and all at once the birds became vocal, deafeningly so, clouds of them swooping at the black things with squawks and screeches.
Kinross stood in vagueness, looking around. Never had he seen the sun of Krugerworld more warm and smiling, the flowers more voluptuous, the trees more heavily laden with bright fruit. At his feet earth tilted and crumbled and a red-capped mushroom emerged, visibly rising and unfolding. Von Lankenau, his shaven face set in grave lines, came toward Kinross from out of the cluster of huts. Before he could speak, Garcia shouted from the direction of the grove and they saw him running toward them.
“Something’s haywire with the villagers,” he told von Lankenau, panting. “They won’t follo
w ritual. They won’t obey me.”
“What are they doing?” von Lankenau asked.
“Nothing. Just standing still. But I don’t like the feeling of things in there, don’t ask me why.”
“Something of truly enormous significance has happened, Joe. I do not know what ... I was about to ask Mr. Kinross for his ideas. Those pigeons . . . but you are right, we must get the villagers back to their huts and to the fruit groves. Perhaps Mr. Kinross will help us.”
Orbit 2 - Anthology Page 10
