Eeda’s little son Kado, her first and so her most precious, was moving about the plants, playing hide and seek with his friends. Or so it seemed. The little males were actually mimicking the scene that was unfolding around Goro even as the tribe grazed.
Two big blackbacks were stealthily closing on Goro, taking advantage of the high green underbrush to disguise their movements. They were adolescents so they were only going through the motions, training for a day when they might actually challenge the king.
But the training was not something to be taken lightly. Challenging a 450 pound silverback, even in mock preparation such as this, could be lethal. Goro was a giant of muscle and iron-like bone. Leaning forward on massive forearms he was a figure of immutable strength.
Goro had already sensed the approach of the upstarts and grunted his grim amusement. The fools were coming downwind, but the mock challenge made the king wonder again about the whereabouts of the giant Tobog for he had not seen or smelled him for many days. The prideful blackback was likely angry at the silverback’s insult at Fur-nose’s lair, and was probably seeking solace from his supporters.
The king could sense the other blackbacks in the trees plotting and planning, hunting or wrestling, and reveling in their strength as they guarded the group.
Then Goro remembered seeing Tobog leaving the tribe some few days after their last visit to the berries near Fur-nose. The big blackback had flung himself through the trees toward the west and he had not yet returned.
Tobog had stopped making mock challenges to Goro’s kingship some time ago, instead foraging in the jungle away from the troop with Omag, or sitting with the crippled ape under the pretense of grooming while they watched the silverback studying him for—weakness?
And the king thought again that perhaps he should have slain Omag long ago, or sent him into exile. But, Goro felt that his former challenger’s mind was damaged like his body, and that on his own his brain sickness would only fester. The king believed that Omag would heal if he were allowed to live with his tribe and since Goro knew no dishonor or weakness in his own heart; he was blind to its existence in others.
The young blackbacks charged out of the dense foliage with a shattering roar that was met with Goro’s own battle cry as he surged to his full height. He heaved the closest challenger into the air and with a thunderous bellow threw the blackback end over end into the tangled underbrush beneath the trees.
The second blackback lost his nerve when Goro’s fighting fangs turned toward him, so the ape retreated, speeding to the closest tree where he leapt into the lower branches.
Goro gave chase, as the other challenger gained his feet and followed, growling and screaming—embarrassed by the outcome of the first exchange.
The rest of the group watched this confrontation expectantly, listening carefully for the timbre of the voices and registering the undertone of merriment that thrummed in Goro’s cries. He was enjoying the mock battle. There would be no blood. The other blackbacks cried and hooted happily from their places in the forest and moved nearer the sparring to watch.
So the other apes breathed a collective sigh of relief and continued gorging on berries.
All except Eeda who was hooting worriedly, searching in the dense brush for her son.
Little Kado had crept closer to Omag to watch the disfigured ape from the cover of leaves near the beast’s feet.
As Omag tipped another handful of berries into his mouth, some of the tasty orbs he was already chewing started rolling out the hole in his cheek. Growling and frustrated, he attempted to wrangle them with his tongue, and in the action he made a wet, sucking noise...
...that Eeda’s little son mimicked.
“Sip. Sip,” he echoed, cheerfully, adding a high-pitched squeak of surprise and wonder as the great bull ape’s eyes flashed in recognition.
Omag swung his massive face down toward the insolent one-year-old, his deformities distorted into a hideous mask as he roared. His long canines hung through the dripping rent in his face and his eyes burned with fury, for Omag could only see the little one’s simple observation as mockery.
And such mockery was punishable with death.
Eeda shrieked as she recognized the source of the angry sound, and hurtled across the ten yards that divided her from Omag, her instincts sharpened by fear for the object of the big ape’s rage.
Omag stood half again as tall as Eeda, towering over the plants that grew around him and hid the focus of his wrath. He lifted his mighty arms, his clawed fingers curled to strike a murderous blow.
But Eeda flew into the space before him and crying out, she snatched Kado up against her breast just as Omag pounded downward with his fists; the blow glancing off the lithe young female’s muscular back.
Omag howled in rage as Eeda raced away, plowing through the thick undergrowth, her little son clutched to her chest.
The big ape gave chase, lurching after her, his head swinging side to side, jaws snapping with great strings of saliva hanging from his damaged mouth. Omag’s disease had not then progressed enough to twist his back and bones or force the unusual limping, and sidelong stagger that dogged his later life.
He was still a bull ape in his prime then, and filled with rage he was unstoppable.
Eeda knew this, and the knowledge spurred her flight. Her little one clung to her and made fearful squeaking sounds as she charged out of the underbrush and scrambled up the rough bark of a towering iroko tree.
Omag bellowed his fury and leapt into the branches after her, his longer arms and more powerful body quickly closing the gap between them.
Below them, the other apes had gone silent at the storm of emotion and action, and had quietly moved closer to each other to form tight groups, embracing and watching the high branches as the chase unfolded.
Goro and the blackbacks had settled their dispute some quarter mile distant and were celebrating their courage and prowess beneath a tree, eating fresh green shoots to cool their heated throats.
Many of the other young blackbacks had followed the action, and ambled out of the jungle to recount the mock battle and boast of the fights that were yet to come.
Goro tensed as they crowded around, and gave a powerful shout that caused them all to cower and offer their open hands in friendship. The king panted at his joke and soon the younger apes hooted their merriment in turn, some dropping to their backs as Goro pretended to savage their throats with his fearsome teeth.
Some of these were his sons, all were of his tribe.
The silverback was first to hear Eeda’s cries.
He climbed to his feet and stood erect; the action and his stance immediately copied by his underlings. Then Goro stood listening; interpreting the voice he’d heard. A female, but it was not the call made to describe any of the fanged cats or choking snakes that hunted apes.
Also, the riot of noise from the thick jungle continued unabated. If it were a carnivore, it would be silent. Instead, the jungle’s inhabitants squawked and screeched at trespassers.
A chase through the treetops, it seemed. There, Goro heard more birds cry out, swooping and dodging to protect their nests.
The danger had not come from outside of the tribe.
Some female was unhappy with her mate, or had refused him and punishment was being meted out—perhaps...
He grunted powerfully, and started moving, leaning forward on his thick arms, strutting on all fours toward the tribe with a force of blackbacks at his heels.
A king’s work was never done.
But he would arrive too late, for Omag had chased Eeda far into the high canopy where the trees stretched for the sunlight. In her fear and desperation the female had chosen the tallest tree, and this lapse of judgment meant she soon found herself scrambling upward through the thinnest branches with the treetop shaking.
Omag bellowed, driving her upwards, his rage blinding him to all danger. The branches under him were already cracking from his great weight, but he pushed on, gripping t
he ever-thinning trunk with his powerful hands and feet as Eeda screamed above him
He shook the tree as he lunged and snapped at the female’s legs, as she made a desperate leap for a tree that grew near...
...and fell. For Omag’s contortions upon the swaying trunk had caused her to misgauge the distance of her jump.
Branches slashed at her as Eeda hurtled earthward, grabbing for them, seeking anxiously for any purchase; until she caught hold of one that held her weight. But the sudden jolt of her body’s deceleration caused Kado’s little fingers to slip through her glossy fur, and without a grip, he fell.
She made a desperate grab for him, but her fingers only brushed his coat.
Eeda watched, horrified, as her son plunged a hundred feet to the jungle floor.
Goro charged out of the forest roaring and pounding his mighty chest as Eeda crouched over her dead infant. The jungle behind the king shook and rumbled as his escort of noisy blackbacks arrived and spread out to take protective positions around the anxious tribe.
Omag dropped out of a tree and squatted by Eeda’s side.
The king flashed his fangs as he charged, his momentum causing him to surge against his old challenger, wedging Omag against the tree with his heaving chest.
The crippled ape lowered his head and extended an open hand of friendship and submission.
Stepping back, Goro snarled at Omag’s gesture, but brushed the fingers with his own knuckles before he turned to Eeda who knelt whimpering and keening over her son.
The silverback grumbled and leveled a fierce look at Omag as the series of events was described to him. Goro glared at the rest of the tribe who had begun inching closer, reaching out and sniffing the air near the dead infant.
The jealous old queens Oluza and Akaki came forward, moaning and panting with sympathy, but generally approving of Omag’s fury at the glossy-haired young female’s son. Eeda should have taken better care of her little one and kept him out of Omag’s reach.
They scornfully suggested she’d do a better job with her next son for both older females knew that unlike themselves, Eeda was well-favored by the males, and coveted by all.
Their harsh message was: There will be other offspring—mourn this one quickly and move on.
After bending low to sniff the dead infant, Goro looked at Eeda with sadness, and then lumbered away with only a quick glance at Omag.
Whatever the insult, as a bull ape Omag had a right to demand respect from the females and the young whether crippled or not. Goro felt the big male had overreacted, but he would refrain from judgment, lest the other mature blackbacks felt their king did not respect tribal law.
Eeda should have let Omag punish her son, or taken the punishment upon herself. Fleeing from him into the high branches had been rash and only invited the calamity. She should not have been so careless with her child.
The silverback or another male would give her an infant to fill the little one’s place after an appropriate period of grieving was observed. Goro paced away, his sadness lifting. He was certain that the apes of his tribe would support the young mother in her anguish. Life would go on as was the way.
But Eeda was incapable of being practical.
She ignored the generous offers of grooming and comfort from the other females and then further their curious snorts as she lifted the dead babe, and carried it with her, cradling him as if he were still alive.
CHAPTER 3 – Eeda
Goro’s tribe had been on the march for a day, and was now getting close to the berry patch that surrounded Fur-nose’s lair; yet one member of the troop lagged behind. She stumbled along after the others, her head low and her eyes haunted. She moved awkwardly, using only one arm to support her forward-leaning gait while the other was folded over her chest to cradle the body of her dead son.
But now all such distinctions of life and death seemed lost, blurred by the tragic circumstances that had wounded the mother’s heart. Eeda’s eyes were flat now, devoid of their usual gleam, focused inward to the days before when her little Kado rolled and played in the grass.
It was late in the afternoon when the apes approached the lair of Fur-nose. A pair of blackbacks that had gone ahead to scout returned to report that something had changed. The clearing and the tree-nest were quiet, and the entrance to the structure that had always been shuttered and unassailable to them now stood open slightly. A finger’s breadth, and no more—a gap that showed a strip of shadow within.
Goro ordered the females to wait with the young at the trees as he moved forward with the blackbacks in a group. These apes that had never been so close to the tree-nest before now approached very cautiously. Those who had survived previous encounters remembered the sting of Fur-nose’s thunder-hand, and were reluctant to invite its roar.
Suddenly, a group of adolescent blackbacks were overcome with excitement and charged ahead—pushed to recklessness by their warrior natures. Goro growled low, but the foolhardy group ignored him. And then, they suddenly stopped and veered left and right, barking and snapping at something hidden by the plant life.
The largest of them turned to catch Goro’s eye and hoot a warning, as the king pushed through the high brush, snarling and growling at his underlings until he finally thrust through the ring they had formed.
The body of Tobog lay on its face. Old Baho came forward to bend over the larva-riddled corpse to sniff at the dark hole in the back of its head.
“Tobog fought thunder-hand,” Omag said from over Goro’s massive shoulder, and the silverback grunted in agreement as a curious chorus of barks issued from the assembled males.
“Tobog was brave,” Omag said, insolently, and then sipped at saliva that was leaking from his broken face.
“Tobog was stupid,” Goro rumbled, and old Baho panted his assent.
The blackbacks had formed a defensive wall of muscle around Goro while he leaned over the dead ape, and it was Baho who rose from investigating the rotting corpse to say: “Fur-nose was hurt but lived.” He lifted his leathery hand and sniffed the thick skin, before lowering it and pointing at the crushed grasses. “His blood trail washed by many days going there...” He gestured toward the strange tree-nest. “To his lair.”
The king chomped his powerful jaws and ordered three of the blackbacks to stand guard over the females and infants where they were already eating berries and digging into the black earth for grubs.
Goro led his cadre of lieutenants toward the strange structure. Hypervigilant in an old foe’s territory, his silver hair prickled on his mighty shoulders.
None could deny that the tree-nest had changed since they’d last been near. It wasn’t just that the nest was open; the very scent of it was different.
Omag stayed by Tobog’s corpse, ever anticipating the day when the king’s bravery would get him killed—and quietly hoping this was the day.
“Stupid Tobog,” he muttered, echoing Goro’s sentiment.
Omag had been close to Tobog and would have benefited if the young bull ape had come into power. With his death, Omag was left with allies in the aging queens Akaki and Oluza who had been prepared to back dead Tobog in a bid for power over Goro. A new silverback would have rewarded such loyalty, which would have opened a doorway for Omag’s designs on the kingship.
He grunted once, and his disfigured lips flapped and made a farting noise that caused him to glare around angrily, looking for any mockery or dissent; but there were none to witness and deride him—only Tobog’s corpse was near.
Omag growled. He would reward such mockery with death. Already on the trail had he overheard a pair of blackbacks panting happily as they retold the story: Sip-sip and the flying infant.
Sip-sip! Omag would not have attempted to punish both the younger males at the same time, but he knew them by name: allies of old Baho, one of them his son. The crippled ape would remember their joke when he caught them alone, and then they would remember his rage.
Omag’s loyalists had told him that such insolence ha
d long been shared among the adolescents and young apes. Likely, Eeda’s son had mimicked them to earn the crippled ape’s fury.
“Sip-sip!”
Omag had repeated the sound himself by reflexively sucking at saliva that dangled from his ruined mouth. He bared his fangs when he noticed the dazed, young female passing by him.
Eeda seemed deaf and blind. She walked through the grass toward the tree-nest trailing after Goro and his blackbacks, her dead son still in hand.
Again Goro’s weakness has failed him, Omag thought. The king should have forced the female to end this mourning for the dead infant had begun to stink worse than Tobog!
Goro grunted, and the other apes halted in the long grass to sniff the air. The smell of death lurked around the tree-nest, but something else was loose upon the breeze. Past Fur-nose’s lair toward the beach came a cold and sickly smell that reminded them of decay and rotten wood—and something else—a metallic taste it brought to mind, of blood.
Nosing the air with his blackbacks, Goro quickly discerned the source—a small cluster of trees of a kind they knew normally offered juicy leaves and succulent bean spears.
Normally, the apes would have fallen upon such a find with relish, but there was something wrong with these in smell and the look—the leaves had wilted. The tree bark was dark and greasy and underlaid with sickly purple veins.
With a very quiet cough, pant and shake of his head, Goro ordered the other apes to avoid the noisome trees as he led them toward the lair of Fur-nose.
The group’s courage swelled the closer they got to the tree-nest for thunder-hand had not spoken with smoke and flame, and Fur-nose had not come out to challenge them...
...and by the smell they judged he never would.
Dracula of the Apes 2 Page 2
