So despite the fact that Seetree and his mates had labored their whole lives under the River Demon’s curse, and nightly dreamt of its foaming jaws; they were emboldened by the loss of their loved ones to fight back—even if it threatened to revive the greater curse.
To this Capan Sparsall, sir-jon and the fust as keepers of the Bakwaniri knowledge had warned their people and ordered them against the action, but the River Demon had dined too freely of late for the crew to accept.
So the bereaved father spoke his mind by the great fire where all gathered around his daughter’s bones to bemoan the fate of others lost to the demon. And in accordance with ancient Bakwaniri law, a majority among them chose Seetree to be capan.
Old Sparsall was hung for cowardice and his flesh cast uneaten on the fire and for obvious reasons, neither fust nor sir-jon disputed the election results.
Thus stirred by loss and the eager crew, Seetree had sent hunting parties to explore the forbidden lands west of the river with orders to bring back sign of the demon and its kind or kill them if they could.
Far to the west lay the first victims of Seetree’s vengeance. A parent and child had been forever riven to pay for the new capan’s lost daughter. Had the ship’s sir-jon true powers of divination and glimpsed the forces that had been unwittingly set in motion by one masked hunter’s arrow, he might have counseled leaving the Bakwaniri lands altogether and like the first fathers run into the east.
But the sir-jon was no more a seer than the capan was the only creature with a taste for revenge. One of his victims dreamed of it.
With closed eyes Gazda saw night apes in a hollow stone mountain where from that height, they threw fire down in burning torrents upon others of their kind that were wrapped in shining stone and thrusting long-knives up into the burning deluge.
He heard screams as they burst into flames...when he suddenly felt himself drifting.
And Gazda saw a dead forest on a muddy black hill. Night apes like him were there in the trees, but these were poor climbers or had fallen because they were transfixed on the many sharp branches or skewered by splintered trunks. The clumsy creatures were up there moaning, bleeding and wriggling with the wood stuck through them.
Blood trickled down over their toes as they kicked their feet.
The night ape’s heart raced to see so many red torrents, and his throat grew hot with thirst.
He chased the blood until his eyes opened. It was dark when he woke.
Gazda was lying on a bed of moss and dried leaves; his vision flickered through quivering lashes as he tugged himself free of sleep, of death—of flame and blood.
The cries of night apes still rang in his ears.
Night apes killing night apes. But these creatures were not of Goro’s jungle, and they had used flame to kill.
Gazda knew little of fire for all the apes of Goro’s tribe retreated from the orange creature whenever it appeared. Sometimes flames would spring up after lightning roared, or sprouted from the dust without reason to chase through the dry grass and trees, and eat up the jungle with its hot, yellow teeth.
The night ape had seen the smoking ruins, and burned his fingers upon the glowing black rocks that the fire left behind. His mother knew little more, only that fire would hurt him if he touched it.
Eeda, like the rest of the tribe, was superstitious about the forces of nature. While the anthropoids had not yet built a pantheon of gods to describe them; they did treat the elemental actions as living beings whether seen at close quarters or from afar.
It was easy to see water as a snake or lizard as it moved, and the wind like an invisible ape or monkey by the way it shook the leafy branches or tried to knock the tribe from their high perches.
The wind was a mischievous infant to the towering storms that lurked behind the canopy above them, where at any moment it would thrash the jungle as a giant blackback would. Such storm apes raged and howled, and threw lightning bolts, branches and rain as it challenged the jungle creatures to a fight.
Gazda had come to understand that the apes also viewed their thoughts, life and death and dreams with the same apprehension and illusion that they did the uncontrollable forces of nature.
Much was unexplainable but good things were to be enjoyed, and the bad were best forgotten.
So, the basic ape philosophy gave Gazda few tools to dissect and understand the strange images that had crowded his night ape dreams.
Flames, darkness and blood, the images flitted from one gory moment to the next as slaughter reigned supreme. Claws and fangs flashed, throats were cut, heads were torn away, and still other night apes were set aflame.
The memories had started his thirsty stomach churning, for with the crimson thoughts had come feelings of loneliness and betrayal, fear of capture and of death—of violation and loss!
Gazda stretched out on his crumbled bedding, and looked into the darkness over him. There in the black high above, a gap came into sharper focus, dim light glowed on a ring of green leaves—the opening through which he’d crawled into the hollow tree—or must have...if he could but remember.
Remember...
Magnuh! Memory of the elephant’s wrath and the injuries he’d inflicted swept over his mind like an avalanche, and he winced to relive the goring tusks, ripping trunk and crushing feet!
Hooting fearfully, the night ape ran his hands over his chest, but felt no rents or tears in the swelling muscle, no split or break in his bones.
Then how? A dream! He remembered then, another dream. His mother Eeda in a shadowed grove of strange black trees. About her hung a heavy mist that wrapped his cold, bare limbs—he had curled up beside her for warmth, and she’d drawn him near—to feed him? No! He chuckled, at the mental image.
Gazda was too old to suckle!
And she would not let...
A shudder ran through him for he had recognized his mother’s scent in the air. She was near—somewhere in the dark she...
He rolled over, and saw that indeed Eeda sat on the mossy floor of the hollow an arm’s length away. She leaned there unmoving with her back against the dark wood.
“Ah...” Gazda started, feeling his spirits rise, but he faltered as her glassy eyes gave no hint of recognition.
The night ape leapt up onto all fours and moved cautiously toward her—where he smelled the death. No. No. NO!
His mother was dead.
It had to be a dream! Or how had he survived Magnuh’s revenge?
Impossible... He pressed at his eyes with his fingertips, caused them to spark, and forced them to adjust further. He growled quietly as he rubbed at his face thinking, “Wake up! Wake up!” before opening his eyes again.
Gazda moaned. The low light from above reflected on his pale skin and a soft glow settled over his mother.
Eeda’s dead mouth hung open, and her head had fallen forward, the lower jaw resting on her deep chest, and below that...
...her breasts had been torn, the skin hung in tatters as if the flesh had been ripped by fangs—by many bites.
...too old to suckle.
The night ape craved no milk...but the bite, he... Gazda’s fangs!
He remembered Magnuh. In the dream his mother had rescued him, and taken him somewhere dark... He looked around. Safe...here inside an old tree.
Comfort...she had carried him to safety, and offered him a breast...and he had...he had...
Lost control of his hunger? No, Gazda had fed upon her with relish!
Delirious, dying...starving! He had drunk her rich blood, sucked it out of the now-cooling heart she had given him so freely.
Growling with rage he thought of Magnuh. The night ape leapt up to the opening in the bark and pulled himself out onto a nearby bough where he roared his fury as a challenge to all the jungle.
Gazda would avenge his mother’s death by making war upon all of those who brought her to this end...and upon Magnuh! The night ape would kill the elephant! And he would kill...
He would kill anything
that dared to hurt...to kill her...
But the night ape had killed her!
Gazda’s face flushed and his heart shuddered beneath this realization. His legs trembled, and as he collapsed upon his lofty perch, a word passed his lips in a language he did not understand: “Ma—mater!”
CHAPTER 23 – The Guilty Parties
Gazda peered into the hollow tree and his shadow fell across his mother’s corpse. He could not bear to part with her and he could not stay. His heart forced him to look away, but his mind chased the nightmare—followed his memory to where his mother had come to his aid.
Magnuh had attacked and Eeda brought her son to safety to...to...
His pain would wrench him around to see his mother’s dead eyes...her shredded breasts. Gazda had done this—her son had... The night ape!
But he loved her so. An accident—terrible but not his fault...he wouldn’t...he couldn’t...
He’d been out of his mind with sickness—dying...
...and yet, the justifications did not matter. He would never escape the pain so close at hand, but to leave her would feel like he was denying his crime.
Such a betrayal should follow him forever. It had to. The responsibility for this lay with others, but it fell to Gazda too. So he would carry it with him always, and as monument to her sacrifice he would hoist her memory high in death.
Poised outside his mother’s crypt, he swore that he would never set her precious body near the jungle floor. Flies would come and other crawling things...come to reduce all life to dirt and dust—his mother and her love to fading memory!
He would catch her dignity and spirit in this high place she chose, and keep it safe for all time within.
So the night ape climbed down from her resting place, and sobbing spent the day dragging mud in green leaf bundles high up into the tree where he layered it on the bark around the hole to close it up—to protect the place where a mother had taken a son for safety, and where he had...
Still as he wept, he spread mud and sticks and leaves over the opening—covering the place where she lay still. Constantly, he cursed himself as the shameful son, praying sadly as he peered through the closing gap that some final rays of light might fall across her gentle face...
But she was gone into shadow...his mother—gone.
When he finished, Gazda disguised the layered mud with sheets of bark that he pressed into place, and soon, none could know that behind it. Behind it...
He collapsed on the tree limb and wept his heart out—in grief he tore hair from his head. His heart staggered from guilt to sorrow to rage at the monster Magnuh, at the night ape Gazda—and he swore revenge upon the beasts that were responsible.
And as he wept, the tears brought that time more vividly to his mind, and he remembered first waking to Eeda’s cry of pain and terror—waking and then flying into the bull elephant’s trap.
What had happened to bring that call from her loving breast?
He could only think of Magnuh then—oh Magnuh! Gazda would use his hunting skills to learn the truth, and bloody revenge would fall upon the guilty.
The guilty? At the thought he wept anew, ashamed at his own weakness—his inability to accept—undeserving to be near his mother’s tomb.
From deep beneath his swelling guilt, he looked down again upon his crouching naked body. Where were the scars that Magnuh must have left? He knew of his flesh’s ability to heal, but nothing could survive a bull elephant’s wrath unblemished!
Is it a dream? Oh please! And he rose upon his haunches glaring at the bark that covered... Had his mother truly died? Could this not also be a dream?
But he remembered her eyes...flat and glassy, and the scent of her dead flesh.
This was no dream.
At sunset, the night ape gathered in a sobbing breath and climbed into high branches where he began hurtling recklessly hand over hand until he caught a hanging vine from which he swept swiftly through the night.
And as he swung, he cast about for his tribe, and upon a wayward breeze he recognized their scent. He thought of Goro then, and of his mother, and Gazda paled at his own shame.
Then came Magnuh’s stink from the forest floor. The beast’s scent was stronger still.
Gazda continued through the canopy until the fruit trees grew shorter and then a large group of them abruptly fell away altogether to form an open space of ruin.
The night ape landed lightly on the torn and gouged earth where the elephant had attacked him.
There, on all fours, he searched the broken brush with his night-enhanced senses attuned to subtle light, shapes and scents, and soon in a tangle of shattered branches and splintered trees he found his shining snake disk. He slipped its chain over his head as he combed through the wreckage and found his belt twisted many times around the sheath and long knife where Magnuh’s mighty foot had crushed them into the black earth.
The powerful weapon was undamaged, but it had been useless in the fight. Magnuh had given him no chance to draw the blade, and because of that...
There was no sign of his loincloth; the untreated leather would have been consumed by a million crawling bugs forever in search of food. The night ape would replace it from the skins at his lair.
But first, he jumped into the trees and flew from branch to branch, the sense of loss still pulling at his savage breast. Loss and pain grew together inside, and swelled until his breath came short and choking and his heart struggled feebly—the constriction causing his fury to boil.
He hunted until sunrise, and in his wrath killed many more creatures than were needed to feed his angry hunger. He killed many mercilessly, fueling his bloodlust until the sun began to rise and the night ape raced through the jungle to drop onto the grass by the sleeping trees, just as Goro and the tribe was climbing down.
The scent of so many apes brought his mother’s kind face to Gazda’s thoughts, but no tears came; his shame had been washed, and his anger cooled by the blood he’d shed in the night.
He told the others that Eeda had bravely saved him from Magnuh, and nursed him back to health in a place she knew he would be safe.
Baho shuffled wearily forward and told him how Goro had saved his mother from the apes with bone faces; how Baho had joined the king to unsuccessfully chase the interlopers down.
Goro had rumbled then from a rise of dirt on which he stood watching the remaining apes climb down to the earth. He asked Gazda where his mother was, for she had been injured when last he saw her. Days and days had passed since she was seen.
But, Gazda could tell by the silverback’s expression that Goro knew she was dead, had sensed or smelled it upon him.
“She died in the jungle before I awoke. I do not know how,” Gazda lied, and then a part of him shifted in shame, so grasping he added, “I buried her.”
Goro grew grave as did old Baho and other apes that gathered, but the jungle allowed little time for mourning—there was food to find, and young to protect. There was much to do, but Eeda would be missed.
Omag, Ulok and the old queens were not so inclined. The crippled ape and his supporters felt the she-ape’s death was evidence of savage justice. Had she not brought most of her troubles upon herself?
Besides there were the bone-faced apes to think about. The king and the blackbacks did not understand their ways, or comprehend the dangerous pointed sticks they threw.
Baho had found one with Eeda’s blood upon it.
“The stick must have killed her,” the former silverback intoned quietly.
Baho told Gazda where the bone-faced apes had attacked his mother, and Gazda quickly followed the scent, speeding to the place despite his growing day-time weakness, eager to wash his guilt away with more blood.
But when he arrived he found he was too late for tracks or trails. The many days of weather had cleared away all marks made by the invaders.
Except for the large wooden bone-face that peered up at the night ape from the ferns that Baho had described to him. The oddity
had been thrown aside by Eeda’s attackers. It had been discovered with a larger flat piece of wood that held little meaning for Goro or Baho.
But this was not a real bone-face.
Gazda claimed the mask, and later took it to his lair to keep. The bone-face was flat and like an ape’s or the way Fur-nose’s was beneath the dried old flesh and skin. Its smooth forehead was wringed with long hair, and a leather strap ran from side to side behind the holes where the eyes would be.
Upon closer inspection, Gazda saw a pair of crossed long-bones sculpted tight under the chin.
On an impulse, the night ape held this face over his own so he could peer through the eye holes. The strange thing smelled of blood and flesh, and had an oily, pungent aroma that came off on his fingers.
Gazda slung the ugly thing over his shoulder, and carried the other strange artifact under his arm as he made his way back to the tribe, his heart sinking as he went. In time, he staggered to the center of the wooded area where the other apes ate leaves and nuts and there he found a depression covered by thick bushes and ferns where he fell into a deep, daytime sleep.
1907-1909
Thirteen to fifteen years of age.
CHAPTER 24 – Life Flies Forward
Gazda’s mother picked through the long strands of hair that grew atop his head, scraping his scalp with her broad fingernails and kissing away flakes of dead skin with her flexible lips.
The young night ape lay calmly against her warm belly, his spindly, white legs draped over her sinewy knees.
“Who is my father?” he asked, yearning to play with the other young apes in the grass.
“No worry,” Eeda grumbled. “You have a mother.”
Gazda snuggled into her lap. “But she has fur...”
“You have fur,” his mother said good-naturedly, pulling out a few strands of his hair to make her point.
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