“But I am different from you!” Gazda rubbed his tender scalp. “And Goro.” Deep down, he had hoped his father was Goro, but he doubted the silverback could sire a night ape.
At that time, Gazda had wondered whether his real father might have been Fur-nose as some had said to bully him—and he had yet to take pride in his many differences from the tribe of apes.
“Go hunt for bushpigs!” his mother scolded with good humor, pretending to push him off her lap. “I cannot eat these questions.”
Gazda had been having trouble with the young blackbacks again. Such teasing always started him questioning his origins.
“Do not worry about the bullies,” Eeda said. “You are different, and they are stupid.”
“No worry!” Gazda turned his head to grin at her. “I have a mother that will always help.”
“I cannot be everywhere,” Eeda chided warmly, her expression turning grim. “You must help yourself.”
She panted happily then and tickled her son’s thin ribs until he couldn’t catch his breath.
The night ape awoke gasping through his tears. Overhead, the dark leaves told him he had slept through much of the day. Gazda whimpered, sniffing at his hands, arms and shoulders, hoping he could catch his mother’s scent, but what he smelled was in his mind still from the dream...and there was something else...
He rolled over to see that old Baho lay nearby chewing a handful of wild celery.
The former silverback was watching over him as Eeda had before she—she was dead.
Gazda had...he had... More tears came suddenly. Embarrassed, he pretended to claw sleep from his eyes as he climbed from his sleeping place and onto his knees before Baho.
The night ape tried to speak but only moaned like an infant.
Old Baho stirred, rising to his knuckles to look down at him.
“Be strong,” he grunted.
“I am not strong, Baho. My mother is gone,” Gazda whimpered, before looking away ashamedly—unable to accept his guilt beneath the honorable Baho’s gaze. “I am alone. She was...”
The old bull ape did not notice any guilty tremor in Gazda’s voice, for he said: “Feelings are like a river and if you follow them they will lead you to the source. And that place is where your strength comes from.”
“I am weak,” Gazda snapped, his heart shuddering, remembering how his weakness had played out. “I cannot...”
Baho grunted, and scratched the stiff white whiskers on his scarred old jaw. “An ape that fears the source of his feelings fears his own heart and will wander lost upon the bank of that river of which I speak. As he does, the infant he hears wailing comes from his own mouth.”
“Does Goro wander this riverbank?” Gazda wondered, having heard the whispers of the silverback’s essential softness of spirit.
“Goro is strong,” the old bull ape growled curtly, thumping a heavy fist against the ground. “He has been to the source of this river to find the infant ape that once he was. There, Goro gathered up that babe in his great arms and carried him here to our tribe—and now within him is the strength of every ape he has ever been in his life, for he knows the lessons of his days. Only a fool would doubt that strength.”
“Where is this river you speak of, Baho?” Gazda asked, his curiosity aroused.
The old silverback stripped juicy leaves off a celery stalk and chewing said, “It is inside you, Gazda. I hear its waters rising in your throat.” Baho reached out and gently dabbed Gazda’s tears with his heavy knuckles. “It is leaking out, look!”
Baho panted with humor over his damp fingers, and with a sharp hoot, he pushed Gazda back into the leaves where the night ape rolled end over end.
“Gazda will find his answers if he looks,” Baho said, watching the young night ape rise into a crouch, but his old eyes shifted to where Omag brooded on a mound of stone beside the aging queens. The trio sat grooming the growing giant Ulok while the rest of the tribe built their sleeping nests in the branches overhead.
Baho involuntarily bared his fangs at the crippled ape before looking back to Gazda. “Remember your mother’s heart. She gave it to you and to this tribe that is her family—so it is your family. You will never be alone for she is here with us, and she is on the river of which I speak.”
A sudden chill went through Gazda and his pale face flushed as he looked away.
The night ape remembered Baho’s words, and in the days and weeks that followed, Gazda searched inside himself for the river the former silverback had described. As he tracked this thing, his mind shifted away from anger and revenge, and within, he remembered the days of his mother’s love, and the many warm places she still existed in his heart, and within the tribe.
In fact, he was pleased to find that signs of her were everywhere.
But great pain and shame always accompanied her spoor, and while his search for her heart kept him from the path of vengeance; it did not quiet his knowledge of those who had shared in his sin.
While upon her trail he came to accept his part in her death as accidental and he knew that his mother would agree.
But he could never forgive himself as she surely would have.
Still, the hunt helped him heal in the seasons that followed, though the strength that returned was destined for violence.
Halfway through Gazda’s 14th year, a pair of starving female lions entered the jungle to hunt in Goro’s land. It had been a dry spring in the highland plateau and many of the larger prides had broken up as they were forced to compete among themselves for scarcer game. The herds of zebra, wildebeest and gazelle had gone far to look for water and had not yet returned.
Those lions that had not followed the game were starving.
The jungle canopy held great reserves of water and from its stores grew food for the animals it nourished. The dense forest could pass the dry months with little change, and only a long drought would drastically impact the life there.
So the lionesses came looking for prey under the trees, and stalked the water trails where passing game would not expect the big predators.
Omag and the aging queens approached Goro to demand that the king do something about this, for there had been an incident involving one of the she-apes.
The crippled ape leaned heavily upon a strange thing he now used as a crutch to help him walk. His disease had twisted the bones in his right arm, shortening the limb, so this tool helped him move upon the ground, though in the trees he still swung with the swiftness of any ape.
The failed silverback had only recently returned from one of his absences and had brought the curious thing home with him.
On one end of a stout wooden stick, a broad, leaf-shaped shining stone was held by strips of hide, while on the other end this stick tapered to a sharp point. The crippled ape used the shining stone as a handle around which he’d wrap his long fingers, and lean upon the 20-inch wooden shaft with its splintered point driven into the ground to brace it.
For Omag it was a welcome aid to his shambling gait, while to its previous owner it was the iron blade, and splintered haft of an axe he had used to defend himself.
The crippled ape had finally satisfied his jealous yearning for Gazda’s shining fang by ambushing a bone-faced hunter by the river, killing him and stealing the axe he carried.
Omag had quickly understood the “walking stick” had other uses that only he could perceive.
Gazda and the other apes recognized the handle on Omag’s crutch as being made of a similar material to the night ape’s long knife, and many wondered at its origin.
The apes shrank back in huddled groups as Sip-sip swaggered and bristled before the king with the aging queens bowing low behind him. Omag reported that hunting lions had almost caught Amak, mother of Ooso, as she made her way to a nearby drinking pond. The she-ape had only survived by a lucky jump and catch at vines draped near the trail.
“A king will do something to protect his people,” Omag said, wiping at the drool that dripped from his chin. “He wo
uld chase the lions away.”
The crippled ape made this assertion in part to undermine his “weak” king, but there was also some tentative hope that Goro would act for Omag had been unnerved since hearing that bone-faces entered Goro’s land on the day the she-ape Eeda had disappeared.
While they had not been seen in the territory since, he did feel a certain constriction in his throat to imagine them crossing the border to hunt for him.
He had grown much jumpier after learning of this, though it had emboldened him to kill the bone-face for his fine weapon. Not long before that he had stuffed himself on female...and at the thought of the flesh, Omag’s nerves thrilled and a deep desire heated his guts.
“Sip-sip!” he lisped, subconsciously lapping at the saliva that the craving had cause to flow from his damaged mouth. The crippled ape slapped a big hand over his mangled lips and scowled at a young ape that had turned toward the sound.
Lions? Omag had begun to wonder if Goro could chase the bone-faces from his land.
Gazda smirked from where he watched the scene astride a tree limb whetting the blade of his long knife on a rough stone. He had learned to sharpen the weapon by copying the actions of night apes in his dreams. It had pleased him to understand one of the things they did.
“The lions will leave,” Goro said, quietly munching nuts, shifting his weight as two females groomed his silver back. “This is ape land.”
“The lions will leave when they are full of ape flesh!” Omag cried, and his supporters screamed their agreement.
The tribe struggled with the terrifying discussion. Even Ooso had carried her daughter Yulu over to where the other nervous mothers crowded closer to the trees.
“No! We watch for lions,” Goro said, shrugging his massive shoulders. “Goro and the blackbacks will warn the tribe, and apes will be safe in the trees. Lions do not climb.”
“The king would let the trees protect us?” Omag countered, saliva slithering out of his ruined face in amber strings. His long tongue, now dotted with blistered lesions, popped out of the ragged hole in his cheek to lap at it.
“Sip-sip” came the sound again.
At this point, Gazda slid his knife away and climbed down to the ground where he stood with the loyal blackbacks who had formed a solid semi-circle behind the king.
“The lions will leave,” Goro growled, rising onto all fours. “We must be calm. Goro watches.”
“So Goro fights the lions?” Omag said sharply, swinging his arm to indicate the aging queens behind him, and the other blackbacks that had moved in back of them with Ulok. “And the apes can rest.”
“Goro will fight any lions that come,” the silverback rumbled, seemingly growing larger as he spoke. The hair on his back and swelling shoulders quivered. “Goro is king, and he has spoken.”
Omag stared at the silverback with his bloodshot eyes, but the tribe had noticed that he, too, had shrunk down as Goro postured. The crippled ape’s breath came hard and fast from his ragged face and made a greasy farting sound.
But no one dared pant or hoot at the embarrassing noise.
“Then Omag will not question the king or his word,” Omag said slyly, as he and his supporters knelt in the grass before the silverback. “Goro will fight the lions.”
CHAPTER 25 – Strange Apes
Weeks later, Gazda was swinging through the jungle canopy, flitting from branch to branch so quickly that when an alarming odor startled his senses he misjudged his leap and fell far short of the next intended limb in his path.
The night ape plunged 50 feet toward the forest floor before his outstretched hand snagged the flexible tip of a long branch that bent mightily but held his weight after much jostling and bouncing.
With the limb clenched in his fist, the night ape sniffed the warm air, casting for another whiff of...and there it was, he recognized the pungent smell. His free hand came up and he rubbed the fingertips beneath his nose, remembering the curious scent he’d noticed when pressing the wooden bone-face over his own.
The strange thing was left behind by creatures that Baho had claimed attacked Gazda’s mother and struck her with a sharp stick. Her scream had baited Magnuh’s trap.
Before Eeda’s son had...
Nosing the air, the night ape bared his fangs. He heaved himself high up the tree before springing free of it, hurtling by vine and branch toward the scent.
Moving at this, his fastest, speed through the high branches, Gazda became a blur, almost flying bough to branch. The dappled afternoon sunlight did not slow him, so dense was the shadow that gripped the trees—so concentrated was the fury that propelled him.
Few of the arboreal creatures even witnessed his passing, though some birds drowsing in the trees squawked suddenly and lifted off—unaware that the night ape was long gone by the time they knew he had been there.
The scent was growing stronger as Gazda raced through the canopy when his eye caught movement on the trail far below. He checked his forward motion by hooking his fingers on a stout branch and swinging completely around it once, twice and a third time, before he let go and dropped through the crowd of limbs, slowing his descent by grabbing at the most flexible branches, angling his fall, until he could grip the tree trunk to use the rough bark as a brake until he stopped.
Then moving silently, he crept out on a limb some 20 feet above the strange creature. The hair on his neck bristled, and his body went rigid as his claws raked deep grooves in the branch beneath him.
A bone-face! Like the creatures that had attacked his mother...that later caused her death.
Could it be the very one? It was moving cautiously along the trail, stalking beneath the trees, the oversized eyes looking this way and that as the long sharp stick in its hands mirrored the action.
Gazda’s mouth fell open, and his immediate rage bled away, as shock sent tremors through his mind. For the moment, his curiosity overpowered his fury.
The creature wore a long decorated cloth that hung over its loins and a vest of woven sticks and bones protecting its chest. But more importantly wherever the flesh was exposed the skin was pale brown—and hairless!
True, the skin was mottled, varying by degrees of yellow-brown, and the muscular limbs were marked in places with blotches—bruises and wounds of dark red and purple, but it was still enough like his own flesh to make him wonder if he was looking at a night ape thus disguised.
Beneath the bone-face would the creature have a fur-nose?
As quietly as a panther, Gazda slipped back to the tree trunk, and then crept down until he clung in place where he’d be just above the bone-face as it passed beneath him on the trail.
He struck with the speed of a snake, his fist snapping down on top of the creature’s head. The impact knocked the bone-face senseless, but Gazda’s strong fingers caught in its hair before it could fall.
The night ape turned and dragged his prey high up onto a broad bough where he leaned his captive against the tree trunk.
Then Gazda ran his nose over the creature’s chest and neck, and his lips curled up with disgust. It was the same stink he’d found on the wooden mask—pungent, but there had been something else, too. This one smelled like an ape, but there was the scent of sickness and decay.
Gazda lifted the creature and held him upright by the throat so he could remove the face covering with his free hand, before stripping off its garments and the metal ornaments that clung to its arms and ankles.
There was hair on the bone-face’s head, and some under its nose—there was no doubt—and upon its skin were dark lines depicting other bone-faces like skulls and bones that danced.
Curious things...
When the creature started gasping itself back to consciousness Gazda let it sink onto its haunches, as he stepped back to study it further.
It resembled a night ape—like Gazda, and like Fur-nose.
However, the bone-faced ape was diseased, for mottled skin and boils showed purple-red around the joints of the creature’s arms
and legs—and a gray-yellow ooze slid out of cracked skin that stank of rot.
Part of its face had been eaten away, too. The upper jaw and along the right side of the nose had opened up to show raw, scarlet muscle beneath, and sight of this put Gazda in mind of Omag. The sores and slight “bowed” shape of its legs reminded him of Sip-sip.
Gazda was puzzled. So, as the bone-face struggled to breathe, the night ape investigated the creature’s coverings and tools that he’d set out on the broad tree branch between them.
There was a loincloth like his own and belt of shiny leather with a knife hanging from it. There was a stick bent around a taut string, and a long, leather pouch full of sharp sticks. These had been slung over its shoulder, and Gazda drew one stick out to study.
Its point was as sharp as a fang, and on the other end split feathers had been somehow attached. Gazda imagined the thing moving through the air...and a dark shadow entered his mind as he imagined it striking his mother as Baho had said.
A red gleam flared up in the night ape’s eyes as he let the stick fall from his grasp.
Squatting before the bone-face, Gazda hissed as it shook its head and opened its eyes to look at him.
Terror filled the disfigured face as the creature saw the night ape’s wrath.
Immediately, it pressed itself tighter to the tree, and gibbered in a terrified and irritating way.
But at that moment as the bone-faced ape showed its fear—the predator in Gazda surfaced, as did the enraged son, and in the creature’s eyes he saw his mother’s terror reflected.
This creature and its brothers were the cause...had forced Gazda to...
He struck the bone-face too swiftly for it to react, and gripping the thin neck, Gazda easily lifted him overhead. The creature squealed, kicked and tried to cry out.
The night ape smiled, and bared his fangs as he lowered the creature toward his mouth.
The bone-face’s eyes went wide.
It made a gurgling noise as Gazda tore into its jugular and drank the foaming blood that gushed out. Then, as if the potent meal added passion to his rage, Gazda chewed, gnashed his fangs and tore at the strange ape’s throat until the head rolled to the side and dangled by a grisly string of flesh and skin.
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