"Yet here I am," Oshu seemed to say. "These things I see pass and come again—cold battlefields, men or ghosts, ghosts of animals or men. Take what comes. Don't be afraid."
There was a magic, Kwa knew. This was magic. Africa was full of magic. It always had been, ever since the days of Moses. And before. Moses must have learned his own magic from someone else. But magic didn't kill. Not nowadays. Poison killed. Fear killed. But not just magic. The thing was—not to be afraid!
There, standing straight in the moonlight, and that grotesque apparition of a monstrous spider growing bigger with each passing second, Kwa shook his two fists at it. He danced. He laughed at it. He taunted it. He dared it to come within his reach.
Under his taunting the thing faded. It disappeared.
But later, when the moon had passed, and Kwa had swung up into a tree to sleep, the old chimp-mother came to him with a branch of bitter leaves which she made him chew and swallow. He knew what they were— those leaves—both antidote and prophylactic for spider poison.
He was glad of this before the sun came up.
CHAPTER IX
MEN LIKE SPIDERS
HE'D learned to sleep as so many of the jungle people sleep—he'd slept like that since earliest childhood—with the thinnest possible partition between sleep and waking. He'd sleep and wake. He'd listen and sleep again. Instantly awake. Instantly asleep. No twilight-zone between the two.
Several times during that remnant of the night that was left after he'd climbed into the tree, he'd been roused from his snatches of oblivion to a consciousness that there was a stir on the floor of the jungle.
The elephants were gone. The buffalo had moved off with a suggestion of stampede. At this there had been the glint of a thought. There was always that speculation in his thought of the difference between men and certain others of the animals. Animals stampeded. Men didn't. When men stampeded they ceased to be men.
The thought—and the occasion of the thought—were still there when he awoke again and knew by a thousand signals that it would soon be light. There was enough light now—from some high reflection in the sky—to fill the forest here on the edge of the elephant park with a hint of day.
WHAT had stirred? What had happened? He listened. He caught the sound of a breath somewhere below that he couldn't identify. It might have come from a wounded animal. Had some renegade leopard broken the truce? That couldn't be it. There would have been an outcry. The leopard would have completed its kill. He tested the air. His gift of scent had returned since he'd put away his clothes and begun again the life of the bush. No, there was no scent of blood.
There was a vine-growth against the bole of the tree. With a hold on this he slipped over lightly from the twisted branches that had been his bed and let himself down with long, smooth reaches to the ground. He would look about and a waterfall and a mossy basin where it would be good to bathe.
HE'D just stepped into the misty dim light of the open elephant park when he saw what he took to be animals—and animals that he couldn't identify—push into the park a dozen yards or so to his right. They were black. They were still in heavy shadow. Whatever they were, they'd seen him at the instant he'd seen them. Or before!
Several things occurred to him at once.
These creatures had been startled at sight of him. They were strangers. They weren't animals at all. And yet they hadn't the appearance of men. They were men disguised. From one of these had come that breath he had heard. Four—five—there were five of them—and possibly more in the background. And this was why the elephants had slipped away—the buffalo had gone with a hint of stampede.
All this, like the quick and unreasoned promptings of instinct.
Then there had come a pang in his shoulder, another in his breast.
If there had been any lapse of time from his first discovery of the prowlers it was one that would have had to be measured with a stopwatch.
With that double sting barely recorded in his brain he'd charged. He'd charged without a word or preliminary signal of any kind. Yet, in some inexplicable way, there had been premeditation.
He'd seized one of the figures by the throat and rolled over with it to the ground. He knew now who his attackers were. These were spider-men; priests—God save the mark!--of Anansi! He'd heard of them.
They carried poisoned darts—little throwing darts no bigger than arrows. The points of these were poisoned with the venom of a little gray spider called "Friend of the Flies," because it killed all sorts of creatures, from toads to a nesting duck or a gorged python, around which flies would later gather, and on some of these flies the spider itself would afterward feast.
Kwa dragged his captive over. It was a question as to who would stab first.
AS a matter of fact, they both stabbed at the same time—the spider-man with one of his poisoned darts, Kwa with his knife. From the poisoner there came a gurgling squeak, then an explosive cry as if his very life had exploded—shrilling—gulping to silence; and all so swift that the cry had become nothing more than an ugly memory and an echo before it was fairly registered.
Spider-men; but with black monkey-fur framing their faces, ringing their arms and legs; gri-gri pouches around their necks instead of ordinary ornaments. Selected men, members of a fraternity as tight and secret as the crafts of the old Nile gods.
That shriek had awakened the forest like the bang of a gun. From stillness there had come a splash of sound, a spreading ripple of panic retreat; other noises—the screech and flapping of birds, a snapping kiyi and snarling of wild dogs, a crash of heavy cattle not picking their way.
Kwa, sure of himself but with a prayer in his heart for Faint Whistle and that bitter medicine she had given him, was reaching out for another assassin before his knife was free. He struck from the ground and opened a body as he would have split a melon; swinging over—as he thought—to avoid the blood; but, having started his swing, discovering that he couldn't stop himself.
Falling—falling! And this was the poison getting to his brain.
He fought it off. He gasped the resolve. He simply would not give in.
That bitter medicine would work.
A jolt revived him for a little while. An enemy had fallen on him and was trying to smother him. He stabbed again and struggled to free himself before he recognized that this was the enemy he had just slit open.
All in the same moment he was conscious of a cry from the trees. There were chimpanzees up there—the Engl-eco people, first cousins to the Furry Tribe the Mu, who had reared him. He let out a call of his own— in the universal speech. But the cry was one of warning for them. It was the poison-cry. Danger! Stand clear!
HE came up reeling, with the sensation that he was meshed—softly, silkenly, as a fly is meshed by the gossamer of a spider after the spider has poisoned it. And this would be worse than death. To be held alive like this. To be drained of his life, his soul. This was what they'd been after, these spider-men, followers of Anansi. He was white. He was fetish. He was great medicine for those who could keep him alive yet drain him of his life.
There was no illusion in his brain. This was no outer, material web that was being spun about him. It was merely the spreading web of paralysis woven about him by the spider venom.
He remembered his appeal to the moon—to Oshu, who also was white. He remembered what it was that differentiated men and manlike animals from the lesser brethren. They that were men didn't give way to panic. He was fighting again. He hadn't even paused.
Another fetish was coming up. The day was rising. It was getting light.
With all that he had of resolve, of purpose, of inherited will, Kwa flung himself forward and struck again.
CHAPTER X
LEO
IT WAS the end of the battle. But whether or not it was his own finish also, Kwa had a slipping moment of doubt. The reflex of the doubt stopped him, gave his straining arm a twist of sharp withdrawal.
There had come a difference in the mass ahead of
him. It was a scattering. It had been like the explosion of a tawny bomb, with a crunching explosion of sound—not very loud—but charged with a power that meant an end of existing things—of things that just now were but forever afterward were not.
The change had outstripped thought.
Then he was face to face—through the still dim and eerie light of the rising day—with the great mask of a lion. The mask was full-maned, close, incredibly large. He had seen this mask contorted with lines of slaughter. But even while his gaze was becoming steady again—in the second or so after it had been like a shaken lamp—he saw the expression of the lion's mask change.
There was satisfaction in it, a return to calm, a hint of majesty; and yet always with that hint of finality also, as in the face of the great Egyptian sphinx.
Panting, still half paralyzed by the poison in his veins, Kwa relaxed.
"Friend!" was what he said, in the universal speech.
"Friend," came the answer from the lion. And then: "I come from the Valley of the Mu."
The big lion hadn't come alone. Kwa could see other lion-shapes back of the great lion-chief in front of him. There had never been lions in the Valley of the Mu, because of the Truce there. Yet lions had come and gone on special occasions. And they'd kept the truce while there and were highly thought of.
Kwa asked no questions. He was reeling in his tracks. There was a stench of blood in the dawn-mist rising from the damp earth. The immediate surroundings were a shambles. Kwa himself had accounted for at least three of the spider—priests. Leo, and his companions, perhaps, had struck down the others.
"My heart," said Kwa, "is already in the Valley of the Mu. I shall follow it."
"When?"
"Now. I was hoping for a lift from elephant or buffalo. But they were troubled by the Spider Magic. I could tell it. They could give me no exact knowledge of the Valley of the Mu."
"Anansi," said the lion, "has forbidden them the place."
KWA supported himself with a hand against a tree. There was a message of disaster in an answer like that. Had the Ape People, his people, been wiped out? The bloody mist was mounting around him.
Leo read his thought. More than half of the jungle speech was intuitional—what among men might pass for telepathy.
Leo now spoke in the grunting tribal language of his kind.
"Brother," he said, "you need a lift and if you take it you will still be in time. Will you accept the offer of my back?"
"You'd carry me?"
"MANY a time," the lion purred, "I've leaped a hut-high thorn fence with a full-grown bullock on my shoulder."
"Lungela!"
Kwa had breathed the word softly—"So be it!"—and stumbled forward. Almost he'd fallen. But the lion was under him with a movement as deft and silken as that of a house-cat playing with a ball of twine. As if he weighed no more than a ball of twine, the great cat shifted Kwa into a better carrying position. Kwa's arms were sunk in the heavy mane. His relaxed body was moulded closely, then more closely still, to the great shoulders. Kwa could feel the ripple and twitch of the muscles as the lion—still as if unconscious of his weight—lightly adjusted him to a position of comfort for them both.
For an interval Kwa's eyes had closed. It was only when a gust of clean air swept across him that he realized that the lion was already running with him and was gathering speed.
The little old ape-woman who'd mothered Kwa and given him the medicine against the spider poison had been a spectator of this mixed drama of the jungle floor. With other chimpanzees she'd watched it from the high branches where they'd slept. In the dim light it had been little more than a shadowgraph. But this had merely added to the ghostliness of it, the element of the supernatural.
It had been for the chimps what it would have been for men to see a corner of Armageddon—that ultimate battle of devils and angels. More terrifying even than the battle, had been that spectral intervention of the lions. This wasn't lion country. Never before had lions been in this part of the Devil Bush. Were they lions? Or were they something else that had merely taken on the appearance of lions?
The king of the specters had carried Kwa away.
The little old ape-woman let out a quaver of lamentation. It was a thin and shaky bleat that anyone could have understood. It was a cry repeated over and over again.
Kwa! Kwa! It was as if she'd mothered a god and now had lost him.
But as the old ape-woman went about the business of the day she remembered what Kwa had said about his father.
THE run of the lions with Kwa had begun—and for a long time lasted— at a gliding, crouching trot or pace. This had been necessary because of the nature of the ground and the absence of a trail. Up over sharp ridges and along fallen trees; then down again some moss-smothered cliff as steep as a wall. Without ever a stop; never a pause; with a perfect precision of movement whatever sort of an obstacle was met and an undeviating gait as smooth as the flow of a python.
How far he was carried by the lion, Kwa would never know. Kwa was fighting the poison in his blood. Time and again, he felt the invisible web of a complete paralysis tightening about him. There were intervals when even the light in his brain seemed to be on the point of extinction, like a flame in a globe deprived of air. But he fought off the feeling.
If it hadn't been for the medicine he'd been given, he must have died.
At the same time that he emerged from one of these periods of trance, the lion—and those that followed him—emerged from some thickness of the forest, and Kwa knew that they had entered an elephant trail. They'd but entered the trail when there was a challenge that came like the blast of a steam siren.
Kwa knew that cry. It was the stop-andanswer challenge of an elephant leader.
The lions had stopped. But in those tireless shoulders under him Kwa could read some sort of a similar challenge. It was a flexing of muscles, a play of nerves that were ready for anything.
Kwa slipped from his place and came to his feet. One of his hands was still in the mane of the lion that had carried him. A second lion had slipped forward and stood at his other hand.
Before them, bulking huge, was that great Tembo of the crocodile pool.
CHAPTER XI
LIONS AND ELEPHANTS
DOWN through the ages lions and elephants had gone their separate yet parallel ways. There'd never been war between them. Nothing but harmony.
Until the coming of the Utangani, the White Man, the lions had been as shepherds to the great flocks of the plains—the myriad gazelle and antelope; herdsmen to the uncounted zebra. The lions had been like those other great shepherds, the old patriarchs of Canaan—feared but respected; living off their flocks, it is true, just as the patriarchs had done; but, like them also, entrusted with the keeping of an ancient Law.
The elephants, for their part, had been more like some race of ancient mystics; not killing at all, keepers of some Ancient Wisdom that already existed before the Law came down from an African Sinai.
The two races, Lion and Elephant, Shepherd King and Primeval Mystic, had been and were still, as different as sun and moon. But like sun and moon they'd swung down the long life of the world in perfect harmony.
"Peace!" said Kwa.
"We were coming to warn you," Tembo replied.
"Of what?"
The lion-chief who carried Kwa broke in with a throaty purr.
"To warn him against us?" he demanded.
"Yes."
THE big elephant—any elephant unspoiled by human contact—was as incapable of a lie as a dog.
Leo, the lion-chief, understood.
"You have listened to liars," he proclaimed.
"Death to all liars!" Kwa cried out in the universal speech; and he was suddenly aware that a jungle crowd was assembling with all the rapidity of a crowd in the world of men.
The sun was up. The light of it was slanting in through the jungle cover here and there in bars of misty silver. These revealed a flutter of wings, the scamper a
nd swing of monkeys who must have already heard the news of what had happened at daybreak.
A meeting like this would have been a great occasion in any case. A meeting of elephants and lions. There'd been perhaps a dozen lions back there in that brief battle of the elephant park. There were others now.
With Tembo there may have been a score of elephants when Tembo sounded his challenge. Other elephants had been drifting in—softly as the rolling up of the morning mist—visible only when they passed some slanting shaft of the early sun, disappearing again into the gauze of green shadows.
"I came here for something else," said Kwa, and all were straining to hear. "I came here to warn my people of the Furry Tribe—the Ape People, who are the friends of you all—that certain of the Utangani, white like myself, were coming to the Valley of the Mu to molest them."
"We have already heard of them," there came a responsive breath from bush and branch. "They are drawing close to Sango Lobango even now. They have taken Anansi himself to guide them."
The information sounded so incredible to Kwa that he made them repeat it. Both elephants and lions confirmed the statement.
"But Anansi is a spider!"—Kwa was suffering from a moment of bewilderment.
In response to his wondering protest there was something equivalent to a mob-shout of negation, of explanation.
No! No! Anansi was whatever he willed to be!
THE answer shrilled down in a hundred bird-cries, the chattering of monkeys, the bark and harsh laughter of hyenas.
The lion-chief let out a coughing roar, brief but angry, that silenced the confusion as a shot would have done.
"Speak, elder," said the lion.
And there was only one—Kwa apart—in the present society, at any rate, whom Leo would have addressed like that. Attention flashed to the elephant-leader like a million needle-points of light.
"Oganga—mchawi!"
Tembo was exerting care to make his meaning clear. It was as if he'd said: "Medicine man—wizard!" A medicine-man might be a legitimate doctor, no matter how many poisoners and fakers may have usurped the title. "Wizard" was not so good. It meant magic out and out, often of the worst.
Adventures of Kwa, Man of the Jungle (Two jungle adventure classics in one volume!) Page 4
