A Feast Unknown (12 page)

I was about forty yards down the hill, out of the direct path of the blast, the greater energy of which would go upward. Then I felt the pressure; I did not hear it. I flew forward; a tree sprang up; I became unconscious.

When I regained my senses, I was still deaf. I could, however, hear the messages of pain in my eardrums, my head, and all my muscles.

The smoke was just beginning to clear away. The hilltop was gone. Most of the trees, branchless, splintered, uprooted, were halfway down the hill. One lay a foot from me. A little more force behind it would have dropped the trunk, heavy as a
great boulder, on my head.

I rose slowly against the current of my pain. The moon was out behind the clouds now, and the sky seemed to be a peculiar shade of dark blue. No doubt, I was furnishing the color, not the sky. The leaves of the trees were a sinister green, and the earth was a repulsive yellow-green. Everything was
stretched, elongated,
as if the world were a taut rubber band. The energy gathered in this band was waiting to be released when my hearing returned.

I was unarmed and naked except for the belt with its sheath and the knife.

Forty feet to my left, Wilfred lay face down. I turned him over. He had no visible wounds, but when I tore off his shirt, I saw on his lower back a bruise the size of a dinner plate. The bruise may have been caused by a truck wheel which lay about eight feet up the hill from him.

He opened his eyes and said something. I could not hear him, and it was too dark to read his lips. I found a match-folder in his pocket and struck a match. It may have been a foolish thing to do, but I did not think there would be any living men around for some time, and I wanted to know what he was trying to say.

The light was just enough for me to read his lips.

“...not with a whimper but a bang, man … ain’t life the shits … tell that bronze cat … no fucking good … God’s a honky, you better believe it …” and then, “Mother!”

The last was not, I’m sure, a truncated pejorative. It was the final appeal to one who had answered his first appeal.

At that moment, I felt sad. If I had been able to know him under other circumstances, and if he could have abandoned all the masks, the mannerisms, the clichés which humans adopt for
a group identity, then he and I might even have liked each other. But that was asking too much of most humans, and, moreover, I find that most humans have trouble being completely at ease when they’re with me.

This, I suppose, is my fault.

I left him with mouth and eyes open. Before noon, the flies would be buzzing in and out of the mouth and the vultures would have plucked the eyes from the sockets.

The hilltop gave me nothing in the way of a weapon. I set off at a trot with the intention of going back up the mountain diagonally. I suspected that Caliban was even now racing down the mountain to check on my survival, unless he was able to see me through those super-binoculars. If I did lose him, I would do so only for a while. Eventually, he would be on my trail, for the simple reason that he was going where I was going. The two old men had told me that, although they probably did not know themselves. I doubted that Caliban would have said anything about the Nine to them, since it was forbidden. Also, he could take them only so far and then would have to go on alone. It was also forbidden to bring outsiders any closer than fifty miles to the caverns of the Nine.

I was thinking about this, and wishing that my deafness would clear up soon, when a piece of bark flew off a tree about a foot to my left. If I had not been looking in that direction, I would have been unaware of it, and the shooter might have been more accurate the second time.

So I thought at that moment. I dived to the ground and rolled beneath a bush in a slight hollow. When I peeked out, I saw a man, whose silhouette I recognized as the Albanian’s, shooting
a man with a burnoose, with a rifle. The man fell forward and did not get up. I jumped up to run away but by then Noli was only thirty feet away. I put my arms up in the air; the automatic could not have missed. I don’t think he would have killed me, but he would have crippled me with bullets in the legs.

I did not know how he and the Arab had survived. They must have been further down the hill when the first jeep went up and they had managed to get away before the other explosions got to them. He said something to me. I shook my head and pointed at my ears. He pointed at his own, and I knew he was deaf, too. The Arab must have been deaf, and Noli had probably shouted at him that I was to be taken alive. Undoubtedly, the Arab had received orders to this effect more than once. But, shaken by the explosions, perhaps eager to revenge his fellows, he had fired at me. Noli was not close enough to knock him out with the rifle, so he had been forced to kill him.

He had to tie my hands and to do this required my cooperation, which I was not likely to give. He solved his problem by hitting me over the head with the barrel of the rifle. I ducked and so reduced some of the impact of the blow, but not enough.

When I awoke, my head ached as if it had sucked in every pain in the area for fifty miles around. My brain seemed to throb like a mangled and infected hand. My eyes hurt as if the optic nerves had been extruded into the eyeballs. My hands were connected behind me with what I later determined was a pair of handcuffs. A hangman’s noose was around my neck, and the other end of the rope was tied to the handcuffs’ chain. My arms had been hauled up almost as far as they could behind me with the result that I pulled on the rope and choked myself unless I
kept my arms up high. In this state, I could not test the strength of the handcuffs’ chain without strangling myself.

Later, Noli would remove the rope during the daytime, but at night he always replaced it.

Noli made signs which told me what he wanted. I would lead him to the source of the gold. And I would also tell him, when I was able, the secret of my juvenescence.

He was taking seriously what most people considered to be a tale of fantasy. He seemed to have done his research well, however, and was convinced that I had a hoard of gold somewhere in this area and that I really was eighty years old.

The facts about me—some, anyway—are available to certain people. The secret archives of many governments and some very powerful individuals contain pages of facts and of speculations, about me. These exist in Washington, London, Peking, Moscow, Paris, Rome, and other places. I know about them because the Nine told me of them.

Noli was either an agent of the Communist government of his country or a private agent. Or he was the former and had been sent to find the gold and was looking for the elixir for himself. I doubt that his government really believed in the elixir.

I transmitted to him my willingness to lead him to the gold. He was elated at this, and, at the same time, suspicious. He seemed to think I should have undergone at least a modicum of torture before agreeing to his demands.

I tried to tell him I did not think the torture was worth it, but I failed. He gave me the signal to precede him, and we went on down the hillside and then began climbing the mountain. By dawn, we were near the top. Noli was puffing and panting. His
mouth hung open, his chest rose and fell rapidly, sweat silvered his face and enormous moustachioes, and sweat blackened his clothes. He was in good condition for a man of fifty-five, which I estimated his age to be. Even a young athlete would have been under a strain to keep up with my pace. Time and again, Noli jammed his rifle in my back and when I turned around, he gestured that he wanted to rest.

Twice, we ate and drank. He carried a canteen of water and had three cans of spam in his pocket. He gave me half a can while he ate one. I wondered what he intended to do after we ran out of food. He might be able to shoot some game, but he would dislike to do this, since it would advertise our presence.

Nightfall found us on the western side of the next mountain two hundred yards below the peak. My ankles were tied with a rope and my handcuffed hands were also tied to a rope the other end of which was around the trunk of a slim tree. The position was uncomfortable. My bowels had moved during the night, and I was able to get only a few inches from the mess, and I had to piss down my leg. Also, it got cold and wet. Mists and then chilling dew covered us. I have been used to worse much of my life. I did not intend to try to escape the first night, unless an irresistible opportunity came along. I would sleep and gather my strength while Noli slept uneasily and in much discomfort. He awoke frequently and sat up to inspect me or prowled around for a while before trying to seize a few more minutes of sleep. Or so he told me the next day. I slept very well.

Dawn was no more red-eyed than he, and it was much fresher.

He stood above me and pissed on me. Probably as
revenge for having rested while he suffered and also part of his psychological warfare. It did not bother me. The urine was warm and felt pleasant, and I have been pissed on by others, all now as dead and as cold as last nights urine.

He untied the ropes and let me get up. I had to piss then. He watched me with an enigmatic look. But his penis was still hanging out of his pants, and, as he watched me, it swelled and grew hard. He looked down and then up at me and smiled. He then forced it within his pants and gestured for me to lead. I knew what he was thinking. The Albanians have been heavily influenced by the Turks, although it is not necessary to enlist history to account for certain attitudes. There are enough Enver Nolis in West Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, none originating from Turkish influences.

At noon, we were at the foot of the mountain. He ate another can of spam, and I got a fourth of another. My stomach was growling, and I could feel my strength evaporating. My hearing was by then almost completely returned, and I could hear his stomach when he was close. He was hungry, despite getting the lion’s share of the food.

The next morning, he was in worse condition. Hunger was beginning to erode him. He needed more food than he was getting even if he had been resting, but the loss of energy in climbing the mountains and in loss of sleep was great. At midnoon, his hunger got the best of his desire for concealment. A mountain pangolin ran out from behind a bush as we were going across a small plateau which was so rocky it contained less vegetation than other areas. The beast rolled over and over at the impact of the .38. The shot came from behind me and was
unexpected. I jumped and whirled. He smiled. He had food and he also had discovered that I was not as deaf as I had pretended.

He picked up the animal, and we traveled three miles before he thought it safe to halt. With his own knife, he cut the beast out of its armor, threw the entrails away, and then dug a hole. He managed to get a small, relatively smokeless, fire going. He curled the armor of pangolin into a bowl, filled it with water from a nearby cataract, put the bowl in the hole, and the hot stones into the water. He sliced the meat and threw it into the armor. He kept taking the stones out as they cooled and putting in hot ones.

The result was a lukewarm but meat-rich soup. There was enough for both of us and enough for another meal left over. He unlocked my hands from behind me, locked them again before me, and had me carry the armor-bowl with its soup contents. I had to give him credit for some ingenuity.

17

That evening, after tying me even more tightly, Enver ate most of the soup and then slept for several hours. When he awoke, he looked up at the mists and the distorted moon behind them. He crawled over to me and said, in English, “I am cold. And I am also hot, my lord. Hot with passion.”

This was the sort of monologue that my biographer might have put in his romances but which more discriminating readers would reject as absurd. They forget that books are often imitated by people.

I said nothing. Noli put his arms around me, and, shivering, clung to me for a while. Then he startled me by running his tongue up and down my spine from the nape of my neck to the base. He then lowered his hand and put it around in front of me and began playing with my penis. He moved the foreskin back and forth very softly and slowly. The heat of his breath on my back and the heat of his hand on my penis, and the lesser heat of his clothed body on my back felt pleasant.