A Feast Unknown (8 page)

Now I knew what Doc Caliban’s ultimate goal might be. He meant to kill me, for some reason, but the end of his journey could lie in the mountains to the west, where I also intended to journey.

I began to get more uneasy. Not that I expected him to try to kill me now. It was obvious that he was “toying” with me. Also, it was obvious that the old men had instructions to talk as freely as they pleased. Caliban wanted me to learn much about him. The more I knew, the more “equal” would be the hunted and the hunter.

I felt angrier. Up to now, every enemy had done his best to make the situation as unequal as possible. But Caliban was treating me contemptuously.

Very well. Let him have his contempt. If he really intended to fight me to the death with only his bare hands, he was not going to frighten me.

I would leave now for the mountains, where I had an
engagement for which I would be late if I did not start now Doctor Caliban, if he was to make the same destination on time, would do better to start on the journey at once.

I inched backwards. Then I stopped. A bronze cloud had scudded into the light of the campfire.

There were empty shadows. A second later, as if stepping from the wings of a stage, the man, the bronze cloud, was there.

The two old men started, even though they must have experienced this noiseless unannounced jack-in-the-boxery many times before.

Doctor Caliban was at least four inches taller than I. His body was superb, massive yet beautifully proportioned. The bones of skull and torso looked very thick, and his skull was long-shaped. He was the only other man, besides myself, and some of the Nine, who had such heavy bones. Which meant he had more foundation for muscular attachment and for larger muscles than most men.

His skin was a pale bronze. His hair, which was of medium length and parted on the right, was a darker bronze. It looked like a metal cap that had been welded onto his skull. And though he was too far away for me to determine accurately his eye color, I got the impression they were light-green.

His face was extremely handsome and regular. It was masculine, yet almost beautiful. It also looked familiar, though I had never seen him before.

He spoke in a deep resonant voice, like a bronze bell’s. His speech was even and regular with none of the hesitations, pauses, vague exclamations, or broken off sentences and phrases that distinguish the speech of most humans.

“Lord Grandrith, the Noble Savage, the titled man-ape, is watching you two,” he said.

He looked into the shadows at the exact spot where I lay. He laughed and pulled from his belt a round object I recognized a moment later as a grenade. He pulled the pin and with a swiftness that might have dazzled a leopard, tossed it at me.

It would have landed just out of arm’s reach if I had not moved forward. I caught it and hurled it back at him and then was gone into the bush. I looked back. He was standing with his hands on his hips, his back bent backward, head thrown back, and laughing. The grenade was at his feet, and the two old men had dived away—very swiftly for eighty-year-olds—and were hugging the ground.

The blacks were standing up and asking questions, but they could not see the grenade and so did not know what was causing the commotion. A big Negro stepped out of the tent with a rifle. I had not seen him before. He looked as if he were a Yankee.

Doc Caliban said, loudly, “It’s a dummy! I just wanted to test his reactions! They’re very good! The best I ever saw outside of my own!”

Simmons, getting up, spoke in a squeaky voice that was comical issuing from such a squat long-armed brutish man. “Doc! When’re you going to cut out this crap! If he killed Trish, why don’t you kill him and get it over with?”

10

Usually, I don’t think in the human categories of good and evil. Those who would kill me are enemies. Just that and nothing more. I kill them without having to justify the deed by classifying them as evil.

But seeing this very handsome man, I experienced a feeling of genuine evil, of the anti-good. The hairs rose on the back of my neck as if a demon of a native African religion had pulled them up with his cold hands of wind.

It was a feeling I did not like.

I decided to leave for the mountains. However, about twenty yards from the camp, I came across a large aluminum-sided wooden-floored cage lying on its side, the door open. I sniffed at it, and I knew not only that it had held a lion, I knew which lion. I also knew why I had been attacked by a hungry lion that had no business in this area. Doc Caliban had not only loosed it at me, he had probably spent some time conditioning it to attack human beings.

If he had wanted an estimate of me, he now had it.

I lifted the cage above my head—it only weighed about 200 pounds—and carried it to a tree I had noticed a moment ago. This was tall and thin and had all the characteristics required for my sudden plan. I never learned its English name—if it had one—but knew it by the Bandili word,
ndangga.

After lassoing its top with my rope, I pulled it down with much straining until its top almost touched the ground. After securing the rope around the trunk of another tree, I wove the branches of the bent tree into a rough net near the top. This required the breaking of a number of branches, which might bring Caliban running. That was a chance I not only would take but welcomed. He, however, did not appear.

The net of branches held the cage as well as I had hoped. I looked through the trees and saw that the two old men had returned to their chairs. They were talking so loudly that they covered any sound I might have made while constructing the catapult. A black brought them glasses with some dark liquid in it, and, between sips, they shouted what must have been insults at each other. The blacks were squatting on the other side of their fire and talking. The fire gleamed on their rolling eyeballs and teeth.

I waited a while. Caliban stuck his head out of the tent once to say something to the old men. At that moment, I whacked the rope in two with the knife. There was a hum, a crack as the rope snapped past me, another hum, deeper, and a loud whish as the tree straightened. The cage flew up and out in a trajectory that came from accident and hope more than skill. But the result was admirable.

The cage, turning over slowly, flew down towards Calibans tent. He burst out of it like a bronze shell from a seventeenth-century cannon. The two oldsters jumped up from their chairs, their drinks flying and their smokes falling out of their mouths as they looked around for the source of the noise. The blacks scattered, some running towards Calibans tent.

Caliban kept on running and disappeared into the darkness, undoubtedly looking for me. The blacks were behind bushes and trees and looking at the crushed tent. Simmons was jumping up and down like an enraged chimpanzee and howling, “Oh, my God! My God! I shit in my pants! I was so scared, I shit in my pants!”

Rivers was on the ground and rolling back and forth and laughing hysterically.

For a moment, I thought of ambushing Caliban and getting this conflict over with. I was restrained by knowing that he probably had the same goal as I and that I would meet him there. I wanted to find out if he could continue to track and harass me. I also wanted him to be even more convinced that he was dealing with a buffalo in the bush, not with an antelope.

11

The dawn was as gray as an old lion’s hopes for fresh meat. It quickly enough became bright and quick and sent its golden roar out over the savanna. The gold melted over the world, and the day was hot and sluggish.

I trotted across the plain for an hour after the sun rose. I had been trotting all night and was thinking about holing up until late afternoon. The mountains, light-purplish and getting taller, were about thirty miles to the west now. Perhaps, if I pushed on, I could get there before dusk and even be part way up the flank of the nearest one.

I kept on going. After a while, I was within a half-mile of a Kitasi village, a collection of about thirty huts, round, double-domed, and built of sticks, grass, and dried mud. The Kitasi were cattle herders, drinkers of blood, many-wived, and of ancestors who had mixed their Negro genes with dark Caucasian somewhere in the north a long time ago. In 1920, when I first encountered them, they wore bark-fiber loin coverings which
projected fore and aft, looking from a distance like the paper boats that schoolboys make. In the old days, the Kitasi had killed their king as soon as gray appeared in his hair. The British had forced a halt to this custom, but the king died by “accident.” Then a white man had given the new king a bottle of hair dye, and the latest king might yet die of old age.

At one time the Kitasi had been a powerful people. They had warred with the Masai, the Agikuyu, and the Bandili. The thirty villages of twenty thousand population, as a result, were now six with about a thousand inhabitants. The Kitasi hated many people, but they hated me most of all, and with good reason.

The men in the old stake-bed truck heading out from the village may have been told about me by radio and were looking for me. It was going southeast; I was going southwest. We were about a mile apart. Then they spotted me, and the truck swung around and raced towards me. I ran towards some acacia trees, a half a mile away, and got behind the nearest one as the truck pulled up, brakes screeching. It had stopped about a hundred yards away.

There were three men in the cab and six on the bed. All got out of the truck. Three were armed with rifles that looked, from my distance, like pre-World War I Enfields. One carried a heavy spear and a machete in a sheath. Two had bows and wore quivers of arrows on their backs. One had a revolver, and the other two carried big axes.

They talked awhile and then spread out in an ever-widening arc, the ends of which curved out towards me. A rifleman was on each end; the third rifleman was in the center. The two bowmen flanked him, and the spearman and the axemen were equidistant between the center man and the end men. The arc advanced
slowly while the men shouted encouragement to each other or shouted insults and threats at me.

So far, they did not know whether or not I had a revolver, but they did know I had no rifle. There were nine of them, and they should have charged me in the truck, swung broadside when near me, and then let loose with a volley. Afterwards, they could have jumped off the truck and charged me on foot. If they were brave and determined, they probably would have gotten me, even if I had killed a number of them.