A Feast Unknown Part 2

The leader and organizer of this expedition was an Albanian. He went under the Arabic name of Muhmud abu Shawarib. His real name was Enver Noli. The others were mostly Arabs, although a few were Bulgarians who had fled to Albania because of their Red Chinese sympathies.

Noli had promised every man in his army that he would have enough gold to support him and four wives for the rest of his life. That is, if the Englishman, John Cloamby, Lord Grandrith, were captured alive.

"He talked only of gold?" I said.

"Yes. Was there anything else?"

Noli was not likely to promise his men the secret of prolonged youth, even if he believed that I possessed it. They would think him crazy and would not follow him. It was possible that he had no thought of the elixir, but I have encountered other men, all dead now, who believed, with good reason, that I had an elixir and were prepared to do anything to get the secret from me.

The Arab said, "You can kill me, Nasrani. But Noli will find you and inflict great pain upon you until you tell him where your gold is hidden. He is a very determined man, very cunning, and very strong."

"That may be," I said. I stabbed him in the solar plexus. Now I failed to have a s.e.xual reaction, and I hoped that the aberration was, for some reason, gone. I doubted it. The truth was that I had only so much j.i.s.m, and it had been used up for the time being.

I b.o.o.by-trapped the vehicle with some wire and grenades so that three sh.e.l.ls-one by the gas tank-would go off if the cab doors or the hood were opened. Then I went into the woods and up a tree and waited. The sounds of battle had died out. Presently, as I knew they would, the invaders came on the track of the vehicle. Two jeeps drove up; behind them straggled a mob, the survivors of the battle with the Kenyans.

6.

Enver Noli was a huge man with a large belly, a shaven head, and great drooping moustaches that fell to his chest. His nose was immense, curved like a scimitar. He wore green coveralls and paratrooper's boots. He held his kepi in one tremendous fist and whacked it across the palm of the other hand. When he gave an order, he bellowed.

A soldier ran out from the main body of the troops and warily approached the vehicle. When he looked into the cab, he saw the wires I had gone to some pains to hide. He reported this to Enver, who stood up in the jeep, which was about seventy feet from the half-track. The soldier raised the hood to check the motor for traps there, and the grenade exploded and then the three sh.e.l.ls. The vehicle and the soldier disappeared in smoke and flame. Noli was knocked off the jeep, but he bounded up and ran away with the rest. Unfortunately, n.o.body was. .h.i.t by the sh.e.l.ls or splashed by the gas. I did shoot two during the noise and panic.

Noli stopped running and managed to halt the twenty or so of his men. He got them to line up and to begin firing with two machine guns and fifteen rifles into the woods. While the bullets were flying around me, whipping the leaves and knocking off chunks of bark, I shot two more Arabs. Immediately after, I descended the tree and ran off in the direction opposite the invaders and then curved around until I was some distance behind them. The field, where the main fighting between the Kenyans and newcomers had taken place, was now being held by the jackals, hyenas, and vultures.

The two hills yielded more dead. The wounded had either been taken away or put out of their pain. The carrion eaters were busy here, too.

The village was entirely burned down, and of the survivors there was no sign. I knew they were hiding in the forest. They had fled to the forest more than once from Arab slave-raiders, though not until after great losses. I had been the one who had led them to victory against the Arab invaders and then led them across the country to terrorize the slavers so much that they never again dared enter Bandili country. I had led them against the Germans in World War I. I had led them in a great raid into Gekoyo. Now they were hiding again, and if they came out once more and fought, they would do it without me.

For 60 years I had been a Bandili and the great father, the elephant who charges, for the Bandili. Now, I was truly exiled. This was no temporary loss. It was forever.

I wept then. I had loved these people as much as I could any group of humans. I was far more Bandili than I was English. I had had true friends among them. But all that was ended. Although this village was the only one of the ten Bandili villages that had betrayed me, the others would be no better. The young were too hating and the old too feeble and too few.

Moreover, the Kenyan government had made it plain that I could no longer live in this country. Not in the open, at least.

I made a sentimental gesture. I waved my rifle at the ashes of the village and then at those hidden in the forest. It was the only good-bye I could give, and doubtless no one saw it.

Then I turned and began to trot across the savanna, towards the hills to the west.

My destination was the mountain range that lay far beyond the hills, approximately a hundred and fifty miles away, and twenty miles into Uganda. I trotted all night. The false dawn, the wolf's tail, was graying the savanna when I began to think about holing up for part of the day. The acacia trees in the distance looked like black cutouts of the monsters of Bandili myth. Then the sun leaned against the night and swung it away, and day padded in. A lion roared in the distance. The air was cool, moving gently from the mountains in the west. A wart hog trotted out of the tall gra.s.s, his tail held stiffly up. The sun gleamed on a yellow tusk.

I ran along easily with the savanna on my left and a clump of hills to my right. I carried the rifle in my right hand. I stopped for a moment because I saw the gra.s.ses move against the wind. Something big enough to be a lion or a man was approaching through the cover about thirty yards away.

The rifle soared up out of my hand, torn away by a blow like that from a crocodile's tail. It spun off, and then the sound of the shot came from the hills.

7.

My arm was paralyzed by the transmission of shock through the rifle, but I did not find that out immediately. I dived towards the tall gra.s.s and rolled towards it. Dirt and gra.s.s flew up so close they fell over me. There were four gouts of earth and flocks of tiny pieces of gra.s.s, each followed by a shot ringing across the savanna.

I jumped up, and, zigzagging and bending low, ran. There was a growl, and a big yellowish brown body moved away from me. I smelled a lioness. She was gone, and I had the gra.s.s to myself except for the brief company of two bullets which cropped stalks only a few inches from me. I dived once more, and I stayed where I was.

Several minutes pa.s.sed. My arm lost its numbness. More shots. More stalks cut in half, falling on me. The b.u.g.g.e.r had superb vision. I started crawling, though slowly. It was impossible to keep the gra.s.s from signaling my progress. More bullets slashed the gra.s.s.

When I had crossed about 35 yards, I was at the edge of the gra.s.s. I leaped up and ran away, still crouching. There were no more shots. Not for a second had I thought that the sharpshooter was a member of the Kenyans or of the band of the Albanian, Noli. A third party had dealt himself in.

I heard a roar behind and looked over my shoulder. A male lion was charging after me. I did not know how he could be in this neighborhood or why he was chasing me. He must have been very near but somehow hidden from me. The stimulus of seeing me run away from him had evoked the reaction of running after me. I knew every lion for 40 miles in any direction from my plantation. This one was a stranger and should not have been here out of his own territory.

He was the largest lion I'd ever seen. He weighed 650 or more pounds, and his mane was so thick that I knew at once that he had not been in the bush for long. He looked as if he had been bred for the purpose of eating me. He also looked as if he had not eaten lately; his ribs were getting close to the outside air.

I'm not often amazed, but this was one of the times. In my seventy-nine years, I've fought at most twelve lions, considerably less than my biographer records. Usually, a male lion is as eager to avoid a battle as I am. But I have killed them with only a knife, as my biographer records, though there have never been any of the face-to-face encounters shown in those very bad and lying movies. If I got into the situations those actors did, my bowels would have been scooped out or my back muscles plucked out or my head bitten off.

I crouched, waiting for the lion with my knife in my hand. The next thing that happened told me that the hitting of my rifle had been no lucky shot.

The knife was jerked out of my hand. Like a bright bird, it flew up and away. I heard the distant report of the rifle before the knife struck the ground.

My moment of shock almost cost me my life. The lion launched himself towards me on the final bound. I got to one side just in time; a paw flashed by, brushing the skin of my chest.

Getting onto the lion's back when he is in full charge requires very swift and unhesitating movements. If the slightest thing goes wrong-slipping a little, estimating the trajectory and speed of the final leap by too little or too much-it's over for the man. I had jumped to one side while he was still on the downcurve of the arc of his leap and stomped one foot and was bounced back in again and had grabbed the mane with my left hand. A savage yank pulled me along with the beast and also up into the air. Usually, I had to use one hand because my knife was in the other, but this time I had both free. And so I had a better hold and was on its back even more quickly than usual.

He reared up and then fell to one side. I went with him but twisted to keep from being crushed. Up he came again. I had my arms under his front legs, and when he rose I had my hands around the back of his neck and locked together.

His roaring had been loud. Now, from somewhere in that cavernous body, he got the force to double the noise. He rolled again-making me feel as if I were being spread out like a turtle under an elephant's hoof-but I managed to keep my legs locked around his belly. His hind feet moved up to tear my legs, but he could not get them under me or even touch my legs.

Then, as we lay in the dirt, slowly, slowly, his bones creaking, his head went down under the pressure of my arms. I realize that this is difficult to believe. A lion has truly enormous strength in those ma.s.sive neck muscles. But I am not as other men, in degree or kind. Not in many things, anyway, and this was not the first time I had broken a big cat's neck with a full-Nelson, though the other had not been as huge as this one.

It was not easy. For a long time, the lion, growling much more softly now, resisted my utmost efforts, and his neck refused to bend any more. But the time came when the bones creaked again like a wooden ship in a heavy sea. My head was buried in the mane as I sweated and strove. The hairs stuck in my face like little spears. The green-yellow lion odor was strong, and, beneath it, was the stench of awareness of death. Not fear of death, awareness of its inevitability. The end had come for him, and he knew it. Everybody born in Africa-antelope, lion, black man, Arab, Berber-knows when the time has come. The awareness is a legacy from this ancient land, the birthplace of mankind and of many many species of beast.

Mother Africa lets her child know when he is about ready to fertilize her soil with the body she gave him. Everybody knows this except the descendants of Europeans-myself excepted.

As I felt the neck muscles weaken with this awareness, and my arm muscles gain in strength for the same reason, I became conscious of an approaching o.r.g.a.s.m. I don't know when my p.e.n.i.s had swelled and my t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es gathered themselves for the explosion. But my p.e.n.i.s was jammed between the lion's back and my belly, and it was throbbing and beginning to jerk.

At that moment, the lion's neck gave way. As the muscles loosened, and the bones broke, I spurted, sliming the fur and my belly.

The lion moaned with a final outgoing of air, kicked, and himself spurted. I rose, unsteadily, after dragging my leg out from under him. I scooped up some of the lion sperm in the dust and swallowed it. This was a custom of The Folk, one which my biographer avoided describing. It is supposed to bestow the potency of the male lion upon the eater. I believe it does; no amount of European education has convinced me otherwise. Besides, I like the heavy big-feline taste and odor of it. It is, more than almost anything, African in its essence. There is everything in it. Let him who would envision the soul of this ancient continent, eat lion sperm.

Always, after making a kill of a beast of prey, I stand with one foot on the carca.s.s and give a great yell of triumph. This, too, I learned from The Folk. But this time, the o.r.g.a.s.m and the knowledge that I was a target for a sharpshooter, chopped off that cry.

8.

Although the knife bore the dent of the bullet near the hilt and also had been twisted by the impact, it was still serviceable. Moreover, I would not have thrown it away if it had been useless. Though I am not sentimental, I could not bear to get rid of it. It had been my real father's in England, and he had given it to my uncle before he became mad. My first sight of the knife was my first knowledge of metal. And it had served me for 70 years and killed 10 times that number of prey and enemies.

I put it in the sheath and looked towards the hills. The sun flashed now and then. The reflection of binoculars or cameras, possibly. Or of a telescope.

A puff of dirt struck immediately in front of me as I stopped to pick up the rifle; the sound of the shot came about a second later. The shooter was approximately 1125 feet away. The second bullet struck a few inches to my left; the third, to my right. The fourth went between my legs. I was being told to run away onto the savanna and leave the rifle behind.

Instead, I cut the lion open and removed a piece of his heart and chewed on it. Four more shots, very close, enabled me to discern the exact location of the rifle. I also saw four men through the bush on the hill.

I left at a slow walk. I abandoned my rifle because its barrel had been bent by the bullet. I was angry because of the ease with which the rifleman was herding me and the contempt I felt he had for me. If he thought I was really dangerous, he would have killed me with his first shot. His actions seemed to say: Try your best, my dear Lord Grandrith. It won't be nearly good enough.

When I had walked a quarter of a mile, the shots ceased. From time to time, as I strode to the west, I looked back. Two miles away, a cloud of dust followed. When I stopped to bathe in a waterhole, the dust settled. I caught and ate several almost mouse-sized gra.s.shoppers which inhabit this region. I threw a stone at a kingfisher but missed it by a wing's length. There are many kingfishers in this region, where there is little water except during the rainy season. But the kingfishers have abandoned an aquatic diet; they have adapted to catching gra.s.shoppers and other insects.

When night came, I backtracked. Twenty minutes later, I had found the camp of the sharpshooter. It was on the flat top of a small hill in a clearing around which was an unusual growth of bush and number of trees. A depression beside it held some water, which accounted for the dense growth. In the clearing were two large trucks, one of which carried a very large camper, and two jeeps. Three tents were pitched; two fires had been built. Some blacks were cooking over one fire, and coffee was boiling over both. There were six blacks and two white men in sight. Then I saw a white man move behind the half-opened flap of a tent. The weak light from the lamp within gleamed on a bronze back for a moment.

I had smelled the coffee a long way off and had been salivating. I love coffee. If these people had not been shooting at me that afternoon, I would have been tempted to join them.

I moved around until I could get a better view of the man inside the tent. I still could not see much of him, but I got the impression of a very large and very solid man. He seemed to be doing some peculiar exercises. I caught glimpses of bronzed biceps, bunching and smoothing over and over again. The muscles looked like mongooses slipping back and forth in a wild play under a blanket woven of bronze wires. I know that that is a rather fanciful description, but that is what occurred to me.

The other two whites, old men, sat on folding chairs with their backs to me. The smaller was thin, quick-moving, wary as a bird, and had a face sharp as the neck of a broken-off bottle. He was dressed as if he had just stepped out of the most expensive safari outfitter's store in Nairobi. As he talked, he gestured frequently with a silver-headed black cane.

The other old man was so wide and had such abnormally long arms, thick neck, simian features, and low forehead, and his arms were so hairy, he could almost have pa.s.sed for one of The Folk.

The blacks had talked among themselves in Swahili, so I knew the names of all three whites. The man in the tent was a Doctor Caliban. The dapper old man was a Mr Rivers. The apish old man was a Mr Simmons. All three were from Manhattan Island.

I suspected that the old men were talking so loudly because they hoped to entice an evesdropper-me, of course-to come closer. I found the trip wire which would have set off some kind of alarm and got over that without disturbing it. I also detected the two rocks, made of papier-mache, which held electronic eye devices inside them. I had come close to wriggling between them, because that was the natural route to a depression in the ground behind a bush, an excellent place to hide while listening. Only because I happened to rub up against the false stone did I discover what it was.

I became even more cautious then. And I noticed that the flap of the tent in which Doctor Caliban had been exercising was now closed. For all I knew, he might be slipping out the rear of the tent to catch a spy.

If the two old men were part of a trap, they, certainly took no care to keep silent on matters that an enemy should not know. And they talked about Caliban as if he were deaf.

I crawled around to one side where I could see their lips. This was not as informative as listening, because I missed words now and then, but it was safer.

". . . really know what's got into Doc?" the dapper Rivers said. "Something sure as s.h.i.t is wrong."

"Looks as if he's gone ape," Simmons said.

Rivers laughed and spoke so loudly I could hear him. "Ape! Ape? You old Neanderthal, you're throwing stones at a gla.s.s house!"

"Listen, you sick legal eagle, you," Simmons said, "this is no time or place for your tired old bulls.h.i.t. This is serious, I'm telling you. Doc has a screw loose somewhere. I think it's the elixir; it has to be. The side effects are finally coming through. I warned him years ago, when he offered it to us. I ain't one of the world's greatest chemists for nothing."

I had been intrigued before. Now I was caught, a crocodile on a hook. Elixir!

"You really think he's crazy? After all these years of doing good, combating evil, fixing up all those criminals we caught, and reforming them?" Rivers said.

The apish old man said, "That's another thing . . ."

I missed what he said next, then his cigar left his lips. ". . . operated on them, he said. Cut out the gland that made them evil, he said at first. Then later on he quit talking about that gland, because there ain't no such thing, and he started to talk about re-routing and short-circuiting neural circuits. Now, I ask you, do you really believe that s.h.i.t? It was all right in the old days, because we didn't know much about the causes of crime then. But it's different now. We know it's caused mainly by psychosocioeconomic environments."

"Do we?" Rivers said. "What really do we know now more than we knew then, besides some things in the physical sciences and a little progress in the biological?"

"O.K., so they ain't as smart nowadays as they like to think they are," Simmons said. "But in the '30's, we could believe anything Doc told us because he told us it was so. But did you ever see him operate on a criminal? Not that I doubt he did something to them, handy as he is with a knife. But this c.r.a.p about curing criminals with surgery . . . know as well as I do that a criminal is the product of genetic predisposition plus environment."

"Doc isn't the man we knew, that's for sure," Rivers said. "I don't know. It's like seeing Lucifer fall. Well, that's stretching it. Doc's no evil angel, but . . . if you want to get right down to the honest-to-G.o.dcall-it-s.h.i.t-not-peanut-b.u.t.ter-reality, Doc may be right about the causes and cure of criminals."

Simmons looked as if he were grunting. He said, "Maybe. And maybe Doc was getting his kicks . . . well, I shouldn't say that, wouldn't, if it wasn't for his funny behavior now. You gotta admit he's been acting kinda peculiar lately. Now, I ain't saying he's become a Doctor Jekyll-Mr Hyde . . . but . . ."

They were silent for a while. Simmons puffed on his cigar. Rivers lit a long cigarette in a long cigarette holder. After a while, Simmons pulled some rectangles-photographs, I presumed-from the pocket of his bush jacket. He held them up so that the firelight illuminated them.

He said, "Looka the whang on that wild man! Did you ever see such a p.r.i.c.k on a white man?"

Rivers took one of the photos and studied it. "My tool is longer," he said. "Used to be, anyway. Eight inches. But it's skinny. I never saw such a shaft on a man except once."

"The son of a b.i.t.c.h is queer," Simmons said. "I was looking through the gla.s.ses when he got up after breaking that lion's neck. He had a hard-on you wouldn't believe outside a zoo. And he was coming like a Texas oil well."

"Yes, I know," Rivers said. "My choppers about dropped out. I saw Doc once, just once, and he's the only man I ever saw, black or white, with a dong as big as that Englishman's. In fact, I'll swear his was even thicker and longer."

"You saw Doc's c.o.c.k?" Simmons said. "When the h.e.l.l was that?"

". . . adventure of the Tsar of . . ." Rivers said. "You remember, Doc and I'd been a long time hiding . . . had to p.i.s.s . . . my eyes about flew the coop, believe me."

Simmons looked around uneasily. "Maybe we shouldn't be talking like this. Doc might . . ."

"You think he hasn't heard us a million times before? He knows how curious we've been. Personally, I think he's been listening to us for years. But what we said never seemed to bother him. You know what a b.u.t.ton-down lip he's got. And he's the most self-controlled man in the world; he couldn't admit that anything we said would stick in his craw. And maybe it doesn't. He knows he's the superman's superman!"

"After what I seen today, I ain't so sure," Simmons said. "I've never seen anything like it! But I can understand now why Doc is so hot to tangle with him. He wants to test his mettle on somebody who looks as if he could give him a hard time!"

The little man said, as if he hadn't heard Simmons, "You know, I used to put it out of my mind, or tell myself that Doc was just keeping his private life entirely to himself. But he never lied to us, as far as I know. And he always said he led too dangerous a life and was too busy and always off on some quest or other. He couldn't afford to get married; it made him too vulnerable. That's understandable. But he went further. He said he didn't want to get involved with any woman because it wouldn't be fair to waste her time. That's understandable. But then he claimed he had nothing at all to do with women. Nothing at all! Now, didn't you ever think that was peculiar? No a.s.s at all! No p.u.s.s.y, no nothing, for G.o.d's sakes!"

"Well," Simmons said, "he coulda been jerking off. But it just doesn't seem like Doc to be doing that. I always thought maybe he wasn't so perfect, after all. You know, maybe he was paying for his mental and physical superiority to the rest of us-to every f.u.c.king man in the world-by not being able to get a hard-on. Could be. Jesus Christ! There has to be some sort of compensation in this world!"

"There does?" Rivers said. "Who told you that, you shoddy imitation of a philosophizing orangutan!"

"One a these days, I'll orangutan it all the way up your decrepit a.s.shole," Simmons said.

"No, you won't. I don't allow anything but high-quality s.h.i.t up there," Rivers said.

They talked for a moment with their hands over their mouths as they held their smokes in their mouths. Then I saw Rivers' lips.

"You know, Doc and . . . as if they were brothers . . . coloring . . . black hair and gray eyes and a darker skin, but Doc has . . ."

They talked on, rambling much. I got the impression that these two octogenarians had known each other intimately for a long long time. They had been through much with each other, and they were very fond of each other. The abuses and insults they loosed at each other were good-natured, indeed, their second natures. And as I listened-read, rather-I understood that they were here on The Last Great Adventure. There had been three other men who had shared their exploits and dangers in the past. But these were dead now. The two old men expected to die soon, but they had insisted on coming to Africa with Caliban, and he had reluctantly agreed.

Now, they were sorry they had come. Or, at least, disturbed. Something had happened to the good doctor. He was here to hunt me down and to kill me. Not with guns. In bare-hand combat. This was not at all like Doc. He had always been averse to killing. He had only done so when he absolutely had to. And he had maintained that every man, no matter how evil, was worth saving.