The Mantooth Part 30

The four of them stood again on the ledge, the cub jumping playfully at the tiger's face. Avatar patiently eluded the mock biting, and pushed her away with softened claws. Like Akar before him, he too found it hard to leave them, and still harder to expression the affection and grat.i.tude he felt.

Retrieving the cub, Kalus knelt directly in front of him and gently, cautiously stroked the great head. 'Don't worry,' he said.

'I understand your silence better than many who can speak. I know you have to leave. And I'm proud, so very proud that I could help you, and be a part of your life. I will never forget you.' He put his face against its shoulder, and let a few tears pa.s.s. 'It's the way of it, my friend. But wherever you go, a part of me will always follow.'

The tiger stood still, confused, but he did not pull away. Again their eyes met, and in that moment it seemed that the two worlds, animal and man, could truly touch. The tiger pulled back slowly. Kalus raised himself and took a deep breath.

'Goodbye,' said Sylviana. 'I know you can't understand. . .but you gave back to me someone very dear.'

The tiger turned and retreated down the slope, as human eyes felt again the bittersweet flow of mortal life.

Chapter 31

It was evening before Kalus said anything to Sylviana of the morning's adventures. First there had been work to do, then he felt reluctant to worry her. Finally, as they sat side by side on a flat stone before the diminishing fire, she asked him.

'Where did Avatar take you?' For an answer he reached into his pouch and took out the cactus buds, and laid them on the stone between.

'Did you ever see these, or hear of them? They come from a desert plant that is like but unlike others I have seen. He was very intent on my eating them---he risked much---but I wanted to talk to you first.'

She took one in her fingers, and held it up against the light. 'If I didn't know better..... They look like peyote b.u.t.tons.'

'What are they?'

'A hallucinogenic cactus, used by the Native Americans in dances and religious ceremonies. It's a kind of drug, if that's the right word for something found in Nature. It's supposed to open the mind, and let you see things beyond the physical reality.'

'Is it a kind of magic, then?' He was fascinated and intrigued that the tiger had experienced this elevated state, and wanted him to feel it, too.

'I guess you could call it that. But one very dangerous to the young, or to anyone who doesn't know what they're doing.'

'Have you ever eaten them?'

'No. I've smoked marijuana, which is safer..... But Kalus, these can't possibly be peyote.'

'Why not?'

'Because if the tiger had eaten them he'd have gone crazy: he wouldn't have understood. He wouldn't have been able to think it through.'

'And maybe for that same reason he wasn't afraid. You still don't see it, do you? An animal's mind isn't less than ours, only different. He lives in his world as clearly, and understands it as well, as you and I. He is not a half-wakened child.'

'Well, a.s.suming all that's true, and that this is peyote. Do you think you're ready for it? Because I promise you, it would take your mind to places it's never been. It could be very frightening.....

Now you're scaring me.'

Indeed, he had all but stopped listening, gazing instead with fixed intensity upon the mystical substance before him.

'I want to try, Sylviana, if only for the pains it cost me to bring it here.' He looked at her intently. 'Where Avatar leads, I want to follow if I can.'

'I can't stop you, but..... Oh, Kalus. I'm so afraid you'll hurt yourself. And after all we've been through.'

He saw the wisdom of this, and her deep concern. 'What if eat just one, and you are here with me?'

The endless conflict between safety and wild freedom once more presented itself. Both felt it clearly. She hesitated, then said.

'If we do it, we do it together.'

'All right.'

Kalus put a bud in his mouth. Sylviana did the same.

'This is amazing.'

Roughly an hour had pa.s.sed, and these words so broke the stillness that it seemed as if Kalus had then and there invented speech. And indeed, so far as concerned the virgin sea on which they now sailed, eternal and boundless, these were the first words, and he and the woman-child, the true Adam and Eve.

For some time now he had remained as a near statue, only his eyes and forehead working, studying in alternate wonder his hand, the circle of stones, then the altar and mirror behind it. Sylviana watched him, feeling the same awe of the experience, and perhaps to a greater degree, the accompanying danger. She answered simply.

'Yes.'

Her voice, like a pebble in a pool, touched the gla.s.sy waters of his spirit, sending out ripples of thought and feeling which seemed as endless as the pool itself. Regaining his center, he became placid with the wisdom of silence, until the shoots that stirred within him were ready to blossom once more in true speech. Sylviana was becoming concerned, but he had not forgotten her.

'All my days,' he said finally, 'I've judged life by the pale shadow of it in which I've often been forced to live, never guessing that the heart. . .the very bones of it. . .are ALIVE.' He paused.

'It seems to me now, as it did when I was a child, that no hope, no dream is ever fully lost, so long as the least fragment remains alive inside you. It becomes like a seed---sleeping, dormant. But not dead.

Until, if we can endure, and fight our way to a better place where sun and water yet flow, it is called gently back to life.'

He looked at her, tears streaming down his face. 'I am alive! And you, my endless miracle. Are alive, and here with me.'

She took his hand, so close, and pressed it to her lips.

'Be gentle, my loving Kalus. Be gentle. There are still so many wounds.'