The Mantooth Part 48

'The men of j.a.pan, Kataya's ancestors, were every bit as cruel as the Germans during World War II. They killed millions in their march through Asia, raping women to death, cutting men to pieces, never sparing the children..... So that when America finally developed the atomic bomb, those with the power to use it had very little sympathy left. But loosing that atomic death, whose lingering effects were not yet known, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, making war against the innocent women and children of that tragic country..... One atrocity doesn't justify another.' And while he was not sure she would understand the parallel, he knew no other way of reaching her.

'The problem with revenge, Sylviana, is that you never hurt the people you're trying to, but only create new victims. Your country condemned to a slow and horrible death, by all the ills and cancers of radiation poisoning, more than a million men, women and children who had no knowledge of, and took no willing hand in, the butcheries of their military government.'

'I don't care!' cried the young woman bitterly. 'You have to care,' said Stenmark grievously, 'Even if it happened before you were born. And even then, that's only the smaller part of Kataya's anger. You lost your father, as we all lost those dear to us..... Imagine if you had lost Kalus, in the full flower of your pure and uncorrupted love for him? And not only Kalus, but the innocent life his seed had planted in your womb.' But Sylviana only wept harder, unable to feel anything but her own pain.

'She may be the last j.a.panese left alive,' he continued. 'And the silent suffering forced on the women of that country by their culture is beyond any power of mine to convey. Should it all be for naught? Hate the men of that time if you want; sometimes I do myself.

But not the women. G.o.d love them.....

'She has the right to bear a child, Sylviana, and to choose that child's father. Think about that the next time you find yourself hating her, or despising the blessed and innocent life that now grows inside her. I don't think you'll have the heart to hate her then.

Not in your worst moments.'

But it was all too much for her: too overwhelming to forgive, or even understand. She raised herself, angrily pushing away the hands that would have comforted her, and ran out of the room with a wordless cry of pain and self-loathing. And kept on running, as if the Devil ran behind her.

In time she slowed to a walk, though she could no more stop moving than deny her lungs the air they screamed for. 'Just walk!' she cried.

'WALK. Until you can't feel anything.'

But after another mile she stopped, and knelt down and wept for the third time. Because she knew that she would do it. She would betray the one she loved most. Until she made him feel her pain, thinking nothing of his own---

'I don't care!' she cried, raging, the three words which so often precede the worst that we are. And though they were not entirely true in her case, the tragic end is often identical.

She would go through with the evil act. She would do it.

Chapter 47

That night Kalus dreamed he was alone in a dark cave, too small and dank for a man. But the light rose slowly through a stone-lipped entrance, and he saw a familiar form beside him as he sank into the wall, to watch. Kamela lay with three cubs beside her. But two had been turned to stone. He struggled to wake himself, because he knew what was to come.

A large wolf entered, looking black, and bared its yellow fangs.

Another stood guard outside as the earth parted to admit the terrible and magnificent b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Shar-hai. He entered, silent as death, and lifted the living cub and set it gently, almost lovingly, in a corner.

Kamela never once moved, or changed her expression as they came closer, snarling s.a.d.i.s.tically.

They raped her, as he struggled to break free. Only then it was no longer Kamela, but Sylviana they raped, and the face of Shar-hai became human as it tore at her. He struggled desperately and called her name as Smith and Rawlings pinned him to the floor. BUT THEY'RE MY FRIENDS!

He cried out to her with heart-crushing pa.s.sion, as the sound of it filled his ears, and woke him.

He lay on his back, wet with sweat, unable to remember. He threw off the sleeping bag which now seemed to him a coffin, or a mummy's wrap.

He tried to shake off the dream, but the images of Kamela's rape had never left him, and those of Sylviana as the victim transferred themselves with terrifying ease. His own reality, as it returned to him, seemed far less real. And it came as no surprise as he recognized the human face of Shar-hai. It was William, his teeth like knives.

The sun was climbing: she would be awake. But this was only an afterthought, as he ran toward the compound. He threw open the first door, then the second, and burst into the room he had never seen. She was there, half dressed, seeming but a continuation of the dream from which he felt he had not woken. For there was no waking from the truth.

'Sylviana,' he pleaded, closing the door while she glared at him.

'You must not see William today. I have seen a terrible vision. And I know, as I have always known..... He will rape you, and try to hurt you! Perhaps he will even (the thought was unendurable), KILL you.'

She forced herself to finish dressing calmly, as he forced himself not to touch her. But as she tried to walk past him as if he did not exist, he could contain himself no longer. He seized her by the arms, and both lost control.

'You can't go to him!' he shouted. 'I won't LET you.'

And his hands were like claws. Then they softened, along with his eyes, and he all but begged her. 'PLEASE.'

'Take your hands off me!' she cried, breaking free with a terrible strength of her own. 'Don't you touch me, ever!' He drew back from her, trembling.

'Haven't you punished me long enough?' he said. 'I am SORRY. For this. For everything. I am in agony; is that what you wanted? But I am also afraid for you, mortally afraid. In some things you are still very naive. You can't see, no one can see, what he will do to you! But I know the look in his eyes, because I have seen it before. It stood in front of me in the arena, at no greater distance than the length of my sword---'

'Shut up!' she screamed. 'You shut up! What do you know about MEN? You couldn't, because you're barely more than an ape yourself. Go back to your beloved hill-people, and eat rotten meat in the dirt!'

But here she paused, remembering her purpose. And through the heat of the first real hatred she had ever felt for him, came the cold touch of poise in the act of betrayal, and she knew with a twisted thrill what it was to surrender to Evil.

'But if you're really worried,' she said placidly, 'Wait for me at the Vale of the Obelisk. I'll meet you there at noon, to tell you of our love-making. And then we'll say goodbye, forever.'

She strode out, and left him shaking. He fell to his knees and wept, much as William had screamed, to find his lover dead. He was alone in a dark cave, too small and dank for a man.....

William did not wake, because he had not slept. He told himself that he was letting it build inside him, mounting toward the kill. But in truth he was far beyond even that. The amphetamines he had injected though every voice of body and mind cried against it, ate him like a cancer.

He had lost all control. This would be an act of vengeance, but not his vengeance. Somewhere in the mincer of pain and loss he had become the very thing he had fought all his life against, what he swore he would never become: an instrument in someone else's, someTHING else's hands. He could not admit this. He could not admit, or think, of anything. For his mind was no longer his own. Not by a conscious act of submission---

He gave a violent cry and hurled a bottle at the crumbling half-wall.

As it shattered, as he saw the broken gla.s.s and knew what it could do to human flesh, he remembered his purpose. In large, painful gulps he drained most of a second bottle, letting the wine take the place of blood in his veins.

He would be Master yet. The sun was up and it was day. He would have her, and then destroy her. Then destroy himself. Nothing else mattered, and Nothing never needed justification. It simply was, the only truth: the hole when the bottom fell out. It was the naked razor, stalking through the streets, cutting out men and women at random.

Letting some grow fat for its later pleasure. Wantonly hewing the poor, who though possessed of a greater capacity for suffering, had reached the limits of endurance and could be tortured no more.

He had become a willing servant of the thing he had always fought, and feared. But he did not care.

He did not care.

When he came to her, as arranged, there was a moment when Sylviana saw what Kalus had seen: a wild, desperate hunger in his eyes, that could no longer feed on things which the earth gave as food. They wanted not flesh, but blood, not nourishment, but to mock the very act of nourishment. They could not be fed, or appeased, any more than one could quench the rape of napalm fire.

She turned away, and felt her heart throb violently in revulsion and fear. Only the perverse pride and will that had slowly taken hold of her, kept her from running away at the sight of him. This, and the stubborn naivete of the illusioned, which told her this instinctive fear was a flaw of perception: that true, malignant evil did not exist, and that things could not possibly come to the ends envisioned by nightmare imagination. It was the same voice that told the world the Holocaust could not happen, was not happening, even as six million Jews, Russians, intellectuals, h.o.m.os.e.xuals and other defenseless minorities, were led to the fire. She listened to that voice, and made it her island of hope, the one that made the twisted dream of murder and healing, kindness through cruelty, destruction and rebuilding, still possible. Like one who had stared too long at the sun, insisting there was no danger, she was completely blind.