When I reached Sam I knew he wanted to send me back inside. But I had brought my bow; he would not wound me that way. He just said: “Hear what I do, Jackson ?”
I did hear it, from near the gate, where the guard who had admitted us the day before was again posted. He was in light military armor today, helmet, bronze breastplate, leather guards on thighs and crotch — all no particular use against tiger except to the extent that it made him feel better. He was carrying a heavy spear instead of a javelin — that did make sense-and his honest hands transmitted to the spear-head a tremor as if he were in the peak hours of a malaria; but he was staying at his post. The sound Sam meant was a light clicking or chopping noise, combined with blasts of soft snuffling breath like a giant’s bellows working on invisible fire. You’ve probably noticed some little house-cat quivering her jaws on nothing when she sees a bird fly overhead out of reach or light on a high branch and scold her; along with the jaw motion there’s a small hoarse cry, a kind of exasperated explosion not quite spitting or snarling, simple frustration, tension of the thing she would do if the bird could be grasped. But this noise outside the stockade gate was more than fifty feet away from Sam and me, and I heard it plainly.
The gate guard called: “I can see the shadow of him through the cracks!”
Sam said: “Jackson, you — suppose you go tell them people to stay inside.”
I moved back uncertainly toward the inn doorway as Father Delune walked soberly by us to the gate. I had to stop, look back, learn what the priest meant to do. He stood right against the logs, praying, his arms spread out as if to protect the whole village with his dumpy old body, and his voice rang musically in the hot street. The breeze that clearly brought me the words also brought the smell of tiger. “If therefore thou art a servant of Satan, whether beast or witch or wizard in beastly form, we conjure thee depart in the name of Abraham, of the Holy Virgin Mother Cara, in the name of Saint Andrew of the West whose village this is, in the name of all the saints and powers that inhabit the daylight, depart, depart, depart! But if a servant of God, if thou art sent to exact a penance and all but one of us unknowing, then grant us a sign, servant of God, that we may know the sinner. Or if it must be, then come among us, servant of God, and his will be done! Amen!”
Yan Vigo’s voice floated down with a break in it: “He goin’ awayl — maybe.” His pointing arm followed the motion of the tiger who had evidently come from near the palings into the range of Yan’s vision. “Standing out in the road. Father! It’s a male, an old male.”
“Depart! In the name of Abraham, depart!”
“Got a dark spot on the left, Father, like the one come Onto Hannaburg last year… Just standing there.”
Then — so much for my errand — Jed came out of the inn, and Father Fay with him, and though I mumbled something neither seemed aware of me. Vilet was back in the entrance staring after Jed, and the white clothes of the pilgrims made a shifting cloud behind her. Father Fay spoke plainly then: “No, my son, I cannot consent, cannot bless such a thing, and you must not interfere with the duty of my flock, which is to pray.” Then all the pilgrims — Jerry and his father and mother, and the white-faced girl, and the old people, were coming out in the street, and rather than be stopped by me I think they would have walked through me if I hadn’t stepped aside.
“Father,” said Jed, “if you will not, then I must ask this other man of God.” And he walked up to the gate, to Father Delune, passing Sam as if he didn’t know him.
Vilet called to me: “Davy, he don’t hear a thing I say. Don’t let him do it, Davy!” Do what? — I didn’t know. I felt as if we were all moving about in a fog, no one hearing the others — if little Jerry over there in his white robe quit his vague grinning and said something to me, I’d only see his mouth open, I’d hear nothing except the echo of the tiger’s roar and that wet chopping of teeth.
Yan Vigo shouted down again: “He goin’ west side. Can’t see — Caton’s house cuts me off.” For that boy up there on the church tower it was probably the biggest day in a dull life; you could hear the fun in him like dance music the other side of a door. I was near enough myself to childish thinking to read the envy in Jerry too as he looked up at the tower.
Father Delune came away from the gate, listening to Jed. For a few minutes we made an aimless huddle there in the street — Father Delune, Sam, fed, myself, and a nameless man from down the street. I saw no one who suggested an active hunter, let alone a Guide. I could look down the entire length of Main Street to its far end, where a smaller gate faced the wilderness. The Guide’s house should be outside that.
Jed was suddenly on his knees to Father Delune. “It must be so, Father! Give me your blessing to go out theah and bring him onto me, so to spare the village, and take away my own burden of sin. I won’t be afeared no-way if I can go with your blessing.”
Sam said harshly: “You be no more a sinner than any other man hereabouts.”
But Father Delune checked him with a crinkled hand, raised to ask the rest of us to be still and let him think. “It’s not fitting,” he said. “I never heard of such an action, it’s not in reason. There may be sinful pride in it — my dear son, who art thou?”
“Jed Sever’s my name, a grievous sinner all my life, and who’s to say I a’n’t bnmg the tiger onto the village account of me? Father, bless my going out to him. I want to die in the hope of forgiveness at the throne of Abraham.”
“Nay, but — why, we all sin, from the moment of birth, but I can’t think thou’st been so — so—” and Father Delune looked curiously, anxiously at Sam, even at me, wanting some kind of support from us I think, but hardly knowing what we could give nor how to ask for it. “Sin, fed Sever — it writes itself in the face, one may say. You strangers, you be friends of this man?”
“My cousin by marriage,” said Sam, “and a good heart, the best, Father, but over-zealous. His conscience—”
“You don’t understand,” said Jed. “Don’t heed him, Father. He can’t see the sin in my heart. The beast won’t go tifi I do. I know that, I feel it.”
“Why,” said Father Delune — “he may have gone a’ready, and no need of all this.”
“Where’s your Guide, sir?” Sam asked.
“Away. Three-day hunt with our best men.”
The tiger roared, somewhere beyond the jumble of old houses on the west side of the vifiage. I heard a rattling, a dull vibration, a crunch of cracking wood. Sam shouted up to the church tower: “Is he in, boy?”
“Nah.” Yan Vigo’s voice had gone high as a girl’s. “Think he caught a claw in the bindings and something bust, but it a’n’t down.” Vigo meant the fastenings that held the stockade logs; they were leather thongs that had been bound there wet and allowed to dry, shrinking to a tight fastening. Only prosperous cities can afford iron bolts or wire. “He’s circling around to the back gate.”
“Father, bless me and let me go!”
I screwed up my own courage to speak: “Father, I’m a dead shot with this bow. May I try from one of the roofs?”
“No, son, no. Wound him and he’ll destroy the village entirely.”
That wasn’t true and I knew it. A tiger is only a great cat. A cat suddenly hurt will run and not fight at all unless cornered or unable to use his legs. But I also knew it was useless to instruct a priest. I saw Father Fay’s pilgrims kneeling together in the street, in front of the church. In spite of common sense I made one more try: “Father, I promise you, I could place one of these in his eye, I’ve practiced on knotholes at fifty yards—”