Out in the hazy hot morning, perhaps still within the forest shadows but certainly very near our weak man-made stockade, the tiger roared.
Everyone in the dining-room — except Jed, I think — looked first at Sam Loomis when that shattering voice outside struck at our marrow. They were probably not even aware of doing it, and surely had no conscious idea that he could protect them; they simply turned like children to the strongest adult present in the emergency. Even Vilet; even Father Fay.
Sam stood up and finished his breakfast tea. “If’n it’s all right with you,” he said, to a spot of air between Father Fay and the doddery inn-keeper, “I’ll step out for a lookaround.” I don’t suppose they were asking even that much of him, so far as they knew. He strolled to the door and stepped outside.
I said — to whom I don’t know, maybe Vilet — “My bow’s upstairs.” Jed was standing then, ponderously, and he shook his head at me. I don’t think he had once spoken since we came down to breakfast. I couldn’t wait to understand him but darted up to our room. When I returned with my bow and arrow-quiver, they were all milling around a little. I saw Jed talking to Father Fay in an undertone, the priest listening in a distracted, unbelieving way, watching his pilgrim flock also and shaking his head. I couldn’t hear what Jed was saying. Jerry was at the front window, his mother hanging on to him or he would have been outdoors. Father Fay frowned at my bow as I slipped past him and Jed, but did not speak nor try to stop me when I ducked out after Sam.
Sam was just standing out there in the sunny and dusty street with a few others. I saw occasional wind-devils rise and whirl and die as a sultry breeze hurried by on no good errand.
The elderly village priest — I heard one of the villagers call him Father Delune — had come out of the rectory by his little church, and was in the street craning his neck to look up at the bell-tower. He called — to us, I guess, since we were nearest — “Yan Vigo’s going up for a look-out. We don’t want too many in the street. It may be illusion.” His voice was good, windy and amiable and edged with fear under control. “They should stay within and pray it be illusion.” Sam nodded, but he was watching me. At that moment a weedy boy climbed out through a louvered window of the bell-tower and hauled himself up astraddle of the wheel-symbol, a good ten feet in diameter, out of which the spire rose. He would have been some thirty feet above ground, and could probably see over the stockade on all sides of the village. I remember thinking Yan had it pretty good.
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?”