“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—”
It only annoyed him. “Impossible. And what if the tiger is a messenger of God? I’ll hear no more of that.” He asked Sam: “Is this your son?”
“My nephew, and like a son. It’s no empty brag, Father. I’ve seen him nail a—”
“I said I’d hear no more of that! Take the boy’s arrows, sir, and keep them till this is over.”
Sam had to take them, I had to yield them, both of us with blank faces. The pilgrims were singing.
The hymn was “Rock of Ages,” which is from Old Time, a commonplace hymn that has survived the centuries when a limitless literature of better music perished. Jerry’s voice amazed me, incredibly clear and sweet — well, I had never heard a trained boy soprano, and never did again until 1 came to Old City of Nuin, where the Cathedral trains them. At the second verse 1 heard someone behind me singing too — Vilet, my good warm Vilet still crying but singing through the sick snuffies and more or less on pitch. I couldn’t sing, nor did Sam, who stood near me holding the arrows loosely in the hand nearest me.
Down at the far end of the street, above the rear gate which stood as high as the rest of the palisade, about eight feet, down there in the shimmering heat of summer morning we understood there was a face watching our human uncertainties, tawny-pale, terrible and splendid. Across the light gold there were streaks of darker gold, as though between him and ourselves some defensive obstruction still cast the shadow of its bars — and to his eyes, some shadow on our faces too?
We had known it would come; maybe we had all known it would find us, in our various ways, unready. The pilgrims were all aware of that face at the end of the street, I think, but their music did not falter. Vilet stopped singing, however; I saw Jed lift her hand gently away from his arm, and then he was moving a step or two down the long street. At that moment the tiger’s face dropped out of view.
“He’s gone,” ViJet said. “See, Jed — he’s gone, I tell you.” She must have known as we all did that the tiger had not gone. Jed did not look now like a man crazily determined to rush into danger. He was smiling, with some sort of pleasure. He had gone only a little way beyond the kneeling, singing pilgrims. Father Delune was praying silently, his old hands laced together below his chin; I think he was watching Jed, but did nothing to detain him.
Nor could I, nor Sam. We were all in a way paralyzed, alone, not hearing each other, watching the empty spot at the end of the street, the blind gray-brown of weathered logs and tropic green of forest beyond. Jed’s face was pouring sweat as it had done the day before on the road. A tremor shook his hands and legs as if the earth were vibrating under him, yet he was going on, slowly, as one sometimes journeys in the sorrowful or terrifying or seeming-ludicrous adventures of a dream.
The tiger soared in an arc like the flight of an arrow, over the gate and into the village.
The tiger paused for a second, his eyes surveying, calculating lines of attack and retreat, measuring with a cat’s wonderful swift cleverness. Jed made no pause but walked on clumsy and brave, disregarding or not hearing the two priests who now called after him in horror to come back. Jed was holding his arms spread wide, as Father Delune had done when praying at the front gate, but Jed seemed more like a man groping for direction in the dark.
The tiger ran flowingly toward us along the hot street, not in a charge at first, but a rapid trotting run with head high, like a kitten advancing in sheer play, mimic attack. I suppose he could not have expected to see a human being walk toward him with those queer forbidding outspread arms. He rose on his hind legs in front of Ted and tapped at him with one paw. The motion seemed light, playful, downright absurd. It sent Jed’s massive body twisting and plunging across the street to crash against the gatepost of a house and lie there at the foot of it disembowelled, in a gush of blood.
The tiger did charge then, a tearing rush so swift that there was time to hear a woman scream only once; then I saw the green fire of his eyes blazing full on us while his teeth fumbled an instant and closed in Jerry’s back. Jerry’s mother screamed again and lunged at the beast with little helpless hands. A swing of his head evaded her without effort. He was trotting off down the street the way he had come, head high again, Jerry’s body in his jaws seeming no bigger than a sparrow’s. He was over the gate and into the wilderness, the woman silent but tearing her pilgrim’s gown to slash at her breasts and then beat her fists in the dust of the road.
I had snatched one of the arrows from Sam’s hand. I remember having it on the string when the tiger was running away down the street, and a black thing crashing against me which was Father Delune snatching my ann so that the arrow flew useless over the rooftops. He may have been right to do it.
Moments later Sam and Father Fay and I were with Vilet, who was fumbling at fed’s body as if there were some way she could make it live. “Mam Sever,” Father Fay said, and shook her shoulder, and glanced back at the other woman who needed him — but Father Delune and the older pilgrim women were helping Jerry’s mother into the church. “Mam Sever, you must think of yourself.”
She crouched on her heels glaring up at us. “You could’ve stopped him, the lot of you. You, Davy, I told you to stop him! Oh, what am I saying?”
“Likely we are all to blame,” said Father Fay. “But come away now. Let me talk to you.”
Sam’s hand on my shoulder was taking me away too. We were in some partly enclosed place, the doorway of a shop I think, and Sam was talking to me, bewildering me more than ever, for it was something about Skoar. He shook me to get me out of my daze. “Davy, will you listen once? I’m saying it was just near-about fifteen years past, and one of them so’t of average places—”