“Better to share the plenty you got with your fellows. That’s the proper way for one to live.”
Tongue Kills smiled unpleasantly. “You speak of many strange things, but I see no signs of power. It matters not the kind of words but how they are used. I, too, know of other languages and other words. I have made the knowing of them my business.” His tone deepened ever so slightly. “You do not want to know of them, white man.”
Malone plucked a sprig of grass between thumb and forefinger and stuck it between his teeth. “Shoot, I’m always willin’ to learn. And since I ain’t goin’ nowhere, why don’t you take the time to enlighten me?”
Tongue Kills’s expression darkened. He nodded once, cleared his throat with a rumble, then spoke afresh. That extraordinary booming, reverberant voice spoke out, rustling the grass, its tone and emphasis sending birds fleeing from their nests and insects rushing to burrow deeper into the ground as the ominous speaker dropped one turgid obloquy after another into the previously calm pool of reality.
“Man, your spirit cannot escape the cradle of dung in which it was originally nurtured, a place shunned by the lowest living things, a birthplace so vile that it is avoided even by the beetles that seek to feed in such holes. The odor of the misbegotten clings to you and can never be washed off, so that the stink of your ever-putrefying soul turns others from you no matter whither you may seek to flee.”
As Tongue Kills spoke, Malone felt himself growing distinctly hot under the collar and, somewhat surprisingly, not only there. Looking down, he saw that the fringe of his deerskin leggings was beginning to curl slightly at the tips. Wisps of smoke emerged from several as if they were not strips of cured leather but rather thick, sweat-sodden matches. He began to perspire and, despite the chill of approaching evening, experienced an unexpected desire to be rid of attire that had become suddenly suffocatingly warm. It was clear that Tongue Kills played for keeps.
Not that Malone was about to take those words lying down or even standing up. He’d picked up a turn of phrase or two in his travels, damned if he hadn’t: the rapierlike accusations of cotton auctioneers in Savannah, the seasoned dressings-down of unyielding Prussian drill instructors. The lamentations of Calcut merchants and the withering complaints of the camel traders of old Araby. Lisboa’s fisherwomen had shared their best and most scatological insults with him, and once, severely in need of a trim, he’d had his scalp professionally singed by the singsong calumnies of a famed Canton trader in opium.
Why, subsequent to one pleasant evening’s drinking and concomitant commentary on Washington politics, none other than Dan’l Webster himself had ventured admiringly that when properly inspired, Amos Malone’s palate was truly an anvil of imprecations on which the mountain man’s tongue could hammer out insult after admirable insult, a river of inventive invective as grandiosely appalling as New York City’s sewer system after a major summer storm.
“I might tolerate that,” he replied carefully, “if it didn’t come from someone so ugly that mere sight of ’im would shock the feathers off a constipated buzzard, the taste of whom would induce in a flock o’ starvin’ mosquitoes permanent indigestion soon as they discovered that their quarry had urine for blood. Why, your countenance’d drive a dozen o’ the world’s homeliest women to sworn celibacy an’ turn the Medusa herself to stone.”
As he listened to this, Tongue Kills’s expression did indeed begin to harden, if not actually to fossilize. His skin began to redden noticeably until, in the gathering darkness, he was actually glowing slightly. Currents of agitated air streamed upward from his head and shoulders like heat waves rising from a paved road on a blistering July noon.
“Your mother,” the medicine man retorted, his voice crackling like a newly set bonfire of Georgia fatwood, “must have mated with a snail, for it is clear that slime was the sole offspring of that union. You reek of man’s civilization, of noxious hypocrisy and embalming greed, of the air you have infected and the water you have poisoned. The soil itself recoils from beneath your feet, and the air screams as it is tortured by your lungs. The fecal matter that emerges from your body is the only pure thing you give back to the suffering earth, on which you are the foulest of parasites, in which even other parasites refuse to dwell.”
Malone was forced to remove his heavy jacket, from which dense smoke was beginning to billow. He threw it down and began jumping madly on it to stomp out the flames that were trying to spurt from the sleeves. His exposed forearms, big around as aspen trunks, began to blister, and the sweat pouring from his forehead threatened to blind him. Even his teeth felt hot.
But he who listens learns. It struck Malone as more than slightly significant that Tongue Kills had spoken not of white man’s civilizations but of man’s. As they continued to trade dysphemisms of greater and greater heat, it set him to wondering as to just exactly whom he might be contending with by the shore of the wandering stream.
Not only the palaverers but the atmosphere surrounding them grew hotter as their calefacting conversation sent the very molecules of the air into an agitated frenzy. They tried to flee, crashing into one other and raising the temperature near the campsite to nearly tropical levels. Malone’s overheated pants and leggings joined his well-pounded jacket underfoot as he was forced to expand the range of his frantic dance. Even the mountain man’s hair was beginning to sizzle.
Meanwhile, Tongue Kills’s smile grew forced, and though he did not give off any smoke, be looked more than a mite disconcerted. Heat continued to pour off him in waves, and he glowed like the big lantern that hung outside the Three Whalers’ Tavern in Boston’s High Street.
When an uneasy Worthless whinnied, Malone realized he’d better do something quick. A mere glance from his mount was suggestive of something seriously askew, but when he whinnied, it was time for a man to give serious consideration to proximate possibilities. It meant ordinary folk had better clear out fast, and the commonly fearful seek cover.
From the beginning there had been a glow in Tongue Kills’s eyes, a particular glow that made Malone suddenly squint with recognition. He realized that he’d seen that exact thing before in another place, far off in the southern seas. It wasn’t a glow that belonged in a man’s eyes, which led him to a corollary that was as revelatory as it was inescapable.
“You win,” he gasped, his throat scalded, the skin on the back of his neck beginning to curl from the heat. “I can’t match you fury for fury, hot word for hot word. You’ve beat me.”
Tongue Kills’s triumphant expression twisted into a sneer. “It is good that you realize this, but it will not save you. I warned you, and you did not heed but chose instead to challenge. You will die, as will all who try to come to this place.”
Malone was down to his long johns now, and only the fact that they hadn’t had any contact with soap or water for an inexcusable length of time kept him from being spontaneously combusted right then and there by Tongue Kills’s unceasing cataract of execration.
“What’ll happen to me, I don’t know, but there’s just one thing more I have to say about you,” he rasped out. “It’s a durn shame that your mastery of heated language happens to be inversely proportional to your humanity.”
Tongue Kills gave a start, then a cry of outraged realization as the paradox wrapped him in its inescapable grip. His fury imploded, inescapably self-contained. Malone shielded his face with an arm as heat, the by-product of all that anger, rushed outward in waves from his antagonist. Frustration, volatile as black powder, erupted. Somewhere behind him Worthless was whinnying loudly while trying to simultaneously keep all four feet off ground grown suddenly intolerably warm.