“‘Hurry,’ the Creator squeaked, peering over the reem’s brow at their pursuers. ‘They’re nearly upon us.’
“‘Yes, oh yes,’ the reem acknowledged, holding back tears. ‘And the next time I stop they will certainly overtake us. Even though I am willing to die with you, Ngai, I would far rather die for you—but I’m exhausted, almost at my limit, and whatever befalls us, befalls us.’ She tactfully did not mention that Ngai might have solved this problem by granting her stamina along with his other tardy favors, but she was sensible of the irony of their plight.
“The dung beetle, who was not blessed with a sense of the ironic, had overheard this exchange between Ngai and the reem. He forsook the reem’s droppings to circle the beast and address her from a point just below her drooping snout.
“‘I love the Creator well,’ he piped, ‘for he has provided for me abundantly. The world is full of manure.
Tell the Sacred One to come down from your horns. I will then enclose him in a concealing brood ball.’
“‘A brood ball?’ exclaimed Ngai and the reem together.
“‘At your service, O Mighty One,’ replied the coprid. ‘By this expedient the reem may run ahead as decoy while you husband your strength and purchase enough time to reestablish your rightful rule.’
“The Creator, won over by the beetle’s sincerity, agreed. It was not pleasant being plastered up inside a dung ball, but it was preferable to being murdered.
“The reem, meanwhile, trotted off to the south, drawing the Creator’s enemies after. When next she stopped, they surrounded her—rather warily, she noted—and vilified her as both a traitor and a trollop.
Surely, they implied, she had done beastly things to entice Ngai to bestow such lethal armament upon her. Where was he, anyway?
“‘I have no idea why he equipped me with these horrors,’ the reem asserted, craftily scything her snout this way and that. ‘I asked him only for the birthright withheld from me on the Sixth Day of Creation—better eyesight or more gracefully turned ankles. After killing the dog with these horns—accidentally, you understand—I realized what a cruel trick the Creator had played on me, depriving me of my peaceful nature and equipping me with these abominations. I determined to use his evil gifts to wreak my vengeance upon him, for in that, I felt, there would be a great deal of justice.
However, Ngai saw me coming and fled Mount Tharaka toward the south. If you, my friends and fellows, will join me in this crusade, I am certain that very soon we will run the rapscallion to ground.’
“This speech much impressed the animals, most of whom followed her southward for three more days. I should add, however, that many of the dogs’ relatives demurred. Grumbling without much conviction about their comrades’ gullibility, they began the long trek home. On their way they chanced upon the brood balls of the beetle who had confined the Creator in some of the reem’s aromatic waste.
“‘Look,’ said one of the dogs. ‘See how large this ball grows. And the beetle does absolutely nothing to help increase its size. This demands our undivided and most reflective attention.’
“The dog’s many kith, kin, and kind sat down to observe the strange brood ball, while the coprid, who had begun to regret his involvement in the entire affair, stayed out of sight.
“Ngai was sweating in his little prison. He knew that, outside, the dog’s family sat in a suspicious ring, waiting for a fateful revelation. Although his strength and size were slowly returning, he was still no match for a pack of dogs. Therefore, making the best of a bad situation, he nourished himself on the surrounding dung (just as would the larva of a coprid) and mixed his sweat with the remaining material to provide the ball with an ever thinner and more transparent rind. This labor cost him much effort, and its sacred heat imparted to the brood ball’s surface a silver-gold glow.
“‘Ah ha!’ cried the dog’s family. ‘Here is the culprit, here is the Dastardly One responsible for our brother’s death.’ And they immediately came forward and began nosing the brood ball, which had by now attained the size of, say, a tsama melon.
“As it happened, all the other animals were returning from their unprofitable Wily God Chase when they saw the dog’s relatives playing ball with a luminous sphere. To winkle out the secret of the ball’s remarkable contents took them only a moment—that glow was a dead giveaway—whereupon they joined in the game.
“The Creator was kicked and pushed from one end of the bush veldt to the other, and in a short while his head ached fiercely. It had been all he could do to keep the expanding brood ball from splitting open and spilling him out on the ground—to be trampled, bitten, pecked, and gored. Probably to death.
Undoubtedly to death.
“And then the reem appeared. She narrowed her piggish eyes in an attempt to follow the action, but twilight had come and all she could really tell was that the animals were scurrying about in pursuit of an incandescent ball. My god, she thought, my God! Those animals have rooted out the truth.
“Shaking off her weariness, the reem charged. What she could see best, of course, was the glowing brood ball, and she rushed toward the shapes shoving it about.
“Ah, what a collision!
“The reem lifted the Creator into the sky with her horns. Upward and away he whirled, there to replace the moon he had broken.
“So that is how the reem acquired her horns, and likewise how the moon was restored to glory after a brief dethronement. Much is taken, but much abides.”
And, surrounded by hyenas, we continued to abide in the trees beside the water hole. Ah, but Helen had taken herself from me, I remembered, and my story had not really helped me to disguise this unsettling fact from myself.
Chapter Twenty-One
Late in the afternoon of the day following Alistair Patrick Blair’s lecture in Pensacola, Joshua was in a small community several miles north of the vast ordnance ranges of Eglin Air Force Base painting a water tower. He was suspended beneath the hemispherical belly of the tank in a set of rope falls, stretched out almost horizontal to the ground, when he saw a dark blue vehicle enter Blackwater Springs from the southeast. Lackadaisically rolling paint onto the underside of a thick steel supporting girder, he watched the automobile out of the corner of his eye. Its movement along the highway was in decided contrast to the little town’s stubborn lack of animation. So far, the most entertaining groundside event of the day had involved a pack of dogs. Heatedly quarreling among themselves, the dogs had followed a lame mongrel bitch into the alley behind the Okaloosa Cafe. You could see a lot from a hundred feet up, but in Blackwater Springs not very much of it was edifying.
Joshua was an employee of Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., a Fort Walton company specializing in sandblasting, painting, and sometimes epoxying a variety of large metal structures. Water tanks. Bridges.
Mining equipment. Towers. Joshua had been nearly six years on the job—ever since running away from home and arriving back in Florida from New York. Although he routinely checked his safety belt before changing altitudes beneath the tank, he had long since lost his fear of falling. The cardinal rule of the steeplejack, or water-tank mechanic, was to keep his brain in gear. Joshua usually did, for which reason, along with experience, he was probably the best man in a set of falls then employed by Gulf Coast Coating, Inc.
As talented aloft as Tarzan.
That was what Tom Hubbard, the president of the company, said about him. Hubbard knew Joshua’s worth, and Joshua knew that he knew it, and the result was that Joshua sometimes took liberties with his work schedule or made disparaging remarks about Hubbard’s business acumen. If the boss got his back up and canned him, Joshua could count on being rehired within a week or two, so long as he appeared repentant and asked for his job back. In six years Hubbard had canned and rehired him a grand total of fourteen times. This game united the two men in a resentful dependency on each other.