‘I suppose I could easily have left you. But everything here has meaning: all my purpose seems to be locked into the secrets of the Vorrh. I don’t know how, but it’s possible that you are a part of that. And anyway, I would leave no creature to the mercy of those man-eating monstrosities.’
‘But what if it was they who were a part of your destiny here?’ asked Ishmael intently.
‘Then it was their destiny to die and my destiny to help them do so. You were simply the trigger to the event.’
The cyclops fell quiet; being a trigger to somebody else’s event was far beyond his experience, and he was not sure how comfortable he was with the notion.
They walked for three hours on a high ridge that petered out into a solid plane of trees.
‘There is the centre,’ said Williams, ‘the core.’ He pointed across into the middle of the dense mass. He unslung his bow and looked around. ‘Stay here. I shall return in a short while.’
Before Ishmael could protest, he walked out of sight, using the shoulder of the ridge as a screen between them. The cyclops sat down and examined his bandaged leg. He heard the arrow loose and felt the strange emptiness in its wake. Ten minutes later, the Bowman came back to stand over him. The same look of loss and confusion had stolen his confidence again. His hands were stained black from the bow and he was searching Ishmael’s face for an answer to which neither of them could find the question.
Tsungali always completed a task once he had undertaken it, but something in him had deserted him this time; his purpose had dwindled. His prey had power and identity, and he was not alone. They were ahead of him, and all he trusted was behind. Last night’s dream had coaxed him to another place, a place that no longer existed. He stopped suddenly and looked at his hands, holding Uculipsa. The old rifle with its inscriptions and dents, with its recently splintered stock, suddenly looked as tired as he. The talismans that lined his body felt heavy and sullen. His age and the strangeness of this country passed through all his protections. For the first time, he understood momentum and it stopped him in his tracks. Why was he doing this? For whom? He sat down and forgot his function. A soft footfall was approaching behind him, and for the first time in his adult life he did not hear it as fear. He stayed still and waited.
‘Little one!’ the old voice said. ‘Little one, why are you lost here?’
He could not turn, but did not need to. He looked at his hands and the blue, wrinkled sheen of the skin. Behind him, his grandfather said, ‘Come home. This place is full of demons and forsaken ones; there is nothing for you here.’
Before him, he heard voices. Williams and his companion were within easy range.
Their silence had become dark and uneasy. Ishmael glanced at his sullen friend apprehensively. ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked. Williams looked into the distance.
‘The shot was flawed,’ he said quietly. ‘The arrow curved and fell short.’
Ishmael did not know how to respond; something in him instinctively preferred to keep the subject of the bow at a distance. In an attempt to change the subject he asked, ‘Are we walking into the core?’
‘In that direction. The arrow leads in that direction.’
Ishmael looked back and forth from the slippery path to Williams’ face, trying to understand the mood and colour of the other man’s introspection.
‘She is struggling,’ said Williams to himself, ignoring the limping cyclops at his side. The sun was becoming strong again, and the breath of the trees was coagulating with it to make the air soupy and moist. ‘This has never happened before,’ continued the Englishman. He looked at the bow in his outstretched hand, disregarding the path beneath his feet.
Ishmael did not understand, and the man’s mood swings were worrying him. Doubt had crawled into their relationship; the offered protection and care was threatened by Williams’ disengagement.
‘I think the bow wants you,’ announced Williams, and the squirm of fear in Ishmael’s gut increased to a shudder. ‘She bleeds and strains towards your hand.’
Williams stopped dead in the track, his arm outstretched, the black bow quivering.
Ishmael blinked at the now-terrifying object held towards him. Williams had shut his eyes against the touch, and the bow swayed slightly, as if its horizontal curve was trying to match the cyclops’ straining eyelids. Ishmael had no intention of touching the eldritch thing. ‘I don’t want this. It’s your bow, I don’t want it.’
‘It’s not about what you want,’ said Williams, his eyes still pressed shut. ‘Come; take her from my hands.’
Tsungali knew that the voices of men, like their breath, did not always live in this world alone. He knew they could pass into others, and sometimes bring back different sayings. That was what the child, Irrinipeste, was so wondrous at doing: her voice had passed into many worlds and brought great wisdom back. So, it could be the voice of his grandfather behind him; but it could also be the voice of a ghost or demon who had stolen it. If he believed, and turned to confront it, he would be lost.
‘Come, take my hand,’ his grandfather said.
In that moment, he heard the echo of those words spoken above him, in the mouth of his prey. Without looking back, he looped up towards the track ahead of them, no longer caring about the noise he made in his approach.
He crept with speed to the edge of the track and saw them in his path, unprepared and engaged in a type of bizarre Whiteman’s game. They had become silent, and the Bowman, the one he knew, held his weapon away from his body, thrusting it in the face of a smaller man.
All this Tsungali saw in a fraction of a second. Whatever this ritual was, it had left them exposed and unprepared: the field was his. He attached the long-bladed bayonet and bolted a round into the breech, then climbed up onto the track and began to charge, head down like a bull, the blade cleaving through space towards them.
So intent was Williams in his self-imposed blindness that he did not hear the fast rustle of leaves or the velocity of the twigs breaking behind the cyclops. But Ishmael did, and he swung around, glaring down to where he imagined he would see the squat yellow bodies of the attacking anthropophagi. To his shock, he was confronted by the charging blur of an enormous black warrior carrying a rifle, a viscous knife gleaming at its snout. It was coming fast.
Ishmael did the only thing that he knew would awaken Williams into that lethal moment: he snatched the bow from his hands with such force that it jarred the Bowman’s eyes open and alert.
The cyclops turned again to the assailant, and his glare was like a slap across the hunter’s eyes. This was not a Whiteman – it was not a man at all. Ishmael’s glaring eye hit his sight and he faltered, slipping on the sticky path. He slid to almost all fours, but never lost his momentum or his grip on Uculipsa. He caught himself without falling and stumbled forward, pulling his lope upright and back into a charge.
Williams saw the charging man; watched him lose focus and slither in his approach. Lifting his hand to his shoulder bag, he pulled out the hefty, eager weight of the Mars pistol before the hunter had righted himself and gathered speed.
As he ran, Tsungali saw the creature raise the bow over his head, he saw the quick, unfolding movement of the other man and he knew the voice he had heard below really had been his grandfather, not a demon or a ghost. The monsters did not whisper below: they were up here, with him, and he was running straight at them.
Williams cocked and aimed the pistol as he saw the Blackman’s eyes.
The point of the bayonet was within two metres of Ishmael’s chest when the great roar put a stop to all motion; all, that is, except for the birds, who threw themselves from every branch and beat their wings upwards and out of the forest, into the bright, dazzling air and away from the terrible sound.