If you’ve read Edgar Pangborn’s novel DAVY, you’ll recognize the post-holocaust future that serves as background for the story below. Tiger Boy is in a sense a sequel to DAVY, set in the late 5th Century post-holocaust, 150 years after the time of DAVY. It’s a completely separate story in itself, though: about a good-hearted boy who has no voice, and his encounter with a wandering youth whose companion is a tiger who moves like a river of fire made flesh. It’s also about such semi-intangibles as freedom and love in a rigidly structured world. (Reality is the stuff of fantasy, after all.)
by Edgar Pangborn
Bruno perceived, but his vocal cords were missing or defective. He could not moan or murmur; as a baby he shed tears without vocalizing. The parish priest Father Clark had declared him to be not a mue but a natural human child, implying that anyone who put Bruno out of the way would face the disapproval of the Church.
Bruno could listen and was permitted to do so even among the Elders. If the old men lapsed into foolness, could Bruna tell? He would squat outside their circle, soft intelligent eyes wide awake; now and then he smiled.
Baron Ashoka, a few of the Elders, the monks of Mount Orlook, Father Clark, Town Clerk Jaspa, all possessed the art of writing, but never attempted teaching it to Bruno—how could a child without speech be taught? And did not his dumbness and illegitimacy mean that God intended him for ignorance and humble service? Once when Bruno was seven he broke away from Mam Sever, who was minding him, ran up into the pulpit and made as if to grab the Book of Abraham from Father Clark. For that he had to be whipped. At Father Clark’s nod Mam Sever attended to it at once with the flat of her shoe.
Bruno’s mother had been the woman of Yan Topson. Yan put her away because the infant was none of his. When Bruno was born, March 10 of the Year of Abraham 472, Yan had been in the south country, believed lost, at least nine months. He returned scarred and gaunt, and entered the Karnteen Hut for the five days of ritual purification; when he emerged his fey woman Marget confronted him with the baby. Town Clerk Jaspa was present, Elder Jones, Marta the Cure-Woman, Hurley the Ironsmith. Yan took the baby—it was dark like Mar-get, and Yan a bright blond with cutting blue eyes—and gave it to Elder Jones. Then he struck Marget across the face, an official declaration that the child was not his but a public charge, and she no longer his woman.
Because the child’s hair was earth-dark, his skin tan as a sandy road, his eyes brown as a trout pool, Father Clark named him Bruno. He grew up living here and yonder, wherever there was food and a place near the hearth. Mam Sever, a bountiful woman whose newborn child had died, nursed Bruno after Marget drowned herself in Lake Ashoka—and they say, Father Clark begged a dispensation from the Holy City of Nuber itself to have her buried in consecrated ground, and was refused. Later Marta the Cure-Woman, Marget’s half-sister, often gave Bruno food and shelter during his growing up. He may have picked up fragments of her learning.
Thus it was that Bruno was allowed to listen—big and powerful at sixteen, apprenticed to Hurley the Iron-smith—when the Elders were discussing the rumored approach of Tiger Boy, whose music of the pipes was always sounding in the woods and meadows for many days and nights before his terrible appearance.
In time he would show himself (it was said) in some open region near the village he had chosen, and play his music, and sometimes sing, incomprehensibly—the words were true words, but no one had ever managed to write them down. A youth, according to the stories, with hair falling to his shoulders. Because of the huge brown tiger that walked with him and lay at his feet when he played or sang, no reasonable person dared approach him, and it was generally understood that he was a manifestation of the Devil.
No reasonable person would approach. But when he ended his music and walked away into the woods—this would always be early evening (they said) and the sunlight making long shadows on the grass—one or two foolish or miserable people might run after him; and not return. They’d be sick people, or very old, or strange in some manner and so thought to be suffering a malady of the mind. When the appearances began—a few years ago, ten, twenty, few agree—children ran after him before they could be prevented. These did return, full of totally incredible tales: the nice young man told them funny stories (which they couldn’t remember), and let them pet the tiger’s fur (but not pull it), and showed them where wild red raspberries were growing, and played music just for them, and then saw them safe to the edge of the woods where they could find their way home. Thereafter children were kept closely guarded indoors at the first hint of Tiger Boy’s presence.
* * * *
“There’s plenty whopmagullion into it,” said Elder Jones in the Store. Bruno was there. “Lies, lies, people got no conscience the things they tell. Like about him raping twelve women up to Abeltown.”
“If it was only six,” said Elder Bascom, “you’d still got to call him supernatural, I don’t care how young and peart he be.”
“Same and all,” said Elder Jones, “there’s something to it, something out there that ought not to be.”
“All mahooha,” said Elder Bascom. “Somebody dreamed it up out of the lonesome itch, and now it goes on and on.”
“No,” said Baron Ashoka, “I agree with Elder Jones. And the thing is against Nature.” He had ambled in, tethering his horse to the rail himself in his democratic way, wanting no fuss from servants as the storekeeper Jo Bodwin well knew. A fine old man in his yellow shirt of Penn silk and loin-rag showing his family colors of brown and orange, he stood with one well-shod foot planted on a chair-seat. Genial, this whitehaired squarefaced old gentleman who owned most of the valley land, the mill, the pottery, the flax fields. As President of the Maplestock Corporation he could -also have been said to own the sheep ranch and fulling mill; in the Corporation’s name he exercised the right to impress four days’ labor each month from every ablebodied villager. He represented the township of Maplestock at the Imperial Assembly in Kingstone, and spoke out there against slaveholding in the western provinces. His family dated back more than two hundred years to the reign of Emperor Brian I, who made the knight Ian Shore the first Baron Ashoka, for services rendered in the Penn War that established our southwest border from Binton Ruins down the Delaware to the Atlantic. The family had grown in wealth and importance also during the glorious War of 435-439, when we absorbed the old republic of Moha, so that now, except for a strip of land border with Penn from Binton Ruins north to the Ontara Sea, we are bounded altogether by water—the great Ontara, the Lorenta and Hudson Seas, and the measureless Atlantic where no one ventures, though men are said to have done so in Old Time. And here was Baron Ashoka chatting with the Elders like anybody. “If it comes on this village,” he said—”God forbid, but if it does we know how to deal with it, eh, Jo?”
“My lord,” said the storekeeper, agreeing heartily with no notion what the Baron might have in mind, “I’m sure we do.” Jo was a transmission line. The labor tax usually took the form of an order to Jo: I’ll have so-and-so many men on such-and-such a date; as one might say over the counter: I’ll have a pound of raisins.
“Standby posse, that’s the thing,” said the Baron. “That’s what I stopped by to talk to you about. No labor tax, boys—take off that worried look.” The company laughed as required, and Bruno smiled, perhaps at the resonance of laughter. “Special guard round the clock in four-hour shifts, Army style by God. You pass the word to Guide Lester, Jo. Five men, three shifts of ‘em, four hours on and eight off, ready to go out and take him.” The Baron checked as if he had bumped into an obstruction. “Hm ... I want the first shift to start tonight, tell him that.”
Jo Bodwin nodded, tactfully silent. Elder Bascom in seventy years had never learned tact “My lord, what with the smallpox last year, fifteen able men took off their regular work is going to make one almighty hole in things.”
“I know, Elder. Yes—well, Jo, tell Guide Lester to get nine men, three to a shift, and I’ll send three archers of my household. He’s to have the first shift assemble outside the Store here, not later than eight by the church clock. And they’re not to go out for any silly rumor about somebody tweedling a pipe in the woods—only for the open appearance they say he always makes. We’re going to deal with it once for all, gentlemen.” Another slip: the Elders were not the King-stone Imperial Assembly, and they weren’t gentlemen. Gossip might mutter that the Baron was feeling his years. He nodded to all, mounted his mare stiffly and was gone.
* * * *
Bruno sometimes woke whispering. In early childhood when he tried to form words with no sound except breath, nothing good happened: the few who noticed were unaware of anything like words in the hissing noise, and it bothered them. Mam Sever, more kindly, was also rather deaf; she noticed the stir of Bruno’s lips but thought he was expressing hunger, and so stuffed him with food and frustration and patted him and went on with her perpetual busyness. By the time he was sixteen Bruno had learned to hold his mouth quiet—except for that rare smile, fleeting as the passage of wings, of which he was not conscious. But often, in the crumbling cabin adjoining the forge where he now lived alone—he was a useful watchman and could be trusted not to steal—Bruno woke whispering. And sometimes when wide awake, if certain that he was alone, he allowed himself the indulgence of it, the hurting half-pleasure.
For his head was alive with words. Magicked by words, their agile intensity, words that soared and swooped and darted about him until he felt himself among the swallows or crossing the hills on hawk wings toward a forever. His words could rush together, go chiming in love together down a long golden rolling morning. And they responded to his wish—a little. He could urge, instruct, tease them until they leaped from thought to thought so clearly that between two pinnacles he could find the rainbow bridge. They would play games with him—ah, it was all a game, he supposed, only a game, something to be doing when not eating or sleeping or messing around or listening to talk-talk or working for goodnatured Hurley in the goodnatured sweat and clang of the forge. Only a game—
Woodthrush, woodthrush, I follow to your city
by the alone way
where you say the fountains are forever playing.
I’m hungry, I’m tired-
why do you cease calling when I was so near?
How can I find your city now
by the alone way?
It was a game of invention, with the tickle of un-tasted pleasure-
Back into the brush smiling, scared, naked,
like a trout to his safehold under a stone,
but it was the trout I hunted.
They’re gone.
My fish-line hangs limp-silly in the stream.
The girls are all gone.
What am I hunting?
Once he had indeed come on girls bathing in a pool in the woods, sparrow-voiced and delicious, but it was Bruno who had hidden. No matter: words can drive one thing into another, flow everywhere, pierce all mysteries at least once. Bruno was often not unhappy.
Anyway Bruno had a girl. His fertile loneliness had created her out of the visible figure of Janet Bascom, daughter of the baker, great-granddaughter of Elder Bascom. Janet as the village knew her was a modest mouse soon to be married to the farmer Jed Homer, who held his land directly from the monastery of St. Benjamin on Mount Orlook; Jed’s second wife had died and he wanted to collect Janet and her plump dowry before he or she became any more overripe. She had smiled pleasantly at Bruno once, perhaps for no reason except that she felt like smiling, and had forgotten it ten minutes later. Henceforth Janet as Bruno knew her was a woman-spirit of air and fire. In the sun her hair became as the halo of the blessed St. Jacqueline in the stained-glass window in the south wall of the church. Her voice rang in his brain, gently, as sometimes the church-bell music reached him across two miles of fields when he was at the forge. Her hands—oh, surely kind if only because such beauty dwelt in them whether they moved or rested. Sometimes Janet even glanced at him again. Should he have known that he did not want her any nearer than she was?
Sometimes when he woke whispering in the dark, especially if the moon was riding clear and jubilant, especially in this sixteenth year when he was beset by the troubles and wants that all youth knows (especially if youth must remain silent) Bruno might go wandering.
He would close the door of his cabin softly. No other house stood near, but he felt such a night as a state of being perfect in itself, not to be marred by noises that are no better than blundering, and heedless. He would slip away across Hurley’s pastureland by routes his feet could follow without requiring thought: Sometimes toward the village, where all the dogs knew him and did no more than snuffle a greeting as he drifted along the sleep-filled streets and marveled to see what broad rivers of moonlight pour from slanting roofs: or sometimes into the woods, under the hemlock and maple and pine. His night vision was a little better than the human norm. He liked to follow the happenings of moonlight where its pattern lay broken on the ground. Now and then when the soft air itself became a challenge he would walk silently for a mile along a certain wood-road, a passage that made him think of the church aisle leading toward Father Clark whom he feared and loved. At the first turn of the wood-road stood a massive rock; here he would leave the road to follow the tunnel of a deer-run that led into the open at the base of a grassy mount. No tree grew on this knoll. Ancient thoughts quickened here about a broad flat rock at the summit; merely one of Earth’s bones breaking the skin, but a sense of human presence clung.
In the night that followed Baron Ashoka’s appearance at the Store, Bruno came here, moonstruck. Along the wood-road the white light created legions of night thoughts driving—where?
Even through the dense growth of the deep-run he heard the music.
* * * *
Baron Ashoka meanwhile had ridden from the Store up the twisty Mount Orlook road to dine with the Abbot of St. Benjamin’s. A dainty small dinner for the two of them, served by one of the Abbot’s many discreet servants, who vanished as soon as the Abbot and his guest had dealt with roast goose and delicacies from the monastery garden—green peas for instance, and strawberries in thick Jersey cream. The wine was a sauterne from the province of Cayuga, unaggressive, but the Baron played safe and drank in more moderation than did the Abbot. The meal ended with a subtle golden tea. Penn merchants, the prelate confided, got it by caravan from Albama, wherever that was—another Penn monopoly. “But I thank the good God,” he said with mischief in his ancient voice, “that my concern is entirely for affairs spiritual. Enough for me my little sheepfold in the hills.” Over the wine he crinkled a smile at the Baron, who seemed gloomy behind that ruddy handsome face under the ostentatious white hair. The Abbot of St. Benjamin’s was entirely bald and sensitive about it, also beleaguered by a host of old-age pains and frets—acid stomach, shortness of breath, swollen ankles, a vindictive prostate. Occasionally he imagined that if only his dignity allowed him to consult Marta the Cure-Woman instead of pigheaded Brother Walter he might feel better; most of the time he merely admitted that old age is like that, a necessary last trial before the tranquil joys of Heaven. “By the way, my dear Baron, I always try to make sure my Cellarer purchases wine from non-slaveholding establishments.”
Baron Ashoka bowed. “It’s a matter close to my heart, Father.”
“Yes yes.” The Abbot reflected on the loneliness of important people. He supposed the Baron believed in God and the Church rather cynically if at all, but quite strongly in the freeing of the slaves, whereas he himself believed deeply in the unshakable Tightness of his Church and thanked God there was no other, but very little in what certain well-meaning visionaries were calling a Free Society. How can you have such a thing? Any society includes and therefore surrounds the individual, cutting off freedom on all sides. Men don’t want freedom anyway, thought the Abbot—look at their panic when they get a little of it! All they want is to dream about it, and talk. Since he liked the Baron, and since they must remain on good terms if the affairs of Maplestock were not to degenerate into a sticky mess-after the Baron the monastery was the largest landholder in the township—these differences of view required solicitous tiptoeing among the teacups. “Yes yes, let us hope the—ah—joys of freedom become happily extended —ah—year by year. And now do tell me!” Spectacles gleaming, little nose twitching like a rabbit’s, he leaned his plump eminence toward the Baron across the table. “Our news of the world is so scant,” he lied, “you must forgive my old-womanish curiosity. What is the latest on this—ah—this absurdity, this Tiger Boy nonsense?”
“Father MacAllister, I am afraid there really is such a person.”
“Oh dear! I had hoped—assumed—it was no more than a country fantasy or a practical joke.”
“I’ve ordered a standby posse at the village, with some of my men to help. We can stop the thing. We’ve always had good hunters here—good hunters and good poachers.”
“It’s really that bad?”
“Father, I got some information the village doesn’t have, through an acquaintance in Grayval, a trustworthy man. Tiger Boy appeared there last month. It’s hardly twenty miles from here, but as you may know, a very shutaway place, not much news coming out of there. He appeared—it was in the full and wane of the moon, I believe, as it always has been. His music was heard in the woods; cattle were killed, everything the way they say it’s happened in other places. Then he showed himself in an open field near the village—played and sang, although my friend said it was more like reciting an outlandish poetry, and he felt he could understand some of it, almost. And the tiger stood by him like—shall I tell you how my friend described him?”
“Oh dear! Your friend is an—ah—imaginative type?”
“Not in the least. My friend says the tiger stood there beside the youth like a river of fire made flesh. And when he roared, once, the village people fell on their faces, and my friend did not hear them pray to Abraham. After the youth had done singing and turned away into the woods, an old woman hobbled after him, and that was when my friend could still see the brown and gold of the tiger slipping away under the trees.”
“How it repeats! An old woman. Always the old or the halt or the sick. Oh dear! The children were kept indoors, I suppose?”
“Yes. One thing was a little different, Father—at least I haven’t heard it in accounts of the other appearances. At Grayval it seems the old woman not only wished to go, but was encouraged to do so by her own people—days in advance, when the music was first heard in the woods. My friend couldn’t discover that they had any spite against her; on the contrary she seems to have been well liked. And he says, Father—he says she wore a garland of May flowers.”
“How’s that? A garland?”
“A garland of May flowers, and when she tottered off into the woods they saw her smile like a girl going to her bridegroom. . . . Father MacAllister, it is on the way to becoming a cult.”
“My God! Yes, I begin to see. Well, Baron, it won’t do, it won’t do. We must eliminate it before it grows.”
Baron Ashoka murmured: “It seems that even in Old Time it was found very difficult to eliminate a cult—any cult.”
“Old Time? Don’t give me ancient history!—we’ll have trouble enough as it is. It’s got to be stopped. Oh dear! Just when everything was so peaceful—but really, Baron, who ever heard of a man walking around with a tiger? It’s not in nature.”
“My mare shied twice coming up the road this evening. She’s a very steady little thing—hardly ever known her to do it.”
“My God, Baron, you’re not suggesting this monster would venture near consecrated ground!”
“Well, she did quiet down as soon as we were inside the monastery walls. Noticed the difference right away.”
“What’s Father Clark doing about all this? It’s his parish. I hope there’s no implication, Baron, that toe are supposed to—ah—take measures? We are a contemplative order.” The old man was up and pacing the room, making the sign of the Wheel on his chest. “You’re aware, Baron, it’s our prescribed duty to remain retired from the world so that we may praise God and the works of his son Abraham, and live by the Ancient Rule that comes down to us from days far beyond Old Time itself, a most holy thing. Eh? Well, what’s Father Clark doing?”
“I’ve talked with him about it only once, Father. He seemed—I would say, resigned.”
“Now I know that man!” the Abbot cried. “He’s a do-nothing. He’ll let that tiger thing move right in on you. He ought to be ready to go forth against it, exorcise it with the power and in the name of the holy Wheel whereon Abraham died for our sins! But not Father Clark. Not that I have a word to say against him, of course—very faithful to his flock, yes yes.” The Abbot sat down clumsily, short of breath, and reached for the wine. “We are, by tradition, by our own law and the wish of the Church, a contemplative order.”
“I have it in mind to ask one thing of you, Father MacAllister. I intend to be with the posse when the confrontation comes if it does. There’s been idiot talk about this beast turning arrows, about arrows passing through the youth without harming him. Soon we’ll be hearing of other—huh!—miracles. I haven’t patience for that sort of thing. It’s a betrayal of human intelligence.”
“Baron, is human intelligence so mighty?”
“I do not say it is. But I think this is an occasion when we must defend it.”
“I’d be happier, my son, if you had said that enthusiasm for evil miracles, whether fraudulent or of the Devil, is a betrayal of God.”
“Oh, that too, Father, that too, certainly.”
“It has just occurred to me that the prior of St. Henry’s at Nupal, somewhat a friend of mine though I can’t altogether approve the extent of his secular activities, often goes hunting with the local nobility—it does, I suppose, help to maintain good relations between two estates of the realm; anyhow, it so happens that he maintains a small pack of northern wolfhounds some of which, I dare say—ah—at a word from me, he might be willing to lend, with their trainer, in a good cause. I do not urge it, I do not altogether approve, but—but—”
“They’d be very handy to have, Father. What I wanted to ask of you was something else. I think I must be the one to lead the posse against this—monstrosity, with spear and sword and bow; also, I hope, with the blessing of the Church and the aid of your prayers, Father Abbot.”
“But of course, my son.”
“It is long since I have confessed. My sins are many, and heavy on me. Cleanse my soul, Father Abbot, and bless me before I go.”
* * * *
Bruno moved toward the music with the confidence that may waken when the heart commands and the mind waives protest. A music such as Bruno had never imagined, pure-toned yet with a hint of reediness that bound it to the earth of grass and forest and stream. The melody’s intervals were not alien to music he had heard in his village, and in the church where Janet’s voice was clearest and truest of the choir—indeed if this music resembled any other it might be Janet’s soprano when it went skylarking above the imperfect dull singing of the rest. But Bruno was not thinking, not making comparisons. He moved toward the music, to the summit of the knoll, to the flat rock where Tiger Boy sat playing and the tiger lay out beside him, tawny gold turned to black and silver by the moon, a river of fire made flesh.
Having come so far, standing by the rock under the other’s regard and observing the tiger’s lifted head, Bruno understood he ought to be afraid. But Tiger Boy finished the air he was playing—it had not wavered when Bruno appeared; and when it ended he patted the rock beside him: who could be afraid of that? The pipes idle in his hand were of a design unknown to Bruno, slender tubes of graded length, hollow reeds, Bruno thought, bound together with vine. The youth with the long locks and clever hands was asking him, no such unwanted questions as Who are you? or Why have you come? or What do you want? but only: “Do you like my music?”
Bruno nodded. Then slowly and carefully, wishing only to be understood and not required to go away, he whispered: “I have no voice. I can speak only this way.” The tiger swung its enormous head to study him more intensely, perhaps disturbed by the uncommon small sound. “But sometimes I think poems.”
“Tell me one,” said Tiger Boy, and laid a quiet arm over Bruno’s shoulders. Tiger Boy was naked and brown, dark like Bruno but with hair lighter than his-skin, and he smelled of leaf mold and wild thyme.
He is white under this moon as sand
where waves have gone over it
on the sea beaches.
He is black under this moon as the mold
that pleased me when I pushed away the pine
needles
and lay breathing the spice of forest noon,
thinking of the friend who had not then come
to me.
Surely the stripes are shadows cast by marsh lilies
when the sun smiled on him:
surely in the day he is a child of the sun
and plays delighted at the foot of the rainbow.
“I like that,” said Tiger Boy, “and it’s easy for me to understand you. A voice isn’t everything. Tell me one more, Poet, and then no more until tomorrow, for I want to think about them, these first poems of yours I’ve heard, and taste them again, and have them go on speaking in me when I’m sleeping and when I play my pipes.”
Bruno whispered: “I’ll be with you tomorrow?”
“If you desire it,” said Tiger Boy, and smiled. “I hope you do.”
I am a stream in flood
with all the weight of thoughts, the fallen leaves
that pile in confusion if the stream is dammed
by the stone of your absence, as just now because
you looked away from me.
See how the flood runs free!
And all my thoughts have caught a thousand colors
not of my common day, because you turned
facing the flood and welcoming my presence
and looked again on me.
“Is there anything in the village, Poet, you would not want to leave behind you?”
The question troubled Bruno for a truthful answer. There was much in the village that he loved: Janet’s voice escaping from the choir like a breeze rushing for the clouds; Father Clark who (he sometimes dreamed) might have begotten him in some fierce .uprising of passion of a kind that married people apparently lost or never knew. There were the village gardens sheltered by lilacs from the dust of the street; the dogs and cats and goats and chickens who never acted afraid of him when he happened by (perhaps these animals are not as delighted by the human voice as we sometimes suppose); the paths and good hidden places of the woods and pastures; and he thought of the red and gold and purple body of Mount Orlook in the autumn under a late sun. There were the white small beaches of the Hudson Sea less than an hour’s journey from the village, where he had once ventured alone at night, when younger and reckless with ignorance of the dangers, in order to watch moonlight on the water. There were all these, and many other pleasures and little loves. But then he considered Tiger Boy’s question, in the manner of one who loves words and cherishes the life in them that they will not show forth to those who do not care about them, and he understood: he would want to leave any place, however familiar and dear, where he would not be in the company of Tiger Boy. Therefore Bruno shook his head, and the transitory smile appeared on his mouth, remaining there longer than at any time in the past.
“Then my search is over,” said Tiger Boy, “if you will go with me and be my friend forever.”
“Is it true,” Bruno whispered, “that some have followed you and died?”
“It is true,” said the other with a quiet above and beyond sadness. “They followed me for love of death and not for love of me—except the children, and they don’t come to my anymore. Since they were in love with death and merely a little shy of speaking to him, I did not keep death from them. But you would be sharing my journey for love of me. Had you thought, Poet, that this village, this nation might be part of a world so much larger that if we had a map of it the Empire of Katskil might look like a speck of dust on a sheet?”
Bruno nodded happily. Then the world’s angers-rushed in across his happiness and he whispered: “Tiger Boy, they are forming a posse in Maplestock, to destroy you. I’ve listened in the Store, where they talk-talk. From tonight on, men will be waiting there to hunt you down as soon as you appear.”
Tiger Boy smiled. “I no longer need to appear there,” he said, and he took up the pipes and played a small thing of amusement, an impudent, jaunty, defiant air. The tiger slanted his head and rubbed his neck softly against the youth’s side. “We’ll go away, Poet. I know places where forest extends for many days’ journey. I know more open regions full of deer and elk and wild swine and buffalo where our tiger can feed in his natural way with no risk of a hunter’s arrow. I have heard talk of a river as mighty as a sea, and beyond it wider plains—they say the old ruins of men’s work stand up stark and lonely there—and beyond that, mountains so huge, so closely ranked together that surely no man ever climbed them: snow remains on the summits, I hear, through all the summer season. We shall look on them. And no more than ten days’ journey from here I know a small lake, deep water blue as noon sky, sheltered by little hills. Men seldom go there now, for fear of tiger, red bear, black wolf—no, they huddle in villages, stockaded villages, the great villages they call cities with high stone walls to defend them against others of their own kind. Isn’t it marvelous, Poet, what fools men are? But we can go to that lake. You’re strong. I’ll make you a bow like mine. We’ll stay there as long as we please, and I’ll make you a set of pipes too, and teach you how to play.”
Bruno wondered why he felt no wish to ask Tiger Boy who he was, or how a brown tiger came to be his friend, or what it was he meant to do with his life in the years to come. Bruno found he truly had no such wish: if in his own time Tiger Boy chose to tell him, good; if not, no matter. Bruno waited among the multitude of words that offered themselves, until he knew he had found the most beautiful company of them in the language, and then he whispered them: “I will go with you.”
* * * *
Maplestock woke to the distress of Hurley the Iron-smith, who rode into town jouncing on his gray plug and his gray hair flying, too early for most folk—scary excitement comes better after settling breakfast. Bruno was gone.
If he’d been an ordinary boy prone to laziness and lapses of virtue—but he wasn’t. Always loyal to his work, seemed to enjoy it too, punctual and goodnatured. Everyone knew how he wandered harmlessly at night, and hung around the Store when he had a free daylight hour. No harm in that. Hurley had never known him to be late or unwilling. Now he was gone, the door of his cabin closed, his bunk not slept in.
Shouting the news to everyone he saw without waiting on a reply, Hurley rode direct to the posse, who were making the best of Mam Bodwin’s cornpone and thin tea, on the back steps of the Store. “Bruno’s gone.”
“Who’s Bruno?” said the gaunt archer with the brown shirt and orange loin-rag.
Stunned, Hurley glared, phuphing his gray moustache. “Da’say you’re newcome around here,” he said, and then realized this must be one of the men sent by Baron Ashoka. He looked at the others, not at their best at seven in the morning after three hours’ guard alert and another hour to go. Dan Short, Barton Linz, Tom Denario —not incompetent exactly, but a scraggy lot, getting on for elderly. Jo Bodwin came out then, and Hurley spoke to him in a dry snarl betraying the truth that he rather loved the boy: “Bruno’s gone.”
“Well, now—the men can’t go looking for him now, Wilbur—see, it’s guard duty. Not without the Baron says so. Ain’t it natural a boy might be late for work?”
“Goddamn it, Jo, you know how it is—he sleeps right there by the forge. He’s never been late. Always there when I want him.”
“But you know, Wilbur, he does kind of go wandering at night.”
“Likely,” said the stranger, “you’ll find him dead beat in bed with some little piece.” Wilbur Hurley stared, his blacksmith’s hand tight on the bridle and one eyelid twitching. “Well, Jesus and Abraham, I can’t seem to say nothing right.” Hurley’s silence agreed.
“Like to oblige you myself,” said Jo Bodwin, “but you see I can’t leave the Store, not with this guard duty thing, I’m supposed to keep it organized and so on and so on.”
“Shit,” said the Ironsmith.
“No, honest, Wilbur, I really like that boy, you know yourself there wasn’t a time he couldn’t come in here and sort of help himself to a bite and so on.” Unknown to Jo, perhaps, his voice had already taken on a note of elegy, as if Bruno were six feet under in the churchyard. “And you’ll find Mam Bodwin say the same—I bet there wasn’t nobody really that didn’t kind of like him.”
“He’ll turn up,” said Tom Denario. “You’ll see.”
“Up there right now likely,” said Barton Linz.
“Guts of Abraham!” said Hurley the Ironsmith. “You can’t any of you lift up off your butts without the Baron says so, I’ll get the Baron.” And he kicked the old gelding into a shambling gallop.
Watching his receding dust the stranger remarked: “Skin my ass if I ain’t just remembered, the Baron was off to Nupal at daybreak, anyhow said he intended it when he rousted me out, sent me down here.”
“Do say!” said Jo. “Now I wonder—”
“It’s a fact Hurley’s old ho’se needs the ex’cise,” said Dan Short, whose uncle had carried on a line-fence quarrel with Hurley’s father about forty years back.
“I do wonder,” said Jo, “what he’s off to Nupal for.”
The man with the orange loin-rag started his morning’s chaw and spat between his feet. “When he rousted me out, Storekeeper, he was higher’n a hickory tree on monastery wine, nor I wasn’t truly wakeful whiles he was expressing himself, but I believe it was something or another to do with hound dogs.”
* * * *
Father Elias Clark, parish priest of Maplestock and long ago a graduate of St. Benjamin’s Seminary at King-stone, privileged (under supervision of the Church) to read the books of Old Time and to write after his name the rarely awarded letters F.L., Frater Literatus, climbed the wearisome long road to the manor under the sun of mid-afternoon. His broad black hat held away the heavy light but pressed its own soggy heat on the pain in his head. The village behind him buzzed and yattered at him keenly, every predictable word another spike driven tap-tap-tap into his skull.
Don’t y remember, wun’t he always ready with them special favors, the way Marget couldn’t do no wrong? Like the time—
Oh, I dunno—poor Bruno, always did think he COULD be a—you know, it ain’t nice to speak the word—and in that case he wouldn’t be none of Father Clark’s get—
Yah, but look how quick and sharp the Father was to say Bruno wun’t no—
But look, didn’t he turn out to be a nice sort of kid except he can’t talk? Wun’t for that he’d be just like everybody, and what harm’d he ever do anybody?
It’s the sin. Turns my stomach to think of that Mar-get you-know with the priest that’s give me communion with his own hands. Disgusting, him and her, wonder the lightning didn’t come for both-
Well, see, God got his reasons to wait for this p’tic-lar judgment,
—in his mysterious ways, amen—
But look, she’s been dead sixteen years.
Do say! Been that long, has it?
But look—
Wouldn’t think he had it in him, would you?
But look—
Father Clark’s mind echoed: Sixteen years! He halted short of breath on the high ground not far below the manor, and through a gap in the hemlocks he looked out over the valley, his valley, to Maplestock, his village, his charge, his parish, his life’s labor, a jewel of human making in that hollow of the hills which he had once thought of as a symbol for the hand of God. And with the village, did not God also hold and cherish that building, that white church he could see from here, and its clean spire rising toward heaven from the matrix of the sacred Wheel? Yes, she has been dead (and not in consecrated ground) for sixteen years, and I may have lost the son I never had—to a beast, to some outrageous devilish thing, whatever it is that haunts us in these years. O Bruno, I begot you on my poor wild love, only to rob you of both father and mother, and have given you nothing in return. (The watch and ward of a parish priest is nothing?) I saved your life—no crossroads burial with a stake in the infant heart, not for my son! Saved you for what?
He sank down by the roadside and covered his face with his hands. How they feared your silence, Bruno, even before it was time for a child to speak! Oh, natural enough, for certainly a child should weep aloud on entering this world, if only to break the silence with a demand and a protest. But they fear silence anyway, because no one ever knows what may come out of it. Not I, certainly.
Out of the silence that surrounded him here and absorbed the small sounds of his trouble as the ocean might swallow one drop of blood, he heard a distant noise of hooves—Baron Ashoka, he hoped. Wilbur Hurley had ridden back to the village fuming because the Baron was away to Nupal and not expected back until after midday. Father Clark had spoken with him, and with many others in the muttering, clattering village. Everyone thought it would be a fine idea if somebody (else) got up a search party. Mam Sever, the priest thought, would have shamed the men of the village into action. But Mam Sever was dead last year of the smallpox.
And why could not I? What’s happened to my silver tongue? My calculated angers? They heeded me once, they believed me a true vessel transmitting the will of God for the direction of their affairs. Now and then (O Lord, forgive me!) I believed this too. I had a vision of a great moral cleansing that would start in this small place (myself the evangelist, O vanity!) and spread—who knows how far? . . . Had I not? And what happened to it? Was my sin so great that God took away all virtue from me? But would not that be a punishment of my village for a sin that was only mine and Marget’s? More light!
O God of Christ and Abraham and of the prophets, having given us life couldst thou not have enlightened us, if only a little, how to deal with it?
It was the sound of horse’s hooves, but blurred as though other feet scuffed along in the dust Baron Ashoka appeared around the turn of the road on his beautiful roan mare, and behind him a foul-faced man with matted hair—a black tangle of it never combed and doubtless full of lice. This man seemed to be slouching along in his excellent, immensely dirty moosehide moccasins, but the slouch was an illusion given by his overdeveloped mass of shoulder and arm muscle; actually he was moving in a quick buoyant stride that matched the mare’s pace without effort. His left hand held two stout leashes, a finger hooked on each; his right grasped a vicious, heavy-butted whip—easily, lightly, like an extension of his arm ready for immediate use. His arms and knotty legs were marked as if by smallpox, but a second look showed the dents to be the scars of a hundred old bites. Father Clark remembered Kingstone, and the wild animal dealers, feral creatures themselves, who brought in wolves and black bear (never the red bear!) to parade them through the city streets before delivering them to the Arena.
The leashed brutes who followed this man, if he could be described as a man, did so not meekly, but with that savage resignation which is only a waiting for the chance that never comes. They were northern wolfhounds, probably from the Saranac country, long in the snout, shaggy, gray as stormclouds and fast as the brown tiger himself. The Baron halted, and as the dogs raised their heads to stare in iron cruelty at Father Clark, he saw that their muzzles were level with the trainer’s waist
The Baron dismounted courteously. “On your way to the manor, Father?”
“I was, yes. This is a fortunate chance—now I can get back to the village immediately. I came to tell you, Baron, that the boy Bruno has disappeared. There was strange music heard in the woods night before last and the night before that. Most of our people think the tiger has taken him.”
“Oh, that’s bad, that’s bad.”
“Some, Baron, are for going in search of him.” Father Clark tried for a neutral voice. “Others are already saying that the tiger has accepted the—the sacrifice, and will now go and leave us in peace. ... I must know which course you favor, Baron Ashoka,” said Father Clark, remembering and half regretting the long years of his dislike for this man whose image tended to submerge itself in the image of abstract power, this man whom he seldom met at all except in the formalities of Friday mornings, when the Baron in his pew was making all the correct motions and would shake his hand correctly after the service with the correct small talk and never offer anything beyond that. Seeing the Baron now sagging with fatigue and his square face gritty with road dust (and in the background that infernal trainer with his dogs waiting like a little company from Hell) it seemed to Father Clark that he could almost like the Baron—if there were time for any such trifles. “The village, Baron, will go according to what you say, not by what I say.”
“Oh, please, Father! Mustn’t underrate your influence— I don’t think that’s so at all. And I can’t let you go back without a drink—wine—tea—whatever you favor, and a little rest. You must be as tired as I am, sir. Please take my horse the rest of the way—I’d like to get the cramp out of my legs anyhow.”
“Thank you, Baron, but I must go back at once. Is it to be a search, or must we let the boy go for lost?”
“My dear man, of course we don’t let it go.” The Baron had taken offense and made no effort to hide it. “We’ll search. But this day will soon be spent. And this fellow and his hounds have walked fifteen miles.”
“It is a human life,” said Father Clark, and lowered his gaze, in fear of seeing some flicker of denial, some unspoken suggestion that Bruno was rather less than human. “There are nearly six hours of daylight left.”
“Father, I beg of you! Exhausted men and dogs can’t accomplish anything, not against brown tiger. If the tiger’s taken him it’s far too late for us to do Bruno any good. We can only hunt down the beast and this—this mythical person, whatever it is, that goes around with him. That I propose to do. With rested men and dogs, first thing in the morning and a whole day for the work.”
“We don’t know the tiger took him. We only know he’s gone, and may be lost somewhere in the woods. These dogs can follow scent, can’t they?”
“They can, Father. They follow it as hunters. They are not much used, I’m told, in work of mercy—too dangerous, hard to hold. And I understand that when they catch scent of tiger they can’t be taken off the trail or they go berserk, nobody can handle them. Once we start after this beast we must stay with the hunt until the end—six hours might be only a small part of it if the quarry is traveling. Am I right, Horrow?”
“They folia, they do. Stay with. Folia till they can pull’s guts out on t’ grass.”
* * * *
“Hear that? He’s made his kill, Poet—woods buffalo, I think. Now he’ll feed and lie up a while, but we can go on if you like, he can always find us.”
“I wish I could sing of our journey, of the journeys to come.”
“No need. I always hear you and I’ll sing for you. Look at the little orchids! Moccasin-flower—Lady’s slipper, some call them. Often they grow where some tree has fallen and lies in decay.”
Here in a lake of shadow
it fashions the sunlight of itself.
If love can wake and shine,
make and declare its own light,
there’s no night too dense for journeying.
Hurley the Ironsmith followed a false trail that day, after returning from the manor in anger and frustration. He had gone again to that rickety cabin by the forge, stood in the bleak room wondering how a boy could have lived there and collected almost no possessions—a few spare clothes, another pair of sandals, all neat as the cell of a monk, his bunk with the blanket squared and trim, no clutter, no dust. As if Bruno had never been here at all. No knife, but the boy did own a good one, and so must have taken it with him—any reassurance in that? Hurley had not been aware of his wife coming in until she slipped an arm around him; he saw she was weeping. “Will, why didn’t we ever know anything about him?”
“Ah, well, Ann...”
“Why don’t we ever know anything about others? Why?”
“Baron’s away to Nupal, Ann. Posse won’t move without he gives ‘em word. So I have to go by myself.”
“By yourself? Where the tiger is? I lose you too, and then—”
“Have to go, Ann.”
“I know you do.” Small and gray, she rolled her forehead against his chest and dug her fingertips into his heavy rib-cage. “So—so go find him, Will!”
Then Wilbur Hurley went out in the late morning with his bow, and a long hunting-knife and steel-tipped arrows of his own making, searching for Bruno whom (he now understood) he had loved more than a little. He and Ann were childless, yet it was more than that, as love is always more than the sum of its needless explanations.
Having no clue at all, he entered the forest by the same wood-road Bruno had traveled. He knew that knoll with the flat rock summit as well as Bruno—better, and knew an easier path to it than the deer-run: push through a thicket by this oak, a thicket no Maplestock forester would ever disturb, and you come out on a single-file but obvious path leading to the knoll and the flat rock, where even nowadays sacrifices are sometimes offered— libations of wine, fresh-killed chickens unplucked, a hunter’s gift of rabbit or pheasant, maybe an egg with a phallic shape drawn on it in charcoal which means some woman desires to become pregnant of a male child. And it’s true (even nowadays) the covens may be more active up there on May Night and Midsummer’s Eve and Halloween than the Church cares to admit. Hurley knew the place from the years of his youth, which are the subject of another story.
He knew the knoll and would have gone there, but as he was moving down that obscure path, silent in his moccasins, eyes and ears intensely alert, he heard the music of a brown bird well known to him and loved, coming from his right and not very far away (he thought) but from a place where the hemlock grew so dense and dark that something of night was always present and something of the dreams of night. Hurley had more than once known the wood-thrush to sing in this manner in the full daylight hours, though his time of glory is evening, when the robin’s sundown music may join him, and perhaps the white-throated sparrow will be a third among them if human listeners are most fortunate and willing to stop their own noise long enough to accept it. But to hear the vesper song of the brown bird in morning hours is not altogether a common thing, and Hurley felt in it the pull of strange. He parted hemlock branches, and moved off slowly following the sound, although he understood that it was remaining the same distance from him, and no haste of his would ever bring him up to it unless that should be the wish of whoever made the music. But a simple bird (Hurley knew) can do this quite well, merely keeping out of sight and perhaps wanting to lead the clumsy human thing away from a nest, no supernatural reason demanded. He followed—traveling, though he could not know it, in the direction opposite to that taken several hours earlier by Bruno and his friends: although in this forest directions cannot always be what they seem, and as some wise man commented maybe a thousand years ago, the longest way ‘round is the shortest way home.
Hurley did not know this part of the woods, but felt (unaccountably) no terror of the lost, and it scarcely occurred to him to wonder how much time had passed while he followed the music—through green darkness or hemlock, and small glades where the sunlight was a green gold flowing down the treetrunks to slake th thirst of the wood-spirits who often look like evanescent butterflies to you and me. He followed, recalling old things, as though the discovery that Bruno was a person, one who might well have been loved, had made it necessary for him to hunt back along some of the plains and hills of childhood, that era when you believed in wood-spirits without any itch to offer a propitiatory smile. He recalled the grandeur of his patient father at the forge, and a dog called Bock always a snuffle of demanding love for him; and he recalled the country of somewhat later years, certain journeys in pursuit of the unattainable, the courting of Ann in her shining girlhood, her marriage dream that their son (never to be born) might win an education beyond their position in life, and so on to learning, glory, maybe even the priesthood— although Will Hurley himself would have been well content if a son of his simply grew into a good and patient ironsmith, for he felt in his soul that there’s a virtue in continuity. (Is it possible that some ages of man have forgotten this to their sorrow?)
He followed the music. Sometimes his mind would have it that the bird was singing: “Will you follow? Love follows. . . . Will you follow? Love follows.” He followed, delighting in the high clarity and tenderness of the song, yet doing so through the mist of his distress for Bruno, and against a growing distraction of pain, which centered in that massive rib-cage and sent spurts and ripples of anguish down his left arm. Why would no one come with me?
“Will you follow? Love follows “
He followed the wood-thrush, if such it was, until the forest ended where the trees had grown to the very edge of a drop, the end of it not seen. Grasping the last barrier branches, Will could look out and up with sunlight pouring over him, to watch at last the flight of the singing bird, a golden vanishing even now become a nothing in the wonderful wilderness of white vapor, and he called aloud: “I will go with you.”
His wiser mind passed through its moment of trouble: I must find Bruno. He may need me. Then his heart burst; he was not breathing; even pain vanished; a wish to live commanded him to keep his grasp of the branches, but he could not. He fell, and the rocks far below took him with mercy.
Thus died, childless, Wilbur Hurley, our Ironsmith, a good man and a generous one of the quiet spirits, on an errand of love; and who has ever supposed these errands can be run without peril?
* * * *
In the first opening pallor of morning Baron Ashoka rode up through the ground-fog to join the men grouped leaderless on the steps of the Store. The Baron was followed by Horrow and his northern hounds, who slunk out of the mist so like a part of it that Tom Denario shivered and made across his chest the sign of the Wheel. “Good morning, Father,” said the Baron; Father Clark bowed wanly. In the damp chill—fine drops glittered on the Baron’s brown and orange hunting cap, and his square face was shining as if with sweat in the lamplight from the Store—the Baron studied the others, greeted them, and asked: “Where’s Hurley Ironsmith? I was certain he’d be here.”
“Wilbur Hurley,” said Father Clark, “went to search the woods for Bruno yesterday morning and has not returned. His wife has still a lamp in the window. I prayed with her until an hour ago. I ought to have gone with him, Baron, but I did not know his intention, and besides, I am not brave.”
“I am sorry to learn of his absence,” said the Baron. He tapped his hat against his knee to knock off the wet, causing his mare to jump and fret a little; his white hair tumbled moist and lank about his ears. “Father Clark, I implore you, if there’s any ill feeling between us let it be put aside while this work is to be done.”
“There’s no anger, Baron. Until we find Bruno and, please God, Will Hurley, I am only one of your hunters to do as you order. Bodwin has lent me a bow—I had some skill when I was younger.” Elias Clark was trying to pierce the formidable shadows and heaving mist, to see beyond the gaunt malignity of Horrow and his hounds, to forget them, to smile. “I have no anger for anyone this morning, Baron, not even Father Death.”
“Then let us go.”
At Hurley’s house, Ann Hurley had made up packages of food, and did not understand how they could not burden their hands with anything but weapons. She was a little silly with grief—fluttered and cried, too deferential to the Baron, rambling in her speech. Father Clark took her aside. “You will find him, won’t you?”
He was not quite certain which one she meant; perhaps she was not certain herself. “Of course, daughter. Wait and pray. If we are late beyond dark, put the lamp in the window again. Now rest in Abraham, and the peace of God be with you.”
At the cabin by the forge, the hounds were given Bruno’s spare blouse and loin-rag to smell, and though the trail was two days old they made no great confusion of it but smelled on a course that took them to the wood-road and then into the tunnel of the deer-run— moving indifferently it seemed, bored beasts performing a trick on demand, bored no doubt because the smell was only the familiar human scent that did not trigger their lust to kill. Nevertheless Horrow gripped the leashes firmly in one hand, the whip poised in the other, as the rawboned heads drove through the mist.
The Baron had left his mare in charge of Bodwin; a tiger hunt is no place for horses if you love them. But on foot, carrying like Denario and Short a long knife at the belt and a seven-foot spear, he was as much as ever Baron Ashoka of Maplestock, tribune of the Imperial Assembly, here in the gray dangerous morning by his own choice. He walked in the commander’s natural place, well back of shambling Horrow and his hounds to leave them room. Behind him were the archers, Barton Linz and Father Clark and that lank man from the Baron’s household whom Ashoka addressed as Kemp though no one else cared to use his name: we do sometimes try in this manner to shut them out from humanity, the bitter distorted ones, as though we had the authority. Then the other spear-carriers Tom Denario and Dan Short. These seven, and the dogs; there were no others.
Climbing the ancient knoll, the dogs lost boredom, galvanized into frenzy. “Aahh!” said Horrow, and responded with a huge bulging of his left arm as the beasts plunged forward against the leashes, and a crack of his whip in the air, a kind of speaking. He addressed them in other ways too, as they circled the rock at the summit snuffing and yattering: “Eh, Jad? Eh, Jedda? What nah? Find? Find?”
The bitch of the pair lifted her long head and howled, her nose pointed toward those crowded hills in the west, remotely visible from the knoll across a sea of treetops, a darker part of the sky. Dawn had begun behind the hunters; the mist was retiring in rags, spent ghosts worn away with the perishing of the night “Tiger,” said Horrow. “It’s tiger. Us knows, eh, Jedda? Eh, Jad? Find!” And he set the pace down the slope, westward and into the deep passages of the forest, a pace that went on through the morning and through a time when some of the day’s moist heat filtered down below the canopy, a pace that would not slacken until the end was known. Mosquitos became a torment, butterflies passed on secret evergreen journeys; then the light above the trees no longer glittered, but turned gray, and a noise not unlike the strange short roar of brown tiger was perhaps instead the first warning of the gray storm that was rolling toward them out of the west across the hills.
* * * *
“That was a hound’s cry, Poet, but I think it was very far behind. We were hunted by them once, in the north-Tiger killed three; he carries a scar on his flank where one closed with him. See!—he heard and he knows. I think there’s a brook not far from here and we can walk down it a way, but Tiger won’t understand—he’ll jump the brook and follow us on the other bank. Are you afraid, Poet?”
Bruno shook his head.
They came to the brook and waded downstream where thickets grew on either bank; as Tiger Boy had known, their friend would not step through the water with them but jumped the brook. They knew his presence beyond the thicket, and when they came out in a clear space he rejoined them with cat displays of pleasure, fawning and arching his golden neck. “He may be the death of us,” said Tiger Boy, “because he fears nothing and is not truly wise. And I see you are not afraid. But we should hurry on. We can tire them. They won’t travel by night, but we can, Poet, as surely as dreams do.”
They moved on quickly, ate quickly from a sack of dried meat and roots and mushrooms that Tiger Boy carried on his shoulder, and the morning spent itself with no further warning of pursuit. Tiger Boy was not reassured, for he could remember how the hounds kept silent on a trail unless obliged to check and separate in search. But later, when morning had passed, and noon, and they heard the thunder and saw the graying of the sky, Tiger Boy smiled and told Bruno: “That’s good, that may help us. A rain would kill the scent. But we must keep on. Are you tired, Friend?” Bruno nodded. “Maybe we can rest soon. Ah, look there!”
Ahead of them the trees thinned, revealing a long ragged slope of rock, too steep and firm for any vegetation but a little scrub, but not too steep to climb. And beyond the crest of it the sky was churning deep gray to black; already large single drops were falling and a snake of fire struck at distant earth. “We’ll climb it, Poet, and let the rain wash our scent from the rock.” He gripped Bruno’s hand. The tiger flowed up the long slope in one airy run and waited for them, a golden silhouette gazing back along the country they had traveled. At the end of the climb Bruno was gasping, hardy though he was from youth and his good work at the forge. Tiger Boy supported him for the last steps, when the rain became a sudden torrent and the vast slanted rock face foamed and shouted like a waterfall. “You’re tired. Let’s get over into the brush by that big rock, and rest. Oh!—have you hurt your foot?”
Bruno nodded. The pain was not too severe, only a wrench maybe, but Tiger Boy picked him up and carried him into the thicket, under the natural roof of a rock overhang that held off the flood and let it tumble as a curtain before their eyes. Within minutes the storm dwindled to a tranquil rain; the smell of wet earth and leaves came sweet, and through the curtain now thin and lazy they watched the air and the green life and a faint return of sunlight. The Tiger lay beside them to lick his fur back into neatness; the thicket filled with his musky scent. Grown drowsy, Bruno whispered: “Is that lake far from here?”
“Maybe no more than eight days’ journey now.”
“And the big river?”
“Oh, much farther. But well come to it before the leaves turn, and where it flows in the south there’s no winter ever.”
On that river mighty as a sea
we shall build us a boat of firm timbers.
One sail it shall carry of white linen
from flax grown in a field of happiness.
And we shall sail over the rim of the world
to a country I made in childhood
where no one weeps.
“Sleep a little, Poet. I will watch.”
But as he spoke his words were smashed down by the roar of the Tiger, who plunged out of the thicket and charged to the edge of the rock slope, and there received the arrow of Father Clark in his neck and the Baron’s spear in the core of his heart, quickly dying. And Tiger Boy running forward would have cried out something to them all, perhaps a warning that he was human, but a cold thing in an orange and brown loin-rag delivered him an arrow below the heart, and shouted: “My shot, Baron! I got him! I got the bastard!”
Meanwhile Horrow, anxious to save a valuable hide that would be his perquisite, whipped the hounds away from the Tigers carcass. Still witless and berserk with the smell of him that was everywhere, in the thicket, the wet air, Bruno’s clothes, they flung themselves on Bruno, who was stumbling to his friend, and brought him down. Moments passed before Father Clark, slashing with his knife and impeded by Horrow’s prancing and gibbering, could destroy the hounds and take up his son’s body in his arms, and learn there was no life in it.
Life lingered briefly in Tiger Boy, and the Baron knelt by him bewildered. “Why did you come upon us? Why? Why have you made us destroy you?”
“I was searching for a friend.”
Later the Baron felt Father Clark’s hand heavy on his shoulder. “They are both dead, Baron. We must take them back to the village where they shall have burial.” The Baron nodded, stunned and vague. “We must look for Will Hurley. I suppose we have other labors, Baron, and certain years to be lived.” They would return together, Father Clark knew, not in friendship but because this is the way the world goes, more or less, in daily necessities, compromises of good and evil, error and some vision and good intentions and growing old. They would consult with politeness as usual on parish affairs, would now and then dine together with the Abbot of St. Benjamin’s, and would remember—imperfectly, more and more imperfectly. And the prior of St. Henry’s at Nupal must of course be compensated for the loss of two valuable hounds.
Thus perished in the summer of the Year of Abraham 488 an unknown whom men called Tiger Boy. And in this manner died Bruno, like many of our other poets, his work unfinished.