Above him, Eeda knew that Gazda was too badly injured to travel far, and she could see that he would die soon, so she carried him higher, swinging toward older trees where higher still she found a hollowed-out trunk into which she clambered—dragging her dying son after.
There in the darkness she licked his many lethal wounds and kept him warm as his body quivered and grew colder by the second.
The night ape drifted in and out of consciousness, drawing comfort from his mother’s scent and warmth from her flesh so near to him, but he was slipping...
Time traveled quickly in the dark, and Eeda knew her son needed sustenance, but with him so close to death she could not leave him alone while she gathered food.
She could not leave him to die that way.
When he called out her name, tears burst from the she-ape’s eyes, and she did the only thing a mother could. She offered him a breast, though her milk had dried up long ago and he was many years too old.
But Eeda had nothing left to give, so cradling her son; she brushed his torn lips with her breast, and was cheered to feel him latch upon it. Not to suckle, but to calm him then, for the end that was to come.
And she felt a peaceful tremor go through him before a similar tingling rose up her own neck to ease her mind.
Her night ape son lay upon her suckling, and Eeda felt great warmth and love passing out of her and into her strange offspring.
So strong was he. So proud was she.
CHAPTER 21 – The Bakwaniri
While hearing of Omag’s depredations could elicit sympathy for those Bakwaniri women with whom he fed his perverse appetites, it would not be fair to paint those victims and their families as innocents in the jungle vastness.
The Bakwaniri lived behind a rustic palisade of poles built on the far side of the river that ran just past the eastern border of Goro’s land. There the green jungle cleared as the geography rose to embrace a vast grassy plateau that led under blue skies into the distant purple mountains.
The village rested in what would have been considered an idyllic setting to a romantic. Steeped in natural beauty this place should have inspired visions of Eden, the polar opposite to the symbols of death and mortality that so heavily adorned the inhabitants’ bodies, clothing and tools.
However, like all things in nature, there were environmental factors like hunger and competition that had shaped these curious people, and their cryptic culture.
And like all cultures, death played a part in its creation, and daily life, and would of course be there at the end.
How a people viewed death was directly related to how they viewed life, and with the Bakwaniri, these disparate states were justifiably tilted toward extinction, and so, the people in the skull-masks held a gloomy view of the world where life came from death, and so even their festivals were celebrated with the shedding of blood.
Within that skewed framework good and evil could also be seen shifting places, but in the name of survival, the definition of sin was often obscured.
Indeed, these people were guilty of crimes not much different from Omag’s that they had for generations committed upon neighboring tribes, many of which had gone extinct under the onslaught of the Bakwaniri culinary and cultural forms that demanded unwilling participants.
It would be unfair to say that these raids into other territories along the river were undertaken with cannibalism solely in mind since slavery and gold had also motivated the land-bound reavers.
Avarice and greed played in their time of poverty and need, and while forgiveness might exist for such sinners and the culture that formed under this duress, it gave them no right to exercise their demons upon the otherwise peaceful folk that inhabited the jungle that they had invaded.
The troubled origins and history of the Bakwaniri people had begun many, many miles to the west, and had chased them through the valley of death to this living desert and made them into the fearful, savage and sickly lot that they were at the time of Goro’s reign.
Those physical and mental infirmities with which they were afflicted came about in part as an honest reaction to the hostile lands that crowded their settlement, for on all sides the thick and labyrinthine jungle was populated by wild carnivores, poisonous insects, plants and worse.
But the blame lay farther back, so untangle their roots, and find them the descendants of fugitives that ran from the authorities at a time when the gallows answered most legal questions, and so every breathing soul to join them since that initial escape: each man, woman and child had been damned by the sins of their fathers.
The first fathers of the Bakwaniri people started out as the crew of a pirate ship that had wrecked more than 150 years before the Gypsy Horvat built his yurt. The vessel took its name to the bottom after running onto the same rocks that later dragged the Westerner so spectacularly beneath the waves.
The cutthroats had been chased there after a desperate sail from their Cuban stronghold with the Royal Navy a day or two behind them, and North African sanctuary on the forefront of their minds. When their Barbary corsair cousins sought to enslave them, these refugee rovers headed south and into oblivion on the savage shore.
Knowing that they faced the hangman’s noose should they be rescued, those buccaneers who survived the wreck opted for the semblance of death, and so they left their ship to be discovered half-sunk near the shore and stuffed with the bones of drowned crew while those 30 men who could still walk...ran inland.
The fugitives, seamen all, had little or no knowledge of Africa other than some familiarity with emancipating its treasures from the locked holds of honest merchant
