Then she set her weapons aside and put her hands out in front of her, fingers spread and palms down, and the night ape did the same.
It was a simple gesture, but both understood its meaning. Like her garments it was uncomplicated, and elegant, nothing like the brutish and harsh language and laws of Goro’s apes.
Harkon and Gazda understood each other. They were both night apes! Had he found his tribe at last?
She retrieved her weapons and backed away, leaving Gazda by the corpse as she melted into the thick undergrowth that choked the jungle floor there.
Gazda’s mind clung to her scent, her actions, and to her clothing, and he glanced down at his own rough black loincloth, glad that he wore it—saddened that he had not brought his cape.
They were not as refined as Harkon’s gear, but Gazda was not just some hairless ape—or what she had suggested an ape-man? No. He was different from the other strange apes in the jungle.
Gazda looked up into the tree thinking of the dead Bakwaniri’s bundled gear and he scowled at the thought of using it. The clothes were more refined than his own, but they smelled worse, reeking of disease and stained with foulness. The creature’s weapons and tools had only filled the night ape with anger and guilt.
He could never use them without thinking of his mother’s death.
But his memory played back to Harkon’s garments, and a thrill of excitement made him hoot and pant with pleasure. Those coverings had seemed practical, and their lines and dark coloration suited his hunting techniques, and would disguise much of his pale skin.
With a final glance along the way that Harkon had taken, Gazda quickly climbed back up into the tree where he investigated his bundle of booty.
The clothing he threw aside, and after it the sharp sticks were cast away. He dropped the bent stick and string that he could not understand, and paused a moment as he considered retrieving the bone-face’s long sharp stick from the forest floor.
Harkon used a similar weapon but Gazda decided against it when he imagined moving through the trees with the awkward thing. Besides, he had no idea how he could employ its sharp end when in close quarters battle with his prey.
The Bakwaniri knife was of inferior quality, but he still wedged it firmly between some branches, memorizing its location in case he ever lost his own blade.
Gazda kept the decorative arm- and ankle-bands. They were made of a substance similar to his long knife, but it was the motif set into them that drew his eye: two were marked by grinning skulls, another of entire skeletons with linked hands and feet and a fourth of long bones crossed in a patterned series. He copied their placement from where he’d found them upon their former owner, dividing them up to slide over his ankles and upper biceps.
Finally, he studied the Bakwaniri’s bone-face covering, in his mind comparing it to the one he had in his lair. Between them he could distinguish differences that made him favor the mask he already possessed, so after catching a whiff of decay, he flung the one in his hands away.
With a final admiring look at his interesting new adornments, Gazda laughed and then leapt into motion, swinging through the trees to where he had left the tribe combing the crumbled ruin of a fallen ironwood for grubs and insect eggs.
CHAPTER 26 – The Lions
As Gazda swept from tree to tree, he again mused upon Harkon’s fine body coverings, and on Fur-nose, whose garments were made of flimsy stuff that pulled apart into threads like spider webbing.
Those marvelous strands had come to mind when he saw Harkon’s leather apparel for it was edged with colored string or webbing. Gazda had seen a connection, and felt it was more proof that night apes were an advanced group of creatures capable of wonders like long-knives, body coverings, the incredible tree-nest and the fantastic things inside it.
Gazda released his hold upon a swinging vine so that he flew some 30 feet in an arc, to where he dug his strong fingers into the ridged bark of an enormous tree.
He climbed upward to rest on a branch where he yawned and studied the Bakwaniri ornaments again; turning the band on his left arm to make the carven skulls move around his bicep.
The night ape snatched a lock of his long black hair and chewed on its end as he studied the way he had come through the trees.
The thick, leafy wall of jungle looked impenetrable, but he knew that Harkon would be in there hunting Bakwaniri for their hair, and a surge of excitement almost caused him to dash after her and join in the killing.
But he would hunt for her track later.
At the moment, he had to tell Goro what he had learned of these Bakwaniri because the silverback’s lands were not open to strangers.
Gazda’s sun-weakness had come upon him when he returned to the tribe late that afternoon, and the apes were preparing to bed down by the time he came awake to hunt for his supper, so it was not until the following morning that he could tell Goro about the bone-faces.
The apes were searching for their breakfasts on the cluttered and uneven ground in an open gash in the jungle where fallen trees had given way to new saplings and much undergrowth. Massive trees formed a dense wall of interwoven branches where the forest edged the narrow clearing.
The night ape was crouched before the silverback and about to speak when Aluga, mate of Baho, tore screaming out of the thick foliage and pushed her way between them. The fur on her shoulders, breasts and belly was soaked with red, and cruelly marked by claws.
As the tribe quickly gathered, Aluga chattered that she had just escaped death. Two lionesses had ambushed
