Still he found her gentle actions alluring, and they caused some unfamiliar passion to rise within him, a yearning similar to his craving for blood grew, but this enflamed other parts of his mind and body.
Thoughts of Harkon also came to him when he was far away with the tribe and at other times when he rested in the day. Gazda would think of her body, and be unable to quash the feelings that rose up in him.
He was glad to have found her in the jungle, and if ever he came upon a dead Bakwaniri with a missing chunk of scalp, a tender feeling would pass up through his chest, and Gazda would quickly find Harkon’s track and follow, there to watch in secret as she made her way through the forest landscape.
Sometimes he would ferret out her hiding places in the night, and hunt nearby so that he could watch over her as she slept, much as Eeda had for him.
Though never again would he let Harkon see him at this task.
Word of Gazda’s and Harkon’s various attacks upon the Bakwaniri hunters had reached Capan Seetree and the crew. Survivors blamed the deaths and disappearances upon the River Demon that was hunting them within its own borders—and that thought kept many a Johnnie from sleeping sound at night, or wanting to go on the hunt at all.
The sir-jon screamed about these grim tidings, and augured a dark future if the River Demon had summoned others of its kind as the old tales of the first fathers and dead Capan Sparsall had warned!
Some returning Bakwaniri said they’d seen a man-sized terror with blazing eyes and long sharp fangs gripping a fellow hunter by the neck before lifting him easily into the trees.
Naught was ever seen again of a man so engaged and it was an oft-repeated tale that any to see that fire-eyed creature only told the story because he hadn’t been seen in turn.
But, Seetree had set his mind on revenge and would not accept cowardice in the crew, so he stoked the blaze of their courage at the great fire by feasting with the rest upon Johnnies that refused to hunt.
A feast that brought the other hunters around quickly enough.
Capan Seetree’s dreams continued to grow, just as his mental affliction and scurv progressed. He was plagued with hallucinations now, and had seen the vast land west of the river as a golden paradise that he was blessed by the jungle gods to conquer.
Once the River Demon and its fire-eyed servants were repelled, the Bakwaniri would claim the jungle as their own and sail through the heights like angels.
True, it was taking too long to find and kill the River Demon, but those Johnnies that did not disappear were hardened for the fight ahead.
The capan felt that they were getting close, or why else would the River Demon have need to call for help from this red-eyed servant?
No. The time was coming and Seetree did not care what was standing in the way. The courage of his hunters would stand with him.
Then he would be capan of all the lands from the river to the coast.
1912
Eighteen years of age.
CHAPTER 29 – Heirs to the Crown
By his 18th year, Gazda had grown tall and long limbed, and his rich diet of blood and vigorous lifestyle had covered him from head to toe with thick layers of corded muscle. The swelling chest, shoulders and flaring back formed a solid pillar of strength that rippled beneath his ivory skin.
Neck, torso and limbs were equally swollen with pliant reams of muscular flesh completing a look that went far beyond the expectations of any normal man. Life among the anthropoids had undoubtedly built this powerful body, but the very line of his form while diminutive in comparison was similar to Goro’s, almost as if his body had grown to mimic his adoptive kind.
He was a man in form, there was no doubt, but never in the history of the species had there been one so strongly made, other than in the imagination of Greek and Roman sculptors.
The night ape was shaped like a god.
Gazda’s hair grew in the appropriate places, if more abundantly than one might find on the average man. His thick, black mane started center to his face, not two inches over his nose where its startling widow’s peak played fulcrum to pointed eyebrows sweeping upward and parallel to his arching hairline.
From there the long locks formed a thick mane of wavy tousles bound away from his brow by a rawhide strap. It cascaded back over his mighty shoulders concealing a sharp line of bristle that sprouted from the nape of his neck and along his spine.
Dark hair grew down from either temple to form a pair of thick sideburns that edged his large cheekbones and continued along the underside of his jaw. This formed a hanging fringe of beard that left his full lips and narrow chin free of encumbrance or decoration.
His powerful chest was shaded by wiry black hair, and a dense spread of this grew down over the flexing of his well-defined abdominal muscles. Similar hair thinly populated his calves and forearms and lay over the backs of his sinewy hands and feet.
The long, strong fingers and toes flexed hard, sharp nails that could puncture bark, or flesh, as many of the tribe’s more ambitious blackbacks could attest.
The night ape’s god-like form was draped with a glossy black loincloth and cape made from the skins of panthers that he hunted with the keen long knife that hung from his narrow waist.
Added to his adornment were several more Bakwaniri bracelets and bands that decorated his arms and legs as proof of his continuing war with the bone-faces.
The skulls and skeletons carved upon these metal rings peered out from clefts in the swelling mounds of ridged muscle and taut flesh.
As the night ape had matured in body, so he had in mind, with special
