Sadly, these thoughts only came to him later when his anxiety began to pass, and with hindsight he could rework the first meeting in his mind. However, he could not live the experience over again, and so events would have to stay as they had unfolded.
He had had only his short experience with Lilly and Ginny to guide him, and so he had awkwardly copied his second mate’s behaviors where he could—though his raw nerves had thankfully stopped him short of grooming the night ape males.
How would they have reacted?
Gazda clambered down to the forest floor again to confirm the night ape trail still wended east. Ginny’s lost friends had seemingly wandered aimlessly, sometimes south, and with uncertain steps had made easy tracks to follow.
His mind traveled back to the tree-nest. He had barely been able to keep his focus with Lilly’s presence dogging his conscience, robbing him of the clarity he required to make the proper impression.
As the others had talked, Gazda had wondered if Lilly was angry because he had taken her blood. Was that why she had chosen to sleep? Upon that note he had also dwelled, thinking that she would only grow angrier to see he had taken another mate! And this one her own good friend.
So, Gazda had been quick to take up the hunt for Ginny’s friends. He had determined the scents of those night apes that had been around the tree-nest, and Gazda had seen mental images of the missing males when he looked into Ginny’s eyes.
It seemed to him now that the farther he got from the gathering, the greater his confidence grew to be. Gazda had two mates of his own, and he decided that worrying about them would be part of having them—which made him think that this might have been why Goro had waited so long to choose queens of his own.
Would Gazda make Lilly and Ginny queens and take them back to his tribe of apes?
It would be a difficult decision to make.
He missed Lilly very much, but found he favored Ginny. The older female’s thoughts were somehow more comfortable for him to know or see when the situation arose. She had experience that he savored in her words and in the thoughts he saw behind her eyes.
So long as he was careful with his passion, and stayed away from the black fog, he would keep her long and happily as his mate, he knew; and he would avoid the mistake of sharing his blood as he had with Lilly.
That had felt wrong to him when it happened, and while he had yet to see any long-term effects, he knew that feeding upon one’s mate was a thing no king or silverback should do.
Gazda had made a mistake.
Ahead he saw tall, widely spaced trees, and he hooted excitedly as he sprang from one trunk to the next. He was getting close to the place where he had slain the traitor Sip-sip.
Gazda was glad that he had drunk deep of Omag’s blood, and of the bushpig before returning to Ginny in their nest high in the trees for he had thought that with his appetite sated, he could better control his passions and desire.
In that way could he mate with Ginny without fear of feeding upon her.
Gazda’s face flushed with shame as he leapt and dodged through a tangle of high-hanging creepers and vines for his thoughts had shifted to his time with Lilly.
True, drinking her blood while mating had heightened the experience in its ardor and danger, but it had shortened the coupling, and complicated his feelings about the young female by endangering her life and distracting him from her physical beauty.
It was as he slid down a long thorny trunk to check the trail that he realized his experience with Lilly might have fit perfectly within the night ape traditions that he had yet to learn.
Then he ran a maze of branches going east again thinking that in his ignorance, he did not know if all night apes fed as they mated.
Because he had only Goro’s apes as teachers, he now had to teach himself.
Already he had learned that feeding before mating allowed Gazda to lie throughout the night with Ginny, and enjoy such intimacy without fearing for her. In that way he could watch the pictures in her mind, and capture hints to the ways of her words.
Though even her words held some danger for as his comprehension of them had grown, so too had his fear that the black fog was gathering somewhere near—as though it too could hear the words and was drawn to their meaning.
So he had quieted her with kisses to lie for a time together and await the clinging murk’s subsidence.
Gazda dropped lightly into the open place where he had slain Omag, and there he found his enemy’s headless and broken body. As he struck the ground a pair of striped jackals bolted away from the remains and disappeared behind the underbrush.
Sip-sip’s body had been torn and mangled, and was just beginning to wriggle with maggots. Of his severed head, there was no sign, something that did not surprise the night ape. The jungle floor teemed with scavengers, and doubtless one had made off with the prize.
Then he hooted worriedly to see the stumps of broken bone-faced arrows protruding from the corpse, and he growled at finding the tracks of many Bakwaniri that had gathered there.
This worried him the more when their tracks intersected with those of Ginny’s friends.
As he puzzled out their capture, he found two bone-faces lying dead in the underbrush, and he smiled to see that each had lost a chunk of scalp.
Harkon the huntress had been there, though she had come to take the hair after Ginny’s friends had been abducted.
Gazda soon found Harkon’s scent headed east and he hurried to overtake her.
Despite the day-weakness dragging at his limbs, he charged ahead through tree, by vine and
