The celebration had lasted most of the night, and even now some few Bakwaniri women were with their slaves cleaning up from the debauch and kindling smaller fires for preparing breakfast as the sun rose.
From her position, Harkon could see where a few drunken men had been left in heaps to sleep it off. So simple it would be to kill the fools. So satisfying.
The feast had lasted most of the night, and the huntress had obsessed upon the fact that with the enemy so distracted and drunk, it would have been the perfect time...
She had been torn, yearning to do something while the Bakwaniri cavorted, desiring to strike a blow now that she overlooked their village—with her son, possibly so close.
After years of an unquenchable thirst for vengeance, Harkon was a stranger to optimism, so all night her fears had been that the last of her people, including Anim, might go to the cooking pot and she herself right there, faithfully waiting for the tardy Gazda to return from his exploration.
She continued to move about in the tree with spear in hand as she had all night, unable to turn away from the strange palisade alive as it had been with yellow light from the fire and torches, and echoing with drumming and dance.
Harkon had ground her teeth as she watched the Bakwaniri caper to their savage drums and eat...oh they ate, and what they ate...her guts still twisted at the thought of what their feast might have been.
Just as she was sickened to see the little slaves—the children—moving about bearing great platters from which they served their skull-faced masters.
A hundred times had she seen her own son in the firelight, only to have her eyes begin to water, and her vision to ripple—to show her another black child, just as her son might have been—would be—could be? She no longer knew.
As close as she was to her enemies, she was too distant to recognize those she had come to save; and it had been years since she had laid eyes on her dear son.
The huntress had returned time and again to the highest branches to watch, as she did now. Smoke from the village cook fires had continued to drift through the palisade and gather in the surrounding jungle like mist. In places it had shifted into the trees, rising upward and clinging to the thick leaves as an obscuring fog, hiding Harkon’s movements.
From the heights there was nothing to do but glare and endure her conflicted thoughts. In her heart she knew an attack based upon hate and fear of loss would fail, that such a thing would only bring her death—and perhaps her son’s, too.
If he was still alive.
Death. She could always find it, and if an attack could not be launched to “save” then why not to “slay”—if that worst result would only see her rejoin her people in death?
The years of her vigil and vengeance were long upon her, and the maternal heart within her breast had grown old and tired.
Harkon’s spirit had shuddered through the aging night, as she cringed to watch the shadows of more captives brought to the great cage by the fire.
She remembered how hours before the revel’s end, the drums had beat anew and several drunken men brought out the rotten skull they had captured. They paraded this before their leaders who leapt and danced and struck the thing with weapons.
Yet even at that distance, the huntress had recognized their hesitation and she smiled, for it spoke of fear and cowardice. Yet, the men had continued their “show” of bravery by attacking the severed hunk of ape meat and bone.
What fools!
Harkon the huntress had laughed at their frail spirits and degenerate natures that could put on such a pathetic show—or eat the flesh of innocent children.
Anim? Had she waited too long?
There was no bravery in them. No skill at arms or strength of limb.
Why had she not attacked the village long before? Did she fear her death or was she afraid to learn the truth about her son?
Finally, the men had lifted this skull and in a long parade drummed and sang and danced their way around the village once and twice and three times until they returned to the center pole where their leaders had hung the thing up for all to see.
Many of the revelers had staggered to their homes after that, and any who did go back to the fire had fed already and were drawn by song and drink instead...
...while Harkon wept in the high branches.
Gazda returned with the morning, dark eyes squinting at the growing light. He climbed silently close to Harkon until he crouched on the branch above her, gauging the huntress’ seething rage before he told her of what he had seen.
“Some are there of Harkon’s tribe with stone on their necks,” he said, tapping at the metal band that clasped his swelling right forearm. The limb, like the rest of his body, was covered in dark mud.
The huntress was especially cheered to learn that he had seen some small slaves up close, sons as he called them in an approximation of Harkon’s language—and that many of the males were of an age to be Anim.
“Many bone-faces watch,” the ape-man cautioned her in his way. He had found the white man and the black that he had come to get for Ginny. “First in the stone lair, then in the stick-nest by the flames.”
When Ginny’s night apes had been moved to the cage by the fire, Gazda was tempted to free them as the last revelers gathered, but enough slaves had been butchered already it seemed, and plenty of meat still simmered.
The captives would be safe for a time.
“When night comes again.” the ape-man said, yawning as the jungle dim lightened. “Gazda and Harkon will kill the bone-faces.”
The ape-man was weary and after a short time watching the village, he flung himself into the treetops to find
