“Like the white-skinned man Lilly is a complicit ‘victim’ of an evil that has stalked humanity since the dawn of time.” Van Resen laughed without humor. “Why not? Many of my colleagues hope to trace the line of human evolution to the African continent. Does it not follow that if these dark jungles are our wellsprings that they might be a similar fount for creatures that have preyed upon us for eternity?”
“Wait!” Seward looked toward the fire. “The drumming has stopped!”
“What did I tell you?” Phillip Holmes moaned from close to the ground where he held himself upright with his arms wound through the bars. “Eternity... You two chatter while the end comes.”
Van Resen and Seward watched a group of skull-masked men armed with bow, arrow and spear approaching the cage.
CHAPTER 34 – Attack
“What has the crow to say of harm and hazard?” the capan had asked of a young man called “crow” before the fellow climbed up the ropes to his moonlit nest on the mainmast. Seetree was worried that the River Demon’s death and its servants’ capture might draw other minions across the river and to the Bakwaniri ship for revenge. “And the other crows?”
This crow had only shrugged and shaken his head in answer for nothing had yet been spied from above. Like his brothers and grandfathers before him this crow had climbed the mainmast daily where he stayed in the “nest” atop it to watch for enemies and hazards in the windy waves of emerald jungle that swept around the ship.
None could remember a time when there was no flock of crows to do this duty, yet had there been a record written within it would be mentioned a first father who excelled at climbing his last ship’s rigging, and who had taken on the crow’s duty when the three-masted village had first been launched.
Ever after had it fallen to his kin to climb the ropes and watch the green—like the crows, they were, and proudly had they watched over the ship and crew. These crows wore masks like the other Johnnies though theirs differed in design and duty, were shaped like the long-beaked skulls of the birds for which the sentries were named.
More than emblematic it was, for the pointed masks were used to focus one’s eyes along the beak like the sights upon a rifle, and the crows would watch the green through deep-set eyes that killed the glare.
It was a quiet shame they bore that they’d caught no more than a glimpse of the River Demon at its years of reaving. But their lofty position was ill-suited to action close at hand—by the river or just past the palisade—being focused as they were upon the greater world from which the larger dangers came roaring.
And there were fighters whose task it was to guard the safety of those who bathed and used the water, and to them had fallen the punishment for failure to halt the River Demon’s ravaging. When their first reckoning came, the capan had started the fire himself, and the angry crew had feasted on their flailing flesh alive and raw.
This crow who climbed from the ropes into the nest was all of 14 years as he saluted his brother.
“Save me a bite of a white one,” he said to the other sentinel who slid down the rope to join in the evening’s bloody revel. There was much talk of the strangers white and black who would go to the fire; and many wondered what the flesh of a monster’s servants might taste like.
The full moon surged past the froth of storm clouds that had piled high as the night came on, and its pale light poured down on the Johnnies and Hearties and little swabs at the great fire.
This crow’s heart thrilled to the beat of drums and dancing, knowing sadly how his night in the nest would feel becalmed.
It was their way for the crew to celebrate what few gifts the jungle cast up, and now with the River Demon’s death the great fire roared for roasting flesh to feed those who had killed the beast.
The crow glanced up past the hanging trees where stars shone in the deep blue that edged the gleaming coast of the rising clouds—and he smiled.
True, he had just come of age, and suffered his first bad bout of weeping boils, but with the River Demon’s death, life ahead was smooth as the crow flies—first a wife, then wee swabbies...
Just as the moon dipped behind a reef of cloud something caught his eye, and he leapt to peer off the port side of the nest. Straight out he stared at great tree boughs that wept green down on the ship where the shadows were deep, and dark against the light from the cooking fire.
There he saw a bright reflection flicker like a panther’s eye, and then, it appeared again—just seconds later, the red lights shining in the night and moving they were. In a white face they shot, closer: five fathoms, and two and then...
Something struck his throat.
Gazda hit the high mast and rebounded wildly as blood jetted up to blind him. He fell but caught the edge of the platform as the bone-face’s body slumped.
The head and mask bounced from one side of the crow’s nest to the other, splattering blood, and rolling along the edge. With a desperate leap and swing, Gazda kicked out to stop its falling but had to scrabble fast as it pitched off the other side.
The night ape snagged the mask by the beak, and pulled it up to his chest.
Panting, relieved and thirsty he set the grisly thing by the body and licked the fresh blood from his hands.
Moments before Gazda had sprinted the length of a broad branch that pointed toward the bone-face lair. Then, at the final instant, he had made the mighty leap across the distance.
Like a knife he’d cut through the air and struck hard enough
