The moons cried out with their silent mouths. The flambeaux uttered bright screamings of unsteady light.
But the ritual did not conclude. The night drew on, the moons rolled, and the four files of Asadi tribesmen shuffled in their places. Some stretched out their hands and fought with the tumbling moons just as Eisen Zwei had wrestled with Denebola, the sun. None left the clearing, though I felt that many would have liked to. Wrestling with their own fears, they waited. The pagoda and the corpse of their chieftain commanded them. I, in turn, was commanded by their awesome patience. Wedged like a spike into my tree, I watched as Melchior drifted down the sky toward the jungle. The Bachelor fidgeted, and the two iron torches began to gutter like spent candles.
Dawn delayed.
Two vacuums existed: the vacuum in Nature between the end of night and the beginning of day, and the vacuum in the peculiar hierarchy of the Asadi tribal structure. Night and death. Two vacuums in search of compensatory substance. When would dawn break? How would the Asadi designate their dead chieftain’s successor?
A commotion in the clearing! Looking down, I saw that the four neat files of Asadi had dissolved into a single disorganized mass of milling bodies. A chaos, an anarchy – as on their original assembly ground. How could a vacuum of ‘leadership’ exist in such an arbitrary mélange of unrelated parts? Only the pagoda had solidity, only the pagoda did not move.
Then, looking up, I saw the old man’s huri floating high above this disorder, floating rather than flailing: a gyrfalcon rather than a pelican. It rode the prismatic, predawn breezes with uncommon grace, flew off so effortlessly that in a moment it had dwindled to a scrap of light far beyond the temple’s central spire.
Then the huri folded its wings behind it and plummeted dizzyingly down the roseate sky. I almost fell. My feet slipped through the fork that had supported me, and I was left dangling, arms above my head, over one edge of the pagoda’s front yard. The anxiety-torn communicants were too caught up in their panic to notice me.
Meanwhile, the huri rocketed earthward. It dived into the helpless crowd of Asadi and skimmed along their heads and shoulders with its cruel, serrated wings. Dipping in and out, it flapped, once again, like a torn window shade, all its ephemeral grace turned to crass exhibitionism (I don’t know what else to call it) and unwieldy flutterings. But the creature did what it sought to do – it scarred the faces of several of the Asadi. A few tried desperately to capture the huri. Others, more reasonably, ducked out of its way or threw up their arms to ward it off. The huri didn’t discriminate. It scarred all those who got in the way of its bladed wings, whether they attempted to catch it or to flee. The eyes of the harassed Asadi flashed through their individual spectral displays, and the heat from so many changes made the clearing phosphorescent with shed energy.
The fact that The Bachelor’s eyes remained cool and colorless subtracted very little from the heat of those thousand burning eyes. The Bachelor. I had nearly forgotten him. He stood apart from his panicked comrades and observed, neither grappling for nor fleeing from the huri. His eyes were clay white, mute, devoid of all intellect or passion. As for the huri, it flew up, flew down, performed a wobbly banking movement, and slashed with its murderous pinions at everything. Finally, it shot up through the shadow of the pagoda, wildly flapping, then pitched over and dived upon The Bachelor. It flew into his face. It bore him to the ground and battered him with countless malicious thrashings.
To the last individual, the Asadi quieted, queued up randomly, and watched this penultimate act in their day-long ritual. It took me a moment to understand. Then I realized:
The Bachelor was the designee, the chosen one, the chieftain elect. Somehow it seemed an inevitable choice.
My arms aching, I dropped from the tree onto the floor of the clearing. In front of me were the narrow backs of twenty or thirty Asadi. I couldn’t see The Bachelor at all, though I could still hear the churning of the huri’s wings and the altered breathing of the tribespeople.
Suddenly a figure, insanely rampant, disrupted the smooth surface of the crowd and darted through a quickly closing gap of bodies to my right. The Bachelor had regained his feet, was trying to fight the huri off. The two of them thrashed their way up the tier of steps in front of the temple. Soon they were on the paving beside the catafalque where Eisen Zwei still lay. There on that sacred, high place The Bachelor surrendered to the inevitable.
He went down on his knees, lowered his head, and ceased to resist. The huri, sensing its victory, made an air-pummeling circuit over the body of the dead chieftain, sawing devilishly at the faces of the corpsebearers and rippling like dry brown paper. At last it settled on The Bachelor’s head. Beating its wings for balance, it faced the onlooking multitude, and me, with blind triumph.
No one breathed. No one acknowledged the dawn as it revealed the caustic verdigris coating the pagoda like an evil frost.
Slowly, painfully slowly, The Bachelor got to his feet. He was draped in his own resignation, in the invisible garb of an isolation even more pronounced than that he had suffered as an outcast. He was the designee, the chosen one, the chieftain elect.
The huri dropped from
