Jungle Of Steel And Stone

After a time he finds a cleft in the rock just wide enough to allow his body to pass through. He eases himself down and finds himself on a narrow, sandy patch of ground that spreads out beneath the cleft—which he can now see is the lip of an overhanging ledge. He pulls the Nal-toon and spear after him, then lies down in the darkness and listens carefully, trying to distinguish those night sounds that could signal danger from the overall din that Newyorkcity emits like the never-ending howl of some great wounded beast.

The relative quiet of Centralpark is suddenly broken by distant, wailing sounds that seem to come from the direction of the place where he found the Nal-toon. Without knowing why, Veil is convinced that the shrieking, ululating sounds have something to do with him; he fears they are the sounds of magic machines the Newyorkcities can use to track him. Clenching his teeth against the pain in his shoulder, Veil stretches up on his toes in order to see over the lip of the ledge.

What Veil sees startles him, and truly frightens him for the first time. A flying machine that is not an airplane, one which he has seen before only in the desert, suddenly comes scudding low, like a giant insect, across the trees at the southern end of the meadow before him. He has seen how these flying machines can soar and sweep and even hover in the air for a long period of time. He had always assumed that these magic machines were used by the white tribes only to drop bundles of food to the K'ung in times of need, but now one of them is searching for him, lighting the ground with its fire-eyes.

The Newyorkcity hunters have very powerful magic, Veil thinks, and it occurs to him that they may be able to find him, no matter where, or how well, he hides. If that is the case, he wants to die fighting as a warrior, not like some wounded animal cowering at the back of a cave.

He starts to pull himself up through the cleft, then remembers with a sharp jolt that he is under the Nal- toon's protection. He has been a fool, Veil thinks, for the Nal-toon has given these things to the Newyorkcities, just as He gave the desert, and everything in it, to the K'ung. The Nal-toon sees and controls everything, and there would be no point to this trial if the Newyorkcities' magic machines and weapons were all-powerful. No. He will be safe for as long as he displays courage and keeps faith in the Nal-toon.

Veil eases himself down into the darkness beneath the overhang. He touches the face of the Nal-toon and immediately feels better.

When he again peers over the lip of the ledge, Veil can see that the first flying machine has been joined by a second. Both are hovering, lighting the meadow around the water. Newyorkcity warriors, all wearing identical blue clothes, swarm over the meadow and through the trees where he had been only a short time before. All of the warriors carry what appear to be bang-sticks of different sizes.

He has killed one of their tribesmen, Veil thinks, and the Newyorkcity warriors will surely kill him if he is caught. He will have failed the trial set by the Nal-toon, and the Nal-toon will never be returned to his people.

However, Veil thinks, the fact that the warriors are so earnestly searching for him seems to mean, as he'd suspected, that their magic is not all-powerful. He decides it is a very good sign.

He quickly ducks when he hears footsteps clatter on the rocks near him. Gathering the Nal-toon and spear against his chest, Veil presses back beneath the overhang as a cone of light flashes down through the narrow opening and sweeps the sandy area where he had been a moment before. Then the light goes out and the sound of shoes on stone moves away.

Veil sighs with relief, then rolls over on his right side in an effort to ease the pain in his left shoulder. He knows that the bang-stick has left its small, hurting spear deep in the muscle; he can feel it there, grinding against the bone every time he moves. He knows he must take it out, for the slightest movement of his arm sends jagged flashes of pain down through the muscles to his fingertips. He can only hope that the bang-stick spear is not poisoned. However, poisoned or not, he cannot attempt to remove the spear before morning; he needs a fire, and a night-fire would be certain to attract the Newyorkcity warriors.

He wishes he had more shilluk to ease his pain, but he does not; he consumed all of it during his terrifying journey on the airplane.

But the Nal-toon is with him, Veil thinks as he gently strokes God's wooden surface, and that is enough for any K'ung warrior. The Nal-toon's face conjures up images of the desert. Home. He will survive this great trial with the Nal-toon's help—and, indeed, that help is already apparent, for God has made Himself noticeably easier to carry. When he returns with the Nal-toon to his people, things will be as they were before; there will be joy, laughter, and dancing in the camp, and for the rest of his life the Nal-toon will look upon him with special favor.

Veil's pain begins to ease as he continues to stroke the Nal-toon's rough surface. Finally he rests his head on God, closes his eyes, and drifts off to sleep within sleep.

* * *

Still imagining himself as Toby, Veil dreams he awakens to find himself sick to his stomach and feverish. The pain in his left shoulder has become a constant, searing ball of agony that sends flickering tongues of flame out into his neck, down through his arm, and into his fingers.

He is being poisoned by the bang-stick spear. The spear must be cut out.

The thought of cutting into his own flesh without the numbing embrace of shilluk fills him with a cold fear, but he knows that he must begin immediately; if he waits any longer, he will soon be too weak to make the effort.

He picks up a dry stick and clenches it between his teeth to keep from crying out as he drags himself from beneath the ledge and struggles to his feet; thunderbolts of pain crash through his arm.

'Nal-toon, help me,' Veil whispers around the stick in his teeth. 'Make me strong; make this warrior worthy of you.'

Using his right arm, Veil pulls himself up to the lip of the overhang. He peers out over the rock formation—and freezes. His sanctuary is surrounded by Newyorkcities. There are runners dressed in strange, brightly colored clothes loping along the stone paths; other Newyorkcities throw discs that float in arcs through the air; women push babies in machines that roll along the ground like Land-Rovers but are silent.

Newyorkcity warriors in blue clothes walk in pairs. Their eyes are searching, and they occasionally touch the bang-sticks they carry in hiding pouches at their sides.

Struggling against the draining effects of his fever, Veil lets himself back down, then lies under the ledge and waits until nightfall, when he can no longer hear the Newyorkcities in Centralpark laughing and shouting as they carry on their frenzied, apparently meaningless, activities. As the moon rises, Veil once again drags himself out from beneath the ledge onto the narrow strip of sand. He drags the Nal-toon after him.

Despite the great risk of attracting enemy warriors, Veil knows that he must build a fire. He uses a piece of flint from the small medicine pouch he wears around his neck to fire sparks into a pile of dry leaves and twigs he has swept up from the sand and placed against a vertical face of the rock. The leaves catch first, and Veil carefully feeds the delicate wisps of flame with increasingly larger sticks and clumps of dried brush, which he pulls from cracks in the rock.

When he is satisfied with the fire's heat, he grasps the shaft of his spear and places the long, iron head into the heart of the flames. Then he strips the clothes from the upper part of his body.

He is ready.

Gripping the spear's shaft just behind the head, Veil fixes his gaze on the face of the Nal-toon. In the flickering firelight, magnified by the fever-heat in Veil's brain, the gnarled face of God seems very much alive to him; God is breathing, gazing back kindly at His worshiper. Veil opens his eyes wide and continues to gaze into the carved eyeholes of the Nal-toon. Then he begins to take a series of deep, measured breaths until he feels a kind of misty, numbing warmth seeping into his mind and muscles. When he looks back into the fire, he imagines that he can see the desert in all its countless, shifting guises; when he glances back at God, the images of home continue to dance on the Nal-toon's face.

He slowly withdraws the iron spearhead from the fire, then holds it aloft for a few moments to allow it to cool. Then, still breathing deeply and clinging to the desert-images in his mind, Veil begins to probe the wound in his shoulder with the needle-sharp point of the spear.

Huge drops of sweat pop from his skin, glisten in the firelight, then roll off his flesh, to be sucked up by the sand. Sweat forms a stinging film over his eyes as Veil struggles to maintain the desert-images, his only shilluk, before him.