The Red One Page 3
Bassett flexed his arm-muscles in quest of what possible strength mightreside in such weakness, and dragged himself slowly and totteringly tohis feet. He was shockingly emaciated; yet, during the variousconvalescences of the many months of his long sickness, he had neverregained quite the same degree of strength as this time. What he fearedwas another relapse such as he had already frequently experienced.Without drugs, without even quinine, he had managed so far to livethrough a combination of the most pernicious and most malignant ofmalarial and black-water fevers. But could he continue to endure? Suchwas his everlasting query. For, like the genuine scientist he was, hewould not be content to die until he had solved the secret of the sound.
Supported by a staff, he staggered the few steps to the devil-devil housewhere death and Ngurn reigned in gloom. Almost as infamously dark andevil-stinking as the jungle was the devil-devil house—in Bassett’sopinion. Yet therein was usually to be found his favourite crony andgossip, Ngurn, always willing for a yarn or a discussion, the while hesat in the ashes of death and in a slow smoke shrewdly revolved curinghuman heads suspended from the rafters. For, through the months’interval of consciousness of his long sickness, Bassett had mastered thepsychological simplicities and lingual difficulties of the language ofthe tribe of Ngurn and Balatta and Vngngn—the latter the addle-headedyoung chief who was ruled by Ngurn, and who, whispered intrigue had it,was the son of Ngurn.
“Will the Red One speak to-day?” Bassett asked, by this time soaccustomed to the old man’s gruesome occupation as to take even aninterest in the progress of the smoke-curing.
With the eye of an expert Ngurn examined the particular head he was atwork upon.
“It will be ten days before I can say ‘finish,’” he said. “Never has anyman fixed heads like these.”
Bassett smiled inwardly at the old fellow’s reluctance to talk with himof the Red One. It had always been so. Never, by any chance, had Ngurnor any other member of the weird tribe divulged the slightest hint of anyphysical characteristic of the Red One. Physical the Red One must be, toemit the wonderful sound, and though it was called the Red One, Bassettcould not be sure that red represented the colour of it. Red enough werethe deeds and powers of it, from what abstract clues he had gleaned. Notalone, had Ngurn informed him, was the Red One more bestial powerful thanthe neighbour tribal gods, ever athirst for the red blood of living humansacrifices, but the neighbour gods themselves were sacrificed andtormented before him. He was the god of a dozen allied villages similarto this one, which was the central and commanding village of thefederation. By virtue of the Red One many alien villages had beendevastated and even wiped out, the prisoners sacrificed to the Red One.This was true to-day, and it extended back into old history carried downby word of mouth through the generations. When he, Ngurn, had been ayoung man, the tribes beyond the grass lands had made a war raid. In thecounter raid, Ngurn and his fighting folk had made many prisoners. Ofchildren alone over five score living had been bled white before the RedOne, and many, many more men and women.
The Thunderer was another of Ngurn’s names for the mysterious deity.Also at times was he called The Loud Shouter, The God-Voiced, TheBird-Throated, The One with the Throat Sweet as the Throat of theHoney-Bird, The Sun Singer, and The Star-Born.
Why The Star-Born? In vain Bassett interrogated Ngurn. According tothat old devil-devil doctor, the Red One had always been, just where hewas at present, for ever singing and thundering his will over men. ButNgurn’s father, wrapped in decaying grass-matting and hanging even thenover their heads among the smoky rafters of the devil-devil house, hadheld otherwise. That departed wise one had believed that the Red Onecame from out of the starry night, else why—so his argument had run—hadthe old and forgotten ones passed his name down as the Star-Born?Bassett could not but recognize something cogent in such argument. ButNgurn affirmed the long years of his long life, wherein he had gazed uponmany starry nights, yet never had he found a star on grass land or injungle depth—and he had looked for them. True, he had beheld shootingstars (this in reply to Bassett’s contention); but likewise had he beheldthe phosphorescence of fungoid growths and rotten meat and fireflies ondark nights, and the flames of wood-fires and of blazing candle-nuts; yetwhat were flame and blaze and glow when they had flamed and blazed andglowed? Answer: memories, memories only, of things which had ceased tobe, like memories of matings accomplished, of feasts forgotten, ofdesires that were the ghosts of desires, flaring, flaming, burning, yetunrealized in achievement of easement and satisfaction. Where was theappetite of yesterday? the roasted flesh of the wild pig the hunter’sarrow failed to slay? the maid, unwed and dead ere the young man knewher?
A memory was not a star, was Ngurn’s contention. How could a memory be astar? Further, after all his long life he still observed the starrynight-sky unaltered. Never had he noted the absence of a single starfrom its accustomed place. Besides, stars were fire, and the Red One wasnot fire—which last involuntary betrayal told Bassett nothing.
“Will the Red One speak to-morrow?” he queried.
Ngurn shrugged his shoulders as who should say.
“And the day after?—and the day after that?” Bassett persisted.
“I would like to have the curing of your head,” Ngurn changed thesubject. “It is different from any other head. No devil-devil has ahead like it. Besides, I would cure it well. I would take months andmonths. The moons would come and the moons would go, and the smoke wouldbe very slow, and I should myself gather the materials for the curingsmoke. The skin would not wrinkle. It would be as smooth as your skinnow.”
He stood up, and from the dim rafters, grimed with the smoking ofcountless heads, where day was no more than a gloom, took down amatting-wrapped parcel and began to open it.
“It is a head like yours,” he said, “but it is poorly cured.”
Bassett had pricked up his ears at the suggestion that it was a whiteman’s head; for he had long since come to accept that thesejungle-dwellers, in the midmost centre of the great island, had never hadintercourse with white men. Certainly he had found them without thealmost universal bêche-de-mer English of the west South Pacific. Nor hadthey knowledge of tobacco, nor of gunpowder. Their few precious knives,made from lengths of hoop-iron, and their few and more precious tomahawksfrom cheap trade hatchets, he had surmised they had captured in war fromthe bushmen of the jungle beyond the grass lands, and that they, in turn,had similarly gained them from the salt-water men who fringed the coralbeaches of the shore and had contact with the occasional white men.
“The folk in the out beyond do not know how to cure heads,” old Ngurnexplained, as he drew forth from the filthy matting and placed inBassett’s hands an indubitable white man’s head.
Ancient it was beyond question; white it was as the blond hair attested.He could have sworn it once belonged to an Englishman, and to anEnglishman of long before by token of the heavy gold circlets stillthreaded in the withered ear-lobes.
“Now your head . . . ” the devil-devil doctor began on his favouritetopic.
“I’ll tell you what,” Bassett interrupted, struck by a new idea. “When Idie I’ll let you have my head to cure, if, first, you take me to lookupon the Red One.”
“I will have your head anyway when you are dead,” Ngurn rejected theproposition. He added, with the brutal frankness of the savage:“Besides, you have not long to live. You are almost a dead man now. Youwill grow less strong. In not many months I shall have you here turningand turning in the smoke. It is pleasant, through the long afternoons,to turn the head of one you have known as well as I know you. A
nd Ishall talk to you and tell you the many secrets you want to know. Whichwill not matter, for you will be dead.”
“Ngurn,” Bassett threatened in sudden anger. “You know the Baby Thunderin the Iron that is mine.” (This was in reference to his all-potent andall-awful shotgun.) “I can kill you any time, and then you will not getmy head.”
“Just the same, will Vngngn, or some one else of my folk get it,” Ngurncomplacently assured him. “And just the same will it in the end turndevil-devil house in the smoke. The quicker you slay me with your BabyThunder, the quicker will your head turn in the smoke.”
And Bassett knew he was beaten in the discussion.
What was the Red One?—Bassett asked himself a thousand times in thesucceeding week, while he seemed to grow stronger. What was the sourceof the wonderful sound? What was this Sun Singer, this Star-Born One,this mysterious deity, as bestial-conducted as the black and kinky-headedand monkey-like human beasts who worshipped it, and whose silver-sweet,bull-mouthed singing and commanding he