The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest Page 16

  A flick of his fingers suggested an abysmal level of efficiency. Pibble shifted his ground.

  “Do you think Aaron would have wished to stop the drumming?” he said.

  “Of course.” No gesture.

  “Did he speak to you about this?”

  “No. He did not speak often.” A movement of wrists and elbows, like that of a Thai dancer rejecting a suitor, implied the aloofness of the chief.

  “Why would he wish to stop the drumming?”

  “For the sake of the Reverend Mackenzie.” The palms were laid together in the attitude of devotion.

  “And you didn’t feel the same about the Reverend Mackenzie?”

  “He bewitched us for a season.” A shrug and a spreading of the hands told that witchcraft was the kind of misfortune that might befall anybody. “If he had not come—” A wholly different shrug, saying that anything might have happened.

  “But Robert Caine would still have arrived at your village, whether Mr. Mackenzie had been there or not,” said Pibble.

  Joshua whisked his hands apart and clapped them together, saying, as clear as words, He would have been nothing to us.

  “What would you have done?” asked Pibble, curiosity getting the upper hand of duty. “Would you have eaten him?”

  “More tales are told than are true,” said Joshua, mocking the white man’s superstition with a flip of the wrist.

  “He’d have been tough,” suggested Pibble.

  “All adult beasts need care,” said Joshua, the glistening stare at last mitigating into professional interest. “A few of the joints might have roast. The hams and the shoulders. With much basting, of course. He was well fleshed, and younger then. Even so, one would need strong herbs to mask that part of the taste which might be rancid. The lesser joints would broil easily enough. The lights—I do not know. I think I would not have used them unless meat were scarce. We had a big lizard in our valley, quick but stupid—hard to catch but easy to trap. Parts of the flesh were succulent, the flavor of a good capon with the texture of crabmeat, but other parts were poisonous. So it might be with a man.” The left hand, thrust forward a little, palm up, fingers curled in, commented that all the foregoing was merest supposition and not based on any firsthand knowledge. The eyes regained their intense indifference. Pibble sighed.

  “What steps could Aaron have taken to stop the drumming?” he said.

  Joshua pouted and put his head on one side. Not a very serious question.

  “Well,” said Pibble, “what would have happened if he had managed to persuade Dr. Ku that the whole tribe ought to move back to New Guinea?”

  Joshua locked his fingers together and folded his thumbs across them, like a prep-school headmaster who finds that he will have to talk to one of the boys about sex a term ahead of schedule. An absorbing but embarrassing point had been raised.

  “What would have happened?” he said. “Who can tell?”

  Pibble allowed the silence to tick by. The old man stared at him, frightened and motionless, as an exhausted hare crouches in an agony of stillness, ears laid back, corneas bulging—sometimes the beagles miss her, but not often. Pibble, alas, knew his own toothlessness: not for him, now, to raise his head from the grasses, his jowls the color of blackberry jam with the blood of the hare.

  “Would you have wanted to go?” he said at last.

  Joshua sighed; his shoulders drooped and his hands pattered onto his thighs.

  “We are old,” he said, “old.”

  His hands spread out again, in a wide tremulous movement, measuring the distance to New Guinea, and the length the journey had been in years to achieve this new balance of life, and at the same time the shortness of the span left them to discover another conceivable posture.

  “But surely,” said Pibble, “life in New Guinea would not be so very different from life here. Isn’t that the point of all these rituals you keep up? Haven’t you begun to return—in spirit, so to speak—by starting this drumming business again?”

  “These are not the same drums. The priest does not call the same spirits. We are not the same men. On the television they told us that when you send back a tame lion to the jungle he can no longer catch meat.” His hands made a baffled movement, the spring of a beast that misses.

  “You think, then,” said Pibble, “that Dr. Ku has served no purpose in keeping all your customs, as far as possible, intact?”

  “You are all the same,” said Joshua, with an irritable flick of the fingers, “all you people who come in from outside. You all think he has done everything for us, as if we were babies who could do nothing for ourselves. He is nothing—a parahili.” An effeminate wriggle of arm and shoulder translated the word into the universal language of men. “But he is clever, certainly. He will know that we have changed, even as much as Paul’s way of painting has changed.”

  “Do you like Paul’s paintings?” said Pibble. Joshua was the fifth of the old men he had talked to. Ishmael and the two younger ones, Jacob and Daniel, were to come, but he knew that he would get nothing police-like out of any of them. Instead he pursued academic byways—something, after all, might emerge there.

  “They are not true paintings,” said Joshua. “Not like the ones we have done on our door and in our hut. They are difficult, but they are clever. When I understand them, they make me laugh.”

  “But the drumming has changed in a way you do understand?”

  Joshua nodded solemnly, an affirmative more potent than words.

  “And the drumming is important to you?”

  Another nod.

  “Why?”

  “We are dying, policeman. For many hours, for many days, we are dead. But when the drums move in our blood we are alive again for a little. It is like this: an old man has a wife, they were wedded many years past, and even after a feast now he can give her no joy, and his heart says I am old, I am old, soon I will see no more, taste no more, smell no more, and my cousins will bury me. But then his wife gives him leave to take another wife, a young girl with hard muscles, and the old man’s strength comes back to him and he has pleasure with her and pleasure with his old wife, too, if he is a good man. So it is with us and the drums. If you could hear them, you might understand.” The whole of Joshua’s small parable had been accompanied by sensual, obscene, explicit finger play.

  “I hope to come tonight,” said Pibble.

  “The priest will slay the slayer of our chief,” said Joshua.

  Pibble was jolted back into the path of duty.

  “I believe,” he said, “that Aaron did intend to move the whole tribe back to New Guinea. If he and Dr. Ku and the women had been agreed on this, could the men’s hut have withstood him?”

  Joshua’s fists bonked together in the head-on collision of opposing stupidities. He gazed mournfully at the smarting knuckles.

  “I do not know,” he said. “The women have no voice, but the wise man hears them all the time.”

  Pibble looked at him gloomily. By their own crazy standards, the old men had a motive for killing the chief, and they could have done it, all acting together—drawing lots, presumably, for the actual man who was to wait in ambush. Pibble had been puzzled all along by the question of smell; everyone agreed that Aaron would have been aware of an outsider (Caine, for preference) lurking on the stairs, but in a house that smelled of Kus an extra-strong whiff of Ku might pass unnoticed. Collusion was in the air; all the old men shared the frightened gaze of the hare. But it didn’t feel right—Pibble found he trusted the movements of Joshua’s hands more than the tongue in anyone’s head. Perhaps they were just frightened of authority, dreading the unknown element as a child dreads the jelly it finds in the cavities of cold meat.

  Or perhaps one of them—Robin, most likely—had stirred himself to the momentariness of action; he might even have a key, or the knack of moving so softly that the keeper
of the door would not be aware of him—after all, they seemed none of them to have heard him stealing out onto the roof through his sliding panel—and now they knew in their hearts that he had done it, but not in their minds. That would account both for the fright and for the apparent truthfulness of all their answers.

  In any case, how was Pibble going to prove it? Unless the younger men were more vulnerable, he couldn’t see anyone except possibly Robin breaking down, and that not till after months of brainwashing—and pretty that would be made to look once the defense learned about it! Fourteen, was he?

  Pibble dismissed Joshua, who bowed himself fussily out but immediately beetled back as if he at last had something useful to communicate.

  “I believe the best cut,” he whispered, “would be slices of the shoulder muscles cut across the grain and beaten very thin. I would fry them with garlic and fennel.”

  The young men were no more vulnerable, no less frightened—if fright it was. Jacob was voluble, Daniel taciturn, but neither said anything in the least bit useful, beyond confirming that they had heard the old men making bets on how much Pibble would discover in the hut. They were both just as firmly in favor of the drumming as the old men had been, both certain that nothing that had happened in the hut was anyone else’s business, least of all Eve’s. Pibble had decided to be tough with Jacob, snarling and sneering, but a chance answer betrayed him; the black man hated and distrusted Caine to an irrational extent, he discovered, and after that the interrogation became almost cozy. He found himself wondering whether he would have liked Aaron, aloof and puritan, as much as he liked the lesser members of the tribe. When the last useless silence was over, he walked down the stairs and found his associates Fernham and Strong waiting in the porch.

  “Time you went home,” he said. “I’m sorry to have kept you. I’ll be staying on for a bit. Does that pub do cooked suppers, Strong?”

  “Fair to middling, sir.”

  “If you see Superintendent Graham, will you tell him I’ll be down here till about nine? I’m going to listen to a drumming ritual in the men’s hut, but it won’t get us anywhere, twenty to one. I don’t think there’s any point in your both coming back tomorrow—if I could have just one chap, you might tell him? I think that’s all. Good night.”

  “Night, sir.”

  Supper was a misery, stale fish in an ectoplasm sauce, and a lonely silence. When he returned to Flagg Terrace, the door was locked and he had to ring. Rebecca let him in.

  “Hello,” he said, taking a chilly dip into the interview he had been shirking, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you. About Robin. Do you know what has been happening upstairs?”

  “In the men’s hut.” The interrogative lilt was beyond her, but she made the question with her eyes.

  “Yes,” said Pibble.

  “Robin. . .drums. . . They have cut. . .his back.”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Robin told me … before … He said: I will do this … I made­ … tears … My brother … Paka—Paka—Paka—Pakatoluji; he was … priest … He lived … bitter days … I told … Robin … I said you go down a black … path; you find … at the end … He said … do you … forbid me … I said: my son … you are the … ­nephew of my … brother … and you are my … son.”

  The large eyes, welling with love amid the puddled face, clamored at him like the eyes of orphans in an Oxfam poster. Sober duty clamored from the other side. Pibble, as usual, compromised.

  “I’m not happy about it,” he said, “and I shall have to make up my mind what to do. The best thing would be for you and Dr. Ku to go along to the local child-guidance people—I’ll send you their address—and consult them. I ought to put in a report about it, but I’ll do nothing for a couple of days and give you a chance to make up your mind. Do you understand?”

  “I. . . understand. . . When you. . .hear. . .the drums, you will understand also.”

  She stood aside. The blue-white flicker of the TV screen bathed the hall from the S.C.R. Pibble climbed slowly (as Aaron must have climbed the night before) up the carpeted flights to the men’s hut. They were all there, waiting for him.

  The air was soggy with burned herbs, through whose haze the homemade candles shone yellowly. He could not see right across the room, but the men—all of them except Robin—were squatting in the middle of the floor rolling dice, with clucks and grunts and much thigh-slapping. Pibble hesitated in the doorway until he was noticed.

  They rose together, like alarmed pigeons, and one of them, Ishmael, strutted toward him.

  “You come at last, policeman,” he said. “First we must initiate you; then we can begin. Do not be frightened. In the valley, we had an easy ritual if a stranger from another tribe wished to sit in the men’s hut.”

  “In the valley,” rumbled Joshua, “a stranger would have brought a pig.”

  Pibble winked at him, and the hut swam with the Kus’ booming laughter.

  “Give me your hand,” said Ishmael. “No, palm up.”

  He held the white hand in his black paw, and quick as a snake-strike the other paw flashed out, a penknife in its fingers, and made a tiny nick on the inside of the wrist. Pibble was too surprised to flinch. Melchizedek stepped forward, drew the drop of blood onto his finger, spat on it, and mixed the liquid into a tiny pile of dust on the floor—a pile which Pibble realized, from the brush marks at its edges, must have been prepared in advance. The old man came up with an index finger covered with the tacky mixture and drew two sweeping curves on Pibble’s cheeks, an ephemeral version of the Ku’s lifelong facial scars.

  “Good,” said Ishmael. “Now we can begin. You can sit there, policeman. You need do nothing. You are not a full member of the hut. Tonight the priest will slay the slayer of our chief. Tomorrow you will go to your own place, for justice will have gorged her fill.”

  Pibble sat in a comfortable nest of rugs at the corner of one of the outer alcoves. From here he could see the whole center of the floor. The men returned to their game and crouched intently as first Daniel and then Joshua made their throws. That, apparently, was the end, for Daniel slapped Elijah jokingly on the shoulder, and Elijah squared up at him like a wrestler. The other Kus laughed and cackled. It was like a group coming out of a pub at closing time. Then, like just such a group, they wavered into the shadows of the alcoves and were gone.

  A noise like the pattering of raindrops on a barn roof, endless and formless, coming from nowhere. Imperceptibly the individual patterings gathered themselves into rhythmic shapes; or perhaps it was only the weariness of the ear that turns a clock’s tickings at midnight into patterns of emphasis. Now the noise slowed and was obscured by a shuffling, as one of the men writhed backward along the floor. He moved out into the middle of the room, naked, crawling with his hands clasped behind his back and his head only a few inches from the floor. In his teeth, he held a small bag from which dribbled some whitish powder. Slowly he slithered backward, waving his head steadily from side to side as he went. Pibble remembered the rhythmic precision of Paul’s practice brush strokes. The man—it was Jacob—was moving in a wide, calculated circle, the dribble of powder from his bag making a precise pattern on the floor. Before he was halfway around, the strain of his posture brought a dew of sweat out all over the blue-black muscles, glistening in the candlelight. A muttering unsyllabled chant joined in with the thud of the drum, then a buzzing whir, and finally an eerie tootling. Jacob cranked his body sideways, nodding jerkily backward and forward to finish his pattern without marring the part which he had already covered, and wriggled back into the dark. The noise, except for the pattering, ceased.

  Melchizedek, also naked, walked out of another alcove without ceremony and put a slit-drum into the circle. He did this five times.

  The buzzing whir began again, and Ishmael stepped into the circle swinging a bull-roarer. He crouched at the center of the pattern, his left arm appa
rently motionless above his head, as the scooped wood whanged around above the patterned powder. Then he flicked it out of the air with a crooking of his elbow and walked into the shadows.

  A group appeared: four naked men carrying Robin on a loose, swaying litter. The boy’s palms fluttered above a small drum which rested on his lap; that was where the pattering came from. They put him in the middle of the circle and left him. He stopped drumming. The overture was finished.

  All the men came out into the light, lounging or squatting against the edges of the screens. Robin fidgeted with his drums, adjusting them to suit his convenience. The biggest was a five-foot log which was held clear of the floor at one end by a bipod like a Bren gun’s; there were three smaller wooden drums, from one of which he had summoned the raindrop noise, one was made of something unidentifiable, and one looked like a squeezed dustbin. Ishmael swung the bull-roarer loosely from his wrist; Melchizedek had the nose flutes.

  Suddenly Robin picked up a tool like an Indian club and beat three rubbing strokes on the biggest drum; it did not boom, but groaned, and the men sighed inward between each stroke. Ishmael started his bull-roarer in a slow, vertical circle which made it emit a deep drone. Robin settled the dustbin drum between his thighs and began to beat it with the heels of his hands in a dull, commonplace rhythm which Pibble recognized as part of the backing to half a hundred pop discs. Melchizedek inserted random poopings from his nose flutes. The bull-roarer droned on, its notes coming in a hypnotic thud as the increased momentum of the downswing caught it. The men began to bark random syllabic shouts. None of the noises seemed to have anything to do with the others.

  Robin fiddled with his rhythm a bit, inserting unnecessary slaps and thumps. The dustbin had a twanging resonance deep inside it, which he was somehow building into a thick continuous note.

  “The drums must be warmed before the spirits come.”