[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

then shouted, "Damn bird, you damn _bird_!" at the top of her lungs. As
though her furious breath had reached them, the lights of the wedding
feast, seen lilting like birthday candles through the maze's patchy
green walls, suddenly shivered and went out. A figure too tall to be
quite human, shaped wrongly to be entirely human, was moving between
the castle and the maze in a way that was not human at all. Julie
backed silently against Farrell, who was grateful.
They heard the hoofbeats first, scraping deliberately on the
courtyard stones, and then the voice. "The desire of increasing riches
occupieth you, till ye come to the grave. Nay! but in the end ye shall
know. Nay! once more, in the end ye shall know your folly. Nay! would
that ye knew it with knowledge of certainty. Surely ye shall see
hellfire. Then shall ye surely see it with the eye of certainty. Then
shall ye on that day be taken to task concerning pleasures." The cold,
piercing drone might have rattled in the cavities of a naked skull, but
Farrell had heard it before.
Beside him Julie made a little sound like Sir Mordred when he bit
himself for the first time. The black horseman was leaning over the
hedge, looking straight down at them. When he smiled, the faint
parallel ridges rose on his cheeks, like gill slits. "My kingdom is
four months' journeying long and four months wide," he said. "In my
city, Timbuktu, which is the City of Wisdom, I have as many scribes and
scholars as warriors and as many books as I have bars of gold. The
throne where I give audience is of ebony, and great elephant tusks arch
above my head. Three hundred slaves stand behind my throne. Before me
and to my right there stands a giant holding a two-handed sword as big
as a man, and to my left my spokesman waits with his mace of office to
give my answers and my commands. To the end of my eyesight, the sun
blazes off spears and trumpets, armor and jeweled trappings. And I sit
in the center of the center of the world and I am not touched. Glorify
the Compassionate, the Merciful. I am not touched." As far as could be
seen, he was completely naked.
"And that's the other one," Farrell managed to say. "Prester
John." But Julie whispered another name and ran out of the maze,
leaving him to trail after her once again. The big horse danced heavily
away from her quickness, and the black man on his back seemed to be
dancing with him as he brought the animal to an easy halt just out of
Julie's reach. Farrell heard her call the name again--"_Micah_"--but
only the California surfing bird responded.
"Mansa Musa is not touched," the black man chanted. Farrell saw
now that he was wearing a pair of dark trousers, glinting and sliding
with the moonlight, and nothing more. "In Cairo the Sultan called me
his brother and desired to embrace me, as the men do there, but Allah
put him away. I handle neither ivory nor gold nor salt, that they may
not handle me. My wives come to me in darkness, that not so much as
their shadows in the moon may touch my body. Only Allah touches Mansa
Kankan Musa."
"It's me," Julie said hopelessly. "Micah, it's me." A tower door
opened and closed, sounding very far away, but the courtyard was
suddenly crowded with the laughter of people starting home from a
party. For a moment, the black man's immense eyes were upon Farrell,
brown as old rivers, deepmuddy with decaying secrets, and streaked by
thin, luminous currents and the slow backs of crocodiles. Then he
kicked bare heels into his mount's thick sides, and the horse lumbered
through a judicious U-turn and trotted away past the fishpond, under
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the spiteful faces of the entryway, and on out into the expensively
quiet streets beyond. The clopping echoes bounced back and forth
between the condominiums long after the man and the horse were out of
sight.
Farrell drew Julie back into the maze, for privacy's sake, and
let her cry. He was jealous at first--_no one has ever cried for me
that way, and no one ever will, I know this_-- but then Julie raised
her face, gasping and hiccuping, and he saw clearly how she would look
when she was old. "Baby," he said, and began helplessly kissing lines
and hollows and wounds that were not there yet, sick with tenderness
and fear.
XIII
"If you'll look over on your left now, ladies and gentlemen,"
Farrell said into the dashboard microphone, "we're now passing the
South American maned wolf." In his rearview mirror, a dozen faces
turned dutifully as directed; two or three others stared straight
ahead, meeting his eyes with the wary contempt that certain children
always show to magicians. _What are you hiding from me while you let me
see this?_ Farrell smiled encouragingly into the mirror, but it only
confirmed their suspicions, and he sympathized, having a touch of their
complaint himself.
"Despite the name," he went on, slowing the alligator train as it
waddled past the yard where the two shaggy, cinnamon-toast-colored
creatures trotted up and down on deer legs, "the maned wolf is actually
a large fox--sort of a fox on stilts, as you can see." He had tried
several times to leave the official jokes out of his recitation, but
management spies always reported him. "In the wild they live on rodents
and insects, but here we feed them chicken and bananas. They'll eat
five pounds of bananas a day, just wolf 'em right down." Somebody
laughed at that one, and Farrell daydreamed about stopping the train
and demanding to know who it was. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]