The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest (18 page)

“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 apparently 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.”

Joshua had come to squat at Pibble's elbow. His belly, culminating in a protuberant navel, sagged outward and down toward his knees. The whole mass trembled slightly, a continuous excited shiver. The note of the rhythm changed; Robin was working steadily now with three drums, the two wooden ones making a flat, dead noise under his left hand while his right hand kept the metal one alive. This he was working now to a slower and slower beat, catching its internal resonance just as it died away into whimperings. At first he filled the gaps with a hiccupping rattle on the small drums; then he added to this a backhanded slap at the long log which groaned its deep note against the metal whanging of the dustbin. Pibble thought he had some sort of wooden knuckleduster laced to the back of his hand, but it was hard to see through the dust and smoke.

Jacob stalked out from the wings and began to strut in front of the circle, as clockwork in motion as the springtime pigeons Pibble had watched that morning. One of the old men handed him a bottle, which he tilted back and drank from. The bull-roarer had stopped, but the old men were calling excitedly together, still in monosyllables, backing the compulsive iteration of the drums. Jacob kept the bottle and continued his strutting. Suddenly he staggered in his march, hunched his shoulders together, threw his head back, and began to glide around the room in a wallowing lope. From his mouth came a high, absurd voice, the voice of a don on “The Critics,” speaking the Ku language in rapid spasms. He tilted the bottle back again, but this time most of the liquid spilled down into his beard and over his neck and shoulders. He gulped unheeding.

“Good,” said Joshua. “It is Korapu. He is drunk and a bully and a coward, but he comes before.”

“Before the green snake?” whispered Pibble.

“Do not name it!” whispered Joshua. “It is ill fortune!”

He moved away from Pibble, as if from the contamination of cholera. The beat of the drums was now very loud. The whole room seemed to have acquired the internal resonance of the metal drum, so that the boards and beams picked up harmonics from each thud and rattle and groan and transmitted them along the framework of Pibble's skeleton. Robin was sitting on the far edge of the light, his whole body slippery with sweat as he worked his instruments into the lurches of the coward god's dance. Korapu broke from the figure of eight through which he had been reeling and rushed straight at Pibble. Pibble rose in self-defense. Korapu screamed a cackling curse and thrust his bottle under Pibble's nose. Pibble took it, put it to his lips, tilted it back, and sucked. Christ! It was raw spirit! He choked halfway through his swallow, did the nose trick with the reeking acid, choked again, and shook his head, his ears singing. Korapu cackled again, a zany's laugh this time, and reeled away. Pibble sat down.

Several times more, Korapu left his dance to share a drink with the watchers; they humored him and took their swigs and, when the bottle was empty, gave him another one. The second time he came to Pibble, Pibble managed the encounter with more dignity, answering the jeering babble with the only Latin he could remember, “
Bis dat qui cito dat
,” and swallowing his tot with a full command over his gullet. The old men were getting bored with this minor demon and beginning to whisper among themselves when Robin caught him in mid-stagger with three strokes at the long log which cut the ribald ecstasies of sound. Korapu fled. The black body he had ridden shriveled and collapsed. Jacob knelt in the middle of the floor in the attitude of the embryo, his torso pulsing like that of an embryo as he gulped, exhausted, at the smoky air. The men didn't seem to look at him.

Robin settled into a slow movement, rubbing a heavy throb out of the long log and counterpointing it with a subdued tapping at one of the small drums. It was a sullen, earthy noise, too slow for any human rhythm, going on and on, subduing thought. The men stood still and waited. Ishmael started his bull-roarer again, timing the emphasis of its downswing to underpin the groanings of the big drum. There were no shouts now. After ages of sound, Robin added a fluttering double beat to the pattern, and then another. The lump of black flesh in the middle of the floor stopped its heaving and began to twitch. A new life flowed into it, slow and cold. It stirred upward, jointless. The head of the man it inhabited craned forward, his eyeballs showed only white, his tongue stuck out between stretched lips. A whispering hiss came from the roof beams.

All the men shouted together, and the hiss answered them. The drums boomed on, busy with innumerable interlocking rhythms. Melchizedek made a short speech in the Ku language and the hiss replied. It was just a hiss, with no syllables in it. Melchizedek spoke again, with the emphasis of a man arguing a case, but before he had finished the hiss cut him short. The men began to sing all together, a chant of short sentences each slightly varied from the last. In the middle of one of these sentences, the snake god left; there was a quick, agonizing spasm and Jacob bowed forward from the hips, his head nearly banging the floor. Then he stood up, scratched his ribs and neck, walked over to where Korapu's bottle stood, took a long swig, and sat down next to Ishmael.

After that, Daniel did a clowning obscene dance in his own person. No spirit came to ride him, and the men shouted happily at him as he bounced and postured. Robin played trickily with the drums but without intensity. When Daniel was tired, he sat down and the men carried Robin out of the circle. The cuts in his back looked raw and nasty. Pibble wondered whether they'd had the sense to use antiseptic on them.

Elijah wobbled affably over.

“Now we will drink
kava
and sleep,” he said. “Would you like some?”

“No, thank you,” said Pibble. “I must stay awake tonight. That was very interesting. What on earth was in the bottle?”