From within the village came the sweet jangling of triple bells. Often they are made of the best bronze from Katskll or Penn — the Church can afford it — and the makers try to cast each group so that it will sound a major triad with the fifth in the bass. The third, struck last, floats in the high treble toward a tranquillity resembling peace, and the overtones play with a hundred rainbows. These village bells were announcing five o’clock: “Time to quit work and pray and have supper.”
Jed’s prayers ended rather flatly. I still glanced behind me as often as I had done when we had the trees at our left, but the tiger did not strike, not then. I did not see him, not then.
The main gate of such a village is usually open during daylight hours so long as a guard is present, but not on Fridays, when it’s considered best to keep folk within God’s easy reach. So that day the ponderous log gate was shut, but I looked through a chink in the log slabs and saw the guard in his grass-thatched shelter, not asleep but mighty restful, sprawled on his cot with a leg hooked over a raised knee and his policer cap let down over his eyes. He bounced up fast enough when I hollered:
Well, there are some things you do and say when approaching a strange village, and some you don’t. I’d goofed in my usual rapid way, too rapid for Sam or Vilet to stop me, as I knew when the guard came swaggering with his javelin up and ready. I whispered to Sam: “Make like a Mister, think you could?”
He nodded, and was in front of me by the time the guard got the gate open and started bawling me out for disturbing the Friday peace-no manners — what ailed me anyhow?
Sam said: “My man, I apologize for my nephew’s hasty speech. I am Mister Samuel Loomis of Kanhar, more recently of Chengo, and the lady is my cousin. This is her husband, Mister Jedro Sever, also late of Chengo but a legal resident of Manster, Vairmant — you may address her as Mam Sever when apologizing for your own bad manners.” Sam had hitched his shirt slightly so that the hilt of his sheathed knife was visible, and he was rubbing a horny old thumb back and forth across the end of the bone knifehilt, and looking down at that thumb along his thin nose, not as if he gave a damn, just sad and patient and thoughtful.
“Mam, I — Mam Sever, I — Mam, I—”
That could have gone on a long time. Sam cut it short by asking delicately: “Is the apology satisfactory, Cousin? And Jackson ?”
“Oh, quait,” says Vilet, hamming it some but not too much, and I mumbled my own snooty graciousness, and
Sam flipped him a two-bit to quiet the pain. Sam had startled me as badly as he had the guard — I’d never guessed he knew how to talk in that hightoned way. Maybe Dion could have found fault with it, but not I. He put me in mind of what I’d imagined about some of the fine old historical characters I’d learned of in school, in what they called a Summary of Old-Time History. Honest, Sam was just as cool and grand and you-be-damned as the best of them — Socrates, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, or that splendid short-tempered sumbitch, I’ll think of his name in a minute, who r’ared up and whipped the Barons and Danes and Romans and things out of merry England and clear across the Delaware before he was satisfied to let them go — Magnum Carter, that’s who it was.
“Well, man,” said Sam, “can we find anything in this village in the nature of decent accommodations?”
“Oh yes, sir, the Black Prince tavern will have nice rooms, I know the people and—”
“How far is Humber Town from here?”
“About ten miles, sir. Oughta be a coach from Skoar going through to Humber Town tomorrow — once a week, Saturdays, and always stops here of course, though with the war and all—”
“Ayah, the rest of our caravan is waiting on that coach at the last village where we stopped, some piddlepot hole in the ground, I didn’t trouble to learn its name.”
“Perkunsvil,” said the guard with solemn pleasure. In a jerkwater village you can hardly go wrong by blackening the reputation of neighboring dumps.
“I guess. We got tired waiting for it. What town is this?”
“This is East Perkunsvil.”
“Nice location. There’s tiger up yonder, by the way — see many hereabout as a rule?”
“What! No, sir, that can’t hardly be.”
Jed spoke for the first time, and reprovingly: “Why not, man? Brown tiger’s like unto the flame of God that burneth where it will.”
The guard bowed, the way you’d better do at hearing anything with a holy sound, but he was stubborn. “Sir, I can tell you, brown tiger never comes anear this town. We don’t ask God’s reasons for the special mercy, it’s just so.”
I’ve noticed every village needs a unique source of pride. It may be a claim that nobody in the village ever had smallpox, or all babies are born with dark hair, or the local wise woman’s aphrodisiacs are the aphrodizziest within forty miles — no matter what, so long as it provides a mark of distinction. In East Perkunsvil I suppose tiger hadn’t come over the stockade within the memory of the oldest inhabitant, so the village was sure God had arranged that he never would. Sam bowed nicely and said: “You be rema’kably favored, doubtless a manifestation.”
“Yes, sir, it may well be.” He was downright friendly now as well as respectful. “Yes, sir, lived here all my life, and that’s twenty-six years, never even seen the beast.”
Vilet said: “Look up yonder then!”
Now chance never plays into my hands that way. If I’d said that, the brute would have been well out of sight before any head turned. And I guess Vilet had never got many breaks of that kind either, for later when we four were settled in our rooms at the Black Prince she had to go over it three or four times, and each time it put her in a warm sweet glow: “’Lookit up yonder then!’ I says, right smackdab on the very second I says it, and wasn’t his o’ face just like a fish and you a-squeezin’ it to get the hook out? — oh snummy!” And she’d bounce and slap her leg and tell it again.
I must have turned when she spoke as quickly as the others, yet I felt as if my head were moving against a resistance, unready to behold a thing that all my life I had feared and in some way desired to behold. Smelling the beast on the road, I had known him from catching that smell once before in the hill country west of Skoar. It’s ranker than puma smell, seems to hang heavier in the air. At that earlier time it had seemed just not quite right for puma, and I had climbed a tree and spent a long night there shivering, smelling him and thinking I did but not once hearing or seeing him. In the morning I’d wobbled down and found his enormous pugs in a bare spot of earth, deep, as if he might have stood there some time observing me through the dark, old Eye-of-Fire, and maybe thinking: Well, let’s wait till Red gets a mite bigger and fatter…
Now, I saw him.
A short way down from the crest of the hill we had descended lay a high flat-topped rock, thirty feet from the road on the open side, across from the forest. The top was slightly tilted, away from the road, so that when we walked past, it had looked like a simple edge, nothing to tell of the slanting platform. Had he watched us go by, or only just now arrived there? Maybe he had been not hungry, or restrained by the fact there were four of us. Maybe he knew my bow meant danger. I imagined him amusing himself with false starts, quivering his hindquarters, playing and enjoying the cat-game of delayed decision and finally for his own reasons allowing us to proceed. Now, following his immediate whim, he stood tall, and I saw him in remote dark gold against the deepening midsummer sky.
He gazed down toward us, or more likely beyond us. He must have known or sensed that the distance was too great for the flight of an arrow from my bow, if he was experienced in such things. He turned on his high rock with no haste at all, flowingly, to stare in another direction, off to the south across the valley, perhaps indifferently observing the smoke of other human places.