“Yes. Let me get the medical handbook.”
The handbook had no recommendations, and Gunda had no antidote. The poison acted on the central nervous system. Paroxysms began two hours after Bro-Kap’s visit They increased quickly in severity and frequency. Some time after midnight, long before dawn, Bob died.
Ramchandra struck the tenth useless blow over the stopped heart, raised his arm to strike again, and did not strike. The dancer’s raised arm: creator, destroyer. The clenched, dark fist relaxed; the poised and separated fingers hovered above the white face and the unbreathing chest. “Ah!” Ramchandra cried aloud, and dropping down beside the cot broke into tears, a passion of tears.
Wind gusted the rain against the roof. Time passed and Ramchandra was silent, as silent as Bob, beside whom he crouched, his arms stretched across Bob’s body and his head sunk between them; exhausted, he had fallen asleep. The rain thinned and weakened and then beat hard again. Tamara put out the oil lamp, her movements slow and certain, full of the knowledge of what they meant. She added the last of the fuel to the fire and sat down at the little hearth. One must watch with the newly dead, and the sleeping should not sleep unprotected. She sat awake and watched the fire die out, and long afterwards, the grey light reborn.
Ndif funerals were, as she had expected, graceless. There was a burying ground not far off in the forest, which nobody talked about or ever visited except for burials. Gravedigging was the Old Men’s task. They had dug a shallow pit. Two of them, plus Kara and Binira, helped carry Bob’s body to the grave. The Ndif used no coffins, dumped their dead naked in the earth; it was too cold that way, too cold, Tamara thought with rage, and shehad put Bob’s white shirt and trousers on him, left his gold Swiss watch strapped on his wrist since he owned no other treasure, and wrapped the long, silky, bluish leaves of the pandsu carefully about him. She lined the shallow grave with leaves before they laid him in it; the four old men and women watched, expressionless. They laid him on his side, his knees a little bent. Tamara turned for a flower to put by his hand, but the pink and purple blossoms sickened her; she broke the chain around her neck, on which hung a little turquoise her mother had given her, a fragment of the Earth, and put that in the dead man’s hand. She had to be quick; the old men were already scraping the dirt back over the grave with their crude wooden shovels. As soon as that was done all four Ndif turned without a word and went off, not looking back.
Ramchandra knelt down by the grave. “I am sorry I was jealous of you,” he said. “If we meet reborn, you will be a king again, but I will be the dog at your heel.” He bowed down, touching the raw, damp clods of the grave, then slowly stood up. He looked at Tamara. She knew his look, the dark, clear, grieving eyes, but she could not meet them, or speak. It was her turn to cry. He came to her across the grave, as if it was any bit of ground, and put his arms around her, holding her so she could weep. When the first hardest sobbing was done and-she could walk, they set off slowly down the narrow, half-overgrown path through the peacock splendors of the forest, back to the village.
“Burning is better,” Ramchandra said. “The spirit is freed sooner to go on.”
“Earth is best,” Tamara said, very low and hoarse.
“Tamara. Do you want to radio Ankara Base to send the launch to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s no hurry to decide.”
The gorgeous colors of the lamabas blurred and cleared and blurred again. She stumbled, though Ramchandra’s hand was kind and firm on her arm.
“We might as well go on and finish what we came for.”
“The ethnology of dreams.”
“Dreams? Oh no. This is real… Much realler than I wish it were.”
“So are all dreams.”
In three days they put in their regular call to Ankara, the inner planet where the central base for the various research groups in Yirdo’s solar system was established; they reported Bob’s death, “by misunderstanding—no blame,” in the Ethnographic Corps code., They did not request relief.
Life in Hamo village went on as before. The Middle-Aged Women said nothing about Bob’s death to Tamara, but several evenings old Binira sat just outside her hut and sang to her, a quiet cricket trill. Once she saw two of the little saweya dancers leaving a flowering branch at the door of Bob’s empty hut; she went towards them, but they trotted off, giggling. Soon after, the Young Men set. fire to the hut, deliberately or by accident, there was no telling; it burned to ashes and all trace of it was gone within a week. Ramchandra spent his days and nights) with the Old Ones of Hamo and Gunda, gathering an increasingly solid bulk of linguistic and mythic data. The long lines of saweya dancers undulated, the baliya dancers thrust their high breasts left and right, the singers chanted “Ah-weh, weh, ah-weh, weh,” and the forest glades round the dancing ground at dusk swarmed with coupled bodies. Hunters returned proudly with dead poro, like suckling pigs with blunt, curved fangs, slung on carrying poles. On) the twelfth night after Bob’s death Ramchandra came to Tamara’s hut; she had been trying to read over some notes, but the pages might as well have been empty, her head ached and nothing made sense, nothing meant anything. He came to the doorway, dark, slight, shadowy, and she looked up at him with dull eyes. He said some-! thing that meant nothing about loneliness, and then he said, with the darkness around him and behind him, “It’s like fire. Like burning in a fire. But the spirit caught too, burning—”
“Come in,” she said.
A few nights later they lay talking, in the dark, the soft windy rain sighing in the forest and on the thatch of the hut above them.
“Since I first saw you,” he said. “Truly, since the day we met, in the canteen at Ankara Base.”
With a laugh, Tamara said, “You scarcely behaved as if…”
“I didn’t like it! I refused. I said, No, no, no!—my wife was enough, this doesn’t come twice to a man in one life, I will remember her.”
“You do,” Tamara murmured.
“Of course. To her in me now I can say, Yes, and to you with me, Yes, yes… Listen, Tamara, you set me free, your hands free me. And bind me. Tighter to the wheel, never in this life now will I get free, never cease to desire you, I don’t want to cease…”
“It’s so simple now. What was in our way?”
“My fear. My jealousy.”
“Jealousy?—Of Bob?”
“Oh yes,” he said, shivering.
“Oh Ram, never—Right from the beginning, you—”
“Confusion,” he whispered. “Illusion…”
His warmth against her the length of her body; and cold Bob, cold in the ground. Fire is better than earth.
She woke; he was stroking her hair and cheek, soothing her, whispering, “Sleep again, it’s all right, Tamara,” his voice heavy with sleep and tenderness.
“What—did I—”
“A bad dream.”
“Dream. Oh, no—it wasn’t bad—just queer.”
The rain had ceased and the light of the giant planet, greyed and filtered by clouds, was like a faint mist in the hut. She could just make out the hook of his nose, the darkness of his hair, in that grey dust of light.
“What was the dream?”
“A boy—a young man—no, a boy, about fifteen. Standing in front of me. Sort of filling everything, taking up all the room, so that I couldn’t possibly get past him or around him. But just an ordinary boy, with glasses, I think. And he was staring at me, not threatening, not even really seeing me, but he kept staring and saying ‘Bill me, bill me.’ And I didn’t think he owed me anything, so I said, ‘What for?’ But he just kept saying, ‘Bill me!’ And then I woke up.”