The Manticore (© Biswapriya Purkayastha)
Page 2 He'd shaken his head. "Ye
know nothing," he'd mumbled. "There was always but the one. There will always
be one." "Well," I'd said,
beginning to get impatient, "will you provide me with a guide?" I'd been
growing tired of the village, which was little more than a circle of mud-walled
huts roofed with skins; tired of the chief, his wrinkled wife, and of his
round-faced daughter, who'd been sitting on the far side of the fire staring at
me with her tiny eyes, as though she'd never seen a city man before. Probably
she hadn't, come to that. "You know that the king's commission means I can
access the royal treasury. I am able to pay as much as you should want." That
wasn't only an appeal to his greed, but a reminder that I held the commission,
and that there were penalties for obstructing me. Slowly, very slowly, he'd nodded, not
looking at me. "I will have a guide for you in the morning," he'd said. "Today,
it is too late for that." I'd not slept well. It
wasn't the surroundings themselves the chief's house was the best in the
village, and of course I'd been given the best room, which had been cleaned out
for my sake. Of course it was still flea-ridden and grimy, and stank of old
mildew; but I'd slept in worse in the years I'd been chasing the creature. It
wasn't the fact that the chief's daughter tried to sneak into my bed in the
middle of the night; I'd been expecting something of the sort, and sent her
away with a promise to look in on the way back, a promise I had no intention of
honouring. No, it was the proximity of the beast itself, the feeling that it
was at last almost within reach. I'd lain awake through
most of the night, imagining it somewhere in the hills above the village,
perhaps knowing how close I was, perhaps sensing its imminent doom. It was far
from a stupid beast, crafty and cunning, and it had evaded me many times over
the years when I'd imagined it was at my mercy. But now I had mastered all its
tricks, and driven it up into these hills, the ancient home of its kind. It had
nowhere to run. Lying awake, I'd almost
imagined that it was outside, prowling the stony lanes of the village, sniffing
around locked doors, trying to find me and destroy me before I could find it.
But the village dogs had been silent, and the night was still. Not even the
wind which blew through the chinks in the wall by my head made a noise. At last, in the early
hours of the morning, with dawn already a promise in the eastern horizon, I'd
fallen into a fitful doze, and into a dream. Much of it I'd forgotten when I
woke, but what remained with me was less a dream than a memory a memory of a
village I'd seen in the far south, years ago, which had been attacked by the
creature. I'd arrived the morning
after the beast had done its work and departed, leaving the village in ruins,
the people all but one of those that hadn't been devoured huddling
miserably in the woods, praying piteously to their pathetic little gods. There
were few enough of them, perhaps a dozen at most. They'd looked at me without
hope, and I hadn't had a word to say. What could I have told them? I'd looked
around, marked the spoor of the creature, and started again on its trail. It was on the way out of
the village that I'd met the one exception who'd neither been eaten nor fled.
It was a young woman, in the tattered remnants of a maidservant's dress. She
was sitting by the side of the road, on the rotting trunk of a fallen tree,
softly singing to herself, a song in a language I'd never heard, with a tune
strange and compelling. When she'd heard me coming, she'd looked up at me, her
eyes fearless in her dirt streaked face. "Don't you dare try and
touch me," she'd said, breaking off her song. "I'm warning you." For some reason I hadn't
felt like laughing. "I don't want to harm you," I'd said. "I was just listening
to that song and wondering why you sit out here while the rest of the village
is dead or hiding." For reply she'd turned so
I could see her back. The cloth hung in ribbons, and the skin below was raised
in ugly long weals, so clear that I could almost hear the slash of the whip
that had flogged her. "What happened?" [ Continue to page 3 ] |