A Feast Unknown (4 page)

Zabu awoke on his back with my hand over his mouth and my knife at his throat. His eyes widened like water boiling over. He shook. With a rip of gas, he shot out a long turd. His breath stank of my whiskey and of terror. The blood on his belly and genitals stank of the terror and agony of the bitch, and of the sperm he had loosed.

“Tell me how this happened, Zabu,” I said. “Otherwise, I kill you right now.”

He was willing to buy a few minutes of life, although his grandfather and father would have died rather than tell an enemy anything. His lips spewed Bandili. His eyes rotated as if he were looking for some device to appear from the air and give him a handhold whereby he could be whisked away from my knife.

Perhaps he thought I had been killed and my ghost had come back.

He had gone through school and college with my assistance. He had denied believing in ghosts. He was an educated man, he
had said.
But he believed.
The hindbrain is almost always stronger than the forebrain, though in a subtle fashion.

Zabu said that the Kenyan army had moved in with the assistance of some of the young Bandili. At the last moment, the older Bandili in the nearby village had found out about the attack. They were told to keep quiet or die. Three of the old men had tried to warn me. One was Paboli, the Spear-Launcher, Zabu’s grandfather. All three did die.

A strange thing happened then. Zabu, speaking of his grandfathers death, wept.

The army units had moved in on three fronts, leaving the western open because I was returning from a hunting trip in that direction. After I got home, the units quietly closed the gap.

During the night, with utmost care, a cannon and six .50-caliber machine guns were hauled in by foot soldiers. The trucks were kept far out in the savanna to avoid noise. The young Bandili had told the army officers that the stories of my supersensitive hearing and sense of smell were not exaggerated.

Zabu talked on and on, as if enough words would build up a wall thick enough to bar my knife. He tried to justify his treachery, although he did not call it that. He called it patriotism and Africanism.

Humans are always labeling deeds. No doubt, he thought he was right. But he was moving his thoughts around in two boxes labeled blacks and whites, just as the whites he hated— with the exception of myself—moved their thoughts around in their two boxes.

What happened next surprised me. I did not intend to do it and had no thought of doing any such thing.

Looking back, I see that the treachery, so unexpected in those who had been my people for sixty years, combined with the shock of the explosions, had literally loosened something in me.

Rather,
loosed it.

It had always been in me but shoved down as deep as deep was.

I stunned him with the knife hilt. While he lay half-unconscious, I cut his tongue off close to the root to keep him from screaming. The pain brought him to his senses. He tried to sit up, and his mouth gaped. The blood shot out.

I kissed him. One, to drink the blood, which I needed because I was thirsty. Two, to stop any sound he might have made. Three, I was compelled to do so.

The blood was salty and unpleasant, as if it contained the essence of a sea-bottom built up from the decomposing flesh and bones of a million poisonous fish. It contained a trickle of tobacco, which I hate. In other words, his blood was like most of the humans from whom I have drunk.

But the blood was strengthening, and I began to feel an excitement similar to that which I felt when in battle or making a kill. However, when it became more intense, it was obviously sexual.

Quickly, before I climaxed, I cut Zabu open with a stroke down his belly. It was not deep enough, however, to cut into the intestines. I know my anatomy well.

As the knife sank into the flesh, I spurted over his belly and the knife.

For a moment, I lost control. My arm straightened, and the knife went in to the hilt.

He writhed briefly as he died. I shook like a tree in a storm.

I sat back, gasping. I wiped off my knife on his hair. I wondered what had made me behave thus. I had intended to stick my penis into the wound and do to him what he had done to my dog.

4

Finally, I quit trying to explain to myself my strange compulsion. I am a relentless hunter but only if there is a scent or track to follow.

I waited. The noise increased, and the celebrators staggered even more. When the moon had quartered the sky, the inevitable fights broke out between the Agikuyu and the Bandili. The few officers not thoroughly drunk separated the fighters and sent them on their way. Some soldiers, however, staggered into the village, a hundred and fifty yards away. They were after women, of course. The older men in the village were Bandili, as proud as ancient Romans and as courageous. They had been imprisoned by their youths, who had surprised them. Now, they were free, and they fought. And the Bandili youths could not stand aside while their sisters and mothers were raped and their elders killed by Agikuyu. They attacked the soldiers. Presently, the two factions were killing each other and innocent bystanders, as in all wars, and the village huts were ablaze.

The battle gave me a chance to leave the ruins of my house unobserved. In a few minutes, I had worked my way through the shadows to the cannon. It was a British gun-howitzer of World War II, a 25-pounder or 88 mm, set on a two-wheel carriage and carrying a shield. The caisson held some shells and point-detonating fuses. These were inserted just before the shell was loaded into the gun and would explode on striking.

The crew of four were moving the cannon to a slight hill to fire upon the village. They were drunk and probably would have hit their own men as well as the target.

I took a semiautomatic rifle from a stack near them and killed each with one bullet. With the first shot, my penis began to rise. At the fourth shot, it was in the state where, usually, the orgasm was within ten seconds of arriving. Then it slowly subsided, and the pleasurable sensations diminished.

The cannon was too close to the soldiers. Before I could have fired two rounds, they would be at me from three sides. I picked up the end of the carriage and towed it off across a level of forty yards and then up a twenty-five-degree incline for perhaps fifty yards. Past the top of the hill, I turned the cannon around on the wheels and inched it down the other, which was a thirty-degree incline. I had to dig my heels into the dirt to keep it from getting away. The next hill was steeper and higher. Twice, the 900-pound cannon and carriage almost got away. A small flat space on top of the hill was large and broad enough for my purposes, and it commanded the side of the smaller hill and the village and the area around it.

I ran back and pulled the caisson, into which I had loaded the dead crew’s rifles, ammunition, and some grenades, up to
the hilltop. I then cached three of the rifles and ammunition behind trees at various places. I lined up the cannon, depressed the muzzle, inserted a fuse, loaded in a shell, and took one more look at the situation.

It was then that I saw dark figures coming out of the woods on the east side of the plantation, behind the soldiers. They advanced in an arc, and several times the moon struck something metallic. There were about forty men on foot, and two groups carried bulks which could be recoilless rifles on tripods.

Behind them, something big emerged from the woods. A long barrel of a cannon projected from a platform. It was a half-track, self-propelled cannon which I estimated to be a 90 mm.

The foot soldiers and the half-track reached a line of trees and stopped. They were out of my sight when they were behind the trees. Four dark figures ran out from the trees towards the cover of other trees near the village. They were scouts.

By then, the Kenyans had discovered that their cannon was missing. Four men followed the wheel tracks towards the smaller hill and soon were hidden by its bulk. The flames from the village were searing the skies. There were many bodies, men, women, children, sprawled between the burning huts. Machine guns were still shooting, but the rifle fire had died down.

5

Suddenly, all firing ceased. The soldiers began to regroup on the east side of the village. I supposed that the officers had sobered up enough to bring the men under control. They were beginning to realize the consequences of their actions. It might be possible to get the government to consider this just an unfortunate incident, but justified, because the mission had been successful. It had obliterated me. But if the other Bandili villages revolted because of this massacre, the government might shoot them to satisfy the Bandili.

On the other hand, they might be re-forming for another attack on the Bandili survivors, entrenched in the woods on the west side of the village.

The newcomers were moving back. Their haste gave me the impression they intended to remove themselves at a great distance from the Kenyan army. It was evident that they were surprised to find the soldiers. I supposed they had come to attack me. For Revenge. For Wealth. For the Secret of Immortality. Perhaps for all three.

Their appearance here at the same time as the army attack was one more of the many coincidences which some readers of my biographers novels have found incredible. These people do not know that some men are not only endowed with “animal magnetism,” but some men also have what I call a “human magnetic moment.” That is, some men, of whom I am one, are the focus of unusual events, of mathematically unlikely coincidences. They radiate something—a quality, a “field,” which pulls events together. The field slightly distorts, or warps, the semifluid structure of occurrences, of space objects intertwined with the time flow.

Whatever the reason for their being here, the newcomers were now leaving. I could, however, directly influence them now. I picked up the tailpiece of the carriage, turned the cannon, unconsciously estimating the distance and trajectory as if I were firing an arrow. I depressed the muzzle and then got down off the operator’s seat and jerked the lanyard.

I had been vaguely aware that I was sexually excited. Now, as the cannon went off, so did I.

The orgasm, however, was not nearly as intense and ecstatic as when I had thrust my knife into Zabu’s belly.