The Sending (13 page)

After following the edge until I was satisfied that this torrent must discharge, not far below the amphitheatre, into the stream I knew, I walked along the north side of the plateau to see if I could spot any particular track which Odolaga would take when he rode up through the woods from his house. All the way the main flock of sheep were on my left, lying down and undisturbed by my gentle pace. Several times I glimpsed a shadow moving parallel to me and wondered if there were still wolves in the fastnesses of the Pyrenees. It seemed unlikely, for in that case there should be dogs on guard and perhaps a shepherd as well. But the shadow did turn out to be a shepherd; the black goat was on duty, keeping always between me and the flock. He would not come near me, and if I had turned towards the sheep he would, I think, have had them quickly on their feet and bunched.

Then I returned to my base and slept until again I could see the plateau and a short pyramid of cone above the mist.

August 23

It was the eagle owl who first put a possible plan into my head. That my objective must be the goat, I had decided when I first saw it, but the mere slaughter of the beast was insufficient. Whatever devilry Odolaga had performed on Rita would not be reversed because an unknown brute had killed his familiar and vanished; and when he realised—as I meant him to—that I, come all the way from Penminster, was the assassin, he was more likely to intensify his attack than relinquish it.

So there had to be a tiger brother fraud to convince him that I was as adept a shaman as he, dangerous and not to be offended with impunity. That was where my friend, the eagle owl, came in. I call her my friend because she had no fear of me. She reminded me of my half-wild Indian owl, presenting much the same silhouette though four times the size. She glided in from her hunting and settled on her branch. It was her daytime roost. She had been the satisfied tenant of the ivy house for years, as proved by a six-inch-deep deposit of pellets on the ground, and she didn't give a damn if I chose to squat on my patch of earth higher up the slope.

Paddy and Uncle Izar were both able to entrance birds. Remembering how Leyalá had planed down from the pediment on to my shoulder and how for an ecstatic moment I had transmitted to him our unity, I was convinced that I too had—or well might have—inherited the gift of simple hypnosis, though none of the advanced technique of Odolaga. In case it turned out that I was to that extent a shaman, I started to prepare my bow and arrows.

I had intended to kill Odolaga if all else failed. Given the wild and broken country, the unknown and untraceable murderer would be away before the body was found, and when found it might take the forensic consultant some time to decide that an arrow was the cause of death. That arrow had to be manufactured on the spot; I was not going to leave a promising clue behind me by carrying arrows through Customs or buying them in Spain. My chief difficulty had been to invent an efficient and easily fitted head. While I was trying in my studio at home to design an improvement on the Birhor method of fastening head to shaft with fine sinews, it suddenly occurred to me that the answer was in my hand at that moment. A shaft driven home into the lower half of a ballpoint pen, the socket for the point evenly crushed by pliers and smoothed with a file, would do very well at close range even if discharged with less than Birhor force.

I longed for a Birhor bow with which I could hit a match box at forty feet, rather better than my headquarters officers could perform with a revolver. As it was I had to make do with a crude longbow. Leaving my owl to sleep off her midnight snacks, I wandered through that thick, temperate forest, searching for a branch or sapling that would serve. No difficulty with the arrows. I came across a species of mountain ash with stiff, straight twigs which only needed smoothing. Tradition has it that the rowan repels witches, but this one must have recognised me as a harmless amateur and allowed its shoots to be stroked and stripped. The bow gave me trouble, for I could not know the properties of the available woods. The ultimate choice was between hazel, an ash sapling or a stout shoot of beech growing straight up towards the light.

I chose the beech and spent the rest of the day working on my weapons. For the primitive hunter, that task takes far more time than the hunt itself. The arrows were easy enough to trim, fletch, bind and notch. The beech bow had to be whittled down to an even thickness and the ends slightly tapered. I dared not shape it correctly for fear of weakening it. When strung, it was the devil to pull and I doubted if it would have enough spring after any prolonged shooting. However, I only needed some practice shots and then one or at the most two for business; those, I could guarantee, would send the arrow slap through Odolaga or his black, comely shepherd with the point sticking out the other side.

Tiger brother did not like owls. He treated them with respect, rather than fear, and had many stories about them. An owl could drive away an ancestral and benevolent spirit just when it was needed; an angry or vengeful ghost could wail like an owl or use the owl to wail for it. I was never sure which. That was one of the many cases when mind was indistinguishable from matter and language was unclear about the difference.

At any rate this fascinating creature of the night, with its eerie call, has been considered a bird of ill omen from time immemorial. It turns up in the environment of witches, though rarely as a familiar. I suspect that the shamans of the English kept live or dead owls like skulls and stuffed reptiles to impress the customers rather than for any real use, but to Uncle Izar the long tradition of the owl could have more meaning than to me. Divination, if there is such a thing? To help in creating illusion for enemy or patient? So it seemed likely that the appearance of an owl at the scene of a disaster would be more significant to him than any other bird, and that, since my whole object was to cloak a tiger brother fraud in mystery and entice the shaman into worrying that he might be up against a rival with all his own powers and more, the owl was a valuable stage property.

Before making use of my large and alarming friend I had to know whether I could reach the far side of the gorge and escape from it unseen. So when at last the bow was ready and tested and there were still three hours before sunset, I again hid my pack and weapons and set off through the woods on my side of the plateau. I soon came to a rough path running along the lip of the gorge. The edge was not so clean as on the grassland, tree roots having split and tumbled the rocks, but there was no possible way down until I came to a clearing where the path dived into a cleft by way of ledges and steps cut through the worst of the rubble. Crossing the fast, shallow stream at the bottom I found a zig-zag path up the other side. Along the top was little cover except rocks, but I thought they would serve at night. The most satisfying discovery was that the path allowed me to cross the gorge in a matter of minutes. I could get away round the base of the peak, a route which I already knew, or along the far side of the gorge and downhill to the confluence of the streams. Whichever Odolaga chose, I could take the other.

I was back in time to watch him make his evening visit. He came up, as the day before, over the far edge of the plateau and into sight. The sheep were on my side, near the boundary of the trees. When the black goat got up to greet him, it was closely followed by the leader of the flock, a fine ewe, black-faced like many of the others, but distinguishable by a white crescent or horseshoe above the nose. The rest followed her, so that the scene was comically like a parade: the colonel and his adjutant facing the company commander and the troops behind her standing at ease in mild curiosity as to what would happen next. Nothing did. Odolaga played with and petted his familiar and then rode off. Company commander and the rest wandered off and lay down or browsed near the skyline above the gorge.

As the sun dipped behind the mountain, its long and gloomy shadow turned the sheep from white to grey. It was time to experiment with the eagle owl. I was sure that I could make her sit still and possibly fly to me—unless she chose to attack—but I wanted more than that: to hypnotise her as Odolaga, according to Concha Pirrone, had hypnotised Leyalá. Of his more complex technique which had nearly destroyed me, I knew nothing.

I held the owl's eyes as she stared at me and either received or guessed something of her simple, passing thoughts. I was harmless. I was food (not to eat but to start up by my movements). I had eyes owlish rather than animal. Strangely, I was in danger myself of being hypnotised; that is to say, there was some degree of mutual trance. Tiger brother, when curing a mentally disturbed patient, called it a drawing out of the soul. The trance became ecstatic, the preliminary to the mystic vision, and I could only preserve my own individuality within the communion by an effort of will, forcing the life that was me to remember its very mundane object. The trance must have been reinforced, for I found that I had succeeded. The owl loosened her grip on the branch and fell softly on to the carpet of pellets. I tied feet and bill and propped her up against the tree.

Blue dusk had now vanished. It was a still night and the highlands sang with silence, broken only by the calling of other owls and a short spell of distant barking from the dogs at Odolaga's manor. I fitted my pack on my shoulders and crept out along the wooded edge of the plateau as far as the gorge, then turned left along it and crouched low to be out of sight of the sheep. At intervals I crawled up the slope and lay still, trying to make out the shape of the black goat. I could not spot him until I had the light of both half-moon and brilliant Jupiter, giving a visibility of over a hundred yards. He was well away from the flock, standing on duty above the path by which his master or any other creature would arrive. It's probable that there was seldom any movement up from the trackless forest on the other side where I had established my lair.

He stood head on to me for a time, curious but not suspicious. My motionless outline with the pack on my back was that of a lump or a cluster of flowers. The position in which I wanted him was half turned away, so that I could aim the arrow behind the shoulder and through the heart. I dared not risk calling him to me. We had to remain strangers condemned to be enemies. If he had come in the hope of finding a human with whom to pass an affectionate moment, I should never have been able to betray his trust and butcher him.

He started to graze a little. When he was in position I rose slowly to my knees, and the next instant he was dead. The arrow is so much more in keeping with nature and our inevitable death than steel or the bullet. It strikes like the hawk, out of silence and back to silence.

I withdrew the arrow, broke it and thrust the pieces into the ground. Then I dragged the goat by the horns to the precipice and threw him over. The sheep had not stampeded, for I was on lower ground and only my head was visible, if that. When I returned from the edge they were bunched behind the dominant ewe, who was looking in my direction but could not see me and was not yet ready to bolt. She may have been waiting for a lead from the black shepherd, always alert to whatever was going on.

It was then that the idea of completing both mystery and retribution came to me. My plan so far had not been over-successful, for when Odolaga searched for his familiar and found him at the bottom of the gorge it would not take him long to discover the very material wound. But if the black goat were partly squashed by a rock or other falling objects, the cause of death would remain obscure and the lunacy which had taken the goat over the precipice could be ascribed to possession, or whatever evil influence Odolaga preferred.

I circled round the leading ewe, out of her sight, and when she was directly between me and the gorge I imitated as best I could a terrified bleating; it was really the bleating of a fawn caught by man or a predator, but I hoped that in essence it was the same as that of a lamb. The ewe boldly made a few steps towards the sound and was met by the coughing snarl of an angry tiger—which, since I am of its clan, I can produce perfectly. She knew nothing of tigers but every gene in her body recognised that such a sound meant death. In blind sheep-panic she galloped, as I foresaw she would, straight away from me, followed by the flock. They hurtled down the steepening slope and over the precipice, the protracted thuds at the bottom growing softer as there were more bodies to fall on. Depth and distance prevented the immolation being heard by human ears at Odolaga's house beyond the home woods, but his dogs heard, and their frantic, warning barks broke out into the silence.

Now for my eagle owl. When I returned to her, she was beating the air, glaring with fury and quite helpless. After smoothing the great furry wings to her side and lashing them with the bow string I tucked her under my arm and was relieved to find how light she was despite her size, certainly not more than ten pounds. Then we took the forest path to the crossing of the gorge and up the other side, where the scattered boulders were smaller than I thought and gave inadequate cover. At last I chose a black outcrop of rock right at the brink, behind which I could safely kneel. I should be able to get away unseen while Odolaga was running off towards one or other of the two points of access to the gorge.

During the period of waiting for him to arrive I began to hate myself. In spite of the depth of the precipice there was a continuous murmur of muffled strugglings. The death of his familiar I had planned; the mass murder of the flock was an unexpected bonus, offered and immediately accepted. It should not have been accepted. I had put myself on a level with Odolaga. Though my magic was a fraud from beginning to end, it was black magic of the worst. The horrified jury in the Wincanton court would rightly have judged me guilty. What would Paddy have said? Perhaps that I had abused religion. And tiger brother? He, having approved the triumph of the clan, would still be doubtful whether the ancestral spirits agreed and would perform the rites necessary to convince them. A long way round to satisfy an uneasy conscience.