Read The Totems of Abydos Online
Authors: John Norman
“Do not be angry,” said Rodriguez. “In their way they care for you. You were apparently the first individual in thousands of years to treat them as something other than monkeys to be ridiculed and swindled, or specimens to be examined. You liked them, somehow, and this they sensed. What has been done to you they did, I am sure, with a certain regret.”
“I am touched,” said Brenner, bitterly.
“I am no longer angry with them,” said Rodriguez.
“After what they have done to you?” asked Brenner.
“No,” said Rodriguez. “I have found out what I came here to find out.”
“I do not understand,” said Brenner.
“Incidentally,” said Rodriguez, “I have heard them speak of a feast of gathering eggs. Does that make any sense to you?”
“No,” said Brenner.
“Nor to me,” said Rodriguez.
“Perhaps they are going to raise domestic fowl,” said Brenner.
“That would seem rather unlike Pons, would it not?” asked Rodriguez.
“Yes,” said Brenner. It did not seem in accord with the ways of the Pons. Meat, for example, and eggs, and such things, were not common constituents in their diet. To be sure, they did not object to being protected by creatures which might require flesh, and such things. But such inconsistencies were not unprecedented. The sweetness, the softness, the gentleness, the innocence, the loveliness of the Pons, and their way of life, was possible only because of the vigilance, the readiness to act, the severity, the ferocity of creatures quite other than themselves. Some gardens cannot grow unless sheltered within rings of iron. Some worlds cannot exist unless nestled within the territory of carnivores. To be sure, the Pons might change their ways.
“I think that in some subtle way,” said Rodriguez, “the Pons have become different over the past months.”
“How is that?” asked Brenner.
“The other father,” said Rodriguez, “saved your life in the forest.”
“I killed him,” said Brenner.
“He must have understood what you were doing here,” said Rodriguez.
“Yes,” said Brenner.
“And yet he protected you, and saved your life. That said something to the Pons of love.”
“He came to the temple,” said Brenner.
“To die,” said Rodriguez.
“He died well,” said Brenner. He recalled the sudden, startling, arresting regalness of the beast, drawn up, proudly, awaiting the blast from the rifle.
“He was the father,” said Rodriguez.
“Yes,” said Brenner, “he was the father.”
“And, too, the Pons, who have been concerned with little, really, but survival, a mere clinging to the thread of life, pretending it is important in itself, and not because of what may be done with it, were moved when you returned me to the village. In this, you, too, you see, taught them something of love, more than survival, more even than the pursuit of truth.”
“I did not want you to die,” said Brenner.
“Put down your head,” said Rodriguez, putting out his hands.
Brenner put down his great, broad, shaggy head and Rodriguez, with great tenderness, embraced it, and placed his own head against it. Then Rodriguez drew back. “I am going now,” he said.
“Will you not wait for the others?”
“No,” said Rodriguez.
“I will accompany you,” said Brenner.
“No,” said Rodriguez.
“Are you sorrowful?” asked Brenner. Rodriguez did not seem as he usually did.
“No,” said Rodriguez.
“You do not regret what has occurred?”
“Certainly not,” said Rodriguez. “I have found out what I came here to learn.”
“The fate of the theory?”
“Yes,” said Rodriguez.
“Are you sorry that it was false?” asked Brenner.
“‘False’?” asked Rodriguez.
“Of course,” said Brenner. “The graves were empty.”
“So?” said Rodriguez.
“If the theory was true, the body of the father, the first father, a Pon, would have been found in the oldest grave.”
“That the grave was empty,” said Rodriguez, “does not refute the theory. It is rather the strongest possible evidence of the truth of the theory. Indeed, it is precisely what the theory in its fullest and most exact form, in its most perfect form, would call for, a form in which I had not even anticipated it might be corroborated.”
“I do not understand,” said Brenner, in consternation.
“Why would the body not be in the grave?” asked Rodriguez.
“I do not know,” said Brenner.
“It was eaten,” said Rodriguez.
Brenner shuddered.
“You are dealing here with something extremely childlike, extremely primitive, something with a very powerful appeal on a very deep emotional level. The rationale here is, or is similar to, that of cannibalism or ritualistic omophagia, as in the mystical eating of a god, usually under the form of a beast, or such, the devouring of the divine, so to speak, to take into oneself the courage, the power, the mana, the traits, the spirit of the other, to make its substance yours, to add to yourself by its consumption. Obviously every day one gains strength by eating, by making the substance of others yours. It is only natural then for the primitive or childlike mind, or even for a more sophisticated mind functioning in this respect, perhaps unconsciously, on a childlike or primitive level, to conceive of the eating of the god, or of the enemy, or the father, as a way of identifying with them, of making their substance theirs, of becoming them, or like them.”
“But why, then, the graves?” asked Brenner.
“They presumably serve various purposes,” said Rodriguez. “For the sophisticated, assuaging guilt, and such, they may serve as atonements to, and as memorials to, the fathers. For the less sophisticated, they may provide loci for the spirits of the fathers, places where they may theoretically be contacted, places which they may occasionally visit, or haunt. Surely one would not wish their vengeful spirits to plague the village. And, of course, for outsiders, they serve to conceal the evidence of the crime. Later, the graves, their preparation and such, may have even become no more than a part of a tradition, the origins of which, and the meanings of which, were lost in antiquity.”
“In the totem feast,” said Brenner, shuddering, recalling the Pons clambering about on the carcass of the father, crouching upon it, crawling within it, cutting loose pieces of it to eat, “the children fed upon the substance of the father.”
“And thus it was, undoubtedly,” said Rodriguez, “even in the beginning.”
“But this fact,” said Brenner, “the emptiness of the graves, does not mean that the theory must be true.”
“No,” said Rodriguez. “It does not. In the end, of course, we do not know. In the end we are left, as always, with the ambiguities, the opacities, the mysteries.”
“But you do not regret having come here?”
“No,” said Rodriguez.
“It seems the final victory belongs to the Pons,” said Brenner.
“Between myself and the Pons there are no final victories,” said Rodriguez.
“You are content?”
“Yes, I am content.”
It seemed Rodriguez would lift his hand again, once more to touch the shaggy fur of the beast, but then he lowered it.
“Good-bye,” he said.
“Come again, to see me soon,” said Brenner. “For I am lonely.”
“I love you,” said the small figure.
“I love you,” said Brenner.
“Goodbye,” said Rodriguez.
“Goodbye,” said Brenner.
The small figure turned away.
“Hold to the string,” said Brenner.
“Of course,” said Rodriguez.
Perhaps it was a whisper of scent, carried over the trees. Perhaps it was a sound, so far off that one could not be sure it was heard. Perhaps it was a sudden sense, or fear, or understanding, or something even subtler than these, as one commonly thinks of such matters, but, suddenly, the beast stood up, frightened, on the height of the cliff.
Something within it had seemed to shriek with misery, with a refusal to believe, with a rejection of an insistence. It was an inward shriek, or scream. It was as though of one forlorn, and abandoned. It was like the scream of a terrified child in the darkness, a bereaved child, in an empty house. It was a scream of terrible, profound, chilling loneliness. The beast stood, risen up, the wind cold in its fur, on the height of the cliff, lonely there, against the sky.
Then, in an instant, it had, in one or two movements, leaping, endangering even a body such as its own, as though insane, descended the cliff, left the platform behind, and bounded along the string, toward the village. In a moment or two it encountered three Pons making their way toward the platform. These small things cried out in fear, seeing it coming, and with such swiftness. It bounded past them, even before they had, in their terror, been able to react, even before they could flee into the brush or hide amongst the trees, so quickly had it come upon them. They turned, then, to watch it pass.
Scarcely a hundred yards from where the beast had encountered the Pons, coming to the platform, and cliffs, it stopped. There the trail of the small, eyeless one departed from the string. The string was not broken. He had not been pulled away from it, clinging to it. The string had not failed him. His trail left the string and set out, perpendicular to the string, leaving it behind. He had, it seemed, at this point, left the string of his own will. He had made his way into the darkness of the forest, enclosed in his own darkness. The footsteps, the beast noted, did not seem hesitant or fearful. It had left the string, it seemed, with a good heart. In the forest, as far as it could, within its limitations, it had not crept, but strode, even marched.
In a short while the beast came upon the first stains of blood, a moist darkness on the floor of the forest, and, a little later, uttered a terrible roar, and a stealthy one, scarcely pausing to discern the origin of that hideous sound, and without the least inclination to defend his dinner, or, indeed, to dispute any matter of significance, sprang away from a small form and disappeared in the brush.
The beast who had driven the other away did not make the prey its own. It did not crouch down to feed upon what it had won in one of the ways of the forest. Rather it stood over the small form, torn to pieces, half eaten, and howled with anguish. It then picked it up gently in its mouth, the head dangling to one side, half gone, and carried it to the village, where it deposited it before the gate. It then turned about and, rapidly, returned to the place where it had found the form. It would have been difficult to say how far the beast followed the trail of the stealthy one, or how soon the stealthy one, to its astonishment, as it had surrendered the prey, detected the renewed presence of the beast. We may conjecture that it fled before the beast for a long time. But one suspects, in spite of the speed, the stamina and cunning of the stealthy one, that there was really no escape for it, that it might have been, had it been required, pursued for days, for months, even for years, that it would have been followed beyond forests, beyond deserts, across grassy plains, and through arctic wastes, that it would have been followed, if necessary, to the very ends of the world, such was the tenacity of its pursuer. But in the morning, shortly before dawn, where two torches, perhaps in mourning, had been set at the gate of the village, the beast returned. In its jaws were the shreds of the stealthy one. Little but skin and threads of sinew held together the remains of it. It had been not only killed, but serrated, and disjoined, and ripped into ribbons of flesh. It had, apparently, long been fiercely shaken, as though in some frenzy of rage, or grief. These remains, such as they were, little more now than hair and hide, some loops of trailing intestine, and such, were left in the clearing, back from the gate. The beast did not put these remains in the same place where it had laid the small form earlier, but, rather, somewhat before that place, rather in the fashion of a token, or offering.
For several nights thereafter the Pons, even in their village, could hear the beast howling on the cliffs, seemingly in anguish.
The summer passed, and then the winter, with its cold, and its snow, came. The forest was white. Gits, and some other creatures of the forest, hibernated. On the ground, covered with snow, lay the husks of fallen lantern fruit. At night, however, even Pons could see dimly, in spite of the moonless sky, simply in virtue of the light of stars, reflecting from the snow. Branches, weighted with ice, laced with crystalline structures, occasionally snapped, and, with a very clear sound, carrying in the cold air, fell to the ground. The floor of the forest was carpeted with white. The tread of fleet ones, dainty, and the tread of others, less delicate, could be detected here and there. During this time the Pons stayed much in their village. The beast, during the winter, roamed much abroad. It was warm in its winter coat, and it enjoyed the cold, and the snow. Without the leaves the forest, the trees like dark, giant posts, was very open to it. The beast, however, it must be admitted, also enjoyed the fall, with the changing of the leaves, and the summer, with the fullness of the forest’s majesty. It was only the spring that caused it great pain. This may have been, in part, because it was in a spring, long ago, on a far world, that Rodriguez and Brenner had first set out for Abydos. But it seems more likely that there was another, and simpler, reason for the pain, a reason which was a beast’s reason.