The Wild. David Zindell
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quite treacherous. In his first rush back to the beach, another wave washed over him, and he slipped on the wet seaweed; it was only his stick and his sense of balance that kept him from being swept off the rock. Encumbered as he was, his leaping along the pathway of the twelve rocks back to the beach required all his strength and grace. All the while, the lamb shuddered in his arm. Twice, he convulsed in a blind, instinctive struggle to escape. Danlo had to clasp him close, chest pressing against chest so that he could feel the lamb’s heart beating against his own.
In the falling darkness it was hard to see the cracks and undulations of the twelve rocks and harder still to hear, for the wind blew fiercely, and the rhythmic thunder of the waves was like a waterfall in his ears. And farther out, the long, dark roar of the sea drowned out the lesser sounds: the harsh cry of the gulls, the lamb’s insistent bleating, the distant song of the whales, the mysticeti and belugas and the killers who must swim somewhere among cold, endless waves.
With every step Danlo took along this natural jetty of rocks, the lamb bleated louder and louder as if he could hardly wait to feel the sand beneath his cloven hooves and bound up the beach toward the safety of the dunes.
When they finally jumped down from the last rock and stood on the hardpack by the water’s edge, Danlo decided that he couldn’t let the lamb run free after all. Instead he twisted the golden rope between his fingers and fashioned a noose which he slipped over the lamb’s head. Using the rope as a lead, he led the lamb up the beach. A quarter of a mile away, his lightship was like a black diamond needle gleaming darkly against the soft dunes. And beyond his ship, where the headland rose above the beach and the dunes gave way to the deep green forest, was his little house. In the gloom of the twilight, he could just make out its clean, stark lines. He had a vague, half-formed notion of sheltering the lamb in the house’s kitchen, at least for the night. He would feed the lamb soft cheeses and cream, and then, perhaps, in the morning he would go into the forest to look for the lamb’s flock. He would return the lamb to his mother and save him from the fate that the Entity had planned for him. This was his plan, his pride, his will to affirm the life of a single animal pulling at the golden rope in his hand and bouncing happily along by his side.
It was in among the grasses of the low dunes, with the house so close he might have thrown a rock at it, that they came upon the tiger. Or rather, the tiger came upon them. One moment Danlo and the lamb were alone together with the rippling grass and the wind-packed sand, and a moment later, upon a little ridge between them and the house, the tiger suddenly appeared. Danlo was the first to see it. His eyes were better than those of the lamb, although his sense of smell was not as keen; but with the wind blowing so fiercely from the sea, neither he nor the lamb could have caught the tiger’s scent. And so Danlo had a moment to look at the tiger before the lamb noticed what he was looking at and bleated out in panic. The tiger crouched belly low to the sand, the long tail held straight out and switching back and forth through the sparse grass. She – Danlo immediately sensed that she was female – fixed her great glowing eyes on them, watching and waiting. And Danlo looked at her. Although he knew better than to stare at a big cat (or any predator), for a single moment he stared. Something about this particular tiger compelled his attention. She was a beautiful beast some nine feet in length and twice or thrice his own weight. In the tense way that she waited she seemed almost afraid of him, yet she was not at all eye-shy for she continued to stare, never breaking the electric connection of their eyes. He decided immediately that there was something elemental and electric about all tigers, as if their powerful, trembling bodies were incarnations of lightning into living flesh. In the tiger’s lovely symmetry and bright eternal stare there blazed all the energies of the universe. The tiger’s face was a glory of darkness and light: the broken circles of black and burning white that exploded out from a bright orange point centred between her brilliant eyes. For an endless moment, Danlo stared, falling drunk with the intoxicating fire of the tiger’s eyelight. Then something strange began to happen to him. He began to see himself through the tiger’s eyes. He looked deeply into the twin yellow mirrors glowing out of the twilight, and he saw himself as a strange and fearful animal. Strange because he stood on two legs and brandished a long black stick, and fearful because he stood much taller than the tiger, and more, because his dark blue eyes faced forward in a brilliant and dangerous gaze of his own. He, like all men, had the eyes of a predator, and through the coolness of the early evening air, the tiger saw this immediately. The tiger saw something else. Although it was unlikely that she had ever encountered a man before, she must have looked within her own racial memories and relived the ancient enmity between feline and man. She must have remembered that although man killed lambs and other animals for food, once a time, it was the lions and tigers and other big cats of Afarique who had hunted man.
Danlo remembered this too. He remembered it with a gasp of cold air and the hot shock of adrenalin and the sudden quick pounding of his heart; in a stream of dark and bloody images called up from his deepest memories he remembered the essential paradox of his kind: that man was a predatory animal who had once been mostly prey. He remembered that he should have feared this tiger. On the burning veldts of Afarique, two million years ago in the primeval home of man, the fiercest predators on the planet had been everywhere: in the tall grasses and in caves and hiding behind the swaying acacia trees, always watching, always waiting. The tiger was the true Beast of humankind, the avatar of Hell out of the dark past. The tiger was a killer – but also something else. For it was the big cats, in part, that had driven human beings to evolve. For millions of years the tiger and the leopard had chased men and women across the grasslands, forcing them to stand upright and pick up sticks and stones as weapons of self-defence. Out of fear of darkness and bright pointed teeth, man had found fire and had made blazing torches with which to frighten these meat-eaters and keep them at bay. The constant evolutionary pressure to escape nature and its most powerful beasts had driven human beings to create spears and baby slings and stone huts, ultimately to build cities and lightships and sail out to the stars. Looking out across the darkening dunes at the tiger, Danlo marvelled at the courage with which his far fathers and mothers and all his ancestors had come down from the trees and faced the big cats, thus turning the possibility of extinction into evolution, death into life. In the short moment that he met the tiger eye to eye – while the innocent lamb still pawed the sand and trotted along unaware – Danlo saw the entire history of the human race unfold. And the deeper he looked into the black, bloody pools of the past, and into himself, the more clearly he saw the tiger’s burning face staring back at him. The darkness falling slowly over the beach did little to obliterate this vision. As the light failed over the dunes and the dark forest disappeared into the night, still he could see the tiger watching him. He remembered how tigers loved the night, how they loved to roam and roar and hunt at night. It came to him suddenly that in this love of walking alone beneath the stars, tigers were the true architects of man’s fear of the dark. All history, all philosophy had sprung from this fear. Darkness, for man, was death – whether the endless death of being enclosed in a wood coffin or the sudden death that came flashing out of the night in an explosion of hot breath and tearing claws. Man had always dreaded darkness and thus worshipped light; the ancient philosophers of the human race, in their beards and their fear, had made a war between light and dark, good and evil, spirit and matter, life and death. This urge to separate form from function, the sacred from the profane, was the fundamental philosophical mistake of mankind. Human beings, in their mathematics and their lightships, in their evolution into the universe, had only carried this mistake across the stars. And human beings, though they might explode the stars themselves into billions of brilliant supernovas, would never vanquish darkness or the terrible creations hidden in the folds of the night.
As Danlo stared forever at the tiger across a hundred feet of darkening beach, these thoughts blazed through his brain. The wind roared in from the sea, carrying in the sound of thunder, and he fell into a keen awareness of the night-time world. Above him were black clouds, black sky, the omnipresent blackness of the universe. Danlo realized then how much he had always hated (and loved) dark places. Yet strangely, like any man, he had always felt the urge to open the door to the darkest of rooms and see what lay inside. Or open the door to his house and see what is outside, in the night. And here, now, on this desolate beach, there was only a tiger. He looked at the tiger’s bright golden eyes blazing out of the darkness, and he remembered a line from the Second Hymn to the Night: You are the messenger who opens mysteries that