The Wild. David Zindell
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be a mystery to him, as he was to himself.
And now the night was opening this mystery, beginning to reveal it in all its glory. Now, over the ocean, the storm was beginning to break. In sudden crackling bolts appearing out of nowhere, lightning played in the sky, connecting heaven to earth. It illuminated the beach in flashes of light. For a moment, the tiger and the lamb and the other features of the world were revealed in all their splendour, and then the dunes and the rocks and the sand vanished back into the night. During this brief moment of illumination, while tiger’s orange and black stripes burned with a strange numinous fire, reality was charged with such a terrible intensity that it seemed almost too real. With each stroke of lightning there was a moment of dazzle and then darkness. Danlo had a deep sense of knowing that there was something behind this darkness, all vivid and white like the lamb’s snowy fleece, but he could not quite see it. The lightning broke upon the beach, suddenly, mysteriously, and he marvelled at the way light came from darkness and darkness devoured light. In one blinding moment he saw that although tigers were truly creatures of darkness, this lovely tiger who waited for him on the darkling dunes had everything to teach him about the true nature of light.
When the tiger finally sprang, it was as if she had been waiting a million years to be released from a secret and unbearable tension. She flew forward in an explosion of colours, all orange-gold and black and streaked with white, and attacked in a series of violent leaps that carried her hurtling across the beach. Her paws hardly touched the sand. Although Danlo had had almost forever to decide how to meet the tiger, when she finally struck he had little time to move. In truth, he had nowhere to run, for there was nothing but grass and sand all around him, and even if the tiger hadn’t blocked the way to the house, he could never have reached its safety before the tiger reached him. Still, he thought that he should try to run, if only to lead the tiger away from the lamb. He should save the lamb; if he and the lamb ran in opposite directions, then the tiger might catch only one of them in her claws. It didn’t occur to him, at first, that the lamb was the tiger’s intended prey, not he. But when he decided to drop the rope and the lamb screamed out in terror, he knew. The tiger, in her astonishing dash across the beach, was no longer looking at Danlo. Her golden eyes were now fixed straight ahead on the lamb. Danlo immediately moved to place his body in front of the lamb, but it ruined his plan by springing suddenly to the left and thus entangling Danlo’s legs in the rope. His feet slipped on the soft sand even as the tiger bolted toward them. For a moment, as he stared at the tiger’s wild eyes and the powerful, rippling muscles that flowed like rivers beneath her fur, he remembered how, as a boy, he had once stood beneath an icy forest and watched as his near-father, the great Wemilo, had slain a snow tiger with nothing more than a simple spear. He remembered this clearly: the silence of the winter woods, the clean white snow, the tremendous power of Wemilo’s thrust as his spear found the heart place and let loose a waterfall of blood. But he had no knife, no spear, no time. In a second, the tiger would be upon him. There was nothing he could do. All his instincts cried out for him to devise some clever plan to flee or fight, and it nearly killed him to wait there in the sand as helpless as a frozen snow hare. But then it came to him that there was always a time to just stand and die, and he was afraid that his time had finally come. For surely the tiger would kill him in her lust to get at the lamb. He thought to raise his walking stick as a last defence, but against the power and ferocity of her attack, it would be worse than useless. The most he might accomplish – and only with perfect timing – would be to ram the sandy point of the stick into her lovely yellow eye. But this would not discourage her; it would only enrage her and cause her to fall into a killing frenzy, thereby dooming both him and the lamb. And more, such an injury could blind the tiger on one side. The wound might bleed and fester; ultimately, it might cause the tiger to sicken and die. He knew that he could never do such a deed. He remembered his vow of ahimsa then, and he realized that even if he had hated the tiger, he could never have harmed such a marvellous beast.
The tiger sprang through the air directly at the lamb, and he loved her: her rare grace, her vitality, her wild joy at following the terrible angels of her nature. The tiger, in her moment of killing, was nothing but energy and joy, animajii – the joy of life, the joy of death.
Even the lamb, he saw, knew a kind of joy. Or rather, the lamb was wholly alive with the utter terror to save his own life, and this sudden nearness of mortality was really the left hand of joy. As the tiger fell upon him, the lamb screamed and shuddered and jerked in the direction of the ocean in his blind urge to run away. Danlo, who had finally fought free of the rope binding them, tried to come to his aid. He too leaped toward the lamb. But the explosive force of the tiger’s strike knocked him aside as he collided with her. There was a shock of bunched muscles and bone, a rage of orange and black fur and slashing claws. Danlo smelled the tiger’s fermy cat scent and caught wind of her hot bloody breath. Her glorious face, all open with fury and gleaming white fangs, flashed in front of his. The lamb screamed and screamed and tried to leap away dragging the golden rope behind him. Then the tiger sank her claws into his side as she pulled him to the ground, and the terrible screaming suddenly stopped. The lamb fell into a glassy-eyed motionlessness, offering no more resistance. Again, Danlo leaped at the tiger, grabbing the loose skin at the back of her neck and trying to pull her off the lamb. He sank his fingers into her thick fur, and he pulled and pulled. The tiger’s deep-throated growls vibrated through her chest; Danlo felt the great power that vibrated through her entire body. Through the brilliance of another flash of lightning, he saw the tiger open her jaws to bite the lamb’s neck. He remembered then how Wemilo had once been mauled by a snow tiger. Once in deep winter, Danlo’s found-father, Haidar, had brought Wemilo all broken and bloody back to their cave, and Wemilo had told an incredible story. Even as Haidar had held a burning brand to Wemilo’s face to cauterize his wounds, this great hunter had claimed that at the supreme moment of his ordeal, with the tiger tearing at him, he had felt neither fear nor pain. He said that he had fallen into a kind of dreaminess in which he was aware of the tiger biting open his shoulder but did not really care. The laying bare of his shoulder bones, he said, seemed almost as if it were happening to someone other than himself. And now, above the beach as the lightning flashed, as Danlo pulled vainly at two handfuls of quivering flesh, this tiger was about to make her kill, and Danlo could only hope that the lamb had entered into the final dreamtime before death. All his life he had wondered what lay beyond the threshold of that particular doorway. Perhaps there was joy in being released from life, a deep and brilliant joy that lasted forever. Perhaps there was only blackness, nothingness, neverness. Danlo wondered if he himself might be very close to following the lamb upon her journey to the other side, and then at last the tiger struck down with her long fangs. Her teeth were like knives which she used with great precision. She bit through the lamb’s neck, tearing open the throat with such force that Danlo felt the shock of tooth upon bone run down the whole length of the tiger’s body. Blood sprayed over the tiger’s face and chest, and over Danlo who still clung desperately to the back of the tiger’s neck. The lamb lay crushed beneath the tiger’s paws, and his dark eye was lightless as a stone. Danlo should have let go then and tried to run, but the tiger suddenly jumped up from her kill and whirled about. With a single great convulsion of muscles, she whirled and rolled and roared, trying to shake Danlo loose. She drove him straight back to the sand. The force of their fall knocked his breath away. If the sand hadn’t been so soft, the tiger might have broken his back. For a moment, Danlo was pinned beneath her. The tiger’s arching spine drove back into his belly and chest nearly crushing him. There was blood and fur in his mouth, and he could feel the tiger’s powerful rumblings vibrate deeply in his own throat. And all the while the tiger roared and snapped her jaws and clawed the air. She continued to roll, spinning along the beach until she pulled Danlo off and found her feet. She crouched in the sand scarce three feet away. Her breath fell over Danlo’s face. He, too, was now crouching, up on one knee as he held the bruised ribs above his belly and gasped for air. He waited for the tiger to spring. But the tiger did not move. During a flash of lightning, she found his eyes and stared at him. It lasted only a moment, this intense, knowing look, but in that time something passed between them. She stared at him, strangely, deeply, and at last she found her fear of the mysterious fire that she saw blazing in Danlo’s eyes. She turned her head away from him, then. She stood and turned back toward the lamb who lay crumpled in the sand. With her teeth, she took him up by his broken neck as gently as she might have carried one of her cubs. The lamb dangled