Stories by R. A. Lafferty Vol 2 Part 27

"Lie still, oaf. I'll spear you through. What now will happen to Treorai who was Ocras the murderer of Allyn?"

"What will happen to Chavo, the sun-fall murderer of Papa Garamask?

Treorai's time is up, as mine will be after a like period. Treorai has had two equivalent years to grow in wisdom as a Rogha. This very week (he will not know the time) he will be set on and killed, and his back-brains eaten."

"'And to keep your gaze fixed on the back of your head,' the dead-man Allyn told me," Garamask mused. But the Ocras-Treorai will not die so. I will finish the business up here, and then I will go down and arrest the fellow regularly for the murder."

"And in place of one Rogha there will be four," Chavo continued as though he had not heard Garamask. "In this way we will reestablish the Rogha and shorten our time of waiting. When there are again enough Rogha, they in their wisdom will be able to find what went wrong with the transformations; and they will find a less grotesque way to bring them about "And you yourself, Papa Garamask, do a good deed in your death this sun-fall. From your death there will spring four new Rogha."

"You violate a code yourself, Chavo. Dying, or freshly dead, I would be good for you. And for four of you? I hear your three companions coming up the line now, so you think you have me fresh? Will the line hold, do you think, Chavo?"

"It will hold. Papa Garamask, you have not violated the code of the line also?"

"Lie still, oaf. Call it what you will. Oh, it will be close, and Iwill not slash it again. I stand by my bet. It frays, Chavo, it gives a little, and the highest one of them is so near the top! It gives more! It parts! It breaks! They have fallen, Chavo!"

The Oganta was sobbing and crying noisily on the ground for the death of his friends, and the deathly inept.i.tude of the recording seemed to give a fitting dirge. Garamask laughed with black amus.e.m.e.nt, withdrew the spear, unlashed the elbow saber from it and put it on himself again. He looked at the Oganta.

"Get up, Chavo. What is the name of the fourth prey again?"

"It is you, the crag-ape, Papa Garamask, for World-men do look funny to us, and we call you so. Or it is myself, the frog-man, if I can kill you here and now and eat and make the frog-leap. We fight, Papa Garamask, and I eat your back-brains! Hear my battle-cry on the recorder that you cannot turn off! Does it not tw.a.n.g beautiully?"

"d.a.m.nable eternal teenagers!" Garamask howled as they closed in b.l.o.o.d.y battle. "There is enmity between us from the beginning of the worlds!

I'll break you down! I'11 choke you to death with the strings of your own hittur."

"Papa Garamask, you lie about frogs' size. I be a very big frog here very soon."

They fought in the late day on the top of the needle in the sky, gnas.h.i.+ng and knifing in their eschatological fury. And one of them would be dead by sun-fall.