Red Shadows by Robert E. Howard (best free e reader txt) đź“–
- Author: Robert E. Howard
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Caucasian.
“You speak my language—how is that?”
The black man grinned.
“I slave—long time, me boy. Me, N’Longa, ju-ju man, me, great
fetish. No black man like me! You white man, you hunt brother?”
Kane snarled. “I! Brother! I seek a man, yes.”
The Negro nodded. “Maybe so you find um, eh?”
“He dies!”
Again the Negro grinned. “Me pow’rful ju-ju man,” he announced
apropos of nothing. He bent closer. “White man you hunt, eyes like a
leopard, eh? Yes? Ha! ha! ha! ha! Listen, white man: man-with-eyes-of-a-leopard, he and Chief Songa make pow’rful palaver; they blood
brothers now. Say nothing, I help you; you help me, eh?”
“Why should you help me?” asked Kane suspiciously.
The ju-ju man bent closer and whispered, “White man Songa’s right-hand man; Songa more pow’rful than N’Longa. White man mighty ju-ju!
N’Longa’s white brother kill man—with-eyes-of-a-leopard, be blood
brother to N’Longa, N’Longa be more pow’rful than Songa; palaver set.”
And like a dusky ghost he floated out of the hut so swiftly that
Kane was not sure but that the whole affair was a dream.
Without, Kane could see the flare of fires. The drums were still
booming, but close at hand the tones merged and mingled, and the
impulse-producing vibrations were lost. All seemed a barbaric clamor
without rhyme or reason, yet there was an undertone of mockery there,
savage and gloating. “Lies,” thought Kane, his mind still swimming,
“jungle lies like jungle women that lure a man to his doom.”
Two warriors entered the hut—black giants, hideous with paint and
armed with crude spears. They lifted the white man and carried him out
of the hut. They bore him across an open space, leaned him upright
against a post and bound him there. About him, behind him and to the
side, a great semicircle of black faces leered and faded in the
firelight as the flames leaped and sank. There in front of him loomed
a shape hideous and obscene—a black, formless thing, a grotesque
parody of the human. Still, brooding, bloodstained, like the formless
soul of Africa, the horror, the Black God.
And in front and to each side, upon roughly carven thrones of
teakwood, sat two men. He who sat upon the right was a black man,
huge, ungainly, a gigantic and unlovely mass of dusky flesh and
muscles. Small, hoglike eyes blinked out over sin-marked cheeks; huge,
flabby red lips pursed in fleshly haughtiness.
The other—
“Ah, Monsieur, we meet again.” The speaker was far from being
the debonair villain who had taunted Kane in the cavern among the
mountains. His clothes were rags; there were more lines in his face;
he had sunk lower in the years that had passed. Yet his eyes still
gleamed and danced with their old recklessness and his voice held the
same mocking timbre.
“The last time I heard that accursed voice,” said Kane calmly,
“was in a cave, in darkness, whence you fled like a hunted rat.”
“Aye, under different conditions,” answered Le Loup imperturbably.
“What did you do after blundering about like an elephant in the dark?”
Kane hesitated, then: “I left the mountain—”
“By the front entrance? Yes? I might have known you were too
stupid to find the secret door. Hoofs of the Devil, had you thrust
against the chest with the golden lock, which stood against the wall,
the door had opened to you and revealed the secret passageway through
which I went.”
“I traced you to the nearest port and there took ship and followed
you to Italy, where I found you had gone.”
“Aye, by the saints, you nearly cornered me in Florence. Ho! ho!
ho! I was climbing through a back window while Monsieur Galahad was
battering down the front door of the tavern. And had your horse not
gone lame, you would have caught up with me on the road to Rome.
Again, the ship on which I left Spain had barely put out to sea when
Monsieur Galahad rides up to the wharfs. Why have you followed me
like this? I do not understand.”
“Because you are a rogue whom it is my destiny to kill,” answered
Kane coldly. He did not understand. All his life he had roamed about
the world aiding the weak and fighting oppression, he neither knew nor
questioned why. That was his obsession, his driving force of life.
Cruelty and tyranny to the weak sent a red blaze of fury, fierce and
lasting, through his soul. When the full flame of his hatred was
wakened and loosed, there was no rest for him until his vengeance had
been fulfilled to the uttermost. If he thought of it at all, he
considered himself a fulfiller of God’s judgment, a vessel of wrath to
be emptied upon the souls of the unrighteous. Yet in the full sense of
the word Solomon Kane was not wholly a Puritan, though he thought of
himself as such.
Le Loup shrugged his shoulders. “I could understand had I wronged
you personally. Mon Dieu! I, too, would follow an enemy across the
world, but, though I would have joyfully slain and robbed you, I never
heard of you until you declared war on me.”
Kane was silent, his still fury overcoming him. Though he did not
realize it, the Wolf was more than merely an enemy to him; the bandit
symbolized, to Kane, all the things against which the Puritan had
fought all his life: cruelty, outrage, oppression and tyranny.
Le Loup broke in on his vengeful meditations. “What did you do
with the treasure, which—gods of Hades!—took me years to accumulate?
Devil take it, I had time only to snatch a handful of coins and
trinkets as I ran.”
“I took such as I needed to hunt you down. The rest I gave to the
villages which you had looted.”
“Saints and the devil!” swore Le Loup. “Monsieur, you are the
greatest fool I have yet met. To throw that vast treasure—by Satan, I
rage to think of it in the hands of base peasants, vile villagers!
Yet, ho! ho! ho! ho! they will steal, and kill each other for it! That
is human nature.”
“Yes, damn you!” flamed Kane suddenly, showing that his conscience
had not been at rest. “Doubtless they will, being fools. Yet what
could I do? Had I left it there, people might have starved and gone
naked for lack of it. More, it would have been found, and theft and
slaughter would have followed anyway. You are to blame, for had this
treasure been left with its rightful owners, no such trouble would
have ensued.”
The Wolf grinned without reply. Kane not being a profane man, his
rare curses had double effect and always startled his hearers, no
matter how vicious or hardened they might be.
It was Kane who spoke next. “Why have you fled from me across the
world? You do not really fear me.”
“No, you are right. Really I do not know; perhaps flight is a
habit which is difficult to break. I made my mistake when I did not
kill you that night in the mountains. I am sure I could kill you in a
fair fight, yet I have never even, ere now, sought to ambush you.
Somehow I have not had a liking to meet you, Monsieur—a whim of
mine, a mere whim. Then—_mon Dieu!_—mayhap I have enjoyed a new
sensation—and I had thought that I had exhausted the thrills of life.
And then, a man must either be the hunter or the hunted. Until now,
Monsieur, I was the hunted, but I grew weary of the role—I thought
I had thrown you off the trail.”
“A Negro slave, brought from this vicinity, told a Portugal ship
captain of a white man who landed from a Spanish ship and went into
the jungle. I heard of it and hired the ship, paying the captain to
bring me here.”
“Monsieur, I admire you for your attempt, but you must admire
me, too! Alone I came into this village, and alone among savages and
cannibals I—with some slight knowledge of the language learned from a
slave aboard ship—I gained the confidence of King Songa and
supplanted that mummer, N’Longa. I am a braver man than you,
Monsieur, for I had no ship to retreat to, and a ship is waiting for
you.”
“I admire your courage,” said Kane, “but you are content to rule
amongst cannibals—you the blackest soul of them all. I intend to
return to my own people when I have slain you.”
“Your confidence would be admirable were it not amusing. Ho,
Gulka!”
A giant Negro stalked into the space between them. He was the
hugest man that Kane had ever seen, though he moved with catlike ease
and suppleness. His arms and legs were like trees, and the great,
sinuous muscles rippled with each motion. His apelike head was set
squarely between gigantic shoulders. His great, dusky hands were like
the talons of an ape, and his brow slanted back from above bestial
eyes. Flat nose and great, thick red lips completed this picture of
primitive, lustful savagery.
“That is Gulka, the gorilla-slayer,” said Le Loup. “He it was who
lay in wait beside the trail and smote you down. You are like a wolf,
yourself, Monsieur Kane, but since your ship hove in sight you have
been watched by many eyes, and had you had all the powers of a
leopard, you had not seen Gulka nor heard him. He hunts the most
terrible and crafty of all beasts, in their native forests, far to the
north, the beasts-who-walk-like-men—as that one, whom he slew some
days since.”
Kane, following Le Loup’s fingers, made out a curious, manlike
thing, dangling from a roof-pole of a hut. A jagged end thrust through
the thing’s body held it there. Kane could scarcely distinguish its
characteristics by the firelight, but there was a weird, humanlike
semblance about the hideous, hairy thing.
“A female gorilla that Gulka slew and brought to the village,”
said Le Loup.
The giant black slouched close to Kane and stared into the white
man’s eyes. Kane returned his gaze somberly, and presently the Negro’s
eyes dropped sullenly and he slouched back a few paces. The look in
the Puritan’s grim eyes had pierced the primitive hazes of the
gorilla-slayer’s soul, and for the first time in his life he felt
fear. To throw this off, he tossed a challenging look about; then,
with unexpected animalness, he struck his huge chest resoundingly,
grinned cavernously and flexed his mighty arms. No one spoke.
Primordial bestiality had the stage, and the more highly developed
types looked on with various feelings of amusement, tolerance or
contempt.
Gulka glanced furtively at Kane to see if the white man was
watching him, then with a sudden beastly roar, plunged forward and
dragged a man from the semicircle. While the trembling victim
screeched for mercy, the giant hurled him upon the crude altar before
the shadowy idol. A spear rose and flashed, and the screeching ceased.
The Black God looked on, his monstrous features seeming to leer in the
flickering firelight. He had drunk; was the Black God pleased with the
draft—with the sacrifice?
Gulka stalked back, and stopping before Kane, flourished the
bloody spear before the white man’s face.
Le Loup laughed. Then suddenly N’Longa appeared. He came from
nowhere in particular; suddenly he was standing there, beside the post
to which Kane was bound. A lifetime of study of the art of illusion
had given the ju-ju man a highly technical knowledge of appearing and
disappearing—which after all, consisted only
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