A fluid, golden movement; the man-lion bounded down lightly, lazily, from the cave mouth, over the gray rocks, covering fifty yards in moments. Now he stood beside Fat Charlie. His tail swished impatiently.
His arms folded, he looked down at Fat Charlie and said, “Why do you not deal with this matter yourself?”
Fat Charlie’s mouth had dried. His throat felt extremely dusty. The creature facing him, taller than any man, did not smell like a man. The tips of his canine teeth rested on his lower lips.
“Can’t,” squeaked Fat Charlie.
From the mouth of the next cave along, an immense man leaned out. His skin was a brownish gray, and he had rumpled, wrinkled skin and round, round legs. “If you and your brother quarrel,” he said, “then you must ask your father to judge between you. Submit to the will of the head of the family. That is the law.” He threw his head back and made a noise then, in the back of his nose and in his throat, a powerful trumpeting noise, and Fat Charlie knew he was looking at Elephant.
Fat Charlie swallowed. “My father is dead,” he said, and now his voice was clear again, cleaner and louder than he expected. It echoed from the cliff wall, bounced back at him from a hundred cave mouths, a hundred jutting outcrops of rock. Dead dead dead dead dead, said the echo. “That’s why I came here.”
Lion said, “I have no love for Anansi the Spider. Once, long ago, he tied me to a log, and had a donkey drag me through the dust, to the seat of Mawu who made all things.” He growled at the memory, and Fat Charlie wanted to be somewhere else.
“Walk on,” said Lion. “There may be someone here who will help you, but it is not I.”
Elephant said, “Nor I. Your father tricked me and ate my belly fat. He told me he was making me some shoes to wear, and he cooked me, and he laughed as he filled his stomach. I do not forget.”
Fat Charlie walked on.
In the next cave mouth along stood a man wearing a natty green suit and a sharp hat with a snakeskin band around it. He wore snakeskin boots and a snakeskin belt. He hissed as Fat Charlie came past. “Walk on, Anansi’s boy,” Snake said, his voice a dry rattle. “Your whole damn family nothin‘ but trouble. I ain’t gettin’ mixed up in your messes.”
The woman in the next cave mouth was very beautiful, and her eyes were black oil drops, and her whiskers were snowy white against her skin. She had two rows of breasts down her chest.
“I knew your father,” she said. “Long time back. Hoo-ee.” She shook her head in memory, and Fat Charlie felt like he had just read a private letter. She blew Fat Charlie a kiss but shook her head when he made to approach closer.
He walked on. A dead tree stuck up from the ground before him like an assemblage of old gray bones. The shadows were getting longer now, as the sun was slowly descending in the endless sky, past where the cliffs cragged down into the end of the world; the eye of the sun was a monstrous gold-orange ball, and all the little white clouds beneath it were burnished with gold and with purple.
The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, thought Fat Charlie, the line of the poem surfacing from some long-forgotten English lesson. And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold. He tried to remember what a cohort was, and failed. Probably, he decided, it was some kind of chariot.
Something moved, close to his elbow, and he realized that what he had thought was a brown rock, beneath the dead tree, was a man, sandy-colored, his back spotted like a leopard’s. His hair was very long and very black, and when he smiled his teeth were a big cat’s teeth. He only smiled briefly, and it was a smile without warmth or humor or friendship in it. He said, “I am Tiger. Your father, he injured me in a hundred ways and he insulted me in a thousand ways. Tiger does not forget.”
“I’m sorry,” said Fat Charlie.
“I’ll walk along with you,” said Tiger. “For a short while. You say that Anansi is dead?”
“Yes.”
“Well. Well, well. He played me for a fool so many times. Once, everything was mine—the stories, the stars, everything. He stole it all away from me. Maybe now he is dead people will stop telling those damn stories of his. Laughing at me.”
“I’m sure they will,” said Fat Charlie. “I’ve never laughed at you.”
Eyes the color of polished emeralds flashed in the man’s face. “Blood is blood,” was all he said. “Anansi’s bloodline is Anansi.”
“I am not my father,” said Fat Charlie.
Tiger bared his teeth. They were very sharp. “You don’t go around making people laugh at things,” explained Tiger. “It’s a big, serious world out there; nothing to laugh about. Not ever. You mu
st teach the children to fear, teach them to tremble. Teach them to be cruel. Teach them to be the danger in the dark. Hide in the shadows, then pounce or spring or leap or drop, and always kill. You know what the true meaning of life is?”
“Um,” said Fat Charlie. “Is it love one another?”
“The meaning of life is the hot blood of your prey on your tongue, the meat that rends beneath your teeth, the corpse of your enemy left in the sun for the carrion eaters to finish. That is what life is. I am Tiger, and I am stronger than Anansi ever was, bigger, more dangerous, more powerful, crueler, wiser…”
Fat Charlie did not want to be in that place, talking to Tiger. It was not that Tiger was mad; it was that he was so earnest in his convictions, and all his convictions were uniformly unpleasant. Also, he reminded Fat Charlie of someone, and while he could not have told you who, he knew it was someone he disliked. “Will you help me get rid of my brother?”
Tiger coughed, as if he had a feather, or perhaps a whole blackbird, stuck in his throat.
“Would you like me to get you some water?” asked Fat Charlie.