Orbit 2

“I’ll take my rightful departure or die trying.”

“Mr. Kinross, the villagers also have a right to live. I will not prompt them nor will Mr. Garcia. We have agreed on that. But if the Herr Kruger can reach them directly through dreams and inspired counsels, and if the collective will moves to act upon you, we will stand aside also.”

“Fair enough,” Kinross grunted.

“One other thing, Mr. Kinross. I fear you may be moving blindly toward a treason of the light. I will say no more.”

Kinross did not answer. Von Lankenau half smiled and saluted him, then turned and left in silence. Within a minute other footsteps approached, light and rapid ones.

It was Mary Chadwick and she was in a fury. Her shirt was half unbuttoned and she clasped in her bosom a dozen or more of the white nutmeg pigeons with black wing and tail tips.

“Down with ice on their poor wings. Half-frozen. You stringybark jojo—” she stormed, face twisted with pity and anger.

“I’m sorry—” Kinross began.

“Then stop it, you fool! Stop it at once! Take that silly fruit to that stupid altar and put an end to this nonsense!”

“Did Lankenau or Kruger put you up to this?”

She stared a scornful denial. Kinross swallowed and felt his face burn under his beard.

“Why blame me and not Kruger?”

“Because I can’t come at the Herr Kruger and I can come at you, of course. Hop, now!”

“All right,” Kinross said. “I’ll do it for you, Mary. Will you understand that I do it for you and not for Kruger, Mary? Will you accept?” He took hold of her hand among the rustling pigeons and looked into her blue-violet eyes murky with waning anger.

“Of course for me,” she said.* “That’s what I came to tell you, idiot.”

“Glory!” Kinross gasped and walked away rapidly. When he came back through the grove the frost had already melted under a warming sun.

“Round two is at least a draw,” he thought, “but Ikind of think I won it too.”

Weeks passed into months and the land smiled. Kinross left fruit at the cairn each morning, whispering under his breath, “For you, Mary.” Also each morning he laid flowers on a quartz boulder he had carried up from the creek and placed by Mary’s hut. The flowers always disappeared, although he never saw her take them.

Stragglers continued coming into Krugerworld by ones or twos every few days and the population of Kruger-town approached three hundred. Kinross talked amicably with Garcia and von Lankenau from time to time. Von Lankenau discussed the expansion of Krugerworld with an increasing population. He thought that at some critical point it would expand enough to accommodate another village and perhaps be dumbbell-shaped rather than elliptical. Garcia told Kinross pridefully that Pilar was carrying a child, he hoped a son.

Sometimes Kinross talked with the villagers. They had lost all memory of their origin. They believed they had come from underground, shaped of earth’s substance at the bottom of a great pit, and that sometime they might go back there to sleep again. They had no clear notion of death.

Kinross no longer wandered aimlessly. At a site a mile down-valley from the village, he built a stone hut. He built it massively, bedding large stones from the creek in clay and rammed earth, giving it several rooms beamed with ironwood and heavily thatched with nipa fronds. He built a stone fireplace and crude furniture.

Mary passed by several times a day, taking little interest in his work. When the house was complete she would not come in to look at it.

“It is a waste of strength and good living time,” she said, laughing. “Allan, Allan, walk under the trees again.”

“Will you walk with me?” he asked.

She laughed and turned away.

Kinross built a walled garden around the hut. He brought water into it with a raised ditch, pierced for drainage, taking off from above a low dam he built in the creek. It fed a bathing pool and turned a small waterwheel. He threshed out grass seeds and spread them and berries on the flagstones of his garden. Birds came and ate, but Mary would not come in.

“You don’t paddock me with anything cold as stone, not by half,” she said.

He saw her more often with von Lankenau and gradually tended to avoid them both, nagged by a question he dared not ask for fear of an answer. The black moods came back and he neglected his house to roam the hillsides as of old. Sometimes he met Kerbeck, vacant-eyed and enormous, wild and shaggy as a bear, and cursed Kruger bitterly while Kerbeck buzzed and hummed. He did not fail to leave his token of fruit each morning on the cairn.

Then one day, leaving Kerbeck and the Kabeiroi on the hillside, he came into the valley and saw a village woman tending grapevines alone at the foot of the hill. She was young, supple and brown and wore only a short paperbark skirt. She stopped working and bowed her head, waiting for him to pass. He stopped and searched in his mind for his limited Spanish.

“Cómo te llamas?"

“Milagros, señor" Her voice was very low and she would not look at him.

“Bueno. Tu estás muy bonita, Milagros"

“Por javor, tengo que trabajar… el Señor Kruger. ”

“Ven conmigo, Milagros. Yo te mando por el nombre del Señor Kruger."

She flushed darkly, then paled. She looked up at him with beseeching eyes shiny with tears.

“Por favor, por gran favor, no me mande usted.

“Quién te manda?” asked a new voice from behind the screen of vines, and then, “Oh. You, Kinross?”

Garcia came into view around the vines. Like Kinross, he was barefooted and wore only stagged-off dungaree trousers.

“What’s it all about?” he asked.

“I was trying to talk to her.

Garcia spoke rapidly in Spanish and the woman answered in a fearful voice. The thickset Mexican turned back to Kinross, fists knuckling hipbones.

“Take the name of Kruger back off of her, Kinross!”

“I remove the name, Milagros,” Kinross said. “Garcia, I—”

“Take it off in Spanish,” Garcia interrupted. “You put it on in Spanish.”

Kinross garbled out a sentence in Spanish. Garcia was still angry. He sent the woman away.

“Kinross, I can’t take away your power to use the name of Kruger. But if you use it wrong, I can beat you half to death. Maybe all the way to death. You get me?”

“Don’t judge me so damned offhand. How do you know what I intended?”

“Milagros knew. She knew, all right. I believe her.”

“Believe what you like, then.”

“Listen, Kinross, stay away from the villagers. I command you in the name of Garcia and his two fists. You can outtalk me and outthink me, but—” The stocky Mexican struck his right fist into his left biceps with a solid thump.

Kinross clenched his teeth and breathed deeply through flaring nostrils. Then he said, “Okay, Garcia. I appreciate your position. The only man I really want to fight doesn’t have a body.”

“Good,” the Mexican said. “No hard feelings, then. But you still stay clear of the villagers, a kind of agreement between you and me. Okay?”

“Okay,” Kinross said and walked away.

When he came into his walled garden he saw nutmeg pigeons pecking at overripe mangoes he had placed there for them. Fearless, they hardly made way for his suddenly slowed feet. The two fluttered briefly when he, unthinking, bent and seized them. They quieted in his hands and he carried them inside, wondering why.

For hours after nightfall he sat before his fire and stared into the red coals. So he could outthink and outtalk Garcia, could he? Well, yes, he could. But the act? How act? How get at a man without a body?