The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest by Peter Dickinson

Author:Peter Dickinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller
Published: 2015-02-03T04:03:46+00:00

VI

There was something horrible about the priest. Eve was frightened of him from the moment she saw him.

She came out of the school after her first lesson, hot and embarrassed with anger. Daddy had teased her, gently but obviously, in front of all the Kus because of her ignorance of their language and life, and they’d all bayed with happy laughter. Honestly, how could she be expected to know the silly savages would have a special grammar for talking to women with? She was as eager to leave the class, when it was over, as the Kus were to stay. So she came out alone.

He was wringing the neck of a black chicken. He sat cross-legged exactly in the middle of the circle of beaten earth in front of his hut. There was a fire beside him. His elbows stuck out and made rhythmic jerks as he slowly twisted the bird’s neck; its wings flapped convulsively, unheeded; he was not looking at what he was doing, but stared with a blind man’s stare across the clearing.

The thing that made him horrible was his flesh. It hadn’t the black, smooth, slightly oiled roundness of the other Kus, which made her think of slow waves moving under wharves; instead it looked as if it had been puddled together by someone trying to model in too sloppy clay. His outline was lumpy, irresolute, the lifeless surface obliterating the underlying curves of muscle and the sharp certainties of bone. Eve assumed he had some beastly disease, like the poor girl who had sat near her in the class.

The school had been built directly opposite the priest’s hut, so that his stare seemed fixed on Eve. And because whatever he was doing to the chicken was not the logical way of killing a bird—the clean half twist and jerk that gets it all over in a second—Eve was sure that he was performing some ritual, a malevolent magic aimed at her. She felt that his uncouth jungly powers had summoned her out of school at that moment to undergo his attack. She wanted to go back into school but was ashamed to; she wanted to walk up the clearing to their own hut, and Mummy, but was afraid to; so she stood and stared back, feeling sick.

“I wish he wouldn’t do that,” said Daddy, behind her shoulder. “Don’t be frightened of him, Eve—he’s not as bad as he looks. Come with me and I’ll ask him to be kindly disposed toward you. Walk a little behind me and don’t stand on my shadow. He does his little magics with leaves and his big ones with drums, but he’s almost given up the drums now. He has to do this business with the chicken every new moon, to renew his powers. We’ll wait here till he’s finished; it won’t be long now. You mustn’t make the mistake of thinking he’s a fraud or a hypocrite—he does know a lot about the medicinal properties of plants, for one thing—and he lives a very austere life; there’s not many in the Kirk could match it.

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