Ranee and the Tigers (standard:adventure, 1131 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Oct 15 2008	Views/Reads: 3100/2510	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Coming of Age can be a real challenge when your adversary is a Bengal tiger. Oops -- two tigers!

RANEE AND THE TIGERS 

Uvea blue, glowing with saki.  Ibis, ankle deep in loess.  Efts in the
oda scuttling along the walls.  Selene lit the courtyard with her 
torch.  A basalisk withdrew.  Half-casks of uva-vint lined the 
colonnade.  Ranee appeared between the columns, drawing her sari 
closer, veiling her face. Monsoon time, she feared.  Attar of erica 
swooned; nausea of bitter vetch. 

The market square was dark, strewn with beggars dozing in the warm dust.
 She passed silently.  With her free hand she tucked the etui safely 
into her pelvic girdle and began to run.  The man with a fez caught up 
with her.  He smelled of curry laced with garlic.  His voice rasped and 
wheezed. 

"I am Rama," he whispered coarsely, close to her ear. 

"Om", she replied, signing with her hand, "Om namah shamaya." 

Rama bowed.  "It must be now." he urged.  "Here are the bolas."  He
passed them to her between the Sari's pleats.  She grasped its strings 
with icy fingers.  "For love of Shiva!" she replied.  From the folds of 
her sari she drew two att and pressed them into Rama's palm.  A minaret 
beneath the moon cast the shadow of Bast, and its Muezzin warbled a 
melodic eulogie to Allah.  Rama melted into a shadow. 

At the tea-shop, Ranee poured a dopful of kat from her ewer and planned
it one more time.  Eosin tinted her cheeks but couldn't mask their 
pallor from the terror that goes with every assassination.  First, she 
ould have to sacrifice a leveret or a paca or a cavy, transfixing it 
with a coptic dirk beside the temple of Ptah.  Then she had to lurk 
amid the rooftiles of the temple until the tiger came to claim the 
prey.  With luck, the bolas would stun him, garroting the tiger as they 
wrapped around his throat.  With luck, the beast would not pounce on 
her before it expired.  With luck, the village would at last be rid of 
a child-eater. 

At the swamp's edge, Ranee squatted beneath a baobab tree and opened the
etui.  She skewered a morsel of cheese with her fibula, and anchored it 
to her spindle of twine.  Locking the bait into a cleft stump, Ranee 
spun the hempline out until she was hidden by scrub. 

Her wait beneath the silver moon was interminable.  "Favor me, Mara,
Goddess of Deception; send a beast into my snare, O Vishnu" she 
murmured, "Honor me, O Devi, above your sabre-clawed child-eater. Come 
Isis and Gods of every tongue and grant me eminence over the hated 
beast!" 

Before long, tugs on her string told their story.  A Paca was impaled on
her fibula.  It took all her strength to wedge the twine as the beast 
cavorted and somersaulted, attempting to dislodge her spring sari-pin 
from its gorge.  Before long, the jerks subsided and Ranee advanced to 
claim the enfeebled rodent.  A moment later, the half-alive Paca was 
tethered just below the leftmost column, behind the fa–7ade, visible to 
all the beasts of an adjoining field. 

Ranee waited.  A full moon rose.  Tree fronds skeined its platinum
effulgence.  Silent garzas flocked above the corraled herd.  Tree frogs 
chirped valentines.  Insomniac snakes rustled restlessly.  No paw-pads 
fell, but a musty dank miasma rolled over the Paca. It was the tiger 
studying its fitful jerks with suspicious yellow eyes.  Tasting its 
blood with a silent sniff. 

Ranee waited.  Sad gongs tolled, distantly.  Fretful monkeys screamed
peace at each other and were silent.  One by one, little silences 
crowded into the ever-present ocean of noise.  The high moon: a 
dagger-edged disc.  Hard, tempered hard, burnt pure, shimmering, a lake 
burning white.   Motionless, invisible, the tiger smelled death with 
each jerk of the Paca. 

Ranee waited.  Dense silence erupted from the jungle, woods and fields. 
Gathering the string, Ranee pulled up the Paca to her, and embraced its 
bloody carcass with her bare flesh, tossing it over her shoulder, then 
drawing it back across her neck, down between her breasts, all over her 
belly and between her thighs.  Blood-covered, she became the thwarted 


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