Ch. 3: The Crossing

There was, of course, the small question of how a monkey was to cross a bay.

“I cannot swim,” said Red-Face, peering down at the dark water with the wary distaste of a creature who has spent his whole life in trees. “Not a stroke. I sink like a coconut. If your house were in a tree, I would be there before you. But it is under the water, and I am a monkey.”

“You need not swim,” said Ugly-Mug. “You may ride on my back. It is broad, and I will go gently. My house is not under the water, not all of it; there is a dry ledge in the mud where my wife sleeps, and you may sit there. I will bring you home again before the moon is high.”

Red-Face considered the crocodile's back. It was broad, certainly. It was also very knobbly, and very wet, and attached at one end to a great many teeth. But it belonged to his friend, and his friend had asked him, and he had been a long time alone.

“Very well,” he said. “But go slowly, and do not dive, and if I fall off you are to fish me out before I have finished drowning.”

“I promise,” said Ugly-Mug, and he did not look at the monkey when he said it.

So Red-Face climbed down out of the rose-apple tree, for the first time in all the months he had lived there, and stepped from the last root onto the crocodile's back. He settled himself just behind the head, with his hands gripping two of the larger knobs and his tail curled tight around his own legs. And Ugly-Mug pushed off from the shore and swam out into the bay.

At first, it was wonderful.

The sea was calm and the evening was warm. The water slid past on either side in long green folds, and little silver fish leaped out of the crocodile's way. Behind them the rose-apple tree grew smaller and smaller until it was only a dark smudge against the darker land. Ahead of them the bay opened wide, and the first stars were coming out over it, and Red-Face, who had only ever seen the sea from above, was amazed to find how big it was when you were sitting in it.

“I had no idea,” he said. “From my branch it looks like a pond. From here it looks like the whole sky has fallen down and gone flat. How do you ever find your way home?”

“By the smell of the river,” said Ugly-Mug shortly.

Red-Face talked on. He talked about the stars, and which ones the fishermen steered by. He talked about a story he had heard once of a tortoise who was carried through the air by two geese, holding on to a stick with his mouth, and who fell to the ground because he could not resist answering when the people below laughed at him. “So you see,” he said, “I shall be very careful to keep my mouth shut and my hands tight.” He laughed at his own joke.

Ugly-Mug did not laugh.

They were a long way out now. The shore behind was gone altogether. The shore ahead was only a pale line where the sandbank lay. The water beneath them had changed from green to black, and it was very deep, and it was very cold where Red-Face's dangling foot touched it.

“You are quiet tonight,” said the monkey.

Ugly-Mug swam on. The silence went on so long that it began to feel like something sitting between them on the crocodile's back.

And then, quite suddenly, he spoke. Perhaps it was the weight of the secret, which had been pressing on him all day. Perhaps it was the darkness, which makes some creatures brave and others careless. Perhaps it was only that he was a crocodile, and could not believe that a monkey in the middle of the sea could do him any harm.

“Friend,” he said, “I have not told you the truth. My wife does not want to give you a feast. She has made herself ill with wanting your heart. She believes that a creature who eats nothing but rose-apples must have a heart as sweet as honey, and she has sworn to fast until she dies unless she eats it. I could not let her die. So I am bringing you to her. I am sorry. You had better say your prayers, for we shall be there soon.”

There is a moment, when a monkey is falling from a branch, before he catches the next one, when the whole world goes slow and clear. Red-Face had felt it many times in his life. He felt it now.

Around him was the sea, black and endless. Beneath him was the back of the creature he had called his friend. Ahead was the sandbank and the deep pool and the wife with her bright eyes waiting. Behind was his tree, too far away to see. He could not swim. He could not fight a crocodile in the water; he could not fight a crocodile anywhere. He could not run, because there was nowhere to run to.

All he had was his wits. And his wits, for one long and terrible moment, had gone entirely out of him like breath out of a punctured bladder.

He felt his hands tighten on the knobs of the crocodile's back. He felt his heart, the very heart in question, banging against his ribs so loudly that he was sure Ugly-Mug must hear it through the water.

Then something cool and steady came back into him. It was the voice of the old king, his friend, who had said to him once, long ago in the mango groves: “When the danger is near, fear it. When the danger is here, do not fear it; think.”

Red-Face thought.

He did not shriek. He did not plead. He did not curse the crocodile or call him a traitor, though every word of it would have been true. Instead, when he spoke, his voice was light and easy, with a little laugh running underneath it, as if he had just been told a joke at his own expense.

“My dear friend,” he said, “why did you not tell me this before we left the shore?”

Ugly-Mug, who had been braced for weeping, was taken aback. “What difference would it have made?”

“All the difference in the world! Do you not know anything about monkeys? We never carry our hearts about with us when we go travelling. Think of the danger! A heart is a precious thing; one false leap and it might fall out, or a hawk might snatch it, or it might get wet. No, no. When a monkey leaves home, he hangs his heart up safely in the branches of his tree and leaves it there until he comes back. Mine is hanging in the rose-apple tree this very minute, on the third great branch, where the fruit is thickest. If you had only said a word to me on the shore, I would have brought it with me gladly, as a present for your wife. As it is, I am afraid she will be terribly disappointed.”

The crocodile stopped swimming.

They floated there in the middle of the dark bay, the monkey sitting very upright on his back, the water lapping at both of them. Ugly-Mug turned this over in his slow mind. It was a strange thing to hear. But then, monkeys were strange creatures, and he had always been told they were clever, and his own wife had said that this one was not like other monkeys. And it was true, now that he thought of it, that he had never actually seen the monkey's heart.

“Is that really so?” he said at last.

“Upon my honour as your friend,” said Red-Face, and his voice did not shake in the least.

The great tail swung slowly round in the water. The long grey-green body turned. And Ugly-Mug began to swim back the way they had come, toward the shore, toward the rose-apple tree, toward the heart that was hanging in its branches.