Ch. 4: The Song on the Hill

The hot season came on. The streams shrank to strings of pools, and the court beneath the banyan grew languid and short of temper. Hunting was harder. The lion brought less each evening, and grumbled. The tiger said, more than once and not quite under his breath, that in the old days a creature who wished to eat had hunted for himself.

Fierce-Howl pretended not to hear. He held court as before, and gave judgements, and divided the meat. But he had grown thin again, for all the food he ate, and there was a tightness about his eyes. His coat, which had been so deep and glorious, had begun to fade a little at the tips, so that in certain lights a pale gleam of yellow showed through the blue like dawn through a curtain. He took to sitting always in the shade of the parasol, and was sharp with Quick-Fingers if the leaf slipped.

Soft-Eyes noticed that he no longer laughed. She asked him timidly whether he was unwell, and he told her that kings carry burdens of which common creatures know nothing. She went away and wept a little, for she loved him, in her fashion, and could not think how to help.

It happened on an evening at the very end of the season, when the first clouds of the coming monsoon had begun to gather in the south, and the air was heavy and close.

The court had assembled for the evening meal. The lion lay in his place of honour. The tiger sat at the king‘s right hand, the leopard at his left with the gourd of betel. The elephant stood at the imaginary door. The peacock had just finished crying the king’s titles, and Fierce-Howl had raised a paw to begin the division of the meat, when from somewhere beyond the tamarind grove a sound came drifting through the trees.

It was a single voice at first: thin and high and wavering, rising slowly through the evening air. Then another joined it, and another, until a whole chorus was flowing out across the forest, rising and falling and rising again.

The jackals were singing to the moon.

The courtiers paid it no attention. Jackals howled every night; it was a noise like the croaking of frogs, too common to be heard. The lion yawned. The tiger was eyeing the meat.

But Fierce-Howl had gone quite still.

He knew that song. He knew every turn of it. He knew the place where the voices dipped, and the place where they climbed, and the long high note at the top where somebody had always to hold steady while the others came in beneath. And he could hear, as clearly as if he stood on the hill among them, that nobody was holding it. The note wavered and broke and fell away. They had no one to lead them.

His body thrilled from his ears to the tip of his faded tail. His eyes filled with tears. He forgot the banyan and the parasol and the lion and the tiger. He forgot Indra and heaven and nectar. He forgot that he was a king. He remembered only that he was Fierce-Howl, who had the finest voice of any jackal between the town walls and the hills, and that his people were singing, and that they needed him.

He leapt to his feet, flung back his head, and howled.

It was a magnificent howl. It went up through the branches of the banyan and out over the forest, long and piercing and perfectly true, and caught the faltering note on the hill and lifted it and held it, steady as a lamp flame. Far away, the jackals heard it, and for one moment their voices rose to meet it, and the song was whole again.

Then he stopped, and opened his eyes, and saw the court.

Nobody moved.

The lion was staring at him. The tiger was staring at him. The elephant had stopped chewing. Quick-Fingers had let the parasol fall, and the lotus leaf lay on the ground, and the evening light fell full on the king's coat, on the fading blue and the dry-grass yellow showing through it, on the too-large ears and the thin tail.

There was a long, shamefaced silence, of the kind that falls on a company of grown creatures who have been made fools of and know it. The lion looked at the ground. The leopard put down the gourd of betel very carefully, as though it had become something disgusting. Soft-Eyes made a small sound, like a cry cut short.

Then the tiger spoke.

“A jackal,” he said. “We have been bowing to a jackal.”

And the word went round the court, low and ugly: jackal, jackal, jackal.

“He has deceived us,” said the lion heavily, rising. “Let him be killed.”

Fierce-Howl turned to run. He was quick, and he knew the forest paths better than any of them. But the tiger was quicker. There was a single bound, a single blow, and it was over before the last echo of the song had died away among the trees.

The court did not meet beneath the banyan again. The lion went back to quarrelling with the tigers about boundaries, and the elephant forgot, after a while, that he had ever been a doorkeeper. Quick-Fingers told the story in every tree in the forest, and it grew a little better each time, as stories do.

Long-Ears heard it from a parrot, two days later. She listened in silence until the end, and then she went alone to the top of the hill beyond the tamarind grove and sat there until the moon came up.

That night, when the pack gathered, the young jackals asked her whether it was true: that the blue king had been one of them all along, and that it had been his voice they had heard, and that he had died for it.

“It was true,” said Long-Ears.

“Was he wicked?” asked one of the cubs.

The old jackal considered this for a long time.

“He was hungry,” she said at last. “Not for meat. For something else. He wanted to be the kind of creature people light lamps for. And he thought that to be that, he must stop being what he was, and send away the ones who knew him. That was his mistake. Not the dye, child. The dye was only an accident. The mistake was in what he did with it.”

Then she lifted her grey muzzle and recited the old verse that her own mother had taught her, long ago:

“Whoever leaves his friends, Strange folk to cherish, Like foolish Fierce-Howl, will Untimely perish.”

The cubs were quiet. Below them the plain lay silver under the moon, and far off, the lamps of the market town were being lit one by one.

“Now,” said Long-Ears. “Who will begin the song?”

And after a moment, a little uncertainly, one of the young ones did.