The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (4 page)

“Yeah, I know it’s strange, Sorcerer,” the boy said. “I can see what you mean about the walls. But the fo-so don’t play.” Xho Xho had been born at Mother of Waters—or in a tent outside the Station, anyway. “It’s the
rules
: caravans come in through the gates.”

Foreign taboos
, Demane decided.

He sent them on ahead, where fort soldiers were collecting spears beneath the tower. Waving Cumalo to follow, he crouched outside, beside the painted walls. “Stand there, will you?” Demane pointed him into place. The two of them hailed from the same remote spur of the continent, and in these parts that made them countrymen. After the native fashion, Cumalo dressed in a voluminous black robe: perfectly suited to blocking the view of passersby.

Demane opened his bag. He stuck his seven-foot spear down into it.

“Hey, as long as you’ve got that bad boy open . . . ,” Cumalo said. “Do you care if I hold a couple pennies for you, at least ’til we get to Olorum?”

Demane dug out a careless pinch of savings. He stood and handed the coins over uncounted.

“Aw, Sorcerer. This is too much! All I need is—”

“Don’t worry about it. Come on.” Demane laid a hand on Cumalo’s back, guiding him back toward the gates. There was a hard talk about gambling in the offing. Cumalo had never made bride-price, and so his lady up north in Philipiya still lived with her parents: two big boys, one baby girl, and twelve long years into an uneasy approximation of marriage. An ugly possibility troubled Demane’s mind. Could a good friend, your homeboy, also be a shiftless, trifling ne’er-do-well?
¹
He looked up at the painted wall.

A hero and his second, beset on all sides by a multinational host, were putting down the enemy with extreme prejudice. No man Demane had met was his match for strength, but the one painted centermost might surpass him in girth and brawn, if true to life. The hero’s right arm bulked with muscle still within human bounds. But that left arm was superhuman, and would have massed as thick as Demane’s thigh. It was the left hand, too, that gripped a rock-hewn axe depicted midstroke, dashing open fully half the front rank of foemen’s skulls. Five heads were as many eggs of bone, blood, brains bursting behind the sweep of the spiked stone that crowned the hero’s weapon. Five more crouched in a desperate scrum, transfixed before the fall of the meteor toward
their
heads. Beside the hero, his second lay about him with a Daluçan knife—a “sword”—scything the close-ranked enemy as might a farmer his corn. Scattered fingers, another hand still on its forearm, a head cloven crosswise, the crown of another with the cranial bowl dumping its jellies: these and other fruits of the flesh tumbled pell-mell in a grisly harvest. Neither the expression nor appearance of the hero’s second was marked out in particular detail, save for the coloring of his warrior braids. Those paints glistened as bright as agate or lapis lazuli.

“It’s showing the battle of Sweet Wells Station,” Cumalo said.

Demane asked, “Who’s he?”

“Big one’s the Lion of Olorum. Generalissimo and the prince the old King chose to rule after him. But a two-headed mamba bit him and he died. The one with the long knife is—
was
—his right hand. The Lion loved his women and left twentysome wives, twice as many children; but those two, well, they say . . .” Cumalo looked at Demane askance, and, thinking again, said only, “That blue hair is really something, huh?”

Demane shrugged.

Through the gates was a view down the Mainway, to the bustle on the piazza at the Station’s center and farther, to the glimmer of Mother of Waters. Folk and beasts glutted the Mainway’s length with all the noise and stench to be expected in-town.

Under-tower, a dozen fort soldiers mingled with the brothers. The fo-so handed out reclamation chits, collecting spears. They wore black robes, strung-bead commemorials of past actions; the youngbloods’ hair was plaited in looping designs, the oldheads in simple cornrows. The fo-so were all unmixed Olorumi, and therefore beardless as babies; their right cheeks smooth, the others finely mutilated. Insignia of a thornwasp, the one-stinger drone, was cut into every left cheek.

“ . . . vouchsafed none but them keeping to the Road. Certain doom befalls . . .”

“This for
that
? Unt uh! This spear was my . . .”

“Naw, you niggas right on time, matterfact. They got
all
the fights going today. Dogs, birds, dudes . . .”

A wealthy merchant, in robes dyed the deepest color of lilies, remonstrated with the garrison’s commandant, whose cicatrix boasted three stingers, a thornwasp prince-of-nest. A handful of fo-so wore breastplates weathered by rust or verdigris; the commandant’s, however, was made of some mirror-polished alloy, flashing even in the shadows under-tower. Not quite able to make out the discussion between the merchant and elite soldier in so much crosstalk and din, Demane sidled closer.

The merchant had just come in with that smaller caravan, fresh off the route Master Suresh l’Merqerim meant to follow tomorrow. Standing attendance on the merchant was a man prepossessing as only brothers were: thick-thewed, with a brawler’s ears, nose, and scars. His master was most insistent: “And yet, that is precisely what we
did
do. Do you think us fools? All the way through the Wildeeps, not a man jack set foot off the safe way!”

“Then we have misspoken,” said the fo-so in the gorgeous cuirass, “and do most humbly beg your pardon.” A man hopes, of course, to inoculate others with his own sense of serenity, by employing that tranquil tone and placid pose. A shame, then, it serves only to infuriate! “Yet we must request that you please moderate your—”

“You fail to
listen.
What I am trying to
tell
you, if you could
hear
it, is that some eater of men—a lion,
some
thing—hunted us south to north across the Wildeeps. Seven men,
seven
(can you see these fingers? well, count them, then:
seven
!) were dragged away in the night. Eaten alive, screaming! The beast came onto the Road. I shall repeat that, for the salient detail here seems not to penetrate your stopped-up ears.
Onto
the Road, man!” As the merchant became exercised, his guardsman shifted impatiently in place. The brother’s coloring was the ruddy-dark iridescence of a plainsman buffalo rider. When he moved, and bone or brawn pressed from beneath the skin, his complexion paled or darkened, going redbone, redbrown, dark brown across his face and bare arms. “There was a caravan some days behind us. Others from the Station will be going south. What of them? You must send down a party of soldiers and root the thing out!”

“Would that our remit did extend to such adventures.” The commandant spoke in round tones, with graceful gestures. “But here at Mother of Water’s garrison, our warrant is the security and defense of this Station, not the mounting of bold expeditions into the bush. Therefore, lacking leave from His Holiest Majesty in Olorum, we must regrettably . . .”

Messed Up roared. “This was my
Daddy
spear! Fuck if I’m selling it for no chip of wood on a leather
string
! Y’ALL MUSTA LOSS Y’ALL DAMN MIND.” He threw deadly elbows, shaking his shaggy head, and the brothers couldn’t calm him. Somehow Messed Up had lost none of his corpulent powers to the rigors of the desert crossing. Not easily, then, did Demane bind that tantrum within an embrace.

“I got him, y’all, I got him,” Demane told the others. “Go ahead into the Station. We catch up later.”

He got Messed Up out past the gates into the bright sun.

Messed Up’s eye on the wounded side was squinching tight-shut, and then bugging wide-open. That cheek tic’d; it juddered—not one of his good days.

“Tomorrow when we go, you just hand em that little piece of wood on the string, and you get the spear back.
Your
spear. Nobody else’s. Feel me?” Demane wondered what other words might explain check and reclamation . . . but then Messed Up meekly nodded.

(And why now? Was this yet more strange sorcery? No: gratitude. After the clash with bandits outside Ajeric, hadn’t the Sorcerer sewn Messed Up whole and fine again, when half his face hung off—hung down—like a flag with no wind to lift it? Hadn’t the Sorcerer bathed that terrible wound, dressed it soft-handedly; slathered all manner of things over it, some cool, some that cut the nightmarish pain? Now it hardly hurt! No, the Sorcerer’s assurances did not make sense, but Messed Up would offer him this leap of faith anyhow. A gift.)

They went in. Messed Up surrendered his spear.

“Bet be RIGHT HERE, too, when I come tamara!” Messed Up shouted at the soldier who stowed the spear in the armory with the rest. Xho Xho and Walead hustled their brother out.

A fo-so turned to Demane. “That’s all you brought with you?” He gestured to the little bag hanging at Demane’s left hip. “Where’s your gear at, your weapons?”

A soldier beside the first leaned over to his friend, whispering (a baseline human could never have overheard): “Naked-ass bush savages. Shouldn’t even let they ass up
in
here!”

A number of petty miracles lay within Demane’s power. His reflexes, his strength, were rather better than even the most gifted of athletes’; and his sense of sight and smell, and so on, could wax exceedingly keen at times. But the blood of
TSIMtsoa
ran thin in him, and it seemed he could not manage the metamorphosis into great power. Even so, provoke him enough, and the provoker
would
catch a glimpse—radiant, dark—of the stormbird. Demane spread his empty hands.

“What you see,” he said, “is what I got.”

A peaceable gesture: and yet one fo-so ducked his head, shuffling, while the other grinned with all his teeth, and said, “’Joy your stay at Mother of Waters!”

With a bob of the chin, Demane accepted the greeting.

Wilfredo wandered off into the westbound traffic on the Mainway.

Teef, Barkeem, T-Jawn, and a couple others were headed to the Fighthouse. Cumalo told them the way.

Faedou limped off north, into labyrinthine alleys.

The remaining brothers either took roost on the split-rail fence or else leaned against the posts of the garrison paddock just round back the tower. “What
ever
you looking for, y’all can find it up in the piazza,” Xho Xho was telling these first-timers. At nightfall, daytime commerce cleared from the piazza “and they kimmel
²
a greatorch right in the middle.” Hundreds would dance and dozens drum until dawn . . .

It came to Demane that someone should spare a thought for where brothers would have to meet the caravan tomorrow. Human bustle and metallic bits, however—countless and reflective—were flickering nauseously in the corners of Demane’s eyes. Dense aerosols clogged his nose and tongue, smell and taste inundated with clamorous trivia. Loud, low, soft, shrill: the Station was a high tide of talk, a stormy sea of noise, wave after wave swamping him.

Xho Xho’s disquisition began to cover local outlets for black market and sin. Here as elsewhere, a silver penny was the going rate; but niggas should not sleep on the fact that, up in the piazza after midnight, there would be mad hoes out, offering
deep
discounts . . . Demane lay a pastoral hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Oh, right, my man. Sorry!” Xho Xho shifted his restless gaze over the Mainway’s traffic. “You
had
said you wasn’t trying to get into nothing nasty.” The boy, though, was, for bitter, and yet ineffably saccharine, was the aroma of mischief. And Xho Xho stank of it.

A wise man would grab hold of this boy, and get honest answers to hard questions.
But Demane let the intuition go by. Squinting, his teeth achy from gritting, he hadn’t yet moderated his senses for city extremes. “Just tell me, Xho,” Demane said, “where at, tomorrow, we suppose to meet up with the caravan?”

Following the boy’s vague gesture, Demane looked across the teeming Mainway. Master Suresh and merchants could not be seen unloading over at that first complex of stables, corrals, and warehouses. “
Where
, Xho? Someplace on the south side of the Station, you mean?”

“Yeah, Sorcerer. Over there.” Xho Xho eyed and dismissed every passing face, as though in hope or dread of one he knew. “Master Suresh got one of the biggest outfits
at
Mother of Waters. Cain’t miss it. Ask anybody.” The boy slithered out from under the shepherding hand. “Well, let me get up with you brothers later at the piazza tonight. All right? I need to go holler real quick at these niggas I used run with.
Yo, Walé!
I’m out! You coming or what?”

“Yeah! Hold up!
Damn!
”

What if, as Walead and Messed Up took off after Xho Xho up the Mainway, Demane had only shouted,
Hey
, y’all be good!
Hear me?
What then?

His eyes were shut, though. He was rubbing his temples.

The brothers scattered.

Cumalo stayed. “What is it, that in-city thing bothering you? Can I help?”

“ . . . No.” Demane blinked and looked around, the sense-ruckus quieting into lucidity. “It’s better now. I’m all right.”

“Well, come on,” Cumalo said. “I’ve got a surprise for you.” He took Demane’s hand and tugged.

A block down from the piazza was a shantytown of food vendors. They stopped at a dingy stall and offered she who worked there warm greetings and smiles. The old woman blinked at them, seeming put out by this interruption of her boredom. It was not at first certain that Cumalo’s courteous request and nugget of rock salt would suffice to stir the concessionaire into sullen motion. She slapped the salt onto the countertop, chose a consequent fragment, and popped it into her mouth. Twice—voluptuously—her eyes fell closed and open again. That softened gaze and a slackened scowl made her seem as pleasant as anyone while she savored the salt. And then the urban disdain returned.

With a fat pestle, the old woman mashed black fruit in two bowls.

“They grow it all along the Daughter,” Cumalo said. The mounded berries spat dark juice, disintegrating into pulpy slurry. “Other than back home, I’ve never found it anywhere except in Mother of Waters.” The tart musk of that aroma! “You can
bet
how surprised I was first time I saw it here.” Men were meant, at this end of the continent, to eke out their tears. Demane therefore hardened his face against the surge of homesickness.