The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (7 page)

“What’s going on here, Isa?”

“I’ve got to go,” Captain said. “I’m tired of running. And don’t follow, Demane, or I’ll let death catch me.” Here was more truth, and the captain had never yet said to him anything truer, or more heartfelt.

They jumped at a dry-stick report. Master Suresh beckoned. Impatiently, he snapped his fingers again. Captain went. He and the master crossed the Mainway, then walked up a northwestrunning alley. Fo-so were hefting the bodies of man and dog into a cart.

A storm was rising in the blood that pumped wildly through Demane. He couldn’t hear his own thoughts, could hardly think them.
Run
, since he couldn’t fly. Perform some worthy feat. A feat as hard and perilous as possible.
Kill something
. He too went out on the Mainway—but eastward through the gates, and then south toward the jukiere and Wildeeps.

There is a pace that a fit man can hold, running on and on, nearly forever. The sun westered slowly across the wide afternoon sky. South of Mother of Waters, there was rocky country through which a millennium of caravans had blazed a trail winding far from the Daughter, down shallower stretches of deep-cut arroyos, around high mesas, across scrub flats. This was neither the season nor perhaps the year that rains would fall; only the intermittent green of sagebrush, pampas, and acacia relieved the droughted shades of gray and dun.

Demane at first heard and smelled little more than anyone would. The pounding and raised dust of his own footfalls, mesquite hanging in the hot air, calls of mourning doves and cicada. Then the vacant hush of human perception began to fill with bright effigies of sound and odor. What was long passed, what was hidden, what was remote came clear to his senses.

A subtle roar built of discrete sounds. The stormbird heard insectskitter and the slide of snakes over stone. He felt it, wind too faint for his skin to feel before, and heard it, rasping particles of dust across the hardpan. The dazzle of scents bloomed. He passed the cold acridity of gecko, and rattler, and ground croc. Old bones murmured stories to him in passing. A child mummifying beneath a wayside cairn: dead of blood cancer. Manifold dung and urine, steer men lion antelope dog, whispered what age and sex, sick or healthy, how long since passing this way.

Faraway some early night dog barked. He’d seen the packs harry a solitary lion or stag antelope in the prime of strength, scores of muzzles stripping the prey of its fleshly raiment, gobbet by mouthful, and sacrificing ten or more dogs to immense antlers, or the might of a lion’s paw, before the better beast was pulled down by sheer rabid numbers. Demane masked his body’s odor in the landscape’s, as he should have done at the gates of Mother of Waters. He quit the beaten trail and ran upcountry, where the lookout and cover were better.

The stormbird beat nearer the surface than it had ever risen—even on sacred grounds back home, in the green hills. He ran harder. His legs and lungs refused to tire. Strength and sensation swamped the indweller, that part of consciousness which thinks and feels.
I hardly ate today
were the last words to trouble his mind for a while. He was ravenous. And below him on the blazed trail, hidden in thick tamarisk, he caught the tattoo of a thumb-sized heart pumping frantic blood. The rich scent came too, of a small shivering body, furred and hot. There was good food just out of sight, a jack-hare about to lose its wager whether to run or hide. In that tussock of weeds right . . .
there
. . .

Buoyant on spirals of warmth.
There athwart the west snaked the Daughter, glittering gray, and down there the southern Crossings, a thicker python, wider waters. He plunged into fresh headwinds. In his shadow stampeding antelope small as crickets separated in the same patternly accord as a birdflock, scores bounding left, scores right, through blond grasses that rippled over the world’s skin. Aw, let them go. He wasn’t so hungry anymore. Better to ride
more soft
rising heat up where . . .
where, exactly? The skyfaring dream came to ground. Every tremor of his lids and lashes abraded the dream’s stuff, and his eyes opening destroyed it.

Fast water sloshed over him, rocking him. Legs outstretched, leaning back on his elbows, Demane awoke in the shoals of a broad stream, wallowing. His bag hung submerged in the current. Panicked, he jumped up. The bag’s flap was thrown back, but water hadn’t entered. Wetness sheeted from the leather and it was dry again in moments. Nothing within was out of place. Aunty used to say, Don’t worry so much: the bag takes care of itself. She had always laughed at his fretful care. Wasn’t it better, though, to err on caution’s side?

And stretching before him was the Wildeeps. Across stream, rich as the rainwoods back home, tangled ancient growth went on and on, green to the east and west horizons. The oceanic foliage rippled and petals like white tongues blew down. The whole southern bank of leafage tossed in gusts of wind which, midstream, Demane felt only as soft breath, scented with frangipani.

And the ground over there was sacred, the jungle godlike and consecrated only to itself. A greatwork lay over the stream where he stood, and over the fast water running on all frontiers of the Wildeeps. Demane laughed. He ran for high steps through the rapids, and crouched down, to swing an open hand against the water’s rush and knock up white splashes. The two greatest wonders of his life, both together at once: one of nature, the Wildeeps where many worlds overlapped; and another wonder, this artifice of magi, the greatwork that bound this savage country and its denizens.

Downstream, he saw a weird pulsing light, stationary just above the trees. Demane waded with the flow, west.

Nude black dirt, a southrunning trail, cut into the greenery across stream. Some bright sign—a thunderbolt, caught and twisted by almighty hands—hovered coruscating at treetop-height over the mouth of the trail. Demane knew what amounted to a library’s worth of disparate lore, and all of it word-perfect, though he was illiterate in the four languages he spoke. Still, that brightness in the sky was legible to his very blood. It read,
Here
is the Safe Road
. Eyes closed, his face could find the folded lightning and know its meaning too, even as the blind feel upon their faces where the sun sits in the sky.

The hard current dragged and eddied about his feet. Demane shuddered, and looked bewilderedly around him, coming fully alert like a slapped sleepwalker.

What had he meant to do, exactly? Track the jukiere across the Wildeeps, kill the wizard somehow, and then return to Mother of Waters, all in one slender evening—was that the plan, then?
No
, of course not! He’d only wanted to . . . scout out the lay of the land. Ye-ah. That made some kind of sense.

Well, brave scout, will you look at the hour? In the west one low cloud glowed sullen and red, its underbelly brass-bright. The blue dusk was blackening, the sun already below the horizon. Perfect nightvision had let the dark creep up on him again. Demane recalled some little animal in the grass. And he’d . . . killed it? And then what? Not
eaten
it, surely, had he? How? His spear, blades, and bow were all untouched in the bag. Running his tongue (not leathery and rough, but a soft fragile slug, like anyone’s) over his teeth: they were all blunt, not mostly pointed ivory tines. He examined his hands. Quarter-moon talons, keen-edged as scimitars along the undersides? Since when?
Of course
there were ordinary human nails at the tips of his fingers. He shrugged: nor did any strange new muscles move in his back. He was wingless. Some half-fledged potential stirred in him, though. Limitless and untapped, the wellspring of the Wildeeps awaited the one who would drink. So close to the Wildeeps, nothing was beyond achieving if only Demane would cease to hold himself back so fiercely.
And is that what you still want, no longer to be a man but a god
. . . ? He spun around and ran for the north bank of the fords. He fled back toward Mother of Waters.

It was as though a great wind carried him across that first leg upcountry, not any strength of his own. But the Wildeeps dropped leagues behind, and the stormbird waned. Fatigue began to drag at his legs and Demane slackened from his best pace to one he could hold. The slow air momentarily strengthened to a breeze. Very nearby, in the dark above the trail, a night dog bayed. In a sweat of sage musk, green attar, and chlorophyll, Demane expunged his scent; but it was too late. The pack had sight and sound of him. Coursing and unshakeable, a score of dogs set up frenzied barking. Demane fled without any plan except to live longer, his feet quickening again.

Dogs run much faster, however, and soon closed the distance. He had to turn and face them. Six in front all but snapping at his heels leapt, jowls foaming, teeth sharp.
Time left him again. Coming to he spat a foul mouthful of furred meat. Doubtfully he tottered, nodding with unfocused eyes. Aching up and down his arms and legs: the print of savage bites which hadn’t broken skin. Limbs and carcasses strew the churned mud about him, his hands gloved in blood. He needed food—cooked, spiced,
vegetable
. Hunger had drawn his stomach tight as a fist.

Demane spat again, a thirsty paste, and began to run. There was a stitch under his ribs, cramps in his thighs, and fatigue that made him wish to lie down anywhere. But he wouldn’t survive another attack, and so step after step, his scent belatedly hidden, he ran on through the starblown night.

Human noise and stink wafted toward him across the drylands. The Station glowed in the distance. Ahead on the trail, barking, savage and remote, addressed some other prey; Demane had to detour far and wide. Meanwhile the moon’s jaundiced eye wandered half its nightly course across heaven. The gates at the tower stood closed.

He circled west to the lake, and washed away the muck and dust. With his legs turning hard and stiff, Demane gimped up the Mainway from Mother of Waters. Fatty smoke from barbecue and his roaring hunger pulled him through the glad crush of the Station’s night crowd, and then down a street above the revels on the piazza. He walked past every grill to a particular fellow, turning a haunch over spluttering coals. “Fresh!” said the man, full of pride, grinning at Demane. “Killed it just this evening, not long ago!”

Demane knew that,
smelled
it, and made his order.

He kept his eyes squinted, for the more sensitive the nightvision, the more cruel the artificial lights of civilization. On a dish of unfired clay the grillmen handed Demane: mashed yam, half charred tips of rare beef, once-tough greens tender from long simmering in pot liquor. Demane set the dish on the ground and tore a withered pepper over top, spilling pale seeds. He rasped two little saltrocks together, dusting the food thoroughly, and handed up both pieces to the vendor, who smiled again. The grillman turned to serve another.

“How you all do
complicate
the thing! Yes, there is the problem of witches: whether they be stronger than natural men, dodging blows which should have landed, or exploiting other such fraudulent advantages. But only think for a moment. Every one of us knows perfectly well what a proper fight looks like. A man who wins legitimately comes up from his descent into the pit
spitting blood
, staggering, hard-used,
hideous
to see
.
And where is there the creature to take such a battering
an
he need not?
He, however, who passes unscathed from bout to bout—making easy mince of formidable opponents—
that man
is a witch! Watch for him! Let’s not overcomplicate the matter. To catch a witch-cheater needs nothing more than to keep our eyes peeled . . .”

His Excellency Sabiq bgm Qaby, Royalcousin, speaking to fellow trustees of the Fighthouse at Mother of Waters

A town like no other in his experience, the Station at Mother of Waters, where noise and business picked
up
after dark. There were more people on the piazza than all the men, women, and children living in Demane’s hometown, whose houses spread out over three hills, the farthest families a whole morning’s walk away. He came upon Faedou sitting on the margins of the piazza. He had a jar beside him, his bad leg stretched along a wall, out from under the feet of enraptured dancers or the blundering Demonridden. Demane pressed one hand flat to the wall, leaned heavily, and worked his sore legs down to sitting. But he’d hardly got settled and halfway comfortable before Cumalo came out of the crowd.

“Sorcerer!” Cumalo’s fingertips tapped upon the air, playing invisible beats. “Get my drum out for me, will you? The good one. I want to play!”

“All right.” Demane fought laboriously to standing. “Be right back.” He looked for a corner out of the good light, hidden.

“Aw, man,
come on
! Why you going off somewheres? Just pull it out of your bag right here. Nobody cares!” Cumalo danced, hands busily pantomiming. Miracles didn’t seem to faze him. What a strange, wonderful town
he’d
come from! Demane’s own mother, father, and siblings used to avert their eyes, sneering in terror, at the smallest miracle—to say nothing of these superstitious northerners!

“Can’t do that, brother. I’ll be right back.”

Down between two inns bordering the piazza, there was a cul-de-sac that ended against a remnant of the old fortwall. Where men had pissed out that Demon since before the fall of Daluça, Demane stooped in ammonia shadows and felt around in his bag. The drums were in the back bottom hall, past tarp and tent, surgical kit and medicines, food and sealed jars of pure water, knives, bow and arrows, his spear, various leather saddles, for dromedary and equus . . . ay, Aunty! Would you scold or laugh—shocked, either way—to see the bag so messy, things spread out everywhere? He found Cumalo’s jimbay and pulled it forth. Back in brightness around the greatorch, Demane handed the drum over. Cumalo joined the twenty or so others playing.

The moment Cumalo lit into the opening evolutions of a hotter, faster rhythm, the other drummers fell in behind his mastery. “The
old
music,” Demane said, throwing up a palm in excitement. “That’s some
church
he playing!” Dozens talking, dozens standing, rushed out to join the hundreds who danced. The crowd jumped like waterdrops flicked onto a hot greased griddle. How to sit out this joyful noise, the spirit so willing! But the body begged to stay put.

“Well, go dance, then!” Faedou waved him up. “Thought
you
would of been out there, if anybody.”

Demane grinned and shook his head. “I’m getting old, old man.”

Faedou blew like a horse. “Boy, I got two sons and a daughter older’n you.”

Maybe just stand up and shuffle a little, at least? He reached back to push off the wall and began to raise up, but his own abused flesh fought the unfolding of his legs with such ferocity, all stiff and chilled, Demane lost heart and settled back down sitting.

“Cut out all that groaning!” Faedou hooted. He drank from his jar. “You sound worse than me!”

A waif appeared, and stood by patiently. Faedou gulped the dregs from his jar and handed it up. The child sped away, and then with slow careful steps returned, bearing back the jar brimful.

Demane asked, “How’s that leg doing you?”

“Same way it’s
been
doing,” Faedou said. “Let me be, Sorcerer. I ain’t in no kind of mood to talk about it.”

So they talked of the road ahead. About as many leagues farther to the south as they’d already come, Great Olorum sprawled on the Gulf. It was a kingdom of many principalities grown together into the vastest of cities, none bigger in the world. And close by Olorum, Faedou said, could be found an outpost of heaven where seven-foot giants lived, supposedly the children of the gods.
The Ashëan Enclave
, Demane thought but did not say. More edifying to listen, he had learned. He tried to square the science Aunty had taught him with Faedou’s superstitious account, all gilded with legend and rumor. There being no god but God, said the old man, those tall folk could hardly be his special children, now, could they? They surely were a sight to behold, though. The naps growing
blue
on their heads, if you could believe it; and hair that glimmered like the sunplay of precious stones handled in bright sunlight. And what were they called, anyway, the blue ones . . . ?

“Em’ralds?” Demane put forward.

“No, man: wrong one! I mean the other’n.
Blue.
”

Faedou swore up and down that he’d once seen such a sky-coiffed man, passing through the far crowd: taller even than the captain, and his hair like cobwebs, with the refractive lucency of . . . those blue rocks.

“Rubies?”

“
No
!”

Every day of his life until today, Demane had grieved to be born so late a grandchild of
TSIMtsoa
, so many mortal generations from his divine progenitor, that there was small hope of ever attaining the glories of the stormbird. He’d failed to give much thought, however, to problems facing cousins born of the other Towers. Suppose you
didn’t
have two faces, one mundane, one miraculous, but just a singular that combined both qualities? Then you’d have to go through life revealing all your secrets to whoever threw you a glance. That, or else be fretting every moment of every day over some tightly wrapped headscarf . . . And yet, to
eat
stellar radiance! What does a sunrise taste of? Not the same as starlight, surely. And the equatorial sun at noon? (Remember these thoughts:
ask him
.) Suppose that gross food altogether were something you could take or leave, like hot peppers, or sweets?
Oh, thank you, but no: just this sublimity of light’s enough for me.
Someday
¹
Demane would like to examine the heliophages of Captain’s scalp carefully, up close. The curly wires on his chin and chest and so forth were darkest brown, a little chestnut, a little fawn intermingled, and one or two strands the vivid shade of the setting sun halved at the horizon—

“Son, you doing all right over there?”

“Mm, what happen?” said Demane. He looked around, rallying back to the here and now.

“Seem like I lost you there, for a moment. You feel all right?”

“Yeah, Faedou. Naw, I’m listening.” Demane banged a fist on his thigh, waking up dormant aches, getting his thoughts back on path. “So what about ‘sapphire’? Zat what the blue one called?”

Nine or ten brothers drifted off the piazza to sit with them and talk the night out, the morning in. The adept spends a long time under tuition, but none of his studies readies him, afterwards, for the loud surmise of men in fellowship, each one shouting genial ignorance at his fellows. Mostly, Demane could nod and smile, laughing when the others laughed. Kazza, who was a fount for the songs and customs of diverse peoples, objected when someone’s guesses ranged too far off the mark.

“No, that’s not why! It’s the
old way
in Sea-john, where he’s from. Men and women there, they only bare their heads for a lover. For husband or wife. Don’t you just love that? I love it! So romantic. That’s why Captain never takes that scarf off.”

“El capitán got him a woman somewhere?” Wilfredo looked around to see who knew. “¿Ehtá casao?”

“Won’t you just ask’im, Willy?” Cumalo urged in his lazy drawl. “You know it ain’t nothing the captain love better than some newzy-ass sumbitch all up in his business.”

Demane laughed loudest of all. He hadn’t known that Sea-john custom!

Faedou changed his mind which wife he loved better; here, tonight, drunk: “the Old Girl.” So many in the telling were his first wife’s charms, it was hard to see how “the Little Missus” had ever got ahead in his affections, even for a little while. Other men spoke of their wives, and brothers of women they hoped to marry; and when the theme was passed to Demane, he spoke too.

“We do it another way where I come from,” he said. “The lady choose for herself. And my Atahly, her mother was—I guess you say, here—
king
. The chief? That’s why Atahly could do whatever she want, have any man. She said, let me try you, Demane, for a year or two, then maybe we marry.”

“You two have a baby, Sorcerer?”

“No.” Though there would be one by now, surely. Sucking a tiny thumb, other hand grabbed in mama’s skirts: a sturdy baby girl, maybe, toddling after her lovely mother; not Demane’s daughter, though. “Stay and marry me, Atahly said.
Then
a baby. But I left.”

“Ain’t you suppose to be the smart one here, Sorcerer?” said Faried. “I would of married a girl like that! How could you just up and leave?”

“Baby, looking at y’all ugly face everyday, I wonder sometime too.”

Kazza had a nose for sad romance. “You ever love anybody else, Sorcerer?”

“Oh, sure. For a long time before me and Atahly got together.”

“What happened? What was
her
name?”

His name was Saxa. “It’s a whole long story.” Demane sighed.

The night then began its descent, down and down, to become the ugliest yet of Demane’s life.

There came fetching up from the flooded piazza another noisy bunch of brothers, T-Jawn, Barkeem, Teef: that whole rough crew. They were on fire about what had just gone down at the Fighthouse: “Niggas was smashed up in there ’til you couldn’t
move
.” “Hot like midday up in the desert.” “Everybody screaming they
head
off!” Telling the tale, the brothers passed a triplesize Demoniac jar from hand to hand, drinking thirstily.

Barkeem: “Why y’all didn’t come? Should of
seen
that shit!” The captain, it seemed, had fought seven men, one after the next, and “knocked” (Teef speaking) “err last one of em out.” “Mais hélas” (T-Jawn) the captain was so well known at the Fighthouse, odds had been set at 50/1; nor could all Master Suresh’s guardsmen together have produced the fifty silver pennies necessary to make a wager. “Yeah, but” (another brother) the caravanmaster and four or five of those other merchants had put down “crazy money on the captain.
Them
motherfuckers made out like BANDITS.”

In gore-soaked detail they recounted the casualties of Captain’s clean sweep. A man’s pulped nose, another’s mouthful of shattered teeth. Yet some other man who, shoulder wrenched from its socket and twisted up his back, had screamed
Mama
. A man’s eye burst to jelly in its socket. A hand stomped, the fingers limp as raw calamari. Knee wrong way back. Sudden silly swooning fall.

“Captain was a MONSTER.” The five come from the Fighthouse all agreed no other word suited:
Monster
, they said several times praisefully, eyes ashine, heads nodding. They would persuade all who’d missed the show of this truth:
what
a monster!

“Hoshit, though! Y’all remember that next-to-last one?”

“Yeah,
he
could fight. Knocked Captain down
twice
!”

“None of them other niggas lasted as long as that one. Didn’t y’all think . . . was a
little
while there, I thought Captain might be gon’ lose. Bossman was looking
toredown
that second time he got up.”

Oh, sorry
,
says your lover to you.
Can’t tonight; I’ve other business!
So what’s he doing then? The man is maiming seven weaker men, that’s what: this, for the captain, being the most delightful of all ways to pass the first free night they’d had in months. Oh, and let’s not forget that—according to eyewitnesses—he killed at least one of those seven.
Killed a man.
And for what? For sport, for lucre. Not in self-defense, not to save a friend, but murder in pursuit of the shiny trash-metals that civilization prized more highly than human life.
Tell us, my son: how are you faring in those strange lands, so far from home? We your parents do so often think of you and worry. Whom have you chosen to walk with, to talk to: some good woman, some kind man?
Nothing Demane had ever felt, no past high or low, could match the intensity of his frustration then. Such emotion needed an out. Yes: other heads were about to feel this balked love as a rain of fire. For such virile alchemy was commonplace in those parts, at that time: there, with wearisome ease, the men could turn private pain into public fury.

“He
won
, though. And GotDAMN! Y’all
seen
how Captain kicked that brother, at the end? So the man
jaw
drop off his face, onto his chest? Then stomped that nigga when he down?”

“Yo, I heard em say: Captain broke dude’s back! Just
broke
it. Couple of them barber-surgeons they had up in there was saying, wasn’t
no way
brother was gon’ make it through the night.”

“Nor even so long; that soul has already flown. I did linger to watch, me, after you lot rushed out—
fiending
, that’s the word, n’est-ce pas?—to suck upon that Demon’s poisoned cock. (I say there, White Boy! Are the rest of us meant to perish of thirst, then? All the niggers who sit to your left?
MER
de! Let’s have those evil spirits passed
this
way
too!) The chirurgeons of the Fighthouse could do nothing for the man. He died. But not before taking all manner of fits.
Comme ça.
” T-Jawn feigned grand mal: limbs aflail, foaming at the mouth, head flung back, eyes bugged and rolling in their sockets.

“Ha ha! You
stupid
, Jawny. Why you so damn crazy?”

“Wait, wait. Which one was that? Big plainsman motherfucker, with the jacked-up ears? Nose coulda been broke like ten, twelve times? That brother—wossname—
Kafflay
or some shit?”

“Yeah, fool. Who your dumb-ass THINK we talking about?”

“Y’all,” said Cumalo. “Come on now, y’all. Simmer down some. You finna make him mad.”

“Who mad? But for real, Sorcerer. You shoulda been there! That was some sure ’nough
shit
you missed, my nigga!”