"I cannot give myself to him."
Batuh put his hand under her chin and gazed with yearning at the bold bones of her face. "You have taught me that we can do anything."
"Not this, Batuh. Do not give me to that ugly man."
"I am not giving you to him. You are mine. Always. But I can think of no other way to keep them here. I can think of no other way to be sure I will have the power I need to hold the land — for us, for our children."
The thought of children by Batuh lightened her fear, yet her heart still prickled with cold. "No man but you has ever wanted me."
Batuh reached into the pocket of his doublet and withdrew a necklace of dragonfly wings, iridescent and more delicate than any Tree Haunter jewelry. "From the Rain Wanderers," he told her. "You will have the most beautiful clothes and finery in the tribe. Never again will you have to work the fields." He pulled aside her long brown hair and tied the necklace about her throat. "Tomorrow, we will return to Long Apari together. You will be my wife."
"You will not hate me for this thing you ask of me?"
"I will hate you if you deny me this thing," he said coldly, and then tightened his embrace. "It is important. You will win prestige among the people for this. You alone will have been favored by a god. No one will ever call you ugly again. And you will be the first wife of the chief. Your story will enter the circle songs to be sung long after we have found our way to the afterworld. Will you obey me?"
Malawangkuchingang looked down at the slender body God had made for her from the earth's mud. Even her own people in the north despised her for being a half-breed. Batuh had spared her a humiliating life by taking her away. God had made her from the mud, made her ugly, and yet given her to Batuh, a man of greatness. God had returned Batuh with the monkeyfaces. God radiated the glory and the power. She was but mud. She was not clever like the boar. She was not strong like the water buffalo. She was not brave like the hawk of Batuh's totem. She had no totem — and she would die as the beasts die. That insight comforted her with the knowledge of how she must live, and she looked up at Batuh with the eyes of a free woman. "I will obey."
*
The moon hovered low in the east, and stars like bead glass gleamed in the embroidered seams of the night. The dark itself glistened shiny as black feathers. Soon dawn would unfold its wings and night would fly.
Jaki sat on a branch in the canopy of the jungle. In the dim light, he turned his face toward the attap hut in the clearing below, where his mother slept. Wisps of burnt waxfern rose to meet him. The frosty smell kept insects away, and Mala burned coils of it throughout the night. The fragrance, associated with night and his mother, comforted Jaki. But tonight, another scent hovered on the jungle's breath. Mala had not noticed it yet — the mountain whisper, the rain echo, the fog smell of the soul-catcher.
The scent meant there would be delicacies. Meat, rare nuts, and berries wrapped in offering leaves were right now being placed among the low tree elbows to be found in the morning. Mala said the soul-catcher brought these foods for them because he loved them. He was their guardian, sent by God to protect them from the jungle. Jaki did not believe that God had sent Jabalwan. God sent fruit and nuts to trees and meat to the bones of animals. The sorcerer was a man, though Jaki had never seen him. He had caught only glimpses, hurried motion-blurs gliding through the shrub at night, soft breathing in the trees' high places, and once a beetle-wing glint of eyes watching him through the wall of Mala's garden.
Tonight the boy had been roused by his bruises, and instead of waking Mala to comfort him, he had lain in the dark thinking about what had happened to him and why. Despite the Rain Wanderers, he had felt a primal pride in his small life. Mala loved him, and the animals who knew him frolicked and lulled with him every day. He had no need for the Rain Wanderers, who called him a demon, and he determined never to seek them again.
The rockmist scent of the sorcerer had risen while Jaki came to that resolve, and the boy crept out of the hut into the forest's milky darkness, hoping to find this fabulous being whom he could barely imagine. Would the soul-catcher, with all his magical power, have fed him and Mala all these years if he had thought Jaki a demon?
He shimmied into a tree whose branches sprawled far enough for him to follow the scent across the grain of the wind. He scurried silently, pursuing the cloudburst odor into the night. This was the closest he had ever been to the soul-catcher, and his heart pounded with excitement. A burst of wind whooshed past his face as he surprised a bird. The lamp of its cry flew ahead of him, and the rain-weary smell vanished.
He swayed with laughter. The soul-catcher was shyer than a mouse deer. A breeze veered off the forest floor, and a blur of the spoor mingled with leaf rot and pea flowers carried from the opposite direction. Jaki turned to pursue, and a brilliant whistle, like a bird's laugh, glittered across the glade. That was Mala. She had caught the soul-catcher's scent, too. Always she called the boy close when the soul-catcher approached.
Jaki paused, and the sorcerer's storm scent disappeared. Briefly, he was tempted to ignore his mother and fly after the sorcerer, just to glimpse this mysterious man who had given them so much. Then he remembered how childlike Mala had looked asleep in the moonlight, and he could not bear to disobey her again. Assailed by a wave of love for her, he skittered out of the tree and dashed for the stilt-raised hut.
*
"She wants you," Batuh told van Noot in Dutch. They stood at the edge of the forest in sight of the trading beach. Batuh had stepped directly up to him and spoken, gesturing to the shy native girl who held back in the shadow of the jungle.
"What are you talking about?" van Noot asked sharply.
"Bright Air between the Palms wants you," Batuh said, thinking dire thoughts of the Lanun to keep himself from bursting into laughter at the joy and disbelief in the Dutchman's face. "She's too shy to speak for herself. Afraid you will not want her. She asked me to ask you. Will you have her?"
"I — the — she's a gift to the captain," he finally blurted out.
"Tuan has given her freedom," Batuh replied. "You did not know?"
"No. I — I hadn't realized. She's free now?"
"Not in her heart. Not till you have her."
"I must hear this from her," van Noot insisted, and walked to the girl, who bowed before him demure as a fawn. "Mala — is what Batuh says true?" he asked in Spanish.
Malawangkuchingang faced him placidly. "You must not tell the captain," she replied. "He is a Christian and will not understand my pagan desire." Breathing deeply to withhold her loathing, she put her hand on van Noot's sweat-gummed blouse. "Give me a secret night with you here in the forest and I can return satisfied to Long Apari."
Van Noot removed his big hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. "I had no idea."
"You do not want me?" Hope surged in her, and she withdrew her hand.
"Of course I want you," he sputtered, and seized her hand. "But I had thought from the night you refused to come away from the captain— well, frankly, that you considered me repulsive."
"I was the captain's wife then, Jan." The sound of his familiar name nipped her tongue like vinegar. "I had no choice. Now I am free again. I have spoken to Batuh, my chief, about my desire. He approves." Close up, Jan's skin glowed like a freckled pear, and she turned her face.
"My lady, you do not seem very eager for this union." The company man glanced nervously about and saw no one else in the chapel darkness of the forest.
"Such unions are arranged differently in my tribe." Malawangkuchingang spoke to the green galleries. A garland of sunlight fluttered, and for a moment she perceived a wet gleam among the tendrils of sunny pea vines, the heat of animal eyes. In the glare of a sunshaft, the sorcerer's ape-slanted brow flashed. Malawangkuchingang continued speaking as though she had seen nothing. "It is our custom when a woman desires a certain man for her to put some manioc in his hand. If he desires her as well, he will then come to her mat. If not, he will pretend to sleep." A sea bre
eze flurried the vines, and the sunshadow she thought was the soul-catcher lifted away with the wind. "A direct meeting like this is uncomfortable for me. Is it not for you?"
"Yes, but I am delighted to hear your true feelings. Won't you look at me?" She looked at him with an intensity he took for passion, and in the amber of her eyes he met his own face reflected. "I have wanted you from the first — when I saw you as the Lord made you."
"Do not speak of the Lord."
Jan frowned around a smile. "Certainly what we're feeling has the blessing of the Lord who blessed lepers, harlots, and his own betrayer?"
Malawangkuchingang searched van Noot's face for his meaning and was relieved to see his blue eyes shining with desire. "Then you will meet me here tonight?" she asked.
"If I can."
"You must." She lay her head against the ruff of his chest, tasted the milky aroma of his sweat, and heard the sprint of his heart. From behind the company man, Batuh appeared, smiling with satisfaction. Malawangkuchingang let the Dutchman go and turned away quickly to hide her shame.
*
"After the longboats are aboard, we weigh anchor," Captain Gefjon declared in his cabin to the company man and the pilot. "We'll put into the strait and spend the night under sail. Van Noot, you'll set aside the company portion of our goods as described in our charter. I'll want the final manifest for the log by sunfall. Pilot..."
"Captain," van Noot interrupted, tongue whisking over his lips anxiously. "We can't leave now. I assured Batuh we would continue trade tomorrow."
"Good." The captain stared at the company man, seeing the eagerness in his posture, flickering tongue, and the whites around his eyes. "It's better for him to believe we are returning. That will forestall any desperate maneuver on his part. Batuh is ambitious."
"Batuh is desperate only for our goods, captain," van Noot pressed. "We have yet to barter our brandy. The natives have heard of our spirit water from Batuh. He's made it so famous they'll gladly trade gold for it."
"The crew needs the brandy more than the potatofaces," the first pilot protested.
Van Noot narrowed an irritated look at the pilot and continued speaking to the captain: "Batuh has assured us that baskets full of diamonds are on their way. Certainly that's worth our brandy."
"Batuh promised us gold today," the pilot retorted.
Van Noot pointed to the pouch tied to the captain's belt at his hip. "You have diamonds there, haven't you? Batuh has kept his word about them."
Gefjon removed the pouch from his belt and placed the two cloudy lumps of rock on his desk. Pale light squirmed through them in smeared rainbows. "Batuh gave me these when I returned the girl to him. He was buying her back, he told me."
"Bait, says I," the pilot grumbled. "He wants us here till he can gather enough of the tribes to take back their gifts and our heads with them."
"Who knows what he's withholding," the captain added.
"Whatever he's withholding now, he'll give up for the brandy," van Noot said. "Let me bring them a few kegs tonight, as a gift. Once they've tasted it, they'll sell their gold idols. We'll leave the natives happy and return home rich."
"We're already rich," the pilot boasted. "We have over six hundred taels of silver in the hold. We have the gold plates and the ivory from the old chief. And we have crates of camphor, gutta-percha, rhino horn, enough total value to outfit a grand expedition. We can come back another season. Let's take what we got."
"I agree with the mate," the captain said. "We leave as soon as the longboats are secure, while the tide is in."
"No." Van Noot swallowed and spoke stiffly. "The ship, the crew, and the cargo are company-owned, and I am the company agent. I will say when the trading is over. Your responsibility is to navigate and defend the ship. We stay until the trading is done. I insist on it." Van Noot had half risen from his seat, and he sank back with the weight of his conviction.
The captain stared at the diamonds. The rocks held sunlight in their oily interiors the way his sloppy life held him. Like them, he remained incomplete, burdened by too much of himself, waiting to be perfected, gem-cut around his flaws. His greatest flaw, in his own estimation, thrived on his appetite for fortune. He had forgone a wife and family to make his fortune, and here it was, in these rocks exchanged for a sad mereling, a girl who knew the Book and yet still wanted her heathen lover. He chuckled humorlessly, and the pilot and the company man exchanged a baffled glance, which he caught. Let them wonder. The Bible was but a dream of men beside the actuality of these rocks. God's tears. For the world is given to Satan, and here is the world's eternity. He existed as a dewdrop, his will the glint of the sun, shrinking across his moment of life. He wanted his share of eternity now, before he gave the lion's share of time back to God.
He faced the officers with a smile so weary it was hidden in his beard. "We leave tomorrow before noon, with the tide. Van Noot, when the manifest is done, bring Batuh one keg of brandy."
*
The evening rains had finished and apricot-tinted clouds reflected in the sea when Jan van Noot rowed a skiff with a keg of brandy to shore. As he approached the fire-dotted beach, his heart tripped loudly, more from fear than the exertion of rowing. The first to go ashore alone, he dreaded the possibility that this might be a deception, a ploy to take his head. Yet he did not stop.
A torch boat carrying Batuh in full feather and beastskin regalia met him near shore and escorted him with song and laughter to the first sandbar. There, natives surrounded him. They attached torches to the stern and bow and splashed the skiff through the shallows to the beach. These aboriginals looked bigger in the dusk, their greased bodies shimmering with energy, and he wished then that he had accepted the pilot's offer of a kris. Though little good any knife would do him among these hundreds of savages, he realized. Eager hands lifted the keg of brandy out of the skiff, and it disappeared at once in the mob of carousing, painted bodies.
Batuh said nothing to van Noot. He pointed up the muddy, weed-strewn beach toward the black tiers of the jungle, above which the first stars appeared. Van Noot inhaled to voice a question, and Batuh turned away and let his jubilant tribesmen carry him off, his white feather headdress swaying vigorously to the drum dance.
Van Noot headed up the beach, waving away mosquitoes and squinting into the falling light to keep from tripping over driftwood and seasnake holes. At the edge of the beach, he stopped. Dread hummed in him. The dark of the jungle rhymed with the black of the earth's interior. Fireflies twinkled, drastic odors tainted the breeze that seeped from the dark, and demon cries tolled. Van Noot looked to the bay, and the sight of Zeerover strung with lights and perched on its slippery reflection urged him to rush back down the beach to the skiff. Before he could move, a voice called to him from the darkness: "Tuan."
He faced about, and Malawangkuchingang stood before him. She took his arm and guided him into the jungle.
"Mala," he said in a hush, "all afternoon I've been in a dream, waiting for tonight."
"Say nothing more, Tuan," she begged him. She could not bear to speak with this devil. If he would only keep silent, her desire to please Batuh would go easier. "Nothing we can say now will match what we feel. Please. Be silent."
Van Noot squeezed her hand more tightly and kept his seething sentiments silent. But his fear would not be contained. "Where are you taking me?"
The sound of his anxiety amused her, and she said around a giggle, "You will be pleased. Do not be afraid."
They walked a winding path through sheer blackness under cackling monkeys and the startled cries of birds. In the wake of Mala's sweet fragrance, the mosquitoes veered away, and soon van Noot relaxed and adopted the native girl's low-slung gait. He felt as though he flew with her through the night's plunging expanse. Whirs, clicks, and whistles of insects spun about them. High overhead, stars came and went like the tide of the wind, like exhalations of radiant smoke in the black of the forest.
A luminous clearing opened before them. The trees glow
ed, strung with lanterns — paper-thin, perforated gourds shining with trapped fireflies. At the center of the clearing a hut raised on log stilts and covered with broad attap leaves housed the night. Mala led him up the lashed-bough steps into a dark interior thick with the scent of blossoms. She sat him down on a floor matted with fleecy ferns and tugged off his boots.
Mala's hair fell over van Noot as she undressed him, and his hands pulled at her sarong until her flesh cooled his. Fearfully, she closed her eyes. His heat touched her with the joy of God's jealousy, which had denied her the man she loved. She wanted to offer this monkeyface no more than a tuber would. She had no choice but to act passionately or he would become suspicious and she would lose Batuh as well as her pride. The music of his touch surprised her. His lips sought hers, nip and tuck, and she trembled, her hands flying in the air, weightless.
Thicketed in the tangle of her hair, his fingers crawling a design between her legs, his face locked to hers, he slow-tugged her toward pleasure. Though she resisted and thought only to pretend, she could not repel the desire his clever touch stirred in her, and soon all pretense collapsed.
She surrendered to his smell of dead fire, his stink of under-rocks, and the widening joy of her body, and her hands fell like sparks to his back. A mindless ecstasy stirred in her limbs, blind and insistent. Not love. Not love but love. She felt her bones unlocking, her heart two-timing, her muscles etched with a deep good feeling. She trembled violently, a cry stung through her, and a stunning blow of passion kicked her legs straight out.
Jan laid her back on the ferns' wool and entered her. He moved in a tantrum rising and falling in the black, riding her the way the moon rides the wind, his sweat bright. She whimpered beneath him. He rode his splinter of eternity hard, lit with her wetness, in full strut until his hunger burst free in a heave of bliss that sprawled him over her.
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