"Mother, why?"
"You will need Father more than I now, because the time has come for you to leave here."
Jaki almost dropped the Bible and the head. "Are you leaving, too?"
"No." She forced all her attentiveness into her face, trying to hold a smile. "I must stay."
Jaki put the Book and the head on the ground before his mother. "Why must I leave?"
"Only God knows," she answered, placing her hand against his cheek to still the tremor of panic there. "We must trust God. Always."
"I don't like God." Confusion surged in Jaki, and he reached for his mother. At that moment, a carnal smell unraveled on the wind.
"Wait here," Mala ordered, and went to the door to peer outside.
"No," Jaki insisted, and he grabbed his bamboo spear from beside his sleeping mat.
Before either of them could move, they heard heavy scuttling on the log stairway, and the door filled with a black, hulking shape. The beast lurched forward into the hut, filling the small space with a pummeling roar.
Jaki and Mala collapsed in fear before the frenzied animal. Then it departed, leaving behind a stink like wood evil with worms.
A bear, Mala thought, remembering Batuh's tales of the big beasts that lived in the mountains. She looked about for a way to block the door, and as she was sizing up her rattan chest, a human figure silently appeared in the doorway.
"Bright Air between the Palms, I have come for the boy. Bring him here."
The figure stepped away, swiftly as a swerve of water so that it seemed to the mother and child as if they might have imagined him. Jaki looked to Mala with alarm. He had never thought of the soul-catcher as dangerous, only as guardian and provider.
"Our time has come, little warrior," his mother said quietly. "We cannot fight it."
"I will kill him," Jaki vowed. "And I will kill his beast," he added with less assurance.
Mala shook her head, her face long with concern yet smiling. "Does not the Book say killing is wrong?"
"Unless one kills for God — like Jacob or David or Moses with the Midianites."
"God does not want you to kill the soul-catcher. He is your guardian — and now your teacher. You will go with him. You will do whatever he tells you to do. Understand?"
"You told me he would come for me when I was to be a man. Am I a man now?"
Mala stroked his hair. "If you are brave enough to leave me and go with him to learn all you must learn, then you are a man."
The muscles in Jaki's small face twitched with thoughts. "Mala, I do not think I am that brave yet."
"Yes, you are." She hugged him and turned him to look at Gefjon's head on the Bible. "Your father will be with you. He will watch you as he always has from the spirit world. Whenever you wonder if you are brave enough, remember him. He has gone ahead of you. He has already suffered everything you will ever endure. Take him and the Book and go now to the soul-catcher."
Limned in dawnlight, the head shone golden. Its life belonged with the spirits — but Mala was here, warm, familiar as sleep. He reached for her, and she seized his hands. Sternly, she said, "You are a man now. Take your father and the Book and go."
Her abruptness squashed the boy's will, and he shriveled to sobs. She released his hands, stood up, and turned away. If she stayed with him a moment longer, she would herself succumb to the anguish of their parting.
Mala hurried to the head of the notched log and stared down at the soul-catcher waiting in the clearing, leaning on his tall blowgun. He had not changed from how she remembered him: naked but for his knotted waistcloth, snake-sinew armbands, and headdress of sacred red and black plumes. He did not acknowledge her. Instead his gaze fixed beyond her in the doorway, where the boy emerged holding the Bible like a tray with the head perched atop it.
Jaki stopped beside his mother and looked up at her, seeking her dark eyes. She would not look at him. She kept her attention deep in the dawn where her pain softened on its way to her heart. The boy faced the soul-catcher below.
The man looked nothing like what he had imagined. He was dark, darker than Mala, almost black as though charred. His hair, too, looked singed and ashen. The boy eyed the twining serpent tattoos coiled about his legs and the puckered, glossy ridges of ritual scars on his chest and shoulders.
"Come closer, boy," the soul-catcher said in his strong voice.
Jaki stopped before him and looked back at his mother on the platform of the hut. The first ray of sunlight had lit the peak of the house like an offering flame.
While he looked away, the soul-catcher stepped closer and snatched the Bible and the head from the boy's grasp. "These are mine now," the gaunt man said. "As you are mine." His fierce, ugly face seemed soaked with shadow dark enough to eat noonlight. "Go to the kapok tree where you searched for me before your mother called you. Wait there."
The tone of command in the sorcerer's voice propelled Jaki, and he scurried across the clearing to the giant tree. From there he watched the soul-catcher climb the steps to the hut. Malawangkuchingang did not step back when Jabalwan approached her. Instead she bowed her head and waited until he called her name.
"Bright Air between the Palms," he said in a voice that surprised her with its gentleness. "You have done well. The boy is healthy and alert. He will be a soul-catcher."
Mala raised her head and met the benevolent smile of the sorcerer. In one hand he held the Bible and Gefjon's head; in the other, he offered a deer-antler vial. "Drink this," he said, tenderly as a father, "and you will know peace."
Mala accepted the vial. "Will I see my son again?"
Jabalwan shook his head so narrowly it barely moved. "You return now to your people. You are going to where we all go. You are blessed for being the mother of a soul-catcher, and you will know no pain. Someday we will all gather again where there is no pain — but not all of us shall arrive without suffering."
"Then I am to die," Mala said with resignation. "For all the love I have given, you are killing me."
"The heart does not die when we think it does," Jabalwan replied, and nodded to the vial in her hand.
The sorcerer waited, and Mala took the vial and smelled the smoke of absolute loneliness, a sweet pungency like crushed petals. Curiously, she felt no fear. She recognized the intractable will in the sorcerer's stare, and the figure of her small son standing beneath the massive trees revealed all that was left of her life. "You will return the Book and his father's head to the boy?" she asked.
"When he has attained, they will be returned."
Malawangkuchingang nodded her acceptance and looked once more to her son. She raised the antler vial to him and quaffed the icy liqueur. The blossom-heady taste of it filled her sinuses and chilled a track to her stomach like a long road of moonlight. The vial fell from her hand as her strength flew from her muscles, and she dropped backward, falling to the verandah.
Jaki saw her collapse, and he dashed across the clearing for her.
Jabalwan met him at the bottom of the nicked log and caught him by his arm. A swipe of sunlight illuminated Mala where she sprawled with her back to the woven wall of the hut, and she raised her hand and waved to him. He let the soul-catcher take his hand.
Mala smiled at her son as the mansnake led him across the glade, backward like a child caught in an undertow. Her son would be a soul-catcher. She had done well by him during their time alone in the glade. On the blue sward before the attap hut her baby had learned to walk, romp, chase butterflies. She had taught him to read the Book as Father Isidro had taught her.
The thought of the black-robed priest shifted the patterns of her hallucination, and she stared lucidly at the priest's rumpled face with its wizened beard and benign eyes. He smiled broadly, pleased that her son had been given over to the life of a soul-catcher. Jesu had come into the world to teach men to be catchers of souls. Her son knew this, because she had taught him. Father Isidro's smile brightened with kindly regard, and she blazed like a sunshaft.
The
poison moved swiftly. Her hallucination vanished, and she felt her life rushing into the gaze of the sun. The wing beats of her heart slowed, and with each pulse, the glare of sunlight concentrated to shadows. She returned to the quarterdeck of Zeerover in the silver dawn eight years ago when she had knelt before the severed head of the captain. That scene wrinkled into Batuh's face, the one man she had loved. He gazed at her with the same grief that he had displayed the morning she had left Long Apari with the sorcerer and his troop of apes.
Batuh's face whisked away. Had his dreams of uniting the tribes come true? She would never know. Where Batuh's face had loomed, bars of twilit clouds dissolved to sunsmoke. Morning mist swirled above the treetops, and she rose with it, silent as the sun.
*
At the edge of the glade, Jaki stopped to look back at his home and his mother. Jabalwan noticed Jaki's leg muscles coiling before the boy knew he wanted to run back. The soul-catcher spat like a viper, and Jaki sprinted to the hut.
Jabalwan waited for the boy to realize that his mother was dead. When the shriek came, the soul-catcher faced downwind to where the bear waited. With a whistle he commanded the beast to attack the hut and kill anyone in it.
Jaki pressed his face into Mala's neck, and as he sobbed he glimpsed a large movement from the corner of his eye. The bear had burst into the clearing, shimmering with raven-blue fur as it charged the hut, its black muzzle a snarling froth.
Jaki clung to his dead mother. Though death flew directly at him he could not let go. The sorcerer had forced other demon-children to this terrible decision. All had died.
Jaki's blood crawled in him. He nudged his mother, and she stared on, unblinking, at the sun in the trees. The sight of the bear's fanged muzzle slashed him with fear, and he tried to tug Mala to her feet. She lay dead — dead as the ape the krait had killed, dead as any of the God-murdered children and women of the Book. The bear's claws dug into the log stairway, and in one bound it rose like a wall of night. Before he knew what he was doing, Jaki leaped over the railing. He bounced off the soft turf and turned to see the bear pawing his mother, swiping her limp body flat. He could not watch. He dashed across the glade away from the soul-catcher and into the trees, running with his full might.
Jabalwan let him go. He whistled the bear away from the hut and slowly crossed the clearing, his face the stern mask life demanded, and his insides bright. After decapitating Mala and starting a fire under the hut, he returned to the forest.
From his refuge in the jungle, Jaki watched a ladder of smoke climb from the blazing hut to heaven, sparks like beings of light, rising, going back to the sun. He did not know it yet, but he was as close now to the meaning of power as anyone gets in this life.
*
The Rain Wanderers lived deep in the mountainous interior. Ill regarded by other forest tribes, they kept entirely to themselves and traded with no one. What little metal they had, they had stolen or won in battle. Masters of poison, they roamed the high stony creeks, lacing the water with pulped tuba vine, which killed the fish they collected for their meals. Occasionally the poison drifted into the tributaries where other tribes bathed, sickening and sometimes killing. The lowland tribes blamed all their unexplained illnesses on the Rain Wanderers, and Rain Wanderer heads ranked as the most coveted of prizes, more so because of the tribe's elusiveness. To seek them out meant to dare the journey into the mountains of the big bears. Few returned — not only because of the churlish bears but also because the Rain Wanderers, eager themselves for heads to assure the fertility of their numerous clans, lived as consummate warriors.
Jabalwan, himself a Rain Wanderer, knew this land’s secrets. His father had been a master poison chemist and reader of bird omens, and he had recognized in his son the trance-strength of a soul-catcher. At Jaki's age, after he had learned all that his father could teach him, he had been given to a sorcerer, a clench-faced man who stabbed the boy with poison thorns whenever the child made a mistake. The brutal poisons had tormented him, wracking his brain and opening his head to the wind. By the time he attained manhood, Jabalwan possessed the spirit of a twisted cypress, grown strong on pain, tied by his roots' mad vibrations to the earth, and shaped by the invisible.
Jabalwan instructed the Rain Wanderers to send a party of hunters into the forest. Within minutes they found the golden-haired demon-child hiding under a pepper shrub and carried him back to their village trussed like a tapir. His head would have been an important contribution to the land's wealth, except the soul-catcher had forbidden that. They threw the boy in a pigsty, a low logwood structure with tight vine-mesh to protect the pigs from panthers.
Jaki curled into a corner, fended off the pigs with kicks until they left him alone, and sank back into his grief. The villagers had gathered to study him, and for several hours faces came and went, gazing with disbelief. The strange faces only thickened his sorrow. That night, sleeping fitfully in the pig dung, beasts rooting aggressively about him, he dreamt of his mother. Her dark hair lavish as night, she whispered, "Be brave, little warrior."
The next day, the Rain Wanderers removed Jaki from the pigsty. They took away his blue silk waist-cloth and bathed him in a stream of chilly mountain water. Jabalwan had informed the tribe that Matubrembrem was to live as a slave among them, and after they had replaced his waistcloth with a crude loincloth of rough gray fabric they took him out to the paddy field and taught the menial work of weeding and spacing rice plants in the mud. Twice that first day, he tried to flee. The first time the other field workers captured him, he received a blow to the back of his head that set his vision fluttering like a branch of yellow leaves. The second time, they beat him, then leashed and tied him to a rock. At nightfall they fed him rice gruel and locked him in a squat pen with a captured gibbon. The animal, destined for the village stewpot, had not been killed yet because it was pregnant. That night it birthed two young. One it ate immediately. Jaki swooped up the second and kept the mad mother at bay with angry shouts and kicks. In the morning he shared his rice milk with the infant. The animal, pink and small as his hand, he named Wawa after his mother's dialect for gibbon. That day in the field, the tiny creature clung to the back of his neck under his long blond hair while he crawled through the mud doing his work. The villagers were amused, and when he returned to the pen that night he found a small bowl of rice milk beside his gruel. The mother had gone to her fate.
*
The Rain Wanderers quickly became accustomed to their new slave and soon took no special notice of him. Only the children, intrigued by the devil child, tried to outdo each other in their brave attempts to harass him. The worst of them, Ferang, had stoned him at the stream on Jaki’s last day with his mother. A son of the village's fiercest warrior, the sinewy youth, older than Jaki, had black bristled hair and eyes like drops of mischief. While the other boys pelted Jaki with pebbles and insults, Ferang dared to touch him, tripping him into the mud while he worked, holding his head underwater when he bent to drink at the river, smearing his leash-rock with pig dung so flies gathered and pestered him. Jaki had no sense of how to defend himself, and the warrior's son laughed at his futile efforts to strike back. Bruised and wearied by day's end, Jaki lay on his back in the pen with the baby gibbon under his arm, staring into the sky and praying as his mother had taught him. The cadence of his prayers lulled him to sleep and invariably to dreams of the attap hut in the bee-knitted glade, and the air full of the flowery wind from the mountains.
Of the faces that came to stare at him, one smiled without malice or mockery: a young girl, with hair unstrung by the wind and eyes just rubbed free of sleep. When no one else looked, she brought him pieces of cooked meat wrapped in rice. She never spoke to him, and he saw her rarely, yet his days grew lighter for her memory. Among the women he worked with in the paddy fields, a few acted friendly toward him because his hard work made theirs easier, and he casually asked about the girl. "Riri, the chief's daughter." Of course, the void in his heart rang — who else would have the s
elf-possession to feel pity?
At harvest time, while their parents celebrated, the children hung Jaki in a wicker between the branches of a giant koompassia tree and pelted him with monkey pips and mudballs. Wawa whined and protested under the tree to the enormous amusement of everyone except Riri, who watched quietly from her father's shadow. At the ritual's end, Ferang lowered the wicker and a troop of howling boys dragged it to the river. They threw it in and let the current pull the line taut, until the basket snagged among the fisted rocks of the fish traps. When Jaki emerged spluttering and confused, they carried him back to his pen and threw his terrified pet in with him.
That night, Riri came to his cage. "Little demon, you have suffered enough," she said and cut the vine binding the cage. Jaki stood up for the first time at night since his capture, and the incandescence of the sky seemed to swim in his head. Riri did not back away when he reached to touch her. Her cheek felt slippery with tears. "Go quickly, demon-child, before the others see what I have done."
"My name is Jaki," he said. "I will not forget you, Riri."
She looked surprised to hear her name, and he smiled. "Go now, Jaki," she insisted
He scooped up Wawa and jumped from the pen in one bound. At the edge of the village clearing he stopped and looked back. She watched him. A dog yapped an alarm, and she vanished into the dark. He turned and ran. When weariness rose in him, he held to his nostrils the fingers that had touched her tears. The gentle scent of her spurred him on, and he ran hard under the small stars.
*
At night's ebb, Jaki found himself thoroughly lost. He stopped by a stream and listened to its flat voice, trying to calm himself. He would not be afraid. Wawa sensed his uncertainty from his perch behind Jaki's head and stroked his cheek. "Where to go, Wawa?"
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