Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  That night the sorcerer and the devil child traveled through the dark, slowly, meticulously, until the swipe of branches and vines had shaken free all the firebark from their hair. Only then did they crawl into a root cove and curl up. "Remember this night, little devil," Jabalwan whispered. "You have seen real demons. You have seen men who have lost their tribe — men who have lost their souls. Remember."

  *

  "I have no tribe," Jaki said to his teacher the day after their escape. "Where is my soul?"

  They had followed a ridgeback up from the lowland forest toward mazy hills to the north. Though a hill trek would slow their progress, the tortuous highland trails, slashed by torrential streams and mudslides, would make pursuit impossible. Sitting on a rain-pitted limestone rock overlooking the jungle plain where they had been, they shared mushrooms and tender radish shoots. "Your tribe is the Rain Wanderers," Jabalwan answered.

  "I am not a Rain Wanderer," Jaki protested. "I lived alone with my mother. I grew up in the valley."

  "Until you were taken as a slave by the Rain Wanderers. They hold your soul now. You belong to them."

  "I escaped from them."

  "You were set free, by Princess Riri. And for that offense, she was made to sit with the pigs a day and a night."

  At the sound of the princess' name, Jaki remembered her drowsy angel eyes, rainwashed hair, and dawn-touched flesh.

  "You would be her slave, wouldn't you?" Jabalwan read Jaki's expression. "Oh, child, you have much to learn."

  "I am a child," Jaki snapped, "but I am no slave."

  Laughter fell away from the soul-catcher's face. "You are a slave until you free yourself and become a sorcerer."

  "Teacher, I have followed you everywhere. I have learned the birds' omens, and I have seen the floating truth of the clouds. I am learning."

  "You can learn all your life and you will still not be a sorcerer. Learning is the way of all people. The sorcerer does more than learn. The sorcerer seeks sincerity. Only through sincerity does one acquire power."

  "How do I find sincerity?"

  "Have you forgotten already?"

  The food Jaki was chewing felt suddenly rubbery. "The Spider."

  Jabalwan's slanted eyes flared with heat. "Will you give your hand to the Spider?"

  In the many moons since he had last faced the Spider, Jaki had changed. The journey with the soul-catcher had changed him. All that his mother had taught him through the Book had come to pass with this strong man. He hath torn that he may heal us, Hosea had promised. What the boy had seen of death and suffering on this tour of the tribes had revealed the gentleness of his mother's death. That she had to die at all still confused him, yet he had no doubt now that the soul-catcher had eased her passage to the afterworld. And the Psalms had said, The Lord is our guide even unto death. The more Jaki knew of the sorcerer, the more he respected the man, enough at last to forgive what he could not yet understand. Had not Isaiah and Micah written, He will teach us of his ways? "Teacher, I have no real understanding of the birds or the clouds. I know only what you have told me. I am just a child, as you say. But I will not be a slave. I love the freedom you have shown me." Jaki forced himself to go on: "I will give my hand to the Spider."

  Jabalwan smiled without mirth. Between them lay all the terror of the world. Could he bring Jaki deeper into that terror, to the collective memory of suffering that made pain magical? Jabalwan wondered if he had that power with this child. Sometimes he could not even bear to meet the boy's gaze: Those blue eyes seemed a declension of the sky, the blue breath of heaven peering through the mask of a human head. Jabalwan had to continually remind himself that this was still just a boy, though his eyes were frightening and his words often unnerving. The mansnake secretly delighted when Matu misstepped in the hunt or wept at night remembering his mother. The demon-child was human; he needed care. Like all beings of this temporary earth who strove to be more, he needed care.

  *

  The journey north to seek the Spider proceeded less playfully than the southern trek. Emang carried them quickly across the flat plains, eager to return to the jungle before the big rains came. When they arrived, Jabalwan let the beast go, and he and the devil child continued their journey on foot. Sometimes the downpour blinded them with silver wind, and they crouched under whatever shelter they could find. Hunched beneath a stunted tree or a tabard of clustered shrubs, they told each other stories. At last Jaki began to speak of the religion he had learned as a child, and when he told the story of the Flood, the sorcerer sat fascinated. In turn, the soul-catcher explained how the rains that came each year delivered the old songs of the tribes from the year before, echoing back from heaven and shaking loose the sweet water of the celestial sea.

  During a lull in the torrent, when they had climbed from the grassland to a dry haven in a cranny beneath a waterfall, Jabalwan reached into his medicine bag and came out with the Book. He handed it to Jaki. "Teach me what your mother taught you," the sorcerer said.

  Jaki took the Book and almost dropped it. It had the heft of an animal and a fragrance like leafsmoke — a feel and scent that swayed through him with memories, a dizzy nostalgia that turned the breath in his lungs to a withheld cry. Tears shot to his eyes before he knew he might weep, and Jabalwan restrained a shudder of misgiving. Jaki regained his composure quickly, reminding himself that he had promised his life to the Spider and would probably soon be joining his mother.

  Opening the Book to its first page, he began to read aloud, touching each word as he translated it to the native tongue he shared with the soul-catcher. Jabalwan watched closely, astounded to realize that each word had a shape, and that each shape had been crafted from elements, the immutable powers of the alphabet. Each letter, he grasped immediately, had meaning within its sound. "Each word is a shrunken spell," he said with awe, and his fingers touched the page reverently. "How skinny speech is."

  Jaki marveled at the sorcerer's fluency, by how quickly he learned the alphabet and by the intensity with which he listened to the boy's favorite stories. The mansnake became intrigued by Elijah, sensing in him a fellow soul-catcher who had been fed by ravens, had heard the still, small voice of the hidden world while wandering in the wilderness, and had finally been hoisted free of earth in a whirlwind.

  Hoping to inspire the youth with the written language of his own tradition, Jabalwan taught Jaki how to read the jungle scrim that other sorcerers left as messages. What before had seemed merely a black creek became a page where casually bent weedstalks recorded a passerby's name and the scattered weave of a fallen nest a sentence describing the route to the nearest fish pool. This language was harder to learn, because it faded so quickly. "The vanishing is part of the script," Jabalwan explained. "How long ago it was written often tells more than the message. The Book's words are timeless. Ours never leave genesis."

  *

  The monsoons had transformed the already plush landscape to a magically dangerous terrain. A hum became a roar, and cascades of mudbroth and shattered trees stampeded down the slopes of the jungle, driving the wanderers up into the forest galleries. Wawa, keenest at detecting these abrupt floods, became their leader as they wended north among rainbow arcs and floats of tiny red-winged butterflies. Biting insects swarmed in brown, gray, and black auroras, and Jabalwan and Jaki painted their bodies with root paste and leaf dyes that made them impervious to the insects and appealing to the animal spirits. Hunting got easier as Jaki became expert with the blowgun, and they had more time to sit among the spreading tree limbs, high up where the light blazed, and read the Book. The air grew abundant, strange with birdsongs and monkey-chatter, mists and sunstruck squalls. Plants opened, outlandish flowers ignited, and the boy's apprehensions about the Spider eased. The hours spent teaching his teacher to read the Book quieted his dread even more. For the first time, he felt calm trust in the unknown.

  At dawn one morning, they heard Papan call. The big bear had been wounded, its right haunch matted in dried blood s
tuck with flies. When they had cleansed the injury with gourd juice, they realized it had been inflicted with firearms. Jabalwan concocted a sleeping potion, and while the bear slept, they dug the metal pellets from its flesh and swabbed the injury with leafsap to inhibit infection. Jabalwan held up one of the pellets and stared into its silver roundness, then dropped it into his medicine bag.

  "The Star-and-Moon tribes are close," the sorcerer said. "They are reaching deeper into the forest."

  For five days, they waited for Papan's wound to heal, always listening for enemies. When he could walk without pain, they continued their journey. Soon they came to a riverbend jammed with deathrafts. The stink of the corpses was lost almost wholly in jungle steam, and the bodies had decomposed nearly to bone, the flesh given up days before. Blue and yellow birds scattered as the soul-catcher began his chant for the dead, shoving the deathrafts free. When they had all drifted downstream out of sight, he waded back to shore. "Those are Rain Wanderer dead," he told Jaki. "They were killed with fire-spears."

  "I cannot believe the Star-and-Moon tribes have come this deeply into the forest — especially now that the rains are here," Jaki said in a voice muted with respect. "I have listened for drum songs warning of the enemy, and I have heard nothing."

  "That means something terrible," Jabalwan agreed. "The Rain Wanderers are not using their drums, because their enemy understands their songs." The sorcerer's face went grim with realization. "They have been attacked by another forest tribe."

  Jaki hunched over, stunned. Except in the south, where the tribes had been crazed by plague, war with the Star-and-Moon intruders, and the domination of the monkeyfaces, all the forest people obeyed benign law. Headhunting flourished among them, but a war seemed unthinkable. The fierceness of the Rain Wanderers had always dissuaded other tribes from attempting more than rare forays for heads. Jaki preferred to believe that somehow a Star-and-Moon war party had endured the rain-veiled trails, because the idea of all tribes stalking each other with fire-spears touched him with nightmare.

  That nightmare claimed him and the sorcerer when they finally found the Rain Wanderers in a mountain valley far from their customary fish pools. Their longhouse had been constructed haphazardly and the rice fields left bare, since anyone old enough to carry a weapon had been dispatched to guard the trails against the approach of the enemy. "Who?" Jabalwan asked the chief.

  "The Tree Haunters." The chief and his men wore war regalia — white body mud, clawstrokes under their eyes, black feathers splashing at their ankles. "They surprised us at our salt spring. We fended them off as best we could, but they had new weapons, sorcerer. Weapons no one has ever seen. Short blowguns that shoot lightning clouds and stab our warriors with metal rain. Look." He opened an amulet sack dangling from his neck and poured out a handful of gunshot.

  "Call all your warriors in," the soul-catcher ordered. "Begin the rice planting, continue the hunt."

  "But, sorcerer, the Tree Haunters destroyed our old fields." The chief’s eyes glowed with angry tears. "That is why we are here. We have lost our fish pools. We have yet to find a new brine spring. Unless we accept the rule of the Tree Haunter chief and trade with him, he will hunt us and destroy whatever we build."

  Jabalwan pointed to the rice fields. "Plant the rice. Continue the hunt. I will show you another brine spring not far from here. We will build new fish pools."

  "But, sorcerer, the Tree Haunters — "

  The soul-catcher silenced the chief with a frown. "I will visit them. I will face their great warrior Batuh and make him understand that the Rain Wanderers are not to be molested."

  The chief embraced Jabalwan with relief, and the two walked together to the longhouse to plan the new settlement. Jaki followed, quivering with excitement to be back among the first people he had known. Familiar faces hovered in the crowd — faces that he had last seen scrawled with mockery, derisive and harsh. Now those faces had gone dull, numb with grief and uncertainty. He observed the rude clearing that was their new home, noting overgrown tangles of flower vines among the vegetable patches, a few scrawny pigs tied to a stake, the fire pit clogged with half-charred logs and palm-leaf litter from flames quickly doused. The signs of a people living in fear.

  Among the women and children who had gathered on the verandah a pretty face appeared that tripped his heart and sent his blood surging. Riri had become a young woman. She studied him with gentle eyes, the wind blowing strands of her long hair across her face.

  A man blocked Jaki's way so abruptly that the boy slammed into him and almost toppled backward. The warrior, resolute as a tree, did not budge.

  "Ferang!"

  "You remember your master, slave boy." Ferang scowled at Jaki's appearance. "How pretty you look, painted like a slink lizard. Get down in the mud and show us how you crawl."

  Jaki tried to step around Ferang, and the young warrior blocked his way.

  "The chief's daughter set you free, yet you are no less a slave."

  "I am the sorcerer's student."

  "Fah." Ferang spit. "Everyone knows you did not give your hand to the Spider. You are the sorcerer's slave as you are our slave. Crawl in the mud, slink lizard."

  Jaki skittered left and dodged right. The warrior swept the ground with his leg and tripped Matubrembrem into the pig dung.

  The chief shouted Ferang's name, and the boy reached under his waistcloth, wagged his penis at Jaki, and strode away.

  Jaki stood mired in pig ordure. Jabalwan, who had watched from the log stair, pointed to the river. "Cleanse yourself." Jaki ran from the clearing, his insides burnished with anger, his neck and face burning with shame.

  At the river, he did not even bother to check for crocodiles or kraits. He threw himself into the water as if off the end of the world. The slow current cooled his hot emotions, and he floated to the surface and drifted on his back in an eddy circle, watching clouds towering above. He would give his hand to the Spider. He would die before he would let Ferang humiliate him again. A yellow dartbird flashed overhead with its tickled call, as if confirming Jaki's determination, before he realized that it had been startled. He splashed toward shore. Riri watched from the mossbank, smiling.

  "Riri — "

  "You must call me princess, like all the tribespeople."

  "Princess," he said, standing. His heart buffeted and steadied. "Thank you for setting me free."

  She dismissed that with a toss of her head that spilled her hair into the breeze off the river. "That was two years ago. You were just a child. So was I. I would not behave that way today. Why did you come back?"

  "The soul-catcher brought me here." The breeze tilted, and he smelled her odor of crushed raspberries.

  "Then you will be our slave again." Her eyes brightened.

  "No." His certainty pushed into words. "I will never be a slave again. I have seen the spirit tree burning at night. I have worn its fire in my hair to escape our enemies. I have learned to understand the birds and read the clouds. I will not be a slave again."

  "I want to see you without your paint." She nodded toward a brake of amole cane.

  Jaki snapped a cane, thumbed out the gelatinous interior, and frothed it in the water. He dipped his face into the suds, scrubbed free the paint, and looked up. She had gone. A laugh glittered from above. From a shaggy bough, she dangled upsidedown. Her breasts swung with her laughter, and for the first time in his life he felt a splurge of desire. He flopped backward into the water and floated, staring up at her with wonder, a soft hammer knocking inside his body. Her face like music kept changing yet stayed the same.

  "You are ugly," she said, and giggled into her hand.

  The soft hammer clunked against his ribs.

  "Oh, don't look so hurt." She dropped a nut, and it splashed beside his ear. "It is not your fault. You're a devil child. That's how the spirits formed you. That's why I like you. You are similar to the people and yet not. And that's why Ferang hates you. He thinks your ugliness is a bad omen. He's a warrior. E
verything's an omen to him. He doesn't see that you are a person, too."

  Jaki sloshed out of the river and whistled for Wawa, who flew out of a blossom tree and tumbled to his side.

  "Come back!" Riri shouted, scrambling down from her perch as he moved off into the woods.

  Jaki kept walking until the girl ran up to him and seized his arm. Her touch stopped him, and silence rose in him like joy, quieting his hurt feelings. Her pretty face muted all sounds except her voice: "You can't walk away from me. I’m a princess. And you're a slave."

  "I am Matubrembrem," he said, words coming from the stillness her touch had opened in him. "That is why I am ugly. And that is why I am free." He stroked her cheek as he had the night she had helped him to escape, and the quiet in him alloyed with the warmth that pooled in his belly. Her hair hoarded light, her lips shimmered on the brim of a smile, and her hand reached up and fingered his wet blond hair where it touched the pale curve of his shoulder.

  "My father made me sit for a night with the pigs after I let you go," she told him. "I'm glad I let you go. You look more like a sorcerer than a slave."

  "Riri!" a woman's voice shrilled from the camp, and the girl skipped backward with a laugh.

  "My mother," she said and dashed off.

  Jaki stood staring at where she had vanished into the brush, until Papan's cough startled him. Jabalwan emerged from the cane brake where he had been watching. "The princess likes you," he said.