"Is there a root or leaf I can chew that will blunt the desire?"
Jabalwan smiled. "No, young sorcerer. Your desire is your endless prayer. It is the plaint of your life, the wish of your soul for what is unfinished — for what the stars are finishing."
"Is that why my desire is so strong at night?"
"Yes. All our hungers are the echoes of the hawk's cry before the sun killed the hawk and scattered its skull into stars and moon. When the sun's back is turned in the circle dance, the cry is loudest. Listen to it — without memory, without hope. Just listen to it twanging your muscles. It has its use, like the hawks that circle over the forest again and again, keeping the wind clean."
Matu nodded as though he understood perfectly, though this perplexed him. Did not the Psalms sing: All my desire is before thee ... the desire of every living thing?
"No sorcerer has a wife," Jabalwan said with a shadowy smile, "but the unmarried women are always eager to make love with a sorcerer, because our fortune rubs off with our embrace. Except at night. At night we become panthers."
Jabalwan understood Matu's urgency, and days later when they arrived in a Stilt Hunter village he indicated to the chief that the devil child was ready to bless the paddies. While the soul-taker visited the afflicted, a gang of giggling young women crowned with flowers led the young man into the forest skirting the paddies. They stripped off his waistcloth, threw it into the paddy, and knelt staring with amazement at the gold wires of his pubic hair before pulling him into their midst. In their laughing, love-wise play, Matu learned the delirious wonder of coupling, and when they carried him into the paddy exhausted, eyes uprolled, and grinning like the blessed dead, the tribe, who had gathered at the hem of the field, cheered. They dropped him in the mud and covered him with ooze. Plastered with earth, he staggered among the fields scattering blessings, his legs still tremulous from his ardent initiation.
At the feast later in the day, Jabalwan smiled to see Matubrembrem gorge himself on food. Grace had returned to the boy's features and gangly limbs after weeks of restlessness. The soul-taker felt gratitude for their detour. Life is the journey of beasts, not the hopes of men, he thought, remembering his promise to the Rain Wanderers that he would confront the Tree Haunters' great warrior, Batuh.
Night lapped in red sunlight on the windy shoulders of the trees, and a black moon edged in silver hung over the smoky jungle when the sorcerers left. The shouts and laughter of the young women trailed after the men as they went to meet the night.
*
Matu's Spider vision haunted him. Some nights he woke torn by fear. The nightmare recurred. The one-eyed monkeyface with the snakehead writhing from his forehead pursued. The one-eyed man chased him deeper into the cave, and this time no sparking lights wriggled, no reassuring call sounded from his mother, only the monkeyface's breathing and the spit of his snake as Matu bolted headlong into darkness. Lying awake then he would hear the monkeyface's whisper in the wind, calling him: Jaki —Jaki Gefjon —
"He is Death," Jabalwan explained. "Death is always more plausible than life, in song, in story, even in act. What more can your dream offer? He is one-eyed, because Death is not ambivalent. There, before the single vision of Death, is what goes deeper. That cave he guards is important. Your father wrote about it in the Book, but you could never understand it until now. If you stop playing with yourself when you think I'm not looking — if you listen well to everything I tell you, you may get past Him and be amazed. You will see, He guards the mine of signature."
Jabalwan had been profoundly moved by what Pieter Gefjon had written in the cover leaf of his Bible. Though the sorcerer had never seen a lion, he understood when the boy had first translated the Latin script: I have seen the lion of the final moment. The lion cast a shadow, the shadow-beast of all people, the panther soul that stalked everything living — though only people knew death stalked life. That knowing itself projected a living death. And only by going past it could one reach the depths of one's identity.
The soul-taker talked to Matu about this on new moon nights, when the forest gathered too much darkness for scavenging. They would chew a black knuckle of root that Jabalwan kept in his medicine bag in a pocket stitched with a staring eye, and the spirits would swarm like gnatfire. As the soul-taker spoke of the Longhouse of Souls, the ghostworld began to drizzle all about them, and Jaki understood that they were inside the Longhouse of the Ancestors, where fogged shapes wafted with languorous weariness among black hives — and indigo faces with char mouths swerved close. Jabalwan's droning narrative quickly carried them deeper into the rainhaze of the Dead. The soul-taker's goal was the cooking pot at the center of the longhouse. There he sat with his spirit ancestors and listened to their stories in the light of the first cooking fire. Matu could never go that far with him. Standing at the cooking pot, the one-eyed monkeyface leered, his serpentheaded brow blowing venom.
"Death has sat with you twice," Jabalwan told him one morning. "The Plague and the Spider both let Death into your body, and yet It remains a stranger and an enemy, keeping you from the cooking pot where all our visions boil. The insights that come from that stew are cooked for us by the old sorcerers. They are the food by which our souls grow strong enough to catch other souls from the claws of sickness and sometimes Death. Without that food, you will not live long as a sorcerer. We must go meet this Death who keeps you from us."
That day Jabalwan led Matu to within sight of Long Apari. In all their travels, Matu had never seen such a village. Six longhouses zigzagged the curves of the mighty Great Dawn Running River. The verandah of each house exhibited heads, and colorful banners flew from the roofs. On the riverside, houses extended into wharves, where baskets and crates passed between shore and a flotilla of dugouts. No paddy fields or vegetable gardens graced the land. Instead, the cleared land had been stamped flat, and warriors splashed in the dust practicing fighting drills. The women congregated in the shade of the verandahs, supervising the dockwork and chewing betel. Children played in fish pools, spearing animals for sport and letting their bodies spin downriver.
For days Jabalwan insisted that Matu sit in the high trees on the bluffs above the river, watching Long Apari the way they had sat in the deep forest watching animals. "Watch carefully," the soul-taker demanded. "You must know this beast well before we go down there to tame it."
Matu knew about tribes from his year as a slave among the Rain Wanderers and from the Book, but he had never truly watched them the way he had watched elephant herds and tapir packs. The routines of the village intrigued him with their regularity: into the sun-sheeted river at dawn the dugouts that had been loaded the day before launched. The nightwatch straggled in from forest posts, and day patrols of a dozen warriors each left the longhouses for the boar runs and creek trails. By noon another fleet of dugouts labored upriver to Long Apari loaded with crates, barrels, sacks, mounds of vegetables, and scaffolds hung with dead animals. In the afternoon, while the wharf-work went on, the warriors drilled.
*
With Wawa scouting ahead, Jabalwan and Matu eluded the redoubled guard force around the village and come to the edge of the clearing before the longhouses without being seen. "The central house with the banners is the one where the chief lives," Matu said. "I have seen him come out to review the cargo rafts and exhort his warriors. He is a powerful-looking man."
Jabalwan agreed with a nod, his wary eyes continually scanning the undergrowth and the longhouses. "His name is Batuh. He is the man who brought your mother and father together. We will go speak with him now."
Matu laid a hand on the soul-taker's forearm. "Perhaps we should wait awhile. Each morning I see the chief go to the women's end of his longhouse to pleasure himself before the boats arrive. He must be in there now."
Jabalwan smiled a joyless grin and strode into the clearing. The moment he rose, Papan bellowed from the far side of the village where the forest swept closest to the clearing, and all heads turned in that direction. Swiftly, Ja
balwan, Matu, and the large ape that had followed them down from the bluffs ran across the clearing. Musketfire boomed from the forest, and the roaring ceased.
Jabalwan put a finger to the frown creasing the space between Matu's eyes. "Do not worry, young sorcerer. Papan was wounded once by the fire-spears. She knows better now than to get close enough to be hit." They moved under the longhouses where the air stank of offal and pigs. "Give me the poison needle."
Matu drew the black-tipped red needle from the back band of his waistcloth and handed it to the soul-catcher. Jabalwan held it before the ape, gestured, and the ape took it and ran into the shadows among the pigs. Jabalwan reached into his medicine bag, removed his headdress, and put it on. "Say nothing," he warned Matu. "Simply watch. Watch. Watch."
Jabalwan signed for Matu to follow and walked around the pilings so they arrived at the notched log stairway. They appeared before the parang-bearing guard as if out of thin air. The guard grunted in alarm, and the sorcerer signed for him to be silent and stand aside. The guard readily complied, and they mounted the stairs to the verandah, where smoked leathern heads hung by their hair from the crossbeams. The women on the verandah jabbered with dread at the sight of the sorcerer and his gold-headed escort and fell silent when Jabalwan drew a dogbone needle from his hair and pointed it at them.
Soundlessly, the sorcerers paced the length of the verandah and stopped outside the doorway to the wives' chamber. Batuh presided within. They could hear him admonishing: "Bend over and forget the commotion outside. I will deal with that when I am through."
Jabalwan growled. Women shrieked, bodies scuffled, and Batuh barged out of the doorway. A stout man, he had grown more stolid and muscular in the twelve years since Jabalwan had last seen him. The measure of his leadership showed in that he did not cry out at the sight of the sorcerer and the devil child, and instead opened his hands in greeting. "Jabalwan," he said. "Your ugly face has haunted my nightmares since you took my Mala from me." He looked at Matu, the black bores of his clever eyes widening. "And this is her bastard son, fathered by a monkeyface in a flash of lust." He touched with his stare eyes he hated and feared in the boneshape of the one woman he had loved. "Even a child is known by his doings," he said in a tone of memory, addressing what he recognized of Mala.
Matu shifted uneasily, yet a response sparked in him, and he looked to Jabalwan for permission to speak. The soul-taker nodded. "Instead of fathers, children will rule."
The claw of a grin lifted one corner of Batuh's mouth. "Yes, your mother told me that once, too. She read it to me from the Book. I believed her and defied my fathers. I even defied you, Jabalwan." He swung a harsh look at the soul-catcher and held his lazy stare. "Do you remember meeting an exiled hunter moving downriver to the land of the dead? Do you remember warning me that it was forbidden?" His laugh showed yellowed teeth filed to points. "Come with me where we are not a spectacle for the whole village," he said, stepping back inside.
Matu trailed after Jabalwan and Batuh into the longhouse, through the muscadine shadows of the wives' quarters to the central chamber. Heads with time-charred flesh and black curled lips hung in a cluster from the main pillar. One of the heads had hanks of blond hair dangling past its mouth hole and the yellow butterfly of a vertebra.
"Your father," Batuh announced, gesturing with mock deference to the skull-staring head.
"You lie!" Matu blurted, and Jabalwan touched his arm and clicked like a cricket.
Batuh came at Matu. "You call me a liar? I who gave your mother to this man?"
From the doorways, women peeked. Jabalwan clicked again and risked a glimpse at the boy. His face, pale as soft gold, twitched, and his eyes said that his brain moved like a swollen river, lost in itself.
"The boy's father is the squall," Jabalwan said loudly. "The clouds with their backs to the earth. This boy is a sorcerer. The Spider has bitten him, and he lives."
Batuh's face shriveled as if smelling a stink. "The clouds piss on you no differently than on any of us."
A murmur passed through the women at the doors, and Jabalwan spoke sternly. "You will curse the whole village if you speak ill of the spirits, Batuh. What kind of chief are you who cares so little for your own people?"
A vein beat on Batuh's brow, and he stepped close and spoke in a whisper. "Have you come to destroy me, sorcerer?" A twisted smile showed the points of his teeth. "You already did that when you took Mala from me. She was my weapon. She was the one woman I loved. Now I am the dead you taught us to fear. Fear me, Jabalwan. Only my care for the Tree Haunters keeps me from killing you and this monkeychild now."
"Batuh, we have not come to destroy you or your head would already be free of your body." Jabalwan stared past the chief to the women and the few warriors who had dared mingle with them. "Matubrembrem and I have come to bless the Tree Haunters. The healers I meet in the forest speak well of the people. They say you are so strong you need not grow your own rice or hunt your own meat. The other tribes pay you tribute for mediating with the monkeyfaces. You have grown wealthy. The other tribes live in awe of you. I have come to acknowledge that awe. To bless you with the wisdom of the ancestors that you will remain strong."
Batuh stomped an angry circle through the wide room, chasing off the onlookers. Alone with the sorcerers, he peered at them with his adder eyes. "You are cunning, Jabalwan. You will use my own people against me. Though I have given them freedom from famine, heads from every tribe, and the wealth of the monkeyfaces, they would still defy me to honor you."
"I am the mansnake. They are my children."
Batuh shook his head. "What do you want from me, mansnake?"
"You will never again kill Rain Wanderers," Jabalwan said with the timbre of thunder. "You will immediately withdraw all your warriors and hunters from the lands west of here. You will never encroach there again."
Batuh's jaw muscles throbbed. "You say this loud enough for everyone to hear. You are not talking to one of your foolish children. I am Batuh, the chief of tribes. I am Batuh, beloved of the devil gods. I am not afraid of your deceptions, mansnake. Why should I obey you?"
"If you do not heed me, the Tree Haunters will lose everything you have given them. Their children and their children's grandchildren will grovel as slaves to the tribes you now dominate."
Batuh shouted something in a foreign tongue, and four men in turbans with beard-hackled faces lunged into the longhouse, scimitars drawn. "The forest people are too afraid to free themselves from your ancient slavery, but the Lanun will happily take your heads."
"Lanun!" Jabalwan said in surprise. "So you trade not only with the monkeyfaces but with their enemy. Do you sell them to each other?"
"The monkeyfaces will not trade their fire-spears with the forest tribes," Batuh answered. "To get guns to rule the other tribes, I tell the Lanun what they need to know to find the monkeyfaces' fat trade ships." Batuh grinned proudly. "Now, for knowing this — and for enslaving the people with your sorcery — I kill you." He signaled the Lanun, and the furious men pounced.
Jabalwan had drawn his dogbone needle from his hair, and he pointed it at the closest Lanun and stamped toward him. The pirate screeched with pain, his sword wrenching free and clattering to the floor. He hopped blindly and collapsed dead before the sorcerer. Jabalwan moved his dogbone in an arc, and another Lanun fled from the longhouse.
Batuh gawked, his face stupid with what he had seen.
"By betraying me," Jabalwan said, "you betray your people and their ancestors. Your father and the fathers before him will not recognize you in the Longhouse of Souls. Unless ..." He put the bone back in his headdress and signed for Matu to step toward the door. "You will do no further harm to the Rain Wanderers. Each new moon you will go personally to the fork in the river west of here and leave a raft with a full sack of pure salt, twenty sacks of clean rice, and a rack of fresh meat. This you will do for two years. After that the ancestors will be content if you leave the Rain Wanderers alone."
Jabalwan
walked to the cooking pot and threw it over in a clatter of metal knives and spoons. "In this house the spirits themselves were assaulted and forced to kill a man." He snatched a stalk of bamboo and thrust it into the smoldering embers of the nightfire. "This house cannot stand." He passed his hand over the embers, dropping a cube of coal tar, and flames hopped like rats. "Get out. Have your warriors cut the pilings. Quickly, before the other houses catch this cleansing fire."
Batuh shambled toward Jabalwan, and the sorcerer lifted the flaming bamboo lance and shook it at him. The chief faltered, sweat sparking from his face. "I will kill you, snakeman!"
Jabalwan thrust the burning staff into the thatch ceiling, and the dry grass ruffled with fire. "If you kill me, I will come back from the dead and kill you!" The flames flew across the roof, and the sorcerer screamed the snake's greasy cry, a coiling eeriness that shook the flesh on his skull and split Batuh's rage to gaping fear.
The chief grabbed his ceremonial sword from the pillar where fire already licked the hung trophies, eyed a tongue of fire laughing in van Noot's head, and bolted.
Matu hopped aside to let Batuh pass. The chief leaped from the verandah and tumbled into the dust, his sword spinning from him. All the women had already fled. The pigs under the house unpenned scurried around the chief while men hurriedly axed the pilings. Jabalwan seized Matu's hand and ran with him the length of the verandah, ducking through coils of smoke. Together they leaped off the end of the platform as a wall collapsed to flames behind them.
The Tree Haunters cut through the pilings, and the burning longhouse sagged to a mound of churning smoke and fiery gushes. Matu squeezed Jabalwan’s hand urgently. "Is that my father's head that hung as a war trophy?"
"Your father is a thunderhead. You are his flash." Jabalwan guided Matu away from the flames. "How can you think otherwise after feeding your blood to the Spider?"
Wyvern Page 12