The people stood back from the sorcerers as they walked away from the destroyed building. Matu stopped and caught Jabalwan's gaze. "Is that the head of my seed father?"
"The edge of death is not a gamble," the sorcerer replied. "Fate is ancestral energy. You know that."
"My mother lied to me," Matu said, coldly.
Jabalwan shook his head with morose disappointment. "Jan van Noot is your seed father."
"Why did Mala lie to me?" Matu asked in a pang of hurt.
"Did she lie?" Jabalwan's flesh knotted between his eyes.
"Who is Pieter Gefjon, then?"
"Your spirit father," Jabalwan answered sharply. "He is the one who watches you from the medicine cloud. Mala is with him now while van Noot crawls with the animals. Wake up to your mother's sincerity, Matubrembrem. Did you suffer the Spider blindly?" He walked away, and Matu faced the pyre alone. The possibility that Mala had lied to him unfurled like nausea. Who was that blond man? How had Batuh taken his head? He looked for the soul-catcher and spotted him striding toward a knot of warriors.
Jabalwan beckoned to a warrior with a fire-spear, and the man ran to him and bowed his head. "Give me your gun," the mansnake ordered. "You will show me how to use it." The warrior obeyed.
Batuh glowered from among his nervous guard, the Lanun keeping safely behind him. The acre of smoke between him and the soul-catcher set the bounds of the earth they had trespassed together. Time shredded among the flying vapors, and Batuh understood, mired in his anger and humiliation, that he fought not only the backward Rain Wanderers and Jabalwan but the dead hordes, the ghost tribes of the ancestors. The future, like the past, took shape from power — and he knew with unbearable certainty that power concentrated within the monkeyfaces' fire-spears. In the widening clarity of his defeat, Batuh foresaw that eventually he would kill Jabalwan, he would slay the past, and he would become the future's first ancestor.
*
Jabalwan and Matu journeyed deep into the mountainous forest, far from the tribes, to practice with the fire-spear. While they practiced, Jabalwan told Matu the story of Zeerover and what he knew of Jan van Noot. Van Noot had spoken incessantly about himself the night Mala received him, and later she had relayed everything to the mansnake. "Your seed father was more mask than man," the soul-catcher said. "His mind knew nothing of spirit, so nothing could keep his body from the knives."
The story of his mother making love to a man she did not love so that Batuh could take heads and begin an empire destined to destroy the tribes sickened Matu with grief and rage. Over the following days, he shuffled among his chores, absorbed in the reality that he existed only because of his father's carnal passion and his mother's duplicity. His parents had made him one of the first casualties in the destruction of the tribes.
Jabalwan sensed Matu's torment, but he was helpless to do more than keep the youth busy and prevent him from sinking into complete torpor. The sorcerer wanted to explore the secrets of his new weapon, and they spent weeks in the yellow hills, mixing the powders of his flash-dust until those grains ignited as potently as the gunpowder that had come with the musket. Matu assisted patiently, although morosely, building twig-fires for charcoal, scooping sulfur from stinking hell-vents, scraping saltpeter from cave walls, and foraging for each day's meals while the soul-catcher flashed his powder concoctions in coconut shells.
When the rainy season began and blowing mists made the powder experiments more difficult, Jabalwan decided to go northwest, deep into the mountains, to meet other sorcerers and show them what he had learned. Matu followed, still shaken by the revelation that he had no lineage but a sexual spasm and deceit. In demonic accord with this legacy, his own dreams had become poignantly lubricious, the lapping sounds of the rain thickening into images of women gamboling naked with him. Even awake, the world began to look feminine. Skirts of rain, vulval blossoms, and perfumes of wet earth made every day a soulful meditation on women. Yet the knowledge of his loveless fathering soured the idea of gratifying himself with the eager maidens of the river villages. He wanted more than an afternoon of rutting, indiscriminate hands groping for him, giggling girls vying to straddle him. He desired the heat of one face, a laugh he recognized, a touch with a name, a look of caring. "I want a wife," he told Jabalwan.
Jabalwan shrieked with laughter, then blinked away his astonishment. "You can't take a wife. You are a sorcerer."
Matu had brought up the subject on a silver evening in the highlands, when gleaming gusts of rain swept the valleys below and the sky overhead draped a blue haze shot with the mica of stars. The world was a woman. The woman was a chasm, the very fallen land before him furred with trees, perspiring mists, glistening streams and cascades. The mountainous contours, the winding descent through forests, the fleshy grass ranges, and pubic heat of the swamp leading to her belly in the sea seemed to hold the very shape of all the travels he would ever make. She held his fate. And he wanted to meet her in a real woman. "My dreams insist I am a man first, not a sorcerer," he told Jabalwan.
The sorcerer raised his shoulders and closed his eyes with weary resignation. The tattoo circles on his lids read the infallible images, and his body sagged. "Well, you are Matubrembrem. The tradition cannot hold you. Go. Take a wife. I must trek higher into the mountains to find this year's convocation of sorcerers. Those of us whom the simplicities of destiny allow are already gathering. We are to meet in a cave at Kinibalu the first new moon after the rains. I will go there with the fire-spear and news of your initiation."
Matu's heart bobbed. "And I?"
Jabalwan's eyes clicked open. "You will find the Rain Wanderers and give the headman this." He took from his medicine bag a pink snail shell with a brown-banded lip and handed it to the youth. "What does it look like?"
"A flower bud, a fresh-laid swiftlet egg ... a sunburned turtlehead."
"It's your cock after the bamboo knife whacks off your foreskin!" Jabalwan choked with amusement. "This snail shell endorses your circumcision."
Matu's face knotted.
"That's the only way you can take a wife," Jabalwan assured him with a slack grin. "You must join the tribe."
The anticipation of that blow coiled Matu's insides tighter, yet he took the snail shell. "The Spider taught me the wealth in risk."
"And your wife will teach you the risk in wealth." Jabalwan sighed and extended his hand in blessing. "Never forget the Spider. Its will threads the moments. You've seen its webwork in the clouds, cobwebs of rain catching life out of the air and hanging it on earth in green trees and hungry animals. You know you are in the web. To forget that now is the worst crime. Everything we call evil comes from such forgetfulness."
*
Jabalwan departed during the night, following the high, windy ridge trails secret to all but the sorcerers who had been initiated in the convocation. The raveling trails carried him above misty valleys, and in two weeks he completed the journey it would take Matu four months of sultry, humid roaming to unriddle among the boar runs and rivers. Jabalwan found the Rain Wanderers and informed them of their monthly tribute from Batuh and also of Matubrembrem's desire for a wife. He imposed no strictures on the tribe in their behavior toward the devil's child and left again for the mountains that same day, believing that only the powers of the world could liberate Matu from a tedious tribal life and return him to the verge of mystery.
The morning after Jabalwan left Matu, a lavender fog enveloped the steppe. One scarlet feather hung from a weed-claw above the niche where the old sorcerer had slept. In the leaf-stuffed fissure of the soul-catcher's bed, his blowgun and its darts lay beside the Book. Matu peered through the hanging gardens of mist above the valleys and watched shooting stars over the distant sea, green splinters in the sun's silver corona. No sign of Jabalwan's direction came clear, so he bowed to the world's four corners and called to Wawa. The silver-colored gibbon swung from the bamboo grove in the rocks overhead, and the young sorcerer selected a vine-matted trail that led westward and down t
he green cliff face toward the gloomy, rain-smoking forests of the heartland.
*
Matu wandered the valleys for several moons, visiting sites of power recommended by local villagers. He went because he carried loneliness for Jabalwan. He went because he carried anger at himself for following his penis instead of his teacher. He trod his seed father's way. It led him west to his tribe and his wife. Among the power sites — man-size anthills carved by the rains to resemble witches, or stone tigers among ancient ruins — he traveled in spirit with Jabalwan. He spent days perfecting the practical skills of watching and stalking that his teacher respected. He began his own medicine bag. He killed a crocodile with the soul-catcher's blowgun and took the white scales of the belly for his sack. Once the skin cured he cut pockets and stitched flaps of varying skins and furs to them so he could tell each pouch by touch alone. Then he began collecting plant parts, minerals, and animal pieces his teacher used for healing.
Each village provided a lesson in suffering. The injured and ill showed him the inconsolable limits of flesh, and in their damage he faced the greedy mouthparts of the Spider, so keen to devour what its web had snared. Sometimes he remembered enough to find the plant or crushed stone that repelled the avid spiderjaws and left bodies alive around their scars. Sometimes the jaws tore life apart, and he sat chanting the dirge poems Jabalwan had taught him. The work took days at each village.
The healers of the villages responded to his sincerity and helped him, adding to all that Jabalwan had taught. And though his physical appearance repulsed the natives, who usually shrank from him at first, he saved lives and won the trust of the people. He accepted the swift, illusory pleasures of the maidens whenever they would have him. He lived in the villages as he imagined Jabalwan would, working by day, cavorting in late afternoon, and returning to the forest at night.
The drum songs called him the Sunstare Warrior. He told each village he possessed no skills as a warrior, that he had no blade, took no heads, fought in no battles, and used his blowgun for game only. Yet the warrior song danced ahead of him anyway. To the people he looked predatory. His thin snake lips, raptor nose, deathly pale flesh, and clear eyes imparted a lethal mien to his tall stature. To ease villagers when he first arrived, he plucked gold whiskers from his chin and handed them to the most timid. In the late afternoons, he entertained the tribe by reading stories from the Book. The people crowded close, enthralled by the strange and violent tales, and his reputation as a prophet of war augmented his drum song.
As villages became rarer, the profuse valleys opened into solitary weeks of foraging and walking. Spirits walked with him. The dreams of the one-eyed monkeyface had stopped, and the world both seen and invisible seemed his friend. Wawa brought Matu berries and accounts of animals at neighboring sites each day, and once they met up with Papan at the juncture of a river and a waterfall, where the fish big as forearms thrashed under the echo-loud cliffs in bends of rainbow.
Sometimes at twilight, Mala watched him from the trees, smiling among shafts of rose sunlight or shadowing close in the pummeling fog. Jabalwan visited frequently while he slept, suggesting routes through the jungle, commenting on the secret faces of the animals the boy had seen that day, and laughing at his daytime fantasies of Riri, the only living woman he dreamed about. And the fear that she might already be given away spurred him on his journey. She had been marriageable six months earlier when she had come down to the river to meet him. The cumin of her complexion, the mischief in her impish eyes, her hot laugh, gums pink as dusk haunted his waking. He fouled shots with his blowgun that could have been meals and lingered asleep to remain in her bewitchment. He could not stop fondling her in his mind. Pondering was not enough. He had to go to her, to be mocked or loved. And to face the possibility that when he found her she would belong to someone else.
*
On a muggy afternoon, Matu glimpsed a rare marker, a sorcerer’s sign nearly invisible among the woven vines of an ancient tree. He plucked the frayed tail feather of an arrow from the matted tree, then began to search the area, soon discovering footprints that led toward the back of the valley. Under a root-arch, he found the bent grass sign of a healer from the Rain Wanderers.
Matu followed the mudpath and its prints to a buffalo path of another season. The jungle had already covered the ditchlike run with pea vines and spangle-leafed creepers, yet Matu could discern the direction the healer had taken.
Wawa chirruped from ahead, giving the signal for a waterfall. Mist breezed through the hanging vines and clung to curtains of yellow bell-blossoms, shrouding the giant limbs of the primeval trees in haze. Colorful flowers glowed spectrally in the gloom, and the air rubbed him in chilled moss scents.
Under colossal cliffs fuming with falling water, Matu wound his way carefully past churning pits of foam. Wawa shouted through the din, announcing people, and Matu pranced out of the wet smoke into the brilliant heat of broad riverflats.
Dazzling waterbirds strutted with stately aplomb in sun-glinting shallows. Crocodiles sank to their eyeholes under the algal mud and copper grass of the banks. Just visible downriver, at the first wide bend where the current splashed among smooth stones, women fished in the rock pools. A tall-peaked longhouse among bursts of fruit trees rose on the high bank almost invisible in the face of the forest. At the sight of Matu the women scattered up the embankment, and he sat down on one of the rocks and waited.
Among the first warriors to hop down the bank and swagger toward him was Ferang, animosity vibrant in his strapping body. "So you have found us." Ferang smirked at his companions, who stood back in deference to the devil's child. "Jabalwan tells us you would be a man." His laugh sounded empty.
From above on the scarp, a voice called out, "Young sorcerer, welcome to your home."
Matu looked beyond Ferang's derision to the chief and his family gathered on the slope. The chief beckoned. Sunlight winced among his white feathers, and his broad features lifted in a smile. His wives and children gawked down at the tall painted figure with sunspun hair. Riri shouldered among them, and the sight of her made Matu's heart jump. She sauntered closest to the edge and smiled widely at him. He elbowed past Ferang, handed the blowgun upward, and picked his way along toeholds and rootsteps so that he passed closest to Riri.
The chief and the elders impressed with Matu's new maturity ushered him into the village with much hooting and yodeling. Matubrembrem's arrival from the headwaters of the Eater of Men seemed to the people a glad omen. Arrack circulated, pigs sizzled in the roasting pit, and spumes of music fell from the longhouse.
Matu jubilated to find the village looking healthier than it had at the previous site. Paddy fields glistened like fur in the blue shade of the ancient trees, vegetable gardens flourished, and the clearing before the longhouse swirled with children. He plucked his gold whiskers for the young ones who shied from him and passed out colored stones and shells from his medicine bag. For Riri, he produced a coil of rare white python skin.
Ferang watched with menacing attentiveness. When Matu offered him the skull of the python, a potent amulet for earthing power during the dance, he lifted his chin, irked. He would not accept a gift from this farce of a human. The Spider had killed Ferang's brother — and it had let this abomination live. Curse the spirits and the Spider. Curse the mansnake. To avenge his brother, to spite the hidden world that denied him, he would find an accident for this boy.
*
Matu entered the village a sorcerer, and before night he had to be circumcised. To the boisterous honking of bamboo flutes, the men of the tribe carried the boy through the forest to a glade of stones. They offered him a deer horn of liquid, which he refused. It touched his nostrils with a soporific smell of night, and he refused a second time. He would not be stupefied his first day with his tribe. Grunts of amazement and concern among the men went silent when the headman drew from an eelskin scabbard a short, black obsidian blade. The eldest of the men pulled Matu's foreskin taut, and the headman sliced
it off in one swift stroke. Blood spat on the rocks, and Matu gnashed the pain. The men cheered, flutes bleated, and the eldest wrapped an astringent leaf about the young man’s wound. All night the Rain Wanderers celebrated, with music, acrobatic dances, heroic stories, and much arrack. At dawn, the tribe crawled into the shade and slept.
In his first weeks, Matu established himself as the tribe's supreme hunter, and the Rain Wanderers favored him with a room in the longhouse among the elders. The honor burdened Matu. He had slept in the forest since Jabalwan took him from his mother, and he felt stifled by the pall of cooking odors, body scents, and the noisome pigs. Soon he began sleeping outdoors again, explaining to the chief that night air honed his hunting skills. The elders agreed, this gruesome sorcerer belonged in the darkness.
*
Every night since his wound had healed, Matu had approached Riri's mat among the chief's other daughters in the longhouse and placed a piece of manioc in her hand. Other hunters, including Ferang, had done likewise, and he had seen her later going off with them into the bushes at the hem of the forest. She did not favor him in this way, though she continued to watch him with smiling directness, and she did not cringe from him when he sidled up to her at the fish pools or in the garden. Many of the maidens solicited his interest with lingering glances and affectionate gestures, but he never visited their mats. The precarious feeling that Riri's garnet-brown eyes inspired did not open in him with any other.
For her part, Riri did not understand her feelings for this grotesque man. Her attraction flexed as strongly now as the last time she had seen him, when he had washed the dung from himself in another river. Her gusty feelings for this pale, stone-faced youth could not be love. They must be the turmoil of fear and wonder in the deeps of her revulsion. She wanted to be near him the way she sometimes wanted to watch dogs root out a squirrel and its litter and devour the runt after the hunters took the rest. Her horror burned cold but sexual, and she felt froth between her thighs when she breathed the forest stink of the wind-eyed boy.
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