Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  Ferang took note of Riri's fascination and Matu's hopeless passion and devised a plan to destroy him with his own desire. He convinced Riri to spend a day working at the far end of the garden where a rill from the river had cut an oblique, stony gorge. Lianas and fallen saplings congested the narrow fissure. The day before Riri came to work there, Ferang cleared the gorge of all the saplings but one, which he slanted across the steep ditch to where Riri would be standing as she pruned the gooseneck gourds. He used a bone splinter to dig out the pith of the sapling at its middle, and then he turned the trunk so his work could not be seen from above.

  The Rain Wanderers gleefully rejoiced, anxious to reassure Matu and his spirit allies that they now accepted him as an equal, this outlandish soul-catcher who had been their slave three years before. Every family invited him to their cooking fire, and in his first weeks he visited each of the clans, including Ferang's.

  A hunter's clan, of the flying fox totem, they boasted a great-grandfather who had been a sorcerer and had roamed among the tribes like Jabalwan. Ferang had pierced his ears with fox fangs and narrowed his face with red ocher streaks, beginning between his eyes and tracing his flat brow and the eminent bones of his sockets. A black line down his nose and the surly set of his long jaw loaned him the brazen semblance of a fox. At Matu's visit to his clan's cooking pot, after the new tribesman had enthralled everyone with strange tales of the south, Ferang invited him to go hunting.

  They agreed to meet on the north side of the village in sight of the garden, early, while morning mist still drifted tattering. Matu arrived first and spotted Riri in the humid light among the gourd vines. She balanced on tiptoes, reaching for dangling fruit in the skeletal trees supporting the vines. Her breasts with their tight dark nipples swayed, her long earlobes bobbed sumptuously beneath her glossy cropped hair. And her stretch lifted the soft bark loincloth from the downy shadow at the base of her spine. The sleek length of her nut-oiled body shone like an eel. She noticed him and adjusted her waistcloth. They waved at each other. The morning between them shivered with sunlight. Plucking a green orchid from the knee of a bumpy tree, he ran to present it to her. On the sapling bridge, he stopped and toed the wood to ascertain that termites had not yet found it. Sensing green wood, he hurried over.

  Ferang watched the sapling give way under Matu's weight and plunge him into the deep and stone-fisted rill. The hunters heard Riri's alarmed cries, and they rushed to the gorge to find Matu unconscious, his right leg bent at a bad angle where it had struck the rocks and snapped above the knee. They carried him to the longhouse, laid him in a grass hammock, and fit the broken ends of his legbone together.

  Matu woke basted with fever, his leg barbed in pain, throbbing knife-thrusts. He chewed the black toes of sleeproot, and the pounding agony softened. Riri wept at his swollen leg until her tears had soaked his silk grass bindings. She swabbed his fever-dew, fed him rice broth, and collected and prepared the leaves and roots he requested. The leaf mash she helped him concoct cleansed the infection from his gashed thigh and the blue milky drops squeezed from the roots dulled the pain and plunged him into moribund trances for several days while the bone set.

  *

  In his trance, Matu returned to the medicine cloud. Mala waited there, unearthly with moon-disc eyes and sunset-brindled hair. "Mother, help me," he bawled, and she knelt over his black-bruised leg and laid her icy hands on the lips of his wound.

  The sound of her voice wavered, exhausted, as though it had traveled through miles of silence. "Now you are crippled. You will never hunt again." He groped for the pain of his snapped limb and instead felt dead meat. The medicine cloud darkened and brooded on rain. Jabalwan spoke from inside an alley of wind. "There is no true freedom in life, Matu. The more you struggle for what you want, the tighter the trap becomes. Where did you think you were going?"

  Matu woke with the comprehension that he would never be young again. His body had been broken. He would never run or stalk again with effortless will. For weeks, he laid in the longhouse, stewing in its cauldron of odors, the remorse for what he had lost a heavy sludge in his lungs. He knew some gladness for the pain, and he listened to it knitting the splinters of his bone, ticking with hurt and mercy. Days of fever relented to days of absorbed watching, contemplating the clouds and the rain, remembering with silent anguish the jubilant love that had lured him here.

  Riri's invincible beauty squeezed his heart all the more ferociously as she tended him with utter patience and extravagant common sense. He knew by the sad melody of her touch and her gracious smiles that she could never desire him. And over the flow of many days, he recognized her true desire, not for any of the young hunters who brought her delicacies from the jungle and serenaded her with sentimental flute passions, but for sullen Ferang who had kept aloof since Matu's injury. Matu had seen the heat in her tapered eyes when Ferang's fox-slanted face peered in at her during the sorcerer's afternoon trances. She thought Ferang stayed away because of the spell of bad luck she had wreaked on the sorcerer, and by her meticulous care of Matu she intended to demonstrate to Ferang her contrition for the fateful wound her beauty had inflicted.

  Matu knew this. Ferang had presented the elders with a termite-hollowed sapling, saying it had caused the accident. Matu clearly remembered the green sapling, yet he did not contradict Ferang's story. "Even a sorcerer can act a fool in love," he told them, and that satisfied their grave doubts and amused the gossips. Ferang brooded on this, baffled. He began to visit Riri more often, hoping to learn more about this enemy who did not challenge him.

  The sorcerer remained reticent. He had fashioned a crutch for himself, and he hobbled silently up and down the verandah, strengthening his withered leg. Riri accompanied him everywhere. Genuine respect competed with revulsion as she witnessed his quiet perseverance during his recovery. His lack of pride made him look ridiculous to her at first, especially when he insisted on bathing and swabbing his ripped thigh in herbal waters and root oils like some precious pet instead of defeating it with the indifference of a true man. Over time she grasped the usefulness of his prideless devotion to his predicament. Two moons after splitting his leg, he walked without a crutch, hobbling stiffly, yet whole. He outlined his scar in a red serpent-swerve and put himself to work on his knees in the paddy fields and the kitchen to stretch and fortify his new muscle.

  When the third moon had risen, Matu requested that the elders send him to the east river fork where the Tree Haunters left their monthly tribute. The headman hesitated, reluctant to send the sorcerer on such a venture, because the last two tributes had been smaller, the salt dirty, and the rice mixed with pig dung. The Tree Haunters' belligerence had rekindled, and a gimp-legged man just strong enough for women's work did not merit the danger.

  "It is because I am a gimped man that I am worthy of the danger," Matu pleaded before the chief's cooking pot. "I will never be all that I was before. Why risk strong men? If anyone is to die, let it be me."

  This argument persuaded the elders, and they agreed that he should guide the tribute raft to the tributary, whose currents would carry it to the village. They offered him one escort, and he selected Ferang.

  Convinced that Matu meant to kill him in the forest in revenge for his injury, Ferang painted his body for battle. He stenciled amulets on the big bone behind his neck and over his heart to ward off evil energy and covered himself with white plaster. He strapped a bamboo blade to each thigh, freshened the poison on his darts, sharpened the wooden spearhead of his blowgun, and selected his most powerful sling gun and a pouch of knifetip rocks.

  Matu shook his head when he saw him. "We are not fighting a war, Ferang. If we are attacked, we will hide." He insisted that Ferang paint over his battle-white with snakeleaf green and yellow and brown nut paste. Ferang complied reluctantly and followed Matu several wary paces behind when they entered the dark, narrow passages of the jungle. He considered spearing the sorcerer through his back and feeding his body parts to the crocodiles, but
within moments in the cool gloom of the forest he sensed Matu's mastery.

  Favoring his right leg and striding slower than Ferang liked and with an occasional spasm of limp that made him hop like a deer, Matu still moved quieter and left no trace. His feet infallibly found the callus of a root, a moss pad, or even the liana rope on a tree trunk where he could place his weight without pressing a print or molesting the random beauty of the leaf litter. He occupied at each moment the forest's precise center, ubiquitous with alertness. His signing of animals long before they came into view and his knowing stare when they faced each other over the evening's leaf fire convinced Ferang he traveled in the company of a spiritman. He purged himself of all thoughts of betrayal and concentrated on defending himself.

  Ferang's wariness gratified Matu. The spirits of the waking world were punishing him, just as the Book assured. His weeks of pain had reminded him of the Spider's cunning and his own impuissance. He was no different from everything else alive. The web of dying had fixed him from the moment he had dropped from Mala. The medicine cloud's reminder that freedom exists only in limitation explained his wound. Loving Riri, loving any woman — Mala, the paddy girls, even the phantoms of his lewd dreams — equaled loving death. The fatefulness of women centered in their power to conceive and birth. They are drowning us with blood. He recalled the menstrual chants of the women when the Ceremony of the Wound greeted the sickle moon. Everyone knew this. It was common knowledge. The surrender of life to death, of men to women, and women to the bearing of the tribe empowered human destiny from the beginning of time.

  Matu felt he had loved death even after he had been shown the Life. He would eat his own death each day that he stayed with the Rain Wanderers. With a broken leg, he could not leave. He knew then that he had to endure like a frail tree and reach deeper into the dirt of necessity, into the dark earth where he found himself, and so he had submitted to Riri's care and the uxorial chores his wound allowed. Only now, at last free to leave, did he demand of himself one more withholdance. He had decided that the first challenge to his wound would benefit the Rain Wanderers or kill him.

  Deep in the afternoon two days later, they arrived at the river fork where the tribute raft waited. Squirrels and red-winged manakins flicked over the rent sacks of rice, and the hung meat had already been carried off by beasts, testifying that the raft had sat undisturbed a long time. Matu stopped Ferang as he moved to approach the offering. "Wait. We must find the trail of the Tree Haunters."

  Ferang wagged his head with annoyance. "Any child can see that we are the only people here."

  "Wait." Matu circled along the far bank of the fork where the raft moored. He listened with all his might for Wawa's call and heard nothing. The gibbon had been distracted by a female in heat. "We will wait," Matu announced when his end of the circle met up with Ferang's.

  The Rain Wanderer scowled. "The afternoon is already tired. How long can we wait?"

  "Till morning if necessary."

  "For what are we waiting?" Ferang threw a fist at the raft. "There is the tribute. Let us take it. We can float it to the riverbend and the homeward stream before nightfall — if we act now."

  Matu stared into Ferang's face and said nothing. The warrior's eyes shone too bright. His defiance gleamed, impenetrable. Matu called for Wawa, and his shrill whistle mimed a barbet so exactly it stiffened the hairs behind Ferang's ears. No answering call came.

  Ferang shed his look of disgust for a mask of compressed determination. He stalked away, sliding through the underbrush along the bank that led directly to the spit in the fork where the raft floated.

  "Wait!" Matu ordered, and the warrior's amulet-painted back stared at him sternly before vanishing in the shrubs. Matu blew the dread out of his chest and went after him.

  They descended through a brake of stunted bamboo where a mudslide had smothered an old grove. Just as they entered the clearing, Wawa's singsong rang from behind, warning of men. Matu reached to pull Ferang to cover, and three Tree Haunter warriors in battle regalia crashed into the clearing from the surrounding brush.

  Ferang's spear flew, impaling the nearest. Matu spun, and a long dart blinked over his shoulder. He put the momentum of his whirling dodge into his spear-arm and flung his dagger-tipped blowgun at the sniper, catching him through his chest.

  Wawa screamed again, and Matu swung his attention across the wall of the jungle. Two Tree Haunters charged across the clearing with metal-tipped spears and parangs. His blood jumped to flee. Ferang stood fast, a bamboo blade in each hand. Whimpering with urgency, Matu fumbled through his medicine bag searching for the flash-powder Jabalwan had taught him to make. A spear wobbled in the sunlight toward him. He threw himself aside, and it gouged past.

  Ferang stabbed his knives into the ground, seized the thrown spear, and turned it on the assailants. He threw and missed, and the two Tree Haunters closed on them. Matu found the gritty soil with no time to light it. A warrior with raised parang hacked at him, and he cast the black powder in his face and hopped away. Ferang had locked spears with his opponent, and Matu had to face the other Tree Haunter alone. He drew his bamboo knife and retreated as the man came at him with his swaying parang. His bad leg cramped with the effort, and he collapsed backward under the warrior's assault.

  Wawa shrieked and flared out of the leafy grove, arms overhead gripping a stick, fangs bared. The gibbon clubbed the warrior over Matu, giving the sorcerer time to slash with his bamboo sliver. The knife daggered the man's left shoulder, and Wawa's stick snapped against his hip. Berserk with pain, the Tree Haunter grabbed Matu's knife-arm and would have severed the sorcerer's throat if Wawa had not snagged his wrist.

  Ferang still pitted his strength against his enemy. He saw the chance for a feint, sagged suddenly, and exploded forward, breaking the spear-lock and knocking the Tree Haunter aside. Ferang's spear snaked after him, goring him between his ribs.

  Matu had rolled to his feet, trying to avoid the warrior's parang and break his grip. Ferang's spear snapped the warrior's back, dropping him with a gargled scream. Matu reeled away, splattered with blood.

  Ferang laughed in relief at the sight of him, and Matu grabbed Wawa's tough hand in gratitude. Their smiles froze. A blowgun poked from the bamboo behind Ferang. Matu shouted in warning. The hunter wheeled about. A dart flashed and dug deep in the globe of Ferang's shoulder.

  Matu yanked the spear from the spine of the man who had almost killed him and threw it vehemently into the grove, finding a scream. He rushed into the bamboo and found the warrior pinned through his bowels to the earth. The man bared his throat and cried to be killed. Matu slashed with a hunter's precision, then jumped away and ran from the grove.

  The Rain Wanderer had curled up in the mud, the dart in his hand, the puncture wound in his shoulder threading blood. Matu drew a finger-razor of volcanic glass from his medicine bag and sliced open the tiny hole with two deep cuts. He put a rubbery fish bladder to his lips, sucked it to a wrinkled vacuum, and attached its opening to the puncture. It drew spurts of blood.

  "Leave me, sorcerer," Ferang mumbled. "I feel the poison on my heart. It is cold. I am dead."

  Matu pinched the corners of Ferang's eyes until he squinted alert. "Listen, Ferang — you will not die. I have drawn out the poison."

  "It is in my heart. I feel it." His eyes fluttered. "Cold."

  "You will not die!" Matu asserted.

  "My soul is leaving." His voice slurred. "Tell my family I sent three ahead of me."

  "You will not die, Ferang." Matu pulled a gray tuft of heart-tripping leaves from his bag. "I will catch your soul. Stay awake!"

  Matu squeezed open the hunter's mouth and pressed the broken bits into his saliva. The warrior shuddered mightily, his legs jerked straight out, and he stopped breathing. Fecal stench clouded up from him with his soul.

  Matu beat Ferang's chest like a great drum, summoning the soul back in as he had seen Jabalwan do. Then he straddled the warrior's thighs and pressed against his chest, f
orcing air out of his body. The air sagged back in as he released, and he pressed again. Matu continued the rite as the day wilted, and the stink of the bodies lured bear cats and foxes.

  In the dark, Matu could no longer see the glister of life in the young man's eyes, and he had to judge the tenacity of Ferang's soul by the limberness of his ribcage as it surrendered to his push and returned with his release. Matu's arms erased by fatigue, he lifted his face to the bonechips of stars and rode the ritual of the stolen breath with mindless concentration. Somewhere in the middle of the night, long after rain clouds had masked the stars and a hot drizzle had driven off the mosquitoes and fireflies, Ferang coughed to life.

  "Why did you do this, soul-catcher?" Ferang wanted to know when alertness eventually fit his voice back in place. The humid night air stank of death, and his chest ached with bruised ribs, yet he floated in brightness, a wallow of joy. "Do you not know that it is I who tricked you into breaking your leg?"

  "I am a clumsy warrior, not stupid."

  "Then why?"

  "Because, Ferang, you are right to hate me." Matu served him an invigorating infusion of barkchips that steadied his shivering heart.

  "I do not understand. The Rain Wanderers love you. Even Riri has come to love you. You could have her for your wife."

  "Perhaps, for I love the Rain Wanderers. If not for you I would have remained trapped among them. A piteous fate for a soul-catcher. You set me free. You broke my illusions with my leg, Ferang. I owe you a life."