Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  The longhouse occupied the glade where Mala's hut had once stood. Matu floated downhill on ghostlegs, sliding like windsmoke through colorful meadows of flowers, among tattered evergreens, and into the shadowy vale of immense trees. Scents of jasmine splotched the air. The sounds of dog yaps, rice pounding, giggling children wove through paths exactly as he remembered from childhood. He stopped beside the oak where he and Mala had buried an ape friend and stared past crossed palms and a sun-spangled creek to the longhouse perched on its stilts.

  "Batuh has sent his warriors all this way to destroy this longhouse, because you and I are Rain Wanderers." Jabalwan lifted his headdress from his bag and put it on. It looked vibrant, the plumage fresh from the birds they had hunted in the mountains. "The tribe has come here to this valley, because it is your birthplace. When you became a Rain Wanderer, this valley became theirs. Do you see the marrow in this root? Batuh is attacking not just our tribe or us but the Life. Do you see that?"

  Matu understood. "By destroying a sorcerer's tribe he destroys the spirit of all tribes. No one will resist him again."

  "He will claim the authority of the ancestors. A warrior, a man of death, will claim the Life. As if he could live forever. Even in his seed." Jabalwan rocked his head moodily. "The people will become slaves of Batuh's masters."

  "I have seen it."

  "Yes. We will not stop it. This is the demon age when the Life shrinks to an infinitesimal seed — maybe even something inhuman." He squeezed his eyes shut to stay the tears of their certain defeat. The stencils on his lids throbbed. Then his eyes clicked open and glared with resolve. He stamped his blowgun and clicked its bamboo bayonet against Matu's. "Death is not a secret. We know what we must do now. We fight for the Life. We can not lose."

  Jabalwan's words shot into him, sharp as darts. When the sorcerer knocked his weapon against Matu's an electric thrill brushed the length of his body. Today men would die. The terror of that certainty linked into images of shouting men, flying weapons, bloodspray, the eternities of war. Death was not a secret. They would fight as men had fought from the beginning of time.

  As they walked together into the clearing, the headman came forth to meet them. His scouts had already seen the war party that had stalked upriver, and his warriors assembled on the banks of the creek, readying a first strike.

  Matu spotted Riri among the women on the verandah. A toddler clung to her waistcloth and an infant suckled her breast. Memories of this place where his own mother had fed him ascended in his skeleton, and he grew lighter. Riri met his gaze and smiled, and he tilted his spear toward her.

  "My daughter is Ferang's wife," the headman said.

  Matu grinned with the thought that if he had stayed, she might have been his. With her or without her, he had come to the same place. She would see him either kill or die today.

  *

  Ferang and the other Rain Wanderer warriors deployed at the creek. He had painted his body for war, like the other warriors, and his hands moved keenly over his weapons, as though he could feel the wounds humming in them. At the sight of Matu, he leaped and charged. Jabalwan jumped to block the attack, and Matu stood aside and took the force of the collision with open arms. The two men staggered in a jubilant embrace. Ferang pulled back with a war yell. "Now the Tree Haunters must fight not only Rain Wanderers but the spirit powers!" he shouted to the others. "We cannot lose!"

  The sound of the same phrase that Jabalwan had spoken but with different emphasis resounded ominously in Matu's ears. We must not lose, he thought and shared a knowing glance with Jabalwan.

  "You have grown stronger," Ferang said, squeezing Matu's shoulders, thickened from three years of mountain climbing.

  "And you have grown more respectable," Matu said. "I have seen Riri and your children."

  "Yes, I no longer set bone-breaking traps for my own people. We cannot afford it. The Rain Wanderers need all our warriors now. There is no place left for us to run."

  "In three days," the headman said, "the enemy will have marched through all the spring-traps and spike-pits we have laid in their way, and they will cross the mountain's skirt. We must go and meet them. They must never see our valley."

  Jabalwan offered his strategy. Using the high trails, they would cross the cordillera in hours and descend on the enemy that very afternoon when they least expected it. The plan unanimously approved, the war party marched up the valley, following Jabalwan and Matu. The ground soon became sheer rock. The wind bragged of death with its cold, and the warriors huddled and clicked their weapons with hollow bravura. At the summit, they gazed down on the enemy.

  The Tree Haunters, colorful ants in their war paint, filed along the stone bed of a creek toward the cliffs that walled the high valley. Jabalwan pointed out the clearing of a withered pond. "In a short while, the enemy will reach that field. We will be waiting in the trees, in two groups. One will hold the cliffside of the clearing, and the other will cut off any retreat."

  The war party descended on the twisted trails that dropped almost straight down through talons of rock. Once among the trees again, the warriors moved swiftly, relieved to be under the familiar tangles of vine and bird noise. A roar crashed through the bramble, and the warriors quailed and fell into a defensive circle, spears jabbing at the shadows.

  Jabalwan laughed and called for Papan to show herself. The shrubs shoved apart, and the man-size bear barged past the warriors and lay her black muzzle between the soul-catcher's feet for Jabalwan to scratch her ears. "I have been calling you for days," he chided the bear. "Where have you been?"

  "Papan is the beast of your destiny," Matu said. "She knew where to meet you."

  The stones in the dwindled pond glowed pale as bones in the green shadows. Jabalwan sent Papan into the dense foliage downwind and signaled Matu and Ferang to position their men in the trees at the back of the open ground. The headman and the soul-catcher took their men into the forest at the head of the creek.

  The band of Tree Haunters hiked over the creek cobbles and into the glade with their spears and muskets on their shoulders. As the leaders stepped toward a root path that led back into the forest, Papan bawled with rage, and the poison darts of the Rain Wanderers swarmed. The howls of the pierced men battered the air, and the Tree Haunters scattered into the brush, to be speared and hacked by their concealed enemy. Those who fled back down the creek met their deaths in a whirlwind of darts from Jabalwan's hidden warriors. The Rain Wanderers leaped from their hiding places and began killing the wounded and taking heads.

  In the confusion of victory cries, no one heard Wawa's frantic call that other men approached along the creek. Matu had pulled himself into the bough of a tree to look for Jabalwan, seeking new orders. Standing apart from the kill-frenzied warriors, Jabalwan ignored the headman's urgings to join in the taking of heads. He searched for a way back up the mountain when he observed the other Tree Haunters charging up the creek. The men they had killed, he realized at once, composed an advance party sent ahead to flush out ambushes. The war party attacking now hulked many times larger, their bodies green with the jungle paint that had made them invisible from the high vantage of the cordillera.

  Jabalwan shouted with alarm. Too late. The enemy had already loaded their fire-spears. They lit fuses, and the first rounds of deadly thunder dropped the headman and the warriors around him. A shot cracked a rock between Jabalwan's legs and sent him skittering backward. He threw his spear and brought down the point man, exposing the enraged figure of Batuh. The chief of the Tree Haunters yowled with delight at the sight of the soul-catcher standing among corpses, a bamboo knife dangling in his hand. Jabalwan stepped back and then stopped, recognizing the moment's finality. He held Batuh's gaze and with his free hand drew his dogbone needle from his hair and jabbed its curse at him. Batuh laughed and leveled his fire-spear at Jabalwan's heart. He fingered the trigger.

  Matu watched Jabalwan veer backward, kicked by the impact, and he sprang from the tree. Ferang caught him with an arm a
round his chest. "No, Matu. He is dead. Quickly, we must escape. We need you to lead us back to the longhouse to save the women and our children."

  The undergrowth beside Jabalwan's body heaved apart, and Papan lunged into the attacking swarm, saliva threading from exposed fangs, claws swatting, strewing gouts of flesh and bowels into the air. Batuh squealed and fell back. Musketfire smoked around him. The big bear thrashed forward, blooming blood, mad with grief, and collapsed across the creek quilled with spears. Metal blades jolted, and the bear's head rolled like a keg.

  Brain rattling, heart twisting, Matu spun away. Ferang kept a hand on him until they had fled far up the mountain slope. The only Rain Wanderers who escaped had been waiting at the cliffside of the pond with Ferang and the sorcerer. They hunkered among the skinny mountain trees, shivering with fear and grief.

  "We have barely a dozen men left," Ferang said, searching the forest for signs of movement. "The best warriors were killed with the headman. We must return at once to the longhouse and take our women and children away. You will show us the high trails to the west, and we will build a new longhouse far from the Tree Haunters."

  "No." Tears streamed over Matu's cheeks, beading like dew on his red and white war paint. Woe pierced him. He closed his eyes, hugged his knees, and rocked his whole body. Finally he said, "You will go back and take the women and children into the forest behind the longhouse. From there you can climb quickly into the mountains. You will find your way to another valley without me."

  "And you?"

  Matu met Ferang's insistent stare. "I am going after my teacher. I have always followed him. When I did not I knew grief. I will follow him now. And many Tree Haunters will come with me. Give me your sling guns." He selected three of the dozen offered. "Do not leave the valley unless you see the longhouse burn. If it burns, you will know I am dead."

  Ferang did not try to stop him when he rose and walked downhill into the dense forest.

  *

  The Tree Haunters camped for the night at the site of the day's battle. A fire blazed at the center of the dry pond. Around it, the warriors had impaled Rain Wanderer heads on their spears and planted them in a circle just inside the grasp of light. Now they sat beneath the heads, chewing betel nut, singing songs, honing their metal blades. Two crossed spears supported Papan's large head. Beneath it Batuh squatted, staring into the flames and seeing there the future rending itself from darkness. His destiny unfurled brightly. The one man he had feared he had killed. No tribe would defy him now. He had become more than a chief. Batuh spirit-chief, slayer of sorcerers.

  Jabalwan's corpse reclined before the fire, his chest caved in where the lead slug had smashed it. Blood had been drained from his body before it could clot, and all the warriors had drunk of it and become spirit-warriors. In the morning they would carry the corpse to the river and the ferry to Long Apari. There they would encase it in salt and display it on the battlefield at each village that raised arms against Batuh.

  A weird yodel swooped from the trees, and Batuh lifted his head to listen. The men around him rose to their heels apprehensively. When the strange wail cut again, they looked about with wincing faces. The sound could not have been made by a human throat and no animal cried with such explicit bane.

  Lightning drilled far off among the trees, and in the lag the warriors waited for thunder that never came. The nearness of the next whistling howl swept everyone to his feet. Batuh grabbed his Spanish sword and swung it ferociously over his head, striking the bear head spiked behind him. Tilting crazily, the wrathful black face seemed to glower at him, in collusion with the wailing spirit of the dead sorcerer.

  Seizing a loaded musket, Batuh shouted to the darkness, "It is a Rain Wanderer trick!" No one believed him, since no one, not even Rain Wanderers, moved through the jungle at night. Batuh recognized the challenge in the deflected glances of his men. He shoved warriors aside with his swordarm, and with a musket poised from his hip he strutted to the creek. A scream from the afterworld lashed from the bank, and Batuh fired into it. The flare from the gun exposed the black arteries tunneling among the trees.

  Sooted from hair to toetips, Matu watched from a bough on the cliffside of the camp. Two of the three sling guns on the branch before him he had packed with naphtha-soaked moss around stones of compacted flash-powder. The third held a pebble-weighted poison dart meant for Batuh if he missed with the first two.

  In the aftermath of Batuh's musketblast, Matu released the taut sling, and the first flash-powder stone arced soundlessly toward the fire and missed. The second stone disappeared in the darkness and then came into view again as it fell into the flames. Blue licks of fire hissed. The Tree Haunters whirled around at the moment the campfire exploded. A gust of silver fire billowed, kicking tinder across the clearing, whipping sparks and clots of flame into the black canopy. When darkness swooped in, Matu came with it.

  The Tree Haunters had run from the blast and huddled in the creek, poking spears at the night as Wawa hopped among the sedges, shrieking the death music Jabalwan had taught him. Matu slung Jabalwan's body over his shoulders and disappeared into the forest.

  Matu knew very well that none of the Tree Haunters would pursue when they saw the sorcerer's body gone. He slept that night with the dead man in his arms, wrung with sadness, entranced by the grisly satisfaction of having retrieved him even as he was lost forever.

  *

  The next morning reinforcements arrived at the Tree Haunters' camp with much fanfare. These enlistees from other tribes had come to follow Batuh, hoping to win prestige and authority in their own villages. The story of the sorcerer's escape sounded wondrous in the light of day. Surrounded by so many heads — and a chief's among them — the new troops bustled, even more eager to participate in the epic assault against the primitive and witchy Rain Wanderers.

  *

  Matu severed the head from Jabalwan's corpse and wrapped it in broad leaves with moss. He dragged the body to the river and floated it downstream, where he could burn it without alerting the enemy army. No deathraft would carry his teacher to the afterworld, for Jabalwan had not died. The mansnake had only been changed, and the doorway of fire would be his exit from this world and his entrance into legend. No death chant rose from Matu's lungs, for he wanted to keep the soul-taker's soul with him. Silently he stacked logs and laid the headless body atop them. As the pyre accepted the flames from the dead wood, he turned to leave.

  On his way up the valleys, Matu collected the plants he needed to make the bone-softening broth he had learned about from his teacher. Then he fashioned a watertight container of bark and gutta percha, brewed the broth, and immersed Jabalwan's head in it. With the slogging sack strapped to the blowgun across his back, Matu climbed to the clifftops overlooking the valley of his childhood.

  For three days he paced those rocks, whistling down into the glens for the big beast Emang and balancing on boulders, soaking in the purple glow of the sky, wanting to feel the deep drive of power Jabalwan had called spirit fist. He felt the balmy wind honeycombed with fragrances: the mint of the jungle and the char of Rain Wanderer cooking fires in the valley below. Even from far away, he could sense the mourning of the tribe. He felt their grief, and he felt the stony earth, laced in nettles. But the crux of all feeling, the current of strength his teacher had talked about, was not there.

  He dreamed of the medicine cloud. The whiteness invaded his sleep, obscuring all images. Toward dawn, the medicine cloud folded back, and Jabalwan walked toward him, light playing over his body with watery sounds. "Life is secret, Matu. Enormous space touches everything, and every move hurtles us through great distances. We can never stay where we are. Only death is known. Goodbye, sorcerer." He smiled then. "Oh, yes — when you're through with my face, leave it in the forest for the small animals to chew."

  Wawa woke him, scampering onto the ledge with the news that Emang had arrived in the valley below. As the gibbon jabbered on, Matu stared past him to the longhouse far below, where
the warning gong had begun to sound. People fled the building, flitting across the clearing into the forest and the remaining traces of night. Far off, just visible in the morning mist, Batuh’s army glittered in the trees at the mouth of the valley.

  Matu slashed open the gutta percha and lifted the sunken head. With deft knife strokes, he severed jaw muscles and skull fascia and peeled the flesh from the softened bone. Matu whistled for Wawa to lead him to Emang. He slung his medicine bag over his shoulder and attached the rubbery flesh to his blowgun to dry. He followed the gibbon to a boar run through the forest that led to a black pond. Sipping at the still, dark water, Emang rested from his journey. Matu scratched the fly-mizzled folds around the rhino's wet eyes and then climbed onto the beast's hulled back. Wawa hopped on behind, and the big animal lumbered away from the pool, taking its lead from the sorcerer's knees on its thick neck.

  Matu pulled Jabalwan's face flesh over his head. The skin fit snugly, smelling of rotted wood and the menthol of the bone-softening broth. He tied its cut neck flaps with twine, covered that and his shoulders with Jabalwan's long black hair, and urged the rhino faster. Emang barged through a tangle of hanging creepers and bean shrubs, and astonished the Rain Wanderers cowering there, who shouted to behold Jabalwan astride the rhino's back. Ferang recognized Wawa and guessed the ruse. With a war cry, he raised his spear and mustered the warriors hiding in the brush.