The longhouse showed among the trees in the distance, and Matu could see Batuh before the notched log stairway exhorting the troops, his sword stabbing at heaven. Matu goaded the rhino into a full charge with a strong cry. Emang galloped, and trees to either side blurred as the beast cannoned into the clearing.
The nearest men got swept under the hurtling hulk and trampled. Others leaped aside with amazed shouts, and the crowd of warriors scattered. Jabalwan's name jumped through the throng, growing louder and wilder with horror. Muskets barked, and powder clouds smoked on all sides. The pellets stung Emang's hide and spurred it faster through the raging noise and confusion.
Batuh stood fast before the longhouse. He drove his sword into the earth and lifted his fire-spear. The slug sucked past Matu's ear, and he raised his spear. The rhino approached the longhouse in a thunderous sprint. Men leaped from the verandah, leaving Batuh standing alone.
Decisively, Matu pulled back on Emang’s ears, and the hurtling giant slowed to a trot. Matu leaped off, his spear leveled before him.
Batuh shouted his disbelief. "You are a trick!" He dropped the musket and grabbed his sword. With a slash he cut through the thrusting speartip.
Matu threw the blowgun aside and stood facing Batuh's naked sword.
"I see you in your mask, boy," Batuh taunted. "Come" — he waved Matu closer — "and you will join your teacher."
A rush of wind carried Matu forward, surprising him with the danger of his move. Batuh's sword swung, and Matu twisted aside as the blade gashed past. Exhilaration grabbed his heart with awareness that the spirit wind moved him.
Time seemed to stop. Matu fixed on the twitch of emotion in his opponent's face as Batuh turned the blade toward him again. "Go ahead, jump. I'm going to stick you with this even if you jump like a toad." He showed his pointy teeth. His nostrils widened, and his cunning face pushed forward. "This is your father's sword, Matubrembrem. He gave it to me when I became chief. And now it will kill his bastard." Batuh exploded into a stabbing lunge.
Matu again nudged aside just enough for the blade to cut past his shoulder, glazing his flesh with its wind. The moment focused to a pivot of imbalanced forces, a stressed instant already exploding into the next movement as Batuh turned the blade to slash. Matu perceived the weakness in Batuh's extended swordarm. He reached out, grabbed the stout man by his neck and shoulder, and heaved him into the ground.
Batuh sprawled in the dirt, sword twisting from his hand and spinning loose. Matu grabbed it and flicked the blade at Batuh, who rolled away and rose to his knees, his face clawed with frustration. The sorcerer feinted with a jab that jerked the man's head back; then, he brought the sword around in a whistling arc that hacked into the side of Batuh's neck. The chief collapsed face down. Matu put a foot on his back and with a double-handed blow, lopped off Batuh's head.
Anguished yells rose from the awed crowd, and Matu lifted the scowling face for all to see. The treeline rang with a war cry, and the Rain Wanderers came running into the clearing waving their wood swords and spears. The Tree Haunters ran for the mouth of the valley, and Matu, holding Batuh's head up with the sword, rode the rhino out of the glade behind the fleeing army.
Sunlight spun emeralds in the forest canopy. Matu steered Emang through a wall of flowering lianas where a tree had fallen and light touched the earth. In the shadows on the far side, he removed Jabalwan's face, kissed its leathery mouth, and threw it into the leaf duff where small animals would devour it before dark.
Batuh's head he carried to Long Apari and posted on the wharf, where it remained until the birds had torn all the flesh from it.
*
Emang carried Matu from Long Apari east along the Great Dawn Running River, his father's sword at his hip, Gefjon's shrunken head angling from a twine looped about his neck.
Rage and sorrow beat in the boy's blood. Why had he lived and a true sorcerer died? Why must he endure each inch of pain on the pitiful road to death? For occasional scraps of orgasm? For the glutted satisfaction of a full meal? For the weariness of old age? Why live at all? Life is secret. Only death is certain and easy to know.
Matu studied his own face in a languid river. He appeared grotesque. His features had become harsh as lightning-chewed rock: his nose jutted instead of spreading wide and flat; his chin thrust out, dented in the middle, so unlike the smooth curve of the beautiful people. And his eyes — so pale, so void, lacked all earth color as if hatched from the sky. Why should this face live? The hollows of his cheeks recalled his mother's image. Jabalwan had been right to bless her with an easy death. Now he wanted the same blessing for himself. He knew he could not have it. He had given himself to the Life, and death would have to find him as it had found Jabalwan. He would live as his teacher had taught him — and he determined never again to haunt himself or others with this need to understand.
He soaked the Book in a river pool until the pages came apart. He carried them to a flat boulder and used a razorflake of volcanic rock to cut out each word. The task took days, and when accomplished he had a grass sack full of words. Matu continued his journey into the rising sun. At each village he visited, he dispensed the words as charms against evil. He placed words on the tongues of the dying, pasted them with fever sweat to their foreheads, glued them with blood to their wounds. In plague villages he enlisted the help of all the able and pasted hundreds of words to all the tools, utensils, weapons, even the garden plants. By the time he reached the sea, he had used up every word. All that remained of the Book was its black leather cover, scrawled inside with the names of Gefjon and his family.
Matu said goodbye to Emang on the beach where van Noot and Gefjon had first traded with the tribes. He knew he would never return to the Rain Wanderers. Remote and primitive, they endured, safe now from the monkeyfaces who had spawned him and empowered Batuh. Matu decided he would give his life to the southern tribes suffering the most from the scourge of the monkeyfaced invaders.
One moon later, on a white-rock beach known as the Snakehunter's Grave, Matu watched a Lanun djong ride into the bay light as a petal. He stood in the shadow at the fringe of the jungle and scrutinized the pirates sloshing ashore. They waded closer, still too far away to hit him with their muskets. They wore filthy breeches and red rags around their heads, their faces splotched with whiskers. Devil faces that mock the human visage. They seemed to embody the very sickness killing the tribes.
One of them spotted him and immediately unslung his weapon and aimed. Matu waited for someone to hand the gunman a fuse. He had never seen a flintlock before. The gun smoked, blackness struck him between the eyes and flung his body into the lap of the jungle.
Part Two:
Wyvern and The Fateful Sisters
Humanity must perforce prey on itself.
— William Shakespeare
Cat’s-paw clouds filled the sky, streaked by a high wind and blue with watershine. Matu rocked awake. A sunburst daggered his sight, and he glimpsed a green lug sail bellied with wind. He raised his head, and the effort almost blacked him out. His skull felt broken — and a sharp needling in his ankles and wrists held him fast.
Through squinted eyelids he made out a grime-stained tiller and a gruesome helmsman missing fingers. Matu looked the other way along the deck and observed a crowd of scrawny men with hair hanging in tendrils from sweatdark headbands. Eyes bruised red, faces sharp as rats’.
Lanun.
Rancid aromas twined in the wind, sour whisks of fish waste, sweat, and urine. He counted eighteen men. A harelipped face swung closer. The split mouth spit words Matu did not understand. Other demented faces approached, and he noted the lice-scabs in their patchy beards and the gray stains of dried salt on their sun-black skin.
The charred faces pulled back then pressed closer, amazed at his pale eyes. The pirates jabbered in a hacking singsong, asking him questions and laughing at his befuddlement. A shout in his right ear turned his head, and he confronted a face with a slimy hole where its nose had been. The
crusty upper lip peeled back from a rotted smile, and the pirate held up the gold-tufted head of Pieter Gefjon.
Matu closed his eyes. His mind raced, and he had to speak strongly with himself to keep his terror from devouring him. You are a sorcerer. No evil can defeat you. No matter the fear. No matter the pain. You are already dead to this world. Let the pirates have your body. You belong with Jabalwan now. No evil can defeat you.
When he opened his eyes again, a knife twisted before his face in rhythm to the choppy noise of the noseless man's voice. Matu looked past the man and the amused crew, to sunclusters on the sea as the boat rose and fell with the chop. Nausea whirled in him, and he squeezed his eyes shut. Ripples of motion waved in the shadows under his lids and seemed to blend with the waves of stink from the men around him. His head throbbed where the lead ball had glanced his skull. His gorge shot into the back of his mouth, and he vomited saliva and bile.
The captain, a massive, bald man with thistly beard, sliteyes under a tigerskin headband, and a scimitar strapped to his muscled back, ordered the boy cut loose. Seasickness bound the blond aborigine now. Matu tried to stand, and his legs folded and dropped him to the rolling deck. The captain ordered that the boy be kept alive, for he wanted him for the slavers in Sangihe across the Celebes Sea. A white youth as able-bodied as this would fetch twelve taels of silver.
Matu curled up at the stern and lay shuddering with queasiness, watching the noseless man comb the hair on Gefjon's head with his stained fingers. Beyond him, sailors turned his medicine bag inside out, strewing its contents over the filthy deck: fingers of roots, hairy tubers, leafrolls, serpent vertebrae glowing like butterflies. They nailed the cover of the Book upside-down through its spine to the mast, and smeared the gold cross embossed on it with fish offal.
In the fifty years since the big ships had first appeared in the southern seas, Europeans had been scattered among the islands by shipwrecks and pirates. Some of this crew had white sailors among their aboriginal, Muslim, Hindu, and Asian ancestors. A blond native, however, was rare. Most of the crew had seen blond hair only on scalps, and they plucked at the youth's long locks and tugged at his loincloth to examine his genitals.
Head pounding, Matu felt helpless against the pirates darting their hands at him, pointing at his nakedness. When the noseless one touched Matu's thigh, he shoved him away; nausea stymied his movements and the crew hooted with glee. Two of them seized him by his arms and dragged him forward, bending him over a stinking barrel of gurry water. He struggled, and the pirates laughed louder, their hands grabbing and stroking him.
The captain ignored the crew, even when a man mounted the tribesman and jigged over him in a lusty frenzy. Several days under sail lay ahead, and the blond native provided amusement. He would let three sailors have the boy today and maybe three more tomorrow.
Matu fixed his mind on his father's sword, which the captain had taken for himself when he recognized the Spanish swordmaker's mark at the base of the blade. The boy tried to draw strength from the weapon that had killed the enemy of his tribe, yet the spirit wind did not rise in him. And the harder he bucked to throw off the bestial men grasping and debauching him, the louder the pain blared from his joints. He shouted the Rain Wanderers' war cry, and the pirates exulted.
After the third sailor had broken his lust against Matu's fierce struggles, the captain ordered him bound again. During the night, other men fondled the prisoner, and the captain, just to keep an eye on him and keep him whole, finally had the youth tied to the mast, arms stretched out on the lower spar like the crucified god his pale ancestors worshiped.
*
At dawn, as they cut down the aborigine to pass him along to the men who had won him by lot for that day, the watch at the prow cried out in alarm. A large ship swooped down on them from the south. With its black sails, it had approached unseen in the last hour of night. The captain and crew squinted to make out the big ship's flag. Matu read it first — heavy canvas stretched taut at the top of the masts and emblazoned with the image of a man-shaped dragon with wings.
"Wyvern!" the watch screamed, and the whole crew moaned and seemed to shrink on their skeletons.
The sound of their dismay inspired Matu, and when they tried to bind him again, he shook off the torpor of his night on the mast and swung out with all his might, knocking aside two men. The crew scrambled for their battle stations, and he leaped from the mast's scaffolding to the deck. His nerves sparked with the knowledge that this could well be his death. He snatched a parang from one of the crew and turned to confront six men with knives and swords converging on him. He faced them with a viper's concentration, parang tip trembling.
A rib-clacking roar rent the dawn, and the junk's mast sheared away in a cloud of splinters. Two of the pirates dropped to the deck. Matu shoved himself against the tilt of the ship and attacked the pirates closest to him, hacking with furious blind speed. All at once he confronted the noseless pirate, who wore Gefjon's head strung on its vine. The pirate had a machete in one hand and a kris in the other, and he grinned with the demented abandon of a man who knew he was already dead.
Matu could see the huge, black-sailed ship behind the madman, rearing above the tiny junk. Men swinging on lines dropped to the decks of the djong with cutlasses flailing. Musketfire crackled from above, and pirates spun off their feet under spouts of blood. The sight flared the killing fire in Matu, and he threw his parang like a spear, stabbing the pirate before him through his nosehole. He drew the blade, and quickly removed the twine loop with Gefjon's head. Looping the amulet around his neck, he shouted his warrior cry.
The huge ship slammed into the junk. Timber flew, and the deck lifted steeply, sending Matu toppling. He flipped over corpses and sprawled to the prow. Staggering upright, he met the baleful lour of the Lanun captain. The hulking man had van Noot's sword raised over his head, and he brought it down so hard that it split the prow's rail as Matu leaped aside.
The captain twisted the blade free just as Matu swung at him, and their two weapons clashed in a ringing tremor. The pirate pushed Matu off his feet, slapping the breath out of him. Matu swung his legs, trying to kick the pirate, but the massive man was sturdy as a tree. He snagged Matu's legs between his ankles and held him tightly for the death blow. The sword hung up, barbing dawnlight at the peak of its arc, then stiffened as if hitting an invisible barrier. Blood spilled from the giant's ears, and he keeled to his side, the back of his head sundered, glittering with ropy brains. The junk lurched, and he dropped overboard, still clutching the Spanish sword.
Matu stared up at the big ship towering alongside and regarded a scowling black figure with silver hair in flying rattails, a red patch over his left eye, and a long mustache dangling with bonebeads. The large man waved his musket, signaling Matu to come aboard. He pointed to one of the lines that had swung from the side of the warship where men already hauled away the junk's meager provisions in a voluminous net.
The pirate could not believe his one eye: a naked, fair-haired youth with a shrunken head about his neck and a parang in his hand dripping Lanun blood. He leaned over the rail to grasp every detail of the queer sight before him. Wind streamed Matu's blond hair behind, and the pirate frowned into the clear eyes and arrogant bones of the youth's face as into a mirage.
All of the Lanun crew slain, the junk listed as the sea rushed in below deck. Matu bounded over the corpses of his tormentors to the jagged stump of the mast and found the Book's cover still nailed to the shattered wood. He pried off the black leather with his parang and secured it across his torso with a strip of cloth. He searched for his medicine bag among the heaped bodies and shattered planks and found his blowgun lying tangled in the nets under the gunwales. The deck tilted sharply, and Matu grabbed the blowgun and clambered for the dangling rope. Swirling like a monkey with the blowgun clasped between his legs, he squirmed up the rope. The eyepatched man who had saved his life offered a sturdy, callus-barked hand and pulled him aboard.
Close up,
Matu noticed the man's forehead brand: the cicatrix of a snake coiled in a figure eight. Diamond chips studded his red eyepatch, shaping an asp's eye. An unearthly music chimed deep in the wells of Matu's ears, and he realized that this was the one-eyed, snake-browed man he had seen in countless nightmare visions from the time he had given his hand to the Spider. This outlandish figure even dressed in the shadow and blood colors he had worn in Matu's nightmares: a black doublet with silver buttons and slit seams exposing a red silk blouse. He wore black knee breeches above gray stockings and low, flaring brown boots lined in scarlet. A cutlass hung from his side, and a pearl dagger handle stuck from the cuff of a boot. Matu swayed before him, stunned by this collusion of vision and reality.
The pirate stared back with his one gray eye, scrutinizing the shrunken head dangling from Matu's neck. The rest of the crew had seen it, too, and they studied the sorcerer grimly. Matu leaned his blowgun on his shoulder and slowly raised his hands in tribal greeting. The one-eyed man grinned a yellow-toothed smile and clapped the youth on the shoulder. "The lad doesn't look to be a scoundrel, mates," he shouted in Malay to the crew. "I say we have him aboard."
Cheers leaped from the men. These first true monkeyfaces Matu had seen close up moved him with their hideous faces and oversized bodies. The snakebranded pirate pointed to the Book's cover, and Matu untied it from his side and handed it to him. The man's good eye widened at the sight of the clear Latin script within: I have seen the lion of the final moment — it guards the mine of signature. He leveled a hard stare at Matu and asked something in his thick voice.
Matu gestured his incomprehension and searched back for the phrases his mother had taught him lifetimes ago. "I speak some Spanish," he said hesitantly, the rust of the words catching in his throat.
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