Jaki fished and hunted with Blackheart to avoid Perdita's flirtations and Pym's dark moods. He fashioned a thumb ring of the amber brooch Lucinda Quarles had given him, and he fantasized about shipping himself to Singapore to find her. That was death. Riri had taught him that. If Lucinda was to be his woman, the Life would lead him to her. So he contented himself with fishing the ancient rivers and wandering the jungle valleys with Blackheart and Wawa. In a jungle dawn’s fog, he remembered Njurat and his legacy as Matubrembrem, the last of the sorcerers.
"You want plunder?" he asked Pym over lunch that day. "I can lead you to a chamber filled with diamonds big as walnuts."
Pym lowered his glass. “Where?”
"Borneo."
"What is this treasure — these diamonds?"
"The treasure belongs to me," Jaki told him. "I am Matubrembrem, son of the devil and heir to the misfortunes and wealth of my tribal people. These diamonds are mountains' tears, shed for grief of the clouds' spelled stories. They were shed for me. All we need do is climb the mountain to the cavern where they are hidden. No one will dispute my claim to them. No fighting is necessary. We need only enough crew to sail Silenos to the north coast of Borneo. I can lead us from there."
"How many diamonds?"
"More than we can carry. Enough to buy a fleet of ships. Enough to build an empire of our own."
"And Perdita —"
"You know yourself that she will be safer from Quarles if you are not here when he arrives," Jaki reasoned. "Iduna is a sovereign kingdom and amply armed."
Pym's shark grin came and went. "Hmm, even if we succeed in getting the diamonds, we face the challenge of transporting them back here without a full crew."
"That's a challenge for a captain the likes of Trevor Pym."
Pym fixed Jaki with a cloudgray stare. "Is it the Life?"
"For a pirate."
*
With a skeleton crew, Silenos avoided the busy sea lanes of the Sulu Sea and sailed through the Cuyo Archipelago. Long clouds ribbed the sky the afternoon they drifted into a cliffside cove on Borneo's north shore. No sign of the Muslim tribes had showed anywhere along the jagged coast for many miles, and Jaki stood in the forecastle and shouted the traditional sorcerer's greeting into the whickering wind: "People of the forest, hear me! I am the soul-taker from the spirit world outside the tribes! I watch the clouds in the hands of heaven with their backs to the earth. I read the prophecy that returns with the rains. I am Matubrembrem — and I have returned to take what is mine. Show yourselves!"
A kavon bleated from the cliffs, and an answering cry spooled down with the wind. Jaki recognized the call of a western tribe that he and Jabalwan had twice visited, and the legend of his early life brightened in him. He called down the tribe, and by sunfall the beach blazed with huge fires illuminating dancers, musicians and long food mats. The pirate crew, who had never seen true forest people, lost their belligerence and behaved with an almost reverent delight to find themselves so honorifically fêted and regally entertained.
Warriors, in fur pelts, colorful plumes, and gleaming zigzag paint, approached for the sorcerer’s blessing. They looked dangerously fierce to the pirates, who stopped eating. The warriors moved to the rhythms of their drums and gongs like licks of fire. When Jaki danced with them, incorporeal as smoke, Pym and Blackheart recognized the unpredictable movements of his fighting style. All else familiar about him vanished, and he became a sinuous shape of flame in the ancestral night.
The feast concluded at midnight, and the crew retreated to Silenos. Jaki stayed with the people, chanting in the light of the dying fire the incantations Jabalwan had taught. The tribe wanted him to return with them to their longhouse to visit with the ailing. He would not. He had come to escort the one-eyed monkey god straight into the mountains to retrieve the mountains' tears and take away as much of the land's suffering as they could carry. Jaki's life as a jungle sorcerer had ended at the Snakehunter's Grave when the Lanun killed him. Since then, he explained, he had been reborn in the sea world of his fathers, where the Life taught him new mysteries.
He did not tell them of his nostalgia for the forest. Smelling orchid smoke coiling with the night breezes, he thought of returning to the jungle and staying. The amber ring on his thumb itched at those wistful thoughts, and he knew then he could never go back. Freedom is effort, he heard an echo of Jabalwan's voice in his memory. If he stayed, he would never be free. Even returning for this adventure endangered him. Here the future was still unbegun and the past demanding, stronger than hope, stronger than question, almost stronger than life. The asphodel ring and its promise of a life of love, a future with a woman who would complete him as a man, had become his talisman against the allure of the past. He clutched it to his breast, and Jabalwan's ghost-voice sharpened: Freedom is effort — and it feeds our hearts.
*
At dawn, Pym relinquished command of Silenos to Blackheart with instructions to sail for Iduna if he did not return after the span of a moon. He selected three hardy sailors and rowed to the beach to meet Jaki. The forest people had taken Jaki's European clothes and given him a pantherskin loincloth and an anklet of tortoiseshell and snake sinew to strap his metal knife to his calf. He rubbed his blowgun with nut oil and sharpened the white edge of the bamboo speartip. He had painted his body green and yellow with black contour lines, so that his limbs and torso gleamed serpent slick and the bones of his face projected aberrant beauty, skullsharp.
Pym faced him now with a tremor of apprehension. Jaki seemed alien; only his blue eyes distinguished him from the heathens who surrounded the sorcerer with proprietary closeness. The men with hair coarse as coconut fur and broad, flat, ugly features had alert, animal eyes.
"You look fearsome, lad," Pym said, his hand on his cutlass.
"This is a fierce land," Jaki told him, and handed him a gourd packed with yellow paste. "You'd best paint your hands and face with this, captain. Otherwise the insects will eat you before we get to the mountains."
The forest people led them into the jungle. Pym and his men stayed close to Jaki, who seemed to grow thinner and almost transparent in the forest light.
Wawa flew through the canopy, ecstatic to be home after more than a year away, and he pounced upon favorite fruits and insects. Pym watched the gibbon disappear into the heights, and though accustomed to staring into the very cope of heaven from the topmast crosstrees, he dizzied to look up at the towering trees. A mite among the buttressed roots of these giants, he reclaimed his true stature. Ant nests chimneyed taller than men, bromelias dangled in the gloom like hairy hung heads, and huge blood-red flowers with the stench of rotting meat hazed the air with flies.
Subhuman masks glared at them from the chaos of vines and air plants — monkey troops aghast at their trespass, screeching and barking and scattering into the verdant shadows. Fretful birdcalls tolled and clicked like mad knitting needles. Jaki whistled, and the noise ceased. An eagle flapped through the sunshafts and alighted on a thin branch above them, watching. Jaki whistled again, and it cocked an eye and whistled back at him before lofting above the canopy. Pym craned his neck, clearly impressed. Jaki smiled to see the formidable pirate captain big-eyed with reverence.
The men slept that night on the leaf beds Jaki prepared for them, and after they dozed he climbed into the canopy and watched the stars feeding on darkness, looking for a sign that what he had come to do pleased the spirits of the sorcerers who had preceded him. The bone of moon set, and bats whirred. "What is hidden everywhere," he murmured in the darkness, "cannot be lost. Jabalwan, my teacher — are you anywhere but everywhere?" No sign came. A star fell, and clouds freighted by in black windwaves. No good omen showed itself— and no bad one, either.
Days led the party through the forest; nights submerged them in exhausted sleep. Nine days after leaving the ship, they reached the steep trails that led into the mountains and the sorcerers' high roads. The pirates gladdened to leave the steamy jungle behind and feel again the com
motions of the wind.
From his nearly fatal first visit to Njurat, Jaki remembered to bring an ample supply of water, and the cold desert crossing turned out less arduous than he had feared. They arrived at the hot spring oasis after only two days and a night on the barren slopes. Instead of the precarious chute Jaki originally had climbed to enter Njurat, a grassy path led them into a paradisial grotto of willow and cypress trees.
Pym danced a jig on a blue moss sward, and his men yodeled their amazement at this garden on the roof of the world. The pirates followed Jaki charily through a grove of scaly fern trees and among boiling mud pools to the crater rim paths, where pink, long-legged birds faced them fearlessly. Wawa rushed ahead into the warmth, and Jaki waited for him to call out the presence of other men. The gibbon found no others. They entered alone into Njurat.
*
While the men luxuriated in the grove, Jaki and Pym searched for a way into the mountain of black slabs that backed the grotto. Together they crawled down into the fissure before the narrow cave entrance where Jaki had once deceptively refused the strong eye. Pym shook his head at the tight passage. "I'd never fit through there." Toward sundown they finally found the rockslab door that Jaki had exited on his last visit, and Pym hollered for his men. Together, bent-shouldered against the rock, they nudged the monolith open a crack, wide enough for them to squeeze through singly. The air smelled baked, and the men hesitated. "It's almost night," one of them breathed, and gestured to the apocalypse of sunfire and rain clouds on the horizon of mountains.
"It is always night where we are going," Jaki said, and led the way in. Pym grabbed the back of his loincloth and followed. The others edged after him, clutching on to each other's clothes.
Jaki fastened candles to the speartip of his blowgun and held the bright flame ahead of them. In the flimmering light, the stone walls looked glassy with rocksweat. Jaki and the pirates stepped lightly, yet the startled echoes of their movements throbbed like old aches. Tongues of candleflame wagged with the air sighing through the open portal, then went perfectly still as they moved deeper into the dark. The ground sloped around curves of leprous boulders and drool-shaped stalactites and pillars.
The darkness went darker. The walls fell away, and they entered a giant cavern. Jaki recognized the dragon pit where he had confronted the immense stone-shaped lizard and her brood of hatched eggs. The resin candles threw too weak a light to illuminate the pit, and Jaki led the men around the depression toward the corridor that housed the torches.
All at once, channels grooved into the rock floor ran with blue fire. Icy flames circled the cavern, and the bowl of oil in the pit ignited brightly. The grimacing dragon skull lunged from the darkness, ablaze in the blue light. Pym and his men shouted — the giant skull bodied forth the horrifying actuality of Wyvern. "What devils’ work is this?" Pym gasped. “Who lit this pitch? You?”
Jaki shook his head and pointed down. Human figures stood in the pit, faces stark white, tempestuous ghost shadows, eyes jerking with sparks.
Two of the crewmen screamed at the sight of the numbfaced specters, and one bolted, arms flailing. A dart struck him in the back of the neck, and he dropped, choked on a scream, and lay still.
"Do not move!" Jaki said, laying down his spear. "Take off your sword belts — quickly!"
Pym and the two sailors, numb with fright, unbuckled their swords and dropped them. The impassive white faces of the dozen men in the pit fixed on Jaki. One of them spoke. And though they could not understand him, the pirates heard the stern command in his voice.
"Matubrembrem, you have returned for one purpose," the skull-painted face said.
"You know my purpose, soul-catcher?" Jaki asked, desperately trying to keep his voice steady.
"We know." The dozen faces looked like submerged bones in the wavery light. "You are the last of the sorcerers, the orphaned son, fathered of strange seed. The prophecies minted you in the pitiful first days of creation. You are the one who has shamelessly chosen death before Life. In you, the prophecies have become history. Now we are ghosts, dutiless in the sunken world. And you are what is left. You are the desperate life of the end, getting and forgetting all that we have been. Thus we knew that you would return. For you did not fulfill the prophecy here at the center of the world. You did not meet the mother of life." The soul-catcher raised skeletal arms to the enormous monster head slavering over her broodlings. "And the proud blood of the earth will not be denied."
"What does the mother of life want of me?" Jaki asked, voice flat now with resignation.
"What you denied her when last you met her." The dozen men each held up a wafer of bread speckled with dark color. "The strong eye."
Jaki had scanned the chamber while the soul-catcher spoke, and he had spotted warriors in the rock crevices who had killed the fleeing crewman. Escape was unthinkable. The choice was death or the strong eye.
"I am Matubrembrem," he said forcefully, feeling the alertness in the many watchful eyes. "I have come to fulfill the prophecy. Escort these three men out of here, and I will wear the strong eye."
"Matubrembrem and the devil gods who have accompanied him will wear the strong eye," the soul-catcher said, stepping up from the pit and holding out the wafer of mushroom bread. "The mother of life will decide who leaves the center of the world — and who stays."
Pym and the two crewmen seized by the sorcerers looked to Jaki with anguished incomprehension. "They will not harm you," Jaki told them urgently, "if you do exactly as they command. They want you to eat their mushroom bread."
"That's all?" one of the crewmen blurted, his face warping with withheld tears.
"It stinks of poison," Pym protested as the wafer wafted before his lips.
"It is not poison," Jaki assured them. "It is a dreaming mushroom mixed with the bread. We will be sick together. But I promise you, no harm will come to you if you stay calm and let the mushroom have its way."
The crewmen whimpered and opened their mouths as the skeletal sorcerers pinned their arms behind them. Pym struggled, and his arms twisted sharply until he screamed and the bread stoppered his cry. Jaki, a sorcerer, could touch the holy bread with his hands, and he remembered with regret the strong eye that Jabalwan had presented to him on his first visit to Njurat and that he had slyly discarded. He ate the wafer given him — and the soul-catcher handed him another.
"You will kill us," Jaki said, staring harshly into the witchery of the soul-catcher's painted face.
"The mother of life will decide that, Matubrembrem."
Jaki ate the wafer, and another came to him. He ate that one, and accepted a fourth before the sorcerers led him down into the pit to sit among the hatched eggs under the dragon mother. The pirates, too, ate four wafers then descended into the pit and sat beside the bowl of blue-burning oil.
"You will stay here until the mother frees you," the sorcerer told Jaki. "If any of you vomits, you die." He gestured to the twisted corpse of the pirate. "As I speak, our brothers in caverns below dismantle the foundations of Njurat as foretold by the first people. Soon, this place of sorcery ends. Our final rite for the mother is you, devil's child: you will finally hear the prophecy you are perfecting, spoken as it came to us from the first sorcerers."
The ghost-painted sorcerer closed his eyes and intoned with ritual zeal: "The end circles from the beginning through the smoke of the air. The living dead arrive from across the sea, from the long night of the north, and the end circles from the beginning. Their history is the death of kings. Their god is a dead king. They bring with them the north bound in bright stone. They melt the north like wax. They melt the north and shape it into spears harder than stone. Their spears kill without leaving their hands. They are death's promise. Their hearts are axes. Their faces are flames. They strengthen our enemies. They defeat us. The dead are their triumph. They spawn on our women witnesses to our end — devil children whose eyes are the shadow of the sky, whose eyes are the color of tears. One will choose the Life above his m
other and leave her though he is her only child. When he appears, the bright anniversaries written on the clouds arrive at their end. He is the last of the people of the waking dream. He is the end of revelation. He will look twice and see the many-born in the black night of the blood. He will see the end that is fire and the love that imagines the world and the wish of love that closes the world in fire. He meets us in Heaven's Flight where the future gathers its pieces. He meets us on the sacred ways in the joining place of end and beginning. And mystery will descend with him and reclaim the ancestors. And the people of the waking dream will be no more."
The soul-catcher walked into the shadows, and the grotto shook, sizzling with trickles of loosened dirt. Jaki stared into the cowl of darkness above them. Vaporous colors flitted through the shadows, and a wave of nausea mounted in him. He knew that too much of the dreaming mushroom provoked convulsions, paralyzed breathing, and killed. What could they do now? They would have to trust in the mushroom.
"I feel sick," one of the crewmen moaned.
"You must stay calm," Jaki spoke to him, laying a hand on his arm. The man's chilled flesh rippled with turgid energy. "Do not give in to your sickness. If we foul this sacred place, surely we will be killed. Stay calm. Soon the dreaming will pass. Remember that. Nothing endures, not even this robust dream."
His words sounded muffled by the mourning noise of his heart. Pym watched with a sharp, knowing eye. They were going to die, and he would not be deceived.
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