“What is that?” he asked.
She wrapped her robe around her and slipped from the bed. She stood at the doorway, and looked back at him as if she were leaving a piece of herself there, with him.
“You will find out tomorrow,” she said, and left him.
15
SEPTEMBER 29
When he awakened, Old Man stood over him.
“Yes?” His head was still muzzy. He patted the sheets, as if disbelieving that an experience so intense could ever end.
“It is time,” Old Man said.
The mine was at a standstill, the conveyor belts motionless. The gigantic factory was almost preternaturally cool and quiet. He scanned the valley, and saw no people, no sign of life.
They walked Aubry down to a skimmer landing pad, where a four-man vehicle awaited. He squeezed in, Old Man right behind him. Its engines thrummed beneath his feet as it spun into the air, taking him up and over the refinery, above the railroad tracks, over the Iron Mountain itself.
Through the window he looked down upon savagely stark valleys, crested with rock and speckled with scrub brush. Off between two peaks, he caught a glimpse of irrigated farmland, green and laid out in checkerboards, stretching off to the horizon.
The skimmer’s humming suddenly became more urgent, and they dropped toward a landing pad on the outskirts of a network of weathered brown brick walls and huts. An immense amphitheater of some kind lay at the north corner of the complex. The amphitheater was at least a hundred meters in diameter, and both ancient and modern in construction: its lower levels were of weathered brick. Its upper levels and the domed roof were of ribbed steel. Even from the air, Aubry could see that there was some sort of a shutter system that could close the dome to the elements. Right now it was open. He thought he saw a flicker of motion from within, but couldn’t be certain.
Hundreds, thousands of people were clustered around the weathered walls. He couldn’t begin to count the throng. As the skimmer landed, his stomach began to sour.
Old Man led him to a corrugated-steel hut at the edge of the complex. “Disrobe,” Old Man said. Aubry complied. Old Man took the clothes and folded them over his arm. “You enter a boy. When you exit, it will be time to become a man.”
He held the door open.
There was no light within, but from the sliver of daylight through the opened door, Aubry could see at least two dozen young men packed into the tiny shed. Wordlessly, they made room for him.
The door closed.
Aubry crouched down, and finally managed to seat himself comfortably.
The heat was killing. Every breath was a struggle. He listened to the breathing of the young men around him, and realized that he wasn’t alone in his suffering. More humbling was the fact that these others had endured longer.
The boy next to him sobbed for breath, and Aubry fought to think of a way to help him. He touched him, shoulder to shoulder, and matched breathing with him. His own breaths were shallow, searing with the heat, but he forced himself to deepen them, deepen until he felt as if he were traveling someplace deep within himself.
Until it felt as if he sat cross-legged on the bottom of a fiery lake. Where he was, there was cool, clear water. Above, there was fire.
Beside him, the boy’s breathing had calmed. Around him in the darkness, one after another of the boys linked into the calm, centered breathing, and escaped the fire.
Aubry sat at the bottom of the lake, breathing smoothly. He felt cool, and at peace. As an experiment, he touched his own cheek with his fingertips.
His fingers burned.
16
When they opened the door, stars filled the sky.
Aubry crawled out and collapsed on the sand. He gasped and stared into the night sky while warm water was sprayed over him.
When he rolled to his knees, his eyes focused on two rows of half-naked men. Each held aloft a flaming torch.
Every young man of the Ibandi was there, in tribal garb, and the sound of the drums beat behind them. Seen like this, in the torch and starlight, in their endless rows, their scarred black cheeks made him feel naked and feminine.
Old Man came to him, and said, “You are a warrior. The scars of your battle were upon your body when first you came to us—we need not put your courage to the test. There is another ceremony which you must complete.”
“I am ready,” Aubry said.
Old Man nodded, and as Aubry stood there, two dark old men came to him. They carried a spear before them, its tip fresh from the fire. It glowed a dull coal red. They extended its searing tip.
Lightning struck his marrow. He smelled his own flesh burn, saw the steam and smoke curling away.
Aubry bit his lip, and tightened his fists into knots. His knees sagged, and the room spun. Air caught raggedly in his throat, and he was certain that he was going to vomit.
Light infused and surrounded him, accompanied by pain so intense that it was a kind of ecstasy.
The glowing spear dipped again. He clenched his stomach muscles, as the world wheeled again and the sky and ground played leapfrog with one another. Then he found his center again, and the world began to steady.…
And then the spear again …
Then repeated three times on the opposite cheek. He still stood tall, but in some odd manner he had passed beyond consciousness. He wasn’t present in the same world and in the same body as the indignities. He sat at the bottom of the burning lake.
Old Man raised his thin arms. “You are men now. You can stop, or go forward. You can be trained for a worker, or a priest. But being a warrior is not about training. It is a thing of the heart, a decision made not over time, but in the depths of understanding. If you choose the path of the Firedance, there is no turning back. Which of our children take this path?”
Of the thirty youths, twelve stepped forward. Aubry hesitated.
Old Man seemed tired. “The Firedance is as ancient as our people. It is Death, it is courage, it is blood. In it, we pit the men of our village against the most awesome natural foe they might face. In times past it was the lion, or the elephant. I have no choice—the test must be terrible. Only one who has endured it can claim to be an Ibandi warrior.”
Only a warrior of the Ibandi could do what Aubry had to do. He could not let anything stop him now. Mira. Bloodeagle. And my God, Jenna.
Someone had to pay. Aubry stepped forward.
17
The base of the wall was of ancient brick, and stone that had been weathered when the pyramids were new.
How exactly do they train their warriors? Koskotas had asked.
We do not know. There are rumors …
And before them was a bed of coals, forty feet long and twelve wide. The air above it shimmered with heat, rolled and wavered like a window into Hell.
To one side, a clutch of women mashed herbs and mushrooms in stainless-steel bowls, dipped gourds in the vile-looking fluid, and handed it out. Aubry was handed a gourd, and drank deeply of the fluid within. It tasted like shit. But he almost immediately sensed the tiny, warning buzz of the Cyloxibin mushroom.
Some of the old, and some of the new. Just another wondrous example of God’s cosmic sense of the absurd.
Some of the substances in that potent brew were as old as the Ibandi themselves. Others were quite new, vegetables that wouldn’t exist at all but for two human beings named Aubry Knight and Promise Cotonou.
Promise …
He drank it, and something within him, some great well of grief, bubbled up and came right to the surface of his consciousness, trying to erupt.
Promise … what have we lost? How much have we paid?…
But another voice whispered to him, whispered quietly, strongly. If you don’t own yourself, you have nothing to give to anyone else. Not Promise. Not Leslie.
Nothing at all.
Aubry drank.
His head began to swim. And he danced.
Right at the edge of the coals, he danced. With the heat searing his lo
incloth, he danced.
His cheeks, newly seared with the marks of manhood, still burned. The worlds whirled. He had barely enough strength to stand, but he danced.
He looked about himself. These were his people. Yet the people of America were his people, too. Black, white. Brown.
But these. Their bodies bent and twisted, so knotted and corded, so muscular, so beautiful. Their faces were his face. Their hearts his heart. And the music that swirled about them, and around them, spoke to some part of him so deep and primal that he barely noticed when the change occurred, when the sour mash he had imbibed began to swell within him, lifting him up to some point above the clouds.
He was light.
He was divinity.
The first of the thirteen initiates began the Rubber Band, dancing with it, the missing rhythm there at last. The last piece of the puzzle, Aubry’s arrhythmical performance of a morning exercise was transformed into terpsichore.
They twisted and hopped … and some far part of Aubry’s mind noticed, almost accidentally, that he was … they all were … upon the coals.
His palms did not burn. His feet did not burn. He moved steadily and smoothly through the motions, and he smelled the singed fibers of his loincloth, but his flesh did not burn. The drums beat and sounded for him, for them, for them all. Aubry was in a place beyond pain, beyond fear, and the fire did not touch him.
A roaring surrounded them, a primitive thunderous wail, something that called from within the amphitheater. A call of challenge older than time. I am here, it called. I am Death. Come to me.
And then it was over.
They stood to the side, and Aubry’s eyes were on the fire, on the terrible pit where the fire burned and wavered in the air, and he heard his own breathing, deep in his chest, and it spoke to him of another man, and another time, and he was separate from himself, watched himself floating up and up away and apart from himself, and hovered there. And watched the thirteen of them.
The old women of Iron Mountain, toothless crones, came to them, and laughed at them, and mocked them, spitting on them.
They did not move.
Then came the old men, men whose hands were crippled, who walked with time-twisted backs, who blinked through rheumy eyes. They carried paddles and switches and whips of braided rope. And they thrashed the young would-be warriors, laboring especially over Aubry, lashing him mercilessly.
None moved.
Then, most cruelly of all, the young women of the village came, and displayed themselves. Thighs and breasts and loins presented boldly, gleaming, undulating, gyrating, with wild cries, and japes.
He noticed that Tanesha was not among them.
And none of the initiates moved—then one boy broke from the ranks, and followed the girl. Right there on the ground, for the sky and all to see, he coupled with her. She laughed over his shoulder as he ground himself into her, hips pumping frantically.
She laughed, and she cried, because she had won, and he had lost, and he would never be a warrior. This was why Tanesha was not there. This was an escape hatch, a ritual of failure, not a lesson.
Aubry ached for the boy, knowing the staggering cost of that moment’s weakness.
The sound of thunder called to the twelve who remained. The earth shook again, and he knew that the time had come.
The gate opened.
The path to the gate was covered with kindling, leading to branches, and from there to a matted floor of logs and shaved wood. He knew that there was a single door, a single door on the far side of the arena, and in times past, between them and the door would be a lion. Or a chained, rogue elephant. Or whatever the elders could acquire to test the mettle of their young warriors. Sometimes chained. Usually not. Maddened by fire. Creatures that must be killed before the fire consumed them all.
His senses were sharper than they had ever been. The entire world narrowed to a pinpoint. Aubry heard the beast’s roar, and knew what he would find within.
18
The beast gleamed, flanks heaving in the firelight. Its tiny dead eyes glared from sixteen feet above them. In his heart, Aubry felt that this was the most beautiful creature that he had ever seen. Dead for sixty million years. Revived through the NipTech nanobots, genetically engineered by machines functioning on the molecular level.
The Tyrannosaurus rex’s stubby nostrils quivered as it sniffed the air. Did some subcellular memory within it quest about, wondering where the swamps and fat-flanked brontosaurs had gone? Was there brain enough behind the sloping brow, within the pebbled flesh to ask what pygmies these were who approached it, twelve weak, tiny, spear-carrying humans…?
Did it feel anything at all? Toward them, or toward the fire that burned behind them? Toward the first of twelve brave lads in that line? This boy had no name, had nothing but hope, and a belief that within him lived a spark of greatness. Even in the face of the greatest predator that ever walked the Earth, his stride was calm.
Nerves and veins seething with the potent brew, Aubry was both terrified and exalted.
But there was a line of fire that each of them had to cross, a line separating the spirit from the flesh.
By striding past the women who used their bodies, the old women who used their laughter, the old men who mocked and beat them …
From love. For what but love could motivate the grandmothers and grandfathers of Iron Mountain to dissuade the children from their terrible destiny? What but love?
Ringing the top of the amphitheater, a hundred men, armed with spears, chanted their excitement. Any young warrior who stepped into this arena would find no retreat, no escape. Here, it was conquer or die.
Aubry’s heart opened to these people, to this magnificent beast, to the world within the Iron Mountain, and most of all, to himself. His emotional skin peeled away to reveal a man he had never known before.
A man who wanted to live and love and laugh.
But first had to kill.
The rex’s jaws flashed down. The teeth snapped shut just a foot away from the first boy. The youth reared back, and the beast squalled as the chain brought it up short. Its great tail thrashed as it spun, seeking a moment of freedom, an inch of slack, any slight opportunity to destroy these fleas.
Behind them, the coals touched the wood chips. The chips smoldered and burst into flames. The logs beyond them began to burn. The initiates weren’t endangered yet—but the threat was real, and nearer every second.
The magnificent beast sniffed the air, and its dead eyes came to life as it sniffed the smoke. Fire it understood.
The King could lie down and die. Or it could kill them all. And die. There were no other options for such a beast. There was fear. There was heat. There was flesh.
The attack began.
And Aubry, in that state outside of his mind, remembered teeth and claws, and the fire creeping up behind them. The rex’s lashing tail almost caught him twice, strobing in the haze. Aubry sprang, higher than he ever had before, over the tail to land lightly on spring-steel quadriceps. He felt no pain, no fatigue.
The spears dug, and the rex was bloodied in a dozen places, but unslowed. Two of the young warriors were down, unmoving … no, one of them groaned and cried.
Atop the arena, the spearmen stared down pitilessly.
A spear rolled from the hand of the dead man. Aubry snatched it up, and looked at the left side of the terrible, wonderful beast. As he stared at it, it seemed to expand, filled his field of vision until the only thing that existed in his world was its dark, cold eye. Its head shifted, Aubry’s hand and eyes in synch, until he felt a part of it.
He knew this tyrant king. His ancestors had known it, cluttering things that were the size of squirrels when beasts the size of houses ruled the Earth. Back that far, before anything with the awareness of life had lived, he and this thing had known each other. Sixty million years before man it had lived, but within Aubry was the germ of cells older than man. Something that understood. That had always fled from creatures such as the Ki
ng. That hid in shadow, and upon occasion ate the eggs of such beasts.
The spirit of a million generations of living things witnessed this moment. That place within him was tired of waiting, impatient now to come face to face with fears older than thought. It guided Aubry’s arm, so that the cast began in his legs, which pulled their strength from the earth. The cast twisted at the hips, and whipped the shoulder forward. He loosed the spear.
It flew true, and buried itself in the beast’s eye.
The rex reared up, howling anguish and rage and perhaps, at last, fear.
This thing from the deepest depths of their nightmares feared men! And all of the young warriors heard it in the rex’s cry. Fear. And Aubry’s heart sang: There lives within you a force equal to the most terrible creature ever to walk the Earth!
The rex threw itself at them, the spear waggling from its bloodied, ruptured eye socket like a flagpole. The tail smashed at another young warrior and he howled, nerve breaking, trying to flee up the wall of the amphitheater. The spearmen on the wall pushed and poked him back down, hooting. He fell sprawling into the flames and screamed, racing up blindly, his hair burning—directly into the range of the blood-maddened, half-blinded rex.
Its head, as large as the cab of a truck, lunged down and snapped, the teeth clacking shut. Half the boy’s body protruded from its jaws. The legs twitched spastically, intestines sliding down the front of his loincloth like Christmas treats exploding from a ruptured piñata.
But one of the other boys lunged in while the head was low, and thrust with his spear. And then another.
Blood flowed from a terrible gash above the single, unblinking eye. The beast scraped at its eye with those ridiculous forepaws, trying to clear its sight. But the gash was deep, and although it blinked and wiped, it could no longer see.
There were nine young warriors remaining, nine against this thing resurrected from their darkest fantasies. Behind them, the flames crackled, nearer now. The rex stopped, shook its head until the dangling human legs fell free. It stood tall, head cocked slightly to the side, smelling the air, feeling its wounds, and perhaps in some saurian manner singing its own death song.
Firedance Page 30