A caravanmaster promises his merchants speed, safety, and thrift. Knowing this, now suppose some man comes whining to Master Suresh l’Merqerim. This man claims they must all take a months-long, budget-busting detour across the continent. Hmm, and on what basis? the master shall quite reasonably ask. Rumor and surmise, is the answer he receives. Well, says the master, extemporizing (for he considers himself a man of wide, deep wits, and so does not dismiss any counsel out of hand, but first weighs the credibility of his source); and whom does Master Suresh l’Merqerim find before him? What wild-eyed woebetider? Just a lowly guardsman—oh, you know the one! That so-called “Sorcerer” fellow, who hails from some green yonder off the very maps of civilization.
Demane’s consternation was plain to see.
Kaffalah half-smiled. “You got all that, right?” He lifted his brows as if to say Yeah, bruh: he be wearing me out too. “It come in the night, so I never did see it myself. I just heard the roar a couple times. Not a lion, though I really couldn’t tell you what. Like this—” The brother’s jaw dropped: the merchant jumped, and the crowd nearby spooked en masse. Demane’s flesh pebbled and chilled at Kaffalah’s uncanny mimicry. “One brother did tangle with it, and got chewed up pretty bad. Before he died, the brother said it was some kind of dark color. Not black. What he said . . .”—Kaffalah squinted and shook his head, acknowledging that his report could only be met with incredulity—“. . . that it was . . .”
“Green,” Demane said in Merqerim; then, in his own tongue: “Jukiere.” Cumalo came up and slung an arm over Demane’s shoulder, nosily leaning in.
“Jooker?” Kaffalah said. “What’s that?”
“You know!” Demane looked from Kaffalah to the merchant. “Jukiere. Big tooth, like lion, but only eat pork pork and . . . we pork.”
The merchant frowned. “Speak sense, man. Who can understand what you are trying to say?”
Demane said, “Cumalo! What is their word for jukiere?”
“Jook-toothed tiger.” Cumalo’s Merqerim was excellent. “They are big cats and prey only on boar and people—they don’t care which. Want a fresh kill every night, too.”
“Jook-toothed tiger? The wizard cats? Do you mean the demons with teeth like this?” The merchant held an index finger curling down at either side of his mouth like outsized fangs. Briefly, he gave them a look of suspended disbelief, as one does when ready to laugh, provided the punchline proves good, and quickly forthcoming. Then the merchant became angry. “An old bush legend. Mere superstitious nonsense! There is no such thing as a jook-toothed tiger.”
Ah, but there was. We, humanity, have our predators too, sir: and bred to the purpose. When the oceans swallowed the island, and the gods wicked and kind returned to heaven in their Towers, they left behind many children, powers that were benign and wrong, both. Among the worst were the wizard cats. The jukiere are clawed like lions, with teeth more terrible; as strong as bears, but wasteful and capricious killers, like polecats. And I’ve not yet spoken of their mastery of maleficia . . . in his own tongue, yes, Demane could have said all this and more. The best he could do in Merqerim, however: “Jooker, them . . . bad. Bad animal.” He turned in frustration to Cumalo. “Will you please tell this fool that a bush legend ate up seven men from his caravan!”
Cumalo answered in Merqerim. “Maybe he’s right, Sorcerer. I never heard of any jook-toothed tiger over here, this side of the continent.”
The merchant had done with such folly. From already a few steps away: “Kaffalah!” He snapped his fingers as for a dog.
No mistaking the rapport went both ways. With surreptitious glances they’d made free of each other’s person, and yet some strange reticence held as well: at least on one side. Kaffalah looked between Demane and Cumalo as if to suss out whether he came third where only two were wanted. Then, reluctantly, he said, “Take care, Dimani,” and helped himself to a final good gander—from head to toe—for the road (only the briefest of nods to Cumalo). Letting go the hand he’d kept all this while, Kaffalah departed.
“Uh oh! What was all that?” Cumalo exclaimed. “I hope I wasn’t breaking up your flow there, was I?”
“Aw, the brother was just being friendly, that’s all.” Demane shrugged off the arm. “Hey, Cumalo, listen. We came all the way across the continent, didn’t we? A jukiere could too.”
“You’ve been out here—what, two or three years? Brother, I came when I was fifteen, and I’ve been traveling ever since. In twenty years I never once saw or heard tale of any jukiere. It just doesn’t seem too likely to me.”
More than simians hate the serpent, stormbird and jukiere nursed ancient enmity. “Well,” Demane said, “I’m going to let the captain know about it.” In soul or flesh, some spark of primal fire seemed to take light in him. “Better to get off flat feet, and get out the knives, before the fight.”—words Captain liked to say.
When youthful friends meet once more in vast old age, often they are astonished by the changes. But, of course, it wasn’t age that Cumalo saw come suddenly over Demane’s face. It was more weird than that, a far richer change. Somewhat wider-eyed than usual, Cumalo said, “Do what you think best, man. But you’d better hope it’s no jook-toothed tiger roaming the Wildeeps.”
“Why me? All of us had better hope . . . Hey! I just thought of something.” A mystery came clear in Demane’s mind. “The captain has some plainsman’s blood, I think. His nose is like that brother Kaffalah’s. And isn’t he sort of red-complected and brown all at once . . . ?”
“If you say so.” The look of alarm passed; Cumalo smiled. This was familiar ground, the enamored bending the conversation back again to his amour. “I don’t see it, myself.”
Teef thrust his head between theirs, slinging his arms across their shoulders. “You two cut out all that ooga-ooga-bug-bug over here.” Which one worse: armpits or breath? Surely, the latter; but the unwashed inferno of his crotch and ass stank worst of all. “Y’all talk so a nigga could understand!”
T-Jawn, Barkeem, and the rest were with him. “Gotta jump, Cumalo,” said a brother. “The dogs is done, and they setting up to put the cocks on next. You had said you wanted to lay a couple coins on the knife-birds. You coming?”
Cumalo looked at Demane. “You oughta come too. Might win you a little something.”
“I’m good. Y’all go ahead.” Demane got out from under the reeking arm. “I’ma go see about a bath over by Mother of Waters.” He backed farther from the propinquities of funk. “Some brothers here might could stand one too.”
“There go the Sorcerer.” Teef shook his head, grinning that wrecked-tooth grin. “Always up in some damn water tryna warsh. Man, one day you gonna turn around, catch cold, and wake up dead behind all that water!”
Demane had tried to explain, in the caravan’s early days, how the auspices of hygiene could ward off many infectious daemons. He’d wasted no end of breath laying out the basics of sanitary rites to the brothers. But all that dropped science had mostly bounced off their hard heads. A few kept clean, and the rest, well . . . “That ain’t really how it work, Teef, but never mind,” Demane said. “I catch up with y’all later.”
Disputing groundbirds versus flyers, rash wagers versus acceptable odds, the brothers betook their stink and themselves up a northwest-running alley.
¹ This hard talk with Cumalo kept getting postponed too because—let’s be honest here—the economics of civilization baffled Demane; no, really, they bored him stupid: bride-price, gambling, the wherefore a half-weight of gold gets you this many silver pennies, while some entirely different exchange the other way around. Aunty used to say that whatever you skip learning is the one thing you’ll end up needing to know most later. But the money-game was unbelievably fussy and rulebound: which little metal counter, and how many of them, and when, and why, for this, for that, for the other thing . . . One of these days Demane meant to get to grips with it all. Real soon now. Yeah.
² Enkindle?
First, let it be
understood that divinities crave tender companionship no less than we mortals do; thus enlightened, we may now begin to examine what form this tender companion of theirs ideally assumes: meet for the passions of a god, delightful to the heart and sensoria divine . . .
from Appendix H (Extinctions and Reemergent Taxa: type, philomel) of “Résumé of Ashëan Hyperphenotypes”; vol. 6, The Olorumi Grimoire
Third of Seven
He bathed in the Mother of Waters. Returning up the Mainway to the Station, he went this time into the warren of corrals and stables and warehouses, southside. Demane asked of a passerby, “Master Suresh l’Merqerim?” and found that name known. He had no problems following the directions.
Floor-to-ceiling shutters of the gallery above were folded back, and there, upstairs, the merchants reclined at a feast. On deep pillows, Master Suresh and his peers; on their knees, bowing again and again, servitors filled cups no sooner than they were drained. From mountainously heaped platters, merchants pinched up fingerfuls of rice ornate with cinnamon and cashews, charred yet tender bits of cabrito, rock salt and smashed garlic, dried apricots all moist and plump and soft again, onions turned to caramel . . . Such were Demane’s powers of scent and taste that he too partook of the meal, in every way except satisfaction. One of the merchants, if not Suresh himself, would now and again peer down from the gallery, on those busting their asses below, and find some cause to scream abuse.
Under the feast, workmen and the captain unpacked the camels’ luggage, packed the burros’ bags, rushed goods upstairs to be stored in one of three warehouses above the stables, and rushed down yet other goods to be squared away into the outgoing panniers. Captain hustled at his tasks as if his life depended on it. Taking perch on the corral’s fence, Demane sat and watched. For a quarter of every night the captain lay as one dead, and the world’s ending might not wake him. Otherwise, there were no idle moments for him. He ran on foot through the white-hot desert, though everyone else rode upon camels. He drilled himself at arms, or drilled the brothers. If he saw you working and the labors sufficed for two, he lent a hand; otherwise you got nudged aside. The man wore you out just looking at him.
Captain had changed his robe. He hardly smelled of himself, mostly of the aquifer minerals and endemica of Mother of Waters. Though never truly needing it, he’d gone to bathe as well. Ashëan idioviruses kept the captain’s breath sweet, wounds sterile, and body odor, at worst, a musk that was sometimes a bit more peppery than usual. Had Faedou only obeyed, and allowed Captain to spit into that great gaping hole in his leg, as Demane had begged, then the wound wouldn’t be festering, but healed nearly whole by now. “Good juju,” however, had proved a poor translation for “panaceaic endosymbionts.”
The work done, Captain gathered with the drudges around a water barrel, awaiting his turn to dip the ladle. Motion caught his eye: Demane jumping down from the fence. Captain handed off the ladle and started across the paddock. Nothing’s better than your lover smiling to see you.
A shout fell on them from the sky.
“Skipping out, is it? This is how much your promises are worth? No more than a pig-raper’s, set to watch the sty!” Master Suresh l’Merqerim leaned over the upstairs balustrade. “Who then will I get to—?”
Snarling, Captain spun and seized a barrel beside that from which the drudges drank. Was it empty? For he wrenched the barrel off the ground, and above his head, so easily. No—half full: weighing more than himself. Water cascaded from the open side as the barrel came up high and lateral—more splashing forth as it burst to staves and splinters against the side of the stable.
“Do you mind, Suresh? I’m coming right back.” A brass quartet blasting ensemble might make such tuneful thunder.
Burros shied and neighed; the drudges, too. Everyone stared in astonishment, and none more so than Demane. Captain’s anger was the cold kind, never hot.
Master Suresh l’Merqerim, mockingly, ducked as if dodging a wildly swung fist, and then left the balustrade to return to his feast.
Captain crossed to Demane. “Let’s walk around here for a little bit.” His whole organism exhaled the scents and signs of misery, of fury. “I don’t have much time.”
Demane nodded to the north. “Over by the Mainway?”
They vaulted the fence, went up the nearest alley.
“I should tell you something,” the captain said. “I need to.”
“Go ‘head.”
Demane glanced aside in time to see the familiar thing happening on Captain’s face, his usual change of mind. Tensely parted, his lips were relaxing now. Whatever bold intimacy he had for one instant meant to confide would go unsaid after all, lost to habits of private endurance. Indeed as they walked, Captain said nothing at all. He picked at the edges of his headscarf, though of course no hair showed. The sun at zenith would have lit this alley all the way down to the dry packed dust. Now well after noon, oblique brightness crowned the captain’s head, everything lower in shadow. Demane began to speak himself, telling of the encounter with the merchant, and what he suspected of the jukiere.
“A jook-toothed tiger, huh?” Captain, tiredly smiling, shook his head. “Trust you to come at me with a story like that.”
The cool dismissal stabbed right into the heart of any sense that they endured this ordeal together, as one. Did the captain have no confidence in Demane’s expertise, did all the faith flow only one way? It hurt in the belly and chest to be brushed off so. Demane couldn’t have guessed his own expression.
“A good thing you’re always watching out. I’ll say something to Suresh.” Captain draped an arm across Demane’s shoulders. “But if you think he’ll change his plans on my say-so, you must have fallen and bumped your head.” As the captain’s hands could no more roughen with callus than they could scar, and bled every day, his thumb-pad and forefinger (playing with Demane’s ear) were absurdly soft. “It’ll just be the two of us looking out, as usual.”
“Yeah.” Demane swallowed and blinked. “All right.” There’d never been anyone who could knife him so with a momentary word, and then speak the wound away in the very next moment. If all those little boyhood heartbreaks had been supposed to make him ready for this, Demane wasn’t.
They’d nearly reached the sunwashed crowds ahead, when—seizing all Mother of Water’s attention—the civil gong clashed to wake the dead. Men bawled in unison: “Clear the Mainway! Clear the Mainway!” The alley was too narrow to admit either beasts or carts, but a stampede of pedestrians came running up its straits. Demane, smashed against the adobe of some stables, caught the captain, who was thrown bodily against him. An ugly moment, you would have thought, all the screaming and frenzied panic. But Demane had by now learned to recognize cover for a clinch, a pretext to grab two handfuls of ass. He stole that grope, the quick kiss collusive.
A drubbing ovation of horses at full gallop shook the earth. One thousand heads—and theirs, too—leaned out on the emptied Mainway. Twenty-five cavalrymen rode past, and onward through the Station-gates. The mounted fo-so, lances at the ready, ranged out along the east-west trail. Next, from the big western piazza, there came five men on foot. They were hunched over and terrified. Dogs—hacked-up carcasses—had been tied to them.
“Cheaters,” said the captain. “They put poisoned collars on their fighting dogs.” Packed into the alley were other refugees off the Mainway, and the eldest of a mother with more children than arms wriggled nearer: to hear the captain’s song, and see what he glossed. “Or they fixed the odds, or else threw some match. Something like that.”
Thicknecked mastiffs bibbed the men in front, forepaws of the dogs wired at the men’s napes, muzzles slobbering cold gore onto chins and chests. On top of rooves, at windows, and from the mouths of streets and alleys, Mother of Waters jeered.
The men ran up the Mainway. Hecklers flung offal, chucked stones.
“Anyone who makes the one-league waymark goes free.” As in battle, Captain wore a look of bleak detachment. “No one ever ma
kes it that far.” To Demane’s senses, the captain’s mood seemed mostly enrapt attention, a little mixed with grief.
One of the indicted passed their alley—booking. His scentwake entirely fearsweat and adrenaline, this frontrunner doubled his distance from the rest every few steps.
Two others, neck and neck, lagged hindmost. One, a fat man, the other, thin but very old, staggered and lurched more than they ran.
Now a lone horseman emerged from the western piazza.
Captain murmured: “Fanged-drone.”
Demane glanced at him. Above his beard, Captain brushed two fingertips down his own left cheek, scarless and smooth. (Though often wounded, he had no scars.) Demane looked back: the horseman’s left-cheek insignia bore two stingers. Unlike the other calvarymen, he did not wield a lance, but viper of supple rawhide. Moaning like wind through arroyos, the serpent lashed the air about the horseman, in sinuous accord with his whirling arm. Spurred, his stallion surged forward. Mother of Waters cheered. Making no soft sound—shrieking—the snake unfurled to outpace sound itself for twenty feet. The viper kissed the runner midmost.
Bit him, rather: with a thunderclap.
“No, pop.” Captain’s forearms crossed Demane’s chest like iron bars. “Stay with me.” Captain reeled him back against long bones, hard scrawn. “You can’t help them.”
Demane, not even realizing, had moved to succor the stricken man.
The viper’s bite had knocked Middle-Man to his knees. His scream was keening and breathless, nearly silent. His robe was split and gaping open—the shirt beneath as well, and living flesh, too. He reached one hand around his waist, the other over his shoulder, as if to catch some small swift thing nestling at his back. Just behind the man stricken, Fat-Man stumbled in astonished terror. He flopped belly down onto his passenger dog. Air currents moved such that Demane knew when Fat-Man’s bladder voided. The wallowing man didn’t and couldn’t rise, flailing with the heavy stiff dog and swells of his own rolling suet, treading the hem of his robe. “Aw, that nigga there?” muttered some fellow-of-the-alley. “Bout to get kilt.”
The Long List Anthology 2 Page 55