Captain sang low. “There’s no reason to watch, Demane.”
Yes, but how to look away?
The horseman pulled up short. (Breeze blowing northwesterly still: Fat-Man’s bowels let go.) The one bitten clambered sobbing to his feet, a generous fillet peeling raw off his back, and struggled off after the old man who was passing the gates. Three times the viper bit the wallowing man. The first bite chunked out pudding from a wide thigh, laying white femur bare in grisly depths. There were screams, pleas, groveling. The next and deadly bite enwrapped Fat-Man’s neck, hungrily gnawing through chins and jowls: crushing vertebrae with a splosive pop. So why then a third bite? Was it done to assure the crowd of a death, to show the body jolting up from the dust, only to fall again, still and silent? Was it done as a droll offering to the great demon, the antiurge, TSOA, that which incites human hearts to senseless evils? Yes.
Up reared the stallion! And how it shone, the breastplate of the rider! Nor with any lack of eloquence did the viper speak its single syllable, spoken in the very tongue of thunder. And the many hundreds who watched, what of them? Mother of Waters roared!
Demane had known noise in nature: he’d heard Mt. Bittersmoke erupt, heard white glaciers calving blue children; he’d stood once knee deep in mud beside his master, on the naked seabed, while she broke a hundred-foot whitewave of returning ocean, her pure will¹ slowing the apocalyptic waters—such noise!—but never before had Demane heard a thousand mortal voices compounding at full cry to deafen like some act of God.
Past the gates the cavalry could be seen distancing. With nimble pageantry, the corridor of lances raveled and rewove down the trail, hemming in the four runners still making dust.
Onward rode the horseman and his viper!
Mother of Waters returned to business. Astride beasts, in vehicles, on foot, the crowd flooded the Mainway from tributary streets and alleys. Demane crouched down by the mouth of the alley, his back to a wall. A dizzying mix of the longing for home with the horrors of abroad made it impossible to keep his feet. “It’s ugly here, Isa,” Demane said, hanging his head between his knees. “How can you stand it?” Through the thickness of his hair, rooting fingers found his scalp, the soft pads kneading. When Captain spoke so softly, and in this timbre, his speech was about as parsable as birdsong, more warble than words. Demane took comfort in the tone and intention, making no effort to decipher what was said. He resolved right then to go back to the green hills, just the moment after this man agreed to come too.
“This will be that Demon’s work!” Master Suresh—jocund, rotund—came up the alleyway. “Taken by drink, is it?” The caravanmaster wagged a finger at Demane, who was crouched in the attitude of one inebriated. “They are sots, young man,” scolded the master, “who would suckle Old Nick’s bitchy teats so much, so early in the day!” To the captain: “About time, isn’t it? Oh yes, indeed: so let’s gitty up, Cap’n!” Master Suresh swept by them in his silks.
Demane made himself stand (the hand in his hair long since whipped away).
“See you tomorrow, all right?” The captain offered a counterfeit smile. “Keep the brothers out of trouble for me.” Nerves and shame were embittering his wonted scent, as if, against honest instincts, Captain were trying to pull over a con—say, to sell twice, to different men, some singular treasure.
Demane looked from the captain to Master Suresh, who was stepping onto the Mainway. Not a comely man, nor kind, either; he was fabulously rich, though, and dressed in the bright-dyed shit of worms. Demane’s guts sickened, on fire. He turned back to Captain, making the same face men betrayed in love have always made.
“No,” Captain whispered. “Don’t even think it.” Somehow, this denial was true, for Demane could spot even dissembling and misdirection. “It’s like I told you before.” Until you there’s been nobody, all my years on the road. And how old was the captain, anyway? About thirty, to the eyes and senses; but . . . the blood-of-heaven ran very pure in him, as it had in Aunty. Although millenarian, she too had smelled confusingly ageless, “about thirty.”
“What’s going on here, Isa?”
“I’ve got to go,” Captain said. “I’m tired of running. And don’t follow, Demane, or I’ll let death catch me.” Here was more truth, and the captain had never yet said to him anything truer, or more heartfelt.
They jumped at a dry-stick report. Master Suresh beckoned. Impatiently, he snapped his fingers again. Captain went. He and the master crossed the Mainway, then walked up a northwestrunning alley. Fo-so were hefting the bodies of man and dog into a cart.
A storm was rising in the blood that pumped wildly through Demane. He couldn’t hear his own thoughts, could hardly think them. Run, since he couldn’t fly. Perform some worthy feat. A feat as hard and perilous as possible. Kill something. He too went out on the Mainway—but eastward through the gates, and then south toward the jukiere and Wildeeps.
• • • •
There is a pace that a fit man can hold, running on and on, nearly forever. The sun westered slowly across the wide afternoon sky. South of Mother of Waters, there was rocky country through which a millennium of caravans had blazed a trail winding far from the Daughter, down shallower stretches of deep-cut arroyos, around high mesas, across scrub flats. This was neither the season nor perhaps the year that rains would fall; only the intermittent green of sagebrush, pampas, and acacia relieved the droughted shades of gray and dun.
Demane at first heard and smelled little more than anyone would. The pounding and raised dust of his own footfalls, mesquite hanging in the hot air, calls of mourning doves and cicada. Then the vacant hush of human perception began to fill with bright effigies of sound and odor. What was long passed, what was hidden, what was remote came clear to his senses.
A subtle roar built of discrete sounds. The stormbird heard insectskitter and the slide of snakes over stone. He felt it, wind too faint for his skin to feel before, and heard it, rasping particles of dust across the hardpan. The dazzle of scents bloomed. He passed the cold acridity of gecko, and rattler, and ground croc. Old bones murmured stories to him in passing. A child mummifying beneath a wayside cairn: dead of blood cancer. Manifold dung and urine, steer men lion antelope dog, whispered what age and sex, sick or healthy, how long since passing this way.
Faraway some early night dog barked. He’d seen the packs harry a solitary lion or stag antelope in the prime of strength, scores of muzzles stripping the prey of its fleshly raiment, gobbet by mouthful, and sacrificing ten or more dogs to immense antlers, or the might of a lion’s paw, before the better beast was pulled down by sheer rabid numbers. Demane masked his body’s odor in the landscape’s, as he should have done at the gates of Mother of Waters. He quit the beaten trail and ran upcountry, where the lookout and cover were better.
The stormbird beat nearer the surface than it had ever risen—even on sacred grounds back home, in the green hills. He ran harder. His legs and lungs refused to tire. Strength and sensation swamped the indweller, that part of consciousness which thinks and feels. I hardly ate today were the last words to trouble his mind for a while. He was ravenous. And below him on the blazed trail, hidden in thick tamarisk, he caught the tattoo of a thumb-sized heart pumping frantic blood. The rich scent came too, of a small shivering body, furred and hot. There was good food just out of sight, a jack-hare about to lose its wager whether to run or hide. In that tussock of weeds right . . . there . . .
Buoyant on spirals of warmth. There athwart the west snaked the Daughter, glittering gray, and down there the southern Crossings, a thicker python, wider waters. He plunged into fresh headwinds. In his shadow stampeding antelope small as crickets separated in the same patternly accord as a birdflock, scores bounding left, scores right, through blond grasses that rippled over the world’s skin. Aw, let them go. He wasn’t so hungry anymore. Better to ride more soft rising heat up where . . . where, exactly? The skyfaring dream came to ground. Every tremor of his lids and lashes abraded the dream’s stuff, and h
is eyes opening destroyed it.
Fast water sloshed over him, rocking him. Legs outstretched, leaning back on his elbows, Demane awoke in the shoals of a broad stream, wallowing. His bag hung submerged in the current. Panicked, he jumped up. The bag’s flap was thrown back, but water hadn’t entered. Wetness sheeted from the leather and it was dry again in moments. Nothing within was out of place. Aunty used to say, Don’t worry so much: the bag takes care of itself. She had always laughed at his fretful care. Wasn’t it better, though, to err on caution’s side?
And stretching before him was the Wildeeps. Across stream, rich as the rainwoods back home, tangled ancient growth went on and on, green to the east and west horizons. The oceanic foliage rippled and petals like white tongues blew down. The whole southern bank of leafage tossed in gusts of wind which, midstream, Demane felt only as soft breath, scented with frangipani.
And the ground over there was sacred, the jungle godlike and consecrated only to itself. A greatwork lay over the stream where he stood, and over the fast water running on all frontiers of the Wildeeps. Demane laughed. He ran for high steps through the rapids, and crouched down, to swing an open hand against the water’s rush and knock up white splashes. The two greatest wonders of his life, both together at once: one of nature, the Wildeeps where many worlds overlapped; and another wonder, this artifice of magi, the greatwork that bound this savage country and its denizens.
Downstream, he saw a weird pulsing light, stationary just above the trees. Demane waded with the flow, west.
Nude black dirt, a southrunning trail, cut into the greenery across stream. Some bright sign—a thunderbolt, caught and twisted by almighty hands—hovered coruscating at treetop-height over the mouth of the trail. Demane knew what amounted to a library’s worth of disparate lore, and all of it word-perfect, though he was illiterate in the four languages he spoke. Still, that brightness in the sky was legible to his very blood. It read, Here is the Safe Road. Eyes closed, his face could find the folded lightning and know its meaning too, even as the blind feel upon their faces where the sun sits in the sky.
The hard current dragged and eddied about his feet. Demane shuddered, and looked bewilderedly around him, coming fully alert like a slapped sleepwalker.
What had he meant to do, exactly? Track the jukiere across the Wildeeps, kill the wizard somehow, and then return to Mother of Waters, all in one slender evening—was that the plan, then? No, of course not! He’d only wanted to . . . scout out the lay of the land. Ye-ah. That made some kind of sense.
Well, brave scout, will you look at the hour? In the west one low cloud glowed sullen and red, its underbelly brass-bright. The blue dusk was blackening, the sun already below the horizon. Perfect nightvision had let the dark creep up on him again. Demane recalled some little animal in the grass. And he’d . . . killed it? And then what? Not eaten it, surely, had he? How? His spear, blades, and bow were all untouched in the bag. Running his tongue (not leathery and rough, but a soft fragile slug, like anyone’s) over his teeth: they were all blunt, not mostly pointed ivory tines. He examined his hands. Quarter-moon talons, keen-edged as scimitars along the undersides? Since when? Of course there were ordinary human nails at the tips of his fingers. He shrugged: nor did any strange new muscles move in his back. He was wingless. Some half-fledged potential stirred in him, though. Limitless and untapped, the wellspring of the Wildeeps awaited the one who would drink. So close to the Wildeeps, nothing was beyond achieving if only Demane would cease to hold himself back so fiercely. And is that what you still want, no longer to be a man but a god . . . ? He spun around and ran for the north bank of the fords. He fled back toward Mother of Waters.
It was as though a great wind carried him across that first leg upcountry, not any strength of his own. But the Wildeeps dropped leagues behind, and the stormbird waned. Fatigue began to drag at his legs and Demane slackened from his best pace to one he could hold. The slow air momentarily strengthened to a breeze. Very nearby, in the dark above the trail, a night dog bayed. In a sweat of sage musk, green attar, and chlorophyll, Demane expunged his scent; but it was too late. The pack had sight and sound of him. Coursing and unshakeable, a score of dogs set up frenzied barking. Demane fled without any plan except to live longer, his feet quickening again.
Dogs run much faster, however, and soon closed the distance. He had to turn and face them. Six in front all but snapping at his heels leapt, jowls foaming, teeth sharp. Time left him again. Coming to he spat a foul mouthful of furred meat. Doubtfully he tottered, nodding with unfocused eyes. Aching up and down his arms and legs: the print of savage bites which hadn’t broken skin. Limbs and carcasses strew the churned mud about him, his hands gloved in blood. He needed food—cooked, spiced, vegetable. Hunger had drawn his stomach tight as a fist.
Demane spat again, a thirsty paste, and began to run. There was a stitch under his ribs, cramps in his thighs, and fatigue that made him wish to lie down anywhere. But he wouldn’t survive another attack, and so step after step, his scent belatedly hidden, he ran on through the starblown night.
Human noise and stink wafted toward him across the drylands. The Station glowed in the distance. Ahead on the trail, barking, savage and remote, addressed some other prey; Demane had to detour far and wide. Meanwhile the moon’s jaundiced eye wandered half its nightly course across heaven. The gates at the tower stood closed.
He circled west to the lake, and washed away the muck and dust. With his legs turning hard and stiff, Demane gimped up the Mainway from Mother of Waters. Fatty smoke from barbecue and his roaring hunger pulled him through the glad crush of the Station’s night crowd, and then down a street above the revels on the piazza. He walked past every grill to a particular fellow, turning a haunch over spluttering coals. “Fresh!” said the man, full of pride, grinning at Demane. “Killed it just this evening, not long ago!”
Demane knew that, smelled it, and made his order.
He kept his eyes squinted, for the more sensitive the nightvision, the more cruel the artificial lights of civilization. On a dish of unfired clay the grillmen handed Demane: mashed yam, half charred tips of rare beef, once-tough greens tender from long simmering in pot liquor. Demane set the dish on the ground and tore a withered pepper over top, spilling pale seeds. He rasped two little saltrocks together, dusting the food thoroughly, and handed up both pieces to the vendor, who smiled again. The grillman turned to serve another.
¹ That is, psychokinesis. Her wings beating: embubbled by her protection, and through the roiling aquatic chasm, he and Aunty came popping upwards into light and air. While he dogpaddled on the surface, she dragged herself airborne off turbulent chop. Then she plucked him from the waves, and flew them back toward the green hills, the undestroyed coast.
“How you all do complicate the thing! Yes, there is the problem of witches: whether they be stronger than natural men, dodging blows which should have landed, or exploiting other such fraudulent advantages. But only think for a moment. Every one of us knows perfectly well what a proper fight looks like. A man who wins legitimately comes up from his descent into the pit spitting blood, staggering, hard-used, hideous to see. And where is there the creature to take such a battering an he need not? He, however, who passes unscathed from bout to bout—making easy mince of formidable opponents—that man is a witch! Watch for him! Let’s not overcomplicate the matter. To catch a witch-cheater needs nothing more than to keep our eyes peeled . . .”
His Excellency Sabiq bgm Qaby, Royalcousin, speaking to fellow trustees of the Fighthouse at Mother of Waters
Fourth of Seven
A town like no other in his experience, the Station at Mother of Waters, where noise and business picked up after dark. There were more people on the piazza than all the men, women, and children living in Demane’s hometown, whose houses spread out over three hills, the farthest families a whole morning’s walk away. He came upon Faedou sitting on the margins of the piazza. He had a jar beside him, his bad leg stretched along a wall, out fro
m under the feet of enraptured dancers or the blundering Demonridden. Demane pressed one hand flat to the wall, leaned heavily, and worked his sore legs down to sitting. But he’d hardly got settled and halfway comfortable before Cumalo came out of the crowd.
“Sorcerer!” Cumalo’s fingertips tapped upon the air, playing invisible beats. “Get my drum out for me, will you? The good one. I want to play!”
“All right.” Demane fought laboriously to standing. “Be right back.” He looked for a corner out of the good light, hidden.
“Aw, man, come on! Why you going off somewheres? Just pull it out of your bag right here. Nobody cares!” Cumalo danced, hands busily pantomiming. Miracles didn’t seem to faze him. What a strange, wonderful town he’d come from! Demane’s own mother, father, and siblings used to avert their eyes, sneering in terror, at the smallest miracle—to say nothing of these superstitious northerners!
“Can’t do that, brother. I’ll be right back.”
Down between two inns bordering the piazza, there was a cul-de-sac that ended against a remnant of the old fortwall. Where men had pissed out that Demon since before the fall of Daluça, Demane stooped in ammonia shadows and felt around in his bag. The drums were in the back bottom hall, past tarp and tent, surgical kit and medicines, food and sealed jars of pure water, knives, bow and arrows, his spear, various leather saddles, for dromedary and equus . . . ay, Aunty! Would you scold or laugh—shocked, either way—to see the bag so messy, things spread out everywhere? He found Cumalo’s jimbay and pulled it forth. Back in brightness around the greatorch, Demane handed the drum over. Cumalo joined the twenty or so others playing.
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