He could do the same, Demane saw: spinning the power as TSIM rather than TSOA. A chrism of bright sun poured down, and humanity dropped off him like a cloak. His imperfect flesh ripped itself inside-out with the rise to perfection, Not piece by piece, all at once: metamorphosis is like death, as he welcomed the change he’d fought off since crossing over into the Wildeeps in that it ruptures mind from body. By grace of the blood, though, your consciousness can cohere into flesh and bone after transformation. If you’re strong enough, if you don’t vanish into the void. Only you can judge whether the gods’ heritage is enough expressed in you to bring you back past throwing off human shape. No one can tell you that; only you will know. For a talisman, gather thoughts of what matters most to you.
—All mine shall live so long as I do: I spear these desperadoes in defense of my brothers. For clumsy little Walead; for Faedou who took a knife to the leg; for Ca—
Join together these precious lights as a beacon, and the gathered shining of your treasures will call you back from the fall into death.
—Aunty needed one of us to pick up the burden. Somebody has to. I’m not leaving the green hills to hurt you, whom I love. I go because I’m the last one left who can—
Becoming the stormbird is as easy for me as you put on your mantle for holidays; I’ve got the trick of it. I think you can get it too. But don’t hurt yourself, Mountain Bear. A heart like yours or mine works miracles best doing for others. So wait on your cause. Or on love. His talons, rootlike, sank lengthily into the mud. Demane came back within a heartbeat: winged and leatherskinned, now. He was no longer a couple inches shy of six feet but just past seven, with hands and maw full of knives.
The tiger made to spring, low and hunch-shouldered. Its sooty lips curled up, the ribbon of its tongue lolling. Fiery pinpricks glowed in its wizard-eyes.
Demane fell back a step, and another man’s last thoughts became his own:
Four lines of black ice slit his belly to tatters. His first scream owed more to fright and surprise, not yet wholly to pain. Hot wet weight slopped down his lap and legs, the living burden of his body suddenly lightened. He thought only to—run! But already too weak, he fell sprawling about to shout Help! Captain! Sorcerer! But agony forestalled any such outcry: fingerlength spikes drove through his shoulder. The socket burst, collarbone crumbled, and bony wing of his back shattered. Great rough strength slung him through the mud. The bonfires on the Road went dark. He saw nothing, felt only the scratching smack of leaves, and weird soft loops entangling his legs. He could scream, he could kick—there was nothing else left to do. A gamey fetor lunged at him, hot, faceward. Last act in life, he got up his elbow, somehow, into the way. Almighty teeth savaged that arm, and folded it down throttlingly around his own throat. There was no breath and no breath and still there was none, and still none. You could count these last slow final blinks on the fingers of one hand, nor need all five. Drugged sleep dampened the fires of his terror. This world ebbing, the enigma burgeoned . . .
Cumalo died. Demane woke, toppling backwards under the weight of the wizard. Claws raked down his chest unable to score his hide. Fangs closed on his impenetrable throat. Stronger, he tore himself free of the crushing maw. The evil wind blew again, and the wizard’s green brindled coat went black and bright as a thundercloud, its fur blazing and freezing in restless patches. Crackling flashes snapped between the hot and cold spots. Demane struck again and again, with all his strength, but his bladed fingers turned on the jukiere’s flesh, and frost bit his hands. Fire scorched them. Where was his spear? The absent gods had left that spear for this very purpose: killing jukiere. Where was it? Neither talon nor claw drawing any blood, they traded blows, impervious to each other. The cat snarled, and Demane husked the strange roar that bespoke his anger in this shape.
And still the Wildeeps went without master, its numina inexhaustible and unclaimed: so draw again. Drink!
Demane drank. His galled and ashen hands blackened, sleek and whole. When I was even younger than you, my mother came back from a long time away—but not in the flesh. She came as light, only to say goodbye. I think she’d gone too far or too deep working some great miracle, and so lost the route back to humanity. He batted the jukiere off its feet and against a great tree, which burst to flinders, the splintered wood into flames. Back broken, the jukiere tried to rise, front paws scrabbling. Time to finish it. Laying his talons point-on-point to make spears of his hands, Demane winged toward the cat. Which drink would be one too far? When was the last line crossed? Already?
In unison Demane and the wizard reached to partake of the Wildeeps—and neither could. Back and forth, they wrestled for ascendancy, the jukiere winning. It surged to its feet. On patches of its fur the action of minute particles ceased, or nearly so; but the hot patches blazed with diametric heat. When Demane speared down a hand to impale the cat, his hand burst into flames. The talons shattered on contact. Seething eruptions of blisters went up his arm. Body and wings: his whole self began to smoke. He crashed to earth. Trees—all the vegetation roundabout—crisped to black, the cinders falling to white ash, and the ash too burning. In another moment, some patch of the jukiere’s fur, infinitely cold, would meet parallel fires, and the resulting discharge . . .
One last drink, then: nothing measured, as much as he could hold. Everything. The talons that had broken regrew, the intact hardened to adamant, and then tapered finer than a hairsbreadth. He flung that hand around, knifing into flesh, cleaving between ribs. The wizard halted the talons’ plunge with its whole visceral will; its stormy fur went dark. They strained against one another. And still Demane drank, as the river below drinks when the dam above has broken. “The gods travel as light,” she said. “I’m joining the Tower in the purissime. You and the children come up when you can.” A star falling the wrong way: that’s how she left me. It is possible for one to win and yet lose—or the other to lose, and die, but take out the enemy too. The jukiere stopped its struggles and instead lunged, with jaws fully agape, forward onto the impaling talons. The tiger’s fangs and tusks, death-limned and aglow with every mustered erg of necromancy, would for a last act snap shut upon Demane’s head.
There’s another, deeper metamorphosis, I think. No, I can’t tell you anything about that one. We’ll learn it by ourselves, if we ever do. You and me both.
Demane spat forth a black glimmering particulate which unmade everything it touched. Each annihilative spark vanished in the instant of unmaking until, headless, the jukiere fell—stormbird triumphant! Demane roared as strength upon strength poured unstoppably into him. His skin took light, sublimating off his bones, and they themselves began to glow, turning to hot gas. Up or away he was carried at great speed across darkness into some dense, rushing, many-layered radiance. In the tidal light he found his tier among winged brethren, who gladly made room for him. And having gathered him up, glory deepened to sweep him from the shores of Earth back toward infinity, but she caught his arm. The woman had the quiet poise of Demane’s elder sister, a muscled shape like his own, Aunty’s stature, the ageless looks of his parents: so that they all must share close blood, though who this stranger was Demane couldn’t guess. “Stay longer than a moment, boy, and there’s no going back. Will you let that jukiere take over the Wild Depths?” Hard to care about terrestrial trivia when the gods of TSIMTSOA called from only a little farther upstream . . . “Wait, boy—wait! Didn’t you leave somebody behind? What was it you kept meaning to say to him?”
—But you hate this life, Captain; you know you do. So if you promised ole Suresh this last journey, then come away with me after we get to Great Olorum. All this is so easy in the green hills. There, you and me could—
Demane broke from the light, and fought his way back down toward mortality.
• • • •
“Ha!” Demane laughed; the sonority was palpable in his belly, his bones, his teeth. “I can feel that one. My teeth jumping.” Next, Isa gave a rich whistle too high and fast to credit from hum
an lips, except that Demane lay there watching the feat, listening rapt. It was like a bitty songbird’s welcome to the sunrise. “Now that one’s pretty, right there. But say again? It went by so fast, I couldn’t catch one word.” Other voices too, none of them any strain at all for him, every one equally his own. And at last Demane exclaimed, “No, no, no: that one! I like that one best.”
“This is a woman’s voice, you know.”
“Is it? Beautiful on anybody. Just seem like it fit you, that’s all. But I could see a man or woman, really.”
“No, it’s a woman’s voice. Deepwaters,¹ we say in Sea-john. Men’s start just a little bit deeper, and not so rich. I like this one, too. A long time ago, I used to . . . well, that stuff doesn’t matter now. All right, pop—for you. But only when we’re alone, you hear? On caravan I have to speak much lower; for respect, so brothers will follow. This one’s still too high.”
• • • •
The weight of the jukiere towed him to his knees, and from there sprawled facedown in its clammy fur. Just a man again, with little more than any man’s strength, Demane couldn’t shift it. The wizard was heavy. Its eyes had turned to glass, its flesh to a quarter ton of clay. He braced his heels to the headless carcass and, pulling back against the wet-suck of the wound, dredged forth his arm. It came free badly scored along its length, all gashed and chewed by splintered bone.
He cradled his torn arm to him. A sip of power from the Wildeeps would heal these injuries. But could he hold himself to that, just a sip, or would another apocalyptic binge rapture him beyond the sky, newest and least godling of the radiant pantheons? Well before noon on the day he decides to go dry, the drunkard already finds himself trembling. That Demon whispers: You can handle it. A little taste. Just get your lips wet.
No . . . he’d better let the wounds stand.
Captain was nowhere in sight, and nowhere close by: must have gotten turned around. He’d know to go back and wait at the boneyard. And just how long would he abide there before striking out alone? In space, it was only a quarter league east to reach the Road, but there were several millennia to cross in time . . . Demane cut off that thought. He fetched his spear from where it had fallen. The captain, no fool, would wait longer than the short while that had passed.
Demane jogged back the way he’d come.
Just a man again, child of TSIMTSOA? Knifesharp leaves struck him always flat-side, never edged; thickets thinned for him, and fanged thornbrakes, pulled aside, whipped back and missed, points always angled to his advantage: the briars caught by greenery, or broken off or blunted. Any other man—just a man—would wonder that all the rotten bits of debris, the sticks and rocks underfoot, kept presenting only soft or smooth-side-up to his soles. But His Majesty, thinking deep thoughts, was oblivious to the scramble of his countless servitors. Demane had yet to learn he’d never be quit of godhead having now put it on.
Ahead was a tree. Approaching it Demane’s step slowed, his knees made weak by sudden understanding. Jukiere piss-sign had splashed all over the tree’s roots, wet only a day ago: at most two. But the scent didn’t belong to the jukiere cooling stiff and flyblown on the embankment behind him. There was another, nor aged nor male. She was in fresh youth, just a few days from throwing a litter of fiends. Demane ran.
• • • •
Soft fingers held him, a damp cloth wiping. He blinked sleepily.
Back from bathing, Isa looked up from these ministrations. “It’s true, what you said. But you don’t know the brothers yet, Demane. Somebody’s got to look out for them.” He tossed the cloth aside, beyond the sheets. “It’s in you to learn fast. So after we come to Great Olorum, take over the captaincy if you want.” Isa smiled. “I’d follow you. You’d be ten times better at it than I am.”
Demane sat up, caught him, pulled him down. “You just now met me in the market. Where do you get all this?”
“I’m telling you, D., you’ve got a hero’s shine on you. Just as bright as anybody I ever knew. I know it when I see it.”
“Me? Naw; I’m no hero. You got me mixed with yourself, maybe. You been in big battles, ain’t you? And wasn’t you over there in that war?” Demane tapped the red coral and white shell necklace Isa wore, one among many, and many-colored. Isa gave him no reply, only a glance that said too much, or said it too vaguely, for interpretation (his finger tracing vascular bulk and striation of Demane’s shoulder and arm). Over there, yes: and marshal of the campaign, too. But Demane would only learn this much later on, when the knowledge could make no difference. “Me, I don’t know nothing about big combat or command. You the one.”
“I know what I’m good for. Believe that, Demane. And I know that if you keep up your wandering, this whole continent will know your name one day.”
Demane smiled peaceably, settling deeper in the pillows; his fastidious new lover sprawled half on, half beside him. If the point was to please him, then Isa could just as well have lain beside him until morning, smelling funky and used. But during two days in bed, with only a quick step out here and there to wolf some meal in the market, Isa always found an imperceptible moment to slip off and bathe, between each time they made love and next. And he never spoiled the afterglow, nor lingered long enough to be missed. What timing! A supernatural gift for love, you’d almost have said. So off south—tomorrow morning!—over the burning rocky hills, across the weeks-wide desert, and finally to some distant, meridonal city called Great Olorum? Sure, all right. This man’s reverent touch, his vox seraphica; the beard that looked to be coarse, but was downy to the touch . . . what was there to complain of here?
“I was wrong about one thing, though.”
“Yeah, whas that?”
“I thought you were going to be a hard man. You know—mean to me.”
“What?” Demane frowned. “But why would you go with somebody like that?” He sat up on an elbow. “Why—?”
“Aw, don’t get upset, pop. I’m glad you’re kind.” If you’d distract a lion? Throw some bloody steak. “Hey!” Captain slipped a smooth long leg across Demane’s lap to straddle him. “Ready to go again? Uh huh, I see. We’ve got to make sure you get plenty now, because I can’t let you have it like this on the road . . .”
• • • •
Overcast warred with blue in the windy firmament. It was sweltering, not long past noon. Two heaps of ash remained of the night’s bonfires, red cinders winking in the white powder. A half dozen burros wandered on the black earth verge, heads in the green while they stood in the mud of the Road. The caravan had decamped, all save for a few brothers—three, four, or five—prayerfully huddled at center-Road. Past the distortion of the veil, the brotherly shapes wavered as if seen through heat shimmer; only the faintest trace of their wet and unwashed humanity came to his nose, their voices remote echoes in his ears. He tossed his burden onto the Road. The grisly decapitation of the monster struck the ground not far from where they knelt in strange vigil, and the head rolled closer still. Five dim forms rose, making noises that were murmurs to him, too faint to make sense of. Walead?—yes; it was Walé who crouched down again to poke at the gore, the tusks, the tongue lolling over the sharp teeth of the gaping mouth.
Xho Xho ran up to the edge of the Road where Demane stood like a revenant on the threshold.
“Where the captain went?” the boy asked. “Why you don’t come out of the trees, Sorcerer?”
“I cain’t, Xho.”
“Hey, you watch out,” Kazza called. “Hear me, Xho Xho? Watch out now!”
The other brothers kept a warier distance. Something wasn’t right. The Sorcerer was barked over with half-dried mud, jellied gore, twigs, and bits of leaves. Blood slathered his left hand and arm to the elbow, the right one lacerated and ensleeved with blood right to the shoulder. He looked to have gathered up some man’s spilled wet insides and tried, by hand, to restore them to the voided cavity. Invisible yet bright, heatless but unbearably hot, he bore a corona any fool could feel. Xho Xho alone was unawed, ha
nging back from fear of the forest, not of the Sorcerer.
Demane knew them by turban, shaggy hair, narrow shoulders. Kazza, Wilfredo, Faried. He called. “I’ma do my best to meet up with you down south. Go on! Catch up with the caravan. I see you when the caravan cross that other stream southside of the Wildeeps, all right?”
Kazza crept a little closer. “You dead, Sorcerer? Come back some kind of haint?”
Demane chuckled. “No, baby.” A grim noise, for a chuckle. “I just made a bargain, became what y’all been calling me—a sorcerer. It ain’t easy for me to get on the Road or leave the Wildeeps anymore.” Demane put a hand back against the nearest trunk and leaned, taking seat at the roots. He rested his hands on updrawn knees. “I want to see Sea-john down in Great Olorum. Y’all go run after the caravan. I see you down at other end of the Wildeeps, Godwilling, as Faedou say. Take that jukiere head to show Master Suresh and them.”
Xho Xho stepped into the forest. The rest cried out in alarm. The smeared apparition of the boy wobbled as if seen through rheum or tears, and became clear once off the Road, by the tree where Demane sat. “Faedou all of a sudden just up and fell out. You better come see, Sorcerer. He dying, I think.” Xho Xho took hold of a filthy hand and tried to pull Demane to standing: budging him not. “And where’s the captain?”
“I told you, little man,” Demane said. “I cain’t get onto the Road.” On both cheeks he bore a delta of rinsed skin.
The Long List Anthology 2 Page 63