The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (11 page)

“Now you free,” Demane said, not quite whispering—nor quite awake. “He
been
dead and gone, you know.”

Captain sleepily rolled his head on Demane’s shoulder to look at him.
What and who are you talking about?

“That man that tangled fingers in your hair and took away your choice. A prince, I think. No, wait: a king? King-prince. Lion-prince. The Lion.”

At Demane’s words the captain’s face went slack with horror.

“So young back then, you made a bad choice, Captain.
Amante, bailarín, cantante.
My Isa of the Song and Inner Chambers. But it was a very long time ago, wasn’t it? Free now, you could make another choice. A good one. For your happiness—”

Captain slapped a hand over Demane’s mouth. “
Sorcerer:
hush
.”

Demane blinked slowly, and came fully awake. “Sorry, Captain,” he said once the reluctant palm allowed him speech. “Sometimes in trance I get to talking out of turn. Did I say what I had no business knowing? Don’t let it worry you. I always forget by morning.”

Would this prophetic indiscretion put him to flight, drive the captain back out prowling in the cold? No. Though a mind twists and turns, most complicated of all things, the body is a simple creature, and prefers love and comfort, to be where it feels safe. On a freezing night, this one spot right here,
ahhh
. . . Captain fell asleep. Cumalo glanced over. He signed with a hand as folk did back home in the green hills, when the hunt was successful, or some athlete won in the games, or sweethearts were finally wed.
Victory, blessings, congratulations!
Cumalo thankfully did not whoop out the ululating cry as well. Demane smiled, made a shooing gesture, and closed his eyes. He set himself to wake at the final quarter of the night, his watch.

The adept will keep an ear out, even when asleep. Such a big camp never ceases to rustle with a thousand small sounds, but the deepest part of the mind, although sleeping, can sort out that noise which doesn’t fit. That one
there
. Bone cracking? Demane opened his eyes and spotted Cumalo, up-Road—and
there
: the sucking withdrawl of deep-embedded fangs?—leaning over at the tent of the merchant Qabr.
Sir?
Are you well?
Cumalo whispered. Then from within the tent, a great dark hand swiped out, brushing his brother’s belly.

Cumalo toppled backwards, screaming. His innards rippled greasily forth. Blasted out of sleep, Demane lurched upright, spear in hand: already running. Captain came afoot beside him, passing him by the third stride. A red maw emerged from the tent’s flaps, its tusks and teeth all golden-plaqued. They snapped onto Cumalo’s shoulder, and bones cracked loudly again, this time such that everyone heard. The tent collapsed just as he and the captain had closed nine and twelve of the twenty strides’ distance. Bulk crashed into the nightwood on the east, and all the noise and disturbance of leaves and branches that could be made was made. They’d reached the fallen tent by their sixth heartbeat, but still too late.

The screaming stopped.

Hell broke loose, the whole camp awake. Anarch of the chaos, Messed Up ran to the dark edge of the Road. “Where it at? Where it go?” There, haranguing the wall of brush—though not
entering
it, mind—Messed Up scuttled back and forth. “I just need to
see
that mammerjammer to kill it!” He stabbed his spearpoint into leaves. Silhouetted in orange shadows about the fires, better than one hundred heads raised up, all of them shouting the same,
what just happened
,
what was that
, the whole camp like a yard full of dogs baying at the night, though the house was already plundered, the thief long fled.

“BE STILL.”

Captain’s voice smote and crushed the uproar. These words rang out huge and bronze as peals struck off some twelve-ton bell,
STILL
echoing back and subsumed by
BE,
and this rich noise continuing to compound as it diminished in slow opulence.

Struck dumb, no one in the caravan missed Cumalo gag his last. That noise, and the rain hissing into the fires: otherwise the camp was silent. The caravan heard that moan, cut short. From the noctuarium, on its own ground, the great cat purred resonant malice. Captain took the bait and bolted toward the monster, which seemed to lurk in shadows only a few steps off-Road. To step off here, however, was to cross planets and millennia; for all the worlds were in flux, and poised to change on the moment for anyplace in the wild depths of time and space. A trap: to fling any pursuit into a random point of infinity—

Demane lunged, catching Captain’s shins, and bore them both down to the ground.

“Stop, Isa,
stop
. I couldn’t catch him like this, at night under a cloudy sky. No way you can!” Demane brought his weight to bear, pinning the thrashing man beneath him. “Tiger killed him already, and will eat
you too
.” Wildly Captain fought to rise, but Demane was stronger. “By
day
, Isa, in the
sun
. When we can see the signs. We
both
go and catch him
then
, that jukiere!”

The captain’s frenzy stilled. One of his hands touched Demane’s wrist and, suddenly by some wrestler’s black magic, Demane found himself stunned and on the bottom, Captain on top. He got off and to his feet, looking blankly down—but accepted an outstretched hand, to pull Demane up beside him.

The caravan watched its two best. No differently would children watch mama and papa squabble in the parlor as the house went up, the heat intolerable, and fire washing over the walls: desperately hanging on to every word, for their lives depended on this outcome. Firelight flickering on wet skin picked out the dark crowd in orange glimmers. Then a pyre came crashing down upon itself, and grown men gave the shrieks of merest girls. There was sheepish silence afterwards, in which they heard heavy meat dragged away through thicket and underbrush. The bitter wind already was warming and dying down. Hot raindrops fell more and more among the cold, and soon only hot.

They drew the merchant Qabr out feet first through the slashes in the tent’s back side. Nor were any wounds to be seen on his feet or legs, his robe all unstained, not one mark upon his torso: such that, at first, it seemed the merchant might emerge in their arms alive, only in a swoon. Then a stir of condolence moved through the littler brotherhood of merchant boys. The pale and dark nephews, one a fifth son, the other a seventh, had become sole and sudden inheritants of two fortunes. By their grief and its abandon, however, they’d rather had the uncles than coin. Below the neck, Qabr’s body was pristine and unharmed. His head, caught and crushed by long teeth, was a torn and punctured bag, slopping bloody curd and shards of skull.

“For
this
we pay you full-weights of gold, Captain Isa Johnny?” Master Suresh l’Merqerim declaimed like a politician in the marketplace. “That some bitching whore out of Hell should come and go, butchering us merchants with impunity?” He gave them high-flown hands, outraged finger-pointing, the whole bit. “How will you make this good? Two excellent men dead already,
two
! And a brother.”

“No one else will die,” sang the captain to the caravan
basso profundissimo
, that voice which is palpable in teeth and bones. “At daybreak, I’ll go into the Wildeeps and kill the jooker tiger.”

That, obviously, wanted amending: “Me and Captain, both,” Demane said.

The night was raw no longer, now sultry, without nip to the breeze. Still, an outcry went up when Demane moved to quench the fires. So he left the lights burning. In that hellish heat, son huddled beside father, nephew by uncle, brother with brother. The caravan had stopped quite early for the night; day therefore took its sweet time coming. A few more tired than afraid succumbed to sleep, and Captain among them. Several times, as a swimmer drowns, he nodded up to wakefulness, but slipped always back under, until his head came up no more.

Man or woman, everyone in the green hills was permitted three days after any death during which to howl out their grief. On the fourth day you had to begin picking up your responsibilities again. Here, though . . . a tight jaw, a little red-eyed blinking, was meant to be the extent of it.
Cumalo!
Not being made for such noiseless tears, Demane cheated, storing away his grief.
¹
He breathed in the measured way Aunty had taught him, and opened his senses fully to the surroundings, allowing his observation of every stimulus to hone ever finer and more granular until he became a sentinel unbeholden to thought or feeling, only alert, only watching.

The sleepless faced the east. And hardly did dawn extend a rosy finger to caress the sky before Master Suresh crossed the mud from one of the lowburning fires. He made to kick Captain’s foot and waken him, but thought better and checked, seeing Demane’s face. There, something deep—
fell
and deep—came very near the surface. The Sorcerer shrugged and the captain’s head rolled upon his shoulder—he jerked awake. They stood. From the gore-spatter in the mud up-Road, and thence into the greenish murk of the Wildeeps, they followed the dragtrail of Cumalo’s body.

Whereof no one dared speak but all did wonder, that among them a single disciple should be held, and he alone, in deeper confidence. Once in bitter jest a brother called that preferred disciple the Lover: hence the name, not his own, which comes down to us.
None save for the Lover accompanied the Patriarch
upon the unknown errand when nights were dark, nor did anyone see them again before the morning . . .

from
Commentaries on Holy Recitature

. . . into a place of deciduous gigantism, the air too rich and stinking of sulfur, of ozone, some unearthly black snow—ash, rather—sifting down: another world, and bright midmorning here. Muttering
earthquake
, muttering
pyroclastic surge
, the ground underfoot thrummed. “You near about beat,” Demane said, urgency giving his tone an edge. “Snatch that off your head, and you won’t be.”

Captain glanced over his shoulder at the Road. A few from the caravan, like children standing before a mirror, gaped blindly back at him.

“They cain’t see you,” Demane snapped. “It’s another world from there. And we gotta go—so,
right now
, Isa.” To stand atop a supervolcano, nine months gravid and about to blow, was nerve-wracking. “Quick!”

Not so quick: just a headscarf, but there have been many shy virgins who shimmied from their drawers more boldly. Uncovered, Captain’s hair flashed once blindingly (Demane—eyes closed, a hand thrown up to shield them further—saw that red flare) and then, gorging widely upon EMR, the heliophages dimmed and darkened past matte, past black, to the fuliginous. Some other time, Demane would have lingered over this sight, for it was wonderful to see how Captain’s eyes, bloodshot and purple-shadowed, instantly clarified, and every sign of fatigue and endurance sloughed from him, exchanged for the fretful antsiness of a superb and rested athlete. But they were standing on a continent that was about to halve in size. Demane rechecked the spoor and trail, seized the captain’s hand, and flung him forward through dense foliage into the next world, himself right behind . . .

. . . pulling the captain second to take point himself, as soon as the leaves snapped closed behind them. “Come here,” he said; Captain came into his arms. “Close your eyes.” Demane’s pores drenched them both, misting aroma herbaceous and evergreen. The air around them cleared, clouds of midge and mosquito falling away.

The captain screwed up his face, blinking away tears. “Ah! Stinks like rosemary.”

Nothing would scent their approach or passage now, either by nose or tongue. They would still, of course, have to watch out, and take care about making noise. And on, to the next world . . .

Had he gone home to the green hills, Demane would have seen men dressed sensibly for the heat, women walking boldly about their business; he could again have expressed himself in the mothertongue, and stopped trying to uphold foreign ways. Going off-Road into the Wildeeps was a joyful homecoming of another kind. Only in the most perilous wilderness could wild power safely unleash itself.

Monsters filled the forest. Twice Demane tore away at a dead run and Captain paced him, half a step behind. Twice again, he held them both flat to the ground, while through the jungle nearby some colossus passed unseen, the earth and trees quaking with fourfooted booms, and they lying under the thickets, with breath held, or scarcely breathing.

Only one of them could perceive the wizard cat’s wake. Only one of them could track the sign under leafy darkness, through mist and rain, and see them safely past every peril. And so no talk, no conflict, entered into who would boldly lead, who meekly follow. The trail took them as much from glade to glade as between worlds. Aunty would have been proud. Demane learned miracles she’d never taught, and learned them on his feet, at speed.

. . . breathing in the minutely floating odorants left by the jukiere’s passage. Molecules mixed on his tongue with secretions of the pineal gland—which, in the Wildeeps, was no longer a rare ichor to eke out in meager drops. Here, his third eye abundantly replenished itself. The wonders he could work! Demane spat. The hot expectoration seethed onto the path ahead, and the way to the next world opened. An effluvious gate . . .

Even in deepest shadow of the understorey Demane was aware when infinities of scent suddenly vanished away, and myriad new odors bloomed over the space of a single step. Families of flora would regress to emergent infancy or advance to atrophied old age. Brethrens of beasts disappeared, and came back anew in strange variants. Nothing remained the same over distances, except the wizard’s vagrant trail. As the worlds changed, so did the times—by leaps of innumerate years: millennia of millennia, if such numbers existed.

. . . careful!
There
—a toad, beetle-small and searingly green as pond scum, crept on the path ahead. It so reeked of murderous fumes that Demane, though all but unpoisonable, had no wish to touch it. For another man to brush the tiny creature even glancingly would kill him on the spot. With the butt of his spear, Demane gouged the dirt and slung the virid speck, mud-engulfed, off the path where Captain’s foot (half naked in a sandal) would step a moment after his own . . .

. . . and the broadleaf canopy sealed above them. Though late morning, it was midnight on the forest floor—light in plenty, of course, for the eyes of a child of Tower
TSIMtsoa
. All this while, and from world to world, Captain had dogged Demane’s heels with the same lightly treading mimicry of a shadow. Now, he shook his hand loose; for just ahead the black-on-black brocade of the jungle shredded, with the tatters admitting sunlight. The captain went to this expanse of dappled foliage and, like some man parched with thirst ducking his face into a pool of water, thrust his head through the leaves to take some sun. According to the spoor, the jukiere had also stopped here not so long ago. Demane stepped up to the prospect beside Captain.

They stood atop a forested bluff, which commanded a view of valley, river running through, and surrounding ridges. At their feet the abrupt slope dropped off into depthless tangles of weed that overgrew the valley from end to end. This world or time was far ancestral to their own, Demane judged. Infusing the scent-drenched air was not one whiff of plant or animal known to him. Across the lush weedfields, in the middle distance, flowed a sludgy river. Sheersided crags, facelike, closed the valley in: the cliffs as smooth as cheeks, the dark bosky heights suggesting hair. One sight held both men captive. Sized so as to beggar comparison, some great vast beast extended its sinuous neck from the muddy waters of the river. If not the whole, could a much smaller part of its body be likened, then? The head was elephantine, and swept up to tree height in order to chew, and then down, to snatch immense tracts of greenery from the riverbank. And the beast’s head was minute beside the forehaunches which rose tremendously above the water’s surface.

“Something’s strange, D.” Captain murmured so softly he must have guessed the range of Demane’s hearing. “Have you seen how the forest keeps changing . . . ?” He took a step almost into full sunlight.

“Yeah—” The breeze shifted: charged with carnivorous reptile. Demane lunged, seized the captain, and drew him back under good cover.

“Tiger? Nearby?” He asked almost without sound. But Demane fiercely shook his head, and covered the captain’s mouth. He lifted his little finger to point down toward the river.

The leviathan fed. Hard by, some new prodigy erupted from the depths of weeds.
This
, by teeth and claws, was no eater of plants! From subtle creeping the monster launched upwards into the air. That leap could not have spanned half a league, surely, however far it seemed—some great distance, though: powered by hugely muscled legs many times the size of its short withered arms. Off the shore of the river there was a muddy island. . . . Ah, no: that was the weed-eater’s back! There, the other landed, claws furrowing through flesh;
the fanged jaws snapped down for a mouthful that could have champed a rhino in two. An unspeakable live butchery commenced.

Here, it would help to have seen the Assumption of the Towers. Such a cataclysm! Tongues of fire licked the clouds; eruptions of steam such as the gods in bright ascent saw blot the sphere below them; tsunami, worldwide; and the isle itself dissolving as does a clump of wet sand, held in a child’s cupped palm which she then ducks, open, under the froth of an incoming wave. Or it would help to know as much of shock and awe as those farflung few, survivors of the long night of dragons, when the Assassin of Cities, Rain of Fire, Lightstorm, Death from Above, Utter Ruin, and Torrent of Thunderbolts brought low the empire of Daluça, capital and colonies, burning and blasting the flower of mortal civilization. But without a cheek or brow brushed by edgefeathers of the archangel’s wings, while you stood a witness to somesuch enormity and from so near, what hope of understanding what they felt?

This is what they saw:

The excavations of the carnivore sent up blasts like storm surge against a rocky headland. Oceanic and salty: though these waters were scarlet blood. Honks of the leviathan cracked back from the cliffs of the valley, echoing, and the outflow of its gore purpled the brown river. The breeze ripened, coating Demane’s tongue and filling his nose with odor and savor of snake’s blood, snake’s meat. He could hardly make out the captain’s mélange of earthling and stardust, though in his very arms. From roosts in the basalt visages—from eyes and nostrils—shadows of greatwinged manikins launched into the upper void.

The sky was cloudless and the river without fog, but throughout the valley a misty pall floated in the middle of the air. Those huge birds wheeled down from the cliff faces, down through suspended vapor, down into the lower clarity. There, they took shape as feathered crocodiles. Half the monstrous flock was bigger and more gaudily colored than the other. One by one the raptors, sized like little men, alighted on the bountiful carcass. Soon dozens of them sawed away with barbed bills. The flux of the river foamed pink and white around the behemoth as submerged scavengers began to feed.

Lord of them all, the twolegged dragon glutted itself, and lesser monsters scattered whereverfrom it wished to bite. Even the rocs, scaly titans, and river sharks couldn’t strip the meat off that mountain in the time the two of them stood watching; still, substructures of skeleton, like support beams of a palace under construction, began to come into view.

The primordial awe ebbed from Demane first. His hand still lightly cupped the captain’s mouth. When he slid it away Captain turned vague, astonished eyes on him. They were the last shade of brown before black, color of coffee, and just now neither grim nor sad but wonderstruck. He was all soft-side-up for a change. And unplucked there on his mouth were kisses like lowhanging fruit, ripe and deeply pink. But the beloved too has extraordinary senses; he scents importunity. “The tiger,” Captain murmured and, blinking himself fully alert, spoke a word chilling even to the hottest lover: “Cumalo.”

Demane turned back to the depths of the forest. “Well, come on with you, then.”

A season ago, Demane walked in low spirits through the market of Philipiya. On that afternoon, rather than pass by, he stopped at the mercenaries’ post. There was a man crying as usual: “
Warriors! Brave men!
Wealth!
” Beside the crier stood another man, who smelled richly of extraterrestrial heritage. Demane went over. The one who cried put questions to him; Demane answered, his eyes on the other all the while, addressing him. Alumnus of many wars by the beads round his neck, and speechless in a black robe, black headscarf, there was no reason to believe the man other than mute—not deaf, though, for he attended Demane’s answers closely. Then they sparred for a brief bout. Demane spoke. “You staying over in a travelers’ barracks? They kind of nasty, ain’t they? You ought to come with me.” However this man answered, Demane knew his life was about to change. “I got good rooms in the amir’s palace. What’s your name, anyway?”

The man dismissed the crier with a glance. And then for the first time Demane heard Captain’s voice:

“I’m Isa of Sea-john, Demane. But if you come with the caravan, you must call me Captain.”

Wait, now: hush
,
Demane thought to himself.
He’s bitterly ashamed of his voice.
So you’d better not say, ‘Your talk is like a song. I never heard anything so beautiful in my life!’
“Where’s Sea-john at, Captain?”

“It’s the borough where foreigners live, down in Great Olorum. Call me Isa when it’s just us.”

“I don’t know that place, Olorum, either.” Demane said. They were crossing out of the market. The crowd among the vegetable stands convulsed, women with baskets fleeing toward the wharves: the late fishermen were coming in. Demane caught the captain’s hand and even when the jostling rush had passed kept hold of it.

“Look, Isa, I don’t get how you all do it here,” he said, “but I want to . . . love you. Understand me?”

The captain looked sideways at him and did not quite smile. But the handclasp lost neutrality and became erotic, a sign of something sure. For this man, Demane decided—on the spot, at that moment—he would stick it out, cross continents, do whatever love required. Captain said, “I understand you just fine.” The sublime low throb of his whisper!

Day after next, midmorning, he departed Philipiya with the caravan of Master Suresh l’Merqerim—without a word of goodbye to either the amir, or that harried ruler’s spoiled son. Menials know all that happens in a palace, however. And so two marble-swabbers, some laundresses, and a run-fetch boy were able to variously report having seen him leave in the company of an Olorumi mercenary, quite thin, unusually tall. And though Demane left behind emptied room, abandoning not one fine rich robe, nor the smallest gaud his patron had given him, the reports of all these menials coincided: as he’d shown up, so did he leave—in the altogether, and carrying just that same ratty little bag.

Demane waited until he drew a breath smacking of carrion, and then said, “Let me see the point of your spear.” Captain presented his spear. Demane pulled the shaft lower and pricked a finger on the tip, smearing his blood so that it glazed the spearleaf entirely.

“Demane . . . ?” the captain sang low.

“With the magis’ greatwork, any knife, spear, rock or whatever can hurt a creature spinning on the Towers’ left while you’re on the Road. But off-Road, you need, uh . . . a sorcerer’s blessing. As long as you can see me, or me you, that spear’s good against the jukiere. All right?”