The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (5 page)

She unstoppered a jar. Hell and its chemicals scorched the air. “You boys take it with that Demon?”

“We good, we good!” Cumalo hurriedly assured her. “Sweet’s just fine, ma’am.”

She grunted and did not pour from the jar but set it aside. She scraped a mugful of dirty crystals from a sack. Half went to either bowl. The pestle worked the grit down into the indigo soup.

She stepped back and grunted once more.
You want em, get em
.

“Over there?” Cumalo nodded toward a prayerhouse, where northerners made petition to their fathergod. There about the entryway was the typical semicircle of wall, low and squat: just right for tall men to half sit, half stand.

“Hey now. You bring me
back
them bowls, hear?”

“Yes’m.”

They perched on the balustrade. From within the prayerhouse emerged basso fulminations, and the muttered
amen
of lighter voices.
Sweet and credible are the lies of the Whisperer, enemy of God. So beware such close-close friendship, young brothers, lest Hell’s dragon make you his plaything!

Demane sipped. Every morning of a long romantic year—years ago now—Atahly had handed him bowls of crushed honeyed fruit, just a bit richer than this. And before then, his mother or father, or Saxa’s parents, had fed him breakfast with the same. “How did she get it so sweet? That wasn’t honey.”

“
Sugar
, they call it. Down around Olorum they grow whole fields of the stuff as wide as kingdoms. Most goes overseas: up on the north continent, they can’t get enough. You can’t really find honey out this side of the continent. Nobody seems to know how to keep bees the way we do back home. Still, this tastes pretty good, I think.” Cumalo looked at him as if fearing to see disappointment. “Or don’t you like it?” Some youth arriving late to worship fled past them into the prayerhouse, casting the brothers a harried glance.

Demane sipped skeptically. “It’s all right,” he said grudgingly, but then couldn’t hold back a huge grin. “Naw. It’s good.”

“See there? I
knew
you’d like it!”

They drank greedily and returned the bowls. Sat again outside the prayerhouse, Demane watched the flux of passersby, local and foreigner. He worked over in thought the same knotted frustrations as always: nothing coming loose, everything tightening.

Cumalo said, “Bossman’s putting you through it, huh?”

Demane gave a bark of mirthless laughter, and said,
For
he who is scaly, fanged and hornèd may breathe thusly into your ear, ‘One lickle kiss; where’s the harm?’
“What do you know of the gods, the Towers, and all that?”

Cumalo never looked fully awake, his eyes were so heavy-lidded. In fact, no one saw more, or more clearly. “Those are some deep mysteries right there, brother. You had to be initiated, over where I grew up. So all I really know is the same as everybody.” Cumalo’s speech grew incantatory: “The gods dwelled upon the earth.” He pointed a finger at the dust. “The gods flew again to heaven”—pointing now to the sky—“and the gods did abandon their youngest born,” pointing lastly at Demane, who nodded.

“Yeah, pretty much. As far as that goes.”

“Why’d they do it, though?” Cumalo said. “Abandon y’all here? I always
did
wonder: the gods, just taking off into the great forever and beyond like that, and leaving behind their own children.” You would have thought this man didn’t have two sons and a baby daughter, fifteen hundred miles away and asking their mama right now, doubtless,
When’s
Papa coming home?

“Exigencies of FTL,” Demane answered. Distracted by a glimpse from the corners of his eyes, he lapsed into liturgical dialect. “Superluminal travel is noncorporeal: a body must become light.” A tall, thin man passed by: some stranger, not the captain. “The gods could only carry away
Homo celestialis
with them, you see, because the angels had already learned to make their bodies light. But most
sapiens
—even those of us with fully expressed theogenetica—haven’t yet attained the psionic phylogeny necessary to sublimnify the organism.”

“No doubt.” Cumalo nodded mellowly. “No doubt. I had always maybe
thought
it was something like that.”

On the street before them a transient little drama arose and died.

That Demon rode a filthy derelict. Women in conversation scattered around the drunken man’s floundering, doomsday rants, and selfsoiled stench. Once past him, the family of women came together again.

“Most people can’t hold Him,” Cumalo said sadly as someone who knew. “My advice, brother, is to let that Demon
alone
.”

“I don’t even mess with Him.”

The grandmother, nieces, and aunties hadn’t missed a word of their argument over the feastday menu, nor yet spilled onion, bound fowl, or gnarled tuber from their brimming baskets. And then the ruck of many black robes, and a corner turned, stole the view of importunate and accosted alike.

“Before the Assumption,” Demane said, “the gods lived here on an island, in different Towers. We children only knew our own gods. My Aunty—my ancestor—came from Tower
TSIMtsoa
. Captain comes of another lineage, Ashé. Following me so far?”

“Uh huh. Go ahead.”

“Coming down from my Tower, we’re all aioloranthropes—”

“Say again?”

“—
stormbirds
,” Demane said, “thanks to the twenty-fourth chromosome. But in Tower Ashé the gods manipulated the genome another way, for polymorphism. Some Ashëan . . . oh, you won’t know what hyperphenotypes are; some
family-groups
are stronger and faster. The warriors. Some are smarter: the savants. Others are oracles and magi. I don’t
know
all the Ashëan types. It’s not my Tower. Back on the island, the family-groups served Ashé each according to their parasomatic strengths. Still with me?”

“Well, a couple words are flying a little high for me there, but I get you basically. You’re saying, the captain comes from a line of warriors.”

“No. I’m saying—” . . .
the mouth of the beast!
Far better to fling yourself to wild lions, suffering the living flesh rent by tooth and claw, than that you should . . .
“—he
doesn’t
,” Demane said. “I’m saying the captain was never meant for the fighting life at all. I’m pretty sure of it.”

“Yeah?” Cumalo turned sleepy eyes on him. “You think so? Man’s twice the warrior you are, and nobody else I ever met can take
you
.”

“But that’s just it, right there. You see what I mean? I’m no warrior either—”

“If the two of you aren’t, it’s got me wondering who in the Hell
is
.”

“Come on, Cumalo! You know me better than that. Didn’t my roots bind up the flux for you? And I pulled the poison out of that merchant’s scorpion bite. You sat
watching me
sew Messed Up’s face back on!”

“Yeah, all right. I see what you mean—a healer, then. And Captain’s in the wrong life too. What’s
he
supposed to be doing?”

Demane seized Cumalo’s knee. “Hang on a moment, all right?”

Here came a plainsman with ruined ears and twice-broken nose, his broad-shouldered swagger cleaving through the crowd. In the freedom of that brother’s wake strolled a much richer, smaller, older man, in robes the color of late dusk. Demane let go the knee and stood. “I’ll be right back.” Without meaning to, he came up to the strangers on their blind side, far too fast. The brother spun with clenched fists.

Their eyes met, and the feeling surprised them both.

Simpatico
, sudden and bone-deep; ill will was impossible. There was a familiar quality about the brother’s face. That aquiline nose . . . was it someone Demane knew? And, hey—the brother had a nice smile, too. They nodded. Their hands joined, snapped apart, and rejoined, shaken in the manner of warriors well met hereabouts. Demane dragged his gaze to the merchant’s.

“You doing all right, boss? I’m Demane,” he said, “a brother with another caravan. I heard what you said back under the tower—”

“Kaffalah!” the merchant interrupted. “What is this man’s purpose? Tell him I neither speak nor understand the rabble’s cant.” The merchant spoke in accents of Merqerim, westernmost of the coastal cities: not one of those Demane had yet visited.

“Kaffalah, brother.” Demane turned back to the plainsman. “I just want to know if any of you seen what that lion look like. The color it was? My caravan, we leaving to go through the Wildeeps tomorrow.”

The brother passed on these words to his master.

“The creature’s color?” cried the merchant. “What
earthly
difference can that make? Tell this irrelevant fool that it was the king of monster lions! A rabid, man-eating tiger! Some unholy cat-fiend slipped the chains of Hell; a harrower of
men who fear God
, men who seek
but to fare the way
in safety, to earn an
honest living
! Color? Its color be
damned
! Did we not all hear the hellbeast roaring in the night? You tell him, Kaffalah. Tell him
this
! That if the greatwork on the Road has lost virtue, such that fell things maraud freely from the Wildeeps, devouring travelers at will, then that caravan which would go south by that route were
mad
. His caravan had better go west—yes!—even to the Great River itself, taking ferry for the far side, and traveling southward
thence
: outside the bounds of the Wildeeps. This man and his master count their lives as
nothing,
should they balk from such sweet wisdom as I speak now. There being no safety on the Road, it should bring them
joy
to bypass the Wildeeps; yea, even to go
half a thousand
leagues off the direct route!”

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?”