Batuh found Mala bleeding and the child suckling. The infant horrifed him: pale as a grub, round head matted with colorless lichen, eyes like chipped glass. The cord had wound about the placental sac, and he lifted it and confirmed that the child was a boy. Mala lay still, pallid with blood loss. Batuh shouted for his brothers, and when they beheld the mushroom-skinned, white-haired baby, they would not cross the threshold. Batuh found wads of sphagnum moss the midwives had gathered, and he used them to staunch the bleeding. "Bright Air, you have given me a son," he told her, and she smiled wanly.
"The child is orang puteh, a white man," she said in a whisper.
"Even so," Batuh answered, stroking the sweat-torqued hair from her throat, "he is of your blood — and he will be chief of the forest tribes. Let the people fear him, and his rule will never be questioned."
While Batuh swabbed the umbilical cord with rice water, a shadow fell over them from the doorway. Jabalwan stood within the room, his black and red feather headdress brushing the lintel.
"I have come to take what is mine," he said in a voice like splintering wood. "You are chief of the Tree Haunters, as I promised. Now you owe me a life. I will take the mother-child."
Batuh stood defiantly between the soul-catcher and Mala. "The mother is my wife. The child is my son."
"They are mine now," Jabalwan replied with a soft hiss like a flame coming on. "They are one life, and they are mine. Will you defy me?"
Batuh thought of drawing the sword he had taken from the monkeyfaces and piercing the sorcerer through his heart as he had once done to the old chief Dajang. Jabalwan had only his small knife dangling from his hip. Batuh's hand twitched yet would not move.
The sorcerer's face, dark as a piece of night, waited, his eyes notches of alertness. He stepped forward and put a hand on Batuh's thick shoulder, his touch bright and humming, a blue link of the wind. "If you deny me, you will lose everything."
Batuh stood aside, and Jabalwan bent over Mala where she lay naked and blood-smudged on a reed mat. From a bamboo tube that dangled at his side he sprinkled a gray powder speckled with pink flecks into the burl cup filled with rice water. He lifted her head and made her drink. Immediately her eyes fluttered, and she glided into a plumbless sleep. With expert care, he lifted the infant from the slumbering woman and inserted a black toe of a root in its mouth. The child, which had begun to cry, calmed. The sorcerer cradled it in one arm and with his free hand drew his knife and cut the birth cord. "You shall be called Matubrembrem, demon-child," he announced.
Batuh felt short of breath. "Where will you take them?"
Jabalwan looked over his shoulder and stared at the chief through his braided hair. "To where the next world meets this one."
*
Mala awoke in the longhouse to find herself cleansed and dressed in a blue silk sarong stenciled with chrysanthemum flowers and her baby asleep at her breast. A flagon of water and a bowl of fruit waited at her side. The crone midwife squastted beside her, eyes brilliant with betel light. "You are the soul-taker's wife now," she gummed, and swallowed her cackle. "Nothing will be too good for you. Ghosts will watch after you and your demon-child. Beasts will bring you food. And the clouds themselves will dance for you."
Batuh came to Mala directly from his training field when he heard she had awakened. He arrived dressed in his battle finery: brown breeches studded along the seams with hexagons of turtle shell, billowy white blouse quilled at the shoulders with green feathers, sword clacking behind him like a tail. Mala had slept two days and nights, and he expected to find her bleary and disoriented. Instead, she sat up alertly, already aware through the crone of all that had transpired.
"I will kill the sorcerer," Batuh promised her.
"No." Sunlight splashed in her lap where Matubrembrem slept, swaddled in white silk, skin like porcelain, hair silvery gold. "No one will murder for us. The old woman says you promised the sorcerer a life for his help. Is this so?"
Batuh's shamed eyes nodded.
Mala reached out and touched his broad face. She had resigned herself to her destiny. The implacable melancholy that had penetrated her with the death of Pieter Gefjon stirred in her. "You will have many wives. All of them prettier than I. Among your people you are losing an ugly wife and a demon-child. Be happy."
Batuh was not happy to lose the one woman who had stirred his blood. That day, Jabalwan appeared again in Long Apari, with a troop of huge apes and two Rain Wanderers. The presence of the Rain Wanderers, ghostly, bone-powdered men with adder-red eyes, alarmed the Tree Haunters and brought the warriors out with metal axes and knives. The sorcerer removed a needle-sharp dogbone from his headdress and held it up to the sky. Whoever he pointed it at would die, and the warriors scattered. The chalk-white Rain Wanderers carried on their shoulders a riding platform of bamboo with a nipa palm canopy, and they lowered it to the ground before the longhouse where Mala lived. Jabalwan motioned, and the troop of hulking apes bounded up the nicked log and into Mala's room. The chief's brothers and their wives rushed from the longhouse with shrill screams. Batuh, who had been at the latrine creek, came running toward the longhouse with sword drawn. When he saw Jabalwan, he lowered his blade.
Mala slept. The marl smell of the apes alerted her just as the largest of the beasts lifted her baby from her arms. She screamed, and the ape dropped the baby back into her lap and retreated. When he reached again for her baby, Mala backed away with a horrified hiss.
Jabalwan strode into the room, barked at the ape, and sent it rushing outside. "They will not harm you," he assured her. "They are my children. You will come to love them." He held out his long-fingered hand. "Come away."
Mala and her infant went with the soul-catcher and his apes, riding on the shoulders of the dust-painted Rain Wanderers in their shaded litter. The last she saw of Long Apari was Batuh standing in the buzzing sunlight, his drawn sword a tusk of yellow fire, his free hand raised in parting, eyes starry with tears.
*
Following serpentine riverbeds of slimy mud and then brambly ridges, Jabalwan led his troop through the jungle and into the mazy and jagged mountains, where sheet mist soon obscured the lowlands they had left behind. Three weeks they journeyed, stopping along the way at tiny villages to eat and rest. At every stop, the people stared in awe at Matubrembrem and presented his mother with their finest treasures: wide-mouthed ceramic jugs and silk sarongs from traders of the ancient north, a snakeskin comforter and squirrel-fur quilt for the child, a yakskin cloak, a hornbill feather blouse, resin candles to keep away insects, and leaf-wrapped bundles of rice cakes studded with honey-red beetles. The apes carried these treasures as the trek continued deeper into the mountains where only ghosts meandered.
In a high valley at the edge of the jungle, the massive trees and their verdant blaze of lianas tattered to evergreens. Meadows of rhododendron and lunar heaths swooped up toward stark black crags. Here, the journey ended. In the heart of the valley, they came to a glade and a hut of attap leaves and hewn wood raised on stilts above ferny ground. Coconut palms crisscrossed each other among flowery fruit trees, and a sun-spangled creek flashed at the far end of the clearing.
"Here you will live with your child," Jabalwan told Mala after the Rain Wanderers lowered her litter before the hut. "I will see that you have meat and foods you cannot forage for yourself. And I will protect you and your child from the biting ghosts of dead cobras." Those ghosts had killed Mala's mother and father and most of her childhood tribe, devouring them with blood-bruising fevers. "The powers of the world want the boy to live. As a man, he will be a soul-catcher. I will teach him myself."
Mala kissed the waxed knuckles of the sorcerer's hand. "Will you be living here with us?"
"You will not see me again until the time comes for Matubrembrem to leave you and learn from me."
Those words chilled her, and her voice shivered when she asked, "When will you come for him, then?"
"At the end of his seventh year his childhood ends. He is not
as other children — and he will not be as other men. That is why you will live here at the top of the jungle far from all other tribes, alone with the spirits that are your child's teachers."
Jabalwan escorted Mala up the notched log and into the hut. A scent of cinnamon lingered in the air from the freshly cut wood. The apes had left her possessions and gifts on the reed mats. Among them she found with relief her Bible. The sorcerer read her gaze and said, "You will teach your child from this. He will know the language and stories of his fathers."
Two large objects occupied the hut: in one corner of the airy room, protected from mosquitoes by a gauzy veil of lake-colored cloth, a cradle carved from the wood of a tree stump and glazed with hardened pine sap — in the opposite corner, the rattan crate in which she had been presented as a gift for the monkeyfaces. The soul-catcher opened its lid and removed a small object wrapped in red silk. "When the boy asks about his father, you will show him this and tell him of the man's bravery."
Jabalwan lifted aside the red cloth and revealed a tiny head in a nest of blond hair, eyes sloped shut like an unborn child's. At the sight of it, emotions burst like weeds in Mala's heart, and she clutched her child tighter. "It is the head of the white chief!"
"Yes." The sorcerer stroked the roisterous beard of the shrunken head. "I prepared him myself. He will be your husband in the other world. Talk to him. He will recognize you."
*
The seven years that Malawangkuchingang spent with her son in the jungle valley at the top of the world filled her with more happiness than she had ever known. Though a prisoner, she experienced for the first time pure freedom, undisturbed by the judgments of other people. Loneliness never touched her, because all that was dear in her life she held close with her child. She named her son Jaki after the captain's father, whose name she found in the cover leaf of the Bible. The boy thrived, healthy, strong, and bright. Watching his life splurge with animal fervor afforded her the greatest delight. In the early years, she taught him of the earth, its green and many-colored jewelry and its creatures. She spoke to him in the two languages she knew, her native tongue and the Spanish she had learned from Father Isidro, which for her imitated the voice of angels and which she used only when she told him of God.
At first Jaki had no interest in God. God was invisible, and the boy, like all boys, wanted only what he could see and touch. He had companions among the jungle animals, the creatures he befriended with food offerings, gentle persuasion, and his own innate animality. Mala taught him nothing of hunting, and the animals of this remote valley knew no fear of him.
Jabalwan's apes became frequent visitors. The sorcerer had trained them to thrash the surrounding undergrowth with big sticks and drive away the cobra and the krait. Docile beasts, they adored how he preened them while softly singing the tribal songs Mala had taught him. Jaki rode on their broad backs, and occasionally they carried him up out of the valley into the expansive rhododendron meadows that sprawled like quilts in the lap of the rocky peaks. Lying among the sun-clustered blossoms, watching clouds sculling over the mountains, Jaki's first memories congealed. He was three years old.
At night, by the pearly light of resin candles, Mala read him stories from the Book. And his dreamland became a desert of wandering prophets, exile, war, jeweled psalms logy with love for the unseen. By day he thought little, if at all, about these mysterious images — until that day in his fourth year when he found one of the apes dead. The beast, cradled in the buttress of a big tree, still clutched its club. Its eyes had already been eaten out by rats, and the ants worked busily in the sockets despite a driving rain. A krait had bitten the ape during the night. The red-banded serpent, battered lifeless at the ape's side, shimmered with ants, its unhinged mouth grinning an empty victory. Mala and Jaki buried the ape beside a massive oak and then sat on a nearby log among glass stems of rain and read from the Book. For the first time, Jaki listened with his heart: "The hand of the Lord has done this. In his hand is the life of every living thing. Job, twelve: nine, ten."
Mala's heart grieved at her boy's hungry need to understand. From that day, she strove diligently to teach him the magic of letters and words. He listened with absorption painful to see in so young a child, and she questioned her capacity to teach him and prayed fervently that he would know what she herself could not explain.
Reading of lineage in the Book, Jaki wanted to know about his father. His notion of fatherhood loomed uncertain. He had yet to see a man, and he visualized a theandric woman big-boned as an ape, hairy with beard and chest fur. Mala could not bear to tell him of his father, the salacious fop who had conceived Jaki through her desperation to please the one man she had loved. Instead she described Pieter Gefjon, the noble sea captain who had given her the Book. She mystified Jaki with her descriptions of the sea and the big ships that had brought his father and his mother's father to the jungle. He could not imagine a body of water greater than the line of lakes he’d seen flashing from the high rhododendron meadows. She told him the sea was so big no man could see the end of it, and he went dizzy with the thought. After that he badgered her to tell him everything she knew of his father, the sea captain. She read him Gefjon's family tree from the Book and showed him his own name, the name of his grandfather, written before his father was born, and he himself puzzled through the captain's fevered scrawl and read the two abstruse lines he had entered below his own name. Mala could tell him nothing of the lion of the final moment or the mine of signature, and when he became frantic to understand, she revealed to him the captain's head. "He is your father," she told him. "Ask him." She explained that pirates had killed him and that Jabalwan the soul-taker had preserved his head so that she could speak with her husband and her son would know the face of his father.
Jaki had thought little about Jabalwan until then: the boy considered him merely another of the jungle's mysteries, a scent of cliff dew that came and went during the nights before leaf-wrapped food appeared among the branch tines of the nearby trees. The sight of the diminutive head with its placid features that still retained their wind-burnished authority filled him with respect for the recondite sorcerer. His mother showed him how she spoke with the captain by placing the head before the Book and opening the covers into the mountain wind that sluiced through the trees at twilight. As the pages flurried beneath invisible fingers, Mala dropped a tiny pebble among them. Where the pebble came to rest, she read the captain's message.
The first night that Jaki queried his father, the pebble landed in Numbers 31, where God commands Moses to slay the Midianites, and Moses admonishes the officers of the army for not killing all the women and children. Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. This confused Jaki. "Did not Moses bring Israel the commandment from God not to kill?" he asked. Mala had no answer for him but to return to the Book and read further. After that, he never queried the Book again, though he continued to listen to his mother read the stories of the vengeful God. The stories thrilled him with their enormous weight of grief. The world bore the history of grief — the dead ape he had buried beneath the oak, the dead father whose small face would never truly speak, the dead little ones and the dead women killed by command of a God with a heart as empty as a blue sky. This was a God of terror and mystery, of all that the boy feared. He would ask no questions of this God his mother loved. Even then, in the midst of his seventh year, he knew he was God's enemy.
*
Mala stood in the doorway of the hut. "Jaki," she called to him, and he sparked out of the black wall of the jungle. He spurted across the glade and pranced into the embrace of her long hair, breathing its grassy scent. "Why did you leave me alone in the night?" she asked, running her fingers through his hair, feeling for bugs.
"Is it night, mother?" Jaki asked impishly, pointing across the tattered roof of the forest at the first green wisps of dawn. "I thought it was morning."
"You thought you could see the soul-catcher."
Mala ushered him inside with a scolding click.
"I have never smelled the soul-catcher so strongly," Jaki said. "I think he is very close. I want to see him."
"He is very close," Mala agreed, and went to the corner of the hut where she kept the rattan chest with all her valuables: her sarongs, the dragonfly-wing necklace Batuh had given her, the Bible, and Gefjon's head. She took out the Bible and the head and laid them on the rush-woven floor. The head was no larger than a pomegranate, and in the brightening darkness the great shocks of gold hair streaming from the scalp and beard looked like fog.
"Mother, why are you taking out Father and the Book?"
Mala hushed him with a stern glance. Jaki could feel coldness spilling around her heavy as a mountain breeze. She baffled him. The sodden fragrance of the soul-catcher wafted stronger on the night air.
With certainty earned from her seven years as Jabalwan's creature, she knew that he would appear to them for the first time soon, when the knives of dawn glinted over the horizon — moments from now. She had planned for this from the beginning, from the day she had arrived here, when she had last seen the sorcerer. After he had left, she had lain with her child, imagining how she would .appeal to him when he returned. The tiny, warm body had inspired her imagination, and she had believed that when the time came, prayerful words would triumph in her. But now that seven years had lapsed and the soul-catcher approached, the words she had envisioned herself speaking did not come. Only anxiety volunteered itself in her. She knew what she had to do, and she put the Bible in Jaki's hands and laid the head atop it. "These are yours now, my son."
Wyvern Page 6
