"Come here, Matubrembrem."
The voice seemed to arrive from everywhere. "You belong with me," the deep, soothing voice said. "Don't you understand that yet?"
"Sorcerer!" the boy cried in despair.
A manshadow drifted like smoke into the morning light, a jump away. "Where do you think you are running, Matu?"
The boy backed off. "How did you find me?"
"The whole jungle knows where you are, child. You've been running like an elephant. If you do not come with me, the Rain Wanderers will have you again and you will find yourself back in the paddy. Is that what you want?"
"You killed my mother."
The man stepped closer, and Jaki retreated several paces.
"Are you going to kill me, too?" the boy asked. "You want to take my head like you took my father's head, don't you?"
"I will make you a catcher of souls. That is what your mother wanted."
"Then why did you kill her?"
"Her time was used up. I blessed her."
"You killed her."
"You look with the eyes of a boy. When you become a soul-catcher, you will thank me for my gift to your mother."
"Never!"
The sorcerer shrugged. "Then run. Make your own way in the jungle. Your head will become a trophy in some tribe's longhouse." He turned and walked off downriver.
"Wait!" Jaki shouted, running after the soul-catcher. He knew he could not live alone in the forest. He had never hunted, but he had been hunted, caught, penned, and enslaved. He would not go back. And if he stayed with the sorcerer, he would at least have the opportunity to avenge his mother's death someday.
Jabalwan did not look back. He continued his stately pace along the riverbank, his blowgun resting on his shoulder. By the time the sun had risen, they had reached the fern grove where Jabalwan knew the Spider lived. The boy still followed several reluctant paces back.
The sorcerer whistled him closer, and when he approached, the man pointed a bony finger at a dew-pearled web among the ferns. A spider, like a splash of pitch, hung at the web's center. "If you are going to be more than my shadow — if you are going to be a soul-catcher — you must give your hand to the Spider."
Jaki gaped, aghast. "It will bite me."
"Yes. And when you are bitten you will suffer a vision. That is a soul-catcher's first sincerity. Maybe you will die because the powers of the world are not ready for you. But if you live, you are one of life's own, and you will be your own guide. Now touch it."
"No."
"You must. Only sincerity brings power. How will the world know you are sincere if you do not offer yourself?"
"You want to hurt me."
The soul-catcher turned from the spider and faced the boy. The lines in his face looked knife-carved. "A soul-catcher is the living pain of the world. The pain lives in him. It is not ignored. It is not frightened away. Because the pain lives in him, he knows how to draw it out of other people. That is why the soul-catcher is welcome in any village of any tribe. That is why you must give yourself to the pain before anything else can happen. Touch the Spider."
The Spider, as big as Jaki's outstretched hand, waited motionless. And when the boy stared closely at it, he saw the fine tufts of black hair on its jointed legs and the oil glow of its bulbed body. He could not bring himself to touch it; he could not even raise his arm. The soul-catcher marked the fear in him, and he spat with disgust. "Did you learn nothing among the Rain Wanderers?"
"I am afraid."
"Fear never goes away. Act! Touch the Spider."
Damp heat flushed through the boy, and his stomach twisted.
"Bah!" The soul-catcher spun off and returned to the mudbank. He stopped there and looked back at the boy, still rigid with fright. "Matubrembrem," he called, and the boy jumped. "Walk away from it. This is not the time for that. Come. I will show you the Life. Then you will see how small a thing fear is. Come."
The gentle tone of the soul-taker's voice lured Jaki away, and he followed Jabalwan into the river's blue mist.
*
"Everything we see around us knows just what to do," Jabalwan told Jaki. "We alone cannot remember enough. So we must watch. Always we must watch. Always." Journeying under the sun-basted canopy of the jungle, the sorcerer showed Jaki how to observe with all his senses. Some days the soul-catcher stoppered the boy's ears with wasp wax, and they wandered in silence until colors sharpened and shadows grew in depth. Other days Jaki, blindfolded, groped through the tunnels of the forest following a baffled Wawa and Jabalwan's rare sounds. The forest spoke, and Jaki learned its laws — the animals' hungers, the spoor of their meals, the hooks of their sex. The jungle's straightforwardness bedazzled him. Simply by watching, he learned the world's secrets. The Book his mother had taught him to read seemed a dim dream compared to the vivid clarity of watching.
One day a new scent appeared in the air, a moist meaty smell. "A Stilt Hunter village cries mournfully, a day's walk away," Jabalwan informed him. "They call me to heal their sick."
"How do you hear them, teacher?"
Jabalwan touched his flat, flared nose, a gesture that meant watch. "At dawn, when the wind turns and comes up the mountain with the day's first heat, I sit in the highest tree I can find, and I listen. The drum music comes then, in scraps, but enough for me to understand what the villages are saying down below. You will learn this. But it takes time and comes later." He cuffed the boy affectionately behind the ear. In the weeks since leaving the Rain Wanderers, Jaki's ire had dulled and he had come to a truce with the soul-catcher. The man had shown him how to find food and how to avoid becoming food for the ravenous beasts that lurked everywhere. That trust mitigated his fear of the sorcerer. The boy still cherished the hope of one day avenging his mother's death. How he would attain his murderous hope he had no idea, yet he knew that with each new day of knowledge he came closer to his day of vengeance.
On the way to the Stilt Hunter's village, Jaki caught a scent of bear. A tongue of wind licked him from a brake of cane carrying the greasy scent of a big beast. He clutched at Jabalwan's arm as he was about to stroll onto the mudbar beside the cane. "Teacher, wait! Beast ahead!"
Jabalwan nodded and smiled with satisfaction. "Very good, Matu. Your watchfulness will lengthen your life." The sorcerer clicked, and the brake burst around a giant, black-furred bear. Wawa screamed, and Jaki flew backward and splashed into the stream, sprawling to his back. Jabalwan laughed aloud, and the big bear lumbered to his side and nuzzled the nape of his neck. "This is Papan, my guardian. Like your Wawa, she has been my companion since her birth. She knows all my tricks. She stays downwind of those I don't want to see her. I have called her here today so that you may meet her."
Jaki rose from the river, and Wawa followed him timidly to the mudbank. "She is the bear that attacked me at the hut."
"Yes. And she would have killed you then if you had not fled."
"Why?"
"You need to ask?" Jabalwan shook his head with bemusement. "Unless your life meant more to you than your mother’s corpse, you could never become a soul-catcher. For you it would be better to be dead than to live motherless and alone in the jungle. It was the only merciful thing to do."
Jabalwan showed Jaki how Papan could imitate sounds. When the sorcerer held his fist up and opened his hand, the bear coughed like a leopard so realistically that Wawa whimpered. With a nod of his head, the soul-taker elicited bird chirrups from the closed muzzle of the beast. Jabalwan waved, and the massive creature slumped off into the underbrush. Eventually, Jabalwan promised, he would teach Jaki how to use Wawa for making sounds to confuse enemies.
"Animals are far greater than people," Jabalwan explained. "The tribes think they are more powerful, because they have fire and weapons. But those are the very implements of their weakness. The animals are strong in themselves. A sorcerer knows this and learns from the animals. Wawa is your circumference."
Matu squinted with incomprehension.
"Wawa is your s
oul," Jabalwan said. "He encompasses you. You are inside his circle of wandering, and he will touch the world around you deeper than you can."
"Is not my soul inside me?" Matu asked.
Jabalwan scowled. "Inside you? Like blood and bones? No. The soul belongs to the world, not to you. Wawa is not your pet. You must let him go into the forest, to wander his own life. He will return when you need him. That is the strength of our animal souls. They hear our needs and they walk with us among all that does not need us."
*
Built directly over the river on vine-lashed piles, the Stilt Hunter village stood on its reflection, accessible only by raft. As soul-catcher and apprentice approached, the tribespeople gawked. Walking the planks up to the wide verandah of the circular longhouse, Jaki tried to stay in Jabalwan's shadow. The Stilt Hunters bedecked the sorcerer with flower necklaces and sprinkled him with blossom water. The murmur of Matubrembrem rippled through the crowd, and people hanging from the wide windows pointed at him. Those closer reached out to touch his sun-colored hair.
The clotted smells of so many people and penned animals disturbed Jaki, and he wanted to leave the village even before Jabalwan had begun his healing rounds. Through his queasiness, Jaki watched carefully as the sorcerer treated those afflicted with fevers, snakebites, and animal wounds. His touch alone brought relief to many of the sick, and his root powders, plant resins, bark teas, and mudpacks sufficed to alleviate most of the ills they encountered. Yet some suffered beyond help, and to these he spoke softly and with caring. The boy stuck close to his side and heard Jabalwan's words: "Rest. The wind knows your name now. You are part of the song it sings to the stars. Rest."
For several days, the pair traveled downriver, among the stilt villages. At each settlement the soul-catcher healed the sick, comforted the dying, and shared a meal with the clans. After they had visited several longhouses, news of Jabalwan's eerie companion traveled ahead of them. In the hill and lowland villages of the Snake Walkers, the people brought their infants and young children to the demon-child, that he might touch them and bestow the favor of the sun god, his divine father. At the feast that followed the healing rounds, Jaki received the choicest cuts of meat after the sorcerer. Wawa, because he hid in Matubrembrem's sun-yellow hair, enjoyed food usually reserved for human guests.
One day in the rain forest lowlands, Jabalwan signed for Papan to cry a high, whining song. The wind wafted a scent the boy did not recognize. Jaki's apprehensions mounted, and he stepped behind the sorcerer and gripped his black waistcloth. A giant horned beast, gray as a boulder, broke out of the jungle and shambled toward them. "Do not be afraid, Matu," Jabalwan reassured him. "Like Wawa, like Papan, this is another of our friends. She is a rhinoceros I call Emang. She will carry us to our next destination." Emang bowed her massively horned head before the sorcerer, and he grabbed one of her ears and mounted, then held out a hand to Jaki. The soul-taker turned the beast back into the jungle, and they set off down a boar run with a speed that rushed the surrounding undergrowth to glassy shapes.
The rhino slowed at the edge of the jungle, where the titanic trees fell away to blue shrubs, man-high grass, and swampy plains. Over the next several days, the flatlands unraveled their beautiful surprises — herds of elephants trumpeting their affections, hordes of wild pigs following trails of fallen fruit among oases of mango thickets. At night, fireflies sifted the darkness and the sky revealed a ghostly riverbed cobbled with stars.
*
In a coppice of mossy trees, they encountered a night-specter: a tall, lightning-shaped giant sheathed in blue flame and seeming to breathe with the wind. Jabalwan called it a fire tree, a place where spirits communed with earth. All night the sorcerer sat before it, chewing roots and speaking with the spirits. Jaki fell into a trance as the soul-catcher's strange words snicked like raindrops in dust. The luminous vigil ended at first light, when the specter dulled in the graying dawn and became a termite-hollowed tree trunk. Jaki rubbed sleep from his eyes and timidly followed the sorcerer up to the possessed tree. The dead wood, sodden with hair-thin fungi, glowed in the cupped shadow of Jabalwan's hands, emitting frost light. He collected several handfuls and put the spongy stuff in a bamboo tube, which he slipped into the leather medicine bag he slung over his shoulder.
Emang crossed the coppice in a day and took them to a grass plain as wide as a desert. Far-off mountains slept in purple haze under soaring clouds. Crossing the plain, Jabalwan explained the three degrees of sorcery. "My father read bird omens. That is the beginning of sorcery, and already I have taught you as much as he knew." Jaki had learned to find water by the circular flight of honeysuckers, and by listening to the varying cries of the forest birds he could track the movements of creatures in the brush. "Knowing the bird omens is all one needs for a long life in the forest. But out here in the open survival requires something more. One must look to the higher powers." Jabalwan gestured with his blowgun at the clouds. "I am a cloud sorcerer. I understand their cold stories. Up there is the spirit world outside the tribes. Together we will watch the clouds in the hands of heaven with their backs to the earth, and we will learn about the Life — for it is the clouds that carry away our spirits. It is the clouds that return prophecy with the rains. I will teach you to know what is yet to be."
*
For several moons they roamed the grasslands, eating grains, insects, and the small animals they trapped at waterholes. Jabalwan made good his promise and taught the boy how to read the clouds for weather and insight. Weather predicitions came easily, even subtle seasonal changes seemed evident compared with the visions that the sorcerer claimed the clouds carried. For a long time, Jaki observed nothing but weather — the fever days presaged by low-running tufty clouds, the dry blow of high serifs, the approaching big rains in whorl-pattern puffballs. Standing in rain-born light, prickled with the first gust of rushing showers and watching lightning dancing on the horizon, the sorcerer said, "See what I see. Look for the flash of joy in the coming storm front, the color of pain in the hot coils of wind-ripped clouds. Here comes the wind again. Smell. What do you sense?"
"Tapir, about thirty of them, to the southeast, three hours' walk."
"Food — is that all you can think of? Smell deeper. Breathe the light — smell past the blood. What is there?"
Jaki frowned, confused. He knew he had correctly identified the tapir. What more was there? The wind felt wetter than the rain. It faintly carried the tallow stink of a delta. "A day's walk away runs a river."
"Yes, that's good. And there's more. Don't you smell the burdens? The wind is choked with sorrows."
"I don't understand."
Jabalwan's smile tightened, neither happy nor sad — a mysterious, slim smile, as if he wanted to share a secret. "Someday you will know. Death for you is still just a corpse." The sorcerer took the boy's shoulders under his arm, and they ran ahead of the downpour to a thornberry covert where Emang and Papan already sheltered from the rain.
Jabalwan set Emang free the morning they glimpsed the wood-tiled roof of a Windbone longhouse. The Windbone people, with their strange ankle-thong sandals, broad-bladed parangs, and knee-length waistcloths, greeted the soul-catcher with the same reverence that the northern tribes had displayed. Jabalwan completed his medical rounds, treating boar wounds, fever, and the ailments of the elders. The tribe received Jaki less warmly. The Windbone tribe had seen Matubrembrems before, children of the devil gods who had built a city of walls to the south. They had no respect for these demon-children, because when they appeared the devil gods themselves approached — and with them came the Star-and-Moon tribes, fire-spears, and war. No one tried to touch Jaki's solar hair.
*
Following streambeds southward, Jabalwan and Jaki met another sorcerer. He stood under the gold-mist flowers of a snakebark tree as if waiting for them, and he greeted Jabalwan with raised hands and closed, red-tattooed eyelids. The stranger wore the knee-length waistcloth of the local people, and he had the squat stature,
long eyes, and broad lips of the Windbone people — yet his legs, like Jabalwan's, bore tattoos with twining red serpents, and his naked torso, too, displayed glossy bumps in an intricate pattern that Jabalwan had said depicted the wanderings of the moon and the sun in their endless romance across the sky. The sorcerer, Dano, having heard that sorcerers visited his forest, had sought out Jabalwan to request his assistance.
Dano led them to a fig grove laden with purple leaves and an atmosphere of pollen languor. In a scooped-out tree stump filled with foamy green liquid soaked a recently severed head. Jabalwan studied it admiringly. "This will bring much power to your fields."
"Alas, we need more than that," Dano lamented. "The Star-and-Moon tribes encroach on our fishing pools, shoot our men on the river, and steal our women and children for slaves. For the chief and his warriors, war is inevitable. When I learned that you were here, I knew that the clouds had brought you to help us. You are a Rain Wanderer. You know the way of making an amulet of a head. So I have preserved this head here, waiting for your help. Will you make a war amulet for us?"
"These are the times of iron, Dano — you know that."
"I know — these are the times of iron. Matubrembrem is here, is he not?" Dano directed a sorrowful gaze at Jaki. "The prophecies bloom. We are the last. Yet we must strive as if we were the first. Is that not the teaching?"
"It is," Jabalwan replied sadly. "And I will help you."
From his leather pouch he removed bamboo tubes and gnarled tubers, which he pressed between rocks to extract a few silver drops of juice. The drops mixed with powders from the tubes to form a green paste. "Without your bone-softening gum, the head would never be more than a longhouse head," Dano said as they mixed the paste with the volatile liquid in the tree stump, producing an oil-sheened broth. They immersed the head and covered it with a swatch of cotton grass.
Wyvern Page 8
