Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

  "She says I'm ugly."

  "She's right. She likes you anyway." Jabalwan put his arm across Jaki's shoulders. "You're lucky we're leaving immediately. She'd have you slaving in the fields again before sunfall."

  They walked to a grove a short distance downriver. Jaki knew the place. This was not the same fern holt where he had first faced the Spider — and yet timelessly the same. "Teacher," he croaked, and swallowed hard to clear his throat. "Ferang says I am a slave until I give my hand to the Spider. How does he know that I haven't?"

  "He should know," the soul-catcher said. "Before you, he had selected himself to be a soul-catcher. He faced the Spider once and backed away."

  "Why? He is a warrior."

  "It is easier to face men than to face the Spider." The sorcerer's gaze fell on Jaki. "Ferang's older brother was to be a catcher of souls — and the Spider killed him. If you had given your hand to the Spider, the watchful Rain Wanderers would have seen and the drum songs would have announced a new sorcerer." Jabalwan signaled the boy to wait, and he stepped softly over the clumped grass and through the fronds. Jaki listened to the flashings of bird and monkey calls. He followed the swirl of wispy clouds like flimsy thoughts in the sky's mind. He tried and tried to steady his piling anxiety — and still jumped when Jabalwan whistled for him. The sorcerer had found a large, bright web studded with dew and hung with a red-splotched black spider. The air around it gleamed softly.

  "You know what to do." Jabalwan stepped back. Wawa hung from a branch above, his round black face in its corolla of silver fur watching with bafflement.

  Jaki approached the Spider, extended his left hand — and fear paralyzed it. Clamping his jaw and pushing his arm forward with strength from his legs, he touched the dew-silvered web. Wawa shouted a warning cry. The Spider jigged swiftly at him, and he snapped back his hand, leaving the web shivering.

  Jabalwan coughed, stunned. He had never seen a movement that swift, and he stepped a pace closer. Jaki looked at him with woeful eyes and thrust his hand back into the web. Again the Spider attacked, and again he whipped his hand away with amazing speed as the black legs closed on his shadow. Terror howled in him, and he remembered Ferang's mockery and shoved his hand toward the Spider, which was vibrating with rage.

  Jabalwan had already begun to rush forward to stop the boy. The furious Spider would certainly inject more of its lethal poison than even a grown man could survive. As he reached Jaki's side, the Spider flailed its mad legs over the hand, and the boy held it there even though pain seared him. Jabalwan's bamboo knife blurred and struck the Spider away. Fang marks raised a red welt in the meat between thumb and forefinger, and already the flesh had begun to swell. The sorcerer hid his alarm and gently pushed the boy down. "Lie here quietly," he instructed. "Do not move. I will return at once."

  "Did I do well, teacher?" Jaki asked, afraid that his reluctance had botched the initiation.

  "You did very well, young sorcerer." The sound of his new title dispelled all the boy's apprehensions, and a glow of satisfaction suffused his chest. "Now wait quietly. I must gather plants to help with your vision."

  The soul-catcher vanished, and Jaki waited, the pain in his hand throbbing darkly. Wawa swung down from the branches and sat beside him, one long-fingered black hand on his forehead. He blinked curiously, and Jaki smiled. "Don't worry. You heard the teacher. I am a sorcerer now. The spirit powers watch over me."

  Jabalwan himself was not convinced of that. Always before when a hand had been offered, the Spider pounced, bit, and quickly retreated — and even then sometimes the venom killed. Jaki's unexpected swiftness had frenzied the creature, and now death seemed certain. The sorcerer quickly gathered the additional plants he needed to help counter this massive dose of poison. Their potency depended on their freshness, and he hurried along. Dropping leaves and lichen shreds into his medicine bag, Jabalwan realized how much he had given his heart to this strange-looking child. Perhaps because of the boy’s strangeness, eyes like metal and hair like the wind, he had become dear to Jabalwan, who had also lived his life apart, strange among his own people. Always before, the soul-catcher had watched dispassionately as the Spider selected candidates for the Life and killed those it rejected. To think of this boy dead hollowed his heart.

  Jaki watched hot tracks of wasps furl like amber ribbons against the tilting sky. A noise came from inside the trees, a sound like rain. The pain in his hand dimmed. His hand dimmed. He could feel nothing in his arm, very little anywhere in his body. Vision began to fog, and he realized that he had stopped breathing. He had to drag at the air willfully, laboriously. Sight cleared, splintered with light and slivered rainbows. Be brave, a woman's voice said. That was curious, for he had felt no fear since the Spider's hooks had seized his hand. Silence pawed at him between flares of noise. The thought occurred to him that the Spider's venom had killed his fear with the rest of his sensations, and he watched the wind feathering fern fronds and wondered if he was going to die.

  Be brave, little warrior. When he recognized Mala’s voice, he remembered her dying day, the light clicking in her open eyes and the cold of her flesh. She stepped out of the tree at his feet, and although she looked exactly as he remembered her, she wavered, scattering and regathering like a reflection in water. She smiled wearily, her long hair caught in the river breeze, her calm voice floating ahead of her: "Be brave, and I will show you something wonderful."

  Vision began to fog again, yet now his mother appeared more lucidly than ever. He could not remember if he had breathed out or in, and that stymied his effort to cross from one breath to the next. "Come," Mala said, offering her hand.

  He reached for her, attracted by the star-flakes of her eyes. Her touch thrilled like rushing water, and he stood up effortlessly into white glare. "Where are we?"

  "This is the medicine cloud," his mother explained. "This is where the dead go through on their way beyond." Just visible as a tracery of vitreous colors a landscape shimmered, a terrain like the rhododendron slopes above the valley where he had lived with Mala. The harder he stared, the clearer the scene became. Stars shone in a sky rippling with light like river waves — a twilight more beautiful than any he had ever seen. He pulled away from his mother and tried to walk out of the fog and into the luminous dusk. "You can't go there, little warrior," Mala said. "Not yet. Only the dead go there. You must stay here in the medicine cloud." A figure had stepped down the mountain slope from the stitchwork of stars, a tall, big-shouldered man. "That is your father," she told him. "He has come to greet you, to give you power for your time in the world." The man approached, fireflies tweaking around him and trailing a vapor shadow the color of water.

  Jaki stepped up to him, straining to see through the moony haze. He blew backward in a gale of horror. The man loomed closer, a one-eyed monkeyface. His right eye patched with red feathers and, good eye gorged with light, the red-faced man stared madly. Long gray hair, knotted in numerous skinny braids, rippled like quills as he charged forward. Most horrible of all, emerging from a hole in the monkeyface's brow, a snakehead spit venom. Its fangs snapped, and venom laced the air. A cry shook! A booming war cry leaped from the gulf of hell, and Jaki's heart hurt as if stabbed. He turned and ran. "Mother!" he cried, and could find her nowhere.

  Behind him the hell-thing hurried, hot to seize him, its wild scream smothering his call for help. He squandered all his strength running through endless erasures of fog. He slowed to within a pace of the pursuing monster. Globules of venom flicked past him, grazing his cheek like hot, stinging sand. Ahead the fog shredded about a shadow. "Mother!"

  "Matu," he heard distantly in Mala's frightened voice. She had never called him that before, and the sound of it almost stopped him except that the snake acid burned the backs of his legs. The shadow ahead swelled to an immense tree, bigger than any he had ever seen. Closer, he spied a root tunnel big as a cave. Twig shoots like mighty boughs swayed in an unfelt wind, their leaves charred black and glinting.

  "
Matu!" Mala's voice echoed from the root tunnel. Leaves like mouths gnawed frantically as Jaki dashed beneath them and into the cave. Jaki sensed others in the darkness. He could feel their body heat, smell their foreign scents. A wink of light flashed ahead of him, and the lumbering shadows withdrew. Moments later, another flicker lured him deeper.

  "Who are you?" he whispered, and the echo rolled back, "We — are — you —” He stared with aching intensity into the black, and he identified gray shapes, hulking forms scattering into particles. The particles became people: sweeping crowds. He beheld tribes wandering in enormous throngs across the blowing ash of time. The horde of people dropped their possessions behind them — cookpots, hunting bows, headdresses, salt bags, pelts. Children straggled, eyes sunken. They left everything behind and wandered under desert horizons. Behind them, gathering their droppings, picking over their fallen weapons and furs, the monkeyfaces in their bulky clothes followed. Swarms of them billowed after the tribes, and then the whole roiling rush of shapes blurred into darkness.

  Jaki listened closely for the massed presences and exhaled with relief not to feel them. He found himself in a bowel of the earth. Walls glistened, reflecting sparkling heat. At first he thought the flametips glowworms, because they writhed briefly while they burned their cold light. When he bent down and stared hard at the pinscrawl phosphorescence under his feet, what he glimpsed stood him upright.

  Each squeak of light was not a worm but a word! The words made names, written in the same language as the Book. The elegant swirls and serifs spelled out endless names: Old Crow, Watermelon Pit Eyes, Baboon Head, Walk on Thin Ice, Crazy Horse, Blood Beard, Iron Thighs, White Maiden ... The radiance lustered like fire, white hot fire eating all shadow, all shape. The brilliance of the names blinded him. The blaze curdled to shadows, and Mala leaned over him, pressing air into his lungs. Blue sky swooped overhead, and his mother's hair lifted in the wind, her smile dazzling.

  "Matu!" her voice croaked, and her image teetered into Jabalwan's panther crouch.

  Jaki sat up in pursuit of his vision and fell back in a sweel of dizziness. The spell of love that had guided him out of the terror of the medicine cloud floated away. In its place hunkered the man who had killed his mother — the man who had been his only real father. The clash of love and hate almost overwhelmed him, and he lay voiceless, shaken with tears.

  Jabalwan rolled off Jaki and stretched out on the leaf mulch, staring up through the trees. All yesterday and all night he had squatted over the boy, breathing for him by pressing on the boy’s chest. During the night the sorcerer's body had gone beyond fatigue into trance, and he had become the sky itself pressing breath into the earth. The boy would live now, because the sky had come down to save him. Gratitude and pride mixed in the soul-catcher, and he listened to the youth's sobs with satisfaction.

  Wawa, who had scurried from the trees to Jaki all day and night, frantic with helplessness, squealed and flipped backward somersaults over and over. The gibbon's racket penetrated Jaki's confusion, and in midsob the last gray smoke of the medicine cloud cleared from his soul. Tears bleared away, and stupendous clarity rang through him, as though the world were a bell struck by his return. He blinked. The core of hate he had felt for the sorcerer who had poisoned his mother had gone. No — not gone. The core of hate had become so heavy it had dropped out of his body and into the earth. He belonged to the world now — not to his grief or his anger or his fear or even his life. His life had gone into the life of the world, the stream of being that belonged to no one. That was why his mother had told him to be brave. She had introduced him to the world.

  Matu, his mother had called him. Matu prospered, adamant with being, not memories. He read the clouds in the wild sky. Even now he could hear the trees drinking rain, could see wasps crisscrossing on their roadless wandering under the cloudpath. Wawa blinked at him almost audibly.

  "You cannot hold it all, young sorcerer." The soul-catcher's low, steady voice grazed his ear. "You hear, you feel, you see, and you smell the Life all around you. As you get stronger, the Life will fit more snugly. Already your senses are returning to their holes. You must choose one direction and ignore the others or you will lose them all. Choose now while the power is strong with you."

  Matu looked up through the trees. In the gust of the moment, cloudscapes lifted him above reason. More than weather thrived in the wind. Heavenward the dreams of the living took the shapes of the looker's reach. He reached out from the Life ascending in him, and he witnessed gullies of heath grass and the tribes roaming deeper into their exile, dropping their weapons, sacred garments, abandoning their children...

  "You have chosen well, young sorcerer," Jabalwan said and placed a hand over the boy's eyes. "Now you see the truth, the spirit world outside the tribes. Now you see how the clouds with their backs to the earth carry our spirits and return prophecy with the rains. From this day forth you will hunger more for them than for food. You will fast and you will wound yourself to be near them. All your suffering will be their long calling, all your needs their necessity. The clouds are the weight of your life and the shapes of your destiny. Whenever you rise to them, in prayer and in pain, they will carry you. For now, you are a sorcerer."

  Jabalwan let his words drift into the boy before speaking again. "I will always be your teacher. I carry the weight of more days. Other than that, and that is very little now, we are equals. We are both sorcerers. We are both given to the Life."

  Matu looked at Jabalwan floating above him, his sinewy face dusted with morninglight, and tried to grasp what the man said. His words sounded sweet, and tense, and gone even as he spoke them, like threads of wind whistling through a hollow bone.

  "I have listened to you read the Book," the soul-catcher went on. "I have come to understand something of the vision in the Book, which is different from the Life in the forest. I understand the rage you must feel toward me for blessing your mother with an easy death."

  Matu sat up, wanting to share with Jabalwan his insight about the world, but his tongue still slept.

  The soul-taker reached among the feathers of his headdress and removed a needlethorn long as finger. "I have soaked this thorn in a red toad's sweat. One stab will kill a man. I am giving it to you, because we are both sorcerers now. If the Life instructs you to kill me, use this." He handed the thorn to Matu, who took it only because Jabalwan's dark face insisted.

  *

  For several days Matu lived in the fern dell, drinking riverwater and eating moss, watching as cloud-drifts revealed their secrets. "The time of the tribes is ending," he announced to Jabalwan the first day that he ate meat again. "The children are being left behind. The monkeyfaces are making them their own."

  Jabalwan nodded wearily. "I have seen it."

  "Then the whole world will become a monkeyface village like we saw in Bandjermasin?"

  "Yes. The whole world one day will be a wall. We will not live to see it, but it is certain as nightfall."

  "Is that good?"

  "Good?" Jabalwan smiled joylessly. "You are thinking like the Book again. For sorcerers there is no good or evil." He looked up at the clouds floating above them. "The sky is deep. It carries everything. No matter where."

  As soon as Matu's strength had returned, Jabalwan led him downriver past the funerary rafts of the Rain Wanderers. Matu's senses had closed in on him again as the soul-taker had foretold, yet with his mounting strength came a burst in physical growth and the first pummeling waves of puberty. Hunkering on a mossbank spearing fish in the tide pools, he met himself in the silvered water and knelt astounded before the changes. He had his mother's high, solemn cheekbones and small, docile ears close to his head. With horror he observed that his nose had grown long and straight — the big nose of a swamp monkey and not the flat, broad, and beautiful nose of the forest people.

  "You will never eat if you are waiting to spear your nose," Jabalwan chided, coming out of the forest.

  "I am truly ugly, teacher," Matu groa
ned.

  "The uglier the sorcerer, the greater his power. You will be less tempted by women — for they will certainly not seek you out with a nose like yours. And good riddance," the soul-catcher quickly added, seeing the consternation on the youth's face. "You belong to no tribe now. The Rain Wanderers have no claim to you anymore. You are a sorcerer, and so you are married to yourself. Your wife is the stately sky. She is naked only to your gaze."

  Matu heard this with alarm. In the weeks since his initiation by the Spider he had endured his first emergencies of lust. Dreams of Riri, her naked, dusk-colored body, polluted his sleep. He would wake fevered, laminated in cold sweat, and could return to sleep only after touching himself where the heat of her body still gripped his wakefulness. Orgasm only deepened the dreams. Alone in the forest, while Jabalwan sewed feather-fins to his cane arrows or sat chewing roots, entranced by the sky's tapestry, Matu thought of Riri and stroked himself until his seed flew from him and peace soft as the inside of a cloud filled his limbs. "Only the sky will be my wife?" he asked Jabalwan. "I will never have a woman?"

  "You are a sorcerer," the soul-catcher said in a gust of laughter. "What woman would want a sorcerer? We have no tribe. Our life is endless wandering without roof or garden. Who would protect our wives and children while we hunt? We would have to build longhouses and pigpens and paddies. There would be no time for cloudreading or healing those who need us."

  "What about desire?" Matu asked, churning with uneasiness. "Don't you have desire?"

  "Everyone has desire. When a man thinks too much about desire, a stink of death becomes apparent in his movements. He becomes hesitant. He whines for pleasure, and his mind is not in the wind but in his memory. Even the future becomes a memory. He is already dead but thinks he aches with life. He aches with the madness of the insatiable dead. Desire is not the Life — but the Life is desire."