Wyvern

by A. A. Attanasio

"Then we are equal again." Ferang's brutal face relaxed.

  Matu helped Ferang to the raft and guided it to the stream that flowed home. Ferang lay spraddled among the rice, the salt a pillow under his head. Cold still outlined his heart, and the air shimmied with invisible mothwings around Matu's sun-furred head. "Where will you go?"

  "To the roof of the world," Matu replied. "I will dance before heaven your battle-triumph over the Tree Haunters." He waved as the current accepted the raft.

  Ferang waved back and held the sight of the lanky sorcerer — arms raised over his head, long white hair burning in the early sun — until the river swerved and the jungle closed on him.

  *

  The memory of Matu's first kill lingered, and for years no day passed without images of the two Tree Haunters he had skewered to the earth with spears. The thought that he might have been killed himself that afternoon did not dim his memory of the despair in the warrior's face whose throat he had cut. The lucidity in the man's plea to die had chilled Matu. Death is not a secret. He would finally comprehend this several years later, when the killing began again. Life is secret.

  Even before killing the warriors, Matu had realized that leaving Jabalwan and searching for a wife had awakened the dark future. Life's urge had led to death, and with the deaths of the Tree Haunters he had returned to the Life, forsaking his hope for a wife and a family tribe. He had known uncounted paddy girls and wanted more. He had loved one woman openly and maimed himself. He had killed to defend himself and been troubled.

  He resolved to be done with the unrelieved loneliness of his needs, and he set his heart on the mountains. Clouds calved from the black peaks, and waterfalls glinted among forests dark as sleep. Jabalwan waited there, and the Life that he hoped would help him forget the taste of death. He felt ready now for the borderland between rock and dream.

  He was thirteen-years-old.

  *

  Rain swept in silent waves over the valleys, beating against the doors of the forest. Rivers swelled over their banks and emptied among the trees, carrying snakes up from the sliding water. Matu collected enough snakeskin to make himself a rain-hat with a brim that sloped over his back. He also trimmed his medicine bag with fangs and made a broad strap of white hide from drowned cave vipers.

  Now he understood why the convocation of sorcerers took place on the highest mountain at the end of the rainy season. The paths up the slopes gushed rivulets, and flash floods boomed unexpectedly, sweeping away boulders and trees. Above the valleys, fog soaked earth and sky and erased vision like the medicine cloud. Only a sorcerer could find his way through this terrain. Secret signs scratched by other sorcerers into the moss on trees and cliff-rocks indicated the path up the fog ledges and into the cold, brilliant world above the clouds.

  That night Matu curled with Wawa under a wind-polished escarpment and chewed on braids of dried meat as rain smashed among the great cliffs.

  Toward dawn, fire spilled into their hollow with a roar, and Matu jerked upright, smacking his skull against the stone roof. He crawled out onto the pitched ledge. Above him, on a granite fin, Jabalwan stood, naked, his black hair streaming in the icy updraft, the fire-spear raised in salute.

  "Come with me," he exhorted, stepping to a higher ledge. "Quickly now, before I freeze my manhood off."

  Matu's fear startled to joy, and he scrambled after his teacher. Jabalwan led them up a gravel spill and along switchbacking trails no more than a palm's breadth away from the void and the dewdrop stars. Where the trail ended, dawn glowed like metal, and the only way to go led up a rock chimney brimming with thick vines sprouting from within.

  Matu stood on the toehold at the world's edge and peered out over violet thunderheads to where the sun squatted, barbed by atmospherics, an amber scorpion. He climbed into the chimney, and the air softened to ferny breezes lush with ripe fragrances of pond grass and willows.

  "Come in, sorcerer and beast," Jabalwan said from below, his voice gaseous in the draft. "This is Njurat — Heaven's Flight."

  Matu crawled through the jagged chute and descended onto a ledge above a misty grotto of percolating mud pools. The banks flourished with giant, luxuriant ferns, ancient cypress and willow trees, and a busy confusion of air plants, orchids, and dusty pink birds.

  "Leave your clothes here," Jabalwan ordered. Matu stripped and followed Jabalwan to a trail among boiling mud pools. Men sat in the mud or squatted naked on the bank. These sullen shapes cauled in wet black earth paid him no heed. Their slick serpent faces stared at the trees bending beneath their green yokes.

  "These are sorcerers from many lands," Jabalwan said. "They will not see you until you have first seen the dragon."

  Jabalwan strode through the smoky light, and Matu ran after him. Seeing again the soul-taker's lean, strong frame, the young man felt his life deepening. He wanted to express his joy at walking once more in the shadow of his teacher, to tell him of his sorrow that he had ever left his side, but every phrase that came to mind weighed falsely on his tongue. At last, he asked, "What is this dragon we must meet?"

  "The dragon is the earth," Jabalwan answered, stepping down into a jade fissure of moss and vines. The rock sweated clear water among dripping roots with white flowers tiny as frost. "The steam pools are the dragon’s breath seeping up through the rocks. As it dreams, its soul travels through the world in the power we call clouds. That is why cloudreading shows the dreams of the world."

  At the bottom of the fissure, a black slab wedged into the earth, and the mountain pried open just enough for a man to crawl through. Sorcerers had carved into the lintel the sign for maw, barely visible among the gnarled roots of the black oak above the cave.

  "You've changed in the year we've been apart," Jabalwan said, motioning for Matu to sit on a rock facing him. The youth, longer of shoulder and thick jawed, wore his hair plaited in tribal fashion. Jabalwan curiously fingered the ugly scar that strapped his thigh.

  Matu told him the story of his love for Riri and Ferang's jealousy.

  "Then you have changed, young sorcerer. When last we met, the whole world was a woman to you. Now you have looked deep enough to know that for a man, woman is death. It is terrible you took this injury to learn this."

  "Only pain could have freed me, teacher. Pain is the only answer to love."

  "Now you must meet the dragon and join the sorcerers. Are you ready? Eat this." Jabalwan reached into a leafpouch that lay at his side and held up a flat circle of bread no bigger than his palm.

  Matu recognized in the mushroom shavings and blue-tinged dough the curls of a fungus called strong eye. Jabalwan often gave it to people as they lay dying. Matu did not want to eat it. The terrible vision from the Spider still pressured his memory with mystery, and he dropped the bread so it fell behind him, where Jabalwan could not see. He bent swiftly, as though alarmed at his clumsiness, tucked the bread into a fracture in the wall, and plucked a tuft of moss which he stuffed in his mouth instead. He faced the sorcerer as he chewed it.

  Jabalwan nodded toward the rock slab named maw. "We will crawl into the belly of the mother now. Come, before the strong eye opens."

  Jabalwan lay on his back and inched into the cleft face up. Matu crept on his stomach after him, relieved that he had avoided the mushroom bread. The tight mouth of the cave hugged and scraped him, and several times he had to empty all his breath before he could squeeze on. The hard rock scraped his skull and spine, and with his head turned sidewise, cheek bleeding, he pushed with all his might. When the passage opened and he could stand, he felt the black breezes. A spark snapped, and one wriggling flame rose from a resin candle in Jabalwan's hand.

  He peered into the damp of the youth's eyes to see the mushroom bread brightening in him. Matu asked where they were, and the older man motioned for him to keep silent. Each small sound, each footscrape and sigh, the underworld barnacled in echoes. Jabalwan held the candle high and the wan light revealed a cavernous space flimmery with bats.

  They walked down
an incline of giant mushroom-shaped outcroppings, striated and glossy as meat, leading into dense heat that smelled of prophecy, incense, and torchsmoke. A black tunnel loomed ahead, and there the descent swooped into blackness. Jabalwan lifted a torch from where it had been turned head down in a stone wall. At the touch of the resin flame, torchlight kicked the darkness back, and the tunnel's arch sparkled with mica-chipped glyphs.

  "What does it say?" Matu asked, echoes washing up into the depths.

  "No one remembers. The first sorcerers carved this tunnel in the times before. Now be silent. This is the dragon's chamber." Jabalwan lowered the torch into the tunnel. "Go forward and meet the dragon of the earth," he commanded.

  Grateful for his clear head, Matu stepped through the archway with Jabalwan a pace behind. Torchlight scattered in starbursts across a mica-vaulted ceiling. The tunnel led to a shallow pit with a thrust of boulder lifting into the dark among sharp, confused shapes. Jabalwan ignited the bowl of oil in the pit.

  Blue light illuminated the giant face of Death. Matu skittered backward, into Jabalwan's waiting arm, and was shoved toward a ferociously huge, fanged face. Matu held back a yell and gaped at the abomination. A malignant skull loomed bigger than three men. The caves of its sockets stared emptily. Its jaw soared, a hollow wave of bone. Rippling vertebrae connected the colossal skull to a marl of stone in the pit. In that stew of petrified mud clustered the round, shattered-pottery shapes of eggs. Three gray eggs, each the size of a honey hive, had smashed open. Inside these eggshell cradles coiled the stone bones of lizards, grappling shapes melted in rock. Matu unclenched and approached the dragon's nest.

  At first Matu thought the monster crèche a remarkable idol carved by the first sorcerers. On closer scrutiny he perceived details of organic precision in the skeletons too minute to have been carved by human hands. "What is this?"

  "The dragon of the earth. The mother of life. This is her true head, discovered here by the first sorcerers. These are her brood, hatched at the moment of death. You are at the center of the world."

  Matu moaned and knelt, overwhelmed. Jabalwan helped him to stand and descend into the pit, to sit next to the eggs and the huddled skeletons. Above him the enormous mother reared, her monster grin suspended over her calves, ready to protect or devour them.

  Jabalwan left him then, and soon a fathomless music began as the sorcerers piped hidden flutes and horns. If he had eaten the mushroom bread, Matu thought, this would have been the furious portal to the medicine cloud. Instead, the great bones before him seemed simply locked in their fate, their passion held in the flame-lit rock. Looking about, he spotted a path beyond the pit. He decided to explore. Lighting a torch at the pit, he clambered into the shaft in the far wall.

  The corridor opened just large enough for him to walk bent over. Branching tunnels led to catacombs of racked heads, a devotional room mounded with cloudy stones called mountains' tears, and a snake-painted crawlway that made him stop. The strong eye would never have let him see all this, and he hesitated to cross these taboo serpent lines until the other sorcerers had accepted him. That reluctance disappeared as he listened to the sounds of the sorcerers moaning the noises of the afterworld. They sounded laughable to him in his freedom, and his glee at having avoided their spell emboldened him. He crept over the stenciled floor and into the forbidden alcove.

  Two heads greeted him, mounted side by side on a stone pedestal shagged with moss. One exposed the tiny, bearded head of Pieter Gefjon. The other also exhibited a tiny, snail-small face wrapped in black hair like smoke — his mother, Mala.

  Matu flew from the alcove, beaten back by the sight of Mala's wee face with her eyes stitched shut. In the dragon chamber, he dropped to his knees. His head throbbed with hurt, fear, and dull rage. He sat that way for what seemed hours. When he looked up, Jabalwan stood before him in the slick blue light, Gefjon's small head dangling in his hand by its hair.

  "You have mocked the earth dragon." The older man's face looked damaged. "You have mocked me."

  Matu glared at him with sulky remoteness.

  "Why have you done this?" Jabalwan asked.

  "I am Matubrembrem."

  "Don't feed me that dung. You have spurned a vision in the dragon chamber. If you had eaten the bread, you would have talked with the earth dragon. She would have told you what to do with your Spider vision."

  The shock of meeting Mala still rushed in Matu. "Forgive me, teacher." He listened to the silver needlepoints of cave-drippings, searching for what to say. "I did not mean to mock," he stammered, faltering before the sorcerer's disappointment.

  "Take this." Jabalwan thrust the head into Matu's grasp. "I promised your mother it would be returned to you when you had attained. Now it is yours. You are not a true tribesman. You are not a true sorcerer. You have attained your destiny." Jabalwan turned away.

  Matu clutched the sacred head and shuffled after his teacher, out of the dragon chamber, up the sloping path to the dark cavern. Matu breathed deeply, bolstering himself for the tight squeeze through the stone maw. Jabalwan did not go to the cleft. Instead he wandered down a side corridor and shoved open a crawlhole in the cavern wall. Sunlight poured in. Outside in numbing brightness, a rock trail snaked among boulders and wended down the slate ridges into the green mist of the forest.

  "Call your beast," Jabalwan ordered. "We cannot stay in Njurat now that you have mocked the dragon."

  Matu whistled for Wawa, and the gibbon appeared on the rock ledge above them, wreathed in fern fronds, a piece of pink melon in its hand, and jabbering annoyance at being pulled away from paradise.

  *

  Jabalwan and Matu camped that night on a mountain ledge under a sky huge with stars. The older man had said nothing since Njurat. Matu thought him angry, but the mansnake knew sadness. He had felt no grief when the boy had abandoned his work as a sorcerer to become a Rain Wanderer. Now that Matu had forsaken his place among the other sorcerers, Jabalwan feared for him. His voice surprised Matu with its sorrow. "You are a sorcerer in spirit. Why do you act as if you had never given your hand to the Spider?"

  "I cannot believe as you do, teacher. I am the son of a monkeyface."

  Jabalwan seized the youth's arm. "You are Matubrembrem. You are the last of the sorcerers. You did not have to mock us."

  "Yet I did."

  "And because of that you have forsaken a life among others. You will have no place in the world but what you make for yourself. No one will walk with you now that you have forsaken the Rain Wanderers and the brotherhood of sorcerers."

  "And you, teacher? Will you not walk with me?"

  Jabalwan's stare glittered in the dark. "You gave your foreskin to the Rain Wanderers, yet found no place among them. You risked your life to reach Njurat, yet scorned the sorcerers who received you. Matu, do you not see? You lose distinction with each insincerity."

  "I am sincere for what I am."

  "And you are alone."

  "I have always been alone, except for Mala — and you. Will you not walk with me, teacher?"

  Jabalwan gazed out across the moonlit forest. "I will not walk with you. I go alone into the jungle." He looked at Matu, and his face appeared swollen in the dark. "But if I meet you there in sincerity, then together we will walk with the beast that walks in us."

  *

  The next day, Matu followed Jabalwan as though nothing had happened to separate them, and the mansnake accepted gladly that the boy had the heart to go on with him after his disgrace at Njurat. He loved Matu, for this devil's child was as near as he would ever come to a son. He determined to teach the youth to survive without the fellowship of sorcerers or the protection of the tribe.

  He led Matu westward through mountain valleys teeming with multifarious life: jungles, dwarf forests of smoke-shaped trees, cactus-mazes, petrified woods where sunlight plucked colors from stones. Once they saw a green deer peer at them and then scurry dizzily into the vine-lash. Jabalwan had not brought Matu on the high trails to experience won
ders. The sorcerer knew the magic design of these cliff paths, and he showed Matu how to find his way through the labyrinth of mountain corridors. From the peaks, the land looked confused. The terrain bunched into a tangle of ranges, gullies, hillocks, derelict glens, and immense valleys. Only on the high trails the sorcerers traversed could one move swiftly.

  Upon the highest verges, Jabalwan demonstrated spirit fist. "There is nothing supernatural about it," he stated, balancing on the selvage of a cliff that leaned over a chasm of clouds and rock spires. "There is a wind in the body — and not just farts, so drop that grin. The wind is an energy that moves in our bones. The first sorcerers called it spirit wind. It heals our wounds and grows our hair. If the body is clenched in a fight, the spirit wind becomes spirit fist. Every fight is a struggle with gravity, whether it is the struggle to climb a mountain or to kill a man. Balance judges the outcome. You must learn to clench your spirit fist."

  When Matu tried to walk the paths Jabalwan crossed with ease, he slid and fell and would have plummeted to his death if not for the vine-rope secured to his waist and anchored by his teacher. Sometimes Jabalwan left Matu hanging for a day, twisting in midair, contemplating the mysteries of spirit fist. Jabalwan had large hopes for his student, for Matu's reflexes dazzled. The soul-taker had witnessed that with the Spider and in the hunt. Now that the youth had surrendered his fascination with God and the stories of God's heroes, they could concentrate on skill, which was a sorcerer's only true power. "Knowledge is as worthless as a ghost," he instructed Matu, "unless it finds its way into the muscles and becomes skill."

  This journey of memory and learning took three years and would have continued if the drum songs had not become sinister with news of the Tree Haunters' bloodiest war raids. The tribes neighboring the deep valleys of the Rain Wanderers had withheld their tribute, and Batuh had destroyed their longhouses. Jabalwan knew the Tree Haunters would assault the Rain Wanderers next. He and Matu hurried along the high trails to the cliffs above the valley where the Rain Wanderers camped. To one side a fleet of war boats swarmed on the wide river, on the other side the Rain Wanderers' vale sheltered a longhouse, paddies and gardens.