The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps

by Kai Ashante Wilson

  “It’s showing the battle of Sweet Wells Station,” Cumalo said.

  Demane asked, “Who’s he?”

  “Big one’s the Lion of Olorum. Generalissimo and the prince the old King chose to rule after him. But a two-headed mamba bit him and he died. The one with the long knife is—was—his right hand. The Lion loved his women and left twentysome wives, twice as many children; but those two, well, they say . . .” Cumalo looked at Demane askance, and, thinking again, said only, “That blue hair is really something, huh?”

  Demane shrugged.

  Through the gates was a view down the Mainway, to the bustle on the piazza at the Station’s center and farther, to the glimmer of Mother of Waters. Folk and beasts glutted the Mainway’s length with all the noise and stench to be expected in-town.

  Under-tower, a dozen fort soldiers mingled with the brothers. The fo-so handed out reclamation chits, collecting spears. They wore black robes, strung-bead commemorials of past actions; the youngbloods’ hair was plaited in looping designs, the oldheads in simple cornrows. The fo-so were all unmixed Olorumi, and therefore beardless as babies; their right cheeks smooth, the others finely mutilated. Insignia of a thornwasp, the one-stinger drone, was cut into every left cheek.

  “ . . . vouchsafed none but them keeping to the Road. Certain doom befalls . . .”

  “This for that? Unt uh! This spear was my . . .”

  “Naw, you niggas right on time, matterfact. They got all the fights going today. Dogs, birds, dudes . . .”

  A wealthy merchant, in robes dyed the deepest color of lilies, remonstrated with the garrison’s commandant, whose cicatrix boasted three stingers, a thornwasp prince-of-nest. A handful of fo-so wore breastplates weathered by rust or verdigris; the commandant’s, however, was made of some mirror-polished alloy, flashing even in the shadows under-tower. Not quite able to make out the discussion between the merchant and elite soldier in so much crosstalk and din, Demane sidled closer.

  The merchant had just come in with that smaller caravan, fresh off the route Master Suresh l’Merqerim meant to follow tomorrow. Standing attendance on the merchant was a man prepossessing as only brothers were: thick-thewed, with a brawler’s ears, nose, and scars. His master was most insistent: “And yet, that is precisely what we did do. Do you think us fools? All the way through the Wildeeps, not a man jack set foot off the safe way!”

  “Then we have misspoken,” said the fo-so in the gorgeous cuirass, “and do most humbly beg your pardon.” A man hopes, of course, to inoculate others with his own sense of serenity, by employing that tranquil tone and placid pose. A shame, then, it serves only to infuriate! “Yet we must request that you please moderate your—”

  “You fail to listen. What I am trying to tell you, if you could hear it, is that some eater of men—a lion, something—hunted us south to north across the Wildeeps. Seven men, seven (can you see these fingers? well, count them, then: seven!) were dragged away in the night. Eaten alive, screaming! The beast came onto the Road. I shall repeat that, for the salient detail here seems not to penetrate your stopped-up ears. Onto the Road, man!” As the merchant became exercised, his guardsman shifted impatiently in place. The brother’s coloring was the ruddy-dark iridescence of a plainsman buffalo rider. When he moved, and bone or brawn pressed from beneath the skin, his complexion paled or darkened, going redbone, redbrown, dark brown across his face and bare arms. “There was a caravan some days behind us. Others from the Station will be going south. What of them? You must send down a party of soldiers and root the thing out!”

  “Would that our remit did extend to such adventures.” The commandant spoke in round tones, with graceful gestures. “But here at Mother of Water’s garrison, our warrant is the security and defense of this Station, not the mounting of bold expeditions into the bush. Therefore, lacking leave from His Holiest Majesty in Olorum, we must regrettably . . .”

  Messed Up roared. “This was my Daddy spear! Fuck if I’m selling it for no chip of wood on a leather string! Y’ALL MUSTA LOSS Y’ALL DAMN MIND.” He threw deadly elbows, shaking his shaggy head, and the brothers couldn’t calm him. Somehow Messed Up had lost none of his corpulent powers to the rigors of the desert crossing. Not easily, then, did Demane bind that tantrum within an embrace.

  “I got him, y’all, I got him,” Demane told the others. “Go ahead into the Station. We catch up later.”

  He got Messed Up out past the gates into the bright sun.

  Messed Up’s eye on the wounded side was squinching tight-shut, and then bugging wide-open. That cheek tic’d; it juddered—not one of his good days.

  “Tomorrow when we go, you just hand em that little piece of wood on the string, and you get the spear back. Your spear. Nobody else’s. Feel me?” Demane wondered what other words might explain check and reclamation . . . but then Messed Up meekly nodded.

  (And why now? Was this yet more strange sorcery? No: gratitude. After the clash with bandits outside Ajeric, hadn’t the Sorcerer sewn Messed Up whole and fine again, when half his face hung off—hung down—like a flag with no wind to lift it? Hadn’t the Sorcerer bathed that terrible wound, dressed it soft-handedly; slathered all manner of things over it, some cool, some that cut the nightmarish pain? Now it hardly hurt! No, the Sorcerer’s assurances did not make sense, but Messed Up would offer him this leap of faith anyhow. A gift.)

  They went in. Messed Up surrendered his spear.

  “Bet be RIGHT HERE, too, when I come tamara!” Messed Up shouted at the soldier who stowed the spear in the armory with the rest. Xho Xho and Walead hustled their brother out.

  A fo-so turned to Demane. “That’s all you brought with you?” He gestured to the little bag hanging at Demane’s left hip. “Where’s your gear at, your weapons?”

  A soldier beside the first leaned over to his friend, whispering (a baseline human could never have overheard): “Naked-ass bush savages. Shouldn’t even let they ass up in here!”

  A number of petty miracles lay within Demane’s power. His reflexes, his strength, were rather better than even the most gifted of athletes’; and his sense of sight and smell, and so on, could wax exceedingly keen at times. But the blood of TSIMtsoa ran thin in him, and it seemed he could not manage the metamorphosis into great power. Even so, provoke him enough, and the provoker would catch a glimpse—radiant, dark—of the stormbird. Demane spread his empty hands.

  “What you see,” he said, “is what I got.”

  A peaceable gesture: and yet one fo-so ducked his head, shuffling, while the other grinned with all his teeth, and said, “’Joy your stay at Mother of Waters!”

  With a bob of the chin, Demane accepted the greeting.

  Wilfredo wandered off into the westbound traffic on the Mainway.

  Teef, Barkeem, T-Jawn, and a couple others were headed to the Fighthouse. Cumalo told them the way.

  Faedou limped off north, into labyrinthine alleys.

  The remaining brothers either took roost on the split-rail fence or else leaned against the posts of the garrison paddock just round back the tower. “Whatever you looking for, y’all can find it up in the piazza,” Xho Xho was telling these first-timers. At nightfall, daytime commerce cleared from the piazza “and they kimmel2 a greatorch right in the middle.” Hundreds would dance and dozens drum until dawn . . .

  It came to Demane that someone should spare a thought for where brothers would have to meet the caravan tomorrow. Human bustle and metallic bits, however—countless and reflective—were flickering nauseously in the corners of Demane’s eyes. Dense aerosols clogged his nose and tongue, smell and taste inundated with clamorous trivia. Loud, low, soft, shrill: the Station was a high tide of talk, a stormy sea of noise, wave after wave swamping him.

  Xho Xho’s disquisition began to cover local outlets for black market and sin. Here as elsewhere, a silver penny was the going rate; but niggas should not sleep on the fact that, up in the piazza after midnight, there would be mad hoes out, offering deep discounts . . . Demane lay a p
astoral hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “Oh, right, my man. Sorry!” Xho Xho shifted his restless gaze over the Mainway’s traffic. “You had said you wasn’t trying to get into nothing nasty.” The boy, though, was, for bitter, and yet ineffably saccharine, was the aroma of mischief. And Xho Xho stank of it.

  A wise man would grab hold of this boy, and get honest answers to hard questions. But Demane let the intuition go by. Squinting, his teeth achy from gritting, he hadn’t yet moderated his senses for city extremes. “Just tell me, Xho,” Demane said, “where at, tomorrow, we suppose to meet up with the caravan?”

  Following the boy’s vague gesture, Demane looked across the teeming Mainway. Master Suresh and merchants could not be seen unloading over at that first complex of stables, corrals, and warehouses. “Where, Xho? Someplace on the south side of the Station, you mean?”

  “Yeah, Sorcerer. Over there.” Xho Xho eyed and dismissed every passing face, as though in hope or dread of one he knew. “Master Suresh got one of the biggest outfits at Mother of Waters. Cain’t miss it. Ask anybody.” The boy slithered out from under the shepherding hand. “Well, let me get up with you brothers later at the piazza tonight. All right? I need to go holler real quick at these niggas I used run with. Yo, Walé! I’m out! You coming or what?”

  “Yeah! Hold up! Damn!”

  What if, as Walead and Messed Up took off after Xho Xho up the Mainway, Demane had only shouted, Hey, y’all be good! Hear me? What then?

  His eyes were shut, though. He was rubbing his temples.

  The brothers scattered.

  Cumalo stayed. “What is it, that in-city thing bothering you? Can I help?”

  “ . . . No.” Demane blinked and looked around, the sense-ruckus quieting into lucidity. “It’s better now. I’m all right.”

  “Well, come on,” Cumalo said. “I’ve got a surprise for you.” He took Demane’s hand and tugged.

  A block down from the piazza was a shantytown of food vendors. They stopped at a dingy stall and offered she who worked there warm greetings and smiles. The old woman blinked at them, seeming put out by this interruption of her boredom. It was not at first certain that Cumalo’s courteous request and nugget of rock salt would suffice to stir the concessionaire into sullen motion. She slapped the salt onto the countertop, chose a consequent fragment, and popped it into her mouth. Twice—voluptuously—her eyes fell closed and open again. That softened gaze and a slackened scowl made her seem as pleasant as anyone while she savored the salt. And then the urban disdain returned.

  With a fat pestle, the old woman mashed black fruit in two bowls.

  “They grow it all along the Daughter,” Cumalo said. The mounded berries spat dark juice, disintegrating into pulpy slurry. “Other than back home, I’ve never found it anywhere except in Mother of Waters.” The tart musk of that aroma! “You can bet how surprised I was first time I saw it here.” Men were meant, at this end of the continent, to eke out their tears. Demane therefore hardened his face against the surge of homesickness.

  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.”