The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps

by Kai Ashante Wilson

  “How you all do complicate the thing! Yes, there is the problem of witches: whether they be stronger than natural men, dodging blows which should have landed, or exploiting other such fraudulent advantages. But only think for a moment. Every one of us knows perfectly well what a proper fight looks like. A man who wins legitimately comes up from his descent into the pit spitting blood, staggering, hard-used, hideous to see. And where is there the creature to take such a battering an he need not? He, however, who passes unscathed from bout to bout—making easy mince of formidable opponents—that man is a witch! Watch for him! Let’s not overcomplicate the matter. To catch a witch-cheater needs nothing more than to keep our eyes peeled . . .”

  His Excellency Sabiq bgm Qaby, Royalcousin, speaking to fellow trustees of the Fighthouse at Mother of Waters

  Fourth of Seven

  A town like no other in his experience, the Station at Mother of Waters, where noise and business picked up after dark. There were more people on the piazza than all the men, women, and children living in Demane’s hometown, whose houses spread out over three hills, the farthest families a whole morning’s walk away. He came upon Faedou sitting on the margins of the piazza. He had a jar beside him, his bad leg stretched along a wall, out from under the feet of enraptured dancers or the blundering Demonridden. Demane pressed one hand flat to the wall, leaned heavily, and worked his sore legs down to sitting. But he’d hardly got settled and halfway comfortable before Cumalo came out of the crowd.

  “Sorcerer!” Cumalo’s fingertips tapped upon the air, playing invisible beats. “Get my drum out for me, will you? The good one. I want to play!”

  “All right.” Demane fought laboriously to standing. “Be right back.” He looked for a corner out of the good light, hidden.

  “Aw, man, come on! Why you going off somewheres? Just pull it out of your bag right here. Nobody cares!” Cumalo danced, hands busily pantomiming. Miracles didn’t seem to faze him. What a strange, wonderful town he’d come from! Demane’s own mother, father, and siblings used to avert their eyes, sneering in terror, at the smallest miracle—to say nothing of these superstitious northerners!

  “Can’t do that, brother. I’ll be right back.”

  Down between two inns bordering the piazza, there was a cul-de-sac that ended against a remnant of the old fortwall. Where men had pissed out that Demon since before the fall of Daluça, Demane stooped in ammonia shadows and felt around in his bag. The drums were in the back bottom hall, past tarp and tent, surgical kit and medicines, food and sealed jars of pure water, knives, bow and arrows, his spear, various leather saddles, for dromedary and equus . . . ay, Aunty! Would you scold or laugh—shocked, either way—to see the bag so messy, things spread out everywhere? He found Cumalo’s jimbay and pulled it forth. Back in brightness around the greatorch, Demane handed the drum over. Cumalo joined the twenty or so others playing.

  The moment Cumalo lit into the opening evolutions of a hotter, faster rhythm, the other drummers fell in behind his mastery. “The old music,” Demane said, throwing up a palm in excitement. “That’s some church he playing!” Dozens talking, dozens standing, rushed out to join the hundreds who danced. The crowd jumped like waterdrops flicked onto a hot greased griddle. How to sit out this joyful noise, the spirit so willing! But the body begged to stay put.

  “Well, go dance, then!” Faedou waved him up. “Thought you would of been out there, if anybody.”

  Demane grinned and shook his head. “I’m getting old, old man.”

  Faedou blew like a horse. “Boy, I got two sons and a daughter older’n you.”

  Maybe just stand up and shuffle a little, at least? He reached back to push off the wall and began to raise up, but his own abused flesh fought the unfolding of his legs with such ferocity, all stiff and chilled, Demane lost heart and settled back down sitting.

  “Cut out all that groaning!” Faedou hooted. He drank from his jar. “You sound worse than me!”

  A waif appeared, and stood by patiently. Faedou gulped the dregs from his jar and handed it up. The child sped away, and then with slow careful steps returned, bearing back the jar brimful.

  Demane asked, “How’s that leg doing you?”

  “Same way it’s been doing,” Faedou said. “Let me be, Sorcerer. I ain’t in no kind of mood to talk about it.”

  So they talked of the road ahead. About as many leagues farther to the south as they’d already come, Great Olorum sprawled on the Gulf. It was a kingdom of many principalities grown together into the vastest of cities, none bigger in the world. And close by Olorum, Faedou said, could be found an outpost of heaven where seven-foot giants lived, supposedly the children of the gods. The Ashëan Enclave, Demane thought but did not say. More edifying to listen, he had learned. He tried to square the science Aunty had taught him with Faedou’s superstitious account, all gilded with legend and rumor. There being no god but God, said the old man, those tall folk could hardly be his special children, now, could they? They surely were a sight to behold, though. The naps growing blue on their heads, if you could believe it; and hair that glimmered like the sunplay of precious stones handled in bright sunlight. And what were they called, anyway, the blue ones . . . ?

  “Em’ralds?” Demane put forward.

  “No, man: wrong one! I mean the other’n. Blue.”

  Faedou swore up and down that he’d once seen such a sky-coiffed man, passing through the far crowd: taller even than the captain, and his hair like cobwebs, with the refractive lucency of . . . those blue rocks.

  “Rubies?”

  “No!”

  Every day of his life until today, Demane had grieved to be born so late a grandchild of TSIMtsoa, so many mortal generations from his divine progenitor, that there was small hope of ever attaining the glories of the stormbird. He’d failed to give much thought, however, to problems facing cousins born of the other Towers. Suppose you didn’t have two faces, one mundane, one miraculous, but just a singular that combined both qualities? Then you’d have to go through life revealing all your secrets to whoever threw you a glance. That, or else be fretting every moment of every day over some tightly wrapped headscarf . . . And yet, to eat stellar radiance! What does a sunrise taste of? Not the same as starlight, surely. And the equatorial sun at noon? (Remember these thoughts: ask him.) Suppose that gross food altogether were something you could take or leave, like hot peppers, or sweets? Oh, thank you, but no: just this sublimity of light’s enough for me. Someday1 Demane would like to examine the heliophages of Captain’s scalp carefully, up close. The curly wires on his chin and chest and so forth were darkest brown, a little chestnut, a little fawn intermingled, and one or two strands the vivid shade of the setting sun halved at the horizon—

  “Son, you doing all right over there?”

  “Mm, what happen?” said Demane. He looked around, rallying back to the here and now.

  “Seem like I lost you there, for a moment. You feel all right?”

  “Yeah, Faedou. Naw, I’m listening.” Demane banged a fist on his thigh, waking up dormant aches, getting his thoughts back on path. “So what about ‘sapphire’? Zat what the blue one called?”

  Nine or ten brothers drifted off the piazza to sit with them and talk the night out, the morning in. The adept spends a long time under tuition, but none of his studies readies him, afterwards, for the loud surmise of men in fellowship, each one shouting genial ignorance at his fellows. Mostly, Demane could nod and smile, laughing when the others laughed. Kazza, who was a fount for the songs and customs of diverse peoples, objected when someone’s guesses ranged too far off the mark.

  “No, that’s not why! It’s the old way in Sea-john, where he’s from. Men and women there, they only bare their heads for a lover. For husband or wife. Don’t you just love that? I love it! So romantic. That’s why Captain never takes that scarf off.”

  “El capitán got him a woman somewhere?” Wilfredo looked around to see who knew. “¿Ehtá casao?”

  “Won’t you ju
st ask’im, Willy?” Cumalo urged in his lazy drawl. “You know it ain’t nothing the captain love better than some newzy-ass sumbitch all up in his business.”

  Demane laughed loudest of all. He hadn’t known that Sea-john custom!

  Faedou changed his mind which wife he loved better; here, tonight, drunk: “the Old Girl.” So many in the telling were his first wife’s charms, it was hard to see how “the Little Missus” had ever got ahead in his affections, even for a little while. Other men spoke of their wives, and brothers of women they hoped to marry; and when the theme was passed to Demane, he spoke too.

  “We do it another way where I come from,” he said. “The lady choose for herself. And my Atahly, her mother was—I guess you say, here—king. The chief? That’s why Atahly could do whatever she want, have any man. She said, let me try you, Demane, for a year or two, then maybe we marry.”

  “You two have a baby, Sorcerer?”

  “No.” Though there would be one by now, surely. Sucking a tiny thumb, other hand grabbed in mama’s skirts: a sturdy baby girl, maybe, toddling after her lovely mother; not Demane’s daughter, though. “Stay and marry me, Atahly said. Then a baby. But I left.”

  “Ain’t you suppose to be the smart one here, Sorcerer?” said Faried. “I would of married a girl like that! How could you just up and leave?”

  “Baby, looking at y’all ugly face everyday, I wonder sometime too.”

  Kazza had a nose for sad romance. “You ever love anybody else, Sorcerer?”

  “Oh, sure. For a long time before me and Atahly got together.”

  “What happened? What was her name?”

  His name was Saxa. “It’s a whole long story.” Demane sighed.

  The night then began its descent, down and down, to become the ugliest yet of Demane’s life.

  There came fetching up from the flooded piazza another noisy bunch of brothers, T-Jawn, Barkeem, Teef: that whole rough crew. They were on fire about what had just gone down at the Fighthouse: “Niggas was smashed up in there ’til you couldn’t move.” “Hot like midday up in the desert.” “Everybody screaming they head off!” Telling the tale, the brothers passed a triplesize Demoniac jar from hand to hand, drinking thirstily.

  Barkeem: “Why y’all didn’t come? Should of seen that shit!” The captain, it seemed, had fought seven men, one after the next, and “knocked” (Teef speaking) “err last one of em out.” “Mais hélas” (T-Jawn) the captain was so well known at the Fighthouse, odds had been set at 50/1; nor could all Master Suresh’s guardsmen together have produced the fifty silver pennies necessary to make a wager. “Yeah, but” (another brother) the caravanmaster and four or five of those other merchants had put down “crazy money on the captain. Them motherfuckers made out like BANDITS.”

  In gore-soaked detail they recounted the casualties of Captain’s clean sweep. A man’s pulped nose, another’s mouthful of shattered teeth. Yet some other man who, shoulder wrenched from its socket and twisted up his back, had screamed Mama. A man’s eye burst to jelly in its socket. A hand stomped, the fingers limp as raw calamari. Knee wrong way back. Sudden silly swooning fall.

  “Captain was a MONSTER.” The five come from the Fighthouse all agreed no other word suited: Monster, they said several times praisefully, eyes ashine, heads nodding. They would persuade all who’d missed the show of this truth: what a monster!

  “Hoshit, though! Y’all remember that next-to-last one?”

  “Yeah, he could fight. Knocked Captain down twice!”

  “None of them other niggas lasted as long as that one. Didn’t y’all think . . . was a little while there, I thought Captain might be gon’ lose. Bossman was looking toredown that second time he got up.”

  Oh, sorry, says your lover to you. Can’t tonight; I’ve other business! So what’s he doing then? The man is maiming seven weaker men, that’s what: this, for the captain, being the most delightful of all ways to pass the first free night they’d had in months. Oh, and let’s not forget that—according to eyewitnesses—he killed at least one of those seven. Killed a man. And for what? For sport, for lucre. Not in self-defense, not to save a friend, but murder in pursuit of the shiny trash-metals that civilization prized more highly than human life. Tell us, my son: how are you faring in those strange lands, so far from home? We your parents do so often think of you and worry. Whom have you chosen to walk with, to talk to: some good woman, some kind man? Nothing Demane had ever felt, no past high or low, could match the intensity of his frustration then. Such emotion needed an out. Yes: other heads were about to feel this balked love as a rain of fire. For such virile alchemy was commonplace in those parts, at that time: there, with wearisome ease, the men could turn private pain into public fury.

  “He won, though. And GotDAMN! Y’all seen how Captain kicked that brother, at the end? So the man jaw drop off his face, onto his chest? Then stomped that nigga when he down?”

  “Yo, I heard em say: Captain broke dude’s back! Just broke it. Couple of them barber-surgeons they had up in there was saying, wasn’t no way brother was gon’ make it through the night.”

  “Nor even so long; that soul has already flown. I did linger to watch, me, after you lot rushed out—fiending, that’s the word, n’est-ce pas?—to suck upon that Demon’s poisoned cock. (I say there, White Boy! Are the rest of us meant to perish of thirst, then? All the niggers who sit to your left? MERde! Let’s have those evil spirits passed this way too!) The chirurgeons of the Fighthouse could do nothing for the man. He died. But not before taking all manner of fits. Comme ça.” T-Jawn feigned grand mal: limbs aflail, foaming at the mouth, head flung back, eyes bugged and rolling in their sockets.

  “Ha ha! You stupid, Jawny. Why you so damn crazy?”

  “Wait, wait. Which one was that? Big plainsman motherfucker, with the jacked-up ears? Nose coulda been broke like ten, twelve times? That brother—wossname—Kafflay or some shit?”

  “Yeah, fool. Who your dumb-ass THINK we talking about?”

  “Y’all,” said Cumalo. “Come on now, y’all. Simmer down some. You finna make him mad.”

  “Who mad? But for real, Sorcerer. You shoulda been there! That was some sure ’nough shit you missed, my nigga!”

  Demane blazed up like a dry thatched roof. “Didn’t I say DON’T BE CALLING ME THAT.” Biggest anyway, he shot to his feet in the seated gathering. He meant just to kick the jar from Barkeem’s hands; the cheap crockery exploded.

  Barkeem curled up on his side, a fetus, or exposed bug. “Please,” he said, and, “I’m sorry!” asking, “What I do? What I do?” One hand he stretched out to soak up the force of any falling blow; the other arm he curled round his head, for a helmet against kicks. Just a year had passed since Barkeem had fled his father’s house, and the sudden furies racking it; sixteen long years he’d lived in that hell. That Demon soaked his robes.

  “Get outta here, all y’all,” Demane said to those come from the Fighthouse. “I don’t wanna hear no more!” Barkeem wasn’t wrong: there’d be fists and stomps for any slow to take their heels. But, as no one there had ever seen the Sorcerer enraged, they all sat gaping. “GO!” Demane lunged and five brothers scrambled up and away. One not fast enough: White Boy caught a foot to the backside. That kick, with a yelp and three huge staggering steps, sent the brother veering off into some dancer’s embrace, who at once shoved him away. He fell sprawling.

  At one time or another, from sickness, or wound, or other misery, Demane had succored them all. And so those five brothers—astounded by this abuse without precedent—wheeled around in confusion, right nearby: doublechecking that Demane and this mad stranger were truly one and the same. He snarled and balled his fists. “Get y’all dusty tails away from here.”

  They slunk off.

  “Dang, Sorcerer,” said Kazza. “You scared them bad.” Scared himself, it was clear, by the wary awe with which he watched for the big man’s next act.

  Fuck them niggas. “They be all right,” Demane said. And his body all char
ged with righteous violence, but the villain nowhere in sight, he swung his heavy arms out and jerked them back in, banging his own chest once with each fist. Captain had destroyed seven men, one of them dead. And what shape would the monster be in himself; all bloody and bruised now, torn and staggering?

  “Somebody here”—Demane squinted around painfully, the greatorch at center-piazza dazzling his nightvision—“point me to the Fighthouse.” It was one of those cubic hulks looming on the piazza’s northwest peripheries, wasn’t it? Or a block or two farther north?

  “Nah.” Faedou shook his head. “You don’t need to go over there.” He patted the ground. “How about you set right back down, instead.”

  “Captain . . .”

  “ . . . ain’t studn you, Sorcerer. He don’t need, damn sure don’t want, none of your do-gooding, witchcrafting help. What Captain would appreciate round about now is some peace and quiet, to be sick and in pain all by hisself. That’s how he was the last six times we come through Mother of Waters. I figure he that same way tonight. Would probably knock your head off, you come near him right now. So might as well just set right back on down where it was you got up from.”

  Demane looked around him in befuddlement, and the brothers stared back. The sweep of his gaze came to rest on a brother in particular: “You knew he was going to the Fighthouse tonight.” Cumalo’s mouth dropped open, but he got no sound out, only sat gobbling. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Hey there,” called Faedou. “Hey now. Before you go shouting whatever you shouting at your homeboy Cumalo, you might wanna hear the reason why the captain done it.”

  “Why he done it?” Demane shouted. “Ain’t no reason why, old man! Captain took a mean cold look around him, and figured the world could use five or six more cripples, and a couple dead dudes on top. So he says, hows about I get myself down to the Fighthouse, see what I can do about this. Earn me some full-boys, too.”

  “No, son. And it really gotta be said—I ain’t never seenchu so out your right mind and good sense. You just as wrong as you wanna be.” Faedou lifted his jar between both hands prayerfully, fortified himself deeply, and then sighed. “Sure you don’t wanna hear why he done it? I hold the man in some esteem and admiration, myself.”