by Adrian Selby
“Oldor-Etil,” said Lorom Haluim, “I know all eighteen of the hasts, as you would call them, of the Etil. These Oldor are closest to me, though I tend all the rivers when I can, rivers being their own term for ‘hast’.”
They spoke quickly, chittering in part, animating their speech with wild expressions, as though their faces conveyed part of the meaning to what they said. Lorom Haluim responded in kind, much flicking of his tongue, baring of teeth and rolling of the eyes. After a few moments he turned to me.
“I have some healing to attend to, they have some gifts for me, some plant hard to come by even for natives to this place. Come.”
I followed them across a stream bubbling over stones and around boulders in a wide valley, the air cooling with the setting sun. A route had been cleared from bottom to the top of this valley, a hard couple of leagues on which, most of the way up, I had not the strength to ascend further until one of the Etil tied a rope around me to help pull me along.
As the plateau widened we broke through the canopy of the trees and I saw something of the endless jungle around. To the west it broke open to the lands I’d escaped from, but all else, the towering ridges and bluffs this hilltop looked up to, was green, fading blue in the mists of evening, shades of further cliffs in the far distance.
Nearby were around fifteen huts, some open at the sides, some with woven rattan panels tied to the posts that supported their roofs.
A group of young men, beeth chewers, chins and throats red from the excess spit of their habit, were preceded by their children, screeching and all baring teeth for their customary greeting. They appeared to have no fear of me, smitten by the returning Lorom Haluim, but I was watched by the men, considering me an intruder. Lorom Haluim swept the children up one at a time, which put the men at ease. I was no threat. Our three companions greeted them and hollered for the beeth.
“Take some, Sand,” said Lorom Haluim. “It will be well received, though your guts will say otherwise tomorrow.”
I took only a few leaves, enough it seemed to avoid an insult. My teeth began buzzing within moments and it soon spread a tingling warmth through me, my head feeling light, sleepy and happy. I sat down and watched the settlement go through its evening. I was requested to join in some songs of theirs, my attempts to mimic their chatter apparently appreciated. Their women joined the men later, some coming up from that awful climb laden heavy with water. An elder then brought out some flasks of boiled rootmilk they called Bala (said with the raising of eyebrows twice). A swig of this was shortly going to knock me out.
I learned that this was the fourth house of the Oldor-Etil, four of eighteen that lived by rigid boundaries for hunting and farming from other Etil, Oldor or otherwise. Only two of the men present could find a way to the paths of the Seventh and Third Houses nearest to them, the protocol fiercely respected, for any that might invade these lands would not be able to progress without knowledge of the paths and river crossings; this much was clear first-hand this last few days.
They had some sympathy for my having been a slave. I was fed well on tapi root and a very sweet potato I had not previously tasted, both of which would become staples over the following years when animals could not be found.
I must have slept like the dead that night; I did not recall drunkenness. My bubbling stomach woke me. I barely had time to get up and hobble to the edge of camp before a thin stream of shit announced the start of my acclimatisation to their food and plant.
“It is my view,” said Lorom Haluim, a little way behind me, “that what we eat and drink contains forms of life too small for us to see without a lense, and that your body takes some time to grow used to them passing through it.”
“You have a lense?”
“Oh yes. We should go, there is much to show you at my own camp.”
Two days working towards those distant cliffs I saw on my first ascent to the Oldor-Etil would have been one but for the cramps and my weakness. I felt swamped with questions, surrounded as we were by so much plant and so many creatures. He gave a potted commentary on much that we passed. At one point he cursed and dragged us quickly off the path. A patch of flowers grew there, a foot or so from root to stem, large orange leaves and drooping violet petals like a crowd of heads in downcast cowls. As we passed by I felt a severe headache and my eyes watered, weeping for the next hour. Some insects were unaffected, the ingestion of which would in turn reduce the potency of this flower’s lethal scent.
There were many such things we encountered, some I could scarcely credit with the effect he had tested and observed as they were prepared for brews or mixes. He had a cure for river blindness, a cure too for deafness in some. On occasion he practised a piercing of the chest with a bamboo needle, its hollow filled with a mix that could sometimes revive one who had shortly died. Usually it was the children that survived such treatment, if at all, but it was astonishing to see.
What passed for his home was the most curious and wondrous place I had ever visited. We had stopped at caffin bushes that grew out of the wreckage of whatever strange trees were there previously. A high bank was to our right, on our left the ground dropped away. Ahead was a thicket of atap. After gathering caffin berries Lorom Haluim led us into the atap where I felt a change; the air was heavier, moister, my sight was sharper, the leech bites less painful. As before, the thicket did not seem traversable, yet we traversed it nonetheless.
We broke through into a wide clearing, slowly rising to the summit of a cliff. It seemed we weren’t in quite the same place we’d been climbing. Now, away on my left, was a rocky cliff face, not the edge of a cliff, and from its plateau fell a stream into a pool that spilled its excess below us, for we were also, it seemed, on a plateau of our own, though the view was masked by the heavy bushes, ferns and trees that fringed the clearing.
Here was a garden, a menagerie of plant that was breathtaking and yet defied the order of nature around it. I could see across these many hundreds of yards species of weed, trees, fruit and shrubs that grew nowhere, to my knowledge, west of the Sar. To see each was to know it, to know what it did, and this itself delighted me. They filled tiers of garden terraces that rose up the slope away from me. The light of this place also could not be described, somehow thickened, creamy as on an autumn evening. Yet it was the afternoon in Hanwoq, the sun ought to have been clearly above us, though now it could not be seen, despite there being no cover, for the breeze at this height freely blew through, cooling me. As I walked through one of the terraces I saw beds in large bamboo boxes that contained earth of many colours, from reddish clays to the fragrant rich black of high mountain soil prevalent in Mount Hope. In these terraces were thick bushes of mountain flowers like a rainbow contained, from the exceptionally rare, potent Citadels Blueheart and Basalt Greenhood to the Rulamna Starflower, a rare ingredient in some of the recipes of Harudan, greatly bolstering the healing of serious wounds or as a three-one kannab mix ingested to ease sickness and clean the blood.
Pathways threaded through these tiered terraces, the walls of which curved together to form a habitat for climbers in the spaces between them. Here grew a multitude of ivies and creepers and runners, many I didn’t recognise, some flowering in spectacular ways, creating walls, even tunnels like coloured rain as they spread in their curved rows away from me. I passed further into the garden and felt sharp changes in the air as I did so; in one area it was humid, yet another area felt cool, as each of the species of plant required. I saw no mechanism for this, or explanation deriving from their shade or position. Such then was my first experience of the true power of a magist, confirming the legends we’d all read, and legends many determined sacred, of the powers magists had to wreak havoc on the order of the world and its peoples. The sense of power intoxicated me, so long powerless. He indeed had nothing to prove and I had the chance to discover recipes that could be the envy of the world. This garden rendered pitiful even the highest communes. Great work could be done here.
Nearly an hour I had s
pent wandering this plateau before arriving at his shelter. Supported by two kapoks at its back, the posts at the front of a grand shelter allowed a roof of thatched atap and walls of lashed bamboo to stop the wind from disturbing the drudha benches and the many trays of jars and bags that surrounded them. An old chest also I saw, a monstrous work of lacquered red oak and bronze that I later discovered was the only place he had to secure his scrolls, powders and other supplies ruined easily by rain or damp. A hammock was affixed to posts within the shelter, near to the fire, burning healthily as though prepared hours before, though he had reached the shelter only a few yards ahead of me.
“I’ve more of these caffin I’ve dried and cooked. They make a fine brew, good with curried meat,” he said.
After untold time living through the porridge or scraps of slavery, this meal he offered seemed almost kingly, the caffin far richer and nuanced for being cooked and ground so freshly. I gave my thanks and he gestured to the hammock, throwing me a pouch of paste for the easing of the swellings and bites of the insects.
“You brought a good deal of plant back with you from your travels, from what I can see,” I said.
He smiled. “It’s no great effort to maintain it here; it allows me to better understand this unique, well…” There was a brief pause. “Enough of that. So, I have made you well. What is it you plan to do now?”
“This place, the plant you have here, as I saw it I could recall it, its potency. I have lost so much of my memory but I know I have been a drudha, I know that if I became a drudha again, here, it may unlock that part of me hidden since before I became a slave. I would be grateful to work alongside you, to help you, to be a better drudha.” Then I seemed to say the opposite.
“I will go back there, to the Old Kingdoms.”
Why did I say that?
“Which is it?” he asked.
“Sorry. I, I wish to stay. The Old Kingdoms can wait. I believe it’s a problem with plant, using a lot of plant, being on the Droop. I believe that the man I was, he speaks out from that place I cannot remember. I talk in my sleep. I find myself saying things and I’m not aware I’m doing it. Catching myself doing it seems to stop it. I understand if that doesn’t make sense.”
He nodded. I’m not sure why I said it, but I felt at that moment I should not try to hide anything from him. This would change soon enough.
“What is he like? This other you that speaks unbidden?”
“A good question. He seems sure of himself, and for that he is a comfort to me.”
“I read the journal you stole,” he said. “The cyca used is common to many of the thamirs who took instruction in the lands about. I saw the recipes and guidance of yours the thamir had added about his own work. There are few I’ve met with your knowledge and ingenuity. I should revisit the east.”
“I am… I was the equal of any drudharch. At least, that is the conviction of which I’ve spoken.”
He kneeled next to me, and put a cool hand to my shoulder.
“I have healed you, but your body tells a story of great pain and abuse. Maybe there is plant here that will restore you to the man you were. You have suffered as soldier, drudha and slave. I agree you should stay, I have some things to learn from you, but have much to share. I would gladly give you a new recipe book, for what is a drudha without one? Perhaps it will be the best of all recipe books, a book that could return to the east and bring some hope to those facing the growing storm from the Wilds.”
He looked me in the eyes then. I could read doubt as much as hope in his gaze; his aura gave the sense of shimmering water between us. To be this close was to be submerged, memories arising unbidden from the fractures his presence created, voices of others it seemed, images I am sure were of my life waking from whatever sleep my trials had buried them in.
For many hours I drifted in and out of sleep on that hammock, both weary but stimulated by watching him work in this great living library. For the sake of what little I knew and a thankfully lean companionship, I became the greatest drudha of them all.
It took years. I became lost in it, for while so little of the source of the wrong I felt could be known, so the fascination I had with my studies overcame it. The Etil did much of the gathering of our ingredients, in particular that which required the harvesting of animals and insects.
Navigating the lands of each River of Etils took most of a year. This was made easier by the carvings bound to trees through their domains, crafted to spin like wheels in the wind and, through holes, create a howling of various distinctions. The purpose was primarily to keep their dead and other dangerous creatures from venturing too close to their paths and camps, as well as distinguish borders.
I was soon accepted as a companion of the magist, not the first by all accounts. All the Rivers and their Houses were glad of his visit; the children particularly were fond of him, though I was less interested in their games, my visits a formal duty interrupting my studies. There were many months across the years where he was often absent, no mention of where. He warned me of it, demanding I maintain visits to the Etil and replenish our stores.
I had success in my wanderings with some of the Etil where I sought plant he had struggled to find himself. I might recount much at this point of the strange and terrible and wonderful things I saw. The truth of what lay in that jungle matched more than a few of the wilder fancies spun by survivors of expeditions there. It is sufficient here to note the Etil did indeed eat outsiders who came for plant. I shared more than one of those feasts. There is plant that properly prepared can provide the transformation of a fightbrew without the consequent damage to the body and mind, also plant that could make some sense of the chatter of birds. There is a race of men that the Etil fear and that Lorom Haluim has seen but once, cloaked as they are in skin transformed by the long ingestion of a brew, recorded in my book, which gave them the changing colours of chameleons.
I took advantage of his leavings mainly to pursue refinements of mixes useful for war; poisons, fightbrews and most intriguingly the lucins he had developed that were without odour or colour, to be inhaled from proximity to a paste that could be secreted upon clothing or any surface.
I used these on the Etil without him ever suspecting, in particular oil from the seeds of what the Etil called the Hanwoq Weeper. The chief effect was a powerful suggestibility, my proximity with any of the Etil while wearing this allowed me to influence their actions to an alarming degree. I abused it, and the Etil, in many ways, farming most heavily for ingredients to refine this oil and harden it to a preserve. There were many poisons that I tested upon them without their knowing. Rarely were the doses fatal. The challenge was to deflect the sickness or other ailment with good works, so my visits would not be associated with a noticeable pattern of debilitation.
I took little joy from the good works I performed; I could not share the delight that others had from my helping to deliver babies or heal wounds and other illnesses. There must have been something in my past that had made me choose this discipline, beyond a mere fascination with learning how to control what happened to people. It must have been for something. While that man in me spoke more and more openly as the years passed, so I struggled to hold to the man I had become, which, for all the timidity and the tremors and awful dreams, seemed a better man.
For a while at least I retained an interest in the Etil beyond their being subjects for my work. I watched a few of those babies I delivered grow through infancy until they could walk and then over the years learn to hunt and gather with their families. More and more, however, I was looking to exploit their knowledge, impatient and savagely thirsty for learning and experiment. I took expeditions with their hunters, keen to learn how they worked in this world, how they trapped and what signs they used to find water or the monkeys and alabs that provided much of their meat. Their women variously gave me time enough to help me grasp some of that curious language, giving me further advantage in my requests of them. I in turn gave poisons that acted more swiftly
, smaller doses felling larger beasts, and counters to more venoms than Lorom Haluim ever had the inclination to research.
The recipe book grew month by month, year by year, covered with skins from the alabs and snakes, the recipes written on slivers of leather bleached and gummed together for binding. I learned to make my own fieldbelt, proofing and lining the pockets for the mixtures and powders, shaping its pouches for the blocks and sporebags, With this I went among the paths of the Rivers on my own, and then into the jungle itself, back to those strange and dangerous plants we’d avoided on my first journey into the Hanwoq’s heart.
I would have died if not for the Etil. I sought these plants for lucin mixes more potent than those the Etil used to walk what they called their skytrails. I suppose there were as many names for the effect of leaving your body that lucins gave as there were tribes in all of Sarun. But this leaving one’s skin I had hoped would help me travel inward somehow. Sometimes I travelled for days, my limbs moved and stretched by the Etil as I shivered and mumbled and lay lost to the world. They gave me water while I wandered and whispered my way through the vales of the mute cold dead of war and sharp vivid warmth of the living, the ones I bled and experimented upon, the ones I saved, those that sang on marches, frosted breath shouting lusty verses, or stripping and dumping their dead into fires or pits as custom demanded. The thamirs of the Etil scratched away at the leathers they used for writing, a record of my skytrails such as they kept for each other and which they used as foretellings. Some of these words, their record of my dreams, brought fragments of me back, the man I was before the Droop, a man others feared, a drudha.
Then, one day, in their recounting of a dream of somewhere cold, a boy and girl that my thoughts had returned to without recognition, they said the word that felled me like a tree, that was my welcome to that part of me for so long the mute custodian of what befell me.
