The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (10 page)

“Master Suresh, the Road, she,” (he, it? shoot! which one?) “is right there. I see she.” (No,
her
, shouldn’t it be? Yes, it should.)

“What? Are you claiming to know where the Road is?” Peering down, Master Suresh l’Merqerim blinked and bugged his eyes, as if he’d never seen Demane before: this unasked for barbarian in his state of folkloric undress, quite an outlandish interloper, among the garbed and sober colloquies of civilization. “Now I forget: which one would you be?
Odell
, is it—or is your name
Birthday Suit
?” Master Suresh enjoyed the pretence that his guardsmen, none of them, were to be told from one another, any more than a perfect stranger from his identical twin. No brother was exempt from this indignity except the captain, who (slick as a snake) had disappeared some few steps back.

The merchant Iuliano said, “Oh, Suresh, what can you be playing at? This strapping fellow could
never
be mistaken for another! He is the guardsman the rest of them call ‘the Sorcerer.’” Iuliano’s regard was warm—a bit chilly, though, that of his man Qabr, riding beside him.

“I, Demane, yes. And the Road is there.” Demane pointed crossriver upstream. “Right there. I sure. I
am
sure.” Aback their burros, the high-toned crowd all turned to look where Demane pointed. Utterly featureless to their eyes, that foggy bank billowed high as heaven, the color of smoke and ash. They looked back at him; but before the clamor of disbelief could break out, the captain shoved forward. He draped a certifying arm across Demane’s shoulders and said, “It’s true,” his voice as little beautiful, as much gruff
¹
as he could make it. Demane forgave the little disappearing act and fell in love all over again, or more so. Whichever. Both.

The impending uproar dispersed into murmurs.

“You know as well as I, Captain, what doom befalls that caravan which strays off the safe path. If we cross to the far bank and attempt to wander the perilous wood hoping to chance upon the Road, all our lives may be forfeit. Are you sure then, Captain Isa, we can follow this, this
sorcerous
fellow?”

The captain nodded. Suresh stood in his stirrups and bellowed: “FORM UP.”

She showed her other face to him. “You’re not scared, are you?”

“No, Aunty.” Demane looked up; and he’d thought her tall
before
! “Let me see your teeth again.”

She grinned: a maw full of ivory spikes. When she stretched out both arms, unfurling veiny thinskinned wings, Demane laughed and jumped up and down. “Fly! Go up in the air with them!”

“Not by day, child.” She put down her arms. “Maybe I’ll take you up after dark. If your cousins see something just
small
and wonderful, they’re ready to scream and cover their eyes. Can you imagine if they saw me looking this way, flying around?”

“I want to change too! Teach me
that
.”

“Ah, Demane, we’ll just have to see, now, won’t we? There’s only a spot of old blood left in you, but it
is
possible. You’ve got the blood-grace stronger than just about anybody I’ve seen these last couple generations.”

Every talon on her massive hands looked as bladed and sharp as his mother’s gutting knife. Demane tested with a fingertip.

“
Careful
, boy!”

“Ouch.”

They forded and crossed the wall of fog. Beyond it, a muggy mist crept along the ground at knee height, and broken cloudcover spat single fat drops, not hard rain. Nothing grew from the black dirt of the Road, which was wide enough for ten to ride abreast. The jungle at either side wasn’t continuous trees but intermittent stands, all overgrown with creepers, moss, and ferns. Between one copse and the next grew tracts of brakes and elephant grass. The greatwork on the Road dimmed Demane’s senses such that, eerily, he could plumb the steamy green landscape with hardly more than human clarity, his scent and taste and hearing so vague and weak that—

“Hey, Sorcerer. You can
ride
that burro, you know. Why you down there walking in the dirt?”

Because he could take the Road’s measure only by touch, through his bare feet. And what had he learned of the Road? “I’m too big,” Demane said, patting at his burro. “Gotta give the poor guy a break every now and then.”

“They small, but just as strong as camels,” Faedou said. “Son, it ain’t hurting him none for you to ride.”

“Naw, naw.
I’ll
tell you why he walking,” Xho Xho said. “Sorcerer wanna be hard like the captain.
That’s
why!”

Walead said, “Yup, yup,” and even Faedou smiled, for there was a whiff of the plausible about that explanation. To keep his body stropped to a razor’s-edge condition, Captain rarely rode; he jogged at the forefront of the caravan for most of every day. For such unflinching commitment to doing everything the hardest way possible, the brothers all thought him a bit mad; Demane too.

“Was I
really
trying to be hard like Captain,” Demane said, “I’d haveta snatch you sideways for talking smart, Xho.”

Walead cackled, and Faedou said, “Sorcerer got you right there, young brother!”

The butt of his spear thumped against the earth. Demane understood little about the greatwork laid over the Road—except that it was unimaginably powerful, and its warding virtue undiminished. But a jukiere wasn’t native to the Wildeeps, and so as free to wander from woods to Road as Demane himself.

“I’m going to leave the bag here with you.” Aunty handed it to him. “It’s better to have it out in the world, in good hands. And you’re the best one of mine I’ve seen come along since the last time I rested. Now, stop that, Mountain Bear! Cut out all that crying right now, and I
mean
it. You start up, you’ll get me going too. I told you I was old, boy. Some of these hills aren’t old as me. Anyway, I’m not necessarily passing on. Just, when I lay me down this time, I’m going to have a good
long
sleep. Might be I don’t wake up again.”

Not long past first light on the second day, the pale and cloudy morning turned lilac, and then murkier still. At intervals livid fire brightened the skies, with thunder cracking hard by. A strange rain began to fall: stinging, gritty, almost like spatters of scalding water.

“What
is
this shit?” Teef held out a cupped hand trying to catch the hard, hot water.

Or no, not hot at all—the downpour was so
cold
, it seemed to burn.

“I know,” Cumalo exclaimed. “I saw this up in the Titans once, crossing the mountains. It’s called
snow
.”

A merchant screamed then, and right thereafter so did everyone else. The burros brayed and fought on their leads. From above and all sides, pebbles and goodsized stones pelted the caravan savagely.

“No,” Demane said, “it’s hail!” Right here, the worlds on and off this stretch of Road happened to be aligned in time and place. So, it might be safer for them to . . . Captain looked at Demane and nodded sharply. The Sorcerer shouted, “Get under the trees!”

The caravan abandoned the Road. Monkeys shrieked and gibbered overhead in the canopy. Torrents of ice thrashed the leaf cover, making a terrific noise, the foliage drifting thickly down in green tatters and rags.

Several brothers sheltered beneath the same huge tree as Demane. “Why don’t you pull something outta that bag for these fucken sky-rocks?” Teef said. “
Do
something, Sorcerer!”

He was just talking smart, but Demane answered anyway. “Aunty never taught me anything for this.”

“Huh?”

He’d spoken his mothertongue, but Demane didn’t repeat himself, only shook his head.

They weathered the hailstorm well enough under the trees. Few stones reached them under the canopy, and those hit harmlessly, all force lost passing through the density of leaves and limbs.

The freak storm quickly passed, the clouds lifting and whitening. There was afterwards a tedious business of accounting for things and persons, recapturing the scattered burros, two of which lay dead, tongues lolling beside ice-chunks of skull-crushing size. Walead and Xho Xho had never left the open Road. Hail had pummeled them bloody. Walead was hysterical with terror and pain, Xho Xho stunned and clingy. Demane cleaned their cuts, having to sew and bandage the worst. In the manner that comforts, he fussed over them; but Walead was inconsolable. At last Demane resorted to a drop of poppy philter under the boy’s tongue.

A merchant had gone missing. Naturally no one had seen or heard anything. The friend of Iuliano, Qabr, came and knelt beside Demane. “When your call rang out to take shelter beneath the trees, I fled without thinking to one side of the Road, Iuly to the other.” Helplessly his suave hand gestured east, then west. “Everyone swears to know nothing. But
you
, Mr. Sorcerer, I have heard them say, are the best tracksman and hunter among us. Will you not have a look about?” The merchant Qabr caught one of Demane’s hands in his, and pressed beseechingly. What to say but yes, of course?

He made to stand; Xho Xho grabbed at him. “Hey, little man, hey there,” Cumalo said, prying loose the fingers, nodding
Go
to Demane. “Check this out! Sorcerer ain’t the only one, you know. I got tricks too.” Cumalo took out his bone dice.

He went to the captain, who then spoke to Master Suresh: the caravan was told to make ready for travel, and then to wait. Captain and Demane, one on either side, worked the grounds with slow steps for longer than the muster could patiently abide. Guardsmen began to joke and laugh. Merchants complained bitterly to Master Suresh of time wasted, daylight lost. The forest thereabouts was such a trampled mess and profusion of scents and sign, blurred beneath rain and melting hail, Demane couldn’t hope for pugmarks. And he found none, nor any splashed blood, either (and the merchant Iuliano was so slight, so small-boned, that a jukiere might have lifted the man off the ground and carried him away, instead of dragging the body . . .), but at length he stopped short and called, “Captain!” The crowd on the Road fell silent, staring.

Demane pointed without explanation into the shadows where a dense growth of leaning canebrake half-hid clods of dung.

Master Suresh l’Merqerim rushed to them. “What have you found? Is that lion scat? It looks fresh!” The man spun about wildly, as if to spot the crouching predator before it sprang. But the thick grass surrounding them might have covered a whole pride, and the nearby copse, elephants. “Has a lion taken him?”

The merchant Qabr wafted nearer, listening, both arms crossed before him, either hand draping the opposite shoulder.

The captain squatted down. With a woody length of cane, he poked apart the moist rubble, and with the stick’s point, nudged forth a mudcaked bit of wool. Sharply he looked upwards. Demane, who leaned over him, had grunted.

“You’re sure?” the captain sang
leggiero
.

“Ain’t a doubt in my mind.”

“What?” Master Suresh l’Merqerim looked back and forth between them. “I see nothing here but a shitty piece of fur. What does this signify?”

The captain, sotto voce to Demane: “Many beasts have dark fur. A boar, perhaps—?”

“Baby, come on.” Demane sucked his teeth. “You see them curls too tight. How you gon’ tell me they come off some pig?”

“All right”—the captain’s song grim now—“all right.” He stood.

“Yes? He said what?
Tell
me, Captain Isa! What is the meaning of all that bushman rabble-babble?”

Impatiently, Captain sang a long line. “Demane understands your every word perfectly, Master Suresh l’Merqerim.”

“And
what
? I insist that you—!”

“It was no lion dropped this dung, Master Suresh. And that is not fur, but a piece from a man’s scalp. The jook-toothed tiger has eaten someone before.”

He was singing past the caravanmaster, to Qabr. Captain sang in a minor key, inflected with blue notes. At once Qabr grasped the vanity of hope. He made a northern man’s sound of terrible pain: a scream swallowed, choked upon. Then the small man opened his mouth wide and wailed.

Neither Demane nor the captain found any other sign.

Ashé’s children wish us well,

but never trust them, born of Hell.

TsimTsoa’s by far the best,

for
weal and woe,
than all the rest!

from
“Tower Song,” chanted for skip-stone games in Great Olorum

Master Suresh required them to pick up the pace. One stop, once a day, at the midday well; nor would they linger there. The caravan would press on as near full dark as possible. He wanted them across the Wildeeps in four nights, though the customary number was six.

Things shook out otherwise.

The skies slowly dimmed, an overcast louring, black and heavy. As this premature night fell, the malevolence of the flanking forests seemed to close in upon them. By late afternoon the feeble daylight had nearly died. From the blustery dark above, rain fell softly on them:
very
cold. The tropical evening waxed ever chillier, the breeze freshening from moment to moment, until it cut raw and harsh. Men saw their breath—many for the first time. Merchants and brothers who had them pulled out second and third robes and every blanket and scrap of cloth they owned, the caravan swaddling itself up. Some dismounted to trot alongside their burros, warming themselves with exertion. Demane slipped lightly into trance.

“Ain’t you cold like that, Sorcerer?”

“Yeah, I’m freezing my
ass off
just looking at you!”

“Si no tieneh con qué abrigarte, take my blanket, Sorcerer. Here.”

“I’m straight, Willy,” said Demane. “You keep it.” The fine drizzle, no sooner alighting, dried from Demane’s skin, and ghostly vapor wished about him. “I got my inside-fires burning high.” He reached and patted the cheek of each brother in turn: Wilfredo, Teef, Barkeem.

“You burning up hot!” Wilfredo grabbed Demane’s hand tight, as if to squeeze some heat into his own numb fingers. “¿Cómo lo haceh? Teach me!”

“All right. But answer me this: Will you sit still half the day, every day, for the next five years?”

“¡
Coño
! The trick take so long to learn?”

“Could be longer,” Demane said. “Some people, they thoughts won’t settle down, and just keep jumping around like monkeys . . .”

He didn’t tell them that this winter, small and local, was stalking them across the Wildeeps. Just off-Road, a few steps away, it was steamy and hot beneath the trees, the drizzle falling blood-warm. The evening, there, was orange and bright, not clouded and dark as the last watch before dawn. This weather was more jukiere mischief. Well before sundown, daylight had nearly expired, and so Master Suresh had to call halt far earlier than he’d wished. Few had tents, or any recourse but to lie down in the mud, rained upon, wrapped in wet and sour-smelling blankets.

In such bedraggled straits Xho Xho sat, embraced by his own thin arms. The brown-blotched white bandages swathing his gashed scalp and forehead were wet through with rainwater. “Cain’t you do something, Sorcerer?” The boy spoke through rattling teeth. “Pleeeeease?”

“Aw, Xho.” Demane sat too; sharing out the hot fruits of an accelerated metabolism, he put his arm around the boy. “You don’t really think I could just open my bag, and the sky would clear up, do you?”

Aunty had very rarely scrupled to work the weather, saying that far too easily you might misalign patterns of drought and flood the whole sphere over; he’d one time, however, seen her break a full-blown cyclone into mere brisk wind and rain. So no doubt
she
could have waved away this conjured inclemency, but such feats were well beyond him.

“
Something
, Sorcerer. Anything.”
Xho Xho huddled under the heat of Demane’s arm. “You sure it ain’t
nothing
you can do?”

Demane thought,
Well . . .
and a whiff of his hesitant consideration must have communicated itself to the boy, for he threw off Demane’s arm and seized his hand in supplication.
Would you be healed? Show faith!
quoth the Patriarch in verses of Holy Recitature, speaking unto a mendicant leper. And with belief and fervor and pleas quite like that sick man’s, Xho Xho begged Demane.

“You
can
do something, Sorcerer! You got to, man: we dying out here!” Well, nobody was dying; but few in the caravan had ever known such bitter chill, and no one had come prepared for it.

“All right, all right.” Demane shook free of the boy, fending off his histrionics. “Turn down some, little brother. I’ll make a couple big fires.”

“Never do I doubt you, mind,” said T-Jawn, from the depths of his cowl. “Mais je voudrais remarquer que, even were these rains to cease, Sorcerer,
where
in all this Godforsaken show could we turn up dry wood?” T-Jawn waved broadly, a gesture encompassing the muddy Road, and the trees’ plentiful deadfall strewn all over it. “Such as this will not burn.”

“Even water burn, hot enough,” Demane replied, and so he looked to Captain, and was given the nod. Brothers had gathered round about, for such had become the tendency when a problem was set before Demane. He drew the sort of deep, deep breath particular to the adept who means to dip into the perilous end of his knowledge. Slowly he let the breath out. “Don’t even like
fooling
with this stuff, really,” Demane said to them. “And, brothers, y’all listen to me. These fires could go all night, or might burn just
half
the night, all right? But let’s start piling some wood up-Road a ways, not right here by the burros. Don’t worry about tinder. All I need is sticks and big wood. Enough for two big fires, so everybody—merchants, too—could get warm.”

They got to it.

Whoever is not master of all that arises, in every instant, was never master at all: Suresh l’Merqerim shot out from among the merchants, intent upon putting down what looked to be a mad uprising. The captain intercepted him, and lullabyishly sang down Suresh’s obscenities and shouts. While the caravanmaster stood by, scowling and watching brothers gather the wood, Captain went back to helping disburden the burros for the night.

“Mostly
green
stuff,” Walead said bitterly of the storm-fallen branches. “And
wet
.” He and Xho Xho stripped the leaves from a heavy bough, and together dragged it to Demane; who stomped halfway down its length and, with a heave and grunt, broke the thick limb in twain.

Twice, Cumalo put down a crosshatched base of logs, and propped up the stick-towers to make two bonfires.

The sons and nephews traveling with the merchants were made to work like dogs. When the burros had all been unloaded and hobbled, given water from the well, and their buckets filled with fodder, the boys’ uncles and fathers sent them to join the brothers’ labors. Neither merchant nor boy asked how these heaping stacks of wood, drenched from the day’s steady rain, would be set ablaze. Except by way of Master Suresh, the merchant elite never addressed their brotherly help. That was the way of things.

In the midst of all this activity Faedou stood looking like the very next man upon whom Death must call. Leaning tripod on his spear, and doddering from agony and chill, he could no longer be mistaken for his own son; more likely for his own grandfather, though a score years in the grave. Faedou’s deep glossy color had gone ashen. Despite the cold, he stank of feverish sweat. And even stifled by the greatwork on the Road, Demane’s nose knew well the nature of that sweetish rot wafting from the wound beneath his brother’s robe. Demane went to him, tried to speak to him; but Faedou would not leave off his litany of prayers. Peevishly he shook his head, and as before, slapped away all offers of help.

The brothers called for Demane to bring the sorcery. The wood awaited, the two towers assembled, and so he had to leave Faedou’s side.

Conical and about man-height, the pyres stood at center-Road, one ten long strides from the other.

Now, I’m warning you, Mountain Bear: they’re not to be trifled with. The wisest thing would be to let them alone forever. I inherited these, and never touched them myself. So you want to think twice, and go ahead and think another time, before you call
yourself trying to make use of them. I hope you’re listening; I really do. Up and kill yourself, or somebody else, or burn down a whole town justlikethat.
Aunty had given him many precautions, and Demane, crouched beside the first tower, needed a long moment to review them all. At his back, the muttersome pipe and rumble of men and boys.

“It’s cold, the wood soaking wet,” Walead complained. “I’m
tired
. It’s raining on my Goddamn head. I don’t see what we had to get all that wood for. How this gon’ work? It
ain’t
gon’ work!”

“Yo, nigga!
Shut up
with that shit, will you?” said Xho Xho, though. “Sorcerer said he could, he CAN.”

“Dang! You ain’t got to get all mad, I’m just
saying
. . .”

His hand, his whole arm, in the depths of the bag, Demane felt through the straw cushioning a solid chest. He found a globe of sealed clay. He thought at first he’d misremembered there being two, and then his tentative fingers brushed the shape of the second. He shifted aside one of the upright logs, and tenderly set a sphere atop the interior base of stacked sticks and branches. Daylight was fast failing. He of course could see fine, but that only made it harder to judge a practical distance for other eyes. Far enough away for safety, yet close enough to make out this gap in the logs.

Not a single one of the caravan’s twelve dozen looked anywhere but at Demane’s obscure antics. Boys shivered in the bite of sleety wind. Men blew onto curled fingers, stamping to get feeling back into bare sandaled feet. Demane called to the crowd, “Michelo!” and that brother came forth: he was the dead shot among them. Michelo could knock a bird from flight, or kill a bolting rabbit, with one thrown stone. “You see where it’s a black hole in them sticks?”

Michelo leaned and squinted. “ . . . think so.”

Demane dropped a pebble into his hands.

Michelo’s first throw struck a log, deflecting off into the shadows of the forest. Master Suresh l’Merqerim had seen enough. “Perhaps it’s slops, not brains, in your skulls! Or is it rather piss and night soil?” Shouting, he came forward. “Can you not see, you simple no-school idjits, that the wood is wet? That God is pissing down rain?”

Michelo’s second throw went true.

Luminous blue and yellow splashed from the clay sphere. Liquid-fire splattered within the bundled sticks and stacked logs; they caught, the wet wood combusting eagerly. Dark and dead one moment, the pyre was toweringly ablaze the next. Men exclaimed at the roar and sudden brilliance. Demane had made the crowd stand far back, but faint warmth washed them even there, and he had to shout down a general rush forward into luxurious heat. There was still the second pyre to be lit.

A single gobbet of bright jelly had splashed out of the wood tower, and glowed amidst the puddles of the Road. Undimmed by rain, like some imp from the firefields of Sol, it danced in the mud. Demane conjured a jar from his bag and with a single spilled drop quenched this molten errancy. He and Michelo kindled the other pyre.

The merchant Qabr refused to sleep fireside with the rest of the caravan; not for this evening, no. Too many eyes on him, the others all murmuring, and with Dom Iuliano’s . . .
absence
, it was all rather too much, just now. Sincere thanks, however, for the concern, very kind—
too
kind. Demane spoke of the safety in numbers, of the dangers to the outlier who wanders from the herd; but with poignant little gestures and appalled stares, the merchant inspired in Demane such a feeling of brutish presumption that his tongue tripped over these warnings. “Bay, would you talk to him? See what you could do?” But neither could the captain’s most suasive song convince. Qabr sent back his nephews—one pale, one dark—to sleep among the crowds about the bonfires, after the boys had pitched the two-man tent in the darkness up-Road from the caravan proper. He went into the tent alone.

Captain quartered the night, as always. No brother was to stand still or sit while on watch. Five would walk up and down with their spears at all times. On nights past the captain himself had often watched three full quarters, and slept only when Demane—“
You
, nobody else”—was awake and on watch. It seemed he meant to do the same tonight. Captain stalked restlessly, with the camp, the Road, and Wildeeps at either side, all under his fierce regard. Never did you see such an enemy of sleep!

For his part, Demane had no quarrel with the body’s requirements, sleep least of all. Master Suresh had held the caravan to a cruel pace, with little rest: that, and stoking his metabolic blaze so high, had taken a toll on Demane. The sleepers lay tight-packed around the sorcerous fires. Ceding his spot to someone needing it, Demane spread his groundscloth outside those spheres of brightness and warmth. He sat crosslegged, spear easy to hand, and closed his eyes. Sleet fell on him, steamed away, and more fell. His trance deepened.

Now and again he surfaced. Sleepless and unflagging, the captain could always be seen either pacing, or else startling to wakefulness some night’s watchman just beginning to nod. Captain had ridden hardly at all today, although keeping pace on foot at the caravan’s forefront had meant flat-out running. Demane thought, as often before:
The littlest children do this
. A baby rages against the eyes closing as if nothing were more hateful. Infants fight for every last instant awake, before being pulled suddenly under, as the captain soon would be, into a vortex of compulsory sleep.

Demane at times could seem to be reading the soul’s deepest secrets, but no; it was the body he read. Or that was usually so. Now, in a trance mixing full consciousness with deepest dream, he could glimpse, and even read, a line or two of the soul’s secret script. “Hey,” he called, beckoning to Captain—who looked first to the sentries: Cumalo, Messed Up, Kazza, Faried, Michelo.

Kazza, in soft falsetto crooning.
I love my wife. She went away from me. What more is there to say?
The other four brothers whose watch it rightly was were all alert too, and pacing up and down. So the captain came over and sat. Say you were a big and burly man who by nature was greatly radiant of heat; then you must learn that your lover would in hot oppressive weathers prefer some distance between you at the hour of sleep, and must learn never to take that move away personally, for it wasn’t meant so, not at all. Still, how deeply gratifying, on a raw chill night, to be so jealously pressed against, when you gathered him in snug under a heavy arm. Some other night, Captain would have flung the arm off, overcautious of any touch nearly to the point of giving himself away (for the deeply secretive cannot grasp that protecting your secret too fiercely exposes it).
I’d give my life to set eyes on her again. I loved my wife.
Tonight, Captain’s robe was soaked through, and he might be agile, might be quick, but when hawk blew like this, you wanted thickness, not rawboned whipcord—or at least a thick lover. Here, under this arm and against this body, there was vast and soporific warmth.