Radix, page 26
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
“Serve me without question for a solar year.”
Sumner sat back, and his face hardened. “I can’t do that. I’m a ranger. I’ve signed an oath of fealty.”
Bonescrolls barked a laugh. He looked at Ardent Fang and Drift with a merry expression. “He’s tighter than a coyote’s asshole.”
Drift covered its head with its hands, and Ardent Fang rolled to his back in a fit of explosive laughter.
“You want to be a ranger?” Bonescrolls shook his head with mock sadness. “Then you are going to be one crazy ranger.”
“Crazeeeeee!” Ardent Fang whined, rolling to his side. He took Sumner’s arm and looked up at him with moist, red eyes. “Kagan, don’t he stupid. That voor inside you is going to break your mind. You don’t want that.”
Sumner refused to meet the tribesman’s gaze. He stared down at his hands: powerful, thick and sinewy, but helpless against the deep pain that twisted him. A clear head had never seemed so important. His contemplation felt muscular and direct, and he realized that if he were deprived of it again, if he had to prowl the wastes with no more wit than a lizard, not knowing where his sleep would take him, he would kill himself.
Sumner looked up at Bonescrolls. The magnar smiled benignly, nodded his head once, and Sumner reached up to the cobra insignia pinned to his lapel and tore it off.
Bonescrolls and Ardent Fang whooped and laughed, and the lupine tribesman slapped Sumner’s back. “Don’t worry, Kagan,” Ardent Fang gusted. “The magnar is wise. He’ll use you well.”
Drift whistled and chirped, and a flare of small birds streamed across the chamber. You made the right decision, warrior.
“Ah, I’m glad you both agree.” Bonescrolls refilled Ardent Fang’s cup. “My servant will need allies. After you rest tonight, I want you to take him back to Miramol with you. He shall live and work there until you hear from me.” He leaned forward and took the cobra insignia out of Sumner’s hand. “You have had too much to hold, young brother—too much.” His face sad and heavy, he added, “But you can relax now. I’m going to take it all from you.” He popped the silver cobra in his mouth and swallowed it.
Ardent Fang lurched into laughter and kicked his legs in the air. “Crazeeeeee!”
Sumner closed his eyes. At least the pain had gone. Silence ranged deep within. The lusk was over.
A burst of sound louder than Ardent Fang’s laughter snapped his lids open: all the birds wheeling around the cavern in a clamor of feathers winged out the window-oval behind Bonescrolls and vanished into a sky of stilled, pink-lit clouds.
“My witnesses,” the magnar chuckled.
***
Skyfires flimmered over the dunes, and a toothed moon hung between two buttes. Corby opened his eyes and looked about, alone in a dark cavern. Above him, the Goat nebula stared down, fixed as an insect eye.
He wobbled to his feet, the squawking insistence of the voor dead narrowing to a thin whine. With one hand on the cool rock wall to guide him, he staggered several steps and stopped. A man-shadow stood still as stone against the creased wall. The shadow stepped forward, and Corby pressed his fingers hard against the rock to keep from falling. The man had no kha.
Slim light from the skyfires limned a long, age-thickened face. Bonescrolls. Sumner’s memories of him flitted through Corby’s mind. But this Bonescrolls was not smiling.
“Sit down, voor.”
Corby bristled at the command in the old man’s voice. He forced energy into his muscles and swung forward to push the magnar out of his way. Bonescrolls, with lithe quickness, sidestepped, spun Corby about, and knocked his legs out from under him.
Sprawled against the cavern wall, the voor gathered his inner strength and drove the psynergy out from his body like a blow. Blue static fuzzed around Bonescrolls’ head and throat and then cooled thick red in his chest before draining purple down his legs into the earth.
“You can’t hurt me, voor. Be still.” Corby’s effort had loosened his hold on the moment. Blaring howls vibrated his skull, and for a moment he felt as if he were blurring out of his body.
“Your lusk is weak.” Bonescrolls sat beside him on a jut of rock, eyepits dark. “By what right are you in the body of this man?”
Everything ran loose. Who was this howlie? Corby could see the old man’s kha now: small as a seed and dense as rock—a green seed suspended within the cloud of the man’s abdomen. Staring at it, he gazed through a long tunnel. At the far end, shapes moved—dark, thick-haired hominids shaping clay with their hands...Redoubled cries from the voor dead churned a vortex, scrambling his thoughts.
“Answer me, voor! By what right?”
The power in the magnar’s voice quelled the grievous uproar in his head. Corby steadied himself. His lips lolled loosely and trembled as his mind formed thoughts.
“Don’t send,” Bonescrolls ordered. “Talk to me like a howlie. Use the body you dare to steal. Tell me! By what right do you claim this flesh?”
Corby’s lips winced, and sounds clumped in his tight throat. With tremendous effort, he forced breath into sounds: “Words-don’t-carry-the-right-I-feel.”
Bonescrolls’ graven face looked lichenous in the slender light. “The world is feeling. Each being lives in its own world. Your people have always respected that.”
Corby’s throat pulsed as his sagging mouth tightened to speak: “I-am-my-people.”
“And Kagan is his people, as I am mine.”
Corby’s body twitched as his power returned, though still his strength did not quite fit his muscles.
“We howlies have a riddle,” the magnar went on. He chanted:
“The stars baked my bones,
The oceans culled my blood,
And the forests shaped my lungs.
Who am I?
“The answer is ‘Human.’ We are as much children of the cosmos as any voor. You have no authority to take this body.”
Corby whispered, lips barely moving: “Words-do-not-carry.”
Bonescrolls’ face darkened. “Then listen closely to what these words carry: I can drive you out of that body. I have the craft and the power. And I will use them, unless you can convince me otherwise.”
The voor’s bald gaze in the slow-rending starlight lent the appearance of a corpse. “My-purpose-is-to-destroy-the-Delph.”
Bonescrolls sat back and nodded once with satisfaction. “Thank you for telling me the truth, voor. I know this is the body of the eth—the Delph’s doomself. And I have no objection to an alliance between eth and voors to end the reign of a godmind. The Delph is my enemy, as well. Once I tried to destroy him—and he proved far too powerful. Kagan must be carefully prepared.”
“The-Delph-kills-voors.” Corby’s blind stare sharpened. “He-destroyed-my-body.”
“And now you will destroy this body trying to get back at him.” Bonescrolls shook his head. “The pain must stop somewhere.”
The Delph is weak now, Corby sent. Soon he will sleep for an aeon. And when he wakes he will be many times stronger. I must stop him now, for both of our peoples.
Bonescrolls remained silent, void of thoughts. Then: “It is all dreaming. Whether you try to kill him or not is not my decision. Kagan must decide, for this pits his life against the Delph’s.”
He is the father of my body.
“Even so. This must be his decision. You must tell him.”
Not now.
“No—he is too far from himself now. And besides, I have need of him.”
He turned his face to the ritual moon and the haze of cosmic lights. “But after a year, you will have to speak with him. Until then, you must in no way interfere with his life. If you do, I will drive you from this body.”
Corby fell silent. The thought of a year spent mindlessly floating in Iz stupefied him. Yet what choice did he have? There could he no struggle with this man. To survive—for the brood’s sake-he would have to go deep into the body and keep a strong silence.
Already he had begun to fade into the roaring, radiant stream of Iz, buoyed by immense forces that in his human brain seemed terrible and incoherent; a grueling din of screams and goblin mutterings. A great depth opened all around him. Flares of scorching white light gyrated to pulsing cries.
Bonescrolls’ eyeglints fixed him in the moment, and one last time before succumbing to the draw of whistling energy, Corby reached out: This is a universe of boundless space, howlie. Matter and energy are rare and small. For us in this vast emptiness, even dreams are real.
Bonescrolls felt the voor-psynergy dim and vanish. It happened so quickly that when Sumner’s body began to breathe with the depth and slowness of sleep, the magnar still leaned forward, watching Corby’s purple kha waver in the night shadows. The voor had gone. Outside, the single bark of a desert fox echoed over the dunes, shrill as moonlight.
***
Ardent Fang, anxious to get Sumner to Miramol so that he could show off the burly desert-colored warrior they had found in the wastes, led the way west among ghosts of water: parched sinkwells and long running curves of vanished riverbeds where the sun’s heat glimmered like liquid.
Drift chanted solemn and slow:
Weird how time is always sliding east.
Weird that time should move at all.
The seer withdrew into the Road. The power-channel it had chosen to follow sizzled beneath its feet and itched up its spine with information about other creatures that had crossed this way. Bonescrolls’ deep, slow, and quiet psynergy shone there. At noon, the né spotted puma pug marks in a sandbed and knew that Bonescrolls had gone on ahead of them. Bending over the spoor, Drift swayed dizzily. Dirge music whispered, flames spit, and a one-eyed man came forward with a curved blade in his hands.
Ardent Fang’s muscular embrace brought Drift out of its glide. It rocked briefly in the tribesman’s arms, its eyes seeing charred bone and blackened flesh, grease and ash in the mess of a dead fire.
“The seer’s only half alive in this world,” Ardent Fang explained to Sumner. “Half its life belongs to the deep dark.”
When Drift revived, it made no comment about its experience. It felt out the Road and continued their trek. In its heart, though, trouble stirred. Bonescrolls had told it twice, as clearly as he could, that he was going to die. But that was too ponderous a thought to contemplate. Thinking about the one-eyed swordsman, Drift felt a wind sound blow through its head and dirge piping begin again. Drift ignored Ardent Fang’s questions and withdrew once more into the Road.
Sumner held himself in selfscan and did not try to understand the two distorts leading him. The lusk had left him wary and shaken. For the first time since arriving in Skylonda Aptos, he had time to reflect, and he didn’t know where to begin. The Rangers...Bonescrolls...distorts...Happy to be whole again, he nevertheless felt apprehensive about where he headed and how the magnar would use him. All that he knew with certainty was that he would have to serve to be free.
***
Everybody appeared twisted, bent, or muddled in some way: hunchbacked, gibbon-armed, muzzle-faced. But all of them, even the legless ones on wheeled platforms and the scabious ones with glossy raw faces, laughed with sincerity. All brightly attired, the people displayed feather-rimmed leather caps, floral robes, and pants of bushbuck skins. The women wore ancient shell amulets, metal arm coils, and cobra-head bracelets. Naked children crouched in baobab trees along the boulevard, their flesh the color of wood.
Laugh, Kagan, or you will insult the people, Drift warned.
Ardent Fang howled with joy, his snout-lips pulled back in a grimace that could have been a snarl except for the happy tears in his eyes.
Sumner grinned and chuckled.
Louder, or they will believe you are dissatisfied.
Sumner forced a few crude laughs, and then Drift reached up and grabbed the back of his neck. Hot, deep-felt jocularity percolated up from his bowels, and he guffawed and swagged with laughter. The crowd responded with hoots and whistles, and when Sumner shouted a gleeful monkey-call, they surged forward and swept the three wanderers off their feet.
Twice the crowd carried them around Miramol, through the warrior’s-walk of overreaching boar-ribs, across the central square of icy mist-springs, up the hill to the curving flower-crowded lanes of the né dwellings, and down again past the blue moss-banks of the river. They lowered the three before the turquoise-studded mudhole of the Mother’s Barrow.
Old women in black robes with collapsed faces and alert laughing eyes greeted them. The Mothers circled Sumner, awed by his size and wholeness. They plucked at his arms and thighs, poked his ribs, pressed fingertips against his stomach, measured the span of his shoulders with their hands, and laughed incessantly. The burn marks on his face and neck particularly impressed them, and all had to touch his face at least once. Then one of them called out to the crowd in a gleeful voice, and the celebration began.
For three days and nights, the riverain forest jangled with the festal sounds of kettledrums, wood clappers, harps, flutes and frenzied laughter. The dirt streets of Miramol jammed with frolicking distorts, swirling together in ritual dances and processions.
They carried Sumner to a large, bamboo-rafted ceremonial hall. On the way, women and men tussled with each other to touch him and toss petals and blossoms in his lap. Seated on a tortoiseshell throne flanked by huge scarlet ferns and arrays of purple and black fronds, he received a continuous offering of foods: slit-bellied trout stuffed with shelled nuts, leaf pouches of monkey stew, crisped snake cubes speared on thin sweet roots, spicy bean paste in blossom cups, and ornate jugs of wine and honey beer.
Sumner sampled everything and tried to laugh at everybody that served him a new dish, though he often succeeded only in gagging on his food. When his glazed eyes and slack expression made it obvious that he could eat no more, Drift escorted him out of the feeding hall. They avoided the festivity-crowded main roads and followed the dark back lanes to the silverwood né lodges. There the festivities ended.
In the clouded, flower-heavy air of a small moss garden, Drift told Sumner the history of the Serbota. It skipped the origin myths and the spirit tales and began with the finding of the Road.
Dog Hunger found the Road. He was a seer or what passed for a seer in those days—he was gendered, you understand, so his clarity was weak. Yet it was strong enough to lead him through the wastes to where no one had gone before, because the land was the sun’s lair.
How did he find himself so far from the tribe? That’s a long story, and I can see you’re weary. Let me tell you only this: The Serbota have always been a gentle people. Always we retreated from our enemies until, finally, there was no place else to run. We were pushed right into the desert and left there to die.
Dog Hunger, who was named that because he never had a full meal in his life, wandered off, like many others had before him, to die where the sun would witness his passing and perhaps, out of pity, accept his spirit. The early people believed such nonsense. Anyway, he didn’t die. Instead, his power led him deep into the wastes, and he became the first to meet the magnar.
Well, when the magnar heard of our plight, he came personally, and for many years he was our tribal leader. He taught us the ways of the riverain forest and the desert so that we could eat again and make houses and, if necessary, kill to protect ourselves. We became like any creature of the forest. But most importantly, he showed us how to be different from the forest creatures by doing what no animal can do—laugh. We learned to laugh at everything, even our enemies-which was a wise thing. Our enemies thought we had become spirit-possessed. Suddenly we had well-trained warriors who fought using the strategies of jungle beasts and who laughed as they killed and even as they died. Now we have no enemies. And yet we still have laughter—and the né have life.
You see, before the magnar came, the Mothers killed all infants born without gender. The magnar stopped that. Not with force but with cunning. He saw that the Mothers were superstitious, and so he told them that their deity, Paseq the Divider who separates night from day and man from woman, was itself without gender. And so we are allowed to live, because it is believed we are the image of Paseq.
The né have done much for the Serbota. Our seers are much clearer than any gendered seer, and though we are not as loud in our laughter as the others, neither are we as cruel in our anger. We keep to ourselves, for we have no other family. And yet we are happy. For isn’t that what it means to be human?
***
The Serbota would have celebrated Sumner’s arrival for a full week, but on the fourth day the monsoons began. Sumner watched in amazement as Miramol transformed from forest village into river town. The vegetable fields were quickly harvested and all the huts dismantled except for the silverwood lodges located, like the Mother’s Barrow, on precious high ground.
With the first lull in the rains, the river hunters unsheathed their dugouts and began their work. Each canoe had elaborately carved gunwales done in the style of their owners. Ardent Fang’s displayed a boar’s head with curved tusks. Only men with boats received the Mothers’ blessing to hunt, and Sumner stayed behind to build his own dugout.
Drift found him late in the afternoon at the dry edge of the cloud forest among giant violets and mossy tree limbs. He bent over a log, hollowing it with a stone adze, his head and shoulders quilted with needles of gold light. Drift helped him steady the log. Bonescrolls sent a message for you last night.
Sumner put down his adze and squinted into the cloud-driven light. Rain arrived with nightfall. He looked at the seer, his vague eyebrows raised in a question.
He orders you to obey the Mothers.
Sumner nodded and picked up his adze. “Tell me about the Mothers.”
It’s best I don’t, for I have no love of them.
“Tell me anyway.”
They’re the tribe leaders. They decide who will hunt, who will farm or fish, and who will breed. All women must obey them without question until they bear a gendered child that survives the puberty rites.
“And then?”
Then they become one of the Mothers.
“Why do you hate them?”
