Forged by Fire (17 page)

Two men and one woman held spears, and the others each carried a small quiver of blow darts slung across their backs. One woman with eyes like chips of jade had a wicked blade tied by a thong to her loincloth. As well as spears, the two men carried damp leather sacks, around which buzzed flies and hung the odor of fresh blood.
Hunters.
The Djimbi woman who’d sung to the escoas spoke to me. She looked arrogant and menacing, her spear sharp, her eyes and nose hawkish. Her long, long arms were hard with sinew and muscle. Every terrifying tale I’d heard about the Djimbi came rushing to the forefront of my mind: They kid napped Clutch babies and fed them alive, limb by severed limb, to dragon hatchlings; they were cannibals who used human skulls for bowls and cups; they knew dragons in the most abominable of ways, inserting fingers and tongues and cocks into leathery orifices.
I didn’t understand what the woman was saying, not a word. I could recognize that she was speaking some form of Djimbi by her telltale glottal stops and singsong cadence, but the words themselves were unfamiliar to me.
“I don’t understand,” I said hoarsely in the pidgin lan guage that passes for common Malacarite. I repeated myself in the Emperor’s tongue. To no avail. The Djimbi woman merely reiterated what she’d said, her lyrical words as sharp as thorns at the ends.
I wanted water. No. I wanted maska spirits.
The Djimbi woman turned to her companions. They held a brief conference, gesturing from the dragons to me. A decision was reached. The Djimbi woman addressed me again.
Her words I didn’t understand, but her gestures were clear:
Take hold of your dragons and follow us.
It’s hard to argue when one shares no common language, and the sight of spears and blow darts makes a powerful inducement to agree. Bristling at her imperious mien, but wise enough to realize my anger was just a vent for my fear, I tied Toadhunter’s neck halter to the back of Warthog’s saddle and, with a whack on Warthog’s hide to get her mov ing, I followed the Djimbi away from the river and deep, deep into the jungle.

We didn’t sleep at night. No. The jungle turned moldy gray with dusk, then plunged into deep, sinister black, but the Djimbi continued walking. I stumbled over an unseen root. Then again. Then again. One of the women ahead of me moaned.

Her moan was gravelly and belly-deep. It went on, and on, and I found myself holding my breath, waiting for it to end, but still it droned on. The hairs on my nape stood on end. Behind me, one of the men barked, a coughing hack I’d heard once in my youth. He continued to bark, punctuating the woman’s ceaseless moan, and others joined him with their own harsh croaks and explosive coughs. I stumbled again, not over a root. Over fear. The Djimbi were evoking barbaric magics to travel by.

Pure One, protect me.
When last I’d heard such aberrant moans and barks, my mother had done battle with a dirge-summoned python in tent on death. She’d evoked magics of clay and birth and creation, and the python had winked out of existence. But my mother wasn’t with me to offer protection against
this
pagan dirge.
About me, frond and vine and steepled root answered the threnody by sliding against one another. I could hear it, a croaking, raspy slithering, but all movement was just beyond the periphery of my sight. I saw only the intimation of black moving beyond black as roots and creepers and bracts and stalks knotted and uncoiled and joined again in an unnatural, night-shrouded orgy.
I had been plunged into a netherworld where the insen tient brooded, the eyeless watched, the stationary stirred, and the sexless fucked.
It was as black as pitch on the forest floor. Far above, the oppressive tonnage of the jungle crown moaned and rasped and sighed like the wooden hulls of a thousand boats adrift on a murmuring sea. Fore and aft of me, the dark forms of my escoas shuffle-lunged with heads hanging. From the corner of one eye, I thought I saw the dragon behind me warp into a yamdalar cinaigour, the slick keratinous invo lucre as bluish gray as a blind eye as it floated in my wake. But when I spun about, I saw only a dark silhouette of a dragon moving through black.
How puny and clean my mother’s magic seemed com pared to the subtle, serpiginous movement of root and vine around us. Instead of fighting the dark with invasive light, the Djimbi embraced the ebon obscure, and the darkness itself cleared creeper and root from our path and guided our footsteps.
Surrounded by dirge and imprisoned by dark, I was com pelled to follow the Djimbi, and foliage parted before me like dark legs spreading wide, directing me into a wet, hid den center.
There comes a point where fear turns into a sterile land without horizons, and to cross such a blighted expanse, one must crawl into the deep quiet of oneself. I crawled into that inner space and remained there till dawn.

A deluge heralded sunup. Overhead, the canopy heaved and roiled. We were submerged beneath an angry ocean of leaf. Little rain penetrated the dense hanging gardens above, and that which did pattered down as sporadic rain fall. We ate chunks of raw meat carved from the grisly slabs in the sacks the men carried. They were hunters, my cap tors. Predators.

My dragons were failing, both of them. The grisly wounds on their noses had become infected from the dirt of their foraging, from the insects that had swarmed around their heads the day previous, and from the sultry jungle heat that breeds illness and disease. Clusters of hard nodules had ap peared overnight on their snouts, fist-sized and turgid, and the dragons showed no interest in their surroundings.

We stopped to piss. The Djimbi spoke tersely amongst themselves. Longstride, the woman who’d entranced the escoas with song and whom I’d named for her long, lean legs, pointed angrily at my back. She wanted me to carry the dragons’ saddles myself, to spare them.

I hated the way her amber eyes blazed at me from be neath her green mane of hair. I hated her sinewy strength, her certainty, her feral grace. Hated her warranted disgust over the state of my dragons.

Hated, most, the fear she induced in me, and the fear of not knowing where she was taking me or what would be my fate.

Truth be told, I would have carried those damn saddles if I could have, not just to spare the escoas but to bolster my courage through bravado. If I hadn’t been left in a cell without food or water for several days prior to being as saulted by a storm and then taken captive, I would have met Longstride’s challenge and thrown her contempt back in her face by carrying first one saddle for half a day, then the other till nightfall. I’d once had the strength for such, and the brazenness. I knew I’d have them again. But to at tempt to haul those saddles in the state I was currently in would have been humiliating and futile, and I was level headed enough to bitterly realize it.

It was while I was stewing with resentment and guilt and fear that I was attacked by a rebound moment and plunged into the furious agony of venom withdrawal.

It came upon me suddenly, or perhaps not; hard to tell when one is crushed by exhaustion and hunger and im mersed in rancor. I was trudging alongside poor Warthog, who was mired in that kind of misery that shuts out all else except the imperative to put one foot relentlessly in front of the other, and next I knew I was on my back, shuddering violently, sweating, gripped with agonizing belly cramps, my back arched like a bowstring. The jungle canopy swooped and circled above me. My fingernails clawed soft, damp loam. My heels drummed against the ground; then I went slack as a gutted bird. I retched. My eyes streamed tears.

Another spasm cramped every muscle in my body, and I went rigid, then convulsed on the ground, loam in my mouth, leaf mold smeared over my cheeks, ivy tangled about my neck.

I was vaguely aware of the Djimbi gathering in a wide circle around me.
It was then that I smelled it, as I writhed and cork screwed on the ground: the wicked anise-oil sweetness and citric tang of venom. The smell was as real as the agonizing cramps gripping me.
I bolted upright with a hoarse cry. The Djimbi stiffened. “Where is it, where?” I cried.
Longstride tossed something into my lap: a leather blad der as withered and deflated as a eunuch’s scrotal sac. The Djimbi exchanged a flurry of comments, then drew closer and squatted on their haunches about me, save for Longstride, who looked down with an arrogance I longed to smack from her face.
My hands shook so badly that I twice dropped the blad der as I lifted it to my mouth. I sucked on it as if it were a teat.
The taste of venom exploded on my tongue. Longstride leapt toward me and barked harsh words. I looked up at her, vision oscillating. Her blurry image gestured angrily at the escoas. She wanted me to use the venom on them.
“You don’t understand,” I said hoarsely. “
I
need this venom.”
Utter disdain on her face.
No half measures.
I bellowed in frustration. Spewing invective, twitching like one deranged, I staggered upright. I stood there sway ing a moment as the few precious drops of venom I’d in gested flickered like weak candlelight in my blood. I hated Longstride, the way she looked at me with such scorn.
“I need to make a poultice,” I rasped. “I need . . . brallosh leaves, or gruel, or something.”
I made angry stirring motions with my hands. She un derstood.
I can’t recall what the poultice was made from; there is a blank section in my memory, whitewashed by the rebound attack of venom withdrawal. Perhaps my captors retrieved roots from my saddlebags, or dug them from the ground and masticated them to a paste. Perhaps they foraged for the snakebane lichen that grows like tiny inverted orange cups on the underside of dead logs, and which, when im mersed in water, turns into a spermy slime that heals cer tain snakebites. Truly, I don’t know what they brought me.
All I know is that the bladder of venom was stuffed by one of the Djimbi with dollops of a gelatinous poultice. The woman with eyes like chips of jade pulled the drawstring shut and massaged the bladder with muscular hands, and then it was time for me to spread the poultice, with its pre cious infusion of venom, onto the escoas’ nares.
I did it with my bare hands. The paste oozed between my fingers, scented oh-so-blessedly with the dragon’s poison. I luxuriated in slowly rubbing the poultice over the scaled snout, savoring venom’s tingle on my skin. My eyes closed as I worked. I yearned for dragonsong. I envisioned Tansan, naked, beneath me.
The Djimbi didn’t hurry me. No. They watched, en grossed. Perhaps an hour passed before I turned away from the dragons, who stood with doughy yellow masks on their nodule-distorted snouts, eyes bright and wide, as if they were surprised but couldn’t recall by what.
Longstride spoke. She towered over me, heat rising off her. Her ivy green nipples were hard as spring buds. She splayed one of her hands across my breasts and against my groin. She spoke, and her voice was husky, and her serumcolored eyes—like watered amber, like golden broth— burned into mine. She withdrew her hands, lifted a lock of my hair, and severed it with a slash of her spearhead. She wove the lock into her moss colored mane.
I didn’t know what her actions meant, didn’t know how I should respond. Didn’t know if a response was even neces sary. Yes, one was: She was waiting.
I shrugged. “I don’t understand.” I repeated myself twice, again in Malacarite, and the third time in the Emperor’s tongue.
The silence following my words stretched overlong. I didn’t know what to do. Uncertainty built into smoldering dread.
Longstride drew herself to her full impressive height, the arrogance on her cheeks compounded by outrage. She snapped something at me, stabbed a finger in my face. Brief conversation amongst the Djimbi, and one of the hunters directed a question at Longstride. She turned and curtly responded. The hunters looked at me as they exchanged words with Longstride. A flat-faced man with hooded eyes must have made a barbed remark, for the other Djimbi looked away from him. Longstride’s nostrils flared, and she barked something at him and raised her hand as if she would strike him. He snapped something back but turned away. She spat on the ground behind him.
Then she looked at me with an expression that could be interpreted only as fury.
We continued through the jungle, Jade-eyes at the fore. By evenfall, we reached their home.

A cluster of huts stood amongst the great trunks of tower ing trees, some huts made of bamboo, others of rawhide. Their simplicity suggested impermanence, mobility.

A firepit smoldered. An enormously fat woman was seated before it, her massive breasts covered with gold necklaces. I gaped. I’d never seen so much gold upon any one before. Around the mountain of her shoulders a fine leather cape hung. The clasp was silver.

A crowd of lean, tall Mottled Bellies clustered about me and the dragons. The women all had long hair, save for the very young. The men, right down to the youngest boy, were all bald. Above a clamor of voices, Longstride spoke to the seated fat woman, who seemed to be a person of status. Maybe a medicine witch, or the tribe Great-elder. A com bination of both, perhaps. A matriarch.

I was shoved forward. The matriarch’s eyes roved over me and she spoke, rubbery lips blurring her words. Embers clucked and hissed in the firepit between us.

Longstride spoke and gestured at my escoas. The drag ons were shifting uneasily, eyes rolling from the press of people, poultice flaking from their snouts. The matriarch gestured me forward.

A sea of hands propelled me toward her. Longstride shoved me to my knees at the matriarch’s feet. The ground was damp under my kneecaps.

The matriarch wore no loincloth. The smell emanating from between her thighs was potent, musky, overwhelm ing. She leaned over, her many gold necklaces—there must have been at least forty of them; it was a wonder her neck wasn’t bowed beneath the weight—jingling softly against one another. With sooty fingers she grabbed my chin. Stud ied my face. Barked something to Longstride. An ember was poked from the fire and brought over, balanced on a spearhead, and I gasped and tried to pull away. The matri arch’s grip was relentless.

By the light of the ember, she studied my eyes. She looked at mine, and I looked at hers, and there passed between us a dark, powerful knowing: She knew about the bestial rite; she’d
performed
it a number of times; and she knew that I, too, had performed it more than once. We had the same eyes, see. Our dark pupils bore shards of white, as if embedded with tiny stars. Our sclera was not white, but a mass of red filaments, of bloody rivulets, of venom channels.
She released my chin and muttered something. Voices blazed around me. Longstride shouted something, her spear raised in the air. She looked around, her hawkish features challenging. Silence. The matriarch spoke. Again, everyone murmured one to another, voices building in volume and expectation to a babble of excitement.
Longstride hauled me to my feet, jaw set with determined triumph. She held my arm tightly. The crowd was dispersing rapidly, and my escoas were being led away.
Longstride spoke, then shook my arm angrily. I looked up at her—she was
too
tall—and realized she’d addressed a question to me.
“I don’t understand,” I said again.
She repeated herself, arrogant pride blazing from her eyes. I hated that superior look.
All my fear channeled into fury, and I jerked my arm from her grasp and stabbed a finger at the rumps of my escoas, where they were being led behind a bamboo hut. “Those are
my
dragons; bring them back
now
.”
Longstride gave a feral grin. She spoke and splayed one hand over my breasts and pressed a clenched fist between my thighs, so that her knuckles were against my sex. Again, she waited for a response. I gave her one.
I spat in her face.
She drew back slowly, cold, eyes molten. Those who had remained around the fire hissed. The matriarch shouted out a stream of words. She was angry at me. No. Outraged.
I was grabbed from both sides and flipped onto my back on the ground. I landed hard, was stunned for a moment, and then pain radiated from my ribs. I bucked and heaved and swore and thrashed. More people descended upon me, and the matriarch continued to shout orders, and I was hauled a short way from the fire. My arms were spread wide, my legs spread apart. A swarm of people descended upon my pinioned limbs and knotted thick vines around my ankles and wrists. Stakes were hammered into the ground be side my hands, beside my feet, either side of my neck, either side of my waist, and I screamed and shivered and thrashed and snapped with my teeth, and perhaps I cried, yes, perhaps. But if I did, they were tears of fury, not resignation.
I was tied, spread-eagled, to the stakes in the ground. My waist, too, was lashed down. The vines across my throat went on last. When I bucked against them, I cut off my own breath and was nearly strangled.
I stopped fighting and instead screamed invective and hol low threats.
The fire was banked. Sparks leapt into the starless dark of the jungle canopy high above. Smoke drifted between the trees, wraithlike in the light of the leaping flames. I could feel the greedy heat of the fire.
The matriarch was helped up from the ground by two lanky adolescents. The matriarch summoned a young girl to her side with a flick of a pudgy hand; the young girl lis tened, then ran into the gloom beyond the firepit and dis appeared into a yurt nestled beside the riblike buttress roots of a tree.
A woman wearing a mask suddenly loomed over me. My curses and screams shriveled up in my throat.
The mask was scaled and in the arrowhead shape of a lizard, topped by a storypole at least five feet high. Gro tesquely distorted faces had been carved into the storypole, and instead of tongues protruding from the leering faces, dark bones swung from rope. The bones clattered together like gnashing teeth.
The mask had no mouth, just a great suctionlike cup, white as bone, soft and wobbly as unset rubber.
Another masked woman joined the first, then a second, and a third. Soon I was encircled by masked women with suckers for mouths, and the heat from the blazing fire was cut off from me by the wall of their bodies. Bones shivered and rattled upon storypoles.
The women linked hands and began whispering a chant. As they whispered, they began bouncing lightly on the balls of their feet. Their breasts jiggled, and firelight and shadow flickered.
Their words sped up. Their bouncing accelerated. Soon their words tripped over one another, and the bouncing turned into shuddering. Linked hands jerked like fish on hooks. The chant became a wordless, frenzied panting. The women convulsed, hands still linked. The ground itself jud dered beneath me.
After several long moments of mesmerizing juddering, the sucker mouths and storypoles and women encircling me melted away. I don’t remember the women stepping back. I don’t remember them returning to the firepit. It was just as if . . . they melted.
At once I felt the full heat of the fire blazing in the pit several feet away.
My skin would burn. I could feel the fine hairs on my arms curling tight and shriveling from the heat.
A man knelt beside my head, grabbed my chin, and cranked my face to the side, away from the fire, so that I was looking toward a woman who stood some eight feet or so away, near the base of a tree. Her back was toward me. She was wrapped in a cape. She wore a mask of some sort, though I couldn’t yet see more than the barest outline of the back of it. The mask bore no storypole.
How did I know it was a woman? The breath of enchanted women had just surrounded me, and the cloying scent of the matriarch was a briny musk in the air. This was a night of swarthy, sinister women’s power. The caped person poised some eight feet from me was indubitably a woman.
The man who had knelt beside me released my chin and drifted away. I stared at the caped, masked woman with foreboding.
She threw back her head and ululated at the starless dark canopy above us. The sound ripped up and down my spine. The tribe of Djimbi, watching from shadow and by firelight, ululated back. The woman threw out her arms dramatically. I saw, then, that she hadn’t been draped in a cape. No. She was winged. Like a bat. Like a dragon.
The inhuman abomination turned, slowly, bobbing in a strange, primitive dance.The mask she wore was carved into the arrowhead shape of a reptile, its bulging eyes painted with the lizard-slitted pupils of a dragon. That was what she was: a she-dragon, a winged sister, a divine human lizardserpent spawned by magic. She was naked and sinewy, her leathery membranes stretching from wrist to hip.
The impossible creature came toward me, wings wide spread. I could no longer swallow, was having difficulty breathing.
The she-dragon circled me, moving in her primitive jerky dance, head cocked to one side, then the next, in a parody of how a dragon examines potential prey. She stood right over my face, straddling me so that I was staring between lean muscled legs into the night sky of her sex. Her great wings flapped on either side of me, stirring leaves and fanning sparks from the fire. She threw back her head and skirled.
The bloodcurdling cry was exactly like that of my moth er’s haunt when she’d taken the form of a Skykeeper. Exactly. A sound dredged from brimstone fury and the corpse-riddled fields of nether.
I inflated my lungs and screamed back. I think I called her a bitch, or a whore, or a deviant. I think I told her to fuck herself, screw her mother, give her ass to dogs. I may have screamed it all.
My words were mere air.
She stepped over me, bobbed away from me. Stopped. Began swaying forward and backward on the balls of her feet, head hanging lower, lower. Her wings drooped. She looked as if she were wilting. She dropped to her knees. Tucked her dragon head between them. Enfolded herself with her wings. From somewhere in the dark, a gong tolled. Eight times.
The masked women reappeared, rising from ground, peeling from trees, materializing from dark air. They formed three tight circles around the fallen she-dragon, facing outward.
The three rings of women slowly began snaking around the wing-shrouded she-dragon, each ring moving in coun terflow to the other. The bones dangling from their storypoles clattered as they moved. The women began their panting chant again that escalated to a long-drawn hiss.
From the darkness of the surrounding night, from the throats of the watching tribe, came an answering invoca tion, raucous, pierced here and there by short, sharp whis tles. A deep booming started, like that of a toad, only fuller, deeper, louder, and far more resonant: the heartbeat of an otherworld monster rising through sludge and swamp to be reborn in the night.
The tribe’s invocation accelerated. The women ringed around the she-dragon snaked about her faster, faster. The deep reptilian booming quickened in the night, altered my heartbeat, pounded against my temples, pulsed between my thighs. Faster and faster noise and motion went, louder and louder grew the hissing of the women, building to an unbearable peak, and I thought my head and heart would explode with the pressure.
Silence.
The triple ring of women: gone.
My heartbeat throbbed against the roof of my mouth.
Slowly the wing-enfolded she-dragon began to shudder. Her wings parted with a shredding sound; the stench of ne crosis filled the night air. Maggots spilled from the crack between her parted wings and belly-humped blind and na ked on the ground, hundreds of them, white and damp and obscene.
Slowly the she-dragon rose to her feet.
Slowly she turned to face me.
Her wings glistened with damp, as if she’d been freshly pulled from a womb or freshly hatched from a shell. She stretched out her wings, stretched up on her toes, stretched to her full great height—
—and that was when I saw she was female no longer.
The winged creature came toward me, and the antennae plumes on its head—for yes, it had risen from the ground with the plumes of a male bull attached to its mask— shivered gracefully with each jerky step. Again the creature stood over my head, straddled my face, and this time when it skirled I was silent with dread presentiment.
That was when I smelled it.
Pure, undiluted venom.
I cannot adequately describe the emotion that swept over me next. It was something greater than relief, darker than hope, stronger than need. It was, perhaps, what a sailor might feel after the planks of his ship have buckled and snapped in a raging storm, after he’s been plunged into foaming salt water, when he feels himself being dragged, for the last time, below hungry waves, and he catches a glimpse of land—only eight strokes away, almost within reach—and he knows that at least after his death, his body will be returned to shore, and home, and the element of his birth.
Perhaps this describes what I felt as I smelled the venom emanating from the creature above me. But perhaps it doesn’t.
The he-dragon danced around me.
The tribe began chanting again, only this was a chant I knew from past experience; this was a song I’d last heard in the dead of night in an impoverished convent situated below limestone cliffs and a hammering waterfall. It was a song that evoked the sensuality of orchids in full bloom, the velvet lushness of wine blossoming warmly through limbs. It was a song of a jungle cat’s sinuous muscle and the pounding crescendo of drums in harmony and the crack and whoosh of flames leaping higher. Words caressed me like fingertips, lapped over me like tongues, pressed against me with the soft fullness of breasts and hips and buttocks.
The he-dragon continued to dance about me. He held a knife in one hand. With a lilting whoop, he knelt and sawed one of my ankles free. He stood and circled around me again.
It was then that I noticed that his wings were tied onto his wrists and forearms and biceps. It was then that I noticed he had high, small breasts with nipples the color of wet ivy. And he had hair, a great mane of it hanging to his waist like a tangled fall of dry moss. Entwined about a strand of that mane was a lock of hair as dark as my own.
This was no
he
. It was a woman.
Longstride.
The tribe continued to plait me in its hedonistic song. Longstride whooped, knelt, and sawed my other ankle free.
I recalled what one of the aged convent sisters had said to me, prior to my committing the bestial rite for the first time:
No one is exploited; no one is forced. It is a divine ex change between beast and woman.
When the last vine had been cut away from me—arms free, legs free, neck and waist released—I chose to remain where I lay, legs spread. Waiting.
No one is forced.
Longstride dropped her knife at my feet and straddled my waist. Slowly she lowered herself to her knees, the mus cles in her sinewy legs gleaming as if oiled. She reached down between my legs.
Entered me.
While her tribe watched and sang, Longstride thrust venom into my womb. Her arms and legs quivered, and I could hear her panting beneath her mask. After I climaxed, I rolled her onto the ground, straddled her hips, and used my fingers to ride her, too.
Beauty is terror. Whatever we deem beautiful, we trem ble before it. And what is more terrifying and beautiful but to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of mortality for but an instant and look naked, terrible beauty right in the face? I was consumed by fire.
I soared high on venom and lust, and though I didn’t quite hear dragonsong—how close it was! how frustrat ingly, wondrously close!—I climaxed again, with an explo sion that ripped down every nerve in my body, and I threw back my head and howled.
I reached for the knife Longstride had dropped. Lunged for her head. Sawed a lock of her hair from her mane. Braided it into my own.
Then I slid off her, weak and trembling, dizzy and puis sant, and as I lay there on the ground, yearning for dragonsong, transported on the wings of venom, I realized I had something others might deem far, far more powerful than the dragon’s enigmatic song.
I knew the secret to breeding bull dragons in captivity.