The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

“Or don’t you like it?” Some youth arriving late to worship fled past them into the prayerhouse, casting the brothers a harried glance.
    Demane sipped skeptically. “It’s all right,” he said grudgingly, but then couldn’t hold back a huge grin. “Naw. It’s good.”
    “See there? I
knew
you’d like it!”
    They drank greedily and returned the bowls. Sat again outside the prayerhouse, Demane watched the flux of passersby, local and foreigner. He worked over in thought the same knotted frustrations as always: nothing coming loose, everything tightening.
    Cumalo said, “Bossman’s putting you through it, huh?”
    Demane gave a bark of mirthless laughter, and said,
For
he who is scaly, fanged and hornèd may breathe thusly into your ear, ‘One lickle kiss; where’s the harm?’
“What do you know of the gods, the Towers, and all that?”
    Cumalo never looked fully awake, his eyes were so heavy-lidded. In fact, no one saw more, or more clearly. “Those are some deep mysteries right there, brother. You had to be initiated, over where I grew up. So all I really know is the same as everybody.” Cumalo’s speech grew incantatory: “The gods dwelled upon the earth.” He pointed a finger at the dust. “The gods flew again to heaven”—pointing now to the sky—“and the gods did abandon their youngest born,” pointing lastly at Demane, who nodded.
    “Yeah, pretty much. As far as that goes.”
    “Why’d they do it, though?” Cumalo said. “Abandon y’all here? I always
did
wonder: the gods, just taking off into the great forever and beyond like that, and leaving behind their own children.” You would have thought this man didn’t have two sons and a baby daughter, fifteen hundred miles away and asking their mama right now, doubtless,
When’s
Papa coming home?
    “Exigencies of FTL,” Demane answered. Distracted by a glimpse from the corners of his eyes, he lapsed into liturgical dialect. “Superluminal travel is noncorporeal: a body must become light.” A tall, thin man passed by: some stranger, not the captain. “The gods could only carry away
Homo celestialis
with them, you see, because the angels had already learned to make their bodies light. But most
sapiens
—even those of us with fully expressed theogenetica—haven’t yet attained the psionic phylogeny necessary to sublimnify the organism.”
    “No doubt.” Cumalo nodded mellowly. “No doubt. I had always maybe
thought
it was something like that.”
    On the street before them a transient little drama arose and died.
    That Demon rode a filthy derelict. Women in conversation scattered around the drunken man’s floundering, doomsday rants, and selfsoiled stench. Once past him, the family of women came together again.
    “Most people can’t hold Him,” Cumalo said sadly as someone who knew. “My advice, brother, is to let that Demon
alone
.”
    “I don’t even mess with Him.”
    The grandmother, nieces, and aunties hadn’t missed a word of their argument over the feastday menu, nor yet spilled onion, bound fowl, or gnarled tuber from their brimming baskets. And then the ruck of many black robes, and a corner turned, stole the view of importunate and accosted alike.
    “Before the Assumption,” Demane said, “the gods lived here on an island, in different Towers. We children only knew our own gods. My Aunty—my ancestor—came from Tower TSIMtsoa . Captain comes of another lineage, Ashé. Following me so far?”
    “Uh huh. Go ahead.”
    “Coming down from my Tower, we’re all aioloranthropes—”
    “Say again?”
    “—
stormbirds
,” Demane said, “thanks to the twenty-fourth chromosome. But in Tower Ashé the gods manipulated the genome another way, for polymorphism. Some Ashëan . . . oh, you won’t know what hyperphenotypes are; some
family-groups
are stronger and faster. The warriors. Some are smarter: the savants. Others are oracles and magi. I don’t
know
all the Ashëan types. It’s not my Tower. Back on the