CHAPTER ONE
The patience of the Sea People was about to be rewarded. They sacrificed and prayed in their homes and temples and at the estuary’s mouth, where the waters changed colour and taste. They conjured the return of the magic creature that lived among them before. It had been called Oneofthewilliams because there were many. Some had black skin and silver hair, some were as white as fish. It was even told that some had feathers. One had carried a bow. Another had one eye.
Sidrus knew little about and cared less for these pagans or their beliefs. He had killed the Bowman Peter Williams, and years later had been tricked into eating his shrivelled head, which seated its longing deep in his marrow and its waking in the empty ventricles of the monster’s leather soul. Now it was waking up. But this he did not know. All he knew now was revenge, as he ravenously sought Nebsuel—the shaman who had dared to attempt to assassinate him, who left him diseased and weakened. But the head had cured him, made him strong again. He was saved, he thought, by his beloved Vorrh. He truly believed that his destiny was his own. His only immediate task and pleasure was to take his revenge. He had sworn an oath to this fine fury before leaving Essenwald. His destruction of Ishmael’s whore, and his blame and execution for the crime, were as nothing to what he was going to do to Nebsuel.
Sidrus’s anger blinded him to the being growing in the quieter part of his cells. The transparent one that basked and clenched and responded to the call of the Sea People.
Sidrus was being pulled. And he didn’t know it. His slender boat veered in a graceful misdirection that notched a degree east every quarter of an hour. So that by the time the sea flowed under the river it was dark again and the implicit Cheshire moon showed nothing, with a modesty that was fiercely believable.
Sidrus made his camp and lay down to sleep. The remains of the head slid silently inside him while ghosting itself into every fibre and energy of its host, grafting its being into the nerve tree, bone, and blood.
Sidrus awoke just before dawn covered in ants. He rubbed his eyes and stretched, brushing their activity from his face and clothing. During repacking he noticed that the sun was bedraggled in the thick vines of the wrong kind of trees. He walked like a somnambulist to his boat and found it facing a dribble of tide that had dropped several feet, and worse, seaweed had decorated its mooring rope. This was all wrong. He sat on a fallen tree, bewildered and for the first time anxious. A flight of black swans thrashed against a thick and cloudless blue sky. All these clear signs and impossible readings meant only one thing: that this place was utterly different to the one that lived in his head and, even worse, his instinct. It did not fit into either and meant nothing to both.
He was lost.
He rummaged madly in his pack, finding his compass, staring at it and shaking it in disbelief. At the height of his infuriation he bellowed out what should have been a roar of frustrated rage. But something in his throat realigned it, bending the vocal cords to mimic a harp instead of a war horn. The sound shimmered through the trees, towards the sea—high, resolute, and profoundly clear. Sidrus grabbed at his throat as if seizing a traitor, but it was too late. The eloquent call dashed ahead, tumbling in its sleek surety and need to be heard. Through the hissing bamboo and the dark sucking mangroves, its shredded velocity leaving all the verticals and diminishing towards the beach. Its last quiver feebly touching the inside of the fair-haired child’s hollow cranium.
Tyc, her rumpled ear wedged tight against the ear of the cold infant, heard the strangled cry. Over the years her name had shortened, indicating her venerable, wise status. The young had very long names, some up to fifty-two syllables. This was to hold them firmly in the world. To tie and bind them to this side of eternity. As they got older and more firmly instated, they needed less, so mother Tyc’s single syllable indicted that she was prepared and unfettered, ready to make the slip into the next kingdom. In reality she had no intention of passing over for a good while yet, especially now that the sacred one was arriving. The future of the tribe had changed and she wanted to be part of it. She even considered recalling some of the shed parts of her name to make her plans to the tribe more obvious, but after consideration she thought that it would be ridiculous and without necessity.
Now she staggered back, shaking the low altar in her haste. She rushed from the temple hut with the excitement of a girl, bursting into the breeze and sound of sea, its low waves rejoicing with the bright palm leaves and the fluttering birds. She shrieked and turned towards the village and sang out with all her might that he was near. He was alive and near. At last returning. Everyone ran towards her and looked in every direction for a sight of the sacred one returning.
Sidrus was out of their range but moving towards them. He had left his canoe in the mangroves and was now on foot. The matted roots and swollen mud made it impossible to paddle forward, so the land was the only way. He did not trust it and had the Mars pistol stuck in his belt and his machete in his hand. His eyes flickered ahead watching for movement. He could smell the sea and knew he would find his bearings when he reached the coast.
The scouting party heard him approaching, cutting through the bush. They stopped and waited, crouching in the spindly grass. They carried a charm Tyc had given them, a delicate contrivance of substance that held the power of the entire tribe. It twitched in the young warrior’s fingers, matching the footfall of the approaching stranger. Sidrus walked into their midst without ever sensing their presence. They all stood up together, holding their arms and spears above their heads, laughing and saying the words of welcome.
Sidrus snatched the gun out of his belt, cocked it and aimed it point-blank into the chest of the first warrior before him. In a quick stab the young man pushed the charm snugly into the pistol’s massive bore. Sidrus pulled the trigger. The gun roared. Its horse-stopping power was no match for the twisted strands of leaves and fair human hair. The pistol’s heavy slide bucked back against the restraining bolts and sent them asunder. The shock wave travelled down into the slenderest part of gun and wrenched the trigger guard away, its brutal velocity and brittle snapping hardness ripping off two of the fingers of the hand that held it. The slide of the breach kicked through Sidrus’s abdomen and disconnected his solar plexus, the last membranous web that had held Williams, the Bowman, trapped inside. It continued and shattered his spine, crushing him out of consciousness.
They carried the broken man back into the core village of the Sea People and placed him before the wise woman. Tyc placed her wrinkled hands over the body. Every inch of her visible skin was tattooed. Many of the designs had lost their sharpness and definition. Age had folded and smudged the insignia while increasing the power of their meaning. She was annoyed by the wounds that he had sustained but was too busy to apportion blame and the necessary punishments. Greater meanings were at hand. She had no doubt that Williams was here, but he was enfolded in the bleeding, wounded body of another. All her skills would be needed. She must release the sacred one from its imprisonment inside this other man, the soul of which she knew was cantankerous and vile. But right now the sacred one needed the blood and the nerves of this monster to stay alive. She must stitch and pray him back into health. So she began on what remained of the right hand, finding that miraculously the three remaining digits still worked. She bound up the other wounds and structured some of the circulation back into function. The splintered spine she could not touch. There were no painkillers in her wide arsenal to quieten its fury; every time her fingers slipped into its disaster zone, the body shook and screeched in agony. She had it strapped down against movement and never again attempted to heal that part of its damage, hoping that in time it would settle and heal over. She and the tribe would have to wait for some primal healing before the true cleaving could finally take place.
Tyc and her neophytes and servants constructed an elaborate frame that worked as a series of adjustable splints and resting platforms, so that the shattered body that held Williams could not move and damage itself further. Feeding and bodily waste could thus be dealt with in a more convenient way. The device also functioned as an altar. Once the body had healed closed, Tyc would start the complex and exhausting work of speaking to the sacred one trapped inside the foreign devil. She intended to enter his unconscious condition and awaken him to gain direction on how the other might be peeled off. The rot and vileness dissected. The Sidrus part eliminated.
Sidrus awoke in the middle of a star-filled night, a warm breeze flowing over his near-naked body, which ached intolerably. He tried to move but nothing happened. He closed his eyes again and opened them more slowly. The same result. He squeezed them tight shut and clicked them open and shut like a camera, as if to paddle away the bad dream with his lids, but it would not go. His head was fixed down and felt strange, as if it had been extended upwards, elongated like a snake egg. A cold, bald, fragile one. His body was also immobile. He was restrained or paralyzed, and he could not tell which because he could not move his head and catch sight of the rest of his body. He could only stare straight up at the infuriating sky. He remembered nothing and feared the worst. He closed his eyes again. He could hear the sea. He was not in the Vorrh. He opened his eyes again. Of course, the sky was so big because there were no trees to obscure it. He became aware of the taste of fish in his mouth. Who had been feeding him and why? His tongue and mouth felt burnt and dry, and his voice sat in the middle of it like a bald chick in an empty, prickly nest.
“Help me,” he feebly said. “Help me.”
There was stirring beneath him and to his left side. Suddenly a face entered his vision. The face of a young boy. He instantly noticed how large and white and mercifully unfilled the youth’s teeth were. The boy ran away shouting, and he waited and prayed for survival or a quick death. It must be remembered, however, that the Sea People are a patient folk, and Sidrus would be given neither.