“Be careful what you wish for, Yoi Sendar.”
You would set yourself up as savior of these people? O Yamamanama, how I will punish you, by and by.
Yama ignored the Shadow’s dim whisper. He was feeling stronger now. It was three days after he had been found by the forest folk. His wounds were healing and his fever had abated, and he had been fed well. He was able to bear the visions which the Shadow brought to him in the night. They were his secret shame, his punishment for having dared act like a Preserver. Never again. Never, never again. He wished that he could renounce everything and find Derev and marry her if she would have him, but he knew that it could not be so simple. He knew that he was set on a hard road that would almost certainly end in his death.
Pandaras had recovered too. He had made a flute from a joint of bamboo and was playing in the sunlight at the edge of the clearing to an audience of fat, ugly, admiring children who were as interested in the fetish he wore on his arm as his jaunty tunes.
The huge kapok tree in the center of the clearing was hung with sleeping cocoons woven from grass and ferns, each tailored to its owner. They would be abandoned when the troop packed up their camp, for the forest folk had no permanent habitation. Men and women were tending the long trench of coals over which they smoked the flesh of the fat caterpillars they collected deep in the forest. These were a delicacy for both the forest folk and the Mighty People. Thousands of caterpillars hung from frames suspended over the hot coals, on which leaves of certain aromatic plants were now and then cast. Sweet-smelling blue smoke hazed the beams of sunlight which fell through the kapok’s leaf-laden branches.
Yama asked the chief, “Why do you work for the Mighty People? It seems to me that you are as free a people as any on the world.”
Yoi Sendar said, “It is a long story, and you may not have one as good.”
Yama smiled. He had learned that this was the traditional challenge amongst the bandar yoi inoie, who decided their social status and won their husbands and wives by their ability to tell tales. Pandaras said that in a year he could be chief of all the forest folk, although he admitted that some of their stories were worth retelling elsewhere. Already young men and women were settling at a respectful distance, ready to enjoy the story and to try and learn how to improve their own tale telling from Yoi Sendar’s example.
Yoi Sendar looked around and said, “This is one of the least of the stories that I know, but it may amuse you.” Yama smiled as best he could. His wounds were scarring—his face was stiff and numb. It was as if he was wearing a badly made mask. He had spent a long time looking at it in one of the forest folk’s precious mirrors. The right side was not too bad, but the left, which Pandaras had had to cauterize, was a patchwork of welted flesh, pulling down his eye and lifting the corner of his mouth.
He had become outwardly what he believed he was inwardly: a monster, an outcast. Derev would never cease to love the boy he had been, but how could she love what he had become? Perhaps it was best that he went to his death after all.
Die? I will not let us die, Child of the River. We will live forever.
Yama told Yoi Sendar, “I would like to hear your story. Then perhaps you would like to hear one of mine, although I doubt that it is as finely made as yours.”
“Listen then,” Yoi Sendar said, and held up two fingers by his ear. His audience shifted, focusing their attention on the grave, ugly little man. “Listen then, O my people. This is a story of long ago, after the Preservers brought us to this world but before we met our dear masters, the Mighty People.
“In that long ago time we were always hungry. One group of us went far into the forests to look for game and found nothing. They walked and walked and at last they sat down to rest on what seemed to be the fallen trunk of a huge tree. But when one of them stuck the point of his knife into the scaly bark, blood spurted out, for they were not sitting on a fallen tree at all, but on the King of All Snakes. The King had been sleeping, and the knife wound woke him and made him very angry. But the men were mighty hunters, and although he struck out and tried to crush them in the coils of his body, they evaded his attack and hacked off his head.
“When they were certain that he was dead (for some snakes have a head at either end), they began to butcher his body, for they were very hungry. Yet as the blood of the King of All Snakes drained into the ground, a heavy rain began to fall, feeding a great flood that filled the forest. The flood washed away the hunters, and all human habitation for many leagues around. We have just witnessed a great flood, O my brothers and sisters, but this flood was far greater.
“Only one woman survived. She climbed to the top of a high mountain and squeezed into a crack in the rock behind the shelter of a creeper. The wind blew the creeper back and forth against the rock, and from this friction jumped showers of sparks. The woman caught some of these sparks and used them to light a fire made from dead husks picked from the outer skin of the creeper. The warmth encouraged the creeper to put forth flowers, which the woman ate. And so she had food and warmth, and later she took the creeper for her husband.
“The woman and the creeper made a child together, by and by, but he was a poor halfling with only one arm and one leg. His name was Yoi Soi. He was always hungry and hopped about everywhere. He quickly found a few grains of rice which a rat had saved from the flood. He set the rice on a leaf to dry, and when the rat discovered what Yoi Soi had done, it swore angrily that in revenge his children would always steal a portion of the food of men.
“But Yoi Soi did not get to eat the rice. Before the grains had dried, a wind came and blew them away across the forest. Yoi Soi hopped after them, driven by his hunger. He passed an ancient tree covered in birds which pecked at any green buds it put forth, and the tree implored the boy to ask the wind to come and blow it down and put it out of its torment. Yoi Soi promised that if he found the wind he would ask for that favor, and the tree lifted one of its limbs and pointed the way to the wind’s home.
“Yoi Soi hopped on more eagerly than ever. He passed a stagnant lake and the scum on the lake bubbled up into a pair of fat green lips which asked the boy to bring a strong wind that would blow away the logs which blocked its outlet. Yoi Soi promised that he would do his best, and the lake give him its last measure of pure water. Yoi Soi drank it down and it renewed his strength at once.
“Yoi Soi felt very strong now, but his stomach was empty. He stopped in a grove of banana plants, but the fruit was out of reach, and because he had only one arm and leg he could not climb. The banana plants fluttered their long green leaves and asked Yoi Soi if he would ask the wind to restore the limbs they had lost in the great flood, so that they could once more embrace the air. When Yoi Soi promised this, hands of red bananas dropped around him and he ate well and went on to the high place of bare rock where the wind lived.
“The wind was very angry that this halfling had dared to track it to its lair for the sake of a few grains of rice. It told Yoi Soi that it had scattered the rice across the world. Rice would feed many kinds of men, but would never feed the children of Yoi Soi. Then the wind roared and pounced and tried to blow the boy from the high place.
“But Yoi Soi had come prepared. He had brought kindling taken from the shaggy coat of his father the creeper, and flints to strike sparks. With these he set fire to the wind’s tail, and the wind flung itself about, howling in pain. ‘Put out the flames,’ it cried, ‘and I shall make you a whole man!’