The jaw now worked in a sideways motion. The Wiseman who had performed the repair was a healer named Nebsuel, who lived in the outcast isles, just inside the mouth of the great river. Tsungali had visited him on his way into the Vorrh.
Nebsuel possessed a great knowledge of the body, of its fluids and lights. His services could be bought, but were better given. He was not a kind man; he did not apply his knowledge for the wellbeing of others. He performed surgery and operated the chemistry of plants to see further inside the workings of the human animal. His true ambition was to isolate the gum that joins flesh to mind, and mind to spirit. His tools and procedures for such work were simple. He would divide and subtract, add and multiply the pain and its relief, while probing the interior of structure and sensation. He was not a man to be taken lightly, and Tsungali knew he might be killed or rearranged by his practices. He also knew that if he did not get help soon, his jaw might never heal. Starvation and blood poisoning seemed a far worse conclusion than Nebsuel’s intrusions.
The outcast isle had been a leper colony. Nebsuel’s family had lived there and suffered the relentless disease, but he had not. Some potent resistance in him had kept him ‘clean’, while he watched all around him suffer. He had seen how the outsiders had treated his family and friends; on trading expeditions to the outside world, he had witnessed open disgust and cruelty against his loved ones.
How he became a Wiseman was not known, but the legends were thick and terrible. Some said he cut open all the dead of the isle and read the complex tales of their mechanisms; others said he travelled away, to collect the wisdom from many tribes, some from beyond the sea. He was rumoured to commune with forbidden spirits, and unspeakable creatures that came to trade knowledge for the souls of men he kept in jars. None of the reports could be confirmed, and they grew more fantastical in their ambiguity. But his powers of healing were not so unclear. They were the only thing about him that was certain, and they were worth the risk of contamination and agony.
Tsungali had sat in a large chair made of sturdy wood, a strap holding his arms tight to his body and firm against the chair. He had laboriously drunk the mixture of stewed leaves that Nebsuel had given him, and now his face drooped numb and cold. His broken teeth had been removed and dropped to the earthen floor, where ants flocked to harvest them, swarming in collective shoves to nudge the prize along their conveyor-belt lines of frenzied, black bodies. Metal and wooden probes extended his jaw, giving access to the glistening muscles, unnaturally exposed inside. Nebsuel worked from both sides, one finger in the exterior wound, which he had unstitched, the other hand teasing and adjusting the tools inside Tsungali’s mouth. His arm, already treated, lay throbbing under the strap, An hour later, he lay in a sweat of recovery, beaming in pain.
‘Tell me of this Bowman,’ Nebsuel said as they sat around a smouldering fire, three days later. Tsungali spoke through gurgles and splutters, as though a wet sock were stuffed in his mouth. He explained his quest and how it had been foiled on both attempts. He told of the Whiteman with Blackman skills, of his cunning and excessive knowledge. He did not tell of what he feared, of what he had seen for those few minutes at close range: the shock of recognition; a face he knew from years before, unchanged by time while his own grew old, and his body, slow. It must have been a mistake, a trick of the mind – the man’s son, perhaps, grown identical in form. The alternative, though it would have explained his power and his automatic place in Tsungali’s memory, was impossible.
‘I will kill him in the Vorrh,’ concluded Tsungali.
‘Or he will kill you,’ Nebsuel stated blankly. ‘Why do you think he heads for the Vorrh?’
‘Because he has a destiny there, something unfinished. Something the white soldiers don’t want to happen.’ Tsungali prodded the glowing embers with a stick, making a new citadel within their flickering hearth. ‘Perhaps he means to meet the angels or the demons that dwell there.’
‘Ah!’ said Nebsuel. ‘I know nothing of demons, but the Erstwhile you call angels are another matter, they have a presence everywhere.’
‘You have seen them?’ asked Tsungali.
‘I have sensed them, felt them near, watching, when a soul shudders on my knives. Some are attracted to the extreme action of men, wanting to see deeper and understand, and maybe become part of man. Have you never known their presence amid your actions of war and butchery?’
There was no answer, so Nebsuel continued.
‘The Erstwhile in the Vorrh could be different, older; a residue, like something left in a closed pipe or one of my test tubes; concealed and contained, too viscous to climb the sides. At least, that would match the stories that are told of that region.’
He made a brief sign over his head, as if stroking some invisible coiffure above his shining, bald scalp. He knew Tsungali had seen more, that there was an understanding which had not been mentioned. For that little act of selfishness, he would give him weak, inexpensive balm to close his wounds. Had he shared all his knowledge and fears, he would be leaving with an ointment that would have healed the wound in two days.
For the wrongness of his quest and his inability to alter or change his purpose, Tsungali would have to pay dearly, but not yet, and not to this doctor. Nebsuel attached a trace scent to the scarred warrior; he would be trackable for up to a year, trained beasts could be used to carry message of his whereabouts; it could be used to find him if he never returned – the state of his body, intact or otherwise, would not hinder its efficacy.
The next day, Tsungali gave his thanks and said goodbye. For his treatment and recuperation, he had traded three-dozen safety pins, twelve blue shells collected by the coastal tribes, and five ampoules of adrenalin stolen from army medical supplies. He had also, unknowingly, traded a week of his life, and all possibility of the fulfilment of his commission.
After his patient’s departure, Nebsuel opened a slanted box and removed a tiny piece of pungent, scrolled cloth, designed for the purpose, stretching it between intricate brass flaps. He took a delicately nibbed pen and scratched a musical, Arabic tracery into its waiting. When it was dry, he unpinned it and rolled it into a tiny tube, which he screwed into a weightless tin cylinder, not much bigger than the curved nail of his little finger. He cooed and hummed to the black pigeon he cupped in his hands as he attached the cylinder to one of the bird’s legs. He stepped outside and cast it to the skies, towards a flutter of rising stars, whistling after it to increase its speed.
The cleric sat at a circular table in his house, close to the forest. The bird arrived out of the sun and flew to its familiar perch and food tray in the Langhorne tower above him. Its weight set a light silver bell in motion, which called the gaunt man to attend. He peeled the message from the bird and straightened the scrolclass="underline"
‘The assassin goes on into the Vorrh to kill the Bowman. He is spoored. Act with speed or be lost.’
The cleric put the slip of cloth into a glass phial, and locked it in a steel box. It was impossible for him to enter the forest, but he needed to prevent the Bowman from dying within it. He would have to send another in his stead, someone to wipe out the fearsome warrior on the Bowman’s trail. There was only one: the Orm.