Once, prodded by Jedit amid his studies, Johan conceded, "Yes. The river flows from the east, then sinks into the bosom of the world and is not seen again. Much of the Sukurvia is undershot by a sunken ocean, a secret sea. The water eventually reaches the southern sea at Bryce." He spat the last name, though the tigers didn't notice.
One day they reached the end of Efrava's oasis. The jungle shriveled to gorse and thornbush and stunted trees with only a few graceful acacias like tall fans. The river became a sprawling swamp stitched by sawgrass and weeds. Johan departed the river and plodded on, the tigers trailing behind, until they reached a tall headland. Standing on a brow of parched grass, they gazed east and saw only rising desert.
Jedit gazed back at the coarse, impassable swamp. "How is this possible?"
Gazing eastward, Johan answered only because Jedit would persist. "Obviously, somewhere farther east, the river runs aboveground but then sinks into the soil. It percolates out here, pooling as this swamp, then continues on down the valley. As you said, Efrava is thirty leagues long, just the length of the river, its nurturing mother. What lies yonder?"
The eastern sun was fierce, and Jedit squinted in glare. "Four days' walk lie more oases. East by north lies the land of the Khyyiani. East by south, the Sulaki and the Hooraree."
"Rivals?" asked Johan.
"We kill each other on sight. Most of the time." Jedit frowned, puzzled. "It's tradition to fight them all, but every six years we meet on neutral territory and exchange the cubs below three years. Otherwise we'd become inbred and die out. More often we sally against them, warring to keep them in line. The Khyyiani are cruel, loving to torture captives with lingering deaths, and the Sulaki sacrifice captives and even their own people to a bloody god named Ergerborg."
Johan squinted in concentration. Over weeks he'd tuned his ear to the tiger's antique accent. Now he fixed the twisty tribal names in his mind. "There's no hope of reconciliation, then?"
"Oh, none. We'd sooner nest with mud imps than those bastards."
Johan nodded, seeming satisfied, leaving Jedit and Hestia as puzzled as ever. Abruptly the magician turned. "We've walked one end of Efrava to the other. Now let us venture south, then north."
"What do you seek?" asked Hestia.
Johan's teeth showed a shark's grin. "Knowledge."
Skirting the matted swamp, Jedit warned of mud imps. Johan didn't seem to care.
On their second day circling south, amidst clouds of annoying mosquitoes, Hestia gave a sudden bleat. Her foot had tangled in a snare. Rather than rush to her rescue, Jedit Ojanen unsheathed his black claws and spun a quick circle. Well he did. From both sides in tall bushes popped a dozen evil faces with bamboo blowguns. Johan, in the lead as always, muttered some enchantment and waved a languid hand, invoking an aura of protection. Jedit flicked a paw at a zipping wasp and spanked a poisoned dart aside, then another. A third struck his neck but lodged in his short mane, not penetrating the skin. Two darts shot at Johan stopped a foot away to hang in midair, then slowly sank to the ground. Hestia had slashed the snare from her ankle. Crouching low, she leaped into a slot in the brush, giving a keening cry that set nerves on edge. Jedit bulled into brush after the biggest clutch of imps.
Squawling mud imps scattered through the brush. Belt-high, covered in reddish fur clotted with mud, they had devils' faces with black rams' horns, pug snouts, yellow fangs, and scruffy dark manes. Jedit caught two. One he killed with a swipe of his huge paw, claws splitting the creature's skull. The other he stabbed from behind, severing its spine. A third he tried to kick to death, but it dove into a bush and vanished. Jedit ripped the bush out by the roots only to uncover a gopher hole. Disgusted, he trotted back to the trail. Hestia, her stripes dusty and leaf-strewn, carried an imp's head by one horn. Showing it to Jedit, she pitched it into the brush.
Obviously protected by some magic aura, Johan hadn't moved a pace. He asked only, "Are these common?"
"As mosquitoes in some spots," said Jedit. He rubbed his own black nose, which was drilled with bumps. "Pests. They avoid us in large groups. They live on rats and hogs and ducks, mostly."
Soon they entered the jungle proper again, nurtured by southward-trending trickles from the river. A herd of tiny yellow deer bounded away from a pool. Everywhere ran game in plenty: water buffalo, deer, wild pigs, red monkeys. Even parrots and giant anacondas and tortoises were food to tigers. Jedit and Hestia ganged up to encircle and kill an animal when hungry. They would gorge, eating flesh, organs, even brains and eyes, then needn't eat for four or five days. Johan seldom ate, subsisting on water and roots and now and then a nest of eggs.
Everywhere, the tigers noted, Johan absorbed the lay of the oasis, until he must know it better than any native. He studied the sky, asked about the year-round weather, memorized hillocks and swamps and open glades, noted the types of trees and how they clustered, tasted the water, sifted the soil for minerals or clay. Whenever the tigers asked why, Johan gave vague answers about "wanting to know everything there is to know."
One time, pacing a sun-dappled trail, he asked abruptly, "Do your people have any legends about flying?"
"You mean," asked Jedit, "about tigers flying like birds?"
Hestia put in, "No, not as such."
"No true talk of magic carpets or winged shoes or soaring boats?"
Numbly the two tigers shook whiskered heads, and Johan marched on.
Over four months, they scoured all of Efrava, until the only place left unexplored was the village itself. Camping by night without a fire under three teak trees, Johan sat against a trunk, hands in his long sleeves and feet drawn up under his robe. Jedit lay sprawled on the ground. Hestia lay nuzzled against his broad back, one arm around him, as they always slept of late. The tigers were nodding when Johan startled them both.
"I have a confession to make," said the mage. "I did know your father."
Chapter 3
The shaman dreamed.
Alone in the large common hut, in the dead of night, Musata, shaman of Efrava and mother to Jedit Ojanen, had hung the burlap mat to close the doorway, then banked a low fire of coals with handfuls of herbs. Among her tribe, only shamans knew how to kindle fire, for only they dared risk it. Into the fire had gone mystic herbs: rue for keen sight, fennel for memory, toadwort to draw strength from the earth, hyssop for purity, teak bark for inner vision, and many other herbs gathered in secret from the forest of Efrava, for only by imbibing native plants with native strength could a native remain anchored to this plane while sending her mind questing to unseen worlds.
Sitting cross-legged, clawed hands on her knees, striped muzzle drooping on her bosom, Musata inhaled deeply and dreamed. Jedit Ojanen, her wayward son, had been much on her mind lately, indeed on everyone's mind, and Musata kept his face centered in the arena of her mind. Yet before her inner eyes, Jedit's head began to spin, and suddenly she beheld-on the back of his skull-the face of the strange man called Johan. Another spin, and Musata saw Jedit's face again. No, Jaeger's, older, broader, with white sprinkled among the black fur. A triad, she knew, for magic always happened in threes. No surprise, for the three beings were linked.
She cast her net wider. More faces, a sea of them. Hestia's. Her own, Musata's. Faces of humans, strangers. A young woman with wild chestnut hair and a devilish eye. A bearded man, the face of a saint. More people ranged behind them. How many humans were there in the world? Ironically, Musata had never glimpsed humans before, even in the spirit world, yet here trouped a veritable parade. People tied to Johan's legacy, no doubt. He carried remnants of their spirits, or even their ghosts, with him. So who exactly was Johan?