Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  Later that night after Davie passed, no celebration was held, despite his victory. His parents were awarded the right to keep and feed his wolf, along with the one of his vanquished opponent, but their hamlet—two-hundred-and-sixty-four souls strong when the day began—had been reduced by one.

  As news of the passing spread, Pappy remained especially reserved, though the conflicts knotting his brow would seep through in the gullies of his forehead. This night, his granddaughter had been inaugurated to bloodshed, and he understood that she had been altered for all time.

  Later, during her nightly chores, after slipping a pair of sand crabs through Ash’s mesh grate which he crushed effortlessly with his aquiline fangs, she asked, “Why do we keep doing this?”

  The question, often posed after a Covenant, always wilted at the end, less a query than a sigh.

  Pappy drew an icy breath that burned his throat.

  “What else do you assume we can do?”

  He had caught her snooping with greater frequency through his library in recent weeks, though he stopped short of reprimanding her. It was her right to pursue all knowledge—secret and otherwise—just as it was his right as a Gaffer to exercise discretion as to what knowledge he may apportion. All she had ever wanted was to learn about the Covenants—to see one live and up close—but Pappy objected. They argued often over this, and as he grew to recognize that his powers to shelter her were dwindling, he struck a compromise: she may revel along the edges of the Mother-of-pearl Way like the others, but so long as he lived, or until she has borne a child of her own, she must never attempt to view a Covenant.

  She agreed to the terms, though at that moment her sense of fortitude turned suddenly as enfeebled as her grandfather’s capacity to cloister.

  “Pappy, may I go and pay respects to Davie’s family?”

  She watched the slow pooling of his eyes as he warmed his cracked fingers over the coal pit. He had explained once how in the past man’s eyes were not as large as they had become, but that the end-of-light forced them to grow at accelerated rates.

  The thought that eyes were once smaller never failed to plunge her into the deepest of sorrows.

  “Don’t be out long, child,” he said.

  From his cage, the robust badger hoisted its striped muzzle to the ceiling and crooned, the residual phosphorescence on his snout from the sand crabs already blinking out.

  ***

  At the domicile where Davie’s service was taking place, Luna kept her distance.

  Davie with his dimples and limestone hair. Luna liked him best of all the others, for he always saved a smile for her, and her alone. Not even their teacher, a lighthearted and pretty mistress that all the boys pined over in their respective darkness could coax it from him the way Luna could, a sensation she likened to the impulse in boys to flex muscles before one another.

  And now they were chanting paeans to his memory. She had long lost count of the number of services she had witnessed, though familiarity was not the reason she dared not enter the tent across the sandy lane. Through the opened flap she saw that it was not house Gaffers leading the keens as was the norm, but a pair of Culling Masters in their full-white body tunics. Men summoned only for disposal of vanquished bodies from other hamlets. And yet here they were, ministering to one of their own.

  As if tuned to her thoughts, the Culling Master nearest the opening turned then to peer outside, his face a black maw under the hood, but Luna did not linger long enough for him to etch her to his brain.

  ***

  She wandered the hamlet byways for a time, weeping in quiet hitches when passing under shadow—as much for Davie as for his parents, who would have little in the end to mourn but an empty grave marker.

  At a tight bend in the Way, she came suddenly upon a pair of men having themselves marked. The artisan dipped his needle into a bowl aflutter with light, the dyes likely stirred with minute traces of cuttlefish ink. The luciferin in their ink infused the marked flesh with a glow, but it was also toxic. And yet the risks were deemed acceptable, for the mild hallucinations yielded were renowned for soothing nerves and instilling bliss, thus their growing popularity.

  The men on the side of the road had already greyed and atrophied—slack, broken, inward-gazing husks of their former selves, which the ink poisons will take in short time.

  They ogled Luna as she walked by, channeling enough strength to fix their gazes and grunt sticky inquiry. She felt no offense. If faint hope was all they clung to, they were welcome to it if she kindled it, so long as it smoldered in their minds and there alone.

  At the hamlet’s outskirts she took the cliff road. Guided by the luminescent spill from the water below, she picked her way up the dark paths until she settled at last on the outcrop she and Davie would often steal to when lessons grew tiresome, or to avoid excessive choring. She let her legs dangle over the ledge and watched a pair of algae farmers along the shore below as they trolled the tide pools with long-poles for the more elusive, inert kelp still edible this late in the season. Fields of star algae and jellyfish blooms cast their lethal copper radiance in rolling veins atop the sea’s undulant hide, so the fishermen kept to the shadows as much as possible, for even the hint of movement could lure a star angler to the shoreline. Several of their numbers had already been lost to these predators over recent seasons, and the men below ventured awfully close to the waterline.

  She trusted in the end that experience would keep them unscathed, though their poles would not be very effective against a star angler. Not against their armored scales. But how she longed to see one. To witness their light, the colors of which she had been told no longer blushed on land, for that fascinated her well beyond their vaunted size and ferocity.

  ***

  “Was it a fine glorification?” Pappy asked upon her return.

  Luna placed her palm to Ash’s cage so his breaths could warm them. As many services as she had attended, Pappy had witnessed countless more. Gaffers were not required to go, though always welcomed. The young, however, were actively encouraged to attend from the age of seven onward. Beyond stripping death of its corrupt, bygone stigmas, it served to foster solidarity in the hamlets.

  “He went well, Pappy.”

  Pappy was rewiring the cable spaulders of his armor, tightening the slack in the lames to better protect his shoulders. Luna had protested earlier in the month when he had started tweaking with his shielding that she should be the one doing the work. She was his squire, the task having passed to her when her father was Bequeathed in a Covenant many years back.

  Luna plopped herself on her mat and counted the stitched joints of their domicile’s ceiling, noting the spots where the tallow seals had eroded. She said, “I don’t understand why you keep fidgeting with that thing. Elders are exempt from Covenants. I love you, but I can hear your joints. They creak like spars in the night.”

  “Dear child, my joints take umbrage to your candor.” And he smiled and kept looping and tying.

  Luna sighed and pulled her coverlet to her chin, freshly quilted with her own scarlet hair. “Will you read me to sleep?”

  Pappy feigned exasperation, and Luna feigned hurt, and in the dimly lit domicile they giggled in a manner far too light to ballast the evening’s weight. His knees cracked as he drew himself up, and Luna tittered further. Pappy extracted their hallowed folio from the trunk where all his ancient knowledge was stored. When she was younger, not long after her father had died, he explained how each hamlet maintained their own folio, which contained all the knowledge for their most favorable wellbeing.

  Their hamlet being by the sea, their folio echoed the maritime.

  Clearing his throat by hocking an especially hefty globule into the coal pit, Pappy began reading.

  “The sea is nature’s vast reserve. It was through the sea that the globe as it were began, and who knows if it will not end in the sea! Perfect peace abides here. The sea does not belong to despots. On its surface immoral rights can still be claim
ed, men can fight each other, devour each other, and carry out all earth’s atrocities. But thirty feet below the surface their power ceases, their influence fades, their authority disappears . . . ”

  ***

  II

  As the next Covenant approached, Luna quivered with all the anticipation of fabled romance. Often she’d awaken with her coverlet twisted painfully between her knees, or cast off the mat altogether, her armpits damp with a novel and potent aroma. Something in her soul was turning itself inside out, thirsting for air, for light, for recognition.

  The low sun, smothered forever under a pewter brume that turned russet by dusk, whispered its cold light through the eroded chinking between the tin panes that framed the door’s flap. She would have to get more tallow soon. As it aged, it lost its ability to mute glow and cold alike.

  Spring’s approach notwithstanding, it had been an especially taxing winter with a stubborn half-life.

  She watched Ash through a single opened eye as the muscular badger skulked nervously about his pen, as if he too were conscious of some nigh event for which his life could play a crucial role. She had known well ahead of her time that predatory animals had long since developed immunities to pestilence. Something in their bodies called an end-zime destroyed it, making them safe for people to eat. So she had been able to glean from what she had read of Pappy’s archive in the dark during his rare nights of deep sleep and feeble ones for her.

  “I’ve told you for an eternity-and-a-half now, child,” said Pappy. “Some warm hog’s milk will do you wonders.”

  He was mending gauntlets using dried ligament. Jaguar would have been Luna’s guess. It was what she would have used, as the cats possessed the toughest fiber with the most flexibility. She gazed at her grandfather as he cinched and threaded, no less amazed at the finesse still thriving in those scored, plump fingers. The waning candlelight bathed his knuckles in a light no coal glow could match, reminding her again that acquiring more tallow was her day’s chief priority, along with some dried fox gut for the wicks. This time she would barter for boar. Tallow rendered from boar fat was the hardiest and most translucent. It also cured faster, thus preventing the gnats seeking heat from embedding into the tallow and reducing ambient glow the way they had done so in Pappy’s fading candle.

  “Pappy, I would like to learn more about the animals. Their importance. Their history. And also why we live by the sea where everything is poison and ruin.”

  Pappy gave her the knowing corners of his eyes and lips. “I will tell you more of the animals. After the next Covenant.”

  Luna stuck out her tongue.

  “Always after the next Covenant . . . ”

  “I am not blind to your evolving, dearest. But so few still carry the confidences of the past two-thousand years. It must be parsed out for its ideal retention. As to why we live by the sea? Well, the edible plankton is necessary to keep us alive. Man cannot thrive on flesh alone. It is why all the inland hamlets have collapsed.”

  Luna rolled her drowsy eyes. “Is that what our grand hallowed folio tells us?”

  Pappy’s eyes widened to match her nerve, their bronze irises trapping the last of the candle fire in maelstroms of gold.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said. His eyes closed, and under their lids Luna could see memory’s hands groping into his brain to muster the words long in standing formation, and when they flowed, they did so in a confident march.

  “The sea is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite . . . ”

  ***

  At dawn of the spring equinox, Luna staked out her place by the Mother-of-pearl Way as far in as she and Pappy had agreed upon, and as the morning swelled to afternoon, and afternoon to dusk, she lost herself gazing into the warm smolder pouring from the hilltop’s tower fuel-torches. Their light gurgled across the nebulous road where the effulgence fractured and scattered, causing sparkles sometimes too painful to look at.

  Still, it was not the artificial light of old—that which she had glimpsed on the preserved impression tableaus she had spied from Pappy’s records. She found their sheen miraculous. Men harnessing fire, controlling the uncontrollable. Pappy had explained that the cities once blazed in the evenings as a result of such ingenuity, but she could not imagine the scope. Hundreds of colors in different intensities, sizes, shapes, all birthed seemingly at a finger’s snap.

  These times, in an effort to conserve what fuel had been stowed away and scrounged, the tower torches only flared four times a year for one hour in conjunction with the new cycle.

  On this night, a wrangler named Bixby strode up the Way. Leashed behind him was a blubbery tabor. Luna had known for some time of the basic workings of the Covenants, how they required volunteers from each hamlet to bring an animal to the proceedings, and this volunteer would engage in hand-to-hand combat with a volunteer from another hamlet, wagering his beast against one of equal species and weight belonging to his opponent, with the vanquished being Bequeathed, and the victor taking both animals as spoils for his hamlet.

  With every delayed crowd swell beyond the rise, she imagined the corresponding swing of mace or crack of hatchet that stoked it, cheering and chanting, screaming and howling, until Bixby crested the hill again many hours later, bloody and limping, but dragging behind him a pair of tabors.

  That night she lost her voice screaming his name with the rest of the hamlet.

  III

  On the eve of the summer solstice, a week before her thirteenth birthday, Luna edged herself further up the Way until she could feel the ceremonial drums in her belly, and watched as a smith named Eryk, with his black sloth-bear in tow, march straight up the iridescent road against a molten sky until he vanished over the rim.

  He never returned, and as the others mourned and wept his demise, Luna lamented the fact that he had ascended with nothing more than a common coal torch to light his entry into the arena.

  That he had been no different than any of the others before him.

  She thought of Davie again, and of how he had met the same unexceptional fate, and of why, afterwards, he had been ministered to by Culling Masters instead of the house Gaffer. The incongruity would trouble her enough so that a few days later she mustered the strength to confront Pappy directly for answers to the questions that have gnawed at her as savagely as any other nascent longing.

  “Why do we not bury our own dead?”

  Pappy had been reading from the hallowed folio when she marched in, all tendons and glare.

  “Rotting corpses may revive the pestilence,” he said. “Even underground.”

  “But you said it was cured.”

  “For the most part. Luna dear, you are bloated with inquiry tonight—”

  She stomped hard enough to rattle every mismatched joint of their domicile.

  “I am not looking for inquiry, Pappy, I want clarity! And do not change the subject. You told me it had been cured.”

  Pappy expelled a breath she never saw him take.

  “As we neared the brink, it was discovered that something in carnivorous animals called an end-zime destroyed the pestilence. But it still flares up now and again, though in far weaker strains.”

  “Why do we not burn the bodies?”

  “We have little fuel to burn. The world . . . it was not always this way.”

  “What really happens to our dead, Pappy?”

  “Nothing that conflicts with our laws, nor the inevitable course of things,” he said.

  He had never once looked up from the folio.

  ***

  Afterwards, she ran.

  Ran through the labyrinthine avenues of their hamlet, swirls of titian dust ghosting her course. Once at the district outskirts, she bounded the Mother-of-pearl Way in three bright-crunching strides, stalwart limbs pumping, and took the path up to the cliffs, halting at last
at the outcrop she and Davie had once shared.

  There, she wept all the fatigues of her body and soul.

  Perched high above the great lurching beast of the sea, she remembered Davie telling her once how at night, with its endless stippling of light, the water resembled how the sky used to appear long before the choking, poisonous breaths of man’s old constructs befogged it, and before The Great Fireball had blotted it out for good. His father had regaled him with tales of con-stall-ations—great pinpoints of luminance and sweeps of gleaming dust in the sky that outlined great gods and warrior-animals. Often she wondered if people like man lived amongst them, themselves also consumed in a cycle of insipid repetition until nothing remained to chew on but dead hope and memory, huddled under their own leaden caul, waiting for the great, final blinking out so they may be one again with the stars. After all, Davie had said, what dwelled beyond the brume were only memories, cast out from one infinite to renew others.

  Three algae farmers worked the shore below, dragging in beached jellyfish to harvest their luciferin. Their glow. Mixed with certain powdered minerals, it remained stable enough to act as a dye with radiating properties. Not very potent, in the end, but enough to blow life into the otherwise stygian night.

  An array of about ten, in varying lengths and degrees of waning sepia and puce, lay deflated on the beach. The fresher they were, the brighter. The air smothered the light the longer it was exposed to it. As a result, the harvesters kept their coal torches a bit further in from the water, though that did not immune them fully from danger.

  She thought of Pappy, and of what he might quote of the scene below her. Cycling through the few memorized passages, she came upon one she anticipated he would have unleashed in the moment.

  “With its untold depths, couldn’t the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration?”