Scourged

by Kevin Hearne

  I wished I could joke with Oberon about it. He’d make me laugh and calm me down. But at the same time, I was glad he wasn’t here. The likelihood of him surviving such a battle as this would be small. My own chances looked fairly dismal.

  The draugar continued to pour out of the mountain and sort themselves on its slope and its base, facing our own mustered forces. Once the flow finally trickled to a stop, the mountain convulsed near the top, but what erupted was not lava. I groaned and got to my feet.

  It was a massive gray hound, much bigger than Oberon, and its name was Garm, the hound of Hel. And Hel came with him.

  There are few motifs more tiresome in history than the power-mad guy who wants to shape the world to suit his desires. Sometimes the power-mad guy spawns hellish offspring that are just as bad or worse, though, wee monsters that grow up to be big monsters, bereft of empathy or much in the way of soul that is not a small, starved, mewling thing. Loki and his children were cut from that cloth.

  Hel stepped out of the caldera and kept growing, half of her a gray-skinned corpse and half of her exposed bone and flesh and pulsing organs. Behind her, the bright fiery hair of Loki rose. The god of mischief grinned madly as he emerged, swelling to gargantuan proportions. They towered over the field using their shape-shifting ability, standing sixty meters tall or more, like some giant mecha suit from an apocalyptic anime. Loki held a flaming sword that I recognized, though it too was much larger than it used to be, and he pointed it in our general direction. His voice boomed across the fields like thunder.

  “Kill them all,” he said. “Scourge them from the plane of Midgard.” The much larger army of draugar surged forward to meet ours, outnumbering us four or five to one.

  Someone on our side blew a horn high up in the air, and it came from behind me, to the right, where the Bifrost Bridge had settled. I turned to see who had signaled the charge, expecting to see Odin, but it wasn’t him at all. There was a latecomer to the party: a chariot floating in the air, drawn by two goats, and a red-haired, heavily muscled figure standing in it.

  “No, it can’t be,” I mumbled, but he let the horn fall away from his bearded face and held up a hammer to the sky. Lightning coalesced around it and he redirected it to strike amongst the oncoming horde, a pointless gesture since the draugar were unaffected by the electricity, allowing the bolts to pass through their phantasmal flesh. He’d have to hammer them into oblivion if he wanted to make them go away, because Loki and Hel would not let something so elementary as lightning thwart them now. But the stark fact of his presence was proof that he’d never gone away when I thought he had.

  “They suckered me somehow,” I breathed. “That’s bloody Thor.”

  seven Star Mountain explodes again. It is a howling, ravenous force with which I am unprepared to deal. This is a battle meant for gods, not a woman from Kansas by way of Arizona.

  “Wukong,” I say, “I still do not know why I am here.”

  “And the answer still remains: to learn and grow.” The grin he flashes me is mischievous. He knows full well how annoying he’s being right now.

  “To learn what, though? To grow in what way? I am willing to do both and to work for whatever goal you set before me, but what you have said so far is too vague for me to understand.”

  “Do you think you were brought here to fight the hordes of the Yama Kings? To fight perhaps the Yama Kings themselves?”

  “No. I do not. That is the source of my doubt. You cannot possibly expect me to fight them.”

  “Oh, but I do. But they are not the true fight. They will kill you if you do not strive your utmost—do not mistake my words—but defeating them is not your true purpose. You must defeat something else.”

  “What? My secret desire to live on nothing but breakfast pastries? My growing addiction to anime?”

  “Your comfortable assumptions. Your habits of thought. They are not merely ruts in the road keeping you on the path you’re following, they are like blindfolds, preventing you from even seeing that there are other paths.”

  “I know that there are other paths.”

  The Monkey King smirked. “You feel comfortable saying that, don’t you?”

  I bite back a heated reply. For while I am aware that there are other paths, there must be some specific kind that Wukong is referring to and he knows I’m not seeing it. And he’s not suggesting some kind of Yoda deal here, where I must unlearn what I have learned. He’s acknowledged that I’m on a pretty high plateau of martial skill; he wants me to ascend above that somehow.

  Or he might be speaking of a completely different path, unrelated to martial arts. For all I know, he might actually want me to watch better anime series than I’m currently watching. I appreciate the value of ambiguity in some situations, but it’s damn infuriating when it’s the guardian of a gateway to a deeper knowledge of the self.

  And I know the purpose of it: The ambiguity forces the student out of established patterns of thinking, and the subconscious begins to chew at the problem like a tough, day-old bagel, even when the conscious mind is otherwise occupied. But knowing the purpose doesn’t help; I’m still faced with a mental obstacle course obscured by fog.

  Regardless, we are through speaking and training. The Monkey King grasps his staff in his left hand and reaches out his furred right hand to me. “Come, Granuaile. It is time to defend humanity, to live or die in the moment. If they win free of Yangmingshan Park, the loss of life will be vast.”

  I don’t know what he intends to do here, so I hold tightly to Scáthmhaide and put my left hand in his right. Sun Wukong grins at me.

  “Sometimes humans soil themselves when I soar the clouds with them. Do please try not to do that.”

  “What?”

  He cackles, shakes, crouches, and then I am yanked bodily into the air by his power, swept along in a massive jump toward the boiling, apocalyptic mess of Yangmingshan. In Journey to the West, it is said he can travel one hundred eight thousand miles in a single leap—enough to circle the globe four times, essentially no different from flying, so this comparatively brief hop to Yangmingshan from Old Taipei is nothing to him but a breathtaking and indeed a possibly pants-shitting experience for me. If it were not for my background flying as a peregrine falcon, I think I might well have had an accident of one kind or another, for as a human it is terrifying to be aloft without visible support.

  And what we’re flying into is terrifying as well. The Monkey King controls our descent to the base of the mountain; we must both bat away skyborne mouths ravening for our flesh along the way, and on the ground a few figures clear a space for us because together we make a strange silhouette.

  Once there, I’m not sure how to feel about what I’m facing. Some of them are clearly demons of unusual physiognomy and have never been anything but horrid creatures that take delight in the pain of others. But some of what I see are maddened human figures, both male and female, charred or bearing scars of some kind, confused as much as anything else. They are souls working off their bad karma in hell until they can be reincarnated, and they’re as worried as I am about what will happen if I kill them like this. Will they immediately be reincarnated, or will they return to their purgatorial hell for centuries more of purification? But there’s a certain fatalism to them as well, these wretched creatures who died who knows how long ago: They know full well they cannot stroll into Taipei and resume their lives as is, being shades of their former selves. They must instead please whatever Yama King is in charge of their hell, and right now their Yama King wants them to slay whatever’s in front of them. There’s a moment in their faces, a flicker of curiosity in their expressions at why there’s suddenly a red-haired white woman here, and then a palpable shrug when they realize it can’t matter in their particular scheme of things, right before they lunge at me with sharpened fingernails and feral teeth in mouths gaping wide. The blunt end of my staff thrust betw
een their eyes, or a blow to the temple or back of the head, ends them quickly. They are unarmed and unskilled and offer no serious threat to me, and I’m saddened by the necessity to hurt them to defend myself. I suppose I’m defending plenty of people back in Taipei, but I don’t feel that; instead, I feel like some sort of monster for taking advantage of their weakness.

  That is, until a serious demon comes my way, blue-skinned and borne aloft by brightly colored wings akin to peacock feathers, with red glimmering eyes in a black-toothed visage. He wields a mace dangling on the end of a chain rope, and I know he’s a dude because he wears nothing.

  “Uh, Wukong?” I glance over my shoulder and see that he is already otherwise engaged. This one’s all mine, apparently. Some lord of a hell upset that I’m plowing through his forces so quickly.

  “Have no mercy,” Wukong calls over his shoulder. “Do not hesitate.”

  Taking his advice to heart, I pull out a throwing knife from my belt and bullseye the demon in his junk. He shrieks and curls around the shaft buried in his shaft, and I brain him with Scáthmhaide while he’s mourning his nads. That makes the damned pull back from me a bit, and I pause as well.

  “No,” Wukong says. “Continue, Granuaile! They must all be sent back, you see? These souls must continue their punishment until they can be reborn again. You do nothing wrong by your violence here. You are both protecting the living and helping these souls on their journey.”

  That wrenches my head around to a different paradigm. I’m not really killing the innocent, or anyone; this is a cleanup operation. Sanitation, even. As evidenced by the fact that soon after these vessels “die,” they melt away much like demons from the Christian hells do, but thankfully these don’t smell as bad.

  “Just think,” the Monkey King said, “after another thousand years or whatever debt their soul has taken on, these people can be reborn and experience bubble tea.”

  That’s a mighty strange thing to think about in combat while shattering skulls. What shall I say to them right before they die again? “Try the kiwi watermelon flavor when you get a chance,” or something like that? Would such words even hold meaning for them? Would they hold on to the idea throughout their purgatorial suffering and then through rebirth? Would they even understand a single word of my language, or might I be communicating to them somehow my personal regret and hope for them? I certainly hope better things for them than mere bubble tea. Their expressions are desperate to simply get through whatever this is—me, hell, whatever—so that they can reach a better place.

  “Am I helping them to learn and grow?” I ask as more of the damned flood down the mountain and our staffs whirl and thunk against heads, caving in temples and crowns.

  “Probably a measure of mercy,” Wukong replies. “We are both giving them quicker deaths than anything they receive from the Yama Kings.”

  I don’t know how merciful it is to send these people right back to be tortured for—did the Monkey King say a thousand years? How does one do so much evil in a human lifetime to deserve that much punishment? I imagine someone like a dictator or a serial killer could manage it, but I’m sure all these people weren’t such. They were millers who cheated farmers, perhaps, or farmers who didn’t take care of their horses, or petty local officials, or terrible grandmothers, but not spirits that could do anything in seventy years to earn a thousand years of punishment, right?

  I try to shake away the thought, because attempting to judge systems of judgment is how one winds up with a head full of batshit. Pick a system—any system, legal or ecclesiastical—and you’ll start to wonder at how anyone could think it was fair. And then you’ll realize it was never meant to be fair but rather was intended to protect the interests of the powerful, and then you’re wading through a swamp of cynicism and your day’s ruined.

  What I like about being a Druid in service to Gaia is that Gaia doesn’t judge much at all—just the theft of her own life force to kill some other part of her. That’s why she prohibits us from using our powers to directly harm others. Otherwise, she’s going to let us sort out judgment for ourselves.

  Why should Gaia care precisely how people once behaved in Taiwan, or about the spiritual life of a mayfly in Connecticut, or about the deviant proclivities of an alley cat in Kathmandu? She will endure so long as the life upon her keeps reproducing. The violent tides of creatures eating, shitting, and fucking each other are what keep her alive. She’s not going to impose morality on that.

  It is why I have kept my Druidic moral code as simple as possible: If you’re doing some kind of large-scale harm to Gaia’s ecosystems, I’ll probably do something to stop you and make you regret doing it. The punishment will be swift and short term. You’ll have the chance to be kind to the earth afterward (or not) and be judged according to some other system (or not) when you die. You might even die in a fight over whose system of judgment is better—but of course that’s not something you can ever know, even in death, because you’ll only be judged according to one of the systems, if at all. I’ll be long out of your personal picture by that time, and your elements will return to Gaia, perhaps to be reused by some other spirit that needs a flesh cart to walk around in some distant day in the future.

  Three lines of fire open up down my side, deep scratches from some clawed, hissing creature that slipped inside my guard. My response is to bat his head off his neck like a melon on a stump and draw power to heal. Wukong is right: They will indeed kill me if they can. I need to keep my headspaces firmly separate if I want to ponder questions of judgment in the midst of battle. Though I am not sure why I should—wasn’t I trying to shake off such thoughts moments ago?

  I compartmentalize the battle in my Latin headspace—pugnā diabulōs!—and retreat to English to consider something new: Perhaps it is my comfortable assumptions about judgment I’m supposed to challenge? The Monkey King and these damned souls certainly have me thinking about it, and I’m at least clear-sighted enough to see I haven’t examined my assumptions thoroughly. I can spy room to grow here, even if it is not what Wukong intended.

  I think my instinctive rejection of judgment comes from meeting too many people who say on the one hand that their chosen deity shall judge us all but then they judge me anyway, rather than leaving it up to the deity they profess to believe in and trust. That’s using religion to cudgel people into conformity, and it grinds my gears.

  But Laksha recently pointed out to me that I had been judging her decisions in a similar way—not via religion, but via my cultural or even personal views of patriarchy. I do regret judging her, but I don’t regret my views. Which, I suppose, is how lots of folks feel about their faiths or deeply held beliefs. That allows me to understand, at least, how easy it can be to slip into a robe of righteousness and comfortably judge others, even if I don’t understand or agree with the viewpoints others are coming from.

  I suppose what I’d really like to understand is our collective urge to focus on differences rather than similarities. I know our brains sort and categorize by default because that’s a survival mechanism—that mushroom’s good to eat, that one will kill you, that one will have you seeing wacky shit like mangoes and papayas complaining to pineapples that millennials are killing the fruit-juice industry. But despite this hardwiring, there has to be a way of thinking that will allow us to see nonlethal differences and celebrate them rather than point at them and judge them unworthy. For we seem to be ever running toward dystopias rather than the other way.

  The Polish poet whose work I’m absorbing as a headspace, Wisława Szymborska, wrote about the loneliness of Utopia and how utterly bereft it is of actual people: As if all you can do here is leave / and plunge, never to return, in the depths. / Into unfathomable life.

  It’s an apt metaphor. I often feel that I am swimming in a vast ocean, a lonely mackerel who’s lost her school and is trying to find her way back or else find some other bunch of fish that wi
ll let her swim along with them. Meanwhile, Utopia is above the surface somewhere and I have no clue. Is that what the Monkey King was talking about? A path to peace I’m incapable of seeing? How do I know…Wait.

  “Wukong?” I say, looking around briefly to make sure he’s still close enough to hear me. He’s not far, but I repeat myself a bit louder in case he didn’t hear me in the din.

  “Yes?”

  “How do I know if I have good judgment?”

  He barks out a few simian laughs. “Do you like bubble tea?”

  That seems like an inconsequential detail, but perhaps even my judgment of that is suspect. Still, it’s a bit of a no-brainer, because it’s delicious. “Yes,” I tell him.

  “And what do you think of this fellow coming our way down the mountain, tall and armored and wielding a sword that looks longer than you stretched out on the ground?”

  He chucks his chin uphill, and I try to steal a glance up there while making sure none of the damned take advantage of my distraction. The figure he’s talking about is impossible to miss, the plates of golden armor gleaming and etched and tied on top of red leathers, his malevolence and power distorting the air around him like heat bouncing off asphalt in the summer.

  “I think he looks dangerous.”

  “Then I think your judgment is sound. That is Wuguan, the Fourth Yama King of Yingian.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s a chance of us hugging this out?”

  Wuguan utters a death-metal grunt that vibrates in my bones and raises his sword, his mad eyes locked firmly on me rather than on Wukong. His muscles bunch, and I can see he’s going to charge or—I don’t know, something aggressive.