Drakon Omnibus

by C. A. Caskabel

  More twelve-wintered Uncarved boys kept coming from the other packs of the Sieve over the next few days, and I met them all with a bruised right cheek. When all thirteen of us arrived, Chaka and the rest of the Guides called us in the middle of the camp to speak to us.

  “Starting tonight and till next spring you will sleep in that hut,” Chaka said, pointing to a wooden structure at the eastmost corner. “Go in there, wear the clothes of the Uncarved and come back, I have a lot more to say.”

  We all ran to the hut, pushing and shoving to make it there first. We rushed in like a herd of animals, searching for the clothes, each one of us wanting to grab the best pieces. A Guide was waiting there for us, and we stopped at our heels when we saw him in front of the thirteen piles.

  “Boots, hides, trousers,” he said. “Undress, wear them, and then we go back outside for weapons. Keep the breeches, and this thing for later.”

  This thing was a linen tunic, one of the rarest that only the othertribers south of the Blackvein could make. It was the softest thing I’d touched until I first embraced a naked woman.

  When we all dressed, I started looking around the hut more carefully. Wooden poles, holding hide covers aloft, reached to the top of the log-built walls and joined only at the center, making a tall roof. I had never slept in anything other than a tent. We stepped out of the hut where four more Guides were waiting for us in a row, each one in front of a pile.

  “Form a line and go to each one of them one by one.”

  Once more we started to push and shove to get ahead of the others.

  “Short blade,” said the first Guide as he gave me a sword the size of my forearm.

  “Long blade,” said the next and gave me a sheathed sword almost twice the size of the small one.

  “Double-curved bow. The rage of Enaka.”

  “Rider’s quiver, hunter’s quiver.”

  Our eyes wide, we started talking about all these precious gifts.

  “Hey, we’ll go hunting! I grew up with the Hunters,” said the one called Balam. He was cocky, strong, and stupid.

  “Rider’s quiver, we are going riding!” said Anak. That one was as much a hairy, ugly oaf as any twelve-wintered could be. But he proved to be a great rider later.

  “No one is going riding for another two springs,” said Chaka. “If you lose any of these weapons, you will sleep with the fish gutters or the Tanners. Got it?”

  Each boy strapped his blade tighter or gripped his bow with all his strength.

  The kid next to me was sweating in the middle of winter. Fear does that. “Redin…from the Archers,” he whispered to me. He was holding his shaking left hand with the right one.

  You shouldn’t be here, Redin. It was my only silent thought.

  Chaka was facing all of us. He grabbed a boy by the back of the neck and pulled him closer.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “Urdan,” the boy said. He was my height, with oily hair.

  “Urdan of what?” an angry Chaka asked.

  “Urdan of the Archers,” he said.

  “Archers? Urdan of what?” Chaka asked again hitting the boy in the head.

  “Urdan of…the Uncarved,” the boy said.

  “You’re smart, Urdan. How smart are you?”

  The boy didn’t reply.

  “If you are very smart, you’ll leave the Uncarved now. Those hands of yours… They are not warrior hands. You’ll have better luck at the Tanners, seaming the hides,” Chaka lifted the boy’s hand. He had long, delicate fingers.

  “I want to stay,” the boy said.

  Chaka was towering above the boy. He pointed with his fat arrow finger at Urdan and said to the rest of the Guides. “Brave, not smart.” He then turned to Urdan. “We’ll keep you. Here, you will have meat almost every night, more than in the Sieve. You’ll need stronger bones,” said Chaka slapping Urdan in the back of the head one last time.

  Meat every night.

  “When do we eat?” asked Gunna to my left. He was a head taller than all of us.

  “The Carriers will bring meat,” said one of the Guides.

  “So, listen carefully. This is the rider’s quiver. The true Archers call it Skyrain.” Chaka lifted the large, deep bag over his head. It didn’t look like a quiver. “You put the reed arrows in here, those with the narrow-shoulder head. And this one with the clasp is the hunter’s quiver. Or Selene. You fill it with the birch arrows, those with the hooked-shoulder head. Got it?”

  Thirteen heads nodded, uncertain.

  “I know all this. Reed to travel far and fast, birch with wide head to kill. You try to pull one of those out of the guts, it makes a mess,” said Lebo. He had the hungry eyes of a mauler.

  There were six more around me. Three not even worth mentioning; they would join Enaka early. Malan the only one I knew from before. And two more who were talking and laughing in a corner.

  “And who are you two, shitheads?” said Chaka. He had the same question as me. “Let me guess; you are the best of the Blades’ children,” he said.

  “Yes, I am Akrani,” said the first. He ended up being a coward, but it would take me a long time to find out. He didn’t even know it.

  “Noki,” said the second. That one had caught my eye from the first moment because he didn’t run or push anyone to get first in line. He moved around us all day, calm and smooth, as if he had been there for many winters.

  “Akrani the shithead, and Noki the featherbrain,” said Chaka. “I seek only One, and you, scum of the Blades, are not going to be that One. This camp here is a nest. One Khun to nourish, One Leader to hatch. The rest are his food, the eggshells, and bird shit. So, you two, enjoy the meat, learn to shoot a bow, unlike your fathers who ended up Blades, and don’t give me any trouble. Now, you can go eat.”

  Our own quivers, bows, and meat. This was too good to believe.

  “The Carriers couldn’t find enough meat,” said one of the Guides with a grin. The rest of the Guides curled up laughing.

  “You’ll eat later, boys. Some of you. Undress, you know the trial,” said Chaka joining the others in roaring laughter.

  Oh, not again.

  The sun’s warmth was dying out, and we were once again suffering the usual standing trial of the Sieve. They did it only that first day, once, to mock us. To remind us. To laugh. To suck the air out of us before we got too full of ourselves. Once was enough. They left us standing in the soupy mist. The Forest demons, hanging from the naked branches, were our only companion. They came to watch the ones who never fall. Deep in the night, we were all still standing. The Guides took us all back to our hut, and Chaka said we were all winners. No one slept a winner that night.

  Each one of the thirteen of us, or maybe twelve, was boiling hard in his chest, restless, certain that he was already the chosen One Leader of the Tribe. Each one of us. Balam, Lebo, Gunna, Malan. Any day now, he thought, they would carry him to his wooden throne to rule. Victory sneaks in and becomes a curse when it fills a young head.

  There was only one problem: the other twelve boys were certain of the same destiny. Maybe eleven. There was a smart one among us, one who didn’t care to be Khun. Not I. Noki.

  “How can we ever beat Gunna?” Akrani asked when the giant boy went out of the hut to take a piss.

  “He can bring down a horse with one punch,” Lebo said.

  Redin had fallen exhausted in his corner and was sleeping.

  “I heard that Redin is the son of Druug, the Leader of all the Archer warriors,” said Anak.

  That was the first thing that worried Malan.

  “No one knows his father,” said Malan the orphan.

  “Almost no one. They say that Redin would fall many times before sundown during the Sieve but would get up in the middle of the night, go back outside, and stand alone. His father told Redin that if he didn’t become the next One Leader, he would skewer him alive on the stake if he ever saw him again,” said Lebo.

  “I see a stake that has his name on
it already,” said Gunna.

  “Don’t say that. All the Guides keep an eye on him and protect him. Druug commands all the Archers. He is the most powerful man of the Tribe after the Khun.”

  Malan was pumping his clenched fists. He talked with slow, clear words, staring at the dirt. “No one knows his father,” he repeated as if he wanted to drive a stake through his fear.

  “As I said. Almost no one. Sometimes the powerful escape the rules,” said Lebo.

  Someone must have told him that word for word. Lebo didn’t look so smart.

  Those first days of training were the last and worst of the winter. We rarely went outside and had endless time for Stories. A snowstorm started soon after we got our bows and lasted for four nights. The snow covered all of Sirol and was up to my waist outside our wooden hut.

  “I have never seen this before. The end of the world,” Chaka mumbled to himself, angered that we couldn’t begin our training.

  The rumor I liked the best was the one about Noki. Noki didn’t care about any of us. He was the most handsome, with a long mane of the blackest hair. The sun had baked his skin darker, and he was the fastest of all of us. I believed that Noki was a more difficult opponent than Gunna.

  “He’s a mad stallion, that one. Don’t fear him. He will never be Khun,” said Lebo the windbag.

  Akrani, who had gone through the Sieve with Noki, told another Story from their old camp.

  “Noki never fell on the Sieve. One night, he was the last one left and started to mock the Guides by dancing around while everyone else was already as dead as a log. He sang to the stars to bring the rain to wash him. The Guides became furious. Instead of taking him to the Wolves’ tent, they left him out all night with a mauler for company.”

  Akrani would have continued, but I stopped him.

  “And he remained standing all night,” I said.

  “How did you know?”

  “I just do.”

  I dreamed that same dream once in the Sieve. It was a clear night, so many stars, not a single Guide or kid around. Silence. Only the two of them were watching from above as I endured throughout the night. Enaka. Elbia.

  “Yes, that’s how it happened, and it is no lie. He was still standing in the morning when we went back outside. But now here is the really crazy thing: he kept standing all the second day too, and that afternoon he finally got his meat.”

  Never did I dare dream that.

  “What tents did he come from?” asked Redin.

  “The Blades.”

  “Shitheads and vultures, all of them!” said Redin, the son of Druug, the Leader of the Archers.

  Noki had just walked into the hut, but Redin had his back on him and hadn’t seen him.

  “What were you saying, Redin?” Lebo asked with a grin.

  “Rats, jackals, Blades. This whole bunch of scum.”

  Everyone looked at Noki for a reply, but he didn’t care.

  I stayed silent, with pursed lips after the end of the Story. I would beat everyone in the end, I knew that much, but it wouldn’t be easy. It was those first nights that I was so certain before I saw the older boys of the Uncarved.

  It was a small camp, with few horses that we were not supposed to ride for two more springs. It seemed larger because we had to move around on foot. It was enough for the forty Uncarved, the thirteen of us and the older ones who had joined winters prior. They lived in huts close by. Smaller huts, as there were fewer children from the previous winters. The Guides, a few tents farther down, had five carvings and wouldn’t dare sleep in a hut. During the first days, they kept us away from the older boys, to protect us. Later, when we started mixing, the beatings came heavy and frequently.

  The snow melted when the cursed day of my ninestar birthday came. I was one of the few who knew the exact date of his birth: nine days after the first full moon of spring. They took us out for training the next morning, and from then on, it was the same ordeal day in and day out. We would go out in the clearing before the Endless Forest and empty quivers of arrows one by one into the targets, as fast as we could. I carried bow and quivers until nightfall.

  “Where do we aim?” I asked the Guide on the first day. Across from me was only a lifeless meadow.

  “Straight ahead.”

  I waited for him to stop teasing me. He waited too.

  “You should have known these things from your tenth winter,” he said.

  He took a closer look at me, and his hand passed through my hair.

  “Ninestar? In the Uncarved? What demon spat on me this winter? To freeze my ass in the snow for a ninestar.”

  He spat on the ground with disgust. When he saw that I wasn’t moved or the least bit scared, he smiled and parted his hair with his hand to reveal the hollow triangle behind his ear.

  “Yep, I am a ninestar too. My name is Bera,” he said. “Well, I never became Khun, or even made Chief of a Pack, but I’m still alive.”

  “Can you tell me where to aim?” I asked him again.

  I should have learned these things from my eighth winter, but Greentooth, the old crone who had raised us at the orphans, had not cared to teach me anything more than to carry the sweet-smelling buckets of horse piss.

  “Do you see the clearing before the trees and after the stream? Aim at that. Between the two banners. There.”

  “You mean the whole field?”

  “You see a field in front of you, right? No grass, no rocks. Sixty paces ahead? It is a hundred paces wide and fifty deep. I am sure you can see it.”

  “But I can hit that blindfolded.”

  “Good for you. Because when you ride to battle in the dust storm or under the thundering rain, you will be as good as blindfolded.”

  The Guide took my bow and the quiver and loaded five arrows between the fingers of the bowgrip hand and one in the bowstring hand.

  “Redin, shoot. Malan, shoot. Gunna, shoot. Lebo, shoot. Anak, shoot. Noki, shoot.”

  He shouted the six names, exhaled quickly six times, and shot all six arrows, one after each name.

  “You will grab six arrows at a time—one on the string, three between pointer and middle fingers, and two between middle and third fingers.”

  He continued with the next six names. After he said all twelve children’s names three times, he had emptied a whole quiver. One quiver which had more arrows than three times the fingers on my two hands. And every single one of them had gone into the target field. None in the stream—or left, right, or beyond the trees.

  “Three Packs of Archer riders. Forty men in each Pack. By the time they shout a dozen names three times, each of them empties one quiver. There, in that field. Count them if you can.

  “They shoot half of the half of those arrows galloping backward, away from the enemy. As the Archers fall back still throwing arrows, three new Packs come in. Each rider empties one more quiver. Yet another three Packs refill all the way back to attack again. Nine Packs altogether. They’ll ride back and forth nine times, never too close to the enemy, always changing direction.

  “The othertribers stand in the clearing. Eighty men wide, twenty deep. They have wood and leather shields, and they stand in formation. They want a man-to-man, blade-on-blade battle. They will never get it. How many othertribers will survive the rainfall of arrows until you can say nine times the names of the three-times-three Packs?”

  Bera was funny.

  “None?”

  “None will survive. They shot six dozen arrows, two quivers on each othertriber. How many of our Archers will die?”

  “None?”

  “None. And when you learn to count—because you will learn to count Packs and men here—you will know that in this Story you just heard, the othertribers were four times more than our Archers,” added Bera.

  “And why don’t the othertribers shoot back at us?”

  “They don’t have this bow, they don’t have stirrups, they can’t ride and shoot holding shaft to ear with both hands. They can throw a spear, but not far
enough to reach a horse.”

  “Got it.”

  “Rain of arrows from the sky. Rain without mercy. Master the bow this spring. Nothing else. Blades and horses are for later.”

  “I aim straight ahead, on that field.”

  “And learn the names of your twelve comrades by sundown.”

  I was a miserable sight when I tried to grab the arrows and nock them with the same speed as Bera. The first days, I couldn’t even shoot half of the arrows into the target field, even though it was right in front of me. Some fell on the trees, others in the stream, and others didn’t even make it that far.

  As soon as we shot, we had to run and gather the arrows. If they fell into the stream, then we had to dive in. The closer we came to the afternoon, the harder it became as I lost my strength. My fingers would bend like iron claws, and I would pull them open one by one when the day was over. Some boys were better than I. And some were worse, thankfully. But I kept getting better. Every day, one day at a time.

  The Goddess of Spring finally awakened in a dazzling brightness, as if she hadn’t heard anything about the countless deaths that had marked the winter. Spring didn’t care about Elbia, or the plague, or anyone else. Spring came and warmed the Blackvein, greened the fields. The lands rejoiced. The maulers rode the bitches, and the stallions mounted the mares in the camp. Life would no longer mourn. The Endless Forest had begun to burst into color. The red flowers in the tree branches were trying to lure me into the Forest, the demons’ lair. But it was so dense and vast that from a distance, the Forest still looked black most of the time.

  We celebrated the full moon by roasting lambs outside, in front of our huts, together with the older boys and the Guides. They had placed sticks around the fire to make small fences. The fences surrounded the fire, and we skewered the lamb pieces on them to grill slowly.

  My training to become a man and a warrior would last five times spring, and that was the first day that I saw everyone at the Uncarved camp together, their faces not hidden under thick fur hats and hides. The older boys were fewer.

  My Pack were all in their thirteenth spring, but I was one winter older, although no one else remembered except me. I had entered my fourteenth spring.