When almost a year of hospitality had passed without even one written word, I began thinking of using those supplies to copy once more the great Holy Book of God. More copies would always be needed. Otherwise, all the papyrus and the ink would go to waste.
During one of my afternoon summer walks with Da-Ren, it started to drizzle. It brought an unexpected, welcome coolness as we were descending the northwestern slope. I suggested that we turn back, but Da-Ren pointed toward the southwestern side of the island that lay ahead of us, toward the settlement. There were about thirty huts, made of mud, clinging to rocks of the same color. In the summer, the villagers whitewashed their mud huts to relieve them of the relentless sun. A handful of refugees, poor and helpless, lived there with their families. They were protected by the Castlemonastery, and they worked hard for that protection.
“First, we will go there,” Da-Ren said.
“They have explicitly forbidden me from taking you there. The women—”
“I have never touched any of their women.”
“They have seen you, though. And what they have to say about it can cost you your life. Don’t ask for this. Not even the monks go there often. And I don’t know what the villagers will do if they see one like you in their homes.”
“One like me—a barbarian, you mean. I am unarmed, Eusebius. And I am going, no matter what you say. Follow.”
The first two mud huts we reached looked and sounded empty of peasants. Chickens were squawking, and a gray dog began to rub against Da-Ren’s legs as if it smelled its wolfen brother on him. Da-Ren stiffened for an instant. Even though the dog wagged its tail happily, Da-Ren sent it away.
A horse whinnied, and Da-Ren jumped at the sound as if he had been resurrected from eternal death. He found the stable and ran toward it. I ran behind him. Tied in there was a flea-infested brown mare. It was one of the island’s few horses, used mostly as a pack animal and to occasionally carry a new bride to the church.
Da-Ren embraced the horse at the neck with his arms and pressed his face to the side of the animal. He remained that way for a long time. He whispered words into the animal’s ear and stayed with it, neck to neck. I had never seen such peace on him before. The rain grew heavier, and it made me even more impatient to return to the monastery, away from the world of men.
I asked Da-Ren to leave before the villagers saw us, but he looked at me with a wandering gaze. He was embracing the animal, the two as one.
After the rain had stopped, he let go of the horse and said, “Now, I am ready.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“We’ll start my Story. Tomorrow. Rest well today. Pray.”
“What happened?”
“The horse. Its smell. It takes my mind back. We have to come here again, and often.”
The sun was setting dark red, the color of the ink that had arrived for me days earlier. The next morning, I installed a sand-rubbed wooden table in his cell and prepared to write, as faithfully as my mind and conscience allowed, whatever he recited. He used simple words, those that he knew and a few more that he had learned with me. I would ask Baagh for help at the beginning of each afternoon, in an attempt to add some richness to his language. Each time his memories and strength ran out, Da-Ren would go to find the scent of the horse. After a while, he bought it from its fortunate owner. He paid a lot more than that horse was worth.
From dawn till dusk each day for a year, I had to listen, understand, find the words, and write them casually and simply. I repeated this ritual the second year, with some improvement, and more carefully the third, by rewriting every chapter. Three times, three years, we wrote his story, starting every year from the very first night of the Sieve. At night, he recounted his life. In the morning, we welcomed the sun’s light to capture his memories on papyrus.
In the beginning, I had enough spare time to pray for both of us. As his story boiled, there was less time. I still tried to pray. I had to. My prayers fought with the waves, the ink, and the blood. Until they drowned, brave.
XX.
Born Only to Die
Sixteenth spring. Uncarved—Mauler.
“Thirty? Did he really say thirty?” asked Noki.
“Yes, he did.”
Thirty tents with Archer girls our age were training a few thousand paces to the south of us. Noki would not shut up about that and tried to persuade me to go with him to have a look. We hadn’t seen a female with two legs that wasn’t an Ouna-Ma for twenty-four moons. Even if the Ouna-Ma showed up one night with dog fangs and thick black hair on her back, no one would care. She was the only woman, a goddess and mother, the one full-moon night she’d come to us.
I too was curious, but didn’t have Noki’s desire. Not yet.
I remember little from that third spring. Maybe because I hated the name we would carry from that point on: “Third of five times spring in training: You are not Starlings or Owls. You will be called Maulers.”
Wretched animals, vomit of Darhul.
We were twelve young maulers.
We had started to ride the previous spring. Unlike the maulers, the horses were animals truly favored by the Goddess. That sixteenth spring, I became one with the horse, though it would be a while before I had my own. The Guides wanted us to learn to ride different horses.
“Our Tribe, we are riders, right?” I asked Chaka, after the first moon I spent on horseback all day.
“Yes, so it is,” he said.
“But we don’t have many Stories about horses, almost none.”
He squinted his eyes, as if my observation had taken him by surprise. He thought for a while and then told me: “What you said is true, Da-Ren. I have many Stories in my old age, but none about my horse. None about my legs, my balls, or my hair either. The horse is part of me. It has no Stories because it is in all of them. Never betrayed me. Never led me down the wrong path or harmed me. I have become one with the horse, its skin is my skin, its blood is my blood.”
“I heard Stories about starving men who drank the blood of their horse to survive,” I said.
“Even then, it is an honor for both. I just told you, the horse has no blood of its own. Its blood, your blood, it is one. Your horse is your life; even its death is your life.”
Our boots and the skin on the saddle were made from horse hide. Craftsmen had glued my bow together by boiling horse bones and tendons. I usually had a piece of horsemeat that had dried for half a day underneath my saddle to eat at dusk. When we were thirsty, we would drink the stingy spirit we made from mare’s milk, and our heads would feel lighter. Before our first campaign, each of us had to be three as one: horse, bow, and man.
The horse was life.
Except if one proved a clumsy rider; then it was death.
We lost three more children, whose names are not worth mentioning, leaving nine Uncarved Maulers. One busted his head falling from a fresh gelding. That was the boy’s solemn Story for the stars. The second one had just broken his arm in a fall, but that was a grim destiny in a tribe of warriors. Broken arms rarely healed. They carved him alive, but I never saw him again. The third was a strong boy until winter came and he started to spit blood from his lungs. They ordered him to a small tent near our hut, and he died there alone. We didn’t move him or lie him on a funeral pyre. The Guides burned the whole tent and sent him to the Unending Sky.
For a ninestar, I continued invincible and grew taller each spring.
When we were not riding, we fought with unsharpened blades, with sticks and by hands, man-to-man, until the afternoon. On the rare occasion when we finished with these fighting exercises early, we listened to Stories.
We were never sent to pile horse dung for the fires. Such petty and dishonorable tasks were handled by the other children, the ragged and the stupid, four times carved. But they were necessary too. They sat from morning till night stirring horn, glue, and wood to make the snake-curved bows of the warriors. We were the Uncarved, with all the glory, fear, and ill fate that would bring
.
The beatings in the camp of the Uncarved had lessened. Younger and smaller recruits had come, and, like any fresh meat, they needed a good pounding. We would make fun of them during their Starling spring.
“Go to the Reghen’s tents and bring the pails of horse piss.”
“Go to the Guides and help them boil the glue.”
I couldn’t see it back then but that spring would be the last carefree time of my whole life. As if afraid we would turn soft, the Guides started taking us out for trials with all the other youths, the thousands of Archers in training, the hundreds of same-aged Blades. The carved warriors-to-be. The beatings became worse. When the other boys would get close, all they wanted was to see if they could take one of us. I made up for the carving that I was missing with bruises everywhere. I could take on two or maybe even three of them, but there were always more. And there were only nine of us left. They were five times a hundred times a dozen. They were uncountable. Someday, by Enaka’s will, one of us would command all of them and they’d bow. But not yet.
Their carvings—usually three, rarely two or one—had swelled with the winters and had become wavy scars, deep and hairless. They crossed the entire arm, parallel to one another. No one confused them with anything else. They weren’t elaborate carvings or the result of accidents. They were straight blade cuts, as if the poisoned talons of Darhul had dug deep into the skin. With time, the scars on their arms took on a rosy color, shameful, and visible from a distance. The boys’ eyes would bulge wide and red and then gleam yellow when they pointlessly searched our left arms.
“What are you looking at, Rabbit? No scar here.”
We always called them Rabbits, to remind them of the fateful last day of the Sieve. They would stare silently. We exposed our left arms naked no matter the cold when we were riding around Sirol.
One very hot day of summer, we had a grueling competition with the bows. Three thousand Archers in training, but none who could compete with us in all the arts of combat. But, from the thousands, they managed to pick out a handful of shooters who were better than we were. And they beat us. Barely.
Noki had seen the long-haired Archer girls for the first time, and he pointed them to us. They were more than fifty of them, tall and strong on horseback, screaming, aiming, and laughing wildly. Despite all the noise, their moves had grim seriousness and discipline. Their hair was tied back with red ribbons and so were their horses’ tails. Their wild battle cries dripped like liquid fire into my ears and down my heart and to my groin.
Noki tried to get closer to the girls, but the young Archer men cut him off.
“If I see you looking at them again, I will chop you to bits,” said one of them. He had another thirty with him, and there were only five of us.
That same night, Malan and I followed Noki in his exploration. To wash off the defeat, we said. But ever since I had seen the girls, my mind ached for nothing else but to see them again. We took our horses at twilight and left our camp unnoticed. We kept the horses at a slow pace and left them to graze far from the Archers’ camp. We tiptoed carefully along an endless expanse of tents after darkness fell. They didn’t have wooden huts like ours, all their tents looked the same. “Archers we need in the thousands,” said the Stories. Noki tried to sniff out where the female Archers could be.
“They’re probably stashed away in a corner of the camp,” I told him.
“Nah, I’m sure they have them right in the center,” he answered.
He had better instinct on all things woman.
It made sense. Everyone could admire them, watch them in the middle of the hundreds of tents. Nobody would be farther or closer.
We reached deep into the belly of the camp and heard a woman’s screams. The three of us crept closer to the tents from where the sound had come and hid behind some hay bushels. In the middle of a fenced ring, bathed by the early moonlight, stood many girls, three times the fingers of my hand, sitting around the fire. Not an ugly one among them. Not a beautiful one either.
One of the girls, close to my age, stood up and sang some words that I couldn’t make out. She then slipped off the short, sleeveless tunic that she wore over her trousers. She was half-naked, fresh, and strong. An older woman approached her, not an Ouna-Ma. From the clothes she wore, she must have been an Archer or their Guide. Her blade was warming unsheathed near the fire.
The girl put a cup to her lips and emptied the contents into her mouth. She closed her eyes, and another one blindfolded her. Two other girls laid her on a large wooden board. They held her down with four hands and put a piece of wood in her mouth for her to bite.
The female Guide took out the blade and stuck it to the bottom of the girl’s breast. With one excruciatingly slow movement, she cut off the girl’s right breast from one end to the other. My mind was cut in half as she bit down on the wood and let out a drawn-out moan.
The older woman kissed the girl’s freshly cut breast and left it beside her. Noki threw up next to me, making a lot of noise. I hadn’t eaten much that night. A second woman took out a wide iron slab from the fire and left it for two breaths on the girl’s open wound. The girl’s scream ripped through the air just before she fell unconscious. Or worse.
“What in the Demon’s name are they doing?” Noki said. Some heads turned in our direction, and we hid.
The girl came back to her senses after a great effort from the rest. She was trembling in a warm midsummer night. The others gathered around her and embraced her one by one. The older one warmed her with a hide, and they all sang solemn words together. “Revenge…honor… Enaka…stars. Our One Story,” these are a few of their words that I heard.
A second girl took off her tunic. Noki was ready to rush in and stop the bloody spectacle when Malan grabbed him by the hand and whispered, “I’ve heard of this. They cut the right breast. For the battle. Have you ever tried loading from your Skyrain quiver, pulling the bowstring and shooting six arrows as fast as you can?”
“Oh, yes, I—”
“In full gallop with a big apple underneath your jerkin, jiggling left and right? If they don’t lose a breast, they’ll die in the first battle. If they’re lucky and are not caught alive,” Malan repeated.
“Bitches of Darhul!” Noki said again.
It was not the sight he had come to see.
“Lower your voice,” whispered Malan. “Why am I even talking to him? Stupid,” he mumbled and crawled away from Noki.
We saw the awful scene a second time when another girl’s turn came. I didn’t look so carefully. I turned my head to gaze at the stars above. For the first and only time, when I heard the second girl’s screams, I was glad that Elbia was looking down upon me from up high.
We did not manage to see a third brutal amputation. We heard footsteps approaching in the moonless night. Small flashes of torchlight accompanied them.
“We leave now!” Malan shouted at me.
I grabbed Noki’s arm to make him follow.
“Lay off!” Noki said, his eyes fixed on the girls.
“Now! Leave the fool! Run!” Malan shouted, louder this time.
It was too late. Instead of me pulling Noki, other hands, many of them, were pulling me. Boys’ hands.
There was nothing more amusing for all those shithead carved Archers than to find a good reason to beat up an Uncarved. One so much better than they were. A few of them would sneak into our camp from time to time to witness the best of the Tribe. They had seen our wooden huts, our gray-white horses, and they had smelled the crispy skin of the young lamb we had roasted.
They had their fun with us till daybreak. The blood from my mouth mingled in the night with the first green leaves and red poppies of the earth. For many days, my whole face was red and purple. As the blood traveled downward, the bruises on my chest became a yellow-green color. Malan didn’t walk for an entire moon. I got a few broken ribs and couldn’t ride for two moons. The three of us could drink only milk for the rest of the summer. No meat. I shriveled t
o half my size, like the girls.
The Guides did not punish us. They nearly died laughing when they dragged us back to the Uncarved.
“You’re lucky that the boys caught you. If the young Archer girls had gotten their hands on you, they would have roasted your cocks on a spit.”
My luck hurt a lot, especially when I tried to lie down. My body had swollen, painted like a rainbow all over, and felt as if I were being pierced by frozen spears every time I moved. I learned to gather the yellow arnica flowers which grew in Sirol, ground them to a paste, and place it on my bruises.
At first glance, the three of us had become laughingstocks, but in truth, everyone looked enviously at our deed as an act of bravery. Even the Guides. The other boys were so jealous that they asked us every night about what we had seen. Again and again. Noki had to recount everything through his teeth—those that were still with him.
The Ouna-Ma who came to tell a Story that moon looked at me with eyes different from any other time. As if there was a slyness in them, like the spark I had in my eyes when I was devouring juicy meat. I didn’t understand then. I had felt the heat in my sixteen summers but didn’t know what to do with it.
I learned to adore milk during those moons. When at last I ate meat again, I didn’t enjoy it, at least not in the beginning. I was just proud that I could even chew again.
Malan held on to a stick for support. He limped badly and was still waiting for his leg to heal. He approached me one night and talked to me for the first time about that day.
“I told you to run. You should have left the fool behind.”
“We go together, we come back together,” I answered.
His hand was trembling as he was holding the stick. He still couldn’t walk well. He came close enough for me to smell his mouth rotting from the hunger and spoke very slowly. “Do you know why you will never be the Leader of the Tribe, Da-Ren? Yes, never. I will tell you, so you have time to swallow it. You care too much about those who were born only to die.”
Drakon Omnibus Page 21
