“But you longed to go to battle, Rouba.”
“Only to smell it. I can’t ride like the threecarved anymore.”
At dawn, the Garol saw two whirlwinds rising to the left and the right of the red sun. The Archers got close to the barricades but never too close. They shot their flaming arrows, the rain of death, and then returned to us to refill. In the heat of the day, one spark would be enough to turn the Garol’s shacks into ashes.
This went on for quite a while, and the othertribers began to thin out slowly as some of the thousands of arrows found their targets. The dense smoke started rising from the burning carts and huts. They were waiting there, shooting arrows that wouldn’t reach or hit our riders, throwing spears not far enough.
I stayed at the back with the supplies. A dozen carts full of countless arrows—shafts made of reed and spruce wood, with iron heads. It took two of the strongest oxen to pull each cart. Each Archer emptied two full quivers onto every charge and then rode back and took two full ones. We had to be ahead of them. They didn’t stop coming until they’d shot hundreds of quivers.
The Blades rushed in last, when the sun had risen mid-sky. That was when I started to hear the cries from the slaughter through the black smoke. I couldn’t resist.
“I have to go there, Rouba. Sah-Ouna sent me. It’s my trial,” I said.
“Let’s go, but be careful. Hold the blade in your right hand,” Rouba told me.
We moved in on horseback so that we, too, could see the battle from up close among the Garol’s burning huts.
I remember the screams more, the scenes less. It was now time for the Blades to tear the heads of men from their bodies and babies from the arms of their mothers. Two of them threw down a girl, and their Chief mounted her from behind.
“Worse than the maulers, those Blades,” Rouba said to me. “They hurry now because they always get the worst share of the spoils after the Archers.”
Rouba had been one of the Archers before they had sent him to rot as a Guide. He had never liked the Blades.
I watched from a distance without getting involved. This was no battle. Hunting wild boars was more dangerous. Some othertribers begged for mercy, and a few fought to the very end. There were no enemies left standing to defend myself from, just women running and screaming, and children watching frozen and silent. Was that my trial? Blades, maulers. Become one of them?
We rode farther into the settlement, where the heat of the battle was still on. An old, husky man had been pierced in the arm by a burning arrow. He lunged toward two Blades with a pickax. On foot, he hacked the first, and with his arm burning, he jumped onto the second rider and threw him off his horse. As the flames started covering both, the old man shouted to a Garol boy that was standing there frozen in fear. The boy climbed on the Blade’s horse and galloped away.
“I can’t believe it!” I shouted.
The old Garol fell when the flames spread to his head. I could swear that for a few moments, there on his knees with his head in flames, he cursed us with all the strength of his soul.
“Not all Garol are chickens. He was brave,” I said to Rouba.
“They were all brave to be waiting for us here, Da-Ren. So? His son will crawl like a slave or get slaughtered like a pig,” he said, showing me the screaming boy. The Blades had already caught him and were dragging him with their neckropes.
Weary from the day’s battle, the warriors ate and drank whatever they could find. Not much.
“Eat something, kid.”
“I am not a kid,” I said to Rouba who offered me a piece of stale bread he’d found in one of the huts.
There was a brown-haired kid a few paces ahead, face down, resting on a blood puddle. I was not a kid anymore.
“You did good!” said Druug.
“Those quivers were always full,” added an Archer next to him; two carvings on his left arm.
“We need to prepare a pyre. We lost eight. All of them Blades,” said the Tracker who came to report to Druug.
“No surprise there,” said Druug.
I was eating next to him. As the Archers walked by they stopped and stared. It didn’t take me long to understand that they weren’t staring at Druug. I had taken off my sweat-drenched tunic and my left arm was exposed uncarved.
Envy, fear, awe?
“You are their last hope,” said Rouba as if he’d read my mind.
“Those poor fucks here—they were starving,” said Druug, pointing to the scattered bodies of the Garol. “This is no good. We need to raid farther away. North, south, west. The Khun should march the Tribe, or come next winter, we starve too.”
The Khun should… He was talking to me, already giving me advice.
“But why did we kill so many Garol?” I asked. “Now who will sow wheat for next summer?”
He turned and looked at me, surprised.
“There are plenty left alive. No need for women.”
Or children.
Rouba turned to me as well and there I realized that I had said the wrong words. Not what they expected from their future Khun, their last hope. “When you are on a campaign, you never ask your Leader why. Why, why, stupid boy. Why will freeze your limbs like a poison-tipped arrow!”
I shut my mouth, but my eyes still asked why. A bad habit of mine. When I did not get an answer, I kept asking. Rouba saw that.
“Why? Because they are the scum of Darhul. That’s enough. When the campaign ends and you return to your tent, some winter’s night when you have nothing better to do, then ask why. But in the summer, when you are raiding, never ask why.”
Before nightfall, the Blades hung the bodies of the Garol leaders high upon the trees to rot unburned so that the young Garol would learn and the old would never forget. They didn’t ask me to help them with that.
I dreamed of boys dancing around a campfire.
The next morning, we packed for our return. Druug left behind one Pack to guard and enforce the Truth of the Tribe and harness to work the few we spared. We started the journey back to Sirol, victorious, though I still didn’t know what my trial was. To fill the quivers? Under the searing summer light, I looked at one of the hanged offspring of Darhul, a young man with long brown hair.
“These men here, Rouba…”
“Yes, I saw them.”
“What? Is it so obvious?”
“They look a lot like you. Maybe your mother.”
“But then how…”
“Don’t ask and don’t search, and the Demon won’t find you. Forget it, move forward. You are not like them. Not anymore. Never were.”
I didn’t know who my mother was, but Rouba from the first night of the Sieve, was the only father I had ever known. I covered my face with a cloth he had given me for the dust and the mosquitoes and galloped far away from the dangling bodies of the brown-haired men.
The battle had lasted half a day, but the return would take another half-moon. That was my first real lesson in the truth of war. We had to ride for one moon so that the Archers would fight for half a day and the Blades would mount women for a few breaths. The campaigns were endless rides on horseback and dull waiting before and after the short battles.
“Khun-Taa may call upon you to tell him what you saw,” Druug told me.
But that was not my fate or Khun-Taa’s. I was not in any hurry to return to our camp. This trial was far from over, and I could sense that.
On the first afternoon of our return trip, the sky darkened and threatened with a few drops. On the second afternoon, it opened and poured so much that I could hardly see three horses in front of me. The animals slid in the mud and hurt themselves. Some were left for dead, and our supplies were ruined. Even our bows that we covered deep under the hides began to take in water and would warp if we couldn’t get them away from the rain. Druug would not allow that. A bow was precious and needed many moons’ work to set strong.
“We must hide, away from the open sky,” said the Reghen.
The Endless Forest, wit
h its dense green foliage at the end of summer, was close to our right. It was the only shelter that could hide all of us under its live oak branches at the end of the day.
Druug and the Reghen approached me.
“Did he really kill a Reekaal?” the Druug said, talking to the Reghen but pointing at me.
“We were all there; you saw what I saw,” the Reghen said.
“What do you think?” Druug asked turning to me.
“What do I think about what?”
“Should we go in there? Into the Forest?”
In the darkness.
He was not trying me. He didn’t know what to do.
“Uh, yes,” I said.
Yes, I want to sleep the night in the Forest. I didn’t give it much thought. The quivers, the Garol, that was not the trial of Sah-Ouna. My final trial was just starting. Three nights in a row, the same thing happened. A raging storm started as soon as the sun went down. Three nights in a row, Druug asked me, and three times I told him: “Yes, we must.”
It was there, tucked around our nightly fire at the edge of the Forest, where I first recited the Legend of my father. It was a great Story that I had been forging with Rouba every day for the past moons when we went for herbs in the Forest.
“A Story to make them forget your ninestar mark,” Rouba told me.
The fires were large enough to scare away the wolves and the Reekaal, and many men fit around them.
“I thought the wolves were our friends,” I said to Rouba.
“Do you want to find out for sure tonight?”
The first night I told the Legend of Er-Ren under the darkened trees, a Pack of forty warriors gathered around. On the second night, there were twice as many, and on the third, everyone. Not everyone, of course, could sit close and hear me, but one told the Legend to the other next to him, slightly changed, adding more blood and lies.
Men love their Stories. That much is true. The Stories they haven’t lived and the ones they’ll never live.
I remember as a younger boy the Reghen saying, “We have never been and we are not, even now. Only tomorrow, when we rise to the stars, we will truly be. In the Story that we leave behind us.”
“Why?” I asked the Reghen one night.
“The flesh lives for a few springs, but then it stinks and rots quickly in one summer moon. The Story endures, strong for countless winters.”
I didn’t have the voice of an Ouna-Ma, but I told the Legend with all the strength of my heart and lungs.
This is the Story of my father, the one I’d never met, the one who never existed, the one I gave birth to.
The Legend of Er-Ren
It was the heaviest winter that had ever descended from the North. Not ever since the time that the black star had fallen hard on the steppe could anyone remember such piercing cold and relentless snow. It covered everything from the Great River, the Blackvein, to the Endless Forest.
The Pack of Chief Er-Ren, my father, had run out of food in the northernmost outpost of the Tribe, where they were waiting out the winter to protect the frozen pass. Khun-Taa was then a younger Leader and had sent the Pack of Er-Ren to see if the Drakons were moving down from the North. Anything was possible in such a cold winter. My mother had stayed behind in Sirol, heavy with child.
Er-Ren’s men, twenty-nine of them, had drunk slowly from the veins of their living stallions for a moon to sustain themselves, and when the horses were nearly dead they were butchered for their meat. But even those supplies were exhausted, and they had meat to last only for five men till spring. They had kept a few horses to ride back in spring, the gray-white ones that the Goddess favored and no one dared to harm.
Fearless, my father strapped himself with his blades, quivers, and bow, and alone disappeared within the rugged Forest to find meat. He moved among the ice shadows for days and nights, and when he was all but sure that he would die of cold and hunger, he came upon a pond. The waters were crystal clear and cool, not frozen, and bluebells covered the grass as if it were spring. Er-Ren realized that he was in an enchanted glade where the Forest spirits ruled the light and the water. But he also knew that at night other demons would roam the same pond.
Then he saw the branches of a bare oak tree changing into antlers and a young deer emerging from within the trunk. The brown-skinned animal stood before him, holding its small head erect, its left dark-liquid eye staring straight at him. Er-Ren chose two arrows that whistled a deadly melody when they flew through the air. He aimed for the heart. The deer froze, enchanted by the arrows’ song, and Er-Ren didn’t miss. Bluebells drowned in a red puddle. Er-Ren heaved the deer upon his shoulders and started the journey to get back to his Pack.
As soon as he was out of the enchanted glade and stepped again into the snow, a much larger doe, its skin white as milk, appeared before him. Er-Ren let the small deer down and reached for his bow. Just then, the doe opened its mouth and asked with the voice of a woman of the Tribe.
“Why did you kill my beloved child, brave Er-Ren? Don’t you know that Enaka protects the young deer?”
Er-Ren was not at all surprised. He was expecting magic.
“And why are you not afraid, White Doe?” asked Er-Ren. “Run and save yourself because I will kill you too.” He would have killed the doe already had he not heard it talk.
“I am not here to save myself. I am here to redeem the life of my child,” said the doe. “Give me back his body so that I may breathe life into it again.”
“I cannot, White Doe; my people are dying without meat. I didn’t kill for pleasure but out of need.”
“In return, I will offer you my life,” said the doe.
Er-Ren looked at the young deer resting lifeless on the snow. Not a spot of blood on the white ground. He could not defend himself against magic. He let the mother approach the deer and she warmed the dried blood of its wound with her snout. The deer sprang to its feet at once and, with quick leaps, disappeared through the wood.
My father took another arrow from his quiver and nocked it. The doe didn’t try to run. The snow around it boiled crimson. Er-Ren had fulfilled his mission of death and life and ran to find shelter. But night had fallen, and the Forest had awoken, spiteful and hungry. Er-Ren lost his way wandering among the weeping songs of the night trees, carrying the bleeding doe on his shoulders until his legs and eyes finally betrayed him. He curled himself up inside his hides underneath a tree. It was bare, with thin branches that rose high like a skeleton waving his fleshless hands. They were white with snow on top and black like death underneath.
It was already too late when he realized, in the darkest moment of the night that he was among cursed, enchanted trees. They were the walnut trees. Their fruit was skulls filled with the brains of enslaved children and their trunks hid the Reekaal from the light of day. The smell of the blood of the doe and the skin of Er-Ren roused the demons. In the greatest darkness of the night, they unstuck their naked bodies painfully but quickly from the old trunks of the walnut trees and surrounded him. The only light for Er-Ren was the bright red of their eyes. With that light alone, he fought on the snow for his life and for his kill. He fought bravely, he fought for long, and he fought until he fell. The Cyanus Reekaal, with the flaming, lidless eyes, delivered with his sharp talons a wound that no man could survive.
Er-Ren took out the silver talisman of the wise Ouna-Mas, and that drew the faintest moonlight as his shield. It blinded bright the cursed offspring of Darhul and kept them away, else they would have torn him apart right there.
Dawn came and the Reekaal disappeared inside the trees. My father gathered his last strength to return to his Pack with the dead doe on his back. Paths of red flowers sprouted, melting the snow, wherever Er-Ren’s blood fell.
The young deer that he had killed first appeared again in front of him, more alive than ever, and said, “See how this ends, brave warrior. Death brings only death. You should never have come into the Forest, Er-Ren. My mother is the Forest Witch, and you killed her. If y
ou hadn’t hunted us, my mother would have come to save you from the monsters.”
“I am not here to save myself, but to bring meat and life to my men,” said Er-Ren.
“Your death is honorable, Er-Ren.”
The young deer lowered its head as if to bow before Er-Ren and disappeared.
My father kept walking with the last strength left in him. As soon as he saw his comrades, he fell dead. But he had already etched the glorious final Story for himself. When the last breath of Er-Ren ascended to the Sky, the doe came back to life and ran away behind the bare trees. A young warrior tried to stop it by throwing a dagger before it was lost, thankfully in vain. A great curse would have been lowered upon all their heads. For the people of the Tribe knew that the White Doe, the Forest Witch, was carrying the soul of my father to the Unending Sky. It was what all does did—carry brave souls to the Sky and cursed ones into the bowels of the earth. That is why their legs are quick but their eyes sad.
Next to the body of my father, where the dead doe should have been, appeared two fat oxen. The next day, winter ended, and I came out of my mother’s belly, wrapped in the first sun of spring. Er-Ren’s Pack slaughtered the two oxen and returned to Sirol with renewed strength. His death had given them life.
Thus declared the Legend of the brave Er-Ren.
It was a Legend that I had made up with the help of Rouba to protect myself from the Ouna-Mas, the snake Witches of the Tribe. It was a Story that adorned the Witches with respect and honor—a Story of deer, Reekaal, a silver talisman, demon trees, and anything else that fed their madness and their strength.
No one would question the folly I created because I dressed it in their sacred robes and superstitions. No one ever claimed to have seen the Cyanus Reekaal, except for a few Ouna-Mas. And even those Witches did so only after they had drunk crazygrass in the dark moments of the night when their eyes rolled white. Never in the light of the sun. Maybe I had seen him too that night in Sah-Ouna’s camp. But I dared not say this to anyone.
So we came to the fourth night of pouring rain, the fourth time that the stormy sky forced us into the Forest. Before I started retelling my Legend, shadows moved in the night mist between the tree trunks. The men strapped themselves with their blades and waited for the Reekaal with trembling knees. They were all looking at me. I had brought them here. I had said the Legend of Er-Ren and the Reekaal one too many times, I was Uncarved, I was the first blade of the Wolfhowl. I was not allowed to be scared.
Drakon Omnibus Page 29
