“Help me,” I said.
“What do you want, Da-Ren?”
“I want you to teach me what you know. The magic. So that I can take on the Witches. To see what they see.”
“Magic? I don’t know.”
“You have to!” I said.
“You want to come with me to gather fruit? I have to go. Coming?”
“Fruit? Yes.”
“Walk with me,” she said.
I followed her that first day, and the second and the third, searching for the food of the Forest deeper and farther each day. We would take different paths every dawn. She would talk about the life-givers and the death-seekers around us, but without revealing her magic, the power I sought. The Forest devoured me slowly. I lost count of the days. We must have entered the first moon of autumn, the most pleasant of all. I felt on my skin that the days were still warm whenever the sun pierced through the thick branches of the trees.
One day, we walked farther than any other time, through tough-soiled paths and rivulets, long dried out by summer and soon to be flooded again by winter. I knelt to touch a plant with small berries, shiny, round, and black.
“Don’t eat those,” she said.
“Belladonna?” I asked.
“Yes, the witches’ plant. We call it Atropos. It was the ancient spirit’s name that still breathes in this plant. She is the weaver of fate who cuts the thread of men’s lives. The arrow that struck you was seeped in this black poison. You know, Da-Ren…”
She stopped her words, not eager to add more.
“What is it?”
“‘Atropos’ means ‘the fate that will not turn’ in the ancient tongue. I stole you from the dead, but you cannot escape the fate you seek. You will die exactly like this, iron under the right rib, someday.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
That was a welcomed fate. I wouldn’t rot from the fever of the mosquitoes or cough the blood of the winter plague. I wouldn’t get shot by an arrow in the back.
“I hear running water.”
“Where the Atropos grows, there is also water.”
More days passed in the autumn’s Forest turning. The blades and arrows I carried with me proved useless, as though I couldn’t remember what to do with them. The Forest was not a threatening evil. Instead, it was the first peace I had ever known in my life, even if I had died there a few nights ago. Zeria did not tell me anything more than Rouba had. The berries, the nightingales’ vanishing summer songs, the acorns, and the bracken changing color. That was all the magic she would show me.
“I want to learn more. About the powerful magic.”
“I don’t have any magic, Da-Ren.”
“My horse, its spirit. How did you bring me to life?”
“You were shaking all over. Writhing in pain. We had to warm your body before your heart stopped. The horse’s carcass gave the warmth.”
“And its spirit?”
“I do not know, Da-Ren. It is something we say to honor the sacrificed animal.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The warmth of the horse that wrapped your frozen body—that is the magic. I did not see its spirit. The horse died; you lived. One for one is the law of the Forest. Whatever you see, smell, or touch. Whatever you hear. That is the magic. The next month—”
“Month?” I didn’t recognize the Dasal word.
“Month, moon, same word. In the next moon, everything around you, this Forest, will begin to die. Its life will grow old and rot. But it will be reborn again in the spring, stronger than before. Everything living around you, connects together, feeds one another.”
“I know all of that.”
“I am not a witch like your witches. I only help the children. Our elder, Saim, may be able to help you. But he will not tell you anything different. Saim has told me that the only magic is to watch one oak tree all day, every day, for an entire year. To witness life and death moving slower than your breath.”
“Year?”
“For twelve moons.”
“That is not the magic I seek,” I told her as I grabbed her wrist.
She trembled silently.
“You don’t understand. I was raised to be the Khun. I have to return. To stop the curse of the ninestar,” I said.
“You’re leaving?” She got up and ran away to hide her tears.
I caught up with her where the trees ended and the pond began, but she pushed me away.
“I can’t help you, Da-Ren. That is the only magic I know.”
“I have to get revenge for Rouba. I can’t go back like this. Hunted and defeated.”
“Rouba is resting peacefully,” she said. “There.”
She pointed to the small pond which mirrored the trees around us on its smooth surface. It was the pond that Rouba and I had bathed in just before the ambush. I stayed there with her all afternoon. I killed a fat squirrel, skinned it, and lit a fire. We stuffed our mouths with berries till our tongues and teeth turned black. We drank cold water. Night came, but it was singing pleasure, not shrieking fear as Selene dipped into the still waters. That place where I had died from a poisoned arrow became life itself.
“And the Reekaal? Those who attacked us?” I asked.
She didn’t understand. I tried to explain to her, but she just lowered her head to take a better look at me, as if I were still hallucinating from the poison. I told her the whole Story of the Dasal and the Reekaal and my Tribe’s Legends of the Forest demons. I spoke to her of the Ouna-Mas.
“Your witches are false. They are not blind from the Atropos. You are.”
“The Ouna-Mas?”
“You don’t understand. The trees, us, me, you, the fallow deer and the gray wolf, the good and evil spirits are all one. When you are an enemy, you are a Reekaal. When you are a friend, you are a Dasal. The entire Forest is one and knows that. It will protect you or kill you.”
None of this had any meaning for me. I just liked listening to her. The magic of her eyes had taken hold, even if her words claimed otherwise.
“We are all servants. You and us. Of the Demon or the Goddess,” I said.
“There are no witches or demons. Only moments.”
“You don’t know what you are talking about. You are a girl from the huts of the Forest,” I said.
“But I saved your life.”
“With magic.”
I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her about how much she didn’t know. I wanted to take her in my arms and not say anything at all.
“The arrow was dipped in belladonna’s blood. The leeches sucked out the poison. That magic is of the earth, not of your gods.”
It wasn’t enough. I took hold of her hand, as I had done that first afternoon when the Blades hunters had brought her to me.
“You don’t believe me. Tell me then: whose servant are you, Da-Ren? The demon’s? Or the goddess’s?”
If I said the Demon’s, all his nine heads would hear me and find me. If I said the Goddess’s, she would ask me why I had saved the girl’s life, why I hadn’t taken her as sacrifice to Sah-Ouna.
So I asked a question of my own instead. “So what is there for you if you don’t have Demon or Goddess?”
“This. Here. You. Me. Now. The one moment, you want to hide me in the oak’s hollow. The next, you want to kill all men. Only the moment exists. The moment is a god and a demon, but it is not blind. It has swallowed yesterday and thousands of summers and has seen tomorrow and thousands of winters to come. That is what Saim says, the wise elder.”
“Only luck?”
“It isn’t luck. The moment is not blind. It has gathered so much. Wisdom has seeped through it. It has taken root and sprouted within you. You can’t escape your moment. The moment will decide.”
“Those who attacked me—”
I couldn’t look into her eyes for long. Her gaze turned my blood into rivers of blue-crystal death.
“They were of your kind, not from the forest. You know,
we also have a story for the ones you call Reekaal that I have heard long ago. But it is the other way around.”
She was making an effort to talk in my tongue. The words were running slowly out of her mouth like the first autumn water flowing on the small streamlets.
“How do you know our tongue so well?”
“My father, myself, and only a few more of us can speak like you. They learned from your own, I learned from my mother and father. Many times before, men, women, slaves of your tribe, of other tribes, escape. Where do they hide? In here. You are a tribe of hunters, we are a tribe of exiles. My mother was not forest-born; she was captured by your tribe. The Witches had put her on a mule, blindfolded and facing backwards, and sent her into the woods to die. The wolves attacked the mule. My father attacked the wolves.
“My father would have killed you any other day. Not leeches but a stab in the heart is what you’d get. But he thought you were exiled because you had saved my life. That is why you are still alive. He owes you; he swore the moment he returned from his capture and found me alive. He owes my life to you.”
“Where is your mother?”
“She died. Many moons ago.”
The leaves whispered a sorrowful song to the last nightingales of autumn, and I came close to her. She ran her fingers through my hair. I did the same. I barely touched her lips with mine. They were soft like the Reghen’s touch on my shoulder. We remained still for a few breaths.
I didn’t know what I was doing. Her lips still tasted bitter from the blackberries.
“You haven’t? Ever before?” she asked.
“What?”
“You haven’t even begun to live yet, and you are already looking for death.”
My legs were melting in the Forest. My heart was on fire, beating more scared than it had in any trial of the Sieve.
“I have to know, Zeria. What is chasing me? The Ouna-Mas are real. I have seen them do terrible magic, demonic rituals. Only this summer.”
“All lies. Da-Ren, listen to me. Stay here. Drown your stories in the pond. They are rotten.”
“They are real. You saw the Reekaal. Aren’t you afraid? Here, now in the night?” I asked.
“I fear many things. But nothing that lives here in the trees and speaks to me. You speak to me. I don’t fear you.”
She kissed me again.
My whole Tribe was washing away slowly from inside of me.
“There are no Reekaal, Da-Ren. No wolfmen, no undead. We will go tomorrow to see Saim, the elder who speaks with the trees. He will explain.”
The next afternoon, Veker found me again, his voice more threatening and desperate. “If you do not leave at once, you will bring death to all of us. I will not let that happen.”
“I am going to see Saim,” I told him. “Tonight. And then I’ll leave.”
He gave me a puzzled look.
“Saim won’t speak to you after sunset,” he said.
At daybreak, we left with Zeria to find Saim, the Forest Wanderer. He did not speak my tongue, and I could not have words with him. He was wrinkled like the bark, with long hair tangled together with leaves. He sat cross-legged under the eternal oaks, with gnarled long fingers around his knees. But I wasn’t scared of him. Unlike Sah-Ouna he had the liquid sparkling eyes of a child. A child who sat and looked at the same oak for a hundred and more summers.
Zeria and Saim spoke for a long time. The old man looked at me at first but then kept his eyes closed while Zeria was talking. She turned to me after what seemed like a whole day.
“I told him everything. About the Reekaal, Rouba, and the Ouna-Mas,” Zeria said.
Saim opened his eyes. He spoke, and Zeria whispered his words in my tongue. “Monsters, everywhere around us…so many…to fight…”
He stopped and looked up as if he remembered a lost thought. Without another word he turned his back and crawled his way on the rustling leaves to reach a sack where he kept his possessions. He pulled out from the sack the skull of an ox, its horns in his hands. He pretended to wear it over his head, laughed, and put it down again over the leaves.
“And such evil men. Can you fight them, Da-Ren?”
“Yes,” I answered while looking at him.
The sun’s rays were falling like a rain of gold, dancing on the sleepy grass. They were helping me reveal the mysteries, unravel the magic. Saim, holding the ox skull, kept saying words I couldn’t understand, and Zeria brought them in my own tongue.
“Yes, monsters, demons. Now I can see them.”
That was the one thing I wanted to hear. Now Zeria knew too. I was right—the demons were real. Saim closed his eyes and started raving like a man possessed in a dream of crazygrass.
Zeria brought his words whenever he stopped. “I see the bloodthirsty monsters. They’ve dwelled here since ancient times. They are the first demons whose empty skulls the blind prophets filled with their magic. And then they multiplied and gave birth to the drakons, the wolfmen, the undead, and the bloodeaters.”
Saim pulled a waterskin out of his sack and gave it to me.
I brought it cautiously to my lips. It was water. Crystal, cold spring water. Nothing else. He spoke loud and close to me, his words spitting my face through two rows of yellow teeth, and Zeria unraveled them, “You drink the truth; you will not vomit the lies.”
I was still thirsty.
“Ask him more. How do I find the lair of the monsters? I must avenge him.” I said, shaking her shoulder to make her listen to me.
Zeria’s eyes were veiled with worry. She said the words in her tongue, and Saim’s answer came again through her beautiful bow-curved lips.
“Go back to Sirol. Find them. The men. They are the only monsters. Ancient and eternal.”
The shields of the Forest trees had stopped the arrows of the sun. Her blue eyes grew dark.
The old man stopped. He motioned with a repeating flip of his left hand for me to leave. He then turned his back on me and started crawling on the grass playing with a yellow-black hopper that had jumped from the leaves up to his arm. Zeria rose. I did the same.
But I still hadn’t found the truth I sought.
“Ask him. I want to know my destiny. Is there a brave ending to my Story?”
Zeria didn’t want to, but I pushed her into it.
Saim turned to listen to Zeria’s words with his head held down as if he were tired and asleep. He answered her, his incomprehensible words coming out angrily for the first time. Still, her voice brought them full of promise and wildflower honey.
“Why does the end concern you, Da-Ren? Find the beginning first. Go back, to the pond.”
I didn’t know if these were Zeria’s words or his, but they were the words that I sought, even for one night. “Back to the pond.” That was the one magic I longed for. Zeria led forward and we made for the pond before the evening light died completely. The blue of her eyes, the black of her hair, the veiling night found us there.
Zeria took off her dress and dove into the moonlit water. Our nights together were coming to an end. I dove too, swimming after her, her feet beating and splashing water on my face. I pulled her from the calf, she laughed and screamed playfully and laughed louder. Selene listened and came closer to golden her skin and silver her hair. I pulled her toward me with both arms, our lips separated by a few playful drops of water. Her tongue moved once in and out through smiling, lively lips. I kissed forcefully like someone who had never kissed before. She kissed me back softer than the dying wind. I entered her forcefully like someone who had never kissed before. The damnation of those eyes I could never escape. It was a complete and soulful embrace. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just stayed inside of her. It wasn’t burning desire yet. I just wanted to be inside of her. As much as I wanted and as much as I knew. The first time. I was still a child inside her wetness, surrounded by her scent of ripe berries and evergreen shrubs. Two children, hand in hand. It didn’t last long. It never faded.
She stepped out of the pond and pu
t on her dress. She came and sat close to me again.
“My mother was not a Dasal. She had lived with your tribe, and she taught me your tongue.”
“You do not look like the women of the Tribe.”
“She wasn’t born of your tribe. She was a slave from the North. She had blue eyes. After she was passed to many brave warriors…and her womb remained empty, they threw her to the dogs in your Great Slaughter Feast of the spring full moon. But the dogs did not dare go near her.”
This I could not believe. The maulers never hesitated. But I didn’t tell her that.
She continued. “Then the Ouna-Mas exiled her to the Forest. But before she died, she spoke to me of those Reekaal.” She shook her hair, and the water drops woke up my skin and my senses.
“I have to know.”
“My mother said the Ouna-Mas had given birth to male monsters with long heads, just like theirs. They are their sons and their servants, and they raise them secretly. They train them to murder the Khun’s enemies. But they are mad and bloodthirsty, so the Ouna-Mas had to rip out their hearts. They tied and locked them with silver chains. And so the sons of the Ouna-Mas cannot leave their mothers’ tents for very long. They must return before daybreak. Or else they will die away from the beating of their own hearts. They hunted you all the way here. Veker says so. He has seen them more times than I have.”
“I have been eighteen summers with the Tribe and I have never heard of this Legend.”
“No legend. My mother told me she had seen them too. I saw them too. You did too. Only a few days ago. Believe your eyes.”
“But you kept telling me that you don’t believe in monsters.”
“I believe my mother. She said they are men, not monsters. Maybe they are hiding. How many times have you entered the tent of a birthing Ouna-Ma?”
“Ouna-Mas don’t have children. I have been to their settlement once. I saw no one.”
And yet I had seen, even though I never quite believed it. I had seen two giant shadows in Sah-Ouna’s tent, standing still like wooden statues. And I had heard from Gunna. Of those huge Reekaal who had attacked him in the Forest.
That was the last thing I needed. Longhead murderers on my trail with orders from Sah-Ouna. And it was the only thing that made sense. Much more sense than the mythical Reekaal and the Legend of Er-Ren. The sons of the Ouna-Mas. Monsters. Men. In the Witch’s tent. In Gunna’s nightmare. In Zeria’s tales.
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