And she brought the fire.
XXXIV.
My Iron, Your Fate
Eighteenth winter. Uncarved—Wolf.
I got good at fucking quite fast, just as I had at riding and blade fighting. It was a useful revelation that the basic secret to perfection was the same in all three. To think with my body and not with my head, and to take control of my opponents by leading them where my body wanted to go. When I was in control, everyone, from women to fearless warriors, could be pierced more easily and sensually.
But the first time—the night I became a man on my eighteenth winter—wasn’t like that. I can hardly remember what my body did that first time. I was lying still on my back most of the night, burning but incapable of movement like a heap of smoldering coals while the Ouna-Ma danced on me.
Whatever it was, it was what I needed. I needed this more than the Banners, prophecies, fathers, Legends, and Leaders, more than the life-giving fire of the winter night. The naked legs of a woman wrapped around me.
It was that moon of my life when I had just about washed the Tribe’s Witch out from inside of me. She came back stronger than ever. The Ouna-Ma came as a woman but left as a demon and goddess, poison and water, death and life, curse and prophecy.
She walked into the tent, looked at me without saying a word, and knelt in front of me. The fire was between us. She started to take some things out of her saddlebag: two wooden cups, dried herbs, and powder. I kept stealing glances toward the tent’s flap and expected the Reghen, the Guide, or someone else to walk in at any moment. She could not say words to me. Selene was not full, and I was not even the Chief of a Pack. She was mumbling a song to break the silence. The silence begged for words, and the song was an excuse to avoid uttering or listening to them.
Selene would have been bright, almost full that night, if she weren’t hidden beneath the snow clouds. With the softest whispering song on her lips, she moved her head to the left and to the right to let me know that I shouldn’t expect anyone else.
It is just you and I alone in the white darkness tonight, Da-Ren, was her silent promise.
She turned silent only when she started undressing with slow movements, a sacred dance ritual she had probably done a thousand times before. She let the black robe fall behind her. A thin tunic covered her breasts and the upper part of her body and left her dark, taut skin bare from the waist down. She took that off. Her small nipples rested high and proud on her full breasts like fresh winter flowers. Nipples that had never been suckled by a babe.
Her body was painted with red and black designs with the henna of the South. Designs that took whole days of careful crafting under a bright sun’s light to make. They said that the Ouna-Mas spent a lot of their time painting one another’s bodies. Her back was decorated with red henna in a pattern of spiral lines, four spirals connecting into a cross, feeding into one another. At the center of each red spiral was a black pattern: a mauler’s head to the north, the two crossed blades to the east, the double-curved bow to the south, and the long skull to the west. Her hands were painted with red henna in intricate blood-red ornaments: flower stems, blades, and arched bows, interlacing and curving like tendrils across the fingers and the top of the hand. They gave the illusion that blood had poured out from every nail and vein and was running everywhere, in harmony, representing with perfect shapes the cycles of life, the spears and the blades of death, and the roots of the trees.
Those fingers touched me and made Zeria vanish for one night. They were painted like the red veil on her long head, the veil that came off last and revealed that long, painfully sensual head with the very short black hair. Her full lips, her forehead was long as a deer’s.
I didn’t know how the Ouna-Mas came to our Tribe, or from where. But they were the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, if only for those big eyes with the full iron-black iris that grew even bigger at night when they danced on a naked man. Even more than their rumps, it was their eyes that were trained for countless nights. She kept them fixed on mine as she moved on top of me.
Later in life, when I would take the Witches from behind, they would always turn their long heads to the side as they were on all fours. Even as they moaned, they never closed their eyes but kept them nailed on me, as if that was the trial they had gone through for five winters. I never regretted that night, although it ended in horror. As I never regretted any of my many nights with the Ouna-Mas.
In my life, I would take only one woman under the spell of eternal love, but as many times as I embraced and looked into her blue eyes, I never felt confused. Zeria’s eyes were colorful forest birds. They were the green of hope, the gold of light, the blue of life. I wanted to hide them from all men before they flew back to some faraway forest.
The eyes of the Ouna-Ma were iron, fire, sweat, death, and a feast of fucking. That night, I truly became a wolf. I burned with unquenchable fire and shivered with the fear of the Sieve’s night from my lips to my feet. I wanted to scream with desire and tear her apart.
When the end came, as she was writhing faster and more rhythmically atop me, I lost myself inside the burning black water river of passion for the first time. I closed my eyes and tightly wrapped my arms around her dizzy. I traced the henna designs on her back as her heart pounded between the painted patterns of the blades and the skull.
She sealed my mouth tightly with her hand. I bit it hard. Her blood blended in with the red finger drawings. She wiped it off on my neck and dismounted me.
I wanted nothing else, not even to speak a word. She wasn’t ready to leave, so she knelt and continued. She started her whisper song once more as she steeped the herbs and the powder she had brought with her in boiling water. She gave me a cup and filled one for herself. The Ouna-Ma had put on her robe, but her bent legs, still showing, naked, made her even more desirable to me. Now I knew what she had inside of her, and it burned my head.
A black horse with raven-black feathers rose from the fire in the tent, evaporated in front of my eyes, and disappeared through the smoke hole. I didn’t want to lose my senses again like I had done the last two times that Sah-Ouna had given me a wooden cup. She had deceived me twice in the past with crazygrass. The Ouna-Ma drank again. I pretended to swallow it all and threw the contents of the cup into the darkness. I kept my mouth full. She drank again. I spat out the black water when her eyes were not on me.
The Ouna-Ma pressed her palm to the back of my neck, pulling me closer to her lips, stuck out her tongue, and pressed it even deeper into my mouth. She twisted it in a deep kiss that choked me. I had kissed Zeria, but it wasn’t the same. The Ouna-Ma’s tongue was fast and persistent, a worm determined to reach all the way into my mind and my heart.
Like a helpless child, I fell backward on the hides, and she climbed on top of me for a second time. She started rocking fast again, still kissing me as if she were slowly filling me with poison, as if she were trying to pull out my soul. Or to make me less careful.
Her knees were bent and locked around my body, her hand squeezed my neck even closer, and her tongue slid deeper down my throat. I came in the end, emptied for a second time, blinded by pleasure, my eyes shut.
That was when the tearing pain came. In half a breath, with one long, angry scream, I flew upward, uncoupling her body from mine abruptly. The two, sharp iron rings she wore on her middle fingers had ripped my skin with quick simultaneous slashes, leaving two carvings. One just below the right nipple on my chest. I had, after all, just lain with my first Ouna-Ma. The other on my left arm, ending my days forever as an Uncarved. A gift to remember her by and an eternal punishment.
I had thrown her off me. She was laughing hard now, almost growling like a satisfied beast at me, already victorious. She had stolen all she had come for. And against her vows, she spoke:
“This is how the boy dies, and the man is born. My iron, your fate.”
Whenever I saw others being carved, it was shameful and reminded me of horses being branded with a red-hot iron. It
was probably an honor that one of the most beautiful Ouna-Mas had come with the order to carve me. She had melted me, I had melted her, and the black water she had boiled had melted us both. She sat coiled next to me, looking the other way as if I were not there anymore. I was alone again. Sleep came fast and sweet.
I woke up much later but still in darkness, delirious and breathing heavily. The horses in my nightmare were frightening shadows, blood dripping from their hollow eye sockets. The black water, the cup. I was losing my mind in that hut, abandoned there, Uncarved no more. The night had begun with hunger, fire, and desire, but it turned into an unsparing nightmare. And that was how it would continue.
I had knives in my bowels. I curled up in pain. I had drunk crazygrass many times before. It had never burned my throat and my bowels like this. This was another kind of poison that swam inside me.
I pulled the Ouna-Ma by the wrist to make her face me. There was blood running from her nose, reaching the edge of her lip. She tried to wipe it off with the back of her painted hand. This blood was not from my carving or my bite. It was from her insides. The poison was burning her too.
She crawled to reach the waterskin. She took a sip but spat it out, coughing up green foam. She tried to stand upright. I went to help her, but my legs were shaking. She pushed me away faintly. The little white rim around her pitch-black iris had become blood red, and she stared, lost and desperate. She was trying to mumble, to speak, despite her vows to not say a word. She couldn’t.
“What did you give me?” I asked, shaking her with both hands.
Gone was her lustful gaze of absolute domination. The gleaming tears of her eyes reflected terror and agony. She barely managed to stand up. She was still trying to utter a word, and she pulled the black robe like a cloak to cover herself. She took two or three steps backward and doubled over with a scream, holding her belly like it was hatching snake eggs that were biting to get out.
She crawled out of the hut, half-naked and barefoot in the snow. But on that one last breath before she disappeared, the Witch looked at me like a frightened girl who had just burst into tears and uttered that one word, the last word I heard from the lips of the first woman I had taken.
“Drakon…”
XXXV.
To Death
Eighteenth winter. Uncarved—Wolf.
Drakon. Solitary servant of Darhul, exiled to the North to guard the crossing of the icy rivers. A creature with indomitable power absolutely committed to protecting a priceless treasure. A mythical beast that spewed fire and couldn’t be killed by any means known to mortals. Its poisoned blood could make a warrior invincible if he rubbed it on himself. Darhul himself, transformed.
Stories for children, women, and fools. I had the rest of my life, as many moons as I had left, to find out. Drakons were the stuff of Legends. None of the men whom I met had ever come across a Drakon. Only Bera had said once, “They had sent me up, very far to the North, on a campaign. I was young like you. Thousands marched, fewer than a hundred returned, and of those few, no one ever speaks of it: I saw him.”
“Saw what?”
“I didn’t see the Drakon; I saw his cloudbreaths of green and blue above his lair. Have you ever seen green clouds dancing and shining in the sky at night?”
“No.”
“Those cloudbreaths were bigger than Sirol, moving, flowing like green rivers above our heads. They had taken the shape of the tongue, the body, the talons of the Drakon, the color of his cursed blood. He was there.”
“You saw clouds only. Green clouds.”
“He was there.”
The Ouna-Ma disappeared half-naked in the middle of the night. She left behind only questions of Drakons and erotic hunger for me to warm in my hut like drakon eggs. And she left the poison inside of me, the crazygrass or whatever it was that she had given me to drink.
Alian sneaked into my hut at dawn, drawn by my screams.
“Are you in pain?” he asked in a worried voice.
“My bowels,” I said. I was burning up.
“Boiled water and salt,” he said. “I’ll bring them now.”
He had long brown hair, Elbia’s brown hair. That I remember of him. He brought a cup of hot salt water. I drank it and spent the whole morning on my knees throwing up until there was nothing left inside me. I started slowly to feel better. I boiled herbs I had taken from the Forest and drank.
I stayed in my hut alone for days. Bera sent Alian every day with water and boiled meat. He was the only one who dared come close. He would leave them outside the entrance and disappear without saying much.
“The others say you got the sickness. Did you?” he asked me once.
“I wish.”
When I had enough strength to stand on my feet again, I stepped out of the hut for the first time to let them know. I was alive, strong. I was also carved once. Finished.
It was time for me to leave the Uncarved, but no one had given me orders. I walked aimlessly around Sirol and looked among the hide covers and the tents, where the dogs mounted the bitches and the warriors took the women. Those acts were not sacred or hidden in our Tribe. Every woman belonged to everyone. That was our upbringing. I had seen it many times, and no one cared who watched or walked by. At some of the Banners, like the Blades, especially in winter, the public display was the main entertainment for the men. I went there now to watch the warriors and the slave girls.
Because now I had questions.
Had I done something wrong? Was I made differently? Why had there been so much fear in the eyes of the Ouna-Ma? Was it so obvious, when I was naked, that I was cursed? As much as I watched men and women sweat and rub against each other like animals in front of me, I couldn’t see anything on the men that was different on me. I saw female slaves riding warriors, and I saw men salivating rabidly and taking common women from behind. The older warriors were more experienced than I, as with everything else, but that was all. But I had questions and no one to answer them.
Why had she uttered that word? Drakon?
I had a lot of time every day to be concerned with things like that, abandoned in my hut, alone, without any idea of what fate Malan was carving for me.
Drakon, the iron ring slicing my arm, disgrace, lust, the Ouna-Ma’s fear, pain, the solitude of the hut as my only cloak, Khun-Malan, the Leader, the death of Rouba, the wolves tearing the flesh of brave Gunna, the screams of Keral’s warriors as the stakes tore through their asses, the decorative horse tails hanging outside of the Khun’s six-sided tent, a poisoned arrow stuck underneath my ribs in Kar-Tioo, Zeria putting me to sleep inside my slaughtered horse to keep my heart warm, another brutal winter descending, Archers, Blades, Rods, leeches sucking blood and giving me the kiss of life, the Ouna-Ma on top of me, falling almost dead afterward, her eyes red and black in fear, the Unending Sky of Enaka colored like the eyes of Zeria, Drakon.
The Guides of the Uncarved had nothing more to do for me, and Bera said, “I can’t keep you here any longer. Chaka is gone, but I have sent word with the Reghen to Khun-Malan asking about your fate. I hope that luck will be on your side, Da-Ren.”
“Why won’t you look at me?”
“It could have been you. But for your mark.”
The mark of the ninestar. As if the mark had had a will of its own and had bewitched me to disappear into the Forest for two moons. As if the mark had decided by itself to abandon the Tribe and had sent me to search for a Dasal girl. The excuses of the weak, that’s what the birthmarks were.
Almost half a moon passed after the night of the Ouna-Ma before Malan finally decided. He sent four proud and strong-muscled Rods to summon me. They rode up to my hut, at midday under a hazy winter sun, and told me to follow them to the tent of the Khun.
I didn’t recognize Malan’s camp. The new Khun had raised, in a matter of a few days and nights, a new six-sided tent on a hundred-feet-tall hill. It was visible from a long distance in the flat valley of Sirol. All the animals and their smell were missing from the camp
of the Khun, except for the horses. I had been in Khun-Taa’s tent only once before, a few moons ago, when he had thrown us out with the certainty that he would not die anytime soon. The Guides used to say to us, “Enaka gave you a short tongue and a long blade.”
The Khun’s tent had a triple entrance, three sheets of rippling fabric falling heavy, each one five yards after the other. They were rich, othertriber spoils from the South and I had to push them aside with both hands. Two Rods were standing guard in front of each entrance. I finally found myself in the largest hall I had ever seen in my life. I was at the beginning of a corridor, at least a hundred feet long, across from Malan’s empty throne on the opposite side. I looked so short and small inside this tent. Broad wooden beams supported a vast structure that rose twenty feet high. It was built as if the Craftsmen had connected many traditional tents together. Lighter beams notched into the top of the vertical ones and meshed to form the skeleton of the hide-covered roofs. The hides were sewn together, leaving smoke holes open. Torches resting on iron sconces illuminated the tent, but there were also many side openings for air and light, half-covered with horsehide flaps.
There was singing. To the right end of the hall, the torch flames trembled above their red veils. A few Ouna-Mas were in a circle, their knees on the hides, and singing. The animal skins hanging behind them were decorated with their unique henna patterns. I walked toward them. An unveiled girl rose to her bare feet and started swinging a black-horn knife, slicing the tallow smoke, over a body lying flat on the hides. The resting body was covered with a robe, and under the scant light, it looked like a black goat to be sacrificed or a giant coiled snake. It was neither. I had tasted her. She was the same Ouna-Ma, the first, the one who had mounted me a few days earlier. She was staring at me with glassy eyes, her body frozen. Her soul had left forever.
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