Drakon Omnibus

by C. A. Caskabel

  I was watching on my horse when I heard a bellow behind me, and turned my head. My eye caught the straw-bearded peasant running toward us. The spear he was brandishing flew through the air, and one of the three Blades next to me screamed as it tore through his back. I turned to chase the man as he disappeared inside a hut. I kicked the door, pulled out my blades, and wielded them left and right in the darkness. The cool air was filled with the smell of warm bread and fresh green onions. My blade tore through the fabric sealing the window, and the sun rays poured in. My next swing found the man below his ribs. He fell to his knees, but at the same moment, I felt the stab of many blades in the back of my thigh. I turned to see a pitchfork, but it had not gone deep, as if a woman had thrust it. She was a woman; I could barely see her in the darkness but I could hear her screaming. The bearded man raised a jar high, ready to crush it onto my head, but my small blade was already deep in his gut. The woman pulled out the pitchfork and moved to pierce me again. I turned with a raging cry, and my long blade fell with a crushing blow upon her neck. Blood splattered against my face before I could see hers in the scant light. With my second blow, her head came off cleanly; it wouldn’t dangle there to haunt me.

  I limped out of the hut bleeding and drenched in sweat, my heart pumping fast. My men dragged the bodies outside. One of them was holding the woman’s head from its long black hair. Her eyes—the color of the clear blue sky, the sky of their gods and angels, the cyan color of the sea I had yet to see—were staring at me wide open. Her blood had covered my amulet and my promise. My blood had filled my boots.

  Rikan cauterized my thigh with an iron blade. I trusted him above everyone else with metal, and Leke helped him bind the wound with cotton strips from the dress of the headless woman. I slept till night, then woke up and hobbled to the wineskin. I emptied it and grabbed a second one.

  Leke asked if I wanted to taste the goat meat. I motioned with my hand for him to leave me alone. Instead, he sat next to me and asked, “How was it? Yours? Your first?”

  The leaves of the olive trees were shimmering in a silver wolf-hide sheen as the moonlight ran on their soft skin. The red wine, the olive orchards, and Selene. I got confused for a moment. I opened my mouth to talk about her blue eyes, the eyes of Zeria, but he spoke before I did.

  “How was your first kill?”

  “Oh, that. I was Uncarved. It was a night of glory. Thousands watching, back at the Wolfhowl.”

  “I know, I was there. I remember you. Thought back then, that you’d be our next Khun.”

  I thought so too.

  “You never talk of the Uncarved. How was your training, Da-Ren?”

  “A heavy curse.”

  “Hard?”

  “No. It was easy back then. They weaned us from all fears and filled us with the longing for the Final Battle.”

  “Then?”

  “It is now that my Uncarved training falls heavy.” When I think about what it could have been. If I had become Khun. “Now that we shovel corpses. We are no more than dust in Khun-Malan’s palm.”

  Leke put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You have the men, at least. The Blades you’ve trained will always follow you,” he said.

  “Yes, I have you,” I said. “But I have no Story anymore. I’ve lost it.”

  Selene had taken on a blood-red hue same as my wine. The leaves of the olive trees whispered like children’s ghosts rising to haunt the night. I had lost count of the springs and the winters.

  “Is this the Hunter’s Moon?” I asked Leke.

  “What? It’s springtime, Firstblade,” he said, his words followed by a giggle.

  Every moon had become the Hunter’s Moon, and I was the hunter. The fires and the blades had melted down to slag every Story I held inside me. And without a Story, I couldn’t live or kill. I still raised my head every morning to see the sky when it was clear and blue, to remember, but now it was nighttime.

  I shut my eyes to bring her up from the deepest wells of my memory.

  Zeria looked back at me with bloodshot eyes.

  Red was their white. Red was their blue.

  LV.

  Vanaan

  Island of the Holy Monastery. Thirty-Fourth Winter.

  According to the Monk Eusebius.

  “So, does this sandy coast in the south have a name?”

  “Yes, Scythe Island, named after its shape.”

  “And those gray hill lines in the northwest that tremble on the horizon?”

  “That’s Foleron Island. The winds are three times stronger there. They built a small fort around each tree to protect it as if it were made of gold. Man-high forts made of flat stones, xerolithos, to shield them from the winds. Only the damned and the exiled stay there. In its own way, though, it is a safe place. Pirates never set foot on it.

  “And this ship approaching, does it have a name?”

  “Yes, and so does its captain.”

  “And the wind has a name to show where it hails from.”

  “And the sea has the name of an ancient king who fell on its waters to drown his grief.”

  “But the waves have no name.”

  “No.”

  “They come, one after the other, relentless by the thousands, like our warriors, crashing against the rocks and the walls. But their names will never be uttered. Their stories will be lost, the memories of their existence, their glory, and their destruction.”

  “Yes, Da-Ren. The waves are so many—their names don’t fit in books.”

  “The warriors. The waves. The children. None of them fits. Their bones—will be lost. And all those heavy books in this monastery, do they have names?”

  “Yes, but they too will be destroyed and forgotten like the waves. A few will remain, and the rest will burn or dissolve underneath the wet soil.”

  “And that faint headland, this small cape there to the east, does it have a name, Eusebius?”

  “The small cape?” I chuckled briefly. “That is the coast of the Holy Empire, Da-Ren. An endless empire. This is no island. It is the land of your tribe’s campaign.”

  “So it is true. My past is half a day’s boat ride across.”

  “Yes, it is true, Da-Ren. We are not dead. We are not ghosts reciting your story in front of the nine gates of hell. We, the Castlemonastery, the desert across, your story, all are alive and breathing. Right now, as we speak. But you don’t need me to tell you; you know it for yourself.”

  “You are right, Eusebius. Our Story may die, but we are still alive. I know that. Do you know how?”

  “How?”

  “I am in a hurry to finish it.”

  “You are still alive.”

  “I need to understand, Eusebius.”

  “What?”

  “Why do Stories die?”

  Another impossible question. How could I answer? But I was a scribe and a monk. I should answer. I knew. I knew the pain of writing, the euphoria of reading.

  “Because it costs too much for them to live forever,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we don’t write the story down, then it will be lost. But even if we do write it, there will come a day when the monastery will fill with stories. New books will come. Some old ones will have to be thrown away. I have burned many books myself, one-of-a-kind transcriptions, the last copies extant. When we had no more space. When we had no wood. I had to choose books that no one had opened for many years. The ones buried deep in the past. Their words, like teardrops, melted the papyrus and ascended to heaven. ‘No one wants us in this world anymore’ was their last, unwritten lamentation.

  “And one day the monks will leave this place forever. Hunger, pirates, or whatever else God brings, one day the end of this monastery will come, even if it is a thousand years from now. The last survivors may take only one chest of books, at most two, if there’s time.”

  “If my Story is good, you must rescue it, Eusebius. Promise me.”

  “Is this up to me, Da-Ren? Think abou
t it. Before I reach my sixty years—if I am very lucky—these papyri codices we write today will begin to crumble and die from the damp. If we don’t give birth to their identical children, the books will not live.”

  “Like men, they struggle for the secret of eternal life.”

  “Of all the ancient books, only those that we love the most and care enough about to copy will survive. Each time, each one, each generation. For your story to live a thousand years, thirty generations have to toil hunched over a similar table, carrying trunks of papyrus, scribing with red and black ink as I do. Until their eyelids shut, tired. Your words dead. Their eyes blind. They barter.”

  “If my Story is a good one—”

  “The novice who will someday take my place, Da-Ren, will have the duty of copying all the important books of the Castlemonastery to save them. All the sacred texts first, of the Faith. Then the classics, the immortals, written by ancient sages about ancient kings. Kings whom our living emperors so much want to emulate. Sixty and more are those books, as fat and heavy as logs if you pile all the codices together. How much time will he have? Maybe enough for one more story, the eternal one that cannot be ignored, the serendipitous one that made his heart tremble. Yours has to be the best story he has ever read. Otherwise, it will die. It will die because to keep it alive for the next generation costs too much. It doesn’t cost gold, but something far more valuable. Blood and breath, the eyes and hands of our children.”

  Old stories, each one scribed in a different wave, crashed for the last time against the rocks of the island.

  “Don’t promise me anything,” said Da-Ren.

  He understood.

  “And one day God’s Final Judgment will come, and all the stories will disappear like a child’s footprints in the sand on a windswept day. All of them.”

  With that, I disposed of his vanity.

  One afternoon I had asked for permission to take Da-Ren to the library, with the hope that I would impress him. It was in the monks’ building next to the refectory, and no pagan had ever entered before. We had more than two hundred books there, stored in wooden boxes, an invaluable treasure. I recited the titles of most of the books.

  “Do you have only holy books here?” he asked.

  I read many of those holy books, one by one to him, and they caught his attention when he first came to Hieros. He wanted to steal a little of our wisdom, to learn about our sorcery.

  “Only these will remain true when the Final Judgment is upon us, Da-Ren.”

  “Too many holy books. You don’t need so many. They all say the same things,” he told me when we stopped reading. We had gone through most of them.

  During the first year, when I read regularly to him, he had many questions about the holy books.

  “Why do you bury the corpses, Eusebius?”

  “Long ago, people believed in false gods and burned their dead. Then came the age of enlightenment.”

  There, his questions were countless—more than the fish of the sea and the pebbles of the coast. What was enlightenment, if the Sun and Selene were gods whom we had stolen from his tribe?

  “Baagh told me a different story, Eusebius. He said the dead nourished the earth with their flesh; their children were reborn in flesh as the fruit of the earth. Body and blood, they said, and put bread and wine into their mouths in their rituals.”

  “I doubt that Monk Evagus spoke such nonsense.”

  “Baagh has traveled in the East and South. He told me that the Buried, those my tribe called Deadwalkers, were farmers. They had few animals, and they lived to plow, sow, and reap. To live, they had to bury the dead, feed the land so that life could sprout anew.”

  “Resurrection will come only for those who have been buried.”

  “They fed their bones and their rotting flesh to the earth. To make life anew. But if you only cared to resurrect them, why didn’t you just put their souls in a flask as the wizards of the South say?”

  “Only the souls of demons are sealed in flasks.”

  “Demons—they always choose the best attire.”

  The north wind had penetrated through every insect hole of the Castlemonastery walls and our cloaks. Our bones were creaking as we rested on the rough stones and the whitewashed walls of the monastery, waiting for the Final Judgment.

  “These peasants here, Eusebius. I never got to know them well enough; even if their women say otherwise. Do you think they came as refugees after Malan’s campaign?”

  “No. They came here from west and south trying to escape the pirate raids. There are plenty of barbarians there too. I came here with them, but I was left at the Castlemonastery as an orphan.”

  “How do these peasants survive? Do they have enough food?”

  “They are fishermen and goat herders; they sow the land, they manage, weather and God willing.”

  “What do they sow?”

  “Barley. It’s the only thing that can endure this north wind.”

  “And they bury their dead? There, next to their crops?”

  “Yes, Da-Ren. We are all people of God here.”

  “I too might die here one day. Can you at least promise to lay my body on a pyre, Eusebius?”

  “I would never do that. It is against everything that I am.”

  “Of course, no, you would never do that. You would burn my Story and store my bones.”

  “As God wishes.”

  Da-Ren was completing four years of exile on a mission of salvation and redemption. “Zeria and Aneria, I must save them.” He would speak their names less and less, mostly when he was drunk.

  “Maybe it is the same. Bones, books, burn all of them, Monk. Just make sure that a strong wind from the south will be blowing when you do. To take the ashes of my body and my Story all the way to the banks of the Blackvein.”

  “There will be a strong southerly wind. I promise you that.”

  But I couldn’t even promise that. I did not command the winds. We discussed all those things in his cell, protected against the north wind. We had reached the end of his story long ago and were rewriting it for the third time.

  I knew for a long time, since his first year in Hieros, that his story hadn’t even begun. Until now, he had described only the early years, to help me understand what was to come. Da-Ren’s real story began after Melea. And Baagh’s story. The one story that Baagh asked him to tell. And the one Da-Ren did not want to tell.

  I suspected it on a day of pelting rain during the first year, before we had written even one word. It was the time when we were reading the sacred books for the first time. I was reading to him from the Old Holy Book when Da-Ren forever lost his interest in the Holy Scriptures.

  I recited, using the grim tone that the text required:

  “You will go to the six cities of the damned, to Vanaan and the five smaller ones, and you will annihilate every breathing creature. Leave no one alive. For you have inherited this land from God, but know this, whatever endures your wrath will defile and poison you.”

  When he heard that, Da-Ren got up, with a scowl on his face. He bit his bottom lip and took one step back. As if each word had become a snake slithering up his boots.

  “What did you just say?”

  I repeated the words of the sacred texts.

  “Read it again.”

  He had me recite it a third time.

  He turned to open the window, to let the wind and the storm rush in.

  “These gods, blind fury they breathe.”

  That’s what I thought he said, with the wooden shutters banging angrily next to him. His hands rose without strength, covered his eyes for a breath, and disappeared within the waves of his hair before crossing themselves in the back of his head. He shut the window:

  “One more time, Eusebius.”

  “You will go to the six cities of the damned, to Vanaan, and the five smaller—”

  “That is what your god said to his chosen tribe, the enlightened, in your holy book?”

  “Yes, and a
fter that He says—”

  “I know what it says after. I was also sent there—to Varazam.”

  “Vanaan—”

  “Yes, same thing. I’ve been there. The gods sent me too.”

  LVI.

  The Master of Varazam

  Twenty-Second Summer. Firstblade

  He didn’t scream for long. No one does.

  The Ssons tied the First Tracker’s wrists to the cart, and he followed on foot as the animals pulled through the scorching rocky desert. He hoped for the slow oxen, but he got the strongest horses. He hoped for water, but he didn’t get a drop. He managed to keep up on two legs for a while when the road was flat. Past midday, he stumbled, and then he continued on all fours. He screamed only for a few breaths. His head banged against a rock as the horses picked up the pace on a downhill slope, and then he was gone, his skin gradually leaving him, first the elbows and the knees, then the brow. His back looked muscled and strong, but his front side was dragged and torn to the bone. His flesh left a swirling brown trail on the burning sand and gravel of a long dry riverbed. The Trackers had brought us in the desert in high summer; they failed the Goddess and her chosen Tribe. Thus spoke the Reghen, thus decreed Malan, and thus the Ssons executed.

  The great Uruat River was an endless snake of mud and marshy water that blocked all passage to the south. It proved more difficult to cross than the Trackers and the Craftsmen expected. All the bridges had been destroyed by the men of the Empire. The soft mud of the riverbank gave way underneath the supporting beams, no matter how deep we pounded them in with pulley-driven hammers. A narrow strip of earth around the river was fertile, alive with fields of wild wheat, pistachio trees, many oaks, and fewer poplars. Not one trunk survived the end of our campaign. The First Tracker had assured us that we would be outside Varazam at the beginning of summer, but by the time we managed to cross the Uruat, it was too late. The sweltering heat and dust became an enemy that we could not overcome, only endure. Past the river, on the road to Varazam, there were no trees, no water, and no villages. Whatever lived there before had been burned and abandoned by the believers of the Cross.