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 ranted. 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 at 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 to half my size, like the girls.
The Guides did not punish us. They decided it was enough. 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 a laughingstock, 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. He had left at least two behind, deathly white with fear, still looking at the young mutilated Archer girls.
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.”
There were only nine of us Uncarved Maulers left. If the Great Khun-Taa, the glorious Fifth Leader of the Tribe, did us the favor of falling dead in two winters from that moment, not before and not after, one of the nine would become Khun in his place.
And soon we were eight.
One cold autumn morning, we found Anak hanging upside down from a tree, as the older Wolves had told us we would find him someday. They had always had it in for him. He was the ugliest, stockiest, and the first the older kids would tease and beat. He wasn’t torn apart or dead. The dogs hadn’t gotten to him yet, though they were jumping all around him. If somebody could shit upside down, he would have. He was very much alive, maybe even better looking, with his long hair falling back toward the ground.
The ninestar Guide, Bera, approached and took out his blade. He didn’t go for his neck. Anak’s wailing was the same hanging upside down. Bera sliced two deep carvings on Anak’s left arm. With one more movement, he cut the ropes and took him down.
“Don’t take anything with you from your hut, Anak. Not even your bow. Just get lost! You will go on foot to the end of the camp until you find the tents where the Archers are trained, and you will tell them that you have come from the Uncarved.”
Anak started to say something but got his answer from Bera before he even had a chance to speak.
“If you make a sound, I will carve you two more times until you stink of fish guts every night. Now get out of here.”
Anak left running, with jeers and flying stones following him.
“Anak was the best archer,” I said to Bera that night.
“Well, at least they won’t throw him out of there, too, and send him to gut the fish,” he answered.
Anak hadn’t done anything wrong. His legs stuck around the saddle better than any of the others. He could gallop without a saddle, lying down on one arm. He could turn his body and send his arrow two hundred feet as he galloped away from the targets. I didn’t expect him to be carved so easily.
“We were too late with that half-wit,” Chaka told Bera as if he could read my thoughts. “I told you to carve him on the second day he was here.”
The Ninestar turned to me and said, “Chaka is right. Every Uncarved can master th
e bow. One might become Khun even if he is second at the bow. But when one becomes the fool we laugh at…then we better carve him early and many times. Each pack of men has its fool, and that much is true, he will never be a Leader.”
The Reghen had another Story about how the light of Enaka blinded the enemies of the Khun. The Khun had to have light, to draw it and to command it. The light had to serve him. It just happened. One was born with it. You couldn’t learn it or master it through any trial.
“The Sun dawns and etches in glorious light the path for the next Leader of the Tribe every morning. The son of Enaka knows. He blinds the enemies of the Leader.” They reminded us at every dawn.
“All of you, remember this one thing,” said the Reghen. “The Guides think they know who the next Khun is. But, in truth, they do not. Only Sah-Ouna knows. But you, the Uncarved, know something else equally important. You know who will never become the One Khun. You know it better than Sah-Ouna.”
On the other side of the fire, Noki was slowly scratching his groin. Malan nailed me with one eye like a searing iron for a girl’s breasts—as if he wanted to remind me that he knew something important.
That I would never become Khun.
XXI.
A Woman
Seventeenth spring. Uncarved—Eagle.
“Noki kissed the Ouna-Ma on the mouth.”
That day I heard this Story, word for word, so many times that my ears started to grow wolf hair. The night before, I was unlucky enough to be sent away on an uncommon chore. It was something the Guides had come up with so that we wouldn’t forget the winter cold. My turn had come.
The trial frightened the Guide more than me. We were patrolling on horseback on the borders of the Endless Forest, near the lair of the blood-eating Reekaal. The Guide was white as snow and held a full moon talisman in his hand while he whispered to himself continuously. Nothing happened to us, just as nothing had ever happened to anyone else I knew who was afraid of the abominable Reekaal. For demons, Firstborn of Darhul and close neighbors, these Reekaal were a quiet lot.
The only misfortune of that night was that I missed the Story that the Reghen and the Ouna-Ma brought. And even worse, I missed the moment when that hot-blooded Noki got up in the middle of it and took the Ouna-Ma into his arms. With one hand, he took off her crimson veil and kissed her on the mouth amid loud laughter and cheers, some of which even came from the Guides before they started on him with the whip.
I had seen this rare scene before, man and woman kissing, but had never cared to ask. It just seemed so strange, funny, and disgusting—two people kissing in the mouth. When Balam and Akrani tried to show me what Noki did, I looked at them as if they were stupid. Truth be told, they were stupid—the stupidest of the eight of us left.
And after that night, we were seven.
We waited till dawn for Sah-Ouna’s verdict.
“What will the First Witch order? Do we carve him or nail him to the cross?” wondered the Guides.
He was lucky. They carved Noki three times, each carving deeper than the other. He was smiling.
“What did you do? What Reekaal got into your head, Noki?” I asked as he was taking off the wolf hide of the Uncarved and packed his quivers and blades.
“I was raised with the Blades, the warriors who work only with knives and are the first to raid the villages. And the ones who fuck the most.”
“The ones who what?”
“You still don’t know what is in between your legs, do you? I was raised differently. I am different. When I was a boy, the Blades used to ride slave girls all day, outside, in front of all of us. They rode them until they couldn’t walk on two feet. I know. We’re all still virgins here, and I am in my sixteenth spring. Do you know that the Archers of our age have been riding women on all fours since last spring?”
“Why do they ride women?”
“I don’t have time to pull your pants down and give you a lesson in the ass. Next time I see you, maybe. But now I’m in a hurry. I’m leaving for the Blades.”
He was already covered with the dog hide of the Blades, Darhul’s damnation; a dog hide, but he was smiling and standing tall, not looking down in shame.
I wouldn’t see him again for a long time.
“Noki left because he wanted to ride slave girls with the Blades,” said Bera. “For a woman.” He spat down at the dirt and shook his head slowly in disbelief.
“He said that you keep us like virgins for the Ouna-Mas. We can only jump over them and not the slaves,” I said.
I couldn’t even understand my own words. The words just jumped out of my mouth without any meaning. I had to go back to the first night of the Sieve. That was the last time that I had had so many questions at once. Bera explained a few things, but without having seen what in the Demon’s name he was talking about, it only created more questions for me.
That night, I dreamed of horses jumping over fences.
And before Selene shone full again, we were down to six. The most useless of the seven, Urdan, couldn’t even shoot an ox when he galloped away from the animal. It was what we called “Enaka’s shot.” All the rest of us could turn our bows and aim backward in full gallop, have only our feet in the stirrups holding us on the horse, shoot our arrows, and pierce a standing target, a pumpkin head usually, up to a hundred feet away.
Urdan got not one, not two, but four carvings. They kept him in our camp as a miserable Carrier, hunting rabbits with the Guides. He was good at opening up rabbits—seems that was the only reason he had made it to the Uncarved. He cooked them too. Urdan would come back from the hunt, never raising his eyes to meet ours, with his rabbits and squirrels hanging over his back. One evening, he brought a deer but even then he seemed sad as the rain, lifeless as his prey. The Uncarved boys didn’t leave any meat for him. He slept with the Carriers and the slave cooks, and we never spoke to him again.
Nobody made fun of Urdan. We were already on our Eagle spring. Come next winter we would be the oldest Uncarved; Wolves. Urdan had endured so much for so long, and his misery was not a laughing matter. It was a nightmare to think that an Uncarved could end up so low in one night.
“I can’t imagine that. A fate of squirrels,” said Gunna.
“Well, it can be much worse,” said Malan.
Urdan’s Story of skinning rabbits and squirrels didn’t last long. One day, they brought him back—or whatever remained of him. A pack of ravenous wolves had come out of the Forest, searching for warm meat in the frozen mud. The animals chased Urdan, but I don’t think he managed to shoot any arrows behind his back as he ran away from them. The wolves kill, but they do leave an honorable sight. They tear, rip, and eat, but the body still looks brave. Like one of a warrior who fought but was defeated. The flesh-eating birds are the worst. They come afterward and clean the carcass to the bone. The cheeks, the lips, the eyes. Urdan left us with a Story and a sight unworthy of Enaka.
“Another one bleeds away. He disgraces me and you,” said Chaka. “I hope the rest of you fare better.”
But it was no surprise. No matter how much crazygrass we could drink, we could never believe that Urdan might rule the Tribe one day. Same for Mad Noki. The truth is that except for me, I could see only Malan and Gunna as Leaders. And most of the time, none of us.
We were gathered around the fire, gulping down snow-watered millet gruel, when Akrani said to Chaka, “Why are we even trying to become Leaders? Gunna will always be first in all of the combat trials.”
Gunna was not first with the blade. He was slow, and I had worn him down in every duel, except for the times he had grabbed me with his hands, which were about as big as my legs. Though I, too, was quite tall and strong for our Tribe.
It was the night Gunna had gone patrolling the Forest border with a Guide, so we talked about him freely.
Chaka answered right away with a roaring voice: “What are you talking about, Akrani, you fool? What is Gunna’s strength next to that of the One Leader? The Khun has hundreds of hands
and legs, thousands of horses and eyes, his power spreads over rivers, from the steppe of the east to anywhere we have warriors guarding. At his signal, the Khun lifts all his hands and horses, and they follow him blindly. Sah-Ouna will not choose a Leader for the size of his arms.”
“But then, why did you send Urdan away for failing at the bow?” I asked.
“There is a line. If he can’t even shoot a bow straight, no matter what the Khun commands, no warrior and no horse will follow. Only some sheep, maybe,” said Chaka.
Night fell cold, and we went to sleep close to the fire. I awoke not much later. Gunna was shaking me and yelling, “Help me! Wake up, Da-Ren.”
I held his hand to get up, but my hand slipped. He had blood all over his arm and was dripping on me. We were both shouting now, and everyone got up at once.
“What’s wrong with you? Where is Tzeba, your Guide?” asked Chaka, who came into the hut after Gunna.
For our age, Gunna was the largest beast I had ever seen in all the camp and already as big as the Rods, the Khun’s fearsome guard. He was shivering from cold and mumbling to himself.
“I don’t know…the Reekaal got him.”
At dawn, we followed the trail in the snow and found Tzeba’s body, his guts spilling out of it, at the Forest’s border. Both of his legs were missing, cut high above the knees, as if they had been chopped with a heavy blade.
“These are not wolves,” said Bera.
Gunna spoke of two giant shadows that moved with the hound’s speed through the branches.
“They were not men, but they were on two legs. They each had a head—”
“Yes?”
“…like Ouna-Mas. One shadow fell on Tzeba. The other ripped me with its claws but couldn’t throw me off my horse. I galloped away.”
“What do you mean? A woman with claws cut him in pieces?”
“It was a giant naked shadow. Tall as me. Man, woman, I don’t know,” mumbled Gunna, shuddering at the sound of his own words. “I looked back. It lifted him up in the air like a baby and threw him to the ground like a puppy.”
Drakon Book II: Uncarved Page 5
