And the day dawned blue.
XXVII.
The Legend of Er-Ren
Eighteenth summer. Uncarved—Wolf.
Rouba and Chaka were waiting up for me when I returned to the Uncarved in the middle of the night. A Reghen was with them.
“It is the command of Sah-Ouna that you leave for the campaign to the North. The Archers will go after the Garol, who have risen up,” the Reghen told me. “We have to see if you are worthy and ready to lead the Tribe,” said the Reghen.
The trap is always set with a great promise.
“Did you see her? What did she say?” asked Chaka.
“Who?”
“Sah-Ouna, Da-Ren. Who else? Where there any others to see?”
“Yes. No. She told me that a great trial awaits me. If I pass it, she will…accept me.” I struggled to remember her words.
Chaka and Rouba exchanged glances as if all of this meant something.
“That’s it,” said Chaka. “Your final trial. The Reghen’s words make sense now. You leave at dawn.”
“This is a great honor,” Rouba told me. “No Uncarved has ever gone on a campaign before finishing his training. You will be riding among the warriors.”
“You will go with him too, Rouba.” Chaka nodded. “He will need a Guide.”
Rouba stuck his blade into the ground to support himself and knelt. “I never dreamed of being in a battle again,” he said. He turned toward me. “And you, you Da-Ren…” He had no more words; he was shaking. An old man’s love and admiration are hard to conceal.
We shut our eyes, though not for long, and woke up before dawn to pack our weapons and ready the horses. There were few of us, just ten Packs. It wouldn’t be a long campaign, but not a one-day raid either. Rouba told me it would be a full moon at least before we were back. The horse that Chaka had given me was strongly built, and I rode taller and braver with each step it took. We moved north, alongside the Forest but never inside it. Almost four hundred warriors in all. The Garol peasants in the north had revolted and slaughtered the guards we had left there. We were to bring the vengeance of Enaka.
“It is a long ride to the Garol settlements, but it will be a quick battle,” said the man who was leading us.
“Is that Druug, the Leader of all the thousands of Archers?” I asked Rouba.
“Yes. Is he better than you?”
“His son wasn’t, for sure. We were in the same hut, Uncarved Starlings, long time ago. He died an Owl the second spring.”
Only one of my arrows had found Redin, the first Uncarved to fall. Above the navel. Any other memory of Redin was fading away.
“Better not remind him of that,” Rouba said.
Rouba kept me next to Druug, so I could learn from him. He told Druug that I was there because Sah-Ouna had demanded it. But everyone knew already who I was. The First among the Uncarved. The Goddess had marked me as the next Khun, their future Leader. If only I managed to complete the final trial unscathed.
After a half-moon’s ride, we made it to the largest of the villages, the only one that was barely fortified, before nightfall. I had thought the breeze would be stronger up north, yet that was one of the hottest evenings of my life. I was dripping with sweat, and my mind started to stray from the heat on the saddle all day, from lack of sleep, and from being stuck to the animal. Druug sent out a Tracker, and he returned a little before sunset. He had seen from up close the Garol and he was certain that they had seen us also.
“They’re waiting for us, barricaded. I count more than six hundred,” the Tracker reported.
I turned to Rouba and said, “The Garol outnumber us. And he says they are well protected behind the sacks and the carts.”
“They are farmers.”
Druug looked at me as if I were a small rat at his feet.
“Why are we riding slowly for so long, boy?”
“The oxen, the carts,” I mumbled.
“Yes, the carts what? Do you know how many arrows those carts carry? More than two thousand shafts for each one of the Archers. If I shoot a thousand times, don’t you think I’d find a neck or an eye? How did you count them as more?”
He was right. They were very few.
“They don’t know how to fight on horseback. They can’t ride and shoot a bow at the same time. They don’t have our bows. They will be dead before the sun reaches mid-sky. Most of their fathers died in the previous uprising. I was at that battle too,” Rouba said.
“Then, why do they?”
“Who knows? Maybe we took all the wheat, and they can’t get through the winter. They choose to die this way, fast.”
“When do we charge?” I asked Rouba.
He gave me a serious look.
“You and me? Never! We will sleep until dawn is upon us. Then the nine Archer Packs will attack, and when it is over, the last Pack of the Blades will move in to clean up whatever is left.”
“What am I going to do?”
“You will watch. Next to me. We will fill quivers with arrows so that they’re ready when the Archers return to refill.”
“That’s all?”
“What do you mean, ‘That’s all’? If we don’t do that, the othertribers will be skinning you alive slowly by nightfall. Your pelt will make a fitting saddle for your horse. All this shit is important. Go and fill the resin and oil pails for the arrows, if you want more work.”
“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, mostly women running and screaming, 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 ar
m 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 we starve too, come next winter.”
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 you like a poison 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, you 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 like you a lot. 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 was the only father I had ever known from the first night of the Sieve. 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 you to tell 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, with 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? In 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 for them to 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 waited 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 with this cold. 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 almost dead they butchered them. But even those supplies were exhausted, and they had meat only for five to last them 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 to a pond. The waters were crystal clear and cool, not frozen, and bluebells had 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 drowning in a red puddle. Er-Ren heaved the deer upon his shoulders and started the journey to get back to his Pack.
Drakon Book II: Uncarved Page 12
