Zeria stayed back, along with the other Dasal and away from me, when I started digging.
“Why did you put him here?” I asked her. “I have to burn his body.”
She came closer, hesitantly.
“Don’t take him out of the earth.”
“What?”
“Give him to the Forest; it will embrace him.”
“That man was a warrior, destined for the Unending Sky, not the Forest. His ashes must rise up high. She waits for him.”
I hoped the Goddess would accept him like this. I couldn’t get rid of all the rosy worms that had invaded every crevice of his face and studded the swollen violet skin. The roots of the trees were already drinking his flesh. I started to drag him out of there to build a big pyre. Zeria came closer and pulled my arm to stop. I pushed her away hard, knocking her down. Once again, she was at my feet like the first time, when I had saved her. The same look of anguish on her beautiful face.
I tried to find the words to explain: “If his flesh does not burn, the soul cannot ascend to the Sky.”
She relaxed at the tone of my voice and raised herself from the ground.
“In the sky? Up there?”
“That is where the brave go.”
“There? To nothing? The skies are cold, empty lakes. Why should he go there? Keep him here, on our earth of life.”
“No! Stop this talk now.”
“To become one with the tree, the soil, the leaves, the animals, the autumn spiders. To live through them again. The earth fed him for his whole life. His body should feed the earth now. To be born again. In here, life never dies.”
I had heard all these mad stories of the Demon’s servants many times before. The Story of the Deadwalkers, the Buried servants of Darhul, the resurrection of the Cross Worshippers of the South. All those monsters were real, not just Legends of the Ouna-Mas. And Zeria’s words were proof of that.
Rouba had not lived that long to become food for the worms. I grabbed a torch from a Dasal and lit Rouba’s pyre. He left for the stars as he deserved. Zeria came closer when the fire was dying out and threw a flask of red water over the embers while speaking words I did not understand.
“Are you…the Forest Witch?” I asked.
“You had fallen to the ends of the underworld. I had to enter the mouth of the snake, deep in the caves of the dead, to bring your soul back, Da-Ren.”
It was her way of telling me she was.
“The forest spirits did not accept this. I owe them,” she told me.
I shivered when she spoke of the caves of the dead. My nightmare returned: the days when I fought off the poison, the mud swallowing me, the seven children with black pebble eyes, hand in hand, wanting to keep me down there. If I had died, I should have risen to the Unending Sky, next to Enaka. But Enaka knew. She didn’t accept me. I had betrayed her. Again and again. For Zeria.
The following morning, I opened my eyes late, later than any other time, and Zeria walked in and left a handful of wild red berries and a piece of bread.
“For your journey,” she said.
I wasn’t ready for any journey.
“I want to…” I started to say.
Her father, Veker, came in behind her and wasted no time in questioning me. “Why did you come? Kala is dead. We could not save him. Cursed monsters!”
I figured that Kala was the Dasal who had been hit by the first arrow, a little before Rouba and I had gone down.
“Who killed Kala? Who shot those arrows?” I asked.
“Who else? Your own kind,” he said pointing his finger at my face.
“Why? Why would they shoot at us if they are of the Tribe?”
“You ask? You, who hunted us and caged us? Damn you! They hunt because that’s what they always do.”
“I will stay here until they come again. I have to get to them,” I said to Veker and Zeria.
“You have to leave today. Those who came were hunting you, not us. They aimed at you even when they hit Kala. Are you exiled from your Tribe?”
“No.”
“Maybe they know you’ve helped us. If you stay, we are all in danger,” Veker said.
Three strong men had come into the hut. I didn’t have my blades, and I didn’t want to fight the men who had saved my life. I nodded silently, pretending to agree with him.
“I promise, I’ll leave at dawn.”
That afternoon, I secretly crept into Veker’s hut and found my blades. I strapped them around me, and I was strong and free once more. The next morning when we met again, I was armed. I wouldn’t take any orders from him.
“I changed my mind. I will stay until I find out what happened. Or I’ll return with a thousand warriors. She will help me,” I told him, pointing to Zeria.
“Listen, young man. I can kill you now. Even if a couple of us die, you die too. You rot unburied, and the crows eat your eyes tonight.”
“Go on!”
“But I took a vow. When you saved Zeria. You don’t die, I’ll protect you even though I piss on you and your tribe. But I won’t let you near Zeria.”
“She is the Forest Witch. I need to speak to her. She is not in danger.”
“What witch? Are you mad, kid?” shouted Veker.
Zeria stepped forward and came next to me.
“She is the only one who speaks my tongue,” I said.
It was my excuse to keep her with me—in the beginning when I still needed an excuse.
“Father, I owe him, let me help him. You promised.”
Veker’s silence and angry mumbling signaled my victory. When they finally left us alone, I asked her to follow me away from the huts.
“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!”
“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 most joyful solitude of the autumn’s Forest turning. The blades and arrows I carried with me proved useless, as if I couldn’t remember what to do with them. The Forest was not a threatening evil. Instead, it was the f
irst 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. Your body was writhing in pain. We had to put you inside a warm nest before your heart stopped. The horse’s carcass was that nest.”
“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, 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.
I asked a question 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 talked 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.
Drakon Book II: Uncarved Page 15
