“This isn’t custom,” the elder snapped.
“Custom is what I say,” came the reply.
The hall slowly went quiet. I coughed, trying to clear my thoughts.
“Who are your enemies?” I asked.
“You are.”
“Who else. Mermaids? Selks? Vampires? Are they enemies?”
They paused to deliberate this.
“They are not our people,” the senior Elder carefully responded.
“And the children of these races?”
“Not our people,” came the reply.
“Blood of Humans is the same as blood of Dwarves and of Vampires. Even Arukh bleed the same red blood. As red as the blood of Horsemen. You say these are not of your people. This is not true.”
My voice cracked. I worked my jaw, trying to swallow enough spit to continue.
“Look upon them! Are they not like you? Do they not walk upon two legs, grasp with two hands, look with two eyes? Do they share the power of speech? Do they not all hunger as you? Who does not know suffering or joy? Is not each people cleaved to male and female? Do we not issue forth from our mother’s wombs? Do we not die the same?
“You say that they are not our people. That they are not our children. I say we are all people,” I called, “of many faces, but of one blood.”
I felt an instants wild elation, caught up in the power of the words, in the grandeur of this truth. We were all one people! I knew it now, in a way I’d never known a thing before.
The crowd muttered angrily, all but the Selk Elders and the Goblin Mother.
I responded with my own passion. If they could not see right before them, let them look upon wrongness and see it for what it was.
“You say that these are different peoples. That Vampires are not Dwarves, and Men are not Selk. But I say to you: If you can say that others are not people like Humans, can you not say that Humans of other tribes or Dwarves of other totems are not people as your people? Are they other peoples too, to whom you owe nothing, with whom you share nothing?”
They quieted, with muted tones of rough agreement.
“If you say these things to me. Then I say to you: Within the tribe and totem, may not family set against family? Will you say your family are your people, but other families of your tribe are not. We are all one, and if we are not one, then we are many and each of us is alone.”
There was a feeling of almost palpable suspicion from them. As if they recognised a truth, but were uncertain as to whether they approved of it.
“If one family can stand apart from others. Then it must be so that one man or another can stand alone. That he will say to his brother or his father, ‘You are not my people and so I do as I wish.’”
They were quiet. Listening. I gulped air.
Arukh. Then they would be Arukh, each one a race alone to their self. I understood then, why we were despised beyond all others. We knew no kin, not even each other. We deserved their hatred, because we were alien, even to ourselves.
I bowed my head, as exhausted as if I’d fought all day. The words had finally run out of me and I could think of nothing more.
“Finished?” asked the King. “Entirely finished? No more? Then counsel is done.”
He nodded to the torchbearer who started forward.
I looked up, and my eyes locked with the girl. The King’s daughter, sitting alone and strange at the King’s table. Sitting as far from the Prince as she could.
She stared at me, and suddenly, I knew my words had meant nothing to her. She was alone in the world, she had no family, she felt no family. She hadn’t even felt anything for daughter, that’s why she drowned it, I realized. It wasn’t part of her. She was all alone in her tribe.
And I realized something else.
Someone had put her there.
Someone had made her alone.
And suddenly the words were coming out of me like water from a brook, called not from my heart, but from the despair in her eyes.
“Look upon what stands in your midst,” I roared and gasped. “You who call yourselves people. You say he is your people, and you say the others are not your people so they do not matter.
“But you are not his people,” I shouted. “He has no people in his heart. You are all strangers to him. You think he will not harm your children, your daughters. You will let others suffer and others vanish. You will watch other mothers grieve for murdered children.”
“Where did he grow up, if not among you? Where did he learn his hungers, but on your children? You think they are safe? They are not safe from him. There is no safe place from him.”
The Elder jumped to his feet. “Lies,” he cackled, “lies in her mouth, she earns the fire...”
My heart leaped as I realized I’d lost, I’d made a terrible mistake. In accusing the Prince of his own people, I’d thrown away my last hope of avoiding the flame.
The Prince smiled, knowing I’d lost, knowing he’d won.
There was a shriek. The King’s daughter leaped for the Prince, brandishing a knife.
He caught her but could not loose her from it. The whole room froze, staring. Shrieking, she fought on, biting and clawing. He could not dislodge her.
“Bastard,” she wailed. “You did it! You did it!”
He hit her. From my cage I heard the slap of her flesh.
“You made me kill him! You made me!”
Still she struggled with him like a mad thing, this little slip of a girl.
“She’s mad,” he announced, grinning. “She’s always been mad. She makes up things.”
“I hate you,” she cried. “You put it in me and then when I had it you made me drown it!”
The Prince grimaced in embarrassment, unable to subdue this small opponent. He hit her, hard and low.
That stopped her. Her cries choked off and her face went hollow as all the air went out of her.
He hit her again, hard. She dropped. He kicked her viciously. Her body wrapped around his boot.
The Prince leaned over catching his breath. Unbidden, a smile slid onto his face.
He snarled abruptly at Tashifar, “Get her out of here.”
Then he turned back to the assembled throng, and the smile returned.
“Madness,” he said. “All lies. She’s always been crazy.”
In the silence that followed, it seemed that we understood all at once, what made a mother drown her newborn child. We all knew what made a girl so silent and strange.
The silence seemed to grow deeper. Spreading out in palpable waves. It felt like hidden knowledge long denied. People recalled lost children never found, frightened ones grown strange with secrets, a sickness at their core that they had never turned their face to.
The Prince sensed it finally. His smile slipped and faded.
The girl crawled to her feet, ran weeping away. None dared look at her. How long had she been like this, I wondered. Years of torment, strange and skittish to all who’d met her, all that pain, all of it waiting for one word, one moment, to let the dam come crashing.
Only the Arukh, Tashifar followed her, calling softly in a broken voice.
The Selk Elders rose and walked solemnly out the door. They did not look back. The Vampire lords, all but the Cull, stood stiffly, gathering their Arukh, they turned and left.
Slowly, one of the horse Elders stood. He carefully turned his back to the Prince, and sat down again, with great ceremony. The other Elders, one by one, did the same.
An argument broke out among the Dwarves. Angry voices rose and fell. Several Dwarves got up to leave.
The Human King protested. Warriors leaped forward. Dwarvish guards drew weapons. They passed.
“Damn you all,” railed the Man King at those who departed. “He’s my son, and he’ll do as he pleases.”
“You think to
judge us!” he roared. “We’ll burn this bitch! We’ll burn your whole city! Do you hear me! You get back here! You all get back here or you’ll all pay in blood! Do you hear me!”
No one listened to him. Not even his own men.
The other races, the other Human tribes followed one by one. Sometimes quietly departing, sometimes with blows and curses, but they all departed.
Now the Horsemen were almost alone, save only for the fugitive Arukh in the shadows, who stood and watched.
A low murmuring began among the Horsemen. Some pushed the Prince away from them. He stumbled and almost fell. Women seemed to surround him.
Several Horsemen began to shout at the King. He screamed back at them, spittle flying from his lips.
“It’s her, the Orc,” the Prince shouted desperately, as the human women surrounded him. “She’s cast a spell on all of us.”
But it was too late for him.
“It’s all lies!” he screamed. “Lies!”
And then he only screamed.
The Cull climbed the pyre to face me.
“You will not see me again,” she said. She touched my forehead. “Live.”
I passed out.
Much later in the night they remembered me again.
The Arukh, Tashifar, wept as he climbed the steps to my cage.
I had never seen an Arukh weep for humans before. Weep for any pain but our own. Perhaps he was not one of us after all.
The King’s daughter waited below, watching with her strange eyes. The little Arukh hovered a few feet behind her.
“Do it,” she said to Tashifar. “Set her free.”
There was something different about her. The pain, that was still there. The strangeness in her, the twists in her soul from hiding--that was there. Then I realized what it was: She wasn’t alone any more.
The old King sat on the ground before us. He’d screamed until he was hoarse. He’d screamed as they all walked away. And then he’d screamed at the ones who remained. He’d fallen to the ground in a fit. Finally, he had covered his face and hair with ashes and sat alone in the hall. He looked grey, and very, very old.
“Should have killed you. Should have cut your throat before you ever said a word,” Tashifar cursed me as he wept. “God damn you. All of them, damn you.”
“Yes,” I said.
One by one he cut the bonds that held my cage together. He freed my ankles, and then my wrists. I could not feel them.
I stumbled down the steps, the young female steadying me, to stand swaying before the King. He looked up at me. His eyes were dry. It struck me then that Tashifar wept for him, on his behalf, because he could not.
“He was my son,” he said. “You do not see things sometimes, because they hurt too much to see. I did not want to know these things. I wished other ways, and I made myself believe in those.”
Did he expect a reply from me? I didn’t have one.
“Even when you see. Even when you know. The wish is so strong. You say it is not this but that. You say it is all right, but it is not.”
Behind us the Arukh cursed me softly.
The King looked up. He smiled gently at Tashifar.
“Look upon him. Never did I have a truer son. None more loyal. None so gentle. I hold him highest of all my men. I but wish he were my blood.”
Tashifar burst into a new torrent of weeping. His world had broken apart. He cried not for the Prince, I understood, but for the pain of all those who had loved the Prince, and in the end, found nothing there worth loving.
“What kind of monster are you,” the King asked, “that you turn our very hearts against us?”
All the words had run out of me. The young female helping me, I limped away into the darkness.
The drums pounded, not the food beat, another beat. Faster, more energetic.
The voice of a some big female Arukh, a Krohn as the Vampires called it, rang out.
“Four horses,” she roared. “Four horses bound her, and still she stood. She laughed at them, and her laughter made them afraid.”
“From behind,” she roared. “From behind they struck her down. They bound her tight and carried her away to their fire. They put her on their fire, but she would not burn. The one and the many gathered to see her burn, but she would not burn. She laughed at them!”
The assembled Arukh roared.
I didn’t remember laughing. I remembered only sick fear and helplessness. Desperately saying anything that came into my head, desperately hoping for something to save me, and knowing that nothing would.
The young female stood up.
“She spoke to them, and they heard her words and were ashamed. I was there,” she shouted.
That was all I remembered, the feeling and desperation behind the words. Not the words themselves.
“I will say her words.”
There was an answering roar.
If I stayed to listen, would I recognize the words she said? Would it be anything to do with me?
She glanced at me. I nodded. She seemed to grin, turning her attention back to the crowd.
What a strange little thing she was, I thought. She didn’t, it seemed to me, so much follow me, as follow some peculiar thing in her head that she thought I was.
I knew then, that the word she’d speak wouldn’t be the words I’d said, but only the words she’d heard. There would be a difference.
Mad, completely mad, I decided. But perhaps it was a better, more hopeful madness than our usual lot. Perhaps that was why I never got around to killing her.
I left. They paid no attention to me. It was just a story. I wasn’t necessary to it anymore, nor it to me.
A name would come out of it, I knew. Another damned name they’d call me by when my back is turned, a name that they’d tell stories of. But the name wouldn’t be me. The name would belong to something they wished for, something they looked up to, a hero, a leader, a saviour.
I was none of these things.
And so, there’d just be another name, with no one to bear it.
At least, I thought, they’d stopped telling that stupid Gnome story.
My wrists still ached. I wondered if they would ache for the rest of my life. I lead the Prince down the streets to the docks. But he was not a Prince any more.
He had no name. No eyes. No tongue. Blood seeped slowly from the scab between his legs as he walked. His mother walked with us, guiding his right hand. Tashifar, the Arukh, walked on his left. His father could not find the courage to walk with the thing that had once been his son.
It had all fallen apart. The Dwarf Totems, appalled, had abandoned the Snow Leopards, who’d fallen into ruin. The Horsemen, divided and dispirited by the disgrace of their Prince, and without the support of the Snow Leopards, had been unable to hold the Human kingdom. It had dissolved into a welter of competing factions. The Horsemen were still there, but they were no longer a power. They were merely players now. Perhaps the Trolls would tame them. All I cared about Trolls was that they’d withdrawn their Interdict. I supposed they still had a use for me in the strange games they played with our lives.
There was a boat waiting for us. A long, flat boat with a single Ublul Selk to guide it. I nodded to Slal. How had I ever reckoned that the Ublul looked alike?
We sat the lost Prince within it, and then I got on. The Ublul polled off and I watched the dock recede with the two of them standing on it.
We arrived at the centre of the Selk domes, at a landing that was more of a nest of rafts moored among the crests of underwater domains. I looked around. Here, the Mermaids had told me, they had sent Mira on her journey to the sea. There were Elders to meet us.
They helped the lost prince from the boat. Through it all, he did not make a sound.
“Will you kill him?” I asked the Speaker, almost wishfully.
“What would it serve?” one of the others asked me. None of them had spoken directly to me before.
“Mira is dead,” I said.
They nodded but didn’t understand.
“He killed her,” I said. “He did terrible things to her.”
“He can do no more harm. Why make more death in the world? There is enough suffering already. Perhaps we can lessen it.”
“I don’t understand you,” I told them.
But they only smiled at me. Then the Ublul took me away.
“They have given him to us,” Slal said trying to explain for me, “for our justice, because by the way they see things, he is owed to us. But we will preserve his life. No one else, not even his own people will promise him that.”
“He has no people,” I replied shortly. “In his heart, he was always alone. There was no one in his world but him.”
There was no reply at first.
“That is a sad thing,” Slal said eventually.
What made him that way, I wondered. Had he somehow been cast out as he had cast out his sister? Or had he, like the Arukh, been born alone.
One last time, I went to the Mermaids’ Dock. The murder had brought me here in the beginning. Murder was not part of their world, it was a savage intrusion. It didn’t belong among them. I would give them the end of the story, and then trouble them no more.
I just sat there and waited patiently. Eventually, they came. With the setting sun, they came.
“Hello,” he said. It was the young male I had first met. Gari.
“Hello yourself,” I said sadly.
The rest slowly arrived.
I told them what had happened. How I had found Mira’s killer. How I had been hunted and trapped. How in the end, his own people had turned against him. I told them how his people had cast him out, and how their people had taken him in.
They seemed to understand this, when I did not.
“Don’t you care about Mira?” I asked them.
“Yes we do,” one told me. “We loved Mira. But now she has gone. It was important that the harm be stopped. It is over now. There is no need for more harm.”
“Let him live,” another counselled. “Perhaps he will become better. Whole.”
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