Lilly departed, and seconds later, the riders appeared on the horizon, in the hundreds. The village was outnumbered in addition to being outmatched, and as the enemy began to take shape, Zack saw that they were in no great hurry. Clearly, they would dictate the terms of the battle.
“All right everyone,” Lucky trumpeted, as loudly as he could, “I know something about dogs, and I know how we can beat them. When they attack, they will attack with their jaws first. So hold your weapons close and wait until the last minute, at which point you will have a chance to spear them directly through the neck.”
Sacat grimaced.
“If they are upon you, and you have no other defense, try hitting them in the nose or screaming in their ear – they have very sensitive hearing.”
“That will be enough,” Sacat growled. “My men have been fighting the dogs for many years before you came, and they will continue fighting them for many years after you have left. I am the commander here, not you.”
Lucky was quiet. Then, much to everyone’s surprise, so were the riders, who halted one mile away from the barricade, only to wait in deathly silence. For several long minutes, nothing happened, and Zack shuddered. Then, just when he thought he couldn’t stand it anymore, the howling resumed, louder than the banshee, thicker than thunder – hundreds and hundreds of brutish, visceral, animal voices – driving away the last remaining traces of any religious faith that still clung to the village. Then, more silence. Then, in unison, the riders began their devil’s prayer: “Hrash og! Hrash og! Hrash og!”
A great wail went out from the village, and the riders advanced once more, chanting louder and louder: “HRASH OG! HRASH OG! HRASH OG!” Zack tightened his grip on his makeshift shield. He knew the meaning of the words as well as any of the villagers, but nothing that God could have taught him would ever have prepared him for the experience of hearing them in that way, uttered by those men, in that accent. “Hrash” meant dog, and “og” meant meat. “HRASH OG! HRASH OG! HRASH OG!” The chant reached a fever-pitch, and the army advanced directly toward the barricade, as if to say, ‘We do not care: build your fences; try as you may; we will stampede all like lava over dandelions!’
The men clutched their swords and spears, and Zack glanced to his right, noticing soldier Klatu for the first time, out of his element, gripped in bald, unabashed fear.
“Zack,” Lucky whispered, “is Sacat going to say anything to rally the troops? Look at them, they’re petrified.”
“I don’t know. He should.”
The army stopped about a hundred yards away, and the men waited.
“Well I can’t take this anymore,” Lucky said. “All right men,” he bellowed. “On this day, the enemy is great, but remember that what we fight for is –”
“Silence, you fool!” Sacat barked, raising his arm, and with it, the bows of several of his archers. “I am Chieftain, not you. One more outburst like that, and it will be your last.”
Lucky stood down, and Zack turned back to the enemy, and a sight that defied all logic. It was something from a dream – a chilling, otherworldly apparition that somehow, more than anything else that he had seen since leaving the world of subways and coffee stains, knocked him back to childhood, where any wonderful or horrible thing was possible. It was a single rider, shadowy in the sun behind it, moving across the army’s front line… in the outline of a coyote riding another coyote.
Zack was bewildered, but as he quickly discovered, the rider had a very human voice, and nothing about him was suitable for children. “I am General Kerberus!” he announced. “I am terror personified, and I give you this one last chance to save yourselves. Defectors, come to my army, and you can be the hrash rather than the og.”
One lone villager sprinted across the barricade, and with a downward stare and a callous flick of his left hand, Sacat gave Sot his orders. The young Captain looked back at his Chieftain, and for half a second, almost imperceptibly, squinted his eyes as if to question why the task had fallen to him. Then he took off, catching the runner exactly halfway between the barricade and the hostile army to claim him back for the village. Once his sword was red, and there were no longer any defectors, he turned to head back. But it was too late. Kerberus was there, and as Sot raised his sword to the neck of Kerberus’s canine steed, Kerberus swung his sword downward and deflected the blow, and the coyote’s teeth found Sot’s flesh.
The coyote was the most terrible and magnificent beast that Zack had ever seen. It was six feet of towering menace with bulging muscles; dagger-sized teeth; pointy ears; grey, white, and brown fur; and ghostly reptilian, yellow-green eyes. It moved quickly and powerfully, and Sot screamed in agony as it ripped the muscles off of his bones and dug into his bowels, while Sacat did nothing. Surely it could have easily taken Sot’s throat first, but surely Kerberus had trained it not to – for moments like this.
Yes, Kerberus told no lie when he proclaimed himself terror. He was in fact a man, but a freakishly large, strong one, with leathery, sun-stained skin covered in scars, shining black armor befitting of an ancient Greek champion, and of course, that one article that did not appear in any history, legend, or fantasy that Zack had ever come across: his coyote-head headdress. It was real. And, except for the human face looking out from the dark shade between its jaws, approximated the visage of the wild animal that served as Kerberus’s legs with disturbing gravity – right down to those haunting, yellow-green eyes.
When the dog had finally had his fill, Kerberus spoke again. “Where is the Chieftain? Where is Sacat?”
Sacat slowly climbed to the top of the barricade. “I am here.”
“Listen carefully. I will offer King Sork’s terms only once. My army will spare the rest of your men today, and your village, if and only if, you give me the fountain… and the Makains.”
No one spoke.
“Well?”
“I accept,” Sacat said. And then, not more than three seconds later, at least a dozen men behind the barricade dropped to the ground, limp, unconscious, and useless, like so many empty puppets. The men looked all around them in panic. Then another dozen dropped. They were the male volunteers, fleeing back to Heaven.
“Oh my brothers, how can you abandon us now!” Klatu cried, to Kerberus’s ignorant laughter.
Then Zack rotated his head and found five angry spears pointed directly at it, and his fear turned to sadness. Just yesterday the villagers had been his guests in the Great Hall, but now they were his adversaries, and Zack and the other remaining Makains were caught between two armies.
Kerberus’s troops marched everyone into the village and ordered them to sit in a large circle in front of the Church. Everywhere were the bodies of the female volunteers, their operators apparently no braver than their male counterparts. Zack pushed his way toward Lilly and sat down.
“Zack, we have to do something,” she said.
Kerberus walked to the center of the circle and removed his grim hat to reveal a face as harsh as the surrounding desert landscape, and the villagers cowered. “Where is the head priest?”
Father Kai rose, unwavering, stoic. “I do not fear you,” he said, “for I am a Makain, and I know that after death, clear blue waters and skies await me.”
“Fear this!” Kerberus said, knocking him several feet backward with a fist to the face.
Then Lilly stood. “You will never silence us. We speak for God! We speak for justice! We speak –”
Kerberus drew his sword and paced to the spot where Tarta was sitting – her arms desperately swathing baby Klatan. “I am in control of this village now! You will be silent. You will do as I say. Or you will drown in each other’s blood.”
Lilly sat down.
Then Kerberus walked over to Father Kai and handed him the sword.
Father Kai looked down at it in his hand; then he looked back up at Kerberus.
“Try it,” Kerberus said, with an ominous smile.
Father Kai did not move a muscle.
“Now,�
� he said, pointing toward the Church, “run my sword through each one of those pretty blue windows.”
Slowly, calmly, and without emotion, Father Kai sent each one of the watery images splashing to the sand in blue, green, and white fragments.
Then Kerberus snatched his sword back and pushed Father Kai to the ground. “Now, where are the Makains?”
“Kosos,” Sacat said, “come forward.” Her face trembled. Nevertheless, she named each and every Makain in turn, starting with the Church leaders, and finishing with the children. As she spoke, Kerberus’s men chained them up, ankle to ankle, wrist to wrist. There were nearly seventy of them; only one member of the congregation was missing.
“Santar!” Sacat screamed, as loud as he could. “Where is the little boy Santar?” No one knew, and this was one of the few silver-linings that Zack could find. The other, was the fact that Kosos did not name Tarta and Klatan. Thank God they had never officially joined the Church.
The entire crowd waited while several soldiers and villagers unsuccessfully searched Santar’s house, but he was worth no more effort than this, and soon, Kerberus and his captains were examining the fountain while Sork’s other minions tormented the prisoners. They laughed, jeered, poked, and prodded, and one of the more creative ones even used black war paint to smear legs and jaws on the dolphins adorning the Makain’s clothing, so as to change them into coyotes.
Zack, chained behind Klatu and in front of Santanodis, Santar’s recently converted father, distracted himself by counting the remaining volunteers from Heaven. There were only five: himself, Father Kai, Lilly, Lucky, and remarkably, Debbie Parsons. Wow, Zack thought, that little guilt trip Lilly laid on her really took its toll.
When Kerberus returned, his men affixed large animal-hide backpacks to the prisoners. Then they marched them through the Great Hall, where they filled every jug and canteen they could find and loaded them into the backpacks. The weight was crushing; Zack felt like he was carrying a hundred pounds.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Kerberus said to Sacat, as they were finishing, “I’ll take your woman too.” They chained Kosos to the group, and Sacat did nothing, even when one of the men approached with a backpack to Kerberus’s, “No, I think I’d like to keep this specimen in good condition.”
And then they left, up the main road and through the village. And as they drudged onward, past the place that for most, was the only home they had ever had, to the emptiness that awaited them, Zack saw little Santar darting between the windows of a house that was not his. He must have been robbing it.
18
“Where are they taking us?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say Sorkium.”
“Is that the capital?” Zack asked.
“No,” said Klatu. “It is rumored that there are at least a dozen Sorkiums, and the one that I think we are headed to is just the closest city in the Empire, an outpost really – at least to Sork.”
“How long will it take to get there?”
“That I couldn’t tell you; I have never traveled that far from the village.”
The prisoners marched north into the formless void that was the desert, and the village behind them slowly turned into a little orange-green dot. They talked very little, and there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
When night came, the soldiers stopped the convoy and set up camp. They pitched tents and built little cooking fires, over which they roasted strange meat as they laughed and drank from their canteens – but none of that was for the Makains, and Zack and his companions spent the evening watching them from the darkness in silent hunger and thirst. When the soldiers finished, most retired to their tents, and the prisoners tried to sleep while a few guards walked up and down the line to make sure that they were not sneaking any water from their backpacks. Lilly was much farther up from Zack, with the women, and Zack had no way of communicating with her.
They began moving again at dawn. The sun was in full force that day, grandiose and arrogant as it climbed to its perch atop the Limbean universe, at all times showering them in its weightless yellow poison. When it reached its objective, and the sky and sand baked until blurry, the soldiers stopped the line and finally gave the Makains a small ration of water. It was not enough. Zack was already dehydrated, and his head was pounding. How long, he wondered, could he possibly endure this?
After the break, Zack tried to make conversation with Santanodis. “So, Santar told me that you taught him about animals and how they struggle for survival. Back in Hawaii, I spent some time studying the natural world myself, before I pursued a career in business.”
“How dare you speak Santar’s name to me… my beloved child, whom I will never see again because of you.”
“Santanodis, I am so sorry. You have to believe that I never meant for any of this to happen. If there was anything at all that I could do, I would.”
“You could break these chains and summon a flood to destroy the soldiers. Or does Makaio’s magic only work when you are trying to collect donations or sell Klatu’s cacti?”
“Santanodis –”
“How did you pull off the fountain illusion by the way?”
“I didn’t, God makes it work.”
“Yes, that is right. He makes the fountain work, but only in that one room, completely under your control, and no one has ever seen what is under that ground. Truly, the only thing that I do not understand is why Sacat would let you keep control over a hidden spring.”
“Santanodis, believe me, I know that it’s difficult to accept things solely on faith, but I swear to you that Hawaii is a real place and that someday you, Santar, and your wife can be reunited there.”
“Oh now you bring my wife into this? All right then, let’s talk about my wife. Let’s talk about her. We fell in love when we were each in our fifteenth year; she was the first person that had ever shown me any kindness in my life. Her parents did not want us to marry because I was too young and too poor to provide for her, and when her father found out, he and I nearly killed each other in a two-hour brawl.
“In the years that followed, I worked day and night at my trade, tool-making, to save enough silver for children. I slowly gained my father-in-law’s respect, but my wife and I were unable to conceive, even as each of us entered our nineteenth year. We prayed to God. We prayed to Makaio. We visited the shamans in the neighboring villages and prayed to their gods. And yes, we even prayed to the Devil. And in the meantime, all four of our parents died, and we were left with only each other.
“Then, finally, by some miracle, we had Santar. He and his mother are my entire life, and I will never see them again. You, with your lies and false promises of Hawaii, took them away from me forever.”
“Santanodis, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. If only there was something I could do.”
“I don’t want you to say or do anything. I just want you to listen and to know how many lives you have destroyed.”
“For what it’s worth, I think Santar loved you very much.”
“Roarglvuk!” This was the most vile curse in the entire Limbean language.
The march continued. The soldiers did not feed them on the second night either, and Zack’s headache accelerated. His throat was sore, and his lower back ached from the weight of his load. If he had been alone in this predicament, he might have vanished to Earth or disobeyed the soldiers so that they might kill him. However, he owed it to the villagers, whom he had led to ruin, to stay alive as long as possible.
The next morning, clouds appeared on the distant horizon, and the entire procession stopped, as every soldier and prisoner got down on his or her knees in silent prayer, facing the clouds. Even the coyotes, at the soldier’s direction, lay down and were still. This was the first time that Zack had ever witnessed this spectacle. “What are they doing?” he whispered to Klatu.
“They believe that the clouds are the spirits of their dead ancestors, who roam the skies collecting what little water trickles through the holes of t
he great glass sphere so that they may bring it to the living as rain.”
“Interesting.”
“Yes, and they believe that the wind,” he continued, putting his index finger in the air, “is the Devil’s breath, as he tries to blow them off course. The prayers help the spirits overcome the Devil, but I’ve always thought the whole thing was a bit of a fiction myself – especially after I learned that our ancestors are really in Hawaii.”
“Yes, well, I guess you can’t blame them for trying, can you?”
“Not at all.”
The march continued. The prayers were not successful in attracting any rain, and Zack’s dehydration got worse. He was dizzy. His feet hurt. His head throbbed with every pulse of blood that surged through it, and his entire torso was wrapped in dull-dogged back and stomach pain.
From this point forward, they took few breaks. With little water and no food, there was no longer much need for the Makains to relieve themselves, and the soldiers certainly did not care about letting them rest their backs and feet.
That night, which was the third night, Zack felt a deep and painful emptiness in his stomach that made him think of the starving children in foreign countries that he, God, Lilly, and Socrates had discussed in Heaven as if they were nothing more than a brain-teaser from the pages of his college philosophy readings, and a profound sense of guilt came over him. Why hadn’t he done more to help them in the days before God came? Zack had no idea that hunger was this physically painful, and he had only gone for a couple of days without food. He did not want to even begin to imagine what it must feel like to actually die of starvation.
The next morning, an enormous cliff came into view on the northwest horizon. At first, Zack could not see anything beyond its edge, but as the morning wore on, and they got closer and closer, the plain beneath appeared and unfolded wider and wider, and it became clear that there was no second cliff on the other side. It was not a canyon; Zack and the others were marching on a gigantic shelf.
The Alpha and the Omega: An absurd philosophical tale about God, the end of the world, and what's on the other planets Page 15
