by Dyrk Ashton
But he’s more than that. The kind of guy who listens to you. Really listens. And with him, she gets the feeling that what you see is what you get. No bullshit. There’s still a mysterious air about him, though. And a sadness, she thinks, though he handles it well. Unlike I do mine.
Only in the last couple of weeks have the two of them had any semblance of a real conversation—about music, his year overseas as a volunteer relief worker, the paper he’s working on for the conference, sometimes Peter, but mostly about a whole lot of nothing important—which is nice, actually. Last week she finally bit the bullet and hinted they ought to go to dinner. Zeke looked stunned, then smiled and she felt like her feet would leave the ground. Last night after dinner it was she who suggested they get some wine and go to his place. He’s old enough to buy it, even if she isn’t. Third date, right?
I was too pushy! she suddenly blames herself—It’s all my fault!—then she counters—Stop torturing yourself! This is for the best, really!—Really?—Really!!!
There is something special about Zeke, though. She just can’t put her finger on it. It’s like an invisible string connects them, tied to something inside her—but that something is numb. She feels the tug, but what it’s tugging at she doesn’t know. She’s convinced, as cliché as it sounds, that when her mother died, something died in her as well. Her heart just doesn’t work like it should. It would make her sad if she allowed herself to dwell on it. Hell, she might be perfectly normal. Everybody might feel the way she does, all the time. But somehow she doubts it.
A voice comes to her, a pleasing lyrical tenor singing on the warm breeze. She looks up from the sidewalk and slows. The hospital is just ahead on her right, but a homeless man she’s never seen before sits hunched against the building between the corner and the entrance, the unlikely source of the sweet melody. If she crosses the street to avoid him she’ll just have to come right back, swipe her card at the door and make sure security sees her through the camera before they buzz her in. All the while he’ll glare at her, beg, say rude things or try to break her heart with some sad story. If he’s a decent guy, she’d make him feel ashamed. She resolves to continue on her present course and hand him some change.
As she comes closer, she hears the words of the song:
“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly,
I dunno why, she swallowed that fly,
Perhaps she’ll die!”
This guy looks bad even for a vagrant, and weird, in striking contrast to his beautiful singing voice. He’s small and stout, sitting with his back against the wall, knees drawn up to his chest, in gray trousers and black boots. He wears a tattered vest under a gray woolen jacket but he has two more coats, one black, the other gray like the first, with the arms tied around his waist. His clothes are sullied with ground-in dirt and God knows what else. The strangest thing, though, are his sunglasses—not just one pair, but four—each placed above the other from the bridge of his flat snotty nose on up over the brim of his grimy stocking cap. Each pair is a different size and style but all have reflective yellow lenses. He holds a torn cardboard sign with the nonsense Will Eat For Food scratched in what looks like dried blood.
The little hobo grins at her. His face is crusted in filth. Slaver froths on his lips, drips from his moldy teeth, runs down the forked and twisted beard that juts from his chin.
“There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
It wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her...”
Then the smell hits her. Working with the elderly and indigent in the hospital, she knows the sour odor people can have when they’re really bad off. Rot and infection, shit and death. But this guy is rank in a different way, like a corpse or rotting fish, or a corpse in a pile of rotting fish. Fighting the urge to retch, she tries not to breathe as she digs in her pocket for change.
“Here ya go,” she says hurriedly as she holds out the money, trying not to open her mouth any more than she has to in a futile effort to keep out the stench.
Still grinning, the homeless man completes the verse.
“She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
But I dunno why, she swallowed that fly...”
He reaches with his wretched right hand. It’s caked in black crud, and the last two fingers are missing.
“Perhaps she’ll die!”
At that moment a chill wind buffets Fi, and it occurs to her that the sun is gone. That fast. Just gone. She glances skyward to see black storm clouds tumbling in. She drops the coins into the man’s palm.
“Thankee, missy, thankee,” his voice creaks. “What be your name?”
Fi feels fixed by his gaze, even though she can’t see his eyes through his sunglasses. Disturbing, profane, violating her, body and soul. She doesn’t answer.
“Some folks,” he says with a leer, “they call me Max.”
And the rain hits, icy cold, which comes as a shock in itself, but then thunder cracks, startling the hell out of her. She turns to run to the hospital door and the portico that promises cover—but the man’s three-fingered hand clamps onto her wrist.
The coins he’s dropped bounce, tinkle and spin on the freshly wetted concrete.
CHAPTER NINE
Order of the Bull 3
The gate to the secret elevator rises. A slab of stone slides aside, revealing a wide lamplit hallway running to the right and left. The three young monks remove their shoes while Tanuki exits, but stay timidly where they are until Tanuki bows and invites them in. “Welcome to our humble abode.”
Down the hall to the right are Tanuki’s, The Rhino’s, and The Bull’s personal chambers, as well as The Bull’s private library, and a vault—their personal armory—but Tanuki leads the monks to the left. They hear low voices ahead. Tanuki motions for them to wait. He sets his backpack down, pads quietly to the end of the hall and listens.
The voices coming from the next room are the calm clear baritone of Asterion, and the agitated, rough bass of Arges. This is a conversation Tanuki has heard before. Arges can be quite single-minded and the subject is close to his heart, one that has made him prone to periods of depression of late.
They aren’t speaking in Turkish, but Minoan, the language of ancient Crete. They tend to use it when in private conversation, even when they’re entirely alone. Tanuki understands the words with ease.
“Only two hundred and seventy-five remain,” Arges grumbles. “Just two hundred and seventy-five, of an entire species.”
“It is unfortunate, of course,” Asterion replies, “but we’ve seen it countless times. Species come and go.”
“But these are Sumatran Rhinoceros,” Arges retorts, “direct descendants of my mother’s kind. They are my brothers and sisters.”
“Tanuki and I are your brothers as well, and this is a journey from which you could possibly never return. What will you do, wait in the woods for poachers, then jump out with a roar and scare them away?”
“I will smash them! Pop their skulls like grapes!”
“Then what? Do you believe for a moment you would fool anyone by cloaking yourself in human form? An enormous hulk of a man with one eye, wearing a horned helmet? Would you hide behind a tree? Cloak as a boulder in the tall grass? Run away? The watoto have eyes in orbit, surveillance equipment of types we have not encountered in all our lives. They would acquire your image on digital cameras and share them with the world. They would hunt you down, and they would capture you.”
“Let them try!” Arges snaps back. “At least I would cause a ruckus, bring much needed attention to this travesty!”
Asterion tries a different approach. “If your existence were to become publicly known, the last thing any mtoto would be thinking about are a few wild rhinoceros.”
Arges harrumphs.
“They may not be able to kill you,” Asterion asserts, “but it’s possible, with the technology they have today. Worse, perhaps, they might not kill you. They have cages, bunkers, that perhaps even you cannot escape. What then? Expe
riments? Maybe you would be put on display. I can see the headlines now, ‘The Cyclops Lives.’ Only not in the Enquirer this time, but on the covers of Time Magazine, National Geographic, scientific journals. You would undoubtedly be questioned by some diabolical method that may be impossible to resist. Have you considered what trouble this could cause for the rest of us remaining Firstborn?”
Arges’s voice loses its emphatic tone. “It’s our fault, you know.”
“Yes. In a way, it is.”
Tanuki wonders, what would the watoto think of Arges if they caught him? What would they really do to him? Tanuki isn’t overly concerned, however. Asterion’s level-headed logic will prevail, as always. It never stops Arges from arguing, though. He likes it, and Asterion humors him. These two have been friends for a very long time and lived through much together. They know exactly how to deal with each other, to placate—and how to push each other’s buttons.
Tanuki also has something in his purse he hopes will help, paperwork formalizing the creation of a non-profit organization for the preservation of wild rhinoceros, funded by Tanuki and Asterion to the tune of three hundred million U.S. dollars. A contact from Istanbul surreptitiously passed it to him at the bazaar this morning. Tanuki will present it to Arges today. He can hardly wait.
From around the corner comes the defeated voice of Arges. “What have rhinos ever done to anyone?”
“Nothing, brother, nothing,” is Asterion’s simple but sympathetic reply.
Tanuki hears Arges shuffle across the floor. He takes his cue and waves the monks to him.
Tanuki enters the main chamber, the young monks in tow. This is the area of the Lair of the Bull where Tanuki, Asterion and Arges spend most of their time during the day. “Chamber” is hardly the right word for it, though. It’s a cavernous hall, 60 feet wide and 300 feet long, with a forty foot high barrel vault ceiling, carved into the living limestone of the mountain, polished smooth. Doric columns line the walls. Between each is mounted a lit gas lantern.
Tanuki steers the monks to the right, where a stone counter partially separates the hall from the kitchen where Tanuki prepares their one meal each day. He bids them to place their parcels in front of the counter and enters the kitchen.
Arges has been cooking, he notices, setting down his backpack. Fumbling my fine cookware with his big fat finger-stumps. Asterion also prepares meals on occasion, but he never leaves paprika spilled on the counter, a tipped salt shaker, containers askew on the shelves and open on the counter, or burnt rice stuck to the bottom of a pan on the gas stove. Asterion would never burn rice in the first place. At least Arges turned off the stove this time.
The monks have everything neatly piled and stacked when Tanuki steps back around the counter and are anxiously adjusting their robes and straightening their sashes. Tanuki looks them over. They gaze back expectantly, show visible relief when he smiles and nods. Tanuki retrieves a rolled carpet from a stack and they follow him into the main hall, straight and proper, bare feet padding on the polished floor.
The hall is sparsely decorated, the scant furniture made of the same stone as the hall itself, including the sets of free-standing shelves of books and pottery arranged in a sensible manner to “break up” the vast expanse of floor. There are only a few chairs, but here and there are low stone tables of various sizes with cushions lining each side, and Turkish carpets piled with pillows.
Asterion sculpted all of the furniture, as well as the hall itself, which he cut from a mere crack of a cave when he first came to this place so long ago. It isn’t austere, but there aren’t a lot of frills, either. It’s clean, organized, practical, solid, strong, and balanced, just like Asterion himself. The open layout was chosen for more than aesthetic reasons. Having to move around indoors with horns on one’s head was also taken into consideration.
A third of the way to the end of the hall, on the right-hand side, is a large hearth with an arched mantle. Another third of the way down, on the opposite side, is an identical hearth. Natural gas fires blaze in both. Heat and cold have little effect on Firstborn, but Asterion likes the ambience.
Opposite the furthest hearth, a hulking black figure crouches over something on the floor near the right hand wall. Tanuki makes straight for it. He can sense the nervous excitement of the monks behind him. Even the High Priests and Abbottess see Asterion very rarely, and the rest only once a year, in early May, when he comes down and addresses all of them for about fifteen minutes, then disappears back into his Lair. Very few are ever admitted into the Lair itself. A week ago a lottery had been drawn so that those who would accompany Tanuki to The Bull’s chambers after the bazaar would be chosen fairly. The high priests and house staff didn’t enter the drawing, leaving it open only to those who might otherwise never see Asterion’s quarters. The monks trailing Tanuki are the three who won. They can barely contain themselves. It wouldn’t surprise Tanuki if they peed their robes.
They hear a scraping sound as they approach, like stone being drawn along stone in long even strokes. It’s accompanied by humming, in tempo with the scraping, slow and low. The sound of contentment.
Tanuki stops ten feet from Asterion, who’s facing the opposite direction, crouched over a long column of marble. The monks silently line up next to each other behind Tanuki, each holding their hands folded before them. Now they see the source of the scraping sound. Asterion is carving flutes into a new column, using nothing but the thumb-hoof of one enormous hand.
“Aster, I’m hoooome,” Tanuki says in English.
Asterion ceases humming, but they hear his breathing. Deep, extended breaths, the sound of air passing through a mountain fjord or wind making its way between the trees of an open forest.
Tanuki clears his throat. “I mean... Your Majesty, I have arrived.” Asterion hates to be called “majesty,” “highness,” or any other kingly term, but Tanuki can’t help himself. “And we have guests. Scheduled guests.”
Still facing away from them, Asterion rises and claps dust off his hands, which sends a sound like cinder blocks being banged together booming through the hall.
“The Little Brother returns,” he welcomes Tanuki in proper British English. He turns around—and there he is, The Bull, in the flesh.
Tanuki hears stifled gasps from the monks, who remain meekly behind him. He can’t blame them. Even after all the years I have known him, Asterion still has to be one of the most impressive beasts on this earth.
At just over eight feet tall, The Bull towers above Tanuki and the three monks, a monument of muscle, hoof and horn. His face and broad head are those of a natural bull, his horns creamy white with swirls of silver-gray, a full five feet long apiece, ending in fine points that face straight ahead. The lobe of his furry left ear is pierced, where a faceted blue garnet held by a sturdy golden stud glitters in the lamplight. He surveys them with his great brown eyes. Tanuki always feels transfixed by that gaze, framed in those horns, like Asterion is pointing at him or reaching to corral him—and The Bull rarely blinks.
From the waist up he’s built like a competitive mtoto weightlifter—but not the fat kind—with a V-shaped torso far more massive than any human’s could ever be, and a neck so thick it’s practically no neck at all. Short black hair that shines deep red in early morning and late evening sunlight covers his body. His legs are like those of a man, though much bigger, and his feet end in cloven hooves where his toes would be. A single hand could easily wrap around Tanuki’s whole head. Each of the fingers end in a single pointed hoof, like half of a cloven hoof. When Tanuki and the monks had approached through the hall, they had seen a dorsal stripe, sometimes called finching, running down the middle of his back, the same creamy white color as his horns.
The Bull has been known by many names over the epochs, and inspired myths and religious practices throughout the world. He was Apis in the Nile River delta of pre-history, Nandi to the earliest peoples of the Indus Valley, and in the Levant he was worshipped as Moloch (a name later besmirched by Ba
phomet The Goat, when he turned The Bulls followers to human sacrifice beneath Mt. Olive), to name a few. Most of the monks of the Order are descendants of disciples of The Bull from all three regions. He is also the fabled Minotaur, falsely vilified by wretched King Minos. Constellations have been named after him, as well as a sign in the western Zodiac. It’s no coincidence the vast mountain ranges that cross eastern Turkey, of which the Kaçkar Mountains where Asterion, Tanuki, and Arges now reside are a part, are called the Taurus and Toros Mountains. The name The Bull prefers, however, his Truename, by which he was known to the ancient citizens of Crete and has always been recognized by his fellow Firstborn, is Asterion.
The monks of the Order of The Bull know every name by which he has ever been identified and the story behind each of them. It’s with this knowledge and the blood of generations of followers of The Bull in their veins these young monks now face their “god.” Tanuki turns to them. Well, maybe not “face.”
All three monks have hit the floor and assumed the pachanga-vandana, the prostrate position of five-point-rest, bent forward on their knees with forehead, elbows and palms touching the floor. Tanuki looks back to Asterion, who rolls his brown softball eyes and heaves a deep sigh. The Bull is not particularly fond of the more submissive practices of the monks. He tolerates them only because the priests insist it’s necessary. Tanuki shrugs his furry shoulders.
“You have returned from your foraging, Little Brother,” says Asterion. “With friends.” He sees what Tanuki has tucked under his arm. “And a rug.”
“A gift for Big Brother,” Tanuki responds.
