by J M Hemmings
What had started as a confrontation had turned into an impromptu motivational speech; William wasn’t sure how or why it had taken such a turn, but he was glad that it had, and from the looks of deep contemplation on the teenagers’ faces, it seemed that they too were pleased that the exchange had taken this direction.
‘Thank you for everything you’ve said, William,’ Jun said. ‘I’m glad I came to speak to you.’
Chloe was blushing now, embarrassed at her earlier outburst and how misplaced her feelings about William had turned out to be, but she too had been inspired by what he’d just said. She was somewhat reluctant to acknowledge this but realised that it was only fair to do so.
‘Thank you, William,’ she murmured, unable to make eye contact. ‘Maybe I, uh, maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe I misjudged you.’
‘Most do, lass, and I don’t blame them. You’re good kids, and I don’t begrudge you for feeling the way you do … did. It is in the past now, I hope?’
Chloe, biting her lower lip, her pale cheeks aglow with starkly red heat, simply nodded.
‘Will you come and eat with us, William?’ Jun asked.
‘Not today, my friend,’ William answered. ‘My stomach isn’t quite ready for a regular mealtime schedule just yet. But thank you for the invitation, I do appreciate it. I’ll just sit here with this masterpiece of a novel for a while longer, I think. In the words on these pages I find the spectacular beauty of what the human spirit is capable of, in the face of so much darkness, and such crushing despair. It gives me hope … and hope is something that we all sorely need now, aye, that we all sorely need indeed.’
‘Okay William,’ Jun said, clearly a little disappointed. ‘I’ll see you later.’
He and Chloe left, and William watched them in contemplative silence until they disappeared into the sea of late summer foliage. He hadn’t planned or expected to say what he had just said; the words had simply tumbled out, seemingly of their own accord, after having been cold-stored somewhere deep inside himself. As he opened the novel again and leaned back against the warm, sun-baked rock, he wondered how many of those words he actually believed.
32
WILLIAM
2nd October 2020
‘My ribs are still aching, and I don’t think the bones have quite knitted yet,’ William said, ‘but I don’t mind the aches and pains too much. It’s the withdrawal that’s the real bastard to get through. But as tough as it bloody well is, I’m getting there, step by painful step.’
He was barefoot, dressed in a simple white tee shirt and blue jeans. The other beastwalkers were similarly attired in casualwear. Njinga’s fluorescent hair – now pink – was almost painfully bright against the earthy tones of the wooden walls and the simple furniture of the cabin room, and her eyes glistened with a subdued but intense sympathy; the plight of any wounded being always struck a deep chord with her. She leaned against the wall, catlike in her casual athleticism; hers was the feline grace of someone utterly comfortable in their own skin, and adding to the heat radiating from her eyes was an explosive energy crackling just beneath the surface of her skin.
William sat down on the floor, leaning back and bringing his knees up to his chest as he released a long, slow exhalation; inside him emotions crumpled, compacting themselves into little molten balls of searing heat, like plastic folding and blackening in a fire.
‘I’m sorry that you’re hurtin’. I really am, William,’ Njinga said. ‘But you needed to get your ass kicked like that. If that’s what it took to jolt you outta that coma of self-absorbed hedonism you were stuck in, then I’m glad it happened.’
Njinga never failed to unflinchingly speak the truth, as hurtful or ugly as it could be, and to do otherwise would be against her nature, and William knew this. He sucked on his lower incisors, and his immediate presence drifted off to somewhere else, as it often did. However, the familiar sensation that announced the presence of another beastwalker jarred him back to the present before he became too lost in his memories. Njinga felt it too, and she glanced over at the door as it opened. Zakaria, stern-faced and unintentionally overbearing, as always, strode into the room, and his hulking physical presence, with its leonine aura of sheer strength and compressed power, quickly dominated the space.
‘William, William, William,’ he murmured, the gentle timbre of his voice at uneasy odds with his imposing physicality. ‘I’m happy to see how much progress you’ve made these past few days.’ His single good eye sparkled briefly with warmth, but his rough-hewn features soon regained their resting expression of grim, uncompromising composure.
‘Thank you, old friend,’ William murmured, his gaze distant and detached, almost to the point of vacantness.
Standing in one corner, Lightning Bird, with his idiosyncratic reticence, observed the conversation play out without contributing. In his dark irises, however, a radiant sense of hope burned bright and hot. The silent intensity of his grave countenance was broken by the hint of a smile, a crinkling at the corners of the tall man’s wide, down-turned mouth; the kind of expression that serves as hard currency passed between the oldest of friends. Finally, he too decided to speak.
‘It pleases me, William,’ he droned, ‘to see you walking among the living, and not in the Shadow Forest.’
‘And I’m glad that you were able to pull me from its suffocating darkness, brother,’ William murmured.
Lightning Bird walked over to William. The tall man moved like a phantom through fog; he glided over solid ground as if levitating, moving with slick fluidity and effortless grace. His was not the boulder-like physicality embodied in Zakaria, but rather the omnipresence of mist around a thundering waterfall; it was as if he was everywhere at once, and all-seeing.
After kneeling, he placed two fingertips on William’s forehead. A surge of energy jolted from the shaman’s fingertips, and William felt his friend’s eyes inside him; gently exploratory, but not invasive. Rather, his presence was a calming, slow-spreading warmth, like a draught of aged brandy. After a few moments Lightning Bird removed his fingertips from William’s forehead, opened his eyes and stood up.
‘The damage was severe, but you are well on your way toward a complete restoration of health,’ he announced in his slow, deep timbre. ‘You will be as good as new in a week or two.’
‘Thank you, my friend. I can’t remember how, but I know in my bones that you were right there with me during the darkest part of the ordeal I went through.’
Lightning Bird, smiling, dipped his head and said nothing, but his eyes told William that he had indeed been there, that he had pulled him back from the edge of the abyss. Zakaria had been observing closely, and once he deemed that it was time to speak, he did so in a booming, proud tone.
‘My friends,’ he said, ‘we are some of the last satyaduta Council members left alive after centuries of war against the Huntsmen. For thousands of years they have hunted our kind, killing us off one by one. Even though so few of us now remain, we must remember that once, yes, once, we were far stronger than them. Indeed, once we stood on the cusp of victory. Once…’
Njinga fixed her gaze on Zakaria, and the dark pools of her eyes howled in silence, screaming of a brokenness of spirit as vast as the Sahara.
‘An’ now,’ she murmured hoarsely, taking over from him, ‘our kind, an’ so many of the family trees of our animal brothers an’ sisters who share this planet with us, hovers on one shaky, cracked limb, teetering over the edge a’ the abyss that is … extinction.’
William clenched his right fist and then covered it with his left hand, gripping it tightly. A blood-heating loyalty and a ferocious fervour of determination swelled within him; a stirring patriotism of sorts, but his allegiance was not to any nation of men. Instead, he gave his fealty to both to his brothers and sisters, in whose veins flowed the same enchanted blood as in his, and to all living things over whose heads the terrible blade of permanent extinguishment was threateningly suspended.
‘That has always b
een their aim,’ William muttered. ‘The complete annihilation of our kind, and unchallenged domination of all life on this planet. And they’re almost there, I’m sorry to say. The bastards are almost there.’
Lightning Bird now spoke up.
‘But they are not there yet. More of us remain than just us four. Many more of us. And we have allies among the mortals too.’
‘Let us not forget, though,’ Zakaria interjected, his broad face darkening with a deep and potent wrath, ‘about those of our kind who are vile, self-serving traitors, serving the Huntsmen under the banner of the Alliance, and the cowards who choose to remain “neutral”, even though this conflict will swallow up their lives as surely as it will ours. Bah!’ He paused here to curl his meaty hands into tight fists before continuing. ‘The Huntsmen and their Alliance lapdogs have the gall to call us “Rebels” – a label I wear proudly, if it means opposing those filthy, treacherous vipers. But never forget, my brothers, and my sister, that for all the darkness and hopelessness that prevails in these times of evil, we still exist. We who believe in the old ways, in the dreams of our fallen Council teachers, of what could have been … and of what could still one day come to be.’
Njinga interjected, turning her fiery gaze to William.
‘We still have Parvati, and you, Tiger,’ she said. ‘An’ we’d best not forget something else: the lost Mothers are still alive, an’ still out there … I can feel their breath on the wind, taste their living blood in the life-givin’ rain, an’ sense their souls throbbin’ with infinite energy when I walk through the oldest forests, those last few places on this planet that remain unmolested by … mortals.’
She spat out this last word with rabid vehemence, the bitter tang of it like a caustic poison burning the surface of her tongue; Njinga had always had a rocky, conflicting relationship with the world of mortals.
William sat in silence, turning away from their probing, voiceless pleas and demands as all three of them turned their attention to him. The paralysis of loaded expectations numbed his limbs and lowered its ponderous weight onto his chest. He had never asked for this. He had never wanted any of it, but almost two hundred years ago the machinations of fate had hurled him into this hurricane, this blizzard of insanity that had given with one hand and had taken with five hundred others. His old teacher, one of the greatest beings he had ever known, had always spoken of this “gift”, of how grateful William should be to have received the so-called blessing of being born anew into a new and more potent form of being.
All he could think of, however, was how it had brought nothing but ruin, destruction, estrangement, loss and death into his life. Near-immortality, an immensely detailed understanding of the mysteries of life and the universe, and the ability to transform his human body into that of a tiger … it all seemed like a poor trade off in terms of what the other end of the bargain had cost him.
‘Yes,’ he finally replied, his voice hoarse and low. ‘You still have me.’
Zakaria raised an eyebrow above his single functioning eye and crinkled his scarred face into a disapproving frown.
‘There is no time for self-pity, William. I know of the battles you fight within yourself, but do not make the mistake of thinking you are alone in those struggles. All of us have faced loss, tragedy, despair—’
‘Not like I have,’ William whispered, ‘not like I have.’
Njinga’s temper flared up with a whoosh, like a lit match touched to a trail of gasoline; intensely mercurial in temperament, she could swing from compassionate tears to wrathful words of contempt in mere seconds.
‘Don’t for a goddamned moment think that you had it the hardest of us, William!’ she snarled, springing to her feet. ‘Don’t you dare pull that self-pityin’ bullshit on us, not now! I was snatched from my husband an’ my children three hundred an’ twenty-seven years, two hundred an’ thirty days ago by slavers! Yeah, I still remember the exact goddamned date! I saw my people thrown overboard into the ocean, chained to cannonballs! I saw men starve to death, women raped, an’ children have their limbs cut off! I was raped an’ beaten senseless countless times by the monster in Louisiana who bought me an’ chained me up as if I was nothin’ but livestock! You think you have a monopoly on suffering, you selfish asshole?! Don’t you dare bring your damned self-pity out now, don’t you fuckin’ dare!’
Lightning Bird stood up, and at once the hornet swarm of tension in the air dissipated. A cooling calm came over the room, crowding softly in like mist entering through open windows.
‘We have all suffered greatly, my friends,’ he said, clasping his long-fingered hands sagely together in front of his bony chest. ‘I do not need to tell you how it came to be that I became the last of my people, the last Chimariko who still draws breath. That in itself is a tale of immense sorrow and tragedy … but what good does it do for me to measure it against your own experience of hurt and sorry, Njinga? Or yours, Zakaria? Or yours, William? We have all been hurt, we have all witnessed great violence and suffering and sorrow, and we have all been victims of it. It will do us no good to dwell on these things. We all know this, yet still we return to them, like maddened creatures drinking from a poisoned well, fully understanding that the foul, tainted liquid we imbibe is killing us, yet lacking the will and insight to move on in search of purer waters. Fresh water, however, is the only way in which we can heal ourselves and find new strength. We cannot continue to drink from the poisoned well and expect to be healed, to strengthen our minds, bodies and spirits. No! We must instead consolidate our strengths, learn from the pain, and look to the future. That is why we four have come here today, is it not? For the future … for the hopes and dreams of the past, now reawakened, reimagined, rewrought and reanimated! Is that not why we continue to fight, why we continue to defy the most powerful group of people on this planet?’
Zakaria walked over to the shaman, placed one of his thick hands on his friend’s shoulder, and gave it a solid squeeze.
‘Yes, my friend, yes!’ he exclaimed, his voice charged with fresh optimism and a burning hope. ‘You are right! Hope! The old dreams, born anew! Carried like pennants on shining lances into the future!’
William could not shake the darkness that clung to him like moss to old stone, but he knew that for now he had to try, or to at least weave a somewhat convincing illusion that a spark of hope still flickered somewhere in the depths of his soul. He looked up and his cheeks creased into a smile.
‘You’re right, my friends … you’re right. We four, and those others who remain loyal to the old ways and the dreams that once were, we are the last hope. And I’ll be damned if I let that last remaining light fade out with a quiet whimper.’
‘It ain’t gonna be no whimper,’ Njinga declared, a dazzling light gleaming in her eyes. ‘It’s gonna be a nuclear explosion. It’s gonna be the light, sound an’ might a’ ten million atom bombs all going off at once. The Huntsmen don’t know what’s about to hit ‘em.’
‘I’ve wasted all these years in exile,’ William muttered in a low, severe tone. ‘For far too long I’ve been running, I’ve stood alone, hopeless, jaded and scared, instead of taking my rightful place here with you, my Rebel brothers and sisters.’
‘And it took a brush with to death to bring you back,’ Zakaria said, ‘but here you are. Here we are.’
William’s countenance was grim, but subtle hope glowed nonetheless in his eyes, like the promise of a sunrise against a black dawn.
‘Aye, here I am. Before we go on, though, there’s something I need to tell you all. As you know, I fought and killed Hernández back in New York. Sigurd, I believe, sent him to track me down. Before he died, he said something strange: he talked about an ancient power rising in what he called “The Dark Land”. He spoke of the Ice Bear being involved in raising some sort of dark and potent power, and it somehow ending the Great War in a way that neither we nor the Huntsmen could have foreseen. He talked of it having a devastating impact on the world of mortals as well. I don’t
know what to think of all of this, but it’s made me rather concerned. What do they know that we don’t? And how has this, whatever this thing is, escaped the attention of the Huntsmen, not to mention ourselves?’
Zakaria furrowed his brow, stroked his stubbly chin and exhaled slowly through his teeth.
‘This matter is worrying, William, and it will certainly require further investigation. I’m very surprised that this has escaped both our intelligence sources and those of the Huntsmen.’
‘Whatever it is, it sounds big, and we need to find out a lot more about it,’ William insisted.
Zakaria clenched his right hand into a fist and snarled wordlessly in a gesture of sudden frustration.
‘If only the Eastern Council still lived!’ he growled. ‘They were by far the greatest of our kind that the world has ever known. They would have known exactly what to do.’ He paused to sigh and shake his head sadly, and his voice dropped to a gravelly whisper when he resumed speaking. ‘We cannot dwell on what has been lost. May the Great Mother rest the souls of our fallen teachers, our sources of light.’ He then transfixed William with a piercing stare. ‘You are the last who carries the fire of their full wisdom and knowledge, brother. And Parvati, of course, but … she is what she is. Perhaps someday she will be able to piece together the fragments of her shattered mind and regain the powers she once had, but we cannot cling to possibilities. We must trust only in certainties.’
