Of Beginnings and Endings

by Robert Adams

  "The leader of the steel-breasts, Deadly Spear's master, bespoke the old white-skinned man as he neared the group, demanding to know how and when and why he was trespassing upon lands owned by, given by the god of Rome to, the chiefs of Spain, Leon, and certain others. He was answered politely, Deadly Spear swore, in his own tongue and in such manner and terms that Deadly Spear's master abruptly changed his hostile behavior, telling all his followers as they followed the old man to his village that he thought this to be a very holy man; if not a true priest of God, then possibly one of a community of monks or anchorites, probably come out of Spain itself, since the old man's Castilian had been pure and idiomatic of Deadly Spear's master's own natal village."

  "But then the other type of accomplished warrior the steel-breasts call a knight, one who had come from the tribe ruled over by the great chief the steel-breasts call the Caliph, disagreed most forcefully with the Spanish knight, swearing that it had not been such a language the old man had spoken, but rather a purer Berber than he had heard since the first day he had set foot in Cuba. The two, recalled Deadly Spear, both were hot-tempered and had almost come to blows in debate on the subject before the party arrived at the village."

  ''According to Deadly Spear, they were all freely given all the fruits and vegetables and meal prepared in various ways that they could eat, along with the lightly fermented juices of certain plants. Enough of the strange stone huts built mostly below the level of the ground were evacuated by their inhabitants to house them, and all of the folk of that village—young and old, male and female—behaved toward these new-come strangers with courtesy and friendliness. The one who first had met them, who was called something that sounded to Deadly Spear like either Zagard or Zakairdot, was the chief of these people."

  "This aged chief, his son, called something like Calf of the Plain, and that younger man's woman, called only Servant of the Mare, often spent long hours conversing with one or the other of the warriors called knights."

  "Now Deadly Spear said that this group of marchers had all been near to exhaustion and starvation when they had chanced upon the old chief, having lost all their horses and mules in various ways, along with many of their supplies and some of their weapons. Only by dint of the efforts of Deadly Spear and a few of the kind of men the steel-breasts call criollos had they all had enough small game and wild plants to keep them alive that far. Therefore, weak as they had mostly been, it took them some weeks of plentiful food and rest to recover their strength. When they were all once more fit and healthy, Deadly Spear's master had assembled them all in the open space of the stone-lodge village and drawn his sword and declared that he was claiming the place and its rich croplands, fields, forests, waters, and any minerals in the names of his chiefs over the Bitter Water. He then called the old man to him, drew from his garments a thing that many of the steel-breasts wear about the neck, this one made of two bands of the yellow metal fastened one to the other as they do, and demanded that the old chief kneel before him and kiss that metal thing."

  "In his ever mild voice, the old chief said only, 'Serve and reverence your own gods as you wish; that is the natural right of any and every living creature. But I must follow the old way, my way.' Then he departed the gathering and all of his people, too."

  "When once the inhabitants all had drawn away some distance from their village and guests, the leaders of those well-served guests drew their followers close together and, in low words, told them that their hosts were none other than godless pagans, not true Christians at all, and therefore no evil wickednesses wrought upon or against them was or could be considered to be a sin, but rather a certain act of faith."

  "Then did they all commence to rifle all the stone-lodges, taking sacks of meal and shelled maize, nuts, dried fruits and squashes and beans, salt, honey, and gourds of the fermented juices. They found none of the metals they so strangely prize anywhere in that village, said Deadly Spear, only a few tools and ornaments of red copper and another metal whose name I misremember, now. When they had taken all that they wanted, they fired the roofs of the lodges and set out east and south, the way they had come."

  "Deadly Spear said that not all those of that village had been in it there, that morning; he said that some of those white-skinned men and women often were absent for days and nights, only to come back bearing plants of various sorts, rolls of bark, honeycombs, baskets of eggs, and the like."

  "The steel-breasts had been on their way only a few hours when they came upon a young man of the village walking toward it bearing a string of fish and a fish-spear. Ignoring his smiles and words of friendly greeting, these steel-breasts took his fish and his spear, struck him to the ground, and wreaked terrible and shameful things upon his body before hacking him to death with their blades. Then they marched on."

  "A few hours farther along that riverbank way, the marchers sighted her who was called Servant of the Mare bathing in a back water pool. The two called knights dragged the woman from the water and, while others pinioned her upon the grassy bank, used her body most brutally, one succeeding the other, until they were sated, then they laughingly encouraged all the other men to emulate them. The marchers willingly complied and the young woman died under them, yet they continued to abuse her dead flesh until it grew cold, they then cut off her head and hung it from the branch of a tree by its long, light-brown hair leaving her mangled, graying corpse where it lay splayed on the riverbank."

  "They made camp for that night only a few yards from where they had abused and killed the woman. After cooking and eating of the stolen fish and other foods, they set up a strong night guard and slept. Although Deadly Spear—who was one of the guards that night—says that there was no disturbance, no noises other than those that beasts make naturally, both the woman's body and the severed head were gone from the places they had been left when it once more was light enough to see these facts."

  "Lousy fucking motherfuckers!" hissed Arsen, "They're as bad as the fucking Cong or the goddamn NVA. I knew it must be a good reason to fight these fucking Spanish cocksuckers."

  "Yes," agreed the Micco, "it is but another example of steel-breasts' innate stupidity and wastefulness. A captive woman is a very precious thing, not to be so used, but to be brought back to work and bear children to the good of the tribe of her captor."

  "But there is more to the tale of Deadly Spear, Arsen Silverhat. He said that most of the marchers became terrified when it was discovered that the body and head both were gone, speaking often of walking, undead corpses, witches and demons called something that sounds like 'afreets,' but that the two called knights struck down some with their fists, beat others, and finally convinced them all that bears had borne away the corpse and head, for all that there were nowhere about that place the tracks of any beast large enough to have so done. Then they all broke camp and marched. Deadly Spear averred that it was full, broad daylight when they rounded a turn in the trail and saw standing before them the old, white-haired and bearded man who first had met them, the chief of the despoiled and burned village, Zagard, with no anger, but rather a look of intense sadness upon his face, bearing no weapons of any description, only his peeled walking stick. Expecting an ambush, of course, the leaders of the march halted in place and those behind crowded close to their rear, and so all heard the old chief's words spoken."

  "'Men of honor, you call yourselves, prating loudly and often of it, yet you own no honor, truly, you know not even the meaning of that word in any tongue. You all came to this land of peace tired and hungry. Here, the People of Peace took you in and fed you, cherished you, gave you rest and friendship, which was but another way of serving the earth, Mother of All Creatures. And how did you depart your benefactors?'"

  8

  "In a low but penetrating voice, in tones of infinite sadness, the old, bearded, white-skinned chief stood there alone on that riverside trail and bespoke the heavily armed steel-breasts," said the Micco. "Nor, or so averred Deadly Spear, could any just then find voice to
counter his or even to respond."

  "'You claim everything you see in the names of unknown chiefs and what you call God, yet you—who, in the sad fact that you do not even feel or understand gratitude for good acts done you, the simple gratitude felt by the humblest of beasts—truly only worship, reverence, a reflection of your own unnatural evil and senseless greed. When first I met you, I sensed this ancient strain of evil in you, yet I had hoped that living in peace among the People of Peace might loosen its insidious hold upon your spirits, that you might begin to become the good men you might have been, but I was proved wrong; too long have you been steeped in the deadly venom of that age-old evil. Such as that evil has made you, you steal things which would have been freely given you had you but only asked, you destroy for the unnatural love you take in destruction, you delight in the infliction of suffering and death upon other living creatures who had thought themselves your friends. You . . .'"

  "But then the master of Deadly Spear found again both his voice and his arrogance and lust for killing. To one of his soldiers, he ordered, 'Hernan, put a bolt into the belly of that viejo babaso.'"

  "The man dropped a quarrel into the slot of his crossbow and loosed, all in one smooth, practiced movement, but the bolt flew rattling off among the brush and little tree trunks beyond the figure of the white-robed old man, and his expression and stance never altered."

  "'Carcamal!' snarled the master of Deadly Spear, adding a whole plethora of obscene and blasphemous insults, while withdrawing from its water-repellent case at his waist a wheel-lock dag, but before he could prime it and span it, the figure of the old man vanished all in an instant as if it never had stood before them."

  "A hurried search could find no slightest trace of the old man or any other human thereabouts, nor was there so much as a single footprint in the soft, sandy soil of the path where he had stood. However, no sooner had the march recommenced, than he stood once more, berating them softly and sadly, in the selfsame spot, but now behind them."

  "Deadly Spear, who had been at the tail of the column of marchers, was brusquely ordered by his master to drop his load of sacks and spear the bearded old man. Dutifully, he obeyed, hurling the largest of his spears with his famous accuracy, and all of the watching men gasped to see the heavy spear pass cleanly through the white-robed figure and bury its sharp steel point in the soil behind that figure, which simply spoke on slowly, sadly, softly, with never a pause as a half-foot of steel and four feet of hardwood shaft passed completely through it."

  "This was when, said Deadly Spear to me, he came to the understanding that the old man was not really there where they all thought to see and hear him, but was most likely in trance state far away from that spot and projecting a semblance of his body, such as a few of the more adept men-of-powers of his own natal land had been able to do. His master, however, insensitive steel-breast that he was, did not understand that he faced no man of flesh and blood. Roughly pushing his way through the bemused marchers, he drew his long steel sword, raised it above his head, shouted a warcry, and ran back along the path. Then he stopped all at once with a cry of surprise and alarm, teetering upon the verge of a round pit that had opened before him when the old man had but raised his peeled stick of wood."

  "Now, Deadly Spear had dashed back to steady his master, and he stated that the pit looked every bit as real and solid as the old man, being about five feet deep and walled to about a foot above the ground with fire-blackened stones. Most of the bottom of the pit was covered in ashes and smoldering, smoking bundles of half-burned thatching. Visible near to one wall, however, was what was left of a pine-wood cradle, and within it was what was left of its infant occupant, one black-charred, tiny, claw-like hand still raised to seek, to implore the succor that never came. He knew then, did Deadly Spear, that this too was a projection, a projection of one of the subterranean lodges that the steel-breasts had first looted, then fired back in the village of the White-Robed Ones."

  "Because he knew that that which he and all the others of the marchers were seeing—or, rather, perceived themselves to be seeing—was not real, was only pictures cast before them all by the magic of a powerful, trained, and intensely disciplined mind, he alone did not scream and quake and befoul himself with his own wastes wrenched from out his body by abject terror when, to the right hand of the old, bearded white-skinned man, there appeared suddenly the gray-hued corpse of the fisherman the marchers had tortured and maimed and slain soon after taking leave of the blazing village. The empty sockets from which they had gouged the eyes stared at them, broken teeth grinning gappedly where the lips had been sliced away, the lower jaw hanging on broken hinges to show the stump of the torn-out tongue. Coils of gas-filled intestines hung from the great, gaping gash in the belly and onto the dusty ground between the toeless feet, decently hiding the evidences of the hideous outrages which sharp steel and cruel savagery had wrought between the legs of the dead man."

  "Deadly Spear stated to me that his master, save for one cry, had held to his courage in the face of the appearance of the murdered fisherman, simply gripping his sword hilt hard and staring at the apparition; but when the raped and brutalized corpse of the woman was all at once in an eye-blink there on the left side of the old wizard, her dead hands holding her severed head between and just below her tooth-torn breasts, the sightless eyes wide-staring and seemingly fixed upon none other save the knight himself, then did the steel-breast let go all his dung and water, begin to cry and whimper like a child in his terror and back stumblingly away from the grisly trio, his trembling hands held before him as if to ward them off, while his fine steel sword hung by its knot from his wrist, clean forgotten, its point trailing in the dust."

  "'Not all of you are so deep in evil as are others of you,' said the sad-voiced old man, 'but those who are the most evil have ordered and infected the rest, have dragged to the surface proclivities which without their baleful influences your spirits—those parts of you that are of the Universal Good—would have kept safely locked away in the furtherest recesses of your beings. Therefore, for all that you all have perpetrated evilnesses, I do not find it truly meet that all should be punished, though it is most likely that the Mother of us all will gainsay me in this regard and see the lives of others forfeit.'"

  "Then, said Deadly Spear, did the other one called knight say loudly, 'What recompense of us would you, foul, heathen witchman? We have little gold or silver among us all, precious little, but we will leave it for the death prices of those two and leave also the food and other things we took from your village.'"

  "Then did the voice of the old, white-skinned man become of even greater sadness, as shaking his bearded head, he said, 'Only life can recompense the snatching away of life. Besides, you only treasure the bits of soft, shiny metals; we People of Peace do not. The food would have been gladly given to you, so keep it—it will nourish some of you and impart to you strength for the long and arduous journey that lies ahead of you.'"

  "'But know you, honorless, ungrateful man, that stolen food will only nourish from this day the least evil among you. From this very moment onward, the bodies of those most steeped in evil will reject this food and any other taken from the Mother, retaining only unnourishing water, so that day by day will the evilest ones of you weaken and sicken as their evil-steeped husks waste away and at last die, that their spirits may return to the Mother and be once more cleansed in the Sacred, Healing Fires. Three evil men of you will die—life for life, as is the Plan—and with each death you still alive will receive a Sign so that you will know that the death is not happenstance or simply the chance Will of Her, but rather a part of the price to be exacted for the wrought evil.'"

  "Then, stated Deadly Spear, did his cast spear pull itself from out the ground where his cast had sent it, reverse itself, and fly fast and truly as if thrown by a mighty-thewed warrior to come at last to be imbedded at his feet, and the old white-bearded one said, in the very language of the tribe into which Deadly Spear had been born
, 'Take your weapon, black-skinned man, for it was cast by order of another. There is but little evil in you, so go in peace from this place. You will live more years, find freedom and happiness for yourself, and finally will die in honor, while combating that which you perceive to be evil.'"

  "The marchers had stood or knelt on the path during all of this, bunched together for safety, wailing, whimpering, crying and gasping prayers in their unholy terror and horror, but when it all at once seemed that the old man and his two ghastly companions were without moving somehow drawing closer to them, they turned, scrambled to their feet, and ran, screaming mindlessly along the riverside, all of them, the ones called knights and the ones called criollos alike, nor did they cease to run and scream until they had exhausted their abilities to do either and then they made to crawl and moan for some distance farther toward the east."

  The Micco tried to draw smoke from his long-stemmed pipe, failed, and after exploring the bowl with a horny forefinger, dumped the ash into the fire pit, then began to restuff the bowl with more of the homegrown, home-cured leaf. When it was stuffed to his critical satisfaction, he took the stem between his lips and made use of the disposable butane lighter gifted him by Arsen and now one of his proudest possessions. With it lit and drawing, he gravely handed it to Arsen and waited until the white man had had a puff before taking it back and filling his own lungs with the acrid but soul-satisfying smoke.