The corpses in the cellar of Forte had no tokens, but they had plenty of company on their journey and left few behind to miss them.
∞
After the sharp turn downwards and the level passageway, Nanda and I found the remains of a fire-ravished skeleton at the top of the next steps. An ax blade was buried in its skull. I looked at Nanda, ready to suggest she go back. But she handed me a corner of her skirt and held another corner up to her own mouth and nose and stepped carefully over the blackened bones. Three more turns twisted the stairs and passageways that led down into the earth beneath Forte. As we reached the bottom of the last stairwell, we found a stone barricade blocking the way.
A small pile of stones left over from building the wall lay to one side of this underground antechamber. Nanda ditched her torch in a sconce by the doorway, picked up one of these stones and hurled it at the wall, shattering a section of cement and sending chips flying through the air.
“Sorry.” She mumbled, not at all contrite. “I had to throw something.”
“It’s a good idea. Let’s break it down.” I set my torch in the holder on the other side of the doorway and stooped to grab a stone from the pile. “Run up a few steps.”
My throw brought a few stones down where she’d broken their bond. She rushed down and as she hauled a rock out of the pile, I cleared a couple more from the small rubble and took them up the stairwell with me. After her throw, I let her collect two smaller missiles and retreat before I heaved mine. Soon we had a pile of ammunition in the stairwell and we wasted no time in battering the wall. Some wood splintered out at us as we cleared more of the wall and sometimes chalk would powder the air. We had a dusty cloud filling the room in no time and our retreats became as much attempts to get clean breaths out of the already thin air down there as to avoid injury.
We blindly attacked our unidentified enemy, fear overwhelming our senses and giving us the power to continue battering at that wall. With two hands Nanda heaved a large rock into the dust cloud and was showered with white powder as she inhaled after the powerful effort. A coughing fit dropped her to her knees and I dashed down to help her crawl out of the mess. Her face was a mask of white and as she choked and gasped to clear her lungs, I watched a myriad of tiny dots appear and wash down the white in streaks of bright red.
I grabbed my shirt from where I had dropped it farther up the steps and tried to wipe her face. She was breathing more easily now, but tears were still running down her cheeks and her eyes were squeezed shut against the blood from a cut on her forehead which was washing the chalk into her eyes. My first swipe at her forehead made her scream and fall away from me against the wall.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. I won’t do it again.” I tried to reassure her.
She reached out a shaking hand to stop me, breathing carefully. Her breath was the loudest sound in the dark air, but already I could hear a strange chatter invading the chamber which had previously been dead silent. Then she reached up and pointed to a spot on her forehead that was the mouth to a river of blood.
“That’s sharp.”
I wished again for a bucket of water, but reached up and probed around the area with my fingers. Looking closely, I could see a chip of something sticking out from the white. I knew I couldn’t get a hold of it with my fingers, so I leaned forward and put my lips against her forehead. She cried out as I took hold of the splinter with my teeth and pulled it from her skin. But I could hear the relief in her breathing as the wound cleaned itself, raining blood down along her nose. She pointed and I pulled out three more large shards and the blood washed the white from her face.
I didn’t tell her... I’ve never told her... that the shards…
The shards in her face and hand were splinters of shattered bone.
She was wiping her face with her skirt, kneeling on a step below me. I looked up from tucking her hair out of the way behind her ears. Over her head I saw beyond the wall we’d destroyed as the dust cleared and the powdered bone settled. I saw a pile of skeletons with rotting flesh. Nanda’s last throw had knocked over not the last of the stone wall but the first of a wall of corpses. The rats must have been scared away for a moment, but they were scurrying back to the feast now and I saw one squinting into the light of our antechamber. One torch had gone out in the attack. The other was as desperate for oxygen as we ourselves were. And I feared when the light dimmed the scavengers would come searching.
“We need to clean your cuts and get some fresh air and food.” I took Nanda by the shoulders and stood her up. “You head up, I’ll get the torch.” I tried to squeeze by her and hold her away from the chamber.
“I want to see what we’ve found.”
I didn’t let her turn. “Later.”
“Don’t you want to explore?”
I pushed her up a few steps, tensing my muscles against the heaving in my stomach, “Go, Nanda. Go.”
She quieted then. And with her bloody skirt hanging from her hands, she started up. I turned, looking down for rodents, and headed down the last steps to grab the live torch and touch it to the other. I left the one to deter the parasites beyond the wall, the other I held out for just a moment, hoping to see a clear tunnel beyond that initial wall of death. But for as far as I could see, there were bodies. A snake slithered out of the eye socket of a skull and snatched a rat that had been trying to chew through a bondring on a fleshless arm and Nanda screamed.
At that sound the boldest of the scavengers scurried back into hiding. I, who had been frozen staring at the crypt, turned, grabbed her hand, and ran.
We ran up and out of that tomb, out of the traveler’s antechamber, through the corridors of the castle to the fresh well of the central courtyard. We both asked answerless questions and screamed demands at our gods. We both cried and looked back with momentary stupidity, thinking to go back and drag some explanations out of the skeletons in the passage. We worked together, needing and shunning the touch of another living human. We pulled up the bucket. We drank and poured water over ourselves, washing away the blood and the stench and the vision. I scoured her face and hands to remove any more bone shards before she discovered them.
We both went a bit mad.
I wanted to leave right then. My reasoning was so we could catch up with whoever was responsible and kill them. Nanda said we needed to pack supplies before we left. To get to the kitchen we had to go through the traveler's antechamber. She said she would not go through there again that night. I agreed. She said we needed sleep. I agreed. So we went to our rooms with plans to climb over the wall as soon as darkness fell the next eve.
Eleven
∞ Nanda Junior’s journal ∞
Spring?
Forte, Kaveg
It’s funny.
Funny awful, not funny ha ha. I think back to my diary in Chicago, in Denver, wherever, the one back there, back then. I used to read it. Go back and read the entries. And I’d always sit there for a while and feel sorry for myself because I only ever wrote the shit down. I never wrote about things like the priest saying Eva looked too young to get married or Mama winning the civic award that Eva and I nominated her for or my winning first place in my first fencing match or Dad putting up the paper Stonehenge on my window so I wouldn’t be afraid of the moon.
But I read back this thing and all I write is the cool stuff. I don’t write about how much I miss Mama or the stars, my city stars; the nearly black sky and only the one or two stars of Orion’s shoulders strong enough to pierce through. God’s eyes, I grew up thinking, watching over me, taking notes.
Last night I couldn’t sleep for trying not to cry. So I got up and wrapped myself in that huge robe Geoffrey found for me. I stumbled my way to the courtyard, the stone one, not the one that was designed to be open to the sky, the one that was meant to be roofed. Meant to be hidden and to hide. I went straight to the far end by the lovers’ statue. I lay down on my back on the cobble and looked up through the clear air, up through the burned out, broken roof, up
through the distracting stars, at the two moons. A full moon but for one sliver and a new bondstar.
The stone arches hung across the moons like... a prison bar.
That’s Longfellow. Not me. Always someone else to say it better, huh? That’s right. You should always tell kids that someone else has already written what they’re trying to say. Tell the hormonally imbalanced girl who seems to have a male hand permanently attached to her ass, who wears her dad’s watch around her ankle cause the strap is too large for her arm, tell this kid, who’s previous emotional vent was beating up any boy who looked at her funny—tell her to read Kubla Khan or Dylan Thomas or, best yet, Dickinson. Start her with the classics before you move her into Sylvia Plath. Encourage her to research these socially incompetent drug addicts and suiciders.
I slammed a fist into my thigh. That brought the sky back into focus. The arches still cutting across it like the safety gate on my second floor Chicago studio windows. I’d lie awake bundled in all my clothes and blankets, pillows tucked up against my back. Hands tucked between knees pulled up to my chest, I’d stare through those bars at the moon. I’d mark its ascension against the lateral bars. I’d note its proximity by its apparent width against the lock. The rays would spill across its shadows and I’d hold up my cuts and bruises for the moon to kiss because Daddy wasn’t around to do it anymore.
I was eleven when he designed my little window so I could capture the moon. I was twelve when four kids broke into the monkey house during his night shift. I was thirteen when he told me to trust the moon to heal me. I was fourteen when he bled to death in that perfectly white bed in that perfectly white room, his hand looking like porcelain in the doctor’s black hand as he thanked him for the extra days, one of his few lucid moments in that last year. He turned to Mama and said, “when they're ready” and she nodded. He reached for Eva’s cheek, turned her face away from the bottles and wires she was organizing, made her look at him, and said, “You’re my good kid, keep it up.” And when his eyes, my eyes I was always told, turned to me, his hand fell limply back to the blanket, “Don’t hurt anyone, Baby Bird.” He paused, to catch his breath, to consider, “make life...” and he stopped.
His hand cooled to ice as we sat there, the three of us, waiting for him to finish his sentence, wanting for him to wake up, just one more time. It would have gone stiff there as well had Dr. Ed not physically escorted us out.
Tears poured down my cheeks, the salt stinging in my cuts, sighs in the place of sobs rushed through my clenched teeth, and my fingers grasped at the Earth as I lay there on the cold stone with the velvety rust-colored robe open at my sides. Moonrays draped across my breasts and my belly, my legs caught in shadow, when I heard a heart-wrenching sob and Geoffrey stood from his crouched reverie behind the statue and gathered me up into his arms. We cried ourselves out with no words.
Tonight, when our swollen eyes have healed, we leave for the dTelfur village.
Twelve
∞ Edling Geoffrey of Kaveg’s journal ∞
Denver, CO America
To be or not. What a question! The guy was talking about killing himself, but I can see it in a whole other light. I am and I am not. I exist, but where? And for what reason?
Last night Nanda took Kelly and I to see a play that she helped Faite choreograph. It was amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it. These people she tells me are actors, they pretend to be other people and they show a tale. They show all sorts of tales. They’re like our callers who tell and sing the tales of Kaveg’s history, but it's all so much more thrilling to see the characters.
I couldn’t follow what they were saying, but Nanda says the language is old and requires knowledge of a million even older tales to be completely understood. I know that the callers take certain liberties with their tales, but Nanda says that she doubts if any of the people in this play ever existed. She says it was dreamed up by a guy who lived long ago and far away across an ocean.
I wonder sometimes what life was like before the hike. When we lived across the water. Some callers offer tales of the fantastic landscape and continuous bloodshed, but since none of our ancestors wanted to remember, we have obligingly forgotten the most of our beginnings. Kaveg has her own peaceful history. So many of Kaveg’s stories are simple tales called to the elders at festivals and bonding or at Forte Night when my father said his grandfather demanded that all the local happenings of the frseason be recalled for him. Emjae would invite celebrated callers from across Kaveg and they would take the Forte people’s tales, the feuds, the births, the losses and the loves and they would sing them throughout the country. Nanda and I met one of these callers at the feast held for me in Sapproach.
∞
Scademann was ancient. Already old when Emjae was a babe, he said. His eyes were glassy sparkles twinkling out from between many folded lids. Seasons of laughter had engraved steppes of smile lines on his spotted and sagging cheeks. His shaking hands peeked out from his cloak, small holes having been crudely cut into the material to accommodate his incessant gesticulation. Most of the man shook, but his hands possessed a rhythm that was mesmerizing. He had found Girard to be a fountain of tales from Voferen and all the villages and countryshales he had visited during his time in the royal and roaming guarde and decided to travel with him to Sapproach and rest there until Girard ran out of tales.
“And each time I pack up to leave, the old boy pulls a new tale from inside his boot.” Scademann punched Girard on the thigh, then flexed his fist a few times, shaking out the small pain. “I should know better by now. The man’s a slab of rock, pure dragon’s hide he is and unflappable. But, when he calls a tale, there’ll be tears in your eyes.” He took a swig of whatever brew he was approving that eve, “Because he’s so dull! This man could make Chyell’s coronation dullsville. But facts! He’s got a mind for details this one. Boring details to hear him tell it, but details.”
Our friend Toss looked away at his bond Krt sitting on the railing by the house to hide his smile. He’d trained with Girard for a short while and had warned us of Girard’s preoccupation with precision. But there was no hiding from Scademann who sat like a prince in a bouncy revolving wicker chair anchoring the seating areas of the porch around Girard’s home.
“Yes, you see, young Elder Girard, that old guarde knows what I’m talking about. Can’t deny it to these folks. Do you know, Geoffrey, that this man knows more about the Lost Battle than any man living?”
Girard stirred for the first time interrupting his friend, “Not true, Scade. The prince will recognize the most of that tale. It was his tutor told it me.”
Scademann raised his glass, dismissing the objection, “Ah, but not with all the little details that you, and I as well, have gathered on our journeys from callers across Kaveg.”
“I’d love to hear the story, extra factoids and all.”
Scademann loved Nanda. “Ha ha, Factoids!” He loved to steal her words. “Since you insist, my dear, make yourself comfortable.”
He looked around at his audience, adjusted in his chair, and took a modest sip of brew. Then he ran a wrinkled hand through his thick white hair and looking off towards the Dormounts he began.
“For one hundred and five frseason after the Landers arrived here, they and the dTelfur lived in peace. Each human species avoided the other. Most Landers moved no closer to the dTelfur village than the forest homes surrounding Forte. And the dTelfur kept their dragons from feeding on Lander herds. Then, while hunting far northwest of Stray Tor, a party of Landers was startled by a sudden crashing in the woods. One man, Hardt, threw his spear and struck the hunting dTelfur woman clean through the breast, she died almost instantly, screaming for her mount to fly away. The distraught dragon ignored her warning and flew at the party to retrieve its mistress. As it flew away with her, it flamed into the forest, which burned for nearly a moon. The hunting Landers returned with a tale of dTelfur attack and Hardt’s brilliant defense of the helpless hunters. Hardt himself never spoke. He h
ad been stricken with love at the beauty of the dTelfur woman and one day soon after the anniversary of the event he vanished, never to be seen again.
"The seasons passed and animosity between the species increased. Dragons hunted closer to Lander settlements. Landers raided active dragonbeds for the easy meat stored there. One hundred and sixty-eight frseason after the hike, a pair of dragons swooped into a village and burnt down half the houses. Only one little boy escaped from the fire to bring his tale to the kimoet. A war party was organized to retaliate and the kimoet, Freyell and Geonn left their ten frseason daughter to lead the expedition into the dTelfur plains.
"Naturally, when they saw the war party from their high perches, the dTelfur organized to defend their home. Many say it was a spell gone bad, others insist it was for their protection, a few even suggest that the dragons went to sleep to keep the fight fair. Whichever it was, the powerful dragons curled up nose to tail surrounding the village and met with the sleep which holds them prisoner to this season. The Elder of the dTelfur was called Konifer and he was a good man. He paced through his ranks that morning checking weapons, judging his troops, and giving words of encouragement to those who needed them.
"One young boy stood amongst those ranks, his new wooden spear sharpened to an apple-thin point, his chin proudly jutting out. When Konifer saw me—you must understand, I take artistic license here, I’ve not quite a hundred and twenty frseason nor am I dTelfur—When Konifer saw me, he stood up straight, towering before me, and he marched me to the gates of the village where he posted me as sentry.
“‘Let no one pass until I return.’
“I watched as he marched grandly away to his place at the head of the troops. I watched as all the men and women of my village marched out to defend our home and our dragons from the Landers. I watched until they were out of sight. Then I followed.
“For five sunrises we traveled east towards the Lander army. The two armies met, neither prepared for a confrontation, on the land known now as Battlescar, but which then was simply the burned forest. The Landers were surprised to see us when they appeared at the edge of the burned forest across which we were marching. They’d seen no dragons overhead and assumed themselves unobserved. We had had no dragon reports and had no idea they were so close.
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