The Seven Days of Wander
Page 80
embrace from this full comprehension.Of void.
For now, again, he had lost something unaccountable. Unmeasurable for it was an intimate of himself as well.
It was as logical to grieve of just this loss as a drowning man deplores his life savings lost in the money bag that drags him down.
Things had died with her, of her, yet would not be buried.
Heart, soul, mind had lost the horizons of his physical body and deplored the universe in each other's eyes.
A fraternal devouring was this death. The brother is consumed with the sister.
Death of a loved carries away parts of the lover living.
Death of a loved one buries all of the lover living. Yet the physical continues drag like a chain into the grave. So that a few parts are pulled away; enough to call the living, human. But never whole. Voices remain unearthed. Her voices, some, walk even now in his breast.
A language of islands is whispered. To the passerby it is only wisps, smoke in empty horizons. To the islanders, it remains a clear sadness of broken peddles.
A long time, he grieved. The villagers shuffled; waited. His grief gnawing the ragged edges where their grieve remained as a hole; torn away by the still fresh raw of their act. Murders dispels, forbids any sense of loss. Or becomes in itself; senseless. Thus, the mind will not allow but holds to the act as justice or the mind becomes in itself: mindless. That entity of self-survival feels too feeble a means before such a powerful force as death to allow death to be called: random. Grief in the murderer is the acceptance of chaos as the primal god.
Finally, scraps of living gathered near the Beggar's hold; tugged at his mind; he rose with the blood, the only awakening as yet was that of his feet, ready to begin their task to the city. All else remained at her name falling away from his eyes.
His feet responded to the shudder inside and moved forward with a slow step.
Exas spoke as he saw the Beggar begin to move away, holding She in his arms: "Hold away, man. The mother is ours to bury and as well, your journey remains now with ours."
The Beggar turned toward the villagers, startling most. For the sun had sunk lower and came new behind the Beggar in the gathering dense of flame. Both himself and the woman carried crosswise to his body were a smear of red, white grey rags, a flow of her stained hair, his smudge red turban, faces both burnt in the colour of death, ash and blood.
An effigy of some terrible idol crossed; emerging out of dying fire.
The blood and tears mixed at his eyes to give a dooming sheen in his glare. A glow of hallucinating pink.
He spoke, low and even, with hardly a part in his teeth: "Who is the friend who lifts a traveller's soul weight? Who is the foe who holds a traveller's sole rise? Can such two hands breath of the same tongue?"
Before Exas could recover his mind from this unrational twist another villager spoke loud "Behold, tis a sign in his eyes, this man has the spirit of the mother!"
"Yes" said another. "The son is the gift from the old passage."
A shorter man added "True! Here are shoulders, young and worthy to the Stone; his vision filled with the task!"
A wide, fat lipped mouth exclaimed "Was it not to be written that 'In the pit, tools will be exchanged!' Look! He rises from her grave as one of hers and one of us."
More of the same milled from the crowd while Exas stood puzzled in this fate overturned, like a breath held in a tipping cart.
Held till the words 'new' and 'leader' became clear in the rubble settling before the stone. That brought his exclaim "WHAT!" He pointed at the Beggar "This is a shadow! The sun paints an image true but as flies to flee into it as some mere bloody gesture. We know nothing of him. He may well be a spy or a some flee of justice willing to return to city and barter our lives for his pay."
An older woman spoke back, out of the cant of her lowered lip "Exas, the great doubter, the village knows your love of stone and the righteous of your hesitation. But mad as the mother was, her heart was ever fierce; no wing beat of hers would carry a hyena amongst us. All others she found, she gave to the village. Only this man did she bring to stone first! Meaning he is first of stone!"
"Old fool! Reading signs in the stagger of ancient fevers, like a jackal calling the wiles of a three legged goat: crafty. We have slaughtered one outrage, do not raise another! Let us at least bury and mourn before we strip the body of our..."
"Enough. Enough." spoke out the Beggar. He lowered her body to the ground. "There is no need for words thrashing like oars beached. For I will lead no one. Indeed I barely follow myself." He opened his palm towards the body "I leave your altar to you. She was desert and will know rest or unrest anywhere. For perhaps the last desert is buried with her, like arms folded. The reach she travelled finds now the centre, the swirl of her horizons visioned; she consumes with the worms a unique world she created.
Stoned or not, in that she was god."
He looked among them, saw nothing. "I cannot replace her. That fate is hers and your own. A rock needs no leash for its journey, your act needs now no leader. The Stone must travel another way"
He looked at Exas and saw something. "But I shall leave this place. By foot or by death. The cause is mine own, the means is your choosing. It is your fate you must discard; your blood rises but can it break a fateful grip?"
“Journey downward then, brother!" barked Exas as he stooped to pick up a stone. The villagers murmured but none moved to stone nor raise a defence.
The Beggar held sad the movements of Exas, as one would watch a dog chase a wounded bear into a cave.
He spoke "Throw then, Exas. I will not fight. My shield lies at my broken feet."
As Exas drew back to throw, his mid finger slipped to a grove in the two fisted sized rock to taut a better grip. That obtrusion disturbed a small tiny but deadly scorpion at rest till night's prey. It struck deep under his nail.
He crumbled in a howl and balled his hand up in pain in the other.
The Beggar and one of the women villagers ran to him; the Beggar pried his curled arm out from his body. The woman saw the poison already spreading in a web of purplish veins. Her eyes came to the Beggar's; they read death between them in the air of a wheezzing Exas. The Beggar went near to the body of her mother and returned with the knife.
The woman nodded for some men. Exas, barely conscious did not resist as the men sprawled upon him to hold his body and limbs firm upon the ground. The Beggar grasping the hand of Exas and held its elbow joint tight on a flat rock.
The woman cut through it in two deft cuts, ignoring the jerk of a wild scream before the second.
Red deep blood poured from the severed joint, saving the life from a poisoned death.
With wide strips from the Beggar's robe, the woman bound the stump tight against the body. Using a fragment to drain her brow, she rose and oddly spoke first to the Beggar dressed now in only loincloth and dirt red turban.
"He may live. Likely was a female night deadly, a scorpion for smaller, yet deadlier than the male, The only saving thing of it, is that its venom has such a potency that the muscles near the sting contort rigid and slow the blood spread. It cannot be sucked out as it is as deadly in the mouth as in the wood. Now, he must be moved to the village, to cauterize the wound's infest."
A greasy beard spoke, wiping the splatter of blood from his cheek: "What of the Beggar here? Nothing is as yet decided."
Eyes hawked in a tan of burnt spoke next "I have a thought that Exas may have gripped more than just a desert's whim."
Woman: "What do you mean?"
Greasy Beard: "I mean if a man raises a fist at another and falls in a fever, there is croft about. And I say that a craft that can so swift remove a man's arm can blind the eyes of an old woman's heart."
A strained tunic spoke next: "As we nearly were. But for the fearless doubt of Exas, clear in the shadows. I agree, no one man could turn so many tricks, but a demon-soul has a rapid hand under its skin of cloak!"
The woman shook her head a l
ittle at them, then spoke again to the Beggar: "What words for your fate, now, man? The crowd tilts in the sway of an arm."
Strangely, at least to the crowd, the Beggar laughed and replied "Many a leader of pluck is downed wing bare by the pluckings of his own house. Whether a rooster crows once, thrice or none at all, the fury of the beaks are like the cracking of eggs. The more a man speaks, the more fragile becomes his shell. Once condemned as a eloquent devil, his tongue becomes his own noose!"
She laughed. The village did not.
A villager retorted "And trust a woman to be the first to be swayed by the swing of his lips!"
A man from the rear, with a chin as a heavy weight upon his face, held up a coil of thick rope and shouted "Swing is the word for the moon's unholy kites."
The woman turned on him "Fool!" You would go through leaders like a dog snapping flies from its nose!"
"But neither shall the dog be lead into fire by the hymn of a jackal's flea!" rattled a thin fist waving from the rear.
"Nay to the rope for a witch can dance forever at death but they say fire spreads the ashes beyond any lizard's growth. Singe his tail and tongue too, flames do more than a choke. BURN THE SON for our mother's blood!" foamed some darting teeth.
"Are your hands not yet sick of their thirst?" Stood the woman back. "Let all this blood cool in the night. "She pointed at the lower sun. "For the day is near done, yet still there is one to bury and one to heal. Let your justice blink in tomorrow's light, such as its