Curious about the situation in the village, Kwasin climbed a thickly leaved oak on the perimeter of the village clearing. From this vantage, he observed three clusters of huts: the longhouse where undoubtedly were held the rituals of the Klakordeth; a large mess hall likely erected after the soldiers seized the village; and a high interior cedar stockade that encompassed a quarter of the village and seemed to be the designated living area for those natives who had resisted the soldiers. But not all of the villagers were confined within the pen; some were at work, under the close watch of their guards, beginning construction on a watchtower near the gate, while others—by far the minority—moved about the village more or less freely while they carried out various chores for their new masters.
The reconnoitering told him all he wanted to know: the situation was grim for the bulk of the villagers. Madekha’s hope that he could emancipate Q”okwoqo from Minruth’s forces was nothing but a wishful dream.
He climbed down from the oak and faded into the woods, intent on getting away from the village as quickly as possible. He would go to Dythbeth as he had originally intended and take his chances with Queen Weth.
* * *
When Kwasin was not yet a half-mile from the village, he thought he heard a woman’s voice come to him upon the warm forest breeze. Yes, there it was again. He froze and listened. The words were singsong, almost as if the speaker addressed a child:
“In the beginning was a formless substance which gave birth to Kho, the Great Goddess. She fashioned the earth, the air, the sky, the stars, the moon, and the sun...”
Quietly, Kwasin moved through the forest in the direction of the speaker.
“After eons, being lonely,” the voice continued, “she copulated with the world and had daughters. These she assigned as watchers over the air, the sky, the stars, the moon, and the sun. She created a great tree with many fruits and birds which rested on the tree. The daughters ate the fruit and copulated with the birds, and from these were born all manner of life, including Old Father Nakendar, who mated with his mother’s sister, Besbesbes, the goddess of honey, and produced a great variety of bear children, which is why you, my magnificent friend, can’t get enough of the nectar of your bee cousins.”
A meadow opened up before Kwasin and, wide-eyed, his jaw hanging, he peered through the underbrush at an incredible site. Indeed, there was a woman in the wood—a beautiful, young woman, her lustrous hair night-black, with a delicate face that was identical in every way to Madekha’s, though perhaps somewhat more wholesome, and not at all serpentlike. But lo! It was not a child the woman addressed with all the affection of a doting mother—but rather a great brown bear, standing upright, fully ten feet tall on its hind legs, as the woman reached up and fed it honey from her dripping hand!
In the tiny hand went, into that great fanged mouth, to be licked by an enormous pink tongue, and then out again it came, miraculously unharmed. Then the woman dipped her hand into the ceramic jar she held nestled in the crook of her arm, withdrew the now honey-covered hand, and plunged it again into that terrible maw.
To see the tiny creature before him do what he, the mighty Kwasin, would never think to do astounded him. He had heard folktales in the lodges and halls of the Klakordeth of an ancient trickster-hero of the totem who had donned bearskins and went to live among a sloth of bears, creating trouble for all the humans and mythological creatures that encountered him; but never had Kwasin believed old Klaklaku to be other than a fable. Now, his heart thrumming with envy at seeing this woman interact so intimately with his totem animal, he wondered.
But soon Kwasin’s heart beat rapidly for a different reason as the bear dropped to all fours and began huffing and growling in his direction, swinging its long-snouted head wildly and baring its awful fangs. The woman quickly stepped back from her ferocious companion and swung about to face Kwasin, who, having heard from his totem brothers about what to do if one unexpectedly encountered a hostile bear in the wild, remained as still as he could. If the animal came any closer, however, he would stand up, making himself as tall and threatening as possible, and roar like a demon. There was no sense trying to run—even the fastest sprinter in the empire could not hope to outpace a charging bear.
Now the woman spoke sternly to the bear, telling it to lie down. The bear continued to huff until she repeated the command again, this time pointing assertively at the ground. To Kwasin’s surprise, the bear complied, placing its chin on the carpet of grass and whining like a chided dog.
“You, in the woods!” the woman shouted. “Come out, slowly, or you’ll anger Parbho and he will eat you.”
Kwasin crawled out from behind the lavender where he had been hiding and stepped slowly into the meadow. The bear whined louder as Kwasin advanced, but stopped when the woman admonished it with a command of “Stay!”
“You don’t look like a soldier,” she said, her eyes narrowed. “But I will have Parbho kill you all the same if you don’t tell me what you’re doing in these woods.”
Kwasin smiled disarmingly and, spreading his arms wide, made an exaggerated bow, keeping his eyes on the woman, and, of course, the bear.
“I am Kwasin,” he said, “an emissary of Madekha, high priestess of the sacred pythoness at Kaarkor and holy daughter of Kho.” And then Kwasin spoke the words Madekha had said would convince her sister he spoke the truth.
The woman started upon hearing the secret phrase, and then her face, surrounded by the dark firmament of her hair, lit up like the most radiant star in the night sky, her lips parting in a gleaming smile. If not for the bear, Kwasin doubted he would have been able to resist taking her up in his arms and covering her with his hot kisses. Then he thought, if not for the bear, of course he would not resist it.
“My sister sent you?” the woman asked, hope ringing clearly in her voice. “You have brought men from Kaarkor to wage war on the soldiers who have taken my people?”
“No, O Fair Adythne,” he replied, “for I can only assume that is your name. Your sister faces troubles of her own in Kaarkor, and needs all the men she has to protect her sacred office. She’s sent only me, Kwasin, slayer of men and monsters, and the greatest lov—”
For a moment the woman had looked forlorn, but now she cut him off, her vision seeming to turn inward as if already she plotted a scheme and his boasting words were but bothersome spores upon the wind.
“It is just as well,” she said over his words. “A large and unwieldy band would only cause the soldiers to garrison themselves in the village and threaten to execute hostages until the attackers departed. And you are indeed a giant, and one man may sometimes achieve what an army cannot. Especially if that man is made invincible.”
“I don’t know of what you speak, O Priestess,” Kwasin said, “but let us first understand one another before we talk of—”
“Yes, yes,” the woman said eagerly, “you are foreign to these parts, unfamiliar with our village, and want to know how it is that I am so friendly with Parbho here.”
It was not what Kwasin was thinking. He only wanted to make clear to the priestess that she was delusional if she thought he would fight her battles for her—that the only sensible thing was to accompany him to Dythbeth, where she could give testimony to clear his name, and also ask for assistance for her village from King Roteka and his army. But the woman gave him no opportunity to make his case.
“Parbho,” Adythne continued without pausing, “is one of seven bears we have trained in the village. We, the Klakordeth of Q”okwoqo, have a long tradition of intimate dealings with our sacred animal, going back almost half a millennia. Oh, how you should see them dance and jump through hoops of fire during the festival days of Kho-wu! But they are much more than just pets—they are our spirit guides, and we of the village could not go on without them. That is why, when the soldiers stormed Q”okwoqo, I set the bears free from their cages—I could not risk that they might slay the spirit guides and use their meat for stew.”
Here the woman pause
d to coddle Parbho’s glossy brown neck, and, at seeing the bear react by licking her hand like a playful pup, Kwasin’s intended words vanished from his mind.
Now Adythne’s beautiful features darkened. “But the soldiers have blocked up Old Father Nakendar in his cave. He would have starved by now had I not fed him what slim morsels I’ve been able to catch in the woods, dropping them down through the sacrificial opening at the summit above his cave..”
“The Bear God is real?” Kwasin said, somewhat dubiously.
“Of course he is,” Adythne snapped. “He lairs in the cave above the northern hot springs—the sacred waters the soldiers defile with their ritually unclean bodies.” Then the priestess’s expression grew yet darker. “But I hold an even greater fear than for Nakendar, who, being divine, is surely just biding his time in his cave while the mortals about him bicker. I have just been to the village and exchanged messages with one of my acolytes by means of the mirror code employed by the daughters of Kho. She has told me that late one night, about a week ago, a gang of drunk soldiers slipped into the stockade without their commanding officers’ permission and at sword-point marched away with a half-dozen children while their mothers cried and screamed and pulled at their hair in dismay. Two men were killed, and a third gravely injured, trying to stop the soldiers. Now, a week has passed and the children have not returned.
“The days grow dark for the people of Q”okwoqo,” Adythne said, looking weary, “and I, their priestess, have been unable to help them. Indeed, if not for the presence of the spirit guides, madness would have consumed me by now. But now that you have arrived, O Mighty Kwasin, we will set things right. And yes,” she added, regarding him slyly, “I know who you are, and of your larger-than-life—if outright criminal—reputation. But that is something I intend to wield to our advantage.”
At these last words, the beautiful Adythne beckoned Kwasin forward, took his hand in hers, and led him past the suspicious, beady red eyes of her bear to the edge of the shaded meadow. Here she knelt on the ground before a pile of dead underbrush, which she proceeded to move aside until a smooth, round stone was revealed half embedded in the reddish-brown soil. She leaned forward, dug her fingers into the earth around the stone, and, groaning, pulled aside the covering. From the deep hole beneath where the stone had been, she drew forth a large bundle sealed tight in waxed antelope hide. Then she stood up and held out the bundle with an air of reverence.
“It is the sacred pelt of a she-bear once worshiped by the Klemklakor in the lands far north of the Saasares, near the Ringing Sea. The she-bear killed and ate my great-great-grandfather, but then choked on his bones and died. Or at least that was the story told by my great-great-grandmother, who brought back the bear’s hide when she returned to her home village of Kaarkor. The pelt was passed to me from my mother, who, while not of the Klemklakor, had inherited it from her mother and understood the sacramental nature of the pelt. And it was while I was partaking of the laurel leaf during the orgiastic rites of my former totem that the old she-bear came to me and told me I must travel to Q”okwoqo to become a sister of the Klemklakor. She also said that neither blade nor spear nor fire would touch him who wore the she-bear’s pelt into battle.”
Adythne untied the antelope-sinew strings that bound the bag and unfurled a magnificent black-furred bearskin, its cured head still attached and serving as a sort of coif. Sinew cords hung from the hide, allowing the wearer to secure the pelt to the arms and shoulders.
“And for that reason,” she said, proffering the pelt to Kwasin, “I pass the holy mantle to you, O Great Warrior, to wear for your protection until you have freed my people from the wicked followers of the sungod. You must, of course, relinquish the pelt after you have achieved our goal, for I intend to pass it along to a daughter of my own one day.”
Kwasin took the pelt—for indeed it was a splendid specimen, one he could not help but admire as a member of the Thunder Bear Totem—and swept it over his great bronzed and muscled shoulders. He smiled appreciatively at Adythne, but only briefly.
“Like your sister,” he said, sloughing the cloak from his shoulders, “you make a compelling argument. But I can’t take up your local burdens. I’m steadfast on a mission to see Queen Weth, and—if she still lives—the oracle Wasemquth, who exiled me from the land nine years ago. For too long have I wandered the wilds, distracting my lonely soul with whatever trouble I happened to stumble across. But our causes lead to the same place. You can’t make the dangerous journey to Dythbeth without escort, but I can take you there. There you can ask the queen to urge her husband, King Roteka, to send a force into the mountains and free the good people of Q”okwoqo from the soldiers of Minruth the Mad. And it would be but little trouble for you to put in a good word for me, who saved your sister from certain death—or worse—in the ruins of cursed Miterisi.”
Since Kwasin had encountered her, Adythne had paused in neither thought nor action long enough to entertain the possibility that Kwasin might not be interested in joining her single-minded quest to free her village from the soldiers. Now, upon hearing Kwasin’s little speech, the woman’s face flushed with anger and resentment.
“You are the mad one, O Kwasin the Ill-fated!” Adythne snatched the sacred pelt from Kwasin’s hands and shook it out with an angry flourish as if his mere touch had defiled it. “For Weth—the very priestess whose ravaging by you doomed you to exile from the land—will have you executed upon sight! And were I to be seen in your company, my loyalties too would be thrown into question, and no hope would my people have of succor from Dythbeth.” Behind them the bear, roused by his mistress’s anger, began growling lightly as Adythne continued. “No! We must fight the soldiers now, with as much stealth and cunning as I can design—for it is clear your dull-witted mind is not made for either. Your course would do nothing but condemn us to imprisonment in King Roteka’s dungeons!”
Adythne was certainly spirited, but Kwasin had known that even before he laid eyes on her. Who else would abandon her mother’s totem in favor of adoption into a foreign one? He knew, however, that such things were done in certain rare cases. Sometimes, in a remote village, an infant’s or toddler’s mother died leaving behind no direct living matrilineal relatives. If no member from the mother’s clan stepped forward to adopt the child, the village priestess had leeway to reassign the child to another totem. There was almost always a great-aunt or a distant cousin able to adopt the child, and if the child was old enough, someone from the mother’s totem would adopt it, no matter the hazy nature of the relation—for were not all totem brothers and sisters of the same spiritual blood? But Adythne had not only switched totems; she had become a high priestess among her adopted people—how Kwasin would love to hear the tale behind that!
The thought of being spiritually separated from his birth totem disturbed Kwasin. Though he had not been among his bear brothers during his eight years in exile, he could not imagine cutting himself off from the Klakordeth forever. The spirit of the bear ran too deeply within him.
He could not, however, blame the woman for her decision to switch totems. The Thunder Bear Totem was of heady stock, the cream of the crop as far as Kwasin was concerned, even if its members did tend to indulge a bit too heavily in alcohol and, from time to time, killed one another in drunken rages, or in ritual games of strength and endurance. But they were bears at heart, his spiritual brothers and sisters—and bears liked their honey, and were also prone to outbursts of violence when the mood set upon them—so how could anyone hold it against them? Because of this, Kwasin did not begrudge the woman her stubbornness either.
And so, instead of arguing with Adythne, Kwasin merely bellowed with laughter.
“You are courageous, O Priestess, and I wish you luck,” he said, “though I doubt you will find it.” And with that he slung his ax over a shoulder and strode leisurely into the forest.
Through the trees he heard the priestess curse him, and then, loud enough that he knew she meant him to hear it, she said
, “Come, Parbho, we shall free the village ourselves. You, at least, are no coward.”
Kwasin walked on through the cedars for some time, trying to keep his thoughts on his goal of reaching Dythbeth and seeking exoneration from his crimes. Soon, however, his conscience began to prickle. He could not keep Adythne’s final words from his mind.
Had he not accused Hadon of exactly the same sort of cowardice for failing to remain behind with him to fight Minruth’s soldiers in the capital? Had his desire to clear his name and abrogate his exile—strengthened by the dreams of his mother’s death that wracked his sleep—at last squelched his seemingly bottomless well of boldness and spontaneity? Not to mention—and here his pride truly stung—his fearlessness?
He muttered a curse. Then, he laughed.
Truly had the priestess worked a spell over him, one that had almost succeeded. No, he thought, not just Adythne, but her sister as well. Both, he mused, had shrewdly and cunningly worked their magic on him—the snakewoman had planted the seed and the bearwoman had sought to harvest it. But he would not be distracted from his mission. Maybe, if the oracle did pardon his crimes, he would return to the Saasamaro with a stalwart band of King Roteka’s soldiers and rout the enemy from Q”okwoqo. But not until he again walked free within the empire.
Kwasin continued on through the woods. Soon he found his mood had lifted and again he began to feel like his old self.
Then came the tart stink of death amid the strong smell of the cedars.
When he found the bodies of the children, blackness consumed him.
* * *
Kwasin knew now that he could not go to Dythbeth. Not yet anyway. He could not let the atrocity go unpunished, no matter his previous plans.
That so-called civilized citizens of the empire had committed such a profane act against the innocent made him feel ashamed of his desire to return to civilization—he had never seen such vile barbarism in all his years among the savages in the Wild Lands. But war, Kwasin knew, sometimes made people commit atrocities they would never conceive of enacting in peacetime. Still, that did not forgive the soldiers who had done this. He would make them pay for their actions. He had no doubt the corpses were those of the children abducted by the drunken soldiers about whom Adythne had raged.
Tales of the Wold Newton Universe Page 23
