Deception of the Damned

by P C Darkcliff

  And the nomads were already close enough to see her tanned cleavage.

  Peering through the undergrowth, they licked their lips as they watched her breasts under the thin tunic. They breathed hard as they crept forward.

  Jasmin cocked her head like a bird when she thought she heard a noise. The year and a half in Hrot’s time had taught her to listen to the sounds of the woods. Her sharpened instincts were telling her to run. And when she saw the men leaping from the bushes, she did.

  CHILDHOOD WAS A SHORT affair in the clans. Once they were five or six, kids had to fetch water from the stream, tend to the livestock, or keep an eye on their younger siblings. When they reached ten years of age, they virtually became diminutive men and women, with a growing burden of tasks upon their slim shoulders. The girls were introduced to all kinds of household chores. The boys started their weapons training and apprenticeships in workshops and smithies.

  Hrot’s nephew Kolpik was big for his age, taller than the stooping Lesana and almost as tall as the petite Jasmin, which added to his belief that he was already a grown man. Although he’d bored quickly of working in workshops, he couldn’t wait to begin his hunting lessons.

  Kolpik had been angry and resentful ever since his mother’s death. And today, when he was going to try his hand at archery, he was so restless and irritable that Lesana threatened to calm him down with her stick. In spite of the threats, Kolpik repeatedly scolded his younger siblings for acting like snotty babies, and he would touch neither breakfast nor lunch.

  He was the first to come to the dirt square. His impatience was starting to boil before the hunters finally came to take him and the other boys to the large clearing behind the fields.

  Kolpik’s heart beat fast when he nocked his first arrow. He groaned in his childish voice as he drew back the string, for it took all his strength to do so. Having chosen a nearby birch as his first victim, he was dying to let the arrowhead sink into the black and white bark. But one of the hunters, a broad-nosed giant with a missing earlobe whose name was Dub, seemed determined to protect the tree behind a shield of tedious instructions.

  “Your posture is all wrong!” Dub boomed behind Kolpik’s back, his giant hands turning the boy’s body so that Kolpik’s legs were parallel to the tree. “Spread your legs a bit more! Good! Relax your fingers, will you? Lower your shoulder and lift your elbow. Not this one, damn it, the other one! Now put your fingers closer to the corner of your mouth as if you wanted to give the string a kiss. Look at the target down the arrow. Can you see it?”

  Kolpik nodded impatiently. His hand trembled from keeping the string drawn back for so long. He was sure that if he missed the mark, it would be only Dub’s fault. Why did grownups have to be such meddlers? Kolpik was sure he would be different when he grew up. He would become a great warrior, so fierce and famous that all enemies would stay far from his village.

  In his mind, the birch had become the body of an intruder. Kolpik was about to shoot when he heard someone scream. He recognized the voice immediately. “It’s Auntie!” he exclaimed, lowering the arrow.

  Jasmin emerged from the shadows of the woods and dashed across the clearing. She must have plowed through bushes, for her arms and legs were scratched and bleeding. Her hair was full of leaves, and she was screaming at the top of her lungs. Kolpik screamed as well. Had something happened to his father? Then he saw the nomads emerging behind her, and a fever of wrath surged through his veins.

  Without thinking, he raised his bow and let the arrow fly at the nearest nomad. Kolpik staggered in shock when the arrowhead somehow found the enemy’s throat.

  Dub snatched the bow and fitted another arrow to the string. The other hunters followed suit. The arrows flew through the air like a swarm of angry wasps. They sank into their targets.

  Hearing the nomads’ moribund screams, and finally noticing the hunters, Jasmin collapsed in the high grass as if she’d been hit by a stray arrow. For a while, she only wheezed and crushed the green straws between her icy fingers. She felt she would never be able to catch her breath again, and that her legs would never grow steady enough to support her. But the fear of another ambush made her scramble up and stumble toward the tribesmen.

  Four corpses were lying in the bloodied grass. Their eyes were wide open and staring as if they wanted to take a look at the arrows sticking from their bodies. Jasmin felt sick when she saw that their hands still grasped their daggers in a lifeless grip. Had she not encountered the hunters, those hands would’ve ripped her clothes and bruised her body, and those daggers would’ve plunged into her heart. And she realized the danger was far from over.

  Her voice was flat and devoid of life as she said, “There were five of them.”

  Dub asked, “Are you sure of this, woman?” His face showed he doubted that a female outlander could count to five.

  “I’m positive, man,” she said as she returned his gaze. “One of them is still at large.”

  Dub glared at her for a while, and then his eyes began to wander around the woods. He turned to the fellow hunters. “Let’s go and find this son of a toad. And you, woman, take the kids back to the village.”

  As the men disappeared behind the wall of trees, Jasmin looked around the clearing. The boys were chattering excitedly, reenacting how the hunters had aimed and how the nomads had fallen. Kolpik stood a little apart, staring at the man he’d killed. When Jasmin came to him and took him in her arms, the boy burst into tears.

  THE HUNTERS CAME BACK empty-handed. The tribe spent a restless night, with doubled guards at the gates, and with armed men making rounds outside the palisade. Everyone wondered who and where the fifth cutthroat was. Jasmin hoped he was just a sole survivor of a small nomadic group. If he was a scout for a large invading army, she and her foolish fire would cause a massacre.

  A large search party was dispatched again at dawn. Kolpik had overcome his shock at killing the nomad, and he pouted when they didn’t take him along.

  As the evening came, loud shouting at the southern gate signaled that this time the searchers had been successful. Their faces were flushed and wild as they poured into the village. Two of them dragged the captive on a piece of rope, with his wrists and ankles tied together as if he were a felled stag.

  “An evil spirit!” they shouted as they hauled him to the dirt square. “We’ve captured an evil spirit!”

  And all hell broke loose.

  The hornblower gave a signal Jasmin had never heard before, but which had an uncanny effect on the tribespeople, who ran yelling to the square. She trailed behind them, wondering what was happening. The horn kept blasting through the village like the call of an alpha wolf; an enraged human pack filled the square, growling insults and gnashing their yellow teeth. Jasmin had never seen the tribespeople so berserk. She looked away when some of them approached the nomad to curse him, kick him, or spit on him.

  The captive trembled as he looked at the crazed crowd. His blind look told her he didn’t understand any of the insults he was being pelted with. Blood gushed from a deep wound on his head. His clothes were nearly gone, and his body was a pulsing mass of raw flesh and bruised skin. The track of broken dandelions and squashed grass he left behind was smeared with blood.

  “He’s an evil spirit!” the searchers shouted. “We found a fiend’s tool on him!”

  A volley of shudders ran through the crowd like an electric discharge. Jasmin looked around with her mouth wide open. The villagers never prayed or worshipped, and they had no shaman or priest to preside over their festivities. No shrine or totem pole towered above the hovels, and no amulets dangled around people’s necks to suggest they had any religion.

  All the more staggering was this talk about fiends and evil spirits; all the more bewildering was the superstitious dread that shone in every eye.

  Jelen the chieftain elbowed his way through the crowd and stood in front of the captive. “What fiend’s tool?” he boomed, wrath flashing in his mean round eyes. “What are you talking abo
ut?”

  “This!” One of the searchers produced a small orange object.

  Jasmin’s knees grew weak when she recognized her lighter. Apart from the gilded trinkets, the lighter was the only modern object she had taken through the portal. She had rarely used it, and she’d never shown it to a living soul, for reasons that became only too obvious today. It must have dropped out of her pouch yesterday during the chase.

  “We saw him wielding this thing,” the searcher told Jelen, holding the lighter carefully between his thumb and index finger. “He did some magic, and a small flame came out of it.”

  The crowd gasped.

  “How did he do it?” Jelen demanded, eyeing the lighter as if it were an exotic lizard that could spit venom in his face.

  “We don’t know, chieftain. We’ve tried everything, but the flame doesn’t come out. It must be evil magic.” The proclamation sent another wave of fury through the throng.

  The prisoner gaped at the lighter in the searcher’s hand. Then his eyes floated over the crowd and alighted on Jasmin. He wheezed something in an unknown tongue, and she was sure he was begging her for an explanation.

  The nomad obviously knew the strange object was hers. Perhaps he’d seen it falling out of her pouch, and he’d halted to pick it up while his companions had kept running toward their death. That would explain why he hadn’t emerged at the clearing along with the others. The lighter had saved his life yesterday—but as he’d somehow figured out how to use it, it had now signed his death warrant.

  Jasmin stepped forward. She parted her tremulous lips as if to say something, but the glaring Jelen shouted, “Go back, woman, and don’t you dare interrupt.” Jelen turned to the crowd. “This thing must really be a fiend’s tool. And this man is the servant of evil powers. He must die, same as his comrades. But his death will be far from swift and merciful.

  “Since he is possessed, it will not be sufficient to merely cut his throat. He must be killed ritually, and his body must be burnt to ashes. Those ashes must be thrown into the river so that they float far away from our village and carry their evil powers along with them. According to ancient traditions, the ritual will take place when Mother Luna shines full and round.”

  The crowd murmured excitedly. The full moon was about a week away, but the man’s slow, ritual murder would be a grand occasion, and well worth the wait. As the crowd dispersed, Jasmin rushed behind the closest hut to throw up.

  The nomad spent the week starving in an empty storage pit by the southern gate. The night after his capture had brought torrential rains, which did not abate for five days. As the tiny cylindrical pit had filled with over two feet of mud and water, it seemed a miracle he was still alive when the night of the rite came.

  The full moon hung above the boggy square as they dragged him in. The deepest darkness had crawled away from the moonlight, but it lingered near on that night, like a giant spider waiting to spread webs of superstitious fear all over the village. The world plunged into blackness whenever a vagabond cloud passed over the starless sky.

  Deep shadows dwelt in the cavities of Jasmin’s heart as well, and she was sick with remorse. She knew the captive was a cutthroat, and it was lucky he’d been captured. The villagers would have surely killed him even if they hadn’t thought he was an evil spirit. Nevertheless, Jasmin couldn’t escape the galloping feeling of guilt.

  It was her fault the man had suffered in the pit. It was her fault he would die a slow and horrible death and that his corpse would be desecrated.

  Jasmin had often sneaked to the pit over the past week. Her soul always bled when she saw him down there, half dead and dozing on his feet like a horse, but unable to recline or even sit down because the filthy water already reached high above his knees. The nomad had no idea what his sentence was; he probably thought he’d been left down there to starve to death.

  Many a time she’d thought of coming forward. She never had, however, knowing that she would end up in the same pit if the villagers knew the lighter was hers. She had also thought of taking a large stone and ending the man’s misery. But how could she ever kill a human being? At times she felt she was a spineless coward, not much better than Hrot.

  Now when the horn blared through the night to summon the tribe, Jasmin knew the man’s suffering was finally coming to an end. She had determined not to watch the rite, but Kolpik, Lesana, and her own morbid curiosity dragged her out of the hut and to the square. Although she would have preferred to stay back, Kolpik elbowed his way through the crowd and secured them a place in the first row. His eyes flashed with excitement she found painful to see.

  A huge funeral pyre was lit on the ceremonial hearth. The flames shot high toward the silvery moon, throwing macabre hues on the faces of the gathered tribespeople. The patriarchs chanted to the beat of a ritual drum.

  Tears filled Jasmin’s eyes when she spotted the prisoner. He was lying only a few yards from the roaring fire, tied to a wicker litter. The filthy water in the pit had swollen his legs monstrously, while hunger had made his ribs poke sharply at his sickly skin. His head reminded her of the head of a mummy. It looked as if an insane surgeon had sewed the front legs of a calf elephant to the upper body of a dissected human corpse.

  Thinking that he was about to be burned alive, the nomad trembled so badly that the litter burrowed deep into the muddy grass under the weight of his shaking body. Jasmin was glad the man’s eyes were fixed upon the moon, almost as if he were praying to it: she couldn’t have born the accusing look he would have probably given her had he spotted her in the crowd.

  The drumming and chanting came to a climax when Jelen stepped forward, followed by a master smith. They crouched by the litter. The smith clasped his giant, calloused hands over the prisoner’s chin and nose to pry his mouth open.

  “What are they doing?” Jasmin had to shout into Lesana’s ear to be heard over the drumming and chanting, and over the yelling of the tribespeople.

  “Jelen’s going to shove handfuls of mud into the spirit’s mouth to suffocate him,” Lesana shouted back. “Then they’ll cut out his heart. Then they will chop off his head. Then they’ll throw everything into the flames.”

  Something snapped inside Jasmin. She couldn’t be like Hrot. She couldn’t let fear and cowardice triumph over her and give free rein to malice and injustice. Jasmin hugged Kolpik and kissed Lesana on her wrinkled cheek. Then she ran toward the pyre, shouting, “Wait, wait! Stop this!”

  “What do you want?” Jelen snapped, lifting his eyes from the prisoner’s face. His right hand was already full of mud. “Step back or I’ll thrash you, woman! How dare you interrupt the rite?”

  The chanting and drumming slowly ceased. Every eye bored into her like a spear.

  “You cannot kill him,” Jasmin proclaimed, loudly so that everyone could hear her. “The tool is mine!”

  She thought she heard Lesana scream. The crowd murmured. Jelen stood up. “Explain yourself!” he boomed.

  “The tool is mine,” she repeated. “I lost it in the woods while I was running from this man and his clansmen. And he must have picked it up.”

  All that could be heard now was the whimpering of the prisoner and the crackling of the famished fire.

  The mud dripped through the chieftain’s fingers. “Why should we believe you?” Jelen demanded. “You’ve always been strange. An outsider. How do we know you’re not making up tales to save his life?”

  As Jasmin opened her mouth to speak, a pleading howl rushed from the captive’s mouth. He’d just recognized her, and his eyes begged her for salvation. Jasmin noticed that his legs were purple from infection. She wished she could tell him that his death would be quick and merciful. And she wished she could be sure it was true.

  Jasmin took a deep breath and said to Jelen, “Give me the thing and I’ll show you.”

  Jelen scowled, and she could almost sense curiosity battling obstinacy behind his mean eyes. Finally, he nodded, and the lighter was brought. Jasmin took it and looked
at it against the backdrop of the raging fire. Only a few drops of liquid gas lingered at the bottom. She shook the lighter and spun the thumbwheel. Jelen stepped back when a few sparks flew out of the wick. She spun it again, and everyone gasped when the flame shot out.

  Holding the burning lighter in front of her, Jasmin walked toward the crowd. People stepped aside to let her pass, almost as though they were wild animals and she was holding a flaming torch. She walked down the awed human corridor like a fire goddess. Then the flame died, and she started to run.

  Jasmin dashed to the northern gate and lifted the heavy bar. She pushed against the gate and opened it, half expecting to be gored by a sentinel’s spear, but the guard was nowhere to be seen. She ran across the drenched pastures and down the fisherman’s path toward the river. She could almost feel the earth shake as the villagers raced after her. If they caught her, the full moon would surely shine on her mouth filling with mud, on steel ripping out her heart, and on flames enveloping her corpse.

  She wondered whether Lesana limped behind the vindictive mob, swearing to kill her. And what about Kolpik? Was the boy running up front, brandishing the spear she had given him? Jasmin knew well from history books—and, tragically, even from newspaper reports—that fanaticism was often stronger than love and family ties.

  Flooded from the recent rains, the river rushed and roared over its collapsed banks. Light brown and ice cold, it pushed along reeds, branches, and even dead animals it had snatched along its way from the mountains.

  The lights of numerous torches were moving and flickering up on the fisherman’s path. Deadly as it was, the river was her only salvation.

  She waded in.

  The rushing water gave a staggering blow to her ankles and calves. She slid and lost her balance. The current kicked her feet from underneath her and dragged her over slick stones toward the middle of the river, where the water reached more than seven feet.