When I reached the field of trials, Malan approached and asked me, “How is it?”
He never spoke first or much until then, but he wanted to taste my defeat.
“It’s like hunger,” I answered.
“Don’t they have any?”
He was talking about roast meat.
“They don’t have Story,” I answered.
Elbia, Malan, Bako, and Danaka were walking toward me from the Wolves’ side, looking strong, tall, and fed. The night before, they roasted horse meat and talked around the fire. I could guess their words: Sheep, fall, Da-Ren, weakling. It was my flesh that they ripped and roasted.
The fourth day dawned on her face.
They don’t have Elbia.
They have tears and puke.
It was only when Elbia’s worried eyes fell on me that I knew what I had to do: find the Truth of the Ouna-Ma, of the twenty-first day. I couldn’t even count that far.
My belly was empty, but my legs were hard as iron once more. I was hungry for the Story. Elbia walked past me, our palms touched and she left something in mine. Meat, a small piece.
“I kept some for you,” she whispered.
I swallowed quickly before the Guides could see me.
We were lined up again. All children, seven times the fingers of my one hand, each two paces apart from the other. The wind had changed. It swept through the bare trees from the north, colder than the days before. The dogs sauntered around us. They had not killed again.
Afternoon came, and we were seven, bone cold, but the Reghen did not throw meat. The Sun was setting red, his sky-archers aiming the last bloodied arrows on us. Malan fell, then Elbia, then it was only Urak and I. He was hungry too. The Guides still wouldn’t stop us. Selene came out half and growing hunchbacked, and I shook my head toward Urak.
“No. Not today.”
Even if we had stayed out there until the moon was full, five nights later, I would still be standing. I was hungry for the Truth like a damned ninestar, whatever that was.
Urak fell like a dead mule a little later, and the two Guides took me to the Wolves’ tent all alone, as if I were the one Leader of all. Keko tripped twice on the way, his stare frozen on me. He was searching for my ninestar mark. He could see only my triumph.
There were some leftover clothes in the hut, but they weren’t mine. I’d swear that I could smell Elbia’s hair on the hide that covered me.
I ate a huge piece of juicy meat. The largest of any day, as if it were for five children and they had forgotten to cut it into pieces. I saved some for the next morning. I was all alone in the tent and asked Rouba, “Will they come?”
“Who?”
“The Reghen, the Ouna-Ma.”
“They always come. They will be late. Sleep.”
I dreamed of Malan and Elbia. They were biting each other’s flesh. I dreamed of the shooting stars falling from the sky. Nothing else.
The wailing of a birthing dog woke me in the middle of the night. After a while, the Reghen, the Ouna-Ma, and the Guides came in.
I tried to open my mouth to ask, but the words would not come out. They ignored me and talked among themselves. I caught a few words: the damned orphan and ninestar. I bit my lip until it bled.
Few days were left until the twenty-first. If I didn’t find the Truth, it would find me.
The Guides had brought just a wooden cup filled with goat milk. When the Reghen came close to give it to me, I lifted my hair and my ear to reveal the small red triangle.
“What is a ninestar?” I asked, with the taste of my own blood in my mouth. I would hear the Story that I wanted to hear and only that.
The Ouna-Ma turned her head sharply, removed her veil for the first time, and started whispering menacing words I couldn’t decipher. The Guides, awed, took two steps back.
Her eyes. I wanted to swallow my words and my questions. Black wells of magic and despair. The pupil and the iris, pitch black, were so big that there was almost no white left in her eye. Black suns shining bright. Her hair almost shaved, cut short and angry. But it was her head, the shape of a snake egg that terrified me, the head she had always covered by the red dark veil, now naked and magical before us. Under the skin, the skull grew toward the back and upward in an otherworldly way, beautiful as a hunter’s quiver. It was true, the Ouna-Mas were creatures of another world. She was like no other woman I’d ever seen.
Her thin, cold, red-painted fingers came out from beneath her robe and lifted my hair to see my mark underneath my ear. She put her veil back on, and I could see her eyes no longer. She formed a triangle with her two forefingers and two thumbs in front of her face like a shield between her eyes and my face. Then she walked out of the tent with Keko and the Reghen.
I remained alone with Rouba inside the tent.
“She cannot tell you the Truth. Only a Reghen can talk to you,” Rouba said.
“Is he coming back?”
“You know, they say that even a three-wintered Ouna-Ma has the same head. Those few who have secretly seen the very young ones,” he told me.
“I have never seen one so close.”
“They don’t live long, and the older ones are all blind and never leave their tents.”
Keko and the Reghen came back into the tent. The Ouna-Ma did not return that night.
“So, you want to learn of the ninestars, Da-Ren?” asked the Reghen.
“Yes, the Legend.”
“It is not a Legend. Listen to me, but ask no questions.”
The Reghen spoke only for me:
The Truth of the Stars
The Dawn of Man:
The Demon ripped out his own heads, turned them into arrow-snakes and sent them onto the seventh and last Sun.
But the Goddess swallowed them all to save her endmost son. Enaka’s belly soon swelled and burst into myriad fragments making the stars in the sky.
Dust fell from the stars, and from them sprouted the first men of the Tribe.
We are all from different stars and different dust but all pieces of the One Goddess.
From darkness and blinding light we are made, and only the Ouna-Mas can see the stardust in our blood, the bright star in our eyes, and our fate. They see where the light of the Goddess blinds with its golden radiance, they see where the darkness is the shadow of Darhul.
Thus declared the Ouna-Mas:
The female babies born on the night of the first full moon of spring will be taken from their mothers at once to be raised by the Ouna-Mas.
The babies, male and female, born on the seventh night after each full moon shall be marked with a circle in the hollow behind the ear because they are fortunate and will bring honor and glory to the Tribe.
You will call them sevenstar.
The male babies born nine days after the full moon will be marked with a triangle before they grow hair because they are unlucky, ninestar.
Hear the last command:
If they have been born on the ninth night after the first full moon of Spring, nine nights after the feast of the Goddess, you will give them a full mark because their fate is far worse than the rest.
These true ninestars will bring darkness and bloodshed to the Tribe.
A black circle for the fortunate sevenstars and a red triangle for the unlucky ninestars.
You will watch them and follow them throughout every generation, because the stars are made of the flesh and blood of the Goddess, and they will never lie.
Thus declared the Ouna-Mas, the Voices of the Unending Sky.
When the Reghen finished the Story, he looked at me with eyes cold and lips tightened. Before I had a chance to ask, he spoke. To give me courage? To get rid of me?
“The signs say that you were born with a dark fate, but that doesn’t mean that you are doomed, Da-Ren. Only Sah-Ouna knows what it means to bring glory to the Tribe. What it means to bring darkness. Or blood. Sah-Ouna deemed you worthy to face the three deaths of the Sieve. Sometimes words mean the opposite. Sometimes even these t
hings are needed. The darkness, the blood.”
“What does it mean—” I started to ask, but the Reghen spoke his last words as he left.
“Do not lose yourself in your own darkness. Fight it. If you were not needed, you would already be dead.”
I prepared as a lone, unlucky Wolf, taking off my clothes for yet another day in the field. The only thing I wore was my loincloth around my waist and my ninestar mark. Already it was more than I wanted. Rouba grabbed the back of my neck with his big hand. He had one drop of courage left to give me.
“The stars mark us all, Da-Ren. With one sign or another. But the Goddess lets us live. No matter what sign we may carry. She lets us live to prove what sign we deserve.”
“She lets us live so she can laugh at us,” Keko roared.
“Don’t listen to him, Da-Ren. This is why we were born. This is why we live. To keep fighting even when the stars have abandoned us. And then, when our actions glow so brilliant they turn even the stars pale, only then does Enaka summon us close to her.”
With those words, Rouba left me in the field again.
Countless were the glowing star-fires in the night sky. The children who had spent the night in the Sheep’s tents were in the field waiting just for me. I too took my place and this time stood next to Elbia.
Keko sent her far from me before I had a chance to give her the meat that I had hidden in my palm. As she walked away, a gust of north wind blew her hair and I noticed for the first time the black circle of the lucky sevenstar marked behind her ear.
I thought I heard her whispering to me again, “Luck, I kept some for you.”
It gave me the strength to carry on until the Sieve’s end.
IX.
No Pyre for the Ghosts
Thirteenth Winter. The Sieve. Eighth Night.
Never again to the North.
Donned in white they stand there.
The ghosts with mulberry lips.
They show mercy for no one.
Gently, they take us in their arms,
like vile serpents wrap themselves around.
So cold the skin.
Before the break of dawn.
A death naked of screams.
It was the eighth night. The madness of the same torment repeating every morning had seeped under our skins and tied knots inside our stomachs. In the middle of the night, came a different Reghen, the third that had come in eight days, dressed exactly the same as the others.
A freezing wind was blowing off the mountain crests that rose beyond the Endless Forest. It was descending from the lands haunted by the bloodeaters and the ice-rivers that the Drakons guarded.
I remained standing for yet another day. I feasted again as a Wolf, the meat and then a Story. The Legend that the Reghen had chosen that night was of the Tribe’s ancient journey to the North. Its Truth fell as a deadly chill on us that night and even worse at dawn.
The Legend of Khun-Nan’s journey to the North
The Fifth Season of the World: Part One
In midsummer, the age-old Demon Darhul sent the black star with the ashen tail thundering through the Sky. Unstoppable, it crashed upon the earth and its dust swallowed the Sun. Thus began the Fourth Season, that of the Famine on the eastern steppe. Only three times a thousand, and some say fewer, survived from the entire Tribe, and even they were no more than hunched skeletons from hunger. They roamed as beggars, but no othertriber showed our people mercy.
It was then that the First Leader of the Tribe, Khun-Nan, rose to power and with him the Fifth Season of the world began, that of the Khuns.
Beside him was his blind daughter, Ouna-Ma, she who first carried the name, and the only seed that remained after he had lost his other five children to the Famine.
Enaka gave the sight of destiny to the blind one, and she commanded her father to lead our Tribe to the North.
With blood and iron, Khun-Nan persuaded the people of the Tribe to follow him to the North, the land of the Drakonsnakes. This was a long, very long time ago, before the Tribe had passed the great Eastern River, the last border of the steppe, and brought us here to the Iron Valley in Sirol.
The enemies of the First Khun foresaw death and despair. But this earth we walk upon belongs to the Goddess. She etches her wishes in the Sky, and the earth reflects them on the dirt we walk.
“We must reach the end of the North. There Enaka awaits,” said the Ouna-Ma.
The Tribe continued northbound until it met with a terrible obstacle. A Drakon, crystaleyed and firecloven, scaled in ice-blades, stood guard on the only passage, the frozen river that never flowed. The Drakon had no name because no one who had been close enough to hear it ever returned.
The three brave warriors of Khun-Nan, the first three Reghen, slayed the Drakon. But that is a different Legend for a braver night. They drew fire from his belly to heal the Tribe from the cold and stole its green flesh to heal the Tribe from hunger. And they took the drakonteeth as triumphal bounty for Khun-Nan.
This is how the passage opened to the North, and the Ouna-Ma said to her father, “Take the drakonteeth, and go to the cave of white darkness at the lands’ end.”
So Khun-Nan ventured alone and found the Goddess Enaka waiting there for him. She had taken the shape of a doe. He offered her the drakonteeth, and she in turn gave him the weapon of victory.
The Goddess warmed him with her breath and said, “Come close, First Leader. I will teach you how to make the twohorn, the double-curved, the snake bow. With this, you will triumph in all battles. Take the heart of the strongest maple wood you can cut, and mix it with glue of the boiled horse’s bones, sinew from the ox’s neck, and elk’s horn. Your warriors, Khun-Nan, will draw these bows with ease even in mid-gallop. They will not need to have their feet planted on the ground. Unleash its force, and you will drive the heavy iron-tipped arrow from three hundred feet away into the heart of your enemy. The lighter spruce tip will travel even a thousand.”
And Khun-Nan returned to his people and said, “Now we will strike south and west, and no one will stop us. Make your quivers large, because that is where we will pour our revenge. Our arrows will fall like a rainstorm on our enemies, faster than their feet and eyes. We will blacken the sky from end to end with these bows and annihilate the othertribal demons.”
This snake-curved bow, born of elk, ox, horse, and maple, was the revenge Khun-Nan had sworn for the loss of his five children. With the bow of victory, Khun-Nan rode south before the coming of the deadly winter.
The last waning moon of autumn had already passed.
“My horse and bow warriors, let’s now head south to the steppe. Never again will you be beggars, and no one will be able to stop us.”
But for some of them, it was already too late. Winter has no mercy for the weak. White-haired women and frail children did not survive the windswept journey of return, and their frozen corpses remain there, unburned and unkissed ghosts. There was no pyre for the ghosts, no time for Khun-Nan to light a funeral fire, and the dead of the Tribe cursed him. The children and the old stand frozen there, only their lips still whispering. Their harrowing whispers have awakened Drakons of evil power.
The Goddess never again blessed Khun-Nan with a son, even though he lay with all the iron-legged women of the Tribe who had survived. That was his punishment.
The younger women of the Tribe had all but perished in the North. Poisoned by the ashen sky that spewed fire when the black star crashed to the ground, they stopped giving birth. Only coal and dead crows grew in the bellies. One child and two women remained alive for every ten men.
The few and childless, the warriors of Khun-Nan, rode until the banks of the first easterly river carrying their strong bows, the gifts of Enaka.
The Ouna-Ma said, “You made it, Father. There they wait, across the river. The She-Wolves.”
“How can you tell, my daughter?”
“I smell their warm piss, I hear their lustful howls, I taste their silent fear. Their males are weak.
Cross the river, Father, and a new strong and fearless seed will take root in our Tribe.”
Khun-Nan’s warriors crossed the wide waters and mated with the wolfen mothers, under the light of Selene. The Tribe was reborn with strong male children born with wolfen souls.
Before the First Ouna-Ma closed her lightless black eyes to go to her One Mother, she told her people, “May no one ask about your wolfen mothers. There will be no moonlight around the pupils of your eyes or thick gray fur on your backs. From the wolves, you took the spirit and not the form. Believe that.”
That is the Legend of the First Ouna-Ma and the She-Wolves who bore us all, the Legend of the First Khun, who found the bow of victory in the North.
Thus declared the Ouna-Mas, the Voices of the Unending Sky.
The Reghen ended his Story, and I moved to cuddle closer to the fire’s embrace. The night was quiet and peaceful, though the wind was singing relentlessly to her with ice-blue lips. Even the dogs were quiet, hiding from the frost. I had heard it many times back at the orphans’ tents during the past few moons: “A brutal winter was descending from the North.” The bees had built their hives higher in the trees than ever before. The apple skins were thick and hard as pig hides that autumn. Even the birds of passage had flown south early.
As the eighth day dawned, the ghosts slipped in silence through the north wind and nailed their ice needles at the soft of our necks.
Apocrypha V.
And I Shall Come with Arms Red
As the One Mother heard the Legends, Chapter V
Clouds gather above the well and stare down at us. God has sent them to judge me. Jak-Ur will die soon if I don’t face my fear.
It is my last chance because it will snow tonight. I still haven’t buried the dead. A murder of crows has gathered. All other birds have disappeared. I have lost the birdsong since the day they came. If it snows, and it will, if the white sheets cover the dead then I can’t burn them anymore. Not until spring. He shouldn’t find them here tonight, on his first night. No one should. It is time for the fire to purge.
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