Jak-Ur wants a son, but I will never give him one. He doesn’t deserve one, and I am afraid that I might love my son, that he might look like my brother. I rub my insides with vinegar and resin, and I let you take me, make me scream and laugh wild with pleasure, but I will never give you a son. You pray; pray as much as you like, I am stronger than your Goddess, and she won’t listen to you.
Make no mistake; you are here to serve my revenge.
I want to know all your songprayers, Jak-Ur.
“Oh Goddess, sweet and beautiful…”
Oh, don’t whimper. Not yet.
XII.
The Twenty-First Day
Thirteenth Winter. The Sieve. Twenty-First Day.
Death could not rest and sent his Redveils. The Ouna-Mas slid into our tent and, after a short while, pointed at me while whispering with the Reghen.
I was sitting with Elbia next to the fire.
“Can I see your mark?” I asked, and she lifted her hair to reveal the lucky sevenstar sign, the black circle behind her ear.
“I will tell you a secret.” I spoke to her loudly so that the Guides, the Ouna-Mas, and the Reghen would hear me. “This isn’t my twelfth but my thirteenth winter. They had forgotten me at the orphans. How can they know what day I was born when they don’t even remember which winter? I was wrongly marked.”
My voice had to reach the ears of the Redveils for my luck to change.
“You will be a great warrior, whatever mark you carry. We will ride the war horses together, Da-Ren,” Elbia answered.
There was no Story that night. We lay next to each other to sleep. I opened my eyes. She was looking straight at me. I smiled. My fingers meshed with hers, and the fire burnt warmer and deeper than ever. She didn’t pull her hand away. Our fingers touched and moved, slowly rubbing together for countless breaths, my heart racing, our eyes closed.
I dreamed of the Endless Forest. It was green and gold.
I awoke in a cold sweat.
I dressed slowly, I ate slowly. I wanted to just stop time. To not face the dawn of the twenty-first day.
“It’s time to go out,” Rouba said to me when I was the last one left in the tent.
I want to throw up. The words didn’t come out.
“It matters not when we will leave this place, Da-Ren. Only that we tell our best Stories when we meet Enaka in the Unending Sky.”
With those words, old Rouba led me out of the tent on the longest winter’s night. The Reghen told us it was the longest when they woke us at daybreak.
“We won’t leave here alive,” I said to Elbia as we stepped into the frigid air.
“What’s got into you? Stop searching for your ruin, and it will not find you,” she said, her voice angry for the first time.
I was not the one searching. Death was upon us, stealing the children away, his night fires spread across Sirol to consume the corpses. If it wasn’t the maulers, it was the plague, or the ninestar curse, the heads of Darhul, there were nine of them too, and the thousand teeth of the Drakon. It was always something.
When we arrived at the field, everyone knew that this day would be different. Elbia swallowed hard when she saw the Archers riding, the hooves raising a cloud of dust that blended with the morning mist.
Standing in front of the warriors were five Reghen and several Ouna-Mas. More than ten, standing in their robes like a black forest of firs.
Six massive men on foot surrounded the strongest horse I had ever seen and were holding the banners of Khun, the One Leader of the Tribe. They wore dark-brown bearskins and had a red cloth tied around each arm. Bako all excited and smiling, shouted, “Rods.” His mouth continued to gape. It was the Khun’s guards, the tallest men of the Tribe, and that meant that the man on the whitest of horses was none other than Khun-Taa.
“The Khun always comes on the last day. We will leave here. Today even,” Elbia told me.
She was right. Almost.
I could swim forever in her smile. I had learned to swim in the marshy waters of Blackvein where Ughi’s body was still floating.
We children stood in one line, fully dressed this time. The weakest pale sun to ever rise upon Sirol broke over the horizon. He too looked as if he had fallen from the plague and the Goddess had covered him in white goatskins to heal him. So faint and small that if I blew he would go out.
Sah-Ouna separated herself from the others, and walked to a cut tree trunk that stood twenty paces in front of me. A sacred knife was in her hand, not a fighting blade, but the one with a black-horned handle. She waited.
“Sacrifice,” Atares whispered next to me. I turned to find his face. There was no one there. Atares had been torn to pieces by the dogs just days before. What demon stole his voice?
Sacrifice. He was right. The black-horned knife, Sah-Ouna, all the others. Sacrifice. Those watching formed a circle around the field, and in the center stood the children, six times the fingers on my one hand, many. The Reghen with their gray robes and the greatest warriors, those with the whitest of horses, were on the north side her stares fixed on the First Witch. The Ouna-Mas were murmuring a solemn song, one of them ululating and piercing my head.
I was boiling in a giant cauldron of agony with Elbia at my side. I wanted her next to me that day. Maybe some of her sevenstar luck would rub off on me. To my surprise, Keko didn’t separate us. He knew.
Her fingers touched mine again.
“All of them came here for me,” I whispered to her.
She squeezed my hand. Tiny silver moons shone in her eyes. We always try to guess. What the eyes say, the stars, the Goddess’s signs. But we never learn.
The stars and the wind remained silent, as if they had run out of Stories to warn me. I had tried to cough for days and nights to see if I had the sickness, but I didn’t. I was as strong as I had ever been, even stronger than before the Sieve, when I’d rarely even seen meat. It was a cruel fate, but I would die stronger than ever. It was too late to escape. I would just make a fool of myself if I tried to run now, in front of everyone, while the Goddess watched. She would feed me to Darhul herself. Elbia watched. I wouldn’t run.
A Guide approached Sah-Ouna, carrying a bleating black ram behind his neck, its front legs on the right side of his shoulder and its hind legs over the left. He lowered it, tied two ravendark ribbons around its horns and held it on the tree trunk in front of the First Witch.
I exhaled my whole life. The tree trunk was there for another soul, one as black-fated as mine. I was not the sacrifice.
Warriors passed; one threw barley and others poured milk onto the tree trunk.
Sah-Ouna raised her hand and the song of the Ouna-Mas died. The First Witch spoke: “Goddess, accept this offering from us and take away the sickness. Do not ask for any more lives from your Tribe, and we will give you this blood, the purest that we can offer.”
She stepped next to the tree trunk where the Guide was holding the ram down flat. Its desperate bleating was the only sound, as if it disagreed with its fate. With one steady and slow movement Sah-Ouna opened the animal’s throat. Blood flowed, first onto her hands and then onto the wood. She emptied the life of the ram into a bowl, then tore the animal’s belly in half and offered the heart to the Sky. She moved her lips in silence for a few breaths and returned the heart to the wood. She took out the liver, raised it, examined it briefly in the pale-yellow light of the sick sun, and then turned her head toward Khun-Taa.
She shook her head negatively.
Two Rods left their guard beside the Khun and approached Sah-Ouna. She turned, and her gaze fell directly on me.
“She’s coming,” I whispered to Elbia, who had glued herself next to me. The Rods were following her.
I would never know why. That hurt the most. What difference did it make if I had been born nine or eight days after the full moon? Wasn’t I the best in the Sieve? With bloodied hands and a slow step, Sah-Ouna kept walking toward me. The sun was high on the horizon, but even the birds remained mute. Not even
the whinnying of a horse broke the frozen silence. The only sound was the mud squelching beneath her feet on every step.
Sah-Ouna was one step away from me.
What was the darkness in her eyes? Sorrow, duty, sacrifice, a Goddess’s demand?
The Demon always looks you in the eye. I knew the Legend.
Sah-Ouna stopped, dipped her hand into the bowl, lifted it, and with her arrow finger painted, slowly, mercilessly, a red circle. On the woolen tunic, high above the chest. Elbia’s chest.
The Witch and the Rods moved to the sides. Across from us stood seven warriors with their heads down. Seven, yes, I’m pretty sure of it.
Elbia turned to look at me with intense, wide-open eyes. Bright eyes swallowing life and the whole world in one breath.
“Da-Ren. What? I…”
A drop ran down her cheek. It wasn’t raining.
It happened before I took another breath. I never had a chance to think, to step forward. My eyes were fixed at hers, not at the men opposite. A mesmerizing whistling song ripped the air and, like a deer entranced, I turned to find it. So fast. The seven arrows pierced the thin white fabric that covered Elbia’s young breasts.
She never had time to say a word. She fell next to me with eyes still wide-open. All seven had found the red circle. And they formed seven red smaller circles. Full circles. Like seven stars.
Did I count them? No. I didn’t have time. But there must have been seven. All acts of the Goddess and the Witches had meaning. There couldn’t have been six or even eight. I think. I didn’t count. It was all so fast.
It was then that Enaka’s icy tongue slid into my ear and carved an eternal memory in my mind. Children screaming. Were they screaming for Elbia? Or for the quivers still full of arrows?
The Guides charged toward us. Children’s bodies slammed into one another and in the pandemonium someone knocked me down. Before I got up a knee hit me hard in the head. Children, Guides, Archers all running around me. Whips waving in the air. I tried to crawl to Elbia’s body, to twine our fingers again, one more time, but the Guides had already taken her away.
The warriors lowered their bows, the Guides fell back, the children stopped screaming. The Witch had already turned her back. There would be no more sacrifices. Only the best of the Sieve. I wasn’t the best after all. I wasn’t the one torch of glowing hope every night among the rest.
The strangest thing happened that morning. At the exact moment I knew I wasn’t going to die from my mark, I was marked by death forever. Those arrows marked me so that I now believed I did carry a curse. I would bring darkness and blood to the Tribe. One day, I would.
I crept into the Sheep’s tent uninvited and stayed there curled and trembling till dusk.
Her face clean, her body dressed and adorned as a warrior Archer, Elbia lay upon a wooden bed in the twilight of the twenty-first day. Everybody took a twig to throw into the pyre, to become accomplices, and beneficiaries. “Sacrifice,” Atares had said that fateful morning.
Danaka gave me a twig as well. She tried to hold my hand. I pulled it away. The warriors came too and in a rare show of respect, dismounted from the horses. Sah-Ouna was holding the pine torch, the firestarter. She raised her hands to the Unending Sky and cried out, ripping the life out of my chest. “Enaka, take the plague of the Drakonsnakes away from us, as you take this one up to the stars. We offer you our bravest soul, the one who faced all deaths.”
Elbia, daughter of Enaka. That was what I called her from the first time I saw her riding. I want to see my mother again, she said. War horses, she said.
The sun set in a blaze of vibrant color, stronger and well fed, when our brown twigs and Elbia’s brown hair went up in flames. He laid himself triumphantly to sleep in the west, his body full of the day’s blood.
I fell to my knees, and my hands covered my face. My chest heaved in spasms. I bit my lips to control myself. And then I broke down. I did not shed a furtive tear or two. I cried with a wailing that shattered my whole body and with burning poison water that I could no longer hold in. I cried on my knees in front of Khun-Taa and Sah-Ouna, the fierce warriors and the rest of the children.
Another Guide whom I had not seen before, grabbed me, like the first night, by the hair and dragged me away from the funeral pyre. He tied me to the stake where they had nailed the ram’s head, away from everyone else. Only the stars and Elbia watched, as he lashed me seven times like a dog. To this day, I can remember those seven lashes.
The first one felt like I was being torn by the teeth of a thousand dogs. The second burned me like the flaming tongues lit by Sah-Ouna. With the third, I begged silently for it to be the last even if it meant death. The fourth ripped the skin so deeply that I could feel the leather and the nails on my liver. The fifth was sweet because it brought me closer to the end and to Elbia. The sixth, dishonorable, marked me on my forehead and my left temple, and the seventh—I barely remember the seventh, but there must have been a seventh.
The whip’s serpents of shame, engraved on my back, healed as I grew older, but the scars on my face stayed for life.
Some scars mark us forever.
XIII.
Baagh, Baaghushai
Island of the Holy Monastery, Thirty-Second Summer.
According to the Monk Eusebius.
“Young man. Sorcerer of the Cross. Save us!” begged the barbarian offering the jar he had just carried for thirty-eight and a thousand steps.
The white pigeons that were carelessly nibbling in the monastery’s courtyard fluttered like frightened wind spirits and flew high to the battlements. The chickens could not follow and made best by scurrying away as far as they could. The Castlemonastery had impenetrable walls, stone-built and tall as six men, to deter all invaders. Except for the woodworm, which had slowly devoured the main cedar gate. On that quiet day, none of us had managed to secure it at first sight of the small merchant vessel. The invader was already within us.
When they heard my cries, about a dozen monks ran as fast as their brown robes would permit to take the place of the pigeons in the courtyard. The First Elder was at the front, holding his arms wide open to keep the rest back. White-bearded and of sturdy build, fearless in front of any danger that this earthly world harbored, the First Elder commanded the man, “In the name of God, leave your blades outside this holy place and repent, barbarian. What do you seek? Are you of the faith? The Son of God prevails.”
Da-Ren showed that he did not understand so many words, so fast, and began to panic. He turned his sweat-drenched head left and right, and his eyes darted from one face to another as if he were desperately looking for someone.
“I’ve brought my offering,” he said, holding out the jar again, and the First Elder motioned for me to take it. But the man would not let it go.
“Baagh. Baaghushai!” he yelled.
He repeated the words many times. The monks, perplexed, whispered to one another, each trying to recognize the strange words, but in vain. As Da-Ren’s strength began to fail him, the ai at the end of the unintelligible word began to fade. And then I understood—as if I were sent by God Himself to be the only one who could understand this man, and the words leaped out of my youthful soul. “Baaghushai. Baaghus. Baaghus. He is looking for the monk Evagus.”
His eyebrows lifted, and the wrinkles on his forehead deepened as his head nodded with excitement.
“Baaghus, Baaghus. Baagh.”
“Evagus has isolated himself for days now at the hermitage in the northern cave,” the monk Rufinus said in a low voice next to the First Elder.
Evagus the hermit, the secretive, the traveler. He had come to the Castlemonastery on an imperial naval trireme from the north only a few days before Da-Ren. The First Elder and the older monks welcomed him like an old friend. They knew him from the days of his youth, when he first arrived to receive the rites of the True Faith, when he still called himself Baagh. He had once been a pagan wizard from the east. He trained and cultivated his faith in the searing de
serts of the south and the east, some said as far away as the cursed city of Varazam.
A few of the suspicious monks whispered that he may still be worshipping a different, false god on some faraway land. On different occasions, I witnessed the First Elder doubting or exalting Evagus, whichever of the two suited him at the time. But the official story among us was that Evagus had chosen for years now the faith of our one true God.
When he arrived on Hieros Island, he told us to call him Evagus and demonstrated that he was undoubtedly a man of the Faith. And of power. He carried a gold-sealed edict from the Emperor himself, who asked that we host and help him as he required, but even the Emperor’s gold seal had no power in the Castlemonastery. Only the First Elder had jurisdiction there.
“Baaghus, Baaghus, yes, he is here,” I answered the barbarian.
“Be calm now, he will come. We will go and summon him. Give me your blades,” the First Elder commanded, but to no avail.
Da-Ren, half crawling, as if he had lost all strength upon entering sacred ground, crouched into the only corner within the courtyard that was sheltered from the noonday sun. The way he still held the jar, I was certain it was filled with gold and gems—but that was far from the truth.
His tall body rocked with spasms, the two scabbards marking his back like the Cross of the Martyr. As he was sitting there with his back turned, it would have been so easy to hit him over the head with a heavy piece of wood, if we could find the wood and the courage. But no monk could do that, even if this man was likely to bring death to us all.
I was sent immediately to the remote hermitage to bring Evagus back to the monastery. The one they called Baaghus or Baaghushai or Baagh. From this point, I will refer to him as Baagh since papyrus costs a lot to buy from traders. That’s the name Da-Ren used.
Spring had covered the paths with thorny bushes and thick weeds, and it took me longer than expected to reach Baagh. I found him sitting in the cave with his head bowed. He lifted it only when he heard the rolling pebbles shifting beneath my sandals, unintentionally heralding my arrival.
Drakon Omnibus Page 11