Drakon Omnibus

by C. A. Caskabel

  Many warlords fell to their knees and begged Ouna-Ma to bring back Selene and ask forgiveness from Enaka.

  “Follow my father,” she said, the first time she spoke men’s words. And only when they swore to do that much, before dawn, Selene lost her red color, and a thin, golden peel of moon appeared. Slowly, the round heart of the Goddess burst out of the belly of Darhul, glorious and full again. And that was how Selene stayed for the remainder of the night, and never again did the Ravenfeather dare swallow her.

  “So will Selene disappear and return, just as your faith in the Goddess,” said the Ouna-Ma.

  Before dawn, the men separated into two camps. Most wanted to follow Khun-Nan and Ouna-Ma, but a few remained faithless. Khun-Nan then raised his bow and told his supporters that whoever would follow him should follow his aim, and that all who refused him would fall.

  With the first arrow, he aimed to the north, and at least forty arrows from brave warriors cut through the sky in the same direction.

  With the second arrow, he aimed at his most ardent adversary, and forty more arrows followed to rip the chests of anyone who still stood in opposition.

  And with the third arrow, Khun-Nan aimed at his own woman, the wretch who had borne his six children, the five who had died and Ouna-Ma.

  After a while, the women, more than four times the fingers of two hands, fell dead from the arrows of their warrior mates.

  With that bow, Khun-Nan ended forever the customs of family, that abomination of same man and woman under the same hut forever, from the Tribe.

  “From this day forth, every warrior can mount any unfilled woman he desires. Except for Ouna-Ma, who will lie naked with whomever she chooses,” said the First Leader of the Tribe.

  The few men of the Tribe swore never again to raise children as their own, nor ever to learn which ones were theirs. They were to leave all the newborn together to be raised by the women of the Tribe. All swore that none would ever again live with a woman in a tent as a family; all would be warriors in Packs. They swore that any woman one brought, slave or of the Tribe, would also belong to all others.

  Those who did not obey were massacred, in the last family ritual of the Tribe, and the many marched for the North, with Khun-Nan, on the route toward salvation and glory.

  As long as the Tribe obeyed the First Ouna-Ma, the golden disc of Selene never bled again and was never swallowed again by any demon in a cloudless sky. The One Leader was Khun-Nan.

  Our Father is a Legend,

  Our Son is every Archer,

  Our only Mother is Enaka,

  Our one Daughter is Revenge.

  This is the Tribe.

  Thus declared the Ouna-Mas, the Voices of the Unending Sky.

  The Reghen stopped and covered himself beneath his gray hood. Redin, the first Uncarved we had lost, did not hear this Story. His ashes had already risen to the Unending Sky. The Sky where we had aimed our arrows as Chaka had ordered. But Redin’s father, Druug, would understand. He would have shot the first arrow.

  XIX.

  Now I Am Ready

  Island of the Holy Monastery, Thirty-third Year.

  According to the Monk Eusebius.

  It took Baagh forty long days to persuade the First Elder and the rest of the monks to remove Da-Ren’s chains.

  It was just three and ten days after the barbarian’s arrival when Baagh requested to speak during the morning meal in the refectory. The monks did not object. It was the only suitable communal congregation for such conversations—a brief recess from prayer. He stood so he could be seen by all to the left and the right of the long cedar table and said, “It will be a pious act to free this man of his chains and record his story.”

  The monks stopped moving their spoons and looked up at Baagh. They had heard all stories of Heaven and Hell, God and Devil, the eternal truths. The story of a sword-bearing barbarian was not of any interest to them. They preferred that the barbarian remain chained. It is rare to find a story that deeply stings the minds and hearts of the wise followers of the Faith. But as fate had it, that was the kind of story I ended up writing.

  “A few days ago, you ordered for him to be chained,” said the First Elder.

  “He has no evil intention.”

  “I cannot endanger everyone based on your words, especially if they change so often.”

  “On the contrary, that is exactly what you must do, old and wise comrade. That is why a trireme of the Imperial fleet brought me to your island, and that is what the gold-seal edict commands,” Baagh replied.

  “Did you know all along that the barbarian would come here?” asked the First Elder.

  “I expected it. I wasn’t sure.”

  The wooden shutters of the big hall were banging fast and angry against the wall to announce a sudden summer storm. The First Elder looked at me silently, and I ran to shut them.

  Baagh and the First Elder were about the same age. Baagh was probably older, but he didn’t have the short snow-white hair or the First Elder’s soft hands. Baagh’s silvery-gray hair fell back and sometimes stood on the air in separate clumps. Looking at his hands, you might guess that he had once been a warrior or a farmer.

  Baagh continued with a calm and patient tone of voice, certain that his wish would prevail in the end.

  “The Emperor and his generals will want to read this man’s story. Protospathos, the First Eunuch himself, asked it of me. He has met this man.”

  “The First Eunuch of the Palace met this barbarian?” interrupted the First Elder.

  “Yes…and he too believes, as I do, that his story is of vital strategic and military importance. Especially if it is detailed. A matter of life and death. Thousands of lives of the faithful will be saved. Believe me; they will be indebted to every written word.”

  “I thought the only thing that mattered to you was to save this barbarian’s soul,” said the First Elder.

  “If that is God’s will, so much the better. But the important thing is to save other lives. Of the faithful. The many.”

  “We are ascetics, neither warriors nor eunuch advisors of the palace, Evagus.”

  “But, just as our Emperor, we too serve the One God. We have a sacred duty.”

  “Won’t he leave to go to find his wife and daughter if you free him?”

  “No, elders, he knows that his only hope for salvation is to do as I say.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes. And you will be too when you read his story. There is nowhere left for him to go.”

  “My heart fears for the innocent,” the First Elder said, after moments of silence. “Here is what I will agree to do: We will keep him chained for one more month, and we will pray for him. We may release him after the celebration of Pentecost.”

  “Why wait until the birthdate of the Faith?”

  “All of us should pray till then for the fire of the cloven tongues of the Holy Spirit to enlighten us before we make our final decision. The clouds of this man’s sins and my fears obscure my judgment. If God wants him to live till then and you are still sure, then I might allow it,” said the First Elder.

  He continued the conversation with Baagh in a low whisper as they left the refectory, away from all other ears.

  It was the beginning of the honeyed season of summer when we freed him, exactly forty days after he first set foot on the island. Da-Ren’s legs were weak after being chained for so long. For the first few days, he had trouble walking, so I had to help him climb the steps. The pain in my shoulders every night felt as if they had been split in two, and I could find no comfort even in sleep.

  It took him weeks before he resembled the man who had charged up the thirty-eight and thousand steps like a demon wind that first day. Baagh ordered me to accompany Da-Ren on his walks, and we went out of the monastery together, always in the late evening before hesperia, at the most graceful moment of the sky. We would exit from the villagers’ entrance of the castle wall and walk on the footpaths that led away from the monastery
to the north and west.

  The worried villagers stole glances. They weren’t looking at me. None of them had ever seen anyone like Da-Ren before, his face and body chiseled like a living statue of the barbarians of the North. He was a young man, older than I but hardly over the age of thirty.

  “Was Da-Ren handsome?” I asked myself many times.

  How could I, man and monk, appraise male beauty?

  As terror I came to know him; in terror I lived with him from the first day. But the women of the village, young or old, married or widowed, innocent or wicked, would have many tales to tell in the years to come.

  “This dark two-legged beast came one night in my sleep and forced me on all fours. He buried his fiery sword in my belly.” That is what the farmer’s daughter, five and ten years old, said when she bore, unwedded, a boy child. The baby had one brown eye and one green. The priest who heard her confession of the barbarian’s vicious acts absolved her of all sin. The priest also had a green eye. The other had been taken out by a pirate’s dirk when he was a boy. Both of her father’s eyes were brown. The peasants and the priest asked for Da-Ren to be put to death by the monks, but Baagh rejected their plea.

  “The infidel comes in through my window every starless night. In the unholy darkness, he grabbed my head with his hand and made me lick the gates of Hell. I lost my mind after that and can’t remember any more,” the miller’s widow said when she was unexpectedly found with a seed growing in her belly.

  Even the married women had some stories to tell, but they were less eager to repeat them. He was as handsome as unspeakable sin, they all wanted to whisper, no matter what words they used. Quite a few monks believed most of the stories in the beginning and commanded me to find him some kind of work away from the villagers’ settlement.

  “He has to labor for the common good. That is a mandate. He must be of service to the monastery. Solitary work,” the First Elder told me.

  I took him around to show him the various jobs he could do. He could weave baskets of the kind we traded with merchant sailors or help with the crops and the olive trees. I didn’t dare think of the food preparation or laundry. But when I urged him to begin such work, he refused, bringing his eyebrows together in bewilderment.

  “I can’t labor in such tasks,” he told me and showed me a scar on his left arm as if that was supposed to explain something to me. I had not heard his story yet and didn’t know if he was a warlord or just lazy.

  “They won’t let you stay at the monastery if you don’t work,” I told him.

  My anxiety ended a few days later when we had to carry rocks to rebuild the church. Men were laboring in heat to carry the rocks from the eastern cliff to the cove and from there up the thirty-eight and a thousand steps. Work for the devil.

  “I can do that,” he said pointing at the man who was carrying a basket on his back filled with rocks. When Da-Ren began to work, faster than anyone else, all the monks and men from the village rejoiced, even though the women’s sordid stories continued unabated. He carried the rough stones that we needed for building and anything else that was heavy up to the Castlemonastery. When there was work, he did the work of twenty monks, but most days he didn’t have anything to do, so it was a blessing when we began the morning scribing of his story.

  For months, I read him tales and waited for the day when he would begin to recite his. All of our meetings took place in his unsanctified quarters, not in the monks’ building. Guests did not stay in the two-story building with us, but in cells attached to the walls, like sand-colored wasp hives. Their few windows had the most beautiful view as if one were sailing eternally on the sea. They also suffered the worst cold in winter and scorching heat in summer.

  From these cells, visitors could gaze at similar barren islands with steep cliffs rising from the middle of the blue-black waters. This was the only picture of the rest of the world. Spring is a God’s gift in my land. Even those barren islands blossom like carefree painted pictures of Paradise then. But they are nothing more than gray stone lands of exile in winter. Not even the rats survive.

  “The visitors are not members of the commune. They only have their one foot in. That is why they stay in the cells along the walls that border the monastery,” said the First Elder, explaining the symbolism of this practice. It would have been more virtuous of him to simply tell me that he was afraid of the thieves who came supposedly for worship and pilgrimage.

  Da-Ren did not pray with us. He never ate at the long table and did not enter the holy shrine with the cross-shaped wooden roof. But through the work of his arms and legs, he earned his bread honorably. The same couldn’t be said for his soul.

  One night during Da-Ren’s first winter in Hieros, the sky clouds swirled like black tentacles and the sea’s dark belly boiled angrily. Sky and sea embraced and set out to drown anyone caught in the middle. The monk awakened me by pounding on my door. His face had the color of a rotten fish.

  “Come at once,” he said.

  I ran past the row of slow-moving monks who had come out of their cells nervously crossing themselves. One of them called out to me: “You brought the cursed demon to the house of the Lord. May God protect us.”

  I crossed the courtyard and, soaked to the bone, climbed the steps to the cells in the wall. As I was approaching his cell, I could hear Da-Ren’s screams whenever the thunder stopped. Baagh was already there, wiping Da-Ren’s brow with a wet cloth. The gaze of the barbarian was traveling far away, as if the storm had awakened the wolves within him. He was mumbling in his native tongue, but I caught only a few words, which Baagh translated.

  “Remember what I say to you, Eusebius. If you repeat these words to him when he recovers, he might start talking to you.”

  Baagh was saying things I was hearing for the first time.

  “Ouna-Ma… she rides me naked… black clouds I fly… mud… under my body … bound… poles… leeches… suck… scorpions… warm in armpits… hot… they suck poison… Zeria… eyes… Ouna-Ma.”

  I remembered the words, but I wasn’t about to repeat most of them.

  “What did you give him to drink today? Wine?” asked Baagh.

  “No, only water.”

  “What did he eat?”

  “He had a feast. Ate a whole fish. We were all fasting and would have thrown it out. The fisherman—”

  “What do you mean whole?” asked Baagh. “The head too?”

  He searched the cell and smelled the leftovers in the wooden bowl thrown into the corner.

  “Snapper. Damn, Eusebius, the head of this devilfish brings hell’s nightmares. This man will suffer for days and nights. Water, much water only. And chamomile.”

  “What does Ouna-Ma mean, elder? He whispers it often when we are out walking and in the courtyard when he sees monks in their robes. What does he mean?”

  “They are witches. Of his tribe.”

  “You mean, women?”

  “Yes, women. Priestesses of a false and hemovorous faith. You will learn of them soon when he starts telling you his story. Remember to repeat these words to him when he recovers. That is how you will find the path to his mind.”

  “I remember all that he has said so far. Once he mentioned the accursed city of Varazam, elder.”

  “Yes.”

  “But Varazam is deep in the eastern deserts. That’s the other end of the world from the northern river where these barbarians dwell.”

  “That is where Varazam was. You’re correct.”

  Baagh’s lower jaw began to tremble when he uttered these words, and the weak flame of the candle sparkled the tears in his eyes. He quickly made to leave in an effort to hide his emotions.

  The massacre of Varazam. The most tragic chapter of the Apocalypse. Had either of them been there? Both?

  “Zeria…Zeria…Aneria…” Da-Ren continued mumbling with his eyes closed and his face sweating cold.

  So passed the first winter and spring. I did nothing else but read stories to him in our tongue, the one
of God. Summer came again, marking a whole year from Da-Ren’s arrival.

  Baagh still hadn’t left to seek the powerful monks in the south and the east who would help Da-Ren save his wife and daughter. How they were supposed to accomplish that, I had no idea. Baagh had declared quite clearly that he would set out to find them only when Da-Ren had begun to tell his story. It seemed impossible to me that something like that would ever happen. He refused to say anything—still negotiating with Baagh.

  “Why do we continue to lie to him, Baagh? The Sorcerers he expects are not going to come, and there is no help that they can offer him,” I said one Sabbath. I had wasted time away from the Holy Liturgy while pleading with Da-Ren to start talking to me.

  “Because I need his story with every detail intact. And because revealing the truth to him will only bring death now, Eusebius. To us and to him. Time is our guardian angel. I adjure you to continue the lie for the safety of all of us. God will forgive you.”

  Days later, I deliberately fed him snapper that had gone bad, but nothing happened.

  “Do you have enough papyrus?” Da-Ren asked me.

  “Yes, whenever you want we can start.”

  “I am not ready to talk yet. Did Baagh invite the almighty Sorcerers? We are losing time, Eusebius. Zeria. Aneria. Death.”

  He was mumbling names that didn’t mean anything to me. One day, he talked as if he had to leave that afternoon to find his wife and daughter, and then he forgot them for a moon or more as if they had never even existed.

  I had plenty of papyrus to last until the next merchant ships came in the spring. I had new reed pens tied with linen cord just waiting for the task. I had ordered from the sailors of the merchant ships better pens, those that were soft and hollow, which I could fill with ink and squeeze to bring the ink to the nose of the pen. I had even found a seashell to use as a big bowl and had fivecleaned and shined it till it sparkled. It was filled with ink, made from iron salts and oak gall. The ink was waiting, and so was I.