“You, Reghen, must find this new Khun and counsel him. That is what Enaka commands of you. Throw down your weapons forever. You killed the Crystaleyed Drakon; your brother sacrificed himself. You owe no more arrows or blood to the Tribe. Wear the robes of wisdom, and paint the circle of red upon them so that they all remember your sacrifice.”
And so the Reghen explained to Khun-Nan why they could not be Leaders.
And Khun-Nan turned to the rest and said, “These three wise Reghen will bring the Truths of my beloved Ouna-Ma and will tell you how to choose a Khun, but none of them can ever become one.”
Khun-Nan closed his eyes. Six sorrowful eyes wept for him, four loving hands covered him.
“There will be a slaughter. The inept and the envious always believe that they are better than the true Leaders,” said the First.
“Khun-Nan did not leave an heir, but Ouna-Ma left a Truth,” said the Second.
“The One Leader must remain standing through an arduous trial, unscathed and Uncarved!” roared the Third from stars on high.
This is how the Sieve came to be. The first Sieve had only youths twenty-winters strong because the Reghen had to choose a new Leader immediately. Khun-Ark was proclaimed the winner.
Bloodshed was avoided.
During his reign, Khun-Ark, the Second Leader of the Tribe, created under counsel of the Reghen, the traditions of the Sieve of the twelve-wintered and the Uncarved. And from that time on, we have followed this path.
The three brothers, the wise Reghen, always served beside the Leader. They chose the new Reghen, who would replace them once they had gone. And they chose new Ouna-Mas, who in turn chose new ones. They let them suckle as babies from the She-Wolves by the river to find the voice of Enaka.
Their previous names were hidden in a talisman around their necks. They wouldn’t even use them among themselves, and they agreed to all be called Reghen.
As the Tribe grew, so grew the Reghen.
There are now one hundred of them, and all share one name. They have two hundred eyes and one hundred tongues, but only one Truth, and they watch everyone, everywhere. For the Tribe.
Thus declared the Ouna-Mas, the Voices of the Unending Sky.
Another day, one of bright spring, dawned.
“Don’t do anything stupid now,” Rouba told me as soon as I pressed the stirrup with my boot that morning.
But I had no idea what could be stupid. Anything could be a hidden trial that would make me second to Malan again.
“You are the next Khun,” Rouba said to me. “As long as you believe it.”
How wrong he was.
I enjoyed a few days of false triumph, waiting for something to happen immediately, waking up every morning expecting to hear about the death of Khun-Taa. But the only thing changing around me was the blossoming meadows.
And then came the fateful afternoon when the rumor reached my ears as well: “Sah-Ouna has called Malan to her tent.”
“What? To tell him what?”
“No one knows. The Rods said she might invite the others also. Maybe even you.”
“Shit.”
I hadn’t done anything wrong. But I was not her chosen one. I stopped speaking to Malan. I hung on the words of the Guides to learn more.
“Fear not. You are the First,” Rouba kept telling me.
“It is not that simple,” Chaka objected when he heard him.
We had gone out that morning to shoot arrows again, as the bow was still my biggest weakness. The contest was coming up, and I didn’t want to lose the red ribbon.
“Sah-Ouna already knows who will be Khun. Has known for a while now. She sees. I made you First, Da-Ren, because you deserve it, but if you do not have her favor…” added Chaka.
Balam, the fourth one, would never be Khun, and that was settled quickly. Only a few days after the Great Feast, he got into a fight over a piece of meat with an Uncarved two winters younger. He lost the fight and three teeth and won three carvings. Gunna had fallen down, coiling in laughter when the young Uncarved Mauler had started kicking Balam in the ass again and again.
“The little guy is possessed by a Reekaal spirit. That’s why he kicks you around like a puppy,” Gunna said as he bade Balam farewell. Balam left with only his shame and his bow. There were three of us left now. Or, really, only two, since Gunna was not born to be Khun and command the destiny of thousands. He was a kid in the head, the biggest kid I had ever met. As in the Sieve, it was down to Malan and me to fight it out.
Rouba was always looking out for me, now more than ever, and he gave me a chance and the challenge to change my fate.
“You carry a heavy burden, young man. The Ouna-Mas fear your ninestar mark. You have to come closer to them if you want to become Khun.”
“How?”
“I mean to really come close to them. I don’t speak in riddles like the Reghen. Do something they need done.”
“Like what?”
“Paran. The youth who was carved three times last spring. Do you remember? He would come with me to the Forest and gather herbs from the Dasal to take to the Witches. He is now a Rod, guard at the tent of Khun-Taa. And he sleeps with two or three Ouna-Mas every night. Come with me, Da-Ren. Tomorrow I will go to the Forest.”
“But we can’t go to the Dasal. Sah-Ouna forbids it.”
“That shit is for the men, not for the Leaders. The Witches need belladonna and crazygrass. I never told you this, but they send me to the Forest almost once every moon. I am one of the few who speak to the Dasal.”
That night, I dreamed of two blue eyes looking at me, sparkling through green oaks.
The next Leader would be the first man to pass through the Forest, the prophecy had said. Rouba was the best possible company for me. He would help me beat Malan. To beat Sah-Ouna. To beat the Forest that had swallowed me alive the last time.
Rouba and I started out for the Forest in the middle of the day after our morning trials. The dark embrace that had encircled me that rainy night was no more. It was now another world—alive, enchanted, and magical. The sun’s arrows were streaming through the leaves and painting everything green and fire white. It was swallowing me alive again. But this time, it was my choice.
“Asphodels,” Rouba said to me. The white flower of death had bloomed early in the Forest of souls.
“Snake! Don’t be afraid. A mice eater! Look at his skin; it has four colors like different arrows next to each other,” he called out to me when I screamed as if Darhul’s offspring were slithering at my feet.
“Hellebore, the evergreen flower. Pick that one. The Ouna-Mas need them.”
The gnarled branches of the eternal oaks had reached back to the dirt and sprouted their own roots. Even those gloomy-looking winter skeletons were now green and had become hospitable tents. Their leaves filtered the sun, making its light soft and its heat bearable, not fierce and scorching as it was in the valley. I hadn’t seen any Reekaal or wolves, although we did find some wolf prints.
“Aren’t you afraid of the Reekaal, Rouba?”
“Reekaal? Never seen them. But to be safe, I come only during the day to meet the Dasal. At night, this Forest sleeps and its other half awakens.”
On our first visits, we never made it to a Dasal settlement. One of them had come south to meet us with a small sack of herbs and roots, taking in exchange a bigger sack of barley. He appeared and disappeared among the shadows of the trees. His clothes were rags that had been dragged through the leaves, his colors were a tree in bloom, and he smelled of wood. His forehead was cracked bark, and his stare was a sharpened ax. He didn’t have blue eyes. Not for an instant did he seem to me possessed, although he did stick his neck out to look around like a hunted animal.
“If you ask them, they will tell you that we are the bloodeaters, the Reekaal,” Rouba said.
I went with Rouba into the Forest almost every seventh day. I went so that I could become Khun. I would then go to the Ouna-Mas’ camp with my sack on my back, which I neve
r opened. There were herbs in there whose scent alone could kill me, Rouba had said, maybe just to scare me. I had never been allowed to the camp, though, and had never seen Sah-Ouna. The Reghen and the young, silent Ouna-Mas would take the herbs at their camp’s entrance.
All I could do was listen carefully to their Stories. The day of my destiny was near. If I did not become Leader before next spring, I would forever lose my chance. Rumors traveled like the plague from fire to fire in the nights and reached everyone fast. Khun-Taa, the Fifth Leader of the Tribe, was ill and coughing blood.
“The End is near,” Sah-Ouna had said at the Feast. It was certain and unavoidable, and only fools and the faithless couldn’t see it. Whoever was unprepared would perish. The camp of the Uncarved was boiling.
I worried more with each passing day, as I still had no sign from Sah-Ouna. But I still had the red ribbon of the First around my arm. Gunna and Malan weren’t the kinds of friends to help me. I had only old Rouba.
“We are whatever the others remember from our last Story, Da-Ren. If it is one of wonder, no one remembers the one before,” Rouba told me.
Everyone knew the Story of when my mother bore me. I had to find the Story of my father—to make one up, just as every man did when he became a warrior. A memorable Legend about my mythical father. Khun-Taa’s father had reached the Black Sea and had shot one arrow for each of Darhul’s eighteen eyes, the Legend said. When my name was mentioned around the evening fires, there had to be a Legend to go with it. And not the one about the triangle on my neck.
I had proved that I was the bravest during the Wolfhowl. I was the best with the blade, and that was something everyone knew. It was the third moon of spring, and we had bow competitions. I wasn’t good at that. Danaka with the female Archers and Matsa, long-forgotten names of the Sieve, were there.
We competed into a huge field, a thousand feet away, in circles. On the second round, we galloped to the center of the field and had to shoot as many arrows as possible at water pumpkins that were placed on stakes. There were twenty in a row, exactly in the center of the field, painted black on one side, so they looked like real heads with hair. Half of them faced one side, and half the opposite side, all mixed up.
We had to hit them on the front side and only that one, every time. Some we aimed at while galloping as our horses approached the target, and for others, we had to shoot backward after we passed the target on horseback. Whoever was second with the horse ran the danger of not finding a target to hit or even being hit by the arrows of the first.
My feet were on the stirrups and my hands free to aim and shoot holding only the bow and the arrows between my fingers, five by five. I hit eleven to fourteen each time. No one hit more than I did. In the last round, only I, Gunna, and one Archer boy remained. I hit nine, the Archer six, and Gunna only five out of twenty. I beat not only the other Uncarved but also the best of the trained Archers as well.
What else did I have to do to prove that I was the next Khun? My two fists rising high, one holding the bow, the other the red ribbon for all to see. Malan was dishonored after the fight with the Dasal that never happened, and Khun-Taa was half-dead. But I was still fighting, not with water pumpkins, but with curses, prophecies, and invisible ghosts.
“It is unfair,” I said to Chaka when the bow trial was over. “What does it matter what night I was born?”
I was dripping with sweat, and so was my horse. I could hardly stand on my legs when I dismounted to drink some water.
“We go now! Mount another horse and follow me,” he said.
“Right now? I rode all day.”
“If you care about being Khun, you follow me now,” he said.
I jumped on a fresh mare and we galloped the horses until we reached a bare hill that was the northeastern border of Sirol. It was close to the Craftsmen tents and the catapult firing ranges, a corner I had rarely visited. We climbed the hill as the sun was cutting Sirol’s ponds in half with a blade of fire. Smaller fires outside the tents looked like tiny sparkles on the earth, reflecting the stars in the sky. More than ten thousand tents once I learned how to count. The Tribe was cooking, singing, dying, and fucking beneath our feet.
“Do you want to rule over all of them, Da-Ren? Or just beat Malan?”
“What’s the difference?”
“There is a huge difference!”
“Yes, I want to rule over all of them.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, Chaka.”
“And do what, my Khun? Where will you lead us? Do you know what’s out there?”
My stare followed his hand as it made a full circle over the purple darkness beyond the river to the south, the black darkness in the east, the hazy nothing to the north, the bronze sunset over the Forest.
“Everyone is coming at us, Da-Ren.”
“Who?”
“Everyone. And from everywhere. The Final Battle. Sah-Ouna said so.”
“You believe that?” I asked.
My horse snorted in fear as if it had smelled a jackal.
“Can’t you see? This world is ending. When I was young like you, everything was so much simpler. We did not have siege machines or all-powerful enemies. We had weaker bows. You wouldn’t even hit five water pumpkins with them today. Now we want gold to trade with; we need to find craftsmen from other tribes to build the machines, to trade wheat, barley, and flax for clothes from the South. Everything has become gold, machines, craftsmen. This is another world. There is no bravery anymore. Three thousand arrows leave our bows and annihilate everyone within a four-hundred-foot distance. Only machines. The world runs like a mad bull to fall off the cliff.”
I had heard about gold but didn’t know what it was good for.
“That was always the Story of our Tribe,” I said.
“No, there is not enough for all of us anymore. We are going to eat each other alive. Our enemies are descending, the Trackers have seen them,” he mumbled to himself.
“We will find meat and horse on the way to the West.”
“We will find shit and death! Who will lead all of them to the West? Who can cross the Forest? You? Are you the One of Enaka who will ride First among all in the Final Battle? Or just a common mortal? Just like the rest of us? Or…or a cursed ninestar?”
My eyes had filled with tears in the night—from rage if it had to be from something.
“You gave me the red ribbon of the First Uncarved, Chaka.” It was the only thing I said with the voice of a little child.
“And I would give it to you again. Because I have known you for five winters. But those down there? Most of them—”
“What?”
“If they see the mark of the ninestar before the battle, they will run scared like panicked sheep. They have feather and grass for brains. They are stupid. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said with my head down.
“No, you don’t. That is the one curse of the Uncarved. You grew up only with the best for five springs since the Sieve, and you don’t know. The ones down there are in pain. They are hungry. They don’t have many nights. You will not have five winters to win them over. They will see your mark, and they will know.”
“It’s not like that.”
“It’s exactly like that! That is why we have marks, banners, sevenstars and ninestars and longskull Witches—so the many and desperate don’t lose time thinking.”
“What can I do?”
“Nothing. You can’t. I seek only One. Not the best or the bravest. I seek the one they’ll fear. The one they will believe in,” he said as he pointed down the hill.
My mare lifted her head; she had smelled something. The moonlight shimmered on the silver-gray back of a jackal crouching ten paces away. Two small shiny white holes, his eyes, were watching us.
How right he was.
XXVI.
The Calling
Eighteenth summer. Uncarved—Wolf.
It was the calling of summer. The hot easterly wind blew softly and blended wit
h the chamomile and the fragrant yellow-white mums. The mosquitoes fell on us like a raging storm and Sirol filled with bloated corpses that rotted faster than we could burn them. They gave off a sickly-sweet scent from their blackened, rotten livers. In the summertime, I always confused those two scents, of chamomile and corpses, as they became one very fast.
That was when her calling came as well.
“Sah-Ouna summons you in her tent,” the Reghen told me on the first day of the third moon of summer. The moment I had been waiting for had come, my only chance to make amends for being born on a cursed day. I wore only a white linen tunic above my trousers. I went to strap my blades and quiver around me, but Chaka didn’t let me.
“You don’t go to the First with iron.”
Alone, naked of weapons, I rode to meet my destiny.
“Cover your face with this veil,” Rouba advised me.
It was a rare gossamer cloth, made by the othertribers of the south or the east, but certainly not from anyone in Sirol. Suitable for women. And for mosquitoes. I took it.
I followed the central path of Sirol, that of the packhorses and the supply carts. I crossed half the camp, arriving at the tents of Khun-Taa, and in the distance, I saw and passed the Reghen’s tents. Khun-Taa’s guards, the Rods, stopped me soon after that, at the entrance of the settlement of the Ouna-Mas, close to the Blackvein.
“Get off your horse, Uncarved,” said one of them.
I was nameless to them. I just had a title that tomorrow could mean everything, or nothing.
Square tents—some with black and others with red painted stripes—were in front of me. The settlement of the Ouna-Mas did not have the traffic and noise of the rest of Sirol. It was a camp of shadows, fire, and smoke, of skinny cats and eagle owls that mostly stayed asleep until dusk. In the middle of the day it looked deserted.
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