“No fear. Go to sleep. It is only the Dasal, the forest peasants,” I said.
For one night, at least that night, I was the Leader of the Tribe.
I fell asleep and dreamed of Sah-Ouna. She was a little girl. Zeria, the Dasal girl, was with her. So was my mother. All three had blue eyes. They walked hand in hand in the Forest, away from me, getting deeper into the wood.
I awoke, not much later to the frightened screams of my comrades.
“Darhul’s demons, the Final Battle. Save yourselves,” yelled the men next to me. Some were already running to get out of the Forest.
The Reghen came running toward me, with Druug following him. “This is not a night for tales,” said the Reghen as he placed his palm on my shoulder to advise me. “You have to lead, Da-Ren. It is the time of the blade.”
“They are Dasal. Do not be afraid,” I shouted. But my voice couldn’t rule over the nightmares of hundreds of men.
I searched until I found Rouba sleeping in the dark, hunched under a walnut tree. I woke him up with difficulty.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I want you to come with me to find the Dasal. Their shadows are moving around us, the wolves howl, and the men are going mad. I want the two us to go deep into the Forest. That is my final trial.”
“Says who?”
“Me. Sah-Ouna. The dream.”
My other choice was to return and report to Khun-Taa how many brown-haired Garol, same as me, we had hanged. That is what I should have done—take the safe and easy path back.
But I did the opposite.
I fell into Sah-Ouna’s trap.
I did what she wanted. What I wanted.
I let the Reghen and Druug know.
“We two,” I pointed to Rouba, “will go to find them alone. The rain has stopped. Get the men out of the Forest and into the moonlight, and don’t wait for us.”
Druug tried to open his mouth, but the Reghen motioned him to stay quiet. I packed my things, letting the Reghen exchange some last words with Rouba.
“Don’t wait for us!” Rouba repeated my words to the rest. He was pulling his horse from the reins with one hand, walking forward at a quick pace. I followed. A calling whispered through the branches and invited me deeper into the Forest.
XXVIII.
Children Hand in Hand
Eighteenth summer. Uncarved—Wolf.
“My end is near, young man,” said Rouba. We had been walking for a long while, deep into the Forest, before the first ray of sunshine reached through the trees.
I stopped my stride and turned to face him. “What kind of talk is that?”
“I saw it. It wasn’t a sign of the Goddess. It was a man’s sign.”
The Guide was talking, but he wouldn’t look at me. He was already looking to the next world.
“What sign?”
“The Reghen have a secret way, their own, of signaling things. But after so many winters in the Tribe, I have learned it.”
“I don’t understand you, Rouba.”
He was fifty winters old, but that morning he looked twice that.
“You see, the Reghen never touch a man or woman. But when they know that someone is going to die, they put a hand softly on the shoulder. Only then. Always the same. A send-off.”
“I’ve never heard of that.”
The birds had awoken early that summer day. There were so many of them, with colors I’d never seen in the Iron Valley. Colors without names. They didn’t want to sing about death, and their chirping drowned out Rouba’s words.
“That Reghen, before we left, he let his palm rest on my shoulder. First time in my fifty winters that a Reghen did that.”
I wanted to tell him that he was talking nonsense. It had to be nonsense. I needed Rouba more than ever before. We were together and alone in the woods. I changed the talk to take his mind away from death.
“Last night, before I came to find you, in my sleep, I had a dream: Sah-Ouna, my mother, Zeria.”
He didn’t ask me about my mother. We had seen the women of Garol. He asked me who Zeria was.
We reached a rough slope and dismounted. The ground was covered with thorny bushes and tall grass, and at some points, the foliage was so dense that I had to clear the way by parting the leafy branches with my hands so we could see our footing. Rouba had brought an ax, and we chopped our way through the woods to help the horses pass. We didn’t need the horses in the Forest, but we needed them to return and couldn’t leave them to the wolves.
“If you want to find the summer settlement of the Dasal, we will have to go two or three days north, to Kar-Tioo,” Rouba told me.
I did want to find the Dasal.
Rouba continued. “The Forest has grown and risen this summer. I don’t remember it being this dense.”
“It is pushing us out. Like someone is resisting.”
“What did you say?”
“Like someone is—”
“Yes, I heard you. Don’t talk like that.”
I was fighting the green monster with the ax, opening its skin to get further inside. There was only one reason I was in the Forest. I had to find a way to tell him about Zeria.
“Rouba, is there really a Forest Witch?”
“Yes, and we are in her wood now. There is a Dasal myth. A deer that sings. A White Doe. This is how I came up with Er-Ren’s Story.”
“My father’s Story, is…from the Dasal?”
“Your father’s? Yes…”
There was a grimace of hesitation on his face, as if the word father actually meant something to him, something forbidden and forgotten.
“You never told me the myth.”
“I will, someday. Not now. We’re too close.”
“Have you ever seen her?”
“Maybe. Once. I’m not sure.”
“But you’re sure that she lives close by. How?”
“Because there are men here. And where there are men, there is a witch too.”
“Why?”
“To feed. Young men are the witch’s meat.”
This didn’t make any sense to me.
“Rouba, why don’t we kill the witches? We men have the blades, the power.” From far back when I had learned I was a ninestar, I had had the same question.
“Ha, ‘kill the witch,’ the boy says.” His eyes were searching around and forward to danger. “Man needs the witch. Else all he has is a cold blade.”
The first evening fell dark fast, and the night creatures rose around us. I took the first watch while Rouba slept, and I was alone with the whispering branches that brought the witch’s words.
“Why are you here, Da-Ren, ninestar offspring of the raven-haired riders? You don’t belong. You are born of dust and blood; this is the wood of the bluebell and the butterfly. Keep your blades away from my green-eyed children. Don’t come further inside me.”
This was her only warning, and then the whispering stopped. The Forest, the owl, and the wolf turned silent. I could hear only the fire’s crackling.
Rouba rose with a sudden move, as if from a nightmare. “My old head is restless,” he said. “I cannot sleep.”
“What bothers you?” I asked.
“That’s not the way of the Tribe. To abandon us here. Why did the Reghen and Druug let us go so easily? They were responsible for you. Strange. And who is Zeria?” he asked me again.
That was the Story I wanted to tell, and to ask him if the Forest Witch had blue eyes.
“Strange, yes. I will tell you a strange Story, Rouba,” I said, and I started to recount my betrayal from the last time I was in the Forest. A girl, a tree’s hollow, blue. I hid her from death.
Rouba’s face turned sour and worried.
“A man bewitched by a woman’s eyes will fall,” he said when I finished.
Before I had another chance to ask him or to explain we came upon a clearing. It was barren, and the sun was blazing hot above it. There was no grass or fern on its gray soil; nothing grew there. Only a swa
rm of flies were buzzing high in the middle of it. Rouba was alert again.
“Don’t step on that clearing, stay in the wood, we’ll go around it.”
He didn’t say another word that day and we spent it trying to distance ourselves from that cursed place.
We started our second day moving slowly on foot through the dense wood and then he started talking to me again, unveiling a future he didn’t want to see.
“It was her fate to go as sacrifice to Sah-Ouna, this girl you found. Why did you do it?”
I didn’t answer. I was looking for that answer myself in the Forest’s womb.
“You can’t just steal someone from Sah-Ouna’s black-horned knife. The Goddess does not forgive such trickery. You owe her.”
I lowered my head so I wouldn’t lose an eye to a branch and kept moving. The Forest was still resisting, pushing me away.
Rouba continued.
“I am telling you this so you can redeem yourself while there’s time. Let’s turn back now. I will not reveal your secret. Something stinks here. Druug shouldn’t have let you go.”
“They were scared. They wanted me to protect them from the Dasal,” I answered.
“You, to protect them? Who do you think you are, boy? The young and the stupid may have been scared. Not Druug. Tell me again,” said Rouba.
“What?”
“What were Sah-Ouna’s words the night she called for you?”
“She said that a great trial awaited me. If I pass it, the Goddess will accept me.”
“She will accept you as a Leader or accept you up there, next to her?”
The bushes and weeds were tangling around me, like the words of Sah-Ouna.
“I don’t remember.”
She said she would accept me. I hadn’t understood the Witch’s forked-tongue speech. I didn’t say that to Rouba. A new fear nested inside of me. Maybe I hadn’t been sent to the Forest to become the next Leader, the next Khun. Maybe I had left Sirol forever.
“This is like a trap. The Reghen, his touch, the Witch—she is pulling us closer,” he said.
“I am not afraid. I am here to find the Forest Witch,” I said.
At the sound of my words, the day’s light became ample as a piercing rain of sun rays tore through the canopy. The Forest glowed gold and silver and embraced me. She was not resisting anymore.
“Welcome, Da-Ren,” was her whisper. “Feed from my body.”
We hunted a rabbit and a deer like my legendary father, Er-Ren, and we lived with the meat and water of the wood. Invisible feminine arms wrapped us warmly that night as we slept among the tree spirits. Mine had blue eyes and golden-green garb. Rouba’s descended in a flame-covered chariot from the Unending Sky.
We kept traveling north, or so we thought. The oaks were getting bigger and wide-leaved, their trunks so wide that it took the two of us to embrace them. The moss on the north side of the wood was our best guess of where north was whenever we lost the marks in the sky.
“We’ve come very deep now. These are the first, the ancient trees,” Rouba told me. “No ax or knife has wounded them, ever. They were born together with the Earth, from Enaka’s first breath, and they are still standing.”
On the fourth night, I thought we were desperately lost as we came upon the same barren clearing again. There was a sickly smell of rotting carcass in the air.
“We are back to the same place,” I said and shivered with gooseflesh on my arms.
“I am not sure it is the same place,” said Rouba.
“It is, it follows us,” I said.
“It’s your fear. Ignore it. Don’t feed it.”
We knew we could not find our way back on our own. When the wolves, our ancestors and protectors, surrounded us at nightfall, we lit a fire and remained within its circle, wearing the wooden amulets that the Ouna-Mas had carved for each warrior. The Ouna-Mas had not forged this Legend with the wolves well.
“One of us needs to stay awake. I have seen men, can’t even remember how many, torn apart by wolves. None by Reekaal,” Rouba told me.
The horses were snorting nervously. I tried to calm them and hold them as close to the fire as they would come. I took the second watch, and when it dawned, I was light-headed and sweaty.
The light of the day rose low among the slender trunks, not high above them, making the trees form long, dark shadows. In the early morning, the Forest was not green. It was covered with nine shadows of black where the sun didn’t hit, gold when it found a crevice, and a blue fog in between the trunks. The sickening smell had disappeared and a crisp morning blossom had replaced it.
I didn’t see any huts. But I smelled the fires, and after a little while, I saw them flickering. Not a man could be seen. Or woman.
“Kar-Tioo! We are here. This is the Dasal’s settlement. Put down your blades now, or they won’t come out. They are afraid.”
I obeyed Rouba and threw my blades many paces ahead of me. We were now completely defenseless and at the mercy of these invisible othertribers, the ones whose father, brother, or both, I had killed in my first fight at the Wolfhowl.
The light woke the leafy branches, and the scenery started to come alive. What was still became moving and liquid.
Brown came first. Brown trunks, brown hides, and brown hair of men, walking on brown mud.
Green was still the bracken, green eyes of men and children staring at us. Her dress was green and gold, its hemline cut short and uneven. The Dasal were encircling us with careful steps as they came out of the woods.
Two blackbirds flying silently at summer’s end. The tree trunks rising like black spears to the east, outlined by the morning sunlight. Her black hair waving strong as she walked toward us.
Pale sunlight, pale white, their faces, hiding in the shadows of the Forest most of the day. Pale and naked laid my blade on the bellflowers.
Bellflowers, campanulas. Little bells, Rouba was calling them. Rivers of them. Violet or blue. Only the sun’s rays could answer that. She was close enough now that I could see her sky-blue eyes.
She was holding two small children by the hand. She looked older than the first time I saw her. Like a woman. I recognized Veker next to her, her father. The one who had escaped. His stare stayed on me. Not hers. Our previous encounter had lasted for only a few screams. Did she remember?
Look at me. Last time I came as death, but I gave you life.
Another furtive look. Oh, yes, she remembers.
The torture of a witch. She knows that only one look can save a boy. But she refuses it. All so powerful we think she is. Or shy or unsure.
I cannot be refused, girl. I whisper inside me; no one else can hear my words. They are for you alone. I need to look into your eyes. On my virgin journey into the Forest, I will not be refused.
I was inside it now.
Rouba and Veker were talking. Words were fluttering like vibrant butterflies that a child couldn’t hope to catch. They gave us pouches of belladonna and crazygrass to bring back. We sat around the fire. She sat with the men of the Dasal and us. The other women stayed back.
“Is that your blue-eyed one over there?” asked Rouba.
I nodded that she was with the slightest movement of my head.
“I would kill her to save you, but…”
“What?”
“She’s their witch. I can’t.”
“Witch?” I asked.
“Can’t you see it? Witch.”
We had given them our game, half of the deer that we hadn’t eaten. They boiled it in a cauldron with greens and filled bowls to give us. They brought a red, sweetly burning water and filled wooden cups. The men talked among themselves, touching our blades, trying to nock arrows to our bows. We were still unarmed; they had kept them. The women examined us with long stares as they were coming and going. I had never drunk wine before. If I were older and wiser, I would wonder what it was, how it was made, where the Dasal found it, but I didn’t think about any of that. Questions like that did not bother me that
day. It was midday, and the air was muggy again. Sweet red-and-blue breaths boiled down my chest. Sweet bliss of mouth and body.
She was looking at me again and I was diving into the crystal lake of her eyes. She was not resisting anymore. Afternoon came, and we were still resting drunk under the trees. Thirst tortured my tongue.
Rouba said to me, “They say there is a pond near here. Let’s go wash off to clear our heads.”
If the Forest was alive—and I was certain it was—that pond was its mouth. A mouth to kiss, to listen to, to devour me. Its green water covered me completely, flowed deep inside of me, everywhere, like new blood. Every part of my body was reborn for a third time.
I was diving in bliss but Rouba was already out of the pond.
“We’re leaving!” he shouted at me from a distance, cupping his mouth with his hands.
I could hear his words, but my eyes searched for her. Resistance. Penetration. Orgasm. Danger.
A day made out of a dream was coming to an end.
Leave for where? The Sieve? The Uncarved? For Sah-Ouna? Not even a moon had passed since we’d left Sirol, but I was on the other side of the world. So far away.
I didn’t want to leave. I hadn’t even said a word to her. I wanted the sun to stop there, to burn all the men around me like tallow puppets that a Witch melts into the fire. To make them disappear. For only Zeria to remain and for that day to come again and again, longer and brighter and to become thirty times summer. Nothing else. That is what I wished for, but I had no Goddess to listen to my pleas. Rouba was already out of the water and dressing. I got out and covered my nakedness. Zeria lowered her head, and her raven-black hair was shining the last light of the evening.
“That’s what witches do. Their calling finds you in your sleep,” Rouba had said to me days earlier. He had been talking about Sah-Ouna.
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