Rouba was already leaving. I had to stop this. I turned to Veker. “More.” I pointed to the small pouch with the belladonna to make them understand.
“No, we don’t have any more,” Veker said.
Rouba was looking at me, silent and angry. I pointed again toward the sky. I couldn’t leave. Not yet.
“Moon. Next.”
The Dasal looked at one another and then at Rouba as if they had all silently agreed to ignore me. Zeria stayed farther back away from it all. I couldn’t find her eyes anymore.
Rouba started to walk away from the pond and the Dasal. He turned his eyes toward me and with a rough, disapproving voice, he called, “Your blades. Are you going to leave them behind?”
It was almost dusk, and the sunlight suddenly dimmed as if the cloudbreaths of Darhul swallowed it. The Demon had smelled my weakness. The bellflowers bent in the dark. I heard birds fly away, squawking, alarmed—as if something evil was descending. The sound of rustling leaves, twigs breaking. Rouba turned to look at the trees behind us. I spotted Zeria twenty paces to my left, and at the same moment I saw her also turning, searching for the danger. A cold blast of wind reached me as if the Demon was breathing down my spine.
The Dasal was still holding my blades and was walking toward me. If anyone from my Tribe ever saw that, they would nail me to a stake at once. As he offered them back to me, I heard the whistling arrow shafts ripping through the air. The Dasal turned to look in the direction of the sound, and his screams of pain came before his next breath. A heavy arrow had found its way in between his ribs. He fell to the ground and curled into a ball. A second one landed on the ground a foot away from me. I grabbed it. A broad iron head, a hunter’s arrow, one of those that brought death from short distance. The hunter was close and we were prey.
“Rouba, watch out!”
Loud screams in the otherworldly tongue of the Dasal filled the Forest. They were running to hide; they were not the hunters. The finches and the hoopoes silenced and flew away. A woman fell behind the shrubs, protecting a child in her embrace.
“Zeria!”
First time I spoke her name, aloud. I called upon death and she listened.
Rouba shouted at me. Only one word. What did he say? “Down,” I think. He didn’t talk of Er-Ren or the White Doe or Sah-Ouna. He didn’t talk of the blue-eyed witch or the Reghen who touched a doomed man on the shoulder. He had said all of that.
What curse, what hoar frost of the soul kept me still standing and naked against death?
“Get down!” Veker shouted in my own tongue.
But I was still standing, looking at Rouba and Zeria. A good archer needs only a breath. I heard again the familiar whistling of the arrow, the arrow of death and first love, but it was too late. The iron ripped through my flesh, burning as a witch’s kiss, and angry as a snake bite, beneath my lowest right rib.
Rouba. I can’t.
“Reekaal,” was his last word. Two shafts deep in his chest, two eyes wide open. Rouba fell on his back and he didn’t move again.
The Sky was descending fast to swallow me. Blackbirds everywhere.
The Goddess, Rouba. Her fury. This pain. I can’t stand it.
But I couldn’t talk. He wouldn’t hear; he couldn’t protect me. I had so much more to say.
I didn’t have the courage to tell you. But you were right, Rouba. Before we left, the Reghen, I remember. His palm, the gray robe. He touched me. Softly. On the shoulder. Like you. I’m burning.
My guts were on fire; my knees trembled and I fell. And so luck had it that the next arrows whistled above my shoulder and missed my heart. Strong men’s hands pulled me away, dragging me shivering.
I had never been cut by a blade or pierced by an arrow deeply. Was that it? The pain was slowly going away now. The legs losing all strength, the blurring mind, the shaking as if the icy north wind were blowing deep down my mouth. Was this the end? A red boiling river of warmth was streaming out of me. As red as the ribbon of the First Uncarved that was still tied around my arm. What was I doing in the Forest’s womb? On any other day, I would have seen the arrow coming. I would have tried to dodge it, but, this time, my eyes had stayed on Zeria.
“Monsters. There,” Veker cried.
I barely managed to see two tall and thin hooded shadows, maybe human, probably not, moving away between the trees. They resembled nothing I knew. They looked like the giant statues that I had seen in Sah-Ouna’s tent, maybe. Gunna before and Rouba a moment ago had said it: Reekaal.
I remember little from then on. The Dasal were dragging me away, their shadows screaming in the fog, the foliage of the tall trees and the blue sky, as my eyes slowly darkened. I remember the cold making me numb, Zeria shouting to the others and pointing to my horse. Zeria wrapping a cloth around my ribs. They dragged the horse next to her. Veker raised a knife; men were pulling the animal down from its long mane. A beautiful mane which reached all the way to its knees. Despair blocked my voice but not the horse’s screams as the blood gushed from its rigid neck. Three of them, red elbow-high, were pulling the entrails out with hasty moves. The smell, the retching. My last memory was of them resting me shivering inside the body of the dead horse. My last nest was so warm.
I died that evening. A blue chilling death. Even for a short while.
I sank into the darkness where breaths stop. My horse grew ashen wings, dove into the soil and started flying down the bat caves. One moment, I was lying inside its open belly, and the next, I was riding it bareback. Until I grew dizzy and lost my balance. And then I was falling alone, sliding down Darhul’s throat for nights on end, without being able to grab ahold of something. My hands reached out, but all they touched was poison that burned through the clothes and my skin. I continued to fall unhindered until I crashed against a sharp branch that tore through my body under the last right rib—the sound of wood breaking—and I landed like a sack of bleeding flesh in the mud. The mud awoke cold and hungry, lapping at me with a thousand tongues, slowly covering me more and more. I stood upright, and I felt light as my last breath.
My body didn’t follow me; it was lying face down motionless next to the thin-branched tree. Charred roots had grown out of the slime, rising upward and their dark tendrils were piercing my skin, pulling my body down. I was watching all this from a few feet away. I felt no pain, as my flesh and the tree were becoming one. The tree was feeding, its trunk and branches growing alive with berries, red as my blood. My skin was losing all color. I had descended into the otherworld, that of Darhul and the dead. Enaka had not accepted me among the stars.
I ran to get back into my skin, back to the living. I pushed my palms in the mud to find the strength to get up again. The dark tendrils tried to hold me down, but I managed to grasp the short blade and hacked at them with madness. They answered back with screams, swirling like a storm of venom snakes around my head. I broke free from the tree as its branches begged for a last embrace. The berries were glowing their own light like torches of gold and blood.
Under that new light I saw them in front of me. Many children, some of them othertribers, some from the Sieve, were standing in the mud. It seemed to me that they hadn’t come from anywhere; they were there all along. All of them had black pebbles for eyes, without any white. I walked among them, but their overlapping whispers were so desperate and fast that I couldn’t make out the words. I was searching for a child, a girl, the one who had granted me the first smile. I couldn’t find her and turned to leave.
Seven children, hand in hand, blocked my way.
“Where are you going? Stay with us, Da-Ren,” they spoke with one eerie voice. It was the sound of chilling wind, not warm-fleshed children. To this day, I can’t remember if the one in the middle, a step ahead of the others, was a girl.
“I am leaving,” I said. “I want to get back to the light.”
“There is no light where you go. We know, we come from there. Believe us. Stay!”
I looked around me where the darkness was heavier
, and not even shadows could be seen.
“Most beautiful Elbia, if you are down here, I will stay with you.”
No one responded, but I could sense her. She was hiding back there. She didn’t answer, didn’t show herself. She didn’t want me to stay in the eternal cold. She wanted to send me back to find the girl with the blue eyes.
I called to her once more.
“I can’t find you. I’ll return…someday.”
The mud danced hungrier around my legs and splashed me all the way up to my neck. The mud heard my promise. The mud didn’t want to lose me. It wanted to feed me to the tree with the red berries. It whispered into my ear. “You live, Da-Ren. That will be punishment enough, the only offering the dead will demand. You live to feed the dead. And feed us you will by your blade. Ascend to the light. Go, slaughter the whole world.”
The tendrils of the tree grabbed me like neckropes and before I could do anything they became a ladder rising high and growing fast. I held on with both hands. Rising. Light. Blue. Bright.
When I opened my eyes, I was in a hut, warm from the hearth and the summer sun. I wasn’t shivering anymore. Why wasn’t I in Sirol? How did I get there?
Two blue eyes were feeding me life. They sparkled and shattered the darkness. They brought breath to my lungs again. A smile, only one in the hut. Her fingers cooled my face and traveled down the pulsing veins of my neck. She pulled the leeches from my chest and ribs. With a soft cloth, she wiped the blood where the dark worms fed. Her eyebrows had the exact same shape and color as the leeches. So beautiful.
“Poison,” she said, “but the leeches got it in time,” showing me the arrow she had taken out of my body. I knew that arrow. I had shot thousands of them.
How could she speak my tongue? Was that another dream? Poison, was her first word ever to me.
I didn’t have the strength to say much. “Rouba?”
Zeria shook her head ever so slightly and remained silent, stealing all hope from me.
A few days before, I was Uncarved and First.
“My horse?” I asked again.
I remembered the blood running from its neck.
“I am Zeria,” she answered, ignoring my question.
“Da-Ren. My horse?”
“You were freezing to death. You had to sleep inside an animal.”
My stomach turned with sickness, and a sour taste in my mouth choked me. That was the strong smell still in my nostrils. The chewed food of the horse’s stomach. I tried to get up to vomit but couldn’t. I was so weak.
“The warmth and spirit of the animal are with you,” said Zeria. She got up, and as she walked around, I saw her green dress flowing. It was tattered and old but seemed unfitting for a peasant girl. Gold designs were embroidered on the green fabric, as if it were made of the Forest itself. I had seen such dresses only in the spoils of war.
I stretched with my fingers the skin around my eyes, to stay awake, not to sleep. Not to fall into the lapping mud again. Zeria came and went many times, my eyes shutting defeated each time she left. I found my strength again two days later. She told me that I had been delirious for two days after I was wounded. Two days falling down and two more rising from the caves of the dead.
“Sleep now, Da-Ren,” she said and covered me with the smooth deer hide.
I slept a sleep naked of dreams.
When I woke up, she was still there.
“Here, I brought some boiled meat. And berries. Red ones!”
I was all alone in the Forest with the Dasal.
With her.
Without my father.
XXIX.
Kar-Tioo
Eighteenth autumn. Uncarved—Wolf.
No shroud, no matter how many times it is wrapped around, can ever stop the earthworms. I dug the dirt with my nails and a branch the length of a blade until my fingers bled. I had to get Rouba out of the rough grave the Dasal had dug for him. I had asked Zeria to take me there once I had regained some strength. It was a shallow mound of dirt protruding from the surrounding grassy field, the first raindrops of autumn already moistening it.
I unwrapped the shroud only to see the old man’s rotting flesh, the color of bellflowers on his skin. His eyes had bulged out whole; his tongue had swollen, half out of his mouth. It looked like someone stuck a purple fish down his throat. I was on my knees, mourning, digging, getting the leaves off him. That was where I finally threw up.
Zeria stayed back, along with the other Dasal and away from me, when I started digging.
“Why did you put him here?” I asked her. “I have to burn his body.”
She came closer, hesitantly.
“Don’t take him from the earth.”
“What?”
“Give him to the Forest; it will embrace him.”
“That man was a warrior, destined for the Unending Sky, not the Forest. His ashes must rise up high. She waits for him.”
I hoped the Goddess would accept him like this. I couldn’t get rid of all the rosy worms that had invaded every crevice of his face and studded the swollen violet skin. The roots of the trees were already drinking his flesh. I started to drag him out of there to build a big pyre. Zeria came closer and pulled my arm to stop. I pushed her away hard, knocking her down. Once again, she was at my feet like the first time, when I had saved her. The same look of anguish on her beautiful face.
I tried to find the words to explain: “If his flesh does not burn, the soul cannot ascend to the Sky.”
She relaxed at the tone of my voice and raised herself from the ground.
“In the sky? Up there?”
“That is where the brave go.”
“There? To nothing? The skies are cold, empty lakes. Why should he go there? Keep him here, in our earth of life.”
“No! Stop this talk now.”
“To become one with the tree, the soil, the leaves, the animals, the autumn spiders. To live through them again. The earth fed him for his whole life. His body should feed the earth now. To be born again. In here, life never dies.”
I had heard all these mad stories of the Demon’s servants many times before. The Story of the Deadwalkers, the Buried servants of Darhul, the resurrection of the Cross Worshippers of the South. All those monsters were real, not just Legends of the Ouna-Mas. And Zeria’s words were proof of that.
Rouba had not lived that long to become food for worms. I grabbed a torch from a Dasal and lit Rouba’s pyre. He left for the stars as he deserved. Zeria came closer when the fire was dying out and threw a flask of red water over the embers while speaking words I did not understand.
“Are you…the Forest Witch?” I asked.
“You had fallen to the ends of the underworld. I had to enter the mouth of the snake, deep in the caves of the dead, to bring your soul back, Da-Ren.”
It was her way of telling me she was.
“The forest spirits did not accept this. I owe them,” she told me.
I shivered when she spoke of the caves of the dead. My nightmare returned: the days when I fought off the poison, the mud swallowing me, the seven children with black pebble eyes, hand in hand, wanting to keep me down there. If I had died, I should have risen to the Unending Sky, next to Enaka. But Enaka knew. She didn’t accept me. I had betrayed her. Again and again. For Zeria.
The following morning, I opened my eyes late, later than any other time, and Zeria walked in and left a handful of wild red berries and a piece of bread.
“For your journey,” she said.
I wasn’t ready for any journey.
“I want to…” I started to say.
Her father, Veker, came in behind her and wasted no time in questioning me. “Why did you come? Kala is dead. We could not save him. Cursed monsters!”
I figured that Kala was the Dasal who had been hit by the first arrow, a little before Rouba and I had gone down.
“Who killed Kala? Who shot those arrows?” I asked.
“Who else? Your own kind,” he said pointing his finger at m
y face.
“Why? Why would they shoot at me if they are of the Tribe?”
“You ask? You, who hunted us and caged us? Damn you! They hunt because that’s what they always do.”
“I will stay here until they come again. I have to get to them,” I said to Veker and Zeria.
“You have to leave today. Those who came were hunting you, not us. They aimed at you even when they hit Kala. Are you exiled from your Tribe?”
“No.”
“Maybe they know you’ve helped us. If you stay, we are all in danger,” Veker said.
Three strong men had come into the hut. I didn’t have my blades, and I didn’t want to fight the men who had saved my life. I nodded silently, pretending to agree with him.
“I promise, I’ll leave at dawn.”
That afternoon, I secretly crept into Veker’s hut and found my blades. I strapped them around me, and I was strong and free once more. The next morning when we met again, I was armed. I wouldn’t take any orders from him.
“I changed my mind. I will stay until I find out what happened. Or I’ll return with a thousand warriors. She will help me,” I told him, pointing to Zeria.
“Listen, young man. I can kill you now. Even if a couple of us die, you die too. You rot unburied, and the crows eat your eyes tonight.”
“Go on!”
“But I took a vow. When you saved Zeria. You don’t die, I’ll protect you even though I piss on you and your tribe. But I won’t let you near Zeria.”
“She is the Forest Witch. I need to speak to her. She is not in danger.”
“What witch? Are you mad, kid?” shouted Veker.
Zeria stepped forward and came next to me.
“She speaks my tongue,” I said.
It was my excuse to keep her with me—in the beginning when I still needed an excuse.
“So am I.”
“Father, I owe him, let me help him. You promised,” Zeria said.
Veker’s silence and angry mumbling signaled my victory. When they finally left us alone, I asked her to follow me away from the huts.
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