“It is always the same. If we attack in the raids sooner than we should, the Archers hit us. Blind. They don’t care.”
“When we delay, we don’t get any of the loot.”
I remembered Rouba saying, “The Blades are for slaughtering the unarmed and the women. They are vultures. The only true honor of the Tribe is the bow. The merciless rain.”
“They don’t respect us as their equals.”
“We have to make heavy shields and learn to fight like the other tribes. In battle, only the Blades fall.”
The soldiers of the Southeastern Empire beneath the river were not Archers. They were formidable sword fighters with armor of steel and iron shields with leather covers. In man-to-man combat, they had the advantage. If we didn’t outnumber them massively, then we would lose more in battle. In the Tribe’s victories, most of the dead were always Blades. The Tribe had yet to see defeat, but only because we had the bow of Enaka, the invincible weapon.
“We are the only ones who see the white of the enemy’s eyes.”
“We are the bravest but are always last to get the women. And the worst meat.”
“Even the Craftsmen eat better.”
“The Rods have five horses each.”
All of them had miserable tales to tell, and none glory. I, too, had a tale, but I didn’t tell it. I remembered a raid at the Garol in the North when I had gone there with Rouba. The Blades had gone into battle only when victory was certain. They had killed the old and taken the women violently before the others came. They had torn babes from the breasts and heads from bodies. All of this with just their blades.
Bloodthirsty warriors, cowards, and lesser in battle, who hid behind the Archers and yet managed to die faster than anybody else. I would fight for the rest of my life beneath the emblem of the two unequal-sized crossed irons that marked the scum of the Tribe. Together with those who wouldn’t have great Stories to tell when they would meet Enaka. Only short ones.
XXXVIII.
Behind Me
Eighteenth winter. Chief of the First.
Loneliness. Not squirrel, nor dog, nor wolf. Loneliness was the unbearable new skin I had to wear. Away from Zeria, Rouba, Bera, and the other Guides, the Uncarved, anyone else I had ever known. A solitary boy Chief among older men who could smell my inexperience. Alone in my tent. Loneliness was the enemy they hadn’t told us about in the Stories.
I had been trained at the blade and the bow. The most common trial of each Uncarved was to slice pumpkins with eyes closed. That training would make me the fear and torment of every pumpkin. But I knew from the first moment I joined the Blades that it wasn’t enough.
My third day as Chief dawned.
“You are the youngest Chief we’ve ever had,” said one of my men who had been there for three winters.
“They brought a fresh one like you five winters ago, but he lasted half a moon. You better watch out, Chief,” added Leke.
“Watch out for what?”
Everything.
The cloudbreaths had parted before dawn. It was a clear-sky day, perfect for riding and shooting.
“We ride for the training field,” Sani said, this time trying to help me rather than challenge me.
We reached a vast and empty field of shit-colored mud and snow-covered stones. The few poles were broken and there were no pumpkins or targets to shoot. I had no idea what to tell them, and I couldn’t even imagine how someone could train there. I wouldn’t even want to ride a horse through that. The men had already separated into smaller groups, each one having its own talk. One group was fighting amongst themselves; another was casually striding around with neckropes. In a third group, farther away, the men were taking turns drinking from a waterskin and from the laughter I guessed it was filled with milk-spirit instead of water.
“Start,” I shouted.
“Start what?” asked a man close to me. He was a man with a long beard, the body of a bear and the eyes of a mad jackal.
“What you do every day.”
“What are you going to do?”
I didn’t answer; I didn’t want a fight.
“Who is this?” I asked Leke, not looking at the man.
“Hey! You asked before. Learn my name. I am Mekor,” the man replied, waving his wide-open hands above his head. Mocking me.
Mekor again, a name I had heard of a lot and would hear for a few more breaths.
“I want to see how the Blades practice,” I said.
“I say you want to see the tit of your slave mother, shit hair.”
There, too, I had the lightest hair color of all of them.
It was true that I wanted just to watch them train because I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t afraid of anything, but it was already too late. My first trial, and last if I failed, would be to finish with Mekor.
He took out both of his blades, and I did the same. Then I thought twice. I had already lost three men.
“Lower your blades, man. I am an Uncarved; you will die here. Don’t be stupid,” I said.
“You’re no Uncarved anymore.”
Smart thought, big mouth, fatal words.
He was wearing a chain-mail armor like nothing in the Tribe, each iron ring smaller than my nail. He had stolen the armor of an othertriber and it fell short and tight on him, almost to his navel and a bit below his elbows. I hated armor. It wasn’t of the Tribe.
“Where did you find this fancy dress? Stole it from a Southerner?”
“Killed him. I’ve killed many.”
“Oh! How? Running scared up the hill like yesterday?”
The men were laughing, the sun was falling bright, his blood was bubbling mad under the stolen helmet. It looked like an upside-down acorn. No Archer of the Tribe wore a helmet. “Blades are vultures; they wear whatever they find,” Rouba had told me once.
Rouba, it’s time to find out if you trained me well.
I took off the soft squirrels. I had nothing but a leather jerkin over my sleeveless tunic. I stayed across from him at ten feet. He motioned for me to come and meet him, but I remained still.
“Hungry again? Or do you always wear your gruel pot on your head?” I said to Mekor.
Leke was clutching his belly, laughing, on his knees.
Mekor sheathed his small blade and raised the long one with both hands. He charged, bellowing, to bring it down on my head, but I made a quick move to the right, and he missed. He continued to wield it high, but he was too slow, like a huge bear in chains. That armor would be his death.
“I still let you live if you quit now,” I said. “You’re too slow.”
That was what had made the greatest impression on me when I had lost those three men at the river. All of them were slow on their feet. They lived night and day on their horses and had all but forgotten how to walk.
“Will you fight, you butt-fucked lizard, or are you going to the snakes without lifting a blade?” he said.
I had no intention of going to the snakes. I let him swing his irons without touching a hair on my head another three times. I was tall and a relatively large target, but I had the fastest legs of all the Uncarved. We kept dancing around, and I waited for the moment when he would have the sun directly in his eyes. Then, I closed the distance between us fast and tried a crazy move. I threw my short blade like a spear toward his face. He fended it off with his, but before he had a chance to stand firmly and parry again, my long blade had taken his fingers. Two, maybe three.
He screamed and tried to raise his blade again. I hit him, deep and hard, low in the bare forearm. His blade fell. I could have sliced his throat right there. But that wasn’t necessary. Not yet.
His wounds were not fatal, but he wouldn’t be a warrior anymore. A one-handed, crippled, burly man who would be fishing salmon from now on with the rest of the bears. He was on his knees, facing me, holding his maimed bloody hand, and screaming. The thirty-four men around us were silent, waiting for my final move. I turned my eyes away from him and shouted for all to h
ear.
“I am Da-Ren, the son of Er-Ren, who fought the Cyanus Reekaal and lived to talk about it. I wasn’t carved on my twelfth winter like all of you Rabbits, and I am the one of only two who survived till the end Uncarved. The other is Khun. Any scum who wants to go to Enaka today come up here and talk lizards. Anyone?”
They listened, and all of them understood. Except for Mekor. My guess, he didn’t enjoy fishing. I saw him with the corner of my eye as he pulled a third blade from his belt, a small dagger. The dagger flew past me, barely grazing my cheek, and my mood for talking was cut abruptly. I ran at him before he got up and, a breath later, opened his throat with the thrust of my blade. The First Pack had one fewer warrior.
“Continue, great warriors. I want to see how you train for battle,” I said to those remaining. “Is there anyone else who wants to leave the Pack?”
Only one more did, the one who had been sitting close to Mekor on the previous two nights. He tried to stab me in the back that night after we gathered to eat outside my tent. Slow feet, stupid eyes. To my surprise Sani warned me from across the fire, his lips opening to “watch out” and his eyes darting quickly to my right. I turned with a sudden move and stuffed a lit tar-covered torch into his mouth. I was out of patience. Out of mercy, I opened his stomach with my iron to end his muffled groans. A quick death. I couldn’t blame him. He was loyal to his friend and his old Chief. Good for him. Enaka would like his Story, if only he could tell it to her with burning tar in his mouth. Thirty-three…
“So? Watch out?” I asked Leke.
“Now everyone will be watching out,” he said, laughing. “You did good. You cleaned up the Pack in two nights.”
It was about then that I stopped killing my own men.
Chief of the Pack. Of brave men. I had to convince them, to trample on them like worms when they weren’t convinced, and that was easy. I had to inspire them, and that was difficult—not to let them think for one breath that I could be afraid of them. I had to make them rip their own hearts from their chests, roast them, and serve them to me on a spit if I asked for it. If I couldn’t do that, it would be they feasting on my heart that same night.
I hadn’t learned that either when among the Uncarved. I had wasted five springs in trials with pumpkins and walks in the Forest. If I had lived one winter with the Blades, I would have been a better Chief now. I may have even been the One Leader of the Tribe. If I had lived.
Sani got up before the men started leaving and addressed everyone.
“I am with the Chief. This stops now. If anyone else tries to harm him he will have to kill me too,” he said.
“Me too,” Leke added and so did a few other voices.
Respect. Not bad at all after three nights. As we were sharing the milk-spirit around the fire to drown the horrors of the day and the night, I asked each of them, “How long have you been with this Pack?”
“Nine winters,” said Sani.
“Three.”
“Two.”
“I came one moon ago.”
“Eight.”
All of them had come on their eighteenth winter, and none of them had reached their thirtieth.
“And where are the older Blades? Do they camp at another Pack?” I asked, thinking I had been put with the youngest.
“Yes…the big Pack,” said Sani, the nine-wintered, showing me the twinkling stars above our heads.
With fortune on my side, I’d have ten more summers of life. But there was something I had learned with the Uncarved. The first Truth of the warriors of our Tribe. The first command any leader of men was taught to say: “Behind me.”
Behind me meant that a Chief always charged first in battle and usually fell first. He did not pass judgment, as the Reghen did, from the summit of the hill.
Outside my tent, I noticed a pole and a wooden slate hanging on it. Small iron pegs were nailed into the slate. I knew from training that every Pack had a slate such as this and counted how many men belonged to it. I ordered Leke to take out five pegs for the five we had lost the past two nights. I would have done it myself, but I got confused. Underneath it, there was another slate. And a third. Many instead of one.
“Which one is our Pack?” I asked him.
“These don’t count how many heads the Pack has, Chief. We are not Archers; we don’t lose count,” he answered.
“What do they count then?”
“It’s a wager we play. They count—” he stammered.
“Play what?”
“They count how many moons the Chief of the First Pack has stayed alive. That is why it is outside your tent. They are for…you to know.”
“Moons?”
He nodded silently.
Not even winters?
“So, what did you bet, Leke? How many slates before I bleed away?”
“I am with you, Chief. I wish you well.”
“Five?”
Bleak silence.
I looked at the slates again. Most of them counted fifteen to twenty moons, some even had thirty, and others had as few as the fingers on one hand. And the last, mine, didn’t have any.
“Throw them all away,” I told him. “As of tomorrow, we will count only our victories, not our deaths. We’ll carve the slates to count the othertribers we slaughter. Bring many slates.”
“As you command, Chief. Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. The starless night had come once again, and so was her sister: loneliness.
Victorious in my small, stinking tent I closed my eyes and dreamed of Zeria. In my nightmare, the Reekaal had crucified me and left me nailed on a leafless winter oak. Zeria came to save me at dawn, her fingers pulling out slowly the pegs from my palms as her lips touched mine.
It was the only beautiful face I had seen for many nights.
XXXIX.
Silent, Holy Night
Eighteenth winter. Chief of the First.
The night was silent. The frosty wind of the North had stolen the voices of men, the songs of birds, and the howling of the dogs. The second full moon of winter, the sacred one that marked the end and the new beginning, was upon us. It was the night of the Story of Birth, the Genesis of the World.
It was a long-standing tradition that once every three full moons every Ouna-Ma was completely free. Once in winter, once in spring and so on… Her only duty was to choose a Pack of men and go there to recite the Story of Birth. But after that, she was free to sleep and speak with any man she favored. Her unique and sacred gift belonged to only one man, usually the worthiest, the Chief of each Pack.
Razoreyes chose to come to my Pack on that Long Winter Moon. Razoreyes, a name I had made up only for her. She was the same Ouna-Ma, the second Redveil I had taken, the one Malan had sent to me after I had made an oath to serve him. She came to our fire and sat among the men. She rode alone, without a Reghen or Rods, on a night when a full Selene had hidden behind the clouds and the black breaths of Darhul. Everyone sat around the blaze and waited for her Story. The only Story that the Ouna-Ma would recite every thirteen moons herself, not delivered through a Reghen’s mouth. But afterward, she would be naked only with me. She had chosen me. This time, she had not been sent. For the men that was the only winter’s moment where they could be so close to a beautiful Witch. Deep in their hearts everyone would kill to be in my place. But all they could do was huddle around the fire and try to listen.
To celebrate the Long Winter Moon, the Ouna-Ma always followed the same ritual; she recited the Legend of Enaka, the greatest Legend of the Tribe, the Story of the Birth of our world. Chills turned the warriors’ skins to gooseflesh. The thought of the Ouna-Ma’s legs wrapped around me made me even more formidable to their eyes—a giant and a worthy Chief.
These were the words Razoreyes spoke a little before she melted with me:
The Legend of Enaka
The First and Second Epoch of the World
Hear now, men, the most sacred of the Stories of the Tribe.
This is the Story of time before yesterd
ay, of the world before the Earth, of the Sky before the stars, and of the Goddess before the birth of man. It is the breath before the breast, countless winters before the cold. An age when the only meadow, the whole world, was a thick slime, black and shiny. No solid earth or wavy sea existed, only the mud boiling hotter than the sun and colder than ice, a sludge that neither light, nor hope, nor even time itself could penetrate.
There in the slimy, shining darkness lived an eternal Demon, alone, the only breathing thing, the ancient, eternal, immortal Snake, Darhul with the nine heads, each dressed in a different skin of black. Ravenfeather, Woodtar, Charcoal, Onyx, Blackberry, Ebonetree, Stormcloud, Nightsky, and Despair were the nine shades of black and the names of the heads of Darhul with the even darker soul.
Then, in that Yesterday—endless for man but only a heartbeat for the Immortal Goddess—as the heads of Darhul fought among themselves, Despair ripped out Charcoal’s glimmering red eye. The eye rolled down from the Demon’s head, covered in crystal tears, into the radiant black muck. A smoldering coal, the orphan red eye drank its own tears, and in the heat and cold of the mud, it transformed.
It became Light.
And thus, the First Light was born, and it took the form of a beautiful maiden, her bareness covered only with a blinding cloud of hope. And she was the Only Goddess, Enaka.
Enaka stormed on Despair, the most loathsome of Darhul’s heads, and from that moment, the First and Final War between the Goddess of Light and the Eternal Demon began. The fiery rays from the Goddess’s quiver and the icy tongues of Darhul fought until the dark slime that made up the entire world split in half. The one baked into life and became the golden earth of the steppe, and the other half melted as death and became the black sea.
The war had no end. No one could prevail. On one side, Darhul spewed black clouds from his nine doubled nostrils, and from the other side, Enaka threw screaming lightning bolts from her chariot.
Then one night, Enaka turned her milk-white winged horse, Pelor, who drew her chariot in the Unending Sky, into a brave, black-haired man and lay with him. From their love, she bore seven sons, the Seven Suns to light the entire world and burn Darhul, defeating the Darkness forever. A new world was born, and it would soon be ready to give birth to men.
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