“I want to understand more, Da-Ren. I’d like to know more about your tents, your clothing, your horses?”
“I have ridden hundreds of horses, Eusebius. Do you know the one thing they all said to me?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Horses don’t tell stories. What do you want to know about the horses? Wouldn’t you rather I spoke to you of the people?”
“I want to know everything.”
“Have you ever ridden, Eusebius, hmm?”
“Only the mule down at the village.”
“What do you think—that if I tell you about horse stirrups, you will understand me better?”
“I have heard about the stirrups.”
“We were the only tribe that had stirrups. Stupid when you think of it, but countless thousands of your empire’s warriors died because of this. We could balance with our legs on the horses and use both hands to shoot the bow. They had never seen stirrups in the empire before we came.”
These details would certainly be of interest to the Emperor and his Generals in Holy Thalassopolis, the reigning city of the Southeastern Empire.
“What other secret do you want to learn, Eusebius? That I kicked the animal’s sides with my heels to get it going? That it grazed on grass two times a day? Tell me what secrets to reveal that Baagh’s Cross Sorcerers don’t know.”
“You’re mocking me, Da-Ren. If you don’t want to, then don’t tell me anything. The less you tell me, the less I have to change the next time we rewrite.”
Only when we had finished the first transcription of the story, and I had read it to Da-Ren, from beginning to end in a pompous voice, did he understand that we had to do what I was saying.
“This is nonsense,” he said about a description I was reading. “No, this is wrong. But, yes, it was winter. Didn’t you understand that?”
Many times when he heard his story, he would say the worst thing: “I’m sick of this. I’m too tired and have forgotten.”
It was strange, but when we wrote his story in short form, it was more painful. The scenes ran like bloodied arrows, stopping nowhere to rest. Only when we lengthened it did it become easier on the ear.
That was how Da-Ren was finally convinced, and I with him. We had to rewrite and rewrite. It would never be good enough, but we had to rewrite as many times as our patience allowed. If and when the wise men ever came to hear his story, it would have to be much better written.
“You should read the Sacred Books, the eternal ones,” I said, “to see what you like about them. They might help to open up your mind and loosen your tongue.”
I read to him all the new codices that the merchant ships brought to the monastery, even the old dying scrolls from the libraries of the South, and Da-Ren gave me gold coins to find even more.
And so we rewrote the story during his third year on the island. When Baagh still didn’t appear, we had nothing else to do but retry a third time during Da-Ren’s fourth year. Da-Ren’s and Baagh’s gold had run out by then. We did not have supplies to do a fourth draft and, thankfully, we didn’t need to.
It was the third winter when we rewrote for a second consecutive year. We searched for the right words, and we took out those we didn’t like. We added color on papyrus. We added horses. A few.
At this point of the story, when I learned that Da-Ren would not be Leader of his Tribe, I always asked him the same thing: “You didn’t keep your promise, Da-Ren. You said the word ‘why.’ You had told me before that the whys didn’t matter, but now you broke down and told me many times why you would not be Khun.”
Unlike the many times he fooled me when I asked him about his soul’s repentance, there were times like these when he had nowhere to hide.
“Do you know how many thousands will be massacred before the end of this story, Eusebius? To etch Malan’s fate in red? How many tens of thousands perished in this tale that is just now starting to boil? But that is what the men and the First Witch of my Tribe wanted, the One Leader for the Final Battle.”
“And that wasn’t you?”
“A Khun looks down on us from the top of the hill. We are small to him, born only to die. He doesn’t see the difference between animals and men. Not even between men of the Tribe and othertribers. He would feed them all to the fire of his Story. I didn’t have that in me. That…gift.”
“You didn’t have Zeria in you either, but you found her. Why?”
“Are you going to start with the whys again? What do you know about women, Eusebius?”
It was obvious that I knew nothing. Nobody else did in the Castlemonastery, and that gave me an idea. I had spent so much time writing, and I wanted to share some of it with all the monks. I asked the First Elder to read the story. He refused. I asked him if I could read it to the peasants. He said that would be blasphemy and no one would feel pacified listening to a tale of slaughters and infidels.
“Maybe I can just choose a few passages about their life.”
He thought about that for a while and said, “Only about domestic matters. These barbarians do not honor family or wife or sister. Tell that story to the villagers. It will water their plant of faith to our True God.”
I found that odd. I asked Da-Ren to sit down with me and write the story of the women of his Tribe. I read it to the villagers on a dark winter night in the stable next to the church. Most of the monks joined us as well. Many women were there, even the miller’s widow who had claimed that Da-Ren had violated her. The unmarried twin sisters were there. They were the ones who worked the fields alone, and it was said that they were not even sisters, that they had just been orphans together since they had arrived at the island with the refugees. Even the mad old woman who never went to church came. She stayed away from the monks. The peasants would go to her for help only when the Almighty God refused to listen to their prayers. And that was more often than not.
Da-Ren had sat with me patiently to give me his account of the women of the Tribe, and I read it from the papyrus, for all to hear and renew their faith in our God.
The Tale of the Women of the Tribe
When I was born, Khun-Taa was the Leader of the Tribe. He had brought us to Sirol in the Great Valley between the Eastern and the Western Empires, in between the Endless Forest and the Blackvein River. During the first summers, Khun-Taa often went on campaigns to the South and looted cities and villages, but he never dared to go near Thalassopolis, the city my Tribe called Sapul. The Southeastern Empire was all-powerful, but the Kings of the Cross Worshippers hid behind the city’s indestructible walls and wouldn’t come out to face us.
For thirteen bloodied summers Khun-Taa raided the South and when he got tired, he camped in the Great Valley and concerned himself with the Change. We stopped moving every spring. The Story of the Change was the Story of Sah-Ouna, the woman he found under the full moon on the twelfth spring of his reign. The Blades captured her across from the Blackvein, between the bare willows half-naked—
The priest had left already. That man was not a monk. He was a man of God. As my faith waned in later years, he became the opposite of God, everything that I came to despise about God. He carried the burden of a thousand rules, rules that the Holy Books never mentioned. His own rules. The more of them he made, the more power he had.
The First Elder shook his head, and I understood that I shouldn’t use another word like that even if it was written down. I would ignore that rule a few more times. He was right, though. The miller’s widow had fixed her dreamy gaze on Da-Ren, her hand rubbing between her legs. I continued.
—and brought her to Khun-Taa. Sah-Ouna was meant to be fucked like a slave, but she possessed three unique gifts, and they were more than enough to transform her into the Wise woman of the Tribe and the Guide of the Leader.
She knew the powers of each plant and every spell. She had a thirst for power. And everyone believed her to be sent by the Goddess because she spoke our tongue. She spoke our words without any difficulty, even if she had been born south of
the river.
She was younger then, much younger and some say beautiful beyond what any man could resist. That wasn’t even her name; no one remembers her real one. Khun-Taa became wet clay in her hands.
Sah-Ouna was a dark mystery for the men but a very visible catastrophe for the women of the Tribe and the othertribers. She insisted on separating the women, taking them out of the men’s tents and throwing most of them with the animals. She had understood that a warrior would either listen to the one Goddess of the Sky or to the one woman who shared his tent.
Even now, I don’t believe that Enaka planted Sah-Ouna at the banks of the river to wait for Khun-Taa. Maybe she lived in her hut with one of our warriors who had gotten away from the Tribe, in love for many summers, until he died or she killed him. She then waited and planned her revenge. Maybe she had children or lost them to the Tribe’s warriors.
One way or another, Khun-Taa made her our First Witch when in reality, she was only an othertriber slave of the South who spoke our tongue.
Whenever I tried to bring up this forbidden Story to other warriors as I grew older, I kept getting the same answer.
“It makes no difference. Enaka has strange ways to send us her Voice.”
For as long as I lived, two things remained invincible against my blade: the frozen wind and the blind faith in the Witches.
But Sah-Ouna didn’t just boil roots and herbs in her cauldrons; she plotted to create a new Tribe. To do that, she had to change only one thing. The women. She separated them into three groups from a very young age.
Very few women, the most fearless who stood out early in the Sieve and endured the training, became warriors. Always Archers. They could not become Blades to fight in man-to-man combat. Women like Danaka in the Sieve. Like Elbia. No, not like Elbia, forgive me.
I stopped to take a breath, to honor the innocent dead. Only Da-Ren understood.
The women. The Archers. None of them could ever become Khun of the Tribe, but some of them could become Chiefs of a Pack of women Archers and command forty of their own. They had their own Packs and fought next to the men but never mixing with them. Their Chiefs took orders from the Leader of all the Archers, and in battle, they were equal and, in some cases, even better than the men.
Fewer still were those who were born with a gift and were chosen from a very young age to become Ouna-Mas. Those with the long heads, pitch-black eyes. They were taken as newborns by Sah-Ouna. They had the gift, they learned the Stories, and they could read the signs of the Unending Sky and Selene. They—and only they—also had the privilege of fornicating for pleasure. At night, they would take off their black-and-red robes and reward the best warriors. Witch would ride warrior like a horse. Warrior would fuck Witch like a dog.
The First Elder approached and whispered to me to stop this at once.
“This is revolting blasphemy,” he said.
“I didn’t write this. It is the words of the infidel. That’s why I read it. It will disgust the peasants and make their faith stronger,” I said, as my excuse.
Surprisingly, the First Elder let me continue. Nobody wanted me to stop. I could read their eyes.
The first, second, and third woman we had all ever lain with, after leaving the tent of the Uncarved, was one of Sah-Ouna’s young Witches. If an Uncarved was to lie with a different woman first, the hut would forget him and cast him out of the Pride of the Sieve.
Every Ouna-Ma left a deep carving, not on the left arm but on the right breast just beneath the nipple, after the first coupling, to show all that he had come of age. A few drops of blood for all of us to remember that even if we didn’t have the carvings of the weaker warriors, our fates would always belong to the Ouna-Mas. Although all were younger than Sah-Ouna, they were usually a few summers older than we were and never got with child. The roots they boiled and drank took care of that.
And then there were all the rest of the women, the endless herd of cows, thousands of them who were neither warriors nor Ouna-Mas. They had only one purpose, and that was to get with child and give birth. Always males, if the Sky allowed, or else they would end up eating whatever the pigs left over. They were always coupling with as many men as possible until their bellies were full. The warriors fucked them day and night. Only from behind on all fours. That was the order so they would conceive only boys. They never spent an entire night with them. Only a few breaths.
The other monks had long excused themselves and left the stable. It was time for prayer, and I imagined the prayers would be longer and filled with guilt that night. It was the third year after Da-Ren had arrived. I had spent a lot of time with his story, but less with the Holy Books. My faith had been challenged and had been found weak. Maybe because I knew the end of his story, or so I thought.
No one was permitted to own such common women for many moons. They could keep them for only a short while, as long as it took for the seed to quicken in their wombs. They succeeded, and the women left to give birth, or they failed, and had to leave and let some other Pack try. Most of them were used by many different tents each moon, and that was necessary. That way, no one concerned themselves with whose child belonged to whom. All and none of the children belonged to everyone, to the Tribe.
Rarely, some discovered the poison of love, even for a while, against every Truth of the Tribe. Or—another way to say it—someone’s cock rubbed itself better in a certain woman’s hole. These unfortunate men tried to keep a woman only to themselves for one whole moon. Hardly ever for two. And I had seen crucified women with their half-rotted corpses exhibiting the revenge of Sah-Ouna, women who had stayed more than three moons in a row with the same warrior without being with any other. Women in love. The Reghen and their two hundred eyes made sure to be everywhere and see these things.
That is the true story of the women of my Tribe, as I lived it.
It was deep in the night. The peasants around me sat with mouths gaping in awe. Maybe it was the barbarism of these faraway monsters. Maybe it was just the storytelling that someone had put on papyrus and read to them something else than the Five Holy Books. Their own life stories were not that different.
There were only three fates that this world of ours had for the women of any tribe.
The witch, the amazon, the cow.
Here in front of us was the crazy fortune-teller who lived in the last hut of their settlement. She read the leaves of the trees, the goat’s shoulder blades, and the flight of birds. She had once been very beautiful, and it is said that she had taken many men to her bed. The priest was terrified of her, and she too never approached him.
Here in front of me were the fighters of life: two well-built, tall women, sisters some said, who harnessed the mules to the plow and kept every man who wanted to possess them at a distance. All the rest? Whether they were young or old or with full bellies like cows, they all had that same nauseating smell that came with feeding animals and children all day.
The peasants left, and I opened the stable door. The dawning light fell on us and the barren island.
“Do you understand, Eusebius? Zeria had been condemned by my Tribe from the first moment she had laid eyes on me.”
I had understood something more. Men and women lived separately in Da-Ren’s Tribe. I knew nothing about horses or women; that much was true. I turned the question back to him.
“What do you know of women, Da-Ren?”
XXXII.
Stake and Lard
Eighteenth autumn. Uncarved—Wolf.
Freedom. Those few nights, before they carved me and after my return from Kar-Tioo, were the only ones I found the bitter repose of defeat and the peace of indifference inside me. I sought nothing. I was never going to be Khun, I didn’t know what I was going to be, and there was nothing I could do about that anymore. I had all but completed my training. My fears had been swept away. I didn’t have to stand out or even to obey in the field of training anymore.
I was naked, unsuspecting, and careless. The wind and the rain pas
sed through me as if I too were made of the same. I became invincible and invisible. Chaka decided to speak to me again finally, to guide me once more now that his guidance meant nothing.
He gave me a warning. “The Reghen say that Enaka always remembers us when we surrender to frivolous joy.”
The pompous words of the Reghen.
“And what do you say, Chaka?” I asked.
“I say: ‘don’t piss with trousers down and your ass facing the Forest.’ Because that’s when Darhul remembers you.”
But I wanted, if only for a while, to forget the rivalries, the trials, and to take a break from the countless moons since that first night when I had been dragged by the hair into the Sieve. They wouldn’t just let me enjoy it.
“Now you are Second,” Bera told me, “but that is not a good place. You are closer than anyone else to the First’s blade.”
I was making more frequent trips to the Forest, which had opened all its fall colors, the wild, the bloodstained, the desperately brilliant. It taunted me to stay. I always went alone in the morning, but I could not stay there for the days that it would take me to get to Kar-Tioo and back. I hadn’t seen her again.
A crazy thought stuck in my head during those aimless long walks: instead of Second, I would become First. The First who would cross the Forest. My Legend would say that I was the one who first found the secret path to the West, defying the Reekaal.
I wanted to learn everything I could about the Forest, even those age-old, sacred secrets that only the wolves had whispered to the Ouna-Mas. Every herb, every tree, every seed, and every path. I wanted to find who had hunted Rouba and me like wild boars. And yes, I pissed many times in there, just to prove Chaka wrong.
I waited patiently for the moment when the Ouna-Mas would order me to go back to Kar-Tioo and bring the precious belladonna. It was my only chance to fulfill my promise to Zeria.
Drakon Book II: Uncarved Page 18