“Do you hear?” Sparrow’s heart warmed, caught desperate fire. He stamped his spear into the dirt. “If we have heart, we hunt again!”
Some whooped and slapped each other, but Wise Eagle’s face was dour. “Soon, we will all be silent.”
“What do they want?” Sparrow asked again.
“What would you want if they had done what we did?”
That nightmarish gobbling sound chased the sparks up into the night. Far away, but closer now. Sparrow could see nothing save shadows and stars.
Fire Ant screamed, “Show yourselves!” His eyes were wide, almost as if he felt fear. Why? What did a man already dead have to fear from life?
A brief rustle in the shadows, and then they heard a sharp sound, a call. The shadows separated into hulking, manlike forms.
“In His name,” Sparrow whispered.
“Silence!” Fire Ant roared.
“We will soon be atop the mountain.” Rock Climber’s thick chest gleamed. He stank of fear sweat. “Father Mountain, see us. Return us to our families.” His eyes went wide. “What if our families do not live? To what do we return?”
“Stand strong!”
Then the clutching darkness vomited Mk*tk.
They charged like one horns, sudden and unstoppable. Without hesitation or fear they flew through the open gap in the boma wall, crashing through the huts and hurling speared bodies into the men’s fire.
There in the narrow shadows, Sparrow fought for his life. A Mk*tk came for him. He retreated a step, then turned with a sob and met the charge. His spear met flesh, but he was still hurled backward into the walls of the healing hut. Sticks and straw burst before the shock, their splinters stabbing him in the back and sides.
Groaning, he rolled up and tried to stand, dizzy and half blinded by a torn scalp.
He blinked away a doubled world and stared out through the hole in the wall. Fire and blood.
Those were the only words that rang in his mind.
Although there were three Ibandi for every one of their brutish foes, they were hard put not to stab one another in the dark, and their enemies used their confusion and uncertainty against them.
There was no mercy or hesitation. There was only screaming, and slaughter.
Fire and blood.
“Back! Back!” Fire Ant screamed. Although he and the men at his side had managed to kill two of the monsters, it was easy to see that his people were breaking.
In the moonlight, blood ran black, and before long all who survived were slick with it.
Fire Ant knew that he must take bold action, or all was lost. If he could only show his people that they were great, that they were beloved in Father Mountain’s eyes, they might stand up to these beasts, who killed from darkness, and finally be free.
And then his chance appeared. The largest Mk*tk appeared before him, an elephant with the first two fingers missing from his left hand. His scarred tree trunk of a chest heaved with kill fever.
The monster charged him, seeking to overwhelm with sheer power, only to be nicked again and again by Fire Ant’s spear point.
Ho! In a fog as thick and cloying as honey, Ant watched his spear move, almost as if it possessed its own mind. He drew a line of blood from the giant’s side, then barely evaded a backhand swipe of a bloody spear that might have crushed his ribs.
He was Fire Ant! He wounded his enemy at the belly and just above the knee, and began singing a little tune to himself, timing his thrusts to his song.
Then, to his surprise the giant stepped back, smearing at the blood with his fingers. Ant had never seen a Mk*tk pause once the killing had begun. Something odd sizzled in the hooded eyes.
Curiosity. Without question, the giant was puzzling through something. Until that moment, Ant had not been certain these creatures thought at all.
Then with insane speed the monster lunged directly at Fire Ant’s spear tip. At the very last moment he twisted aside, scoring along Ant’s upper ribs.
Two of Ant’s men hurled themselves between their chief and the monster. As they struggled with their foe, Ant rubbed his hands along his wound and stared at the blood on his hand.
Something strange boiled through his veins, emotions Ant thought buried with his first body. Could that be … fear? But how could a dead man feel such a thing?
“We die!” Rock Climber wailed.
“Stand! Stand!” Fire Ant backed away from the giant Mk*tk, confused by his own confusion. The monster killed one Ibandi, then another took his place. They tumbled out of sight into the shadows, lost in the howling confusion. “We kill them here or die!”
The night’s darkness beckoned. A lone thought fluttered through his mind, brief and bleak as a dying butterfly. What have I done?
“They seek our softness,” he called. “They would kill the women and children!”
Despite his quavering knees, Wise Eagle sneered at Ant. “As we sought theirs. You did this! We trusted you, and you brought us death! We die. Our children die.”
Fire Ant balled his hand and struck the hunter to the ground. But even as Eagle fell, Ant’s own mind echoed the words.
Wise Eagle rose from the dirt, spitting blood. He held his spear high, squinting into the darkness. Eagle opened his mouth, but before he could say a word the air in front of him blurred. A spear buried itself in his belly, driving him off his feet and back against the boma wall. His hands clutched at the shaft, staring at it as if wondering how such a curious thing had come to be.
Fire Ant smelled blood and shit, and his own stomach rolled.
Eagle’s woman snatched her round-bellied son from the ground and screamed, “Run!”
The boy had seen no more than seven summers. He fled only a hand of steps before he was clubbed down like an antelope, then hacked to death in the shadows.
There were fewer battles now, only slaughter. The Ibandi no longer outnumbered their attackers. The unequal contest had become no contest at all.
The shadows were distorted by thick-limbed spearmen hunched over a splintered boma’s whimpering survivors. Watery screams peaked and troughed with the sigh of knife against skin. And then, finally, even that yielded to the wet whisper of flesh torn from bone.
Desperation lent Fire Ant strength and speed. He deflected a spear and slashed back to open a Mk*tk throat. Dying, his enemy crashed against him, driving him against the wall. The monster punched the side of Ant’s head, then collapsed. Groaning and blood blinded, Ant sank to the ground.
The Mk*tk dragged him away. A Mk*tk child, now recognized by the leather strap tied around her bushy hair, pointed at him, jabbering to the adults.
So. A man could not outrun his sins, after all.
Fire Ant wandered between the worlds of dream and flesh. The world of flesh was hard. His hands were tied. Spears jabbed into his ribs, just enough to draw blood and force him back to his feet and walking.
For two days he and five other captured hunters walked. They were allowed to lie down at night, but sleep seldom came. Not since the first days on the mountain had he known such marrow-deep fatigue. A hunter named Great Crane lost the strength in his legs and was butchered there in the sand. Although they prepared the corpse for cooking, flaying flesh from bone, they ate not a bite, leaving the meat for scavengers. Fire Ant’s dazed mind refused to make sense of it.
Finally they reached a gully wherein camped a hand of Mk*tk families, each with a brooding male, two or three females, and a hand of hairy children.
And to his amazement, one of the women who approached him was not Mk*tk at all but an Ibandi. His misty memory dredged up her name: Dove. She was the girl they had failed to save in the earlier raid. Hadn’t Quiet Water said Dove was dead?
The hulking Mk*tk leader’s face was a mask of crisscrossed scars, his nose was broken and only a thumb and two fingers remained on his left hand. He pressed his face close. He reeked with a thick, wet buffalo stink. His mouth moved, and he made noises.
Dove translated. “He is Flat-Nose. He
wants to know what are you.”
“You are a dream dancer,” an astonished Fire Ant said. “What are you doing?”
“Living,” she said. Although her mouth moved, her face was leeched of emotion.
“But you are a dream dancer,” he said again. Confusion spun his mind.
“I was,” she replied, “but you did not come for me. Now I am Flat-Nose’s third wife.” Flat-Nose growled and clicked. “He asks if you are a kind of monkey. He said you fight like a man but kill women and children. He does not understand.”
“He killed ours,” Fire Ant replied.
She translated. Flat-Nose grunted.
“He says that Ibandi are not men. That killing such weaklings is less than killing four-legged.”
Fire Ant’s mind reeled. “You are his wife now? You are a mountain daughter! How can your mouth shape such words?”
Without expression, she spoke, and Flat-Nose answered.
“He said that he fucks any animal he wants. Ibandi killed his brother and his brother’s son, and for ending his brother’s line, you will suffer.”
Fire Ant could barely force his mind to think. “I am beloved of Father Mountain!” he said. “Free me!”
Dove translated.
Flat-Nose spit into Ant’s face. Then he spoke again.
“What did he say?” Ant said, dismayed by the weakness in his voice.
Dove translated. “He says ‘You are worth killing slowly. I will make you a gift for God Blood.’”
Staked to the ground, Fire Ant sat on rocks and gravel, legs straight in front of him, his heels a bare step away from the central fire. Sitting beside him, Sparrow tugged at the leather straps binding his arms, crying.
Sun Runner had been staked to an acacia tree. As he screamed, the Mk*tk women used glass knives to slice skin from his right leg. After exposing a wound, the Mk*tk women slathered on some salve that smelled like fresh-cut cactus.
The bleeding slowed. In time, Sun’s anguished cries died to a whimper. Then the women began again, slicing a new strip.
It seemed to go on forever, until Fire Ant was certain that if he lived ten hands of lifetimes, his ears would never be free of Crane’s screams.
Surely, these were not men but evil jowk.
“Fire Ant!” Sparrow cried. “You are with me. I am not afraid.”
“Do not fear. I am at your side.” Fire Ant could speak the words, but his voice was no longer steady.
Sparrow panted. Just a boy, really. Brave, and strong, but he had not even undergone his manhood ritual. He should have, but there had been no hunt chiefs to take him up the mountain. “Tell me about the next world.”
When Fire Ant searched his mind, his memories melted like spiderwebs in the spring rain. “It is cold….”
“Like night on high ground?”
“Only more. Cold that makes your teeth clatter together. Cold that makes your bones ache and then go numb. Cold that burns like fire.”
Sparrow closed his eyes as if for the last time. He had begun to shake, and although he bit his lip until it bled, could not stop.
Dove approached, her head down. She was shorn of her breast flaps, nipples exposed to skies and eyes. She shuffled just ahead of two giant males. “Prepare yourselves,” she said.
Sparrow searched her face. “What will they do?”
“They will search for your num” she said. “You will scream. They will not stop until you are drained. I am sorry. You should not have come for me.”
“We had to come,” Sparrow said.
“No,” she said. “You did not.”
Sparrow licked his parched lips. Although the boy was trying to be brave, even from his distance, Ant could smell the piss.
Why did his stomach knot? Was he not the chosen one? Had he not returned from heaven? The worm of doubt had burrowed into his ear, whispering no.
He fought to ignore the doubt. He had done right. Had he not done what he must, in the process freeing a precious dream dancer from the hands of monsters? Certainly, he was beloved of their gods, if not himself divine.
If he prayed, perhaps Father Mountain would weave Sparrow and Ant new bones or return them to the jowk. And then, just as he had once before, Fire Ant would lead his people to victory. He would bring Sparrow with him down the mountain. Death was not a cave. It was a path through sheltering trees, leading the faithful back to the light. One needed but believe.
The Mk*tk dragged Sparrow to the fire, laughing and howling as they did. Terror clawed inside Ant, and the wounds bled prayers: Father Mountain. Give us num or return us to the jowk….
Over and over again he chanted it, and remembered the world above the divine clouds, the manner in which the cold …
The cold?
Hazily, he blinked away the confusion and tried to focus on what was happening over at the fire. All difficulty fled as the first scream sliced his ears.
There followed a dance of knives and fire and many, many blows. Mk*tk drums shivered the night air as their hideous females chanted in unison. The women, who had seemed so passive and small compared to the males, were most eager to tear flesh. They hunched around Sparrow’s bound body, lifted him up and staked him to a tree by wrists and ankles.
And then, as Dove had warned them, with fire and knife they peeled and probed. They peered inside Sparrow, deaf to his cries. Then the Mk*tk women closed the flap of skin, covered it with mud, and began searching in another place.
On and on they went. Sparrow fought to hold Fire Ant’s eyes. “Where is Father Mountain?” he screamed.
“He tests us!” Fire Ant howled in reply. “Do not despair.”
As the night wore on, the Mk*tk males seemed to have become bored with their play Some few still drummed, but most tottered off to their huts.
At last the drums fell quiet.
“What do you see?” Ant whispered to the boy. “Do you see the mountain? Do you see Great Mother?”
Sagging in his leather thongs, the boy managed to raise his head. When Sparrow opened his mouth, blood drooled out, his teeth broken. He managed to mumble a single despairing word. “Nothing,” he whispered. “Nothing.”
Hearing Sparrow’s words, the shambling Mk*tk women approached him again, the oldest’s shrunken breasts dangling like rotted fruit. In her own thick-bodied way she might once have been beautiful, with full round hips and smooth skin. But that was long ago. Now her skin sagged and her toothless mouth was a wrinkled, stinking hole.
She lifted Sparrow’s chin and thrust her hand into his mouth. Ant saw the knife descend, and her arm work back and forth. Sparrow spasmed, and then went limp.
Dead? Alive? Ant could not tell, but hoped dead.
She hurled Sparrow’s tongue onto the fire. As it sizzled she whispered something that he couldn’t hear. A voice behind his eyes said, It doesn’t matter. You speak no Mk*tk and the witch Dove was not here to translate. Whatever secrets, comforts or insults she might have offered fell on deaf ears. Sparrow was beyond hearing or understanding.
Fire Ant turned away. This is a test. Even now, Father Mountain was lifting Sparrow up to heaven. The body would go into the earth, and his flesh would flow from his body. That liquid meat would sink deep within the earth and flow up to the top of the mountain, where it would receive new bones. And then … and then …
He could not put a word to it, because his heart was frozen in sudden terror: the Mk*tk women were coming for him.
Ant strained and pulled against his bonds, all his memories of heaven suddenly dissolved. Their knives slashed the thongs binding Sparrow’s hands. Numless, he sprawled upon the ground. Two males pulled Fire Ant up and lashed his wrists. With what little strength remained he fought, struggling also to remember that there was nothing to be afraid of. He had already walked this path. There was nothing that they could do to him that the mountain had not already done….
The old woman shuffled to the fire, then from it extracted a brand as thick as his thumb. Chanting something that he could not un
derstand she waved the flame back and forth before his face, then touched it to his right hand. He bit back a scream. She touched it to his left, and he lost control of his tongue, babbling sounds that made no sense, even to himself.
She burned the top of his right foot. And then his left.
My eyes, he thought. She is touching my spirit eyes. She knows our ways … or else (even more unspeakable!) our ways are the same.
She thrust the torch between his legs. Fire Ant shrieked, both in pain and anticipation of greater insult to come. But the brand he feared would burn and tear merely grazed.
She smiled at him. “No,” she said, shocking Ant by producing a word in his own tongue. Then changing angles, she thrust the glowing brand into his right eye.
The world died.
The stick in her hand sizzled and popped in the wind-whipped flame. She smiled at Ant as if they two shared some great and intimate secret. He blinked his remaining eye. What a terrible thing, he thought, for this demon to be my last sight in this world.
Would Father Mountain gave him new eyes? Why did he hurt so much? He had been through this before, had died before. Why was it so difficult to remember his previous passage from life to death, from flesh to bone?
Why?
Ant looked down at Sparrow. The boy trembled. Silent but for the rasp of wet, labored breathing.
Sparrow seemed both to accuse and beckon. You led me here. I followed you. Now, follow me …
She brought the burning brand close and then closer … and then pulled it back. She yawned, exposing teeth rotted to rancid stumps, brown as her wrinkled face.
“Later,” she said, again surprising him with another Ibandi word. “Soon.”
The others giggled. For half the night, they had played with Sparrow’s body. Too soon, the sun would be reborn. Torture was grueling work: they needed their sleep. Before the sun was directly overhead they would rise and have their day. Perhaps their children would pelt him with spit and shit all day long. Dance for him, deny him food and water. Tease him with the sight and scent of their loins. And then when night fell, the adults would finish what they had begun.
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