Nightmare Magazine Issue 23

by Nightmare Magazine

  He held the unopened letter and thought about the final decades of his life. He could spend them alone on his property, caring for his mules and letting his name slowly submerge his title. It would be an honest life, a quiet life. Perhaps, after enough time, he could take a wife, or at least start a meaningful relationship, if he did retire.

  Yes, perhaps.

  But the morning after he read the letter, he saddled his mule.

  Zonia appeared on the third day of his travel, in the afternoon. It was a sprawling province of shacks and buildings that threatened to become a city, that hinted at a capital for Zita, the first real city for a country new to independence after decades of colonial rule. Built into the stained crags of the Galimade Range, the buildings of mud brick and copper roofs sat beneath the flat red sun, each an unintended replica of a flattened or exploded bullet, a moment of violence that injured or killed depending on how far each sunk into the mountain, of how much copper was revealed.

  The house of the great gunfighter sat at the highest part of Zonia, a grand building that spoke of decadence, desire, and dominance. It was, the sin-eater thought, one of the finest that he had seen, a building of not just of magnificent construction, but of psychological insight. As a physical object, it was twice the size of any building around it: both taller and longer, as well as wider. It had been made from thick granite blocks that led up to a roof made from ridged iron metal. There, in its vast spread, the bloody sun reflected across it like a flag, a banner of violence earned.

  Beneath it, on the long, wide veranda, as if it were to her that the duty of holding the flag fell, was a single woman.

  Sonia Salazar, the wife of Arryo, he knew.

  He had not seen her in the flesh before, but he had heard stories, had seen pictures. In terms of their flattery, he thought that they were quite fair: Sonia had been a beautiful woman for whom the transition from her middle to late years had done little damage. She was tall and lean and her hair was cut short, dyed to a blonde that verged on silver, and within her bearing was a grace and surety that appeared embarrassed by the house she stood before. Accordingly, she dressed simply in brown pants and a white linen shirt, and she did not hide her clean arms, arms without any tattoos.

  Arms like his own, arms that recorded nothing for God.

  “My husband is inside.” Her grip was firm, dry, and she did not ask his name. “I apologise for the heat, but he is always cold.”

  He unstrapped his thick leather bag and brushed the dirt from it. With the same hard bristled brush, he dusted off his own browns and blacks, then the mule. Once the animal had been stabled, he followed her inside. There, she led him to the end of the hallway where a heavy wooden door stood. Her long, elegant hand pressed against it; but there was no strength in the push. Instead, her head tilted forward. “He has deteriorated since I wrote to you.” She spoke quietly, but there was nothing that spoke of grief. “I feared you would arrive after he died.”

  “God is in no rush to take a life,” he replied. “It is said that he enjoys the longer tales, those that linger. It is only family who are anxious at the end.”

  “We all feel it. All of us in Zonia.”

  He placed the heavy bag on the ground, waited.

  “I do not want you to misunderstand me,” she continued. “I do not want you to think that I do this alone. This is not the decision of his wife: this is the decision of his community. We know that to remove his tattoos is to go against his wishes, that it is to hide his soul from the eyes of God. But it needs to be done. Even Ciri, the mortician who is responsible for Arryo’s tattoos, has agreed. We do not do this because of God, I want you to know that. We do it for history. Soon, Zonia will be the largest province in Zita. We are the first block in the rebuilding of our nation. We must be strong and secure. We must be an anchor from which the nation can hang. If the truth of my husband is known, it will erode this, it will damage not just our home and our livelihoods, but our nation.”

  Beyond the door Arryo Salazar lay in a large bed.

  At first glance, his body was lost in the mix of reds and browns and yellows of the bedding and cushions, but soon, Arryo’s long body emerged. He lay on his back as if he were dead, as if he lay in a casket for public display, his sun-faded flesh sunk deep into his bones, his eyes closed and mouth a pressed line. From his neck, black tattoos covered him, twisting down his torso, his arms, his legs and, even his bare feet. They were, the sin-eater knew, the story of his life: each act, each secret, recorded in the private language of a mortician, a language in which words and illustrations were joined and woven together. There were no lies: for the devout, to lie to God was to invite his wrath. He judged you not on your acts, but on the honesty by which you acknowledged them. For God, it was said, the perfect history was one in which tragedy and triumph, weakness and strength, were told in tandem, where the truth that the divine already knew was acknowledged without artifice.

  The sin-eater approached Arryo Salazar’s body, the bottles in his bag clinking as he placed it on the hard floor. Closer, now, it appeared as if Arryo’s tattoos had begun to blend with the shadows of the bed. He looked, the sin-eater thought, as if he was dissolving.

  Feet

  Arryo Salazar had been born eighty-three years and forty-two days before the sin-eater turned over his foot, turning it to his gaze. The date was recorded as a small circular mark below his left ankle. His mother, lines leading out of it said, was named Jero, his father Manet. But it was not his true birth, not the birth of the man who lay before him, no: that happened sixty-nine years ago, the story of it curling up into his shins, into the foundation of his body.

  He was a slender young man then, a boy, truthfully, before a late growth that would deliver him to his six foot one height. He was often described by soft words, by gentleness, and he had avoided much of the rough sport of his peers. That resulted in many of them comparing him to a girl, teasing him as if he had feminine qualities, suggesting he had been born wrong, insinuating that he was queer in all the ways and shapes that the word could imply. It resulted in a young man easily baited, who responded in violence and anger, though no one had been seriously hurt and his parents believed that he would grow out of it.

  But then he turned fourteen.

  “Is that acid?”

  The faint smell of burning flesh—a kiss to the ankle, no more, no more—touched the sin-eater’s nose. “Yes,” he said to Sonia. “I start with a mild variety. As I increase the strength, it will get more and more painful. But I try to limit the pain as best that I can at the start.”

  “I have heard others use rock salt.”

  “It removes very little, to be honest,” he said. “A mortician records for life. Of course, ink fades, no matter the quality, and it is not uncommon in a man of Arryo’s age to find that his first tattoos have been retouched. Fortunately, he does not appear to have had his marks redone.”

  “No. He believed to do so was a vanity, to turn his life into a fashion. In his appearance, he was quite modest.”

  “But elsewhere—”

  “Otherwise, as you can read, he was not.”

  At fourteen, Arryo Salazar picked up his first gun.

  In later years, he would claim that it was a Hawese revolver, a civil war relic, a piece made long before Zita ceded their sovereignty to the Shibtri Isles. The truth was that the young Arryo knew nothing about revolvers, about their make and design, and much less about those tied to a civil war ended decades before his birth. He did not even know about the (then current) attempts of others to regain their independence. Oh, he was not stupid, no: he could read, he could do math, but he was a boy who had little time for books and intellectual pursuit. He left school at fourteen to make money, to escape his peers and the poverty that his family skirted.

  To that boy, the revolver was just a gun, a simple tool that he purchased cheaply before the freight company began its journey to Aja. To buy it, he had taken a loan from the freight master. Before handing him the money,
the older man had said, “Smart, boy. You don’t go unarmed into the desert. There’s all kinds of desperate out there.”

  But it was in the province of Aja that he drew the gun. In the evening, he pushed through the curtain to a bar that the same freight master led him to, leaving the sweltering red sun and dry dust behind. He was tired and dirty, and it was here that he pulled out his revolver and fired into the face of another man.

  His name was Dekor Alma. He was a large, boisterous man, a man known to be a fine drunk and an intermittent father. He was a subsistence farmer the rest of the time, a man trying to make his living out of the sunbaked dirt, a farmer who paid sixty-five percent of his income in taxes to the Governor of Zita, the Isles-appointed ruler of the nation. Alma’s friends thought him decent and later said he meant only to make a joke when slapped the young Arryo across the ass, yelling that he had a “fine dress” for one as delicate as he.

  All six shots from the revolver were fired, but according to all, even Arryo himself, the other man was dead by the second.

  Legs

  He killed another three men in prison, a truth he was public about, an admittance he believed was important for the man he would become. Who the men were was less clear: years later, as the aging mayor of Zonia, Arryo Salazar re-created the names of these men, described them as sympathizers and traitors. Only the words curled up his thighs, no longer than the sin-eater’s fingernail, claimed that they were not. He had forgotten their names, if he had ever known them. They meant more to Arryo now as tools to forge his reputation as a man who fought against colonisation and slavery, a man who wanted to regain what the Shibtri Isles took away from him and his people. He needed them to show his love of Zita, for without it, he was no better than a bandit, a killer: a gunfighter who took the lives of men and women for naught but money.

  Two years after Alma’s death, on a late Oktober evening, late enough that the seething red sun had sunk behind the flat desert, leaving the cracked, broken landscape that was the true prison guard to fall into an inky stillness, the left side of Arryo’s prison was blown open. Made from poorly sealed brick, the walls had always been weak—small bricks could be pushed out—and because of it, the explosion shook the entire prison as if the hand of God had lifted it into the air. What fell out were fifty prisoners. They landed before the freshly killed corpses of their guards and their saviour, the bandit Caeh Jah, who recruited them all to his “revolution.”

  Jah was a heavyset man with a thick greying beard. His hair was still black, as black as the tattoos that curled around his arms and neck. His revolution was widely known as fiction, and his speech to the prisoners was as hollow as any he had given. Yet Jah believed that his speeches hid his true intentions, created a false trail that the authorities could not fail to follow; whereas the truth of it was that Jah had simply not registered as important enough to warrant attention in a landscape seething with true revolutionaries. In the minds of the Governor and his authorities, Jah was a small time bandit, a man who did as much damage to his fellow people as he did to the invaders.

  What none realised as they entered the small, muddy camp of Cael Jah was that as age crept upon him, Jah had begun to wish that his lies were real. He began to entertain notions that he could be a true part of the revolution. He did not possess a strong sense of self-awareness, and so he was unable to connect his newfound desire to his age and to the death of his eldest son months before. He certainly did not realise that it was the combination of these that drew him to the young Arryo, that saw him befriend the man after a long walk through the night that ended as the red sun lit up the collection of stolen copper roofs and tents that was his camp.

  “Look at these marks on my skin. They speak of my parents, of a man and a woman who in their great grandparents had known men and women who had been free of Isles rule. I was of the first generation who could not teach that to my own child.” Jah held court in his hut, a narrow building that had two rooms, both of which he cleared out before Arryo arrived. There, he would prepare a warm beer and lean meal to share. “We have lost our independence, not just in terms of land, but in identity, in culture. Even the God who reads my body is not ours anymore. The lines are different to my parents, to their parents, are altered by the Isles’ influence. It knows no sanctity when it perverts and we must take a stand. Not tomorrow, not next month, not a decade later, but now. Look out the window, Arryo. Look at that awful, blood-soaked sun. That is our sign, our banner in this revolution.”

  At first, Arryo had been wary of Jah and his friendship. He was a jaded young man, the dark, cruel lines that marred his face etched into place as the feminine quality of his youth was replaced with a lean, stretched appearance. Yet, while the appearance of his youth had left him before he arrived in prison, his lack of power, his inability to find self-determination, remained. It had made life difficult in prison, and he feared that any relationship with Jah would be one in which he would remain subservient. When it was clear that the older man did not want to control him—that he had identified instead in Arryo an as yet unspecified need for direction, a way for him to gain what had never been given—the young gunfighter was seduced for the first time in his life intellectually.

  In his other relationships, Arryo’s expressions of self-determination remained as violent as they had been in the bar earlier. He struck out at men, at women, and even at the mortician who had laid the ink upon his long legs in those days. He took insult easily, and it was not long until he had killed another five men.

  His relationships with women in the camp did not fare better. He identified within himself an attraction to passiveness, to a lack of assurance, an inability to be dominant. He did not like to be told what to do, did not like to feel as if he was not in charge. He desired to be in control, to be the dominant partner. Yet, a great number of the women in Jah’s camp were prostitutes, or had been; it was one of the few professions that women from poor villages could obtain under Isle rule, and he knew that their passiveness was a deceit. He found his gaze turning to girls who were younger than him, to those who, because of their age, had been taught to respect their elders, had been taught to be quiet and obedient.

  Soon, such were all he desired.

  Hands

  For the most part, the sin-eater noted, Arryo Salazar’s hands were clean, long-fingered, delicate even in his final days of inactivity. Tattoos looped gently from his wrists, curls that hid numbers, kept a count that he had believed at first were for the men and women he had killed.

  But no.

  “I have not seen him weep before,” Arryo Salazar’s wife said. She held a damp brown cloth to her nose and had already left the room twice. “For as long as I have known him, he has been so strong, so direct. It has caused us many fights. The last ones we had were about Zonia. We fought about reverting the name to Galimade. The people of the town want it, for it is the traditional name, with a strong heritage, but he would not hear it. This was two weeks ago. His voice never lost its strength. It was Zonia, he said, and cared not my opinion, or my tears in regards to it—and now, now I find myself in the presence of his own.”

  The sin-eater continued his work silently.

  “Does the smell affect you?” she asked, finally.

  “It will follow me for days after,” he admitted, his voice quiet, his throat raw from the smell and taste of burnt flesh. “But such is my trade. Just as a mortician will sit with needle and ink and records in a ceremony he or she will never speak of after, I do the same. I carry the tears with me. I hear the pain in their breathing, their voices. I see them strain against my straps. It is a dishonesty to pretend otherwise.”

  “In that way, you are much like believers, are you not?”

  “In my youth, I would not have said so, but now . . .” He shrugged. “Now I no longer believe we are so different.”

  Arms

  Caeh Jah’s long nights, his seductive words and ideologies, his intellectual birth of Arryo, continued for two years. In that t
ime, the bandit’s riverside camp stopped its drifting up and down the riverbanks to sink roots into the ground, to become an outpost for those abandoning the cities controlled by the Isles.

  According to the new Isle Governor, Benard Hart, Caeh Jah was part of a revolution striking deep into the heart of the empire’s land.

  He spoke the words in a theatre three times the size of Jah’s camp, to an audience that stood before him in parade uniforms, to soldiers old and new. He had arrived in Zita with two thousand new recruits and a directive to civilize the natives, and his speech was the start of a campaign to do just that. He spoke in the bold language of the Isles, spoke in the name of freedom, of democracy, and, in the morning that followed, crimson and black uniformed soldiers stepped into their saddles, revolvers and rifles in their grasp, and rode into the desert.

  Cael Jah was one of the first killed. Unaware of his approaching mortality, he rose from his wide bed in the pale red-lit morning. Half-naked, he pulled open the cloth of his door, stretched, then spat. He twisted his neck to crack it . . . and in that movement, saw the Isles soldiers sweeping down to cross the muddy river into his camp. He cried out, but the sound drew the first shots, and he fell to the ground, clutching his stomach. He managed to crawl into the first of his two rooms, stopping before the boxes beneath his bed, before his weapons. He was already dead when an Isles soldier came up behind him and shot him the back of the head.

  It was this last that offended Arryo most.

  He had been out of the camp for a week, officially picking up supplies. Unofficially, Jah had sent him away because of a growing tension between the young man and those in the camp that he hoped to diffuse. Arryo had not been surprised. He had begun to realise that he could no longer stay in the camp but had not yet decided where he could go. He had hoped that his return would be quiet so that he could talk to Jah, to ask him his opinion, to ask his help.