by David Estes
It shall be done, he thought. May I burn in the first heaven if I have chosen wrongly.
8: The Beggar
The Southern Kingdom, Calypso- Circa 522
“Mama!” the boy screamed, thrashing about in his bed. The darkness seemed to swirl around him like a dust storm, forcing its way into his eyes, his mouth, his nose, choking him, stealing his air. The images he saw—memories, but not real memories—sent shockwaves of fear through him:
A woman, her eyes dark, her sweaty hair darker, like a waterfall of wet silk, touching her baby for the first time. The beautiful smile on her brown-skinned face, the unconditional love in her expression…and the horror that flashed as blood-red boils began bursting from her flesh. She collapsed back, scratching at her cheeks, her arms, her neck.
In the boy’s mind, the woman died, as she did every night. Over and over and over again, only to be reborn a night later to the same fate.
The boy thrashed, trying to escape the nest of tangled sheets that suddenly felt like a prison.
Thump! He hit the floor in a convoluted mess of blankets and thick clothing.
The impact helped vanquish the memories—he thought he’d hit his head, though he wasn’t sure exactly. Slowly, slowly, his breathing returned to normal, his heartbeat slowing.
Sweat trickled down his spine. In fact, it trickled everywhere. His body was sheathed in sweat, as it always was. Living under the hot Calypsian sun was part of his curse, the eight-year-old boy felt. Right now, he felt like he was being cooked alive, and he longed to peel off his thick gloves, his long socks, the mask he wore. Every bit of his body was covered, save for his eyes and mouth. It was a necessary precaution, he knew, given his condition.
He squinted as a bright light approached, bobbing in the darkness.
“Get off the floor, boy,” a stern woman’s voice said. “Get back in bed.” The lantern stopped, illuminating the dark, crinkled face and graying hair of his guardian, a fiery woman who used words like weapons.
“I can’t sleep,” the boy said. Back then he was known as Chavos, though the stern woman usually referred to him simply as “boy.” “I had a nightmare.”
“You are the nightmare,” the woman growled. Her words stung, because they were the truth.
Chavos was the baby in his darkest dreams. A killer. Dangerous.
I killed my own mother.
Sometimes he wished it were he who had died instead.
“Why don’t you leave me then?” Chavos said, each word quivering like a lonely leaf blasted by a stiff wind. His bottom lip trembled. Tears pricked at his eyes.
“Because you’re family,” she said. “And family doesn’t leave. I loved my sister very much. I’m doing this for her, not you. It’s what she would’ve wanted.” Somehow, this knowledge only made the tears fall faster. He was glad they were hidden beneath his mask, though they made the cloth cling to his cheeks. His aunt hated him, there was no doubt about that, and yet she was all he had.
“Why am I like this?” he asked. “Why me?”
The woman’s voice softened for a rare moment. “Only the gods know. Now back to bed. And don’t let me hear you making a ruckus again.” She made a shooing motion, but didn’t actually touch him. She never touched him, despite the thick folds of cloth that protected her from his skin.
My skin, he thought as he scrambled back into bed, leaving the sweat-damp sheets on the floor. My curse. My weapon.
The lantern bobbed away, and darkness returned. Chavos longed to feel a hand on his face, arms around him, holding him, protecting him. I’m not the one who needs protecting, he reminded himself. Everyone else needs protection from me.
Chavos was born with a strange marking, a tattooya as they were called in the south. Though his aunt had only let him see it once before, illuminated by torchlight, the image was burned into his memory: three broken circles, joined together in the center. A fourth broken circle spinning between them.
The plaguemark.
I am death. I am poison. I am a murderer.
He blinked away more tears and tried to sleep. Eventually, he drifted off, and even his dreams were afraid of him, keeping their distance as he slumbered.
Two years later (Circa 524)
Chavos peered through a crack between the shutters. It was the best he could do. The wooden shutters covered all but a tiny strip of the dirt-streaked glass window, nailed firmly around the frame. Children laughed, playing in a dusty field. He watched them often as they ran, kicking a worn leather sack back and forth. It was some sort of a team game, though Chavos had never been able to participate in such a thing. His games were all solitary ones.
Now, he longed to join these children. Most of them were dark-skinned, like his mother had been, like his aunt was. They looked like Calypsians. He, on the other hand, was eerily pale, which should’ve been impossible given his mother’s brown skin and his father’s even darker skin. Or so his aunt told him. He’d never actually seen either of them. His father had left before he was born, apparently, and never returned.
A smart move, all things considered.
Chavos stuck his eye further into the crack, trying to see more of the sand field, more of the children. He watched them often, and though he didn’t know their names, he knew them by the way they ran. Wind, he called the girl who was about his own age, a fleet-footed player who often scored for her team. Her long, dark hair trailed behind her like shadowy tendrils as she raced for the sack.
Chavos’s breath caught in his lungs as he watched another player cutting in from the side. Rockhead, he’d named this one, an older boy with a big ol’ head who liked to throw his weight around. Wind didn’t see him coming, her focus entirely on the leather sack. Chavos wanted to warn her, to shout something, but his voice stuck in his throat and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because he was too far away for her to hear him.
The collision was violent, and Wind, who was in an awkward position, got the worst of it, flying through the air and crumpling to the hard ground, her leg bent awkwardly behind her. Chavos watched as she writhed in pain, and he knew her bones were broken.
She might never run, or even walk, again.
He backed away from the shuttered window, the thought of the injured girl making him unbearably sad.
She needs help, he thought, suddenly feeling full of energy. He charged for the door, which was locked and barred from the outside, a precaution his aunt never failed to forget when she left their house. I can break through it, he thought, determination coursing through him. He picked up a wooden chair awkwardly, trying to raise it over his head so he could crash it into the door. His thin arms wobbled and the chair tilted and his legs gave out.
“Oof!” he grunted as the chair landed atop him, cracking his jaw through his face mask. He lay there for a while, his face throbbing. The pain, however, wasn’t nearly as bad as the realization that he was useless. Purposeless. Stuck inside all day every day, he had no real reason for living.
He pushed the chair off, cringing as two of the legs went in opposite directions, having shattered in half when he fell. His aunt wasn’t going to be pleased.
Who cares? he thought. A broken chair is nothing compared to that poor girl’s broken bones…the girl! Wind! Remembering her, he rushed back to the crack in the shutters to see what was happening.
He gasped.
The girl was walking away, toward one of the neighboring houses, flanked by two boys and a man. The man was large, a gray-skinned Dreadnoughter who Chavos had seen many times through the window. One of the boys was another player that he also recognized, dark-skinned in the typical Calypsian manner. The second boy, however, had wavy blond hair and light skin. Wisps of bright light seemed to rise from his chest, but were quickly fading.
And then the light blinked out and they were gone, disappearing inside another house.
As expected, Chavos’s aunt was not happy about the chair.
“This will cost me a week’s worth of Dragons to repair!”
she shouted, each hand holding one of the shattered chair legs.
“It’s just a chair,” Chavos said, thinking of the girl’s broken leg. It’s not broken anymore, he thought. Somehow she was healed. Regardless, it was the wrong thing to say to his aunt, because the chair legs were still very much broken.
With a snap of her wrist, she threw one at him. It hit him square in the chest, bouncing off and rattling across the floor. “Just a chair? This was your mother’s favorite chair, crafted by one of the best woodworkers in the city! Is it still just a chair?”
“I—” The thought of his mother should’ve sent a pang of sadness through him, but instead he felt nothing. The truth was, he didn’t even know his mother. And when she’d died—when his condition had killed her—he was a newborn babe, as unaware of what was happening as a raindrop was of splashing into a puddle. “Yes, it’s still just a chair.”
“You little wretch,” his aunt growled, stalking toward him. She raised the other chair leg threateningly, and then swung it, aiming it for his shoulder.
He acted on instinct, thrusting his arm out. The wooden stick stopped. He stared at his gloved hand, which had caught his aunt’s hand, preventing her from completing the blow.
He could feel the warmth of her skin through the glove. No, wait. It was more than that. He could feel her skin against his. It felt—it felt—
Wonderful.
And terrible.
“Oh gods,” she murmured, pulling back sharply, her eyes flicking from her hand to his. “What have you done?”
For a moment Chavos was confused, but then he noticed a sliver of pale skin shining from a tear in his glove. He stared at it, mesmerized by the look of his own flesh, the way it resembled the crack in the shutters, when sunlight shone through the window in the morning.
His aunt backed away further, a strangled groan rising from deep in her throat. “First your mother, and now me. You’re a demon, boy. A demon.”
He was a boulder and her words were pebbles. It’s not my fault I was born this way, he thought as he stepped around her.
He left, never returning to see what had happened to her, though rumors of a great plague raging through the city sprung up a few days later.
Only they weren’t rumors.
Five years later (Circa 529)
He no longer thought of himself as Chavos. No, that person had died along with his aunt. The Calypsians had given him many names, but his favorite was the Beggar, so that’s what he called himself.
Of course, no one really knew who he was. That was another effect of his tattooya. He could float through the city and barely be noticed, even garbed in his strange attire—long cloak, face mask, gloves, tall boots. And those who did notice him couldn’t seem to recall him afterwards, not his appearance or the way he walked or anything.
I am a ghost. I am a Beggar. Unnoticed. Unwanted. Unimportant.
The plague had torn through Calyp for four long years, reaching as far as the Citadel. Though it was his aunt who had apparently left their home shortly after he had and run through the city ranting and grabbing people, infecting them, the Beggar took responsibility for each and every one of their deaths, which numbered in the hundreds, if not thousands.
Empress Riza Sandes, named after the City of the Rising Sun, had perished a year into the plague. Her eldest daughter, Sun, had won the empire four years ago, defeating both of her sisters, Windy and Viper, in hand to hand combat in the arena.
I am the Beggar. I am a murderer.
And then, as swiftly as the plague had arose, it vanished. Those quarantined had been sent to an uninhabited island in Dragon Bay, left to eventually succumb to the disease. In the last year, talk of the plague had dwindled, though he still heard his various nicknames mentioned in idle gossip, many people claiming to have seen him in alleyways, lurking in the shadows.
Since his aunt’s death, the Beggar had not had skin to skin contact with another human being. He didn’t know if it was luck or careful practice, or a function of the ethereal manner in which he could pass through the city unnoticed; regardless, he was glad for it.
Sitting with his back against the wall, sweating beneath his thick clothing, the Beggar thought about all the deaths he’d caused. People he’d never met. Strangers. In some ways, that felt worse than what he’d done to his aunt, to his mother.
I don’t want to kill again. Never again. Please, gods, please let me just live…
Why?
The question came out of nowhere, as it often did, pounding through his head like a slow drumbeat—why…why…why…why?
Why do I want to live?
Though he hated to admit it, he had hope for himself. It felt selfish, this hope, considering all the pain and suffering he had caused. And yet he clung to it like a beetle to a palm frond under the onslaught of a summer storm. Hiding in plain sight, he listened to the stories told in alehouses and marketplaces and on the streets of Calypso. Tales of the tattooya-bearers, Southron gods in human form who had come to save them all, to help them win the civil war with Phanes, and then the whole of the Four Kingdoms. Even the empress’s second oldest daughter, Fire, bore a tattooya, the firemark. She was loved by her people because of it. They thought she would be their savior, when she came of age.
When the Beggar heard those stories, he felt connected to the other marked people. Can I be like them? Can I do something good with my curse?
In those moments, he felt the opposite of the way he’d felt on the day he’d infected his aunt. He felt like he had a purpose, a reason for living.
He felt hope, like a flame burning inside his chest.
I have a role to play in this world, he thought. He wanted it to be the truth, more than anything else.
Someone flicked a coin into the small leather box he’d set before him when he sat down. It clinked amongst a handful of other coins he’d received so far. They were mostly coppers, but still… “Thank you,” he murmured automatically, still lost in his thoughts.
Strong hands grabbed him, pulling him upwards, slamming him against the wall, causing stars to burst across his vision. The smell of smoke and onions assaulted his nostrils as hot breath splashed across his mask, brushing his exposed lips. “Don’t fight it and this will all go easier,” his attacker hissed.
He heard the jingle of coins as someone else presumably scooped up his leather box and made off with it. The hands released him and he fell, collapsing to his knees.
He blinked, trying to restore his vision.
He squinted as light poured in, obliterating the stars. As expected, his coins were gone. He scanned the street, but the thieves had disappeared. Several sets of eyes were focused in his direction, but the people seemed confused, as if they weren’t quite sure what they were seeing. He didn’t know what he looked like to them, exactly. A smudge of gray against the tan stones perhaps? A shadow in a place where there shouldn’t be one? It didn’t matter. They wouldn’t remember any details about him.
Something felt strange, however.
He felt…cool.
The wind was blowing, yes, but usually that didn’t help him much, due to his thick clothing and face mask. And yet, the skin on each side of his chest felt cooler as the sweat seemed to dry. The coolness seemed to originate from the exact places where the attacker’s strong hands had grabbed him, the man’s fingers poking into his flesh.
Oh no. Ohnoohnoohnoohnoohno!
He looked down.
A wail tore from his throat when he saw the holes torn in his shirt, twin spots of pale flesh staring out at him.
The plague had returned to Calypso.
Three years later (Circa 532)
Countless people had died because of him. Were still dying. Each time the Beggar’s heart pulsed in his chest, he wondered whether someone else had died.
Though plague victims continued to be quarantined on Dragon’s Breath, the empire’s efforts had done little to stem the spread of the disease.
The Beggar woke up each morning
and found a looking glass or a puddle or a water trough, forcing himself to stare at his own reflection. And each day he made a choice not to kill himself. He wasn’t sure why, exactly, only that his tattooya would pulse from his skin, staying his hand.
One day the sun was shining brightly. The Beggar was on the move, heading for a part of Calypso he hadn’t been to in a while, hoping for a change of scenery. As he approached a main thoroughfare from the safety of an alleyway, the trio of pyramids rose up in the distance, towering over the sandstone dwellings most citizens lived in. A royal cavalcade was moving through the center of the street, pushing the crowds to the dust-piled edges of the buildings.
Several of the horsemen steered their steeds precariously close to the crowd and the onlookers were forced to jump back. One of them was too slow, nearly getting himself trampled, falling backward in a cloud of dust. Unlike most people in the crowd, he was light-featured and looked out of place amongst the Calypsians.
There was something familiar about the man, who wasn’t much older than the Beggar…
The man turned, coughing out a wad of brown spit.
The Beggar froze. Him. The blond-haired boy from the dusty field that day, all those years ago, the one with the girl who shouldn’t have been able to walk, the one who had wisps of light trailing from his chest. Though the Beggar hadn’t thought of that day in many years, the memory of it was as vivid as a spark in the dark…
It was the day he’d accidentally killed his aunt and released the plague.
Yes, he was certain it was the same boy, though he’d grown up a lot since then, as had the Beggar. Somehow, over time and distance, he still felt inexplicably connected to this man, though he’d never met him before in his life.
This feeling spurred him forward. With each step, he felt as if his fate was finally calling him. Or at least part of his fate. For the first time in his life he knew he was in the right place at the exact right time. This is why I’m not dead, he thought. He approached the boy from behind. “Are you injured?” he asked. His voice, which hadn’t been used in a long time, sounded like that of a stranger to his own ears.