One Great Year

by Tamara Veitch

  Katari shoved the prisoner to his knees. Inti was shaking at his father’s side, staring at the blood down the front of the filthy captive’s clothing and on his chin.

  “Where’s my jaguar?” Inti demanded, clenching his jaw. The Emissary stared at him without understanding. Sartaña and Katari both wondered if Inti sensed the Emissary’s energy. Would Theron recognize one of her own? There was no sign.

  “He murdered your Patha. Bring the head, the paws, the skin! He ate his heart like it was a pear!” Katari said angrily, pacing threateningly around the Emissary on the floor.

  Sartaña knew what Katari was doing. As always he was bent on twisting Inti to his will. Katari handed his son a heavy, flat stone that barely fit in the boy’s hand and nudged him forward, close enough to touch the prisoner. Inti trembled with rage, and his legs felt as though they might buckle.

  The boy gulped as the guard returned with the ghoulish head of the jaguar extended in his palm, too near his face. There could be no mistaking. All sympathy left him; there was only anger remaining. Inti had been exposed to violence his entire life. It was a part of life and of survival, and in that moment he was filled with murderous rage.

  “Ripped apart while you slept … while you did not protect …” Katari goaded, determined to inflame him further. The young prince swung the rock and hit the prisoner with a sickening thud. A large gash opened up in the man’s head directly above his left eye as he fell to the dust.

  Katari glowed with satisfaction. It was as he thought! Even Theron, daughter of White Elder, could be used and turned under the correct circumstances! What great power this knowledge gave him!

  The injured Emissary looked up from the dirt, and Inti felt a wave of compassion upon seeing the fear and confusion in his eyes. Suddenly, the stranger seemed familiar, as his karmic colors billowed and swirled through the room. Inti turned his face away from the victim, and Sartaña silently called to him, praying for him to stop, praying that Inti’s Theron-soul would not succumb to Helghul’s manipulation.

  The boy stood shaking and remorseful, rock in hand, unwilling to strike a second blow and unable to rouse himself to the anger and brutality required to continue. Katari, sensing that Inti had lost his rage, pushed him forward. Inti snapped his shoulder back and glared angrily at his father.

  “That anger you feel is for him, not for me! He attacked your kingdom! Will Patha’s murder go unavenged?” Katari growled, but Inti remained frozen.

  Angered by his son’s mounting compassion, Katari took the rock from his son in disgust and pushed him aside. The boy turned his head away as his father slammed the weapon against the captive’s yielding skull and sprayed them all with blood and grey oatmeal chunks of brain. Though Inti’s eyes were closed, the sound of the stone as it connected reverberated sickeningly through him.

  The colorful bands emanating from the murdered Emissary slipped upward like smoke through a chimney as his spirit was released to the place in between. He was once again a current, traveling the Grid until his next incarnation. Sartaña was overcome by the cruelty and waste she had witnessed. She mourned the loss of such a good spirit in the world, though she knew the Emissary’s absence was temporary.

  Inti would not look at the battered heap as a dark pool of blood spread slowly, covering the dirt and pebbles as it crept across the floor. Instead he stared at Sartaña’s door. The eye was there. Even from a distance, Inti could sense it watching them. He wondered briefly to whom the eye belonged.

  Despite her grief for her bludgeoned ally, Sartaña knew that her son could see her and she smiled. So rare was the occasion for her to smile that her scars pulled and stretched in complaint. Her lined skin creaked in protest but she continued, seeing that Inti’s eyes were kind, as they had always been. Sartaña was flush with pride that Inti had been unwilling to do as Katari had intended.

  Inti could not see the karmic colors that flowed down the hall and joined with his, but Sartaña felt her son’s spirit reaching out to her. Theron’s energy once again coupled with Marcus’s like a key in a padlock. The chamber turned and opened them up, and both the child’s and the mother’s skin erupted in gooseflesh.

  Katari regrouped as the brightness of the auras doubled in the dim hallway. He saw Marcus’s familiar aura swirling around Inti, and angrily he hurled the blood-covered stone against Sartaña’s door. The high priestess jumped back as it impacted with a thud, leaving a bloody imprint on the wood.

  The tendrils of Sartaña’s aura that had reached out now retreated. She had seen and felt the colors of Inti and the Emissary, felt the familiar warmth and goodness that radiated from them. It was stronger than human touch, so deep, not just barely-there tingles but complete and overwhelming connections, and it was more than she had felt in many years. She had been alone for so long, reconciling her Marcus-memories and cataloguing her previous lessons and lives. She had only seen her son from a distance through the sliver in her door, but this time they had connected.

  Katari directed Inti toward the exit, leaving the guards to clean up the carnage left behind. Sartaña listened as her son was reprimanded by his father for being weak. She meditated and inexplicably felt a new strength, reminded that she was not alone.

  CHAPTER 12

  A NEW PURPOSE

  Sartaña was grateful when she finally heard the rustle of her cell door, hungrier than she had felt in years. Her guard stumbled as he entered and, grunting, kicked the ground at his feet. He placed a wooden bowl of water and a small chunk of dried llama meat on the floor. Other than a thin reed mat for sleeping, the cell was empty. Opposite the door, under the tiny window, ran a narrow, fetid ditch the length of the entire building. The putrid trough was occasionally flushed with dirty water to wash away the human waste that had collected there, but the stench never waned.

  Sartaña’s guard retreated and, once again stumbling, he kicked aside the stone that was tripping him up. The door closed with a clunk. Sartaña crouched to eat and felt the stone beside her. In the dark she picked it up and felt the sticky blood and hair that clung to it. She remembered the crash of the rock against her door as Katari had thrown it hours before.

  Sartaña dipped the corner of her tatty robe into her shallow water bowl, using almost all of her daily ration to soak the cloth. Respectfully, though she could not see in the darkness, the high priestess washed away the gore, all the while praying for the Emissary whose blood had been so cruelly shed. The rock was round and smooth, and once clean, Sartaña decided that it must become an object of reverence to remember the brave life it had taken.

  The high priestess held the stone and meditated through the night. Her interaction with Inti earlier in the day had somehow lit a spark of hope within her. Sartaña’s Marcus-brain was racing, and she prayed specifically for the knowledge of what she should do. What could she do?

  When Sartaña woke, a narrow ray of light from her high window was spanning the length of her tiny cell and cascading beautiful silver light particles in its path. The beam illuminated the shimmering, hoary dust in smooth, straight rows that appeared to rain down and disappear where the light left off. Sartaña was grateful for the beauty. It reminded her that she was still a part of a miraculous world. As she watched, the beam in one small section began to swirl and change, and she was mesmerized as she realized a face had formed. It was the familiar curve and arc of Theron’s cheek and jaw. The dust moved as Theron often had, tossing her hair from her eyes, and then it was gone. The sunbeam returned to its gravitational pull, returned to the silver rain, and Sartaña was left with the beautiful image in her mind.

  Sartaña’s Marcus-brain was at full attention and compelled her to take up the rock that she had so reverentially scrubbed the night before. Sartaña looked at the rock in the light for the first time and knew what she would do. She would carve into the stone. She had a clear picture in her mind of the design. She would draw a group of seven identical circles in a repeating pattern that would form a flower with six petals. It was
the same pattern that graced her shoulder and that freed her soul.

  Sartaña’s role as an Emissary was begun anew with this random, seemingly insignificant undertaking. She searched at the edge of her cell in the dirt and pebbles and tried each small shard as a tool until she found one sharp and dense enough to make a scrape in the smooth river rock. She worked devotedly for hours, then days, and she was amazed by the divine design that flowed so easily from her untrained hands. Sartaña had never been an artist or craftswoman, yet she had produced an extraordinary, geometrically perfect carving in only a week, with an inadequate tool and no ability to measure. It was truly miraculous.

  The evening of the seventh day, Sartaña’s guard entered to deliver her rations. Sartaña did not have time to hide the stone in her hand. The curious man demanded to see what she held. Hesitantly she handed the stone to him, and he turned it over in his palm and stared at her dumbfounded.

  “You carved this?” he asked, tracing the grooves in awe. She nodded tentatively. “Where is your blade?” he asked. Sartaña raised the small, worn-out scrap of stone up to him, and he shook his head in disbelief. “High Priestess, you did this without a proper tool? It’s not possible! It’s perfect!” he proclaimed. Sartaña glowed at his response to her work. Without another word the guard left, taking the stone with him. The woman feebly reached out to stop him, but the door closed with a clunk.

  Sartaña was crestfallen; she had felt like her old self during the past week. She had felt a sense of purpose and distraction that had eluded her during her imprisonment. She lay down on her mat and wondered if the kind guard would take her handiwork to Katari. It had been worth the risk. Considering how compelled she had been to do the carving, she knew that whatever happened was meant to be.

  Sartaña was not alone for long. There was a rustle at her door, and she snapped upright in alarm. She was relieved as her guard entered with a secretive smile on his face. In his hands he held a bulky goatskin sack. He dropped the bag with a weighty clunk and unloaded a small pile of river rocks in the corner of the cell. Sartaña stared at him in astonishment as he handed her a sharp, crescent-shaped stone with a worn wooden handle.

  “This was my father’s … he was a skilled artisan and carved his whole life. It is a strong blade and should make your work much easier,” he said proudly. Sartaña held the tool like it was a precious gem, turning it over in her hands in disbelief. “Don’t hurt yourself,” he added pensively, glancing back and meeting her grateful eyes. She wished she could thank him. She knew that if Katari discovered what he had done, he would kill him. Her guard was a good, brave man.

  Sartaña made her way to the heap of stones and chose one. She raised it to the heavens in blessing, and her mind flashed with visions from her many past lives. When finally she settled on one image, she began to scrape, scrape, scrape. She was a whirlwind, overcome with purpose and expertly carving with a skill she had never learned.

  Day after day, week after week, month after month Sartaña churned out the spectacular etchings at an impossible pace. She engraved images from Marcus’s past lifetimes, concepts that no one of her time or land had ever dreamed of.

  There were days when Sartaña almost ceased to exist, fully transmuted to the higher part of herself. She carved stories, ideas, experiments, celestial maps, centuries of knowledge etched deep into the indigenous river rock. Her guard had begun leaving her cell door ajar, and the light and warmth from his fire comforted her and danced in patterns on her walls. He would sit next to the opening with his back pressed to the outer wall while she carved, and he’d tell her stories about Inti and the generosity and kindness of his spirit.

  As the days passed, he shared humorous and interesting stories about his own children and family, as well as the daily events in the city. Sartaña loved the sound of his voice and worked in a new state of contentment. More than once he shared with her a hallucinogenic cactus drink, which helped her visions and creativity to bloom.

  The guard continued to bring fresh stones and take the completed art away. Unsure what was happening to them, Sartaña found she didn’t care. The stones would end up where they needed to be. Her job was to produce them, as prodigiously and prolifically as possible. What she did not know was that she was not alone in her task—other people nearby, Emissaries like her, were also busily carving without training or cause, but with burning determination and in complete awe of the results of their toil. They too were being guided by their unconscious higher selves, though they did not know it at all. The Emissaries were often confused and disturbed by the foreign images they produced, but they were compelled to continue.

  The stones began to turn up in Stone-at-Center. Citizens found them and marveled at their intricacy and bizarre images. The community embraced them as signs from the gods riddled with messages too grand for them to understand, and they took them to their high priest to decode. Initially Katari dismissed the stones, intrigued but unconcerned by the images, assuming they were remnants from a time long past, a Golden Age that he had known well and did not fear.

  Katari’s interest in the stones changed as they grew quickly in number and the entire community could speak of nothing else. One afternoon Katari was handed a specimen that caused him considerable alarm. The image was of a young warrior, aiming a spear at the belly of an older man. In the sky above there were three stars, and at the feet of the older man there were oddly bent bodies that looked to be fatally injured infants and children. The boy was wearing the headdress of a high priest, and on his forehead was the eye of protection in the center of a triangle. Unlike the other stones that he had disregarded, Katari pulled this stone aside and kept it hidden in his chamber, disturbed by its imagery and its resemblance to both Inti and himself.

  People continued to bring the perplexing stones to their leader, and his unease grew. He was given another specimen that depicted a young boy in a high priest headdress marked with the eye of protection, sitting on what was unmistakably a throne.

  The next day, after a restless night plagued by nightmares, Katari decreed that all of the artisan stones were to be brought to him, and for each one he would pay a small sack of grain. The hungry people reaped the benefit of the high priest’s interest.

  Katari didn’t know where the stones were coming from or who was producing them, but many of the images indicated the knowledge of Atitalans. He had murdered or imprisoned the few Emissaries that he had encountered in this life, but Helghul knew there must be more. The high priest outlawed the production of the stones, declaring that anyone caught carving them would be put to death.

  Early one evening shortly after the decree, Katari was interrupted during his meal. He was especially irritable because the crops were doing poorly, and he had spent the day threatening the farmers and demanding they work longer hours to manage the grueling task of better irrigating their lands.

  “Master, a load of stones has arrived,” a servant announced.

  “More of the same?” Katari snapped.

  “There are too many to tell.”

  “Put them in the courtyard. I will see them after I eat,” Katari ordered, through a mouthful of bread.

  “Why do you care about a pile of rocks?” Inti asked sheepishly, too curious about his father’s growing obsession to stay quiet as he usually would have.

  “Any change is worth noting. The people care, they are mesmerized by them. A smart leader watches the crowd,” he explained.

  “The ones I saw were all children’s tales: monsters and moons,” Inti countered, his mouth, like his father’s, spraying crumbs as he spoke.

  “Have you heard them called the ‘magic stones’ or the ‘sacred stones’?” Katari asked. Inti could only nod, his mouth bursting with half-chewed meat. “Doesn’t that concern you? Have you learned nothing from me?” the father snapped at his son irritably.

  Inti retreated back into silence while he ate. His hope was to endure his training with Katari and to eventually lead with compassion and humility.
He continued to hear his mother’s words these ten years later: Trust your instincts. You will be a great and well-loved leader. He missed her and wondered how alike they might have been. Would they have laughed together? Healed together? Would she be ashamed of him if she knew the things that he had done? He was ashamed of himself. As he aged, it pricked at his conscience, a constant reminder to do better in the future.

  Katari was despised by his subjects. Selfish and cold-hearted, he had continued to claim the greatest part of his city’s wealth and crops for himself. He ran the sacred sites and temples like a business. For thousands of years, Stone-at-Center had been open to all people. Katari had changed all that, limiting access and requiring “donations” of beans, grains, peanuts, and cloth. No one could enter without paying his toll, and many were turned away—the sick, the elderly—even after days and weeks of travel. The high priest had become powerful and rich, continually expanding his lands through commerce and force, but the people were left with barely enough to survive.

  Inti was increasingly aware of the discontent in the kingdom but dared say nothing. He knew what his father would say, he had heard it many times: “A king must feather his own nest first.”

  After they finished eating, the duo stretched their thick frames, belched, and made their way out to the square. Inti was quiet as they walked, so similar in body but not in soul.

  Upon exiting the low stone archway, they were stunned to see a pile of more than two hundred stones of varying sizes. The high priest and his son contemplated the stack.

  Inti ran to the pile and crouched, laying the smaller stones in neat rows at his feet. He studied the images of maps and celestial charts, but he could not understand what they were. The knowledge was locked deep inside him. Inti wondered if the stones held prophecies or if they were from the Ancient Ones as rumors had claimed. Some were incredibly well done and detailed, but others were just scratches, no skill at all, undoubtedly by someone desperate for a sack of grain.