Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  As we ate, his remains and those of Hin as well waited on a raft of floating rushes a few dozen paces out into the lake. The night’s feast was both funeral and celebration. Ruc hadn’t objected—he had something of my own order’s practicality when it came to corpses—but once or twice throughout the meal I caught him staring at the floating shadow, as though the wrecked flesh held the answer to some unspoken question, and when the Witness finally gave the order to light the pyre ablaze, he didn’t take his eyes from the tongues of flame.

  As the sodden body turned to ash, the Vuo Ton sang a simple, plangent melody in their own language.

  “What does it mean?” I asked Chua quietly.

  “It is a celebration,” she replied, “of his bravery.”

  “Strange practice,” Ruc said, his voice sanded perfectly flat. “Murdering a man, then praising his bravery.”

  The Witness turned toward us. “We asked no more of him than we do of our own children.”

  “What kind of people feed their children to crocodiles?”

  “They are not food. They are fighters.”

  “Not if they die.”

  “If they die,” the Witness replied evenly, “they die with a knife in hand. What pride could they have, spending their lives in hiding?”

  “More than a hundred thousand people in Dombâng,” Ruc said. “Most of them live, laugh, thrive. No one throws them naked into the delta to fight crocs.”

  “And this is why the people of Dombâng are weak. You have forgotten your gods.”

  Kossal, who had been gnawing the meat from a rib, paused, wiped his face, then poked the bloody bone at the leader of the Vuo Ton.

  “Tell us about the gods.”

  The one-eyed man nodded, as though he had expected this. “You are not from Dombâng.”

  “She is,” Ela cut in, nodding at me. “We’re Kettral.”

  Kossal rolled his eyes, but didn’t bother responding.

  “Kettral,” the Witness said, drawing the word out as though studying it. “I have heard stories of these warriors. Now I start to understand how you weighed so heavy in the Scales.”

  He turned to the Vuo Ton seated closest, murmured a few words I couldn’t understand, then said again: Kettral. Surprise rippled down the line, questions and exclamations. Women and men began studying us anew, eyes bright in their tattooed faces.

  “And why,” the Witness asked after a pause, “have the Kettral come to the Given Land?”

  “To find you,” Ruc said grimly, shifting languorously as an uncoiling snake.

  “You are not Kettral,” the chieftain said. “We have seen you in the city. Why do you want to find something you have ignored for so long?”

  “Because a week ago almost two hundred men were slaughtered. Half were Annurian, half native to the city.”

  “Ah.” The Witness paused to translate for the others, then turned back to Ruc. “A fat ship? Its decking reeked of salt?”

  “More blood than salt, by the time we found it.”

  The Witness nodded. “A great sacrifice. Holy.”

  “Explain to me,” Ruc said, “what is holy about two hundred men with their throats torn out, their arms ripped from their shoulders, heads severed, eyes gouged, vines planted in the empty sockets?”

  “This was the work of the Three,” the Witness replied, as though that explained everything.

  Ruc watched him for a moment, then turned to study the mass of Vuo Ton scattered over the boats and rafts. “The Three?” he asked quietly. “Or the three thousand?”

  “You think we attacked your people?”

  “I’ve never seen a god,” Ruc replied. “But I have seen you.”

  The chieftain shook his head. “You have not seen the gods because, like all in the city, you have forgotten your worship.”

  “Oh, worship is doing just fine in Dombâng. Kids get dragged out into the delta to die every week.”

  The Witness shook his head. “The Three would no more take one of your feeble city dwellers than a jaguar would a slab of rotten meat.”

  “I’ve seen the bodies,” Ruc replied quietly.

  “The Given Land is rich in ways to die,” the Witness said. “Snakebites and spiders. Drowning. Thirst.”

  A hot vision seared across my mind—the eyes of a jaguar and beneath them the eyes of something else, a woman who was not a woman. Pain blazed through me. My skin had long since scarred over, but I could feel the wounds that made the scars as though they still bled. I felt dizzy suddenly. The light of the lanterns reeled in vicious orbits around me. Even the stars seemed to be on fire.

  “What the priests of your city do,” the Witness went on—he was still talking to Ruc, oblivious to the fact that I’d come momentarily unmoored—“is not worship.”

  “Says the man who tried to feed us to the crocs.”

  “You came to us. You demanded this.”

  “We demanded a conversation.”

  “Only those weighed in the Scales are given a voice.” The one-eyed man shook his head. “You chose this,” he said again.

  “And what about the men on that transport?” Ruc asked. “Did they choose it, too?”

  “We are bound by the oaths of our ancestors.”

  Ruc snorted. “What about the feebleness of city dwellers? I thought we were rotten meat, well beneath the interest of your Three?”

  The Witness smiled. “Two hundred men, all armed, ready for violence. This is not a solitary soul abandoned on a mud flat. This is a prize worthy of a hunter.”

  Ruc fell silent. The slitted eyes of the dead crocodile surveyed the night while the feast cooled on the platter around it, grease congealing on the meat, which had gone from red-brown to gray.

  “How do you know all this about the Three,” I asked, “if no one has ever seen them?”

  The tattooed man turned to me, seemed to look at me and through me at the same time.

  “Every ten or twenty years,” he replied, “they leave a warrior alive.”

  I shook my head. “Why?”

  “To bear witness,” he raised a hand to his own chest, smiled in bemusement as though surprised to find he had a body, as though surprised it had not been destroyed, “to the truth.”

  Dizziness washed over me again, but I forced it back, forced myself to focus through the haze of memory on the present moment, on the man sitting across from me, on the question burning like fire in my throat.

  “How do they choose?” My voice was husky as it left my lips, ragged. “How do they decide who to spare?”

  He shrugged. “Their ways are their own.”

  “Maybe,” I replied, “but you’ve been worshipping them for thousands of years. You must have some idea why they do what they do.”

  The Witness raised an eyebrow. I could feel the unreadable eyes of the Vuo Ton on me, could feel Ruc at my side, studying me. I had overstepped; a part of me knew that. I was pressing too hard for a truth I should have had no reason to want. And yet confronted with a man who claimed to have faced his gods, I needed to know.

  “Why did they spare you?” I demanded.

  The Witness pursed his lips, traced a scar that ran the length of his arm, as though he were following some path on a map with his finger.

  “I saw myself in them,” he said finally. “Perhaps they saw some fragment of themselves in me.” He shook his head, as though uncertain of the words. “Perhaps they want someone who will teach the next generation.”

  “Teach them to die,” Ruc growled.

  “Teach them to live,” the Witness countered. “To fight.” He paused. “The Three could end us all in an afternoon. They could rise from the waters this very night and drag us to our graves. You saw your own men on that fat ship. You know what they can do.”

  “Then why don’t they?” I demanded. “If they love hunting so much,” I gestured to the dark reeds swaying at the edge of the lake, “why are we still here?”

  “If we were gone, who would they hunt?”

  “
If this is true,” Ruc said, “and I don’t believe it is, you have made yourselves into prey.”

  “We are all prey,” the Witness replied with a smile. “Life isn’t in the ending, but the living.”

  Ruc shook his head. “Easy for you to say. You’re still alive.”

  The smile drained off of the chieftain’s face. His eyes looked suddenly hollow, as though they were holes drilled into some bottomless darkness. “There is nothing easy about living with the memory of the Three.”

  “How exciting,” Ela cooed, laying a hand on the man’s shoulder. “You really have seen them.”

  He nodded.

  “What do they look like?”

  I forced myself not to lean forward. Memory slammed into me like a fist, obliterating the present. All over again I saw the leopard coiled snare-still on the bank, saw it gather, then leap, jaws open. Felt myself raise my useless hand to fight a little longer, and then witnessed, as I had in a thousand dreams, that woman who could not have been a woman burst from the water, naked and perfect, saw her catch the cat by the neck with one effortless hand, saw the creature jerk, go limp as she snapped its neck. It had to weigh a hundred pounds, but she tossed it aside easily, almost negligently, the way a woman at the end of a long meal might toss one final, well-cleaned bone onto her plate. I could feel again my heart scrambling desperately in my chest as she leaned over me, could see those eyes, the same eyes that had haunted me ever since, cold and golden, framed in that perfect face. I could hear my voice in my ears: Are you here to save me? I could see her bare teeth, the sharp incisors, as she smiled, then shook her head.

  “They are beautiful.”

  For half a heartbeat, I thought the words were my own, though I had not opened my mouth.

  Then I realized it was the Witness. Slowly, my memory faded. The real world bled across my sight once more—Vuo Ton seated on the rafts of rushes, the severed head of the crocodile gazing at me with lazy eyes, Ruc, still but ready at my side, Ela’s fingers lingering on the chieftain’s arm, and the Witness himself, his gaze gone impossibly distant.

  “Like people?” I found myself asking.

  “They are to us,” he replied, “as we are to the shadows we cast.”

  On the raft before us, the dark shape of my own shadow shifted beside Ruc’s, twitching with the lantern’s fire, as though something inside both of us was restless, as though something beneath or behind our bone and skin rejected the stillness of our bodies.

  “That’s pretty,” Ela said, trailing her hand along the chieftain’s arm. “I like the part about the shadows. But I don’t know what it means.”

  “They are like us,” I said, the words too hot and urgent to remain inside of me any longer. “Like us, but faster and stronger. More perfect. More full of whatever it is that makes us alive.”

  From across the platter of cooling food, Kossal narrowed his eyes.

  “You have seen them.”

  It wasn’t a question, and I didn’t answer it. I turned instead to the leader of the Vuo Ton.

  “What color were her eyes?”

  He smiled at the memory. “Like the last light of the sun.”

  “Golden?”

  He nodded.

  “And the scar?” I went on, my heart thudding painfully, “right here?” I raised a hand to my cheek, traced the line down along my chin.

  “So you have seen her, too.”

  I hesitated, then nodded. I could feel the eyes of all the Vuo Ton upon me, steady and grave. I ignored them. The only gaze that mattered belonged to Ruc, who was studying me with a mixture of anger and open disbelief. I turned to him.

  “You wouldn’t have believed me.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t believe you now.”

  I started to object, found I could not. My whole life, I’d carried the memory of those golden eyes, the casual, awful might with which that jaguar had been tossed aside. Most of the time it seemed like a vision, a dream, the phantasm of a mind baked too long in the sun.

  “Of course you don’t,” I replied finally. “I hardly believe it, and I’m the one who saw her.”

  I turned away from Ruc to find Chua leaning toward me, her weathered face intent. “When did she find you?”

  I stared at her, uncertain how to relate an encounter that I’d spent almost two decades denying. The fisher stared back, hands clenched in her lap. The Witness watched me with his singular stare, as did Kossal. For once even Ela was silent. I could try to hide, to stuff the memory back into whatever part of my mind had carried it all these years, but I was tired of holding it, tired of hiding. The somber faces of the Vuo Ton twitched with the flickering lamplight. The moon had climbed free of the reeds; it hung overhead, a single, impossibly distant lantern almost lost in the immensity of the night.

  It happened, I told myself, trying to feel the truth of those words. It was real.

  Though he was the only true skeptic, perhaps because he was the only skeptic, I turned to Ruc, took a deep breath, then began slowly to unfold the story.

  “I was eight when my mother tied my arms and legs, then paid a priest to leave me in the delta.”

  “You told me this story.”

  “Not all of it.”

  Ruc opened his mouth to object, then shook his head and clamped it shut. Whether that was an invitation to continue or a refusal to engage in the topic at all, I couldn’t say. It didn’t matter. I had thrown myself from the cliff—there was no turning back, no choice beyond the plunge.

  “My mother thought that sacrificing a child to the delta might reverse my father’s fortunes, might save them both, and so she gave me to the priest. He drugged me and took me to the delta.

  “I woke up on a mud flat, my vision swimming, head throbbing. I couldn’t see the city, couldn’t even see the smoke. Just reeds all around, and the slow, brown water swirling at my feet.”

  I glanced over at the Witness. “The priest had untied me.”

  He nodded. “Scraps of the truth remain, even in the city.”

  “The hunt,” I concluded quietly.

  He nodded. “Kem Anh and her consorts would never hunt a child of eight. Those in your city who call themselves priests have forgotten that. But even they cannot forget that the Three are hunters.” He cocked his head. “Did he give you a weapon?”

  “Hardly a weapon,” I replied quietly. “An old knife.”

  I could still feel it in my hands, the weight, the rough wood, the nicked steel of the dull, rust-spotted blade.

  “A mockery,” the Witness said, shaking his head.

  “Maybe,” I replied. “But that knife saved my life.” I stared into the swirling currents of my memory. “For a while I didn’t move. My head ached and my legs felt like lead, but the reason I didn’t get up, didn’t try to do something, was terror. My own blind panic pinned me to that mud better than any steel shackles. The priest might as well have left me tied. I lay there all morning, wondering when I would die, and how. The day was hot, my tongue swelled in my mouth, but I didn’t dare approach the water, didn’t dare twitch. I was horrified of qirna, of snakes, of crocodiles, of everything.

  “In the late afternoon, a red-bill duck landed on the bank near the reeds. Just as she started pecking for bugs, a brown-back uncoiled from the reeds, caught her in a long loop of its body, and began to squeeze. I couldn’t move. I just watched. The duck twitched and struggled. Her feet scrabbled at the mud. It seemed to go on forever, and then, just like that, she was dead. Still.

  “I thought about killing myself then, about stabbing the knife into my stomach. It looked so much more peaceful to be dead, but the getting dead—that looked hard. I didn’t know where I was going, but I wanted to be away from that duck, away from the snake slowly swallowing the body, and so I made my way down the mud bank. When I reached the end, I had two choices—swim to an island on the far side or go into the reeds. I swam, forcing myself to go slow, not to thrash, not to do anything that might draw a school of qirna. When I reached the island, I
climbed partway into a low tree and fell asleep.

  “I woke up lost and baffled, unable to breathe. At first I thought my father had his broad arm across my throat, choking me, then realized I wasn’t in my home, that there was no stink of quey on the air, no cursing. A moment later I tumbled from the tree, and when I hit, I remembered: the priest, the mud bar, the island. I scrabbled at my chest and found a boa wrapped tight around me, squeezing, squeezing. It was dumb luck that I still had the knife, luck that the hand holding it was free. I went at the snake with a mad fury, stabbing over and over so viciously I cut myself in half a dozen places. Finally, just as the strength drained out of me, I felt it loosen. I dragged it off, hurled it away as well as I could, retreated shaking into the tree. I stared half the afternoon at that dead snake, then made myself climb down, skin a portion of the body, and eat the meat, which was still warm.

  “I’d been on that island for three days when the jaguar came. Maybe it was the snake’s blood smeared over the dirt, maybe my own blood, oozing from the cuts that broke open any time I moved, or maybe my luck was just done. It caught me standing by the bank, a makeshift spear in hand, trying to take one of the river eels. I noticed it only because everything went suddenly quiet behind me, the insects and tiny birds instantly and perfectly mute. I remember turning, seeing that mottled pelt, those wide eyes, the teeth, and thinking first, It’s beautiful and then a moment later, Now is when I die.

  “I managed to hold it off for a little while, my knife in one hand, my spear in the other. It was wary, but it had me trapped on the island. It was a better swimmer than I was, and I was exhausted, sick, too hot. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to flee. Each time it came at me I was a little slower, and then it got inside my guard, sliced open my arm with a claw, knocked my spear spinning into the water, darted back, circled around, then paused before the kill. When it leapt for me, I was dead, would have been dead except that, just as its feet left the ground, a woman who could not have been a woman, a naked woman with golden eyes, exploded from the water, caught the cat in midair, snapped its neck, then tossed it aside.”

  “Kem Anh,” the Witness said quietly.