Skullsworn

by Brian Staveley

  “Yes.”

  I straightened up, plucked a skull from the top of the wall. It was heavy with packed dirt. “You think Csestriim did this?”

  “Yes.”

  I stared at him. “The Csestriim were creatures of reason. I’ve read the chronicles. They were utterly untouched by emotion. They had no superstitions. They didn’t create shrines.”

  Kossal shrugged aside the objection. “To twist an entire city to their will they could play at being gods.”

  Ruc shook his head. “You’re even crazier than the Vuo Ton.”

  “And what,” Kossal asked, turning to face him, “is your explanation?” He gestured to the wall of skulls. “Something piled those bones. Something has been piling them for thousands of years, and not just heaping them there and leaving, but tending them. Planting flowers. Replacing them when they fall. Adding to the pile.”

  “Some cult,” Ruc said. “Another group like the Vuo Ton.”

  “The Three are gods,” Chua murmured.

  “No,” Kossal replied. “They are not. Ananshael is a god. Eira is a god. Gods don’t do this.” He raised his chin toward the wall.

  “What he means,” Ela cut in helpfully, “is that gods don’t spend thousands of years squatting in the backwater muck making towers out of skulls. They have better things to do.”

  “But why would the Csestriim spend millennia in the delta?” I asked, shaking my head.

  “They have nowhere else to go,” Kossal replied. “We defeated them, hunted them almost to extinction. In the thousands of years since the wars, the Csestriim who survived have done whatever they needed to do to continue surviving, to continue defying our god. They have posed as sailors and soldiers, peasants and priests. Maybe this is part of a larger plot. Maybe these three are the only ones left. Maybe this is just their revenge.”

  “The bronze weapons,” Ela pointed out, angling one of her sickles so that the sunlight darted across the skulls. “The first humans didn’t have steel. They would have fought with bronze.”

  I ran a hand along the wooden shaft of my spear. “This isn’t thousands of years old.”

  “Of course not,” Kossal snapped. “It looks like it was made last week. It’s the ritual that’s old, just like the myths. The Csestriim have been here for thousands of years, cheating Ananshael. Men and women go to the god more frequently. When they pass their stories on, they get some things right, miss others.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Chua said.

  Kossal turned to face her. “Anything that doesn’t die insults my god.”

  “Speaking of dying,” Ela said, turning to me, “aren’t you cutting things a little close, Pyrre?”

  I glanced furtively at Ruc, then shook my head. “I have until the end of the day.”

  “We may not see the day’s end,” Kossal said. “If you have business to settle, now is the time.”

  “Besides,” Ela added, “it gives us something to do while we wait.” She pursed her lips, studied Ruc for a long time, then turned back to me. “So. Are your body and mind singing with love?”

  And just like that, it was time to face it, to confront once and for all the question that had plagued me since the moment Kossal and Ela first sang to me in the Hall of All Endings back in Rassambur. There were no more days, no more evasions.

  Did I love him?

  At times, during our two weeks in Dombâng, it seemed that I could almost say yes. When we’d raced through the city together, tracking the Asp in pursuit of Lady Quen, the fierce delight pounding through my veins had felt the way I thought that love should feel. When we lay in the hut of the Vuo Ton, lost in the labyrinth of each other’s arms as rain tattooed the reeds of the roof—that had felt like something that a person might call love. If I’d killed him in those moments, with Ela looking on, maybe I could have claimed my victory.

  In each case, however, just when the prize seemed within reach, it slipped away. I would look at Ruc, as now, and find him suddenly, impossibly distant. There were days, like the long trip back to Dombâng after the Vuo Ton had disappeared, when he seemed almost a stranger. Whatever we achieved, however close we came, whatever delicious fever seared my heart—it didn’t last.

  Whenever I asked myself that question—Did I love him—I always arrived at the same answer—no—the word like an iron gate barred against my entrance.

  For the first time, however, lost on that island in the delta, witnessed by the gazes of the living, the undying, and the dead, I began to doubt the question itself.

  I’d been treating love like a thing, an achievement, a trophy to be won and hung around my neck. People talk about it that way sometimes:

  My love for you is undying.

  He never knew my love.

  It is an error of grammar to make love a noun.

  It is not a thing you can have.

  Love—like doubt or hate—is a verb. It has no fixity. Like song, its truth is in its unfolding. Language is filled with these illusions. A fist, an embrace, a blow—they are actions, not things. Action takes time, and time is the tool of my god.

  I didn’t love Ruc yet, but there was still time.

  I turned to face him. They’d stripped away his vest before tossing us into the delta. I could see the scar etched over the muscle of his stomach and chest. Some of those scars, I’d given him. Others he had come by on his own. I wanted to touch him, to run my fingers one more time over that smooth, warm skin, but I’d touched him before, and touching hadn’t been enough. If I was going to love him, really love him, I couldn’t just touch him. Even the bright violence of our fighting hadn’t been enough. I needed something more. I filled my lungs with the hot delta air.

  “I came to Dombâng to kill you,” I said.

  I don’t know what I expected from him. A quick retort, maybe. Scorn. Silence. He’d faced the betrayal of the Greenshirts without much more than a flicker of anger. All the time I’d known him, he’d been so cool, so ready. Even busted up, even bleeding, he never really looked hurt.

  As I finally told him the truth, however, the whole truth that had been burning away inside me, the words seemed to land like a blow. He took a step back, not the tactical step of a brawler giving himself room, but the half stagger of a man who’s just taken a fist to the chin. He watched me a moment, then closed his eyes, shook his head, as though he could deny what I’d said, as though that gesture could cancel out the whole world.

  I could have killed him then—I could feel Ela’s eyes on me, and Kossal’s, his dispassionate, hers eager, curious. I could have ended him in that moment, but I needed more. I needed him to scream at me, or beg, or start sobbing. I needed him to deny me, or accept me, or do anything other than rock with another punch. I needed to see past the calm to the beating heart of him. The surface of the man was gorgeous, but I couldn’t love a surface.

  “I’m going to kill you now,” I said, testing the weight of the knife in my hand.

  He opened his eyes. Sweat dripped from his face, soaked his vest, mingled with the blood leaking from his shoulder and arm. He didn’t seem to notice any of it. His eyes never left me. The whole world might have disappeared, might have sunk into the mud.

  I held the bronze knife in one hand, my bronze-tipped spear between us. “Don’t you want to ask why?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll lie.”

  I shook my head. “I’m done lying.”

  “I liked you better when you were lying.”

  I closed my own eyes, searched the corners of my reluctant heart, waited for him to strike. He didn’t.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” I said at last.

  “What, exactly, were you afraid of?”

  “That you wouldn’t let me get close to you.”

  I opened my eyes to see Ruc’s face move through a series of masks: amazement, confusion, disbelief. Then his laugh tumbled out in great, delighted whoops. I hadn’t heard him laugh like that since Sia, since right afte
r our first fight, our first night together, when we lay in bed dabbing a sweet-smelling salve on each other’s wounds, passing back and forth a bottle of plum-dark wine, each ministering to the other’s broken parts with the lightest of kisses.

  “Yes,” he managed finally. “You’re right. Knowing you’d come all the way to Dombâng to slide a knife between my ribs might have made things more complicated.”

  “Complicated is fine. I like complicated. But you wouldn’t let it be complicated.”

  “Why, in the name of your broken god, would I let it be complicated, when complicated, in this case, stands in for murderous?”

  I opened my mouth, closed it, then tried again. “Because you love me? Because I thought I could love you.”

  He stared at me.

  “Love isn’t killing people, Pyrre. Killing is the opposite of love, you twisted bitch.”

  “How do you know?” The question was barely loud enough to hear, but it burned like a coal in my chest. “How do you know?”

  “Because I was raised in a world where people value life.”

  “And that world told you there was one way to love, just one. It told you the only real love was what you hear about in the songs, what you see in the plays. It said love was flowers and gentle caresses under the moonlight.”

  “As opposed to what? A knife in the back and a bath full of blood?”

  “Yes!” I said. “What are flowers? What is moonlight?”

  “They’re beautiful and gentle, for starters.”

  “And who said love was beautiful or gentle? Who said it was only those things?” I took half a stab at him with my spear. It wasn’t a real attack, but it felt strange to be holding the weapon without doing something with it. He knocked it aside casually. I circled to my right, still talking. “The night I met you, I broke two of your ribs and you beat me unconscious.”

  He shook his head. “That was different.”

  “Different how? A bare-knuckle fight is a long way from tulips and moonlight.”

  “It wasn’t the fight that made me—”

  “Made you what?”

  He tested my guard, first high, then low. “It wasn’t the fight that intrigued me. It was finding someone smart, quick, tenacious. What about all the lazy days in between the fighting? What about those evenings out on the water? Those mornings drinking ta while we watched the sun come up? The fists and bruises were just incidental.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You’re sick, Pyrre. Your whole religion is sick.”

  “What’s the sickness in thinking love is bigger than a few kisses, bigger than running through the same platitudes night after night? Why shouldn’t love be more than that? Why shouldn’t it be braver, more frightening?”

  He lashed out with the sword. I parried, bronze grating over bronze. I pressed the attack a moment, slashing high then low, before stepping back, my breath hot in my throat. Ruc watched me warily.

  “You’re a killer,” he said. “Just like the crocs or the vipers. A fucking animal.”

  “We’re all animals. We’re born. We fight as hard as we can to stay alive, and then, in spite of all that fighting, we die anyway.” I shook my head. “The reason we think we’re different from animals, better than them, is that we know how the story ends. We’re in on the joke.”

  Ruc shook his head. “No one told me this was how it would end.”

  “You knew it was coming, one way or another.”

  “The way matters.”

  “Of course it does, you beautiful fool.” I studied him, the rise and fall of his chest, the way his forearm flexed as he shifted his grip on the sword. Then I looked past his brown skin, past the lush muscles of his shoulders and stomach. They teach us this at Rassambur, to peel away each of the body’s layers, to unmake what Bedisa has made and in that unmaking to see what it is we are. Ruc was warm flesh hung on a frame of bone. Soon, in a time counted in heartbeats rather than days, Ananshael would touch him, and he would be dirt. So would I.

  What I needed, before the god unmade me, was for Ruc to see, for him to understand.

  “Do you know what happened,” I asked him, “our last night together in Sia?”

  Instead of answering, he came at me with a series of quick, savage overhand blows. The earlier testing and probing was over. Any one of those, had it landed, would have split me from my throat down through my chest. I turned the first aside with the shaft of the spear, dodged the next two, thrust out with an attack of my own—deflected—and then we were circling again, eyeing each other through the light flashing off of our bronze.

  “What I know,” he said between heavy breaths, “is that you said you wanted to stay with me our entire lives, until one or the other died. Then the next morning, you were gone.”

  “I tried to kill you,” I said, remembering that night, the way we made love over and over, then how he’d fallen asleep tangled in my limbs. I remembered watching his chest rise and fall, remembered the warmth in my own heart, remembered thinking, This is a test. As Kossal had explained to me days earlier, sometimes the god speaks in our bones. Any murderer can kill someone she hates. Ananshael requires something more of his faithful—I understood this even then, that hot, sweet night in Sia. “After you fell asleep, I took one of my knives and laid it against your throat.”

  “And here I thought the fact that you disappeared was bad.”

  “I couldn’t do it.”

  Ruc snorted. “Obviously.”

  “I failed in my faith. At the time, I thought I cared about you too much.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t swoon.”

  “Stop being an asshole. I need you to understand this.”

  “Understand what? You didn’t kill me in my sleep all those years ago and here you are again, back to finish the job? All right. I understand.”

  This time he went for the spear, ignoring my body, trying to slice through the shaft. I knocked aside three blows, four, five, angling the wood so that the bronze glanced off rather than biting, but Ruc kept coming and coming. I had openings, moments when I could have slipped either the knife or the spearpoint past his guard, into his heart, but I couldn’t kill him, not until he saw what I wanted him to see. He didn’t drop back, even when I gave him space, just kept coming at me, trying to back me up against the wall of skulls. I parried, ducked, slid outside his range. I was better than him, faster, but the game I was playing gave me no room for mistakes. Which was true, also, of the game I played with myself.

  As he coiled his arm to attack again, I tossed the spear aside, dropped the knife. The weapons clattered to the sun-baked dirt.

  He hesitated, staring at me. My breath burned in my chest, but I forced out the words.

  “Back in Sia, I thought I was in love with you. Then I thought I needed to kill you to show that my faith was stronger than my love. I was wrong on both counts. What I felt—that need to have you close, to have you near me all the time—that wasn’t love. It was something else, something small and grasping and selfish. Love is not this stupid holding on. Love is larger.”

  Ruc stared at me warily, his chest heaving. “I have no fucking idea what that means.”

  “Yes,” I said, “you do.”

  I reached out, took the tip of his sword between my fingers, raised it to my neck. “When I die,” I said, “I want your hand behind that final cut. I want to do it looking in your eyes.”

  It was the truth.

  I’d been scrutinizing my own mind for so long, spying on my every move, weighing each choice, second-guessing every path taken or ignored. It felt good to stand there, stripped of my last weapon, stripped of all the lies that had led to that point, and to say out loud, in plain language, one of the few things I knew to be true.

  “He is waiting for me,” I said. “He is waiting for all of us.”

  The sun ignited the delta haze, setting the world aflame. Blood and sweat burned on my tongue. Every line, every reed and rush, every angle of Ruc’s face, seemed carved int
o being with a knife. It was beautiful, all of it—the mud, the skulls, the blood-bathed bronze—and soon, maybe before my next breath, it would be gone. I stood with my arms at my side, pinned in place by the day’s heat and Ruc’s unwavering gaze.

  This was the man I had come to Dombâng to love, and I did not love him.

  In that one moment, it didn’t matter.

  I could feel my own unmaking hanging in the air like the silence before a song. The silence was all.

  Slowly, like a person moving through water or the depths of a dream, Ruc lowered his blade.

  “No,” he said.

  For a moment I thought I might sob, collapse. I’d failed. I’d done everything I could to serve my god, and I had failed. I ached to have that bronze blade inside me, to feel Ananshael’s final touch.

  “Do it,” I said.

  “No.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking past me, as though trying to make sense of something far off, but moving closer.

  “Please.”

  He shook his head, took half a step back.

  “I need you,” he said quietly.

  “No, you don’t. You just said it—I’m vicious, sick, twisted.”

  “That’s why I need you,” he said again, then nodded over my shoulder. “If I’m going to live through this, I need all the vicious I can get.”

  Slowly, as though just in that moment reawakening to the feel of my own body, I turned.

  The noon sun hung directly overhead, hammered like a bronze disc into the sky. The delta, normally so filled with the music of bird and insect, had fallen totally silent.

  They were here.

  As I stared, the Three stepped naked from the brush, two men and a woman, just as Dombâng’s priests had claimed for centuries. They were easily the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen, lithe as any jaguar, sweat-dappled skin shifting over the muscle beneath, eyes like liquid jewels, hair slicked back with water or sweat. The tallest of them, one of the men, was dark as midsummer midnight, each of his arms almost as wide as my waist. For all his size, however, he didn’t look cumbersome or slow. He moved like flowing water, like a storm rolling over the land. The other man was shorter, slimmer, paler, built like a whip rather than a bull, constantly coiling and uncoiling, even when he seemed still.