“This thing will come in handy once you get your hands on it,” Ero said as several pairs of curious eyes turned to them, attracted by the shock. “Stop fighting me on this. You’re not a child anymore, and I don’t like to check over my shoulder every five minutes to make sure you’re still alive. You still haven’t transformed, so you don’t have any weapons on you to protect yourself.”
“Protect me?” Domino laughed, suddenly suffocating in his own skin. “Oh, yeah, of course. Protect— Be honest, Ero. You’re just trying to humiliate me. Don’t act like—”
“Like what? Like I care? Like I took an oath to protect you?”
“You care? I’m touched, Ero. Really, you have no idea. My heart is leaping with joy.”
“Good,” Ero answered, ignoring his nephew’s sarcasm.
“I don’t want that stuff.” And Domino was ready to repeat it over and over again.
Nichan hunters didn’t carry weapons, ever. On them, they would have been a sign of weakness. Nichans were weapons, even with their incomplete transformations. Blades were made for humans, or for nichans who had resigned themselves to a human life.
As if he’d caught the thread of his nephew’s thoughts, Ero said, “I thought you liked humans. Since you spit on this gift the Gods have given you, you should feel no shame.”
“I told you that I will transform—”
“And yet here I am, wondering if I should believe you. What are you waiting for to try?”
“I’m—it’s dishonorable for a hunter to carry this.”
A hunter. Domino saw himself as such, as a nichan made to fight for his people, to protect them. Until today, for obvious reasons, he’d been a poor hunter. Yet he knew he was meant to be one, not to be left behind to tend the crops or raise children. He was a nichan hunter, even though Ero now provoked him by insinuating otherwise. This weapon was dishonorable and repugnant to him.
Ero laughed and grabbed his pitcher to empty it. “You’ll speak of honor when you have honored your clan. Until then, take this knife and keep it with you. That is an order.”
“Of course,” Domino said, bile in his throat. He grabbed the weapon, leather groaning against the palm of his hand, and hid it under his tunic, pretending not to care what the nichans in the inn would think.
But in the core of his mind, his pride yelled at the blow it had just received.
X X I V
“What does a real nichan look like?” Gus asked.
Facing him, Domino smiled dubiously and rubbed his nose, spreading on its rounded tip the red makeup running across his face. “We’re real nichans.”
“But the ones before?”
“Before the Great Evil?”
Gus nodded.
On the other side of the village, across the rows of huts, a loud cheer partly covered Domino’s answer. Someone had probably just won the last fight.
The Koro—the summer solstice celebrating the rising point of the year—would last until the next morning. For the moment it was still daylight and the two children didn’t feel like joining the rest of the clan for the festivities. Like everyone else, they were made up in carmine—shoulders, cheekbones, forehead and the top of the head—and had put on their most colorful clothes to catch the eyes of the Gods. If, as nichans hoped, their creators had noticed their effort to attract their holy attention, they surely wouldn’t blame the two children for preferring quiet to collective excitement.
Domino repeated himself as the screams faded in the distance, replaced by laughter. “You mean when they were in their true form?”
Sitting on the edge of a stump, Gus bent his knees against him and nodded again. “What were they like?”
Domino bit his lip, hesitating. He rubbed his earlobe and quickly moved his hand away. His ears had been pierced the day before, and he’d been scratching them ever since. Once the holes healed—Gus had to let this process happen naturally—Mora would help Domino enlarge them by gradually increasing the size of the wooden rod piercing his flesh. For the moment, half a golden ring hung from each side of the boy’s face. The loops were a good match for his complexion. Gus liked them.
Domino rubbed his nose again. “To be frank, I don’t know.”
“No one knows?”
“Yes, some people do. The Orator knows. He knows everything about the Gods and the time before the Corruption. He must know that too. Ero, he must know.”
An icy finger ran down Gus’s spine, and he tightened up to suppress it. Domino must have felt it, for he moved to his friend’s side, sat closer to his stump, then passed a hand over his own right cheekbone. The outline of his scar appeared beneath the red pigments.
“I think I know,” Domino announced.
A distraction, Gus thought. His nichan friend often did this when a disturbance came between them, menacing to raise a shadow over their good mood. He would tell a story, something, anything, as long as they forgot what was haunting them. Above them, a bird squeaked as if interested to know more as well.
“Mora said that we used to be big beasts,” the little boy said, opening his arms in a circular gesture. “Where we nichans pray, there are very, very big rocks and they are shaped like beasts.”
The Prayer Stones. Gus wasn’t allowed access to them. The sacred place belonged to nichans and nichans alone.
“How big are the beasts?” Gus asked.
“Almost like the sanctuary.”
“You all? You were that big?”
“No! No, not us,” Domino laughed. “The beast-shaped rocks. They’re huge, as if they’re trying to touch the sky. Sometimes they do. The clouds are so low that the Stones disappear in them and we have to go back home. Because the clouds hurt.”
“Like the black rain,” Gus whispered.
Domino nodded. “Yes, the clouds, they either choke people or… or they burn them.”
“Like in the Arao.”
Matta had told them about this place a few days earlier, about these lands perched high up in the middle of the country where once humans, nichans, and dohors used to go to touch the skies with their fingertips, to caress the Gods’ faces, to praise their creators. With the Corruption, the clouds had become poisoned, taking on the morose hue of death, forcing people to migrate to the outskirts of the Arao, to abandon their homes, their sanctuaries and their temples.
In order to get closer to the Gods, nichans had once located their sacred place at the top of a hill. The Prayer Stones. It wasn’t far from these that the Uetos came to establish their clan two generations before Domino was born.
Gus tried to imagine them. Rocks shaped like beasts. But what kind of beasts? The little boy knew so few of them apart from the village chickens and the rooster. The others would end up on his plate without him having had time to see what they looked like before they were stripped of their skin and bones.
He could see in his mind, however, the dense, puffy, dark clouds that occasionally let only thin streams of ochre light pass through, never reaching the land.
What if Domino went there when those clouds were too low? What if he was hurt?
Gus was very good at imagining that. His heart raced. “It’s dangerous to go.”
“It’s okay.”
“Don’t go there.”
“We don’t go when it’s like that. No one wants to go in the clouds.”
In the village, the cheers exploded again, startling Domino. “I wonder who’s winning,” the boy blew as he glanced toward Surhok’s heart.
But Gus didn’t care about the shouting and laughter. All that mattered to him in this moment was getting that promise. He didn’t want Domino to go there, to put his life in danger to pray to the Gods who’d abandoned them all. The Gods’ love didn’t matter. Only Domino’s friendship mattered.
Mother would have been furious if she’d heard all of his blasphemous thoughts.
“Don’t leave me,” Gus begged, reaching out to Domino.
“Get him out of here.”
This voice. It wasn’t
Domino’s. Gus turned and darkness rose all around him, leaving but a flickering flame by his side. Wrenching pain twisted his insides. Cold and yet as burning as hot iron shoved into his flesh.
“Let me see him,” he said and two arms reached out from him, thin and bathed in sweat.
The scars lining his forearms . . . He couldn’t think of them now. He couldn’t let his shame distract him from his goal. He had to hold him. To see him. The end was close, he could feel it, had heard them announce the price of his mistake. Soon it would be too late.
“Please,” he begged again in a wet breath, blood coating the surface of his tongue. “He’s . . . he’s mine. Please . . . ”
But he was alone already. A baby cried in the distance, first calling of his life.
“No,” Gus sobbed. His arms curled around his aching belly. More blood flowed between his legs and his weeping intensified. “Don’t take him…”
The baby screamed again and the door was slammed shut.
Domino. Don’t leave me . . .
A figure approached and Gus came out of his torpor. With a pasty mouth and heavy eyelids, he straightened his back and opened his eyes. One more second lost in his memories and he would have fallen asleep in front of his full plate, in the sanctuary.
The place was almost empty, quieter than the village had been on that particular Koro, years ago.
Domino had promised that day, as Gus had asked him to. But Domino, barely eight years old at the time, had quickly realized that such a promise was impossible to keep. Under Mora and Ero’s authority, he’d returned to the Prayer Stones again and again. The path followed by nichans had no regard for the fears and promises of two children.
The rest . . . The baby’s scream, the pain turning his guts inward . . . In the end, Gus had fallen asleep while eating, long enough to dream of pure nonsense.
With a foggy mind, as if after too short a night, Gus grabbed his cutlery, mechanically mixed the vegetables and fish cooling on his plate, and tried to ignore the silhouette walking in his direction.
He recognized her without even looking up. A little smaller than him, with skin much darker than anyone else in the village, Matta slid onto the bench across from Gus yet without sitting right in front of him. But the Santig’Nell was within earshot and briefly glanced in his direction—obviously in hope of initiating a conversation. He ignored her. He’d woken up drenched in sweat after a nightmare, hadn’t found anything clean to wear, having neglected his laundry chores for too long. After that bad meal and the resurgence of his old memories, both of which left a bitter taste in his mouth, Gus was in an unfriendly mood.
He grabbed his plate and got up from the table. Matta had taught him years earlier that a well-bred person who was given food and shelter without any compensation should leave nothing on his plate. Another lesson he chose to ignore.
“You shouldn’t—” began the woman, leaning slightly to him.
But the sound of the village bell covered the rest of her words. In one motion, all faces turned to the sanctuary’s front door, through which a flock of nichans rushed in. They patted their bare arms and shook their wet hair.
The bell. It hadn’t rung for over a year.
The Corruption Rain!
His dishes in his hands, Gus walked at full speed and reached the kitchen door in a couple of heartbeats. It may have been too late to return to his hut, but there was more than one shelter in the village. Anything would do. Anything except staying in the sanctuary for hours with the Uetos waiting for the Corruption Rain to stop.
With a flick of his shoulder, he pushed open the kitchen door and stormed out. Several nichans camped here. Two lit a few lamps to ward off the sudden darkness. The rest watched the black rain from the only door leading outside. They were chatting heartily. Two of them noticed Gus’s presence. However, the uninviting glance they cast toward the young man was enough to thwart his plans. Walking tall, he went to the sink to empty his still full plate and rinse his cutlery. As he pumped to draw water from the deep source underground to the faucet, the others noticed his presence as well as all the food the boy was wasting.
Heat rose to Gus’s face and ears. But he kept acting as if nobody was watching, as if the shame festering in his stomach wasn’t as strong as his need to escape everyone’s attention.
No chance of getting out that way. Outside, the downpour was getting heavier, forcing the nichans to back up to avoid the splash. Gus took advantage of the distraction and turned back.
The sanctuary had meanwhile welcomed a few more individuals. When the front doors closed, Gus flinched. He was trapped here with the others.
Damn it!
He’d spent all of the Corruption Rains he’d known in Domino’s company. Not this time.
No one came in anymore, yet the number of nichans seemed to grow endlessly, filling all the available space. A figment of his imagination. It was so dark in here.
Dark enough to hide him from sight.
Without wasting a moment, Gus walked to a corner of the large room. No one on this side, and no lantern to reveal his position. He sat on the stone, tasting its coldness through the worn linen of his pants. At the table he’d left two minutes earlier, Matta still ate, her back to him.
And he waited.
Voices rose from the four corners of the room in a permanent humming punctuated by cutlery pounding, laughter, throat clearing, and interjections. A group of young men laughed near the front door. Farther away, two children ate alone, sitting next to each other. At the end of a table, a large group of nichans of all ages had gathered around one person and one child. This person was talking, sitting on the edge of the bench as if it were a much more comfortable seat. His back straight, wearing a black tunic, this man seemed to want to dominate the others who drank his every word, nodding gravely. The twist of hair falling down his back was so long it brushed the ground with every flicker of his head.
Even with his poor eyesight, Gus recognized the man. Issba, the Orator of the clan. Gus had never spoken to him, but he knew the man. By reputation only. Domino wasn’t fond of him.
Someone at that table jerked his chin in Gus’s direction. The others turned their eyes to him. Issba too, soon imitated by the child sitting next to him—his apprentice Tulik, also dressed in black. There was no gentleness in their eyes. Maybe a spark of curiosity here, a lack of interest there.
The Orator’s brown gaze settled on Gus, piercing, as if coming to a realization. Nearly a minute passed without either of them breaking eye contact. A silent encounter.
Around the Orator, the nichans had gone back to their nonchalant chatting now that they’d lost the man’s attention.
Issba suddenly raised his hand to impose silence to his disciples. He obtained it the next second. “A perfect example, indeed, for the defilement has already crossed our threshold,” said the man.
His voice rang effortlessly and covered those of the other conversations in the sanctuary. The last voice died with a questioning murmur. Heads turned, first to Issba, then to Gus, whom he was still observing, hardly blinking at all.
“A defilement marked out by the Gods,” said the Orator. “They wished for us to know, to see the Corruption at work. Look at him.” All eyes were now on Gus.
The boy trembled and gritted his teeth. He stared at Issba as the man stood from his bench, his long twist of hair similar to a rope dangling from the back of his skull.
“His appearance alone highlights the flaw in our enemy’s strategy. The stain is no match for the Gods’ might. Those eyes. Those wings. Impossible for this thing to mingle with the rest of the population. The Gods have marked it, and mark my words, none of us failed to heed that warning.”
A few nods of agreement, whispers of approval. As a reflex, Gus raised his chin. He was still trembling.
Issba approached, sliding like smoke under the light of the lamps that reinforced the prominent angles of his features and the hollow scars on his cheeks and temples. “Your defilement will not
reach us. It has no power, for we see you for what you truly are. A deception. Where the rain fails, where the dohors fail, you will fail too.”
“This boy has no use for your sermons.”
Alone at her table, smaller than everyone else, Matta had turned on her bench and looked at Issba with a placid but unsettling gaze. The crystal replacing her left eye shone in the darkness of the sanctuary. An immediate reminder of her blasphemous identity.
Issba raised a hand in her direction, as if to stop a projectile. “Don’t address me, vile creature! The Unaan may tolerate you, but I am not fooled. I will always recognize an evil minion, no matter its appearance.”
“An evil minion,” the woman repeated. “Young people use and overuse fancy words these days.”
She seemed so relaxed, more relaxed than she’d ever been in Gus and Domino’s company. Whether her attitude was honest or woven of pretense, she gave the impression to not take Issba seriously, as if he were but a noisy child on a whim.
“Silence!” Issba scolded, suddenly calming the ardor of the nichans around him. “The Gods do not—”
“An evil minion?” she cut him, directing her attention to Gus. “This boy is full of the Gods’ beauty. This beauty—this Light—has been saving lives in this village for more than ten years. You should be ashamed not to recognize the work of our creators.”
“The Corruption’s maneuvers take the most subtle forms. You and your eye are undoubtedly the proof of it.”
Matta chuckled and went back to her meal. Motionless, Gus remembered to breathe when Issba’s attention was drawn back to him.
The man detailed him up and down. “I will not waste any more of my time with a creature like you, but I will add this: the taint calls for death. It will find you.”
The answer left Gus’s mouth without his being able to hold it back, strong of a truth he’d accepted a long time ago. “I know.”
The Nichan Smile Page 30