Loved Him to Death: Haru of Sachoné House

by K. M. Frontain

  Looking at my god’s favourite servants, my skin crawled only slightly less than when my attention fixed on the marble effigies of Omos.

  One breaker shark came up close to the path and rolled. A black eye regarded me until the sleek body glided onward. Black back and sides, white belly. Beautiful, dangerous child of Vaal.

  “Peace, Little Brother,” I said. “I didn’t know you were there. I’ll give you a gift later to make amends.”

  The dark shadows beneath the ripples of liquid blue flashed away until nothing but the blue remained. A small shocked noise issued from Halva’s throat, and he grabbed my upper arm.

  “Choné! I’ve never seen that happen before! What have you done?”

  “Nothing of any import. They only came up so that I would notice.”

  He stared at me a moment, then looked again at the empty depths. “How could you not have noticed them before now?”

  “I’ve never been this close to the causeway before, and this is the first I’ve walked on it. The sentinels wouldn’t have me nearby.” And now I was on the path but still only a third of the way to the end. I didn’t know if I could progress further.

  Odd, but Halva’s touch seemed to lessen the sensation of tightening skin.

  “Yes, of course,” Halva said. “But I’ve never seen the sharks leave just from a man talking to them. Why would they listen to you?”

  “But don’t you know, Deyer? They are children of Vaal, just as I am. That is what my people believe.”

  “Vaal?” Halva repeated.

  His expression hinted of distaste, and his hand fell away from my arm. I looked away to avoid being further offended. My skin began to crawl again.

  “But you were claimed by Omos this day,” Halva said. “Come. You must enter the dome at once.”

  A sharp tap on my shoulder, and we moved onward. From the corner of my eye, Little Brother reappeared, and he was grinning.

  Mercy, Vaal. What were You thinking to send me into this harbour on this day? Do You owe Omos a favour?

  Certainly the pair of divinities had to be in concord for this to have occurred—my presence in Verdant at this time. Or at least, so I thought.

  However much my skin pained me, I could not turn back. I had been given a mission. I had best see the innards of Celestial Dome, or Vaal would send me to His favoured offspring the next time I dared take a dip anywhere but in a small tub.

  Chapter Three

  As we drew nearer to the sentinels, fine details in the black marble became visible. Pale striations, rippling in diagonal patterns down the lengths of each effigy, imbued a living quality to the stone. The dragons seemed to squirm, just a little, with each rolling bounce of the causeway, each shift in my perspective.

  The statues rested on rock spurs which had their feet sunk deep in the harbour. At the moment, the apices of the spurs were just above the water. As a result, the sentinels towered eleven cubits higher than a man. But sometimes, when the tides were very high, only the gaping heads peaked out at visitors coming along the cerulean planks.

  I think I would have been more apprehensive if the tide had been high, because the eyes of the effigies, though mere carvings, had the aspect of always being focused on me. At water level, they—and the jagged teeth beneath them—would have been a mere cubit from the causeway.

  But I doubted I’d see the statues move in actuality, or feel their teeth sink into my flesh and crush the bones beneath, because it seemed Omos would shrivel me with his power from a distance. Halva and I had advanced two thirds of the way along Celestial Path, and I rubbed at the vest over my chest, feeling pain above my heart.

  Each step brought a feeling of stretchiness and repulsion charging to my torso, where it coalesced within the mark of Little Brother. I could suffer this sensation better than when it had been spread out over my entire body, but it was growing in strength, enough to interfere with proper breathing. The shark symbol felt like the curse I’d always thought it to be.

  I lowered my gaze to the planks and shut my eyes for a second. Vaal. Vaal, if You want me in the dome, then give me strength.

  I stumbled, landed on one knee.

  “Is something the matter, Choné?” Halva asked.

  “I’m winded,” I said, rising up. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You? Winded? But I’ve seen you clamber up and down the mainmast of your ship three times without stop, playing chase with your crew.”

  I tried to smile it off, but the gesture must have looked sickly, because Halva came in close and grabbed me about the middle. “Here. Lean on me a bit,” he said. “I didn’t know you were ill. Perhaps Omos let you in the harbour for the holy servants to heal you.”

  “That must be it,” I said.

  I was glad he’d taken hold of me. The moment his skin had touched mine—his pudgy hand clasping my bare waist—I felt as if the marble guardians had lost sight of me. The pain had vanished, the creeping sensation, too.

  Ah. Perhaps Omos’s effigies had sensed me coming—somehow—but Halva’s contact had muted or masked all indications of my presence.

  Then thank Vaal for big men. I was only a slight man of about three cubits. Halva’s bulk easily doubled mine.

  “Must we hurry, Deyer?” I asked. “If you could only get me past the guardians and to the first step, I can rest a bit.”

  “But of course you may rest. First Servant assured me the old Oradhé wouldn’t die until after you were seated within the amphitheatre.”

  I stumbled again, this time from surprise. Halva must have thought me more ill than before because he lifted me up and puffed along at a steady clip toward the dome steps, straight past the sentinels. He looked sick when he at last set me down, but I was too embarrassed to say anything. I slumped onto the first step and kept my head down, thinking about what Halva had just said and noticing how normal the atmosphere felt on the other side of the effigies. It appeared I had escaped beyond their notice. They were only set to guard the entrance, not keep strangers within.

  “Deyer…?”

  “Yes, Choné? Are you better?”

  “Much, but I worry for you, who carried me quite a distance.” I didn’t dare look at him yet. “The illness is sporadic, you understand. I didn’t need you to carry me. I would have recovered shortly on my own. See? I’m breathing fine already.”

  “No need to worry about me, Choné, but I thought you’d die before I presented you to First Servant, the way your cheeks became so flushed. I had no idea someone with such dark skin could have red cheeks.”

  “I was a little embarrassed,” I admitted, “to be carried like a child, a man of my age.”

  “Heh? How old are you, Choné?”

  “Forty,” I answered. Silence prompted me to look upward. Halva stared down at me with a blank expression. “What is it, Deyer Halva?”

  “You’re forty?”

  I started to smile, but reconsidered. Indications of irritation hinted on Halva’s moon face, a bit of narrowing around the eyes, the lips becoming tighter, a general stiffness of expression.

  “But Deyer, we’ve been doing business for eleven years. You couldn’t have thought I was any younger,” I said.

  “Yes, but…”

  “Yes?”

  “But I took you for an agent of your House, you understand? Perhaps a favourite son. When we first met, you looked like you were seventeen, no more.” His frown of disapproval became a puzzled grimace. “Choné, you still look…”

  Mirth burst from me after all. I laughed. “I was twenty-nine, Deyer. I can’t possibly still look seventeen!”

  “You were always so damned polite! You’re still that way!”

  I blinked in surprise. “Does that make a difference?”

  He scowled. “Ahh! I’ve had less polite business associates than you, Choné. I always thought you were being respectful because of your youth.” He scratched at his jowls, even yet scowling mystification at me. “I don’t know why I didn’t remark this before. I suppose
I just became accustomed to seeing you the same way all the time.”

  “But you can’t think I still look seventeen, Deyer,” I repeated, frowning now as well. Surely not. He couldn’t possibly.

  “Well…I…didn’t feel you were, but…”

  The man had addled his mind when he winded himself. I presented my most congenial and reassuring smile to him. “I’m polite because it serves me better when contracting with astute men such as yourself. I assure you, Deyer. I am forty.”

  “But you don’t look older than twenty, if that! And it’s your comportment, not your looks that make you seem older. Give it up, Choné! You’ve a secret you’ve not been telling me.”

  “But I’ve been selling you the secret all along! Didn’t you listen when I said that the mix of essential oils my family produces does as well for men as women?”

  He stared at me a moment, and then looked away with a chagrined expression. “Hmm. Well. I use it to oil my hair. Thought it was women’s stuff, you know. But it makes the curls so much more manageable.”

  I laughed, but voices further up along the balconies stifled my amusement. “Deyer. You said the old Oradhé hadn’t died yet. I hadn’t thought this.”

  “But Intana won’t choose another until the old one expires, Choné. That’s how it is. Old Oradhé breathes on. And so you must come into the dome and be seated, or he’ll just keep us waiting.”

  I found Halva’s lack of sympathy a little shocking, but I realized the practice of losing and choosing Oradhé had been institutionalized to the point that no one really considered the Oradhé as more than a useful symbol of divine grace. Once Oradhé, person no longer.

  “I find it difficult to believe the old Oradhé waits on my convenience,” I said.

  “Eh? Well, perhaps not, but it was First Servant’s prediction that old Oradhé won’t breathe his last until all the omens are in place to welcome the next incumbent.”

  “And so I am one of the omens,” I concluded, once more looking downward, this time to hide my distaste. I didn’t like being anyone’s omen, but it had happened often during my lifetime, first because of my bad luck hair, then because Little Brother had left me alive in Blood Bay, the boy who had stayed in the water the longest.

  I rose to my feet. “Onward, then.”

  Halva was less jovial after that, perhaps sensing my unease, but he kept up a near constant dialogue as we negotiated the white marble balconies and dark passages along the perimeter of Celestial Dome. Anyone wishing access walked nearly the circumference to reach the steps leading inward. It was a journey of dark and light, meant to awaken humility in a mortal. Each tunnel had its own sensation and provoked reflection once the pilgrim had won through to the next open space. Accustomed to this phenomenon, whenever we were on a balcony, Halva had the wherewithal to impart the customs his people upheld.

  Conversation was not tolerated within the dome. We were to take seats and be still, to watch the old Oradhé die and wait for Intana’s eyes to lift. Priests were permitted to speak, so too the Oradhé and his successor, but anyone else risked imprisonment, excommunication, and a death sentence.

  That day, First Servant also conducted a second ceremony, the ritual of manhood for the youths belonging to elite families. Naturally, rich and important fathers didn’t want their sons to miss out on being the next Oradhé, and so the holy servants ministered an early rite of passage.

  “The youths, each in turn, stand before First Servant, who bathes them in sanctified oils until the entire body is covered. The youth places in his mouth a section of Omos’s Sacred Bed, and steps into the aperture that leads beneath the dome. The boy swims to the golden chain and back, and when he returns, he is a man,” said Halva.

  A section of Omos’s Sacred Bed was a sea sponge of extraordinary properties. Apparently, one could breathe through it when underwater.

  “Don’t bother trying to discover a source for it, Choné,” Halva said after he mentioned it, for I must have had a keen look on my face. “It only grows beneath the dome.”

  I smiled to apologize for my merchant’s greed, and Halva continued relating rules and facts until we had come to the last balcony. Here we paused at the topmost step and looked down into the dark passage. The final and harshest tunnel to surpass, or so Halva had said. The other tunnels had forced me to remember and ponder many things, some unpleasant, but from this one I sensed the potential to provoke complete emotional collapse. If I could not descend its distance, I would never gain entrance to Celestial Dome.

  “Shall we?” Halva asked.

  “Yes,” I answered and took the first step down. At once, I slammed back into that moment, the worst day of my life.

  Jumi next to me, my cousin, my only friend, and lately my first lover. To my other side Rohuri of Dalku House. He’d made much of it, coming down the beach to stand next to bad luck boy. No words, just dark glares and silent challenge, a smirk for the girls above the tidewater marks.

  I am not in the centre, but to the left end of the line, the bad side. Rohuri could have shoved his way into the other end. He had the right, coming from a family more prominent than mine, but instead he mocks me, the slightest boy amongst the youths seeking manhood in Blood Bay.

  Second step down.

  Beyond the girls watching with avid expressions: the mothers, the aunts, the matriarchs, their faces stolid, no tears to shame us, no tears to provoke Little Brother to seek more. To the very rear: the men who’d survived the ordeal before us, some of them only a few years older, some withered with age.

  I look away. No good to feel hopeful. Today my bad luck hair will no doubt kill me.

  Another step, another.

  Rohuri pretends to have no fear, but there are little bumps along his arms and torso. I look down his body further and see that he has an erection. He faces Little Brother proud, while I shiver and want to creep back from the water. I want so badly to touch Jumi a last time, but do not want to pass any misfortune on to him.

  Be safe in the water, I pray for him. Little Brother, Vaal, let Jumi return to shore a man. It doesn’t matter about me. Don’t let my bad luck hair reflect on Jumi, who is perfect.

  More steps. I no longer counted. Move. Move forward, despite memory, pain, torment.

  “Go!” Chief Grandmother shouts. And we go, charging into the waves in unison. If there is any safety facing Little Brother on a shorefront, it is in this manner, broaching his domain in an angry wave, screaming our family names and calling to Vaal that we are ready to be men of Brellin. Take those that are unworthy. Leave the rest to protect House and help family prosper.

  We are hip deep in the waves when the first of us dies, and it isn’t me. It’s Jumi. Little Brother takes him in the middle, and I see Jumi’s body bitten through. Blood everywhere, Jumi staring at me until his chest and head sink. Little Brother comes again, and that part of Jumi is gone.

  Forward. Forward into the bay. Forward, down the steps.

  Rohuri is screaming, turning back before he has completed the rite of passage, before he stands shoulder deep in the waves. Little Brother comes rushing in. The strike takes both back onto shore, where Little Brother thrashes with a chunk of Rohuri in his mouth. Most of Rohuri remains behind on the beach when Little Brother rolls back into the bay. Rohuri dies unattended on the sand, a shame to his family.

  I stare back a moment, listen to the shouting of boys that have moved further ahead of me, hear the pleas of the women urging us onward. I turn and thrust deeper into the water.

  Take me, Little Brother. Take me to Jumi. I don’t want to live without him.

  Light shone now, reflecting up from the curve of the descending tunnel. I wanted to rush toward it, but my legs felt as if massive chains were wrapped around the ankles. This tunnel would have me remember all of it, every excruciating instant.

  Twenty-seven boys went into Blood Bay. Eleven men came out. Bad luck day. Day of tragedy. Little Brother had come in numbers, greedy, provoked, and taken an unheard of toll. An
d I’d watched it all, more than shoulder deep in the waves, floating far out in the bay, waiting for Little Brother to take me to Jumi. But Little Brother never did.

  That day, Little Brother won tears from the women of Brellin, more tears than he’d taken in ages beyond count. And while the women wept and the ones of my House screamed for me to return to shore, I treaded water and begged Little Brother to receive me. I stayed more than an hour out, until my limbs were exhausted and the waves carried me back to the shallows. Too numb to speak when the surviving others dragged me up on dry sand. Too numb to care when my mother slapped me and demanded why I had dared swim with Little Brother for so long. Hardly noticing when the family matriarch struck Mother in turn and called her down for touching a man without due respect.

  I didn’t feel the scarification when Chief Grandmother came and slit the rows of diagonal marks on my chest. She blackened my wounds with soot to make them form ridges when they healed, and thus gave me over to Little Brother for all eternity; put his body in a nearly complete circle around my left nipple, a series of nicks in the shape of a shark. Little Brother on my heart, all but sealing it.

  There. The exit. A wealth of light beyond. Almost done. Almost. Reach the end, reach it, and forget again.

  Chief Grandmother and my family matriarch—they call me good luck because that day, the day of our rite of passage, Little Brother had eaten all the bad luck left in me. The yellow streaks in my hair no longer counted. Jumi had died for it. Rohuri had died for it. Sixteen boys had died for it.

  A day later, when the scarification had swollen and given me a fever, I stumbled into Chief Grandmother’s hall and demanded she stab me in the chest for having caused the deaths of so many boys, but she only looked at me with a severe expression and ordered me to carry my responsibilities as a man.

  “Little Brother let you live because the rest thought your bad luck would protect them. They were certain of your death and their survival. They did not show the appropriate respect.”