Marrying a Monster

by Mel Dunay

She clenched the head of her cane so tightly that Rina found it painful to watch.

  “Nobody doubted that this was Shaipinob Bhana, the Mountain King’s Sister, come to torment us and make sure that her brother got his brides. But there was an argument about what they should do about it. The Imperial presence down in the valley included a man who had hunted on Mount Snarl before, one year when a panther settled there and became a man-eater. This hunter had managed to kill the man-eater. My mother, and some others, argued that we should send for this man to see if he could kill these monsters.”

  “I like the way your mother thought, ma’am,” Vipin said. "Although an Imperial hunter of that time would not have been well equipped to deal with a pair of Zatas.”

  “It did not matter what she thought,” Rakee said, growing testy.

  “The men of Goatsfart hired the hunter before we could. They were poorer than us, but more desperate. There were fewer of them, you see. The wedding of the Mountain King calls for at least four unwed women of an age to marry, and to Goatsfart in those days, even that was an impossible burden.”

  Raki had spoken of getting the difficult part of her story out of the way first, but it seemed to Rina that this part was her trying not to tell the difficult part.

  Vipin listened with rapt attention, since this was full of all the details that would appeal to an anthropologist. Delna’s father listened nervously but attentively, knowing that this was important. The council seemed nervous as well, but also distracted and skeptical. They did not interrupt.

  “The grownups here in Barleyfields felt that they were getting to milk the goat and slaughter it too,” Raki went on.

  “If the hunter succeeded, their daughters would be safe, and if not, Barleyfields would have done nothing to make the spirits angry.” Her voice here was bitter and sarcastic, and her small, wrinkled face looked like it had just bitten into a sour fruit.

  “In those days, the festival was only for the brides-they were allowed to play and dance and not to work. Every stitch of pretty clothing, every bangle that a family owned, was loaned to them. If they hid behind their houses with some strapping young man they liked, nobody said anything to them.”

  “If there is a spirit who wants our women as wives, surely he would insist on virgins,” One of the elders scoffed.

  “If you had seen what I have seen, you would know that his appetites are not of that kind,” Raki said quietly.

  “The night of the Mountain King’s wedding, my sister and the women her age changed out of their fine clothes and bangles and put on simple linen saris. Their parents wanted to keep the finery, you see.”

  Rina found herself suddenly disgusted with these people. Earlier, she had understood where Delna’s father was coming from, when he argued for doing the safe thing, the obvious thing, and going ahead with the ritual no matter what.

  The fact that he did not have daughters of a marrying age made it easier for him. But the thought of the Barleyfielders lending their finery to their daughters for a few days, and then taking it back when they were about to die...the coldness of it made her feel sick.

  But this was not the Barleyfielders of today that Raki was talking about, not even the Barleyfielders of the generation of the eldest man on the council. This was the Barleyfields of the Imperial era, nearly a hundred years ago.

  “My parents put me to bed early that night,” Raki said. “Because I could hear the Mountain King roaring, and the older girls screaming. My father told me that it would not be like this for me.”

  The youngest elder opened his mouth to say something but the others prodded him to be silent. Rina could not have interrupted even if she had wanted to.

  “I woke up early the next morning. Well, we are farmers, we all get up before dawn and march down the slopes to our terraced fields. But I woke up even earlier than that. It was perhaps a couple hours past midnight, by Imperial reckoning.”

  “I went out to see what had become of the brides. ‘How could you do such a thing?’ my mother asked me later, and I’ve often asked myself the same thing. Perhaps I thought they would be alright, just as my friends who were harassed by the Mountain King's Sister came back more or less alrighty.”

  “Sometimes a panther gets old and sick. It is smart and experienced but so weak that it can no longer hunt goats or sheep or deer. And then it starts eating man. And if you interrupt it when it is feeding, you will see something like what I saw that day. But you will see only one or two carcasses.”

  Rina felt her stomach churn. Vipin quietly reached over and took her hand.

  “Every one of those girls struggled and were killed slowly. You could see it on the ground.”

  Rina glanced over at Vipin. His skin had flushed to a reddish-bronze all over. It was not just his face this time. His jaw was clenched. But his cheeks were wet with tears.

  How can you do what you claim to do if you find stuff like this so upsetting? She thought. But almost immediately she had the answer: he did the things he did because he found things like this upsetting.

  He had revealed his true identity to the girl's parents, to her, and to the council, probably against orders to judge by what he said, because he thought he had a chance of preventing anything worse from happening.

  “Did that happen in every village that year, or just Barleyfields?” The girl’s father asked. “And what happened to the hunter that Goatsfart hired?”

  Rina could hear the desperation in his voice, hoping against hope that this could be made to turn out all right.

  “It happened all over the mountain,” Raki said wearily.

  Suddenly she seemed even older than she was, as if telling the story had drained her.

  “When I got older, I asked everyone I met on the mountain, everyone old enough to remember that year, what had happened. I wanted to know what was behind what I saw.” Raki had remained dry-eyed throughout her story, but now a tear rolled down her cheek.

  “Most people just wanted to forget it, but I couldn’t. I know more about what happened the last time we had a greater masting than anyone else alive or dead. Except those...things,” She spat the word out. “And you can’t very well ask them.”

  “Ma’am if it would not tire you too much, I would like to talk to you in private about what you know,” Vipin said.

  “We will talk,” She said. “Ninety-nine years I’ve waited, for someone willing to listen.”

  “What about the hunter?” Delna’s father insisted.

  Rina couldn’t blame him for wanting to know, but somehow she knew that the hunter had not come to a good end.

  “If you had been raised in Barleyfields or Goatsfart, you would have heard the story, although you would not have known that it happened so recently,” Raki said.

  “There is a bawdy tale teenagers love to tell each other, about the hunter who went looking for the Mountain King, and got caught by his sister instead. You’re supposed to snigger at that, and imagine her as a strong, handsome woman. But that is not what the Mountain’s King Sister is.”

  Rina thought of the orange eyes in the night, and shivered, but Raki barely paused for breath.

  “When they found the hunter, he was in terrible pain, babbling and mutilated, the gun he trusted in snapped in half. The Imperials decided that a Jaiyan had done this to him and had to be punished, so the council of Goatsfart picked out a drunken lout who beat his wife, and told the Imperials he was to blame. The Imperials did the rest.”

  “What happened to the hunter after that?” Delna’s father persisted?

  One of the council members stirred. “I think we’ve heard enough to decide what to do,” He said. “Many thanks to Raki ma’am and the outsiders for their information. You may go.”

  “Don’t let the ritual go forward,” Vipin urged. “You don’t have to sacrifice the women of your families to save everyone else. There are alternatives.”

  “That is for us to decide, outsider,” Said another council member. “You may go.”

 
“If you do go ahead with the ritual, at least be prepared to fight back,” Vipin insisted, but the elders were already filing out through the back door.

  Once outside, they went to Raki’s house. Rina largely ignored the older woman’s long, rambling conversations with Vipin. He said he was a government agent, who specialized in these things, let him try to sort out the truths or exaggerations in Raki’s stories.

  While Vipin interviewed Raki at her home, Rina was busy calling everyone she knew who was from Thundermouth. She got busy signals from Amita and out of service signals from everyone else. Any number of people on the mountain had cell phones, but there were no landlines.

  Rina left text messages and voice messages for everyone, and then, when Vipin and Raki were finally done, Vipin escorted Rina back to Kajjal’s family’s house. She held his hand to keep him from getting lost. At least, that’s what she told herself.

  “Well, did you learn anything?” Rina asked Vipin.

  “I learned a lot, I just don’t know how much of it is relevant,” Vipin said. “The most important thing I learned is that there are no stories of these Oldbloods ever helping humans or trying to live peacefully with them.”

  “I guess I’m not sure what you're getting at.”

  “Far away in the north, I once came across a community where an Old One was drinking the blood of the villagers,” Vipin said, seemingly as much to himself as to her.

  “They did not come to me, in fact, they did everything in their power to keep me from finding out about it. Eventually I learned that it was extremely rare for people to die of the blood loss, and when it happened the Old One was at pains to repay the family as best it could.

  The Old One drank human blood because, long ago, it had been injured protecting the village from another, more hostile Old One, and the people had agreed to help it in repayment. In return, crime was virtually unknown.

  No one stole, no one murdered, no one beat his wife or his children or his aged parents, like that scapegoat the council at Goatsfart found in Raki Ma’am’s time. Crime was unknown because any one who committed it had to answer to the Old One instead of the council.”

  Rina thought about living in a community where the local constable was something like the spidery black thing that harassed children and mutilated grown men. Always watching, ready to spring on anyone who stepped out of line.

  “I don’t think I could with an arrangement like that,” Rina said slowly.

  “Neither could I, but it’s at least more honest than what the creatures here are doing,” Vipin said. “And only volunteers were fed on; people who were afraid or unwilling were left alone.”

  “What did you do about the blood-drinking Oldblood?” Rina asked. “I mean, if it's not classified or something.”

  “I did a lot of research, and found a story that pointed to a potential cure. There are doctors and scientists who take an interest in these things, although they have to be very quiet about it. Eventually, my colleagues managed to cure the creature.”

  “That's good,” Rina said. “What about the village?”

  “It still protects the place. People who don’t like being watched by the Old One move away. We’ll have to see how the Old One behaves if the whole town goes away in a couple of generations, but for the time being everything is fine.”

  “I don’t think that’s an option here,” Rina said.

  “No it isn’t,” Vipin said.

  “The creatures on Mount Snarl are thrill-killers. They don’t want anything from the people in the villages that they aren’t already getting, every ninety-nine years when the barrier protecting their lair from the outside world weakens, and the flowers are affected.”

  “Is that how it works?” Rina asked.

  “It’s a working hypothesis, anyway. These are not just Oldbloods, Razatas, descended from both humans and Old Ones. These are Zatas, the Old Ones themselves, and in the declining days of their power, the Zatas made pocket dimensions where they hid from the humans, and sealed them with barriers.”

  “Where do the flowers come in?”

  “Some plants are sensitive to the presence of these other dimensions, and it may be that the smokeflowers are like that. And so, when the barrier goes down, and Shai and Bhana prepare to hunt, the flowers go wild.”

  “You’re discussing the incidentals so calmly,” Rina said. “But what are you going to do about this?”

  “I believe I will have to kill them,” Vipin said. He spoke as calmly as he had before.

  “How? By letting them laugh to death at the sight of you telling dirty jokes and blushing when you get to the punchline? Whatever weapons you had in your luggage got crushed by that boulder outside of Goatsfart.”

  To her astonishment, Vipin chuckled to himself. “I should be offended that you think I’m such a prude.”

  “Stop changing the subject,” she protested.

  “Very well then: the subject of how I would go about killing these two Zatas is classified. I am not at liberty to discuss it.”

  His eyes flared gold in the dim lights as he glanced over at her. He must have seen the fear in her face, because he said: “They can die from a gunshot or a knife thrust, in the right spot.”

  “That was why Bhana went after the hunter,” Rina said.

  Vipin nodded. “He really was a threat to them, or could have been, if he had understood what they were capable of.”

  “Just what are they capable of?” Rina asked.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” He said.

  “That is not reassuring.”

  He squeezed her hand. She did find his touch reassuring.

  “They probably would not attack a pair of people, or a group, except on the wedding night itself when they know no one would interfere. Try not to be alone after dark until you get home.”

  He hesitated. “I have to keep moving on up to Thundermouth. The stories imply that the creatures’ home is at the top of the peak, and that on the night of the festival they start there and come rampaging down.”

  “If you can stop them at Thundermouth, then maybe you can prevent them from killing anyone,” Rina said.

  “Things could get ugly. If there’s anyone you can trust to take you back down the mountain...”

  “There isn’t,” Rina said, thinking of Jabar.

  The conversation went a little bit further down this direction until they reached the front door of the house.

  Then, quite suddenly, Vipin said: “I will be with you as often as you need me, until we reach your parents’ house. When I was assigned this case, I wasn’t sure what I’d find. Now it’s clear that this is serious business. I hope your friend Amita is alright.”

  “Even if you don’t like her hand on your thigh,” Rina joked. “I got a busy signal when I tried to reach her an hour ago, so she’s most likely fine.”

  “Do you think she will still be at the next village when we reach it?”

  “Stayout? I wouldn’t think so. She has no relatives there and she’s not that big on hallucinogens, which is their main crop,” Rina said.

  When they reached the front hall of the Bardek house, Vipin hugged Rina briefly. he strength in his arms made her feel safe, if only for a moment.

  “Don’t worry,” He told her. “I don’t think anything more will happen tonight.”

  Rina spent a restless night, with women returning from the party every ten minutes. She managed to talk to Delna’s mother, who said that the girl was doing fine, and that she and her husband had been asked to say as little as possible about what had happened.

  “The council is still investigating” was the official version. Rina knew what that meant: the council had decided to go through with the ritual and didn’t want to start a panic.

  She could only hope that Vipin managed to kill the creatures before things got any uglier. She tossed and turned in bed, and then a disturbing thought came to her. The back of her scalp prickled as she worked through the idea.

  Wh
y are you acting like it is solely his problem, The thought went, Isn’t it your problem too?

  You’re too used to letting other people do the hard work for you in a confrontation, the voice inside her head nagged her.

  Yeah sure, She told herself. The middle of a showdown between a monster-hunting martial artist and a couple of Old Ones is the perfect time to assert yourself.

  Just remember that you will probably be there anyway, The voice reminded her. Vipin’s plan sounds like it depends on the ritual going forward at Thundermouth and then him intervening before the brides-including you-get hurt.

  Rina couldn’t even find it in herself to be angry at Vipin for that. The options were limited. Their chances of convincing the Thundermouth council were probably not any better than the chances of convincing the Barleyfields council.

  The one thing they knew about the creatures was that if at a certain time of the year they saw a group of young women camping outside with a few chaperones, the creatures would attack them.

  Any plans to prevent the creatures from harming people would depend on using the brides as bait, no two ways around it.

  Rina had yet another bad dream that night when she finally fell asleep but it was at least more concrete than the ones she’d been having. She and Vipin were both armed with machetes and torches, standing back to back in a great cave.

  Two creatures were attacking them, one the skinny, purple monstrosity of Raki’s stories, the other a huge, white-furred behemoth. Vipin fought the same way she’d seen him fight Jabar, with speed and grace, but he was not fast enough to hold off Bhana, or strong enough to hold off Shai.

  Rina spent most of the fight getting knocked down, dropping her weapon, or hacking ferociously at a spot where the fast-moving creatures had just been. Then Vipin fell to the ground, bleeding from a head wound and she screamed....

  She woke up nearly everybody in the house when she screamed, which was...awkward, especially when the older women started reassuring her like a child.

  The worst moment was when Delna just looked at her, with a sympathetic, knowing look, convinced that she knew exactly what was going through Rina’s head.