The Mortal Tally

by Sam Sykes

  She bared sharp teeth and loosed a shrill whistle. From nearby roofs more of the giant simians came leaping down to fall neatly in line behind her as she led them through the streets, their tails raised and bright-red buttocks flaring.

  The crowd resumed its normal shuffle. Daaru sighed and returned to Gariath.

  “Yengu Thuun clan,” he snorted. “Nice people, if you meet them out where their beasts have room to roam. Not fit for the city.”

  “And who is?” Gariath grunted. “Besides humans.”

  “It’s no secret that the humans control the desert,” Daaru interjected. “We build because we defend ourselves. We seek coin because we must trade. And you…” He gestured to Gariath. “They have never seen anything like you, except…” He glanced around warily. “It’s not important. We have to survive. Now more than ever.”

  Something in the tulwar’s voice dropped from a growl into a sigh beyond weariness.

  “Come,” Daaru said, heading into the crowd. “My wife will be waiting.”

  Gariath followed, swaying slightly as he did. The anger was dizzying, boiling behind calm faces and squinting eyes. It peeled off every tulwar here. This city was a pot of oil, waiting for a torch, and the scent was everywhere.

  Save for one spot where there hung only the reek of tobacco.

  But when Gariath turned to look, the old tulwar was already gone.

  True, his experience with tulwar had been limited, but Gariath felt comfortable enough to draw a few conclusions about them.

  The differences between males and females were limited to such things as a few subtle curves on the latter and slightly bigger fangs on the former, for one. They had absolutely no idea how to contain their emotions, by either scent or sight.

  And, if Daaru’s daughter was any indication, they were born obnoxious and grew only more obnoxious as time went on.

  She, a four-foot-tall runt with barely any fur on her and wrapped in a red-and-yellow chota, sat beside him at the edge of the fire pit at the center of the house’s central room. In the four hours during which Gariath had been subjected to her father’s hospitality, she had taken three bites of her dinner and spent the rest of the time sitting.

  And staring.

  Meat sputtered on a metal grill above a smoldering flame. The tulwar insisted on barbecuing it with thick, spicy pastes instead of letting the meat speak for itself, but Gariath didn’t mind. It was passable and plentiful.

  And yet it was not the meat they had brought back to the city. That had been sold to someone else. This meat had been bought from someone else, which had in turn been bought from shictish traders, he had been told, rather than coming from an honest kill.

  That bothered Gariath, but so did a lot of things in this house. Such as the little tulwar girl. So he shoveled a piece of meat in his mouth so that he would not feel tempted to curse at her.

  After all, it wasn’t her fault her father had raised her stupid.

  “I bet you killed a hundred of them!”

  And it wasn’t as if she were the worst of his litter, either.

  “Wow! Shicts! And only two days away? They’re so close! I bet they’re right outside the city now, lurking in the filth and eating rotten meat!”

  That particular line of excited blather belonged to a three-foot-tall blur that was currently running circles around the fire pit. Gariath caught glimpses of it whenever it stopped long enough to grab another piece of meat. Enough, at least, to know that it was a boy with even less fur than his sister, with a head too big for his body and eyes too big for his head.

  “Is it true that their arrows are poisoned? I heard their arrows are poisoned. Auntie Hamaa says that the shicts smear their weapons with shit and—”

  A loud crack pierced the air. The boy came to a sudden halt, rubbing his head where a wooden skewer had struck him.

  “Do I raise gaambols or tulwar?” a woman clad in a purple chota growled at the boy, color flaring into her face. “A tulwar wouldn’t run as you do, but a gaambol wouldn’t say such things in my house.”

  “But Mama,” the boy whined, “that’s what Auntie says, not me!”

  “Then you can act like a beast in her house. Shicts speak filth, not you.”

  You all speak the human tongue. What sense does it make to choose words to qualify as filth?

  Gariath kept that thought in his head, instead biting down on another piece of meat. When the food ran out, he noted, the conversation would get very colorful.

  The boy’s face brimmed with color for a moment, though it was in pale, immature hues. He looked across the fire pit pleadingly. “Father, I—”

  “You disrespect your mother, Duja.” Daaru’s lips perked up into a smirk at his son. “You should be grateful she didn’t have anything heavier to hit you with.” He cast eyes across the fire pit toward Gariath. “You don’t want to disrespect our guest, too, do you?”

  “No!” Duja roared emphatically. He ran to Gariath’s side, took the small wooden plate from him, and heaped it with more meat before setting it back down before Gariath with a stiff bow. “Forgive me, honored guest.”

  “It’s fine,” Gariath replied, taking another piece.

  “It is not fine,” the boy snapped back. “I have shamed my mother and father. I have shamed my ancestors. I have shamed my Tul.” Instantly his eyes brightened, his previous injury forgotten. “Do you also have a Tul, shkainai? Are you duwun? I bet you are. I bet—”

  “Duja!” his mother barked from across the fire pit. “Remember our deal. Honor both guests before you pester them.”

  The boy blinked and then, remembering the massive vulgore that had been too huge to enter their home, quickly heaped meat upon another plate and ran it outside. His mother watched him with a growing frown.

  “And be careful!” she called after him, then looked to Daaru. “I don’t want him spending too much time around the vulgore. It’s liable to crush him by accident.”

  “Him, Thamla,” Daaru corrected. “Not ‘it.’ His name is Kudj.” He waved a hand. “And he is duwun. He was bound to die sooner or later.”

  Thamla sighed and nodded, with an alarming amount of casualness, considering what her husband had just said. She leaned over, took another skewer of meat, and laid it on the grill. She glanced up at Gariath with a deeper worry in her eyes, but said nothing.

  Presumably there were only so many its she could be concerned about at one time.

  “Still, I am in no hurry to have another one,” she said. “Even if he is duwun, you must watch over him.”

  Gariath’s eye ridges furrowed at that word. They kept saying it like it meant something, but it sounded like babble to him. Perhaps that showed too plainly on his face, for he was surprised to hear a soft voice speak up beside him.

  “Duwun means his Tul is young.”

  He glanced down at Daaru’s daughter. She loosed a gasp and immediately looked down at the floor, regarding him through the corner of her eye.

  “If you wanted to know,” she offered meekly.

  Before Gariath could affirm that he hadn’t, Daaru spoke up.

  “The tulwar do not teem like humans and shicts,” he said. “There are only ever an exact number of us at any one time. Our bodies die, but our Tul”—he tapped his chest—“is reborn elsewhere as another tulwar. The duwun have forgotten so many lives that they have not much care for this one.”

  “I’m saan, though.” His daughter spoke up once more, careful not to look at Gariath. “My Tul is older.”

  “Like her father and mother,” Daaru said, smiling. “Whoever she was before she was born as Deji, though, she must have been very rude.” He grunted at his daughter. “Your fathers and mothers were all warriors. Why do you not look our guest in the eye as they would?”

  Color flooded Deji’s face. She stared intently at the ground, as though she were selecting a spot she might dig up and bury herself in.

  “It’s fine,” Gariath grunted again, turning his face to his meal.

&nb
sp; It wasn’t that he intended to be ungracious—he might have spent much of his life in a cave, but even the Rhega had laws of hospitality—but everything about him itched.

  That might just have been the woven rug upon which he sat. Or it might have been the air, stifling in this big baked-clay house. Or perhaps it was some allergy from the tulwar’s beds, made from timber they bought from humans and covered with hides they bought from shicts.

  Of this entire house, all that he knew for certain belonged to the tulwar was the swords on the wall. Everything else here reeked of human, of shict.

  Of them.

  He could smell the tall ones in the sheets, the short one in the rugs, the pointy-eared one in the meat. He could smell Lenk in the steel. And each time he thought of them, he could not help but feel a pain in his chest for the humans who had left him.

  No, he told himself. You left them. They wanted to sit in the reek and grub through the filth for coin. They chose streets full of shit and humans choking on gold over you. You don’t need them. They’ll die without you.

  And yet their stink would linger. In the air, he would smell them.

  Human weakness. Human filth. Shaab Sahaar reeked of it as surely as Cier’Djaal did. If it were up to him, they would burn in the same fire.

  Gariath chose not to say this.

  So, by his estimate, he was a good dinner guest.

  The rest of the meal passed mostly in silence. The boy would occasionally come barreling in to collect more food for Kudj outside. The girl would offer a few more shy words before quietly slinking off to her side of the house. The husband and wife would share a few quiet words of concern whenever they thought he wasn’t listening.

  He wasn’t. They weren’t saying anything interesting. So he felt justified in setting aside his empty plate and rising up to walk out into the warm night.

  The houses on the banks of the oasis fed by the Lyre River were all clay, older ones from the clans that had initially settled this area—Daaru’s own Rua Tong included, he had been told. But even here, amid the old houses, he saw human chairs on porches and shictish hides over doorways.

  A rumble caught his attention. Beside the house Kudj was a dark round shape against the night sky as he lay on his back and slumbered noisily. Sprawled out on the peak of the vulgore’s rounded belly, Daaru’s son strained to snore as loud.

  “We think, in a past life, he was one of my fathers.”

  Daaru emerged from the house behind him, his grin broad and white in the dark. He looked over Duja as the boy squirmed and rolled over on Kudj’s ample girth.

  “He does nothing but eat, sleep, and make messes,” Daaru said as he packed a long-stemmed pipe. “Just like my grandfather. That would explain it, wouldn’t it?”

  “Or he’s stupid, lazy, and dirty,” Gariath grunted.

  Daaru laughed, lighting his tobacco and taking a few puffs. “As is any child. But that, I think, does not make sense.”

  Gariath stared blankly at him for a moment. “But him being his own grandfather does?”

  “I don’t know what gods you have, dragonman, but ours is dead.” He gestured overhead, to a sky alive with stars. “When he lived, his stride spanned kingdoms and his brow scraped the sky. And when he died, every drop of blood he shed became a tulwar.”

  “So you worship a dead god,” Gariath snorted.

  “We do not worship Tul.” Daaru’s eyes were bright as flame as he turned them to the dragonman. “We are Tul. As he is eternal, so are we. We are born, we die, we come back again. Life means little, death even less.”

  The Rhega had no gods. The idea of being terrified of something dwelling in the sky was absurd. The idea of being terrified of something dwelling in the sky that was dead, even more so.

  He liked that last bit about death, though. Pithy.

  “That’s lucky.” Gariath watched as Kudj stretched. “If the vulgore decides to roll over, he might come back as his own brother next time.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Daaru said, taking a long inhalation on his pipe.

  “His mother seemed to disagree.”

  “His mother worries too much.” Daaru loosed an ashen sigh into the night. “But I welcome it. If she is worried about the boy, she has less time to complain to me about leaving the city.”

  “To hunt?” Gariath asked.

  “Something like that,” Daaru chuckled. He shot a meaningful look at Gariath. “Do you have children?”

  Gariath, in turn, cast a meaningful look away from Daaru. “Yes.”

  “Then you understand. It’s for them that I do this.” He sighed, folding his arms and leaning against his house. “Those are my father’s swords that hang on my wall. Once they were used for better things: fighting shicts, fighting humans.” He drew in a deep breath. “Fighting…”

  Gariath said nothing.

  “What I do now is not fighting.” Daaru slumped to his rear, rested his arms on his knees. “What I do now is kill. I kill for coin. I kill for food. I sell honor and I am not the one to decide the price.” An iron pause followed, something heavy and full of crude edges. “For this my family eats. It is what I must do.”

  Gariath said nothing.

  “Perhaps if I were duwun, it would not matter as much. But I am saan, as my fathers were. My burden is memory.” He rubbed his neck. “Here, at least, I have my family. Here, at least, I am tulwar.”

  He looked up to the sky with a weary smile.

  “What more can I do?”

  Gariath said nothing.

  “You could try not being such a coward.”

  Or at least Gariath had intended to say nothing.

  He was a little surprised to hear the words come from his own mouth. Though if the tulwar’s wide eyes were any indication, not as surprised as Daaru.

  “What is a tulwar?” Gariath gestured out over Shaab Sahaar. “I met one out in the desert, watched him fight with the fury of a hundred. I lost him somewhere in the streets, and who are you? A creature that lives in human houses, sleeps on shict hides, speaks the human tongue?”

  “There are many clans in the city—Rua Tong, Yengu Thuun, Tho Thu Bhu—and they all have their own dialects,” Daaru replied, his voice a low growl. “A common language makes it easier for life to—”

  “Easy.” Gariath barked a gruff laugh. “Life is not supposed to be easy. It’s something big and ferocious that bites and claws and only respects you when you fight back. Those that hold their own know what it means to grow strong.”

  “Do not speak to me of strength, dragonman.” Daaru rose to his feet. Even in the dark of the night, the colors blossoming beneath his face were bright as firelight. “I carry more than swords on my shoulders. I carry lives. I carry people.”

  “Your family, yes,” Gariath snarled. “Your wife, who takes the coin the humans give you and buys the meat the humans sell her. Your daughter, who speaks the tongue of people who would buy and sell her like meat herself. Your son, who watches you leave to scrounge at their feet for—”

  “YOU ARE A GUEST.” Daaru’s roar shook the curtains in the window. “I did not bring you to my home to mock me.”

  “Then why did you bring me here?” Gariath met his voice with a growl, something low from a low place. “To see your city? To see your family? So you could show me what kind of life you lead?”

  “And what if I did?” Daaru drew in a breath, struggling to control the anger painting his face. “What home do you have that I am keeping you from? Or were you merely wandering the desert for fun? The other clans will know you, in time, and your bravery. You could have a life here.”

  “What life?” Gariath growled. “There aren’t enough lives to go around for all the bodies flooding the streets.”

  “It’s the shicts. They attack our villages, send more and more refugees to the city, and—”

  “And you buy their hides and you buy their meat and you buy human wood and you buy human steel.” Gariath threw his hands out in a sweeping gesture to the city. “How long
before all this is gone? How long before I look at tulwar and human and can’t even tell the difference?”

  “And what would you have us do? Starve?”

  “Die today, you die as a commodity, something traded between humans like coins. Cast this off, die as a tulwar, die proud and free.”

  Daaru’s face now was a flurry of color. The reds, yellows, and blues shifted with every breath, growing brighter and dimmer like the beating of a heart. Yet even that furious color paled in comparison to the anger burning in his eyes as he locked a scowl upon Gariath.

  “You are not the first to speak of that,” Daaru all but spit. “Years ago someone else said the same thing. It was repeated over and over until it was in the mouth of every tulwar in the tribelands. And do you know what happened then?”

  Gariath said nothing. He did not back away as Daaru stalked toward him. He did not look away as Daaru scowled up at him.

  “The Uprising happened,” the tulwar growled. “Three months of slaughter. Collapsing of thirst in the desert, dying under arrows when we stormed Cier’Djaal, cut down by the fashas’ dragonmen mercenaries in the streets. And for what? The freedom we wanted belonged only to the dead we picked up when we limped back to the only things we had left.”

  He looked long to the side of the house. Even through all the uproar, Duja had not stirred from his slumber. Kudj yawned in his sleep, reaching up to scratch an errant itch on his belly. The tulwar boy instinctively reached out, seizing one of the behemoth’s tremendous fingers and holding it close.

  “Family,” Daaru said. “I was too young to join the Uprising. I was too young to burn my father’s body when they dumped him at my mother’s door.” He turned his eyes, the anger even and steady in them, back to Gariath. “I am saan, not afraid to die, dragonman. But my son is still too young to burn my body. It is not my time.”

  Gariath merely leaned down so that he was face-to-face with the tulwar. His words were pushed between teeth on a soft growl.

  “Then I guess Tul isn’t so eternal after all.”

  There were many ways to win a fight.

  Some ended in a single blow, some ended in so much blood a man could choke on it. But the real victories, the ones that counted the most, did not end in death.