by Jeff Kamen
She chats with others sitting nearby. She sips wine from a cup and glances about. Many of the hunters have stripped to their vests, revealing an array of tattoos that gleam darkly on their limbs and torsos as they sit drinking and joking. She studies their scars and amulets and braided hair, the little bones and beads that some have twisted into their locks, and in some cases their beards. Observing the way they conduct themselves, cleaning weapons, spitting, a rowdy pack ready for anything and Sandor their absent master. Once more she searches for him, her mind racing as she considers the things she has to say.
‘Don’t worry, my lovely,’ Rosa says in her ear. ‘He’s probably just out walking.’
‘Sure, of course,’ she says, distracted, glancing across at Lajos and Radjík, who with some difficulty she’s made a point of avoiding. Not until matters are straight, she tells herself, whatever it is that straight will bring them to.
Soon afterwards, Pétar and Yvor come over to join her group, the older brother sending her a wink. She smiles warmly back at him, deciding she likes them more and more, these bearded brothers, their talk not of knives and hurt, but of birds and deer and harvest. She is exchanging a few words with Pétar when she someone calls to her. With sinking dread she realises it’s Karl, asking where she got her name.
‘Jaa-la,’ he calls again, grinning. His voice is thick with drink and loud enough to cut across surrounding conversations. Aware that others are looking his way, she fixes a smile and says, ‘Nowhere really, Karl,’ — instantly regretting it as he gives a wild laugh and says even louder, ‘Eh? Don’t be like that. Come on, you can tell us.’
As more of the gathering turn round, taking notice, she says, ‘If you really want to know …’ but he is facing away from her, talking to a friend, leaving her to risk ridicule by repeating herself for nothing. To her relief he turns back again, pulling at the forked points of his beard. ‘Do what?’ he says, ‘what d’you say?’
‘I said I’ll tell you, if you’re interested. If not …’
‘Karl, give it a rest,’ Tomas says drunkenly, leaning with his arm around Rosa.
‘I’m only askin. What, aint I allowed to talk to her?’
‘Just watch your mouth, that’s all.’
‘Look, I don’t mind,’ she says, cringing inwardly as someone jeers. A few people start clapping, goading Tomas on.
‘See? She’s not bothered.’
‘Said leave her alone, Karl.’
‘What’s got into you, fiddle boy? You speak for her or summin?’
‘Don’t be a dick …’
At this, catcalls rise around the fire. She is searching for the right moment to get up and leave when Karl, laughing in fits, repeats his original question. In some irritation, she says, ‘I got it from a map. You asked me, so there you are. Now you know.’
‘What?’ he says delightedly, ‘a map? What you talkin about?’
‘My name. I saw the word on a map. I liked it the sound of it … so I stuck with it.’
‘Yeah? You really got your name from a map?’
The laughter and jeers subside as the clan’s interest turns to what she’s saying.
‘I was very young,’ she says. ‘I just liked it, that’s all. I don’t know if I’d choose it now … but there you go. Too late.’ She shrugs. ‘Anyway, it seems to do.’
‘Yeah? A kid readin? You hear that?’
‘I know. I started early. But I expect you knew that.’
‘Me? Don’t know nothin, me. Aint that right, Laz?’
In reply, Laszló, a very tall, lean figure with a dark goatee, tosses something at him across the fire. It looks like a cut of fatty meat. Karl catches it, grinning, then tosses it back again. Then one of his party gets up and heads away. Others return to their conversations and it seems to her that matters are moving on again.
As she turns back to her friends, she finds Rosa taking up a ladle of punch, her brow raised quizzically as she offers it round.
Catching Rosa’s eye, she says, ‘Go on, then, think I need it.’
‘Sure? Thought you didn’t like it.’
‘I don’t. What’s in it, anyway?’
‘Been steeped in weeds.’
‘... Weeds?’
‘Funny weeds.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Nope.’
Jaala shakes her head. ‘Give me some anyway.’
‘Naughty you,’ Rosa says, watching gleefully as she drinks the punch straight down.
‘One more,’ she says, panting. ‘I’m behind.’
‘Whew!’ Rosa hoots as she drinks another ladleful, and as she smiles at Rosa’s giggling, the warm air seems to shimmer slightly, forming a pleasant haze. They continue talking and others come to join them and Tomas lurches upright and starts to sing. Finally, she finds herself relaxing. Voices both near and far seem to alter pitch, to fade in their ability to hurt, probe, jab at her. The punchbowl returns, and at Rosa’s prompting she laughs and says, ‘Just one more, then,’ and they are both laughing as she takes up the ladle, and before long are laughing in each other’s arms.
But by the time people are turning in for bed, she is laughing no more. She has watched a number of couples stagger off together, and as Pétar bids her goodnight, his eyes lingering, she feels a loneliness return that sends her striding away to the treeline. She knows she ought not to enter the forest with her head swimming in such a way, but when she considers going back, a cold and brittle anger reinforces her decision, and she takes the southern path as before.
She makes quick progress, and in a short while is certain she is close to the spot where she’d seen him with the stranger. It is only when she thinks of who he’d been talking to that she feels the first stirrings of regret. She stops a minute, listening as the forest breathes and whispers around her, and then taking up a fallen branch to guide her way, she treads on.
Further into the night she goes, the vast and devastating night, and when she finds a glow in the distance she does not check her pace, but rather hurries towards it — as if to break through to the truth at last, to quicken an end to things.
Then she hears dogs barking. She stops in the near blackness. The sound is dim but undeniable, and she waits, listening again, and when it seems clear that it originates from the direction of the glow, is not the sounds of dogs on the hunt, she continues tentatively ahead, this time holding the branch like a weapon.
The glow brightens, the barking growing ever sharper. Any thought that she’d mistakenly strayed home has vanished: the noise has to be coming from the Maga camp. She realises she has turned west somehow, has entered the borders of the rugged wilds.
She has done it, has arrived. And yet to get anything back, she must go closer.
She sees smoke drifting through the trees; can taste it, strangely sweet. On she goes, gripping the branch, checking the woods at her back as they enclose her within a dim cast of light.
Noticing the teeth of a broken fence, she stops again. Waits. Checks for movement. Then on hearing a drumbeat, she continues, leaving the path and treading quietly through the wood’s dry debris.
Going slowly now. An anxious figure passing wrecks of fallen timber. Rotting black logs. The pale bodies of chopped tree stumps.
The glow warms to an orange flicker, the drumming a persistent thud over the barking. Go, she tells herself, but whether emboldened by drink or enticed by a dark curiosity, she stands listening. A minute later, noticing dark shapes lying beyond the fence, she peers over the old decrepit palings to discover traps have been laid in the area, gruesome iron jaws lying agape in the grass.
She stares. The barking and the drums and the night around her throbbing, pounding. Imagining her ankle severed in an icy wrench of bone and sinew, the life she’d known destroyed in a moment, in dreadful shrieks and blood. She listens a minute more, dark and afraid and solitary, and this time when she looks ahead it is in painful recognition of something she cannot turn from: that unless she knows more about his people, mor
e about his background, she will never know why he’s become the man he is.
~O~
Coming before the imposing stockade that marks the settlement’s perimeter, she sees an unkempt grassy waste leading to rows of shelters and huts, black against the firelight.
She goes alongside the stockade in dismay, finding a barbaric construction of pike-tipped hardwood palings and iron posts, the uprights reinforced with crossbeams lashed with ropes and chains. Strung among the ligatures is a cruel array of hooks and blades set at angles so as to inflict the greatest possible damage to anyone breaking through. A salvage of bleached bones and skulls dangles in their midst like souvenirs of failed attempts gone by.
As she follows the path towards the gates, the smoke grows thicker and she tastes its sweetness again. She finds her fear being dulled by it, and once more detects a strange shimmering around her, a sense of retreating hurt. The trees seem to sway at her approach, to rustle strangely ...
Going on, she looks at the settlement buildings again, outlined before the glow. Just then she sees figures moving. They vanish, then a moment later others appear, passing a gap between the huts. Passing in a strange dance before the fire. She hurries ahead, treading recklessly until she reaches a better vantage point, and what she sees next has her gasping. Astonished, appalled. The Maga are mostly naked or thinly clad in furs, men and women of all ages, some barely out of youth. They are touring in an eerie procession around a great central bonfire, bounding and leaping, their skins glistening with oil. Instinctively she checks the outer woods again, finding the trees honeyish in the flickering — no one stalking her, no one there — then she turns back and crouches at the posts, trying to take it in.
The dancers are whooping and yelling as they circulate, wild and ecstatic figures with their heads thrown back and their arms wheeling as they go. They twist and fall away as though gripped in a trance, seemingly blind to everything around them. At first she cannot fathom how they could be in such a state, and then she realises it’s the smoke, and that she herself is drifting, becoming slowly accustomed to the monotonous chanting which accompanies the drums, able with little effort to recall nights of similar abandonment within the presences. A sort of muted terror starts in her, sluggish and cold, but when she moves on, it is not away from the camp but closer to it, in search of a viewpoint from which she can discover more.
On she goes, the shadows leaning and leering, the terrible barking spiked with howls, and on finding a wider gap in the buildings she crouches again, watching a man in a ceremonial headdress go to a claw-footed brazier. He throws into it what looks like handfuls of ash, or a thick white powder.
Tall flames arise, lighting up his face and upraised hands, and then thick smokeclouds blot him out completely. They go mushrooming upwards in the heat and billow away from the settlement, soon to thin out and drift towards the trees in a fire-tinted haze. To touch with peculiar sweetness her dry and waiting lips. She inhales the smoke deeply as it surrounds her, and this time she does not rise and move on, but leans against the posts as though anchored to them, staring helplessly at the spectacle.
Round the Maga go, flinging their bodies about, dancing with drugged abandon. She sees some stooping to throw dirt over themselves as they stamp and shuffle and leap into the air, while others lie shuddering and writhing, bypassed by the rest of the tribe as if nothing exists but their own private communication with whatever it is that fuels them, drives them on. A few go staggering by; others move more easily, among them a couple of figures with long greasy whips who flog themselves shoulder and back so that the blood runs freely and glistens.
She sees big white dogs running among the dancers in a state of chaos; others are chained to stakes hammered into the ground. It seems the loose dogs are free to do as they please, whether to roam about or attack at will the chained members of the pack, and in a stricken daze she watches them bounding to and fro, vanishing and returning in the smoke, howling, baying, a noise she wants to shield her ears from, make cease, become silent, yet she cannot, for something is compelling her to watch and understand that which for the Naagli is forbidden. Then a man with ferocious grey moustaches comes into view, his heavyset body gleaming orange and his shoulders bloodstreaked where he’s been lashing himself with a length of knotted rope. He wanders about with a cold gaze, grinning, lashing himself in rhythm, left side, right side as he continues around the fire, and she watches him go and watches others take his place and finds people breaking off to couple with one another ... men and women who, as the minutes pass, start having sex in pairs or groups of pairs like some hungry and bloodstained herd.
Gasping, she forces herself up ... goes slowly along the path as if in search of something different ... proof that this is not where he is from, not what he belongs to ... but when she stumbles and falls this time, just in sight of the grim black gateposts, the slick mass of bodies is still there to behold, with cries of ecstatic pain rising from their midst like the sounds of a world she does not want to live in.
She holds her face. Then, blinking dully, she looks again. The Maga are still there, undeniable, real. Wandering unbalanced within the smoke, their eyes wide and staring, like some lost race of mindless souls searching the air with their hands, chanting in a language she has heard before but knows only from another’s darkness.
The tyrant. The one who begot Grethà.
VAD-RAS-KAR ...
She closes her eyes, whispering, sweat forming on her brow. When she is able to focus, she notices the drummers seated in a row behind the flames. Men and women both, naked and dripping, their features locked as though in anguish. Their wet arms flashing as they look glassily towards their hunched and arching brethren, figures who are prostrating themselves before each other, sucking and licking at their neighbours and some turning to mount each other, penetrating them from the front or behind or riding them at an angle, their oiled hands groping, slapping, hurting, and the pale heavy smoke continues to drift her way and she is deep in its scent and deep in its meaning and she can feel something of a new terror growing inside her, not of the crazed scene behind the huts, but of something else, something she’d thought was deeply buried, but is buried no longer it seems, for resolving itself in the flickers is Vadraskar’s chamber, an airy white bedroom laid with a cool marble floor.
It’s happening. The tyrant is stirring again. Her own fierce likeness that walked the mountain a century ago.
In this foul and shimmering scene, slaves are being marched in one at a time with their wrists cuffed. She sees the drugged and soporific look in their eyes as they are thrown down in front of her, whining and weeping in hope, imploring her for mercy.
VAD-RAS-KAR ...
A quality Vadraskar does not know. Searching them for signs of growing apprehension and finding it there the moment she pulls on her taloned gloves, the leather polished to a high gloss to match the long curves of steel. Those sad uplifted faces. The stripped bodies then tied across the bed so she can go at them with her claws. Watching the eyes register the shock as she hooks in her fingers, her weaponed hands working deeper into the hot systemic meat of them, gouging and twisting and snapping their strings, those delicate threadlike and elastic connections that held them together all their lives and which now are to be ripped asunder.
Emptying their contents onto the floor … the noise … the noises the victims are making no longer human, unintelligible ... reaching in further and deeper until … until she’s scraping away at cavities of streaked red bone and the white silk sheets lie drenched in it all, drenched in a darkly dripping welter. Panting not just with exertion as she lugs ... as she lugs the warm cordia across to the fireplace. Watching it hiss and sprawl as it splashes down among the coals, armful after armful, heaps of it spitting, blackening … blackening as it smoulders.
Some of the victims still screaming.
Still screaming.
Still.
Behind her eyes a clear view of the tyrant turning to a mirror; as if i
t was yesterday.
VAD-RAS-KAR ...
VAD-RAS-KAR ...
She lurches, vomiting against the posts, vomiting between her hands. Then she vomits again, hunching, and up comes the punch in a reek of vinegary juices.
Naughty you ... naughty you ...
She retches twice more, dryly, then it’s over. She lets the saliva spool from her mouth and then slowly cleans her hands in the dirt, in the dry grass, and sits back again. Struggling to think, to see ahead, to understand where she is.
Sensing a great tiredness descending, she watches with heavy eyes the figures passing before the flames. She sees a woman foaming at the mouth and another tearing at her hair, screaming shrilly. People rocking where they sit, bloodsoaked and disorientated and in tears. Go, just go, she urges herself, get out now, and then she notices another figure behind the flames, one which sets her rigid. An imposing figure seated in a large carved chair, its great head obscured, draped in a flowing dark cloth. A figure both motionless and faceless as it studies the scene before it; and in spite of her dread she follows its gaze, and as she does so, she feels the night and all it holds come shuddering to a halt.
Sandor.
There is no mistake. It’s him, her beloved. Naked, coupling with a chubby girl who is facing away from him, her round haunches raised up high and her raw knees and elbows shunting back and forth as he thrusts at her, as he beats her with his fists, his face locked in a cold grimace of hatred.
Sandor.
She watches him claw at her, pull at her, hold her in place. Behind him a big man with a solid paunch is approaching with an axe.
Sandor.
Suddenly the man dips his shoulder, and with a single upstroke swipes at one of the dogs trotting by. The furred white head flies up spinning.