Face your fear.
Some boys in the Kerrick had worked to be a part of many different hunting teams, to get as many markings as possible. Over-achievement was considered showy, a way of making light of recognition that took other men years to earn. The Bolg taught that you did not advance yourself at another’s expense.
Piju thought that he had fit in well among the other hunters. He frowned at himself. Second thoughts filled his mind, but what would he have done differently? He was ambitious, but hid it as well as he could. He had learned from all the other hunters, for the men were all willing teachers, but hadn’t worked to be included in any other hunter’s groups. Some of the masters showed favorites, though the Kerrick never showed favor. Perhaps the Kerrick should have marked him with Elk or Boar, but they had only been individual kills; he would have waited until the Master thought he deserved it.
Should I have worked to befriend the other masters? He asked. But, the Kerrick was like a father to him, and the only master he had wanted.
He wasn’t even rare for losing his parents. Death was common among the Bolg, especially among the hunters. Many of the boys had lost their fathers and many had lost their mothers. Among the fishing clans, the loss of a whole family boat was common enough. Piju had lived, his family had died. It was how things happened.
All in all, there was little about Piju to tell him apart from any other Bolg his age. Even in a small village like Leest, there were a dozen boys within a year of his age which fit his description in most particulars. Every household had its own tattoos, but only a Bolg would know a netted grouse, a six-sided net with the squiggle of a red bird within, from a netted salmon, which was also red, but had a fishtail instead of a head comb. All that was different about Piju was that the other boys of his age were out in the common field, and he was sitting at the edge of it.
It was the last night of the year named ‘Demon Death’ and the night for ceremonies. Piju had been anticipating this moment for years, spying on it with the rest of the boys, and now sat miserable in it. The secret ceremony of adulthood was conducted on the last night of their twelfth year, when boys were taken as apprentices to their new masters and began their adult life.
The parents and the heads of households sat on the edge of the field, watching their Masters take new apprentices, and watching their boys become men. Sitting in the cold and snow, they all looked much the same. Piju was the smallest of the lumps. Huddled under a thick wool cloak, tucking his feet into the warm material, he was just another gray lump among the other gray lumps, at the edge of the village field.
The elders and the masters had gathered up the other five boys of Piju’s birth year, which had been called Early Snow. When there had been kings of the Bolg, a long time ago, they had used numbers for years. That made little sense to Piju, since a year deserved a name like anyone else; even if this year’s name was Demon Death, it was better than a name like ‘Twelve.’
Well, ‘Twelve’ beats out ‘Fisherman’s boy scared of water’ for a name. He had earned that name, but that didn’t make wearing it any easier.
Piju watched as each boy got a strong drink of the poison the elders were drinking. It was something ice-distilled from the fermented honey and berries that the old folk drank the rest of the year. The Kerrick, seated next to him, took a measured sip from his own clay jug; he wasn’t taking an apprentice this year, so he didn’t join in the ceremony.
The boys, soon to be adults, drank it down. They each gasped at the burn in their throats, doing their level best to be men and not sputter and cough. The fire burned their throats, and the flavor stung their noses like a lit brand. Kerrick laughed quietly but didn’t offer Piju a sip. He handed the jug to Harran’s parents. They were from Piju’s birth family, the Abernehh clan, and close cousins, but he didn’t speak to them; he was too lost in his own personal misery.
Harran and Piju had been friends from birth and had worked together and played together whenever there was time. At twelve, Harran was as different from Piju as anyone in his age group. Where Piju was graceful and fast, Harran waddled and looked clumsy on land. In a boat, he was said to be amazing. Harran was smart as well, in a way Piju had never been. He grasped answers, when Piju was still lost, dreaming, in his head. Harran’s advice, good at the time, had kept him in the Kerrick household when they would have sent him back to Abernehh.
Well, dying younger would have saved me this misery at least.
Harran was his best friend. As little as they had time to talk, Harran tried to keep Piju going when he was ready to give up. Piju spent most of his time alone or with a small team, deep in the woods, days of walking from Leest. Even with a team, they trained to stay silent most of the time. Piju spent a lot of time in his own head, in his stories and dreams, talking to himself.
Each boy was grasped from behind and blindfolded. The elders sang the death march, and they led their captives around the field in the middle of town. Clearly lost, Harran tripped over the same tree root on each pass near his parents. It was a secret ceremony, but the secret was so well known that most of the younger children were watching from the roof of the council hall. Piju was of an age now to take a master, so he sat with the adults to watch the ceremony.
His own parents and his brothers were long dead. They had been lost with their small boat on a clear day in the shallow sea. The Abernehh had taken his sisters and wanted him to come to them, to join Harran’s family. Piju had not and would not. He knew that he had been doomed to die at sea and wouldn’t bring his fate upon his friends.
There had been a bonfire earlier, and all the town had gathered and sang away the old year. At sunset, they had made the new master, Master Waylaid, and now everyone had headed off to bed, except the elders and the children who would be new adults…and of course their parents and friends and lots of small ones who weren’t supposed to be here.
In his shame, Piju imagined the rest of the town, standing just out of sight in the woods or packing the roof of the council hall, a hundred witnesses to his private misery. Old Vars got the coals ready, stirring them and sprinkling some water across them, so they steamed in the cold air.
In a sudden rush, they ran the boys across the bed of coals, stripped the boy pants off of them, and gave them over to their new masters. Each shivering boy was presented with a fine belt, and a kilt. Each was sat down by the coals, and his village mark was scribed upon his shoulder with a hot coal. They would tattoo the symbol of Leest over the brand when the swelling went down, but the burn and the fire walk had a secret wisdom, which the elders were whispering to the new men.
Piju watched from the sidelines, sitting with the Kerrick, but no longer belonging to him. The news had struck him to the core, and he literally had no idea what to do next. Master Kerrick was master of all the other hunters, but he had been as close as a father to him. Since the death of his family, Piju had lived with the Kerrick household and hoped…well, honestly assumed, that they would take him as an apprentice.
Piju, for his age, was a good hunter. He had hoped to someday make master hunter for the village of Leest, but the Kerrick had plenty of boys of its own. They weren’t taking a new apprentice that year, but there were five apprentices already. Piju knew that two more family boys―one year and three years younger―would be added to the apprentices. There were a dozen full hunters and five masters as well.
How many hunters did Leest need? He only had one answer. Apparently, they needed less than they had.
Piju wanted to ask the Kerrick, “Master, how much more would one hunter mean?” But it wouldn’t make a difference, so it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Kerrick had said, “No.”
The hunters were all one family. The Kerrick had to take care of his own first, and the orphan he had agreed to watch second. When Kerrick had said, “Take a different master,” he meant, “Go back to your mother’s people where you belong, back to the boats.”
Maybe the Kerrick just thought he really was just ‘alet Ke
lpwa’ scared of the water. Now that Piju had faced the forests and fought with wolves, he should become a man and forget his silly childhood dreams. But to Piju the dream was real, and he had nowhere else to go.
The village of Leest was his home, as little time as he spent actually among its buildings. The three streets led everywhere there was to go in the world. One led to the docks, the second to the fields, the third up the hunter’s track to the northern pass. Even a child knew that there were other villages out there, but he had never seen one. Anything more than two days of walking might as well have been a place in a story, like the secret mountains of the Fomor on the far side of the shallow sea.
The center of the Leest was this field, which, behind a small stone wall, normally only held a few dozen sheep and the village’s few remaining cattle. Piju looked at it now, and it seemed empty. The dozen old men, five new men, and dying fire were a world apart for him. He was no longer welcome in his own world. If he were welcome in the family he wanted, he would be standing by the coals, with the Kerrick wrapping a kilt around him. Now, he would have no adult mark on his shoulder. He had no sponsor, no family, and no master who would see him marked before the fire.
Kerrick had spoken to him earlier, as the sun went down.
“There is always next year for ceremonies,” he said, but Piju didn’t expect to be alive next year, so this was all the ceremony he got.
When he had been only seven years of age, Piju had had the dream. He had died on that boat.
In the dream, the net was huge; he and his father pulled and pulled and more and more net came up. The sun went down, and still they were pulling length after length of net into the boat. Strange black fish spilled out around their feet, the bottom of the boat full of fish and net, but still they pulled and pulled. The fish changed. There were red fish among the black, but still they pulled and pulled. A storm came, the wind rising and the rain stinging their faces.
He called for his father to stop, but he wouldn’t. In a darkness, lit only in sudden strobing flashes of lightning, they struggled against the net, pulling and pulling, while the fish moved around their feet. Still they pulled the net into the boat.
The black head of a water horse had crossed over the stern of the boat. The monstrous head was smooth and black, like the head of an evil turtle. The long neck arched high over the boat, while the eyes regarded Piju. The eyes were as large as his palms, and it spread its lips in a nasty grin, showing teeth the length of his fingers, each as thin and sharp as a bronze needle.
As the beast looked at him, the storm stilled, and the waves went flat. Like the center of a hurricane, the air felt heavy and still. The water horse was a pitch black shadow on a pitch black night. His father saw nothing, leaning forward to grab the next length of net, lifting all of the fish in the world into his boat. Then the water horse leaned down and took Piju into its mouth.
It was a prophecy dream, hard enough to make him sick. He knew, without a question, that there was a slick, black spirit in the water which schemed to drag him down into the cold depths of the sea. Abernehh, Piju’s birth family, were fisherman, and even at seven he had manned the nets with his brothers. That day, for one day, he had stayed home, feverish and curled sick before the fire, while his family had taken his fate for him. Others might call it luck, or fate, or prophecy, but he knew there was a beast in the water which had taken his family and wished for his death. He would not let it drown him as well.
He left the sidelines of the field, slipping away quietly in the dark. Perhaps the Kerrick watched him go, perhaps not. He was living entirely in his memories now. He wandered for a while, meaning to go out toward the forests. Instead found himself standing in the trees on the hill above the docks, watching the docks while his mind drifted through the long distant past.
Harran was led down the road, a much shorter path, from the village field to the docks. They rinsed his mouth with salt water and gave him a seat before the boats. The docks had been at the center of their earliest memories. Tonight, the small boats sat still and empty, watched by the apprentice, who was watched by the Abernehh, on his taking night. Such was the ceremony.
Piju didn’t want to disturb him on his special night. They were good friends.They had been family, but the last survivor of a drowned boat was a bad omen in any case.
Piju’s family had been fishing folk―Fir Pigurae―but they were dead now, and he wasn’t getting back on a boat. This had cut him off from his mother’s family, one of several in the Abernehh, something like five or six years ago.
The village had been kind and helped a boy with weird visions. Perhaps they had hoped he would try to apprentice to the seer, but he hadn’t. He didn’t care to have a prophecy vision ever again. Lynneth had taken that position.
Lynneth was born to the Dobbs. She should have been herding sheep, but she was willing to take the apprentice position from Imregor. Piju had retreated to the forests and the hunters of the Kerrick. Imregor was dead now as well, leaving Lynneth short a master and Piju without another option.
Today, he was cut off from the Kerrick, and he was on his own. The village was full of young men with working families and born-to guilds. The boys his age that hadn’t had a place to go had worked out details months or years ago. Piju had neglected all hints that he would have to do the same. The village was kind, but he was older now. He was supposed to act like a man, not a scared seven-year old boy.
Now Piju was almost out of options. His first option was what everyone expected of him. He should return to the Abernehh, beg forgiveness, and be returned to the good graces of the family. Piju knew that the Abernehh didn’t put any faith in his prophetic dream. They expected him to face his fears and get back to fishing. In Piju’s mind, there was little fear involved; he saw that the prophecy continued and that he was destined to die on a boat.
He wasn’t really scared of dying; it just seemed like something to be avoided. As Grandpa said, “If you grab the fish by the fin, expect the fishhook in your skin.” He had done that and had the scar on his thumb to remember it by. Just as personally, the Kerrick had told him on his first hunt, “When you fight a wolf, don’t throw away your spear.” That had kept him alive. He had thought then, more than three years ago, that he could avoid his destiny by staying with the Kerrick. He would be a hunter and avoid the prophetic dream forever.
The spirits though, they were terrifying. The water horse, that black monster from the depths of the sea, was a terror you couldn’t point a spear at, couldn’t face up to. The eyes looked out of his dreams at him, waiting for him. Five years and it hadn’t faded from his memory, but was more solid in his mind than his father’s voice. Piju had heard stories of other horrible creatures, demons, and ghosts. If he had a choice, he’d have nothing to do with them the rest of his life.
It always seemed to Piju that if you knew the rules, you should follow them. When you did things the way you were told, you didn’t get a fishhook through the thumb, and you didn’t get eaten by a wolf. Simple rule, “If the boy called Piju goes out on a boat, that boat isn’t coming back.” They could call him scared of water, ‘alet kelpwa,’ but he would call it just good sense.
There was a second option but not a good one. The village of Leest, as of sunset, had a new master, who did not have even one apprentice. During the dinner and bonfire, Harran had suggested this to him. Harran had seen the signs of Piju’s rejection, even before the Kerrick had been forced to put it to him plainly. Probably the whole village had known, years before, but only bothered to tell him now.
Piju found the new master on the other side of the council house from the field. On that side of the council house was the village fire. There was no fire tender working tonight, but the new master was keeping it burning. The giant was sitting cross-legged by the fire, clearly not cold. His cloak was bundled behind him, the kilt and vest of a Bolg covering very little of his bronze-dark skin. The monster, for Piju had trouble seeing him as a man, had dozens of long thick braids, but
, while Piju watched, he slowly cut one from his head with a black stone blade and laid it in his lap. The giant chanted to it in a low rumble, a complex chain of words, none of which made any sense to Piju. His mark of mastery was a complexly knotted square on his left shoulder only slightly older than the brands of the boys, the new men, from the field on the other side of the council house.
Piju didn’t spend much time in the village; none at all would be more nearly correct, so he knew little more of the monster than the usual Fomor stories he had heard secondhand from Harran. There was a tower above the cliffs, a long day’s march up the shore. The monsters sometimes sailed past Leest, their huge ships careless of the tiny Bolg boats.
He remembered Harran’s stories. Then they killed the children with their blood-drenched black knives and fed their spirits to Cern! Piju shivered.
“No, he is a man, not a monster,” he corrected himself.
As a child, which lacking the brand he technically still was, he had heard stories of their brutal nature and rough humor, which often ended up with someone dead. They were the punishers of the young who did not go to sleep on time, snatching them up and sacrificing them to their evil gods.
The giant was clearly of the Fomor race and not one of the Bolg, but the Bolg try to teach their people to see beneath the surface of one’s appearance. Piju didn’t know what to expect from a…monster like the stories presented. But this wasn’t a monster; not a Bolg, true, but Piju hoped that Master Waylaid was no Fomor either.
The Fomor are big men, nearly half again as tall and easily three times the weight of a Bolg. Even seated by the fire, he was as tall as Piju. Like every Fomor in every story, his skin was dark, his eyes were black, and his hair hung in thick ropes. Even more frightening was the horror of his face, with one eye pure white with scarring and a scar from his forehead, through his eye, and into his thick black beard. The stories Harran told said that the crease in his head was from the blow of an axe. He was frightening to look upon.
The Broken Man Page 7