The Tankar Dawn

by Walt Popester

  “It’s a duty of every guide to keep at least one ear open. I can’t even choose which ear.”

  “You don’t care about peace.”

  “It’s hard to make peace on ruins. Hate brings hate, and I want to break this chain.”

  But not before having your revenge, Dag thought. And you? Did you throw molly or stones to the pigeons? How much effort did the world take to change you?

  The Faithful Five of the Nomad Emperor came in. They knelt down and hammered their chests twice.

  Baikal dismissed Dagger with a bored gesture, returning to the big table in the middle of the room. He pushed away the litter of mugs and spread the map over the table, dragging the mugs back again to fasten down each corner.

  With his hands resting on the edge of the table, he looked up and made a barely perceptible movement.

  The Faithful at the center, the highest-ranking one, nodded once.

  The Emperor looked at the map again. “So it begins.”

  “We should have settled down at Hanoi’s Rock. We could defend ourselves better, there. This pyramid is as good as useless.”

  “Jetsum. My faithful.” Baikal motioned to him, caressing the sinuous profile of the river. “Kahars lack clean water. Once, their whole people seemed to fall ill, because of the temple, everyone believed. Now I know there was a more logical explanation to the problem. Now, the position of their migrant villages is always determined by the water supply.”

  “The…sense of all this, my Emperor?”

  Baikal smiled. “It’s not hard to guess where they will camp to launch their decisive attack. The first question of a Kahar about any part of Adramelech is, Is there water? And then, Is the water good? And if he has to extol a place he says, There’s plenty of water all year round, and it’s sweet, there’s no such water anywhere. They will camp here, and here, on the banks of the river.”

  “An impeccable deployment,” Jetsum said as he approached, caressing the deepest of his many scars. “It’s a vise.”

  “The vise of a thirsty people.” Baikal thought of something that didn’t make him smile. “As it’s always been.”

  Dag had no intention of listening to a new war council and went away. He had ended up in the most prolific Tankar clan, as it seemed.

  * * * * *

  Kugar hadn’t open her mouth anymore after that Don’t call him crab. All the attention of Dagger seemed to have only succeeded in destabilizing her mood and making her anger unpredictable. The carpets in her tower room were now scattered with broken cobs and glasses.

  The guards didn’t approach her anymore after one of them had caught a splinter in his carotid.

  Kugar was still the machine of brutal death Dagger had met for the first time. Yet she didn’t attack him, nor bite him. In the same way, she didn’t talk to him.

  “Are you sure you want to go inside?” one of the Nehamas guards asked that night.

  Dagger didn’t even answer as he nodded to the door. He sat down with his back against the naked stone arch open to the outside. He looked at the boundless desert, faraway beneath him. He thought he would keep silent like the last nights spent in there, then he lost himself in her breath. Every night the dream’s the same. Every night I scream your name as I fall into the emptiness of that pit. He thought he was talking, but he focused on his lips and felt them still.

  “I know what it means to live in a bubble of silence,” he said. “I—only I—can understand you. The kids we were have disappeared under the sands of this desert. Or maybe they are gone with the current, and chasing them has no sense.” He looked at her. “The boy in front of you is not me anymore. I was buried under all that rubble, and I dig and I dig but I can’t find myself. Do you know how it feels, Kug? Is this why you don’t talk anymore?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Yet her breath…“There’s no complicity when everything is clean and neat,” Dag continued. “You know complicity only when life presents you with its contradictions, when you have to climb on the back of others and push them to the bottom to get to the surface. Complicity. To find that one person who’s marching at your side toward the same destination, be it even yet another hell that will refuse you.” The far-off ruins called him insistently. “I’m still here, Kug. I’m still walking through that forest, fleeing from my shadows or in search of them. I’m just waiting to feel your fingers lacing in mine. I’m just waiting to know that you’re here, that you didn’t really leave me, not you.”

  A fire, a thousand miles away, was lit in the desert. Others appeared, drawing a ring around the fortress. Seized by the unusual show, he didn’t see a tear of fire falling down Kugar’s face.

  The oil lamps in the room threw odd golden shadows onto the dark balcony. The night was utterly still except for the fires burning in the distance, lonely stars in the infinite nothingness below.

  The flames in the desert began to move. Hour after hour, Dagger followed the movements of those that once had been only red dots on a map.

  They were approaching the fortress in the dunes. Baikal was about to have the worst of it. The circle was getting closer and closer to the core of his rebellion.

  At the rising of the red moon, the Kahar armors lit up like a red sea among the ruins, touching the abandoned camp of the Tormentors. The sea fragmented in a thousand rivulets running between the white tents, as silent as lines of blood slipping on a table.

  Their army was so divided, when the rebel yells of the Nehamas shook the fortress and the tower itself. One of the tents caught fire, then another, and another. The screams of the Kahars rose to the horrors of the dawn, when the whole camp at the foot of the fortress caught fire.

  Besieged by the flames, the red sea fell back in the opium fields in a messy, chaotic way. New fires were lit there were only the shadows of the ruins had been until then. Dagger knew what was happening, the tactics Baikal was using. Just like Crowley, he’s trapping them between the hammer and the anvil.

  The Nehamas and the Tormentors had walked the endless tunnels beneath the remains to trap the Kahars.

  The night slaughter was followed by a day of blood under a hostile sun.

  At sunset nothing remained of the yukas but a plain of ashes. Dagger saw heaps of carbonized corpses, large black spots around which a Tankar blade glittered from time to time.

  And then nothing more. The silence and darkness brought as gift by the night reigned again sovereign.

  Dagger threw a date pit out of the balcony. He was too tired to light the oil lamp again, and let the darkness seep into the room.

  In the penumbra, he watched Kugar. “The battle went well. For all you care.” He picked up some shards from the ground and tried to make them match, to put the pieces together, but as hard as he tried he couldn’t make it. As he was still trying, he felt liquid running down his cheek.

  A tear.

  I will do it. He wiped his eyes with his forearm, stood up and threw the shards in the desert of ashes at his feet. He screamed. He screamed until he was out of breath, and locked his fists. He knelt and punched the floor until he tore his knuckles.

  In the silence that followed, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  Dagger closed his eyes and locked his bloody fingers between hers, thanking a god in which he didn’t believe for having granted at least one of his prayers.

  * * * * *

  The funny thing is that you still have to talk. Dag grabbed the flap of the warm fur and laid it on their naked bodies.

  A dark and cold room, an uncomfortable floor and pillows that smelled of sweat—that was the safe harbor at the end of the storm.

  Kugar was not sleeping. She kept her eyes fixed in front of her but now, skin against skin, Dagger felt peace in her breath. She turned in his arms, crouching against his chest. He caressed her, and for the first time since he had arrived at the fortress in the dunes he hoped she wouldn’t speak.

  The fragile reconquered balance was soon broken. Rising from the bowels of the tower, Dag heard a
sound that he had learned to know well—heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  The door was thrown wide open and the shadow of a guard appeared in the luminous archway. “Well, look at that,” the guard said. “She throws bottles at us, while you…”

  Dag stood up. “What the Ktisis do you want?”

  “The Emperor wants you with him. Now.”

  Dagger understood the meaning of now, when he was nearly dragged down the stairs and thrown into the throne room while he was still dressing.

  Baikal was sitting on his throne, his powerful hands around the armrests. His thick white fur was lit by the candle burning in the niche at his left, where the skull of the Tormentor Asmeghin had never stopped laughing. A second candle had been lit in the niche at his right, and seemed to be waiting.

  The Emperor tilted his head. “So, did you make her talk?”

  You must be an animal to think that when a woman doesn’t speak the problem is in her mouth. “More or less,” Dag answered, fastening the last button.

  Baikal didn’t react in any way. He stretched out his right arm, indicating where Dagger should sit, then stared in front of him toward the black archway opened on the past.

  A clattering of chains preceded the guards’ footsteps.

  He saw Baikal tighten his hands on the armrests and lock his black lips. Fear, and waiting, shone through his blue eyes.

  How long have you been waiting for this? Dag wondered, sitting at his side. It’s not worth living a single day for revenge, haven’t they taught you that already?

  Every other thought was interrupted when a Kahar boy was thrown into the room. He rolled on the floor, in chains, then he looked up and stared in front of him. Raven-black, shiny fur covered his whole body, which was already developed and more robust than that of any human, and of many of his Nehama peers. His eyes as black as night shone with pure hatred in the light of the waiting candles.

  An adult Kahar followed the boy beyond the dark threshold, standing austere. He was surrounded by five white Tankars, each holding one of the chains that kept him bridled. The rusty links had already dug bloody furrows in his fur. The signs of the battle, and perhaps of torture too, were everywhere on his body. A collar of finger-long nails forced him to hold his chin high. Yet that warrior, wounded but not bent-down, gave such a dignity that he seemed incapable of bending his head in the face of fate. He was much taller than the guards around him, and broad as well.

  Baikal raised one hand. The chains were put in tension, yet the five guards struggled to force the Kahar to the ground.

  With the metal song gone, no sound was heard anymore.

  “Vektor,” Baikal pronounced. “How long, my friend.”

  Vektor turned his head to avert his tumid gaze, and said nothing.

  “What’s the matter?” the Nomad Emperor continued. “Didn’t you consider the possibility of being defeated by a Neha—”

  “Defeated?” The Kahar shook his head. “A Tankar would never attack from behind, maybe not even a Nehama. No, it must have been the demons of the dunes to defeat us.”

  “Don’t talk about old Gorgor superstitions in this sacred place. War is not glory, but death and misery. I hope your people have finally learned it today. You have killed and tortured in the name of the only blasphemous belief, that every drop of enemy’s blood falls on a land never too small to be divided.”

  Vektor’s eyes stared into space. “There is less and less space in this world, no fertile land to grow your children. You can’t know. You’re alone. And you’re fighting, alone, a war we’ve all long forgotten. You can’t afford the luxury of hatred and vengeance, when your children are so hungry that they don’t know how to smile.”

  The Nehama closed his eyes, then looked at the son of Vektor, clinging to the right arm of his agonizing father. “Take the boy away.”

  Jetsum advanced. “We tried,” he answered. “It’s impossible to separate them.”

  The Nomad Emperor smiled sadly. For a moment he met the eyes of the Tankar boy, before focusing again on his defeated enemy. “Kahar Asmeghin,” he said. “Your father Nehorur once taught me humility, and we all thank him for his lesson. Only in this way could I cradle the will to accomplish the plans my lord had in store for me.” He stood and descended the steps of the throne, watched by the army of dead on the walls. “Don’t fool yourself. Today I will regain his favor, and to demonstrate my devotion to him I’ll make sure that you, his son, understand well. Piece by piece.”

  Vektor, his breath broken, turned his head toward Baikal as if he could look at him. “With all these beautiful words, aren’t you forgetting a detail, Baikal son of Exodus?”

  “Which one?”

  The Kahar smiled. “The pots of shit are still full. Go empty them. Empty them, shit boy!”

  The Nehama started. The two rolled on the floor in a clanging of chains, around and around, until they stopped at the feet of the statue of the veiled woman with the dead boy in her arms.

  Here is war.

  Everyone drew back, not daring to interfere even when they saw that Vektor had ended up on the top of Baikal. “You remember it, do you?” the Kahar shouted. “You remember when I held you on a leash? You think you’re free, free to give us death, but you just changed the leash around your neck!” He choked the Emperor with his chains. “It’s not mine, now! And it’s not one you will easily get rid of!”

  Bai freed himself, kicking away his enemy. The son of Vektor tried to run to his father’s help, but he was immobilized. Nailed to the ground, he watched his father move back against the blows of the Nehama. Blood splashed—the claws tore the brown hair, opening wide gashes on the chest.

  “Why?” asked the Nehama, jumping against his enemy with outstretched arms. They rolled again to the ground. Claws, fangs and bites—muscles were denuded under the torn fur. This time, Baikal ended up. “Why?!” he asked again.

  Vektor laughed at him and at his tears, shaking his head. “Hate is the leash,” he said. “Hate is the prison. Don’t you understand that, my brother of misery?” He slowly turned his head and opened his eyes in a gap to look at his son—a smile of blood which contained all his will to live. “Kill me, Baikal son of Exodus, and grant death to my son. This won’t make your torment milder, nor our world fairer.”

  Baikal grabbed Vektor’s head and slammed it against the floor.

  One.

  “No.”

  Two.

  “No!”

  Three times.

  “NO!”

  A puddle of dense red blood spread to the ground, at the slow pace of the smile of Vektor, who replied, “Yes,” in a feeble whisper. “Empty the pots. Empty the pots…shit boy!”

  “NO!”

  Baikal banged the head of his enemy and brother for the last time, and even Dagger could hear the sound of the skull breaking. The black beast’s eyes rolled backwards, the gnarling jaws relaxed. The copious blood pulsed from the nostrils to feed the death flowing on the floor.

  Baikal threw his head back. “THE FATE OF KTISIS AWAITS US ALL!” he screamed. “There’s no way to turn back! There’s no way…there’s no way to…” He squeezed his eyes. He clutched his face on Vektor’s chest, his fists closed. Soon his hands opened and slowly his blind hatred turned into a hug.

  Nobody dared say anything as the Nehama watched over Vektor’s body. Lying in their blood, the two energumens seemed small and fragile.

  Only the Kahar’s son found the courage to keep his head high. He approached the dead body of his father buried under the white mass of his assassin. No one stopped him, not even Baikal, awakened from his pain. The boy showed no fear and didn’t avert his eyes from those of the Nehama’s.

  They remained one in front of the other, the past and future hatred.

  The Emperor took the boy’s hands and broke the chains. He looked into his eyes. “Go,” he said. “And come back when you will be.”

  The young Kahar didn’t answer. He stroked the thick black hair on his father’s ches
t, at the height of his heart. He pulled off a handle of it by cutting it with a claw and left the room, leaving a deep silence behind.

  From father to son, Dag thought. From the cradle to the tomb.

  One by one, the Faithful ones went away and the Nehama guards followed. Soon only the dead kept them company, the endless skulls with their black, curious eyes.

  Sitting on the floor, his back against the mole of the enemy he had just killed, Baikal stared at the flames so intensely that it seemed it was his gaze that fed them. “Dagger,” he said. “Listen.”

  The boy stepped forward, as the great head of the beast turned to him.

  “I don’t have much time. We must penetrate Asa and eliminate the Disciples who control the Beshavis, the last clan in the ends of an enemy.”

  Dag widened his arms. “If I could really defeat them, don’t you think I—”

  The Emperor growled, and Dagger said no more. He thought his head would fit perfectly the mouth of the beast without even scratching against the canines.

  The voice rose from the dark, “Your demons. Do they ever let you go?”

  Dagger would recognize it even in the middle of hell. They both turned and looked for her, but didn’t find her. Where are you?

  The fragmented whisper of a thousand bones preceded the sound of the hinges. Dagger saw the skulls moving threateningly forward from the dark, then a door hidden behind the maternal statue opened. It had to be the same used by Baikal to move, unseen, in his tower.

  Kugar appeared in the twilight of the arch, dressed in rags. “The temple of Ktisis. That’s always been the key, and you know that better than me. Both of you know that, maybe, you stubborn wet ends.”

  Dagger looked again at the enormous white beast.

  “Yet you, big brother, want to destroy it.” The girl advanced. “Because you are rough and ignorant, despite the gift of Hanoi. You consider that temple the cause of our father’s ruin and of all the evils of the world. The curious thing is that you may even be right.”

  Baikal growled softly. “Girl. You’d better keep your mouth shut when you’re not using it to suck the cock of your uncle.”