I wanted to get up, ask, yell, shake them up, but I didn’t. They would hear my heartbeat. They’d know I wasn’t asleep. I was a “ninestar.” And worse, I had no idea what that meant. The Greentooth always told me, “You won’t last even nine nights in the Sieve, you cursed creature.” She never said seven or ten. Always nine.
“What punishment does his mother deserve? Would you slaughter her if you knew her?”
“Slaughter her? I would nail her to a stake. Is that why Sah-Ouna spat on him first?” asked Keko.
“Why else? Sah-Ouna knows the fates of us all and every breath that comes out of our mouths till the day we die. Who do you think marked him as a baby? The Ouna-Mas.”
“Stupid of you, Rouba. Why did you bring him in this pack? With the strong?”
“You shut up. The Goddess decides,” said Rouba.
I had forgotten to breathe for some time.
“Wake them up. It’s time for them to go out.”
The other three woke and ate their gruel quickly. I couldn’t swallow any, as if the mush were made of river gravel. I felt a tickling like a scorpion running up my ankle. It was only a small shiny green stinkbug warming itself near the fire. I’d eaten stink bugs many times when hunger was cutting me in half. In the orphans’ tents. Where my mother had abandoned me. Whoever my mother was.
VII.
No Mother
Island of the Holy Monastery, Thirty-Third Summer.
According to the Monk Eusebius.
An eternal traveler am I, my sandals walk upon all the empires of mortal Kings, but only in the Empire of Heaven do I belong.
And now, as I write the story of Da-Ren, nowhere will I make mention of the name of his tribe, or the names of our Empire and its Emperors as they have already been written down in history. Because this is not the epos of one tribe, of the straw-haired, or the brown-skinned, or the blue-eyed, or the slanted-eyed, or the black-haired. It is not the story of a tribe of the north or the east whose feet once thundered upon the earth before obliterating itself, a victim of its own barbarism. This is a story of every tribe’s rightful thirst for survival, and its lawless hunger for the annihilation of its neighbors. God has not cursed or embraced one tribe alone; anyone may sit to the right or to the left of Him.
And I will make no mention of the dates of the historical age because it is the story of every age from the time that Man made the knife, sharpened it, fastened it to his belt, and fought the abominable beasts and his own despair with his Brother as comrade. Until the time when Woman came between them and the Brothers turned on each other. And Woman planted in their place the seed of the next Man, the better, the stronger.
And I will not refer to the empires and the cities with the names that all remember still. I will intentionally wash them clean, for I can bear none of them, nor omit them from my story, nor write their true names. They are the names of all the cities that fell, and will fall again, into the hands of the barbarians. Even those that still stand unconquered will fall in time. For it is all of these cities, ours and theirs, that deserve to weep for this story. And it is all the fiery deserts, the endless grasslands of the steppe, and the darkest forests made of timber and of stone; these are the wombs that spat out the barbarians and will do so again.
No, I will not mention all this because I am a man of God, still, and this is not my world. I am only passing. My world is eternal, there above in the heavens—neither north nor east have I a curse to cast, neither south nor west do I have to offer praise.
Already fourandten days had passed since I had commenced on the documentation of Da-Ren’s story. The elder monks had decreed that it was to be I who took on the task of the scribe.
“The wisdom of the monk is within his cell, in his solitude, and a great sin indeed it would be for one of the Elders of advanced age to hear the profligate memories of this barbarian,” said the First Elder.
“You are a young novice. You will have all the time to repent, and this tedious task will also serve as your penance,” they explained.
I am eternally grateful to their fear and their laziness.
Da-Ren had been for a year on Hieros Island before he was persuaded to tell me his story. He had spent those months in chains, then exchanging pleas and curses, and finally with ample study of the holy and other books. He was neither a monk nor a novice, nor would he ever become one until all his unholy deeds had been documented. The monks expected him to suffer for his sins, repent, and receive forgiveness. He would accomplish only the first.
He did not attend the holy service, but we offered him food, clothing, and lodging. In exchange, he would fish, carry stones for the walls and the church and other supplies from the cove up to the monastery. The idle receive no food, and the lazy deserve no warm clothes, not even at the Holy Monastery. This was an inviolable rule.
I had taken it upon myself to try to teach him our language as best I could. He could speak quite a few sentences but could not write a single word. I explained to him that I would begin to write down his story only when I deemed him ready in language and mind. He agreed to all these terms because of the assurance the monks had given him that this would save his wife and daughter.
It was the kind of story that one would never read in a monastery. After many years of study, I knew well the language of the saints and the sages and the writings of east and west, but I could not understand even the simplest truths of his tribe. There in the north, between the steppe and the North River, Blackvein he called it, was a world of agony, dark and barbarous, a hell deep within the bowels of the earth.
At first, he believed that we would finish in no more than a few weeks. Initially, I shared that belief and expected him to recite a brief story about his wife and daughter and how their lives were in mortal danger. But I knew nothing of his tribe and every answer he gave me, brought up more questions. At the end of the second week, he asked me if it was necessary to describe with such exhausting detail his childhood years.
I answered, “The elder monks asked you to tell me everything that you saw and lived. Everything, Da-Ren, every pagan custom and any sacrilegious acts.”
I did not know what sacrilegious acts a boy of twelve could commit and what purpose it served to waste so much papyrus and time stolen from my prayers to write this sinful barbaric tale. But these indeed had been their words to me.
It was worse than any rumor ever heard of these tribes. A man of God would never read it, and it would not lead me closer to the gates of Heaven, but to the jaws of Hell. And we were only at the beginning.
Baagh wanted me to stretch the documentation of the story as long as possible, make it as long and detailed as I could, and I tried to do it without exhausting the patience of the barbarian. It wasn’t hard, as we haven’t even started getting into the heart of his tale.
We always met in his bare cell; he sat on the stone floor or the straw mat, I on the stool behind the writing desk. It was never hot in there, not even in summer, the stone walls remained chilly as his story, the small window open to the sea winds and the salty rain. Winter was torture even for a monk, the bone-piercing dampness punished me for every stroke of ink.
“Da-Ren, for a year now you have been pleading for your wife and daughter’s life, but you have yet to speak even a single word of them.”
“I did not fall in love with my wife at thirteen, Eusebius. I could never—”
“But I thought that Elbia—”
“That was impossible. You don’t understand.”
“That which I fail to understand is how the powerful of your tribe could accept exposing their noble-born children to the same trials as the orphaned and the poor. How could any mother tolerate this atrocity against the more privileged—”
“The what born? You have indeed grasped very little.”
“I too have never known my parents, but all the scriptures say family is sacred and parents should never abandon their—”
“No child knew their parents, Eusebius. There was no
marriage in the Tribe.”
“How can that be? You said that Elbia’s mother—”
“The women and children stayed together until the child’s twelfth winter. That could have been Elbia’s mother raising her, then again it may not have been. Whoever she was, she was raising many other children from the same tent at the same time together with other mothers, whether they were hers or not. Any woman with a childless belly and on her feet, would do. If you were lucky enough to have the same woman as a mother for a long time, it simply meant that she was not getting pregnant. And then, barren and useless, she could end up floating face up in the Blackvein along the slave corpses, kissing the vultures.”
“Godless words.”
“Only few could be sure of their true mothers. And no one ever knew who fathered them. Each child had to make up a Legend about his father, a Legend that lifted our blades when our hands could not. No child, from any tent, ever knew who his father was. No woman belonged to one man. A man could have a child with any woman. He would fuck anyone, always from behind to give birth to boys.”
I made the sign of the cross.
Behind our monastery on the western side of the island lay the few mud huts of the villagers who coexisted peacefully with us on this salt-ravaged rock. They would provide us with food and other necessary supplies, and in turn we offered them God’s blessings, their only protection from pirate raids. The First Elder charged me with the task of collecting supplies from the villagers, so I had seen many women. Some were filthy and miserable, looking like the daughters of Satan, but others kept my gaze engaged longer than it should have been.
The First Elder cautioned me early, when the first hair of manhood appeared on my upper lip, “Resist the temptation of the flesh, go to your cell, and pray. The cell will be your teacher and your only guide.”
But my cell would soon become the altar of impiety, as Da-Ren’s savage and licentious tales crawled down dark, lowly paths.
“Let me tell you about my mother, Eusebius. My mother was the horse dung fire of the tent. The fire nurtured me. And my father was a Legend. I will tell you his Legend someday, the Legend I made up for him. And that was the same for all of us, orphan or not.”
“That’s unspeakable cruelty.”
“No, it was very easy. This age-old agreement made my Tribe as hard as iron and as invincible as the wind.”
“To struggle in vain.”
“To struggle only for the glory of the Tribe. We had brothers. Thousands of brothers. All equal. What is cruel and difficult is having a family.”
“No mother waits for her child to return from the Sieve,” I answered.
“And no mother bade her child farewell. Even if it was of her blood when the child left for the Sieve, never to be seen again.”
I never had, nor ever believed it my fate to have, my own family. But this barbarism made me rise from my stool and stop writing.
“Now do you understand, Eusebius, why…I never…”
Da-Ren faltered. Was it possible for one of these barbarians to weep?
He lifted himself from the cold stone floor where he had remained cross-legged for quite some time. With his forehead and left palm, he supported himself on the decaying wall next to the window. His right fist pounded the wall seven times. He had done it before, and every time he hit the wall seven times. The white lime cracks were splattered with red spots as Da-Ren found his words again. “Do you understand now why I cannot speak to you of my wife and daughter before you learn that no one in our Tribe was permitted to even have a wife and daughter? You have to understand that, Eusebius, or else you are going to write shit for a story.”
And with that, he bade me to leave him with a flip of his hand, without even raising his head to look at me. For the entire night during prayer and matins at the break of dawn, I could not concentrate on my invocations. I feared that I may have locked him into his other cell, the one of his darkest mind, and he would abandon the telling altogether. The next morning after the service, I went to him and asked him to continue as he saw fit.
“Tell me, Da-Ren. What did the Guides mean when they said that you were a ninestar? What curse was this?”
“At last, a good question, monk.”
VIII.
Even When the Stars
Thirteenth Winter. The Sieve. Third Day.
I collapsed like a sack of bones in the mud on that third morning. Rouba and Keko’s night whispers were dripping in my head like poison. They followed me from the moment I stood in the field till the mud embraced me.
“Ninestar. I have never seen one in the Sieve…marked by the Ouna-Mas. Da-Ren is sure to have the curse of Enaka. It is the third night today. They will finish him on the twenty-first day. Why do we keep him and feed him meat?”
For the first time, I got inside the head of every child who had fallen and lived their nightmares. I was cold, but I didn’t fall from the cold. I was hungry, but I didn’t fall from hunger. My knees hurt, but they didn’t bring me down.
Defeat crawled up from the dark well of my mind, where the tongues of the two Guides were stirring the curses and the ninestar marks. Defeat found me.
“Why do the weak fall?” Rouba came and asked again, as he had the day before.
I didn’t answer.
“Speak, you rats.”
Their legs burn out, the hunger pierces their bowels, the cold cracks their bones. That’s what they would tell him.
“You? Orphan?” Again, he asked me.
They didn’t fall because of tiredness, hunger, or cold. They fell because they didn’t believe in victory anymore. Defeat had taken hold of their minds. Their hearts burned out way before their legs.
I didn’t answer.
“Will you fall? Are you Wolf or Sheep?”
I didn’t answer. I just wanted to sit for a while, to rest. Just for one breath.
I made the same rounds with my eyes under the first rays of sunlight, but more carefully this time. Sooner or later, I would have to find an escape before the twenty-first day. On each side were sheds that stored the hay bushels, but there were also some for the Guides and their horses to take cover. The Reghen and the Ouna-Mas were not there. Afterward, I learned how to smell death creeping up on us, whenever I saw an Ouna-Ma.
The Wolves’ and the Sheep’s tents were on the south side of the field. Those of the Guides were on the west. A wall of naked oaks stood along the western and northern edges. Before dawn, we could still hear the monsters of the Forest howling. On the other two sides of the camp, stood adjacent sheds that protected bushels of hay and, behind them rose a thick prickly hedge bush, barren of green, a fence of thorns. Once or twice we’d heard children’s screams, dogs barking behind the wall of thorns.
We were trapped in a cage surrounded by Guides and maulers. The dogs would catch my scent in an instant. They would find me before I even had the chance to run out of Sirol. And go where? I had never left Sirol before.
I started fighting my own mind. Defeat had taken control of it.
It’s early. The day has just broken, I thought.
I’m tired, my mind answered back.
Not even three have fallen yet. We have to hold on.
Ninestar, it mumbled.
One boot stepped into my mind, another on my heart, and they were thrusting me downward. I took two steps behind the line as if that would be enough to hide from them. I fell, and my knees sank into the shit-colored mud. I pressed hard with my hands and let out a nervous giggle as my foot slipped back. I got on one knee and pushed again in vain. I was face down on the brown mud. It was daybreak when I fell. I remember that, nothing else.
I didn’t dream of anything. A cauldron pouring darkness.
Two small hands wrapped themselves tightly around me, and the sound of children’s coughing woke me. A little girl with curly hair had cuddled behind me. She was a twelve-wintered but half my size. I was in a small tent with many other children packed like sheep who smelled of puke and piss all together un
der the same hides. Packed like Sheep. I could make out Urak and Matsa, but not Malan or Elbia. Unlike me, those two had remained Wolves for the third straight day. Three of the children were coughing and wouldn’t stop even to take a breath. Their days were ending. I had seen many orphans withering away every winter.
We walked out of the tent. A large pot was standing there, its fire long gone. Before I even got close to it, countless small hands were dipping inside. I was the last to reach it, so only fresh rain and a bit of gruel remained at the bottom. I dipped both my hands to take as much as I could, to scrape the dregs from the bottom of the pot, and I licked my fingers clean. No one had eaten meat here. I could smell the stinking hands of the other children in my gruel.
When I reached the field of trials, Malan approached and asked me, “How is it?”
He never spoke first or much until then, but he wanted to taste my defeat.
“It’s like hunger,” I answered.
“Don’t they have any?”
He was talking about roast meat.
“They don’t have Story,” I answered.
Elbia, Malan, Bako, and Danaka were walking toward me from the Wolves’ side, looking strong, tall, and fed. The night before, they roasted horse meat and talked around the fire. I could guess their words: Sheep, fall, Da-Ren, weakling. It was my flesh that they ripped and roasted.
The fourth day dawned on her face.
They don’t have Elbia.
They have tears and puke.
It was only when Elbia’s worried eyes fell on me that I knew what I had to do: find the Truth of the Ouna-Ma, of the twenty-first day. I couldn’t even count that far.
My belly was empty, but my legs were hard as iron once more. I was hungry for the Story. Elbia walked past me, our palms touched and she left something in mine. Meat, a small piece.
“I kept some for you,” she whispered.
I swallowed quickly before the Guides could see me.
Drakon Book I: The Sieve Page 5