He felt Vek relaxing and said nothing else.
He couldn’t.
The shit boy couldn’t speak.
* * * * *
His injured, white legs dangling in the void, the shit boy sat on a sort of altar before the pitiless ocean of ruins. The faraway dunes seemed roughened by an impetuous wind, but the expanse of old stone defended there and everywhere the proud Tankars, inhabiting villages as distant from each other as the stars in the sky. He would never get tired of that spectacle, even if it was his prison.
He was sitting on the top of the fortress in the dunes, in the Tormentors’ domain, where the Kahars were waiting to be received by the Last Shaman. He was alone in the world.
I could run away, but where to? What’s beyond? I could die. Yes. I could die and never regret anything. Not anymore.
Then that memory struggled to the surface and he couldn’t put it back down: You will resist. You will live.
He raised his eyes. The stars were hidden by a thick amber blanket—the desert dust, made of what remained of all those who had tried to tame it but ended up becoming part of it.
I thought they could never divide us until they left me the sky. But they did, and they will do it again. I can’t allow it. Do you understand it, Dad? He looked down, the faraway rushing river. He felt its call and thought it would take so little; an accidental movement and then down into the maternal embrace of emptiness.
A shout tore his thoughts. “Shit boy! Shit boy, where are you?”
Rogoh, Nehorur’s handyman, came out of the never-ending darkness. Bai didn’t even try to stand up after he was thrown to the ground.
“There was a reason we left you tied to that pole! Why did you run away?”
I hadn’t yet seen the stars, today. Bai would have answered, but a kick in the belly took his breath away. And Vektor didn’t tie me tight, after all.
“Let’s go! The damn ceremony is about to begin.”
His eyes fixed straight before him, the shit boy followed Rogoh to the mother tent at the foot of the tower soaring above the Tankars’ world.
He entered the orange twilight, breathing the smoke and the stench of wild fur. Why do they want me here?
Everyone smiled, recognizing him. He went forward among their kicks and spits, his head down, indifferent to his own pain in that hostile place.
A shove made him trip to the ground. The last two Kahars moved away before him, like curtains on the sad stage where he would be a protagonist once again.
Nehorur came forward wearing the ceremonial dress of Asmeghin of all Kahars—the jade chains at his neck so numerous and thick they nearly covered his whole bare chest. The short golden skirt was tinted with lapis lazuli powder and adorned with red gems. The black make up intensified his disturbed and cruel gaze, together with the blood red mane descending to his sacrum.
Even that day the Asmeghin hadn’t renounced his inseparable necklace of ears. The boy didn’t take long to recognize his, white as a gem in the middle of the mummified cartilages.
Nehorur had a blade in his hand.
Everyone was laughing.
The shit boy stood up. He closed his hands into fists and didn’t speak so as not to lose his tongue. Or I will never talk to Tusday again, he thought with a painful hint of sarcasm. He remembered her laughing in his arms, and the days spent watching the stars together.
The stars. He remembered her stupid snigger as she went away after having sacrificed him on the altar of a better life. No physical pain could ever make him forget that. He was ready. He was ready for everything.
He put his hands to his torn jacket and bared his chest looking straight before him.
“Oh, are you really afraid I will kill you?” Everybody laughed at Nehorur’s wild burst of laughter but, when he stopped laughing, everyone stopped laughing with him. “Or maybe this is what you hope for? No, no. You know we were forbidden to kill you. It would be impolite to do it here in the home of the Tankar who has spared you, and then… I’m not that evil.” The Asmeghin walked around him as the shit boy lowered his hands again, the glare of the torches reflecting on the white hair of his chest.
“We forbade you to reproduce, but you wouldn’t listen.” Nehorur approached, the light of the flames dancing on his red fur. “Of course it’s hard to tell if your voice has lowered, but your body speaks for itself.” He patted the boy on the back. “Look at his thorax, look at his muscles. He’s not anymore that little slip of a boy entering every hole to clean it from the shit.” Nehorur made him lose balance with a kick and Bai fell. He pulled himself up with a knee on the floor and his head bent. “Aren’t the signs of his coming of age so clear?”
All too quickly the shit boy understood what Nehorur was getting at.
The Asmeghin grabbed the boy’s right leg and raised it in the air. “It looks pretty clear to me. Look at that! We gave you back your life and you reward us like this?” Everyone laughed again. “Now any moment might be good for him to impregnate one of our daughters.” Nehorur let his leg go and turned to his audience. “What do you think I should do?”
“Cut off his balls!” a Kahar shouted.
“Let him swallow them, like that dog his father should have!”
Nehorur urged everyone to keep calm with a theatrical gesture of his hands. And nodded. “I understand your point of view. I thought we could leave him just enough to distinguish him from any bitch in heat, but I agree we need a more permanent solution to our prob—”
“Nehorur!” a thundering voice swept the laughter away.
The Asmeghin tuned around, annoyed he had been interrupted in the middle of it. He didn’t seem to calm down when he realized that a simple first shaman of the temple had dared so much—a Beshavis, on top of that. Nehorur advanced lockstep toward him.
The young shaman resorted to the only formula that could resolve his present situation, “His immensity, the Last Shaman.” He bowed and quickly disappeared behind the tent he had just come out of.
Bai took the opportunity to vanish in the darkest corner.
Nehorur came to find him there. He appeared between two wings of the crowd and threw a rope at his neck, trampling his left hand with the intent of breaking all its bones.
Argh! The shit boy brought the wounded hand to his chest. He didn’t scream.
“Try to ruin my life once again, if you can! Try to work like that, if you can. If you’ll empty one bucket less, I will pop your eyes out and make you eat them!”
Vektor ran to his father. “Dad, he’s coming! What must I do?”
The Asmeghin took his son by the scruff of his neck and handed him the rope to which Bai was tied. “My son. This is my gift to you on the day you’re becoming a Shaman apprentice. Hate. Never forget hate, and keep it close. We can’t afford bullshit today.” Then he added, “Let me do the talking.”
Vektor turned the rope two times around his hand. “Stay, friend,” he said and there was no sign of mockery in his voice, as if he just wanted that none of them ended up in trouble.
The members of the Kahar clan sat in order of importance on the wooden boards and waited.
“Come,” Vektor whispered. They walked forward until—on all four and barely lowering his left hand which throbbed with pain—the shit boy could see between the legs of the bystanders what was happening.
The voices dropped of a sudden. The shit boy was sure he would never forget that: the most complete silence, in which even the fire seemed to try to burn slower.
Out of the tents two shamans appeared carrying long poles on their shoulders. Then, out of the nothingness behind them, emerged the old and putrid figure of the Last Shaman sitting on his throne. It was surrounded by flies. The sparse hair covering his body was white, like the underlying skin and his eyes staring into space. His body looked fragile under the simple linen vest he wore, but drops of jade and amber adorned his wild mane gathered in tails as thick as ropes, together with small chains of purple amorphis. His skeleton hands, and arched, lon
g nails rested on the arms of his throne as he advanced.
The smell of withered flowers reached Bai’s nostrils, a useless attempt to hide the old, dirty, and stale stench underneath—and the reek of shit, which Bai would have recognized even in the middle of hell’s stink.
The synchronized pace of the litter bearers was the only audible sound in the silence suspended in the air thick with smoke. The four shamans marched to the middle of the tent and put the litter down with slow movements, kneeling at the side of the Last.
Now the flies were flying no more. They had landed on the old Tankar’s skin, and it seemed they were looking straight ahead.
Whoever he is, the shit boy thought, he should be dead already for a long, long time. Bai had never met him, not even when his father took him to the holy ceremonies. Why is he considered so powerful?
Nehorur put one knee to the ground before him. “Skalmold, Last Shaman,” he said. “Thank you for the privilege to bow in your presence.”
A silence halfway between embarrassing and solemn followed. The ancient figure on the throne didn’t answer. It seemed he hadn’t even heard the Asmeghin’s words.
Nehorur cleared his throat. “And we’re happy that—”
It was then that the ancient Tankar opened his mouth to slowly pronounce, “A dog’s breakfast has taken place.”
The shit boy felt discomforted to hear that voice, so strong compared to the frail body it came out of. There’s something… something in him that is not like it should be. Something that doesn’t belong to this world.
Nehorur swallowed a lump of saliva, the shit boy clearly saw that. “You’re right,” the Asmeghin said. “And I’m ready to offer my firstborn in exchange for the most faithful servant you lost because of Gorgors’ treachery.”
“Lost because of Gorgors’ treachery, you say,” Skalmold repeated, bringing the chill in the tent. “Betrayed, I say. Sold to an enemy way more powerful than you, an enemy able to manipulate your pain and will. And you, his slave, led the holy Tankar army to their ruin against the Pendracons’ Fortress.”
“Victory was at hand!”
“But there was an unexpected element in your path, named Crowley Nightfall.” Nehorur looked down, waiting in silence for the rest of the Shaman’s words. “Yes, you impulsive Kahar Asmeghin. You lost. And with your fool actions you risked bringing disaster on all of us.”
Nehorur bent his head. “Yes,” he answered. “I lost.”
“And if all this weren’t enough, you denied Ktisis and embraced Sep-hul-turah.” Skalmold slowly shook his head. “The watcher of the vagabonds and the exiled. This is their cult, the cult of humans, who have always thought the endless changing of existence a punishment, unable to understand that change is the aspect of life itself. As long as everything changes, everything exists. As long as everything is destroyed and regenerated, everything survives.” A shadow crossed his eyes. “But it’s not my duty to discuss the decisions of the clans. I didn’t want you here to judge you. I can’t put myself in the place of chaos, which will find the way to you and take you to victory or into the hot sands of hell, as it will deem appropriate. I am here to watch. To listen. To understand.”
His voice was followed by so deep a silence that when he spoke again, Skalmold’s voice seemed to rise from the conscience of Bai, hypnotized by the turbulent melody of his words. “What must I do to keep the nomad and warrior civilizations of the desert together, now that the external element, the powerful unknown, has fallen on us with all its violence? The other Asmeghins have already been here, you are the last. Where are we going, in your opinion? Where is your goddess taking us?”
“To the end of the road. The Tankar Dawn.”
Skalmold smiled, his frozen sneer suspended on all of them like a crescent moon on the world. “The road,” he said. “The road doesn’t exist. We create it with our path, and we direct it toward our ruin at every wrong turn. What made you think you could get your hands on that temple or allow anyone else to do it?”
“Aeternus is the messiah we—”
“You hope Aeternus can give you back the mother of your son, when she was killed by the temple he desires so much, and the disease that spread out of it.” That didn’t seem a reproach anymore, but a mere observation. “I know your happiness, Asmeghin, the one you lost. The arms of whom we love, the only safe place.”
Nehorur’s hands locked into fists. He seemed on the verge of bursting. “Things were different, once.”
“Things never get back the way they were,” the Shaman answered. “They never do. I’d want that too, but the river of time flows only one way.”
The shit boy shivered. Those words… he thought.
“You…” Nehorur said.
“Yes. Me,” Skalmold said. “I am the Last Shaman, and I’ve been here for a long, long time. I am the one who was awakened by the call and I know that to be responsible for a power means to defend it from who may use it for his purpose, so blinded by his past that he can’t see any tomorrow. You and the shadow who took possession of all your hopes are so similar, in the end. What would the charm of power be, if it didn’t watch over us all but was enslaved to the will of an assassin? This is what’s happening because of you, and I don’t know how to impede it.” He coughed once. “The Balance is disturbed, I can feel it. You are too blind to see.”
The Asmeghin bent his head and the dead ears followed his movement. “I am ready to pay for my actions.”
A sneer appeared again on the Shaman’s face. “Some crimes are too big to simply pay for them. I was passing my knowledge down to Exodus, Asmeghin of the Nehamas, so that one day he could take my place. He would become the Guardian of the river that flows under the world and keeps us all together. You Asmeghins didn’t take only him away from me. You took away the time I dedicated to him.”
“Gorgors killed him.”
“You killed him by marginalizing him and leaving him alone against Aeternus, the man who got into his head to revenge against his god. Don’t sell me the Gorgors story.”
“I’m offering a substitute for your…” Nehorur paused. “Faithful Nehama.” He made a nervous gesture toward his son.
Embarrassed, Vektor reached his father, who put his proud hands on his son’s shoulders. The young Kahar had taken with him the Nehama on his leash.
“I see you’ve respected my will to the end.” Skalmold smiled. “That’s good. The young Nehama has learned hate, and hate keeps a mortal alive, it gives him strength.” He opened his mouth to continue, then he tilted his head to the side in an unnatural way, his every muscle contracted by a force no one would expect in such a scrawny body. The veins on his neck swelled as if a river was flowing inside them.
For a second, the shit boy expected to see him burst out laughing, yet Skalmold didn’t move. Is he… dead?
The litter bearers at his side looked astonished, but the Last Shaman wasn’t unconscious. He was breathing fast and raised his eyes to the great emptiness weighing on all mortals.
He moved backwards as if he had been run over by the impetuous desert wind, with such a violence that he pushed the throne and the bearers themselves. A moan laden with pain escaped his lips, “No,” and soon it became a yelp, “No! You can’t bring him back to this world! Not him!”
Bai saw them for a moment, and for a moment he was sure he was the only one who could see them—the white appendages surrounding the throne, the viscid tentacles which had followed Skalmold beyond the curtains he had come out of.
The thin tentacles were all under tension and seemed to pulse toward the old body of the Shaman.
Skalmold said nothing else. He kept staring upward, in silence.
There’s something in him, the shit boy thought again. Something that doesn’t belong to this world.
* * * * *
The shit boy scrubbed and scrubbed, because that was his job that day too—to remember he was anywhere and anyway the last ring in the Tankars’ food chain.
Nehorur entered the m
other tent. “Still nothing?”
“Nothing,” Rogoh answered, his back resting against a pole. “The sun has set for the second time and he’s still sitting there on his damn throne. They say he’s ill, sick with the same disease that’s decimating us. It’s that temple, I tell you. That cursed temple.”
“Talk respectfully about him, at least in public.”
“Perhaps he’s just meditating. I heard they can stay like that for years, but he’d better wake up. This age is not short of changes.”
Nehorur unsheathed a long, sharp curved blade. “I told you to watch your mouth, dog!” He looked at the motionless body of Skalmold, and the three young shamans sleeping with arms and heads resting against the litter. “We could be heard.”
Rogoh brought his cigar to his lips. “By whom? I only see the shit boy here.”
Bai made sure to keep his head low. He rubbed and rubbed. No, please. Not again.
Nehorur’s Faithful laughed, probably looking at Bai. “What do you think was the meaning of his words? He sounded as if he had tasted a purple cactus.”
The Asmeghin produced a bothered snarl. “Meaningless visions, like the ones of the Nehama he was training like a puppy, do you remember?”
“How can I forget?” Rogoh answered. “How can anyone forget the way he made an ass of himself during the last council of the Asmeghins. I have seen, he said. Maybe he had seen even the Gorgors raping the asses of his cousins over his decapitated body.”
The shit boy kept on rubbing as the adults laughed. He knew Rogoh had spoken like that only to be heard by him.
“Yeah, they meditate and meditate…the problem is they keep on shitting all the while.” The Faithful smoked again.
“Really?”
“Yay, at least twice today. The old Tankar has good guts.”
“Well, we don’t have to take care of that.” The Asmeghin pricked the shit boy with the nails of his foot. “Isn’t that so, my little one? Do you want to be the next Shaman’s apprentice, don’t you? Well, let’s start by doing your job.”
Dagger 4 - The Tankar Dawn: A Dark Fantasy Adventure Page 4