The flames dashed up into the sky, tearing at cleanliness, a film of dust and dirt floating outwards, coating people and buildings, muddying them, blocking nostrils, ruining taste.
He grasped for the air surrounding him, reaching out for it, and it shivered as though vibrating at his call, tingling in greeting, a private greeting, felt and shared with him while remaining obscured from all passing eyes, with no outward show. There were no words to describe it. For it was not touch, or sight, smell or taste, he couldn’t hear it but it was there, unmistakable to him, calling out to him, telling him of its existence. It seemed to tingle with a billion invisible lines, always moving, changing, floating, but at the same time staying connected. It was as though his whole body could breathe in this connection, breathe through it, become part of it, connected to its movements, to its existence, almost one with it. His sense of it faded with distance, yet he knew instantly that it was out there in all things. It ebbed and flowed with the wind, it was taken away, gliding out of reach to be replaced by more of the same, the same yet different. He felt the loss of the passing air as he felt the greeting of the new, all spoke to him, all was connected to him.
This was Daygo’s flow. The realisation sent momentary wonder through him. This was life, this was all things, flowing, connected, moving. Movement was life, movement was existence. He knew it in that moment, knew its truth, understood it as one with it.
He lifted a foot forward, slowly, testing. His leg responded as it had before, despite so much more awareness, despite his body being alive with sense, tingling all over with it, breathing it. He was ten times the scale.
He was held within, amidst this flowing sense all around, that seemed to be of him and yet separate, the same as him yet different, as though the encasement of his body withheld him from joining his brethren, from joining himself, from becoming whole once more.
He could feel the force of it flooding through him. He pulsed; slowly, never rushed, constant and yet at the same time too fast to recognise, too miniscule to notice, he just knew. He breathed in life’s essence through every pore, and it filled him up and rushed through him, inflaming every instinct and urge and fiery emotion, magnifying it by ten, allowing it to flow free, loose, no longer restrained by the tight, constant grip of human consciousness and thought. He was free; to be, to act. Guilt lessoned and grew small. There was no guilt to life, to nature. There was only action and movement, destructive and constructive, and all things were born anew.
His emotions flooded with life, with feeling, boiling forth, free and exaggerated, unafraid, not restrained by conscious thought; allowed to roil within as they were created, allowed to take form within himself, allowed control, allowed to dictate thought as opposed to thought dictating to them. Thought became an offshoot, directed and restrained by the emotions within him, it became a tool of feeling, a tool of vibrant, destructive life, an expression like the movements of his body, no longer the dictator, the decider, the tyrant of what was within him; now it was ruled, now it was dictated to, now it could lie in chains, restrained and screaming for freedom, it could be released at the whim of emotion, at the whim of life.
And Rage was in control; turbulent, vicious, lustful rage. It looked out at the men before it. Racquel, it was the whisper of thought, but thought was no longer in control. Rage knew the answer now. Thought was a bi-product. Vengeful hate, deprived for so long, repressed, boiling, crying out for freedom, crying out for expression, hungry, thirsting to be satisfied. His body seemed to shake with it, the air around him seemed to shake with his fury, not in fear but in recognition, in simple response to the force of it, the force of nature, ready to burst forth into destructive action, as was nature’s call, as was its right to do. It was answerable to no one; it just was. That was it. It simply was. Unexplained, unforgiving, uncaring, indiscriminate in its expression. It was life, it was movement, it was all.
And it was confined within Liam, it was acting through Liam, it was miniscule and individual within him, it was his peace and it would act.
The men spread out all around him, circling. He could hear their voices, their taunts. They filtered through, playing their part.
Liam smiled. “You’re all going to die.” His arms lifted to spread wide to either side, his dagger held lightly in his right hand. They laughed at him, though some seemed nervous. It was irrelevant to Liam. Pain, terror, death; this was what he longed for, this was what he urged for and it was overwhelming within him. They began to enclose their circle, cautiously approaching him as one.
The first man moved and the air spoke to Liam, the air told him what his eyes could never do, every slight shift of weight reflected in tiny little refractions, tiny little movement, singing out to him, telling him instantly, in constant flow. Liam moved instinctively as his opponents did. He responded to their movements as they made them as opposed to after they made them. They moved and he moved. The man’s body readied, it turned out and then inwards sharply for the thrust of a blade. Liam had reacted, had set himself into flow, even as the man only readied himself for the blow; by the time he made it Liam stepped simultaneously forward and to the side, his knife entering simply into his throat. Liam flowed away from the sword swinging from behind his back and stepped back in as a man’s knife thrust came for his new position; he raised his knife as he moved, cutting long along the man’s exposed forearm, using his strength and the man’s momentum to deadly effect, moving away from the next stabbing blow as he did so, all one flowing movement. He stepped back into the screaming man, sucking in his stomach and rolled around, ducking below the downward swinging axe that buried itself into the already dying man’s shoulder, his knife stabbed roughly into the axeman’s thigh, just behind the protective flap of leather. He wrenched it free, turning, stepping back and then forward, dodging the panicked and awkward swing of a shortsword, his knife slit across the man’s wrist as he ducked underneath his arm, coming up on the other side of him, using him as a buffer against the next charging man, a man that he had been tracking, feeling, for seconds, knowing he was coming and when he would arrive.
But his hate wasn’t satisfied; after the first two fell, dying, he wanted more. He wanted more pain, he wanted more anguish, more suffering. He altered his cuts, altered his flow. He wanted to slow them, cripple them so he could elongate his own satisfaction. There could never be enough.
“Not enough,” he whispered. The charging man was forced to slow and swipe his comrade’s arm away, whose weakened hand lost grip of the sword. Liam was already stepping into the space created by the attacking man’s clearing movements, knowing what was going to happen, able to read it, see the future before it happened, his being processing every minute detail, knowing it clearly, easily, obviously. He cut above the man’s eyes with a backhanded swing, smoothly splitting the skin above his eyebrows as the short sword clattered and rang on the floor amidst the cacophony of grunts and cries of his assailants. Blood instantly poured down, blinding him. Liam didn’t stop for an instant, he moved with the precision of a master dancer re-enacting a set routine that had been performed to the point of it becoming second nature. He never moved too fast or too slow, never rushed; every step, duck and dive controlled, finding the right space, stopping in time, changing direction in time. Every pocket of safe air called to him as the men converged upon him, telling him of its existence.
“There will never be enough!” he shouted in rage. There was not enough to satisfy him here, to satisfy his thirst; years of torment had dug the well deep and ever deeper. It was a gaping hole that needed to be filled with blood. There was not enough blood here to fill it. He stepped forward, into the throng of stumbling men pushing at each other for space. They started to panic as his knife arm stabbed with more speed, with a frenzied lust for blood and pain and punishment. They fell away, crying out, swinging arms awkwardly thrown before them, unbalanced swipes of weapons desperately swung in his general direction, trying to fend him off, get him away as they stumbled backwards, away fr
om one another. Liam barely had to move to avoid their careless blows. His knife dug downwards diagonally, cutting through the cloth of a man’s tunic and slicing the genitals beneath.
“I need more!” Spittle flew from his mouth. They would all pay, they would all burn in his hellfire; there could never be enough to their suffering. Screams rang out through the street, some from the audience that had built to watch the gang’s justice as they turned and ran in fear.
The men backed away, stumbling backwards, crawling on the ground in terror. Liam followed them, ensuring none escaped. He turned but was too late as one man found his feet behind him and started to sprint away. Liam roared in rage at the back of his sandy-coloured head. His gaze fell on a man and a boy standing in a doorway three houses up, the boy grasped firmly by the man’s left arm. The man’s eyes met Liam’s, and he backed away in terror. Liam stepped towards them but they turned and ran.
He turned back to his three remaining subjects, too crippled to move, and set to work. Their cries and screams travelled through the empty street, reaching around corners and in shuttered windows. Sometimes eyes peeked out, but Liam would find them and once they had met his fiery gaze they returned behind their wooden protection.
As the last man eventually died, Liam fell to his knees.
“This was not enough,” he whispered into the dead quiet of the street. Not nearly enough. All of a sudden, a force came flooding down on top of him, like a dam had broken and an avalanche of water crashed onto him, knocking him senseless, to collapse to the ground beside his dead.
8. Foreboding
Leandro sat cross-legged in front of the assembled priests. He had been allowed to pray with them in the strange humming dance that they partook in every day at sunrise. He had tried his best but simply could not perform many of the movements and postures involved in their prayer. There was a hidden strength and flexibility to the priests that was incredible.
They were the famed Walolang de Kgotia. The nearest translation that Leandro could find was “stream soothers”. He thought that this meant the Daygo stream, for it was his understanding that these men were priests of Daygo, part of one of the many subsects of an ancient religion almost gone from existence, the most ancient of all. Thought by many to have been the first, the original, that all had subsequently stemmed from. Leandro could only imagine that what remained of that original was so diluted and warped by thousands of years of human interference as to be almost unrecognisable. Leandro knew of no religion that was not, in some way, based upon what was known by historians as the first religion of Daygo. Though some, such as the Levitan Church, only seemed to use this historical reference to fill in the gaps.
He had entered the forests of the Chewe people in the mountains north of Darwin six weeks previously. It had taken him since then to find the priests. The conditions, as he trekked through the rainforests, had been enough to drive him half mad. The air was hot and thick with moisture, the constant humidity becoming so bad at times that he struggled to breathe, having to stop every ten or fifteen yards for a break. Often leaning against a tree as opposed to sitting down. His every footstep was haunted by paranoia as to what may lie beneath it. Snakes and rat-like creatures had often scuttled from his path or reared their fanged heads before him, causing an agonised shriek of panic from his throat as he stumbled or jumped back. He had felt as though he was under attack from the environment and often found himself wondering how any of the tribes survived in such a place. His sense of disbelief had increased when he saw them running through the trees in their bare feet. He had more than once praised Levitas for his thick leather boots, which, while causing his feet to sweat profusely, had saved him from a poisonous snake bite and Lev knows what else since his arrival in the forests.
Some habits were hard to break. Despite his loss of faith, he still sent thanks up to Levitas after lucky escapes and found himself unconsciously beseeching Him for good luck before he realised and stopped himself. His mind seemed an empty cavern without that divine presence occupying it.
He had come across numerous and varied forest tribes on his path to the temple, managing to avoid long stints on his own. He had found them a fascinating and refreshing people. There was nothing within their lifestyle and ways that was familiar to him. They seemed utterly apart from the rest of the world. All modern medicine and scientific advances were lost to them. They had no metal, apart from a few rare pieces that they wore for decoration, picked up from what might have been left behind by the rare traveller that had passed through the woods.
This he had used to his advantage, trading the copper coins that he had on his person for food and information far outweighing their worth. He wanted to learn all that he could, ready to write about it in great detail when he returned home to write the journals of his travels. He tried to commit everything about the tribespeople to memory or write, in shorthand, on the precious paper of the diaries that he had brought with him.
Leandro had always had an affinity with languages and could speak most native tongues of the different races and cultures within Levitashand, even as many were dying. As a priest, it had been a favourite study of his. But the tongue spoken by the tribes in the Chewe forests was not documented or ever put into print, partly because the Chewe tribes had no writing to speak of and relied completely on the telling of oral histories. It was only through extensive research and quizzing of historians and language experts that he was able to acquire a smattering of words that allowed for basic conversation with the tribespeople. But as he was admitted to the tribes and spent time with them his language grew to the point that he found most things communicable.
They hunted with spears and sharpened axes made from wood and stone. They were ingenious in their use of the forest’s materials around them, using stripped bark and various lengths of vines and plants to tie their weapons and clothing together. Leandro had possessed a preconceived notion that the tribes would be constantly hunting and scavenging for food in the forest and survival would be a battle for them; but he had quickly been disabused of that idea. The tribespeople spent a bare three to four hours every day providing themselves with food, and much of this time was the gentle labour of gathering fruit, nuts and herbs, amidst amiable chatter, which were in abundance in the surrounding areas. Depending on the day, they might spend an hour or two hunting a large forest boar or some other such creature that would supply more than enough meat for the entire tribe. The rest of the day they spent performing odd chores, playing with their children, hidden away in their tents or partaking in some competition or other.
For the most part, it seemed a consistent and relaxed lifestyle. Their diet was surprisingly varied and nutritious. He was also surprised at the lack of difference associated to gender. Outside of the irrefutable responsibilities of a woman to carry and deliver a child, and the hunt for meat, they shared all chores equally.
They were a small race, their average height between five and five and a half feet. They were dark of hair, normally worn to mid length, and round of face with definite and full features. Their eyes tended towards a reddish, brown colour. They had long torsos and short legs, their arms long and dangling below their waists like apes.
They dressed in their environment, with leather and furs from the animals they killed, bamboo-like grasses plucked from the ground and separated until they made a thin, cloth-like fabric that was woven together into clothing, normally to complement the leather. Their chests and lower legs were mainly bare, and they sported a multitude of tattoos in all parts of the body.
On first appearance, they had seemed a wild and dangerous race of people. Carved wooden piercings looped through the middle of their noses to exit out at either side in honed down points. Similar decorations hung dangling from their pierced ears or protruded from their lower lips. The strangest of all was the ceremonial garb of the tribal leader. He wore the bones of his ancestor, the leader before him, strapped all over his body. The spine dangled behind him from his neck, the skull sat li
ke a crown upon his head, the jaw lay loose underneath his own. Shins were strapped to shins and the ribcage bounced on top of his chest as he chanted amidst a burning collection of herbs and plants that let off a pungent odour.
They lived in fear and respect of the Daygo stream, and though they held fear for its unpredictable actions, they also seemed to hold onto a strange sort of acceptance. Life was movement, they would say, that was all, one could never know in which way it would go.
They were honest in their conductions. There was no guile to them, although they did hold a strange sense of humour that often left Leandro the butt of jokes he did not understand. He would sit, smiling dumbly back at them, his eyebrows raised. He had grown affectionate towards the Chewe tribespeople.
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