The Secret of Namana (The Arnaka Saga Book 2)

by Lucia Ashta

  Then, at dawn, two young men dressed in the camouflage of hunters discovered the mother while Coyote was away. The men did not notice the pups concealed by rocks and sagebrush a few paces behind the mother. They did not consider that coyotes would likely have new families since it was springtime and that in killing one animal they might endanger a whole family. They did not notice her swollen teats.

  The hunters were foolish and immature. They did not pause to think about anything; the killing was only for sport. They would later brag of their hunt.

  Coyote was near enough to hear the two shots ring out, their echoes slicing through the air with the same finality as the life they ended. He spun toward the direction of his family and ran faster than he ever had. But he sensed the loss of his partner long before he reached her.

  He checked on their pups and found them safe and well, sleeping groggily as new babies do. Now, his priority had to be their survival.

  Coyote retrieved the five pups and encouraged them to nurse one last time. They drained the milk left in the mother’s body. Then, Coyote moved the pups to a safer spot, one far away from the sights and sounds of nature devouring the body of their dead mother.

  Relocating his offspring took a good part of the day since Coyote had to move them in installments, able to carry only one in his mouth at a time. When he finally settled his family in their new location, Coyote was tired and hungry.

  The pups would pass from this world anyway. Days old, they were not strong enough to survive without their mother’s milk, despite Coyote’s attempts to feed them regurgitated food. And so Coyote had set off to continue with his life, with a deep loneliness saddening his heart. He wandered aimlessly through the mountains until he encountered this woman.

  She was different, and Coyote felt himself drawn toward her. She was open enough to connect to him. He turned toward her and searched inside her eyes under the rising sun.

  8 A Final Act

  The ceremony was solemn. The Temple of Laresu’u Kal’s community was stunned by the violence that had invaded their quiet life. On this day, everyone from the temple was dressed in white. The pupils traded their violet-colored tunics for white ones like the masters at the temple wore. The white honored the peace of Master Tahn’s spirit, now free from the constraints of a body.

  According to temple tradition, Master Tahn’s body was wrapped in a linen cloth that would decompose in the ground. His body was placed in a hole within the earth and then covered with flowers the pupils picked to honor the memory of the beloved master with the easy smile. Prayers went in each handful of strongly scented dirt until the hole was filled. They left the grave unmarked, as all graves there were.

  The body was given to Mother Earth; it was only borrowed to begin with. No one would visit this site in search of a connection to the man. Master Tahn was gone, living fully within the ethers, until it was his time to return to earth once more in another body.

  The soul was free of the body in the ground, and everyone gathered there understood it as they turned and walked back toward the temple. Not one of the forty-nine students, the four masters, or Ashta and Anak—who were neither pupils nor masters at this undefined juncture of their lives—spoke a single word until they passed through the temple gate. There was little to say and much to process. They all knew better than to fill the void with empty words.

  Ashta and Anak wondered at the timing of Master Tahn’s death and what it meant in relation to the attack on Master Sina and Master Kaanra’s departure. The events were likely interrelated, but how? Neither Ashta nor Anak was aware that Tahn had briefly been protector of one of the world’s greatest secrets. They did not know that Tahn’s attacker succeeded in retrieving the parchment scrawled by Dann’s dying hand.

  Tahn died in an attempt to conceal the secret of Dann’s final prophecy. Tahn never read the prophecy and, for a while, delayed the dark’s ability to locate it. But though his restrained action proved wise, it was insufficient to prevent the dark from honing in on the prophecy’s whereabouts.

  The dark had waited for traces of Dann’s final prophecy for over two centuries. For hundreds of years, the dark scoured the corners of the earth for whisperings of its existence. It found none. But eventually, inevitability intervened, and the dark discovered a hint of its survival.

  It was the gathering of the temple masters to discuss Kaanra’s search of the doman that unwittingly brought the secret to the dark side’s attention. Even though this fresh source of thought and energy was tenuous, it was enough to put the prophecy and all that it implied in danger. The temple masters did not realize how jealously the dark side coveted this secret. The dark side desired knowledge of Dann’s final prophecy fiercely, because it knew it was a secret of the light.

  In the end, Master Tahn’s actions proved futile. By choosing not to read the final prophecy, Tahn tried to protect it. And, had his attacker not already known that Tahn possessed this formidable secret, he very well may have succeeded. But Tahn’s attacker did know.

  When Tahn discovered the parchment tucked underneath Sina’s garments, a raven as dark as the moonless night sky watched. Distraught, Tahn did not notice it. If Tahn had not been so absorbed with Sina’s condition and the responsibility she held for the planet, he would have noticed that something about this raven was disarmingly different.

  Master Tahn was well acquainted with the raven and its medicine. It represented the magician in the animal world. The raven could act as a vehicle of white or dark magic; it did not usually discern between the two. Magic was magic, and either type could inhabit the raven.

  Had Tahn detected the raven that spied on him and Sina that morning, he would have sensed the humanity within the animal. He would have known the raven perched in the tree above them was not a raven at all, but a human being with the rare and elusive ability to shape shift. Yet, no matter how skilled the dark master of illusions was, a trace of humanity remained within the eyes of the animal that he could not hide. Tahn would have noticed it.

  But Tahn did not, to his demise. Still, there was a sort of good fortune that would result from the raven being there to witness it all. The raven watched Tahn dispatch the twins to recruit students to help move Sina. The raven saw Tahn find the parchment and choose to exclude the twins from its discovery.

  This exclusion shielded the twins from the raven’s focus. In his dedication to one mission—to locate and retrieve the final prophecy—the raven did not concern himself with the importance of the twin light warriors and how they might shape the destiny of everyone involved.

  While shadowing Tahn, the dark illusionist learned that the master did not reveal the prophecy’s secret to anyone; he did not even read it himself. So when the dark conjuror took the form of a young, innocuous girl by the river the morning after he attacked Sina, he believed he could complete his mission by retrieving the parchment. He thought there was no further need to contain the secret. Sina would likely die, taking the secret with her to the other side. He did not realize then that there was another who knew about the prophecy and was already searching for the doman.

  The dark magician was excited with pride. He anticipated how his overlord would praise him for his fine work. He would bring the final prophecy to the dark side, and the dark would finally triumph.

  It was these thoughts that alerted Master Tahn. Something was not right. Tahn could feel darkness roiling within the image of the innocent-looking girl. The picture did not match the energy. In an instant, Tahn formulated a plan.

  Tahn approached the river. He kept a smile on his face, as if he were enjoying the beautiful sunshine and the flowing water, just as he always did. When he reached the bank, he hiked up his robe, acting as if he were only going to wade into the water. But he did not. Once in the water, Tahn dove in, and he stayed under as long as his breath held. He was trying to soak the parchment within the leather pouch at his waist.

  It was his only hope, to soak the parchment enough to blur the lines of ink and distort
Dann’s final message beyond all readability. But the water had to soak through mostly sealed leather to affect the parchment. When Tahn came up for air, he turned toward the girl, but she was no longer a girl.

  The shape-shifter realized what Tahn was doing, and he ran toward the temple master. All thoughts of illusion left him in single-minded focus on his mission, so the girl reverted to the man’s true form. Master Tahn’s last sight was of a man, gnarled with darkness.

  The man’s features would have been pleasant to look at, if not for the deep-seeded darkness that distorted them over decades. The man was once strikingly handsome, but temptations led him to iniquity, from which he never returned. A nasty edge replaced handsomeness, making the man look vile.

  Tahn experienced the man at his worst. Rage at Tahn’s deceit and fear of failing contorted the man’s face. His eyes bulged in consuming fury as he wrapped his hands around Tahn’s neck; he pressed the life out of the gentle master.

  Instead of saving his life, Tahn resisted his murderer’s attempts to drag him out of the water by his neck. Tahn knew the water was only just now entering the leather pouch, and he concentrated all of his strength on holding the pouch underwater.

  Tahn’s eyes blurred as his brain yearned for the breath of life. But that only made him dig his feet further into the riverbed. The extra moments Tahn bought with the sacrifice of his life were enough to mitigate the catastrophic damage knowledge of the complete prophecy would have had. When Tahn let go of this world completely in a final desperate gasp for air that met with water instead, he left knowing he had protected something more important than a single human life.

  By the time the man dragged Tahn’s upper body out of the water and recovered the wet parchment, only a fraction of the words were legible. In disgust, the man hurled Tahn’s body back into the River Haakal, where the body turned with sightless eyes to stare at the riverbed bottom, murky from the silt the struggle kicked up.

  Tahn should have told Ashta and Anak of the doman the night before. When he was interrupted by Sina’s waking groan, he should have continued. Ashta had intuited that waiting until morning to learn of the doman would be too late, and she was right.

  9 A Trail of Tobacco

  “Coyote is the joker. There is mischief in coyote.”

  Marco swiveled his head around so quickly that he strained a muscle in his neck. Consumed as he was by Elena, who lay on the ground absent from her body, he had not noticed the man’s approach. As Marco surveyed the man now, he could not believe he had not heard him.

  The man was big. He was at least as tall as Marco was, with broad shoulders and a strong presence. How could Marco have missed him? The man stood a respectable distance away and watched Marco hover over Elena.

  Marco forgot the stranger’s question—what coyote was he even talking about?—when Elena began to stir on the ground.

  “Are you hurt, amore? Are you okay?” Marco asked while he ran his hand over her hair and looked her up and down.

  “She is fine,” the man answered, and Marco was again startled that the man had moved in closer without Marco noticing. The stranger was still a body’s length away out of respect for Marco’s protectiveness of Elena, but it was apparent the man thought he had good reason to be there uninvited.

  Marco assumed he would ordinarily be concerned by the presence of an unknown man in this isolated setting, as Elena lay nearly unconscious on the ground. But for some reason, he felt that he could trust this man, and it was a relief to hear him say that Elena was okay.

  Elena tried to open her eyes. It was difficult for her to pull out of Coyote’s consciousness. It was comfortable there, in complete acceptance of the ebb and flow of existence. She didn’t know if she wanted to come back to her body or not. Coyote seemed so much wiser than she felt most of the time.

  “May I touch her? She needs a little help right now.” The stranger addressed Marco.

  Worry surged within Marco who paused only for a moment before nodding a single nod.

  The man moved close enough to touch Elena. He unclasped a brown leather pouch he wore at his waist; a beaded red and yellow bear adorned it. Leather tassels shook and swirled around the edge of the pouch as the man felt around for what he needed. Finally, he pulled out a carved pipe—it too was carved in the shape of a bear—and a small handful of tobacco. He lit the tobacco with a gaudy plastic lighter and puffed away.

  When the smoke was plentiful enough, he said a barely audible prayer of gratitude and honor to his ancestors and relations. Then, he began in the north, facing each cardinal direction in turn, sending smoke out with each prayer. He thanked Father Sky and Mother Earth, Brother Sun and Sister Moon, and, finally, he turned his prayers inward, to his heart center. Only after all of this did he return his attention to Elena’s prone body.

  He pulled in a big breath of tobacco, placed the still-smoking pipe on a rock, and kneeled at Elena’s head. He placed both arms on her shoulders and crouched down. In three staccato bursts, he blew the tobacco smoke into the crown of her head. Then, he sat back on his haunches and waited. The smoke swirled up and encircled the stranger in a thick screen of mysticism.

  Elena sensed someone calling her back into her body and reacted. She attempted to open her eyes again. This time, she was able to, although it was still with great effort.

  Through hazy eyes, she saw Marco, always there for her. She felt another person there too. She leaned her head back and saw a man with long black, peppered hair and heavy-looking turquoise earrings. He had a weathered face with tattoo markings on his chin. Then, without meaning to, she fell asleep.

  When she woke up for the third time this morning, the man was gone. Without a word, he had walked off into the mountains. A trail of tobacco marked his first few steps away, his token of thanks to Mother Earth.

  -----

  Despite Master Tahn’s murder that morning, Ashta and Anak’s plans remained unchanged. They would leave the Temple of Laresu’u Kal as soon as possible. It was more important now than before that they leave immediately.

  The twins would have to leave without learning who attacked Master Sina and murdered Master Tahn; they did not understand what a doman was or why the dark pursued Dann’s final prophecy. But there was no one left at the temple to provide them with answers. Kaanra and Sina had purposely deprived the remaining four temple masters of details to protect them.

  Besides, their friends urgently needed their help. A universal imbalance plagued the world. When the dark side reached across an extraterrestrial dimension to commit the unthinkable, the darkness went too far. Stealing souls humans held in the light was explicitly prohibited. The twins had wrongs to right.

  Ashta and Anak prayed that their mission to save Baldub and Carn and to retrieve the cousins’ souls might intersect with the path of their beloved master, Kaanra. Despite their being unaware of what Kaanra’s quest was, and the importance it had for the survival of light on earth, the twins knew that he would likely need support to complete it.

  And so it was that once again Ashta and Anak would leave Arnaka for unknown places and adventures. They arranged a blanket, a set of spare clothes, two empty canteens, and Kaanra’s herbal healing ointments in the satchels their mothers had made for them. Then they went to the food stores at the back of the temple where the community kept its food dry and cool. There they gathered what nuts, seeds, and dried fruits they could fit in their bags.

  With that done, they strapped their swords to their waists. The sun was already high in the sky, but they chose not to delay their departure until morning. The sooner they helped return balance to the planet, the safer everyone would be.

  They turned toward the dormitory halls before leaving to check if Master Sina’s condition had improved. The twins navigated familiar pathways distractedly until they arrived at the corridor outside Sina’s bedroom. Whispered voices slipped through the partially opened door. As Ashta and Anak drew nearer, their hearts leapt. The murmured conversation spoke of Sina wakin
g up.

  Anak reached out and nudged the door open further. When a temple master similar in age to Master Tahn looked up, he responded to the question in Anak’s eyes by nodding subtly. Yes, they could come in. Master Payuu’s long brown hair was pulled back in a braid at his back to reveal tired, red-brimmed eyes. He had slept on a reed-woven mat on the floor next to Sina’s bed the previous night. The remaining four masters were taking turns caring for Sina. They did not want to leave her unattended.

  Master Payuu had slept fitfully, unable to surrender his responsibility for Sina’s well-being fully. Then, he had woken to the tragic news of Master Tahn’s death. Master Payuu and Master Tahn were friends. They had not been close as children, even though they had been around each other regularly since their parents dedicated them to temple life at the age of seven. Once they both chose to walk the path of temple masters, their further bonding was logical. Master Payuu was more timid than Master Tahn was, but they were both affable men, and they enjoyed a pleasant friendship.

  Just as his personality was more restrained than Tahn’s, Payuu was also smaller in stature. He was thin and petite for a man, but his brown eyes were big and round. Payuu was usually silent, a true reflection of the inner serenity he enjoyed.

  Through the disciplined practice of years, Payuu taught himself to avoid chatter of the mind. Eventually, inner quiet became his natural state of being. It was this inner peace that shone through his big, wide eyes and made them look clear and transparent. Payuu was a placid, contented soul.

  But this afternoon, Payuu’s normally bright eyes evidenced shock and concern. He walked over to the twins who hovered inside the door unsure of what to do, and he embraced Ashta in a rare display of affection. Ashta could not remember if Master Payuu had ever hugged her, and she was deeply grateful for his embrace. She held onto him tightly.

  Together, they breathed. They offered each other encouragement and the knowing that all was well despite appearances. They breathed in and out and shared peace, until Master Payuu let go of Ashta to hug Anak.