The Sin Eaters
by
Aaron Summers
There is, in all of us, a city of demons designed by the heavens and crafted on earth.
PROLOGUE - LEVIATHAN
The boy froze as the high reeds swayed. Their heavy seeds helped give away his hunter’s presence. His little predator had to learn if she was going to survive. He grinned as he crouched at the marsh’s edge. The twin yokes weighed him down. It was no matter. His father would see him carry both their burdens to market today and would finally understand that sixteen summers was long enough to become a man. He was the strongest boy, maybe the strongest person, on the whole island. He could both carry this burden and still surprise his sister.
The grasses shifted. A nest of frizzled black hair screamed as it leapt. He roared. She skidded as she ran into him and fell on her back, giggling. She looked so much like their mother.
“You better run or I’ll put all this salted shark on your shoulders and make you carry it, little starfish!”
The girl squealed, rolled away, and was gone. She was so fast. He could never catch her. But they had reached the village and the market. He watched the meadow’s grasses part as his younger sister chased imaginary monsters around the village’s low stacked stone wall.
“Hunting for children? Be careful or you’ll catch one.”
A spark fired in his chest. No, his father only teased him. This was part of the journey to manhood. The spark changed through the years, shifting from visceral fear into a simpler tension as he grew into a muscular, leather-skinned fisherman like his father. His father’s eyes changed, too. Gone was the simmering fury that once took so little to provoke. Plum-colored patches lingered beneath the elder man’s eyes, making him look more tired more often than enraged. His sister Ariad had never seen their father’s black rage.
The boy grinned. It would be easy enough to make a child. The village girls fawned over him. His mother teased him about their unwanted attentions. There was time enough for women. Now was the time to show he could provide for a household. If done well, he might take many wives or even becoming a seafaring trader. The mid-morning sun baked the air around them. He wondered if they had salted the sharks well enough.
“Look at the boy we’ve made, Luosa,” his father said. “He carries the burden, tends his sister, and saves his parents’ old backs. Soon he will catch all the fish! We will want for nothing. But we have arrived. Come.”
His father walked past him through the twin posts that marked the village boundary. They were beholden to village law now that they were among its people. He tried to remember everything that meant. The heart law was simple enough: honor your elders. Every other law derived from that. He would keep his mouth shut and let his parents do the difficult work of selling their catch.
Luosa rubbed his aching shoulder as she passed.
“Thank you, son.”
He closed his eye for several seconds in respect and then followed them inside. The village lived. It throbbed with people. They struggled to move amongst each other. He saw many neighbors and enough strange faces to wonder how many trading vessels waited at the long eastern beach. They bumped against him without care for the heavy burden on his shoulders. It would crush someone if it fell. He gripped the straps tighter. They fought to the market center.
The criminal pole jutted from the circular stone platform where the elders made their announcements. Untrusting of his own quivering legs, the boy snuck a brief glance at a filthy ragged man lashed to the tree-sized timber. Long-neglected curled black hair obscured the prisoner’s downturned face. It was no one the boy knew.
His father paused. The fishmongers were not where they should be. The wind blew from the west and so they would be west of the market, but the boy would not tell his father how to find the wind. His back was screaming now. It would surely snap in half. He would be buried beneath a mountain of cured shark meat. They finally headed west, towards the mountain.
A jiggling sunburnt man clapped as they approached. His head, shaved clean in advance of his thinning hair, was bright red in the high sun. He lifted his tunic to mop his face.
“Behold, the shark bane approaches!”
“To hell with you, Tadana,” the boy’s father said.
“And I will take you with me. Heelip, it has been a long time! You’ve brought me your lovely wife. Surely she is tired of your rough hands and desires a more tender husband.”
The men embraced. The boy wondered if his father squirmed in the sweaty man’s soft arms. Tadana was his favored fishmonger, without a doubt, but the man could be such a burden.
“If I liked soft hands unused to work of any kind, Tadana, I would surely find you first.”
Luosa wrapped her arms around the fishmonger’s bulging stomach and squeezed.
“And what is this you bring? Is this... why, you have found the most curious beast of burden. Is that your only son being crushed by the season’s catch?”
Heelip frowned as he considered his impatient son. The load grew heavier.
“Indeed it is. Tell me, how was the sunrise from the market this morning? I am sure you were awake and busy long before dawn’s first light and not out peddling yourself to whichever woman would give you the time.”
The boy’s knee buckled. He grunted, locked his leg, and managed to stop his burden’s terrific momentum from toppling him.
“Was that something you said, boy?” Tadana winked at Luosa.
His other knee buckled and the load fell backwards. The straps around his hard shoulders snatched him off his feet. He tumbled into the dirt. When he rose, his parents and the fishmonger were laughing. His mother wiped caked dirt off his face.
“Your stubbornness may kill you one day,” she said. “Go find your sister. We must haggle with this slippery eel.”
He mouthed protest but stopped. He had seen his parents work Tadana before. They would argue, gripe, and bicker for almost an hour before agreeing on their first price. There was nothing to be learned from this today. He wandered away as he rubbed his aching back.
A creature banged its head on his throbbing kneecap.
“I was just looking for you,” he said.
“Well I found you first!”
He lifted his sister high above his head in offering to Sky. She squirmed in his tender grip.
“You are not so strong! I could carry that twice as far and run the whole way. Show me the market! Come on!”
He lifted her onto his shoulders. After the morning’s weight, she felt less like a burden and more like wind. Besides, from her perch she could see the top of every stall. He knew what it looked like. Brilliant dyes stained every canopy of the hundred merchant stalls. Each was unique so that villagers would know where to find their favored basket weaver, spear maker, fishmonger.
“How do they make the purple?” she asked.
“From a sea urchin. It’s a prickly little thing like you that someone must dive very deep into the water to find. They are rare on our island.”
“I’ve seen an urchin! Have you ever dove so deep?”
“No, starfish. I have no need to test the ocean. The island provides everything we need. Besides, they do not grow here.”
It was the right thing to say. That’s what the elders said, wasn’t it? The island did provide everything. A single sprawling mountain with gentle slopes as black and fertile as any soil he had ever seen helped the distant forest renew itself each year. Pineapple, papaya, and their like grew in abundance. The village never lacked new timber. The flatland meadows provided grasses for weaving and grain for eating.
The mighty god Ocean humbled the island’s bounty, though. It gave life in every way. They could harvest seaweed, catch fish, shark, octopus, and every other kind
of swimming thing, even draw salt from the water and use both. Ocean could be wrathful, too, but the mountain protected them from its worst aggressions.
She kicked her heels into his chest.
“Where does the red come from?”
“You know that one.”
“You say it is dust from the mountain but I rubbed it on Luosa’s cloth and it wasn’t red at all!”
He laughed and leaned her backwards. The little girl’s hands snatched at his corded hair.
“Ow! Child, I have you.”
“Do not tell Luosa!”
“I imagine she already knows a little sea urchin ruint her cloth.”
“Oooh! Where do the blues come from? And the yellows! The pretty greens look like leaves! Where do these come from?”
They wandered back to the market center. The prisoner still waited on the pole. He would wait there until the elders rendered judgement. They were fast with their justice. Usually, they would exile a criminal from the island. It was a fate worse, he thought, than death. He understood their unique place in Ocean’s endless expanse.
Less than seven days’ sail to the setting sun lay as many islands as a person could want, if they knew how to navigate. He had seen them only once during a bountiful fishing season when the whole island ate more fish than they wanted and his father, demanding a higher price, risked the journey to leaner markets. To the rising sun but many weeks away waited more islands. Without his island, any traveler risked thirst and starvation before the eastern frontiers or their western homes. This was why even the raiders respected the island. To take it by force would incur the wrath of all travelers. It would be a crime against Ocean, who gave the island to the world.
The prisoner stirred. He began slurring words into unrecognizable sounds. The boy walked closer. A triple-braided rope held the sun-scorched man in place. He snarled as he whipped his head from side to side.
Ariad screamed. The boy started to retreat but paused. The man looked up. His small eyes, sunken into a craggy face, were focused. He was not a lunatic. The slurred sounds were words. The man was telling him something.
The criminal began shouting. They locked eyes. The boy’s skin crawled beneath a panicked gaze drenched in fear. No man should be this afraid of anything.
The ground rumbled. The man began shouting. He surged against the ropes as they cut into his tattooed arms and bare chest. He had to be a raider. But the boy knew the raider tongues. The man spoke something else. He turned to follow his panicked stare as the ground rumbled again. People were screaming. Their useless voices merged with the quaking ground into a single rumble. Then he saw what the prisoner saw.
The mountain burned. How could a mountain burn? In all his sixteen years, he had never seen it burn. His father and his mother never said a mountain could burn. The elders never shared a story about a burning mountain. No trader warned them of something like this. Had Ocean itself risen up to reclaim its precious waystation, the boy would not have been more surprised.
A glowing angry fire washed from the mountain’s missing peak as black smoke stained the sky. The fire washed into the ancient forest. It burst into flame.
The ground rumbled again. The stone platform cracked. Ariad was screaming. He gripped her tighter to his shoulders. They needed to run. The prisoner understood what was happening. He had tried to warn them. He was still screaming, shouting, ruining himself in bloody abandon against his ropes to escape the end of this world. What else could it be, as the mountain spewed fire from its shattered peak, but the world’s end?
He turned back to the screaming prisoner as the eastern sun dimmed. The sun struggled to shine through a wall of water as high as the burning mountain. The wave began to fall. Ocean itself had risen up to reclaim its island.
CHAPTER 1 – QUESTIONS
A great glowing tree loomed across the field. Its elven light cast a bluish glow in the otherwise dark space that was this open country. As Eliza drew closer, she saw the haze of light was actually dozens of large orbs hung among the ancient oak’s countless curving limbs. It was just a decoration. Her breath fogged the chilled windshield as she exhaled.
The car rumbled along. Pavement had yielded to gravel more than a mile back. She checked her phone again. The green path on her map continued, oblivious to the celestial tree and the winding back road. She would arrive soon.
WhatIsEvenGoingOnHereWhyWas…
She made a fist to dig her nails into her palm. The panicked monologue stopped. She waited, breathless from the new pain in her hand, until she could only hear rocks crunching beneath her rolling tires. It was quiet again. The car rumbled forward.
The tree vanished as the road dipped low. It blossomed back to life as she rounded the last bend. A two-story whitewashed farmhouse camped beside the field where the tree lived. Eliza had not noticed it before and wasn’t sure that it had even been there. Of course it had. The tree distracted her. Most things distracted her these days.
She parked alongside the road. More cars than she could count filled the house’s gravel lot, the grass around it, and halfway down what she guessed was Dr. Behema’s long, lonely driveway. A lot of people were here. She made a gentle fist in anticipation of an outburst that never came. Being here felt different than thinking about being here. A lot of people were interested in Dr. Behema’s invitation. She wasn’t a lone idiot, at least.
The air outside the car was brisk. The defogger’s musky warmth still filled her nose. Even this far north, it shouldn’t be this cold in August. A storm system must be settling in over them. She sighed. The rain might help with the heat during her longer afternoon runs. The morning runs were cool enough. She wrapped her arms across her chest and headed to the house.
The tree’s bioluminescent glow called to her. She stopped twice to look, the first time almost running into a Jeep’s oversized bumper and the second time actually running into a portly older man wearing a wine-colored cardigan draped over thin shoulders. She was jealous. He, at least, had checked the weather before heading to the country. She was wearing the only decent blouse she owned. It was woefully inadequate for anything except the summer heat. The silky emerald fabric complemented her olive skin, or so her mom had said last Christmas. Eliza didn’t consider those things often. She knew she was a plain woman despite the potential of her heritage. The daughter of an Irish-American man and a Latina-Sioux woman should have been beautiful, she thought, as she picked at the blouse.
The man seemed to notice. He slipped the handwoven sweater from his shoulders and offered it to her. Eliza started to balk, felt goosebumps beneath her shaking fingers, and accepted. She draped it around her shoulders.
“Th... th… thank you. Unseasonably col... ugh. It’s cold.”
He smiled in reply. She decided she liked his smile. His teeth were weathered by decades of black coffee and strong tobacco and he smiled with his entire face. She tried to return the smile but found her teeth were still chattering.
“Hmm, yes. Our climate is increasingly erratic, though perhaps for reasons beyond our current understanding. Let us head inside. My party is about to begin.”
Eliza stopped walking.
“Your pa… party? You’re Doc… Doc… Behema?”
“Philip Behema, yes. As you are Doctor Eliza Reyes.”
He had turned back to face her, oblivious to the chill that crawled into her bones. Teal light glinted from his round glasses while he waited for her next question. She followed the light on his face back to the tree.
“Not… not doctor. You did the tree?”
“My wife, yes.” His crackling voice trailed. “Her grandmother planted the tree almost a hundred years ago. My wife grew up playing among its limbs. She wanted everyone who came here to see the tree how she did.”
Eliza glanced at the man. He was looking into his hand, a thumb rolling a golden ring around his finger. He still wore the ring. She would try to remember that he was a human, too, despite her misgivings.
“It’s beautiful.
I watched it for many miles.”
“Let’s go inside. You are the final guest. I feared, perhaps, you would not come.”
They slipped between cars to reach the whitewashed porch and the blazing red front door. His wife had an eye for vibrance. Eliza found her attention drifting back to the glowing tree, beautiful, haunting, until she thought of an anglerfish luring its prey. The tree lost some luster. They were only electric lights, after all.
“Doctor Behema,” she gripped the door handle before he could. “Why are we here? Your invitation, it… it…”
She wrapped the cardigan tighter.
“I don’t understand.”
“There are many things you do not understand, Eliza. Certainly, you have questions. Helena informed me how little she had taught you about our world before she opted for a Magellanic retirement. You are my guest this evening in part so that you have the opportunity to ask me these questions.”
Eliza hadn’t heard someone else mention Helena Haim’s name in many months. She had refused to think it, much less discuss it with other people, and now this man was her employer, sight unseen, on the word of the woman who left her behind. Her cheeks burned as though he had slapped her.
“Helena left a lot of things… unsaid. I’m not here to discuss her tonight, though. Your invitation was strange. I didn’t really understand…”
He held up a thin hand.
“Then why did you come?”
Eliza cocked her head. Hadn’t she just told him that?
“Precisely.” His pleasant smile shifted to a grin she did not like. “Come inside. You will learn much tonight that will lay the foundations for long hours and fine palaver. This is the completion of your education, Eliza. As Helena intended.”
He opened the door. Her rattled mind hardly noticed his hand on her shoulders, easing her inside. Light and warmth overwhelmed her. She tried to dig her fingernails into her palm but the traitorous hand would not respond. More than a hundred people lingered in the antique space too small to comfortably hold so many.
The Sin Eaters Page 1