When I looked at him, I realized that there was absolutely nothing that I, or any of the healers, could do to help him, but I ordered all the healers to him anyway. Fortunately, he was the only one injured on the trip, so they could do that.
“You’re going to survive, you’re going to survive,” I told him as I carried him to the House of Healing, “I just know it, you can’t die, you can’t…”
“Asha’rai,” He croaked, “I…”
“No, father,” I was crying now, but I could not wipe the tears off of my face, “Don’t even think about dying.”
When I set him down on the bed, the healers came to inspect his wounds, and I looked at his wounds for the first time. He was covered with slashes, his face a mess of them, and his bared chest even more so.
“There is nothing we can do for him.” One of them said in a stupid, no vile, monotone.
“No,” I was crying rivers now, “Do something! You can always do something, or are all of the old stories about the healers wrong? On all my authority, do something!”
“We would be wasting—” He started but I cut him off with a punch to the jaw.
“Nothing would be wasted…nothing…nothing..” I told him, my voice trailing off as I noticed how the healer had collapsed on the floor, but I did not regret it. No one was doing anything! No one! They were just going to let him die.
“Do something,” I growled, “Or I’ll see that you get the same treatment.”
The healers around me bowed and got to work as soon as that happened, trying their best to treat his wounds. Finally, he touched my face.
“Asha’rai…my daughter…you have been so good…but now is the time to stop.” He said.
“Stop what?” I asked my father.
“Stop…trying to…heal me…you must learn to accept that some things cannot be fixed.”
And at that moment, he died.
I cried, I wept, I sobbed so hard that there is no word for how much I cried. I do not remember the crying much, only that I dropped my face to my father’s chest and cried so hard that the bandages started to come off as the tears soaked through the bandages.
No, I thought, Not my father…not him…why…he couldn’t have died…he couldn’t have…he’s so good…God would never take him from me.
Somehow I was shaking him. “Wake up!” I screamed to my father. “Wake up!”
I knew that if he actually did wake up he would scold me, or maybe I didn’t, but I didn’t care any which way.
“Dear Lord, father—wake up! This is not funny! Wake up!”
But no, he would not wake up, no matter how much I shook him and cried into his bandages.
Everything was such a blur, all of the healers coming and going, Ani’sja trying to comfort me, saying that we all fell down and that what really mattered was getting up.
I must’ve punched him in the jaw or something because he stumbled away, crying, too.
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.
Finally, after an untold amount of crying, I finally was forced from my father’s body by someone—maybe Ani’sja—I didn’t know—someone who cared about me and took me home no matter how much I punched them and protested. Finally, I slept in my own bed.
But the next morning, I could not help myself. I cried and cried. What was life, in not one to live with love, and what was love if you lost it so quickly? Why had He taken my father from me? Why had all of this happened? Why…why?
Those were the thoughts that I thought as I wept. Finally, sometime later, I summoned up my courage and went to the House of Healing.
It was a large longhouse, abnormally large, with many beds, and two entrances. It was all made out of wood and string. Healers clustered around beds, treating various patients.
When I looked for my father, I realized that his body was not there.
I walked up to the nearest healer and demanded, “WHERE IS HE?”
“Where is who?” The healer, an old woman, asked calmly.
Enraged, I punched her, but was able to control myself this time, and simply punched her in the arm rather than in the face. The woman almost collapsed.
“YOU KNOW WHO I’M TALKING ABOUT!” I roared. “My FATHER, you dumb little piece of crap.”
“He—” The old woman stuttered, “Has been—moved—to where he will permanently rest.”
“He had a FUNERAL and no one told ME about it?” I roared.
“Er…” She said, “No, he—didn’t…he—he’s not having a funeral.”
“WHAT?” I was enraged, obviously. I was so enraged that I was ready to strangle this stupid old mother—
“Er—not yet.” She said.
“And I haven’t been informed of the arrangements?” I was more than angry now. They wanted me to not even know of his funeral when he was my own father? This was an outrage! This was evil!
I slapped her and got ready to punch her when I was grabbed by the legs and dragged out of the House, thrown a few feet for good measure as the door closed.
I ran back and banged on the door.
“LET ME IN!” I roared, but they would not. I do not know how long I stood there and hollered but eventually somebody came out and led me back to my hut. By that time, I was crying.
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Ani’sja was in my hut and he sighed. “Dismissed,” He said to the person that led me back to my hut. The person—whoever they were—bowed and walked away.
“Asha,” He said, using my nomen for the first time, using the name that I was only allowed to be called with my husband, “It’s okay.”
“No it’s not!” I sobbed.
“No, Asha,” He said, hugging me, “I know what it’s like. You don’t want to hold it back, you don’t want to stop the tears, but believe me, the only way to move on is to accept what happened and move on.”
“NO!” I was acting like a child now, but I didn’t care one bit. “I can fix this. There must be a way! There’s always a way! That’s what he said.”
“What who said?” He asked, almost dumbly.
I backhanded him this time, then sobbed with shock of what I had done.
“What have I done?” I sobbed, trying to embrace him.
“You have done what was natural,” He said, “It’s like that for all of us, at least in my experience.”
I nodded, still sobbing.
“Please,” I said, “Please forgive me.”
“Don’t worry,” He said, “I forgive you. I will always forgive you.”
“No,” I thought about what I had done, blinded by the grief, yes, but still bad, “I don’t deserve your forgiveness.”
It was all rushing into me, all of what I had done, and most especially what regret I felt. I had done truly horrible things, I had backhanded elders, I had punched a healer in the jaw—none of this was justifiable.
I put my head against his chest and cried, and had a sudden realization: all of these feelings made me weak. If I was going to restore humanity to its former place, if I was going to usher in the golden age, I could not let my emotions dominate me. I had to learn to become one without emotions. I did not say anything to him on this, for he would surely denounce my views, saying that I was crazy or something, that we should all feel emotions.
But emotions were a minor loss compared to this.
And so when he went away, I decided to make up for everything that I had done, doing it not because I wanted to do it, but because I knew that if I did not, our tribe would break into two factions, one of them supporting Ani’sja and the other supporting a new leader and we would never be able to usher in a new golden age of humanity.
But there were still mutterings about Ani’sja not wanting me anymore, and that I was only doing this to make up for punching healers.
“I mean,” One of them said one night, “She did horrible things, things that I will never forgive her for. Yes, she might’ve been blinded by grief, but that is no excuse for punching an elderly healer. I wouldn’t blame Ani’sja if he thought that she’d gone too far this time. So maybe he’s threatening her with unfaithfulness, saying that if she doesn’t make up for it, he will bed another woman.”
Fortunately, I figured out that since those rumors actually supported him, and I did not try to have him squash them, however much I tried to squash them myself. After all, if it looked like that was exactly what was happening, they might think that Ani’sja was a man steeped in morals, exactly the man that you would want as chief. (This was because chiefs were often judges of various crimes that happened within the tribe.)
But, as I thought to myself one night, the women would not like him if this rumor was true, and the woman would not like their husbands for thinking in such a way. And so it would not result in anything good coming out of it if the women left their husbands.
But that would not happen, I told myself…it could not happen. Women would not leave their husbands for such a thing as this. And plus, some women would have the stupidity to actually think that this was right, as there was a big enough amount of women in the tribe for a few to think that. And so I was forced to choose between two impossible choices. One, the women felt hurt and some might even leave their husbands, the other the men decided to possibly revolt, thinking that if their chief thought such thoughts and had such ethics, he was not their chief after all. After all, that was what the Shantus said, and that was what they preached.
The Code of a Chief’s Honor, they called it. It was very similar to the Code of Honor itself, which was how the regular tribesmen were told to operate. It outlined that a chief should hold himself to higher standards than anyone else, even the Shantu, as he had the most influence and power over the whole tribe. I personally thought that the Shantu had more power as he held the religious power to depose the chief if he saw fit, but in most events, they were right.
One day, as I was doing my daily service to the community, I came upon a man who told me that I was not helping the tribe, but rather hurting it. The man was old and he looked almost senile.
“You are focusing your efforts in the wrong direction,” He said, “If you do not stop now, all of humanity will perish.”
I frowned. “Why?” I asked him.
“I will tell you and your husband—and only you and your husband—tomorrow night, deep in the forest, where you first killed the boar.” After this, he walked away.
I frowned. Tomorrow was the funeral for my father. I had personally helped to organize it, trying to hold back tears throughout the process, but I had been able to.
“Okay,” I muttered, hoping that the old man heard me because at this moment, I was willing to do anything to further what my father had set up for me to do and I had a feeling that this had something to do with it.
The funeral was extremely emotional for all of us, even some of my father’s family members who hadn’t liked him. One of them, a man named Tis’rai, who was my father’s half-brother, had the most profound effect on me.
“I have to say, throughout my relationship between him and me, I was not the biggest fan of his. And like many people, at times, I pitied him, for he seemed to have the worst luck. But now, I have decided to set aside all of the grievances that I ever had with him to describe the man, who, even with his faults, was able to be the best version of himself that he could. He was a man of hope. He looked to the times of the golden age and saw himself in those times, as a young child. As an adult, he believed in the impossible dream of restoring them. He was always so full of hope, even when life seemed to want to strike him down to the darkest depths. He first confessed this dream to me, in an argument, saying that he was not going to just give up on his dream of restoring what was lost just because I thought it was impossible. It should be said that he believed in the Devotion of Generations, the devotion that says that one person can make a big impact far beyond what they will ever see. And while that devotion is a rare one, I believe that it is one that we should all take on. We may never see the fruit of what we seed, but it is still worth it to seed it. I believe that that should be our forever axiom. As I look back on his life, and on mine, I realize a profound difference. I only ever planted seeds that would mature when I could see them, never planting seeds that would never see the light of the sun however long I lived. Those seeds, I realize, had but minor effects on the greater world. His seeds would never see the light of day for a thousand generations but would have an absolutely glorious effect on the world at large. That is something that I believe that we can all learn from.”
The other speech went by in what seemed to be a heartbeat, and it finally was time for me to make my speech.
I looked out over the crowd and sighed. It was but a small crowd, only about fifty people, for my father had never had many friends or family in his life, however much I tried to deny it.
“My father used to tell me of the Golden Days when humans could do anything when we were like angels, or what the people of the east speak of as gods. Those were his favorite stories, and mine too. I thought the same way that he did at the tender age of five. I thought to myself that I could restore the Golden Age of Humanity. Unfortunately, unlike him, I thought to myself that those were childish thoughts, that I could not ever hope to come close to restoring the Golden Days. But why do I tell you of this? Why should I tell you of my failure to believe in what he believed in? Because I tell you, this, this is what I have come to believe! That the impossible can happen! That we can bring back the Golden Days! That what he believed in was possible and that we can achieve it! I tell you, my friends and relatives, that, even though I cried for his death, I rejoice now in his life!”
And with that, I walked off the small podium and went to join Ani’sja in the cheering crowds.
But the mood would not stay happy as we witnessed the drums and the burning of my father’s body, which we were all supposed to be viewing with somber faces. I will not lie to you, I did cry, crying for what was lost, and what should have been, but I did not fear, and in the end, I decided to complete his life’s work on my own. I would plant the seed that would mature into gold itself.