T'aakshi

T’aakshi spent the next three days exploring Kuchisoto’s sprawling network of dirt paths and streets. Visits with his father had always been short-lived. They arrived in time for whatever ceremony or meeting required their presence and left again as soon as it was over so that they could be back with the tribe as soon as possible.

However, Ia-dou came by shortly after his audience with the Inari-da bearing a message. He and T’aarak would leave together, sent on their way by the Inari-da themselves, in three day’s time.

This left him with the opportunity to see the town in a way that he had never done before. In some respects, Kuchisoto was comfortingly familiar. In others, however, it was entirely strange. The tribes on the wastes, for example, did not trade inside their own communities. Food, clothes and equipment were almost always shared with each other when required. They took hunted animals and gathered food to shrines and distributed as needed. Folk with skills used them for the benefit of everybody, whether those skills were needlework, carpentry or even metalwork.

In Kuchisoto, however, tribes exchanged goods with each other. The Eastern tribes brought rare hardwood on the backs of sleds pulled by hounds more wolf than dog, and traded with tribes in the West that had access to the sea—like the Su’roi—for things such as blubber and seal fat. A northern tribe, the Ko’gishu, their furs adorned with intricate bone-carved jewellery, each wearing a string of delicate bone carvings tied around their foreheads, traded bone and ivory carved goods of a quality T’aakshi had never seen another match.

His father had once told him that Ko’gishu bone weaponry could match southern steel, though he had never seen that in practice. T’aakshi hadn’t either, but looking at the deadly selection of items, each razor sharp, set out on tables in the market square, he could almost believe it.

Even stranger were the southern traders. Pale skinned and shivering, no matter the thickness of their furs, they stood out wildly in the marketplace. It seemed to T’aakshi that these men mostly guessed at the value of things, with some demanding enormous amounts of excellent resources for relatively useless things, such as one trader that T’aakshi had seen attempt to argue that his roll of translucent crimson cloth was worth anymore than scrap, despite how little use it would be for anything besides, perhaps, tinder.

Most stuck to trading iron-made objects, such as hinges, nails and cooking pots. Iron itself was rare in Tagaya, and though it was possible to make simple items, like blades and arrowheads, by hammering the metal into shape, the southerners could somehow craft small and intricate items that should have been impossible by hammer. Almost unbelievably, these men were content to trade such things for what seemed to T’aakshi, comparatively useless pieces of gold or silver. They were pretty metals to be sure—the temple in the centre of Kuchisoto was proof enough of that—but had no use that he could see beyond looking nice.

It had been a pleasant distraction from what lay ahead. His dreams had grown more violent, and he now began them as the beast more often than not, tearing his way through his people one by one. Before, the dreams had ended with seeing his father’s lifeless eyes, but now, there were others sometimes in his place. S’aahiri, Mura, T’aallin—even T’aarak and S’aarasu had found their way into the dreams, victims of his murderous rampages.

Now, on his last day in Kuchisoto, waiting for the Inari-da just outside the town’s gates, his stomach lurched every time his mind wandered towards his task. To his left, T’aarak stood, hands clasped behind his back and eyes locked towards the gate, pointedly ignoring T’aakshi. Behind them, waiting in near-silence, the parties each of them had brought stood awkwardly, following the examples set by their leaders.

He tried to suppress a scowl when he thought about the number of hunters they had taken from the tribe between the two of them. Having to take twelve had concerned him. T’aarak’s party making that number double was a travesty. Their people needed these men, and the formalities had forced them to waste them on journeys that the two of them could have made by themselves.

Movement drew his attention back to the gates. A procession of Ia-dou filed out from the town in two columns, spreading out in an arc before T’aakshi and T’aarak. Following them, S’aana came, heavy burgundy robes trailing through the frost-hardened ground behind her. Laid horizontally across her hands was a spear with an azure crystal embedded in its haft, just as his father’s had been. The tanae gleaming under the mid-day sun captured his gaze almost immediately.

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“T’aakshi and T’aarak of the Su’roi, it falls on me as your tribe’s representative among the Inari-da, to see you depart on your hunts,” she began, coming to a stop before the two of them.

“You compete for the leadership of the tribe, but it would do you well to remember that you compete as brothers—for the good of all the Su’roi and not only yourselves.”

He glanced at T’aarak, and the man’s already hard face twisted as though he tasted something foul at the idea that they may be brothers in anything. Before he could think too much about it, S’aana strode towards him, holding the spear out in front of her.

“T’aakshi,” she said, her tone losing its formality. “Whether you win or lose, it falls to you to carry your father’s memory, and his honour, into battle against the foe that killed him. His spear is yours.”

He reached out with trembling hands and took the spear, strangely numb. He looked down at the weapon he’d seen his father use a thousand times. It looked strange in his hands, as though they weren’t really his hands at all, and this was happening to someone else.

“I must warn you, boy,” S’aana continued, rasping voice low so that only he could hear. “The tanae is not yet yours to use. I will allow you to take this piece of your father with you on the hunt, but you will swear to me, on yours and your father’s honour, that you will not use it.”

T’aakshi met her eyes and saw in her glacial stare the grim promise of what would happen if he took the spear and did not keep his word. Part of him wondered how she could ever know if he used it, but there was never really any telling what the Inari-da were truly capable of.

“On my honour and my father’s—you have my word.”

S’aana held his gaze for several moments longer than needed, and T’aakshi had to resist the sudden urge to fidget and squirm under it before she finally nodded and returned to her original position.

“Then all that is left for me to do is to wish the both of you good hunting and a safe return. The party that successfully slays the creature shall be the victor, and thus shall the new Chief of the Su’roi be decided. Return to the Su’roi, and choose carefully who will accompany you on this journey. Your hunt shall begin as soon as you are ready.”

Her final words spoken, S’aana inclined her head to both T’aakshi and T’aarak before turning and striding back through the gates, followed closely by her solemn-faced Ia-dou.

He glanced across at T’aarak and found the man already glaring back at him.

T’aakshi held his gaze, refusing to back down. T’aarak might well be a better choice to lead the tribe than him, but he wouldn’t allow himself to be intimidated by the man, no matter his experience. The older man broke eye contact first, storming to the front of his group with a fierce scowl etched across his face and stalking off through the snow.

T’aakshi tightened his grip around his father’s staff, feeling more than ever like he was still a child playing pretend at being his father. Every fibre of his being wanted to return home and stay there. To let T’aarak hunt the creature and take the title for himself. But that wasn’t an option anymore. Not unless he was willing to allow his people to throw themselves at the beast, wasting their lives on a hunt that might well be impossible.

“So lad,” T’aallin said, a satisfied smile worming its way across his face as he walked up beside T’aakshi. “Kill the bastard that killed T’saamu, and make you our next Chief. Simple enough. We have a full compliment already—do we head straight into the wastes? We could steal a ground on T’aarak’s group that way.”

T’aakshi turned to face the group of men that had accompanied him to Kuchisoto, and was startled to realise that every pair of eyes was upon him, ready to listen to his decision.

“No,” he said, only slightly hesitant. “The tribe has been missing too many of its best for too long. T’aarak will take who he pleases, as is his right. But I won’t be forcing any of you onto a hunt that we might not make it back from. We go home first—the tribe’s needs come before mine.”

T’aallin’s grin grew, and he turned towards the assembled hunters.

“Well, you heard the man, we make for home!”

T’aarak’s group had the same idea, and within a day, the hunting parties were travelling parallel to one another on the same roads and at the same pace, but keeping themselves just out of earshot of one another. Otherwise, the journey home was even more uneventful than the journey to Kuchisoto had been.

Smoke on the horizon on the sixth day of travel, just as T’aakshi recognised the first of the landmarks that marked that they were close to home, was the first sign that something wasn’t right. Eager talk of families and fires and fresh food fell away, leaving fearful silence in its wake.

Don’t let it be home.

He rushed to the head of his party, barely noting that T’aarak was hurriedly doing the same as he scanned the horizon.

Please, Gods, don’t let it be home.

A deep pit of dread settled inside of him, and what he saw savagely extinguished any hope that had existed there before.

The home of the Su’roi—his home—lay in ruins, plumes of smoke trailing into the sky from its still-smouldering buildings. There was no sound, no movement—not a single trace of the bustling community remained. No trace, except for one: the dark shapes that littered the snow between collapsed tents and splintered wood and streaks of stark crimson, still visible despite the gently falling snow.

The bodies of his people.