She was the mind. She had forgotten her name. She was in the place all people arrive. It is the world’s first cell. There are no faces there, mirrors are lost, and the soul is changed for a dream. She smelled the pines and groundwater; the wood and leather scent; the ash and ruptured ground.
She had brought her smaller self. She fitted to it, and poured herself inside. When she looked up, she saw her wiser, draped in blades, red metal, and a smile that reached her eyes. It was her most majestic memory. No master or ruler could hope to match her mother’s significance, even with all the stars in all the cells of the daylight sky.
She looked out from their position, at the top of a grassy hill, to the country. Here she glimpsed a city. Twilight had fallen on that place, and its people had dragged pots out into the streets and started fires. There was smoke here.
She felt the heat of her wiser’s lap, in the cradle of which she sat. “Are you sure you want to know?” her wiser was asking. “I can only say a little of the call. You are too young to know its whole body.”
“Please, wisi?” she felt herself plead. “It is such a brave and weighty thing!”
“If you so desire,” her wiser said, “listen to the words, joyous one. For what I tell you is told only by your wiser, and I cannot stay long. If you take a man, one day you will tell it to him. If you bear daughters, one day you will tell it to them. It has always been this way; it will not be forever; it will be again.”
“Why did it start that way?” she asked.
“Because the first breather was a woman,” her wiser replied. “At every thing’s beginning, all was cold and there were only clouds. Onn, a cloud in the shape of a woman, formed on the top of the highest mountain and froze. Then Am and his warriors encamped in the firmament.” She pointed at the setting sun and then at the other lights in the sky. “He began to march around us.”
“So the warmth came and Onn melted and she went down from the mountain. There, she found the water from her melting had seeped into the rich, ancient dirt, and made a crude people of mud and leaves. She laid with one and produced Ann, who was a man.”
“Onn had many children. She raised a house where they could live and give thanks to Am; that was Trethbiekilon.” Her wiser pointed a finger to the polis below them, at a spot where rose the pillars and towers of the Gilded Enclosure. “She lived with her mate at its breast, and her youngers populated its edges. Many seasons passed, and Onn’s children had children, who populated their edges. Eventually, Ourland was full of Onnpeople, and the whole place was full of Secondpeople, who live far over every horizon. We made many wealthy things.”
“Bad, which causes all disasters, was angered by the wealth of our outerpeople – the old wisers, and the old lawsmen, joyous one, who have all passed away from us. It made a dancing and brought about fighters to torment them. Many of these were shaped like Onnpeople, but they were most truly like attacking beasts, because they have no inner good. Their wrongdoing does not reflect on you or me. It is not an unkind thing to use or destroy them, because it was the filth of people that danced their name.”
“The bad-danced beasts treated people like they were vermin. They ate our flesh and burned our dwellings. They put cages around our hands and told us where we could and could not walk. They took arms from the women and did not let us move the call.”
“The beasts would melt when they had been thrown down. When all fell away, they had no real face, form or name. This is because Bad danced them to hate what came before, and to have no care at all for merit, Am, or the outerpeople. Without these, the beasts’ being was an empty place, and they were easy to fight.”
“The greatest among them came again. Many of them had stolen Onnpeople, and learned not to melt. This made them powerful. They put on us rules, and a new call. You will hear it, but you will not speak it, or I will cut out your tongue.”
“Onnpeople put up arms against the bad-danced beasts. They triumphed over us. We rose up many times, but each time they triumphed over us, and they put us to their words and their call. Then at last, we rose up with the Secondpeople. Even with the aid of so many friends, they still triumphed over us, and there was such pain. But the bloodshed had become too great for them, the nag of rule too troublesome. So some of the beasts went across the water plains, and toward their far shore, where lies the end of time.”
“One day, those beasts will return. When that happens, Am will be dislodged from his position by the bad-danced animals. He will retreat from us, back to the place away from the sky. They will run over everything and everyone. Then the land will freeze. The forest will freeze and the trees will freeze; the waters will freeze and the fish will freeze. Their bodies will collect in the soil and make it rich, and time will make it grow old. The clouds will come down from the stars and settle on the land. All will be forgotten before Ourland remembers itself again.”
-
She saw next her lawsman, who had put her to her wiser. This man had no majesty. He did not have metal armor, but a leather covering; not a sword, but a till. He must’ve been born with his hands caked with soil, and they smelled like pinetrees. The skin on his face sloped in a musical way.
They sat together on the ground of their bedplace. They spread colorful carpets and milkwater flowers about the floor, as though it were a holiday. She knew the warmth of his smile at her presence. He had brought out his cloth and thread, and they had begun to fill figures with sand before weaving them together.
“Like that,” he said, watching over her hand as she knitted her toy’s head into a single piece. “Just like that.”
“Why are dolls, losma?” she asked.
“You must ask the ones who make them,” he said. “Why do you?”
She finished weaving and turned it towards him. “Friend,” she said.
He held up his own, which he had knitted into a black windshape. “And now, she has one too.” He neighed and snorted as he nuzzled its nose against her doll. She laughed at his impertinence.
“Why does losma?” she asked in return.
“For fun,” he said. “After your wiser returned from marching, and took up her promises, and could no longer visit me. I needed friends.”
“Why?” she asked, weaving black strands into the doll’s head. “What do they do?”
“They bring joy and peace,” he replied. “If you find one that does something else, tell me.”
She had become engrossed in his words, and pricked herself with the needle. Her father’s eyes widened when he saw the blood begin to ebb from her finger.
He wound a piece of fabric around it. She didn’t cry out. “That’s it,” he said. “Brave girl.”
She said nothing, only allowed him to do as he would to plug the hole. The bandage began to slow the ebbing pulse in her fingertip until it stopped. “Does it hurt?” he asked her.
“It feels like wisi,” she said.
“Wisi?”
“She’s gone,” she said. “I need her.”
He rubbed her finger and nuzzled her head. “I know,” he said. “I know how it feels.”
He replaced their needles and string in a wooden box. He took her by the hand and guided her toward the shelf where it was kept. Her lawsman brought out a mask down from it and showed it to her.
“When she was a girl,” he said. “Wisi gave this to losma. She knew she was going away and that she wouldn’t see me. She put a little bit of herself in it. That’s what you do. You put a little bit of yourself wherever you go. If I touch it, I can touch her – even if she’s beyond Ourland, or far away from the sky.”
He took her hand and placed it on the mask’s surface.
“Everything will always be with you.”
She picked up the mask, hugged it close to her chest, and smiled. Then she grabbed at his windshape and pushed her doll at him.
“With me,” she insisted.
He took it. “What a might you have, joyous one,” he said, sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her away. “There can be no end to it. It’ll shine on all there is.”
“What now?” she asked.
“This is when we eat,” he said. “I will light a fire.”
-
She could still smell the food her lawsman laid out. She took a deep breath. It mixed with his scent and rose up through her mind and body and stomach. It put down a pathway toward the Windshape Celebration.
She moved with her lawsman to Trethbiekilon’s sellers, who populated their corner of the city with stalls, trinkets, food, and fruits. It had become a place where people roamed and lived excitedly. Her lawsman’s delicate white cowl placed her in the shade, and his face-mask, proof of his promises sustained, was carved with stars, beasts, and illustrious oaths. She thought it to be finest among those sported by the other men she saw.
They passed the Onnhouse. Every heart knew it was a holy place. Some came as worshippers, proclaiming themselves there as servants of sky and water. Some came as supplicants, bearing gifts and treaties for the masters of their Enclosure. Here came she by twilight adventure, teaching herself the glory of high places and Trethbiekilon’s horizon. She and her father made a dancing there in the way that was right for a hot season, and they were at last permitted entry to the temple square.
Pars awaited them there. Pars, the first windshape! Pars, the giver of dancing! What a wonder he was; what a fear his face sent into her.
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The artisans who had conceived Pars’ grandeur had taken great pains to etch out the detail of the danceshape’s mane, hooves, eyes, and snout. His eternal vigil watched over her mother’s house, which was the house of their ruler, and she believed that the sun would go away before the Enclosure might depart its voluminous shadow.
She pointed to the monument and asked her lawsman, “Why did they put this here?” He answered her, “To become more holy.”
Within the Enclosure’s walls, her wiser remained always at the master’s side, in maintenance of her promises – except for today. For today was the Windshape Celebration. Today there was peace in the country, a good harvest, and empty skies. There was surely no need for fighting at any point in the world.
The bells of the Enclosure, the master’s herald, were struck five times by his servants. She held her hands to her ears when they would sound. The thunder they made cracked open the doors to the fortress, and her wiser emerged, clad in armor adorned with flowers.
When the Enclosure had fully disgorged her wiser’s shining party, they received her. Each family removed the red metal of their promise-bound warrior, and put water to their body. Only after they had scrubbed the grit and sweat from her skin did her wiser dispose with her countenance and sweep up her and her father in her arms, crying out in joy.
Together again, they reentered the city.
When Am had achieved his apex, they moved to the table of Pars, where a turn-reader had emerged from the Enclosure. His agents dressed him in the buttoned vestments that bound his mind to the world, and they threw a fire on the bed of coals that his table was host to.
For the reader’s craft, a beast was brought out from the master’s pen. It was leashed, placed in metal cuffs, and proceeded before the people. When she gazed on it, she saw a sleek, long-toothed, long-haired creature of tremendous strength and dignity. It walked on four legs, like a furred, muscular windshape. When it was urged on toward the table, its chains cut against it, and it groaned and exploded in a scream of protest. All the people laughed and exalted Am, who would have surely aided in the subjugation of this enemy. The beast passed her by and its gaze brushed against her own, demanding nothing and saying little. She wondered that a shape so sublime had been danced by filth.
The master’s blades were thrown into it.
The beast was dragged up to the table, leaving a red stain where it was hauled. It was split open at the belly by the reader, who threw its flesh on the fire to produce his lines. He stared into them while his agents danced. On his seeing the turn, he spoke of good harvests and healthy children, which could only be attributed to the sacrifices and devotion of the Onnpeople. Good times were on their way. And there was shouting and jubilation among the attendants, and among her own family.
In the evening, Am shined bright over Trethbiekilon, and lent the clouds his most favorable and exquisite colors. Her parents danced alone beneath the statue of Pars, well after the other men and women had departed for home. She watched them sway beneath the monument’s shadow, and hold each other close. She marvelled at that sight for the rare and precious gift it was. She felt that a pressing gap in the center of her had been filled up, that she now had a line of golden thread linking her heart to her stomach. But, at this moment of satisfaction, a strange melancholy surpassed her.
She approached and looked down into the fire of the turn-reader, where the bones of their sacrifice still lay, and inhaled its warmth. She saw the marks that the heat had made in the beast. These would never leave it behind.
Her own hand entered the flames. She laid it flat over the fire, which licked against her hand – cutting, kissing and writing itself into the skin.
Even as her wiser rushed over to tear her hand from the coals, to shake her and thunder most terribly, she smiled. She held her hand in the way she would a jewel, as treasured and beloved company.
-
The smoke of the coals twisted and flickered in her mind, smearing and infesting its process, calling back to a time when the world was more full of fire. The years turned and quiet changed for terror and calamity.
She broke free of the arms that held her, leapt from the carriage and landed in the muddy road, splashing filth all over her hands and body and face. She heard shouting as she threw herself into the dark, but she knew the men would not come for her. They would be greatly troubled, and she would make their hearts sorrowful, but these were too afraid of the greycoatted ones, and the ending they brought, to go looking for one little girl. The night was total, but her path was bright. All the while the world had become lost to Am had the fires of the city and the city temple raged. They sent ashen plumes up toward the sky, and set the horizon aflame. She followed them through dirt that soaked and grass that itched, clutching her lawsman’s windshape tightly.
She met the Onnpeople’s conscription as she entered the city. The dead were numberless. Rocks, hooves, and barbed arrows had scattered them about the walls and fortifications, and broken their bodies into lethal positions. She stumbled over her people, doing her best to keep her footing, and her eyes, off of them.
Just as she was about to clear the entrance, she tripped over one of the fallen warriors. Before she could stop herself, she looked to see what she had tumbled over, and she took her first face.
A thin stream of blood trickled down from her lawsman's nose to her leg when she held his head in her lap. His eyes and mouth had never closed. In his right hand, her lawsman clutched a rusty stuf, and his left had been stretched into the depths of his cover, to grasp at something she could not see. She pulled it up and back into the light.
She took the doll in a daze, and pried the blade from his hand. She left her windshape with him and pressed into the streets, where she doubted any life save her wiser’s could persist.
She wove through a tangled mingling of substance. The city had been shaken and tossed apart, built as it was from soil, plants, and people. For the first time, they had begun to churn together and become more truly like one another. When she passed the Onnhouse on her way to the city’s core, bulky grey shapes, clad in their cloaks and knives and chains, hauled candlesticks, ornaments, images, and spices from it. They paid her shadow little mind as they comported their loot to a train of wagons assembled before Pars. The danceshape’s head had been hit by a massive rock and brought to the ground, crushing the table of the turn-reader. The city bells rang throughout, struck in a final act of desperation as the Gilded Enclosure was sacked. She moved into it, the first place of the Onnpeople, where the walls were high and the doors had become open.
The Enclosure’s facade had once seemed enormous. Now bombardment had produced gaps and inlets in every wall, pillar and window, splintering the wood, metal, and fired sand that it was cut from and flinging it open at every corner. She picked her way through the rubble of it, into its once-grand reception.
The room was adorned with bodies of her kind, comrades of red metal smashed and torn in the defense of their beloved dynast. At its center did she see the body she sought, and even in death did she hold majesty. There is a shattered glory in a fallen temple and temple-bells. It is the kind that pervades the ruins of an ancient and royal people. That was her wiser’s breed now, an amorphic presence of the deformed real, and divinity annulled.
Standing next to her mother’s body was a man. Standing next to him was a Bad-Danced Beast.
“Health to you,” it said.
She knew it was a Bad-Danced Beast, for nothing besides a Bad-Danced Beast would appear so delighted in that moment. To what except a Beast would this orphanning bring joy? And what was a Beast, if not an unholy monster, sent to disembowel and desecrate all which was celestial? What was a monster, if not a thing in the shape of a person?
A velvet blindfold wrapped around the Beast’s eyes. Clasped to its side was a stuf of a different shape and metal. Even on the battlefield did it wear a shirt of orange and emerald, with nothing but chain links beneath to preserve it from arrows or blades. It surrounded itself with greycoatted compatriots, who turned towards her also.
She stood before them, and brandished her lawsman’s knife in her hand. To the palm of a warrior it was a shorter blade, but to her premature digits it held all the weight and power of a killing-sword. She screamed something at the Beast that she could no longer remember – an oath of hate, vengeance and immortal war.
Her vision slipped and changed. She fell to her knees. She could still remember the smell and taste of her gag. Her eyes were immersed in a red haze pouring through a dent in her skull. “This is a thing that needs education,” she heard the Bad-Danced Beast moan. Its thigh had been cut apart, skewered and slashed. Tending to it was… who was he speaking to?
It was the man at the Beast’s side. Surely he must have been a man. He was kneeling down, treating and binding the gruesome wound she had given it. As he held the Beast’s leg, he was careful not put too much pressure on the wound and cause his master undue pain. A beast wants pain, she thought. It wants not its brother. So was she perplexed and saddened by the actions of her kin.
“Put the mark on it,” the Beast sang. “Put the mark on that thing. Then put it on wheels. Put it with the rest of the women.”
The Beast waved its man away and hobbled over to her while she was restrained by the greycoatted men. In its hands it held her doll, which it inspected with great interest, before dropping it at her feet.
“Filthy feurkun, covered in dirt. Angry feurkun, covered in blood,” the Bad-Danced Beast grumbled. “Can you understand me, feurkun Chamark? Can that mind suffer a whit of clarity?”
She could not. She could only scream her contempt for it through her eyes. It frowned.
“No. No wisdom for the little Chamark.” It went for her hands. She resisted, and so it seized them with a tight grip, bending and stretching apart her joints to take a look at her palm. “Only pain, yes. Only scars and blisters and burns. What a poor kind of offering!”
The Bad-Danced Beast let go of her scar and held her by the cheek. “This feurkun land has treated you so poorly, little Chamark. I cannot help but feel misery for your life’s brew. You can’t appreciate my words,” it lamented, slowly, enunciating its vowels. “But I can make you remember what I say, yes. And in so doing, release to you a gift.”
“You are thinking that this mission is done for cruelty, feurkun Chamark,” the Beast continued, gesturing at the dead. “You are thinking this is for anger or nonsense. Or because we are hungry.” It shook its head. “But you are wrong about this.”
“Once, I was a young man, in a hot and grassy place. I saw a wingless kind; it could fly over trees.” It pointed away to the rafters. “I looked over to a friend of mine, and I asked him: ‘Commander, how does this one fly?’”
“After that time,” it continued, reaching around its head to untie the velvet cloth that concealed its eyes. “He moved his metal, and he explained it to me…”
It took the blindfold off and let her see what laid behind. “…so that I, too, could fly without wings.”
Her heart stopped, and she shook. It leaned in close when she tried to look away, forcing her to see. “My friend was wise, feurkun Chamark. Do you know what this means?” It waved at its unveiled visage. “I’ll tell you. Flying is not only obtained by wings. A man who grabs onto the birds, he will be flying. A man who blows away the air, he will be flying. A man who bursts the ground underneath him; he will be flying too.”
It tied the blindfold back over its head. “You see, feurkun Chamark, this mission is not about cruelty. It is not about drink or riches. This mission is about flying. You are the trees, yes. We are what flies.”
It picked up her doll and stood. “Inside you will soon arrive a tongue with wings. Words that can fly. When they do, little feurkun, you’ll fly too.”
The man returned, bearing the mark: a hot rod of metal and ink that would anoint her skin with a master’s seal. When she saw it, her hatred gave way to confusion and terror. The Beast reached out a hand to wipe away her tears.
“That’s good,” it said. “You cry now. But you take care about it. When the time is right – crying, this is a woman’s labor. All this hard stuff, this hitting, this smashing, this burning is your teller's labor. He needs you to feel for him. That is divinity’s directive. But cry too much, drown him in tears, and he’ll hate you for it.” He pushed her forehead. “And it is he, not me, who you must fear. This, too, is divinity’s directive.”
He limped away, falling back into the ashes of the Enclosure. One by one, his greycoatted attendants followed him into the flames. The last among these to do so was the Beast’s own companion, whose irises twinkled brown and white, and spoke of cold. He looked back at her only once before he departed.
The mark of the tithe pressed itself down into her skin, scoring the face of her destiny forever. It had pressed fire into her body: fire that would rage and simmer until the sun had been driven away and the world had begun again. This was the last time she cried.
She fixed her eyes on the insignia of the Beast, a bone and arrow flapping fast and raggedly over the Enclosure, agitated by smoke as it burned to the ground. She wondered what they meant. She wondered if there was some answer hidden in its lines that revealed a just and decent reason for her hatred, her pain, or the emptiness of her world.
Fourteen years passed before she would find an answer. It offered no comfort; but, there was comfort to be found. In the living and the dying.