Heretic
Part Two
Chapter 7
Ylla awoke to the sounds of drums and blaring horns. The sun pierced through the hide covering the hut’s door, surprisingly bright. Ylla’s body moved grudgingly, her head still half in the dreams she’d been ripped from. The shadowed hut was empty except for the curled-up form of Vehx lying at the foot of her bedroll. When she’d gone to sleep, Isaand had been sleeping on her right, with Taram’s older brother Kotaa past him. Both of their bedrolls were empty.
A high-pitched peal of music split through her thoughts, coming from the direction of the village, some powerful horn followed by a chorus of deeper instruments. The drums continued to beat a steady rhythm, as fast as a march but far more chaotic. Vehx opened one eye as she began to wriggle out from under her blankets.
“What’s going on out there? Where’s Isaand?” Ylla asked.
“Some human nonsense, no doubt. As for Isaand, he went across the lake last night, leaving me to keep you out of trouble. He was supposed to return before the dawn. Perhaps he got eaten by the Lsetha,” Vehx said.
“That’s not funny.” Ylla glared at Vehx, who only yawned. She took hold of the blanket and yanked it hard, spilling him out onto the dirt floor gracelessly. Vehx hissed, then crawled onto one of the abandoned bedrolls.
“Ylla?” The hide covering the door was pulled aside, letting in a stream of light that made her squint, her eyes aching. A short silhouette stood in the doorway. “You should come, the feast is about to start. Normally we wouldn’t feed outsiders, but dad said he’d vouch for you and…” Taram stepped into the hut, letting the hide drop, and looked around with a frown. “Where’s Isaand?”
“He went out already,” Ylla said. “Isaand doesn’t sleep good.”
“Oh, ok, I’m sure he’s already there then. Come on, there’s plenty to eat. I hope you like fish.” Clearly excited, Taram dashed outside. Ylla did not know if she liked fish much, but her stomach was growling already, so she jumped up and followed.
Outside, the village was bright and crowded. It was more than an hour past dawn, and the sun gilded the surface of the lake for miles around. Ylla hesitated at the bridge, but Taram took her hand and helped her across, and this time she didn’t feel so frightened or have any bad memories. The only thing that really scared her was when she felt a sudden thump against her back, knocking her off balance. Vehx pulled himself up to her shoulders, sharp claws pricking at her skin, and settled in around her neck to be carried.
Across the bridge was the village proper, and the wide grassy sward where the standing stones of Ulm-etha loomed. Thick woven blankets were set out all over the grass, with huge platters of food atop them, each one overseen by an elderly man or woman with wrinkled brown skin. They doled out food onto small beaten tin plates, and the villagers were carrying them as they stood and walked around the square, eating and talking in little groups. Most of it was fish of various kinds, but she also saw steamed turnips and radishes, squares of flat-bread, and big piles of mashed chickpeas.
Behind the food were the musicians. Lines of drummers sat, beating swift patterns on the small hide drums between their legs. Behind them woman blew various horns made of some kind of white and pink shells. Hundreds of people were chattering, their voices mixing with the music into a great cloud of noise that pressed in on Ylla from all sides. Women with flagons were moving through the crowd, passing out cups or wine to the adults and lake-water to the children. One of them smiled and pressed one into Ylla’s hands. She raised it to her lips and was startled to find it tart and sweet, flavored with something she couldn’t place.
“What’s all this for?” Ylla tried to ask, but it was too loud, and Taram was running over to talk to another group of children, four boys and two girls. The oldest of them was a sour teenager with his arms folded, the youngest a girl half Ylla’s age and height, tottering along and grabbing the legs of passersby. Ylla let them go and took another drink. It was strange, but she thought she liked it. Nervously, she crept up towards one of the blankets and looked down at the food. The server grinned toothlessly, an elderly woman with wrinkled brown skin and a long gray braid that was fraying and thinning. Ylla went away grinning, a plate of flat-bread covered in chickpeas and several slices of thin white fish. The festival atmosphere made her feel light and warm. She could remember other festivals, back in her village, but those she’d spent on the edge of the square, looking in with her parents well away from the central bonfire. Here, no one was paying much attention to her, and she was a part of the crowd.
“Ylla!” She looked up at her name to see Taram waving her over insistently. As she came closer the older girl looked her over head-to-toe, like one might a goat at market. “Grasslander,” she pronounced. “I bet you don’t know how to swim, huh? I’m Keya. Taram’s my cousin.”
“Honored to meet you,” Ylla said, as she’d been taught back home, but the children laughed at that.
“Oho, an honor is it?” Keya smiled and leaned down a bit to meet her at eye-level. “Taram says you helped to heal his da. Are you a doctor’s apprentice or something? I’d love to know something as useful as that but all I know how to do is mend nets and boats.”
“I’m not really an apprentice. Isaand did fine without me for a long time. But I told him I wanted to help him, so he said he’d teach a few things, how to clean wounds and change bandages and such,” Ylla said. Vehx squirmed on his spot around her shoulders and the girls drew in breath at the sight.
“What is he?” a boy asked, amazed.
“He’s a kettha. They live in jungles and steal eggs,” Ylla said. Vehx flexed his claws a little at that, pricking her skin, and she winced. “His name’s Vehx.”
“Can I pet him?” the little girl asked. Before Ylla could answer, Vehx bounded off of her, making her stumble backwards and spilling a piece of fish onto the ground. The kettha landed in the girl’s outstretched arms, making her squeal with delight. In seconds he was curled up in her arms, being petted by three of the children. Ylla thought he looked smug.
“If you want, we could go swimming some time, with Keya and her friends,” Taram said. “We have to stay close though. The Lsetha won’t come close to the cliffs, it only attacks out in the open lake. At least, it hasn’t so far.”
“Hmph, there’s the wisdom of country bumpkins for you,” Vehx said, though only Ylla could hear him. “The Lsetha is a Sendra. It can go where it wishes. Should it decide it wants to, it could pluck the lot of you right off this island.”
“Shush,” Ylla hissed. Taram looked at her funny, and she quickly added. “Yes, I’d love to. You’ll have to teach me though. I’ve never been in water higher than my waist.”
Keya started to say something, but a flurry of horns drowned her out, along with a chorus of cheers from the villagers behind them. Curious, Ylla turned to see an elderly man, his hair mostly fallen out, a knobbly cane under one hand, stepping up from beside the ring of stones. His face was flushed, and he weaved slightly to the side, so Ylla knew he was drunk. Even so, one of the flagon bearers filled his cup to the brim with more wine, which he immediately began to down. Everyone was looking at him and talking, and he was flanked by two people in fine clothing, a handsome woman in her fifties and an earnest young man with a club foot. The woman wore a light blue robe with swathes of white patterned across it, and a dozen necklaces of beads made of fish bones. The club-footed man wore all black, with a lot more of his body covered than the other men, and the cords around his neck held small black stones like those the village was built on.
The drunk man outshone them both, though. He was dressed in rippling dark-gray silk striped with blue, with black stones hanging at the ends of the sleeves, and he had necklaces of both rock and bones. Silver rings were placed on every finger and in his ears, and a headdress of white and black feathers was placed on his head, with a big black rock in the center of it, polished smooth and perfectly round.
“They’re are clerics,” Taram told her, leaning close to her ear so she could hear. “Iettaw is in the blue, she serves Maesa of the Lake. Guadan serves Ulm-etha.” He pointed to the man with the club foot, leaving her confused.
“Is he a cleric too?” She pointed at the old man, who was refilling his cup again, barely able to stand.
“No, that’s old Metthat.” Taram hesitated. “The sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?” Ylla froze, and the fish in her hand dropped to the ground unnoticed. Taram did not notice her distress.
“Yeah, I was really getting worried that maybe my grandfather or grandmother might be chosen this time, but early this morning, when we normally get up to go fishing, Mavan came around to tell me- oh, Mavan is my friend, he’s the cleric’s nephew, so he hears everything from his da- anyway, he said they drew the lots last night and Metthat was chosen. That means today is a festival. No one fishes on sacrifice days, because we’re supposed to have a big celebration to see off the sacrifice and make their last day joyous. But Metthat is always happy anyway, he hasn’t fished in years ‘cause he has so many sons to do it for him and he just sits in the village and eats and drinks all the time. He’ll make a good sacrifice, everyone says his life’s summer days are over.”
“When will they do it?” Ylla asked. She looked down at the food on her plate, but the sight of it made her queasy. Her stomach was clenched tight.
“Midday, when the sun’s overhead. The stones are built so that all the shadows spread out, away from the altar. Metthat’s soul will follow them, out into the rest of the island, and down through the rock to all the other islands in the lake. They’re all connected, underground. That’s what Guadan says anyway, though I don’t know how he would know. He never even goes in the lake.”
“I’m glad for you, that your grandparents weren’t chosen. Please excuse me,” Ylla said, and dipped down respectfully, which only seemed to confuse Taram and set Keya to giggling. She turned and rushed quickly through the crowd, leaving her plate and cup sitting on a stone. She heard Taram shout behind her, but wriggled between two men and broke into a run.
She stopped behind a trio of huts cradled by a shelf of rock that rose higher than their roofs. The shelf was made of many flat pillars of stone, all uneven and of different heights, so she was able to easily climb them and get to the top. From there, she could look off across the lake, where other islands rose with their own huts, their own rings of stone waiting to receive Metthat’s blood. Ylla sat and curled up with her knees against her chest. Her eyes were dry. She used to cry a lot, when she’d been little, but the villagers would grow irritated when she did and slap her, telling her not to make such noise. Her parents never hit her though. At least… she didn’t think so. It was getting harder and harder to remember them clearly. When she thought mother or father images appeared in her head, lots of impressions and feelings mixed together. But they were all getting mixed. Sometimes her father was a big man with dark skin and a haggard look, his back bent from labor. Sometimes she saw a lighter skinned man with hair like straw, his face contorted into a snarl, weaving from too much drink. Had her mother been slim and beautiful, still young, or plump and matronly with a warm smile? Father a voice inside her said, but it was the voice of a grown woman, cringing in fear from a raised fist. Mother, a voice inside her called, but it was the voice of a grown man sobbing as his guts slithered between his fingers, lying amongst corpses on a bloody battlefield. Bile rose in her throat. Ylla grabbed her head and pressed in with both hands, trying to hold the memories still.
“Don’t, you’ll hurt yourself.” The voice was almost gentle, and for a minute Ylla thought it was Isaand, but then she felt the soft silky fur of Vehx as he pushed his head up against her leg, curling up to lie beside her. “Trying to force yourself to calm down will only make it harder. Relax, think about something else. Look, down below. The fish think they are birds.”
Puzzled, Ylla looked. A few hundred feet from the where the island and the lake’s surface met, a school of silver fish as long as her arm were swimming. Every few seconds one or two of them would leap from the lake and spread their fins wide, and for an instant they would be soaring above the water, almost as if they were flying. Then the would sink beneath again with a splash, and more would follow.
“What are they doing?” Ylla asked.
“Catching bugs, I should think. Animals are simple. Most everything they do is in pursuit of food, or mating, or avoiding danger. Only gods and men make everything so bloody complicated.”
Ylla watched them in silence for minutes. Her thoughts were still aswirl, but every time a fear or question rose to the front of her mind she focused harder on the fish. The flying ones moved on, and she turned her attention to the great armored beasts that trundled slowly along the sandy shore, as big as pigs and covered in the greenish fuzz of some underwater moss.
“It will get easier.” She looked to Vehx, who was laying in a ball, his tail to his snout. He did not look at her.
“How do you know?” How could anyone know? She’d heard tales of people coming back to life, cursed by a god to live and suffer as atonement for some terrible sin. In the stories, they bore some mark so that all who saw them knew they were unnatural, and were shunned everywhere they went. She’d heard tales of people blessed by a god, given life again to right some wrong, only to lay back down and sleep when their task was done. None of them were like her. She didn’t have any reason to be alive, except that she didn’t want to die.
She was old enough to know that stories were just stories. No one knew what it was like to come back to life, unless they were somewhere far away, where she couldn’t ask them. It could get better, like Vehx said. It could get worse, too. It was getting worse. At Tzamet’s village she’d been confused, happy that she was okay but also a little scared, but she’d still felt mostly the same as she did before. But on their way across the Warana grasslands, every day more and more memories returned to her, memories from her time in the Churn.
She dreamed of it, sometimes. It wasn’t dark, there was just nothing to see. It wasn’t hot or cold, there was nothing touching her, but all the same she felt a constant pain like her body was being crushed and twisted from all sides, her bones snapping and skin tearing, but she had no body. There were thousands of people all crushed up against her, crying or screaming or laughing madly, but she felt alone. Isaand had told her that she had been dead for less than an hour, while Vehx and Amauro fought. But her dreams went on forever, so long that sometimes when she woke she felt as though a thousand years had passed.
“Because, you little fool, I’m a god, wise and ancient. You’re supposed to take me at my word. In truth, what is happening to you isn’t so different from what happens to the rest of you creatures. You age, and your brains acquire memories. This world is harsh and rough, and you can’t put three humans in a room without them taking sides against each other, so you make it harsher still. Naturally many of those memories are bad ones, so the older you get the more your souls become heavy with suffering. Those souls weaken from bearing all that weight, until a man is beaten down and crippled by it all. That’s why we created the Churn in the first place. To strip it all away and make new souls, clean and innocent, so that a life can start fresh. Well, that’s what the elders say, anyhow. No one asked my opinion when they set the universe in motion, I was not yet True.”
“True?”
“You humans would say ‘born,’ but it is not the same. We gods always exist. But we are not ourselves. We are like children, except we are fully grown, just not as we should be. We are… incomplete. It is not important; you could not comprehend it. I was saying-”
“You made the Churn to heal us. The elder gods did, I mean,” Ylla said.
“Heal is not the word I’d use, but that hardly matters. My point is, all men and women live with the same problem you are facing now. Memories are a sickness, growing on your brains like mold on bread. The more of them you get, the less your life will surprise and awe you, but it is still there, unchanged. It’s only you that’s changed. But memories fade. They never disappear, but they are ground down, pushed deep inside where they can no longer be seen, and so you go on living. It’s almost as if there is a Churn inside every man, rinsing him clean to make room for newer thoughts.”
“What about you gods? If you don’t die, how can you get your memories cleaned away? How do you not go mad from it?” Ylla asked.
“That’s simple. We don’t have memories.”
“You do so. You know who I am. You remember how I met you, and who Isaand is, and-”
“Those are facts, not memories. I recall these things, but it is not the same. They don’t transform and erode my brain, because I don’t have one. Well, this stupid animal I’m trapped in does, but that’s not me. Gods don’t change like men do. We are as we are. Slowly, we might divert to another path, over the course of centuries, but that path will always veer close to the one we started on. We don’t- Bah, there’s no point in explaining. You are a child, and worse, a human. You could not understand.”
“So I’m going to be like this forever,” Ylla said.
“Well yes, but so is everyone else. The memories trapped in your soul, the ones that came from the other dead, they’re no different than your own memories. Right now they are raw and painful, but they will fade. In a year, perhaps a decade, you’ll not recall a time when they weren’t a part of you. Besides, it’s not truly forever. You’ll die, sooner or later.”
“You’re not really very good at comforting people,” Ylla complained.
“I’m a god, not a priest. I dispense my wisdom, it is up to you to find a use for it. Besides, what do I care if you’re comforted? Your whining irritates me, I just wanted to put a stop to it.”
He was so irritated that he’d come and sought her out, after she’d left him with that little girl. Ylla felt different, and realized that there was a faint smile on her lips. Below, the strange armored creatures were climbing up the side of the island, still hundreds of feet below the surface of the lake. As she watched, one of them let go and began to slowly drift down, like a feather floating on the wind. The memories she’d been struggling with were still there. She thought of her parents and saw only a jumble, but somehow, it didn’t hurt so much now.
“Vehx, where do you think Isaand is? He didn’t say when he’d be coming back, did he?”
“I truly have no idea. That boy fancies himself a hero, no matter how much he denies it. It’s possible he came across someone else in danger and stopped to help them. Or maybe he found that pretty girl from yesterday and decided to spend the night with her.”
Ylla didn’t like to think about that. It brought images to mind of things she’d never seen, things other people had done, that she didn’t understand. Vehx spread his wings, as though he were shrugging. “I would not be concerned. Szet’s power is linked to Isaand’s soul. If he is harmed, it will heal him. Up to a point. Isaand is slow by nature, he thinks too damn much, you have that in common. He’ll return when he returns. Though I suppose I could go looking, if you insisted.”
“I’ll wait,” she said. “He’ll come back.” And suddenly she found herself hoping he didn’t come right away. If he came now, he’d be there when the sacrifice was killed. If Isaand was a hero, he wouldn’t stand by and watch them die, would he? But if he tried to stop them, they’d kill him instead. It was better if he stayed away.
Heretic 