Saying Goodbye to the Sun Page 15

  Mercy is a weakness.

  A knock in the darkness startled me and interrupted my thoughts. Would a Lost One knock? Probably not. Then it occurred to me that the Lost One in the dungeon hadn’t made a whisper of sound, not even when it laid its wretched fingers on my shoulder and sent me to the depths of the netherworld. This had to be someone else. Someone had come to call and even granted me the courtesy of a knock. Did this place have a cleaning staff? I resisted an insane urge to giggle as I pictured some bedraggled old ladies with linen carts and pointy fangs going from room to room, knocking on the doors and calling ‘housekeeping’ as they went.

  Again came the knock, louder this time. Perhaps whoever it was thought I was still asleep. I thought about pretending to be, hoping they would go away. Then I remembered the dream, and the terrible, debilitating loneliness I’d felt as I watched Raine die in the water. Did I really want to be alone? No, I decided. I didn’t.

  “Come in,” I whispered. Seconds later, a door opened to my right.

  When I looked at the door, a bright shaft of light started as a narrow strip and widened into a wall of blazing fury. After sitting in the dark for so long I had to shield my eyes from the glare. Only torchlight, but to me it felt like staring at the sun. A cloaked figure shuffled into the room through the open doorway, then closed the door behind it. The light that had invaded the room vanished, plunging the two of us back into darkness. After the light receded I heard those same shuffling footsteps coming closer in the dark. Oddly enough, I felt no fear. Because of that, I did not need to ask who had entered. I already knew.

  Ramah, Second of the Council of Thirteen and father of Raine had come to call. It didn’t take much imagination to know why. He had come to talk about Raine, of course. I had no idea what he thought he would get from me that I had not already offered to the Council, but whatever it was, I knew I didn’t have it.

  I was wrong.

  “Vincent,” his voice came from the dark, “Would it bother you if I lit this candle? The dark is suited to some purposes, but I find of late that I prefer candlelight to darkness.”

  “Please do,” I said, relieved that I would not have to have this conversation in the dark.

  A soft light began to glow to my left. I did not have to squint or look away this time as the light slowly advanced through a few lesser stages of luminescence into a soft glow. It resembled nothing so much as a child’s night light. The smell of melting wax filled the room. It was, in fact, a single candle Ramah had brought with him. It shed just enough light for me to see all four walls and the door, which this time had no bars. I was in a small room of smooth stone, surrounded by tapestries that covered three of the four walls. All of the tapestries showed scenes of night. On one, a pack of wolves was on the prowl. On another, owls scoured the undergrowth from lofty perches. The last showed only a single moon, but such a marvelous likeness it seemed to shine with its own glow, reflected from the candle.

  “It’s beautiful,” I breathed.

  “Yes,” Ramah said softly, “the moon is a lovely thing. Yet even as the moon shows us great beauty, she also hides great darkness in her shadowy realm. You and I are of the latter, Vincent. The darkness holds us in its bosom. It protects us even as it kills us. It is our salvation and our damnation. There is no beauty in what we have become.”

  He looked at his feet as he spoke, as though the words shamed him. The tone of his voice painted pictures in my mind of a sad, lonely old man. Raine’s disappearance must have been hard on him. Certainly that could account for his melancholy; Raine was his daughter after all. But I got the impression there was more to it than that. Oh, he was worried about her, of course, but the weight he bore on his shoulders seemed far greater and older.

  “This isn’t about Raine, is it?” I asked.

  “It is, and it isn’t,” he said. “It is not only about Raine, would be a better way to say it.”

  Ramah stepped over to the bed and sat down, his face turned toward the candle. The flame’s reflection danced in the inky blackness of his eyes, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Ramah nodded. “I know. There is no way you could. I will try to explain it as best I can. I was one of the first, you see. From nearly the beginning I have watched and enjoyed the climb of our race. We have been there almost from the dawn of Mankind itself. Watching, hiding, feeding. As Man has grown, so have we. And I was there for nearly all of it.

  “The Father visited me for the first time over six thousand years ago. For all these long millennia, I have never seen the green of grass under the spring dawn, and neither shall you. The dawn, and the light that it brings, are now your greatest enemy.”

  I shivered. The room seemed to have gotten colder since Ramah came in. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “You must know what will become of you, Vincent. I will not send you naked into the night to learn your new self; though others of the Council who would see you cast blind into the shadows to learn your own way. I have persuaded them to allow me this visit, and I shall use it to illustrate the depths of what has happened to you. You must listen carefully to what I am about to relate, and above all, you must never forget it.”

  Ramah needn’t have worried; I listened intently to every word he told me. His tale is one I will never be able to shake, but sometimes I wish I could. I relate it now to you, as near as I can recall to his own words. Let us see if it is a tale you would soon forget, as well.

  ***

  As a boy of ten seasons, I ran through the herd pretending to be one of the hounds my father had trained to keep the animals from wandering. To wander too far into the wastes was to die a slow and painful death, so my father told me. None would go there, and none who had gone there in the past had ever returned. This, my father swore to be true, and so I obeyed his command. In the tiny village on the edge of the Eastern Wastes where we lived, my father was Houlo, or chief, and all listened to his word, for it was Law.

  Years later, as a man of twenty-nine seasons, I was Houlo, and my word was Law. Like my father before me, I forbade anyone from crossing the eastern borders of our village and venturing out past where the grasses died and into the place where the merciless sun bleached the sand white as bone. No good could live out there, and no good could come from there. Such was the wisdom that had been passed down through the ages, and such was the word of the Houlo for as long as anyone could remember.

  But every man must have a weakness, even one responsible for the lives of one hundred and twenty-six men, women and children. Mine was a woman named Neelie.

  Neelie was twenty-four and as yet unbound. Her father had tried to barter her into some other families with no success. No hut in the village would have her, despite the fact that she was as beautiful as sunlight passing through the morning dew. Her hair was a raven’s coat; her eyes the arresting blue of the Big Water, which is now called the Mediterranean. She was so beautiful it hurt my soul just to look at her, and more than once I had thought to barter her father for her hand and have her come to live in my hut, where such beauty that is not of the eyes and hair might be enjoyed.

  My mother would not have it, and even though I was Houlo, it was still her hut in which I lived. It was not the way of my people to abandon their parents and form huts of their own, and until she joined my father in the After, I would live with her and abide her rules.

  And so Neelie remained unbound into her twenty-fifth season, a time when most young women in our village were long bound and heavy with their second or third child. To my knowledge none but myself coveted her company at all. Most of the other villagers gave her a wide berth, not wanting to have anything to do with her.

  You see, Neelie was a Chalika, a witch woman, or so the villagers believed. They would have liked nothing better than to banish her to the southern lands, or even into the Eastern Wastes themselves, so much did they fear her. Whenever an animal died, or a villager took sick, or a crop failed
, everyone pointed to Neelie and demanded that she be sent out from among us to find her fate wherever witch women will.

  I would not allow it, for I no more believed her to be a witch than I believed my own mother was. Yet nothing I could say would convince anyone else of this, and so Neelie remained in the village, unbound, unloved, and unwanted. Except by me.

  One night, while my mother slept, Neelie came to me in my hut. She bade me come outside with her and I went. We walked to the edge of the village, near the trees, and under the full moon. With tears in her eyes, she told me she knew the other villagers feared her and wanted me to banish her, and she asked why I had not. I told her the truth. Every bit of it. I told her I was in love with her, how I had tried to convince my mother to let me barter her father. I told her I did not believe the things the villagers said, and, as Houlo, I could not send one of my people to face their fate in the wilds. Not when I was convinced of their innocence.

  After I told her this, she put her arms around me and thanked me for believing her. We kissed, and the kissing led to more. Under the stars of that long ago night sky, we were both beautiful, young, and alive, and we took full advantage of it. It felt good, almost like touching the gods themselves. I would have stayed there forever had it been up to me. With the sun, however, our ways had to part. It would not do to be caught together as we were, with the approval of neither parent.

  Unbeknownst to us both, my mother had watched the whole thing. She had awakened in the night, and when she could not find me inside the hut she went outside and searched for me. She found us in the middle of our rendezvous, and watched as the night waned and the dawn approached. I can imagine her there, her wrinkled face a mask of anger and disapproval. Such a woman was my mother that she would wear such a face for any woman I coveted. None would be good enough for me. It was worse, though, that I should so desire a wretched Chalika.

  She would not have it, of course. She confronted me when I returned home, demanding that I banish Neelie that same morning, for the sake of my family’s honor. I refused and told her I wished to bind Neelie to me, and that I would barter her father with or without her permission. And when my mother scorned my beloved and called her those names only mothers seem to know, I slapped her. Yes, by all that is holy, I slapped my own mother and sent her to the floor.

  I regretted it immediately, and wanted to apologize. How could I strike my own mother? But the blood that burns so hot in youth is also slow to cool. And instead, with the names my mother called Neelie and the sound of my hand across her cheek ringing in my ears, I reached for my spear and went out to hunt. I had always loved to hunt, and I thought perhaps I would be able to settle my head while out on the prowl, letting thought recede and instinct take over.

  I was right, and it was a far calmer young man who returned from the hunt with an elk carcass slung over the shoulders than the one who’d left. As I walked into the village, I decided I would speak to my mother further and try to convince her of Neelie’s purity. I was sure I could make my mother see in her what I saw. All would be well, I would see to it.

  I was so absorbed in these thoughts I failed to notice how empty the village was. It was not until I reached my own hut and went inside – leaving the deer outside to hang while I fetched the skinner – that I realized I could not hear the usual sounds of men, women, and children going about their lives. True, my village was small, with just over a hundred people, but even that many people make noise. In my village there was only silence. I stopped in my entryway to listen, and realized the reason I could not see anyone was because the whole village had gathered on the edge of the Eastern Wastes. I heard them faintly from my hut, but I could not make out their words from so great a distance. But I didn’t need to hear their words clearly in order to know what was happening. The only reason the entire village would gather at the Eastern Wastes would be to banish one of our own.

  A cold feeling snaked up my spine from somewhere below, and I ran to the place where Life ends and Death begins, for so we called the spot where we sent our banished out into the wastes. I felt a terrible certainty that something unspeakable had happened, and so I ran all the faster.

  When I arrived I was beset by several men from the village, who beat me with fists and sticks before grabbing me by the arms and forcing me to the ground. Then they bound my hands behind my back and dragged me to the edge of our world. Once there, they pulled me to my feet. As I raised my bloodied head I saw without surprise my mother standing at the edge of our borders, the bright red mark of my hand still visible on her face. I winced a little when I saw it, but I could not change it, and I would not beg. Looking at the grim faces of the men on either side of me, I knew begging would do no good, anyway.

  As my mother spoke, I learned what had happened in my village while I was away. While I was hunting, she had gone into the streets wailing at the top of her lungs. She’d told all who would listen that the Chalika had bewitched her own son, and then she would point to her own face as proof. Though she was accusing the village Houlo, she had been wife and mother to Houlos in her time, and so was looked upon as wise and knowledgeable. The villagers, a highly superstitious group to begin with, believed her without question. For what man would willingly strike his own mother? That the villagers already believed my Neelie a witch woman only aided my mother’s cause.

  Just before I arrived, they had sent Neelie out into the blighted land. I could see her tracks in the dirt, but they grew faint as they entered the living sands of the Wastes. I stood in silence, listening to my mother’s accusations, knowing their inevitable conclusion. I was to be banished along with Neelie, the two of us sent to die in the dead land.

  I did not look at any of them as my bonds were cut and Harik, the new Houlo, pushed me from the circle of stones that marked our village’s border out into the burning sand. There he and three others stood with spears ready in case I tried to return. They needn’t have worried. Not then, at least. I had determined almost from the moment my mother began to speak that I would never return. I turned to face them, and spat at their feet. With my life as I knew it over, I turned and walked out into the land where, according to my father, all things died.

  I tried to follow Neelie’s trail, but it was no use. Only a short way from the village her tracks disappeared in the ever-changing sand. Hills would rise and fall; valleys would emerge and be filled in, all in a matter of hours. So constant was the change that as I looked behind me I noted my own tracks had begun to disappear. Still I trudged along, praying to any and all of my gods who might be listening to help me find Neelie before it was too late for either of us. None of them answered.

  For seven days I wandered the Wastes bereft of food or water. During the day the sun coursed right through me, leaving the burned and flaking skin of my body to blister and crack. At night it was all I could do to keep from freezing to death in the other extreme temperature of the desert: cold. I took to burying myself in the sand, for it held the heat of day and made the nights tolerable, while also shielding me from the sun during the day. The temperature of the desert was only bearable at dawn and dusk. The rest of the time I spent asleep under the shifting sands.

  By the time the sun sank below the horizon on the seventh day, I was no longer hungry or thirsty, only tired. The anger had faded, not because of any feelings of remorse on my part, but because being angry simply took too much energy. I closed my eyes and thought happily of shallow pools with many fruit trees nearby. I thought of my hut and of my father, and how shamed he would be to learn what had become of his son. Mostly, I thought of my beloved Neelie, now lost to me. I didn’t think she could have lasted as long as I had, and so I believed her dead. I also believed I would be joining her very soon. On that night, I dug myself from the sand, but could not raise the energy to rise and walk another step.

  I lay there, drifting into a sleep from which I knew I would never wake, and dreamed of the one night we’d had together. That night there had been no Houlo, no village, no hu
ts, and no disapproving mother. That night there had only been Neelie, myself, and the moon. I closed my eyes, wanting that to be my last memory, and drifted out of consciousness.

  I was still asleep when I heard his voice, and it roused me from my pleasant dreams. I tried to ignore it, hoping it would go away, but it didn’t. When I felt a nudge in my side, I reluctantly opened my eyes. A tall figure dressed in a loose, flowing black robe stood over me, the dark fabric whipping in the night wind. I could not see the face under the dark hood, but I could feel his eyes on me. They burned into my skin like coals from the fire. He neither moved nor spoke as he stood silhouetted in the moonlight, regarding me as though measuring me for something.

  I sat up, and the movement hurt terribly. A great deal of my skin was burned and burned again from the wicked sun. I managed to get into a sitting position, and asked the stranger who he was. He told me his name was not important, and that later he would reveal more to me. He told me he could help me, if I wanted, and all he wanted from me was an answer to a simple question. I asked him what would happen if I chose not to answer, and he replied without hesitation that I would die there in the wastes that very night, and the vultures would gorge themselves on my bloated flesh for many days to come.

  I agreed to answer his question. I had expected him to ask my name, or where I was from, but he did not. The one question the Father asked of me as I sat half-dead at his feet was this:

  “Do you want revenge, Ramah, son of Aryk?”

  I had been sent to die alone and burned by my own mother because I’d dared to love a woman she did not approve of. The village I had hunted for, fought for and bled for, had put me out like a common criminal. I’d done my best to lead them well, and they left me to die in the wastes like a dog. Not a single person even asked me if what my mother said was true.