The Woman Who Buried Nations Read online

  “Amen,” shouted Boyd, “I again say that we are blessed to have such a wise ruler, are we not my friends?” And many of the men cheered into that dark night, even as they avoided the knifing eyes of their wives, who mostly stood like statues digging their nails into the shoulders of us, their anxious children.

  “My people,” said Adair through reedy, wine-rimmed lips, “The banchecki only protect us because we provide them ready sustenance. In return, they offer us security and their unique sense of loyalty. Unlike us, they are ancient and ageless. We can betray them if you wish, but we can never be rid of them, for their hearts shall pump longer than ours, and their appetites shall rage larger than ours, and their hate and love and mercy is not of our likeness…”

  An obedient hush fell over the crowd. “We can domesticate them, or we can betray them, but either way they will feed on our flesh. Of that I can assure you.” I shuddered at those words, at the horrible compromises of mankind. The crowd half-groaned and half cheered.

  “Now, great aunt Dramadi,” Adair continued, “will you please, for the love of the gods, perform the sorting ritual.”

  And so the old herb witch removed eight rings, one representing each of the families slotted for the game of chance, and she murmured ancient words over the rings and the orbs pulsated and glowed. Each of the selected families held their breath until nearly blue, eyeing their assigned color and praying it would not burn last. One-by-one the colors were snuffed out – each time to the resultant relief of the assigned family – until at last, there were but two colors and two families remaining: rose and amber. Everyone in the village watched the final two colors flicker, even the growling specter that was the banchecki. I guess one could fairly say that they had a vested interest in the proceedings.

  Somewhat colorblind since birth, Boyd wilted when he glanced over at his wife and observed the sliding wickets of her eyes. And then the last light remained, amber, and Hilda fell like castle turrets under siege, and Boyd gasped, I imagine his very life must have then felt like an eclipsed sun: absent of all light yet damaging to look upon. When I think back on it now, I am always amazed by how truly small our ‘large’ men were.

  Dramadi shook her head as she tossed the darkened rings in the fire, muttering in a language ancient even to our people. Boyd, his very skin hard as rusk collapsed next to the flames, and he would have rolled into them if Adair hadn’t stepped between his best friend, his only true friend, and the orange inferno – that tireless comet that stalked their campsite and brought light where no light wished to be found. Adair bent down and he helped Boyd to his feet, and turned him toward his wife, who did not make a scene because that was not our custom.

  As by their agreement with the banchecki, Ryne, the youngest of Boyd’s brood was taken from his mother’s arms and carried out into the surrounding woods by Adair. The banchecki chirped and sauntered along the forest floor, etching their way out into the woods as slowly as silt left by a receding river. Their very breath a hot brackish wave of expectation.

  “Go!” shouted Adair, and he pushed Ryne forward into the night. We watched as the boy ran through off through a maze of trees, screaming and crying, as the banchecki prefer to feast on live prey…

  When Adair returned, our entire village stood in an ovular pattern. It was like a crucible hung over and around him, dead silent, and we a wall of eyes just staring, castigating him in the shimmery stardust of the dwindling flames. Not a one of us felt clean.

  “What?” Adair shouted. “What is it? Well? What is it with you people!” And he raged and stormed against us, and against the night, and perhaps against his own mortality and the weakness of all flesh.

  That evening, after we all bedded down, Adair snuck into the O’Donough tent and he carried out their daughter Loreena in his arms. He crept over the forest floor with that child, who was dizzy with the night and the daze of childhood. He carried the child far, far away from the camp, beyond light, beyond sound. I was that child, of course.

  I opened my eyes as we reached an opening in the tree line, somewhere three miles north of camp.

  “Where’s mommy?” I asked.

  “She’s not here, little Loreena,” Adair said.

  “Where am I?” I said. Oh, how my tiny pupils struggled; they couldn’t adjust to the surrounding blackness of the night.

  “Do you know what the banchecki do with children?” Adair said, his words loose and dry in the moonless ether.

  I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.

  “Yes…” I answered. “I think so.”

  “Well, I too am a banchecki,” said Adair, “Or will be. And I will taste of your flesh and then I will live forever and ever. Run!” he commanded.

  He set me down and I went off screaming into the woods. It all felt like a cruel nightmare, yet I knew it wasn’t.

  Adair was careful not to let me get too far ahead, perhaps he had made that mistake before. As I said, he was no longer a young man. No longer young, but soon! or so he thought. He raced, raced through the woods and I ran without breathing, too scared to scream. And that horrible man followed with curdled milk in his stomach and we banged into trees and then there was a sudden snap and a shift, and Adair lay draped over a tree branch, gasping for breath and wincing into the void.

  With Adair detained, I crept into the shadowed halo of a bramble bush. As humans, we so often forget that the primary purpose of thorns is protection.

  My eyes finally adjusted, and I watched from the edges of the forest as Boyd loomed over Adair. Behind Boyd sat the banchecki.

  “I had my suspicions it was you,” Boyd said. “How could you do it?”

  Adair smiled at his last friend, his half-brother. “I just wanted to live forever, brother,” he said. “As they do…” He laughed and pointed at the banchecki, who were now gathering around him, encroaching upon him from all sides.

  “Live forever at the cost of becoming a monster?” Boyd said, and his words dropped and fell there dead among the scattered detritus of the forest floor.

  “Live forever, at any cost,” Adair said. “Yes….”

  And then the banchecki were upon him, snorting and pillorying him with their acidic tongues and their claws of iron and bronze, their green ooze blinding his eyes, so that it’s likely he could only hear as they finished their work, finished him and drained him of every drop of blood and ounce of saliva.

  As you may know, the banchecki do not often eat the flesh of an adult human. That night, they made quite the exception. But I didn’t stop to watch the whole feast, I turned, my clothes torn by thorns and scattered deeper into the woods. I was not ready then to die.

  “Loreena,” Boyd called, but I kept running and I was never found by the Kimall Clan. Later that evening I encountered another child, Boyd’s son Ryne. He was miraculously spared by the banchecki. We talked of returning to the Kimall Clan, but by then we were to spun around to know which direction would return us to our families. Thus us two children walked, three lonely nights and two desolate days before we reached civilization.

  I would have died out there if it hadn’t been for him. He was older and better understood how to navigate the terrain. Even then I knew he was special, though I later realized it was for all the wrong reasons. Though an orphan, Ryne would one day be known as Lord Dober, the most powerful invader in Thanatos history. As for young Loreena, well, as I said, that was me. Tough little Loreena – poor child – the girl who was swaddled by monsters and raised by butterflies.

  The Fragile Ones

  When you’re my age, everyone assumes you only want to talk about the past. And in my case, the singular horrors of my memories. As though because I am ancient history, that I desire nothing more than to spend what little time I have left pontificating about times and people of old. Oh, what I would give to be asked about my future, at least once in a while. But you are here to gather my thoughts on the ‘Scriptorium Massacre,’ even though I’ve provided oral narratives on this subject before. I should have writ
ten a book and been done with it, but for obvious reasons I never again wished to hold quill in hand. I suspect you hope to unlock some new fact or quote, from which to make your name at the academy? And perhaps I should not complain, for if I didn’t play my little part in the massacres, I wouldn’t be visited by anyone at all. I like the honesty of your face, and thus I will tell you everything pertinent to your study. If you can find a new angle into the madness, then I applaud you.

  Throughout the ages, there are those who believe power cannot be conferred, that it must be taken. Extracted vigorously, with the same lustful force as a drunk downing the last dregs of his mead. My would-be murderer, Adair of the Kimall Clan, was one such man. His nephew, Lord Dober was also of such a belief, although it cannot be denied that for many years it served him well. For if I claimed otherwise, it would be to deny the movement of a man who was born to primitives, raised by a smithy, and yet died some fifty years later marked as lord of the largest empire our world had known. And though he is rightfully vilified, he too had his romantic notions. “We fight now, so that we can build schools and libraries later,” he would often say. And on the surface, that was something even my adoptive Mellites supported. Evil rarely lets you in on its little secrets, and never at first. No, the infancy of darkness is one marked by hints, by subtlety, which is why even our wisest representatives often become unsuspecting accomplices to the darkest of arts. He, the smithy’s son, wished to forge the very world in his own image. Though we all slide to the inevitable, like so much coarse sand through an overturned hourglass, for a period of time he accomplished that remarkable feat.

  Lord Dober, or Ryne as I still knew him then, was perhaps three years older than I. Although we didn’t speak often of our shared past, we maintained a friendship throughout our early childhood. There is something uncanny about being near those who remember where you’re from. It’s not as important as pulling a sledge in the same direction toward a future, but it can almost obscure that fact. We used to spend a great deal of time just rolling down hills together. I suppose since we had lived dizzy lives already, we thought maybe the spinning would lend us an equilibrium. I don’t know if I ever saw him laugh except when he was drunk with movement, gripping onto me like some old staggering crank.

  “Loreena,” he would shout in his husky voice. “I do believe this is the time I shall lose my meal.” But he never did, as the Kimall stock is hardy if nothing else. As for his parents and mine – our real parents, that is – we never much spoke of them, and in time we began to block them from our memories all together. There wasn’t much of a civilization where we now lived, but it was something more than the nomadic existence we were born into. After enough days, even the strangest of lands begin to smell like home.

  You know, it has always fascinated me that we were both raised by the very people our parents wished to conquer. And of course it is even more interesting, that Ryne, as Lord Dober, would ultimately finish what Adair set out to do: to grip the pulse of the world with his own stubby fingers. There was nothing he wanted more than to control his adoptive world, and nothing I wanted more than to save it. Of course, subsequent events would prove that neither of us succeeded. Not in the end.

  I was taken in by a family of modest means, Mellites in every sense of the word. There was Warwick, who lost his wife to child birth, and there was his daughter, Daphna. She was young at the time I was adopted, perhaps older than me by two and a half years. Warwick was of mostly tender years, but appeared quite old even then. His face carried with it every pox scar, every faded swatch of sunburn, and every bruise from three decades of life. Like most Mellitian men, his face was a tangle of thick fur. For obvious reasons, Mellitians did not shave. I always felt a bit apart from their world, but in time we formed our own version of a family. It was only ever us three.

  The villagers had come upon Ryne and I walking forlornly along a dusty deer path on the outskirts of town. It was determined at once that we would be split up, for nobody in that village had the means to fill two more stomachs. They didn’t know much of the Kimall clan, for we had never before dipped so far south. It was to our benefit that they didn’t know, of course, or they would not have granted us entry into their community. As you may have read in the foundational texts, Mellites were notoriously distrustful of strangers. They were a wonderfully insular people. That was both their strength and their weakness. Ryne was housed with a Tangolorian family, and I with the cloistered Mellites. I suppose they thought it more appropriate that I, a girl, went with the weaker nation. After all, how could they know that this weed would be the last thing left of my era.

  The Mellites loved me that first week. You see, I was too shocked to do much other than sleep and drift in and out of an uneasy consciousness. When I started to bounce back, in my second week, I was almost turned out. One morning I had made a ball out of twine, and I was tossing it back and forth with Daphna when Warwick returned from preaching.

  “What on Thanatos do you think you’re doing?” he said, rushing over to put a stop to our movement.

  “We were just having fun,” I said.

  “Fun?” he shouted. “Don’t you know that you could ruin Daphna? Don’t you realize what would happen if she were injured?”

  “I didn’t think,” I wailed.

  “I have given you a place to stay,” he bellowed, “but I will never place you above Daphna’s need to be protected,” he said.

  Later that night, in the jaundiced glow of candles alighted by marine oil, Daphna put her arms around me in a warm embrace.

  “I’m sorry that I got you in trouble,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry that I put you in harm’s way. I didn’t mean to.”

  “Father is just overly cautious,” Daphna said. “I think it’s because he lost my mother.”

  “My people are very different from yours,” I said. “But I’ll do my best to fit in.”

  She sighed and stroked my hair. “I wish I were strong like girls from your nation.”

  “No you don’t,” I said. “We’re just weak on the inside, and you on the out.”

  Dramadi had told tales of a people who never healed; not ever. She said they carried with them every bruise and scrape of their short lives. I learned that Dramadi was right, and that the people of her ‘myths’ were my adoptive Mellites. That is why they were nicknamed “the butterfly people,” of course.

  After that day I learned to fit into the unique parameters of their society. I have always been quite good at hiding in plain sight. And soon I fell into the strange rhythms of my new land. There was father, and my sister Daphna, and me, the ‘odd’ one because I lived among strangers. For several uneasy years we had peace, and I grew up and out like a holly bush. But though I loved my new family, I never gave up hope of one day finding the Kimall Clan. I missed my mother and father, even if they were willing to sacrifice me to the banchecki. And I know that Ryne missed his parents too, especially his mother.

  “I’m sure father’s the chieftain now,” Ryne would insist on the rare occasions we discussed the past. “After all, he’s the one who challenged Adair. That would make me a lord.”

  “Of course,” I would say, mocking his pride. “It couldn’t be any other way.”

  “Instead I’m stuck here, a lowly smithy apprentice,” he would pout.

  “Yes,” I would answer. “And yet the sun still rises.”

  I was a girl of perhaps twelve when Ryne, henceforth Lord Dober rose to power. It was the most unexpected thing. He won our city in a match against Elder Heinrich, who had thought he was dueling for the honor of his sister. A miscalculation. Lord Dober cared not about Heinrich’s sister; his only aim was to draw Elder Heinrich into an arena where he could be legally slaughtered.

  We all gathered at the village square on duel day, even the Mellites, who as a rule avoided the jostle of crowds. After all, they almost wilted with touch. But for a time the Mellites were treated fairly by Lord Heinrich and his family, even if they were on the w
hole considered different, separate from the Tangolorians. They thought the Mellites too delicate, and the Mellites thought the Tangolorian world too dangerous, so in a roundabout way, all more or less agreed on the natural order of things. They were wrong.

  I must admit to vanity. I am telling you all this not just because I am lonely and old, but because I like how you do not shy away from my haggard appearance. From the moment you entered my hut you did not recoil at the scars on my face, its many crevices, its dark permanent imperfections. See, this left-arm of mine now hangs as though by a metal hinge. I look like a true Mellite now, even though I carry not their blood. Some of us are more sensitive than others, but we all carry with us our scars. Many now claim that I am the last Mellite, but of course that simply isn’t so. I was merely adopted into their nation. As I like to say, I’m not a Mellite, I’m just old and spent.

  Would you believe me if I told you at one time this face almost passed as pretty? Surely my sister Daphna had me beat; she was always so careful. First because father asked her to, and later because she internalized his fears. Before life catches up with them, most Mellites are exceptionally beautiful, you know. More so than other nations. Only their beauty is ever more fleeting, this world too full of traps. The gods certainly love bestowing their unique ironies upon us, do they not?

  Anyway, what was I taking about before I got distracted? Oh yes, the duel. For the match Elder Heinrich chose a mattock and Dober a single metal rod, one smelt by the hands of his own adopted father. His weapon glistened in the spartan sunlight that morning. We gathered in the old courtyard and enveloped them in a din of noise as the two men circled one another. Neither wore armor aside from a thin layer of chainmail. Neither had a shield. They stomped heavy-booted feet on the ashen earth, a flat circle worthy of such a duel. I was, of course, cheering for my Ryne. Gods help me.