Daygo's Fury (35 page)

But his hate wasn’t satisfied; after the first two fell, dying, he wanted more. He wanted more pain, he wanted more anguish, more suffering. He altered his cuts, altered his flow. He wanted to slow them, cripple them so he could elongate his own satisfaction. There could never be enough.

“Not enough,” he whispered. The charging man was forced to slow and swipe his comrade’s arm away, whose weakened hand lost grip of the sword. Liam was already stepping into the space created by the attacking man’s clearing movements, knowing what was going to happen, able to read it, see the future before it happened, his being processing every minute detail, knowing it clearly, easily, obviously. He cut above the man’s eyes with a backhanded swing, smoothly splitting the skin above his eyebrows as the short sword clattered and rang on the floor amidst the cacophony of grunts and cries of his assailants. Blood instantly poured down, blinding him. Liam didn’t stop for an instant, he moved with the precision of a master dancer re-enacting a set routine that had been performed to the point of it becoming second nature. He never moved too fast or too slow, never rushed; every step, duck and dive controlled, finding the right space, stopping in time, changing direction in time. Every pocket of safe air called to him as the men converged upon him, telling him of its existence.

“There will never be enough!” he shouted in rage. There was not enough to satisfy him here, to satisfy his thirst; years of torment had dug the well deep and ever deeper. It was a gaping hole that needed to be filled with blood. There was not enough blood here to fill it. He stepped forward, into the throng of stumbling men pushing at each other for space. They started to panic as his knife arm stabbed with more speed, with a frenzied lust for blood and pain and punishment. They fell away, crying out, swinging arms awkwardly thrown before them, unbalanced swipes of weapons desperately swung in his general direction, trying to fend him off, get him away as they stumbled backwards, away from one another. Liam barely had to move to avoid their careless blows. His knife dug downwards diagonally, cutting through the cloth of a man’s tunic and slicing the genitals beneath.

“I need more!” Spittle flew from his mouth. They would all pay, they would all burn in his hellfire; there could never be enough to their suffering. Screams rang out through the street, some from the audience that had built to watch the gang’s justice as they turned and ran in fear.

The men backed away, stumbling backwards, crawling on the ground in terror. Liam followed them, ensuring none escaped. He turned but was too late as one man found his feet behind him and started to sprint away. Liam roared in rage at the back of his sandy-coloured head. His gaze fell on a man and a boy standing in a doorway three houses up, the boy grasped firmly by the man’s left arm. The man’s eyes met Liam’s, and he backed away in terror. Liam stepped towards them but they turned and ran.

He turned back to his three remaining subjects, too crippled to move, and set to work. Their cries and screams travelled through the empty street, reaching around corners and in shuttered windows. Sometimes eyes peeked out, but Liam would find them and once they had met his fiery gaze they returned behind their wooden protection.

As the last man eventually died, Liam fell to his knees.

“This was not enough,” he whispered into the dead quiet of the street.
Not nearly enough.
All of a sudden, a force came flooding down on top of him, like a dam had broken and an avalanche of water crashed onto him, knocking him senseless, to collapse to the ground beside his dead.

Leandro sat cross-legged in front of the assembled priests. He had been allowed to pray with them in the strange humming dance that they partook in every day at sunrise. He had tried his best but simply could not perform many of the movements and postures involved in their prayer. There was a hidden strength and flexibility to the priests that was incredible.

They were the famed Walolang de Kgotia. The nearest translation that Leandro could find was “stream soothers”. He thought that this meant the Daygo stream, for it was his understanding that these men were priests of Daygo, part of one of the many subsects of an ancient religion almost gone from existence, the most ancient of all. Thought by many to have been the first, the original, that all had subsequently stemmed from. Leandro could only imagine that what remained of that original was so diluted and warped by thousands of years of human interference as to be almost unrecognisable. Leandro knew of no religion that was not, in some way, based upon what was known by historians as the first religion of Daygo. Though some, such as the Levitan Church, only seemed to use this historical reference to fill in the gaps.

He had entered the forests of the Chewe people in the mountains north of Darwin six weeks previously. It had taken him since then to find the priests. The conditions, as he trekked through the rainforests, had been enough to drive him half mad. The air was hot and thick with moisture, the constant humidity becoming so bad at times that he struggled to breathe, having to stop every ten or fifteen yards for a break. Often leaning against a tree as opposed to sitting down. His every footstep was haunted by paranoia as to what may lie beneath it. Snakes and rat-like creatures had often scuttled from his path or reared their fanged heads before him, causing an agonised shriek of panic from his throat as he stumbled or jumped back. He had felt as though he was under attack from the environment and often found himself wondering how any of the tribes survived in such a place. His sense of disbelief had increased when he saw them running through the trees in their bare feet. He had more than once praised Levitas for his thick leather boots, which, while causing his feet to sweat profusely, had saved him from a poisonous snake bite and Lev knows what else since his arrival in the forests.

Some habits were hard to break. Despite his loss of faith, he still sent thanks up to Levitas after lucky escapes and found himself unconsciously beseeching Him for good luck before he realised and stopped himself. His mind seemed an empty cavern without that divine presence occupying it.

He had come across numerous and varied forest tribes on his path to the temple, managing to avoid long stints on his own. He had found them a fascinating and refreshing people. There was nothing within their lifestyle and ways that was familiar to him. They seemed utterly apart from the rest of the world. All modern medicine and scientific advances were lost to them. They had no metal, apart from a few rare pieces that they wore for decoration, picked up from what might have been left behind by the rare traveller that had passed through the woods.

This he had used to his advantage, trading the copper coins that he had on his person for food and information far outweighing their worth. He wanted to learn all that he could, ready to write about it in great detail when he returned home to write the journals of his travels. He tried to commit everything about the tribespeople to memory or write, in shorthand, on the precious paper of the diaries that he had brought with him.

Leandro had always had an affinity with languages and could speak most native tongues of the different races and cultures within Levitashand, even as many were dying. As a priest, it had been a favourite study of his. But the tongue spoken by the tribes in the Chewe forests was not documented or ever put into print, partly because the Chewe tribes had no writing to speak of and relied completely on the telling of oral histories. It was only through extensive research and quizzing of historians and language experts that he was able to acquire a smattering of words that allowed for basic conversation with the tribespeople. But as he was admitted to the tribes and spent time with them his language grew to the point that he found most things communicable.

They hunted with spears and sharpened axes made from wood and stone. They were ingenious in their use of the forest’s materials around them, using stripped bark and various lengths of vines and plants to tie their weapons and clothing together. Leandro had possessed a preconceived notion that the tribes would be constantly hunting and scavenging for food in the forest and survival would be a battle for them; but he had quickly been disabused of that idea. The tribespeople spent a bare three to four hours every day providing themselves with food, and much of this time was the gentle labour of gathering fruit, nuts and herbs, amidst amiable chatter, which were in abundance in the surrounding areas. Depending on the day, they might spend an hour or two hunting a large forest boar or some other such creature that would supply more than enough meat for the entire tribe. The rest of the day they spent performing odd chores, playing with their children, hidden away in their tents or partaking in some competition or other.

For the most part, it seemed a consistent and relaxed lifestyle. Their diet was surprisingly varied and nutritious. He was also surprised at the lack of difference associated to gender. Outside of the irrefutable responsibilities of a woman to carry and deliver a child, and the hunt for meat, they shared all chores equally.

They were a small race, their average height between five and five and a half feet. They were dark of hair, normally worn to mid length, and round of face with definite and full features. Their eyes tended towards a reddish, brown colour. They had long torsos and short legs, their arms long and dangling below their waists like apes.

They dressed in their environment, with leather and furs from the animals they killed, bamboo-like grasses plucked from the ground and separated until they made a thin, cloth-like fabric that was woven together into clothing, normally to complement the leather. Their chests and lower legs were mainly bare, and they sported a multitude of tattoos in all parts of the body.

On first appearance, they had seemed a wild and dangerous race of people. Carved wooden piercings looped through the middle of their noses to exit out at either side in honed down points. Similar decorations hung dangling from their pierced ears or protruded from their lower lips. The strangest of all was the ceremonial garb of the tribal leader. He wore the bones of his ancestor, the leader before him, strapped all over his body. The spine dangled behind him from his neck, the skull sat like a crown upon his head, the jaw lay loose underneath his own. Shins were strapped to shins and the ribcage bounced on top of his chest as he chanted amidst a burning collection of herbs and plants that let off a pungent odour.

They lived in fear and respect of the Daygo stream, and though they held fear for its unpredictable actions, they also seemed to hold onto a strange sort of acceptance. Life was movement, they would say, that was all, one could never know in which way it would go.

They were honest in their conductions. There was no guile to them, although they did hold a strange sense of humour that often left Leandro the butt of jokes he did not understand. He would sit, smiling dumbly back at them, his eyebrows raised. He had grown affectionate towards the Chewe tribespeople.

However interesting they were and though he enjoyed their company, his main goal always remained to find the Walolang de Kgotia and learn from their religion and rites and what it was, precisely, that they actually did. At the end of each short stay with a tribe, or forest village, as he had come to think of them, he would ask after the whereabouts of the priests and their temple. While they had been forthcoming before this point, suddenly they would become quiet, glancing unsurely to one another or upon the ground. Eventually, he would get a loosely pointed arm and a change of mood to have done with this foreigner.

His efforts grew frustrated as he walked from tribe to tribe, following such loose directions and little else, but nevertheless he retained hope that he was, painstakingly, nearing his target. Five days previously he had entered a village where he had finally received what he took for directions to the temple itself. He had left excited and light of foot.

He had wandered unsure and lost for two days before finding the place, wondering if the deliberately vague directions were in the least bit accurate.

All of his travels had led him here, to the famed and feared priests of Daygo and their temple to the spirit of all, though he had been warned time and again to stay clear of the place as it was holy and should not be interfered with.

The temple itself was a series of caves, naturally appearing, in the side of what developed into a mountain, the forests along its side climbing spectacularly upwards. Leandro could see the inclining green through the parting of the trees above the clearing. He realised then how rarely it had been that he had seen the blue of the sky and felt the sun’s light. As a result, looking up into the blue above the clearing was strangely beautiful and awe-inspiring. He was accompanied by the feeling that the world, being the forest, was encased by the gentle blue glow of Daygo. In that moment, he realised how close to holy that place must seem to the tribesmen, with its clear, circular view of the sky, mostly naturally created in the dense forest. At its highest, the sun bathed the clearing in bright yellow light, causing Leandro’s eyes pain at the now unaccustomed brightness. How horrible it would be, he thought, to be denied the sun and the sky.

Their holy caverns were strange in appearance. The land of the forest seemed to drop suddenly downwards in one area, forming the gaping, dark and gloomy cavern entrance, encircled in hard, mostly bare, rock. It was as though half a hill was pushed against the side of the mountain. Grass and trees and the usual foliage of the forest grew all along the sides and up the hill, covering it as it would anywhere else. The cavern seemed to narrow within into a passageway of sorts. The ground before the cavern was mostly bare of life and sloping downwards into the gaping mouth; the small patches of foliage growing amidst the rocky floor trampled over time by the soft footsteps of the priests.

Ten steps clear of the entrance, at the top of the slope, was the first of the beehive-shaped huts of the priests. Eleven in all; they were barely long enough for the inhabitant to lie out fully within—certainly Leandro could not in any that he saw—and allowed for no rolling room. They were tall, curving constructions made from curved and warped wood, lashed together with the ropes and twines of the forest.

They were haphazardly spaced around a central area where the priests built a communal fire and did their cooking. Just outside the miniature settlement was a small garden patch that grew various different herbs and plants native to the forest. Leandro had learned that these were used for medicinal, religious and flavouring purposes. Some gave off a thick, pungent smoke when burned and when inhaled gave an uninhibited, light-headed experience that was frequently interjected by bursts of laughter and giggling. Others were used to eject and clear worms and other parasites from the body. Still more were simple flavourings. Beside this they grew vegetables and other food stuffs.

They rose and chanted in the mornings, staring up through the branches of the trees at the sky, sometimes shaking their arms up as though impeaching the sun to show or for the world to end, or for something to happen, or even their floundering arms might be asking their God the perpetual question of “why?” to some unexplained or misunderstood tragedy. Leandro would watch, fascinated, until the chanting would quieten down and eventually die out, signalling that it was time to eat.

Over the three days that he had been in their presence, he had observed their habits and routines with interest. They lived very simple and repetitive lives. They looked well fed, with some of the older priests showing paunches.

He questioned them about their lives and their beliefs. Mostly he simply received surface and vague answers. They generally deferred to their high priest, Obasi, as though unsure of what information they were allowed to part with. So Obasi answered most of his questions, a constant frown between his eyebrows.

They seemed confused over their purpose and their answers, yet they spent their whole lives dedicated to this cause that Leandro had not, as of yet, been able to fully ascertain. It was not at all what he had expected. In his experiences, when visiting extreme religious, cultish groups, their belief and purpose was fanatical, delusional in most cases. But he found that these priests seemed, if anything, to be suffering a crisis of faith.

While physically they looked healthy, their eyes looked tired and haggard, and their heads hung slightly, giving them a hounded look.

At one stage he wandered up to the hilltop that framed the entrance to the caves, where the earth was clearly disturbed. He stood, looking down at the upturned soil, wondering if this was their graveyard, when a woman priest stepped up to his side. She stood silently beside him for a moment, watching the soil where he had watched. She pointed two fingers at it.

“Two of us,” she said. “Two years.” She shook her head. Leandro looked across at her, at the deep sadness that lined her face, and he did not know what to say. He reached a hand out and placed it on her shoulder. What more could be said or done, for the grief of those who were lost? As a priest he had seen it often; sometimes it had seemed that he was the harbinger of death. He wondered if this was the cause of their distress. Was it the simplicity of death to crumble their faith, as it tested the faith of all? Had they thought themselves above such things, as servants to their Daygo? It seemed a lame explanation.