Daygo's Fury (8 page)

The smith looked up as they walked in. Instantly, his eyes narrowed and he stood up, leaning on the shovel. He was a huge man, wide of shoulder with a barrel chest. He wore a leather jerkin with nothing but his hairy chest underneath. His legs seemed too small for his body.

“What do you fellas want?” he asked. The bellows the apprentice stood beside was at the left of the forge, the smith was directly in front of it and the shield was hanging up on the right of it. It would only take the smith two quick strides to get across to the shield. Liam glanced across at Calum, not needing to speak to him to know he was considering the same things. They would have to pull the smith away from the furnace and towards the front of the room so that one of the boys could get behind him and take the shield from the wall.

The problem then lay in how to get back out with the smith between that person and the door. Liam reluctantly conceded that they would have to use their knives. Calum walked to the right while Liam spread to the left.

“Never seen a forge before,” said Calum, trailing his hand along the table at the right side of the room. He stopped and looked at the smith with interest. “How do you make the metal?”

The smith eyed him. “We don’t make metal here, boy. I’m surprised you’ve never seen my forge before. Where do you live, down in Ratville?” His scepticism was plain in his voice.

“Ya,” replied Liam. He stood to the far left of the room. “We only heard about your place last week. Normally don’t venture this far over, thought we’d come over and have a look.” Liam sat on an old anvil. “Funny stool,” he remarked.

“That’s not a stool, boy. Tommy,” said the smith, looking over at his apprentice. “Take a break from the bellows and escort these boys out.”

“Well, you’ve seen the forge now,” the smith addressed them, “and you’ll be taking your leave. We’ve got work to do, and I don’t have time to be watching over two slum rats!”

Tommy walked over to Liam as he stood up. Suddenly, Liam knew what to do. Things always became obvious once you saw things clearly, without restrictions. Liam gave the shallowest of nods to Calum. Calum took a step away from the table.

Liam waited until Tommy put a hand on him to push him towards the door. The second he did, Liam’s fist lashed out, taking Tommy full force on the nose. The boy let out a gasp of shock as he fell to the floor, holding a hand up to his nose. It came away bloody. Violence always worked best when it was unexpected.

“Keep yer fuckin’ hands off me,” Liam said. He looked up at the smith, who gave a guffaw in disbelieve.

He dropped his shovel. “By Lev,” he exclaimed as he plodded towards Liam, his face like thunder, his hands making fists. Calum backed away into the wooden table as though in fear, taking a few sidesteps towards the shield as the smith strode towards Liam.

Liam pulled his knife from his pocket, buying time. The smith pulled up short at that, his eyes widening in disbelief.

“You’d want to put that away, boy!” he growled. Calum was at the shield now, lifting it from the wall. The apprentice sat up. He glanced Calum’s way, and Liam cursed quietly.

“Master!” said the apprentice.

“Not now, Tommy,” said the smith, his eyes on Liam. He took a step towards him.

“The other’s takin the shield!” Calum was a few steps from the wall now.

“What?” said the smith, turning to see Calum with the shield in hand. Calum stood still, trapped but waiting for his moment. The apprentice stood up and pottered towards Calum. The smith glanced at Liam, then took a step towards Calum.

Liam darted in, knife in hand, and stabbed the smith in the ass. The smith let out a yell, threw a backhand at Liam and narrowly missed. Calum made to move but the apprentice jumped in his way. He threw the shield low towards Liam. It bounced along the ground, rolling to him. Liam dashed over to it, grabbing it as Calum and the apprentice grappled.

He looked up to see the smith picking up a large, flat-headed hammer, his face red with rage.

“Leave that there!” he bellowed. The apprentice went down once more with a yell of pain, his hands going to his crotch. The smith glanced back and moved to the centre of the room, trying to watch both Liam and Calum at once, barring Calum’s way once more. Liam backed to the door.

The smith looked towards Liam, and Calum sprang forward, but he slipped on charcoal dust on the floor. Liam’s eyes darted towards Calum. The smith took in the gesture and lashed out with his huge left arm, hammer in hand, as Calum stumbled.

Things seemed to slow down for Liam. He felt his grip on the shield loosen and heard it hit the ground. The apprentice still groaned on the floor, the fire in the furnace still burned brightly. The smith’s muscles rippled as the hammer connected with Calum’s stumbling form. The crack as it hit his forehead was sickening. It drove his head backwards as his whole body fell forwards. The hammer seemed to bounce slightly before continuing past Calum’s head, his neck bent. His form fell all wrong, too limply, not naturally. It seemed to collapse down on itself to the floor, twisting as it did so.

Then there was stillness, and Liam stared at Calum’s lifeless face.

The shield rattled on the floor, spinning in circles as it found its balance.

Everything seemed to have slowed down and stayed the same. Sound and sight seemed to become more distinct and more muffled at the same time, as though he were less involved with it now, as though it had become objective to him, like he was withdrawn from it all, watching as an outsider. His gaze locked on Calum’s face, it seemed as though he couldn’t look anywhere else. Calum’s forehead was caved in, almost at the angle of his nose. His brows were pushed unnaturally backwards. The left eye hung loosely off to the side, dislodged from the socket.

Liam picked up the shield.

Sickness welled up within his stomach, panic and horror overtook him, and he had to physically pull his head away from the scene, turning it, jerking it sharply so that the sight was out of range of his eyes. He stumbled and ran from the smithy, the shield dragging along in his wake, gripped in his right hand. He was distantly aware of Carrick’s crew outside the entrance as his legs dragged him away. His ears registered the cries and shouts as they set upon the chasing smith but none of it seemed to reach him.

He stumbled around the corner and made it a few more yards before collapsing on his knees. He brought his arms up, resting on his elbows, shield forgotten somewhere along the way. He threw up violently on the street floor, his mind reeling in horror.

He had seen a cat like that once, its head rolled over by a passing wagon, its eyes and brains split open on the pavement. It didn’t seem right, it didn’t seem possible, that was Calum. His breathing became laboured, his head falling between his hands, his fringe draping in his own puke.

His chest clenched again and again, hurting his heart. He couldn’t see through the tears or breathe through the sobs. He couldn’t hear past the thumping of his heart.

He shut his eyes hard against the vision in his head and began to pray frantically to Levitas.

******

“There were no goodbyes. There was no farewell. His light extinguished, with the barest puff of wind, the fire blown out by a savage, careless blow. And He is still there, looking on in shock. He is still living. So He still lives, He still acts. He turns and runs. He cries, He moves on, He feels pain, He sees love. What would have happened to His life without this significant blow? The pain flourished within Him like an ever-budding flower. A living wound that grows larger yet never seems to run out of surface to spread over. There seems unlimited scale to suffering. Unlimited scale.”

Writings from “Me, ‘The Makings’”

Niisa paused for a moment, setting the head of his axe down against the earth. He looked at the monkey that sat watching him from a tree further along in the forest. She moved on top of her branch in a slightly agitated way, moving her head, dissatisfied, snorting sometimes and grumbling. He often found her following him, tracking his movements, but she never came too close.

He pondered her situation. There was clearly no motive for what she did. There seemed no reason for it and no action that she was likely to take. So why did she follow him? Why did she not let go? It was a disease of the mind, what his parents might call grief; a new thing to Niisa. Before this he had thought that humans were somehow unique in this way, somewhat of an aberration in nature. But then when he considered this, it did seem an unlikely outcome. Why would humans differ from the rest of the creatures of the world in such a way? And yet he was the one that differed from the rest. He was the aberration.

But this discovery posed a new question to him. Did this not mean that grief and such emotions were inherent within Daygo? It was something that held no logic behind it to Niisa. What was the purpose of such things, what use could it be to Daygo, or was Daygo as strangely assorted as the people of his tribe? It was such a vast question that it boggled the mind.

But he continued to ponder it as he twisted a handful of weedgrass around one hand and picked the axe up with the other. He chopped down at the root of the grasses, severing each stem until his hand pulled free. He placed them with the rest and continued until he had as much as he could carry.

Walking back towards the village, he enjoyed the unusual stir in the air of the forest. The gentle breeze created a lightness in the air that was normally lacking. Branches and leaves rustled in the layered canopy overhead where the ceaselessly climbing trees spread wide, overlapped and intersected, blocking the sky and the sun from view. He wondered if above them all the air was clear and the wind strong and the world massive to behold.

His sister Chiko came out to meet him as he reached the outskirts of the village.

“How is the woods, Brother?” she asked, her words always pronounced individually, rising and falling like the playful chirping of the birds.

He looked at her. “The woods are changed every day, but how am I to tell you how?”

“Tell me how you feel it. The woods are the woods.”

“There is a breeze.”

“Yes, there is!” She jumped beside him. They walked a few steps. She looked at him sideways. “Did Sikkha watch you?” Niisa nodded. Chiko placed her palm between his shoulder blades and rubbed it around in a circle, a gesture of comfort and affection she often gave him.

“Don’t worry, Brother,” his sister continued. “She will forget.”

They passed the first hut of the village, a round dome the colour of the trees and the forest. The huts of the village were a mixture of wood, green sapling, bark, moss and mud all tied together with rope made from the same weedgrass that he held in his hands. They smeared the entrance daily with the juice of the Tulsip flower to keep ants and insects out. The floor was layered with the leather and furs of dead animals to protect them from the bare earth. The forest provided for them in every way.

His tribe had been living in the same village for the past thirteen clan chiefs. Before this, they lived two miles to the northwest, but in the time when the Earth changed, rumbled and moved they were forced to relocate and rebuild their huts. The old village was now a holy place for the Abashabi that many travelled to when they needed to find calm and perspective. Niisa, too, liked to sit amongst the old huts. They were a monument to time, the only tangible proof he had of their history.

It was late in the afternoon, after the hunt and the day’s main meal, and the villagers were at their leisure for the rest of the day. Many of the men lounged on the ground or sat propped against the trunk of a tree, not so unlike the black panthers that draped themselves across the upper branches of the forest. Some picked at their teeth with loose pieces of bark, some dozed and others chatted and joked together, and some others had disappeared inside their huts with their wives. The women were much the same yet less obvious in their lounging; many sat propped against their huts, sewing new clothes or mending others, drying sheets of weedgrass, performing a multitude of small chores, but performing them slowly, lazily, almost with more purpose towards prolonging than completing as they chatted to one another. The children napped or played together in groups.

There were only two adolescent boys in the village, but in three days’ time Niisa would become the third when his earlobe was filled with a flatstone. For this, his mother felt that he would need a new walothsa, so she had sent him to gather some weedgrass for drying the next day. The one he wore, that covered his loins and looped around one shoulder, was starting to tighten on him.

He heard his parents before he saw them, coming upon them halfway through their conversation.

“… chief suggested he should wait another year,” his father was saying.

“He is already a year too old,” said his mother, her voice strained.

“Nuru spoke up for him with me. He will be at the hunt.”

“So long as he’s wearing the flatstone this gathering.”

“So long as he …” His father paused with a hand from his mother as she saw him approach over her husband’s shoulder. She smiled.

“How much do you think you have grown?” she asked, indicating the bundle in his hands as she stepped past Dikeledi.

“Better to have too much,” said Niisa. “There is plenty in the forest for the village’s needs.”

She passed a hand over Niisa’s as she took the bundle from him. “I’ll have to weave it extra thick to make use of it all,” she smiled. His father stepped around her and clasped Niisa’s ear between his thumb and forefinger, and pulled.

“Feeling strong?” He grinned.

Niisa pulled his fingers clear. “The stone will fit,” he said.

“It should, with the size of those lobes,” his father laughed. Fumnaya slapped him.

“What about this ear?” Chiko laughed as she tugged his other one with a loose hand.

“Not unless he gets promised at the gathering.” Dikeledi reached across and grabbed at Chiko’s hand with a look of playful malice. Chiko snatched it away, her feet taking a quick hop with the movement.

“No, no,” Fumnaya shook her head. “Far too soon yet. You can spend some more time as your mother’s boy. You have years yet to find a promised.”

His father smiled at her as he made another quick grab for Chiko, causing her to scream out and dash for safety at the side of the hut. But Niisa noticed a small rise of his eyebrow as he looked back at his wife.

Before he knew it, his father had reached around his shoulder and clasped the skin between his nostrils. “Or perhaps next year he’ll be made a man too!” His hand was gone after the barest tug and a wink at Chiko, who squealed with laughter as she pressed against the hut.

His mother smiled. “Will you help me separate the strands, Niisa?” she asked him, freeing a hand and reaching it to his shoulder.

“Okay,” he said as she led him to the side of the hut, where she sat down. He chose to sit a step away from her on the bare earth. She dropped the bundle of grass between them and patted the place next to her against the side of the hut.

“Sit down here next to me.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to sit against the hut.”

She looked up at him, a half smile playing across her lips. “Why not?”

“It will make my back lazy. And then I won’t be able to sit without it.”

She snorted. “Did I just hear my son call me lazy?”

Niisa said nothing. Taking up a blade of weedgrass, he started to pick at its tip, beginning the slow process of separating each strand of the grass for drying the next day. After a moment, Fumnaya reached out for her own piece with a small shake of her head, chuckling softly to herself as she did.

******

There was another girl in the village getting her ear stone with Niisa, the daughter of his aunt Onye. She was small, with weedy black hair and greenish eyes and a pointed nose not as wide and flat as the rest of them. Her breasts were small and her hips only recently showed some curve to them. She was halfway between woman and child. She wore a wreath of flowers that dangled from underneath her hair, behind her neck.

Her face bunched together in expected pain as the chief stepped up with the heated needle in hand. The drum beat was steady and loud amidst the forest’s usual hubbub. The small fire beside the chief and the girl was an oddity, its colour strange amidst the greens, reds, yellows, oranges and browns of the natural forest surrounding it. Birds whistled in the trees, a parrot perched half-hidden in the leaves of a branch behind the chief a small distance away, staring out at the village, its sideways eye taking in the peculiar behaviours of the humans around it. Niisa knew a snake lay curled and hidden somewhere in the bush twenty yards left of the parrot, startled and on edge by the unusual beating of the drum. Animals all around them must be wondering at the noise, as Niisa did at this strange tradition; one of so many strange traditions that he’d never found an answer for. He stood waiting his turn.

The needle pierced through the skin of the lower lobe of Razi’s left ear. She squirmed underneath the pressure and pain as it passed deeper through, widening sharply from its thin point. The chief rolled and pressed the needle, creating as large a hole as he dared. Withdrawing the needle, he used it to tap one of the two small, round, black stones from the little fire at his feet. He covered his fingertips with balm before picking it up gently, and with thumbs and forefingers he pushed the stone into the newly formed hole in Razi’s ear. She cried as he did it and a cheer rose from the village.

Niisa looked at the stone the size of half a fingernail that now sat snugly in her ear. The flesh around it was red and sore. There was a faint burnt smell. The chief took a finger full more of the cooling paste and smoothed it over the stone and ear both. Niisa looked at Razi’s face. Her lip quivered slightly, her eyes were red and watering, but she looked sheepishly around at the smiling faces surrounding her and she smiled in turn.

The chief beckoned Niisa over. The drum beat started again. The crowd hushed and watched, smiling, while some whispered their congratulations to Razi; consoling, welcoming and hugging her with hands and arms.

Niisa turned his mind inwards as the chief went to work and listened to the pain and watched for the strange sensations that passed throughout his body. His eyes remained open but he couldn’t say what they saw. He lived within himself, his face flat and expressionless, until the muted cheers brought him back to the outside world. The reaction was different for him; he could sense it in the air. There were some small glances, some questioning looks, a few raised chests as they took slow breaths, but whatever it all was that made them uncomfortable, that made him seem strange to them, it remained under the surface as the village congregated around him as much as Razi, patting his back, squeezing his shoulder, offering congratulations and small jokes about hunting and manhood to him and his parents both. His mother and her sister hugged each other, small tears in their eyes. The drumming had stopped but spontaneously the crowd began to sing and make ululating music from their throats, and soon all were dancing in celebration in the middle of their village in the forest.

******

For some time in his life Niisa had tried to sneak away from the village so that no one would see him wander off on his own. It was a small area, but every action was seen within it. Now, when he wanted to leave, he just did. With some time left in the day, he walked from the village. His ear throbbed, feeling as though it were being pulled apart. The skin around the stone was red and raw, firstly from the incision and then from the burning heat of the stone. The paste helped to soothe the pain but nevertheless it was a constant presence that he knew, from his previous year’s experience, would persist for some days. It was not something he had missed upon its subsequent removal the year before.

He walked until the distractions and noises of their little village were beyond his ears and eyes. Then he took a deep breath and sat amongst the leaves and vegetation with legs crossed before him and hands resting, palms down, on his knees. After something close to an hour passed he turned them up to face the sky, or at least the forest that clung to itself above his head. He watched the bark of the trees.

Night had almost fallen when his mother found him. He became aware of her presence before him without really seeing her. She stood with the backs of her hands pressed against her hips, looking down at him for too short a moment before she set about breaking his calm.

“It’s nearly dark, Niisa,” she said. “You can’t be out here, not paying attention to anything, when the night falls. A thousand things could kill you while you sat there. Why do you sit like this? And at the night? If only you returned at a reasonable hour, it would not be so bad.”

He slowly turned his head and looked up at her placidly. Feeling no need to answer, he didn’t.

“He’s here!” she called out, and a little time later his father appeared through the trees. Glancing at Fumnaya, he raised his head in exasperation, appearing to have grown too used to such a scenario to even voice a complaint anymore.