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The content of this page is © copyright Stephen Deas 2001 and is used here with permission.
I don't remember where I heard this, or found it, or had it spoken to me. I only remember the words. I know I heard it a long time ago. Perhaps in the last cycle. Everyone knows it now; the last line of it, at least. I don't have a family crest or a family motto because I don't have a family. No fear for consequence remains. A war-cry. A call to arms. Centuries will go by, and when people read this, they will still think of Skyrie. They'll forget the rest, of course. Flames had their fangs sunk into half the houses of the village. My sister screamed as a soldier reached down from his horse and grabbed her hair. I watched her struggle free, and then be kicked to the ground. The soldier jumped down after, kicked her again, raped her there and then. I was nine years old. My sister, Daikina, was fifteen. I'd seen it happen so many times before, I thought nothing of it. The soldiers came to Skyrie every few months. They took what they wanted, Burned a few homes because they could, killed anyone who resisted them. It was, simply, the way of things. The people of Skyrie struggled on as best they could. Trapped between a salt-swamp and the soldiers, they had nowhere else to go. My people didn't fight them. They didn't know how. They didn't understand that they could. They tolerated it as they tolerated a harsh winter or a flood. With endless patience and suffering. When I was eleven and the soldiers came, I fought them. I was an errant child, fit and fast and strong as any adult by then, and my parents had long abandoned any hope of controlling me, of instilling their quiet, patient forbearance. I think, even then, they knew and I knew I was not one of them. I fought the soldiers. I shouted and swore and challenged them. They kicked me down. I got up. They kicked me down again. I got up. I dragged one down from his horse, wrestled wih him, beating my fists against his face, kicking him, stamping at his feet and hands, anywhere the thick hides of armour didn't protect him. I might even have beaten him. I think I would. But he was one of many. My family and tribe watched as they circled me beat me down and kicked and kicked. No matter what they did, I wouldn't stay down for them. I refused. Eventually they beat me into unconsciousness. Daikina escaped. They raped someone else that year. When I was twelve, they came again. I had not forgotten. Neither had my family. They tried to hide me, tried to send me away into the swamp to gather Nodwyr toads. For the first time, I understood that the people of Skyrie knew when the soldiers would come. I had not forgotten. I had had a year to prepare for them. I was a year older, a year fitter, a year faster, a year stronger. A year wiser. We had no weapons in Skyrie - we ate what we grew or what we gathered. But I'd seen the soldier's weapons. I'd seen them cut and stab. I knew what they were for. I killed one soldier and crippled two more of them with my makeshift spears. One of the cripples I got to with a knife before they could stop me. The second was lucky. They did more than beat me this time. I thought they would kill me, but they had a worse intent. Twelve years old, and I was ready to die, to cast this body aside, and take another. To reincarnate. I know there are peoples for whom death is an enemy, a thing of fear, a final end. For the tribe of Skyrie, death is a transition. And end and a beginning at once. Not to be sought, not to be feared. It simply was. We all would die, and would have no regrets, no clinging on to an imagined past. The soldiers understood this. They determined I would not escape so easily. They cut me and stabbed me and beat me to the brink, and then held me there, bundled me on to the back of a horse, and took me. Perhaps I should have died anyway. If I wasn't as strong as I am, perhaps I would. But I lived. They took me on a journey of seemingly endless miles, to what seemed to my delirious eyes, a vast city, a veritable nest of life. Inside. To a man with powers I could not comprehend who called himself a sorcerer, and who cursed me. The curse of Ehwan is simple and ancient, he told me. I would be mutilated. I would be marked with the mark of Ehwan, a cross branded between my eyes, so all could know I carried the curse. I would not die of hunger or thirst, though I would feel the pain of starvation. I would not die by my own hand, simply suffer the wound and live on. I would not die by falling from a cliff, though my bones shatter and my organs burst. I would not die of drowning, though my lungs burn with pain. I would die only by the hand of another. And whosoever killed me would suffer the curse as well, and take my branding and all my injuries and carry them on. Or I would die of age. Thus is the curse of Ehwan. To be unable to pass on to the next life. To live on in this one, year after year in a shell of tortured flesh. The sorcerer explained all this to me, and they branded me. And then they severed both of my legs high above the knee. They returned me to my village of Skyrie, a lesson to the rest. I, who had fought alone for them, would now be a burden to them. I couldn't understand that they accepted me back, with the same passivity as they accepted the soldiers. Here is poor Volutiun the cripple. We must care for him. I would have turned me away. Cast me out. My legs began to grow back. Not quickly. But within months it became obvious. Little buds of flesh bulging from my savaged stumps like flowers in springtime. I didn't understand this was wrong. I didn't know I couldn't do this, but my family did. They told me many times how I was not of the Skyrie, not one of them. They learned to fear me, yet they still held me close. Sometimes they thought I was possessed by a demon spirit, sometimes by one divine. I tried to tell them I was simply me, Volutiun, the boy they'd known for nearly a cycle, but nothing would sway their minds. And I think, even when they remembered the boy Volutiun, it came easier to picture him as demonic or divine. When the soldiers came again, I hid from them. I remembered the sorcerer. I had no books to learn from, no library to consult, no mentor to teach me. But no one had told me I needed these things. All I knew was that it could be done. I hid for a second time when the soldiers came, but this time I watched them through a magic eye. They had no idea I was there. I watched them, how they moved, what they did, how they worked together or alone, I learned their faces, their voices, their smells. I listened to their words and understood their orders. When they left Skyrie, aflame once more, I followed them with my eye, racing along the barren boundary of the swamp until there was no swamp, only sea, and they took me and my eye to their home, their town, not so vast and not so far away as it had seemed. I followed them with my eye through streets rank with the smell of decay to a grand palace, the most magnificent thing I had ever seen, with a single white tower rising from it midst to pluck the clouds from the sky. I left them there and rose up, beside the tower, peering into every window, until I found him. Lounging on a bed of feathers. My sorcerer. Even as I'd followed the soldiers, I'd known they'd lead me to him. I would watch him, watch his moves, his words. His powers were far greater than mine, but I would learn from him, without his ever knowing, how he did what he did. I would be patient in my revenge. I watched him lie there, naked, caressed by two raven-haired whores. Patience fled. I raced towards him. I saw him look up, startled, straight at he, and I plunged the wooden sword I'd so carefully crafted through the eye and into his heart. He jerked. He lived. He didn't die. I stabbed again. Hacked and slashed, but to no end. He knew I was there. He saw me. My weapons were useless now, and he knew it. I could not strike him through my eye. In panic, I destroyed my eye and ran, deep into the swamp, sure he would find me. See me. See my legs and the fading brand between my eyes and know his curse had failed. And know, therefore, he was free to kill me. For the first and last time, I was afraid. For three days and three nights I hid there, among the tendrils and tentacles of the swamp, waiting to be found, unable to move. I watched the four moons of Xanusia wax in unison, preparing for the next great cycle My cycle. On the fourth night, with the four moons blazing full above me, I returned to my village of Skyrie and burned it to the ground. With torch and sorcerous fire, I did what in all their years, the soldiers had never been able to do. I destroyed it. I stood, with my carved wooden sword in one hand, flames flickering from the other, and my tribe learned I they had been right all along. Demonic or Divine. I raised the sword. "There is no Skyrie. I will curse all those who have cursed me one thousand times over. I have bitten their curse and swallowed it whole and now I will spit it back again. Follow or fade into the swamp. All ways lead to rebirth. There is no Skyrie. I am Skyrie." We made spears. I showed them how. We made armour and shields. I showed them how. And then we made war, and I showed them how. We didn't come by day, but at night. We didn't shout, we whispered. We didn't steal and loot and burn. We killed and murdered. We didn't leave to come back another year. We didn't leave at all. I have been Skyrie Volutiun ever since. Of the curse, only the faintest trace of my branding still shows. I think it always will. Sometimes, in battle, I paint it's symbol on my face. To remind me, and to remind my enemies, and most of all to remind those who fight at my side. No fear for consequence remains. The content of this page is © copyright Stephen Deas 2001 and is used here with permission. |