EXTRACT FOR
Tallamun
(Author Unknown)
CHAPTER 1
TAMBER
The horn of the hunters sang from the heights of Taskiluh Mountain to the east, blue peaks shadowed by thunderheads reflecting the fading sun.
Tamber White hair, son of Lantuk Twin Soul, waited beneath a shaking allo tree as leaves of yellow and bronze drifted down about his head.
He was three weeks into his naming hunt. The mountain foothills had proved good shelter from Yangmpabat parties, sent to search for him here and in the Yangti Woods that stretched back to the home villages of the Malai.
Damp air caressed his skin, moisture dripped from leaves like a soothing balm on his head.
He laid his head back against the wood, praying to Great Soul for guidance.
The spirit answered; the leaves of the allo hissed and a waft of bitter, yellow incense assaulted him.
He smiled tightly.
Favored of the gods.
The blessing, so Lantuk claimed, that was a curse.
The hissing stopped, the tree went still and the incense sent waves of wild happiness coursing through him and lit his muscles like a torch.
He heard his prey-beast bundling through the trees.
The Pugi male darted from cover five spans to his right. Tamber hefted his throwing spear, loosed it in one fluid motion and the blade sang true as it took the two-legged beast in the chest, knocking it to the ground.
As he made his way towards it, Tamber whispered a prayer of thanksgiving. The beast was struggling, pulling with hooked claws, disturbingly like fingers, against the sharp metal bedded in its puny chest. Tamber cast his shadow on the beast. Fur on the thing's head hackled and it growled in its incomprehensible tongue. Tamber raised his obsidian sword and swept the dim beast into oblivion, the blow cracking the skull, splashing brain over his doe-leather boots.
He bent and sawed through the gristle of the ears- proof for the Yangmpabat when they finally caught up with him that he was a man and deserving of the name.
That he had not skulked as they hunted him, but had hunted in his turn.
In his thirteenth year a man to be reckoned with.
Proud warrior of the Malai, as his ancestors had been.
***
Six sets of ears adorned the bandolier hung across his chest when the hounds driven by the Yangmpabat hunters finally caught scent of his trail. Two days earlier he had butchered a family of Pugi he stumbled upon in the trees. He had not deigned to take the ears of children or women for such trophies had no place on a warrior's baldric.
From the tree-lined valley below and to his west came the blast of onyx horns, sharp and shrill, as tradition demanded. The Yangmpabat announcing that they had found his trail. The sound sent a thrill of power through him.
***
Two tendays and three suns ago he had been driven from the village, cudgeled by men, stones cast at him by children and women.
His own father had hit him last, tears rolling down the gray kill marks adorning his face.
Tamber had smiled then, through the pain, and grabbed his father in a bear hug.
"I'll be back, Da." he said. "I'll make you proud."
Two tendays and more.
Even the legendary Tarnag had only lasted three tendays.
Tamber knew he could relax now. Let them catch up on him, take the final beating and let them drag him home in triumph.
A man at last.
That was not Tamber´s way. Tarnag's record had stood for five generations but it stood to be broken. Why not by him?
He quickened his pace a smile worming its way onto his face. Close to exhaustion as he was, he could still lead the Yangmpabat a merry chase.
Tarnag's spirit would have to watch out for its premier place in the world would soon be forgotten.
***
Night began to fall in a curdling glory of thick purple air.
Tamber climbed a knotty-barked ankha whose leaves were like little blades. He climbed easily; hand over hand, his body still limber despite the distance he had traveled.
The ankha soared above other trees and at the top he breathed deeply and scanned the forest below.
He saw them a league away, five hundred yards below down a steep, winding ravine.
The excited yapping of dogs and the howl of brutal meskini told him all he needed to know.
They had a fresh scent. They were hot on his trail.
Darkness would do nothing to stop them.
He weighed his options. The white river known as Seskinglincuhun, Burden's Fall, cut down the mountain towards the east. If he made it across, he could lose the dogs and the meskini. In the absence of scent, darkness would force the hunters to encamp, buying him precious time.
Howling from the east dragged his eyes outward. He scanned the area near the river.
His eyes caught a flash of darkening movement, a tight beam of evening light revealing shapes of men running at a crouch.
The hunters had anticipated that move, gotten ahead of him to the east. West lay steep canyons, impassable and dangerous. He grinned and looked behind. That left only high mountain- a place lowlanders like him did their best to avoid.
The tree line ended half a league above, gave way to bare granite stunted with dwarf allo and spruce. Far above the rock gave way to snow and in the fading light the gleam of snow and ice was dark as fallen blood.
If they wanted him they would have to fetch him down from there.
His eyes traced the path of an eagle soaring in flight and his heart soared with it.
***
His lungs burnt and his head swam.
The air here was thin and bled daemons.
He forced leaden limbs ever forward. The sky above had grown fainter, false dawn approaching.
Through the long night, the sound of the hunters had grown ever louder.
The night had turned on his thirty-first day.
Tarnag's record had fallen. Tamber knew he should stop. His body screamed at him to lie down on the frozen snow and wait for the dogs to come- to take his beating as a man and return home in pride, to sit by fireside while the old women danced and sang Songs of Truth and the old men spitted meat by the fireside.
He shook his head, willing this weakness away.
They had to catch him first. He would not surrender.
***
An overhang of massive granite, shaped like the buried nose of a giant, slippery with ice, barred the way. It towered over him, blocking out light, making him queasy with vertigo. He edged left over a crumbling edge of rock, a sheer drop tugging at him, towards a crevice he had earlier spotted.
Chill wind whipped him, pulled at his hair. He leaned hard against the granite, its dampness welcome on his skin. The wind carried the excited barking of the dogs, closer now.
Always closer.
He had led them a merry dance, zigzagging back and forth across the face of the mountain, climbing ever higher.
His eye for land kept him out of trouble. An instinct told him where impasses would appear, and he found he could usually calculate a way around them.
Also, he had felt the hand of the Great Spirit, Atman Karra, breathing down his neck, the warm damp excitement of the beast spurring him on.
He pulled himself onto a ledge of frozen shale. The crevice ahead was too narrow for the slanted sunlight of late evening to penetrate. He stumbled forward, eyes momentarily blind, adjusting to the gloom. The shale beneath his feet tremored as if he was treading on something living. The stone walls seemed to shimmer like disturbed water. A faint wordless whisper, like nails on skin, wormed its way into his brain.
He spun on his heels in alarm.
Nobody there.
He shook his head, made his way fearfully deeper into the crevice, the whisper a chill wordless mantra. Something awaited him here. He could feel its unnatural mojo, like a giant cockroach crawling on his shoulder.
Further back a ceiling of rock stretched over the crevice making a massive roof. Left of center a worn funnel dripped ice water and the walls were covered in frozen lichen.
He ducked into the gloomy entrance to this sudden cave. His run had ended. More; he could not stifle a feeling that he had been driven here, like a badger run to ground by baying hounds.
A bellow of air blew against him, powerful enough to knock him from his feet. He scraped skin on sharp rock as he tumbled sideways, hitting his head against a bowl of granular limestone.
As his eyes blurred he saw her; body emanating light, long hair, naked breasts, body radiating heat like smoldering timber almost ready to burn, skin which looked, in places, rotten as a week old corpse. She leant close and planted a kiss on his cheek and smiled.
His arousal was painful and tight as she pulled him to her.
He screamed as consciousness left him, aware that she was taking him. Riding his soul.
***
Soaring on the wings of the falcon, above seas of iron-green, he watched them come in long ships as large as the basking whales the Malai sometimes hunted.
On the ships stood men like beetles dressed in pale metal carapaces, a faint noxious aura about them. Frail they looked, these foreign warriors. The warriors of the Malai had nothing to fear from them, not individually, but they came in their thousands. Insects boiling in from the sea, floating on great wooden homes. Locusts or termites.
They brought death with them.
When their weapons spoke the Malai died and their whetted blades bit Malai flesh.
Ceaselessly. Ceaselessly.
The world fell apart.
Flesh burnt. Men were strapped to wood and died. Fevers swept children like a foul curse. Boils sprang up on their young bodies and dragged them screaming to Yimti's chill kingdom.
Blood and tears dripped from Malai eyes.
The callous earth drank the People dry as the gods mocked them for their weakness.
Like a plague the beetles kept coming, carriers of pestilence, bearers of death.
In his dream Tamber screamed and his scream was the voice of a bird protesting the future.
***
A dog barked- its wild, green-toothed fury tearing Tamber from the oracle's dream.
Pain ripped through his arm.
He opened his eyes, his body already in motion; the hound's fetid breath in his face.
The large hound clamped its jaw on Tamber´s right arm its thick-neck lowered, worrying him, trying to drag him from the crevasse like a stunned rabbit.
Pain like a hot blade tore through Tamber, making him sick, angry. He drew his skiri from the belt around his waist and stabbed at the hound. The blade sliced muscle and drove into the soft flesh of its neck. Tamber rammed the blade home, twisting and slicing to inflict pain. Yipping the beast fell away from him and lay flat on the ground whimpering.
Tamber levered himself to his feet, kicked the hound in the head and smashed its skull with his heel. He snarled and spat. The blood from the ragged wound on his forearm dripped to the frozen earth, wisps of steam rising as it fell.
"Tamber enough!" The voice was the deep bass of Tamber's father. "Take your beating as the man you have become and let me walk you home, son."
Tamber shook free of the rage that possessed him. He took deep breaths, sucking in his father's words.
Gods how he had missed his family, missed the company of people.
He blinked tears from his eyes.
He sheathed his skiri. The Yangmpabat, a dozen hunters and an equal number of slobbering hounds, waited for him lining either side of the crevice.
As he passed each man raised the staff of his spear and brought it down on Tamber's back. They did so gently causing nothing but mild discomfort.
His father, the last in line, lashed out at Tamber's forehead, but pulled up so the wood barely grazed his skin. The old man's chest was swollen with pride and when he smiled the warmth in his eyes was like flame.
Father, look at me, Tamber blazed silently with his eyes. I have made you proud. I am a man and my Keni will be remembered for generations.
Neither man said a word. His father touched his cheek in gentle greeting.
"Come home with me, boy who is now a man. My Yemki. Come home. Your mother will be worried sick."
***
The village, walled by a palisade of stone, built atop a mossy earthen embankment, lay on the lee of a stony hill. Cresting the hill was the ziggurat that held the Gourd of Souls, and the chieftain's hall. Smoke rose in grey gouts from the flue holes in the roofs of low-eaved buildings which wound their way up the side of the hill.
The leader of the Yangmpabat pack blew his large yellow-boned aranyx horn, announcing their return. People lined up outside the village on a path that threaded through waving fields of flax and corn. The dozen veteran warriors of the Yangmpabat shadowed their naked charges, those who survived the trial. Of the ten who had set out only eight had returned.
Two young men had been caught and killed in less than a tenday and their names consigned to oblivion. Their families would not paint their faces with the dark red ochre of mourning, nor would they mutilate their faces to show their displeasure with the gods.
They grief was to be suffered in silence for those men were gone as if they had never existed. They lived now as nameless slaves who roamed the great hall of Dasia Kerara, their souls but a pale shadow of the almost men they had once been.
Tamber's father strode beside him grim face betraying no sign of emotion but Tamber felt the older man's pride like a cloak covering them both.
Tamber puffed out his chest and swung his arms as he walked and, despite bone-deep weariness, his heart welled with a fierce wellspring of emotion.
The thin line of people lining the track moved aside as they strode by and fell into step behind, a thin and gentle song of welcoming rising from their throats.
One of the two striplings who had not returned was Tamber's oldest fried, Tengubkan. Tengubkan's father, a quarrier, stared with a blank face, shock-riveted, as he realized his son was no longer amongst the living.
The man might cry with his wives in the stone hut he had built with the labor of his own hands. He might indulge in kai-wine or even walk the path of sacrifice. If he did, he would do so quietly. No public grief would be allowed him.
Tamber was moved by a brief impulse to reach out to the man, to whisper him words of comfort. He squashed the notion. Friend or not, Tengubkan had failed. He no longer existed. To grieve for him, or comfort his father, was to make a mockery of the process of Yemki.
This was the way of the Malai and it was this, the rigorous nature of their rituals that set them over all others.
The Yangmpabat procession reached the commons in front of the ziggurat. Three shamen and the chieftain stood in the center, surrounded by men of the elder rank.
Blank inscrutable eyes watched their approach.
The eldest shaman hopped forward to meet them, willow withes in his left hand. He spat in a circle, hopping one-legged and beat the drum in his other hand. Long greasy hair swung about his face. Bones, braided in his hair, clacked as he danced. His lined face was shadowed by the skull cap of the meskbear he wore.
He howled and beat the drums and the village held its breath.
When he had driven the evil spirits away he signed the mark of Great Soul and sat panting on the ground. The chieftain stepped forward. He clapped his hands. A Pugi male was dragged from a nearby stockade. The thing squealed words in its unholy language as it was prodded forward on the sharp end of tintuk blades.
Its eyes were wide with fear. It started to blubber and its face melted as the tears fell.
Tamber swore. The beast's craven behavior was a bad omen.
The chief drew his sword as the Pugi was shoved to his knees. He swung the sword and the beast's head rolled, eyes and mouth still moving as his spirit left his body. The shaman watched with hooded eyes the roll of the head, sniffing the air and beating his drum in a spastic motion. Eyes and mouth ticked and Tamber could see the whites shining where his pupils should have been.
The shaman hopped carefully over the splatter of blood the Pugi's blood had left on dark stone.
He raised his hands to the sky and howled.
The people cheered. The omens were good enough.
The feast could begin and Tamber would receive his tintuk sword.
Tamber could not drag his eyes from the shaman's hooded face. The man's lips had twisted sourly and Tamber guess was he was being less than honest. Worms of fear wriggled in the pit of Tamber's stomach; worms with round white heads crawling amongst his intestines, growing and swelling, feeding on the courage of the future.
In his mind's eye he saw the oracle of the cave again, smelt her smell of sweet sweat and rot. He remembered the dream she had given him, a dream he did not understood and had almost forgotten.
A dream of death.
The shaman was lying. This augury was a bad one and the shaman was hiding that fact.
To the north, over the enormity of the ocean, thunder rolled and clouds gathered dark and vicious.
Wind whispered with the stink of Great Soul´s sulfur. Tamber knew this was the true omen. Thunderclouds shadowed the future and the wings of the world held nothing but fear for the Malai
The shaman glanced at him and smiled from behind a stump of rotted teeth.
We need to talk, young one. The voice in Tamber's head was a faint dry whisper. We need to talk.
The ceremony progressed. Tamber lowered his head as his father handed him his tintuk sword and the old men spoke of humility. When he raised his head again, his eyes shining with tears they spoke of tender nobility.
None could see the sore wound, the vacuum of the future, troubling his soul.