Speaker for the Gods, week 23

King Keone, part 1

I opened my eyes to a purple sky mottled by puffy orange clouds. The rain had stopped, the storm broken and routed. Throbbing body-wide pain suggested I wasn’t dead; my right temple bayed like a hound. I touched its sticky mass and cringed at the flare of pain, but the damage seemed only skin deep. Sound filtered in with other vibrations: the slow jostling and creaking of an ox-drawn cart. Other men lay next to me, pressed up shoulder to shoulder. I felt their chill but turned my head all the same to confirm they were dead. Blood had dried black over sloppy white markings split here and there by hideous wounds. My feet were higher than my head, I finally noticed: we traveled an upward slope. I craned my neck to see out of the cart with little success: just the tops of trees that glowed with the falling Sun.

Abruptly the cart turned, swinging its prow to the left and rotating the world until we’d all but turned around. Still we kept upwards: these were switchbacks headed into the hills, the Kuamo’o range I’d spied from the crossroads. The whuffing of oxen filtered over the cart’s walls along with Kane conversation on the topic of dinner. Hundreds of birds sang and cackled and screamed from the trees like a children’s choir gone wild. Brown-jacketed mynahs alighted on dead faces just feet away to peck at their eyes with yellow beaks. Fearful of making a sound, I puffed out my cheeks and blew a hard stream. The mynahs cocked their heads at the first gust but flew off clucking with indignation at the second.

The satchel was gone. I didn’t feel too stupid for losing it; they’d probably have taken the thing when they threw me in the cart. No weapons, no tools, nothing to eat or drink. Fog from my knock to the head pulled at my eyelids while pain and fear kept them wedged open. I made up questions to focus, since this was clearly a convoy and escape was impossible.

Why was I alive? Had they thought me dead? Since no red-garbed To’means lay in the cart, I must have been preserved for a reason. Had Keone recognized me from the field, or was the fallen haole too great a curiosity to ignore? Impossible to know; for my own part, I couldn’t have drawn the king’s face from our brief encounter at distance. Was I to be tortured, or put to work? They could have killed me on the field and chose not to.

Another switchback, a return to our first course up the westerly road to the mountain town of Noio Koha. The road got steeper as the sky’s violet got deeper. Hunger pangs set in, distinguished from the toxin cramps I’d suffered all day by their sharpness. My back was wet and clammy from blood pooling faster than it could drip out between the planks of the cart bed. The invaders hadn’t bound me. I could have summoned the energy to slip over the cart’s lip and fall to the ground, but wouldn’t make it ten yards before someone snapped me up and couldn’t survive the jungle even if I did successfully flee.

Sit and wait, Ashur. You always get another chance, until you’re dead and you don’t. I tried to think who’d said it, so long ago even his descendants had forgotten the name. It had been the Chief, I realized: maybe the best soldier I ever knew. Most men use their ferocity or passion to fight, but as Staves demonstrated there’s simply no substitute for talent and intellect. Chief had a way of slipping every scrape cleanly, or near enough. Always picked the right spot to hide, the best instant to move. When all the others got plugged, only we two made it out of the black pyramid. He retired the next day; I bought a tough old nag and rode her out of the desert. Or did I? Into my brain flashed an image: running with Beatrice over deeply cracked asphalt, hauling Lizzie between us howling with a bullet in her. She’d live but lose the leg, and they went off together after that. But then what happened to the Chief? Was my memory collapsing under its own weight?

It gnawed at me. The dark sticky corpse cart, like my cabin on the Ashkandi¸ demanded distractions and my brain was happy to furnish them. I’ll start at the beginning and say I was a young man. There was a war in the desert—a city in the desert, up the mountains from the west coast of what folks still knew to call America. It was long after the monastery burned, but I still had my old rifle. There was money out there, and fine guns that’d get you more money, so I made my way up the mountains and down into a dry crater. The donkey died; I was lucky to find someone before my water ran out, and he pointed me to the city. Camps fought amidst the ruins still in decent condition, settled in crumbling towers with glass faces now absent. Inside they had been gorgeous, though now each was hived with rooms for eating, rooms for sleeping, rooms for birthing the small, skinny babies. The city eroded under the sand’s assault, free from the overgrowth that really broke buildings down.

I fell in with a good crew, six folks you could trust to make good choices. Fighting’s just a bunch of choices you make really fast, the Chief said the first day, and you don’t have to be faster than the other guy if you just think faster. Most want to be called Captains or Colonels and the worst go by Commander; he was a fat sixty-year-old with a scraggly white beard and he was the Chief. Lizzie and Beatrice were an item, all spunk and shotguns and piercings. It’s a hard life for women, brutal in ways I know but can’t imagine. They made it work. The other three—Victor, Adrian, Gumarro—burned through any tobacco that came to hand and drank like sailors though they’d never seen more than the Salt Lake. They’d come from the far south and spoke amongst each other too fast to hear a syllable. It was a common tongue and I knew the curse words but nothing else.

The black pyramid sounds, when I say it, like something out of a children’s story. It was very real: black glass rising story after story, broken in places and ground down by decades of neglect. The proud folks inside did their best to keep it up. We tried to kill them. Not all of them, of course, though the women and children would suffer once expelled.

The lower levels were a shootout, bullets blowing chunks from ornate columns that looked well used to the punishment. At the pyramid’s heart was a massive atrium, open to the sky where the top had fallen in. Things went well at first; we were winning until ropes fell from the upper levels and foes followed down to surround us. Adrian went down, Gumarro right beside him. Beatrice took two above her knee, though one popped out the far side. We lost Victor in the confusion and I don’t know where his story ended. The question became not how to win, but how to flee. I laid down cover with the Chief while Lizzie got Bea to the exit. Out of ammunition, we had to cross the room. No, the Chief said. “Sit and wait. You always get another chance. We’ll figure it out.” He called for Lizzie to go. I wanted to follow, felt my young legs could take me across. But the Chief was never wrong, I thought. What were the odds my choice was the right one? Lizzie hauled her lover away while Bea screamed our names.

“I’m going,” I told the Chief.

He shook his head. “Don’t do it. Always another chance, kid.”

I hunched and started to run—made it safely without a scratch except for a roll on rough concrete. I looked back just once to the Chief, heard him yell something before bullets from the balcony cut him down and then rushed to help Bea. We carried her out, held up a merchant’s wagon with our empty guns and never looked back. Never got paid our last due, but nobody complained.

That was the real story, as close as I could piece it together from spasms of sense memory. But leaving with the Chief wasn’t my brain’s first conjured story. His words were the same, I’m fairly sure. But how many of the others were wrong? How many of the hundred teachers in my head were frauds? The more I’ve seen and heard—many things over many years—the less it all fits together. I expected wisdom building through the ages, as my beard’s first grey hairs took their glacial time appearing. It seemed to me, lying in awful sticky soup at the bottom of a corpse cart, that the world was a mess. Lessons are just armistices with the past: stories that reason out what came before when what came before never goes away. In some other world, a young Ashur bled out in that old hotel lobby. Someone learned a lesson from him, too.

Westward hills gradually chewed up the Sun. The cart came to a stop surrounded by tall trees showing orange skies between them. Commotion surrounded the caravan: loading, unloading. I wasn’t sure how to proceed, surrounded by enemies who might not know I lived. Pushing myself up on my elbows, I saw thatched roofs too high for a single story. There were a more than a few such structures and the volume of voices told me hundreds of men were gathered here. I had arrived at long last, through none of my own efforts, in Noio Koha. Lowering myself back down to the cart bed, I grimaced at the cold muck sticking again to my back and shut my eyes to feign death.

The cart tilted as men hopped up on it; the wooden gate groaned as it fell. The talk over me was fast and confusing with words I didn’t know, but haolecame up along with Keone’s name. When “he’s not dead” hit my Kane-adapted ears, I groaned inside but kept up my act. A sharp stick to the ribs brought me miraculously to life, lolling my head in confusion and drooling. The less lucid I seemed, the safer I’d be from torture. Hands gripped beneath my arms and they lifted me not unkindly from the awful cart. I kept myself mostly limp and forced fumbling footsteps, careening between two white-streaked soldiers.

Shouts came from behind. I craned my neck and rolled my eyes to look: they’d taken Staves from the cart. He was disarmed but trying to fight his handlers, screaming incoherently. His jacket was black with corpse runoff, blood dried down his face. My shirt and vest were the same. Though the Colonel made a fuss, he moved with his captors. He was faking too, I thought—funny two such different men would take the same tack. There might be trouble later if they thought us in cahoots.

Hundreds of men teemed about the town center beneath the tall houses. For all the army’s bustle, I saw only a handful of tents scattered about: surgeries where women tended to men who might still be saved. Anguished cries came from inside, but the mood in Noio Koha was bright—the battle won, the enemy retreated. Torches burned throughout the town, brightening in the dusk like twinkling stars overhead. They stretched off to the west, plunging down at last over the ridge and down the far slope to where Kimo arrested us days before.

Between dark houses we were led until at last a chain of bamboo cages emerged from the dusk, set against a high stone wall. Gates opened on well-crafted hinges and clattered shut behind us. Five men had brought us here—two for me, three for the Colonel—but only two remained to guard us while the others left. Three torches burned atop long stakes, set at even intervals around the cages. Our jailors reclined against the nearest hut with spears in their hands and conchs dangling from their hips. Any alarm would go up quick.

We were the only prisoners. I stood on dirt and rotting leaves, separated from Staves by an empty cell: two bamboo barriers and five feet of air. I’d be able to stretch out on the ground, but only by sticking my feet through the wide-spaced bars. Staves curled into a ball holding his head. I thought I heard him muttering, but it was hard to tell with the torches’ crackle and the building music throughout the village. It was a night for celebration and the guards looked miserable to miss it.

“Colonel?” I hissed. No response. Quick glance at the guards, who just stared.

“Colonel Staves!” a bit louder now.

“Quiet! No talking,” one guard said in Kane with an authoritative thump of his spear haft.

“May I speak in Kane?” I asked carefully. It was cheeky but a decent gamble—we might be too precious for casual beatings.

“You’ll speak when Keone demands.” That was something. At least we’d live to see Keone.

“My friend is hurt,” I explained, pointing to Staves balled up on the ground. “He may not live. Please let me check him.” The guard looked at his partner, who shrugged. The first man approached Staves’ cage and peered down at him.

“There’s blood on his head,” he observed. “But it’s not bleeding still.”

“Colonel Staves,” I said loudly and clearly in English, “can you hear me?” The guard hadn’t given permission but didn’t stop me. “Colonel Staves, this is Ashur.”

He rolled slowly to his back and raised his head an inch off the ground. Between the guard and me, his face was a mask of flickering shadows. Two blue stars shone through the umbra, focused on me.

“Ashur,” I repeated, putting a hand to my chest. The eyes blinked and words came from his mouth in singsong just over a whisper.

“He jumps into the sea because it is green. He jumps into the sea to visit the queen.”

“That’s right,” I started, but the song continued.

“He jumps into the sea because the hunting hounds…” he took a breath, built to a crescendo,“Go no more a-hunting, a-hunting a-hunting!” Full-throated singing now, even as the guard slapped angrily at the bamboo bars. He jabbed Staves with his spear haft, unnerved but unwilling to truly harm. That was good to know. The Colonel cringed with each jab but kept on singing until the guard returned to his post with a helpless sigh. I slid to the dirt, rested my back against the bars and fidgeted until they weren’t digging into bone. The poor addled Colonel hadn’t feigned his condition after all. He sang to the night.

“Well the elephant lives in Make-Believe Town, and he is a wise old man. He studied in books where nobody looks because they’re all covered with jam! He is wise because of his blue shirt of lace. He is wise because of his wrinkly face. He is wise because all the hunting hoouunndsss…” And here came a deep breath, “GOOO no more a-hunting, a-hunting, a-hunting! GO no more a-hunting, but that’s in animal Make-Believe Town.”