The Unfettered Dream
By S. A. Barton
Copyright 2013 S. A. Barton
I listen to my father, and I wish he would beat me. But he will not.
He beats my brother for his feeble mind. He beats my sister for being a girl. He beats my mother for bearing them to him instead of more warrior-boys like me. I am clear-eyed, straight of limb. I am strong and fast enough that even now, while the top of my head only just reaches his shoulder, I can touch him with the dry bamboo when we practice the ways of spear and club. Sometimes, I can. And I have brains enough that when he pays Old Holy Man to teach me to read and write and recite the holy tales, I learn.
But I am not strong now while he beats my mother and brother and sister, and I am not smart. And he does not have the money to pay for me to learn more of holy tales and writing this month. The merchants from the river valleys and plains to the south have come up again as they sometimes do. And as they sometimes do, they have brought with them clay pots of beer made of rice and honey.
I am glad we do not know how to make it here. And I curse the merchants who bring it.
Because of them, Father has spent the money. Because of them, Mother and Sister must feed us with what they gather in the hills, like peasants too weak or foolish to till their land instead of the warrior family that we are.
Because of the merchants and their evil magic of beer, I lay on my pallet in my room beside my empty ghee lamp, hearing Father beat Mother and Sister in the kitchen. For now, Brother has escaped. I hear Father shouting, blaming, cursing them for bringing misfortune upon us. I hear him blame the beer, too, as I do. And that makes me stop in my blaming thoughts. They are too much like his.
He is too much a coward to claim his own actions, to see that it is his anger and his drunkenness that bring our misfortunes. It is strange to think of a strong warrior who has been to war as a coward, but in this it rings true.
I curse him in the dark. I ask the gods to make him see. I ask the gods to kill him. But I ask it quietly, in the smallest whisper. Because I am small, and only a boy, and too weak to defend myself for true if he were to hear me.
And so I listen as he beats them, and I lie still. And I curse myself too. The gods refuse to come for him, or for me, or to save any of us.
The next moon the merchants are gone and so is the beer. The beatings are fewer. They pass quickly, only a cuff or two. But I remember.
In practice with the dry bamboo, I bruise his leg, and I smile to have returned a little bit of pain to him. He sees my smile, and his face darkens like a storm. He strikes my ribs, my arms, my legs for my disrespect. I see the anger, and he forgets that he is teaching. But he does not strike my face or my hands. He cannot forget that I am all he truly values, his only heir. He will not risk ruining me. He does not understand that he already has. That his violence and crudity has taught me how the path of the warrior is capable of destroying even the man who survives the war, of destroying even the women and children and men who come nowhere near the field of battle.
He says war must be. I say war is a choice. But I cannot say so aloud. Instead, I nod as if he has spoken a great truth.
With the beer gone, there is money for the Old Holy Man again. I take it, and I go. I sharpen my bamboo stylus on smooth stone. I mix the soot and oil as the Old Holy Man tells me. I shape the words he says.
I shape them with ink on dried leaves and scraps of hide. I shape them with the soft gray stone we gather in the hills, on the walls of Old Holy Man’s hut. I shape them with a stick in the dirt. When I dip water for him, I pull on the rope to make the bucket trace their lines in the flow of the creek that tumbles cold out of the mountains. Their lines disappear in the water, but they stay held in my mind, safe.
The Old Holy Man asks me why a warrior’s son should love words so much. I tell him that perhaps I am not a warrior’s son at all, and he smiles a small smile and says nothing.
Suddenly I am terrified of that small smile and what it means. I run from him. Father will hear. Old Holy Man will tell. My heart flutters like a bird with an arrow through its breast, dying. I hide in the woods, among the stone claws of the mountains that rear from the earth in these hills at their feet. I hide until the cold of the clear sky night forces me out, shivering. The moon follows me with its pitiless eye until I am inside by the hearth, still shaking as Mother warms leftover bread over the coals for me. She tells me that I must not wander in the night. She warns me of the dangers of bandits and tigers, the danger of falling in the dark and breaking a bone on the stones, and that I must not anger father. Never anger father. She does not say so, but I think it: he is the tiger in the woods, he is the stone in the dark.
He has already been angry today. I see the bruises on her face, fresh. I know that he thinks he put them there because it is my fault, because I made him be angry by not coming home, that she made him be angry by not teaching me to come home when I should.
I know that he put those bruises there because he chose to put them there with his fist, and no other reason.
I go to my bed on the floor, chewing the dry bread, grateful for it after the long walk in the cold dark. It sits in a lump in my guts, below the heavy lump of hate in my heart. Hate is the tiger, I tell myself, and I must let it pass from me lest it devour me. As it has devoured Father, and made him in its own image, a beast in the shell of a man.
I think I know hate and fear. But I do not. The next evening, I learn what they are.
In the morning, Father demands to know why I did not come home. I tell him that Old Holy Man made me think, that I needed to meditate on what he said. It is—in part—the truth.
Father demands to know what Old Holy Man taught me that was so disturbing. I do not know what to say, only that I cannot say the truth. I stammer. Stammering only baits the tiger; the fear attracts it. Father demands louder, faster. His face fills mine and his spittle flies into my face like hard rain in the teeth of the winds off the mountains. I shiver.
There is rice beer on his breath. How does he have rice beer again? I have seen no merchants. The thought confuses me more and Father screams into my silent face until he is breathing hard. As if he were practicing the spear with me.
He closes his mouth and steps back, thoughtful. If I will not answer, then Old Holy Man will answer. He puts his club on his belt and takes up his spear, and he goes. He does not take the light club and spear of dry bamboo we use to practice. He does not take the simple club and spear he takes to hunt.
He takes the engraved club and spear he takes to war.
I spend the day near the house, pacing. I cannot stop to help Mother or Sister or Brother as they work, tidying the house, tending the garden, grinding the grain. I do not eat. I pace, an unquiet ghost, helpless.
Father returns when the sun hangs low in the west over the trees.
There is blood on his spear and a smile on his face.
I rush to him before he has even left the edge of the wood, before he has set foot on our little plot of land, given him by the lord for his service. The land I would inherit if he dies. I reach up and shake him by the shoulders. I wish I could push my nose into his and shout into his face as he does to me, but I am too small.
I push his shoulders as hard as I can. He hardly moves. He smells like sweat and beer and blood.
I demand to know where he has been and what he has done, as if I am the father and he is the unruly child. I know what he has done, but I do not want to let myself see, so I shout.
He laughs at me. He tells me that I will never see Old Holy Man again, that a warrior has no need to think so deeply that it disturbs him, that too much learning is a weakn
ess. He puts his big bloody hand in the middle of my chest and pushes. I fall into the dirt. The back of my head digs into the turf and the world swims. He laughs again, tells me that my lesson is not over today, and walks past me as I squirm like a lizard in the dirt.
Mother is saying something to him too, as I stand. I cannot understand it through the ringing in my ears. He shoves her as he shoved me, and she falls off the stone step of the house into her herb patch, flattening the tender flowers. I follow him in, leaving Mother to pick herself up. He lifts up a great clay pot from behind the bags of rice and dal in the larder. The larder is not my place, so I pay it little attention; I had thought the clay pot was cooking ghee but now I can smell what is in it as it sloshes. He takes it into the main room and