Initiation Rites: The Bones of the Earth-Part 1:

Chapter 4: The hunt

  By mid-morning, when Javor was expecting the air to get hot, low, dark clouds came out of the north, growling. A north wind, dry and chill, carried a strange odour too faint to really identify. Javor felt annoyed because he could not quite identify it before it blew away. He stopped to shift the heavy pack on his shoulders

  Photius looked back over his shoulder.“Are you tired, my boy? Or have you recovered from yesterday?” he asked.

  “I’ll never recover.” His voice sounded strange to him: hoarse, deeper than before. He hiked the pack higher on his back and stepped past Photius.

  They had been walking since just past sunrise, heading north by northeast. The killer’s trail wasn’t hard to find: a path of trampled grass and broken bushes and trees, scattered with debris. It led across the pastures and then into the forest beyond, and then up into the higher hills. Along the way lay mementos of the killer’s passage: footprints, broken trees, and several times, parts of human bodies. Javor gagged the first time he had seen a woman’s leg, bloody and twisted, lying lost in tall grass.

  “I want revenge,” Javor had said in the village under the morning’s first light.

  “Revenge?” Roslaw had said. Most of the headman’s face was a bruise. There was a nasty red scar under one eye and he was even gruffer than normal. “Javor, you’re brave, no one would deny that. But there’s a difference between bringing back two girls whose kidnappers have been killed for you, and facing that thing. You would not stand a chance.”

  “I’m going. Who’s coming with me?”

  Only the Greek traveler, Photius, answered. “I’ll come with you, young man. I, too, want this monster dead. Its destruction is part of my mission.” Javor had wondered what he meant by that, but did not ask. He focused on gathering what he needed.

  With barely a word, the villagers had helped him pack. His uncle, Swat’s older brother, gave him fresh trousers, a tunic, boots and a cloak. His aunt brought bread, fruit and other food, enough for him and Photius for two days, three if they stretched it.

  Javor had tucked his great-grandfather’s dagger into his rope-belt and tugged on it to make sure it would stay. He had taken his father’s small axe, the same one that Hrech had taken, in what felt like a different life. To remember him when I kill that murderer. When he had walked out of the village, Photius had walked in step beside him. Javor had taken one last look behind him, to see his people gathered at the edge of the village; Roslaw had waved, and so had his uncle; his aunt had wrung her hands and cried. And he had seen Elli, who had just looked at him, her fist in front of her mouth, her eyes wide.

  But no one had said anything.

  Javor had looked at the sky. Clouds moving from the west. It’ll be a nice day.

  Good day for hunting.

  Javor had shrugged to adjust the pack, and had walked north-east without saying goodbye.

  “Do you want to take a rest?” Photius was saying. He was having no trouble keeping up with Javor’s long strides. It was the first time they had spoken since leaving the village.

  “I want revenge,” Javor repeated. “Now tell me the truth: who killed my parents?”

  “Your people told you: it was a monster,” Photius said seriously.

  “Look, I know everyone was terrified,” Javor snarled. “So if it was man who was so terrible, he was a monster, I understand. Now tell me about him. Was he alone? How was he armed? How big was he? What did he look like? I’m going to track him down and do to him what he did … he did to my …” Javor choked. He could not breathe. All he could see was his father, his dark hair soaked with blood. He could feel his mother’s little body in his arms. He choked and wheezed and his whole body shook. The pack slipped off his shoulders and pulled him backward, until he was lying awkwardly on the pack, his knees bent painfully.

  Photius knelt beside him and brushed his fingertips over Javor’s temples and eyes, murmuring low. Javor took a great, shuddering breath and stood. He blinked, shook his head, then picked up his pack and strode ahead again.

  “It was a monster, Javor,” said Photius, walking just behind him. “Really. Not a man. It was enormous, man-shaped but twice as high. Scaly grey skin. Massive arms and legs, with sharp claws as long as your hand. A mouth like a boar’s, but filled with fangs like an enormous lizard. It suddenly appeared in the town just after dawn, and no one even saw it coming. It broke heavy timbers like you would break a piece of kindling.”

  The wanderer’s words filled Javor with a creeping horror, a loathing somehow coupled with familiarity. He felt he could imagine the creature, not only how it looked but what its voice, its roar sounded like, how the thing smelled.

  “It knocked down a hut, and the people inside ran screaming. The fiend hit the woman there with its fist and broke her back as she ran. Your headman, Roslaw, tried to throw a hunting spear at it, and it just bounced off its skin. The monster slashed at him, and Roslaw was lucky to keep his head on his shoulders.

  “But the monster had a purpose. It went straight toward your hut. Your father tried to stop it—he stood in front with his heavy scythe, and he hit the monster with a blow that would have sliced an ox. But the fiend barely felt it. It slashed and pulled down half the roof and then hit your father on the head. For what it’s worth, my boy, I think your father’s end was swift.”

  “Please, don’t tell me what it did to my mother,” Javor interrupted. “I know enough, already.”

  At sunset they camped beneath a stand of stunted trees. Photius built a fire while Javor looked for some wild fruit or berries, but they ate most of the food that Javor’s aunt had given them. Javor stared into the fire, but all he could see was his father.

  He saw Swat standing in front of his house, swinging the heavy scythe. Behind him, his mother in the doorway, crying, pulling her husband. Swat swung the scythe again, but a monstrous claw swept down. Swat dodged and the claw hit the thatch, bringing it down on Swat’s legs. The man stumbled and the claw hit him, hard, on the head. Swat fell flat onto the ground and did not move.

  Javor saw the doorway torn apart, saw his mother fall back…he squeezed his eyes tight, then looked into the darkness around him. At anything but his mother.

  Photius came close and raised his hand. Javor flinched back, but the old man shook his head. Tentatively, he reached closer again until his fingertips touched Javor’s eyelids. “Sleep now, son,” said the old man. “Tomorrow, we enter the monster’s own territory.”

  The sun rose behind murky clouds and a northern breeze chilled Javor. They broke their fast with clear water from a spring, a few berries and two of Photius’ mysteriously sustaining cakes.

  They followed the faint path through the grass. As they went on, the grass became shorter, the ground stonier and the killer’s trail fainter. Soon, Javor couldn’t even distinguish it, but Photius forged ahead, confident.

  Past a small rise, the thin grass disappeared into a loosely-packed scrabble. A few bent, withered trees with hardly any leaves clung weakly to the hillside. Ahead, a brackish creek wandered sluggishly to the east. At the bank, Photius said “Take care now, son. Don’t touch the water,” and they hopped carefully from stone to stone across a natural ford. Javor could see craggy mountains ahead; surprisingly, they had no snow on their tops. The whole vista seemed dead and repellent. Javor gagged on the reek of rotting animal carcasses.

  “Take care, I say,” Photius repeated. “This is no place to quail.” Photius gave Javor a sip from his wineskin. Javor had drunk ale, even the heavy wodova the villagers brewed, but he had never known anything like this liquor. A heat he never felt before spread throughout his body, to the tips of his fingers and toes. “That should sustain you. Take heart now, lad. The test is soon.”

  “What test?” asked Javor. But the old man just smiled grimly and tucked the wineskin back into the folds of his cloak. And Javor knew what he meant.

  The sun rose higher but cast no more light. The path started to rise again through dusty hills while
the sky seemed to get lower. All morning, the old man told stories that Javor barely heard. All he could think of was his mother’s broken body, his father’s crushed skull.

  “They live in the desolate lands, you know,” the old man was saying. “The far north, the north-east; and in latter days, many have been coming from the east toward the north-west, around the edges of the civilized world.”

  “Why?” asked Javor, surprised at his own interest.

  “Civilization is abhorrent to them,” said the old man, delighted to have an interested audience at last. “Civilized men learn how the world works, which gives them power over darkness and ignorance. The monsters know this and hate it. Their power is based on fear and ignorance.”

  “Why? What difference does civilization make?”

  “Knowledge, my boy. Knowledge banishes ignorance, banishes fear.”

  “I don’t see how knowing about monsters makes them any less powerful or fearsome,” Javor answered. He was getting angry. He still did not know whether he believed the story about a monster. But then, what broke those heavy timbers? It took four men to move those.

  “Knowledge erodes their power, my boy. First, and most obviously, the more we know about our enemy, the easier it is to defeat him. We must learn the monster’s weaknesses, you see.”

  Photius stopped walking and swung his pack off his back, then sat on a rock. “Tell me, do you believe in gods?”

  Javor stopped, too. “Well, yes, like Perun and the Dazhbog and the Chernobog.”

  “Why?”

  Javor opened his mouth but could think of no answer.

  “Is it because your parents told you they were real? They told you all the stories, and the headman and the shaman and all the other people you know repeated them. So, why can you not believe in monsters?”

  “I have seen Perun’s lightning and the dawn of Zaria. And I have lost brothers and sisters to the Chernobog.”

  “Ah—the dark god. You refer to the pestilences.”

  Javor nodded. “But I have never seen a monster or anything like one.”

  “Do you believe in bears? Wolves? How often have you come face-to-face with one?”

  “I have seen a bear and I have seen what wolves do. I have seen a whole chicken coop ripped apart and all the chickens killed by a fox, I have seen the bones of deer in the forest after they’ve been killed by wolves. But I have never seen any sign of a monster.”

  “Until now. Javor, how else could you explain the effects you saw on your own home? Or what your own people are telling you?”

  Javor was getting angry. What does he want from me? “People are stupid. My people are stupid. They could have fought off those raiders if they had stood together. And they tell each other tales and then believe them! One man catches a small deer, but by the time the story gets around the village, it’s a herd of wild oxen! So, no, I don’t believe my people!”

  “True. If you talk to three different people in the village, you’ll get three different descriptions of the monster. That’s the way it is with people, and evil things everywhere thrive on that. So do the gods, mind you. No one knows where they come from or what they want, or how strong they really are or what their weaknesses are. Soon the rumour of them is greater and far worse than they are themselves. A man in your own village, Borys I think his name was, told me about a dragon that ate a whole village in the south. I have heard that tale in other villages, too. But the name of the destroyed village always changes, and with each telling, the beast does something worse and gets bigger and stronger. And if the monster’s reputation is so fearsome, soon it doesn’t have to do anything but show up to make people run in panic, and the monster can take what he wants without any bother.”

  “Are ... are you saying the monster that killed my parents isn’t so bad?”

  “No, unfortunately, my lad, in this case we’ve seen just how bad it is. But we’re going to find out its weaknesses.” He set out along the trail again, and Javor followed.

  By midday, they were climbing the steep, rocky slopes of a grey mountain. The air grew steadily colder and the clouds got lower and darker. Above, Javor could see only grey: grey rocks reaching dizzyingly upward, grey skies. No white or green.

  They stopped for a rest at a small ravine cut by a mountain stream. Photius sat against a rock and shared some of his wine and his mysterious, invigorating bread.

  “We are now about to enter a truly dangerous area, my young friend,” he said, gazing calmly up the mountain.

  “How do you know?” Javor didn’t see anything about the slope immediately above them that set it apart from the part they had just climbed.

  “The aura of this place is black, dead. There are loathsome things ahead.”

  Javor let his pack slip to the ground and looked at the old man. He was sitting on the ground, leaning back against a boulder, and from Javor’s perspective it seemed the rock was almost a continuation of Photius’ head.

  Then Photius’ head seemed to move. It got longer, higher, and something black rose over the top. No—some animal, a huge snake was rising from behind the rock. In an instant, it towered over Photius. Covered in gleaming black scales, it curved its hideous neck downward again in a fluid motion, opening its maw wider, wider, so wide that Javor thought he would lose his mind. Slime dripped off its lips and teeth like daggers grew outward from the jaw.

  Sound faded and time slowed for Javor. Photius looked up, eyes widening in horror. The snake, or whatever it was, lowered its head as if to swallow the old man whole. Javor’s body seemed to know what to do without his mind telling it. He realized that his father’s small hatchet was in his hand and that he was raising it over his head. He took two long, fast steps and sprang upward, swinging his arm down as he rose over Photius. The axe came down hard onto the snake’s skull, and he could feel its blade digging into flesh and bone. There was a horrible wrench at his shoulder, and he let go of the handle, and then his feet were on the ground again. He bumped into Photius, sending the old man sprawling.

  Javor became aware of sound again, of Photius yelling incoherently and the snake-thing roaring, tossing its head back and forth with the axe embedded in its skull, spurting slime and blood that hissed when it struck the rocks around them.

  Across the ravine, miles of tail writhed and tossed in rings and loops among the rocks. The snake-thing brought its head down hard on the ground right beside Photius, then heaved up again.

  Javor scooped the old man up in his arms—he was surprisingly light—and leaped up the hill, away from the snake’s death throes, just as it brought its head down again into the ravine. Half-carrying Photius, Javor scrambled up the slope. When they had climbed far enough that they could no longer see the snake-thing among the boulders, Javor halted, panting. “Was that the monster that killed my parents?” he gasped.

  “No, Javor,” Photius gasped back. He looked bad. His face was gray and he seemed to be trembling. “No. That was a mere minor beast, a cold-drake of some kind. It was much smaller and weaker than the thing that killed the people of your village and all those warriors.” Javor was beginning to get his breath under control.

  Javor started back down the slope again, half-sliding on his backside.

  “Where are you going, boy?” Photius asked, panic around the edges of his voice.

  “To get my axe back.” It was still embedded in the monster’s skull. Despite Photius’ incoherent admonitions to stay away from the drake, Javor skidded and slid back to the ravine where the thing’s body lay strung out like an unravelled skein of wool. Its tongue now hung out of its mouth, draped over a dead log. As if it isn’t long enough, already, Javor thought. Stinking steam rose from it. Javor reached for the axe handle, embedded deep in the fire-drake’s skull, and pulled hard. It would not budge until Javor tugged several times, and then all it once it came out of the monster’s head with a sucking sound. Javor watched in wonder as the drake’s blood—if that’s what it was—evaporated in steam until the axe blade
was completely clean. He shuddered, then tucked the axe handle into his belt and climbed back up to Photius.