Chapter 41: Wanderer

Together they walked up the broad ramp toward the pyramid’s entrance. Stone figures stood at attention on either side like sentinels. The statues had the shape of men and were carved to appear dressed in some kind of armor Tarek had never seen before, but the faces were all of animals. One had a long, fanged snout under recessed, boar-like eyes, while another looked nearly like a monkey. Each one was different, and all made him uneasy.

“What people built this?” he whispered.

“A foolish one,” Xochil answered. “A people more interested in looking back than moving forward.”

“What were they called?”

“They called themselves the Chosen, if you can believe it. And you don’t have to whisper.”

Tarek shrugged self-consciously, looking around at the walls of natural rock rising on all sides of the pyramid. “It feels like I ought to. Like this is a special place.”

“They certainly would have liked to think so. Idiots.”

They reached the flat landing at the top of the ramp where the entrance loomed. There were no statues here, merely six heaps of rusting metal of various shapes piled haphazardly. Xochil pointed at one of them.

“See what being chosen gets you?”

Tarek looked closer, trying to make sense of the jumble. One of the rusting metal plates looked shaped as if it might cover a human chest, and another like a peaked hat.

“Is it armor?” he asked.

“And whatever’s left of whoever was wearing it. Rattle it around and a bone or two might fall out. Or maybe not. There might be nothing but dust at this point.”

Tarek drew back. “Was there a battle?”

“No.” Xochil sounded disgusted. “The fools sat down to wait for their king to come back. They didn’t know he’d take the better part of a thousand years to get around to it.”

“I don’t understand,” Tarek said. “How could any of this be for me? That’s insane.”

“I’ve had a long time to think about it, and insane is as good a descriptor for life as any other I’ve found. I don’t expect it to make sense yet, boy. You need to come inside and see what’s there.”

Tarek edged past the rusting piles of armor, imagining men sitting there calmly until they starved and died, never once moving in search of sustenance. Why would anyone do such a thing?

Xochil followed him into the darkened opening. Tarek expected another anxious descent into darkness, but suddenly a light bloomed behind him, throwing his shadow onto the granite blocks before him. Turning around, he saw a white-green ball of moonlight hovering over Xochil’s hand.

“You couldn’t have done that before?”

“Unless you’ve got a torch hidden in those nasty furs of yours, shut your mouth and keep walking. Using my power tires me, and I’m near the end of my strength. But you need to see what’s in here before I cure you, so… go. Quickly, if you don’t mind.”

They marched into the deep recesses of the stone structure, the floor sloping down beneath their feet. The green-tinged light in Xochil’s hand cast a harsh glare onto stone that had been carved into ornate patterns and curlicues in lines bordering the floor and ceiling. Carvings of hands and faces adorned the spaces in between at irregular intervals. They were breathtaking in their artistry. Tarek stopped to look more closely at one, but Xochil chivvied him onward. Twice they passed branching paths, but his guide kept motioning him forward. Downward.

The floor levelled out, and the hallway terminated in a wide, tall chamber that Xochil’s house would have fit comfortably inside. Xochil’s light filled the space, and Tarek’s breath caught in his throat. After handspans of looking at the monochrome shades of night and the severe gray of granite all around, the room was a cacophonous riot of color. The carvings here had been painted in every shade under the sun: greens and reds and golds and blues. Every last bit of the walls was covered in brightly painted carvings. An incongruously plain altar of black stone big enough to lay down on sat in the center of the room. Directly over it, a marvelous contraption of crystal prisms and metal dangled from the ceiling, catching and amplifying the light, sending rainbow streaks spinning about the walls in dizzying cascades.

“What is this place?” he whispered, awed.

“This is where we’ll do it. But I wanted you to see the room first.”

Tarek nodded, clutching the bag holding his precious blood cloths, eyes wide as he took in the grandeur of the great chamber. “How was this done? Who made all this?”

“This is the place where the Lost stopped, when first they became the Lost.” Xochil looked about the chamber with a wistful air.

Tarek frowned. “Who were they before that?”

“It’s amazing to me that more of you don’t ask. No matter where I go among the tribes, you have your stories, your legends, your tales of heroes and fools, but nothing about how it started. Have you never thought about it?”

 “I’ll bet Tavi has.”

“Likely he has, the little shit. He’d be one of the few. A whole nation of people with no idea of their origins, and all their stories shaped to guide them away from the fact. Stay close to home, don’t ask questions, listen to the elders, pray to the Ones Beneath. Don’t wander too far. For all the differences that have sprung up between the tribes, that’s the one constant. It’s uncanny. The ones who built here did their job too well.”

Tarek struggled to follow the meandering words. “The Lost have always lived in the Land. Always.”

“I suppose you could say that, yes, but what about before they were the Lost?”

Tarek shook his head, baffled. “I don’t know.”

“Tarek, your ancestors came from outside the Land. They came to this weird, wild place no one could ever find because they needed to hide. They were being hunted. They named themselves the Lost because they didn’t want to be found.”

“If that’s what happened, why don’t we have any stories about it? Why wouldn’t they pass them down like all the others?”

“Because if no one knew about the place they left, no one could ever think about going back.”

Tarek trailed his finger along the nearest wall, marveling at the minute perfection of the carving. The art was mostly of people in action, some of them fighting, others kneeling, and still others engaged in actions he didn’t understand. The progression of figures seemed to tell a story of sorts. “The Catori loremaster would have a fit if he could hear you.”

“Him and plenty of others.”

“But why do you need me to see this? It’s an interesting story, and this place is incredible, but we’re here to cure me. Why does this matter?”

Xochil threw up his hands. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, stupid boy! You have to understand how you came to possess the blood magic before you can choose to be rid of it. I need you to shut your mouth and listen. I’m not throwing a history lesson at you for fun – this is the most important conversation you will ever have, and I’ve been waiting for it a very long time.”

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Tarek let his hand drop from the wall and turned to face the old man squarely. “All right. I’m here and I’m listening. I don’t understand, but I’m listening.”

Xochil’s lips quivered and he tugged at his beard. “Fine. Good. That’s good. I shouldn’t shout. I’m… highly invested in all this.”

“You always act like you don’t care about anything.”

“I don’t want to care! I’m sick to death of all this. So much time spent, so much effort wasted, and I’m not even sure it amounts to anything. When you get to my age, cynicism is easier, and when you can’t quite manage it, well… you’ll have to forgive an old man if he fakes it, instead.”

Xochil took a calming breath and passed a shaking hand over his brow. “I’m tiring too quickly. Damn this weakness. Here’s the point, boy: when I say this pyramid was meant for you, I don’t mean someone like you or someone with the blood magic, I mean you. You, Tarek of the Catori. You, now.”

Tarek opened his mouth to speak, but Xochil forestalled him with a raised hand. “No, shut up. I know you don’t understand. Let me speak.” He crossed the room and pointed to a carved panel painted in golds and blues and greens. “Look at this.”

Tarek approached and saw that the wall where Xochil had pointed was crowded with human forms no taller than his hand. There were hundreds, each carved in life-like detail down to the snail-shell curves of their ears. The scene showed a man sitting on an ornate chair painted with gold. He was bedecked with finery in much the same way the chief of the Kuruk had been at the Congress, but on this figure the accoutrements looked noble and proper instead of excessive. The seated man held out his hands in a greeting or blessing of some sort, and nearly all the figures around him bowed or knelt. Xochil ran his fingers gently over the seated man’s form, dust falling loose at his touch.

“That rat Rekoma, the chief of the Kuruk, keeps trying to get the other tribes to call him the Kuhul A’hua. It’s an old term; it means the greatest lord of all, the king. He’ll never succeed. The man in this carving was an actual kuhul a’hau in a way that scheming idiot could never hope to be. He cared for his people. It was a time of earthquakes and great floods, but he led them in wisdom and strength. He had the magic of his ancestors more strongly than anyone could ever recall, and he used it to know the minds of those who loved him and stop the plots of those who did not.”

Xochil flicked another shape with his fingernail, drawing Tarek’s gaze. Tarek saw a man behind the ruler’s gilded chair who was crouched as if in the act of rising from kneeling. He was pulling a long knife from the folds of his robe. “But he wasn’t perfect, and he didn’t know everything, and so one day he died on his throne.” He pointed to the adjacent scene, which showed a mob with knives as long as their arms chasing a group of weeping, frightened women and children. “They called his magic unnatural and banned anyone from their lands who had even a trace of it. Not that they truly cared about the magic, but that conveniently got rid of all the nobles and rich men. They were greedy and stupid.” Xochil’s lips pursed as if he wanted to spit. “And now they’re dead.”

He walked several paces further and gestured to the scene on the wall. Many people pointed upward toward a diamond painted white and gold against a background of black. “When the ones who were chased out gathered, they realized there was a new star in the sky where none had been before. It was large and bright, but it acted like no star they’d ever seen before. It moved from one night to the next, tracing a path through the sky. They called it the Wanderer and followed where it led, past the end of the world any of them knew. The son of the dead a’hau, who had much of his father’s power, awoke from a dream one night and pronounced that the star held the soul of his father, and that he would return from time to time to protect and guide his people.”

“A star? With a man’s soul in it?” Tarek asked, dubious.

“I told you to shut up.” In the wan light of his magical illumination, Xochil looked tired and sunken. His hands trembled. “Yes, Tarek, a star with a soul in it. Or a comet, at least. Do you know so much about the world that you can tell me for certain that’s not how it works?”

“Well, no, but…”

“As it happened, others thought the same as you at first, but nearly twenty years after the Wanderer left the sky, it returned, marking its course and this time leading the people from th desert where they had been scrabbling out a meager existence into a new land no one had ever before found, encircled by water and mist. It was so well hidden that none of those that had chased them could ever hope to find them. By then, most everyone believed.”

Xochil gestured to a scene of pastoral life punctuated with pyramids. “They called their new place the Land and never left it. And here we are.”

Tarek touched the figure of the man on his golden chair. “Why wouldn’t our ancestors want us to know this?”

“Because some of the great man’s descendants were every bit the evil tyrant he was originally accused of being. They killed the ones they led and drank their blood. Created fear. Sowed discord. Lived for their lusts. After a time the people forgot the miracle of the Wanderer and came to fear the blood magic, until even the children of those tyrants wished to be rid of it. They suppressed the old stories, and when they found the Heart of the Song and realized they could drink of its magic, well… the era ended. The tribes splintered. Forgot where they came from. Lost the learning of thousands of years. Lived in huts in the most savage parts of the Land, some of them. Sound familiar?”

Tarek nodded. “And what makes you think that I have some special part in all this?”

Xochil pointed to the gold-and-white diamond carved on the wall. “The Wanderer star. Can you guess what it ended up being called as the language of the Lost changed over the centuries?”

Tarek spread his hands. “I couldn’t even begin to guess.”

“You should listen to your brother more. It’s called Gurobo.”

Tarek frowned. “That’s the one Tavi got all worked up about. Zuma too, at the Congress. Said it caused the flood.”

“Oh good, there is some hint of a spark inside your head. The Wanderer was supposed to reappear in the skies this year, and it didn’t. It’s gone, and the lack of its influence on the waters and gravity and whatnot – never mind, don’t even ask the question, you won’t understand the answer – is wreaking havoc on our weather. So the rains fall harder and longer, and the floods get worse.” Xochil wiped a hand across his slack lips, and Tarek noticed age spots that he was sure hadn’t been there before. The old man’s legs were trembling now too, but his gaze still demanded Tarek’s attention.

“Where is the star?” Tarek asked. “Where did it go?”

“It came back,” Xochil said gravely. “Some part of it came home.  It’s not in the skies now because when it passed overhead twenty years ago, it left its soul behind. Now the bit of rock and ice that’s left in the sky has no reason to return.”

“The soul of this a’hau,” Tarek said. “And that’s supposed to be me?” He laughed. “Some great king?”

Xochil tottered back to a section of the wall to one side of the assassination scene and with a palsied hand wiped the thick dust from a large face carved into the wall. It was nearly half as tall as Xochil himself. “You tell me.”

Tarek opened his mouth to object, but the face drew his gaze. He knew it. He’d seen it reflected in still pools and the wavering of gentle streams. He saw bits and pieces of it every time he looked at Tavi. It had his mamah’s brow and his tata’s chin. The air leaked from his chest without any words, and he drew closer. The skin tone was a lighter brown than his, and the eyes were more green than the muddy moss he saw in his own, but… “Impossible,” he whispered.

“Every year you look more like him,” Xochil said with a sad kind of fondness. “They named you Tarek at birth, and I wondered. In the tongue I grew up speaking, tarek means wander. But it could have been chance. By the time you had ten summers behind you, I was sure.”

Tarek’s mind reeled. How can my face be here? Even if he’s wrong about the whole story, this building must be hundreds of years old. How? He stuttered out a few nonsense syllables, stopped himself, and touched the graven face. Even the contours felt right. He’d touched this face every day of his life.

“How do you know all this?” Tarek finally asked.

Xochil tried to push himself up from where he leaned against the wall and failed. “The assassination,” he said weakly. “By the throne. Look.”

Tarek went back to the now-familiar scene of the a’hau giving a benediction to his people as his death rose at his back unaware. Next to the gilded chair, mostly hidden behind it and the great man sitting in it, stood a young, slender figure in simple robes leaning on a staff. He leaned toward the a’hau, his hand extended, and seemed to be about to speak in his ear. An advisor. A counselor.

“I know this because I saw it happen,” Xochil said behind him. “I was there.”

Xochil fell into a hacking cough, and Tarek went back to him, concerned. The old man waved him off irritably before wiping his mouth, taking a shaky breath, and giving him a feeble smile.

“I was his little brother.”

 

Author note: Okay friends, I think I'm feeling done posting here on Scribble Hub and nobody finding my work. If anybody's reading, by all means drop a note and encourage me to continue. Better yet, migrate over to Royal Road, where I'm posting this every week, and read the rest of the story!

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