Ander - Part 4: Subchapter 7
7
"How's the cut?" Kadai asked, eyeing the long brown line of animal grease across his son's midsection.
"What cut?" Hezzi replied, the smile on his face forced, but there. It was the only piece of good news Kadai has gotten all morning. His drisa was slowly but surely going back to normal.
That's another gift Ander has left us, he thought. By the Cora, I've been so blind all these years...
An uncomfortable silence descended upon them, and Kadai realized he didn't really know all that much about his youngest son.
Morning sunlight flowed in through the open entrance and Kadai looked around at all the bits and pieces decorating his son's tent, most of which were made by Ander over the years. There was a long piece of bark, intricately charred by coals to make the mountain's outline, accurate down to every last peak and crevasse as seen from the Northern watchtowers. There was a small collection of unique river pebbles, blacks and blues, speckled and striped, worn smooth over countless years before they were plucked from the rushing waters by an eager hand and a keen set of eyes. And past all these, right up against the canvas where the light didn't quite reach...
A wooden carving of Hezzi. Kadai reached out and picked it up, his heart heavy with sorrow.
"I remember when Ander made this," he said, slowly turning it over in his hands, feeling its rough texture against his palms, the flow of the grain, the care and attention to detail evident in every chip and cut. But there was something strange...
Kadai held it up to the light, and his heart nearly stopped in his chest. There, right in the middle, exactly where the real Hezzi would bear a long, jagged scar for the rest of his life, was a splintery crack, zigzagging across the surface like teeth.
"I had to glue it back together with resin," Hezzi said, his eyes downcast. "But Ander said he'd make me a new one. He promised he'd get it back to me one day, and I trust him this time. I really, really do."
"That's good, Hezzi," Kadai said, barely supressing a shudder. The crack in this carving, matching up so perfectly with his son's wound, was a terrible omen. He could feel the hand of fate rushing to meet him, all of them, and it would not be kind. He knew all this, but he could not foresee how fast it was moving.
It was already with them.
Wolves were starting to flow past in droves, their shadows flickering across his son's tent in alternating patches of light and dark. It was time.
Time to start the funeral.
*
"How is this possible? How could this have happened?" the whispers travelled through the crowd, all uttered with the same kind of bewildered sorrow. Hezzi looked to the left, then to the right, and all the faces were the same: downcast and grief stricken. But there were no tears. Tears would be an insult to the honoured dead.
Something warm and soft suddenly closed around Hezzi's fingers and he almost pulled back in alarm before he realized it was only Renna, clutching his hand like she would drown without him. He started to say hello, but the sight of her face was enough to darken this already dark day even further.
Her eyes were puffy and bruised, almost swollen shut completely. There were nasty cuts in her lips and against her temple, cuts that could only have been made by the claws of one furious she-wolf.
He should have been there for her.
"Renna?" He didn't even know what to say to her. He was no stranger to beatings, some of them very severe indeed, but this felt different. This was Renna. She wouldn't even hurt a butterfly, and to see her like this...
She turned her face away, her lips trembling, as if ashamed to let him see her like this, but she squeezed down even harder on his hand, too scared to face the coming days alone.
Hezzi squeezed back, thinking that maybe she wasn't the only one who needed something to cling to. Maybe they would be able to keep each other afloat on these dark waters looming up to meet them, waters they couldn't do anything to avoid.
The first wave was already upon them.
Garten was lying on top of a massive funeral pyre, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes closed, surrounded by every Wolf of the tribe. Looking at his face made Hezzi feel uneasy, like maybe he wasn't really dead, despite the red hole between his eyes and the flies crawling all over his lips and nose. If Banno's body had been found, he would have had a pyre just like this, too. The thought of his eldest brother - so big, so strong, a monolith of eternity in every sense of the word - as a corpse on a pyre made everything feel so unreal, like he was dreaming.
"I don't want to watch this, Hezzi," Renna whispered, her hand shaking in his. "I don't want to watch them burn him..." She raised her free hand to her mouth and started chewing on her nails. It was an old habit of hers, but it's gotten much worse. Some of her claws were chewed all the way down to the quick, and sometimes they would bleed without her even noticing. But he did. Ever since Ander left, he's been noticing all kinds of things.
Like the way their little group had clustered together without any urging, him and Renna, Sorrin and Mellah, Lana and Danado. Even Nilia, who was supposed to be standing with the other warriors to honour Garten's passing, had chosen to stand with them instead.
And dotted among the grieving faces were flashes of hatred and malice, random glints like you would find in the side of a broken stone, there and gone in the blink of an eye, maybe real, maybe just a trick of the light, looks that said: This is all your fault. Garten is dead because of you. We'll make you pay. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. You should have taken your brother's bow. You should have done what Garten asked of you. You should have birthed the vengeance of our tribe. You should have plunged that broken piece of wood into -
"Hezzi? Are you all right?"
Hezzi jumped as if stung by a bee, momentarily grateful to be rid of those thoughts, but then he realized he had woken into a world much worse than anything his tired mind could whisper. He could actually see the scratch in Garten's arm, the scratch he had put there with Ander's broken bow. It was like seeing his own gruesome signature on this grim mess.
"I'm fine," he lied. "I don't really want to watch this either, but we don't have a choice."
"I know," she sighed.
Father stepped forward, and a hush fell over the crowd. As Chieftain, it was his job to honour the dead and to console the living, but the task of lighting the pyre would fall to Mother. She already had the lit torch in hand, staring at the flames dancing before her dead eyes.
"Garten was a strong Wolf," Father started. "A fierce warrior, a brutal fighter who never showed any mercy to friend or foe. He lived as a true Wolf, and he died as a true Wolf, upholding the laws which bind us all. When he reaches The Path, I know it will lead him to peace and serenity, and well deserved rest."
"This is such a farce," someone whispered from behind the anonymity of rows upon rows of likeminded Wolves, and as much as Hezzi hated hearing anyone speak ill of his father, in this case he couldn't help but agree. Father never liked Garten all that much, even before he tried to kill Ander, and his speech sounded like something hastily thought up ten minutes before the funeral was slated to begin: generic and lacklustre. Giving a boring speech was one thing, but at the opposite end were those listening, and right now the ones who were listening were finding it very hard to contain themselves when the Wolf giving out praise to the dead obviously didn't mean a single word he was saying. Hezzi was never very good at reading people, but even he couldn't ignore the balled fists, the cold stares, the fangs barely held in check. There was a pall hanging over the pyre, not of death, but of impending disaster, and Father must have noticed it, too, because he cut his speech short, "May he find peace at the end of The Path," and stepped back, making room for Mother to do her bit.
The crowd softened noticeably as she approached the pyre, holding the torch up to her eyes while she chanted her blessing in the old Wolven tongue.
"Garten, mag yo siel styg sahm met di rook van yo lyf, op na di berg van ons voor vaders..."
Hezzi was so caught up in what his mother was doing he didn't even notice his father circle around until he placed his hand on his shoulder.
"Hezzi."
"Hello, Father."
"Is that cut still okay?"
He hated it when people asked him about that damn thing. Granted, the only ones who ever did were Renna and Mother, and it was sort of Mother's job to ask, but he still didn't like it. It felt like they thought he couldn't handle a bit of pain, even though he's never complained of his wound, not even once. He's never even winced where anyone could see him, and now even Father was looking down at him with an odd kind of concern, like he might just collapse and start bawling at any second. Well, Father has been acting a bit strange lately. Kind of... different from his usual far-off self.
"I'm fine, Father. Really. You can stop asking me every time you see me."
"I see. That's good."
Mother was now circling the pyre, the smoke from her torch blowing back in her face, the flames rippling the air. "Garten, mag yo siel vrede vind in di arems van di Cora, mag Die Pad yo lei na di eind del oseh jagtog van di volg ende we relt..." She bent down and touched the flames to the dry, splintery wood of the pyre, carefully stacked by Garten's fellow warriors, layer by layer.
Father suddenly squeezed his shoulder, so hard it almost bordered on pain. "Hezzi?" he said, looking straight ahead as the flames first tasted, then devoured the lower kindling.
"Yes, Father?"
"I am proud of you."
Time did not stop. The world just kept going on like it always did, one moment at a time. But Hezzi felt frozen inside, unable to react. Hell, how could he even begin to react if he didn't even know what he was supposed to be feeling?
Mother circled the entire pyre, still chanting, until the whole thing was bathed in a ring of red, crackling fire. The heat washed over Hezzi's face like warm breath. He could even feel it caressing the cut in his stomach, extra hot, as if it was trying to get inside, as if Garten was trying to finish the job even as the flames drew closer and closer to his dead body.
Father was proud of him? For what!? He's been fighting and struggling and trying his very best his whole life just to be able to hear those words, only to be overshadowed by his stronger, smarter brothers. Is that why Father chose now, of all moments, to tell him those words? Because both his brothers were gone forever? Because he was the only son left?
He felt trapped. With Renna holding onto his hand and Father holding onto his shoulder and the pyre smoke blowing into his face it felt like he was suffocating. It stung his eyes and scratched his throat but he couldn't even cough because everyone was being so dead still.
Dead still... just like Garten.
The flames had finally reached him, and the long strands of hair on his legs and tail were beginning to curl up and singe away. The smell of burning fur was the most bitter thing in the whole world, more bitter than the most poisonous of mushrooms, more bitter than the hatred surrounding them, it was a bitterness that clung to you in sticky layers, bitterness that wouldn't come off even after a dozen washes, and it was that bitterness now infecting the wind.
"Are you saying that because Ander and Banno are both gone?" Hezzi whispered, not caring if Renna could hear. "Are you saying that because I'm the only son you have left?"
"No, Hezzi," Father said, looking straight ahead at the growing fire. "The worst thing about being a fool is that you do not realize you're being a fool until someone comes along and shows you what a terrible fool you are, and I have been the biggest fool for such a long time."
Hezzi has never heard his father speak in such a way. The Chieftain, calling himself a fool? He could barely make sense of it. It was like two opposites trying to be the same, like he was suddenly supposed to believe that up was down and hot was cold.
Father sighed. "It took something as extreme as Ander's sacrifice for me to realize what should have been clear as day to any father. You were brave enough to do what I could not, and for that I'm so proud of you, Hezzi. I'm proud to have you as my son."
The wind roared through the pyre and the flames crackled and the smoke rose high into the air. The fire grew until Garten's body was no more than a shadow glimpsed through dancing red teeth. Embers blew in random swirls past the Cora statue's teeth of stone, watching over the whole affair with its painted eyes of blood red berry juice.
Father was proud of him...
Hezzi reached up and wiped a tear from his eye. Because of all the smoke. Lots of Wolves were tearing up, standing so close. It was no big deal.
He wiped a second tear away, and Renna squeezed his hand.
Maybe things really would work out in the end. If Ander could start a new life, maybe he could do it, too. Maybe he could build himself his own little Grovenglen right here, within these walls, a Grovenglen where no one hated each other, where those that could inflict the most pain were not considered 'strong' and those who dared to show an ounce of compassion were not considered 'weak'.
His father was proud of him. That alone was enough to start him on the path of his own Grovenglen.
And then Wardo stepped up and cleared his throat. "Unless anyone objects, I'd like to say a few words."
Hezzi quickly looked up to see if his father would say anything, and he wasn't the only one. Heads were turning all over the place, some to look at Wardo, some to look at Father. The ones looking to Wardo seemed surprised, but also eager to hear whatever he had to say, while those regarding Father had their teeth bared just as Father had _his_teeth bared towards Wardo, and even though he didn't want anything to do with this, Hezzi couldn't help but feel that no matter what happened, no matter who spoke first or to what end, it would only end in misery and bloodshed.
The seconds dragged by, made even more uncomfortable by the fact that Renna was now squeezing his hand so hard he could feel the blood pulse in in his fingertips. He still had trouble believing the story Nilia had told him of the voracious little furball that had taken a huge juicy bite out of Wardo's leg, but right now he would give anything for that tale to be true, as long as it gave her a chance to make it through this second wave of dark water.
"This is a funeral, Wardo," Father said. "Only Garten's friends, family, and comrades have the right to speak of him, and you are none of those things."
"Me? Not a comrade?" Wardo threw his arms wide and spun around in a little half circle as if to ask the crowd, Can you believe this? "I may not be a warrior, but how many times have I sat in_your_ tent with your most trusted advisors, drawing maps and devising strategy with Garten right there by my side? Was I not just as much a comrade to him as his fellow warriors? Was I not more of a comrade to him than you?"
"Let him speak!" Dorin shouted, and that was the stone that caused the ripple to spread, first through the cluster of warriors, then on to almost every Wolf surrounding the pyre.
"Let him speak! Let him speak! Let him speak! Let him speak!"
Father was stuck. He couldn't ban someone from speaking at a Wolf's funeral, and Wardo knew it.
"Everything our esteemed Chieftain said about this fine young warrior is true," Wardo began, his voice pushing through the roaring fire for all to hear. "Strong, fierce, brutal. A true Wolf, just like Banno, the Wolf whose memory he fought so hard to uphold..."
The Wolves listened intently, nodding their heads and shouting, "Yes!"
"But look at him now, reduced to this blackened lump of meat for us to mourn over..." As if on cue, the pyre cracked and settled down a few inches in a flurry of sparks, causing one of Garten's arms to flop down by his side, engulfed in a glove of flames. It was all too easy to imagine him struggling against the all-consuming heat, far too easy, and Hezzi suddenly felt like throwing up. That stench... that awful, disgustingly sweet stench...
"And why!?" Wardo screamed at the crowd. "Why are we all gathered here in sadness and suffering at the passing of a friend instead of celebrating the execution of an enemy!? It's because of him!" He pointed an accusatory finger Father's way, his eyes blazing, his mouth frothing. "He could have ordered Ander's head chopped off right there beneath the Cora's shadow, all tied up and harmless! Then none of this would have happened! But no! He allowed himself to be blinded by affection for a treasonous murderer! He's the one who failed to uphold our laws and protect his own people! By the Cora, he couldn't even protect his own firstborn son!"
Hezzi felt his father's hand suddenly leave his shoulder, watched as he stepped forward to confront the Wolf on the other side of the fire. From this angle all he could see was a massive back and wide set of shoulders, hunched over in anger. He could almost trick his eyes into believing the smoke was rising from his father, and not from the pyre.
"Are you trying to challenge me, Wardo?" He threw his arms wide. "I'm right here! There's nothing stopping you! I don't care if this is the funeral of my strongest warrior, if you disrespect me or spit on my honour, I will make sure we build a pyre for you next!"
Hezzi felt a rush of pride for his father in that moment, but Wardo didn't seem impressed. In fact, he was shaking his head and clicking his tongue as if he were dealing with a stupid pup. It was a look Hezzi knew well, but he'd never seen it directed at his father before.
"You don't like what I'm saying, Chieftain, and so you resort to picking a fight. I am half your size, with not a single day's worth of battle training to my name."
"That didn't stop you from killing that bear."
Wardo looked down at the trio of scars running down his chest, left to right, and when he raised his head he was wearing a smile. "There are more ways to fight than with brute strength, Chieftain. I'm surprised you still haven't learned that, even after seeing what your dosa did to survive. In some ways, we are actually very much alike, him and I."
"You are nothing like Ander!" Father bellowed, so angry Hezzi feared he might plough right through the fire to get at him.
"I should hope not. Ander is a double murderer rotting away somewhere in the woods as we speak. Come to think of it, maybe I should go out and follow his tracks while they're still fresh, see how far he made it. Should make for an interesting little game."
"You shut the hell up about my son," Father said, seething with fury, but Wardo just carried on, oblivious of how deep he was digging his own grave.
"If it was any other Wolf, I'd be surprised if he made it even halfway through the woods, but Ander is a tough one. Even though I pierced him myself, I'd wager he could've made it all the way to the river before breathing his last. That would be rather poetic, don't you think? To die by the same river that claimed Banno's life? Garten would have loved it, the way he was always going on about poetry. Ooh, I hope that's what happened!" He rubbed his hands together, bouncing up and down like a child, and now Hezzi was the one struggling to hold back his anger. He envisioned himself leaping over the flaming pyre and burying his fist right in Wardo's smirking face, but this wasn't his fight, it was his father's. And although ripping Wardo's head off might prove satisfactory for one bloody moment, it would not be very wise. Hezzi knew this because he understood exactly what Wardo had meant when he said that, in some perverse ways, he and Ander were alike.
Hezzi looked around at the tense faces, at all the Wolves lightly crouched in place, ready to leap into the fray. You didn't have to be a visionary to know to whose defence they would spring to if it came down to that.
Just like Ander, Wardo had a way of touching people. But unlike Ander, whose touch was warm and guiding, Wardo's was more like an infected wasp sting, slowly spreading outwards to devour any healthy flesh it came in contact with, corrupting it into the same, puss-filled web of bloody holes to be found at the centre.
Wardo was the wasp, his tongue was the stinger, and his words were the dripping poison.
"I bet his eyes and mouth are crawling with maggots, his putrid, festering body buzzing with flies, his fur crawling with beetles and ants." And then came the final insult, the one that finally pushed Father over the edge. "It's exactly what he deserves. Fair is fair."
He shouldn't have said that. Hezzi didn't know exactly why those words were so much worse than the maggoty bug ones, but he could see it instantly in the way his father's face changed. Gone was the resolute determination to keep his temper under control, gone was any semblance of self-restraint, replaced by a look of pure, animalistic fury, his lips peeled back to reveal all the teeth, his muzzle crinkled, his eyes darkened in such a way he hasn't seen since Banno was still alive.
"Fair?" he growled. "You call what happened to my son fair!? What do you know of fair!? Nothing that ever happened to him was fair! Since the day he was born it wasn't fair! None of it was fair! It wasn't fair!! It wasn't fair!!"
He lunged around the crumbling pyre, kicking up dust, his fists locked and his fangs bared.
"Father, no!" Hezzi yelled. He reached out and just barely managed to grab hold of his father's arm, nearly pulling poor Renna right off her feet as he did so. Hell, he almost went sprawling himself.
"Let go!" Father yelled, jerking his arm free, but that single delay bought them just enough time for a stronger pair of helping hands.
Nilia quickly and expertly wrapped her arms around Father's middle, and no matter how hard he thrashed, her grip did not loosen.
"Calm yourself, Chieftain," she said in his ear. She did not shout, neither did she whisper. She simply talked the way she always did, as if all hell wasn't on the verge of breaking out all around them. "Calm yourself right now."
"That bastard! The things he said about my son! You heard him!" Father swiped his claws in Wardo's general direction, who, despite the grin on his face, looked all too relieved that someone had managed to step in before things got ugly.
"This is exactly what he wants," she said, the lone voice of reason in a mass of chaos. "He wants you to lose control. He wants to make you look weak in front of the entire tribe. He wants you to strike him down at a funeral. Don't play into his hands, Chieftain."
Father was still breathing heavily, and there was a thin foam of scum drying at the corners of his mouth, but he gradually stopped his struggling. "You can release me, Nilia," he said, staring daggers Wardo's way, who now had Thoka and Dorin standing on either side of him like a pair of bodyguards.
Nilia carefully stepped back, but not too far, lest her grappling skills be needed once again.
But something didn't feel right. It scratched at Hezzi's brain like an annoying tick. All of this strife just seemed so... pointless to him. Maybe it wouldn't have before, but it certainly did now. What was the point in goading out his father like this? What was the point of making such a scene at a funeral?
And then the answer came to him in a single, blood curdling word, a scream at the edge of the crowd.
"FIRE!!"
At first Hezzi thought that certain someone must have meant the pyre. Well big deal, it was almost burnt out, but then heads turned, and he saw the second column of smoke rising up against the clear blue sky like a black pillar. It was coming from...
"No!"
Hezzi's mind went totally blank. He didn't hear Renna calling his name, nor felt it when he pulled his hand away from hers. The pain in his gut told him he was running, and running much too fast, but it seemed a paltry thing compared to that infinite black scar against the sky, rising up and up and up...
He -
For those of you who are interested, Shekka's 'Old Wolven chanting' is really just some butchered Afrikaans, chopped up and jumbled and stuck in there to make a semi-fictional language. For the two or three readers who can actually understand Afrikaans her words will no doubt be understandable, but really weird and choppy. Here's a loose translation for everyone else.
The first part: "Garten, may your soul rise together with the smoke of your body, up to the mountain of our ancestors."
The second part: "Garten, may your soul find peace in the arms of the Cora, and may The Path lead you to the endless hunting grounds of the next world."
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