©2019 Liam Keith

FRONT MATTER

1. This work is protected under copyright law.
2. The characters and scenarios depicted in this work are fictional, any resemblances to actual people or events are purely coincidental.
3. This work contains language and descriptions not suitable for children, including profanity and graphic violence. Sensitive readers be advised.

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Nilu and her mother sat together in the shade of their hut, each with a goat hide across their laps. The girl gripped a jagged flint rock and scraped at the silvery membrane on the underside of the fur. She watched her mother’s use of the tool, trying to mimic her quick, deft strokes.

     A strong wind ruffled the towering canopy above them, and in the gale, they could taste the salt of the ocean beyond the forest. The leaves and branches rested again, but for a moment, an unnatural silence seemed to have arrested the pulse of the woodland. From the stillness, there was a sudden, enormous movement as flocks of birds rushed above them, cawing and darkening the sky. Then came a rumble like a thunderclap deep in the ground. The tremor traveled beneath Nilu’s feet, quaking a tall stack of earthenware beside her. Nilu’s mother raised herself up, placed a hand on her daughter’s head, and scanned the surroundings.

     Three women came and huddled around Nilu and her mother, trembling. The tribe’s shaman parted the furs that hung in the doorway to his hut. He shuffled out, tilted back his head—a mass of dreadlocked hair, feathers, and beard—and looked up at the sky, sensing with his eyes, his ears, and his spirit.

An excited young boy scaled a tall tree that the tribesmen often used as a lookout post. Expecting to see storm clouds approaching from the horizon, the boy was confused to find that the sky was clear in all directions, save for a few white puffs drifting above. The people all came together in the center of the village and began to speculate about what had caused the quaking in the ground. The shaman found himself having to pound his staff into the dirt and shout in order to quell the clamor that was beginning to erupt.

After a time, the hunters came dashing into the village, tossing aside the plump, black-grey pig they had felled. Panting, the eldest hunter placed his blood-streaked hands on his wife’s shoulders. As he fought for breath, he gestured his arms in large arcs, his eyes wide and lips mouthing words that failed to sound. The people crowded together to listen to the hunters all try to relate what they had just seen in the meadow. Nilu thought she understood what the adults were saying, and if it were true, she had to see it for herself.

Nilu’s father appeared out of the forest, his sinewy arms cradling a bundle of stripped saplings and coils of vines. He listened to the story of the hunters and dropped his haul where he stood. The people filed in together, following the hunters down the footpath to the meadow, their voices whirling in a tangle of fear and excitement.

As the trail through the forest opened to a clearing of grassy waves, they saw a giant body lying supine. It resembled a man in shape but was so large that the sight of it could rob the legs of strength. Many of the people, in fact, had fainted into the tufts of grass just off the footpath, as others simply stood motionless.

The corpse filled the meadow, nearly from end to end, and one of its alabaster legs splayed sidelong up a ridge. The giant’s massive limbs had snapped even the thickest trees like mere kindling during his fall, and left furrows of upturned earth where the bulk of his body had crashed down.

Voices cried out from somewhere near the giant’s head. Nilu was thrown atop her father’s shoulders and carried along, down to the commotion.

     Nilu gasped as she was brought face to face with the titan–his enormous countenance might have been preternaturally handsome if not for the grimacing mouth and vacant, milky eyes. His head was bald, and his skin was cloud-white with a shimmer of pale green that shone where the sun was glinting off the contours of his muscles. A headdress of woven vines and hundreds of brilliant flowers lay askew off his crown. His enormous skull, cresting higher than several men standing atop one another, was fractured and crazed like a bird’s egg that had fallen from a high branch. The strange flesh of the young god seemed like something between that of human skin and the brittle carapace of an insect.

     Nilu and her father walked around the crowd and saw what the shouting had been about; the back of the giant’s head had broken open, spilling out a viscous, black fluid. The people protested in chorus as one of the young tribesmen dipped a probing finger into the bile, and they watched in horror as the digit decayed in seconds, turning into a rotten mush that was squashed in the grip of his other hand. The lad’s face contorted into a bewildered rictus, and a crescendo of pitiful little whines became chilling shrieks by the time he was running on the trail back to the village.

Looking closer, the people noticed that the tall grass and shrubs that were coated in the strange humor were beginning to wither and putrefy. They scrambled back from the cursed blood, tripping over one another. Nilu’s father placed her down from the perch atop his yoke, and the flash in his eyes shepherded her and the other children to a distant hillock, far from the corruption.

     The crowd cleared a path as the shaman and his apprentice arrived. Upon seeing the corpse, the spirit man howled, fell to his knees, and his eyes rolled back. His body shuddered, his feathered headdress rippling like the plumes of a mating bird. He gnashed his teeth, large and yellow against the pale ash painting his wizened face. The people fell silent for a time, and then many wept. The shaman stood with the help of his apprentice, and then banged his staff into the ground with a pained wail. The apprentice ushered the people back along the path to the village as the shaman stood in the sea of grass, staring at the corpse.

That night, the people sat shoulder to shoulder around the big fire in the center of the village, wondering about the dead giant. Where had he come from? Was he always there, yet somehow invisible to them? Would they no longer be able to hunt beasts and gather fruits in the meadow? Perhaps they had caused this by taking too much from the woodland.

     The next morning, after sharing an uneasy sleep, the people prepared for the day. Not long after they had set off to the cove, the fisherman, his wife, and oldest son returned, tearing into the village, shouting and panting. Their nets were tangled and empty—they had seen something terrifying at the water and had fled instantly. The fisherman spread his arms wide to the people gathered around to indicate something of great size, while his wife stood with arms folded, shuddering. Several of the men sidled next to one another, exchanged some words with the fisherman, and darted at once to their huts.

Before long, the tribe’s hunters and warriors, armed with their spears and clubs, had assembled in the center of the village. The group cried out in one voice, then marched into the woodland, moving against the ocean breeze. Nilu and her friends raced after the men, and her father followed close with his hatchet. The shaman brought up the rear, chanting, howling, and praying as he went, with the apprentice behind him beating together the thighbones of a goat. The able men drove forward, gripping their weapons tight, all wondering if the sting of a spear or the might of a club could do anything at all to combat whatever darkness might be upon them—one that could kill gods.

     Nilu was captivated by what the shaman was carrying in his free hand—the Seeing Skull. This object was only brought out during times of great distress, such as with a death in the tribe, or right before a battle. The relic had a glowing ember in each eye socket, and it issued a sweet-smelling smoke. Its movement was hypnotic, oscillating back and forth on the twined cord that held it, somehow in rhythm with the eerie singing of the spirit men. For a moment, the skull had rotated around and held Nilu in its gaze, and she startled, thinking that it could really see her, that something inside of it was aware.

     After marching down long stretches of footpath, crossing a placid stream, and scrambling up gullies, the forest dropped away and ahead of the party was an argent ocean spanning into boundless haze. This was the edge of the world, and beyond the sands were unknowable distances of sky and waves. 

     The shaman raised the Seeing Skull high as he shimmied down a jagged rock face to a strand of beach. Peering across the shoreline, he saw that the fishing family had left a frenetic trail in the sand. These scrambled tracks led the party further down, around a cliffside beaten by the high tides and bedecked with barnacles.

     Rounding the rocks and entering a cove, they recoiled as they saw the colossal body of a woman. She lay contorted, with half of her face impacted in sand and a single, lunar eye staring at the people, seeing nothing. Her azure hair, longer than her bronzed body, fanned out and draped over the wet stones, tide pools, and crackled mounds of her own naked form. Nilu’s heartbeat excited and pattered in her tiny chest—how beautiful had the goddess been! Tears bloomed from Nilu’s big, dark eyes, and she wiped them away before anyone could see.

     A young tribesman pointed toward the waves lapping at the giant’s feet—there were scores of silvery fish bobbing and drifting lifelessly in the surf. Crabs were scattered all around in the sand, upturned with their white bellies to the sky.

A stream of black blood was running out from between the goddess’s crossed thighs, and feeding into the ocean water. The group sprang back from the frothing wave fronts at once.

     The Seeing Skull burst into wild flame for a moment, and the party froze in numinous awe. The shaman rattled in his skin, an unknowable presence gripping him, forcing him down onto his back. The apprentice steadied his teacher and lifted his frail old bones from the sand.

     When the group brought back the news to the people, fear and confusion grew. A wild hysteria began to consume them, like a flame devouring a dry leaf. 

What did it all mean? 

The tribe would now be tasked with locating new places to hunt and fish, fearing the curse of whatever evil spirit had killed the magnificent gods and sullied their sacred grounds.

Over the next few days, the people sent small groups to search for unmarred sites to find food. Their foraging yielded only handfuls of berries, nuts, roots, and plants a day. Some of the scouts had ventured past known horizons to survey the deeper lands, finding only a small abandoned village and many impenetrable mountain slopes. Able to procure only scant sustenance, the people felt their spirits ebb away, and they awaited the end of time.

As the hottest days of summer came, the stench of the rotting gods filled the forest. The tribe’s elder woman had conceived various wooden animal masks for the people to wear. The beaks and snouts of these visages were stuffed with the most fragrant flowers and herbs in the woodland, with some notion that even the smell of decay—aside from being horrendous to the senses—might carry the curse. Nilu’s mask was carved like the face of a hare, and she did not mind too terribly having to wear it every day.

     Scouts took turns guarding the meadow and the shoreline, keeping vigil over the bodies and monitoring the spread of decay brought by the tainted blood. Most of the meadow was lost; lush, green life was now replaced by blackened leaves, fruitless tendrils, bare roots, and the rotting bodies of small animals. The few sporadic areas where the blood had not touched seemed outwardly unsullied, as viable plants grew within them. Elsewhere, the cove was a wasteland of fish skeletons and decomposing crabs. Only a distant stretch of beach beyond a dangerous outcrop of rocks–crossed only when the tide was out–contained any sea life in its waves or tide pools. 

Cautiously, the hunters, foragers, and fishers took what little they could from the small, healthy patches of the forest and shore. Although the people were still wary of what may be coursing in the meat and fruits brought back to the village, they were far too hungry to refuse them.

Some moons later, a third giant body was found, high on a windy plateau where a few of the men went to wrangle goats. This one had the look of a brawny old man with an enormous beard of moss. The elder god’s broken body was curled into a ball–the gesture of a pitiful and miserable death. Across the breadth of his shoulders grew patches of gnarled little trees with bright green florets. His flint-grey flesh was beginning to sag over his mighty skeleton, and one of the scouts reasoned that the old giant must have died the same day as the other great spirits. 

The men walked around the perimeter of the enormous corpse, marveling at it and inspecting it for any clue as to how the god might have been killed; they saw that the behemoth’s massive rib cage had nearly collapsed, and there was a yawning aperture the size of a cave in the center of his chest. The corrupted blood that had once spilled in a torrent from his ancient heart was now dried up around him, and the carcasses of goats were scattered about. A venue of buzzards eyed the collection of carrion from an adjacent precipice, their instinct to feast subdued by some impalpable repulsion. The men could only behold the mountain god for a short time before being overpowered by the smell of rot, and they scrambled back down the mountain path.

Throughout the coming season, the people rationed out their food, smoked strips of meat, and buried earthenware loaded with plants and herbs. Although they survived autumn without losing anyone, winter was particularly unforgiving; all three of the women who had been with child gave birth to lifeless little bodies, themselves passing into death afterward. The shortage of food atrophied the strength of the men who did without for the sake of the women and children, and the gentle elder woman went from a cough to the funeral pyre in just three days.

As time passed, Nilu noticed her father becoming more and more like a brown skeleton beneath the layers of fur he wore. She and her mother tried to help him as he struggled to chop and haul his loads, but he always sent them back to the village. As dusk came each evening, he would slowly trudge back into the village to unload his burden of wood and vine, and then immediately lie down to sleep in his hut.

The shaman and his apprentice prayed from the first glow of the sun into the deep hours of night. In the dark, Nilu could spy out of her hut two ghostly faces caked with ash and dried animal blood blazing by firelight. The holy men chanted with guttural voices and such desperation that it made all of the people uneasy as they tried to rest.

By the time the coldest days had gone by, a third of the tribe had succumbed to the starvation and anguish wrought by the curse. The people gathered one night to burn their dead husbands, wives, parents, and children on a large pyre–eleven bodies in all. The moans and cries of the grieving drowned out the shaman’s frantic praying. Still, the spirit man shouted his words with violent fervor, hoping his incantations might cross the void that now existed where benevolent gods had once dwelled. Nilu watched the white smoke and cinders swirl off the great fire, rising up into the night sky and disappearing among the stars. She felt her mother and father squeeze her close, and tucked there into the warmth of their bodies, she was not afraid.

In the spring, the scent of decay finally lifted and the winds became fresh and balmy once more. One morning, the scouts were astonished to see that the body in the meadow had been completely subsumed by new, verdant grass and a smattering of vivid wildflowers. Only an odd undulation of the terrain gave any semblance to the broken shape that once lay there.

     The ocean goddess’s remains had been carried out into the sea piecewise from the rhythm of the tides. Crabs ducked in and out of the sand, and gulls lighted around in the surf precisely where the body had been. The fishing family, now only father and son, eagerly returned to their trusted pools, watching and testing the waters of the cove before committing to dropping their nets.

     The meadow was brimming with berries and herbs again, and the tides were ripe with life as they had been before. The people returned to familiar patterns of work and custom, but a certain darkness loomed over them; sickness of the bowels, pervasive malaise, malignancies of the mind, sleeplessness, nightmares, and painful skin lesions, all of complete novelty, had begun to plague the tribe.

Among the ailing, the old shaman had fallen very ill. Over the course of just two days, he had gone delirious in the throes of an intense fever, unable to take food or much drink. What little he was able to speak to his apprentice was incoherent tongue and fragmented nonsense. He suffered for many days and nights, his convulsions and spasms giving way to an eerie stillness that came over his tired old body. 

The apprentice emerged from the hut one morning, his head hanging low and his shoulders slumped—the shaman had died in the night, but not before having a fevered vision. He had summoned his apprentice and, feeling death upon him, dipped his finger in the ochre paste of a concoction he had been given to eat. The shaman drew on his own bare and pulsing chest the crude shape of a bird.

The following day, the apprentice performed rites for the shaman as the people placed the spirit man’s naked body on a pyre. Each person walked by the body, tossing a handful of flowers onto him. Many regarded the odd drawing of a bird scrawled onto his chest, and wondered about it. The apprentice called Nilu’s father forward. The woodsman climbed the pyre at once, and after a few swings of his hatchet, severed the shaman’s head. The apprentice placed the head in a basket, knowing that he was now tasked with the tradition of transforming it into the new Seeing Skull and retiring the old relic to the earth. The apprentice brought forward a torch, tossing it into the kindling beneath the pyre as people began to weep. The fire engulfed the shaman’s empty husk, and the tribe collected their broken spirits into a dirge that lasted hours.

When the time came again to wrangle goats, a troop of weary men returned to the plateau–the deathbed of the elder god. The titanic body had crumbled and been transformed into a heap of rubble, yet a few rib bones, as large as canoes, jutted out from the mass. Goats loitered around the debris, eating tufts of thistle that erupted from spaces between the rocks. One of the men glanced over his shoulder and saw, far below on the floor of the neighboring valley, strange forms. Considering the new shapes for a while, they recognized them as people.

     While the tribe in the village struggled to regain their health, five scouts took up posts on the plateau. Each day, they watched the work in the valley evolve from calculated scars in the earth to an impossible array of structures, larger and more complex than in any village they had ever seen. The effort soon resembled several villages nested within one another, with a multitude of smaller huts made of earth and timber fashioned around a central point. At this axis was a strange, smooth mound, much larger than any knoll in the forest meadow. A group of people clung to the mound like ants each day as they carved lines and patterns into its surface. 

The foreigners came in waves with asses and cattle, pulling carts, wood timbers, stone casks, baskets, and an array of oddities the tribesmen did not recognize. They were always flanked by vicious-looking men who were plated on their heads and trunks like beetles, carrying bizarre but unmistakably dangerous implements.

One morning, two of the scouts had gone closer to the well-trodden path that emerged from the mysterious horizon, hiding themselves in the branches of trees. They perched many lengths from the road, but were close enough to get a better look at the strangers. A procession of people in tawny robes appeared, each one moving in concerted steps. Hoods covered their heads and cast such umbra over their faces that it seemed they were made entirely of shadow beneath their garments. 

The scouts spied a heavy-bellied man being carried in an ornate palanquin. He had a long, black beard and was clothed in a sanguine tunic with intricate embroideries. A dazzling collection of jewels dripped down his chest, suspended on silver bands as thick as snakes. The tribesmen wondered if he was the shaman or seer of these strangers. The scouts gasped as they saw, behind the palanquin, a young boy carrying a tall post adorned with an icon—a bird made of gold, radiant like the sun.

Many moons after the arrival of the valley chieftain, the scouts noticed that small groups of the strangers began to splinter off from their massive and complex village, probing the edges of the forest. The people were made aware, and the young shaman urged them not to make contact with the foreigners. The scouts monitored the valley dwellers closely and debated whether they should kill them as they moved closer to the village with every one of their excursions. They remembered the shaman’s orders—to stay away from the foreigners. Each time that the robed men came deeper into the forest, the scouts could only hide themselves in the tree branches, stilling their breath as the intruders rifled through plants, plucked mushrooms, and dug up roots on the forest floor below them. The tribesmen knew it was only a matter of time until the village was discovered. When they talked about the possibility of defending their home, they recalled the frightening beetle-men that were never far from the strangers in robes.

One afternoon, Nilu and her mother went together to the edge of the village to hang up and stretch goat furs. The woman patted her daughter on the back and walked back to their hut to fetch some cordage. Nilu plopped down and lay back against a mossy stone. She fidgeted with a prickly frond and watched a lizard swim across the surface of an old mushroom-studded tree. As Nilu’s mind drifted off into a daydream, she heard a cracking branch. When she sat up, she was met with an entirely alien presence emerging from between the trees.

     A man in a tawny robe stood in front of her, with a nearly identical companion close behind. The man’s face was bathed in shadow, but Nilu thought she could make out features that were sculpted unlike any she had ever seen; the stranger had large, dark eyes and an angular nose that reminded her of a bird’s beak. As he stepped forward into a beam of sunlight, she saw a smile on his clay-colored face, and she grinned at the funny way his black eyebrows grew together, like a hairy caterpillar crawling across his forehead. The man knelt down, and opened his hands to her.

     Feeling her heart beginning to gallop, Nilu took a half step forward. She looked around for her mother, and thought about crying out. The man motioned to her, and his smile seemed to glow now in the light piercing the forest canopy.

     With only a bit of hesitation, little Nilu reached out and took hold of the stranger’s hand.

     In the shaman’s hut, a wraithlike wind blew in and chilled him as he worked, pulverizing herbs. He turned around to see that the embers in the Seeing Skull had burned out, and the greyed coals smoked impotently in its sightless eyes.

     Outside, screams echoed through the village.

END