Chapter 31

  Arturo worked on convincing himself the rain didn’t bother him for the better part of the last three hours, worked on the nonchalant smiles and shrugs he would perform for Aquiles because, of course, the rain didn’t bother him. He’d lived these fields and these skies. Another rain drop ran into his right eye and caught a bit of his sweat and burned, and his hands clenched on the saddle as he tried not to scream. His brother was the prissy one enraged by inconvenience, not Arturo. At least Aquiles was fuming openly behind him, and that made hiding his own clenched silence much easier.

  There was the wetness, the chafing, the weight of wet wool, and the image of the column of men gathering burned into his waking mind, a field of soldiers come to kill him filling the road before them, and he felt the ice penetrate deeper and deeper to root its frozen spikes in his marrow. The cold put an pressure in his bones. It wasn’t his chronic pain or his body missing the Mother’s greetings each morning, it was expectancy, of waiting to be dulled and scratched by surging energy to satisfy the primal need for the blood of those who wronged him. He longed to kill the Stranger.

  A worried whine pierced into Arturo’s dark thoughts and pulled him back to reality. Chico looked back at him as they rode. He hoped without reason that the merchant was wrong, but he knew the man spoke the truth of it. He hung his head and apologized to Chico for his thoughts, so foreign and twisted to him. Arturo wanted a simple life, a wife and kids and a herd of sheep. He wanted his hands sunk into the Stranger’s throat and his thumbs in the Stranger’s eyes.

  “Should we stop to train?” Aquiles voice sounded from behind.

  Arturo shook himself and replied, “We’re close now. I need to see what’s happened.”

  “Ok, I understand that.” A few moments passed, and Aquiles spoke again, “Can we take a break from riding then? This wet is rubbing my thighs raw.” Arturo felt the sensitive scratch in his own skin and nodded. His brother jerked and reined the horse in.

  “Any more food?” Arturo asked.

  Aquiles shook his head, “Just the rabbit and the rice. Nothing to cook the latter in.”

  “Maybe we should have got a pot and not a sundial.” That earned him a sharp look, so he raised his hands and continued, “I have no problem catching our dinner. Esta? bien.

  “We have the syrup too.” Arturo pulled out one of the clinking vials of that sweet syrup.

  Aquiles snatched it from his hands and said, “And, we have a thousand men that want us dead. We need it for them.”

  Arturo sighed. He knew his brother was right, but he always had a hard time when sweets were involved. His brain wouldn’t think rationally.

  The man was staring into the vial he’d taken when he said in an unconfident tone, “The Mother has been sending her greetings in a pattern.”

  But that was nonsense. Arturo was sure his greetings had been random. “Hermano, I think you’re finding faces on cliff sides. The Father has been unstable, right? So, she’s probably going crazy too.”

  Aquiles shook his head slowly, “No. Two days in the afternoon, then three days in the middle of the night, for me. Last night, this morning technically, I got one in the middle of the night again. I would bet all the food we catch for the next month I get two more days of waking in the middle of the night.”

  “Do you really have enough to go off of?”

  The great detective smirked, “It’s a good thing those men won’t make it to us before the pattern has a chance to complete again. They’ve only left the Capital this morning. That many men? It’ll take them longer than us to get to your home.”

  “By all means, track the ‘pattern’.” Monks and their research.

  “I will. Don’t hide from me when she sends her greetings to you. Yours seem less regular.”

  “Si?, si?. No hay problema…”

  Aquiles nodded, “Gracias.”

  After stretching and using one of the empty sacks to pad their legs from the rub of the saddle, the brothers set off again, much to Chico’s relief, who whined through their entire pause on the journey. Rain still splattered on Arturo’s face, at first refreshing, now bothersome, as rivulets ran down his neck to soak his robes. He sniffed at his armpit. It wasn’t as bad. That was something. The remainder of the rabbit sat in his stomach, a sad attempt to dissuade his hunger. Aquiles seemed strong, but the guy practically hated eating, except for those gross sausages.

  “You really like those sorry excuses for sausages from the Monastery?”

  He felt Aquiles pull back, the horse startled at the movement. “Of course! You don’t? They’re perfectly seasoned and nutritious. None of that excess fat in chorizo.”

  “Don’t you talk down chorizo, cabron. That is a delicacy.”

  “Over-spiced nonsense that stuff is.”

  “Take that back!”

  “No.”

  Arturo sighed, refreshed by the lighthearted argument. “The perfect amount of heat and fat, a sprinkling of salt and spice, charred over an open fire. Truly an eating experience if you get the good stuff.”

  Aquiles spat to the side of the horse, “Eh.”

  Arturo shook his head and laughed, “I have more to teach you about food than you have to teach me about the forms and blessings, hermano. This is truly sad.”

  “Why is it such a big deal to you?”

  “Aquiles, our food defines us!” Arturo scoffed, “Olina made enfrijoladas a little differently than the tavern in the pueblo over. And that tavern is different from the next. It’s identity! Don’t they teach you about culture in all those classes?”

  “Si?. I just didn’t care for it.”

  “Figures,” Arturo laughed, and he added, “if we make it out of this, we’re trying a mole from each stand in the Capital to prove my point. They’re all different. As distinctive as the sign overhead, or the rudeness of the owner.”

  The other man whispered from behind, “You know… I thought, if briefly, about asking one of the Children to a meal in the Capital. More for her than I, of course. I don’t think I’ll have much of a taste for it now that my life is over.”

  Arturo turned in the saddle, disheartened to hear an echo of his own feelings in his brother. “We’ll get through this.” His twin wouldn’t meet his eyes. “You’ve been so confident about taking these guys out. Que paso??”

  “It’s not about them. It's about this.” He pointed at their faces. “How will we ever convince the people to accept this?”

  Arturo didn’t have an answer for that. His brother continued, “I am not good with people like that. And you said it yourself before. If you went home, you’d have to lie to everyone about your nature …our nature”

  His brother was right, of course. People would see their likeness and run from them, fearful for their lives. “We’ll have to figure that out when we get to it. For now, it’s surviving this attack.”

  But, Aquiles just waved his hands at that, an apparent indifference to the possibility of fighting an army by themselves. Confidence was a virtue in a fight for your life, and Arturo was lacking. For all his talk and bluster the other day punching blasts at Aquiles, he knew what it had been about: putting on face. He put on faces like the thespians in those Capital plays.

  The dog beckoned, and the brothers followed. “We know where you’re taking us now, Chico,” Aquiles called out to the giddy animal. It barked over its shoulder, taking little leaps forward as it looked back at them and tried to run. At one point, it tripped in a shallow dip in the road and sprawled out on the ground with its legs flung in front of it.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  “Poor guy,” Arturo cooed as Chico stood and shook its coat.

  “Don’t talk to it like that. It stole your vision earlier. It's not some helpless mutt.”

  “I know, but he’s still cute, isn’t he?”

  Aquiles’ face twisted into a confused and disgusted look, “Sure.” Chico gave him a soft growl.

  They carried on through the rain. When it began to let up, Arturo lifted his head from the penitent position of protecting his eyes from the downpour. He saw drooping clouds with legs, bleating and hopping through the grasslands. “By the Father’s name, those are my sheep!”

  Aquiles craned his neck to the side. “They’re, uh, fine specimens,” he commented.

  Arturo agreed, they were. “I think we’re really close, but we normally kept the sheep further from the pueblo. Easier to handle without people around.” He recognized these hills now, knew the herd was much closer to the pueblo than these sheep were ever guided in their lives. His heart began to race. Maybe the merchant was wrong. Maybe some of the townsfolk saw neither Arturo nor Barto had returned to take care of them and brought them close to the pueblo. Would the sheep miss their grumpy shepherd? Arturo would. Did. His heart broke a little more, the ice grew a little harder. The Parents weren’t descriptive of an after-life. It existed, yes, but the details were blurry. The Guidance taught that people went to be with their loved ones in their death, meeting with any animals they kept in life. He hoped Barto was there.

  Arturo looked at the dog and hoped his death could be full of mangy mutts just like it. Sure, Chico was freaky and supernatural, but he was a sweet dog. Maybe Arturo’s dog-of-the-after-life could show him around all the good places to eat. Maybe there was a market with a stand called Los Tacos de Los Muertos. Maybe he would open it if there wasn’t.

  A smell cut through his thoughts, through his mind. They were on the upslope of a hill in the grasslands, the pueblo built into a bastion of earth with the slight rises, slowing the wind, trapping air, trapping stench. A stench to singe his nostrils, turn his stomach end-over-end. He had been attempting to distract himself, a practice he’d come to master with his pain, yet the stench shriveled his imagination. Where he had grown used to that taught string in his chest in anxious times, that hot ball in his gut, now his heart was still, a void, and his stomach shrank and quivered. Nothing else got through. Nothing but the stench. Rot, smoke, and mold. Rigor mortis, char, and vomit.

  Death.

  The horse crested a small hill in the road, and ruin spread out before Arturo and Aquiles. The dog stuffed its tail between its legs, and the horse tossed its head, spinning to the side to give the brothers an unbridled view.

  Arturo’s pueblo was a blight upon the land. A black, smoldering scar crawling with carrion birds and sheep scavenging for scraps. The stench magnified tenfold, like the land was a wall built against it. Aquiles threw up sick off the side of the horse.

  But Arturo felt numb.

  A handful of buildings stood as they once had. Those few were dark squares, watchtowers for the dead, looking out over a field of decay. The rest of the huts and shacks and homes and hovels were unmade things, past a possible comprehension or appreciation of when they stood tall or stood at all, unless the onlooker had been to this place before, seen it alive. It looked now like it never had been. Arturo could see mounds of something lumpy, fleshy, and still. The birds would swoop down and land at the peaks, picking at what lay there. They would jump away, cawing and beating their wings. Even they couldn’t take the stench for more than a few moments.

  And Arturo felt numb.

  The mounds of bodies looked almost an unreal thing, impossible, so enthralling and eye-catching in the childrens’ hands that stuck from it, open mouths elsewhere. Still so far away, but the old buildings were not but the burnt ground, and the structures dominated. A pair of pyramids, devastation to equal the grandeur of those in the Capital. Nothing moved but the small specks of birds riding the hot wind from the determined fires strewn about the ruin. The stench was too much. Would he have to dig through those mounds to find Valeria?

  And Arturo sunk into his ice.

  Piercing and searing cold, his fingers tightened on the reins. Aquiles could not keep his composure. Arturo could. If he did not, his screams would split stone and sorrow and cleave the land in two. He knew this. He felt this energy in him. The Ministry attack might have been the birth of a demon, but this cut the cord.

  “Let’s go.”

  Arturo held his face still as stone, not a twisting of his mouth or a tear from his eye escaped his forced calm.

  “Where’s the perro?” Aquiles questioned as he tried to kick the horse forward.

  Arturo looked around, and the dog was gone from their sight. “He brought us where we needed to be. His task is done.” Ice in his voice now too. It sounded not his own.

  The horse refused to move even from the rise, equine cries protested each of Aquiles’ kicks and prods. Arturo jumped to the ground. A billow of dust came up around him, and his feet crunched on the only living matter in a great radius around the pueblo. The scar extended past the buildings, evidence of an unmanaged fire raging into the countryside. Perhaps it had only just stopped with the day’s rain.

  One footfall forward and then another, Arturo’s muscles strained against him, telling him to run, telling him to hide, begging him to break. He did not. He walked towards the desolation of his childhood, a phantom sweeping towards the spirits of the dead. His parents screamed their last screams, cried their last tears. They burned in all of these buildings now with all of these people. Over and over they died. His hands began to ache. The old pain returned. In all of its truth and callousness. And it was the only thing that rooted him now. That familiar ripping in his joints. He grimaced. He was used to it. And his parents died around him. The sombrero was on fire.

  And, after a moment of walking, after years of wading through ice, he was among the buildings. Aquiles followed him, a Thunderhead before the Bolt. His brother whispered, “They might have left traps for us. Move carefully.” Arturo ignored him. His body refused to move faster than a trudge, feet pushing debris and dust before him. Aquiles would catch anything before he could anyway.

  They passed burnt buildings, the belongings of his people were piles of ash inside. Faint streaks of color survived the stripping of all things good. A red shawl here, worn at the frays where the elderly woman pulled it tighter against the wind. A yellow doll there, cracked in the head where the little girl dropped it from too high and cried in her mother’s arms all night about it, refusing to sleep. A blue pot, half finished before the dad gifted it to his son to place his newfound trinkets of tied grass in exquisite knots and likeness of his parents. That boy was dust, that father ash, that little girl and her mother were smothered, and that abuela had burned. Wind whistled in the crooked angles and corners of alleys and walls and roofs once standing precise and proud, staunch detractors to the beat of the sun over the years. They had withstood gust and torrent, but not this.

  “A group of black riders passed me on the road to the Capital. The Stranger had a companion. I never saw her in the Monastery,” Arturo noted as if an academic observing findings in his research.

  “It must have been them.”

  Arturo just nodded in response.

  His nose grew used to the smell. Damn his nose and mind for growing used to it. He scratched and twisted it and pulled on it, tears finally seeping onto his hands, making them slippery, ruining his purchase on his failing nose. He needed to smell it, to be ruined by it. He shouldn’t get to get used to it. He should drown in this stench. He should die in his failure. He should have been here.

  Arturo walked through a pillar of smoke coming from one of the buildings off the main road of the town. He walked to his home where nothing stood, a hot brand on his mind erased by fire of all things. He felt nothing. There was nothing to feel. He felt sick. He looked to where his bed was and saw his body strapped to the bed, bleeding and burned, perhaps where it should be now. Trapped and dead, yet he walked free. He turned and saw his body chopped in two, entrails strung out in the road. He saw it hanging over the side of the building, his life painting the walls red, sizzling in the embers on the ground. He saw it leaning against a wagon, head bulging from a hard blow, eyes popping from their natural position. He saw it wherever he looked, and he wondered why he was allowed to walk among his corpses. What kept him from joining the dead?

  Arturo looked across the blackened road, craters and blasts in the dirt marring the old wagon ruts from the merchants coming to trade wool. He walked past one of the twin mounds of death there, ignoring it to go to one of his favorite spots. Olina’s tavern was nothing more than a pathetic pile of charred wood and brittle mud adobe. It was simply gone. The bar he would eat at, the stools he would sit on, the people that would fill it with anger and cries of their greatest joy, all gone. Blown away by the wind. The entire block was flattened. He could see clear through to the road where Valeria’s dye shop would imbue his wool and the tanner’s leather with stitch and color. Funny, the straggling color in the other homes they passed were nowhere to be found in that ruin. The most colorful spot in the town, home to the most colorful part of his life, was gray.

  Arturo turned back around and faced the bodies. Most ignored him, eyes closed or staring off into the distance. Some met his gaze. They didn’t seem to mind seeing the murder there. Lanky, sweet Arturo had come home. Would he go digging in those mountains of carnage? Would he find the cobbler and the butcher? Would he find Miguel and Antonio’s families? Would he find Olina?

  And Valeria?

  He didn’t know the faces that looked at him. Not because they were unfamiliar, no. He recognized many of them. Old men that would walk about town, getting snapped at by younger women whom the men bothered. He saw children that would kick balls of leather about, shouting and laughing. He saw drinking buddies, and friends, and fathers, and mothers, and brothers, and sisters. But he did not know them. He knew them for the life in their eyes, the breath in their chest. These poor imitations were bloodless, silent, and lifeless. His home was lively. This place was dead. Finally, his face looked up at him, the same distant stare as the others, body crushed by the weight of a hundred.

  Aquiles had been silently following him around, but he spoke now, “What should we do with them?”

  Arturo took a strangled breath, realizing he’d been holding it for a while now. “Gather as much wood and dry grass as we can find and burn them.”

  His brother met his eyes with horror. “You don’t want to look for the people you knew?”

  Arturo cast his arms about him, staring at the ground. “I don’t know this place.” Aquiles clenched his jaw and tears fell down his cheeks. He did not respond, so Arturo reiterated. “We burn them. And we get far enough away to not smell them.”

  “And the girl you loved?”

  His tears came freely, and his heart should have broke, but he could not feel any more than this. He wished he would punch at the earth and shout at the sky, but he couldn’t. He should’ve returned home when he had the chance, but he didn’t. And the Stranger would have to pay for Arturo’s own transgressions.

  “She’s dead.”

  His voice had come from far, far away. His hands were dirty and bloody. He retreated further inside.

  Valeria was dead.

  They all were.