A cacophony of jackal calls erupted in a wide semicircle around them. The canines saw the humor apparently. Kelis still acknowledged none. He tossed away his knuckle root and said, “Our storytellers teach of the God Talkers, too. They are of our legends as well as yours. You have heard these.”
“And you believe, then?”
Kelis did not answer, but Aliver knew what he would say if pressed. Of course he believed. To Talayans truth lived in spoken words. It did not matter that at times their legends were highly improbable or that they often contradicted one another. If they were spoken-if they had been handed down to them by those who came before-there was nothing to do for a Talayan but believe. There was no reason not to. Aliver had heard a great many of their legends over the years.
He knew that the God Talkers were supposed to have marched through Talay and into exile. They were enraged, the legend went, at their banishment. They had helped Tinhadin win the world, but now he-the greatest of them-had turned on them and forbade them from using their god speech. They cursed under their breath, quietly so that Tinhadin would not hear them. But even these whispered curses had power. They had torn swathes out of the land; they had tilted slabs of the earth’s crust; they had sparked fire with waves of their arms; they had touched their eyes on the beasts of the plains, corrupting them, twisting them into creatures like the laryx. They had done much damage, the legends went, but fortunately they walked on past the inhabited regions into the truly arid, baking flats to the south. According to myth, the Santoth still lived there. Nobody had ever ventured there to verify this. Why should they? Only one person would ever have reason to go in search of them-a prince of the Akaran line going to rescind their sentence.
“You want to hear someone else’s story instead of yours?” Kelis asked. “Listen to this one then. There was a young Talayan whose father was a very proud man, a warrior. He lived for war and he wished his son to do the same. His son, however, was a dreamer, one who predicts when the rains arrive, when children will be born healthy, one whose sleeping life is as vivid as the waking. The boy dreamed things before they happened. He spoke with creatures in his dreams and sometimes awoke, still remembering the animal’s language, for a few moments at least. The son wanted badly to learn more about his gift. The father, you might think, would have been proud his son was chosen for this. But he was not. When the father slept he was dead to life; only awake did he find meaning, only in war were all things clear to him.
“He forbade his son to dream. He did it with all the spite he could direct through his eyes. He did it through ridicule, with biting words and with scorn. He stood over his son when he slept. Whenever he saw the boy’s eyes move, the sign that he’d entered the dreamworld, he jabbed him with his spear shaft. He awoke him to pain again and again. Soon the boy feared sleep. Dreams sometimes came to him anyway, even in the light of day when he was otherwise awake. The father learned to recognize dreams in his son’s eyes, and he would slap him if he suspected the boy’s mind had wandered. None of it stopped the boy. He simply could not help being who he was. But the father found a way.”
Kelis paused to listen to a sound nearby, the scrape of sharp-clawed feet across the dry ground. They both listened for a moment, until the serrated trilling of a black-backed cricket cut through the faint sounds. The scraping was likely a lizard. Nothing that would bother them.
Aliver prompted, “The father found a way…”
Kelis continued. “He adopted a dead man’s son, and he put that dead man’s son before his own son. He called him firstborn, which meant that everything that was the father’s-his name, ancestors, belongings-would go to this adopted son. If the dreamer son wanted to live a prosperous life, he could do only one thing. He called the adopted one to the circle and killed him. He thrust his spear through his chest and watched his new brother drain of life. Instead of being angry, the father was pleased. It was just as he thought. His true firstborn son had a warrior within him, whether he liked it or not. The father got what he wanted. After that his son truly hated sleep. In sleep he still dreamed, but only ever of the same thing. He dreamed of that fight, of sinking his spear home, of the blood, of watching a man’s face as he dies. So the dreamer was squashed; only the warrior remained.”
“I have not heard this tale before,” Aliver said.
The other cocked his head to the side, straightened it. “None of us choose our fathers. Neither you nor I, nor anybody else. But, believe me, when one is born to a calling, it should not be refused. To not do the thing one was born to do is a heavy burden to bear.”
Aliver’s legs were stiff the next morning, but they loosened readily enough when put to work. The pace of the second day matched the first. The land through which they traveled shared the same tree-dotted and wide-valleyed rolling contours. But on the third day a pack of four laryx caught their scent and fell in behind them in pursuit. The loping beasts yelped their garbled speech and grew near enough that, glancing back, Aliver could see their individual features. One of them was missing an ear. Another ran on a weakened foreleg. The leader was a larger beast than the one he had killed, and the fourth tended to flank out toward one side, as if already anticipating rounding on them. If the four of them caught up with and surrounded the men, there would be no hope of their escaping alive. Laryx’s hatred of humans went hand in hand with their fear. Like a lion hunting the cubs of lesser cats, they seemed to hunt men out of spite.
Running before them, Aliver realized how different he was now from when he had hunted one of these beasts just a few weeks before. Back then, he had faced with clarity the reality that if he failed in any action, he would die horribly as a consequence. The strange thing was that at his core this feeling was entirely familiar to him. At some level he had lived with such a fear since the evening his father was stabbed in the chest. There had always been an unseen monster pursuing him. Facing a real one, in the bright light of day, liberated something in him. He had run the beast into the ground and then turned on it and drawn close enough that he could smell the creature’s breath. He had looked at the foul entirety of it and…he had done what he was supposed to do. He sank his spear deep into its chest and held it in place as the laryx bucked and protested with the last of its strength. He was not sure exactly how, but he knew this deed had altered something within him for the better.
Kelis pressed the pace. They did not stop at midday. Instead, they ran on through the rippling heat. Though laryx had the capacity to run for hours they only did so when truly provoked. They lost the laryx pack when easier prey-warthogs-came to the beasts’ attention. The two men ran on with little rest and did not pause until several hours after dark.
On the fifth day they traversed a salt flat and came across a mass migration of pink birds. Thousands and thousands of them marched across the land, an enormous flock shimmering in the sun’s glare, each of them long necked and graceful, with black legs that stepped high and formal. Why they did not fly, Aliver could not guess. They just parted as the two runners passed through them, watching them sidelong and without comment.
Late the sixth morning they came to the great river that drained the western hills of water. It was a wide, shallow trench more than a mile across. In the rainy season it was a formidable barrier. Even now it served as the southern boundary of inhabited Talay. The river itself was but a trickle now, a narrow vein of moisture a few strides wide, ankle deep. The two men stood in the water. Aliver enjoyed the feel of the smooth stones beneath his feet, slick against his skin. Had the horizon around them not been an endless stretch of pale, coarse soil, sparsely vegetated and crisped by the long tenure of the sun, Aliver might have closed his eyes and let the feel of the stones and the water conjure memories of times and places very far from here.