Ostel and I were frozen, staring at what he’d done. Sharskin turned towards us, staff still gory with Menic’s brains. His face was hard and I could see many things in his eyes, but no ghosts. He seemed the utter antithesis of all we had known before our Severance, the Outcast personified, brutal, mysterious and free of the shackles of others.
“Listen to me,” he directed us sternly, and we listened.
“We are cast out, all of us,” he told us. “See what that means? No lawgiver will come save you. No community will step in to provide for you or protect you, save that which we make together. Leave me and starve, if you will. Walk away now, and take your chances with the cold and the beasts, and with them,” and he jabbed his bloody staff back towards Orovo, “who will never take you back, and never accept you, and in the end won’t even suffer you to live. Or stay with me and obey me, for to me is given wisdom and truth.”
He paused, as though there was some real chance of either of us just wandering off at that point. He had just bludgeoned our companion to death, it was true, and might do the same to either of us while we slept or on the trail; for some infraction, real or imagined; for no reason at all. But he spoke fire. He spoke lightning. His words were like a door through which we could glimpse . . . ancient things, secret things. And what else did we have save the hunger and the cold?
“What wisdom?” whispered Ostel, who was bolder than I in that moment. His tone admitted of no doubt, just a desperate wish to know.
“What our ancestors knew, and what they have forgotten, and what the ghosts will never tell them,” Sharskin breathed. “There is a word for what I am that you have never heard before, a word our ancestors knew back when they knew all things and were great and strong. Priest, that word is. Priest, I name myself, for I have heard the voices of our ancestors and been given their secrets. I am the one true priest, the sole inheritor of our ancestors’ greatness, and to me is given the task of changing the world. To me, and to those others who bear the Mark of Cain. Remember what I told you, Handry? This mark, that cut us off from our kin and left us with all men’s hands raised against us, this is a badge of pride. This is the restoration of our birthright, freedom from the tyranny of the ghosts. This does not cast us down, it raises us up so that we may once again approach the power and majesty our ancestors knew, before they fell from grace.” His smile was brilliant, as hard to look at as the sun. “Now, will you follow where I lead?”
He knew we would; we knew we would, but there is a special magic in saying so, binding yourself with word and thought to another man’s purpose. From that moment, as Ostel and I tried to outdo ourselves with our babbling pledges, we were his followers and members of his congregation.
With Menic left behind, our journey proceeded more swiftly and smoothly. There was a moment, though, when Ostel almost tripped himself over the dead body. The stories we had told each other as children were true, I discovered: there was one flesh an outcast could eat without sickening. Ostel wanted to butcher Menic and take the meat, looking for a couple of nights of full bellies and not having to break his fingernails scratching in the earth for roots.
But Sharskin would not have it. He did not strike Ostel but his disapproval alone was enough to make the man cringe.
“He was lazy and worthless,” was Sharskin’s epitaph for Menic, “but he was one of us. We are a select brotherhood. We do not eat the flesh of our own.”
“But . . .” Ostel waved a shaking hand at the cold corpse.
“Hold out, my friend,” Sharskin said, gripping him by the shoulder. “There will be food, where we’re going. When we reach the House of our Ancestors you’ll never want for it. You think I grew strong on twigs and worms? But not our own. It is forbidden.”
So we followed him into the wilderness, watching no further ahead than his footprints as he navigated by sun and stars. We made his fire and kept his watch, scavenged for scraps to feed us, and Sharskin lit the fire with a bright square he held cupped in one hand and took the lead when we found some beast that wanted to challenge us. Each night he told us more of the same tale. Yes, the world had turned against us, but it wasn’t some stupid accident or punishment for our crimes. We were important, singled out as special for all the world. And yes, that meant hardship and tribulation, but it was for a purpose. We were marked out to bear a burden by our ancestors, who recognised in us the strength to do their will. And how much better it was to suffer because I was special, than just because I’d been a clumsy fool once when I was thirteen!
We skirted a couple of other communities on the way, both big ones, though smaller than Orovo had been. Then we found the first abandoned one, and that brought us up short. I had seen how a village was born; I had not thought they could die.
Sharskin gave us some small time to pick through the wreckage. The tree at its centre had burned long ago, and the houses were empty and decaying. They were not quite like the buildings of Aro or other living communities, though not a world away from them, as though the architect hadn’t quite known how houses were supposed to be. There were some bones, too—human rather than the open lattice bones of animals. I poked about around the base of the scorched tree, finding the scars of an aborted attempt to cut it down before the fire was set. Most of the bones were around there. I found one skull where half the bone was just eaten away, riddled with holes all about one side, and tried to imagine the ghostlight flickering there.
When Ostel and I had tried and failed to satisfy our curiosity, we returned to face Sharskin’s quizzical gaze. If he was expecting us to have solved the mystery, he was to be disappointed.
The next village we found was also dead but the tree was not. Instead it was diseased, the trunk warty and puffed out with boils. The houses looked as fallen-in and rotten as the last lot, perhaps even more so, but we could not go close to investigate. The air was thick with big, barbed wasps issuing from all those nodules on the trunk, hives and hives and hives of them. We saw a few dead animals closer in, the wasps busily stripping them down and crawling in the hollows of their skeletons. Neither of us wanted to see if the world’s antipathy for us would ward their stings away, and certainly Sharskin was keeping a prudent distance. I never knew whether the ruins and the undergrowth concealed a trove of more human remains or whether the inhabitants had time to flee the horror that had taken over their tree.
“Something is there that destroys communities, some malaise,” I speculated.
Sharskin grinned a little. “You think so?”
“Or something was here,” I corrected myself. “Once. These are old places.”
“Half the answer, that is,” Sharskin told me. “Right lines, boy, but wrong conclusion. But you’ll understand it all. I’ll teach you what went on here, back then. Just a little, and the rest will come to you in a flash, you’ll see.”
We avoided another dead village, all overgrown with creepers and brambles, and dead for no reason we could see, save that Sharskin kept a good distance from it. That night, though, we camped in the shadow of a tree surrounded by a different sort of ruins.
People had lived here, though we saw no signs that this was where they had died. We lit our fire at the base of a tree that seemed the same type a village would grow around, just like the virgin one that Iblis and her ghost had picked out. At the base of its lowest branches I could make out a swelling, as though a hive had begun there and failed.