One Great Year (17 page)

More than once since that first time, a weapon had been handed to the young boy. Inti had been forced to strike a prisoner while the king reminded him that as a leader, it was his duty to protect his people from the criminals. It was his duty to “skin the monkey.”

It wasn't like hunting and survival, and Inti was sickened by the torture and abuse. He did not understand that he was as much a victim of his father as the captives were.

Sartaña was startled as she heard the commotion of Katari's entrance; he had been there earlier that morning, and it was unusual for him to come twice in one day. She peeked through the small sliver in her door, hoping for a view of her son and the beautiful halo of color that surrounded him.

The air vibrated with the cruel energy of Katari. The high priest pounded especially hard on Sartaña's door, desiring that she witness the scene he had orchestrated, which was about to be played out. She pressed her eye to the knot, watching Inti. His colors were strangely tumultuous, and his small hands were balled into fists at his sides.

Sartaña's soul reached out to him, and her heart and body ached to touch him—so close but kept apart by an inch of wood. She longed to see his face, to hold his hands in hers, to hear his voice.
Turn around
, she called wordlessly.
Look at me
, she begged, without a tongue and the ability to shout.

Despite his rage and upset Inti felt an itch, a gentle tug at his instincts telling him he was being watched. He turned his anxious gaze to her door and saw the eye pressed to the gap in the wood. It was so white that it seemed to glow and he paused, inexplicably drawn to the eye that seemed to smile at him and had strangely called to him.

The lump in Inti's throat bobbed and choked him as they grew closer. Katari felt his son lagging behind and losing his fury. He saw Sartaña's eye pressed to the door and became aware of their multicolored karmic energies intermingling in the corridor. He felt the weak telepathic strand forming between them and irritably corralled his son forward, whispering dark words in his ear and glaring threateningly at the space where the eye had been moments before.

Katari barked orders as a prisoner was led in to the chamber by two guards. The captive was heavy-set with dark, sun-worn skin, and his hair was alive with lice. His tunic and pants were covered in blood, and the stench of him forced his captors to suck in their breath in disgust. Katari ignored the bands of purple and indigo light that flowed beautifully in and out of the man, mingling with the similar karmic colors that flowed around Inti—the bands of an Emissary, which only Helghul and Marcus could see.

Sartaña gasped as her Marcus-brain recognized one of her own, and she watched in horror, dreading what would come. The prisoner had once been an Atitalan. He was a vaguely familiar face in a crowd of students from long ago. He had had a strange name, Zarathushtra or Zoroaster … something like that. At present he was nothing more than a tool in Helghul's experiment, a test of his ability to turn an Emissary. Marcus struggled to remember him and began to pray.

“This man was found covered in blood and surrounded by the carcass of the jaguar cub. He's from a distant land. He speaks no language that we know,” the captain of the guards explained.

Though he feigned outrage, Katari had invented the story himself. The foreigner had been an ideal pawn. A stranger to Inti and therefore unable to plead, explain, or beg mercy, he had come to Stone-at-Center as a pilgrim. Katari's Helghul-brain had identified the Emissary immediately, and he had detained him without explanation. The prisoner had languished, starving in the prison for many days before he was thrown the dead carcass of the small animal. In desperation he had fallen upon the creature for survival. Katari had watched merrily, his plan fully in motion.

Katari shoved the prisoner to his knees. Inti was shaking at his father's side, staring at the blood down the front of the filthy captive's clothing and on his chin.

“Where's my jaguar?” Inti demanded, clenching his jaw. The Emissary stared at him without understanding. Sartaña and Katari both wondered if Inti sensed the Emissary's energy. Would Theron recognize one of her own? There was no sign.

“He murdered your Patha. Bring the head, the paws, the skin! He ate his heart like it was a pear!” Katari said angrily, pacing threateningly around the Emissary on the floor.

Sartaña knew what Katari was doing. As always he was bent on twisting Inti to his will. Katari handed his son a heavy, flat stone that barely fit in the boy's hand and nudged him forward, close enough to touch the prisoner. Inti trembled with rage, and his legs felt as though they might buckle.

The boy gulped as the guard returned with the ghoulish head of the jaguar extended in his palm, too near his face. There could be no mistaking. All sympathy left him; there was only anger remaining. Inti had been exposed to violence his entire life. It was a part of life and of survival, and in that moment he was filled with murderous rage.

“Ripped apart while you slept … while you did not protect …” Katari goaded, determined to inflame him further. The young prince swung the rock and hit the prisoner with a sickening thud. A large gash opened up in the man's head directly above his left eye as he fell to the dust.

Katari glowed with satisfaction. It was as he thought! Even Theron, daughter of White Elder, could be used and turned under the correct circumstances! What great power this knowledge gave him!

The injured Emissary looked up from the dirt, and Inti felt a wave of compassion upon seeing the fear and confusion in his eyes. Suddenly, the stranger seemed familiar, as his karmic colors billowed and swirled through the room. Inti turned his face away from the victim, and Sartaña silently called to him, praying for him to stop, praying that Inti's Theron-soul would not succumb to Helghul's manipulation.

The boy stood shaking and remorseful, rock in hand, unwilling to strike a second blow and unable to rouse himself to the anger and brutality required to continue. Katari, sensing that Inti had lost his rage, pushed him forward. Inti snapped his shoulder back and glared angrily at his father.

“That anger you feel is for
him
, not for me! He attacked your kingdom! Will Patha's murder go unavenged?” Katari growled, but Inti remained frozen.

Angered by his son's mounting compassion, Katari took the rock from his son in disgust and pushed him aside. The boy turned his head away as his father slammed the weapon against the captive's yielding skull and sprayed them all with blood and grey oatmeal chunks of brain. Though Inti's eyes were closed, the sound of the stone as it connected reverberated sickeningly through him.

The colorful bands emanating from the murdered Emissary slipped upward like smoke through a chimney as his spirit was released to the place in between. He was once again a current, traveling the Grid until his next incarnation. Sartaña was overcome by the cruelty and waste she had witnessed. She mourned the loss of such a good spirit in the world, though she knew the Emissary's absence was temporary.

Inti would not look at the battered heap as a dark pool of blood spread slowly, covering the dirt and pebbles as it crept across the floor. Instead he stared at Sartaña's door. The eye was there. Even from a distance, Inti could sense it watching them. He wondered briefly to whom the eye belonged.

Despite her grief for her bludgeoned ally, Sartaña knew that her son could see her and she smiled. So rare was the occasion for her to smile that her scars pulled and stretched in complaint. Her lined skin creaked in protest but she continued, seeing that Inti's eyes were kind, as they had always been. Sartaña was flush with pride that Inti had been unwilling to do as Katari had intended.

Inti could not see the karmic colors that flowed down the hall and joined with his, but Sartaña felt her son's spirit reaching out to her. Theron's energy once again coupled with Marcus's like a key in a padlock. The chamber turned and opened them up, and both the child's and the mother's skin erupted in gooseflesh.

Katari regrouped as the brightness of the auras doubled in the dim hallway. He saw Marcus's familiar aura swirling around Inti, and angrily he hurled the blood-covered stone against Sartaña's door. The high priestess jumped back as it impacted with a thud, leaving a bloody imprint on the wood.

The tendrils of Sartaña's aura that had reached out now retreated. She had seen and felt the colors of Inti and the Emissary, felt the familiar warmth and goodness that radiated from them. It was stronger than human touch, so deep, not just barely-there tingles but complete and overwhelming connections, and it was more than she had felt in many years. She had been alone for so long, reconciling her Marcus-memories and cataloguing her previous lessons and lives. She had only seen her son from a distance through the sliver in her door, but this time they had connected.

Katari directed Inti toward the exit, leaving the guards to clean up the carnage left behind. Sartaña listened as her son was reprimanded by his father for being weak. She meditated and inexplicably felt a new strength, reminded that she was not alone.

Sartaña was grateful when she finally heard the rustle of her cell door, hungrier than she had felt in years. Her guard stumbled as he entered and, grunting, kicked the ground at his feet. He placed a wooden bowl of water and a small chunk of dried llama meat on the floor. Other than a thin reed mat for sleeping, the cell was empty. Opposite the door, under the tiny window, ran a narrow, fetid ditch the length of the entire building. The putrid trough was occasionally flushed with dirty water to wash away the human waste that had collected there, but the stench never waned.

Sartaña's guard retreated and, once again stumbling, he kicked aside the stone that was tripping him up. The door closed with a clunk. Sartaña crouched to eat and felt the stone beside her. In the dark she picked it up and felt the sticky blood and hair that clung to it. She remembered the crash of the rock against her door as Katari had thrown it hours before.

Sartaña dipped the corner of her tatty robe into her shallow water bowl, using almost all of her daily ration to soak the cloth. Respectfully, though she could not see in the darkness, the high priestess washed away the gore, all the while praying for the Emissary whose blood had been so cruelly shed. The rock was round and smooth, and once clean, Sartaña decided that it must become an object of reverence to remember the brave life it had taken.

The high priestess held the stone and meditated through the night. Her interaction with Inti earlier in the day had somehow lit a spark of hope within her. Sartaña's Marcus-brain was racing, and she prayed specifically for the knowledge of what she should do. What could she do?

When Sartaña woke, a narrow ray of light from her high window was spanning the length of her tiny cell and cascading beautiful silver light particles in its path. The beam illuminated the shimmering, hoary dust in smooth, straight rows that appeared to rain down and disappear where the light left off. Sartaña was grateful for the beauty. It reminded her that she was still a part of a miraculous world. As she watched, the beam in one small section began to swirl and change, and she was mesmerized as she realized a face had formed. It was the familiar curve and arc of Theron's cheek and jaw. The dust moved as Theron often had, tossing her hair from her eyes, and then it was gone. The sunbeam returned to its gravitational pull, returned to the silver rain, and Sartaña was left with the beautiful image in her mind.

Sartaña's Marcus-brain was at full attention and compelled her to take up the rock that she had so reverentially scrubbed the night before. Sartaña looked at the rock in the light for the first time and knew what she would do. She would carve into the stone. She had a clear picture in her mind of the design. She would draw a group of seven identical circles in a repeating pattern that would form a flower with six petals. It was the same pattern that graced her shoulder and that freed her soul.

Sartaña's role as an Emissary was begun anew with this random, seemingly insignificant undertaking. She searched at the edge of her cell in the dirt and pebbles and tried each small shard as a tool until she found one sharp and dense enough to make a scrape in the smooth river rock. She worked devotedly for hours, then days, and she was amazed by the divine design that flowed so easily from her untrained hands. Sartaña had never been an artist or craftswoman, yet she had produced an extraordinary, geometrically perfect carving in only a week, with an inadequate tool and no ability to measure. It was truly miraculous.

The evening of the seventh day, Sartaña's guard entered to deliver her rations. Sartaña did not have time to hide the stone in her hand. The curious man demanded to see what she held. Hesitantly she handed the stone to him, and he turned it over in his palm and stared at her dumbfounded.

“You carved this?” he asked, tracing the grooves in awe. She nodded tentatively. “Where is your blade?” he asked. Sartaña raised the small, worn-out scrap of stone up to him, and he shook his head in disbelief. “High Priestess, you did this without a proper tool? It's not possible! It's perfect!” he proclaimed. Sartaña glowed at his response to her work. Without another word the guard left, taking the stone with him. The woman feebly reached out to stop him, but the door closed with a clunk.

Sartaña was crestfallen; she had felt like her old self during the past week. She had felt a sense of purpose and distraction that had eluded her during her imprisonment. She lay down on her mat and wondered if the kind guard would take her handiwork to Katari. It had been worth the risk. Considering how compelled she had been to do the carving, she knew that whatever happened was meant to be.

Sartaña was not alone for long. There was a rustle at her door, and she snapped upright in alarm. She was relieved as her guard entered with a secretive smile on his face. In his hands he held a bulky goatskin sack. He dropped the bag with a weighty clunk and unloaded a small pile of river rocks in the corner of the cell. Sartaña stared at him in astonishment as he handed her a sharp, crescent-shaped stone with a worn wooden handle.