Excerpt from The Dead Gods

 

“Kiri! Come on child, I am finished for today. We are going home.”

Tunaka stood up and straightened his back with a grunt. He wiped his dirt-encrusted hands on his rough tunic. He had spent many long hours preparing the rich soil that characterised the fertile pocket of the Dofr’ame forest. It was now a fine tilth, perfect for planting. Tomorrow morning he would sow beans and pulses. In the afternoon he would perhaps take his bow and hunt in the brooding forests. Unlike the days of his childhood, the forests were now teeming with game. For now though, the sun dipped towards the horizon. He could almost taste the stew his wife had spent the afternoon preparing. He visualised it bubbling away over the firepit. His stomach rumbled in anticipation; he had earned his supper today.

He heard a giggle behind him and the pounding of tiny feet. He turned to see his five-year-old daughter hurrying over from where she had been playing in the dirt. Her smiling face warmed his heart, although he scowled when he saw her intended route.

“Go around, Kiri, not on the ground I have prepared!” he cried in mock frustration and anger.

She came to a sudden stop and then ran around the side of the prepared bed. She sprung towards him and he caught her and embraced her in his arms. He revelled in the fierce, tight hug she gave in return. Her smell mixed with the aroma of the rich earth filled his nostrils, and he felt content and happy. His life was more than he could ever have dreamed of at her age. Reluctantly, he set her back down on the ground, kneeling down to her level.

“Come on now, my sweetling, it will be dusk in an hour,” he said, attempting to dust the soil off her clothes. “I need your help to carry the tools home.”

“Yes, Ubaba,” Kiri replied, picking up a wooden rake and standing to attention like a militiaman. “Why are you afraid of the dark? You always finish your work in the fields before the sun has set.”

“It is force of habit, sweetling,” Tunaka replied, smiling as he signalled for Kiri to begin the stroll home from the fields. As the sun settled low over the horizon other workers could be seen leaving their fields and plots, journeying to their homes and hovels clustered here and there amid the fields.

“I asked my friend Tablis why,” Kiri said, as they walked together. “She said it is because you are afraid of the ghosts that rise from the old city over there.”

As she spoke, she pointed to the shattered ruins of what was once the city of Acarross, standing beside the river. Its once mighty walls were falling into disrepair, still charred by the cleansing fires of nearly two decades before. So intense were the flames that some parts had melted almost to glass. Some of the stones had been robbed for building projects elsewhere, but the place had mostly been left to its ghosts.

Tunaka gave it a fleeting glance, no more than that. His gaze returned to their path ahead. The place was imprinted on his psyche, a place of monstrous evil, oppression and black cruelty. It was best not to cast one’s shadow in that fell place; between that and the forest that was once the abode of the foulness. Tunaka shivered despite the warmth of the sinking sun on his back. He needed to remind himself that the evil was gone, that the demons of the past were no more, yet always there was a gnawing doubt. He knew what was buried there.

“We were an enslaved people once, Kiri.” he replied, as they trudged homeward, his daughter carrying the rake over her shoulder like a spear.

“Years before your mother and I were blessed by your birth, we were captive here in these same fields, fenced in by evil monsters that haunted the forests. Chained by cruel men who once dwelt in that accursed pile of stones.”

“What happened to the monsters and the cruel men, Ubaba?” Kiri enquired, looking suspiciously at the old city.

“That is a tale of how we freed ourselves from the terror of both. Of the days of Nurarna and the northern warrior, Kaziviere, the Gutspiller….”

The sun sank as he continued to tell the story and as they neared their home their shadows grew long in the telling.