God Within Us

In the darkness of the nightfall, the Baskord tribesmen erected a great bonfire to celebrate the baghatur’s raid against the southerners. Huge longtables assembled by slaves and servants groaned under the weight of the feast - seasoned flatbreads, cuts of fatty mutton, lamb dumplings dripping with broth, and enough southern wine to turn the great Cherech river red.

Men and women sat together by the fires and beneath the open night sky, laughing and brawling in equal measure as they feasted for what might well be their final time. War was to be on the horizon come the morning, and though talk in the camp had seldom broached the subject, Yesugei sensed how the atmosphere in the camp had grown colder once the joy of Arsen’s tribute faded. The bonfire was a final send-off for warmth and plenty - and once it faded there would come the cold, and ranks of the Baskords’ widows and orphans would grow ever more once again.

From within the shaman’s tent, Yesugei heard the ringing of clashing arms and the thrumming of bowstrings as men of the tribe sparred with dulled blades and shot at wooden targets to the roars of gathered crowds and their applause. In the evening, the green boys would play as warriors. And come the morning, they would see their first man die - for better, or for worse.

The thought of the coming duel made Yesugei’s stomach turn, and then the shaman’s prodding forced a hiss from his gritted teeth as a dull knife of pain twisted through his leg.

“Your pain is a gift,” Aysen told him as he pulled forth a wooden box decorated with painted Modkhai swirls and healing glyphs. “The bone was not shattered in the fall - and the rest of your wounds are minor, or already healed.”

“Healed enough for your khan to make sport of me, you mean,” Yesugei replied bitterly. “No honor in killing cripples and the wounded, I suppose. And even less so in dying to one.”

“Poor sport never stopped your own tribe’s cruelty,” came a bitter voice from the other side of the tent, where another Modkhai dressed in furs stood up from her prayers. When she drew near, Yesugei saw the girl to be half Aysen’s age, her bitter face framed by long, black hair which fell around her shoulders instead of the braids of the Modkhai. “Before your Qarakesek set out on their conquest, our people’s shamans had never been touched by your wars. Now look at my father - show him what sins he answers for!”

The elder shaman gave a sigh, and set down the poultice in his hand to remove his veiled headdress. The dim, flickering candlelight cast the shaman’s face in a reddish hue - and it was only when Aysen twisted his head to the side that Yesugei saw the grim ruin hidden by the shadows.

The flesh running from the crown of the shaman’s head down to the nape was a ruin of twisting scars, craters, and deep fissures that exposed hints of skull. The borders of the ruined flesh could only have been made with a razor-sharp blade - a skinning knife, taken to human flesh in a terrible sin.

Without his scalp, the shaman’s head was completely bald - bereft of the long braids into which other Modkhai weaved their charms and crystals, and a sight as wrong as a bird without wings. The Modkhai wore their hair long, never cutting it as a symbol of their devotion to the gods’ perfection of the mortal form - without their braids and charms, it was said that the Modkhai were powerless, severed from their connections to the spirits and the earth.

“It was a Qarakesek knife that took my pride, my honor,” said Aysen quietly as he placed his headdress back onto his scarred head. “A band of warriors thought it a poignant message to cow the shamans of the rival tribes into submission…though whether they acted alone, or on one of your brothers’ orders, I never learned. But that was long ago, and the men responsible are dead.”

“It must have been one of his brothers,” muttered the girl shaman as she took a seat by her father’s side and helped him to lay out the contents of his medicine chest. “Even the Qarakesek know to shed a shaman’s blood is a sin beyond measure - yet only the White Khan’s children could think themselves beyond the heaven’s judgement.”

Fire from within rushed to Yesugei’s face as he spat back, “And who are the Baskords to speak of heresy? Your own tribe was among the ones who raised Jirgahadai as the Universal Khan - one above by the gods and the Eternal Sky! Yet did your father dare to raise the matter of heresy then?”

“Enough.” Aysen placed a hand on his daughter’s arm, and sent her away with a wave towards the tent flap. The girl obeyed her father, but cast a final poisonous look Yesugei’s way before she stepped out into the chill night air.

Once he was sure his daughter had left in full, Aysen gave another sigh before uncorking a foul-smelling bottle. “My daughter learned to nurse her hatreds from Böri himself - and she is proud, head-strong, and unafraid to speak her mind. She would talk circles around you until the morning, speaking of all heresies and sins except the one that matters most - the one that no one here but I knows of.”

The shaman leaned in close to Yesugei’s face, and his voice took on a new, dangerous edge, barely rising above the din of the outside. “I sense your corpse-stench, Yesugei-mirza. The smell of death is strong on you - the smell of your death, and the deaths of too many others. It is the smell of Apostle magic, and betrayal.”

Apostles? Yesugei made to stand, but a lightning bolt of pain jolting through his calf set him back down. “Apostles? You know of them as well?”

“The tribal elders taught me and my brothers the ways of healing and spirit-calling," said Aysen. "But knowledge of the Dreamers…I received from these."

The shaman pulled back his right sleeve, revealing a thin arm pierced by five small crystal fangs swirling with red, gold, and deep purple - swirling with a life Yesugei had not seen in Tseren's own braided crystals. The flesh around the fangs was red and scarred - burnt by the shrinking of the crystals which seemed to wither in size even during the brief glance the shaman afforded him.

"Do you see this?" Aysen whispered. "I saved these precious few when your brother’s men scalped me, and they had not changed for ten years. But now, my shards have shrunk and burned ever since the ash began to fall from the sky, and my pain has never been so great as when you came into our camp.”

The swirling colors seemed to fill Yesugei’s whole world. Within them, he saw strange black figures flickering against the clouds. In the world of the swirling colors and dancing figures, Aysen’s voice sounded muffled, distant. “My crystals sense what the others cannot - you are drenched in dark magic: an oathbreaker, and a slave to the Dreamers."

"Oathbreaker?" Yesugei tore his gaze away from the enthralling crystalline world, fixing the shaman with a dread stare. "What oaths have I broken? And I am no-one's slave - least of all the Apostles'. I killed one of their kind in the Devil Woods."

“Yet you still carry their magic with you,” said Aysen, his mouth set into a hard, thin line. "I can feel it sustaining you - empowering you. A Khormchak drawing on the magic of the Dreamers...did Tseren never tell you of the stories, the sacred pact that you broke?"

"Never." He was too busy seeking the bottom of a cup, most times. “Of what pact do you speak?”

Aysen pointed the largest of the crystal fangs in his arm. “The pact whose memory all of our people once carried with us - woven into the magic of these shards when the world had last seen ashfalls and madness consuming mens' minds.

“Those were the days when Modkhai and Qarakesek were a separate and wary folk, roaming far from one anothers' lands unless they sought pillage or blood-feuds. It was in those bloody years when from the rot and death of a great battle there came the first Dreamer - tearing free from the earth within a great spine of black glass. It was the first Dreamer who called down the first ashfalls to choke the sun from the sky, and for an age our people and yours were ruled as cattle - butchered in the thousands to awaken more of the Dreamer's kin with the scents of blood and despair.

“The elders said that our agony was only brought to an end by the goddess Khariija, who struck down the first Dreamer and brought your khans and our elders into a pact: should the spirits who called themselves the Apostles ever darken our world again, the Khormchaks and Modkhai who had once been divided and weak would stand together to resist their ilk and bring back the reign of the sun. We had done it once before - yet now the folk of the steppe have lost their way…and their kin draw on magic they should never have unearthed."

Yesugei's head felt light as he listened to the shaman's words. The pact...the pact…he remembered his father, whom the Modkhai had prophesied to unite the Khormchaks under one ulus. Was that why he and Jirghadai had worked to unite the tribes beneath their banner of conquest? Did his father know what was to come, what death and horror was to consume the steppe? But if so, why had Tseren never bothered to tell any of the White Khan's blood what future their father had armed them for? And what more...

“If this pact of yours was struck so long ago...how could the Qarakesek be sworn to it when we did not even exist?” Yesugei replied. “Back then, there were only…”

"The Qara-Isyqs?" interrupted Aysen. "The Qyzylkurans? The Western Gur? Those great tribes vanquished by your father?”

He remembered the banners and notched blades that hung on display in his father’s grand yurt - the last vestiges of the great tribes that had once held their steppe empires for hundreds of years…and were destroyed in twenty by the Blackwind and the White Khan who had led the downtrodden Lesser Tribes into rebellion. Where there were once three, then there were none - and so were their oaths.

Aysen continued as he smeared the contents of the foul-smelling bottle onto Yesugei’s leg, causing the burning, throbbing flesh to grow cool. “The Great Tribes might have faded away, but do the Qarakesek and others not trace their blood from the sons and daughters of those same tribes? Were the Qarakesek themselves not founded from a fragment of the Qyzylkurans’ ulus? Your blood is their blood - and your oaths theirs, for all Khormchaks were kin, once.”

“Oaths sworn by our ancestors so long ago are meaningless,” Yesugei shot back, though he found himself speaking more out of spite than faith in his own words. “Your forest folk might ruminate on pacts and promises for centuries, but khans and tribes of the steppe rise and fall with the turning of the winds.”

“Why do you think our elders send down shamans to advise your khans?” muttered Aysen as he wrapped a bandage around Yesugei's leg. “When the Great Tribes grew weak and fractured, the elders knew our pact would be forgotten without our shamans to remind the descendants of the fallen. Now every tribe holds a shaman from the Mother Woods - and every khan's ear is held by those whose duty it is to remind them of their ancestors' promises when the time comes.”

The shaman spoke the truth - or at least half of it. In the last kurultai he had attended, Yesugei remembered how the khans had each ascended the holy Khurvan with their shamans in tow, Modkhai all. Yet he also remembered the mockeries and disgust the Modkhai attracted - and how most had spent more time at the bottom of a cup, in the arms of their harems, or glutting themselves on foreign delicacies rather than tending to any spiritual duties, for faith and ancient oaths took second place to the luxuries and vices of being a khan’s right hand.

"A clever plan, to your elders’ credit," Yesugei laughed. "If only your own shamans believed these legends. Come now, how many other shamans have you heard speak of these Apostles, or of ancient pacts? Tseren might have, if my father's gifts to his children were on his advice, but the others..."

“Have lost their way, indeed,” sighed Aysen as he tied off the bandage - tight. Yesugei sucked in the pain, and then the shaman sat back on his knees. “It has been too long, I suppose. Too many generations have passed, and too many of our shamans no longer remember what they were sent to do. And many of those whose crystals still remind them of our ancestors' suffering numb their minds to the pain with wine or poppy tears.”

Tseren...The old Modkhai's red-tinged face with his squat nose floated back to his mind from the darkness - and his incessant quaffing of arkhi. What did he see? Why did he abandon his duty?

The shaman's voice was bitter with sorrow, and Yesugei saw Aysen's hands curl into fists on his lap. "Even my own daughter can no longer dream as I do... But I still hold true to the old ways - shaved and scalped I might be, but I still see things in my crystals when the stars loom large, oathbreaker…Yesugei. Do you know what I saw the night before you came to our camp?"

The fangs swirled with nothing but shadows when Aysen revealed them again, his face becoming a mask still as stone as he peered into the bound darkness. “I dreamt of a woman carved from wood and bound in thorns, calling for one that would never return to her arms. I dreamt of a pale eagle racing across a dead sky, chasing after a serpent of stars. And worst of all, I dreamt of the falling ash piling high to choke all beneath the silent heavens, and then a great flood to scour the world clean once all was dead. When I walked the trail of choking ashes and drowning waters, I saw two places: a black mountain, and a white city, and the city’s bells were tolling the death knell of the world.”

"Black for the east...white for the west..." Yesugei muttered quietly to himself.

"Yes, black for the east. The black mountain - the Khurvan," spoke Aysen, his eyes lighting up with understanding. "And white for the west...a city with pale, dead walls, astride a great flooding river..."

The name came to Yesugei's lips on its own. "Belnopyl. The White City. The one the Klyazmites call the Jewel on the Cherech.”

“Yes,” said Aysen again. “That is where it all began, and that is where our answers lie. And that is why you must live.”

Yesugei's eyes widened. “I thought you took me for an oathbreaker. You would let me free?”

“An oathbreaker who knows what is coming is more valuable to me now than a man leal and ignorant,” replied the shaman as he stood to his feet, his healing done. “And I did not say I will let you go free. You will survive the duel against my khan, and then you will travel to the west while I travel east. Perhaps at least in one of the two we can find some sense in this madness consuming the world. Then, we will find one another again - this I have seen in my dreams.”

“Your dreams will be for naught if I die,” said Yesugei. He looked down at his hands, cracked and bleeding; his injured leg, pain throbbing to the bone that left him scarcely able to stand. The shaman’s healing was incredible, but even so… “Your khan will kill me by his own hand tomorrow.”

"Then that would make you an oathbreaker twice over," said Aysen, and then a small grin curled to his lips. “I swore an oath. I cannot die. Not now. Those were your words, were they not?”

He felt a strange chill run through his body at the shaman's words - as though the night air had suddenly grown claws and cut him to the bone with its cold. Yes…Vasilisa…I will return…I must return.

Targatai, Khenbish, Tseren, and Kaveh…I will return for them.

I will fight for them.

When he looked up at the shaman again, he saw he was no longer speaking to Aysen - not truly. The chill he felt carving through his soul was not of the night - but seemed to radiate from the shaman's hunched form which no longer seemed human in the half-darkness. The voice that flowed from the shaman’s cracked lips was that of a singer’s - high and soft.

“A burden heavier with every stride is yours and hers, oathbreaker.” spoke the spirit dwelling within the shaman's body - speaking with a smile that seemed twisted, inhuman upon Aysen's visage.

The shaman walked slowly to the doorway of his tent, and at the threshold he turned to cast a final glance Yesugei’s way. The reflections of the bonfire outside played red and orange against the shaman's beaded veil, but from behind the leather strips Yesugei saw two pinpricks of bright, molten gold staring through.

“A burden heavier with every stride…the sorrows of the world, an endless tide. You must live, oathbreaker. Suffer, and live."