Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (little bear else holmelund minarik .TXT) 📕

they carried the plague on the clothes and blankets they had bought for us while they were there. When they returned to the plateau, they embraced us and gave us souvenirs, and then we ALL got sick. Every single one of us.”

I shuddered. “God. I know what that’s like.”

He rolled his shoulders. “The elderly died first. Mother died because she insisted on caring for her sick parents. Our clan-fathers died because they tried to save the woman they loved. Our ranch hands died because they looted our lumber and iron and tried to run, sick and crazed, into the mountains. Tsunda, weakened from ritual fasting, somehow held on until the end before she expired. But Saaba and I did not die. We were deathly ill, and for five days, we faded in and out of fever, coughed water from our lungs and choked down scraps of food when we could. Our skin and mouths became blistered. We were covered in awful rashes that transformed into deep bruises.”

I listened to him in disbelief. The symptoms Vash had described were identical to HEX: a two-week latency period, followed by a five-day spiral into death. The only difference between what I’d been through on Earth and what had happened to him on Archemi was that HEX had a hundred-percent mortality rate. But otherwise…

“I cared for Saaba as best I could, fully expecting to die at any hour,” he continued. “We barely survived, but when we convalesced, we realized that we were going to perish anyway. There were no adults. The herd had strayed. The food gathered and stored in the yurts were rotting. I ate what I could, but Saaba could still take nothing but thin broth. My little sister... I’d spent her whole life protecting her, helping her. She was only seven, and I was a boy of twelve by that time. The other clans of the plateau would not help us, because of the plague, so I did the only thing I could think to do: I packed our things onto our sturdiest camel, let Saaba ride in the saddle, and set out with her for Norbu and the temples.”

“Damn.” I whistled. “I’m sorry, man.”

“Mmph.” Vash gazed up at Erruku as clouds dimmed the moon’s steady golden light. “The trip to Vhashti Shar, our temple of Burna in Norbu, is arduous. A two-week trek through the same black mountains where you say you found Burna’s tomb. We were tough children, born and raised in the wilderness, but we were weak and delirious and very, very young. We fought wolves and harpies, we killed and ate mountain goats to stay alive. But when we were about halfway to the monastery, pushing ahead through awful snow, we were struck by a rockslide. I was walking on foot and managed to avoid being crushed, but the camel carrying my sister was not fast enough. The slide buried him and Saaba together. I ran back and began digging. I dug until my hands bled. Eventually, I found her. She was still alive, trapped under the rocks and snow and sheltered by the twisted body of the animal that now crushed her. I fought with everything I had, but no human child alone could have moved that camel and the stones holding it down. I tried to pull her free, and almost tore her in half. Her legs were gone.”

I watched him, saying nothing.

“She knew it as surely as I did.” Vash shook his head slightly, staring bleakly at the horizon. “Saaba was only little, but she was a herder’s daughter. She had seen livestock caught in avalanches before. While she wept from agony, she looked me straight in the eye and asked me to end it. Painlessly, quickly.”

Vash squeezed his eyes shut, his thin mouth twisting down.

“You did the right thing,” I said softly.

“Of course I did. I knew it then, and I know it now.” He drew a deep breath, his grey eyes clouded with old pain. “But just because it was the righteous action to take did not mean I could bear to live with myself. I dug a little trench in the snow and lay down, sung a song to Burna, and went to my death. What I didn’t know at that age is that while death from the cold is peaceful, it takes a very long time. You fall asleep, your heart slows, and if you stay just barely warm enough, you enter a kind of strange sleep. It was in this state that my future Master found me. The Baru, Tantun Gorta. He was on his way back to the monastery when he came across the avalanche and found us, brother and sister, with me lying as if composed for burial. He sang the rites and burned what he could of my sister’s remains, then wrapped me in a shroud. His plan was to take my body to the charnel ground at Vhashti Shar. The valley where the accident took place was so cold that no animals had come to eat us.”

I nodded. That was a big deal to the Tuun. Vash’s people—our people—disposed of the dead via sky-burial. Corpses were left out on a special hillside to be eaten by a species of giant fly bred especially for the purpose. The flies ate the bodies before they putrefied, leaving nothing but small amounts of alchemically hardened bone. That bone was given to the family of the dead, typically to be carved into commemorative beads like the ones Vash wore in his hair. The average Tuun believed that if a body was allowed to rot or wasn’t given rites, the soul wouldn’t separate from the corpse, and it would come back as a ghost.

“Gorta carried us all the way to his camp. He chanted the Rite of the Fly-Headed God over me, and as he tells it, nearly pissed himself when I opened my eyes and looked