Chapter Forty-Eight: Sacrifice

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In the morning, Aric was gone. I had slept deeply and didn’t remember him leaving. Erman, preparing a millet, cheese, and herb porridge in the cauldron, smiled warmly at me as I struggled to sit up. The pain was surprisingly small.

“How do you feel?”

I felt refreshed but oddly numb all over.

“This all must seem strange,” Erman said. “But you’ve nothing to fear from me.”

Was my apprehension so apparent? The seer’s home was a sacred space, and there were protocols to observe; I knew nothing of how to conduct myself in that regard. I knew better than to fear his command of spirits. Priests talked grandly and showed little for it. The real peril was that he knew too much.

“It’s the rest of the world that looks strange to me,” I smiled at him and regarded him a moment. He’d always been kind. His inelegance and honesty endeared him to me. He’d aided me when he had no reason to—at least, no reason I could discern. 

“Indeed. They are not like us,” he returned my smile and gave the cauldron a good stir, clanging the ladle against the rim before hanging it back on its hook. Then he looked as if he’d suddenly remembered something, shuffled across the room, and began rummaging through an earthenware jar on the floor beneath one of the tables, coming up with a double handful of walnuts for his porridge.

With the fields too torn and bloody to graze, the camp rolled on shortly after our victory. We headed south along the course of the Volosdanu beside the rapids, which make the river impassable for many miles. Here, the waters fell in giant steps and roared so fiercely they could be heard for miles. Our own dead had been embalmed according to the Skythian custom, their bodies hollowed out and filled with herbs and chaff, then covered with wax. They were dressed in their finest and placed in funerary wagons to keep until spring when the ground would thaw enough to dig.

The remaining Geloni army was permitted to take their dead from the field and burn them on great pyres fueled by the wood of their provision wagons. Some of their best warriors were ransomed for gold, livestock, or other goods. The rest we trailed behind us, bound in chains or tied with ropes of hemp. These were healed, fed, and clothed. But the walking, the cold, and sleeping huddled together on the ground was more hardship than many could shoulder. They moaned incessantly and wept, and I began to question what sort of men they were. My meager pity soon gave way to contempt. After all, it was they who sought this war. Now they tasted suffering they had hoped to visit upon us and found it too bitter to swallow. 

When the Geloni captives were pressed for their purpose in making war upon the Skythai, they claimed to want restoration of Gelonus so they might reopen the northern karevan routes and enjoy the same trade enriching the colonies. The Greek poison had spread north. Or perhaps it had never subsided, but lingered in the soil, in the people, who would never be satisfied with the simple, honest life of farming, but craved the gilded lives of serpent-tongued merchants. And still, they might have simply occupied the fort, but they recruited a sworn enemy of the Paralatai and came for our own king’s head, bent on our destruction. One could at least admire their boldness, if not their ends.

After six slow days, we arrived at a sanctuary beside the rapids, which the Skythai called Apatura—swift waters—and made camp. Here was a broad, flat field, at the center of which were two structures: one a kind of earthwork platform and the other an earth-and-ditch enclosure. The fold was like the earthen banks of a ringfort on three sides, open to the Dawn. The mound was not unlike the barrows that cropped up across these plains. But it was oblong rather than round, with a level top and a sloping ramp leading up its broad dawnward face. At the top, near its southern end, there stood a low altar of weathered granite. Into the stone was fitted the hilt of an iron sword, its waxed blade pointed toward the sky.

We made camp some distance away from the sacred grounds and, the days being short, held no rites upon our arrival. Fires blazed before the platform as the sun set, and the grounds were prepared for a sunrise ceremony. An invalid still, I watched all from the distance of Erman’s wagon as the sun slipped behind the ancient sword in the altar, its slim silhouette stark in the sanguine glow. Nearby, the warriors drank and danced and brandished their own swords in the firelight, and I wished I could be there with them instead of languishing out here, out of mind. Behind me, I could hear the captives’ lamentations in the falling darkness.

“What’s happening?” I asked Erman as I peered into the dusk. 

“We wait. Tomorrow at noon, we honor Ari, the Great Sword. With sacrifices, we honor its giver, the Heavenly Father, Papahio, for deciding a just outcome to the battle.”

“Haven’t enough men been slaughtered? How much blood can the gods drink?”

“Sacrifice is not slaughter. It is an act of healing.”

I shook my head, too weary to argue.

“In times of great devastation, it is the beginning of our restoration. Through sacrifice, the world was made, and thus man and all he lives by. Manu first sacrificed and dismembered his brother, Yama, and apportioned his remains in the creation of the world: 

‘The moon was born of his mind; from his eye, the sun;
From his skull, the dome of heaven; from his breath, the wind;
From his blood, the waters; from his hair, the plants; 
From his flesh, the earth; from his bones, the stones;
Thus did Manu cause the world to be created when he bound Yama as the sacrifice.’ 

“With this, the proper order came to be, as the first sovereign’s many powers were portioned out amongst his corresponding parts:

‘The priest was from his head and mouth; the warrior from his heart and arms; the commoner from his loins and feet.’

“Those disparate members combine to form the body of the tribe. Some its mind and laws, some its strength and will, and some its support and abundance. By this, our order is achieved.”

 “But why must more men die because of it?”

“When the substance of the universe gathers into man or beast or tree, they call this birth. When it dissolves once more, they call this death. Each generation dips its waterskin into the great well of creation, and each birth pricks a new hole in its hide, slowly draining it. Sacrifice refills it before it runs dry. It restores balance, healing the injury our existence has caused, slowing the world’s decay. Eventually, all things return to the source to one day be reborn. Our substance is enduring, fluid, timeless. Now and then, the majesty of Nature fades, and the cosmos sickens. Just as slaughter and harvest feed and heal the bodies of men, so must we replenish the body of the world,” he said, “to keep the Arta from collapse.”

Reeds had been spread under the priests’ feet, and wagons of brushwood were used to light three great sacrificial fires around the sanctuary. An officiating priest called Akhtar stood before the central fire and recited the sacred litanies as the Skythai warriors gathered before the mound. He bade them withdraw their swords or, if they had none, their spears. He said that the sacrificial altar was adorned with glory this day. The foremost among the gods, invited by songs and sacrifices, took their seats where the holy myrtle branches—their leaves carefully dried for such an occasion—had been laid with care beside the altar. 

All gazed reverently upon the branch-strewn mound as if expectant of some heavenly portent. Akhtar told how Papahio gave mankind the sword to vanquish the enemies of gods and men with the admonition: “The sword contains a divine spirit within, known to men as Law. Protect all creatures with it, dealing justice to those who seek to harm. Honor its use in accord with the dictates of just laws; do not dishonor it in use upon whims.” They were nearly the same words I had often heard from Aric and Bornon as they instructed me in the use of my own sword.

After a lengthy recitation of verses, the prisoners were lined up, Geloni and Siaposh alike. There were too many to count, a thousand perhaps. One man in every hundred was chosen to stand out from the line—the weakest and most grievously injured of the dejected mass. The first prisoner, his hands bound, was made to kneel over an empty glazed wine vat where the master of sacrifice and keeper of the sacred fires, the athravan Oustana, poured wine over his head and spoke an incantation, an invocation, aloud: 

“Lay his feet down to the north. 
Cause his eye to go to the sun; 
send forth his breath to the wind; 
send his spirit to the sky; 
send his blood to the waters; 
send his flesh to the earth. 
Thus, I free this being to inhabit all the realms.” 

Then he cut the prisoner’s throat over the vessel. This he took by the red-painted handles, once filled to its brim, and carried it atop the platform. There, he poured the blood over the upturned blade of the sword. One by one, the serene priest led the chosen prisoners into the enclosure to bow with their necks over the blood-soaked vessel and be sacrificed. 

After the initial ceremonies, in which all were obligated to partake, I watched from a distance, sitting in the back of a cart with Erman. I resented my injuries for keeping me confined, but I didn’t need to be close. I had neither queasiness nor bloodlust, neither the desire for peace nor vengeance. But I no longer flinched when the blade opened the flesh. When the blood poured out. It was merely one more consequence in a long string of events, choices, deeds, and fates I had come to accept.

This rite was enacted for some ten men. And where each of those men’s bodies lay in the earthen fold, the athravan hacked off their right hands and, carrying them up the platform also, tossed them up in the air, calling out some blessing or oath to Papahio.

The warrior is from his heart and arms.

It was not the first I had seen of such rites. These honored a different god than those of my homeland, but I supposed the purpose was much the same. When the seed pits, lain silent all winter, were finally opened in spring, it was the most fraught moment of the year. Neither the coldest night, fiercest storm, nor even the raids of enemies could compare to the breathless, heart-pounding fear every man and woman in the fort felt upon the opening of the pits, unsure whether, shut away in the dark, the seed had spoiled under the influence of some malevolent force of the earth, or insects, or demons, or unappeased dead. Only once in my youth did I see a pit spew forth seed covered in a putrid mold of decay, and the people took it for a curse. They were not wrong, for all the crops grew poorly and were afflicted with rust that year.

In the good years, and more so in the bad, the Mother was given a special gift to replenish her coffers as She—we hoped—would fill ours. When the pits were emptied and the furrows plowed, a youth was sown into one of the pits. Usually, a farmer’s boy just coming to manhood. He was almost always a sickly sort, slow of mind, or lame in some way. And then again, with the scything of the final sheaf of the harvest, an old man would come forth to be bound up in the sheaf and beaten upon the threshing floor. For those who could offer no labor or craft, it was a great pride for their kin to see them offer themselves on behalf of the people. They took great comfort in knowing that those who had been fruitless in life might be fruitful in death. Like the gods, the people showed them great honor for their sacrifice, so they went to it like heroes—willingly and with gladness in their hearts. 

These warriors were neither willing nor glad.

“You disapprove,” Erman’s gentle smile fell as he turned to me above the chanting of the observants. 

I stared at the gore upon the mound in numb silence. “Your ways are still strange to me,” I said wearily. “I don’t understand what your gods want.”

“They want what we want. Even the noblest kings—and the gods themselves—must sometimes be brutal in creating and maintaining our order. But Papahio shows us how even they are not above Arta. War is among the worst things in men, but also the noblest.”

“How so?”

“When it makes us seek justice and hold ourselves to account for our sins, as we conduct ourselves under the watchful gaze of Papahio, whose great blue eye looks ever down upon us.”

I turned to face him. “And these men have been judged?”

“Battle is judgment. Matters too great for courts and councils are taken to battlefields, and what men cannot settle, armies and the gods do.”

“And what then?”

“Then the time for treaties returns.” 

“And this is the only way?”

“If we do not fight to preserve the good order, who will?”

I stared across the blood-reddened field. Ugly though it might be, perhaps he was right. What other cause could there be but the one which sustained us in this world? Were we—heart and arms of the earth—agents of destruction or preservation? And how had I come this far without knowing which? 

The bodies and arms were left where they lay, arrayed around the blood-soaked sword as our battered warriors tended their wounds and prepared for the next battle, wherever it might be. The rest of the prisoners were gathered for the slave markets in the south, the colonies, and beyond. The Geloni, of all men, should be quite at home in the lands of the Hellenes. There was a sacrifice of beasts as well, and at night there was feasting around the sanctuary grounds. Still recovering from my wounds, I was unable to join the celebration. I watched from the stair of Erman’s wagon for as long as I could until I drifted into painful sleep, propped against the doorframe. 

The following day the Warband departed again for the Marches before Dawn—before I could see them off—which was perhaps for the best. With my tally formally made, my time among them officially had ended. I would miss them—all of them—more than they should ever know. 

As we broke camps and resumed our road, the prisoners were silent.

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Chapter Forty-Nine: Apprentice

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