You Came for the Beginning

Prologue

Turley slapped at what he was sure was a mosquito on his neck and was rewarded with a confirmation when he sighted a speck of blood and a half of a wing in the palm of the scraps of clothing he’d stolen to wrap his hands in.  The heat was sweltering, and the insects feral.  He’d covered nearly every other part of his body – some of his coverings made from the scraps of clothing he had pilfered from the body of a dead friend - but for fear of overheating, as he had seen some of his companions do, he left his head and neck bare.  He wore a long-sleeved tunic in the fashion of the Mezare, but his breeches tucked into his boots marked him as a foreigner as surely as the color of his skin did. 

He smacked at his cheek then, and when the bindings on his hand came away clean, or as clean as they’d previously been at any rate, he was left to wonder if the tickle had been real or imagined.  In this land that was as alien to him as a naked woman to a green boy’s eyes, it was easy to believe that even the imagined things were real.

This morning, they’d been forced to pick their way single-file through the thickest trees and undergrowth he’d ever seen in his life, hacking their way through with their sabers, careful to step only where they could see the ground, as none of them wished to die the way Edulis had.  He wished for the dense shade of those trees now.  Exulon cannot be much further.

They had been following the river now for forty days, but if you pressed him, he wasn’t certain he could say they’d traveled much further than thirty span during that time.  Perhaps less.

His father had tasked him with finding the tomb of Skennan; something Turley hadn’t even thought was real until his father had insisted on the venture.  An expedition his great-aunt would have called foolish, had she known of it, and one that most people, even some of the men in his party, believed to be the errand of a man obsessed with tales invented for the sole purpose of creating fear in children.  There were times, when the heat of the day became too much, when they’d been forced to choose between leaving the pack mules behind or finding an alternate route around the cliffs, or when he’d watched Edulis bleed from every orifice after the snake bit him, that doubts the size of Harker’s nipples burrowed wide tunnels into his own mind.  He always managed to crush them before they could take root by remembering his father was a man much more learned than he.  His father, he knew, would have traded places with him if he could, leaving Turley to fight the arduous and ongoing battles with his great-aunt and Andrus to do the exploring.  He slapped at another potential wing flutter on his skin and almost wished it was his Great-Aunt Helibore that he was fighting, rather than insects.  It only took the image of her face ruddy red and boiling with anger for him to decide to be grateful for his current place in the world.

When they’d awoken that morning, Thormin and Godel had both been too ill to move.  Thormin had shit himself and no one seemed keen to clean him; both men sweat with fever, but shook with chills.  They might yet live, if the rest of the group came to a halt and nursed the two of them.  When they had been closer to civilization, they had left five men behind; four who were ill from either the insects or the heat, and the fifth to go back for help.  They’d left another behind when they’d awoken one morning to simply find him gone.  They were not close enough to send a man back for help this time.  Turley knew, as he watched their teeth chatter that he could set up camp, nurse them, and watch the rest of his men grow sick and die of the fever the insects brought while the men sat stagnant and waiting.  Or, he could leave the men to die.  They would likely die no matter what he did, but they would certainly die if he left them.  After only a moment’s pause, Turley ordered, “Fill their waterskins.  If they are alive when we come back this way, we’ll figure out a way to get them home.  If not, they would have died anyway.  We can’t stop for weeks every time a man falls ill.”

He noted the three faces in the group that took his words with animosity.  “Would it not be kinder to just shoot them now?” asked Fulton.

“Their deaths are not certain, and we’ve not the ammunition to waste.  Fill their skins.  Fulton, you clean Thormin up before we go,” Turley said.   The rest of the men jumped to fill the waterskins before they could be assigned to help Fulton wash the yellow shit from Thormin’s backside.  

“The top is a lonely place.” Departing words from his father.

It was, but someone had to lead.

When they reached Lake Exulon eleven days later, there were only five men, including Turley, left in his party and he knew he ought to have turned back.  Depending on the size of the sarcophagus, five might be enough, but it seemed unlikely as the myth claimed Skennan had been sealed in stone. Turley was determined not to return to Jálame with nothing.  At the very least, he would find the tomb if there was one to be found.  When he returned to the city, he could write and ask his father to send more men.  Remembering the city caused him to feel anew all the places where his sweat had gone sticky, dried, then sweat into stickiness again.  He thought of the last bath he’d taken before starting out upriver.  It had been a full lounging tub and the girl who had joined him… what was her name?  He couldn’t remember now, only that she had looked close enough to Harker for him to close his eyes and imagine it was her; and had been skilled enough for him to forget for a moment that Harker existed at all.

“Make camp,” he called over his shoulder, then shed his clothes and stepped into the lake, his skin pimpling as the cold water sent a shiver up his spine.

Turley cut his swim short, the insects buzzing above the water were barbarous little bastards and much too thick in numbers for him to enjoy himself.  He dressed without drying, fearing one of the tiny bloodsuckers might find his nether regions before he could cover himself. 

Turley retreated from the beach, where small flies seemed to boil from the very sand itself, and trod back to the tree-line, where his men were setting up camp and the insect count was fewer.  He rifled through his pack until he found the map his father had sketched for him.  It was worn in the creases from all the times Turley had folded and refolded it; he feared more for the damage that might be done to the ink of the page from the humidity in the air than to the parchment itself. 

The sketch was no hastily drawn thing, but the work of thousands of pages turned by his father’s hand.  He sometimes imagined his father squeezing the books themselves until the ink dripped knowledge into the man’s narrow head.  Turley would not have had the patience for it; such work required a certain kind of man.  Turley’s own disposition was more closely aligned with that of his grandfather Harlan when he’d been a young man – or so he was always told.  Their differences did not stop Turley from recognizing his father for the great man that he was.  Whenever Turley doubted that his father was the man called by God to lead all people onto the wheel, all he had to do was recall the image of ink dripping into his father’s brain.  His father was the man meant to lead them, and the thought that Turley would have some small part to play in that made his blood run just a bit quicker.

Turley glanced up at the lake; Lake Exulon was big, but not so large as some of the lakes in Abdiera – he thought he could see to the other side of Exulon without the aid of a spy glass, and the terrain around the lake seemed to be mostly flat, which meant for easier going than they’d had in days past.  They’d finally arrived at the easy part of the journey, and he thought he felt the relief of the men as well as his own.

To be continued in an actual book…