Dhavalos - Little Goose
< Rebirth
As quietly as I could, I leaned against the wood frame and held my face close to the leather hanging that acted as a door. My heart was hammering so loudly that I was sure that my parents would hear through the stiff flap. I needn’t have worried. My parents were too busy fighting to hear me. They’d been arguing fiercely for an hour now, at least, and though I could tell that they were trying to be quiet, every so often their voices would build like the yowls of squalling cats. I strained to make out the words, but they had gone back to an indecipherable mutter now, my mother beseeching and my father a low growl.
I glanced out the window. In the yard, a ground-tied donkey chewed peacefully on the early autumn grass. Beside it, I could just see the corner of a cart covered in an oilcloth tarp. Earlier that afternoon a man had come up to the farm in a small two-wheeled cart. He wore the undyed hooded robe and knotted rope belt of an Ankorite, one of the strange monks who lived at the Parzin Monastery to the north. The Monastery was at least two days travel by horseback and longer by foot, so the Ankorites were an uncommon sight. I had seen them twice before in the village, going about with wide hoods throwing their faces into pools of shadow, but until today none had ever visited our farm.
I wasn’t surprised – my father had no love for the mysterious men and said as much, usually punctuating a slew of epithets by spitting over his shoulder. A traditional sign against evil, at least in our village, but my father didn’t seem to fear them so much as they disgusted him, and spat harshly as if ridding himself of a foul taste. I had seen him act the same way once when he and my mother spoke of Harran, a man known mostly for being drunk and waking up sprawled in the filth of the town’s alleyways.
In truth, I knew nothing of these Ankorites, except that my father reviled them. My father was a man of few words and fewer expressions, so I knew they must be something dangerous for him to hate them so, something vile and dark. And now, without warning, one was here.
I shuddered and turned away from the window, trying to concentrate on what my parents were saying. My parents had seen the man coming and gone out to meet him. They were too far away to hear as they spoke to him, but my father’s hand gripped the donkey’s harness so tightly that even from the house I could see the knotted muscles in his forearm. I was sure that my father would send this man away, that he would protect us. But to my horror, after a few minutes the man got down, tethered his animal, and walked with my parents into the house. My mother had made tea, and they had spoken – a few exchanges only, hard and threatening from my father, trembling from my mother, and only a soft murmur from the strange monk – and then the Ankorite had gone outside. At first I heaved a great sigh of relief, but a stolen glance out the window showed me that he hadn’t left, that he had only gone out to lean against the cart. And then, my parents began to fight.
Listening to them and thinking of the unknown man just outside, my chest tightened. I struggled to breathe slowly, struggled not to let the spasms and hated, cursed wheezing force its way out of me. It had been with me all my life, but since taking ill last winter it had drastically worsened. Now, whenever I was anxious or angry the thin, reedy sound of my own breathing betrayed me. My brother, two years older than I at nine winters, would tease me mercilessly. He refused to use my name and called me Little Goose instead, saying my labored breathing sounded like the pair of geese we kept in the hen yard. He would run circles around me while flapping his elbows and making a mocking impression of the honking bird, pushing me off-kilter over and over until I collapsed into a wheezing pile. My sister Leta tried to stop him, but although she was not as thin as I, she was no taller and still only six winters old. There was little she could do if he was determined. Still, despite her age Leta could scold as fiercely as Mama, and while I kept my mouth locked through his bullying he knew that if he pushed Leta as he did me, she would scream and cry like a banshee and Papa would have his hide. So as often as not he would seek entertainment elsewhere when Leta came storming over, leaving me in the mud. Leaving me to be rescued by my little sister.
The humiliation could bring tears to my eyes that his physical harassment never did, but I would strain every fiber of my being not to cry. It would only make me gasp harder than ever, and leave me doubled over and wheezing too hard to stand. Just breathing, staying alive, marked me out as a weakling. A cripple.
I despised it. I despised my brother and my sister and myself and my sick, frail body. Sometimes in the hidden depths of my heart, I even despised the Great Holy Ones for allowing me to be born this way. In my darkest moments, I wished that last winter’s sickness had just taken me. But it hadn’t.
So I found myself with my parents railing beyond the door, and an unwelcome stranger out the window, trapped between the two. My small hands clenched the door-stile until my knuckles creaked and ached like an old man’s. The wood of the doorframe was worn smooth by a thousand touches a day, and it should have been reassuring. This was my own room, where I had slept with my family since I was born, where I knew every corner and bump in the floor and could find my way in the darkest moonless night. It should have brought me comfort – but instead it felt unfamiliar and hostile, as if I had accidentally stumbled into someone else’s life and I was unwelcome there. When my father saw the Ankorite approaching, he sent Leta and my brother away with the baby, a little boy born last spring. But me…my father turned to me with a strange look on his face, and told me to go wait in the sleeping room we all shared. I had never seen that look before from him, but I had seen it, on my mother’s face from time to time when she didn’t know I could see, when I was wheezing and helpless and drowning in shame.
It was pity.
That look from my father, a look he had never spared for anyone, put a knot of cold dread in the center of my chest, devouring all the warmth in the room, stealing my breath and winding tighter with every moment. Why were my parents tolerating this man on our land when he had obviously upset them both? What business could my family possibly have with this Ankorite, this tainted man my father so despised? And most of all, why had I been asked to stay?
My parents’ voices escalated suddenly, and I froze like a rabbit sensing a hawk overhead. My mother sounded distraught, anguished. My father sounded furious.
“Kalar, you have to listen to reason!” My mother was pleading, the way she would sometimes plead with my father not to lay into us with his belt when we were in trouble. “This is the only way, we don’t have a choice! There’s nothing we can do!”
“Nothing we can do, nothing we can do,” he spat back, slamming his hand onto our table and making me jump at the sharp crack of flesh on the wood. “Nothing we can do but send him off to be a…a catamite! A plaything to those ancient lechers!”
I was confused – nothing they said made any sense to me – but I couldn’t stop listening.
“It’s not like that –” My mother’s voice broke, and my father rounded back on her again.
“Of course it is! They live alone, they cut themselves off from everyone, even the Circle and their own Mother Ekklesia, they show up whenever they please and abduct new ‘acolytes’ and drag them out into their damned Monastery –”
“Kalar!”
“I don’t care! I don’t care if the Great Holy herself hears me; I’d call her here and watch her burn this man and his whole wicked, rotting order to the ground.”
“They’re still holy men Kalar, you’ll have us both shunned for blasphemy!”
My father snarled, “And what of it? Let them shun us if they wish but that is no holy man!”
“Listen to me.” My mother was suddenly quiet, but somehow that just let her intensity cut through like a finely-honed knife. “If we do this, the compensation is a portion of the winter stores from the monastery for the next five years. Five years of food enough to get us all by. Which is beside the point, because you know full well that we need it this year.” She was quiet a moment, and when she spoke again I could barely hear her. “Half our crop’s rain-rotted in the field, and all the money went to the medicine this winter.” She stopped, and I heard her try to stifle a sob. “If we don’t do something, we’re going to starve. And you know it.”
My medicine. My family was going to starve because of the medicine they bought to save my pathetic life. I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach.
“We’ll find another way.” My father was just as quiet, but his tone was one of desperation, a man grabbing for answers. That was more terrifying that anything else that had happened, than anything else in my young life, and my chest seemed to clamp down.
My mother was weeping now, her words punctuated by sobs. “Even if we could scrape by, after the sickness last winter you know he wouldn’t make it through a hard season. And…we’d loose the baby.” She sniffled hard. “We can either give up one son…or we can lose two.”
My breath stopped dead, trapped and rattling in my throat. Give up a son?
“Besides,” she went on haltingly, “they’re all healers. They keep all the old plant lore in those scriptoriums; they grow the herbs that he needs. And he needs them Kalar, he’s getting worse. We can’t take care of him anymore – we can’t keep him safe from his own body. But whatever else is true, they can.”
“But…” My father trailed off. He sounded defeated. Broken. “He’s my son.”
“I know. He’s my son too.”
They started crying then, both of them, but I couldn’t hear them anymore. The world shrank around me, thick and blurry and pressing in, and I sank to the floor, fighting to breathe. They were talking about me. I gulped at the air like a landed fish. They were talking about me. I didn’t understand, but I knew that was why the Ankorite was here.
He was going to take me away.
* * * * *
Everything moved fast then, too fast. I remember a blurry parade of images: my parents finding me slumped against the wall, picking me up. My mother breaking down and sobbing into my shoulder while she clutched at me like a drowning woman; Papa’s face completely slack, empty of any expression at all. Then their voices explaining as gently as possible that I was to leave them, and go somewhere where I would be taken care of. My mother put me into a traveling cloak – I recognized it as one she had woven herself and had planned to sell at the market, but I couldn’t feel touched or sad or anything at all. I was too numb to even put it on by myself. As we were leaving the house, my father pressed something into my hand, but before I could look at it, before I could even think to look at it, I was being pressed out the door and into the yard.
Without really knowing how I got there, I was standing before the Ankorite’s cart. The donkey turned and looked at me, shoving his muzzle into my chest. Unthinking, I stroked one of the long, stiff ears as the animal nosed at the pockets of my cloak. His questing head was warm and firm against my stomach, and felt a slight connection to reality, like someone stirring in their sleep at a noise outside the window. I looked up. The Ankorite sat on the cart bench, looking down at me with his face shrouded in shadow. He stretched out at hand. I looked askance at my parents, waiting for them to say it was all untrue, just a bad dream, waiting for them to take me back into the house so we could all sit down to supper.
“It’s…it’s okay lamb,” Mom said, her voice faltering. She hadn’t called me that in years. “Just go with him. Everything will be –” The sob rose up and choked her; I saw it wrack her body as she half-turned, half-fell into my father’s arms. Her shoulders shook, and I heard her gasping. In that moment, she sounded like me.
Somehow, that made it feel real. I started to shake then, and I looked at my father. “Papa,” I pleaded, my breathing starting to come in quick gasps. “Papa please –”
“Son.” My father stopped, visibly trying to compose himself. Then he forced himself to straighten up and look me in the eye. “We’ve always tried to teach you to be a good person. To teach you the difference between right and wrong. And I just…” He cleared his throat. “I just don’t want you to forget that. To forget us.”
My father grabbed me in his large, weathered hands and lifted me up onto the cart bench. There were tear-tracks down his weathered face, and he gripped my arm so hard that I would later find the print of each finger bruised into my skin. “Promise me. Promise you won’t forget.”
“I promise Papa.” The only sound I could get out was a hoarse whisper.
“Good boy.” He was choking on the words. “May the Holy Queen bless you, and keep you safe.” He gave my arm a last squeeze, and though it hurt I didn’t pull away. “I love you son.”
I wanted to tell him that I loved him too, that I loved them both, that I didn’t want them to send me away. But no words came out. Just the first whispers of that horrible wheezing starting up once again.
The Ankorite shook the reins and clicked his tongue. With a half-hearted bray of complaint, the donkey started forward, the cart jolting into motion behind him. We were pulling away, leaving my home, my family. Leaving everything.
“Wait.” My mother’s cry was weak, but it hit me like an arrow. “Wait. Wait! I love you!” I saw her start toward me, but my father caught her, holding her back as tears poured down her reddened face. “I love you!”
Her cry was the scream of an eagle, high and piercing in the empty air. The sound of it was etched in my mind forever. Years later I would still hear it echoing around me when I jolted awake from bad dreams. I watched my father holding her back as we turned the corner and the cart began rattling its way down the hill.
Then they were gone.
For the first time I looked down at my hands, clutching the object my father had given me. It was a small hunting knife, a smooth deer-horn handle protruding from a leather sheath. I ran my fingers over it, struggling to understand. This was Papa’s first hunting knife. My Grandfather had carved it for him by hand, given it to him when he was barely older than me. It was my father’s prize possession and one of his oldest – he would never have given it up.
That was the moment it truly hit me. I was leaving my family behind, and I would probably never see them again. I was being taken by someone I didn’t know, someone my father hated and I feared, to a place I’d never been, to meet a fate I couldn’t even guess at. The man beside me meant nothing. I was all alone.
Fear surged inside me, cold and dark, dragging at me from inside. There was an empty feeling that yawned wide within my chest like a bottomless black pool, pulling me down into it where I would never surface again. I started gasping and clutched at my chest, doubling over as I fought to breathe. My lungs felt like clenched fists and my breath railed in my throat with the sound of a high wind through a reed bed. I couldn’t get any air, and I panicked as the edges of my vision started to go dark. Everything was closing in as I was sucked down deeper and deeper, the light receding rapidly away so that in a moment it would vanish entirely. I knew this was what dying felt like.
There were hands on my shoulders, gripping me, then prying my mouth open. Something was placed on my tongue that tasted sharp and green like a meadow in the heat of summer, and then there was a water skin at my lips and a voice ordering me to drink. Too shocked and frightened to disobey, I did as I was told. Whatever plant had been placed in my mouth was still in rough chunks and it dragged at my throat as I swallowed. I would have gagged and coughed it up if I had any air in my lungs to do so, but with the water I managed to get it down.
The result was almost instant. It was as if my lungs had been levered open like a bellows, and I took a great rattling gasp of air, and then another, coughing between breaths. The sound of my own pounding heart receded in my ears, and my vision cleared. My chest still hurt plenty, a deep ache, but I could breathe. And for long minutes I did nothing else. It was only when the wheezing stopped, when my breath was a soundless as a normal person’s, that I turned to look at the Ankorite.
He was looking back at me. His hood had fallen down over his shoulders, and I could see his face now. Even though my father had always referred to the Ankorites as old men, he was actually not so old at all, maybe only a few more winters than Papa. His brown hair wasn’t short like the Circle priest in our village; rather it was just above his ears on the sides but extra long down the middle and tied back with a leather thong. He wore an expression of concern.
“Are you alright?”
I stared at him, trying to decide if I should speak to him. My father had always said the Ankorites were foul, corrupt men who required the sign against evil just for looking at them. But now, with his hood off, he didn’t look terribly frightening at all, just a regular man with a strange haircut. His eyes seemed kind.
“I think so,” I said carefully, watching his reaction.
He smiled widely. “Thank the Heavens,” he said. “I confess you had me a bit worried.”
“Oh.” My hand went to my mouth, which was still heavy with the aftertaste of plants. “What did you give me? Sir,” I added, remembering myself.
“Ephedra. It’s a plant that grows in the hill country – lots of it, lucky for you.” He smiled at me again. “And there’s no need for the ‘Sir.’ My name is Brother Touraj. What’s yours?”
He didn’t seem evil. In fact, it gradually dawned that he had sort of just saved me. So I told him my name. “But my brother calls me Little Goose,” I added. “Because of the wheezing, you know.” Then I looked down at my shoes, embarrassed and unsure why I’d said it in the first place.
“Well, that won’t do at all,” said Brother Touraj. The donkey had stopped, probably when I had my fit; he snapped the reins lightly and the beast started off again with a grumbling noise. The Ankorite spoke over the gentle rattle of the cart. “You’re to be a Brother, like me. And one of the best parts is that you get to pick a new Brother name, all for yourself.”
I stared at him. “I’m going to be an Ankorite?” I whispered, struck with horror. To my surprise, he laughed. The hooded Ankorites had always been such foreboding figures, I would never have been able to picture one laughing, and the sound was strangely calming. “Yes, you are to join our order. But don’t worry. I think you’ll find we’re not nearly so dark and frightening as people say.”
“But you –” I blurted, then bit my words off sharply. All the things my father had ever said about them were tumbling through my head. I didn’t even know what most of those things meant, as I’d never heard half the words before and was too afraid to ask, but I’d always sensed they alluded to something dark and vulgar.
“We plant herbs,” he said, with a hint of a smile. “We copy and keep the ancient texts. We give aid and knowledge to those who come looking. And most importantly, we pray for guidance and wisdom.”
“From the Holy Queen?” I asked. I felt I was on certain ground with that one – after all, everyone prayed to the yazata Queen, our blessed ruler – but his brow creased with a slight frown.
“Well…yes and no. That’s a bit complicated, actually.” Then he looked over at me and the smile was back. “But time enough to worry about that later. For now, just give some thought to your new name.”
“I already know what name I want.” And as soon as I said it, I knew it was true. Brother Touraj raised his eyebrows.
“Already? You’re either a bit rash, or you know yourself well indeed.” He looked at me, a penetrating look that I had to stop myself from turning away from. Beneath his easy-going manner was something quick and precise, something that went right to the heart of me. Brother Touraj, I realized, might be a smarter man than he let on.
“So,” he continued after a moment, “what is this name that comes to you so readily?”
I took a breath. “Dhavalos.”
“Dhavalos?” he repeated, his voice carefully neutral. “Most of the young boys want to name themselves after Afshin the Warrior. Or Mehrzad, first to smite down one of the foul Demons of the Lower World. Or the great Dragon-Purge Kian. But Dhavalos – the patron saint of growing things? Why that one, child?”
I didn’t feel as though he disapproved of my choice; it felt as though he genuinely wanted to know what I was thinking. At home, people cared more for what I did than what I thought, and the unaccustomed attention made my cheeks turn hot. It was one thing to speak when I knew no one was really listening, but now that someone was actually interested, I felt uncertain.
“Take your time and think it through,” Brother Touraj said, in the same voice I would have used to calm a skittish plow-horse. “What made you want that name?”
I thought of the plants he had given me that had brought my breath back, and of the crops standing rotten in the field at my farm. “We need growing things,” I said slowly. “We need them for everything. Those saints are all mighty warriors…but without wood for a smithy fire, you can’t even forge a sword. And the Book of Light has incantations against demons, but without plants how would we even have paper to scribe it on? Or ink to scribe with?” I thought of my family. “Warriors could not even feed themselves without the crops.” Brother Touraj was nodding slightly; taking this as an encouraging sign, I forged ahead. “Dhavalos…the Exalted Litany says he made the plants grow. That he was given a blessing by the First Holy Princess, and that wherever he walked, everything was lush and green. I think that would be better than being a warrior… warriors can protect us from the Demons and Dragons and the other Soulless Ones, but they can’t protect us from sickness or starvation, like the plants can. And some people might need to call on a Dragon-Purge, but everyone needs to eat.”
Brother Touraj clapped his hands. “That they do, my boy!” he said, his voice so hearty and full of laughter that it startled me. “That they do.” He patted me on the shoulder. “That was very well said indeed. In fact, I’ve never heard it put better, even by the Arkigos himself. I think we’ve found an unexpected blessing in you, lad. You’ve got true wisdom in you already, and I know you’ll make a fine Ankorite.” I felt unexpectedly pleased at his praise. Accustomed as I was to all the things I couldn’t do on the farm because of my infirm lungs, it was a rare treat to have an adult show me pride instead of pity. Brother Touraj shook his head, apparently still delighted with my answer. “Dhavalos it is then,” he said.
“Dhavalos.” I tasted the name on my tongue. Somehow, it seemed right.
“It’s a good name,” Brother Touraj said. “Better than those others, I’d say.”
I fiddled with the hem of my tunic. “Well, they wouldn’t have fit me anyway – I can’t even pull the plow out to the fields. I could never be a great warrior like them.”
“Neither could I.” I looked up sharply, to see if he mocked me, and saw that his face was sincere. “But the world has warriors enough. I think it needs more people like you, to see to the growing and tending of living things, rather than practicing to kill them.”
I didn’t say so, but secretly I couldn’t have agreed more.
“It’s just three days to the Monastery,” he continued cheerfully, “and once we get there, we’ll get you a whole bushel of herbs for your lungs, see what we can do for your breathing. Dhavalos is a fine name – it would be a shame to waste it with people calling you Little Goose.”