Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 85
She climbed the great steps of the tower, up and up. The higher she went, the more moss covered the stones under her feet. Clem panted heavily behind her, whining. She told him to stay and continued on until she reached the very top of the tower, which was open to the sky.
Night had fallen, and the full blanket of the stars lay like a shroud overhead. Lord Cabal sat on the edge of the parapet, playing a flute. He raised his head at her approach, but his eyes did not focus on her, as he had been blind since drinking her headwoman's blood, which her mother had cursed. His fingers were puckered in old burn scars.
"Lord Cabal, I am Imelda da'Farrow, and I have come to kill you for what you have done to my people."
Cabal whistled, low. A great raven emerged from the shadows and spoke to her. The raven said, "Lord Cabal will expire with the sun's rise, as he has lost a wager with the Dark God. Why not let him enjoy his final night?"
"Because he did not allow my people enjoyment. He brought only death and ruin, slavery and subjugation. He does not deserve another night."
The raven bowed its head.
Imelda drew her family's sword and cut off the raven's head. As she did, Lord Cabal's body fell from the parapet, and broke on the shore below.
#
The third of the lords called herself Moirate. She traveled the land on the back of a giant turtle, her path winding and fickle—never passing over the same route twice in a season. It took some time, but Clem found the turtle's scent. They traveled weeks across the low and high country, through bogs, over winding deserts, through hail and snowstorms and sleet and deep forests teeming with snapping fairies and ancient trolls long since petrified.
Imelda found Moirate sitting on the back of her great turtle next to a bubbling stream. Puffy seed-heads filled the air.
"Do you know me, Moirate?" Imelda asked.
"Can't say I do," Moirate croaked, peering at Imelda with her one eye. Like the other lords, she was long past her prime, a withered husk, back hunched, fingers curled with arthritis. "Could you help me down, child? I need a nap."
Imelda offered up the head of her mother's staff. Moirate pressed her hand to it, steadying herself as she dismounted the turtle.
"You murdered my mother," Imelda said.
"Could be. I've murdered a lot of people's mothers. That's how this is done, love." Moirate patted her turtle's enormous nose and offered it a thatch of thick, crunchy comfrey.
"You've been fueling your lives on our family's blood," Imelda said. "I can't let you do it anymore. Not one more."
Moirate gave a slight shrug. "Our time is ending anyway. There will be another wave of lords. And another after that. You achieve nothing by speeding up our end."
"You are sure of that?"
"As sure as I am that the sun comes up in the north."
"I'm not," Imelda said, and she ran Moirate through with her sword. The sword went through Moraite's middle and lodged in the thick shell of the turtle. The turtle tried to lumber away, dragging Moirate through the mud, finally tearing her body free from the sword. Moirate fell, and the turtle kept moving, taking the sword with it.
It took a very long time for Moirate to die. She lay bleeding, snarling at Imelda, clutching at her guts, spitting obscenities about her fellow lords. Imelda waited until she stopped squirming, and then called Clem to her side, and began again.
#
The fourth lord, Abasa, had learned of the deaths of her comrades and installed herself in a tower at the center of a great maze. Imelda approached the great stone face of the maze and gazed up its mossy exterior. Oh, to be a bird! But if she could not fly, well, she could climb.
She stuck the end of her sword into the seams between the stones and climbed up onto the top of the stone wall that made up the maze. Clem barked at her below, but she told him to stay, told him she would return, and she hoped that was the truth.
From the top of the wall, it was easy to trace her way across the top of the maze to the center where a great glass tower reared skyward like an icicle. There were no guards here, only field mice, a pair of uninterested skunks, and a lonely puppy baying at the end of a lead.
Imelda cut the puppy's lead with her sword and let it free, and it transformed into a small, frightened boy who raced away into the forest before she could calm him. Imelda pushed open the great creaking door of the tower.
Lord Abasa sat in the center of the room on a purple throne, head lolling, tongue thick in her mouth. She held an empty jug of wine in one hand, and she was singing up into the beam of light that engulfed her from the aperture above. While the other lords had been elderly, she gave the appearance of middle age, with streaks of white marbling her dark hair, and laugh lines pulling at the corners of her mouth. Imelda's mother had looked much like this, only sober.
"You!" Abasa cried, and she lurched from the throne and staggered down the dais steps. She had to grab hold of the arm of her throne for balance. "How dare you challenge the order of things! We would die on our own time. We would—"
"Not fast enough," Imelda said. "I'm here to break this cycle."
"You can't! It can't be done!" Abasa threw the wine jug at her. It broke against the floor. "There is a time and season for every lord. It's not yet your time!"
"Yours is over," Imelda said, and raised her mother's staff. She spoke the incantation her mother had taught her on her death bed, the one that could only be used against the fourth lord.
Abasa screamed and melted into a steaming pool of noxious flesh and charred bone.
And her mother's staff shattered.
#
The fifth and final lord called herself Soiban, and Imelda did not have to seek her out. Soiban's armies came in pursuit of Imelda instead, tracking her progress from one dead lord to another, all across the world of Ket, from her village to the tavern, to the tower, across the lake, along the turtle's path, and through the great maze.
Soiban and her armies found Imelda lying with Clem in her arms at the edge of a great ravine. Imelda slowly raised her head and shifted Clem aside gently, so as not to disturb his rest. He had earned a very long rest.
"I heard you were looking for me, Farrow's daughter," Soiban yelled across the distance between them. Summer had turned the fields a glorious red-yellow, shot through with the nodding blue heads of cornflowers and puffy spires of delphiniums and alliums. Insects buzzed. Great butterflies, big as Imelda's palm, fluttered through the field, oblivious to the women and the army.
Imelda made to advance, but Soiban raised her sword. Soiban was younger than the other lords, on first glance, but only because she had access to more blood, more power, more of the essential life of those like Imelda's mother to keep her looking youthful and strong.
Imelda hesitated, then, "It is you who have sought me out. I was simply sitting here with my dog."
Soiban threw back her head and laughed. "I expected you to be some great warrior, a prince! A lord in the making! But you are just a skinny little girl with cheeks like apples. How extraordinary in your…ordinariness. Your brothers were far more formidable."
"Is that why you killed them? They were all I had left."
"You have the dog. You have your life. I left you all you truly needed, as I do with every family with magic in their veins. It wouldn't do for me to murder you all to the last, would it? How could I continue to harvest you if you all dropped dead?"
"I'm here to end the cycle of lords," Imelda said.
"With what? Your bare hands? You have no weapon, no talisman. Your dog is an old ruin and you are an unblooded girl. There is no way for you to stop any of this. It's gone on long before you and it will go on long after."
Imelda took the shard of her brothers' bone from her pocket and cut open the back of her hand. She raised the bloody bone and murmured one final incantation. The bone zipped from her grip and embedded itself into Soiban's eye.
Soiban howled and grabbed at her eye socket. She fell from her mount and writhed in the field. Where her body touched the field, great fibrous roots grew from her flesh and burrowed into the ground. Her army began to break apart, but they were not fast enough. Soiban's body bloomed into a great red-brown tree, seventy feet tall, a massive giant whose crown seemed to touch the sky, and all around her, the soldiers too, grew roots that stopped them in their tracks. Their arms became great boughs. Their faces roughened into thick bark, and where moments before there had been an army, there was a forest so great that Imelda could not see the end of it. A few mounts still galloped about, confused, amid the trees, tattered clothing, and scattered weapons.
Imelda placed her hand on the tree that had been Soiban. A whispery voice reached her ears, and when she raised her head, she saw something of Soiban's face there still in the trunk of the tree, grimacing, fighting the spell.
"You…were to be…the…next…Lord," Soiban said. "All of this power…immortality…would be yours."
"I know," Imelda said. "Power like yours can only exist if many suffer. I have endured suffering. I won't be the one to cause it."
"… fool."
"Maybe so, but I'm not a tree." Imelda patted the rough bark of the tree and called for Clem.
Clem raised his head and came to her side, weary and loyal. Imelda caught one of the mounts, and put Clem into a saddle bag, and turned the anxious creature in the direction of home.
Home, where the magic came from. Home, where the magic would stay, forever, until the next traitorous lord sought to begin the cycle anew.
And when they did, Imelda would be waiting for them.
THE SKULLS OF OUR FATHERS
MY FATHER CAME HOME from the war with the skull of a northerner, polished smooth as silk. The lower jaw was missing, but the rest of the teeth were intact, and I asked him if he had removed their fangs and he laughed and patted my head.
The skull sat on our mantle. When friends visited, he would take the skull down and cradle it under his arm like a beloved pet and tell the tale of how he acquired it. The story changed depending on his audience. When it was dark and dreary, the rain streaming outside, the roll of thunder like the distant sounds of bombing, he said he came upon the northerner while on beach patrol. She popped her head out of a dug-out and fired three lavender-kissed bullets in his direction. They ricocheted off his fellow soldier's helmet, and one grazed his arm.
"A ricochet usually isn't deadly," he said, "but it sure feels that way." And he would roll up his sleeve and display his scarred arm and beam triumphantly at his audience.
During some stories, the woman was very tall. Other times, she was short and muscular, with red-stained teeth sharpened into points, and she was eating the heart of one of his comrades. This was the first detail that made me doubt my father's story, I admit. I was young. The skull itself was nearly white, including the teeth. And the white teeth were worn, not sharp.
I was never supposed to touch the skull, but one night when my parents were out at a rally, I dragged an old milk crate up to the fireplace and touched the rim of one eye. The bone burned me; icy cold. I gasped and sucked my finger.
"How did you really die?" I asked. "I hope you died terribly."
The skull only leered at me.
When my father was drunk and on his own, decompressing after a long week at the patent office, he would tell a different story, railing on in the living room, stomping past the mantle, talking to ghosts in the skull.
"You deserve to be here, you know! After what you did to us. To all of us. To me. I should have crushed your skull in and burned it up with the rest of you, but I wanted you to see us. To see what you will never have. My life. My family. This house. Our world! Our world will never be yours, now. You understand that?" He put both hands on the mantle and shouted at the skull, his spittle splattering across its forehead.
I asked my mother one night, "Does father love the skull more than me?"
And she looked very sad and brushed the hair from my eyes and said, "No. It is not love that he feels, it is anger at things left undone."
"But we defeated them all," I said. "The northerners. It's done, isn't it?"
"Not for him."
When I was older and allowed to visit the homes of others, I expected them all to have skulls on their mantles. But when I asked about it, everyone peered at me as if I were odd, all but one girl, Mirisha, whose expression became somber, and she gestured for me to follow her, and we went quietly down into her cellar, where it smelled of old wine and crushed mortar dust, and she carefully opened a battered trunk with great curled writing along the top. Inside, resting next to a battered old scattergun, a tri-pointed silver medal, and surrounded in soft violet silk, polished white skull. This one bore a great crack in its forehead.
"My mother calls it Fuck-Face," Mirisha said. "She says if we're naughty we have to stay down here with Fuck-Face."
I shivered. "My father keeps ours on the mantle."
"When I'm old enough, I'm going to burn it up," Mirisha said. "We should burn them up together."
"I don't know. Who would my father talk to, then?"
Mirisha did not look at me, but at the skull, and she nodded. "Yes. My mother, too. I think she would be very lonely without Fuck-Face."
"What do you think really happened, in the war?"
"They killed people. Collected their skulls."
"Have you touched it? Does it burn?"
Mirisha's lips trembled. She nodded.
"Let's put it away," I said. "It's easier to forget about, down here."
"My mother doesn't forget."
I knew even then that she was right, not just about her mother, but about my father. They would never forget.
As I got older, and the war became further away in time, visitors reacted differently to my father's stories as he strutted around our living room with his skull. They no longer looked at him in admiration and wonder. When he lifted the polished skull from the mantle, ten years after the war, and began to talk about stalking the enemy woman into the deepest part of a tangled forest, one of my university friends said, "That's horrific. And obscene. To desecrate a corpse like that."
The room grew silent. My father froze. Then he began to shake with rage. "You little fiend!" he said. "You spoiled, mewling brat of a child! What do you know about how your freedoms were won! About how they are kept! You are free to sit here and insult me because I kept murderers like this one from slaughtering you all in your beds."
"So instead you brought her body into your home?" my friend said, and my father yelled at her to get out, and she did, and she was never allowed to come back.
I lost a few friends this way.
I left home after university and traveled the world, or what parts of the world I could. The northernmost reaches of the world were still off-limits, their shores shrouded in green miasmas and red electrical storms leftover from the war. I met many old people still clinging to those days, to that war, and I found another woman with a skull, an old matriarch in the village of one of our allied countries, and when I asked her about it, she spit at me and made a ward against evil.
"Why do you keep the skulls?" I asked, and that made her laugh.
"Why do you wear a hat and trousers? Because it is expected! It's a story! It's a lie we tell ourselves, a lie that makes us who we are, a lie that says we are civilized people doing what's expected of us."
I thought about that on my travels, but after that period, life carried on, and like everyone else I became mired in the trappings of adulthood and responsibilities. I married, I had children, I danced and went to rallies. I cheered when they finally opened the northern coast to sea traffic. I mourned the death of our leader.
One day, as my children played in the gullies behind my home, their shrieking voices filled with delight at some discovery or other, my mother called and told me I had to come home. My father was dying.
I took a long, winding train ride back to my village, and I went to his side, and found that he had the skull with him, tucked tightly under his arm.
I said, softly, "Who was she really, papa? The skull?"
"I don't know, I don't know. There were so many. So many."
"What do you mean? So many attacking you?" Surely that would have made it into one of his stories…
"So many skulls."
"I don't understand."
He began to weep. "A field of skulls. So many skulls. No buildings. No grass. Just dust and skulls and glass, from all the heat. It incinerated everything but their bones. Their cold, cold bones. Those northerners. So cold."
"You're saying she was already dead?"
"All of them were dead. An army? A village? I don't know. We stumbled upon them. Thought they were ours, at first, some atrocity committed by the northerners. But you can tell from the skulls. Their skulls are icy cold."
"But you and your squad…you said all the time…you fought dozens of people. Killed dozens of the enemy, you had those marks on your scattergun—"
"I thought war could be just and honorable. I was wrong. We were all wrong."
"I'm sorry, papa."
When he died and we buried his ashes, I put on a thick pair of gloves and I buried the skull with him. I saw Mirisha at her own mother's funeral, many years later, and asked about the skull in her cellar.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Mirisha said, and she wrung her hands, and she would not look at me. "My mother was a hero. She would not go around carrying skulls like trophies."
But I was no better. Because as the years passed, I, too, forgot about the skulls. It was easier that way. And when my granddaughter came home from a rally and told me she was joining the military because her grandfather had been a hero, I nodded and told her I understood. I told her I was so happy for her.
"The world needs brave young people," I said, and how I wished I could have given her that skull and explained, but I had buried it, as we had buried our stories and memories with our dead, so that each generation, again and again, had to pay the same price, had to learn the same lesson, had to fight the same war.
