Chapter 31 - Old Digging Stick
Camp of Oma, Leva soils. SE Britain
Self pity has been replaced by determination to escape. Ur’salla tramps gentle slopes towards a stack of oak bark placed in the shadow of ancient trees. These skins of trees have been placed on the edge of Oma’s clearance where ash and dirt meet with the frontier of Nature. Ur’salla places down twines next to the stack and selects crumbling sheets of oak to place across them. She crouches down to tie her bundle. Ur’salla has been tasked to fetch this bark to replenish the tanning pit that stinks beside her den. Her masters made a mistake in sending her alone and unescorted to the edge of wilderness.
Ur’salla glances over a shoulder as her last safeguard check. Concern sweeps her face when she sees a familiar figure sauntering up the trail from the camp,
‘Damn that treacherous fool’ she curses beneath her breath in response to seeing Aarva approaching.
Everything had been so perfect for her to run. She reconsiders her plan, but Aarva is a fair distance away. Ur’salla reminds herself she may have no choice but to run,
‘This could be my last chance!’
She makes a show of removing her bark boots, and innocently tiptoes beyond the wild tree-line as though seeking privacy of the toilet. Ur’salla hopes this might deceive her gaoler. Her captors don’t know how she can run barefoot through the wilds.
That hope is dashed when from down the track, she hears Aarva call out,
‘Ur’salla step out from those woods. You’ve no business being there. Come out now.’
Moss rubs against the soles of Ur’salla’s feet. She senses the spirits of the wilds yet feels confusion. They both beckon for her to enjoin, and issue caution. Her acute hearing tunes to the forest, songbirds in coverts, the crunch of dead leaves made by rodents, a stone-axe chopping into soft wood.
She studies the understorey and her eyes pick out magical symbols carved into the bark of trees. The huntress knows these to be warnings intended to frighten away savages. Ur’salla remains unsure. Escape feels compromised by some danger ahead. She hears more desperate cries from the open ground to her rear. More cries from Aarva as they echo from tree trunks,
‘Stop the concubine, catch the runaway!’
Aarva is audibly panting as he runs. He’s calling out for more barbarians to intercede. She’s no choice, and strides out into more wildwoods before breaking into her sprint.
Green and white flowers carpet, as ransoms and celandines race with each other to enjoy springtime sunlight, before it's stolen by a canopy rejuvenated. Wild garlic strokes at Ur’salla’s calves on each leap of a long limb. She snakes her escape around thickets and saplings to run from the manmade hell of her servitude. She hears the sounds of men and dogs reaching the edge of the woods from behind. Ur’salla runs in search of a stream to lose traces of scent. This game is on and she knows the rules of play as the predator, but here she is the prey.
A foreign barbarian man kneels in front of a tiny grave, freshly dug here in a small forest glade. He clutches his ancient digging stick. Grief stricken, Brazille presses his furled brow against the tool. He cut Xagu’s little grave in between two roots of a mother oak. This forest tumulus and his whittled wand of foreign grain, are unconventional for one of the Leva kind.
Brazille just buried the mortal remains of his daughter in this tiny grave. Xagu, his little vole had lost her fight against Raspu. The fecundity of barbarians is great, but so is their mortality. Brazille is bereft with grief. Xagu was too young, female, and low status for inclusion into any tomb of the ancestors. By the customs of his own culture, this father was expected to spread her ashes across the wheat gardens as an offering to gods.
He asks himself, ‘Why should I worship the ancestors when they stole the breath of my girl?’
Her father inherited an alternative to the religion. Brazille tightly grips the long handle of a digging stick polished by the hands of generations. An heirloom handed down from a continental grandmother, who herself was wildborn as foreign savage. Brazille recollects tales that the gummy-mouthed old crone retold him. Stories of wild ghosts more benevolent than the gods of agriculture. These same tales of wild bulls and of bears, he'd repeated to Xagu as she sat with him in front of the hearth.
Today against the wishes of his embittered wife, he brought their daughter’s limp body out here into the woods. In the tradition of his wildborn grandmother, alone he laid her to rest. Brazille had implored the Oak of Life to guide her spirit to a better afterlife than the damp dirt of the barbarian’s underworld. His wife’s criticism has poisoned his heart,
‘Xagu I am sorry that I brought you and your mother to this cursed land. These soils don't want us. Maybe Mazde tells the truth when he complains I avoid the labours to spend time out here in the woods? I know not the answer, but here I leave you to rest in this paradise’. Xagu doesn’t respond.
Rather, vibrations begin to speak. They reverberate from the point of the digging stick jabbed into soil, echoing along a grain still pressed against Brazille’s forehead. His private grief disturbed, he mutters,
‘Something is coming through the forest towards this glade’. Brazille panics, and stands back up from his kneel to prepare a thoughtless defence of his daughter’s grave. He takes grip of the thin end, making its whittled handle a macehead.
With a burst, the intruder leaps at him from the dark forest. Brazille swings his improvised war club at the demon. Ur’salla’s face is painfully impacted by a foreign grain. The cartilage of her nose is shattered as she is struck back to earth. Her form crashes to lay between saplings. Traumatised by his own thoughtless act of violence, Brazille first gasps at the sight of an innocent young woman slain by his own thoughtlessness. Red blood soon streams from her damaged face. Brazille recognises his victim, a concubine of elderman Paaxti. He hears the barking of Sun-dogs, and the calls of his clansmen in the woods. All nobleness slips from this failed farmer. Remorse is replaced by thoughts of ugly opportunity.
He calls out loudly to Oma’s posse, ‘Here! Over here. I have stopped the runaway’. This wise action will put Brazille in favour with the council. Perhaps it's time for him to forget paradise, and to mend his ways. The wooden staff of a wildborn grandmother creaks and groans as it transforms into a snake.
They bind the runaway concubine. Criminalised in defiance of Leva laws. They ask, ‘Why would she wish to return to the starvation of savage ways? A madness to be thrashed.’
Together, Brazille and her gaoler act as draught oxen to drag Ur’salla’s broken body back through the woods. Alive and conscious she’s to face vengeful justice. It isn't just her face that is broken, but her spirit. She weeps uncontrollably. Tears, snot, and blood all congeal together to run down her face. Freedom so cruelly presented, only to be snatched away with such force. Her punishment will be severe by a law devoid of compassion.
City of Anna. SW Asia.
Ittidu is with Sagmi on the plaza practising new skills of trade. Ittidu examines bundles of fibres cleverly entangled into a yarn. These fibres are not those harvested from the linseed, but are from the soft undercoat of faraway hillside sheep. Šamkat will be pleased with her apprentice, and her weaver women kept busy.
Now that these bundles of luxurious fibre have been graded, Ittidu needs to make a record of the transaction. She picks up a sharp stylus of cut reed and presses its sharp end into a small block of wet clay. Impressions are left on its surface. These marks will record origin, value, and ownership.
Sagmi encourages Ittidu, ‘One more tablet to be scribed then our work is done for this day’. Ittidu leans back over to impress the stylus into the soft clay.
A warm wetness runs down from her nose to her lips. Ittidu tastes a metallic substance on her tongue. Red droplets drip onto the surface of the clay tablet.
Sagmi suddenly exclaims with concern, ‘Miss Ittidu, your nose bleeds!’