Chapter 4: Bones of the Hill Demon

There are scoffers who misjudge the tale of Cayntuk among the Hills of Uzpuru. They say they have heard this legend before. They say there was no man named Cayntuk who went into the Hills, rather, there was a warrior called Hoomai, who climbed the Salted Mountains to slay a demon of the snow, and drink the marrow of its bones to adopt its strength.

Others have said the tale of Cayntuk among the Hills is a mimicry of when Keeri-Kangu, son of the god Meeta, found himself in a witch man’s spell and wandered the shadows of an enchantment. Keeri-Kangu, whom the Woy and the Chanbrat people revere, searched among hills of darkness and dreamcraft. There, he tamed a strange beast. The beast, from love of the god’s son, went before Keeri-Kangu to show him the way out. But the beast was swifter than the god’s son, and feared losing him in the fog, so for the love of Keeri-Kangu the creature took bone after bone from its own body, laying down a path for the god-prince to see. And Keeri-Kangu followed the bone road. Until at last he came to the final bone, where the beast had laid down and died. Mourning him, Keeri-Kangu stepped out of the curse and into the true world.

But this I say to you, what of it? That there are hills, demons, evil or loyal? A tale of a hero lost in darkness? Only one such adventure is permitted to have happened? These prove what to me? They are a concern to me?

And you will see and you will know how little they have in common with the tale of Cayntuk in Uzpuru. There were hills, and there was a demon, but Cayntuk’s fate cannot be compared to Hoomai and Keeri-Kangu. The trials of men in the wilderness are never so unalike. But the ways in which they cannot compare are as torches lighting the way for hearers who would learn something, rather than crow of what they think they know already.

And if you still do not believe this tale, that is between you and your heart. I will show you the way to those Hills, then, and you may go into them, and see how real they may be, though it should slay you.

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“I shall not go back,” spoke Dotha. “In that command, I refuse.”

Brate could not see her just then. He turned. There were rocks at the feet of the hills, rocks as tall as tall men, and rocks as squat and wide as short, plump men. It was as walking on another road, but the road was but a narrow, rising pathway, and its sides were fenced by rocks, and beyond the rocks were the long, sweeping sides of hills.

There was a dread air in that place. Something watched them, Brate knew it. His skin was ticklish with the expectation that a falling death would soon come from above, from the hill sides, whether arrow or boulder or the sky itself. But that was the root of the fear in that place, that he could not even see the sky. The air, the living spirit of the hills was sickly and dim.

It was not quite blinding, but Brate felt as if he were going blind, as if his crippling had begun. He was surprised his eyes did not vex him. Nor were the breaths he drew any feebler, but as full and clean as in a meadow or pinewood. Though all about was the brown light, the yellow mist, there was not one grain of dirt in the air. The earthen, sanded fog was composed of nothing. No touchable, tasting element. But it was there, obscuring most of everything else there, which as far as Brate could see was only great rocks and hills as steep as city walls.

“Go back?” Cayntuk’s head did not stay still. As soon as he looked to the left hand his neck was already turning, led by his chin, to the right. He peered forward at their faint footing ahead, but was already shifting around to look back over his shoulder. When he did this, Brate saw the man’s face.

It was a face which Brate imagined his own resembled. Eyes strained open like a scroll, mouth pattering silent questions. But his head kept moving in its discontent, disbelieving circuit. The man held his sword ready for the blow. He did not seem stony anymore, but diminished to ash by the true stones about, moments from shattering into whichever direction the wind would carry him. He did not seem stout, or strong, or sure. Just another ghost beginning to realize it had died long ago.

But while the men faltered, Dotha was unchanged.

“You said we were to wait outside this filthy country’s door,” she said, half-quoting Cayntuk, while supplying her own appraisal of the Hills.

“And then I said to run,” said Cayntuk, ever searching through the dread air. “We were pursued. I never meant for you children to enter this place. Never thought you’d follow me this long. You should have gone the way to Masyad with that tribe of peaceful folk. But you followed me. Now you are cursed.”

“You can protect us,” said Dotha.

“I have not said I will protect you,” said Cayntuk. His swaying, almost darting gaze had slowed while exchanging words with the unhappy Dotha.

“You told us to run, so we did,” said Dotha. “You have charge over us. You know this is true.”

“If you did as I said you would be halfway to Bavbiium by now,” said Cayntuk, his voice becoming low, yet with a rising grit to it. “Had I commanded you stay with the caravan, would you obey?”

Dotha said nothing.

“I thought not,” said Cayntuk, resuming his nervous watch of the road ahead and the towering slopes and the way behind.

“If we must speak of the caravan,” Dotha had regained herself, “I cannot reason why you balked at what could have served us for a long while.”

“Quiet now,” Caytuk said, searching. “This idle talk is a danger here, do you not understand?”

They had stepped into a wider place, though no less shrouded. A clearing without clarity. It was a ground of gravel and chalk, with some sprigs of grass growing near the base of the hills. Now there were five slopes Brate could see, surrounding them as the limits of a ring. There were other clefts about, doorways between the hills, more paths to nowhere.

“You, with your stature and strength,” said Dotha. “Your sword. They would have surrendered their beast, cart, grain, anything, had you put it to them.”

Cayntuk froze where he stood. His head was fixed upon a stiff, trembling neck. Then slowly, yet still trembling, did he wheel his face to behold Dotha. She stood silently, staring with a sneer, the yellow air pooling against her. Cayntuk’s lip curled and his wide eyes narrowed.

“Are you the demon?” he said. His arm was half raised, sword quivering in his hand. Dotha’s sneer withered. Her mouth opened but she could not speak. Brate scurried between the two.

“My gracious lord Cayntuk,” said Brate. “This I know well. She is my sister. There is nothing strange in what she has said, though it displeases you. It is just the way of her.”

There was a clatter. Of something passing over stones and dislodging them. Stones slipping and chipping down a slope. Cayntuk turned his full body toward the sound. What was there to see in the burnt air? Nothing moved, according to the eye. Another stone fell, clinking. Something moved, according to the ear. Cayntuk dizzied himself, searching every cloven doorway for a newcomer.

“This haze is working confusion upon your mind, o mighty Cayntuk,” said Dotha. She was careful to step two full paces away from him.

“Leave him alone, Dotha,” whispered Brate.

“Hush, boy,” said Dotha. Then she reached out her hand toward Cayntuk, palm to the ground as though to soothe him. But she stepped no nearer to the man and his sword. “We should find our way back into good air. This magic will break even one so brave as you.”

“Brave?” whispered Brate. “Can’t you see he is as afraid as we are?”

She struck her brother on the arm to silence him. Cayntuk kept walking in a clumsy circle. His brow soon ached from the straining of his eyes to see something, anything on its way. But there were only stones and slopes and tawny air.

“It is too late,” said Brate. “We cannot—”

She struck him again.

“Your brother is right,” said Cayntuk, his words shaking as though he were cold, though he looked at neither brother nor sister, only the hills. “It is long past late. Run, if you like.”

“We may as well,” Dotha muttered to Brate. “He is sick. I do not know what use there—” She screamed with the full heft and wind of her lungs. Brate screamed as well, first because she had screamed, her mouth near his ear and her words low, then violent against his hearing.

And he screamed a second time, for he saw the origin of her horror.

Something had entered the graveled clearing at last. Something awful, monstrous, with as foul and fiendish a visage as neither brother nor sister could imagine of their own perversion, nor in their sleeping hours when stray spirits pluck at the dreaming mind for their own amusement.

It was seven or eight feet tall. Its face was as a hunting bird’s, its mouth like a wide hooked beak. The demon had one eye alone, in the center of its brow, filling much of its forehead in greater size than the creature’s skull seemed able to bear. On its head, and its jowls, and down its neck and breast and back were rags of hair, as the mane of a lion many hundreds of years old, left to grow and coarsen over unstopping time.

But its body was manlike, with a pair of scrawny, muscular arms and legs. The skin of the thing seemed almost blue, even in the brown putrid air of that place, blue like dead flesh, and in some places there looked to be cracks running against the grain of its brawn, as newly emerging scales, whether like a serpent’s or merely flakes of skin.

It walked in stiff, slow paces from one of the clefts between the hills. Cayntuk had seen it come, somehow knowing before it appeared by which gateway a demon would enter at last. The warrior did not scream as the others had, but his sword fell from his grasp and made a frail, cheap sound as it struck the gravel. Cayntuk balled his fists and hardened his arms, as if to squeeze the fear from his body. Then he crouched and recovered the sword.

Brate and Dotha had hid themselves in the gap of the hills opposing the place from where the demon came. They would have run the length of the foggy gorge, but there was no gorge. There was no way onward. It was a closet of stone and earth, a doorless tomb into which they ran. They turned around and pressed themselves against the sides of the hills, hoping to become one color with the slopes and be hidden from sight, or burrow into it by pressure alone.

But the demon had not seen them, or cared not for them. It raised foot after foot, swinging its way ponderously toward Cayntuk.

He raised his sword.

The creature spoke no tongue of man. Its beak parted, and a sound came forth in no semblance to the appendage which ferried it. Not a falcon’s screech or a crow’s croak. A manlike voice, though no words in it. A bowel-born blasphemy, a growling moaning call, pushed out from the gasses of organs buried in its belly, belching the sounds of men who had perished, many men, deaths of agony whence the soul had stolen away already and the body itself died abandoned and lonely. The sound of something that did not know it was alive, or dead.

The demon blinked, and in the pit of its brow, where one eye had stood, there were two eyes now, side by side sharing one cavity. It blinked again, and the single eye returned.

Forgetting his quest, and in simple hatred for the sight of the thing, Cayntuk hurried at it, sword raised.

He swung his blade. The demon’s arm swept at the man and flung him. Cayntuk rolled through the air then struck the ground, spreading gravel in his fall. Then the demon seemed not so slow and without thought. Some wit animated its body then, and it ran after its fallen assailant.

Something awakened in Cayntuk as well. The power of the foe’s hand or the pain of his fall roused the man’s battle-blood. The passion which poisons a man who has fought for his life before, near to losing it, sure he would lose all if he did not bend to the desperation already possessing him. Like a creature of mud without heart or fear, he stood. His mouth opened, drool spilling down his beard. With a shout, Cayntuk swung his sword at the demon.

Its hand glanced away from the blade, its other arm already flying down upon the man. Cayntuk rebuffed the second limb and struck at its thigh. He pierced the flesh of the creature. It was like stabbing into an old hole of brittle and burned firewood. The wound was of no account to the demon. It raised its gored leg and kicked Cayntuk away. Man and sword stumbled back, refusing to fall this time.

He rushed his foe again, taking hold only a little of his mind, keeping away from its reach. It boxed at him, and he stepped aloft. It closed in nearer, and he bit its hand with his sword.

The demon voiced its nauseous, miserable roar again, and Cayntuk roared in reply. But battle cries do not trouble the damned.

The creature of the Hills of Uzpuru went at the man. It considered the bronze blade in its enemy’s hand no longer, going to him with arms spread in a steadfast embrace. Cayntuk cried out and stabbed at the demon’s breast as it lumbered against him. Whether or not the blade found its mark, he did not know. Two cold arms were around him, carrying him like a father hoists a son, and then he felt himself thrown upon the ground.

A foot stomped against his hip. Cayntuk howled at the power of the blow, not knowing whether it brought pain. He felt the demon seize his hair and raise him halfway to where he nearly sat up, then a leaden hand clapped against the side of his head and he was spinning along the graveled earth again. He saw the glitter of a thousand candles wherever he looked. Spitting and moaning, the man crawled upright, then fell over of his own weakness. He heard footsteps from all directions.

He was lifted into the air by two hands. Through the lights in his throbbing vision he saw the single eye, the beak, near, near. Cayntuk snarled and clawed at the beak. The demon caught his left arm with its mouth. It was like a smith’s tongs pressing against his skin, slicing the meat on both sides of his arm, but more concerned with breaking the bone, pinching deeper. Cayntuk drove his fist into the demon’s lone eye. The eye blinked, and the upper and lower lid clamped upon his wrist like a second mouth.

Cayntuk could not struggle against it. He could only yell.

But the beak opened. The eye opened.

The man dropped to the yellow ground. He lay there, breathing for a moment. There was a vicious sound somewhere near, as a wheel crushing glass underfoot. Cayntuk, panting, brushed his own soaked hair from his face and turned so that he sat up on his side. The demon was on its back, arms pounding at the earth, one leg flexing like a grasshopper’s caught by a toad. The other leg was lax. An animal was there, its mouth on the demon’s shin, mauling and wrenching the limb between its teeth. The animal wore an orange pelt, and was four-footed. Its tail was only a stump.

And the demon tried to rise, but the animal jerked it so suddenly that it fell flat again into the shale floor of that place.

It was a dog who had caught the demon. The dog. As though it handled a limp serpent, Ruok dragged the demon further away in its mouth.

Cayntuk found his feet, in a stupor all the while. His sword was not far. Taking it, he staggered toward the demon, which wriggled with perfect incompetence in the mouth of its new enemy. Its eye blinked, and the two eyes appeared again in the socket, and it saw the man standing over it. Cayntuk brought his blade down upon the demon’s neck with a shout, then again, shouting with each blow. There were many blows and many shouts before the head was hacked from the body.

Then there was quiet. From demon. From man. From dog.

Even the Hills of Uzpuru, which made no sound and knew no breeze or echo, seemed silenced for a time.

When Cayntuk felt refreshed, he set again to his work. He bore the head away from the body, hauling it by the rope of its mane, until he came upon one of the clefts. There he slung the head into the rusted and clouded air. It made no noise wherever it landed.

The man went back to the dog, who sat beside the carcass of the demon with as much cool and contentment as a dog might after a hunt. It showed no interest in the dead thing, and only sat panting gently. Cayntuk knelt and pet the animal at its shoulder and head, pulling an ear. The dog licked at his filthy hand.

“My great helper,” said Cayntuk. He smiled on the dog. “My life belongs to you. I name you Meeta, for it was told to me that the god Meeta pulls drowning men from mires and sets them on hard ground.”

Ruok, or Meeta, seemed indifferent to the new name, but licked its friend’s face all the same.

Cayntuk looked up, for others were walking toward them.

The brother and the sister had found their courage now that the danger was ended. Both stared at the headless monster and said nothing. When Cayntuk stood to his feet, Brate asked, “Are you not injured? I thought you dead three times in the fight.”

“I feel alive,” said Cayntuk, rather surprised himself. He had not thought of injury until the young man asked it of him. “Stand back.”

He picked his sword off from the ground and went to the demon. The dog whined at him, but Cayntuk was devoted to the task.

“You may have what you like of it when I am done,” said Cayntuk. “I take only a little.”

He began chopping at the demon’s legs. It was no easy labor. While the flesh of the ugly corpse was moldy and compromising, its bones were of some thicker make than the things born upon the earth. It took far too long to accomplish, and by the end Cayntuk had changed from the restful, cheered man spared of death only an hour earlier, to a cursing, frustrated, sticky butcher, hot and weary, with two foul, stinking treasures for all his labor.

He had taken the long bone of the leg from each of the demon’s limbs, and had scraped as much flesh from both as he could with his sword. The sword was ruined in the end. Not only now bathed in the water and color of things meant to remain inside a creature, it was also so chipped and chackered that it no longer looked like a sword, or even a tool of metal. Cayntuk did not seem to mind. He threw the weapon away into the fog. Brate watched it disappear and sighed.

There was yet some length of hair from the demon’s mane, shorn during the beheading. From this, Cayntuk knotted and twisted a cord, which he bound about the two bones, so that he could carry them on his back.

“We must know,” said Dotha. “Since you brought us to this lost land. What was the purpose? What are these bones to accomplish?”

Cayntuk looped the new cord over his shoulder, the bones knocking together.

“Come, we can leave now,” he said.

“O Cayntuk, you must tell us,” said Brate. They joined him as he began walking into one of the pathways between the slopes, the dog at his side.

“They are implements,” said Cayntuk, “for a rite.”

“Are you going to make a sacrifice?” asked Dotha. “To who? And with whom?”

The yellow and brown vapor swallowed them all, but they heard the dog panting, its claws scratching on the graveled ground. They kept close to the animal’s noise, and walked on.

“No sacrifice,” said Cayntuk. “Other than all that I have given and must give to gain the needed materials. But there is only one other piece to seek, and then I go to the place where the rite must be done. And I will prepare it.”

“What will it do?”

“I shall see.”

“What is your meaning? Why then do it?”

But he did not answer. They could not see him, but they heard his footsteps, and a grunt in his breathing as he walked. And they heard the dog panting, its claws scratching on the graveled ground. They kept close to the animal’s noise and walked on.

Click here for Chapter 5: Talafin

© 2024 Forrest Lybrand