Karadra's Shipwreck

The Island - Chapter 4

In the dark, he felt his body being jolted and his stomach roiling. Pain shot up his wrists and ankles, bound together in an unnatural and uncomfortable position.

Slowly, he started regaining his eyesight through a cloud of dizziness and nausea. Light flickered in his view, little wet glimmers swimming in a distant black canvas that constantly changed shapes and colors. He could hear people murmuring around him but couldn’t understand a word. Footsteps on branches echoed in the night, behind the rustling of leaves and the howling of trees – the winged nocturnal predators and the insects all sung in a jungly parody with Arsik in the lead role.

It took him a while to realize he was being carried. His hands and feet were tied on a thick reed; he was dangling from it like an animal, his face towards the sky. A small group of the savages he fought before, led him to a place that could only be a camp. Beyond the guide’s naked body, what Arsik could make out looked like a modest settlement of tents and campfires, dense smoke and the noise of crackling wood, along with a deep, coarse voice chanting and breaking at every verse.

Arsik’s hair hung nearly to the ground as, upside down, he strived to focus. His stomach, though, didn’t much agree with the recent poison it’d received, and he had the very sudden urge to vomit. Shivers and convulsions raked his body as a result.

The smell wafting towards them from the fires brought a lovely taste to Arsik’s mouth – charred meat, which reminded him how long it’d been since he’d had a warm meal and how much his stomach would thank him for it. He couldn’t identify exactly what they were cooking over the fire outside the tent he was being led to but, whatever it was, it looked delicious and quite substantial in size.

When they entered the tent, they threw him unceremoniously to the floor. Arsik gasped at his back’s impact with the hard ground and clung to the reed they’d used to carry him. Someone barked a word in a foreign language and went back out into the night, leaving Arsik alone with a guard. The burly man had his arms crossed over his chest, a machete on his belt and inscrutable eyes that glimmered in the dark like two pieces of burning embers.

Arsik shifted slowly and sat up on his elbows. He studied the man with eyes full of tears from the countless little aches that stabbed his entire body. After he had watched him long enough, he passed out again and, this time, he felt he vomited in his sleep for sure.

***

He heard talking – a harsh, incomprehensible language from two male voices. The age difference between them was easy to tell – one voice clearly old, slow and deep, the other louder and faster. Arsik opened his eyes and saw rounded outlines that gradually exhibited more and more angles. A torch burned in the hand of the younger man, who spoke incessantly. Next to him, an aged man with a painted face, sagging skin and a narrow chin, held an ancient staff with a small black stone wedged on its top. His eyes bore into Arsik who was tied up once more – this time on his feet, on the same godsdamn stalk of reed, that had somehow been set against the wall, restraining him.

“Where am I?”

His question interrupted the young man’s chatter, and he turned to spit a word at him, glaring. The elder man stopped him with a gesture.

“You are in the camp of the Aduna, in the heart of the Thorn,” said the old man, speaking the Teyne language with an impeccable accent, a fact that relieved Arsik a bit.

“In the heart of what?” The words came hoarsely from his mouth; his hands wriggled in bounds that allowed no chance of escape.

“The Thorn, the forest. You call it Sara-Thorn,” he said, cutting the name in two distinct, separate words.

“You sound like you come from Sara-Port,” Arsik answered mockingly, mimicking the old man’s speech. “You don’t happen to hail from there, do you?”

In the dark, the old man’s eyes narrowed into two disapproving slits. The shadows flickered across his face, and the young man next to him continued to shift his attention between his elder and Arsik.

“Once upon a time, in another life,” the old man replied coldly.

“Yes, I get it, I’ll be like you one day,” Arsik mumbled and the old man arched his brows. “Are you the leader here, then? Will you free me?”

“I am the Shaman. Do you know what that means?”

“A cook?”

The old man’s eyes flashed with anger, and he murmured a response that brought a smirk to the young man’s mouth.

“A Shaman is a spiritual leader, the tribe’s mage.”

“Well, mage, you’re not doing a good job. Your people attack whoever crosses their path. What is their problem, really?”

Arsik’s anger surged with every word. Hours had passed since the last time he’d had a drink, and he felt the need to skip any kind of conversation and devote himself to a higher purpose.

Drinking.

“My people are a tribe of hunters and their job is to attack their prey, foreigner.”

“Then they’re complete fools. They mistook me for a gazelle or a boar? I got two of them though. That third shithead with the blowgun or bow or whatever the f**k that was, I didn’t even see.”

“No. They didn’t mistake you, foreigner.”

Arsik shuddered at the old man’s words and started understanding his current position with a little more clarity.

The young man stepped forward and crouched next to Arsik, near his hands, tied behind his back. Arsik could lean over just enough to wonder what the man was looking for, and this proximity already made him uncomfortable.

“What is he doing?” he asked the old man, who responded with a grimace. A moment later, a crack sounded and Arsik yowled in pain louder than he’d ever had in his life.

“What- Ahhhh! What are you doing?!”

The young man straightened in front of him with blood running down his chin and onto his chest. From disturbingly close, Arsik saw his little finger trapped between the stranger’s teeth, who chewed in pleasure. Searing pain coursed through his hand and radiated through his body.

The old man spoke another word, Arsik kept screaming, and a moment later, his howling reached a crescendo after a second bite.

Two of his fingers had now been severed with evident ease and were tossing and turning between strong and eager jaws. Arsik wept and screamed and felt the anger like a golden glow flooding his forehead. His voice sounded more powerful then, less like a sob, but the pain returned very soon, and he felt his body bending and breaking.

When he was able to see again, the old man was peering curiously into his eyes and the young one was leaning towards his hands again. Arsik glowered at him and clenched his teeth.

“I will slaughter you!” he managed before the old man commanded the young one to stop. The latter turned to him questioningly.

“Berserker,” said the old man. Neither Arsik nor the young man, who was still chewing on the two fingers like a little kid gnawing on overcooked meat, understood the word.

Before Arsik could decipher it, he remembered the cooking fires outside the tent and the smell of meat and realized where that meat came from.

Nauseated, he heaved on the young man who barely had time to step back and avoid the projectile. Soaked in sweat, Arsik felt every strength abandon him. Spit and blood dribbled from his mouth, and the only thing he managed to say through frozen lips was a weak “What?”.

“You are a Berserker. You have the spirit of rage inside you, foreigner.”

“f**k you,” Arsik said fluently, and he got all the more irritated as he considered what strong teeth the young man had to have in order to be able to chew his fingers raw, and that Arsik himself, if he tried to eat an apple, would bleed profusely.

After the old man spoke a few words in their language, the young man hurried out of the tent, leaving Arsik and the Shaman alone.

“Luck is on your side, young man.”

Arsik raised his head –that’d been hanging like an anchor over his chest– and looked at the old man with swollen, wet eyes filled with disbelief and wonder.

“This isn’t happening,” he said to himself and burst into tears. “At least kill me before you eat me,” he sobbed.

The old man waited for Arsik’s despair to be spent. Arsik suddenly felt overwhelmed with exhaustion and an enormous weight that’d begun from his forehead. Where before burned the flame of rage, now sat an anvil, unbearable and unyielding, and Arsik bawled his eyes out.

“We are not going to eat you, foreigner. You have the spirit of rage within you. You are a Berserker. Your blood is tainted.”

“A what?”

“A Berserker.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“I told you, someone who is possessed by the spirit of rage.”

“Like all of us,” Arsik said heatedly, as if he was defending himself in the most absurd trial ever held.

“Not like all of us. You carry it inside of you, two spirits inside one body. You are its host.”

Arsik didn’t understand anything. He tried to speak but helpful words eluded him; slipped to the tip of his tongue and halted there abruptly. He shook all over; sweat and blood had formed a little puddle under his feet.

A sudden dizziness capsized everything around him. While losing consciousness, he heard the echo of the old man’s words moving further and further away, until darkness enveloped him once more.

***

He woke up again, on his back, for the third time in the same day – or night; he had no clue what time it was anymore. This time, the first thing he became aware of was an acrid smell, sour and a little sweet. His body was burning up. His head weighed like a ton of lead when he raised his eyes. Everything around him spun in circles; everything on him hurt.

The smell was coming from his mutilated hand. A strange substance had cauterized the open wounds of the two missing fingers, offering a small relief in the hell he was going through. He lay down, alone in the tent, released from his restraints. Sitting up abruptly caused everything to grow dark for a moment.

I’ll have to be more careful, at least at first.

When he recovered, he saw a wooden bowl in front of him, containing fruit and something that resembled roast meat. Touching his hand, he felt the gap where his fourth and fifth fingers used to be and fell into despair.

He chased those thoughts away for now, for the sake of survival, and went for the food. Fleetingly, he considered the possibility of it being poisoned, but there would be no sense in that. It was too easy for them to kill him, and they had already tended to his wound, so obviously they wanted him alive. At least, for a while.

He devoured the food ravenously and drank water from a jug. Outside, he could hear the savages’ songs, entire chants, off-tune and out of rhythm – very unlike the voices of the bards that came through the 21 Seagulls or other taverns in Saraport and the islands.

All that seemed so far away now.

Slowly, he headed outside. His weapons were missing. He carried a green apple in his right hand and bit at it stubbornly. He might risk breaking the last of his teeth, but if that young man could eat raw fingers, then Arsik would eat that godsdamn apple even if the pain killed him.

Outside, nearly forty people had formed a circle, chanting and dancing around the large pyre burning in its center. Smoke and odors drifted over from the fire and, in front of it, the great Shaman lifted his arms in exaggerated gestures that only priests and religious zealots could execute.

Arsik spat a piece of bloodied apple peel to the ground. A number of eyes turned his way as he walked outside. There were women there too, naked and ugly and wild, and they sang just as awful as the men. Some of them wailed between fits of weeping. Then he understood.

This was a funeral, a ritual for the men who’d died by Arsik’s hand in the jungle. These were the wives of those he’d killed, mourning and scowling at him, and Arsik felt more of an intruder than ever.

Afterwards though, he remembered that they had kept him alive and a small sense of security coursed through him. He allowed himself a taunting smile as he watched them staring at him with hatred, while he awkwardly ate an apple with more blood on his gums than a tribe of cannibalistic natives who fed on raw human body parts.

The Shaman approached him. “We are burning the dead,” he said emphatically as he stood in front of Arsik. “Those who fell by your hand. Their spirits will be embraced by the Great Sentinel tonight.”

“I can see that,” Arsik sputtered around a mouthful. “Good for you. Can I go now?”

The old man smiled. “We will eat them after. You can have some too if you’re still hungry.”

Arsik understood that the meat in the bowl was human. That detracted his chewing momentarily, but he suppressed his revulsion, ultimately deciding that he didn’t care that much after all. His gaze remained on the old man.

“First we eat, then we discuss something important, Berserker.”

“I’m not… Whatever that word is… Why did you keep me alive?”

“Because we have something for you. A very important mission.”

Arsik frowned. “A mission? Like a job?”

The old man gazed at the circle. At the waving of his hand, it broke apart unceremoniously, without the tribesmen ceasing their chanting.

“Yes,” he answered. “But first, we eat. Come with me, Berserker.”

He swept his arm as if showing the way to a banquet, and Arsik followed.