Aur Child

Bemko-Tiul, struck by another terrible calamity in his life, distraught by the sudden loss of the entire family with which he had shared his new beginning, the only people in Hill Village who he could be sure really cared for him, could not say for how long he had lingered with his boots in the foamy shoreline after Gallia-Tiul had left him. Despite the gathering darkness, his brow beaded with sweat. He noticed an unusual shaking in his hands. The events of that day swirled numbingly inside his massive head. Another small moan escaped between his pinkish lips. He was comfortable with confusion, but this was different; it was paralyzing.

He was confused by Gallia-Tiul’s reactions. She had refused to listen to him, although he wasn’t so sure himself of the point he had meant to make about the song he remembered. Was she angry with him? He had done what she asked; no Apostates or anyone else had threatened the family nor the Aur child.

He was also confused by Alai’s intentions. For hours the poor man had sat like a statue in his cottage, but as soon as Bemko carried the small clay pot into the forest to bury it as Gallia had asked, Alai made off with the Aur child in his small boat. Why didn’t Alai say where he was going? Alai knew the Aur child didn’t belong to him, yet he took it with him anyway. And his family; they would be cremated tonight in the pyre without him. He had left them all behind.

He was confused about the boy and his mother. After overcoming that initial shock of their death, Bemko struggled to suppress the tingle inside him that urged him to do something about it. But what could he do? The pyre was likely being constructed as he stood there staring out onto the sea beyond the point where he had last seen the black line of Alai’s wooden mast slide away. The drapier would have wrapped the bodies tightly and immersed them in the dry brush fuel of the pyre. In a few hours, the darkness would be such that the fire could be lit to burn beneath their final moon, so that their memory could be celebrated upon its future appearances. None of these duties were his. To watch them be consumed, he reasoned, was all he could do for them now.

The only thing that was not confusing was the children’s song that repeated in his head. It glowed there with the same feverish joy he felt when tending his plants. A hint of it had come to him several days earlier when speaking with Alai, but today all four lines of the simple song solidified and, from what seemed like the voice of a loving maternal figure, sang to him softly.

’Boil a’kelp bright,

For it won’ grow,

A cure all’itself,

O’r the great green glow.

But why this song now? He was certain it was a memory from his childhood. That was a thrill he would like to rejoice in if circumstances were different. He even fancied that the voice could be that of his mother. Did he seek comfort in a song that was sung to him as a child? It seemed unlikely, given the lyrics themselves. He hummed the lyrics over and again as if trying to learn them by rote. Or, he thought to himself, as if trying to decipher their meaning. With that thought, his eyes widened. He stared down into his massive hand and thought. He thought so hard that his fingers involuntarily curled up into a rocklike fist. The other clenched in kind so that before him hung the pair of fleshy masses. He leaned forward once or twice, as if intending to move, but returned to that coiled position. Then, without any further hesitation, he turned and walked with a certainty that had never been seen in him at Hill Village.

He plucked a few leaves from a particularly luscious plant inside the greenhouse and crumbled them into the small flask that was always in his satchel. Then, he proceeded past the courtyard gate in the direction of the village proper.

Twenty minutes later, Bemko arrived at the peak of the hill beyond the wind towers where the pyre had been erected for the wife and son of Alai. He crept among the heavy shadows of the wind towers and to the pyre itself. The drapier sat listlessly on a tuft of grass. Alai’s bicycle and trailer, used to transport the bodies, had been parked close to the pyre. Bemko appeared from the shadows and stepped confidently towards the drapier.

“Evenin’, Frenk,” he said, and presented a mudra after pulling his hat off his head.

Frenk seemed startled to see anyone with the moon still so low.

“Oh! Bemko. What a terrible evening,” he said, and then, acknowledging the man’s relationship to the bodies lain within the pyre beside them, “I’m so sorry for you.”

Bemko avoided looking Frenk in the eyes. He removed the small plastic flask from his satchel.

“I thought you would be thirsty sittin’ vigil up here, so I brought you some water.”

Without a reply from Frenk, he handed the flask to the wiry man.

Frenk reached out a branchlike arm with twiglike fingers and said, “Mighty thoughtful of you, Bemko.”

“A thought’s but a lost drip if you don’t act on it,” Bemko said, reciting another saying of the region.

Frenk nodded, lowering the flask from his mouth. “You know,” he said, “the Elders, they’ve been assembled down there for hours now.” He pointed with his other hand towards the village clinging to the side of the hill so that the man now appeared in the darkness like a young sapling. After another swig from the flask, he wiped his mouth on a floppy sleeve. With a smack of his lips, he said, “Ah, you’ve got some of those fancy flowers in here then?”

Bemko smiled in as friendly a way he could muster, given the circumstances, but did not dare to reply.

“I guess you’ve come to pay your last respects before the ceremony?” Frenk asked.

“Huh?” Bemko was surprised by the suggestion. “Well, yes, yes, I thought I’d come say my peace here before the crowd comes up. And,” he added, sticking to the original reason he had concocted for making the visit, “to bring Alai’s bicycle back to the cottage.”

Frenk yawned, the gap of his mouth pitch black like a tree hollow. He stood up with a slight wobble and said, “Well, I just come across exhausted. Perhaps it’s best I step into a wind tower and have a few minutes rest before the ceremony myself.” He nudged his chin toward the pyre. “That’ll leave you some time with them on your own.”

“Thank you,” Bemko said. He watched Frenk stumble away in a confused stupor. Before he arrived at the wind tower, the man fell to his knees and assumed an early slumber. Bemko stared carefully in the darkness to make sure the man did not move, but it was unnecessary. The tincture of leaves would keep him asleep for quite some time.

Bemko turned to the grueling task at hand. He pushed the bicycle closer to the pyre and positioned it beside the section where he saw the heavy fabrics the two bodies were wrapped within. Carefully pushing away twigs and branches, he created a narrow passage through which he intended to drag the bodies out of the waiting pyre. The plan proved to be much more difficult than imagined. With each snap of a twig, with each snag of the fabric, Bemko shuddered in panic. His short breaths were not caused by physical strain. He was afraid of himself, but he was already committed. To be caught now, he knew, would be unforgivable, especially for an outlander. With each grope into the pyre, Bemko sobbed more for the terrible thing he was doing.

First, he extracted the bundled body of the boy. Then, with much more effort and noise, he dragged the mother’s wrapped form out of the pyre and laid her upon the trailer beside her child. With a deep breath, Bemko searched to calm his nerves. He had done this only to emancipate them from the mouth of death, he swore to himself. Returning to the pyre, Bemko struggled with deep grunts, uncertain as to how much he should hide his work. Looking into that gap, he realized that he should have brought some light blankets to replace what he had removed, but it was too late now. He arranged the twigs and branches in such a way that, combined with the thick darkness that had set upon the hill, the absence of both bodies was, he hoped, sufficiently disguised.

It took Bemko less than ten minutes to return to the cottage. That sad place, he knew from tradition, would be undisturbed by villagers for many days. Releasing the ropes that bound them to the trailer, he cradled the mother under one arm and the son under the other. The dog crawled in behind him, sniffing at the air and whimpering. Both bodies were carefully transferred back to the bed upon which they had been discovered not half a day earlier. With a shaking hand, Bemko hesitantly unfurled the heavy drapes to expose the disheveled heads of the two corpses. He leaned over the bed; his face soaked with tears that had not stopped falling since he began the extraction an hour earlier, and kissed each of them gently upon their chilled foreheads. Then, he left them alone in the cottage.

With a frightened pace that would have appeared odd to anyone watching, Bemko skimmed along the nearside of Crabber’s Point. Knee deep in the tidal pools, he waded out and searched in the darkness for the even darker patches that flagged back and forth in the swirls of oscillating waves. He scraped at the rocky ledges until his satchel was stuffed with long strips of the slimy brown seaweed that grew in the crevices. Occasionally, he would raise a snatched bunch of it to his nose to smell it. The moon was high above him when his satchel bulged beyond capacity with the weight of the seaweed. His skulking trot home left a trail of pressed water leaking from the bag and returned him to the kitchen of the family cottage in enough time to see the crowds upon the wind tower hill silhouetted by the first flames of the pyre.

When the water he was heating rolled up to a boil, Bemko began to slip each strip of seaweed into the bubbling pot. After several seconds, each specimen of the dense brown plant transformed into a bright, translucent green. In successive rounds, Bemko removed this cooked seaweed and hung it out onto the back patio to dry in the arid breeze. He continued to do so until late into the night, when he finally collapsed into the chair from exhaustion and stress.

But his work was not done. In the hazy gleam of sunrise the next morning, Bemko opened his eyes after an uneasy nap to witness the morbid funeral he had created. The back patio was oddly decorated in a drab fanfare of green seaweed. He carefully peeled these dry strips from lines and, when he could no longer avoid it, turned to the woman and child. His hands shook again. His legs wobbled as he approached the bed. Leaning over, Bemko pushed his finger against the lips of the mother, separating them enough to fit a thumb in as well. He propped open the jaw as wide as it would go. He struggled to see through the blur of tears.

Strip by strip, he proceeded to stuff the bright green seaweed deep into the woman’s mouth. He returned over again from the patio with a new batch of the sticky green strands. Each time, he managed to push even more seaweed into the mouth shaped like a scream. Once he determined he had filled the mother’s mouth – what exactly was enough he had no way to know – he turned to the boy. He struggled even more, both physically and emotionally, with the child’s tiny mouth. His chest heaved with the pain of the unforgivable thing he was doing – he could hardly explain it to himself. To act in this way upon a hunch. The hubris to trounce upon so many taboos and expect a miracle was beyond ludicrous.

But what had he left? He didn’t have intelligence, he knew, only intuition. He dismissed clarity for clairvoyance. A long-lost liturgy replaced logic. But beyond all that, he hoped for a miracle. He had followed Our Order’s doctrine and, in so doing, considered it a promise. For that, he reasoned, he was therefore entitled to more than hope. Expectation.

He packed the gaping mouths with seaweed and thought of what they might do to his own body after this discovery. Then, he waited. When he judged a mouth too dry, he applied a drop of water, the most meticulous watering in all his life. He sang to them, the lullabies now coming freely as he went about his work. Lullabies that transcended villages as much as memories. This alone was some – the only – reassurance that he was right in what he was doing. This he continued, alone and unmolested, until he was found out.