All that has been, will be again.
Thus had Brant of the Makmorni, the Sunset People, always believed. The idea was not new; it had been passed from grandfather to grandson since time out of mind.
Now Brant was the grandfather, only he had no grandsons to teach.
He sat on the still-frozen earth outside the hut of the Wise One, watching the clouds change into reddish-amber shapes as the sun went below the burial field’s sacred mound on the shortest day of winter. The cold crept into his bones as he waited on Skala the Wise to summon him inside.
Overhead, the sacred oak tree spread its gigantic limbs protectively over Brant. Acrid smoke from the peat fires in the surrounding huts stung his eyes, but smelled of home and safety. All was peaceful and quiet, but he knew how quickly that could change.
Brant went over his weapons as he waited, an automatic habit. One he tried to impress upon the younger hunters and warriors. They listened to him, or at least most did. After all, did not the midsummer marks on his life-stone need all the fingers of five men to cover? A long life for a regular hunter, let alone for a warrior who bore scars and owned femurs from many upon many battles.
Brant’s hair and beard still held some of the color of the evening clouds, but more and more the hairs drained and turned instead to something matching the dirty snow that still lay in the shade of the roundhouses.
Brant felt all of those summers, all of those gray hairs. He felt it in his bones and in his spirit. Life had been good, but he was tired.
The stone head of his war axe was loose. Brant took up a handful of the slushy snow, not feeling the cold in his work-hardened fingers and palm as he rubbed it into the sinew lashings until they were wet through. He used his teeth to pull the trailing end as he worked the ties, tasting the salty life force of the red deer who’d gifted the thongs to him by its death, tightening the oak haft against the heavy gray chert until he no longer felt any movement. He’d have to wait until the meeting with the Wise One ended and he got back to his own hearth to dry the cords, shrinking the lashings and tightening the weapon even further.
Only one weapon was allowed inside the hut of the Wise One. His grandfather’s grandfather’s war club.
Brant stood as Skala’s withered face appeared at the roundhouse’s opening. With the turf-covered walls and door framing her face, she looked a bit like a mossy turtle. With her white hair and whiter eyes, she might be more mound-spirit than turtle.
Brant did not smile at the thought, but it was not easy. Skala was not his grandmother, but they had always shared a relationship closer than most blood kin.
He ducked into the hut and squatted before the small turf fire at the center, looking up at Garm, his grandfather’s grandfather.
His ancestor’s skull peered down at him from its tiny platform of deer bone and auroch horn. The old man looked at him from behind those empty sockets as the light from the fire danced over his fleshless cheeks, and those of the smaller skull to his left. In the flickering light, both skulls took on that same red color. The color of the dusklit clouds, of Brant’s hair, of the lumps embedded in the huge war club propped against the platform.
Garm’s club was a weapon suited to the man’s legend. Nearly as tall as Brant, nearly as thick as his wrist. Studded with unique chunks of not-stone.
Those lumps were unlike anything Brant had ever seen anywhere else. In the entire clan, or of the clans as far as Brant had traveled, nearly thirty day’s fast walking, no one knew of what they were made.
Each smooth nodule was the size of his large toe. They held some sort of magic, for they would slowly turn green throughout the season, until they resembled the flesh of a dead man right before it falls from the bones. Once every year, on the night of the midwinter festival, the lumps were rubbed with oil-soaked leather until the green vanished and they shone forth as though they were captured drops of the evening sun.
The smaller skull above would look down at the restoration, and if it deemed work and worker worthy, would restore the power of the sun so the crops and animals could grow, the babies quicken, the clan thrive.
Garm would look on, protecting his charge in death as he had in life.
Garm’s companion served as the clan’s totem and god. In life, he had been Donkeek’t, The Saving Hand. The name was not easy. It came from some other language, perhaps not one spoken by natural men.
Legend held that Donkeek’t had driven the B’zuni—another tongue-bending name—from the land, saving the Makmorni and all the other clans from destruction. Donkeek’t had fallen in the battle, slain as he finished the final magic to bind the B’zuni from the land.
Garm had given his life protecting Donkeek’t long enough to work his spell.
Brant had asked his grandfather about the B’zuni, but the old man knew little. He had not yet been born when Garm fell.
“Creatures of fog and smoke,” he had told the wide-eyed youngster. “Black as a cloudy night. Cold as the water that kills. Devoid of kindness. Full of hate.”
“Where do they come from?” Brant had asked.
“Elsewhere,” his grandfather replied in a low whisper. “Outside. Between the shadow and the earth, maybe. They are not of this world, boy. Yet they hate this world and everything in it. Were it not for Donkeek’t, there would no longer be a world.”
Brant joined Skala in the midwinter chanting, polishing the ancient war club until the embedded lumps shone bright in the firelight.
Above him, Garm and Donkeek’t smiled down on Brant and Skala.