Red Ruby Seeds

A/N: This story deals heavily in cannibalism as a cultural practice. It also features decapitation and themes of war.

The tree stood as the road between heaven and the earth. Its branches grazed the rush of stars overhead and its roots twisted into the rocky soil of the plains. Its rotund trunk and lush foliage spoke of years of survival in this harsh place. Its limbs groaned with dull red fruit, their corpulent bodies split on the ground all around their mother, their wet innards glistening in the moonlight.

Queen Whirlwind bent down and picked up one of the pomegranates. Her fingers traced the plump bodies of the ruby seeds inside. With violet tipped fingers she grazed the cheek of her husband. His skin fell away from the muscle at her touch, his skin rotted by three days of heat in the sun. The queen gave a stifled gasp at the putrid blood that clotted over the stain of the fruit on her fingers.

“My lady,” Dark Stallion murmured by her elbow. The man wouldn’t even raise his eyes to look at his older brother’s last expression of horror. Whirlwind could understand, here the magnificent warrior was only a severed head and an inviolate stain against the bark of the tree. His body had been fed to the carrion birds, scattered across the plain, bones tucked into the caches of foxes, his flesh in the belly of wolves, his blood soaked into earth. Nothing remained but their memories and this last edifice.

She removed a dagger from her belt and cut the rope that tied his head to the tree bark. Dark Stallion caught it with the ornate urn that would carry his brother from restless wandering to the honored place among the ancestors. All that remained of Fire Lord, King of the Sarmant.

That and the blood upon the tree.

As her other husband closed the box Whirlwind raised on her tip toes and reached for a budding fruit. She must have fruit grown from the blood of her king. The bodies on the ground were already dead, offering their flesh to seed the plain. She must have what had sprouted from her husband’s seed.

She plucked the desired pomegranate and dropped it into the pouch upon her belt. It was just beginning to split with its bursting life. She could see a glimpse of the future within the crimson jewels.

Of a fire, a most wondrous fire.

“My lady?” Dark Stallion asked again, and Whirlwind slowly shook her head. He was not to ask after a woman’s affair. They descended back down upon the battlefield like the mar, the night women who feasted on the dead. They crawled over bloated corpses and grazed the stolid faces of the dead with their warm hands. The sun’s fetid reach extended into the cool night as the smell of death choked and blinded the eyes. Wolves flitted through the grasses re-playing the singing of arrows three days before. Whirlwind pulled her shawl up over her mouth and kept one eye on her people’s primal enemy.

The wolf was a familiar death. It was as much a part of the land as the river that brought disease from its shores, the fire that cleansed the plains when lightning vivisected the summer skies. These were not the deaths of a true Sarmant however.

Death at the hand of the stranger was the proverbial touch. Invaders were as constant as the rise of the sun and moon. If it was not the Eran it was the Dahae, Sakae, or one of the myriad other rival tribes. Sarmant lived to fight, fought to live.

What was unfamiliar was whatever ritual of humiliation the barbarians practiced upon her people. The collection of heads by the Eran was decadent. The Sarmant satisfied themselves with scalps, nothing more was needed. Her husband’s beheading and dismemberment had been an act of supreme hostility. The invaders didn’t eat their deceased kin, but all people knew what became of those dead that were not properly interred. The queen’s blood roiled as fiercely as the great cauldrons the Sarmant used to boil sacrificial flesh off the bone. Before and behind her was an army of wandering dead.

The pomegranate rested against her belly like a babe. She cradled it lovingly as she crossed the killing field, hands and knees dirtied by dead blood and disintegrating flesh. Her fruit remained clean in its womb, shielded from all the horror of this world.

“Hurry,” Her daughter hissed as soon as they came into sight. Black Mare was warily watching the distant campfire of the stragglers that remained to raid the few farms in the area and enslave whatever Sarmant they could catch. The main army had departed the day before to chase after the retreat of the clan. The queen and these two alone had remained, the brother who had loved Fire Lord, and the daughter who may have belonged to him, his brother, or both. His closest family. The collection was their duty alone.

For the king would lead the rest of the dead home.

Black Mare’s eyes fell for a second to her mother’s abdomen as she held her horse for her to mount. Her shawl had fallen forward as the queen had pulled it away from her mouth. It pooled around a bulge in the center of her waist. Black Mare looked away. It was her pouch, surely, full of some prize. Her mother had ceased to menstruate a year before. She caught a smirk on her mother’s thin lips for a second but when she turned her face the queen’s expression was dour.

Black Mare swung into her saddle and held the box that contained Fire Lord’s head as his brother mounted his horse. She didn’t remove the lid. They could not eat his flesh in its putrid state, even boiled. Her hands clenched. They had been denied that last act of love. His essence had been scattered, lost in the bellies of animals and on the wind. Her mother-husband’s soul was in peril.

Tears lined her eyes, she would take a thousand scalps off the head of the Eran! She would cut them off the dying and the living! She wouldn’t even stop when her knife became dull, she would use her own hands and nails until they were slippery with blood!

She lifted her face to the moon as her mare began to gallop towards the mountains. The winding and narrow paths were impassable to an army, they would avoid the Eran this way. Once they had circumvented the enemy they would rejoin their clan on the other side of the foothills. They chased the opalescent light in the sky for it was shining over their kin as well.

In that nascent light however, there was all that was terrible about existence. The price of a soul was that of a body; to have no home, tribe, or family. To forever eat dirt and wander aimlessly across all time.

Div chased them as great shadows against canyon walls and the darkness between trees. They would consume the night with their great reaching jaws every time the moon disappeared behind a ridge. When they were immersed in darkness the entire slain army of the Sarmant pursued them as they carried the head of the king. Their horses galloped in a silent horde as the queen wept into the night. Their swords glinted as stars in an inverted night, their arrows rattled in their quivers as the wind through stone and tree. The cold splash of river and stream was the last adoring touch.

They were leading the dead home, one last time.

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When she was alone the queen kissed the king for the last time. Outside the mound her people celebrated, they beat drums and played flutes in a joyful clamor. The smoke of cooking fires filled the tomb, a preamble for the sacrificial meal that would be laid out for the dead.

In the dark the queen lifted the skull to her lips and kissed her king’s cheek. The empty eyes of hundreds of ancestors stared out from the wall of disembodied skulls, the remains of the countless others dismembered on the battlefield. Before her was the tombs of the past kings and queens of the Sarmant who had been fortunate enough to be sacrificed in their old age.

Those that had survived long enough to be sacrificed to the fire goddess and eaten by the clan were the greatest of the ancestors. They had given their wisdom to the people and their soul upon death. Not disease, nor war, had allowed for the possibility of their soul to be lost. Her mother and her three husbands had been killed together before her ascension, and she carried all their souls within her; complete and inviolate. She could feel their life within her even these fifteen years later.

She had hoped for such a fate for herself, but she knew when she had started to dream of the fire she would be lost. She could smell the smoke. She had eaten the pomegranate.

“I will be with you soon,” she promised. Within the next year she knew. Even if her body was mutilated as his had been, she would find him again. A man had only one wife. While a woman was free to marry as many as she liked, and all women were held in common; a man had only one wife. Whirlwind had always remembered this with her spouses. Each one deserved her time, affection, and respect. A woman shouldn’t take more than she could acknowledge. So, Whirlwind had limited herself to the two brothers.

Nevertheless, Fire Lord had been her king, hand-picked, and the father or uncle of Black Mare, the child she wished to succeed her. He had been her favorite, her eternal companion. His death was the signaling of the end of her life.

She laid her hand over her abdomen, but not quite yet.

The raucous noise that greeted her when she exited the tomb soothed her fears. Her people were so loud they could have called down the fire goddess in their joy. Whirlwind sighed and raised her head high as she walked into the crowd. Behind her the tomb was sealed, not to be reopened until it was the queen’s turn to lay down her head.

She found her daughter before one of the fires, her son at her feet. The boy was only two years old, fascinated by his mother’s fur-lined boots. Whirlwind smiled down at the child, all she would set the world ablaze for. She recognized the boots and knew Black Mare’s feet were swollen again if she would wear these oversized ones. She would have another grandchild in summer. She gave a small chuckle at Black Mare’s singular husband as he sat beside her, the only man she was affectionate with at all. Black Mare had always preferred women and would continue to evade the touches of all men save one.

The peculiarities of people, from the baby’s curiosity to Black Mare’s sexual scorn, those small but poignant idiosyncrasies of those she loved, she already knew she would miss them. The world was already slipping away from her. She would not see that second grandchild, and she would only be a mother once more. The smoke was acrid and thick.

She called Black Mare away from the fire. She took her into her tent and explained they were to divide the clan in two. They had a few months before winter before both armies would retreat. They would open two fronts to push the Eran back over the river during the winter. They would not be cornered again as they had been in the battle that had taken Fire Lord’s life. The attacks were to be quick but devastating. A pelting to march the Eran back step by step.

“Then in spring, we are going to start retreating again,” Whirlwind told her daughter. Black Mare made a disapproving noise in her throat.

“We’re going to give up any land we take back? Mother what are you—?” Whirlwind held up a hand for silence.

“We are going to lead them here.” The blood drained out of Black Mare’s face at her mother’s words. “That is when our armies will reunite.”

“For another battle?” she asked incredulously.

“Yes, but only I will be fighting it.” Whirlwind smiled. Black Mare tilted her head, clearly uncertain if her mother was joking or not. Whirlwind ended any impression she was not serious. “You will close off one path of retreat, Dark Stallion the other. And I will face them alone.”

“What, what?!”

Whirlwind repeated herself but to hear it again apparently only made Black Mare even angrier.

“What are you planning? What are you thinking? How could one woman alone defeat the army of a king?!” She demanded with her fists clenched, probably longing for her mother’s neck.

“With fire.” Whirlwind answered and laid a hand over where the pomegranate once rested. Black Mare blinked at her. The queen lowered her eyes. “I am uncertain how, but it is all I dream of. A most splendid fire, a divine fire, which will consume them all.”

“How could you even think to bring them to this place, where ghosts walk? We don’t even graze here!” Black Mare pointed at the tomb, the sacred monolith. Dug by the first great queen of their people. Whirlwind’s gaze followed the direction of her daughter’s outrage.

“It is the perfect place,” she murmured. “A place we don’t use.”

Black Mare open and shut her mouth. Whirlwind smiled sadly at this daughter who was so like her. She had Whirlwind’s dark, oval eyes unlike the round ones of her father-uncles. The black hair she was named for had been inherited from Whirlwind as well. Both of their brows were high, and their cheeks were flat, something that could be seen in her grandson’s face as well. Whirlwind had married Fire Lord and Dark Stallion to secure an alliance of two lines, but Black Mare had taken after her mother’s family.

Her temper however was far more like that of her sire, whichever one. She was far brasher than her mother. Her people needed that sort of tireless confidence Fire Lord had exhumed now more than ever. They were exhausted and disheartened, but Whirlwind knew Black Mare would fight until there was nothing left of herself but an angry, inviolate ghost.

“Think only of the child that grows within you.” Whirlwind kindly suggested. Black Mare recoiled as she had unlikely told anyone save Archer, her favorite female, that she was with child again. True to form however her response was angry.

“This child needs pasture! A homeland! To be looked after by her ancestors! She already has been denied the soul of her grandmother’s husband, and likely her grandmother too!” She snapped as she protectively covered her belly with her hands. Whirlwind raised her hand again for silence and even shaking in rage, Black Mare quelled before it.

“Think only of your child as I think of all the children this clan may ever have.” Whirlwind said evenly. Black Mare swallowed and let her mother pass her in silence. She never protested the decision again however. Despite her frustration and fear, Black Mare trusted the woman who had led her through battle her entire life. The woman who had tied her to her breast shortly after her birth to rote an enemy horde. Her daughter’s life had always been in Whirlwind’s hands.

She would not let it be extinguished even as flames began to overtake her.

The clan split itself the next morning. One half approached Whirlwind on her piebald charger and the other half gave themselves to Black Mare on her palomino. The mother and daughter parted with one last glance, one last nod.

The image of her daughter parting into the sun, with swollen feet, heavy breasts and all the potential of life, remained etched on the back of her eyelids as a bright light. Whirlwind’s breasts had already begun to swell as the conflagration inside her began to grow. A fire in her belly, hungry for battle.

#

The Sarmant had learned much from the wolves who harassed their cattle. They moved in small packs that would nip heels and show their fangs. They worried their prey relentlessly. They would appear out of nowhere and fill the sky with a hail of arrows for no longer than a few brief minutes. Before the army could reform after the chaos they would retreat.

They would let their voices join the howling of the wolves in the night. They circled camps in the night, conjuring div in their shadows and horrid shrieks. They would pick off any stragglers like the wolf did the sickly calves. They poisoned wells and dug traps with their claws.

They only killed a few dozen or so in the biggest attacks, and sometimes only one scalp could be claimed. Nevertheless, over the weeks the sea before them began to thin, from starvation, dehydration, desertion, and murder. Prisoners were executed to fatten the fire goddess. Farmers’ sons and daughters joined their horde. The tide began to turn as the world began to cool.

It was during winter when Whirlwind began to show. She became a brand in the snow. Glowing brightly and leaving puddles of melted snow in her wake as she walked across the camp.

As planned the armies were glowering at each other across the river. Whirlwind’s army held the north, Black Mare’s the south. Between them was a killing field of a mile wide. The headless corpse of the Eran diplomat sent to persuade Black Mare to turn against her mother stood as a rotting edifice in the middle of the field. Only Sarmant peasants could cross the field to water their cattle, and each time they did their feet crunched the bones of those who had tried to challenge or disobey their nobles. In spring it would be the lushest pasture.

The pomegranate tree became barren as the queen grew. The blood stain remained on the trunk, waiting to fertilize an entire new generation of ruby colored seeds. The tree and the queen, both impregnated by the same man, would give birth together in the summer.

Only the oldest priest was bold enough to ask the queen after her inexplicable swelling, and his concern was it may be a tumor.

“I feel the same as I did when I was pregnant,” Whirlwind told him. “My breasts are even enlarged.”

She ghosted her fingers over her sore breasts. She winced even at that small touch. Her nipples were dark and large. Unlike the tree she couldn’t feign death as she grew life.

“If my lady is with child that would be most extraordinary.” The priest commended. Whirlwind’s eyes fluttered at the passing nausea she often felt now. The smoke had begun to choke, her throat was always irritated. “But I am fearful to let the necessary time pass if it is not.”

“Let us enjoy the time we have,” the queen suggested with a wry smile. “It may come to nothing after all, as we are due to continue our war when the snow lifts.”

The priest left her and the wisewoman continued to minister to her nausea and swelling. As her breasts remained swollen and her belly continued to grow however rumors inevitably spread. Few dared to ask after the queen but to those few who had the privilege, Whirlwind did have an answer.

“I do believe I am.” And no one seemed to know how to react, including the queen herself. For a child to be conceived by a barren woman could only be the act of a god, and gods only interfered so overtly in the direst times. What could a child born to a barren woman mean for their people?

She didn’t speak of the seeds. The vessel of life from the fire goddess. She didn’t tell the wisewoman her pain was because her child was searing her womb. That her sweating was from the feeling of her innards being consumed by flames. That her last child was turning her body to embers. Soon all that would be left was skin over ash, to be scattered on the wind. Ash to feed the plants, animals, and her clan.

She had looked to death to save her people and she had been answered.

The answer however was too horrible to bear. She would not share it with anyone. This would be her last sacrifice as queen.

The family had their own questions.

“Is it mine or…his?” Dark Stallion asked her the evening of the first snow fall.

“His,” Whirlwind answered quietly. It was the first time she could say for sure. He kissed her cheek and took her into his arms. Not for the first time they mourned the man they had both loved together.

She wasn’t surprised when she saw Archer riding Black Mare’s piebald into the camp as the rumor even drifted across the killing field.

“She just wants to know if it’s true,” the woman said breathlessly as she knelt before her queen when they were alone together. “If you really are…with child.”

“Yes.” Was the curt response. Archer left without another word. A day later she returned with a message upon her lips.

“I trust you.”

Whirlwind nearly collapsed in relief, but also the fierce roar that swirled around her heart and lungs. She was almost afraid smoke would exit her mouth when she spoke.

“Tell her to carry on the plan then, and to have no fear.”

When the snow began to melt Black Mare began to move her camp back towards the mountains as planned. A few days later Whirlwind’s army convened on the bank to launch a folly at the Eran. The war was re-ignited with a song of arrow-flight.

The Eran jumped the banks of the river to rote the remaining Sarmant. The clan ground the bones of their slain kin beneath their horse’s hooves as they retreated. The lone pomegranate tree was still barren in the dirty slush, the blood-stain as bright as a brand in the snow. Perhaps even the Eran remembered what had stained the trunk. The tree was untouched by the flow of humanity around it.

The Eran were evaded as the Sarmant flowed into the foothills. They forced the army to wedge and divide itself to fit down the narrow washes and steep canyons. They would not be allowed to reform until they had reached the plain of the tomb. The arrogance of the Eran king strengthened the flow. Any experienced leader would know this was a ruse, but the Eran could only feel confident their superior numbers would eventually overwhelm the cowardly Sarmant.

The king was a fool, women never fight as men fight.

Black Mare’s army closed in from behind to dam any possibility of retreat. Within the foothills the snare began to choke the Eran. They had no choice but to try to jump two banks at once if they tried to break the Sarmant line. The scattering of the army made it easy to ambush troops individually.

The washes and canyons soon flowed with melted snow and blood. The rivers ran with a red tinge that spring, flowing into the plains below with an unexpected burst of life. The wolves followed their Sarmant sisters, feasting on the corpses and scattering bones and souls.

It was summer when they finally reached the tomb. Whirlwind’s army evacuated the winding canyons for the open plain of the mound. The surviving Eran were at last able to amass themselves into an army. Their sea however had become a lake only a few feet deep.

The grasses were dry, parched in the heat. Whirlwind was unbearably heavy and bloated. Her skin burned in the sun, her body burned from within. She was caught by Dark Stallion as she began to slump on her mount. The air was suffocating in its humidity and in the distance clouds roiled on the horizon.

A great pain vivisected Whirlwind’s body and she knew the time had come. She was in labor. Her body heaved downwards even as a searing heat rushed out towards her thighs. There would be the fire, and then nothing but ash.

“Take me to the top of the mound!” She cried above the wind to Dark Stallion. He glanced at her nervously but obeyed his queen. He led her horse as she struggled to remain upright. The horses climbed on their sturdy legs up the mound, digging into the earth against the wind. When they reached the top, she could see the entire plain, a churning mass of humanity below. The Eran with their banners in the center, Black Mare’s army just outside the foothills, her own clustered around the mound.

The dark clouds radiated the heat of the earth below. They shook the sky from within their distended bellies. The sky itself struggled to give birth as the wind screamed across the plain. With one last thunderous crash, the child of the fire goddess was born; the fire of heaven.

Lightning.

“Retreat towards the forest,” she ordered as she dismounted. Dark Stallion hesitated as her understood he was to leave her. She raised her hands and he lowered his face to kiss her one last time. One last taste of life even as her insides curled into nothing but agony.

He left her, and alone upon the tomb with all the ancestors beneath her feet, she gave birth to her child. She laid her down as the fire goddess had her child. She laid her before her husband’s remains, what had been conceived in his death. There was a blinding flash as the fire within devoured her body and raged towards heaven. Her body was encased in flames and she shone brightly over the plain.

There was no pain, no pain at all. Just a distant tremble and beautiful light vivisecting her body. She followed the fire to heaven and left her child to burn below.

#

Black Mare opened her mouth and tore her lungs open when she saw her mother be struck by the lightning bolt. The scream had barely left her lips when it was over. It was nothing more than a catastrophic flash of light. Yet she felt she saw her mother be torn asunder by the light. Her body consumed in an explosion of fire.

Archer and her husband both grasped the reigns of her horse when she tried to gallop towards the tomb. They begged her to not be a fool and to think of her children. Of them and the people.

“Oh, oh, Momma,” Black Mare covered her mouth with her hand and turned away. Tears flowed down her cheeks. Had that terrible thing been the plan all along? Archer had confirmed her mother was pregnant, or thought she was. How could she sacrifice herself like that if she was? What had she done?

Black Mare raised her head at the sound of screaming. From where her mother had been struck a fire was growing. Fanned by the wind it was rushing down the tomb towards the Eran, and away from the other half of the Sarmant. There was a palatable panic as the Eran cried out and rushed away from the flames.

And they were coming directly at her line.

“Hold! We’ll kill every last one of these dogs!” Black Mare screamed and drew her bow. She loaded two arrows and aimed them at an Eran noble. They sang through the air and sliced through the crevice between his breast plate and helm. His head spun through the air.

“For my mother!” She cried. Her people followed her example to murder every last person responsible for the angry ghosts of their kin. Tears filled her eyes as the conflagration continued to devour the Eran army. The wind blew west, keeping the flames away from the Sarmant and instead continued down the line of the Eran. She would have her thousand scalps.

“Little Sister!” She called out to the inferno, her mother’s last child. The title women gave to females they adored. The latest addition to their clan.

They killed the terrified remains of the Eran army in two hours. It was a mass sacrifice for the fire goddess. They let her eat every one of the bodies in her divine flames. Her mother’s dream come true. The Sarmant retreated to let the flames burn themselves out. They retreated into the mountains and watched the inferno burn for three days from atop the high, stony cliffs.

In that time Black Mare gave birth to her child.

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“I have a name for you now,” She told her daughter as the embers cooled upon the burned plain. She smiled down at the infant tucked into a sling along her breast. She had been uncertain why the child had been born with the red hair of Fire Lord. The bright color seemed to be a recollection of some sort, perhaps of the blood on the pomegranate tree. Now she knew why this soul had found her way here.

“Fire Wind.” This girl with the dark eyes of her grandmother. She would not be denied the flesh of her namesakes. Those two souls must live on in the child who would hopefully one day consume Black Mare’s flesh.

Black Mare walked across the smoking plain. All the remained were the melted metal of shield and sword, and a few bones poking out of mounds of ash. The Sarmant never grazed here, they could afford to lose this one pasture. If only Black Mare could be so conscientious in her death. She gathered the ash from the place her mother had given birth. She had the tree her father-uncle’s head had been hung on enshrined and fertilized by the ash.

The next year she fed her daughter the flesh of her grandparents; ruby colored seeds.