Chapter one of Novel Five - Rough First Flow Draft

The Gospel According to Don Quixote
Chapter one

There’s a unique shade of green that leaves own only when they first unfurl to face the spring sun. A pure unblemished green that made Nahtan slowed from a loping run to a full stop in the middle of the ancient trail he’d followed for the last three days. Instinct rather than thought drove him into the thick foliaged to his left.
Motionless, he squatted in the thick mat of rotting leaves and began to listen to every sound surrounding him, classifying each and moving on until he’d finally focused on the one sound that had crept into his sub-consciousness and stopped him.
The sound of the wind, he knew, was by far the most complex as it slipped over, past, through, and around countless obstacles and hindrances. The wind carried as its burden sounds and scents that all can, but few actually do, sense or feel.
He resisted the urge he felt to get up and run away through the foliage though he knew he could do it without attracting the attention of the group a few yards to his north. The breeze had slowed but it still brought the scents of the group to his nose mixed with the more familiar scents of the northern forest.
His mind slowly sifted through one familiar marker after another until only the unfamiliar scents of the men and women to his northwest remained. Women, was the first word through his mind. He couldn’t remember having smelled, or seen a woman in many seasons. His body tensed as it began to rise and move involuntarily toward the source of the scent. Such had been the power of its attraction for him.
He took a long breath to relax the muscles of his legs and back as he settled to the ground again as the less powerful but more frightening smell of male sweat bullied its way into his consciousness making caution overcome the growing pressure between his legs.
Adjusting the bow and quiver on his back, he backed away without rising up and slithered through the foliage following the wind through the leaves and branches. The skins covering his feet made no mark on the earth beneath him as he covered the distance separating him from the group. They’d stopped moving he knew and had already begun gathering up wood for a fire. That they, whoever they were, had made no attempt to be silent or even careful in charging through the forest told him a great deal about them sight unseen.
His arrival in sight of their camp happened just as the first snaps and pops of a campfire that was sure he knew to grow much, much larger than it needed to be. Smoke billowed up amongst the think canopy of branches above their heads in such volume that it was sure to attract the attention of anyone from horizon to horizon who looked up.
He looked across the valley to his left and saw that the sun wasn’t much more than one or two diameters above the horizon. “Good,” he whispered barely loud enough for even himself to hear it as he crept on his belly, inches at a time, close enough to be able to see all of them.
His gasp surprised him and caused the woman feeding wood into the fire to pause and then finish dropping a small branch into the flames.
Nahtan had retreated almost two body lengths when he felt a sharp point against the small of his back just before someone took a handful of his shirt and pulled him to his feet.
His second unguarded reaction that morning was prompted by the owner of the hand that he pulled him up off the leaf mold. He looked up from her uncovered bosom, precisely at eye level for him, up to her face more than a foot’s length, at least, above his own.
She looked down upon him from two dark blue, almost violet eyes in which he saw not the slightest indication of either mercy or kindness. She said a few words as she pushed him in the direction of the camp. Her words had an odd sing-song quality as they fell upon his ear which didn’t match her massive size and strength.
Realizing that he had no other option than to go with her at the moment, he decided to do just that and then look about for a way to escape later. He couldn’t help but look now and then to his left fascinated by the graceful movements of the woman’s heavy breasts not two feet from his face. The unfamiliar pressure in his loins returned with a vengeance just as he was walked out from the forest into the small clearing where they’d tethered their animals and built a fire.
He again turned his head to the woman, watching her face as she looked about unsuccessfully for her companions. He could see from their tracks that they’d fled into the trees in four different directions. He watched as, when she shouted for them to come back to the fire, her efforts caused tiny vibrations in her breasts.
Somehow he found himself on the ground in less time than it took to realize where he was looking up at her, and then at the other four as the appeared in front of him. He worked his jaw as he rubbed the right side of his head with a callused palm finally understanding that she’d knocked him to the ground and he hadn’t either sensed or otherwise seen it coming all. The knowledge hit him hard as it had never come close to happening to him before.
Ignoring him, each of the group, three women and two men went back about the tasks of setting up camp ignoring him as if he wasn’t even there.
“I guess I’m no threat,” he said under his breath as he stood and brushing the dust, twigs and bits of leaves from his vest and leggings.
“Look around you,” a man said to him as he skillfully erected a sort of one-sided shelter from branches he cut from the surrounding trees, all of us but one would easily make two of you. Do you think you are a threat to us?”
The man who’d spoken was very dark-skinned, even for late summer and incredibly tall, though not quite so tall as the blond woman now gone back to gathering wood for the fire. His language, though hard-edged, and guttural to his ear, was understandable enough.
“I am Nahtan, teller of stories and holder of memories.”
The big man stood placing his left hand flat upon his chest and, bowing, said, “I am Khatib, and she,” he indicated the tall woman who’d just reappeared from the forest, “is Anatak, and if I were you I’d do my best to keep my gaze a little higher if you don’t want to get knocked down again.”
The small man nodded. “Can she understand my words?”
“Yes, she can,” was all he said before going back to weaving branches this way and that. Over his shoulder he finished, “She can speak to anyone and be understood. Always has.”
Nahtan walked toward the tall woman and stopped in front of her. “I ask your forgiveness,” he said just out of arm’s reach.
“Why were you looking at me that way?” She dropped the last of her branches and turned to face him.
He bowed slightly and said, “I have never seen a woman such as you.”
“What does that mean?” She took a step toward him.
“You’re beauty overwhelmed me. It will not happen again.”
She stopped, looking down at him for a moment before saying, “Help me with the fire wood.”
It was not a question, nor was it quite a command, but he took it as one and followed her into the shadows enveloping the forest still just out of arm’s reach just in case.
“What was that about?” Massoon said as he unburdened one of the pack horses.
Khatib shrugged before stepping back and looking at the shelter and, satisfied, he turned to him and answered, “I am surprised she didn’t break his neck.”
“I think she didn’t know what to think,” Okio said without looking up from the meat and roots she was chopping for the evening meal.
“Yes she did,” Alsa said as she dumped the contents of the basket in which she collected a days travel worth of mushrooms and fruit.
“Okay, she did, but she still wanted to beat him up I think.”
“I did not,” she said dumping an armload of wood by the fire. “It’s just that his eyes are right there,” she pulled an arm up horizontally at the level of her nipples. Maybe I should cover myself.”
“What for?” Okio said looking up. She too wore just a skin around her waist about a foot’s length or a little more, more than enough for the heat of summer though Alsa wore both a vest and leggings of pale deer skin and always had.
Everyone waited for Anatak to answer but she ignored them and pulled up a section of a fallen log. She sat next to the fire and stared into the growing flames.
Nahtan watched the interchange with great interest, wondering who these people were and how they’d come to be together. Questions about this and a dozen other things rushed through his mind as he watched the simple evening activities, each man and woman busying themselves with roles that were as clearly defined as they were well practiced. In his mind he began to construct a story about these people, all so extraordinary in appearance and speech, he knew he could spin a tale that would hold the attention of any audience long enough to earn a meal or two, or convince a crowd not to do him harm.
“So who are you?” Anatak said without looking up.
“I am Nahtan, teller of stories and holder of memories,” he said as he had said before. He pulled himself up his full height and looked around to see if anyone noticed. No one did.
“I am Khatib,” he said with no bow this time.
“I am Masoon,” the shorter man said with a slight bob of his head.
“And I am Okio, and you could help me over here if you wished to suddenly become useful.”
He turned toward her as Alsa introduced herself without looking up from her fruit and fungus.
Nahtan took a circuitous path keeping several feet between him and each man or woman he passed until he stood in front of the Okio woman.
She looked up at him though the most oddly shaped eyes he’d ever seen. A golden brown they were. Her face was very round and very flat with a small nose. “Do you have a knife?”
He thought that was just about the strangest question he’d ever been asked and it hurt his pride somehow. He reached behind his back to pull his prized possession from the scabbard. His hand searched his back for the half-second it took for him to realize that it was gone. His eyes sought out the tall woman, Anatak, and quickly found her. She had the leather-wrapped grip in her left hand and the tip resting on the index finger of her right hand. He knew she knew he was looking at her. He’d already sensed that in her, found some sort of kindred spirit, a fellow traveler though the shadows that seemed to consume the world from ocean to ocean.
It was then she smiled for the first time, at least the first time he’d seen her smile. In a movement almost too fast for him to follow, she took the blade in her right hand and threw it towards his head. Time dilated for him as it always did in times of danger. By the time the knife had cut through two feet of air he knew that it wasn’t going to hit him; that it would miss him by an inch or two, so he relaxed into perfect immobility and watched the blade slowly approach his face and then fly past ruffling the air near his ear.
He’d watched her the entire time, though it was only three slow beats of his heart. She had examined his face, gauged his reaction to what she’d done until the knife had buried itself inches into the tree to his left.
The smile returned to her face as he stood, she maintained eye contact with him until he turned away from her to retrieve his knife.
He turned back to find the other four pairs of eyes focused on him. He made eye contact with each until he’d returned his gaze to the tiny woman sitting at his feet. He tested the edge of his blade with what was left of his thumbnail and found it still sharp enough to split a hair. Sitting down in front of the tiny woman at his feet, he began to slice up the fruit and mushrooms she’d pushed across the broad plank at her feet.
Khatib leaned toward Anatak and whispered, “He’s not at all what you thought he was, is he?”
“Shall we take him with us?”
Khatib looked at her. “Do you think he’ll want to?”
“No man truly wants to walk alone.”
Khatib watched him carefully slicing the apples Okio had pulled from trees they’d walked under that morning. It was obvious to him that the knife Anatak had thrown at him was very, very sharp and equally obvious that she could have killed him had she chosen to do so.
“I think that it would be equally difficult for a woman to walk alone for all her days….” He followed her gaze to the small man slicing apples half a dozen paces across the fire. He had known Anatak since he’d found her, a small silently crying child, covered by her dead mother’s body in the burned out remnants of village in which the Hors had left nothing else alive.
A scratching sound pulled Khatib’s attention back to her. He watched as she created designs in dark earth at her feet with a stick she must have sharpened with Nahtan’s knife before she’d returned it to him. She’d told him long ago that they were the signs of the gods that had created both her people and this earth before the long ago. Asymmetrical crossed lines in various forms, five and six pointed stars, crescent shaped moon forms, fishes and fat sitting men, she always drew them exactly the same way, the way she’d been taught since she was old enough to hold the drawing stick in her hut seated at the foot of her mother.
He’d asked her a dozen times what the signs meant, or meant to her, and had always gotten exactly the same answer, “The signs and symbols of the sacred before times are not for the uninitiated, I will share both their creation and their mysteries with my daughters when they are born, with them and only them shall I share the mysteries.”
“And when will you have the daughters of which you’ve spoken so many times?” he asked as he stood. He’d asked the question before; it was a game they’d played many times. So many times, in fact, that he was stunned when her answer this time was different. So different that he stopped mid-stride and turned back to look at her.
“What did you just say?” he asked having heard her words but not believed what he’d heard.
Wrapping her fist tightly around the stick, she drove it far into the ground before she looked up at him. “You heard what I said.”
“Him? You want him? That little man?”
“It’s not about what I want. The prophecies of my mother have all come true for me but one.”
“She foresaw a tiny frightened man fathering your children?” he couldn’t stop the laugh that boomed forth from him. All eyes were on him as he watched Anatak stand to her full height.
“No,” she said simply,” she said that she’d foreseen that I would see the man who would fill my womb in a dream of my own.”
He looked at Nahtan and than back at her. He spoke loudly not caring who heard him as he replied, “You saw that,” he said still pointing at Nahtan,” in a dream? I don’t believe it.”
Nahtan stood knife in hand.
Okio said, “I wouldn’t.”
“I’m not you,” he hissed not taking his eyes from the man across the fire nearly twice his size.
Khatib took one step toward the fire before Massoon stepped in his way.
“Massoon, you had better move.”
“You should think about what you are doing. You do not know anything about this man you seek to kill.”
“He is barely a boy.”
Khatib place a hand in the middle of Massoon’s chest to push him aside expecting him to yield easily but he did not. He took the big man’s hand in his own and twisted it effortlessly yet powerfully enough to drive Khatib to his knees dropping his blade on the way down.
Nahtan watched everyone. He had no idea what was going to happen but he was anxious to see. No one looked surprised at what had happened between Massoon and Khatib. Massoon released his hand and waited for him to get back up on his feet. He wiped both sides of Khatib’s blade on the leather of his leggings and handed it back to the tall man. Not a word was said as the activities that had been going on before the confrontation resumed as though there had been no excitement. And, as he relaxed and sank back into a crouch in front of Okio and Alsa.
Alsa pushed more apples toward him and went back to work. Okio stared at him intently.
Nahtan cut an apple in half, and then in half again before returning her stare. “Yes?”
“I watched you.”
“And?”
“You showed no fear. I would have seen it were it there, but you had no fear of Khatib that I could see though he would easily make two of you.”
“I think,” he said returning to his work, “that it doesn’t matter so much the size of the dog in the fight, as it does the size of the fight in the dog.”
A broad grin grew across Alsa’s face though she didn’t stop what she was doing she looked over at him and then at Okio.
“What?” Okio said. She looked at Alsa for a second and then stuck her knife into the wood at her feet, stood up and walked away.
“What did I do?”
Alsa turned back to face him after Okio disappeared into the shelter. “You’ve surprised her.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, and you should know that she doesn’t like to be surprised.”
“Well, no one does,” he said starting in on the haunch of meat Alsa had return with.”
“No that’s not it. Okio, I think is very good at reading people, like some can read the sky and tell when it will rain or be cold, or read the signs in the forest and tell what animals can be hunted, she can read a man or a woman. So you can see how you surprised her, and why she doesn’t like that very much.”
“What about you?’
“Me?”
“You, what’s your story?”
“My story?”
“Yes everyone has a life that is a story.”
“I have done nothing.”
“You have survived this world in which we live.” He looked around the campsite and saw that neither Okio nor Khatib had reappeared from the darkness of the shelter he had built.
“They probably won’t come back out until tomorrow morning. That’s what they do every night.”
“They are bonded?”
“What?” She looked up with a confused look.
“A man and a woman who decide to create children together over time.”
She stopped cutting and laid her knife on the plank. “Why would anyone want to do that?”
“So they can know whose children are whose.”
“What woman would not know her own children?”
“A man wants to know who his children are I guess.”
The expression on her face eased from confusion to amusement. “You’ve never had a woman have you?”
“Had a woman?”
“Buried your manhood between a woman’s legs.”
He immediately looked down and finished removing the bone from the hunk of elken meat in front of him. His knife cut through the flesh with little resistance until he had a large pile of cubes in front of him.
“You do good work.” She’d moved around behind him as he’d worked, head down, suddenly oblivious to everything and everyone around him. He started when he felt her hand on his shoulder. She leaned past him and tossed a few cubes of meat back and forth before she drew her hand back to his stomach and then pushed it down into his crotch causing his manhood to stiffen, and his face to redden even below his sun-burned face.
“We may have to keep you around for a while.”
Having again gathered his wits, he looked up to see her retrieving a basket from beside the fire. Two pots, one slightly larger than the other, both very black, had been suspended over the fire on what had to be an iron pole. Steam rose straight up from each in the still air of the campsite.
“Put the meat in this one,” she said as she set the basket down onto the earth next to his knee. He shifted his behind to relieve the pressure that remained as he grabbed one handful of meat after another until the basket was full and the board in front of him empty.
He readjusted himself on last time and then stood, checking for obvious signs of his condition as he did so.
“Just dump half in each one,” she said as she pushed everything else that had been gathered up that day into each of the pot. When she was done she began to stir one pot and then other.
He watched her slowly stir the content of one pot and then the other.
“You could help you know,” she said.
“Do you have another spoon?”
She pointed at the pack next to the shelter with the spoon in her hand. A moment later he too was stirring the pot as soon as it began to bubbling and spit its contents into the coals below. He stopped stirring and used a log at his feet to back the coals to either side of each pot. The bubbling slowed enough to keep the contents inside the blackened pots and out of the hot earth beneath them.
“This isn’t going to take very long,” he said as he resumed stirring the pot.
“No, we’ll eat first,” she said without looking up. “Anatak, Massoon, bring your bowls; get it while it’s hot.
Massoon preceded Anatak by only a step or two and both soon stood over the fire bowls outstretched to Alsa. Nahtan took a short deep breath and then reached up to take Anatak’s bowl from her hand. It was then he noticed that she’d put on a doeskin vest that she’d obviously just cut as there were, as yet, no stitching nor any kind of adornment such as he’d come to expect on the clothing of beautiful women. But she’d put it on and, though his experience was very slim, he knew that she’d put it on because of him. He thought of the quills and beads that filled his small pack still cached out among the trees and how he could take the rough cut skin and make something beautiful from it as he filled her bowl and watched her walk back to the tree stump she had been sitting on.
“What about them?” He indicated the shelter Khatib had built and then disappeared into.
Massoon answered, “They’ll come out when they’re done,” and took his bowl back to the spot upon which he’d already spread his night cloth and blanket.
Nahtan looked over at Alsa who handed him a large bowl someone long ago had scooped out from the burl of an oak tree. “Thank you.”
She bowed her head slightly and began to fill hers as he filled his. Setting the bowl down on top of the woodpile Anatak had collected; he emptied the remaining contents of his pot into Alsa’s and began looking around for someplace to wash it.
“Leave it, and come eat with me,” she said walking past him and picking up his bowl. The two of them clean up after they get finished.”
“Eating?”
“Fucking and then eating,” she said with an odd smile, “Okio is obsessed with filling her womb with as much of Khatib’s seed as she possibly can.”
“She wants to have a child?”
“Her womb is old and dry though she’s convinced Khatib she’s much younger than she is. When men think with that,” she poked him in the groin with the thin end of her spoon, “they can be very stupid.”
He followed her over to the trunk of an enormous tree more than wide enough for both of them to recline against it side-by-side.
“It’s going to be cold tonight,” he said taking the bowl from her.
“It can’t be, this is only the eighth moon of this year, we have at least two moons of hot weather to come.”
“Maybe,” he said between bites, “maybe not. The wind hasn’t been blowing at all as it should be, at least not as it has in my lifetime.
“The wind blows amongst the trees as it always has.”
He spooned the contents of the bowl into his mouth as quickly as he could out of long habit. Those who stayed long over something as simple as a meal would not last long in this world he knew, and had seen for himself enough times to take the lesson as his own. He set the bowl down in the soft earth next to a thick root and then took in his hand a clump of dry earth. “Do you remember the last time it rained?”
Her hand stopped the spoon halfway to her mouth. It hung there as she watched him let the dust in his hand drift towards the ground on the slow breeze.
Her spoon fell back to her bowl. “Where did you come from?”
“South. You going to finish that?”
“I am, there’s more in the pot.” She pointed at the fire with her spoon at the same time he moved off in that direction. “I could carve you a ladle you know.” The look on her face told him she had no idea what a ladle was. “I’ll make you one,” he said in a whisper only he could hear.
“Would you?” Anatak stood over him with her bowl thrust towards him. He took it from her hand afraid she wouldn’t release it. She did. And she smiled. “I brought your packs in from the forest. They are next to my things. I heard you say that you believe it will get cold tonight. How can you know that?”
He looked over at Alsa for a few seconds as he filled Anatak’s bowl. Handing it up to her he explained, “I spend my days alone mostly, walking the old trails, the older the better even if they are only seen once a day you can feel that they were there once and where they go makes sense somehow. When you follow them the forest itself swallows you up and you become part of it, and when it does it speaks to you and tells you its secrets.
“I have never known a man to speak of mysteries as you do.”
“The forest is only a mystery to those who will not see it.”
“Thank you,” was all she said as she took the bowl from his hand and walked back to where she’d been eating. He took a step back toward Alsa but she shook her head and then inclined it towards Anatak. When he hesitated, she mouthed the word go and inclined her head again. Finally his feet began to move of their own accord, or maybe at Alsa’s command he wasn’t sure. One step followed another until the sound of the wind in the trees above his head stopped him mid-step.
As he watched the branches far above his head sway first one way and then the opposite, he inhaled deeply through his nose once, and then again.
“Yes.”
He looked up beside him and saw Anatak standing next to him looking up into the trees.
“Yes?”
“I’ve never seen the trees do this.”
“I have,” he said and walked over to where she’d laid his packs.

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