The Reward of The Oolyay (3 page)

“I was at a bare-knuckle match in The Grain District,” said Teftek. “A resident named Ridgol was knocking the qulrota out of a Haygy named Jium. Then some alarms went off and all the soldiers got rounded up and dragged back to base- you know the rest.”

              Pojlim nodded and sat for a moment, mushing the Y’yoz root around in his mouth contemplatively.

“I was having sex,” he said at last. The response was simple and honest- Teftek decided not to follow up on it and, after a moment, Pojlim’s head disappeared back under the truck.

Teftek checked his pocket-ticker: Base 15, Unit 42.
Late
, he thought. As he brought his ticker away from his eyes, a child that seemed bleaker than anything he had ever seen stood almost directly in front of him. The child's cheeks were recessed so deeply that they seemed like canvas stretched across bone. The child’s eyes were not a Vesh’s eyes. They were neither white, nor red, nor even (like those very blessed, gorgeous models from the inner-cities) a hue of purple or orange; they were black. Pitch black. Outstretched toward Teftek was the child’s tiny, malnourished arm; rubbery white skin hung from his birdlike bones, and scrawny fingers looked rheumatic with bulbous knobby joints. A single finger protruded off the hand that pointed away from all the others, directly at Teftek’s forehead, as if attempting to drill into his brain.

“You are the death-priest,” the child said, his eyes seeming to look through Teftek towards something far away.

“What?” Teftek asked, shifting nervously and feeling deeply uneasy in the child’s presence.

The tiny little boy dressed in black, thick wool kept his hand firmly pointed at Teftek’s head.

“You are the death-priest?” he asked. Teftek realized now that this was a question and he relaxed just a little. Then a very old, tottering Hagayalick Necrologist strode up behind the boy and lifted his tiny frame up. The boy looked at the Hagayalick and repeated, “You are the death-priest?” Teftek relaxed slightly, not noticing Pojlim, who was secretly observing Teftek’s fright with slight amusement.

“Forgive him,” the ancient Hagayalick Necrologist interjected. “He is waiting for The Seeker, Inlojem…but I told him to go to your transport truck. Are you…uhm…
The Captain,
Teftek?”

“Captain Teftek,” Teftek corrected. “Not,
The Captain
, just Captain.” Most older Vesh had titles which seemed almost regal in nature, but were considered part of their names. These roles were ascribed to them during their youth in religious societies, but in the Uyor Sevoign these titles were either discarded or never given in the first place. Teftek would never find out that Pojlim was actually named The Grafter, Pojlim, because he had sewn a finger back onto an elder of his village when he was a child.

“Of course,
Captain
Teftek,” the relic of a Vesh said, stressing Captain far too heavily to mean any sort of respect. “This is The Prophet, Iogi.” He took Iogi off the ground and handed him to Teftek, who stood awkwardly with the child facing him, the boy's armpits resting on Teftek’s hands.

“You are the death-priest.” The child repeated. Teftek wasn’t sure whether it was a statement or a question anymore. The child just said it. Teftek handed Iogi to Pojlim, who had crawled out from under the truck to observe the wonderful awkwardness.

“Right, we’ll get him to where he needs to be,” Teftek assured the old Necrologist.

“Oh? Well…that’s good,” The priest replied dismissively, He was already walking away as three other children crowded around him. These children were much better nourished than Iogi, and they immediately began complaining about trivial discomforts while yelling at the old Necrologist for the smallest of offenses and pulling on his robes.

“Where’s Inlojem,” Teftek barked, his voice carrying above the complaints of the other child prophets who swarmed the Necrologist like Snap-fish.

“What? Oh…” The Necrologist turned around, with three children hanging from his arms and back, his old frame seeming as if it would collapse right there. “He is…”

“I am here,” Inlojem stated, pushing past the other Necrologist and walking directly toward Teftek. A child prophet started whining and grabbing Inlojem’s arm, and Inlojem pushed the child away from him by the forehead. The child began to cry, and amidst the chaos the other children began to cry as well. The ancient Hagayalick caretaker looked severely dismayed. Inlojem turned around and stared at all three children like a Shade just before it cuts open its victims. Their cries ceased. Inlojem turned away with a grunt and continued his B-line toward Teftek.

Teftek instinctively gripped his repeater and mentally prepared himself to speak to the towering old Oolyayn Necrologist, who lumbered at him in a manner that was also strangely elegant. Teftek straightened up as Inlojem reached him, and Inlojem stared Teftek down. The old Vesh’s eyes seemed to hold the world in their grasp; a looming sense of hatred that could not be manufactured over time, but seemed to have been built into him from the start. There were a thousand wrinkles around them, each one telling Teftek a new story about the trauma that this Vesh had either witnessed or had imposed upon others.

But Teftek knew something about trauma. The weapon at his side had eliminated villages, and no matter how creepy or strange, no Necrologist with some half-cocked belief about an ironic death-deity could scare him. He swallowed hard and then creased his brow as Inlojem finally spoke.

“This is it? You’re a boy!” Inlojem barked.

“I am Captain Teftek,” Teftek protested, “and I’ll have you add-“

“A little boy! They expect me to bring a child-prophet to the edge of the world, and they give me a little boy with a dung-popper to lead the way,” chastised Inlojem. His words were directed both at Teftek and to someone else entirely, as if cataloging this perceived misfortune to his deity. “What nonsense.”

“You will address me as Captain Teftek!” He barked.

“Captain of what? O
ther
boys
? Do you know what’s out there? Have you ever been in the country of Shades? Do you know what the Oolyay brought us on these vessels? I have slit the throats of boys like you in their sleep and spread their blood all over the camps, so that-“

“Are you going to get in the truck or are you going to stay here?” Teftek asked, losing his patience as he felt his fingers wrap themselves around the trigger. Inlojem’s eyes burned holes in Teftek’s neck, his own hand gripping his sickle-blade readily. Slowly, Teftek heard Inlojem’s footsteps, as he moved around the Captain, so smoothly that the motion was invisible at first. Teftek’s eyes followed Inlojem until he met Pojlim at the back of the truck. Still glaring at Teftek, Inlojem jumped up into the back of the truck, ignoring Pojlim’s tilted, respectful head and his outstretched helping hand. Teftek holstered his gun and pulled his eyes away, finally releasing the breath he'd been holding.

*  *  *

Inlojem sat upright on one of the pakrim benches inside the transport truck as its three-wheeled structure bumped along over rough gravel. Surrounding him were
other boys
, he thought, whose only differentiation from their captain were their muscles. Many had thick red or orange beards that spread from their chins like explosions frozen in time, and some had tattoos of Fio Rij Hagayal, or of The Oolyay. They had given Inlojem and the child prophet some space, leaving them on a bench of their own, pressed up upon the front of the truck’s tent-like enclosure against the back of the cab.

They looked and acted like grown Vesh, a couple of them singing and going on about a fight that had occurred in the town’s tavern. Yet, their voices quivered like prepubescent adolescents when they mentioned the dreaded alien ships that crashed throughout the planet. A hint of doubt entered Inlojem’s mind as he heard one of them attempt to explain the situation calmly using words like “fission frags” and “nuclear fires”. Such things elicited a more intense level of fear within the eyes of the young boys who surrounded the Necrologist.

They seemed so troubled by these words, words for strange weapons that Inlojem didn't understand. They looked like old men, if only for a moment, in their ponderous, concerned gazes. It led the old Vesh to invite a moment of doubt into his own mind, as he looked back beyond the town towards the distant smoldering wasteland that had been created by the falling alien ship. Even though he had already known, for the first time he understood that this was happening throughout the world; alien ships were crashing and eviscerating villages, towns and whole cities.

Inlojem watched The Ulgayir fade into the horizon of smoky ash and disappear as the truck struggled up the mountain paths, almost throwing him from the bench at each bump in the road. Inlojem knew that next to him, The Prophet Iogi stared at him with what seemed to be longing, keeping the child within his peripheral vision.

“You are the death-priest?” Iogi asked.

“Yes,” Inlojem replied coldly, keeping his eyes squarely on The Ulgayir as its points vanished. Inlojem had learned to detest child prophets because they had been so deeply corrupted by the Hagayalicks, who spoiled them and pampered them for every muttering line of tripe that came into their vacant, materialistic minds. Those children were undisciplined, royal and vicious, lying about someone they hated so that person would be killed by the Hagayalicks. Other times they simply spun myths out of their own creativity, and established new rituals just because they could. Eventually they would turn into Necrologists who killed, raped and tortured anyone who they proclaimed an enemy.

They were nothing like the child-prophets of Oolyay, whose very existences were predicated around suffering. In the early days, in the days of The Shades, when Shades would prowl from town to town and spread their plague across the land, the children of the Oolyay were brought forward through mishap and terror. The joy of those who received them, to see children spared by the vicious Shades was intense, but the suffering of their bodies was equally miserable. Their flesh were blighted with an unquenchable hunger at first, which would have to be fed until the fever subsided. Afterwards there was always dementia; a bout of sheer insanity where the deepest, unknown secrets of the Oolyay spewed forth into the cold world of Veshmali through the child’s unfiltered lips and betrayed the cruel God.

Visions of the future seeped into the demented eyes of these young, malformed children, and were muttered from their whispering mouths, consumed with awe. Their only surcease from suffering came from the old Necrologists, from roots and medicines that only slowed the process but quickened the hallucinations. Inlojem had treated twenty of them and remembered each little face. He remembered watching them rock back and forth, side to side, their eyes losing their vital redness each day. The color was obfuscated with black, with the Oolyay’s darkness, until finally out of their mouths would come the muffled mentions of another dimension, where they could see the whole future as clear as a tri-moon-lit night.

  Then the Uyor Sevoign had arrived with their
cure.
Their doctors, dressed in beige sanitary robes and wearing latex gloves, dispersed like lurking tethaguls through the town and pricked the arms of child prophets with needles. Those doctors looked at Vesh like Inlojem and Quantelenk and asked them questions like “how could you,” and “Did you
know
this was happening?” assuming he had the intellect of a child. He had brought Vesh back to life before. He
knew.

It wasn’t long before the eyes of the remaining Oolyay child-prophets cleared and, exceedingly bothered by the bastard children of their makeshift Hagayalick allies, they had disappeared. They wandered out to the outskirts of the town and then over the mountains and simply ceased to exist. One or two took their lives with their own hands, cursing their saviors for stripping them of their prophetic gifts, but the rest listlessly wandered off, disappearing into the plains and the mountains. Those children had accepted death already, but their bodies had been spared. The Necrologists and villagers were not surprised when the skeletons of children were brought back by scouts and hunters, but pangs of sadness chipped at Inlojem’s stoic disposition upon seeing them. Vesh like Inlojem looked at the doctors and medics and asked questions like “how could you,” and “Did you
know
this would happen?”

The one that now sat next to Inlojem had been cured…listless, dead inside and visionless. Apparently he had been repeating the phrase, “You are the death-priest,” for days, once he found out that he was supposed to leave the town. From the look of the child, he was twenty, twenty-five harvests at most.
Eight rotations, according to the heretics,
Inlojem thought reflexively. A cold anger swelled in his heart as he automatically did this conversion. He hated to concede even a fraction of his soul to their methods.

Each harvest divided the planet’s celestial rotation period into thirds. When the Uyor folk arrived, they began to document tri-harvest cycles in singular full solar rotations and divided the days into twenty increments which they called bases. Inlojem kept to the harvest cycle. That meant that this one had been cured young enough that he probably didn’t even remember the dementia, or the hallucinations. He was just a prophet by name, because he muttered things and looked skinny, like an Oolyay child-prophet from the days of the Shades. Inlojem brought himself to look at the child sidelong, and thought...