Smoke and Mirrors: Chapter 1

  I began to swing.  My life flashed before my eyes.
  It was a phenomenon that I had heard of before.  I had always imagined it as a blurry sequence of brief but meaningful images – a glimpse of a birthday party, the flutter of a lovers eyelash, holding the hand of a passing loved one.  Never had I dreamt of the depth, intensity, or incredible detail that the experience actually entailed.  And never since have I doubted the great and terrible power of the human mind; a power that, in everyday moments, feels as small and comfortably familiar as a stream of single linear thoughts, but can suddenly stretch before us as a great ocean of infinite possibilities, with the capacity for infinite layers of thought and perception.
  The following pages are filled with the thoughts of a few mere moments.  As my physical eye traced the graceful – even beautiful, perhaps – arc of my glinting sword, my inner eye gazed upon the passing of decades.
  The events tumbled one on top of another; I felt them all nearly at the same moment.  It was a bewildering clash of passionate emotions and sensations as you can imagine. Therefore there was no 'beginning' as such to my recollections.  But to describe them to you, I feel that I must begin with my earliest recollections. 
  Those earliest memories are dreamlike, disjointed images of my mother leaning over me, or of my father brushing his scarred and callused hands across my forehead.  I could hear the sounds of my siblings noisily running past.  Smells – there were many of those.  Dust, leather, cedar, sweat, onions, fire, meat being cooked.  Home.
  As I grew older, so the memories grew clearer.  By the time I was ten they were so clear and precise that I could describe each and every moment to you, but they are so ordinary I feel no need to tell them in detail here.  My childhood differed very little from any other child in the clan; it was filled with chores, study, petty childhood rivalries, and naive avowals of love. 
  Around the age of eleven I began to become passionate about my people.  I learned that we were a proud race, conscious of nature in a way that others could never be.  Our physical senses (especially hearing and smell) and our intuitive knowledge of the way Nature breaths and lives was indisputably superior to all others.  We were the Wolf People to outsiders, the Lachlan amongst ourselves. 
  My siblings, Maren and Tade, had little interest in the many various rituals that it was our duty as Lachlan to perform.  I think they would have ignored them altogether if they could have.  However, our father was a fervent believer in tradition and strictly kept all the holidays and rituals that the Goddess and the Elders demanded of us. 
  When dawn came each morning, while the others moaned and begged for more rest, I was already clasping my prayer beads and kneeling at the window.  I would feel a beautiful fire in my blood as I watched the sun rose.  The sensation was strange but delightful to my young heart.  Once I spoke to my Father of it, and he told me that it was the Mother Spirit, our goddess, singing inside my heart that made my blood tingle so. 
  Just as I loved and kept our many precious rituals, so I hated our enemies.  They were many, as we were a small clan encased in a great and powerful nation.  Their country was called Aya, and I had been told that it stretched from the sea in the west to mountains in the east – the other side of which, it was said, was the end of this world and the beginning of the next.  The Queen Aya, for whom the country was named, is said to have come from that Otherworld.  I had heard that the Ayans revered her as a Goddess and believed she was immortal. 
  When I was very young, they hardly interfered with us at all.  However, I had been raised from birth hearing terrible stories from the previous generation.  They said that once the Lachlan had rivaled the Ayan in power, until the raids.  Village after village was pillaged, the women raped, the men and children murdered, and all the homes burnt to the ground.  Now we were the last, and too few and too weak to reclaim vengeance against our tormentors. 
  And now they paid us the greatest insult; they ignored us.  They treated us as being of no consequence.  I loathed them; I loathed how they kept us trapped within a small area within the forest, so that I could not see the oceans or the mountains but only hear them described to me by the Elders.  When I thought of them, I felt a heat in my blood that was very different from the Mother Spirit singing in my veins.  It was the fire of hatred, and my father, who had lost his mother and father and sister to the Ayans, did all that he could to feed this fire.  When things were going badly, he showed me how the Ayans were the true cause of my miseries.  When I spoke of how fiercely I hated them, he would draw me to his side and embrace me, smiling as he whispered into my ear, “Now you...you are truly the son of my making.”
  One day, when I had turned thirteen years old, Father stopped me in the middle of my chores and bade me follow him.  I looked to my mother, who was sewing near the stove, for approval, only to see the strangest expression of discomfort upon her nodding face.  The fine hairs on my arms stood on end and I felt a terrible sense of unease about what was to come. 
  Nonetheless I followed my father.  He led me to our small wooden shed, where we kept all our tools and barrels of cured meat and jars of vegetables.  He took from it the bow and quiver of arrows that we occasionally used to hunt.
  “Are we going hunting, Father?” I asked.
  “After a fashion.”  His voice was so peculiar.  It sounded as though he might laugh, but there was also a joyless darkness within it.
  Then we walked and walked, farther through the forest than I had ever before traveled.  It was farther, even, then the day we had chased a fickle deer for an entire afternoon.  It was halfway through the night when my father gestured to me that we should slow our pace and take great care not to make noise, and another hour or two after that before we stopped.
  I could smell burning cedar, and see the glinting of little lights in the distance.  Shadows passed to and fro about them; men tending to low fires.  I wondered at first if they were a group of hunters resting before an early morning, but started when I noticed that their shape indicated the strange garb of the Outsiders.
  I had only seen one or two Outsider before this moment, on the occasions when a proud hunter had dragged home an enemy corpse alongside the rest of his cache.  It was then that I realized that seeing the remains of something has so little to do with what it is when animated with life.  As I crouched down in the darkness, I could smell that they smelled like us, hear that their voices sounded like ours; most astonishing all, I could hear that these cold, soulless brutes could even laugh like us.
  “Are they the Outsiders?”  I whispered to Father, feeling compelled to make certain.
  For a moment he did not respond.  His face was mostly concealed in the darkness of night, but an occasional flicker of the distant firelight and the breath of the moon's light illuminated the deep furrows in his brow and the gleam of his eye.  For a moment, he didn't look my Father at all.  I glimpsed him as the man he was beyond the role of my father, a man brimming with hidden emotions and wild fantasies.  I could see broken dreams with untempered passions that threatened to overcome his reason, and I was afraid.
  I had often been afraid of my father.  He was a large, powerful man, with equally large and powerful convictions.  But often this fear stirred a sense of adoration and reverence within me, so that it often only strengthened our bond.  I respected him and loved him, and did my best to always walk within his footsteps; but during that brief span of time, I felt an entirely different fear towards him.  I felt that he was dangerous and unknowable, and that perhaps I was better in the company of the Outsiders than near my own father.
  But then the spell was broken, and he smiled the old smile that I had always treasured. 
  “Yes, they are.  You're very clever, to have noticed from this distance.”  He clasped one hand upon my shoulder.  He scanned the group, his deep brown eyes jerking hastily back and forth.  Then they settled upon something.  “Now, you see that man, along the southernmost corner?”
  I followed his gaze and saw one of the men, far to my left, starting to break away from the rest of the group.  The firelight illuminated his back of his head, the hair of which was a queer bright yellow color.
  “Yes, I see him.”
  “We will follow him.  And you,”  He gave me a final pat on the shoulder, “Can lead.”
  I did not take this honor lightly; my heart was pounding at the prospect of making a mistake and drawing the enemy's attention.  Childishly, perhaps, I was not concerned about the danger of being found out, but only of disappointing Father.  Luckily neither event came to pass; we followed the man safely and silently until he was just out of earshot of the others, when he knelt at a little stream.
  There was a kettle in his hands, and I could see him dip it down into the cold water.  I was eying him so intently that I did not notice as my Father slowly pulled the bow off his back.  The next thing I knew an arrow had pierced the stranger in the ribs, and he fell howling into the stream.
  “Quick!”  Father snapped.  He leapt out from the brush and splashed through the water and straddled the man.  Father muffled the Outsider's cries with a burly hand, and wrapped the other arm tightly around his neck.
  I stumbled after him. The stranger was bucking and kicking like a wild animal in my father's grasp, but Father was far too strong for him.  Father's grip was brutally tight.
  “Time to become a warrior.”  His voice was harsh, his lips curled in a snarl.  There was such terrible, terrible hatred in his every word, in the way he drew each breath.  “You have your knife?”
  The stranger then grew very still, and looked pleadingly up at me.  A tiny circle of moonlight had crept through the roof of boughs above and illuminated his face perfectly.  It was abnormally pale, but otherwise so common in feature that it could have been the face of a Lachlan.  His eyes were blue, like my sister's; they tried to gaze piercingly into mine, but I looked away.
  Father could sense my uncertainty.  “Don't be fooled, Azan.  They may look like us, cry like us, laugh like us...but they are not men.  They are beasts.  Creatures like this --” And he shook the Outsider so violently that I thought that his neck might break, “Like him...they murdered and raped our people.  They stole everything we had, everything!  Men are not capable of such cruelty.  They are not men.”
  I bent over slowly and withdrew a knife from a sheath around my ankle.  My father had given me the blade on my birthday a few days before.  As I did so, I begin to feel the heat of rage bubbling up into my heart.
  When I looked up, there were tears running down my cheeks.  “Thank you, Father.”
  A warm smile spread across his face.  A proud smile.
  I plunged the blade into the man's side.  Father told me the wound was not fatally positioned, and bade me try again.  I had to stab him seven times before he slumped soundlessly in father's arms, and five more before Father was satisfied.  When it was all finished, my hands and clothing were nigh unto unrecognizable, as they were so heavily coated with blood.
  Father dropped the body, and it rolled so that it lay face down in the stream.  I stared at the corpse, trying to comprehend the enormity of the fact that never again would those hands grasp another, nor would the chest rise and fall, nor the eyes see – and most incomprehensible of all, that I had caused this change. 
  “One less vermin.”  Father kicked the corpse, and it lolled onto one side.  The water streaming past it's face gave the illusion of tears.
  For a moment I felt the most overwhelming sense of self loathing, and very nearly plunged my knife into my own heart.  But then Father reached out and grasped my face with both hands; for the first time in my life, I glimpsed tears upon his face. 
  “You are a warrior now, Azan.  A true man.”  He choked back a sob, and then held me tightly.  “I'm so proud of you son.”
  I packed away the horror, the loathing, the fear, and instead gave myself to an incredible sense of power.  All that night, I thought it to myself time and time again: I am a man.