…Boy With No Name

By D.B. Dakota

Born on harvest day, he's blamed for starvation, declared a curse by the priestess who's scheming for control. He suffers brutality and scorn, but his family steels him against ignorance and giving up. An outcast mentalist, he sidesteps superstition, invents revolutionary trappings, discovers a lush homeland and rescues the tribe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781613091869

Book preview

One

Kanni grabbed an empty basket, broke away from the pageant, and dashed off to her wickiup for more stone cakes.

Kanni, wait! Bearuff, her mate, yelled; he’d been eyeing two unfamiliar men leering at her. The oglers slipped out of the crowd and took out after her at the same pace.

Come back, Kanni! She must have been out of earshot. It was as though she didn’t hear the warning, and hurried along toward home.

Bearuff judged the strangers to be from a foreign tribe because they talked only to each other, revealing they couldn’t speak the Aureoll tongue. They wore sleeveless jackets made of uncropped, untanned hides, whereas bronze-skin Aureolls, more accomplished, were better dressed.

Cautious to keep from being seen by the strangers, Bearuff tailed them at a distance, picking up a broken tree limb along the way. As the two aliens swaggered along, they striped their faces with small chunks of yellow dye. Paint was nerve. The stain and pattern gave away the place from which they had come. Bearuff knew and bristled, overcome with anger. They belonged to the plundering Nullif brigade, a roving cult of lewd crusaders and grain thieves.

To keep from being spotted, Bearuff angled off the lane, aiming for a nearby house. The Nullifs were in Aureoll, Bearuff had no doubt, to start another blood revenge cycle, which to them was sport. Within their culture, sexual aggression was a gauge of high social rank.

Bearuff changed direction, sped up, and sneaked along in back of the vacant houses; his own was just ahead. The code of desert warfare required Aureolls to protect the honor of their women with spears, then invade the Nullif colony, if it could be found, and even the score with bloodshed if they dared. Not invited to the Pageant of the Husks, the strangers were there to pick a fight.

Bearuff stole to within sight of home, the Bearuff-Kanni house. She was just entering. Simple farmers, not sportsmen or warriors, Aureolls had no spears. Save for throwing stones, they helplessly allowed renegades like the Nullifs to have their way with the women. But Nullifs had yet to meet up with young Bearuff, strong and fiercely protective of his comely wife. He found no wisdom in the Aureoll’s Tolerance Rule, which promoted trying to live in harmony with brutes.

Kanni rushed into the wickiup. The interlopers, sneaking behind her, sprang toward the door. The leader man plunged inside. Outside the door, the accomplice loitered and kept watch. Bearuff heard Kanni squeal. Creeping up in back of the watchman, Bearuff raised the tree limb club high, and with full force swung it, striking him on top of the head. The lookout toppled to the ground without a sound except for the crack of the bludgeon on his skull.

Bearuff dived inside the wickiup and saw Kanni’s bloody face where the assailant’s fingernails had dug into her cheek. The attacker shoved Kanni onto the straw bed and fell on top of her. Her screams drowned out Bearuff’s noise as he rushed forward. The Nullif didn’t see Bearuff behind him with his foot drawn back, leveled at the man’s groin. With all his strength Bearuff kicked the rapist in the crotch.

Iiooowwah, the man shrieked. He bounced off to the side and grabbed himself. Bearuff seized the gagging invader by an ankle. Twisting the leg, he hoisted the howling man in the air and twirled the body around like a loaded sling. Aiming at a wall support mast, Bearuff slung the body toward it and let fly. The Nullif’s head struck the timber as blood streamed from his mouth.

THE PAGEANT OF THE Husks was a time of gladness and merrymaking, the sipping of acorn tea, and feasting on Kanni’s stonecakes. The harvest is good, a villager observed.

Ever it is, always, remarked another of the scores who had gathered on the east-facing ceremonial slope to give thanks to Maizzea for the fine crop of maize.

And how good your cakes, Kanni, added a third, munching. Kanni bowed at the compliment. Only the petite, young bride knew how to make them, and so tasty at that. The secret is yours—might you tell?

Kanni only smiled, laced her fingers down in front, closed her eyes, sniffed the cakes, and tilted her face toward the river. Something leafy grows there, she replied, and with her hands made a grinding motion. Her recipe called for sprinkling the foliage on the crushed corn as it fried on a rock.

Oh! Be it mint?

Kanni only smiled. For the pageant, she had kept the pones warm by tucking them between layers of husks in baskets waiting on a mat of marsh grasses. The bite-sized delicacies were being eaten faster than expected, so she had gone home for more—and then the assault.

THE SLASHES ON KANNI’S cheek were healing; she could feel scabs hardening as she rubbed her fingers around. The attack by the Nullif fiend had left her disfigured and now she might be scarred for life, and ugly. How unsightly her face might be she had no way of knowing except for comments Bearuff, her peers and friends might pass on, tempered of course to spare her from humiliation over the attack.

She remembered hearing about another way to know, to see for herself a likeness of her features. She could peek into the looking-pool, the only mirrored surface in the village. The pool was the tadpole hatchery, a glassy, stagnant puddle of water seeping out of a cavern in the side of the nearby mountain.

However, the pool belonged to Ummbl, priestess and the nation’s doctor. The medicine woman and practitioner in the realm of the supernatural, her creed was divination, the pursuit of foretelling. Her object of worship was Tungsee, god of medicine and prophecy.

Tungsee’s sanctuary was underground, back in the cavern. From there he ruled an empire of visionaries—demons, some natives called them. Tungsee revealed future events to the priestess-physician and she passed the prophecies along to the citizens, around three hundred souls, including children.

The cavern was called Passa, a Tunguzz word for mouth, because the cave’s entrance was built up to look like the mouth of a human. The upper lip was plain, but the lower lip was a row of smooth, red stones. Behind the lip, fierce-looking teeth stuck up. Whitish, icicle-shaped stalactites, knocked loose from the cavern’s roof, were anchored upside down in the ground. Getting inside Passa was a struggle, and its look frightened people away, all except Ummbl.

By law, all contents of the pool, namely reflected images, were the property of Dr. Umm, as some knew her. She used the pool’s images to exorcise evil spirits, and groom herself. The pool was Ummbl’s private looking-spot coveted by local residents, but forbidden to them. Anyone who gazed into it was an image vandal and thief. She kept the puddle covered with tumbleweeds to prevent vain citizens from inspecting their faces and warping upcoming phenomena.

Did Kanni dare to even get close to the authority’s territory? She pondered a long time and then talked herself into it. She would merely lean over the pool, capture a reflection of her face, and hide it in her mind; a quick glance was all she needed.

She trotted to the pool, pushed aside tumbleweed, and waited for the water to settle and the surface to flatten. Inspecting her wound, she found it not too upsetting. On her knees, gazing straight down, she encountered someone she’d never seen before—her own self.

She inspected her bronze skin and large, dark almond eyes; she bared her handsome teeth. She smiled roguishly, then frowned, and played with her hair. Turning her head this way and that, she was getting to know herself, and took longer than a glance. Ignorant of the law, Kanni broke it. She got caught. Since it was her first infraction, the slender youth was scolded by the doctor and warned to not mutilate the pool-image again.

The disfigurement didn’t affect Kanni’s genial disposition; one and all liked to see the jaunty one coming. Wearing a dressy vest of tailored hides, her long black pigtails bounced as she scampered along house-to-house, passing around stonecakes as gifts. Glib and cheery, she was a potter and weaver.

Her house, the Bearuffs’, was tawny-colored, the only home around with an ornate door. Houses in the community were dusky and all alike, but Kanni wanted something different. Being an artist too, she decided to paint pictures on the homely door. For paint, she had to concoct her own.

One source of pigmented raw material was where mint grew, in a swamp along the riverbank. Here and there were stands of the stately pokeweed. Featuring small white flowers, its berries were dark red, the size of the rabbit-like pika’s eyeball. The berries clustered on long drooping racemes and looked good enough to eat.

When the pokeberries ripened, Kanni snuck off to get some dye. She made her way through honey mesquite, red-tasseled ocotillo, and blowing sand, a showy but exhausting trek, considering her condition. She was expecting a baby, which would arrive as a gift of the harvest moon.

The Bearuff house, one of ninety-five, was on the outer fringe of the settlement, bordering a sandy wilderness. Blue lupine and green-bark, yellow-flowered paloverde thrived, along with other vegetation. This plant life was used to build wickiup houses. Kanni picked a few clusters of pokeberries and took them home.

Creating disorder and staining her hands, she squeezed the juice out of the berries onto a platter. With her fingers and a feather she painted designs on her door, a flap of animal skins. Most of the time she kept the door open. To keep prowling animals out, like raccoons, coyotes, and bears, she folded the flap closed and laid rocks against it.

Door designs were made up, imaginary. She drew stick figures of black tail deer, cock-like roadrunners, moons of varying fullness, and arrays of dots, linking the figures as if in motion. So pretty, the neighbors said. One envious soul withheld comment. In adorning her door, Kanni broke the law again; she didn’t know about that ordinance, either.

Parts of the pokeweed were poisonous. Not the berry juice, just the roots and seeds. For that reason, for protection of the people, Dr. Ummbl and only she, the nation’s health official, was sanctioned to extract poke juice and paint with it. The reasoning was that poisons found their way into places unforeseen. Poke poison, too, would creep up through the stems, mix with the juice, and infect the unwary.

As a precaution and to safeguard the citizenry, the untrained were not to handle the poke, absolutely not. The jealous neighbor woman who knew the law tattled to Ummbl, and passed along news of Kanni’s belly. It was round. With child, was she? Dr. Ummbl was the village hatcher and general practitioner.

What Ummbl looked like, none but her peers knew. In keeping with her exalted position of high priestess, her public face was smeared with makeup, assorted colors of clay, nutgalls and plant extracts. Her dark eyes were intense and squintier than the sloe features of the tribe, suggesting she was not pure Aureoll. Her face was small with thin lips and hollow cheeks, and drained of expression.

To some, the look was hostile. If she had emotion, it didn’t show. Tall, thin, at mid-life and childless, she was hopeful of becoming a mother too. Few grandparents lived to see their grandchildren; such was the Aureoll life span. Boys assumed the roles of men about the time their voices changed. Aureolls were migratory descendants of the Tunguzz.

Concerned for Kanni’s fetus, Ummbl threw up her hands over the door-painting infraction and let it pass; Kanni had two violations against her. But to protect the unborn child, the doctor ordered the mother-to-be into her infirmary to get an Evil-web treatment. Knowing she had no choice but to obey, and in the company of six neighbor mothers, Kanni checked in, removed some garments and stretched out on the floor.

Wielding a turkey feather, the doctor painted a picture of a spider web on Kanni’s bulging abdomen, the paint being the blackish-red juice squeezed from pokeberries. Demons, maladies, and poison could not pass through the web into the womb and harm the unborn growing within.

A warning to all bad spirits was issued. Evils tangle, demons strangle, the doctor murmured over and over. The warning set up a chant, a loud and clear scolding, picked up by the other women. They held hands and formed a ring, encircling the operation.

Chanting, Evils tangle, demons strangle, they shuffled around the half-naked Kanni. She was lying on an agave fiber mat in the middle of the doctor’s house.

Scattered all about the physician’s home-infirmary were implements, elixirs, and essentials of the medicine woman’s profession. These included ritual masks, carved bracelets, a necklace of wind-chime bells made of dry reeds, a basket of corn silks, stacks of corncobs and husks, and pots filled with potions, including poke juice.

Her trove had several bladder-pouches containing prognostications: derelict hornets’ nests holding names for newborn babies, dried insects, bat wings, spider silks, beaver teeth, and tongues and twitchy legs of dissected frogs. She was the nation’s healer with a well-stocked infirmary of nostrums and contrivances.

Kanni got up off the mat and put her garment of hides and woven corn shucks back on. She smiled at her neighbors and the doctor in thanks for the thoughtful procedure. Dr. Ummbl prescribed a cautionary treatment. Removing a nostrum from a wall peg, she gave an order to the mother-in-waiting. On this totem, chew. Or a No Moon will hatch.

What, O worthy doctor, is a No Moon? Kanni asked, scratching her head, assuming she’d give birth to a baby not unlike other infants.

No Moon is a moon lost, a Hollow. I implore you, spare us the hatch of a Hollow. Ummbl didn’t clarify what all that meant and the patient was not inclined to ask; she just wanted to free herself from the operation and go back home.

The practitioner dunked the totem, an organic ornament, in raw squash meat and scalded tadpoles. She hung it around the expecting one’s neck. The totem was one of many tribal necklaces crafted by ancestors, using old corncobs, nearly petrified, strung on a hide thong from the swift antelope. Each coming of dawn, nibble the totem and you will hatch a Sunup, bright and of the proper disposition, the doctor instructed.

Kanni respected the Evil-web and over her term never washed it off. But the totem? Chew this olden cob of doubt? she grumbled that evening to Bearuff. It is surely foul.

He shook his head, grinned, and hugged her in sympathy. Dressed in a loin hide, he’d been toiling in the late spring sun. Easygoing until provoked, Bearuff did question authorities and their rules, but only to himself. Regarding arms and protection from Nullifs, he didn’t agree with officials at all, but that was as far as he went. He had the freedom to disagree all he wanted—in private. Publicly or in person, authorities were not to be questioned.

As to medical advice, Bearuff didn’t pay much attention to it. The maverick just laughed behind the doctor’s back and went about his work. A stocky, muscular man with straight black hair to his shoulders, he, too, wore a totem around his neck. Not a petrified cob; it was a stone emblem, a fine, sharp flint, awarded him by the tribal council for valor in the skirmish with the two Nullifs.

Regarding her own totem, in deference to the medicine woman’s credentials, Kanni told her mate, "I shall wear it, though. Surely having it near my mouth will be good custody.

Two

Awaiting the arrival of their firstborn along with the rest of the Aureoll nation, the couple spent the summer in the field tending a special kind of grain, a rainbow-colored corn. Bearuff was a hoepigeon, weeding and tending the crop.

Kanni was a rainduck. She watered the plants one at a time by carrying water in a pot from the nearby River Reoll. Being close to river water, the harvests over the seasons had usually been fruitful. After the crops were laid by, Pageants of the Husks were regular events.

During the passing summer, however, the river level had gotten lower and lower, an unusual and worrisome condition. Their main livelihood was corn and without irrigation—hand watering and rain—the nation would perish. Small wonder they lived for the harvest.

The new adventure of giving birth drew near; having no trouble over the suns, moons and seasons, as the Aureolls reckoned time, Kanni carried her unborn to term. Without warning, heavy in labor, her time was at hand. She was expecting at any moment—and Bearuff was in the field, working. Alone in her house, she was frightened. Not knowing what would happen next, she began to shout for assistance. She waited, paced, hurt, and cried out, Help me! Please find and bring forth our hatcher of babies!

Standing, she bent way over to spy what was working its way out of her paunch. Dangling from her neck, the totem scraped the dirt floor. She craned with her head between her knees. Her face contorted to squeeze away the pangs. The spasms pelted her tense body. She clawed her ankles, shrieked and collapsed. No one responded.

The nearest neighbor did hear Kanni’s shouts and ran toward Passa in the desolate palisades to summon Dr. Ummbl.

ONE CELEBRATED TIME each autumn was set aside for an assessment of the upcoming harvest. The appraisal was a ritual, but practical too. Prior to the main gathering of corn, random ears with husks on were stripped from the stalks as samples. For an authoritative evaluation of the yield, the specimens were carried to a mystical place, the Passa, Tungsee’s grotto and the priestess’ sanctuary.

Back in the sacrosanct cavern, the upcoming harvest was being delivered, inspected, and judged. That sun of all suns, Ummbl, was absorbed in grave business, more seismic than a baby on the way. And the timing? Dreadful, with the fate of the nation about to be determined.

As midwife, Dr. Umm attended to the birthing of living offerings essential to the tribe. Of all gifts, maize was the most crucial and sacred. Diviner Ummbl, wearing a Mask of Doubt, sat cross-legged in her shrine back in the tall, deep chamber in near darkness. She delivered corn, ear by ear, brought to her by graincrows, men who had been harvesting samples since dawn.

Filing in from the field, the graincrows, one after another, arrived at Passa and slumped onto a tapestry of woven meadow plants. Passing by the cave’s mouth, they crawled back into the blackness where Ummbl was cloistered. Each graincrow carried a pregnant husk, an unopened ear, between his legs. Arriving at the appraiser, the crow rolled over and placed his random specimen of the harvest in her lap to be opened and evaluated.

She was weeping. At the shucking of each ear, she sniffed and quivered more and more. She couldn’t go on. Husks were concealing evidence of unsound grain. A sun of joy this will not be, she sobbed to her partner. Numbered now are our seasons, for we shall fall in hunger, each and all.

She looked up at Kon-Shenn the helper, her frail spouse with a small, pointed chin beard. A trustor in the highest council and speaker of candor, he was, more than anything, his wife’s moral judgment. He had been standing by her side throughout the assay, holding a torch so she could see.

Never has this happened to our harvests, he sighed as he toed the bad ears to one side. Good spicas are few. Set forth here is misfortune far and wide; what more do you need to see? Kon-Shenn