Under the Red Sky

At the Edge of the World, the umber bluffs two to three spear throws from the village of brutal clay abodes, two men circled around each other under the empty and bloody Red Sky. Dust and sand clung to their sweaty, brown chests and legs. Black tresses of hair hung down around their faces, resting on their otherwise bare shoulders.

Each man held a pale spear as tall as himself, a spear of solid bone carved from the legs of an agmagog, the rare beast that crawled across the endless, ochre sands of the Thirsting Lands like gargantuan lizards with bulging eyes, rolled-up snouts, and razor tusks.

Mithash could only taste the dry, umber dust as his jaw ground sand between his teeth. His dark eyes strained against the white light of midday as the hot wind gnawed upon his skin. His only comfort was that the Edge of the World the air, though dusty, was free from the stench of dirty bodies, scat, and goats. And so, Mithash focused on that comfort. He focused on deep breaths of the odorless, dusty hot air as he stared down the other man. His mind was empty and poised for the violent dance before him.

The two men were not rivals. They were not friends. They were a seasoned hunter whose expeditions had left scars beneath his eyes, down his arms, and deep within his mind, and Mithash, a younger hunter who had yet to know so many wounds to bear so many scars.

They stepped like lithe, stalking beasts. Their strained eyes carried a grimness that seemed to understand the price of their wager: the first to make a mistake would be the first to die.

They came to the bluffs of the mesa to settle some small dispute. The seasoned man had insulted the younger. The younger man had answered with the hunters’ custom: “Fight me at the Edge of the World and die by those words.”

Crack. The men clashed. Spear hafts whipped through the air. Crack. Crack. CRACKcrack shouted bone striking bone. Hungry for the kill, the older man lunged with a furious cry, thrusting to deliver the pierce of death. The first mistake.

A deft crack and a quick sidestep threw the deathblow off its mark. The older man was all but dead now; his killer knew how to send the blow.

Mithash watched the hunter’s eyes flash with blinding, crippling pain when the spear sank deep into his prey’s chest and ran through his lung. The man did not cry out; only a muffled gasp lighter than the evening desert breeze passed his lips as he dropped to his knees. He grabbed the white bone haft with two hands, smearing his red blood across it.

The eyes of the dying man stared up at his killer. Mithash’s cool gaze watched those eyes flash between hate and despair as a flame flickers at the end of the night.

The man had no last words for Mithash, no requests, no pleading; he knew what had just happened, he knew what he had asked for, and he had accepted what was to come as much as any man could. His eyes settled on brutal, hot hatred. His smirk of admiration revealed gritted, yellow teeth lined red with blood.

The killer reached to his own hip with his right hand. He grabbed the chitin axe slung at his waist, raised it up… and smacked the dying man between the eyes. His skull popped. Blood spurted. The dead man shuddered once with the shock of the blow and fell to his side on the rocky ground, ugly red fountains gushing out from his face to quench the thirst of the rocks beneath him.

The killer kicked the corpse over onto its back. A man should not die on his side he thought. Let him stare up at the Red Sky. Let him defy it one last time.

The young man looked down, planted a goatskin boot on the dead man’s chest, and yanked his bloody spear free. He walked over to the bluff and stared out into the endless waves of ochre dunes beneath the empty Red Sky, his back to the corpse and the clay abodes.

The strong live. The weak die thought the young man. His wild black mane tangled with the wind. Sweat ran down his chest, shoulders, and back, mingling with the dry dust and wet blood sprayed by the axe blow. He heaved deep and weighty breaths. His muscles shook with the thrill of fighting, the thrill of wagering with life and death.

Your words are true once again, Old Man: the weak must die so that the strong may live. Spots of red smattered the smooth skin of the young man’s cheeks and strong, pointed jaw. His rich, dark eyes burned with resolve as he stared out into the Thirsting Lands, watching hot winds blow sand across them. When a weak man challenges a strong one, the weak man must die.

He was called Mithash Who Hunts, one of several men who carried that epithet. He was one of many mighty men who would travel out into the Thirsting Lands in search of the great agmagog or whatever other beast they might find and kill such as the chitin beasts who flew upon the hot wind and scavenged the dead or the lizards who hid in the sand waiting until a man walked over them to burst forth and rend him by their jaws. But, the agmagog was the beast that fed the tribe best, and so when the Old Man said that an agmagog would come, the hunters went out, laid bait for the beast, and killed it. Many had died this way.

Mithash Who Hunts had just killed a man, but that would not earn him a different name. Men often died. Men were often killed. The infernal gusts were always scattering grains of sand.

Strength does not just come with the thrust of the spear and the beating of the chest. He could beat his chest, and so he thought he was strong. Let me never be so foolish. Only an idiot tells a man he will kill him; a strong man just does it. He was too old anyway; death is better for him. Perhaps he knew that. Perhaps he did not have the courage for one more hunt.