†
It was the day Cain had turned twelve years old, the morning he snuck away from his drunk, slumbering father. The air was moist, he remembered, his eye lids heavy, and the sky cast in darkness. He had stayed awake from dusk till his mother’s departure for the canal. It would be an hour before her return, the same time it would take to reach the southern altar. Fate had dealt a cruel ultimatum: leave now and let her suffer his father’s wrath or stay and face the beating so she wouldn’t have to. He sucked air through his teeth, mulled the scent fermented goat’s milk and sweat.
The kumasi skin pinned to the door knocked gently as Cain slipped into the early morning. His trek took longer than he expected, so he did not arrive until well after sunrise. The ritual had finished by then, but he could hear that the living sacrifice had yet to leave the altar. Cain shuddered to recall how tall the walls had seemed to him then, how their crumbling bricks ripped the skin on his fingers, spilled grit in his eyes, and how he feared that the faithful might turn him away if they thought he was crying. It was the most grueling climb of his life, and when he reached the top, to the shock of the congregation, he discovered his worries were unfounded. Tears or no, they cast him out. “The gods have no want of the unblooded.” They didn’t even tell him what that meant.
After, Cain wandered the southern ruin empty handed, lamenting he had ever stepped outside his father’s hovel yet delaying his inevitable return home. A part of him had hoped to die out there amongst the bronze swords marking the shallow graves and the remnants of ruins: clay, onyx, and stone. The witch will get me, he made himself believe. He had to pretend—real monsters were never like the ghost stories—though the thought comforted him as he lay in the shade of a decrepit arch and cried himself to sleep.
Young Cain awoke to smoke floating on the evening sky, a wispy trail of pearl across paling blue and blooming peach, wafting from the chimney of the last intact dwelling. Was that there before? It seemed impossible to miss. Then he heard that tragic melody and the melancholy in its ancient words. At once, the superstition set in stronger than a child’s skepticism. The urge to run was in his blood, yet his legs carried him forward, toward an open doorway where at once the hymn ceased.
“What’s that? A boy lost and far from home?” spoke a native woman, her voice haunting and aloof as her milk-pale skin, ghost-white braids, and eyes of murky fire. “Did they cut out his tongue, or do you think he was he born that way?”
“Who are you talking to?” Cain whimpered, though no sooner than he did, he saw the babe in her arms swaddled in a sash of silk.
“So he can speak. We were wrong, Adnihilo. What a shame. I thought we might have been gifted a mute.”
“Who are you?”
The pale woman arched her back, leaning tall into her throne of yellowed bones. “Have they forgotten me so quickly, before the moon has died its ninth? Or have they been made to forget?” She lifted a bronze blade from her lap and rose on long, slender legs, towering over him as she strode closer, clutching the tarnished sword in one hand, her other arm cradling the infant to her breast. “I am Bianca, boy. Why did you come here?”
“I want,” Cain fumbled. He wanted to run, to close his eyes and sprint crying into the black desert steppes where the cackling hounds would have him. Instead, he answered, “For someone to die.”
Bianca’s lips curled, and she squeezed her child tighter—so tight that the babe began to whine. “No,” she spoke, “What you want is to kill, to spill blood, to watch it seep into the sand and feed the old ones. They languish beneath us, waiting hungrily for the fall of the Walls of Barzakh. And you may be the one to bloody their altar, to offer up the child and bring about the end.”
“I don’t understand.”
The witch pressed the sword into his hands. It was heavier than he expected, and queerly formed: an arm length blade, double edged, a subtle, leading curve in its final third, a tail of tang lengthening the brass hilt. It felt like a hungry fang in Cain’s childish grip.
“Go,” Bianca ordered him. “Kill the boy and bring me the man.”
Cain’s memories became a blur after that. He could not recall emerging from the ruins, marching under the Walls, nor arriving home. What came after, though, was forever burned into his eyes. A body lay bloody on the dirt floor, her face like a dashed pomegranate, its juices drenching the old man’s fists. He was unconscious, stooped against the wall and clutching an empty milk-skin on his bulging belly. Peering through twilight, Cain watched the stained kumasi bag contract and expand and contract and expand, and he listened to the snores, deep and tranquil till he drove the bronze sword into his father’s entrails. The old man was so numb, he didn’t even scream as fermented milk spilled out his abdomen; but the boy did, and he retched as the stench molested his nostrils.
†
Kill the boy! thought Cain, recoiling from the brush of fingertips as he woke to Jezebel standing before him. “I’m sorry,” the words slipped from his lips.
“For what?”
He handed her the purse. “We need to stop by Shaka’s. Eabroni said he’d cut me bargain if I got him a steak.”
“Oh,
