Sacrifice: Chapter 8
Embarkations (NORTH) – Chapter 1. Trial
The three men walked out over the muddy road to Miller’s corrals. The road was rough and uneven in the throes of the season, its dark damp earth molded in bootprint and hoofprint and the tracks of passing wagons, like a murky sea caught fast at the moment of turmoil. Their heels sank into it but they walked on unheeding, and the scent of the rains that had summoned this morass could still be perceived lingering on the air like an afterthought to the deed itself, warm and slightly humid and sweet. Beyond them out in the distance across the basin the low buttes were painted with suggestions of some more tender spring. An eagle, invisible in that vast open azure, let out a lone piercing cry.
Miller’s horses were out to pasture, and the three men entered the empty corral behind the long building of make-shift stalls. The space was delimited by a fence of crooked jostling trunks and branches with a zig-zagging middle rail, a wild affair that Miller himself had wrestled together and for which he harbored an unaccountable pride, though he was always repairing it because the horses would rub against the planks and undo his crude work and escape into the prairies to feast. Within the corral, the dark of the mud; beyond it, the pale of the desert. In the middle of the corral there stood a tall cast-iron tub, rusting at its edges and filled with a green liquid that was evidently meant for the horses, and Tenner strode up to it and laid his hands on its lip. He bounced his weight there and then he leaned against it, his body stretched out and long, as though testing his strength against its mass, as though his entire purpose there had been to overturn it, and then stood and nodded to the others. “This’ll just do,” he said.
Then he took two lucifer matches from a little tinder box in his coat pocket and broke the head off of one, flicking it from his fingers with an easy gesture. It sparked upon his fingernail and caught aflame in midair, smoking and sizzling away from him like a miniature meteorite hurled down by some god onto the earth and leaving in its traces the faint scent of burning sulfur; then it struck the damp ground and was spent there. A final tiny curl of smoke went up to mark its passing, vanishing into the air like the ghost of some minute city that had been cindered in its fall. Tenner held the matches up with the remaining sulfur hidden in his fist and Strongman Sam drew his lot. Miller watched them critically from a distance, his arms folded before him and the black bullwhip still rolled into a coil in his fist like a dead serpent. Strongman Sam held the headless match up before him and looked grimly at Tenner, who only nodded, his mouth expressionless beneath his mustache, his eyes illegible. So Sam shrugged and rubbed his shining bald head and took off his jacket and loosed his suspenders, slipping them over his shoulders one at a time, then undid his shirt and took it off as well. He strode to the fence, lay these items almost delicately on its upmost rail, as though afraid he might injure his garments or the fence itself, and then proceeded to undo the buttons of his longjohns, withdrawing his arms and letting the upper part dangle from his pants. Bare-chested and bare-backed, pink and soft-looking as a baby in that cool spring light, he walked to the watering tank, and put his hands upon its rim, flattening his massive back and leveling it out behind him just as Tenner had done, like a man set to begin a race. He peered up at Tenner from that position for a long moment, as though in estimation of the man’s quality, then nodded, and Tenner nodded as well but this time to Miller. The snake uncoiled, its long tail flapping to the ground.
Miller stalled a moment, looking from one to the other as if he expected them at the last moment to rescind, but he ought to have known better, for a man’s pride will carry him past sense and folly alike and into a realm far beyond any reasoning, where even the gold of glory and the iron of death mix into an amalgam all their own. No glory however comes to the executioner, for he is the deputy of Time on earth and Time is secretly feared and despised by all, and Miller sensed this and wished now he could be quit of his task, but he could not. That was the wagon to which he had hitched his own pride, that he was a man cold to the suffering of others, and now his pride must pull that weight. He let the bullwhip drag in the dust a moment, drawing it to and fro as if he would test its heft, its movement, but in truth he knew it like an extension of his arm, every inch of its oiled and sinuous length. He looked at them once more, but Sam’s eyes were downcast upon the ground now as though in shame, his dense musculature shifting beneath his fatty body like so many formless creatures stirring within a pale mud. As for Tenner, he was fingering his enormous mustaches and his dark and fixed gaze was fast upon that same mobile terrain; he was staring at it as though in some vague perplexity about its constitution, and he would not look up at all.
Miller shook his head in a final and comprehensive judgement of these events, lifted high the hand that held the whip and brought it down with a tight fast jerking motion like he were tossing dice, and flinched as he did so. Nor was it for fear of the whip, whose path he could have traced in the air, so well did he know the instrument. There was a booming there against the walls of the corral as the whip cut through sound itself, and after a still moment a thin angry line appeared on the white of Sam’s back. Sam’s body recoiled and twisted. His face tensed as if a cloud had passed his features, some dark thought. Then after a moment his jaw unclenched and he nodded again; and Miller brought his hand up, and the tip of the bullwhip traversed the space between them in an exhilarating arc, another resounding crack. The back arced and the shoulders rose. A second line crossed the first at its corner, some invisible child’s hand that had wished to draw an angle there but had failed the meeting of the lines.
At the third fall Sam was sputtering and red and his eyes were tearing up as though he had been bereaved of something precious by these blows, and at the fourth he let out a bestial howl and clenched his teeth. He shook his head in ire. He remained there a moment with his eyes shut, then rose painfully and looked at Tenner and Miller in a strange mixture of defeat and rage and challenge. Crooked vectors of blood upon his back had complemented the lines of the whipfall and had gridded his pale skin in the arcane geometry of some warped world, a place where nothing could be built to plumb or purpose. He put a hand delicately upon the small of his back and moved gingerly away, over to the fence, where he took up his garments and began the trembling procedure of donning them.
Tenner watched him go in that same state of intense calm that he had evinced before and during the whipping. He had kept silent and still throughout the entire display, standing there like a sentry or some assessor of Miller’s work, one arm folded across his chest and his hand at his mustaches, his eyes dark and ardent as they ever were when they cast upon the world, gazing speculatively as the lines manifested on Sam’s back and watching them as though he would measure how much more fragile was this flesh of a man than the hide of those beasts for which this implement had been designed. When Strongman Sam had stretched his longjohns upon himself the life began to show through, but he turned his stained back toward the mountains and stood there clutching his shirt and his jacket in his hand, leaning against the fence as if exhausted from the mere effort it had taken to cover his wounds. The high sun glimmered on his naked crown, beaded with sweat as it was despite the cool of the morning. Behind him stretched the desert plains, the intense sky that seemed to pass over them endlessly before all at once colliding precipitously into the hills at that distant juncture on the horizon, at some point where nor sky nor earth failed but rather wed and welded into some third substance in some second world. Sam looked out at nothing in particular, his eyes dull with pain, and Tenner looked to Miller.
“You ain’t gotta do this,” said Miller, all his bluster gone, and it was not clear if he wished to preserve Tenner with his words or sought rather exemption from the hard duty he had too lightly taken upon himself. He had even begin to loop up the excess of the braided leather, all fifteen feet of it, as though he was certain that no man could resist the sight of the scene that had preceded, not to speak of the act itself. But Tenner merely looked at him a moment with his intense and inscrutable eyes and a turn of mouth beneath his mustaches that might as well have been contempt as anything and doffed his hat.
They had agreed to five strokes, though Sam had at first demanded seven. He had said that for himself he could resist even ten, but did not want to incommode his challenger. Miller said that if he was called upon to do this thing he would do it right. He would bring the whip down with all the strength and skill he could bear upon it, as if it had been in fact a raging bull his hand sought to tame, and he said that they were fools to hope they could withstand that lash more than two or three strokes. He said he had once seen a thief whipped down in Mexico, and that with a riding crop, and the man had cried out like a child before the third fall and had been blubbering by the sixth. “The devil has a Mexican got to do with it,” responded Tenner. “A cur would shout out at blow one.” Miller shrugged and said that might be but that a riding crop was sure no bullwhip and they had damn well better know what they were in for. He said that they would be scarred for life. But Tenner only repeated what he had said before, which had sparked off these events in the first place, that a man should know how far into pain he could press before his will would crumble, that it was not right that a man did not know as much. That the Roman Mucius Scaevola had thrust his hand into the very flame until it withered there, so much was he master of himself, and he, Tenner, could not conceive why a man should not put himself to the trial now and then to gauge his command of his own spirit, and if such a trial left scars then so much the better, for the scars would be permanent reminder of the judgement. Then Miller had smelt gold in the business and had suggested that they take bets in the saloon, but Tenner had grown disdainful and said it was not a matter of earnings and it was no affair for the ogling of the crowd.
Now he doffed his jacket and his shirt and cast them down on the ground beside the water trough like shed skin, then stood beside the vessel a moment, his hand upon its rim, gazing steadily into its depths, the vivid green strands of algae there that seemed to shoot out from some world behind the world, a place infused with colors uncategorized and unnamed. Little mosquito larvae flitted dark and minute in the water, jerking about as though they themselves were driven on by the goading of a whip so small it could not be seen, in courses leading no where and to no right end. Then he looked up at Miller and at Sam and took up his position there as he had done afirst, the hard arcs of his muscles casting shadows. His forearms were dark to just above the elbows and the tan of his neck cut off abruptly at his shoulders, showing where the sun had been at work etching him in his labors and where its rays had not pierced the pale remainder. He could smell the brackish scent of the water in the tank. Its rim was sunned and hot beneath his palms with an almost intolerable heat. He looked down to the drip edge where the dust was dry already in the precocious threat of summer and noted the inverted cones there where the antlions were already sifting their pitfalls, and he stared into them as though he would penetrate beneath the surface and lay his vision direct upon the monsters themselves in their dark dens, their squat horned bodies working silently in the sands and their long serrated jaws dangling open in perennial unslakeable thirst. Then he nodded his head to allow the commencement and tensed his grip upon the rim.
His skin fretted somewhat at the first crack of the whip but otherwise he showed no alteration. By the third blow his face had grown russet, his dark eyes watering; a tremor had set into his body as though an energy were welling deep within it and his mouth had contorted into a smile of a weird and rising triumph. The whip had fallen upon him as though it were falling upon stone so little did his body shrink beneath its blows, with only those angry red lines glutting like gullets to betray the truth of its substance and the truth of the deed. And Miller, perceiving the immobility of that flesh and its refusal to buckle before his hand, was filled with a shock of resentment for which he would never have been able to account, and brought the scourge down furiously, as if his manhood had been called into question by this impassivity, as if he would punish virtue itself and strike through the poor armor of that skin to mark the very fortitude which was layered somewhere beneath it. He lifted his hefty arm and threw his whole weight into the downward slice and sent the whip ruthlessly slashing through the air. Then like a man possessed he thrashed violently once again, and with a tiny ejaculation of rage yet again.
When the echo of the last fall had spent itself off, ricocheting impotently into the void and followed thence by no cry but Miller’s own, the horseman stood stock still, the scourge lying limp as a dead snake on the ground where he had suddenly dropped it. He was breathing heavily through flared nostrils like some upright kin to his own bulls and stared down at the whip with an almost deranged expression on his face as though it had some way betrayed him. Then Tenner rose stiffly, stiffly bent to pick up his clothing and his hat, then stiffly straightened again. He put the hat on his head but did not dress himself, holding the clothing instead in his left hand, his torso nude to the light of day. He turned and looked over the others, as though he had forgotten their presence there and was only now just recalling. A tiny rivulet of crimson showed on the pale of his inner arm and wove down the dark sinews of his forearm and dripped silently from the forefinger of his out-turned hand, feeding the earth like an offering. He stood in that attitude what seemed a long while, gazing at them mysteriously, while Miller dithered in shame and Strongman Sam looked wild-eyed from one to the other.
As for him, the smile yet played on his fine lips beneath his enormous mustaches, and his eyes were ablaze. “Well now,” he said softly. “Well now.”
You have just read a chapter of the serial novel SACRIFICE, by John Bruce Leonard. A new chapter will be published each week. Subscribe below to receive new chapters directly in your email.
