Outlaw (25 page)

Hadn’t Shaka said that his identity with and in the things and relationships of this world only distracted from his true identity and could thus be his downfall?

He looked at the warriors staring back at him with vacant, dark eyes. He knew that he was forgetting something—being one with his Father—but he now felt oddly disconnected from that truth.

Here in the flesh, in the real world, he saw only rejection. And he felt only isolation. The feeling threatened to bring fear with it, so Stephen shut his eyes and took a deep breath.

It’s OK. It’s going to be OK.

When he looked back at Kirutu, the ruler wore a knowing grin.

“I don’t belong to your world,” Stephen said. “It holds no power over me.”

“No? And I say that every pig will root in the mud until he finds food. Perhaps if I show you that food, you will pretend to be alive. Then I will have reason to kill you as well.”

What he could mean, Stephen didn’t know.

“Bring her!” Kirutu ordered to one side, expression now flat.

Two warriors emerged from around the corner, supporting a hooded woman who struggled feebly in their grasp. She was one of them and her hands were tied behind her back.

They stood her up next to Kirutu, who kept his eyes on Stephen.

“All of this valley and everything in it belong to me,” the ruler said. “What I do to one, I can do to whomever I choose.”

He waited a beat to let his words carry, then issued an order.

“Remove her hood.”

One of the warriors jerked the hood from the woman’s head. Stephen’s mind put reason to what he saw before his heart could react.

Here stood Lela, hair still matted with blood. She was awake and her eyes were round with fear. If not for a gag, screams might have accompanied the tears running down her cheeks.

But he didn’t need to hear her screams, he could hear her heart already.
Save me
, she was crying.
You said you would protect me
.

Before Stephen could react, Kirutu stepped behind Lela, grabbed her hair, jerked her head back, and ran a sharp bone knife across her exposed neck.

He held her still for a moment, then released his hold. Lela collapsed to the ground. Dead in her own blood.

Stephen recoiled.

Do not forget. Do not forget.

“She means nothing to you because you are dead,” Kirutu said. “And yet you show fear because you mistake yourself as one who deserves a woman. You deserve nothing but your own misery. In this too you are alone.”

Shaka’s teachings flowed through his mind, longing to be absorbed but finding no place to rest. In their place a larger realization swelled: Lela had accepted him where these others did not. She had trusted him. He’d failed her.

“Take her!”

The two warriors grabbed her arms and dragged her around the corner, leaving Stephen numb on the path.

“In the Tulim, life is mine to give and take,” Kirutu said. “I have taken the place of the shaman who once spoke the ways of the spirit. I am now ruler of this valley. The woman you call your mother believed that by giving me her life, she spared yours. But she only sentenced both of you to death. Now you both live at my whim.”

“No,” Stephen said.

Eyes fixed on him, Kirutu lifted his hand and motioned with two fingers. “Come.”

A woman slowly stepped into the daylight from the dark entry above Kirutu. A white woman dressed in a top and a short skirt, both woven from strands of palm thread. Her skin was luminous and her dark hair long, and Stephen knew immediately that he was looking at his mother.

She stood on the landing, tall and brave, arms at her sides, staring down at him. He hadn’t prepared himself, not knowing what to prepare for, but looking at her now, he could see his face in hers. His skin on her body. His eyes in her face.

Eyes that brimmed with tears as she gazed down at him.

His mother slowly descended the steps, walking upright, holding her head steady. There was a bruise on her right arm…two more on her legs. No cuts that he could see.

Her fingers were trembling as she set her feet on the path and stepped forward. Stephen stood still, at a loss. But he didn’t have time to consider the matter because she was suddenly rushing forward.

Her face twisted and tears streamed from her eyes as she reached him. The woman who was his mother threw her arms around him, pressed her cheek against his chest, and clung to him as if he were her flesh.

“Thank God…thank God…you’re alive. You’re alive. You’re alive.”

She was speaking in the language Shaka had taught him. The tongue of his mother.

She pulled back and looked up into his eyes. “You’re alive.” She touched his arms, his shoulders, his neck, drew her thumb over his cheek, nearly frantic in her thirst to know that her eyes did not deceive her.

He’d never felt so treasured as he did in that moment. It was as though she lived only for him. And now he stood before her, flesh of her flesh.

“You’re healthy?” she asked. “He took good care of you?”

Stephen wasn’t prepared for the emotions that rose through his chest at her question. A whole new world blossomed in his consciousness. Where he’d felt a desire to be close to Lela, he felt perfectly as one with this woman.

She was the one who’d given him birth. Who’d submitted herself to life under Kirutu’s brutality so that he could live.

So that
she
could live through him.

And yet upon her seeing him alive, her only concern was for him.

The details of her story, merely fascinating only two nights ago, now flooded Stephen’s mind with vibrant life. In that moment he became his mother’s son. Wholly and without reservation.

“I’m your son,” he said, speaking her tongue.

She blinked, eyes wrinkled with smiling gratitude. “You remember me?”

He somehow did, if not in his mind, in his bones.

“I read what you wrote.”

“So you know.”

“You will come with me?” he asked.

“No.” Fresh tears spilled from her eyes. “No, I can’t come now. In their eyes you are Outlaw.”

Stephen felt the crushing weight of that single word as if it were a boulder dropped from heaven. He felt his fingers tremble at his sides. Why, he didn’t know. She was his mother; he was her son. Yet he was Outlaw. Unworthy to be with her.

“You are well?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said.

But the bruises on her body suggested he should.

She glanced over her shoulder at Kirutu, who seemed content to let them speak, which confused Stephen in the wake of his harsh words.

His mother turned back, speaking now in a whisper. “I have dreams, Stephen. I can only remember parts of them when I wake, but they keep me alive. They are something beautiful. A great love. Shaka taught you how to love?”

“He taught me many things…”

“You must remember his words! They’re from beyond all that you see, like Shaka himself. You must not give in to the thoughts that will tear you apart.”

She knew, then.

“There isn’t time, sweetheart.” His mother placed her hand on his chest and gazed up into his eyes. “Promise your mother you’ll remember. Promise me.”

“Enough,” Kirutu said.

Enough? Fear swiped at Stephen’s mind, threatening to pull him into its prison.

“I beg you, Stephen. You have to remember, because I can’t. It’s the only way.”

“Enough!”

She backed away from him, eyes pleading. “Don’t give in to the fear. I beg you!”

Kirutu stepped up from behind and struck her jaw, sending her staggering.

“Enough!”

He grabbed her hair and pulled her up against him.

“Find the light,” his mother said.

But Stephen could see no light now.

The warriors on either side closed in next to their ruler. Kirutu brought his knife up to her exposed throat and pressed the blade into her skin, deep enough to draw blood.

“You have no mother because you are dead. The dead feast only on bones. It would be this woman’s bones that I feed you.”

The world had darkened and his mind was spinning, taunting him with a terrible fear. He couldn’t leave her in this monster’s house.

Three paces to Kirutu’s right, Lela’s blood still soaked the ground. The bodies he’d passed upon entering the compound still hung from their perches. Tulim was a valley of death, and the mother who had given her life for him was in its grasp. She too would die. Of this Stephen suddenly had no doubt.

“You will leave this valley and the mountain on which you hide, never to return. Know that she will serve me as I see fit, as she has. She too is dead.”

Stephen’s self-control was slipping, he could feel it, like silt being drawn by a deep current, pulled toward open waters.

A very faint voice at the back of his mind suggested that Kirutu was playing him, taunting him, daring him to react. But the warning was already distant, a voice far out from the shore. And then gone. In its place Stephen heard only the rush of blood in his ears.

Kirutu lifted his blade and swiped it against his mother’s cheek, leaving a bleeding gash in her flesh.

She gasped with pain, and Stephen felt something in his mind snap. Only one thought remained.

Save her.

And with that thought, a hundred emotions he’d long mastered overtook him. To save his mother he had to terminate the threat against her.

Kirutu. And the warriors at his side. Those who’d subjected her to endless abuse because she’d given herself to save her son.

All of this came to him in a single blink of his eyes, exploding into his awareness like a ball of fire that consumed his mind.

With that awareness, only one impulse.

To kill.

HIS BODY moved without forethought, overtaken by the instincts that Shaka had nurtured in him. Exact movement and calculation of forces, isolating muscles for their most efficient purpose, directing nerves to trigger with precision.

Since being taken by Shaka as an infant, Stephen had been in contact with no other man, much less lifted a hand to harm one. But these were no longer men in his mind. They were simply forces of darkness aligned against his mother. Black bodies inhabited by evil.

They were death itself, and his mother was in their grasp.

He had taken three long running steps directly toward Kirutu before he realized that he was moving. But Kirutu couldn’t be his first target. The man had his mother by her hair and a knife at her throat.

If directly threatened he might kill her. If not he would keep her alive as leverage. Stephen needed his mother alive. And he needed a weapon.

He didn’t know how this logic came to him—he was simply aware of it, knowing Kirutu’s animal instinct as well as the air he breathed.

Already at a full sprint, he veered sharply to his left, directly toward two warriors already throwing their spears. Stephen saw the shafts leave their hands and he saw it slowly, the way Shaka had taught him to watch thousands of his own projectiles travel to their intended targets. If properly focused, the mind could more accurately perceive.

See it differently, Stephen. See it in each moment, bending to your will. See it stopped in time.

He saw. The spears were already airborne, five paces distant.

As was he, hurtling forward in a low dive, eyes on the spears’ long shafts, spinning through slow, wobbly rotations as they flew. Their trajectory was fixed.

His was not.

He tucked himself, rolled once on the soft ground, and came around as one of the spears sped past him.

The one he would take for himself.

Using his momentum he came up, hand reaching for the butt of the shaft already. He closed his fingers around the wood, took three bounding strides toward the two empty-handed warriors, planted hard, and spun, swinging the spear in a full circle by the end of its shaft.

The spear was capped with a bone head sharpened to a blade on both sides, slicing through the air eight feet from the end of Stephen’s extended arms. The head completed its arc at three times the speed of his rotation and hardly slowed when it cut through the first warrior’s neck.

The second warrior had time to pull back, but not far enough to avoid the spear’s tip, which tore out his throat.

Four seconds since Stephen had first moved.

Two warriors lifeless.

One spear in hand.

Stephen didn’t pause to consider—his mind wasn’t thinking so much as reacting. And the ease of his first success only fueled his determination to save his mother. To slaughter the whole compound if required.

The speed and precision of his attack gave the Warik pause. The entire compound came to a standstill, all eyes locked in wonder at the feat they had just witnessed. Even Kirutu, who was clearly not accustomed to being questioned, much less bested, was still.

While his attack still had them set back on their heels, Stephen tore forward. Straight for Kirutu, spear cocked already. The man’s head was to his mother’s right now, a hand’s span between them. It would be like striking a coconut on the run.

He’d hit a thousand coconuts on the run. And his arm was already in forward motion when the Warik warriors recovered. Not only a few, but all of them at once, moving as one large body, like a school of fish or a flight of birds.

They roared and launched themselves forward, swarming around Kirutu in one black mass, cutting Stephen off from their ruler.

His attack had made them stronger, not weaker.

He knocked two spears from the air with a swipe of his arm and was at the throats of the leading men with his own shaft turned wide. The long hardwood shank struck three men broadside and shoved them back into the others, momentarily stalling the surging warriors.

“Stephen!” His mother’s voice screamed over the din of crying warriors. “You can’t—”

Kirutu had shoved his mother off to four men, who gagged her as they hauled her up the steps. Stephen’s path to her was cut off by the encroaching warriors.

He skipped backward on bare feet, twirling his spear in both hands, aware of his control over balance, speed, angles of attack, and escape.

But none of these promised a route to his mother.

His heart pounded, not from exertion, but with emotion. Rage. Fear for his mother. He could feel her years of suffering wash through his body as if it had replaced the blood in his veins.

And that blood was as black as midnight, swelling in him still, blinding him to everything but the desperate need to save her.

The warriors were closing in on him now, twenty of them abreast, forming an arc. He could tear through them, he was certain. Would tear into them. Wanted nothing more now than to rip them apart, a notion that roared through his mind like a rabid beast and left him trembling.

Only then did he see the flood of warriors pouring through the gate. Like dark waters they spilled into the compound and spread wide in both directions along the fence with the intention of sealing him in.

There was only one way to reach his mother. Kirutu had to die. Without a leader the Warik would offer no threat, like a headless snake.

Stephen slowed his retreat. The warriors, emboldened by the flanking maneuver of those streaming through the gate, slowed, clearly sure in their numbers.

The body follows the head, Stephen. Control your mind and you will own your body.

The ruler stood near the foot of the steps, at ease, watching without concern, bearing only the single knife. He lifted one hand to his mouth and issued a shrill whistle. Then threw his head back and laughed, a madman relishing his power.

Hatred swallowed Stephen whole. It wouldn’t suffice to kill this man. Kirutu deserved to be crushed by the same brutality that had fed him for so many years.

Stephen grunted through clenched teeth and sprinted directly at the line of warriors closing in on him. Beyond them: Kirutu. He held the spear loosely in one hand, like a javelin. They’d seen what he was capable of, and they second-guessed themselves as he’d known they would, pulling up sharply.

All hesitated but two, who increased their pace. Both were armed with axes, no match for the spear in Stephen’s hand. Did they still not know his reach? No, how could animals such as these learn so quickly? So then, these two would be the first to pay for their ignorance.

Three spears angled for him, thrown from the line to his right. He sidestepped two of them easily, snatched the third from the air with his left hand, took a stutter-step, and sent it forward, screaming full-throated.

The spear struck one of the axmen as he turned to evade, and plunged deep into the man’s bowels.

The other came on without missing a step. The man’s audacity darkened Stephen’s vision, focused his rage. The world was slow before him—he could feel each footfall like hammers on the earth; hear each pump of blood as it rushed through his brain; see the man’s bared teeth and defiant eyes. This single warrior embodied the evil that had tortured his mother.

The valley was shrieking, roaring, rushing with a wind that swept black streaks of vapor overhead—this he saw and heard only as a distant distraction. This and the thunder of the warriors’ feet as they flooded the compound with shrill cries.

His own scream joined theirs as he came under the man’s swinging ax like a battering ram, headfirst.

The impact of his skull against the warrior’s chin offered up a loud, crushing crack that sent a jolt of pain down Stephen’s spine. He didn’t so much collide with the man’s head as hammer through it, leaving the warrior’s skull shattered and his body lifeless before it hit the ground.

Stephen was much heavier and stronger than the warrior, and his momentum carried him through without breaking his stride.

Kirutu would die. If so required, Stephen would tear the house apart board by board to reach his mother. Nothing else mattered now.

But when he lifted his head, he saw that the balance of power had changed. No fewer than fifty of the warriors who’d poured through the gate were closing in on Kirutu’s position directly ahead, forming a circle around him.

The ruler of this realm stood with arms still spread wide, relishing his power, untouched by fear.

Stephen took two more long strides before a single thought penetrated his darkened mind. Kirutu knew that every warrior in his command would die to save him. They feared him more than they feared Stephen.

On the heels of this realization, the fear that wouldn’t find a home in Kirutu’s mind found one in Stephen’s.

They were too many. He was throwing himself into certain death. If he died now his mother would have no savior.

An arrow sped past his head and he narrowly avoided a second by pulling up sharply. It had been shot from the left, where the compound had been empty.

With a single scan of the field, Stephen saw what he hadn’t seen before. The warriors were still entering through the first gate, streaming along the fence to form a perimeter and cut him off. But many more were now entering through a second gate at the opposite end. Hundreds.

A thousand, like bats flowing into a massive cave, cutting him off from any hope of escape, even if he did reach his mother.

Panic set into Stephen’s mind. And with it a terrible desperation he’d rarely felt. The need to breathe, to fight, to destroy, to save, to protect his life because he couldn’t die now. Not while his mother was enslaved by a ruler who fed on the fear of others and crushed any who challenged him.

The warriors were holding back now, focused entirely on surrounding the compound and sealing him in. Kirutu grinned wickedly, surrounded by his men who bobbed up and down, taunting, slightly crouched and ready.

If he’d had a bow…but he didn’t.

He took three long steps forward, drew the spear he still held in his right hand back, and put his full weight into his throw, directing it at the body of a warrior who stood in front of Kirutu, protecting him.

The spear flew as though on his breath, straight and true, streaking with a speed that denied the wind whipping past its shank. The sharp head struck the warrior protecting Kirutu, broke through his lungs, and reached the ruler before losing its momentum.

Movement in the compound stalled save for the rushing of warriors along the fence. Kirutu stepped back, touched his ribs, and slowly lifted a bloody hand.

His eyes lifted to meet Stephen’s, and he stepped forward to show his body. Pierced and bleeding, but the wound was only superficial.

“For this you will burn alive with your mother!” Kirutu’s vitriolic voice carried over the warriors’ cries.

He extended his bloodied hand toward Stephen, fingers spread wide and trembling.

“Take him!”

A thousand warriors had entered Kirutu’s sanctum and formed a broad ring around the entire field. With a roar that overpowered the shrieking sky, they surged forward, closing in on Stephen like a massive constricting snake.

He did not calculate. He did not think. He did not embrace his survival instinct as much as become it. His mind collapsed in on itself and he found identity only in survival.

To this end, speed and momentum would be his only advantage. If he could not escape the compound, both he and his mother would be burned.

They would expect him to run. He stood still.

They would expect him to rush them as he had before. He took a knee. And he waited.

His body was trembling, he could feel it in his fingers as he planted one palm on the earth, readying himself. Fear crashed through his mind like a thundering boar. He couldn’t escape it.

So he used it, tensed and coiled.

You will burn alive
, Kirutu had said. If not for that cry, they might have sent a thousand arrows into his body.

The warriors on the leading edge were covered in sweat that beaded on their oiled bodies. Stephen fixed his gaze beyond them on those who trailed, ten deep.

He didn’t think of them as armed men, but as a thick veil of evil that he had to escape if he was to save his mother.

Twenty paces, and still he didn’t move.

Fifteen, and he dug his fingers into the earth and shifted his weight to give himself maximum leverage.

Ten, and they began to pull up, their prey at their feet, captivity now assured.

Five, and Stephen launched himself.

His movement was again so sudden that he’d taken three full strides and was already in a full sprint before any could react.

An ax was arcing toward him when he reached the line, but he managed to slow its drive with his right forearm. The ax head glanced off his shoulder, leaving a bloody gash.

Then he was past the warrior and crashing through a gauntlet of bunched, sweating bodies. Their spears were useless in such tight formation. Some swung their axes, but there was too much flesh in close quarters for any weapon to effectively find his body.

Fifteen battering strides and Stephen slammed past the last of them, sending a smaller man flying onto his back. Blood flowed from his shoulder, but his body was fueled with enough adrenaline to suppress any pain.

He sprinted across the open field, knowing that spears and arrows could still reach him. He veered to his left, away from the back gate, which still accepted a steady stream of warriors. He struck for a vacant section along the wooden fence, fifty paces distant.

All that mattered now was reaching that barrier.

He shut down his hearing and paid no mind to the pursuit.

They were coming after him, a herd terrified of failure. He could feel the ground shaking under him. Arrows sailed past; a spear clipped his right elbow.

None of this mattered. Only the fence.

Twenty meters.

He adjusted his approach and angled for a sapling that grew along the enclosure.

Ten meters.

Stephen left the ground at five paces, planted one foot on the tree’s supple trunk five feet above the ground, and used the sapling’s recoil to spring him higher. His progress catapulted him to the fence’s crossbeam—barely.