Chapter 235 - The Birth of Death part 10

What if Wali was right? What if the god of death really had been born into the world? And what if he could lay hands on it? Make war on it? What if he could kill Death?

The implications drove Khronos to distraction.

Khronos was not ordinarily given to flights of fancy. Perhaps his imagination had been inflamed by all the destruction he had witnessed. Perhaps he had been tormented by death and deprivation for so long that the mere notion of destroying death, no matter how farfetched, was just too attractive to dismiss. He stood at the entrance of the cave for most of the day, watching the black rain fall, his brow furrowed in thought. Once or twice, a member of the Gray Wolf Clan approached him, tried to draw him into conversation, but he waved them away with a snarl of annoyance.

What if he could kill Death?

His mother was old now. Not as old as Wali, but it would not be long before she followed his father into the Land of Warm Days. If he could find Death and kill it, would that then mean that she would not have to die? Would it mean that he would not have to die? And his children…! Trava had already birthed two children who had died before their naming ceremony. If he found Death and destroyed it, then no more Gray Wolf Clan children need ever perish again!

It was a child's reasoning, but no more ridiculous than any other superstition born of mortal mind. Deities with golden penises. Gods with the heads of animals. Planet Nibiru. I sometimes think the more farfetched an idea is, the more seductive humans find it.

And Khronos was seduced.

He was seduced by the thought of tracking down this incarnate god of death, seduced by visions of confronting death and killing it. The Anaki had only a nebulous idea of what a god was. They worshipped animal spirits and the souls of their ancestors. In their lore, the gods were aloof creatures, entities that dwelled in the Land of Warm Days and were not overly concerned with the affairs of mortal men. The Anaki god of death was a mysterious being named Omak, a shapeshifter that sometimes took the form of a snake or a bear, sometimes a great cat. They did not consider it a malevolent entity, more of a trickster, like Coyote of Native American legend. But if the god of death had been born into the world of the living, Khronos reasoned, then it must have some physical form, and if it was a physical being then it followed that it could be killed.

The next morning, Khronos gathered the clan together and announced what he intended to do. He told them of the visions he had had, and what they might stand to gain if he succeeded in his quest. An end to death, he exclaimed. An end to dying! His eyes blazed with a passion very like religious ecstasy.

He expected his tribesmen to be skeptical, to attack his reasoning, to scoff, but they did nothing of the sort. In fact, they were just as excited by the idea as he was.

That night they had a great feast. There was plenty of meat. There were animal carcasses strewn from one end of their territory to the other. They ate until their bellies were swollen, and then Hama, Old Zambi's young replacement, prayed to the guardian spirits for a successful hunt.

Khronos left out the following morning, accompanied by nine of the clan's strongest warriors. Tulpac accompanied him, of course. And then there were his two brothers, his last surviving uncle, the oldest man to join the expedition, and five other tribesmen.

The black rain had stopped falling, though the sky remained heavy and dark with cloud. The men headed east, toward the column of smoke, which was still visible on the horizon. Though thinner, it curled from the earth to the heavens like a great vine.

The men were greatly excited at the prospect of finding Death, and they debated as they traveled what form the deity might assume when they confronted it, and how they might then kill it. Their mood darkened as they progressed, however, as the landscape they journeyed through grew ever more severe.

More and more trees lay toppled upon the earth the further east they went. They passed an increasing number of dead animals, their carcasses battered and beginning to bloat. And then they rounded a high, rocky ridge, and the forest on the other side was utterly destroyed, not a single tree standing, not a living thing moving.

Perhaps you've seen photographs of the Tunguska explosion. On June 30, 1908, in what is now Krasnoyask Krai, Russia, a meteor or cometary fragment exploded about ten kilometers above the Earth's surface. The kinetic energy released by the hurtling projectile knocked down trees over an area covering 2,150 square kilometers.

The Event that leveled nearly half the territory of the Gray Wolf Clan was no meteor or cometary fragment, and the destruction that it wrought was not quite so extensive, but the sight that greeted these prehistoric men when they rounded the ridge was very similar to the Tunguska explosion. As far as the eye could see, the forest ahead of them lay flattened, as if crushed beneath the heel of a vengeful giant. And these were men who knew very little of the universe beyond the boundaries of their hunting grounds. These were men who attributed the circumstances of their lives, both good and bad, to the whims of fickle spirits.

I'm sure I don't have to explain why nearly half of the men wanted to return home immediately.

Khronos was enraged by the terror of his fellow tribesmen. He railed at them, called them cowards. Finally, disgusted, he snarled, "Go home then, and cower with your women at the back of the cave! Perhaps you can help them breastfeed your children!" In the end, only two men turned back. They retreated from the leveled forest as those who remained hurled stones and mocking epithets at their backs.

Khronos watched the two retreat, marking the men in his mind. He would turn them out when he returned, he decided. Exile them from the clan. There was no place in their community for such craven hyenas. But for now he had more pressing matters to attend. Vengeance would have to wait.

"It will be dark soon," Tulpac said at his side. "Perhaps we should make camp here for the night. Continue in the morning."

"Let us push on a little further," Khronos replied, still glaring at the diminishing forms of the two deserters. He glanced at his old friend, who looked strangely childlike with his shaved head and beardless face. He smiled, squeezed his cousin on the shoulder. "A little further," he said in a gentler voice. "Then we rest."

Tulpac looked to the east nervously, then sighed and nodded his head.