THE BEAR LUMBERS towards a fireplace, calm falling on those around him like a cloud. It’s the natural inclination of timorous children and Ambercrest’s alpine dingoes, to lounge around him as he sits with the elders.
Snow begins falling outside the house as Uñak enters the room carrying some furniture and a figurine. The room is crowded with softly speaking families, guests, travelling through the mountains. Uñak admires the delicate carving of a dancing woman entwined by a floating ribbon before throwing it onto the fire. Another man takes the tall chair from him and promptly begins breaking it into pieces, snapping off its arms first.
Uñak sits down on a cushion and turns to The Bear. ‘The Hollow Man is conscripting Wallaja and Dharanyak to fight with his Armin in return for land between The Black Forest and the Shadow Mountain -our land, he wishes to give to us!’
‘Did they tell you why?’ asked The Bear.
‘Raken,’ rasped Uñak ominously.
The Bear leaned back and shook his head. ‘So, I heard.’ A new tension filled the room as ears prickled. After a moment of thought The Bear declared, ‘there are no Raken here. Richard has been living in that hall of death too long. He is a man possessed by greed and now paranoia.’
The room relaxed as more wood from the chair was added to the fire.
The Bear remembered the Raken. He had fled them in Hadarach as a boy with his sister, before they had been caught on the Kariah Sea by Ashen Armin. Knowing how to hunt, fish, trap, and ride horses bareback, enabled him and his imperturbable sister to survive and rise easily through the army’s ranks -she, like an arrow from a bow, and he, like an elyarish berserker.
Decades ago, first contact with the world outside Uñak’s tribe had been with Ashen drones, rockets, and mortars. Flying in a highly coordinated formation, small, unmanned machines swarmed and bombed their village gardens and homes. Toddlers and the elderly, unable to run fast enough were killed as others fled into the forest. Survivors lived off leaves as many died from their injuries, sickness, and starvation in the months thereafter. Civilians who tried to return home along paths to the village, tripped wires attached to stun grenades or were shot down with sniper rifles. Uñak still displayed an unexploded mortar his uncle Kiakoa had carried throughout the island to warn others.
As a young Armin, The Bear crushed every task given to him, setting several course records; but he was also a belligerent drunkard, so uncooperative that leadership refused to promote him and gave him his own platoon to prevent him corrupting others. Future particularly unmanageable men were sent to The Bear’s platoon. During a routine mission, his platoon of five hunted and killed animals on privately owned estates with high grade weapons, using their allocated bathing water to clean and cook their game. They returned to base so foul they were nicknamed the filthy five.
The Bear repeatedly disciplined Armin who outranked him whenever they were caught intimidating or terrorising lower ranking Armin, civilians, women, and children. For kicking a dog, an officer received three broken ribs by boot. For pulling a girl’s hair, another received a severe scalping. However, despite his misuse of weapons and rank, he was never detained because he was needed to deprive the enemy of nice things like bridges and power lines. His men, so individually dysfunctional their group was like a frag grenade waiting to go off, could be counted on to get behind enemy lines and f*ck up everything. The Bear enjoyed killing Raken more than anything in the world. So, when the Raken-Daughn war ended, he took to drinking, stole a train, drove it out of Asher and climbed out in the mountains somewhere, leaving it to roll on backwards down the line. He survived the cleansing and was found passed out in a cave somewhere along the Whispering River. The smell of must from fermenting fruits had drawn some local teenagers to investigate. They had run back to their camp to tell their families they had found a bear in a cave.
In that camp now gone, The Bear was nursed back to health. During that time, he was given Kiakoa’s mortar to hold in his own hands. He had turned it over and dismantled it enough to find symbols from Asher’s wealthiest families on its parts.
Today, The Bear had meandered along towering windswept cliffs that looked like a hundred-foot tidal wave of earth, frozen in time. Eagles soared in cool skies over the jungle draping on its crown. He had followed the heavily rusted, metal housing remains of a disused conveyor belt, and scrambled up a steep incline of loose gravel, to a break in the ‘tidal wall’. The Bear stood on the edge of a dirt crater more than a kilometre wide and just as deep. Uñak’s original home, its trees, gardens, homes, school, hospital -everything ever woven, painted, or carved with care, birthed, blessed, or buried there- existed only as a ghostly presence in the minds of those left behind.
Below, was a treeless, alien, desert of a crater. Its deep open bottom heaved as if with a tangle of squirming caterpillars or wriggling maggots. It was the chaos of several thousand sweating bodies: men working shoulder to shoulder, digging furiously with hand tools and their bare hands. From where The Bear stood, it appeared the earth had been wounded; its core, the men’s flesh, exposed. It leeched a foul-smelling mud; sweat, urine, and blood mingling with the dust.
The Bear had seen war, but this was a hell like no other to him. These men clawing face down in the dirt for bluerock, together digging their own monumental grave.
The fire crackled, Uñak and The Bear exchanged regards.
‘Tell the tribes to join the Armin,’ The Bear smiled gently. With a clean-shaven face, in the fire glow he looked like an angel -beautiful and terrifying. ‘It will make it easier for us to Strategically Transfer their Equipment to Alternative Locations.’
Uñak nodded. ‘It is done.’
Leaving Ambercrest, The Bear was cloaked in possum fur as he led a horse through falling snow, yet to settle on the ground. The serenity was interrupted by shouting from a nearby hut.
Looking in the direction of the commotion, The Bear paused in his tracks to listen. The shouting worsened into pleading and crying followed by a familiar type of wailing. With a broad hand, he patted his horse firmly to say, hold up mate, before backtracking to offer some dead ground counseling.
~
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