Marked In Flesh

CHAPTER 23

Cel-Romano

The men and women in the small villages that dotted the border separating Cel-Romano from the wild country led simple lives. They farmed, raising the crops that suited the land. They raised some animals for food and others for fleece. They stopped in certain shops in the village proper to listen to the radio or use a telephone because such things weren’t found in most houses. They laughed; they sang; they married and made love and raised children.

And every village had one or two families who had the special duty of following a path into the wild country to a designated place and leaving a gift at the full moon. Sometimes it was special food; sometimes a length of cloth or a rug. Sometimes it was a book purchased by the whole village just for this.

Members of the families would go to that designated place and say, “For our friends,” as they held their offering. Sometimes a wolfman or a foxman would come out of the woods and accept their offering. Sometimes it was a Crow or a Hawk that would land nearby and indicate the gift was acceptable.

Generation after generation, each side carried out the ritual. A gift in exchange for the men in the village venturing into the wild country to cut wood to warm their houses, for the women to pick fruit. And when the Important Men from the Big Cities came to the villages to take most of a harvest, or the horses that were needed for the farms, or the animals that would have been sold to the butcher for the coins that would provide the income the family needed for the next year, sometimes there was a basket, woven from vines and filled with fruit, left on a doorstep. Sometimes there was a rabbit for the pot or a small deer that kept many families in the village from going hungry.

“For our friends.” The people knew the wolfman, the foxman, the Crow, and the Hawk were messengers. They knew there were things in the wild country—and in the sea—that were too ferocious and should not be seen. They lived at the border of the wild country; they lived in fishing villages at the edge of the sea. They had always known what the Important Men from the Big Cities refused to know—that being friends was the only way to survive.

Since the New Year, the Important Men had come to the villages and taken more than food and animals; they had taken the strong, healthy sons because “we need workers in our factories; we need soldiers for the great battle.”

There would be no battle. The people in the villages had passed down the old stories and they knew this, but the Important Men wouldn’t listen. They claimed that they needed more food, more animals, more fish for the cause. They needed more wood, more glass, more metal, more cloth, more leather.

More men.

“Do not forget,” fathers whispered to sons. “You will come home to us if you do not forget.”

Day after day, the people tended their flocks and their fields. They baked bread and wove cloth. And they traveled the paths to the special places, bringing not only gifts but also precious photographs of their sons.

“He is a good boy. Let him come home.”

There was no answer. But as the villagers returned to homes all along the border of Cel-Romano, the land was filled with a terrible silence.