Skillful Death (15 page)

Soon after the shout, Constantine felt the ground booming with the footfalls of the horse giving chase. He veered left and ran in a low crouch under the splintery sharp low limbs of a stand of pines. He hurdled a piled stone wall and ran downhill, through a blanket of sweet ferns, to the dry creek bed. On the other side, the forest opened to tall oaks that scraped the sky with reaching branches. Constantine ran full speed, enjoying the way the suit moved against his skin and how his tight calf warmed to the exertion. He sucked in full, deep breaths of clean air, and blew out the clouds of stale hospital tent air that had settled into his lungs. Constantine ran until his legs ached and he was within sprinting distance of one of his secret caves. He stopped and crouched, catching his breath after only seconds.

He listened. Nobody was following him.

Constantine walked to his cave and picked carefully through the possessions hidden there. He found a decent blade, not good enough for what he intended, but something to put in his secret pocket for emergencies. He gathered some pouches containing his jellies and powders, and a big hard stone. He flipped the stone between his hands as he walked down to where the Masty stream gurgled over and through an exposed vein of rock. With his hard stone, he beat against the vein until he found a big node of flint, buried in a larger chunk of chalk and limestone. After excavating his node, he set his hands to detaching a sharp flake. He took a break from his work with the beginning of a sharp blade emerging from the node. He smiled at the shiny flint. It would be his best knife so far, a perfect killing blade. He put it in his sack with the rest of his tools.

Constantine climbed the rocky bank to Hyff Lane and headed south.

T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
, D
OM
waited on the wall with a small loaf of bread and watched all the workers file into the dwelling. Tara was not among them. None of the women laughed at him, but several looked at him with what he took for pity in their eyes. Dom ate his bread alone as he worked. He didn’t have much to do on the south side of the house, but he spent as much time as he could there, just to watch out the windows at the courtyard where she might walk by. At the end of the day, he rushed down to the wall to see if she’d somehow snuck by him earlier. He didn’t see her that evening either.

The next morning, he stood at the wall again. This time, he waited without bread. He folded his arms and watched the same groups of workers file past, on their way to their duties inside the dwelling. Nobody spoke to him or gave him more than a passing glance. Dom wished he had Pemba there. Pemba could talk to anyone under any circumstance. He could have questioned any one of these people and found out what happened to Tara. Dom simply watched them walk by. An occasional growl rumbled in the back of his throat until he noticed it and tucked it away.

After he finished his work, he ran to Pemba’s house to ask his advice, but his friend wasn’t at home. Back at his own room, built on the back of Denpa’s house, he sat on his bed. He wondered if Tara had gone back to her home, her soul still fatally attached to her beautiful body.

Just after the sun set over the back wall of Denpa’s yard, the old man banged through the back door and stopped in his tracks. He held a bowl of rice.

“Dom! I didn’t think you were home.”

Dom nodded.

“I was about to give your rice to the cats. Do you want it?” Denpa held out the bowl. Dom took it and scooped the rice into his mouth with his fingers. Denpa’s rice was terrible—clumpy and crunchy, barely worthy of the cats—but it was welcome to Dom’s empty stomach.

Denpa sat down slowly, gripping his hands to his lower back as he took a seat and watched Dom eat.

“You couldn’t eat rice when you first came here. Do you remember that?”

“No,” Dom said, through a full mouth.

“Well, you could, but you’d regurgitate it quickly. You would rub the center of your chest, right here.” Denpa demonstrated.

Dom shook his head.

“I wasn’t sure you’d survive. You were already so skinny and then once you started vomiting up rice, I thought you had some fatal disease. You don’t remember any of this?”

“No,” Dom said.

“I thought
my
memory was bad. Perhaps I’m making it up.”

“I’m sure you’re not,” Dom said. “I just don’t remember it.”

“How is your occupation?”

“Well,” Dom said. “I finished the house on the hill today.”

“So quickly?”

“Yes. It’s so much easier to do a new house than to try to fit pipes in a house where people already live. You have to make holes in everything, and there’s always somebody standing there telling you where you can’t put a hole. They never have thoughts about where you can put one.”

“Perhaps you can ask that everyone start afresh with a new house?”

“I simply don’t understand why people aren’t more interested in plumbing. Some of their friends have running water, or their neighbors. After seeing how much easier it is when you don’t have to haul everything in buckets, why wouldn’t you beg for that same convenience?”

“You can’t ask the snow to melt. One day, it just begins to melt. Once it begins, it all eventually melts,” Denpa said.

“Your poems don’t actually solve anything,” Dom said. “You understand that, right?”

“I’m not trying to solve anything,” Denpa said.

“You’re trying to force me to have patience that I neither want, nor need. I believe that a great man creates his own future. If I work hard enough, I can make all that snow melt.”

“And if you do nothing, it will melt on its own,” Denpa said. “It’s not a solution. It’s just an observation.”

“Then thank you for your rice and your observations,” Dom said. He handed the empty bowl back to Denpa, who nodded his bald head and retreated back to the house.

Dom hated how mad Denpa could make him. He wished that he could remain forever calm and civil, like Denpa, but his anger always forced him to say something that he didn’t intend. He ran through the conversation in his head, trying to identify the trigger that had so quickly summoned his impatience.
 

It wasn’t, Dom decided, the talk about the snow melting. The old man always had a metaphor or parable on hand to explain any situation. Dom appreciated straightforward wisdom. If Denpa had something to say, why couldn’t he just say it directly?

But that wasn’t the thing which had irritated Dom. He hated when people made him remember his early years, when he’d just arrived at their little village. Recounting his story with Tara was bad enough, now Denpa felt the need to talk to him about how he’d had a hard time digesting rice? What did the old man hope to accomplish by bringing up this ancient digestive failure? Was Dom supposed to feel shame from those early years?
 

Dom thought about moving on, going someplace fresh where nobody had any memories of him wandering the streets, a skinny near-dead waif who had to be rescued and fed rice until the burning lump in his esophagus made him vomit while rice stuck in his nostrils. But whenever anyone arrived in the village, they always came with a story. They had references and relatives and everyone knew something of their backstory. Who would vouch for him at the next village? And could he find a new place where his looks wouldn’t automatically mark him as a foreigner? Denpa didn’t seem to think so. When asked, Denpa said Dom was unique, and that everywhere he went, he would be Dom.

That night he dreamed of Tara. He saw her floating upright over the lake, with only the hem of her long dress touching the surface of the water and wicking the moisture up into the fabric. He saw the moonlight racing through the curves of her black hair, looping and diving through it. She raised her arms to him, inviting him in. He moved towards her, his own feet somehow sliding across the slippery surface of lake as he reached forward to join her in an embrace. Just before their fingers touched, his feet lost the secret of levitation and he crashed down into the icy waters. He could still see her through the distorted lens of the turbulent surface, but she didn’t seem to see him. She still looked straight ahead. No matter how hard he kicked, he couldn’t reach the surface of the lake.

In the morning, Dom waited for Denpa to come outside for firewood so he could make a request. That was the day that Dom murdered Denpa.

♣
   
♢
   
♡
   
♠

Malcolm: Stop. Stop talking.

Dom: Why.

Malcolm: I told you when we started: if you confess to murder, I won’t document it until you’ve turned yourself in. I won’t be a party to that.

Dom: This incident happened thousands of years ago.

Malcolm: First, you’ve been very cagey about names, and places, and dates, so there’s no need to exaggerate like that. And, second, there is no statute of limitations on murder. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed.

Dom: But surely there’s no need to document this exchange?

Malcolm: I think I’ve given you plenty of latitude so far. We didn’t go on the record about how you knew certain events that happened when you were unconscious or not present during your childhood.

Dom: I told you...

Malcolm: Stop! I don’t want to get into that right this second. But again, I have to draw the line at murder.

Dom: You should let me continue. Perhaps murder is too strong a word.

Malcolm: Did you have malice aforethought?
 

Dom: Did I want him dead?

Malcolm: Yes. Did you want him dead and premeditate how you would kill him?

Dom: Somewhat... No, no! Let’s just say no, I didn’t.

Malcolm: You’re not convincing me.

Dom: Please just hear me out and then if you deem it necessary, we’ll take this to the authorities.

Malcolm: I will, you know. If I feel I have to, I will.

Dom: I know.

W
HEN
C
ONSTANTINE
ARRIVED
BACK
at Sasha’s house, the two old horses stood at the corner of their paddock, and raised their heads to greet him. He wished he had something to give them. The two old gents had barely any grass in their lonely paddock. Even the low-hanging cedar branches had been stripped of anything green. Constantine walked past the horses and followed the path to the barn. Sasha was gone, and his father was probably still out on his horse. Constantine found his way back to the farrier’s room and the wealth of skins and hides there.
 

The father’s words rang in his ears. “Five suits.” He imagined slicing off those fingers with his new flint knife and then shook the image out of his head. He would make one suit, one perfect suit, with the best parts of the glistening black hide. Only then would he think about what would come next. First, he had to puzzle out how to manipulate the snakeskin.

He dragged the scaly hide to the window and perched on top of a cedar chest. An inch away from the shiny skin, Constantine studied the way the scales interconnected and the tissue at the edges. His normal approach of fraying and re-integrating the edges wouldn’t work. The skin was too fragile. With the sharp needle Sasha’s father had bequeathed, Constantine worked a tiny hole to see how it would hold up to lateral stress. It was no good. The skin tore easily when punctured. In his bag, Constantine had packed a small sack of resin he used like a varnish. Mixed with a solvent he found on the farrier’s shelf, this liquid penetrated a small patch of snakeskin and then dried to leave it tough. He couldn’t pierce the toughened hide, but he could create the holes first and then treat the surface with his concoction.
 

The sun descended across the window’s rippled glass as Constantine worked. He glanced over his shoulder at one point to see a woman standing in the doorway, rubbing her hands with a cloth that hung around her waist. Later, Sasha brought him rough wooden tray with bread, meat, and fruit. Constantine shoved bites into his mouth and quickly returned his fingers to working the skin. Sasha sat nearby and talked until he realized that Constantine wasn’t listening, and then he talked some more. Eventually, Sasha left, but he left behind three candles burning on the windowsill.