The King's Army is descending on her little village . . . and they are led by a demon general hell-bent on vengeance.
Lunsa is an Herbaline, a healer of a small tribe hidden deep in the mountains. As a child, she witnessed a brutal injustice, but w...
Tiny flakes of it fell onto the weathered stick Lunsa used to tend her poison garden.
She straightened. Her long, brown, unmarried adult braids swung against the shoulders of her modest, thickly-woven summer dress. She studied a flake.
Unlike the white ash that drifted from the Serengai or the yellow pollen that speckled her herb beds with aphrodisiac dust, this black snow's acidic oils stained. Devil's dandruff, her grandmother-ka would have called it. An ill omen.
Snatching another flake from the air, Lunsa placed it on her tongue and breathed in through her mouth.
It tasted of fire.
She finished uprooting brambles, winding them like fat snakes around her weathered stick, and tossed them into the shadows. Every season, the Serengai's blood trees crawled closer, and every night, their vicious stickers crept out to strangle her garden.
Not only a garden to her, but also her inheritance. Her grandmother-ka had planted these to cure the sick of their most dangerous ailments. Lunsa had moved all of the herbs she dared. These last few plants, the deadliest and most valuable of potent poisons, would rather die than leave their home soil. And so she tended them, in their deathbed, until the day the Serengai overwhelmed her efforts and smothered them all.
But today, the black flakes did not waft on a smothering wind. They drifted from the south. The direction of friends.
And enemies.
Lunsa planted her bramble-winding stick, bid her garden farewell, and descended through a warm clover field. Redbugs buzzed softly on the early summer breeze, green-breasted mouse sparrows flitted across the azure sky, and her faithful companda, Asnul, dozed upside-down off a sturdy tree branch.
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She lofted her split-cedar basket and made a kiss sound.
The companda yawned and cracked his sleepy gray eyes.
She opened her arms.
He slowly ambled down the branch toward her, upside-down, with deliberate hand-over-hand grips. One hand let go of the tree and curled around her vest, and then the other did, and then his back legs released the tree. His light body thumped her chest, and he hung upside-down from her softened leather vest.
She cupped his gentle body in her arms.
In his masked, gray muzzle, his mouth curved into a perpetual smile. His long, mossy fur tickled her cheek like a child's caress.
She carried him and her basket down an old bucardo trail to the jagged cliffs above the Hundred Strokes River. They followed a narrow ledge onto the King's River Road, to her village. Nestled deep in the silent woods of the mist-shrouded mountains, her village exploded with activities because sun-speckled days like today were rare.
On the edges of the fields, young girls fixed charms tied to branches celebrating the recent Rain Festival. The familiar clop-clop-clop of hollow chimes enticed the goddess Eleana to flow her sustaining milk upon their newly planted squash.
Their prayers to Bor-Alis, god of peccari, had already been answered. A hearty migration of the eager, oinking beasts filled her kinsmen with full stomachs and hope for stocking a summer larder.
Children darted after a kicked bladder-ball, bubbling with laughter, while their mothers stretched black and white hides across bent hoops and worked greasy brains into the leather. Unmarried girls smoked skins over an ash pit.
They greeted her, "Herbaline," and chatted amongst themselves, as loud as the gossip-birds flying overhead.
Compandas peeked out from vests and belts and baskets, always upside down, and slothful, yet always near to their person's heart.
Lunsa reached the symbol of their village in its center: The Hollow Tree. Split by lightning to the blackened root, a lesser tree would have died. Instead, from the ash, a new tree sprang up, green and lush and thrusting toward the sky, teeming with chittering swallows, lazing upside-down compandas, and life.
The sweet-smelling, softly furred compandas were gifts from Eleana and infused with the goddess's life spark. They knew a person's heart and kept their secrets, and they protected a person's spirit from malicious devils.
It was under the village tree where a newborn baby selected her companda, or heart's companion, and it was there that a companda would return after the baby grew into an old person and died.
You could have a tree full of compandas without a village, but you couldn't have a village without the companda-filled tree.
This was the tree of hope and the tree of punishments.
