Character Conversations: Coming of Age (Pt. 1-Sutek and Family)

The slow swaying pace of his camel was about to put him to sleep when the bird-song-like sound of his sister's whistle jolted him back to awareness.

He sat up straight, looking ahead and behind him to make sure that he hadn't strayed from the caravan, but the familiar line of camels with their backs laden with everything his tribe owned reassured him that he had not.

The whistle came again, further ahead in the line, so Sutek gently nudged his camel forward in pursuit of his sister.

He pushed forward, nodding in greeting at some of his tribe members and stifling a laugh at some of the ones that had managed to fall asleep.

His sister finally came into view, the silver rings woven into her four long dark braids catching the light like a beacon. She sat straight atop her camel like a pillar, her dark robes catching around her as she turned to look at him, her dark heavy brows raising when she spots him.

"Did you have to come all the way from the back?" she asks with a smirk, her dark brown eyes lighting up at the chance to mess with him.

"I was in the same place I was when we first started. How was I supposed to know that you'd rush to the front?" he retorted.

She snorted at this and leaned over to nudge him. He grumbled but couldn't help but smile. His older sister Tinaash never missed an opportunity to mess with him, but she also never ignored him like he saw some of his friend's older siblings do. As the oldest daughter of their mother, the chief, she could have used her responsibilities as an excuse to give him a wide berth. Instead, she made it a habit of taking him everywhere.

"Look over there, just beyond the dune," she said as she gestured with her chin and he obeyed.

With a hand raised to block the glare of the sun, he squinted past the dunes.

In the distance, he could see where the sand began to give way to rock, and smatterings of green began to adorn the otherwise barren landscape.

"That's the city of Tahet. They've long abandoned their tents in favor of resting behind their stone walls,"

He could hear the distaste in his sister's voice but wasn't sure if he felt the same way.

"Abandoned? They just decided to settle down,"

She shakes her head, the silver rings in her hair knocking against each other at the sudden movement.

"How can she call herself a Zilmatican tribeswoman when she chose a husband with strong walls over a husband whose warriors have been holding Avith at bay?"

Tinaash glared at the distant city.

"It's like Father always says, we don't worry that the walls of our tents are soft because of what's here—" she pounded on her chest. "The spirit of a Zilmatican tribe is stronger than any stone,"

She urged her camel forward and Sutek followed. He didn't doubt that his sister had a heart stronger than any fortress, something she inherited from their mother, but as Sutek placed his hand over his heart, he couldn't help but worry that he didn't possess that same strength.

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Date and palm trees lined the way as they grew closer to the city walls that cast a shadow over their caravan. A distinct whistle pierced through the air, getting both his and his sister's attention. Hearing that it came from the direction of their mother's cart, they rode further ahead toward it.

She smiled as she saw them coming and raised a tattooed hand to become them forward.

"Are you excited to meet your aunt?" she asked once they reached the cart.

"Yes."

"I guess," his sister responded at the same time, although begrudgingly.

Their mother snorted at their responses but tried to cover her smile with her hand.

She looked a great deal like his sister, or rather, his sister would look like her when she got older.

His mother's four thick braids were woven together and pierced with gold rings and where he and his sister's arms were almost bare, dark lines and swirls of ink stood out against the amber skin of her arms and legs.

"You're both as enthusiastic about the trip as your father," she said fondly.

"He's just mad that you made him go ahead of the caravan," his sister said.

Their mother had asked their father to travel ahead of them with a small band of men to give their aunt a warning that they were coming, but their father didn't like anything that put distance between him and his wife and children.

"But he still did it, because he knows that it's for the best. Just like the two of you will be on your best behavior when we meet your aunt and your cousins, right?" she said, with an eyebrow raised in challenge.

Both Sutek and Tinaash quickly nodded.

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When they reached the gates to the city, the heavy wooden doors were immediately opened for them and a willowy-looking man with pale hair wearing drab colored robes greeted them.

"I am Pallu. The servant of Chieftess Hulda. Please follow me," he said as he bowed lowly.

His voice was thin and tired, his eyes downcast. With his cheeks hollowed and his eyes sunken, he looked like hunger itself, despite the trees heavy with dates and livestock that they passed on their way.

He led them through another set of gates into the main fortress at the center of the city and then through the quiet halls of the fort itself, never once raising his head or speaking a word. Tinaash peeked at Sutek and nudged him, gesturing her head toward the odd servant of their aunt.

"I won't tease you for being too quiet anymore. Now I know it could be worse," she said, a nervous smile tugging at her lips as she tried to lighten the stifling atmosphere.

Sutek let out a sigh and nervous laugh of his own. He had never been that much of a talker. Most of what he wanted to say was said to his family, his sister, mother, father, or maybe to one of the friends he hunted with. He was in no position to call anyone strange for being quiet. But as they passed servants, all shabbily dressed, hollow-eyed, and silent he also began to feel like disrupting the quiet.

"What was Aunt Hulda like when the two of you were younger?" he asked, he and his sister speeding up to walk closer to their mother.

His mother looks relieved to hear his voice and the pensive expression on her face melts into a smile as she recalls her childhood.

"Hulda was always the smart one. She never skipped out on our lessons, but she never told on me when I did. She is my big sister, so I'm sure you know how we treated each other," she said.

She sighed and fidgeted with one of her bracelets and Sutek realized that this is the first time he had ever seen his mother nervous.

"It has been a very long time, but I am sure that at least this will be the same,"

As she said that Pallu stopped abruptly and dropped to his knees in front of a large bolted door.

"Why did you stop? Are you alright?" Tinaash asked.

"Someone with my inferior fate cannot tread here. Chieftess Hulda and Chieftain Gershon await you inside,"

At the mention of his father's name, Sutek looked at his mother and sister. At least they knew that his father and some of their tribesmen had arrived safely ahead of them.

The doors opened to reveal a room dimly lit by torches and thin streams of light pouring in from the narrow windows. Smoke billowed up from a fire pit in the center and his father sat uncomfortably next to it, avoiding looking directly at the column of smoke.

His father, a tall and broad man, whose tattoos adorned both the sides of his face and the majority of his arms and legs was wearing clothing similar to what Pallu had been wearing, albeit better quality. His inky black hair, which was shaved on the sides to show some of the tattoos on his scalp, lacked the adornments Sutek was used to seeing him wear at family gatherings, nor did he have the turban he wore when out doing the tribe's bidding. It was strange to see him so...bare.

When his father saw them he hurried to them, wrapping both Sutek and his sister in a bone-crushing embrace before gently pressing his forehead to their mother.

"Do not put a desert between us again, my love," he said out loud, but Sutek heard as he whispered something else to his mother under his breath.

"Your sister is not well,"

"It will be fine," his mother said reassuringly, but Sutek noticed the strain on her face, a discomfort that had begun as soon as Pallu had greeted all of them at the gates.

His mother extracted herself out of his father's tight embrace, a feat Sutek and his sister couldn't accomplish and turned toward the woman still standing behind the column of smoke.

She rose slowly, her frame thin, but her posture stiff and straight. As she walked from behind the smoke which obscured her, Sutek heard his sister let out a quiet gasp.

Sutek didn't gasp, but he did feel an overwhelming sense of unease.

His aunt resembled their mother in a superficial way. Similar nose, brows, and hair. But where his mother was strongly built, with a smiling face and eyes, Chieftess Hulda was startlingly slim, with her gauntness giving her face an eerie sharpness to it. Her eyes were hard and cold, and while some of the tattoos that he could see of hers matched those from his mother's tribe, others that marked her neck and cheeks were foreign to him.

If his mother was put off by her sister's appearance she didn't show it. As his aunt walked over to them his mother opened her arms wide.

"Sister! I'm so glad to see you,"

She didn't brush away his mother's embrace, but she didn't return it either, her body tensed as his mother wrapped her arms around her.

"Your husband has told me that you're trying to outrun your fate. Do you really think my walls are strong enough to shield you?" the Chieftess Hulda said, her voice a dull thud compared to his mother's enthusiasm.

"Sister, I come to you looking for shelter. King Avith's men draw closer and closer to us and have barred us from our usual trading posts,"

"Is this not your tribe's fate?" his aunt responded, her head cocked to the side, eyebrows knitted together in confusion.

"Hulda, please, I'm trying to tell you—"

"You turned away then. Turned away from the insight I had been granted. But it didn't matter then and it doesn't matter now. My fate is big, and yours brings you crawling to my door,"

His aunt smiles abruptly, her expression not matching her sharp words and her sharp smile not matching her dull eyes.

"Don't talk to my mother like that!"

Tinaash steps forward but is stopped by their father.

"Come children. Let them speak without disruption," his father said as he led them out of the room, leaving behind the two chieftesses.

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In the months that followed, Sutek didn't see his aunt or any of the other family members that were said to inhabit the fortress. His sister had been hopeful that they would be returning to their own lands after their aunt's stony reception, but they weren't kicked out.

Their mother laughed off the interaction, saying that their aunt had promised her when they were children that her tent would always be open to her and her family and that the promise still stood now as long as their people didn't make things hard for her people.

"We keep our promises and we pay our debts. Whether in feast or famine, this can never change,"

Sutek felt comforted by this and ignored the nagging feeling of unease that would appear every time he thought of his aunt, but Tinaash continued to be resistant, pointing out that their aunt no longer lived in a tent.

"We can keep our word, but we can't force others to do the same," is what she would mutter as a rebuttal, once their mother was out of earshot.

Despite the growing tension between his mother and sister, and the precariousness of their living arrangement, there was much to keep him preoccupied.

He still hunted with his friends, and some of the boys from the city had even begun to join them. They shared stories and games, and although conversations with the local boys often left him with more questions than answers as they called each other things, such as 'big fated' and 'small fated', and outright refused to speak about his family or the fortress.

But as his fifteenth summer approached, he was having more and more discussions with his parents about finally donning the turban and veil and getting the tattoo that marked his coming of age.

"Do you feel ready for your rite of passage," his father asked him one night as they all ate around a crackling fire, the stone walls serving as the only reminder that they were not truly home.

"Yes, Father," he nodded.

His father smiled at him but still raised an eyebrow.

"Good. But remember, this isn't like hunting with me or your friends. You will have to travel alone for days in search of game, and then you will have to bring it back on your own. You will only be able to rely on yourself,"

His father's words were blunt but Sutek could see the concern in his eyes as he said them.

"You have prepared me well," he replied and his father grinned, tousling his hair.

"My boy!" he laughed and Sutek's mother joined in, but suddenly Tinaash slammed down her plate of food and stood up.

"Why will he come of age here? Why are we still here?"

Her raised voice easily carried outside the tent and Chieftess Halimat quickly grabbed her wrist and pulled her back down.

"Sit down and watch your tone! Have you lost your mind?" Their mother hissed through clenched teeth, but Tinaash was not cowed.

"Have you? Why have you brought us to this stone prison? Our aunt is a madwoman, her husband is a bedridden old man who can do nothing but hide behind these walls, and every day we're here is another day that demon who calls himself emperor can claim to have beaten us. Mother, where is—"

Before she could finish Chieftess Halimat grabs her jaw, stopping her tirade and forcing her to look at her.

"Be quiet. You are a smart child Halimat, but not smart enough to keep your mouth shut about things you have no understanding of. You want to go home? Fine. You disagree with me? Fine. But you will not raise your voice at your mother's table. You will not contradict the words of your chieftess. And you absolutely will not speak ill of your host within her own walls! Do you understand this?" She finished, her voice only growing above a whisper at the end.

Tinaash blinked back tears and nodded.

"I understand."

Chieftess Halimat roughly let go of her jaw and wordlessly went back to eating.

After the dinner ended in silence, Tinaash hurried away from the tent with Sutek following behind.

He expected her to go to her own tent and intended to follow her there to console her about what happened over dinner, but instead of stopping in front of her tent, she looked around and went past it.

Sutek slowed his steps.

He and his family moved to the main fortress, but they simply set their tents up in the yard, just behind its walls, which meant that the relatives they lived with might as well have been ghosts to him. He only ever caught shadows of them. A silhouette of his Aunt outside of his parent's tent.  The ever-silent servants of the fortress hurrying into the fortress to tend to the chieftess' son.

Neither he nor his sister had stepped foot in the actual halls of the fortress since that day, but as he watched his sister carefully slip into the fortress, he knew that would change.

He followed her, just out of sight, down the desolate grey halls until she stopped short just outside a room with the door slightly cracked open. Smoke leaked from the gap, seeming to curl around the two of them and the faint sound of chanting and rattling could be heard from the inside.

His sister looked behind her and saw him. Her eyes widened slightly as she hurriedly waved him forward.

Wordlessly, they both crouched, peeping through the cracked door.

He saw his aunt, chanting as she kneeled in front of a bed, its inhabitants obscured by a gauzy curtain. In front of her was a bowl filled to the brim with a dark red liquid. A man sat by her side, his robes, although well-made, hung off of him and his face was twisted with worry and unease.

"Will he get better?" the man asked, his voice as feeble as his appearance.

She stopped chanting and held the bowl up to the bed, her eyes downcast as an emaciated hand reached through the curtain to take it.

"Our son is a fragile seedling competing for sun beneath the shadow of towering palms,"

Suddenly her eyes darted to the door, a gleam in them that cut through the smoke.

"But I will clear a path towards the light for him,"

She turns sharply to the side, her eyes appearing to cut through the darkness as she stared in their direction.

Tinaash pulled Sutek away from the door in a hurry, the two of them running until they were back near their tents, both of them taking deep breaths of the night air.

"What was that?" he asked his sister once they were in the clear, his heart hammering, unsure of what they had witnessed but certain it wasn't anything good.

"Nothing good. That woman is doing something evil. This whole place is evil, and I don't know why Mama can't see that!"

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"Eyes open, and keep your footsteps light," his father told him as they reached the part of the terrain where sand gave way to shrubs and gravel.

Sutek nodded and kept quiet, listening closely for the sound of water. His father told him that there was a spot where the river found itself trapped and where vegetation and game were made abundant by its capture. He tried to remember the path to get there so that when he had to hunt alone during his coming of age, he would know the way.

"When you hunt for your coming of age, you'll be alone for days. This day has been coming for a long time, but I still can't make sense of it. When you were a baby, you could fit in my hand. You didn't cry like your sister. You were so small and quiet,"

"So Tinaash was loud even back then,"

His father keeps his eyes forward, but Sutek can hear him snort and the smile in his voice.

"She has always been outspoken, yes."

They stop once they reach where the river pools, the air smelling fresher, and a cool breeze blows across the water and through the increasingly dense greenery.

His father turns to him, his smile soft and only slightly colored with sadness.

"Sutek, you were so small and silent that it was hard for me to tell if you were doing poorly or not. I would stay awake, just to make sure you were still alive. Then one day, as I held you, you squeezed my finger with such strength I was sure that you would survive,"

He smiles wistfully and reaches out to give Sutek a chest-rattling thump on the back.

"You are my strong son! I now have no doubt that you will survive. I can already see you returning in victory, heavy with bounty,"

His father beamed at him, brimming with pride and Sutek couldn't help but smile back.

"I will do my best," he mumbled as he fidgeted with his bow, a little overwhelmed by his father's sudden burst of sentimentality.

"You always do. Now we will meet up here at sundown,"

"We're splitting up?"

"Consider it practice, but remember, be back by sundown,"

With a nod, their paths diverged, with his father following the river and Sutek choosing to stay close to the perimeter, hoping to catch a gazelle when it came to drink.

His chance came when one ambled up, its cautious glances missing him as it dips its head to drink.

Taking a deep breath he draws his bow and holds just for a moment before releasing. It should have been a clean shot, but the gazelle jerks its head up at the last moment causing the arrow to hit its shoulder instead of its heart.

Startled and wounded it bolts from him and into the desert.

With a grunt of frustration, Sutek gathers his bow and sets off in pursuit of it.

It shouldn't have been able to get that far, yet dusk was beginning to settle and he was still tracking it. Too close to sundown for him to find another quarry, he continued to follow the tracks, even as they led him further and further away from the river.

The drops of blood clotted the sand, and he knew he had almost reached it. He notched an arrow, just in case it had already been found by scavengers.

The gazelle wasn't alone when he reached it.

Kneeling next to it was his aunt. The way she looked at him as he drew closer, eyes sharp and smile tight, made him feel less like a cautious hunter and more like prey that had strayed too far out of its den.

His grip on his bow tightened.

"It is fate that you're here," she said as she gestured to the laid-out gazelle, the creature's breathing labored.

"What are you doing out here?"

Sutek didn't mean for the question to sound so blunt and he quickly dipped his head, not wanting to disrespect her, no matter how uneasy her presence made him feel.

"There is something I needed to do for my son. He's ill, you see,"

Sutek nodded, although it still didn't make sense to him. She was a chieftess. She had servants. What was in the desert that she had to fetch personally?

"I would put it out of its misery, but I lack the tools," she said, once again motioning to the gazelle.

"I have to meet my father by sundown. We can walk together since it's dangerous to be out here alone," Sutek said as he took out his knife and approached, joining her in kneeling beside it.

"He's great at tracking. Maybe he can help you find what you're looking for?"

The gazelle looked at him with glassy eyes and he placed his hand just below where the arrow struck in both apology and thanks.

"I have already found it," his aunt said, and as he turned to her he was met with a cloud of powder.

With his eyes watering and his throat burning he tried to look at her to see if she had been affected too.

Her smile did not falter, even as his vision blurred and the world tilted.

He felt his back hit the sand and could only lie there as he felt his aunt pry his fingers from his dagger.