“THE FIRST conqueror came the day I received my first tattau.”

Theron winced at the memory of the marking all these years later, letting his mind travel the fringes of memory, conjuring up the notion that those days of pain and suffering were better than the moment he lived in now because even if they were hard at that time, they felt like nostalgia now.

Everything was nostalgia now that the new conqueror had come.

He eyed the lean man in front of him and blinked away a bead of sweat. The face looking back at him was calm. Free of the sheen of sweat. Theron supposed he had nothing to sweat over, really. He merely had to wait. Him with his pale skin and hair, his hooked nose that made him look like a bird of prey. He had all the advantages at the moment, so maybe it was best to frame the whole thing in nostalgia. It might be easier after all, to hear the story of your genesis that way. Origin stories were always wrapped in myth and legend anyway, and when the truth was brutal, the story was even more fanciful.

A man needed to think he was special, after all.

This man in front of him, this Yuri, with his impatient air, the brutal hand that wiped at his albino brow with barely concealed frustration, this man would need a tale, a spinning of threads that made the most colorful of wall hangings. Of that, Theron was certain.

He sighed with longing at the start of the story, drinking in the man’s interest like water. Yuri would want the whole thing, and he couldn’t have it without knowing the way it began.

The ending was nothing without the beginning, after all.

Theron licked his lips. They were so dry. Parched, really, and split from so many things, the least of which was want of water. He might have chuckled if there was anything here to chuckle about. Instead he continued, watching the man’s eyes in case his attention wavered. He couldn’t have that. He needed the man rapt, and so the story would be fanciful, and it would be detailed.

And every bit of it would be true.

“My tattau,” he said and shifted just enough to relieve the way the shackles around his wrists bit into his skin. They were heavy things, not too tight to cut off the circulation, but small enough he couldn’t slip them over his hands. But he relished the feel. The feel of them reminded him he was alive, and there were times in the last few hours he had prayed for death.

“The marking was painful, I admit.” He caught the interested shift in Yuri’s gaze at the word painful. No doubt the man thought he was weak. No doubt he thought the pain suffered now would break him, if he thought the marking of soot into his skin was painful. He couldn’t help a feeble smile.

“You think a tattau is nothing but a momentary sting,” Theron told him. “And perhaps on legs or arms it is. Perhaps in tribes where the mark is but a small thing for decoration. Not in mine. Not on the softest flesh. The flesh of your core, or your underarm.”

Theron felt his legs weaken and he caught himself from letting his weight go, an motion that would make the chains bite down harder. They rattled in his ears as he tried to twist just so, moving sideways as much as he could to let the long swath of markings that went from his armpit all the way down to his hipbone show in the lit of the torch.

“You don’t know how it was with my tribe. A tattau this size took years to complete.  Hours of effort and magic and meditation at each stretch.”

Yuri seemed unimpressed and yet there was a glint in that baleful eye that encouraged Theron. He was caught in the words. Ensnared like a hare in a delicate twine. Good. He had him then. He only had to keep the twine tight enough to hold him, loose enough to make him think he was free.

“My skin at the lowest rib stung like it had been scraped raw and doused with fermented balsam gum,” he said. “And I suppose it had when you come to think about it. I knew the outline of the first symbol meant clay – our word for the dirt beneath our feet and the soil we’d been formed from, the earth that sustained us. It was the most important symbol of the magic that would be created over the seasons and I knew the outline was as crimson at the edges as the soot that filled it in had been black.”

Theron looked down at his feet, imagining again the henna on his toenails, pretending the veins that stood out so blue against his skin were trails of decorative woad tracing his instep in preparation for a sacred ceremony. He closed his eyes and tried desperately to imagine the woman those things had been done for. The nights they spent together. The seasons they lived with each other. Yes, even the deaths they lost each other to in all of their lifetimes together.

It was more than nostalgia that made him pause over the memory and interrupt the tale. It was desire. A want so acute it hurt more than his cracked and bleeding mouth. But he shouldn’t  think of her. Not yet. It wasn’t time. To think of her now might weaken him, and he had so far to go. So much story left to tell.

The sting of leather seared against his back and he sagged forward. He had forgotten for a moment, one blessed moment, that his hands were bound above him, that the trickling of water against the stone here inside his own sacred mountain was not there to quench his thirst as it normally would. It was good that his memories could still be as vivid, could still take him away. He needed that. Hanging like venison ready to be stripped of its skin, he knew he would need the memories before this was all over.

He did his best to lift his gaze to the arrogant youth in front of him and managed to just hold his head aloft for a few seconds before it fell and his glance went once again to his toes.

“You wanted the whole story,” he said to Yuri. “I’m trying to give it to you.”

There was a shuffling sound, one that Theron imagined was Yuri easing closer. He heard the unmistakable gravel of Yuri’s voice even before he felt the man’s fingers in his hair, yanking his head upward so that he had to stare straight into the ice colored eyes of the savage.

“Your idea of the whole story and mine are different, old man,” Yuri said.

Theron gave him a tremoring smile. “Nevertheless, it’s my story you asked for.”

He could smell the cactus wine on Yuri’s breath. The onions he’d had for supper. So the pup hadn’t come as far from the bitch’s lair as he thought– he kept some of those familiar things cloaked about him like old bits of flax thread. Theron couldn’t help a short chuckle.

Yuri seemed annoyed by it. He yanked harder, leaned down to peer into his face.

“What do you find so humorous, old man?” he said.

Theron’s scalp hurt, his skin was on fire, the ribs beneath his tattaus made breathing difficult. They were broken, no doubt.

“You denounce your mother, and yet you carry all of her habits into your new land.” Theron panted out the words. “That’s what is funny.”

“What does my mother have to do with any of this?”

Theron tried to shrug but the burning in his armpits kept his muscles from moving. “Without your mother, there would be no tale to tell.”

Yuri grunted. His nod to the shadow and the hulking form that cast it from some place behind Theron meant Yuri’s handler had stepped away. He would be okay for a few moments, then. As long as he kept talking, the pain wouldn’t get worse. Maybe it wouldn’t even come again for a while. That alone was worth the price of the tale. But it wasn’t the reason for it.

Theron’s feet twitched against the stone floor. “That first tattau only heightened my already blossoming pride,” he murmured, trying to ignore the cramp that arched the middle of his sole. He grimaced, trying to stretch it out, to feel the muscles lengthen. When they wouldn’t, he decided the best focus was distraction. He was good at it. Practiced.

He made himself concentrate on the story, the thoughts coming in a rush at first as the cramps pulled at his fibers, then slower as it eased.

He made himself think again of that day, how even in the shadow of the great beasts that had arrived in his homeland on that first day of his markings, those women who straddled them were stranger still. So large, their legs hung down past their mounts’ bellies. Such strange, beautiful, and cold women.

“I spat at them all,” he said. “Thinking my contempt could make them go away.”

He shook his head to rattle the memory loose and he sighed as he remembered.

“My pride,” he said. “Always my undoing. I let fly at the largest of them, the one in front. The one with pale skin and obsidian hair and when it landed on her foot, she gave me a cold smile.”

Yuri’s thoughtful tone startled him. “I know who you mean.”

Theron nodded as he blinked through the gloom at Yuri.

“Indeed you do. Your mother. She was huge, so huge that even the beast she rode looked too small to carry her as she spurred it forward to look down at me. I could see nothing but contempt in her face for my arrogance.

“Even still, I could feel the power of my mark beginning to swell within me, the power given me by my temptress, and I lunged forward to kick the tender ankles of the mountain she rode until I felt myself being lifted from my feet, still kicking–but at the air now– until I landed across that gargantuan lap with my bottom perfectly poised for a spanking.”

He thought he heard Yuri chuckle, and that was good. He didn’t mind a little mockery. It didn’t hurt quite so much as the things the handler did to him. A little humiliation was nothing really, in the face of it all. He was encouraged.

“A man doesn’t receive a punitive spanking from a woman, and at ten annums, with the initial symbol that bound me inexorably to my temptress, I was most assuredly a man even if my size and my number of seasons begged a girl to believe otherwise.”

Theron thought back to the moment. He could see again the massiveness of the woman who was this arrogant youth’s mother, the feel of her skin against his. His sense of rage as he twisted and snaked about in her grasp, how she chuckled at first then roared at his impotence.

He felt again how his face burned with rage, how his voice box choked off the words in a fury so volatile he could’ve chewed leather to ragged skin.

It wasn’t a pleasant memory. But those things couldn’t be changed now. He sighed.

“She slapped me cold,” he said and was surprised to hear thoughtfulness in his voice. “Pain rose to my throat and forced any words stuck there to come out in an anguished cry. I sounded like a wailing lamb bleating for its mother.”

Yuri nodded. “She had large hands.”

“Yes.” Theron eyed him from beneath aching eyelids. He thought the sting of sweat was making everything in his vision blurry. It certainly seemed watery, like looking down through a moving river to the stones beneath.

Yuri stepped closer. The cactus wine had soured in his belly, Theron could tell. The sweetness barely masked the onions.

“What is coming of this, old man?” he demanded. “You waste time.”

Theron shook his head.

“To take you this far back,” he said. “Even though you think it’s extraneous, is still not far back enough. I’m assuming you know of our history, my tribe. To begin the tale at the time of the first conqueror and not explain how crucial the moment she came to us was to our culture is to expect you to understand what that culture is. But you couldn’t know it. You only know what you saw little by little over the few years you came to us. But it’s important for you to have it all. Right from the beginning. You asked me for the tale. I’m telling it. It’s not just because I’m vain that I tell you of my first day as a man, not because I’m vain even still, in this my doddering season.”

Yuri’s voice took on an accusing tone, one that Theron thought he’d have to quickly placate. “You might want me to think your doddering, old man. But I know better.”

Theron tried to shrug again, to make the claim seem insignificant. Pain sliced down his back. Yes. Definitely a few broken ribs, the result, no doubt, of the last bit of work from Yuri’s handler.

“Our tribe is one of four clans that eons ago went to war and had to be physically separated from each other in order to keep us intact at all. That was as much as I knew then, and it was part of the ritual that tapped the ashes into my mark so that I could be closer to my temptress than any other being. More, I learned later as each symbol became part of my skin, but on that day, I knew that my temptress, the temptress of clay as we called her, had been granted the full story of the war as part of her symbols and tattaus. She was one of four, descended from a great temptress who split the very earth we roamed in order to keep the clans apart – and to keep us from killing each other.”

“I know the power,” Yuri said.

“Indeed you do,” Theron said. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That’s the least of the tale, although you think it the most important.

“Her mother was a temptress, and her mother before her, all first born women granted power to use the soil so long as it was also protected by her. My temptress–witch–in your language–was five years older than I, and I, just that day, had vowed to be her Arm in all she did and needed. I grit my teeth as the bone needle bit into my skin over and over, taking short breaths each time she dipped her marker into the ink made with the ashes of her grandmother’s bones. I took her flesh into my own and became her tool to protect her if needed. More than that I wasn’t to know on that day, but I knew that she had chosen me above the many much more physically suited.”

“You loved her for that,” Yuri guessed, and Theron heard a note of scorn in the man’s tone. It didn’t surprise him; men such as Yuri, young as he was, invincible as he was, could never imagine embracing the vulnerability love can bring.

“So now you know the importance of that in my mind, and how it had been sullied by the appearance of the largest of women I’d ever seen, of the massive mounts they rode, who pitched their beasts side by each at our border and declared our land their own. As I lay across the leader’s lap, willing the tears to retreat, I made myself stare at the ancestral mountain we kept and I prayed to its sacredness that this truth, that we could be a conquered people, must not come to pass.”

“So much for your prayers, old man,” Yuri said. “This mountain is mine now. This mountain, this land, everything in it.”

Theron nodded. “Indeed, it is yours.”

It hurt, but he forced a laugh anyway. He knew it would enrage the young pup. He expected Yuri to lose his patience, to press further.

He didn’t expect to feel a searing pain beneath his ear lobe. Yuri’s handler and his hot iron again. He could smell the skin burning, and he knew the flesh would putrify. He bit down on a scream, focused like his temptress had taught him, and then thankfully, the trickle of water, the smell of damp earth, and the hot pain in his neck eased away and all went black, blessedly black.