A Drum Beat Forever: Horn Burr

Chalcolithic deliciousness...

A teaser! We dive backwards, beyond the age of literacy and into the age of legend to bring you a vision of a larger future project we plan to deliver: a Copper Age historical fiction novel. The horse, the wheel, and the language take “the wheel” in this exploration of motherhood and childhood under time's passage.

Enjoy!

1: Horn Burr

And when the burden of their labors became too great, the gods cried out to their midwife, saying:

"Create a mortal, that he may bear the yoke! Let him bear the load of the gods!"

They made themselves heard and the midwife of the gods led them in the mixing of clay with blood to form the first men.

The gods captured moonlight, with which she cast man's keen eyes; their backs she fortified with supple wood capable of bearing the load of the gods without snapping at once, and in their ears she whispered the true names of all things to make them wise and capable of receiving instruction.

After all of this the men stood inert as stones, and the gods were outraged that they had toiled for naught. They cried out to the midwife:

"What useless tools are these! They are keen yet cannot strike, strong yet they bear no load, wise yet unable to speak!"

The midwife of the gods smiled at their ignorance, saying:

"There is one gift which they require above all, but which only I may give."

Then she struck each man's heart like a drum to the mother's song, and the men walked, hunted, plowed, and worshiped as was proper — and it was proclaimed as their living sign. And in each the drumbeat went on, passed like a great burden down a laborers’ line, from man unto man-child as the elders' sight faded, backs bent, and minds waned — the clay of their bodies gave way until their chests beat out their last.

But the drumbeat went on forever.

Labor pains wracked Mother’s body, forcing her to lay back on the muddied bank of a nameless creek. The others had long since vanished deeper into the woodlands; only one elder woman with a sunburnt body broadened by her own past births had remained with Mother, until eventually she too had run when the beating of hooves drew near. Mother had clawed at the woman's arm like a shrieking animal pulled from its nest until the woman shook her off. The older woman’s pleas for forgiveness faded, as did the hoofbeats for a time.

Another arc of burning pain tore Mother from tailbone to upper gut. Her bare heels pushed out in agony, cutting valleys into black mud ribbed by pale root tendrils seeking the waterline. She arched her back as wet earth clung under curled toes and her cries echoed unanswered among windless bog trees that gathered summer heat in their loose embrace. Her first child was coming.

Sharp cries of pain gave way to the deep groaning of true child bearing. She willed away the world and imagined instead that she lay in a cave, marsh weeds and dangling branches hardening to hide her from the evil. She strained fruitlessly, pulling at spread legs until her skin was beaten red, freckled by dappled sunlight. Sweat beaded on her nose and brow so that between exertions she let her head fall back into the sopping mud in both exhaustion and to let the water's coolness crease along the knotted muscles of her heated neck.

Eventually something changed within her. A dropping sensation filled her gut and the pressure became urgent. Distant bird calls faded into the sound of blood rushing in her ears as she pushed, and pushed, and pushed again. With a final roar she felt the splitting agony between her legs finally hold its breath and the silence was broken by his first warbling cry.

Wordlessly she wiped him clean of mud and feces, clouded mind unsure if she had voided her bowels from the exertion or simply lain in it. Her beet red face widened in an ugly torrent of laughter and tears. He was a perfect heart to her cave, with dark hair clinging like moss to his conical head.

She pressed his cold little body to her breast and prayed to Sun Mother he would drink the damp heat emanating off her chest as readily as whatever milk she could offer.

---

The sun was still high when the men found them. The trio swayed in uneven rhythm with their horses' tails as behind them a trail of smoke scratched the perfect blue sky from where Mother's folk had once lived off a bounty of fish, eels, and river greens. The men smelled of leather, horses, and sweat left to cure in the world's wide spaces between yellowed grass and cloudless sky.

Arronian led them, broad golden beard over a chest of flashing copper scales, flanked by a narrow shouldered imitation of himself riding upon an uncaparisoned horse. Behind them trotted a white mare bearing a windblown gray-beard in a high crimson cap.

“As I told you, a woman,” said the youngest, named Kotil.

"So you did, brother," said Arronian before spurring his horse forward.

The three men entered Mother's green cave unbidden, leaning against musty manes to avoid low branches as grass and weed tails tickled their horses' hanging stomachs.

Mother silently wept in the mud. Hot tears ran down cheeks and onto the boy as she tightened her body around him — too exhausted even to scream for help that would never come.

"Please, just leave us," she repeated in a language the men could not understand.

Kotil circled her on horseback, eying the treeline. "Couldn’t keep pace with the others, they must have left her behind to have the child."

Arronian grunted.

"But what do we do with her?"

"There is no option," said the old man, the chimes about his neck jingling as he pressed forward, "they must be killed like the others."

"For pity's sake," cried Kotil, "look at her. Let's just leave them. She's a pretty enough thing, she'll have her strength back in the morning and can find some man to take her in."

The old man blew at his mustaches. "Kotil son of Irarrian, I saw you strike down a man this morning with my own eyes. To do that and leave what may well be the man's seed is childishness, and leaves a fallowed field for tomorrow's enemies." Eying Arronian's back, "you think me a heartless bastard don't you? But you'd also be leaving a mother and child to starve in the wilds — to the predations of the weather, beasts, and worse."

The woman continued muttering, face downcast towards the babe between her knees. Kotil opened his mouth but found his voice drowned out by his elder brother's.

"Uncle Yurian is right. We've scattered the river folk to the hills and it may be weeks until she finds survivors. She could never manage it with a newborn."

He spoke with the finality of a hammer blow, but Kotil's feet hit the sucking mud with the force of a drum-strike. "Better a chance than pointless slaughter. I rode today for wealth and family, not this. I'll not be dirtying my blade with the blood of a child like some outcast wretch."

The brothers locked eyes for a moment over her rocking form. Shrugging, Arronian dismounted. Yurian and Kotil looked on in a silence broken only by the stuttering chirrups of a swamp bird. Arronian drew a curved copper dagger from his belt but kept it poised behind his back as he knelt over the woman. Her mud slathered face finally rose from the boy and the earthy heat of birth flooded his nostrils.

Mud squelched under Kotil's shifting feet as Arronian and the woman whispered. Arronian knew only a few words of the river folk's trilling tongue, so they mimed with gestures for several dragging moments in a way only coherent to the two signers.

Eventually Arronian's free hand wormed between her arms and parted the boy's legs to confirm his sex. He said something to her and she nodded with sunken eyes.

The knife came out. Kotil stepped forward but faltered as he saw his brother raise the child's cord, and after some sawing, cut it.

"A thick cord. He will be a strong boy," said Arronian, turning to his uncle, “I will take her and the boy as thralls to serve my house.”

Yurian turned his head as if absorbing a grievous wound. "Thralls? We haven't kept thralls since we crossed the great mountains. None of the righteous clans have."

"But before that we did."

"Did we not grow more wise? A wisdom you seem willing to throw away to the shame of our ancestors — you tempt their wrath on our entire house. And for what? The used fruits of this young girl?"

Arronian smiled. "Because I can."

---

Her body was too raw from the birth to walk the distance to their stead or even share a horse with one of the men; instead, the brothers used a polished stone hatchet and spare leather ties to fashion two branches into a crude litter on which they strung a coat to bear her weight as a horse pulled it. As they worked, the woman cooed worshipfully over the boy and old Yurian kept his own silent company.

They soon left the green cave, her litter bouncing behind Arronian's horse. In the unfiltered sunlight their white-on-crimson patterned horse coverings came to life, gold tassels dancing with each thumping hoofbeat. The sun wheels drawn on each beasts' hindquarters subtly shifting under flexing muscles.

The treeline began to shrink back as mounding greenery gave way to smoother grassland that hissed beneath the litter. She reached out with a childlike greed to pluck the last passing blue blossom as a token of the river. Soon Kotil began to sing, softly to himself at first, a song for the beginning of a journey, but brassily after he and the girl met eyes with shy smiles so that she could hear each word ring out on the open air.

Arronian smiled too, but kept his gaze on the rolling grassland ahead. His mind hung like a cloud over the future and the clear path he knew fate had laid out before him. There would of course be a feast for all the clans to celebrate the ousting of the river folk, where he would be toasted until he was too drunk to stand. His wife and rivals would certainly grouse for a time about his thrall-taking, and no doubt as the reality of the victory settled in there would be endless quarrels about dividing up the new grazing lands and watering rights — a deluge of legalism, cynical calls for traditionalism, and nakedly punitive claims over personal jealousies — but these could each be navigated and crossed in their own time, like a traveler fording riverlands by patiently seeking out their shallows.

But as he looked forward he did not look back, and there was just as much he did not see. For he did not see the burrs clinging to the bottom of the litter the woman rested on, pulled by his very own steed. Horny brown balls which would soon go to seed in the shaded creeks and watering holes of his stead. In future summers they would cling to each passing animal, shepherd, and child sent to fetch water, only to fall off with a wicked mind of their own — littering the stead's walkways and earthen floors with barbs that relished biting into the unwary toe and which could not be coaxed out without the victim gritting their teeth and tearing the barbed devil out in a rivulet of blood.

He did not see the boy.

Interested in supporting? Tooky’s Mag is now accepting paid subscriptions!

We’ve also released a novella ‘Improvidence’, a Lewis & Clark style adventure across the post-collapse ruins of America: https://a.co/d/3AGjHU2