Mango Chiefton's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

Mango pressed a rag to his carved arm and watched the blood soak through. One rune had nearly killed him. Dozens waited. He could not keep bleeding out for each line. He wrapped his arm tight and set off across the shallows, hunting the old ink parlor the elders whispered about. If any place held a shaman's secrets, it was there. The parlor slumped between rotted posts. Its sign hung cracked, the paint long gone. Mango shoved the door and stepped into dust and cobwebs. Faded chairs. Empty jars. On a shelf he found bundled sticks of pale incense, ground from bone. Beside them lay a broken bone stencil, its edges worn smooth by old hands. Someone had carved runes here before him. He gathered both and turned to go. A shape moved in the doorway. Mango raised his fists. "Easy," the shape said. It was Riko Quickpaw, his young cousin, thin fingers already busy shaving a splinter of bone to a point. Riko had trailed him from camp. The boy carved fishhooks so fine they looked like hair. "You bleed too much, cousin. The whole troop smells it on you. I want to help before the fish take you next." Mango almost sent him away. But he looked at the wrapped arm and the dozens of runes ahead. He held out the incense and the stencil. "Then help." Riko chewed his lip. He crossed to the shelf and pulled down a glossy bulb, red petals wet in the gloom. A swamp poppy. "My mother chews this for pain. It kills feeling in the skin." He crushed the bulb and smeared the pulp along a fresh line on Mango's chest. The skin went numb and cold. "That stops the hurt," Mango said. "Not the bleeding." Riko lit a stick of the bone incense. Pale smoke curled up. He waved it over the numbed skin. "The old master burned this over his cuts. Watch." Where the smoke settled, the raw grooves from the first rune stopped weeping. The blood thickened and crusted fast. Mango stared. He pressed the numbed patch. No fresh blood came. The smoke sealed the wound as the fish carved it. They worked through the night. Riko chewed poppy pulp and packed each planned line. He burned the incense low over the fresh cuts. Mango waded to the shallows, smeared the paste, and gave his skin to the teeth. This time the piranhas bit and the smoke closed the grooves behind them. He carved four runes before dawn and stood upright, pale but breathing. Riko wiped his hands and grinned. "See? You keep the ink. You keep the blood." Mango touched the four fresh runes on his chest. He would live long enough to finish now. But four had taken a whole night, and dozens remained. The beast still walked the sleeping ground. Time, not blood, was the enemy now.