Hangman vaulted over the ledge, landed on another rock below him, and sprang from ledge to ledge until he landed on the ground.

  He only glanced at the Gorlock long enough to make sure it was really dead. It was.

  He squatted down next to his brother and turned the boy over. Jono was fourteen, the age of initiation in the Godless Clan.

  He looked a lot younger and a lot smaller than only four years younger than Hangman. He didn’t remember ever being that young or that small.

  Hangman scooped up the boy in his arms. Jono’s blood made him slippery, but that didn’t matter.

  Hangman walked out of the clearing just as his father, cousins, and uncles entered it. They surrounded the Gorlock and started hacking it to pieces to take the meant back to their camp.

  Hangman didn’t wait around to help. He carried Jono through the jungle, down a mile of winding pathways, and back to the place where the men camped the night before.

  Hangman kicked the party’s woven reed sleeping mats into place by the fire, laid Jono on the mats, and rolled some of the party’s baggage into a knot to make a pillow.

  Jono didn’t come around during the whole trip back to the camp.

  Hangman had the place to himself until the men returned. No women came with them on this trip. Women weren’t allowed to attend a boy’s initiation rite.

  Women weren’t even allowed to come on the journey or even to know where the men took the boy for initiation. This rite belonged only to the men.

  Memories of Hangman’s initiation flooded back to him while he soaked a piece of soft fur in a bowl of water and used it to wash the blood off Jono’s face.

  The sequence always followed the same pattern. The boy to be initiated had to go through the whole camp of women on his way to leave with the men who would initiate him.

  It usually started with the boy’s mother sobbing over him, hugging him, and talking to him a mile a minute about all the different ways he had to be careful so he didn’t hurt himself or get himself killed.

  Then all the boy’s other female relatives wound up doing the same thing one after the other. His sisters, cousins, aunts, and more distant relatives all had to come and cry over him when they realized he might not come back that day.

  Hangman remembered his mother doing the same thing to him—not to mention all his aunts and female cousins.

  At least he didn’t have any sisters to cry over him. He was the oldest of four boys. Now Jono initiated, too—the first after Hangman.

  Hangman found himself studying his little brother more closely. These wounds would scar over. They would mark this young man in ways no one could see from the outside.

  The same thing happened to Hangman. The scars on the outside didn’t hold a candle to the change that happened on the inside when he went through his initiation.

  The men came back, butchered the Gorlock, put a hunk of meat on the fire to cook, and sliced up the rest to dry it out for traveling rations.

  Hangman paid no attention to them and went on tending Jono’s wounds. No one knew better than Hangman the life Jono could look forward to after this.

  Hangman mopped down all the blood on Jono’s chest, but those wounds were only scratches. They didn’t go any deeper than the surface.

  The slashes on Jono’s face were the worst. Hangman left, found the leaves of a certain plant in the jungle, brought it back, and ground it into a paste in one of the bowls the party used to eat out of.

  He smeared the paste on the wounds. The sensation woke Jono up.

  He jolted back to consciousness and tried to fight Hangman off before Jono recognized who it was.

  “Lie down, little brother,” Hangman told him. “You’re safe. You’re in the camp. You did it. You’re initiated.”

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  “Is it dead, Hangman?” Jono husked. “Is it really dead?”

  “You killed it. Do you see the meat on the fire over there? You’ll be eating that Gorlock for dinner tonight. You’re a man now. You can lie down and rest. You don’t have to fight anymore—not today at least.”

  Jono didn’t relax right away. His head jerked the other way.

  Hangman followed his brother’s gaze. Their father, Shadow, sat across the camp talking to his brothers, Butcher and Fang.

  Butcher was Kral of their band—the leader of this family group of the Godless Clan. Hangman, Jono, and their two younger brothers were the youngest of the cousins—the sons of Butcher, Fang, and their now-deceased oldest brother Midnight.

  Midnight’s sons were the oldest cousins. Now Alien, Feather, and Banjo served Butcher as their Kral.

  If anything happened to Butcher, his sons Boxer and Magnet would serve Shadow as the next Kral until no men of that family’s generation remained. Then the position of Kral would pass to the oldest son of whoever happened to be Kral at the time.

  The cousins sat together or worked on the other side of the camp. Fang’s sons, Viking, Chaos, and Vulture worked to construct a frame over the fire to dry the Gorlock meat for travel.

  “You see?” Hangman murmured. “Father and the others are probably over there deciding on a name for you.” Hangman pushed on his brother’s shoulder. “Lie down. You don’t have to do anything else right now. You can rest.”

  “Did you see, Hangman?” Jono husked. “Did you all see?”

  “We all saw. The test was perfectly valid. You were too dazed to hear us cheering for you, but we all saw.”

  Jono looked away. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember much of anything.”

  “You went down hard and fell unconscious. We all thought you would die, but you got up and you defeated it. You did very well. I’m proud of you and I’m sure Father is very proud of you. Just imagine the weeping and crying when Mother sees you.”

  Jono didn’t take the joke. His dark eyes darted back to Hangman. “How bad is it, Hangman? Tell me the truth.”

  Hangman looked up from his task of grinding some more of the leaf paste. He couldn’t look away from his brother’s eyes.

  No one understood that question as well as Hangman did. He saw it in the eyes of everyone who looked at him every day of his life.

  He even saw his own reflection in his brother’s eyes right now. The glassy surface of other people’s eyes was the one place where Hangman saw his own reflection.

  In those moments, he saw himself as other people saw him. He saw himself as a grotesque, hideous, deformed creature as disgusting to them as all the blood-thirsty monsters roaming this country.

  Hangman would have liked to look away from that reflection—and from everything it meant to his life.

  He had trained himself ever since his initiation never to look away—from anything—especially not that. He always faced it head on. He had to. He couldn’t run from his own face.

  “It isn’t as bad as mine,” he murmured. “You will be scarred, but only slightly—like Viking over there.”

  Hangman waved his grinding stone over his shoulder toward his big cousin.

  Viking was easily one of the tallest, burliest men of their family band. All the men of the Godless Clan wore a combination of cured skins tied into loincloths around their waists.

  That was their only clothing apart from footwear and knee-high leggings also sewn from the skins of creatures they hunted. The jungle was too hot to wear anything else.

  The men let their straight black hair grow long. Some tied it into bunches with strips of hide or twisted cordage from the jungle. Others wove it into plaits or any other arrangement to keep it neat and out of the way for hunting trips.

  Viking was one of those who used vines and hand-twisted cordage to bind his hair into thin, rope-like strands. He kept his hair bound up away from his forehead all the way back across his whole scalp.

  It gave him a much harsher look than most Godless men, but he had one of the softest, kindest personalities in the whole band. Everyone loved him, especially women and children.

  A long, whitish scar cut down one side of Viking’s face. The scar started just below the left eye and ran straight down to the jawline.

  Most people thought Viking’s scar made him look powerful, masculine, and distinguished—which it did. No one thought Viking’s scar made him ugly.

  Jono sank back on the mat, but he didn’t relax and he didn’t look away. “You wouldn’t lie to me about it, would you, Hangman?”

  “Never. I can bring you a basin of water so you can see your reflection if you want. The cuts look worse now than they will after they scar. They won’t make you look different—not like mine make me look different.”

  That finally satisfied Jono. He settled down and turned his face away to watch the activity of the camp. “I can’t believe it’s over. I looked forward to this day for so long. Now I feel nothing.”

  “It comes later,” Hangman told him. “The mark grows over time. It grows with you. You don’t become a man at initiation. This is just the bridge that takes you across the river to the road to manhood on the other side.”

  “You make it look so easy,” Jono breathed.

  Hangman snorted. “You only think that because I’m your older brother. I would think the same thing about you if our positions were reversed.”

  “No,” Jono murmured. “It isn’t that. It’s you.”

  Hangman didn’t answer. No one had to explain to him how everyone treated him differently—in ways that had nothing to do with his looks.

  Everyone in Butcher’s band treated Hangman like he was much older than he really was. They all treated him as though he had much more authority than he did—more than a man his age should have.

  Everyone treated him as though he was actually more like Butcher’s brother instead of his nephew—one of his youngest nephews.

  Hangman didn’t realize until now that his status had been affecting his younger brothers, but it must have been.

  Jono, Landus, and Jarun must have grown up seeing everyone treat Hangman differently—and not because of his looks.

  Hangman didn’t try to come up with a sensible objection to this because there wasn’t one. It was just one of the undeniable facts of his reality—just like his scars.

  End of Chapter 2.

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

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