Thin curls and chips of volcanic glass littered the floor, planed off the flint held in his steady, unmoving hands. With a scrutinising eye, and the occasional movement of his knife, he put the finishing touches to the sharp edge of the volcanic stone. When the edge was finished to his satisfaction, he tested it with the tip of his middle finger. The edge effortlessly sliced a tiny gash, which welled with blood. Satisfied, he pushed the flint into the final setting on the wooden sword, where it glinted alongside the other sharp flint teeth.
It was ready. Almost everything was ready now. He had prepared himself for the task ahead, having refused food for the last two days, drinking only water, to keep himself alert. His eyes had a glazed look often associated with drugs, but he had not been drugging himself, just preparing, meditating, thinking, deciding, making up his mind about what must be done. All doubt had been filtered away during this time and he was left with a cold dead certainty. All that was left was for him to finish his preparations and face his destiny.
The men were coming for him. The same men who had raped his sister. He was the one who had found her, still clutching feebly to the straw of life that loosened even as he approached. He had seen the way they had torn her clothes, cut her skin, seared her breasts with cigars, and as a final indignity cut her beautiful black hair with a hunting knife. There were cuts scattered across her scalp from where the clumsy rapist responsible had slipped with the knife and penetrated flesh in another way. He had known just from seeing her that she would die. No medicine could save her from the wounds they had inflicted, not even the strange practices the kin of these men had brought with them. Not that they would treat a girl like this, not that he would take his sister to see men like that. He had sat by her on the edge of the riverbank where they had left her, holding her hand gently, whispering lies to her about how it was all going to be all right. He was still holding her hand half an hour later when she finally loosened her grasp on life. Her sobbing faded, her breathing shallowed, and with an almost inaudible gasp, the spirit left her. She was fourteen.
He knew they were on their way. His grasp of their tongue was not expert, but it was enough to understand. He had heard the words they used like ‘resettlement plan’, ‘establishments of reservations’, ‘extensive mining rights’, ‘land rights’, ‘legally binding mineral claims’. The concepts were unfamiliar to him, but he knew what they were. Weasel-words to take from him and his brothers things that nobody owned in the first place. His father had laughed when he had heard the idea. Own the land? How? Would you take the hills and put them in a box? Next these newcomers would say they owned the sun and the clouds and the air. ‘The land owns you, never forget that’, he had said, countless times, dismissing the claims as the rantings of the feeble-minded. It was lucky for the old man that he had died peacefully in his sleep in the land he loved. He would not have survived seeing the newcomers putting their invisible boxes round the hills. Now it was his son who had to face the men who came armed with guns and pieces of paper. They held the paper like it was a talisman, like the black ink scrawled on it would banish whatever demons lay in the earth they tried to occupy. In some ways, he was more frightened of the paper than of the guns. He had heard stories, passed from mouth to ear, mouth to ear from all across the land. Tales of men who had tried facing up to the guns and pieces of paper, and had been shot, or worse taken away in chains and never heard of again. Some had taken the rash step of attacking these newcomers, and had incurred their wrath. Not only had they died, but their families had been taken away. Some still considered this to be honourable, to die fighting for what they believed in, for their right to live. He did not agree. While the prospect of being herded off the land into reservations was terrible, a break between himself and the land, he could not consider a fight so futile. They already saw his people as savages, and confirming it by making war would only make things go hard for his people. No, he thought, a true warrior had only one way out.
The wooden sword completed, he donned the remainder of his clothing. A loose leather tunic bound with a belt of rough hemp, from which hung items of his faith. A dark hemp kilt, from whose belt hung a bone knife, almost as sharp as the teeth of the wooden sword. A leather thong round his neck, from which hung a dreamcatcher with his totem, the sparrowhawk, detailed on a tiny shard of silver. Lines of blue woad on his cheeks indicated to the world that he was not afraid to die for what he believed. This was final, there was no way out. He could not walk humbly to the dusty patch of land they allocated for him, likewise he could not attack, insuring his people’s death as surely as his own.
He picked up the small clay bowl. The berries had soaked in here for two days, the water absorbing their bitter essence. He placed the bowl to his lips and drank. His head slowly began to swim. Carefully he lay on his straw mattress, placing his wooden sword across his chest as the darkness came. As the last breath expired from his body a single tear leaked from the corner of his eye. His body shuddered slightly as he died a true warrior’s death.