This is part 2 of The Hymn of the Skirts. It continues on from the perspective of one of the boys in Loud Mouth’s group. The world has changed much in the time between now and when this story takes place. What was on the paper given to the boys? What is the goal of the Priests? Let’s find out!
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Part 2: Twitch
Vengeance is the right of every living being that has suffered. The ancients often spoke of their rights at length. Hammurabi’s Code. The Magna Carta. The Constitution. The Free Folks Agreement.
All weak declarations of a pitiful people with vision but no strength to hold onto it. My great, great, grandfather watched the last free city burn. He stood on the hills and felt the heat on his brow. The smoldering ruins perfectly reflected what humanity is capable of.
It was a great bedtime story for a father to tell his child, and it’s been passed on ever since. He said it would serve as a reminder of all that was taken from us; it would be the foundation for a future where we don’t make the same mistakes. Instead it just pisses me off.
I ripped the sleeves from my brown shirt. Priests never said anything about a rule that I needed sleeves. To hell with their sleeves.
They plucked rats straight from their mother’s arms. I bet they had to pull Sweaty away from his kicking and screaming. Makes me laugh thinking of the slurping noise as he slipped from her grip, like a pickle you squeeze too tightly pulling it from a jar.
He was right to worry. He would never be a weapon. By the God in the sky or the one in the ground, I swore the second I saw him I would kill him myself if he got in my way.
He stared at me like a rat watching a snake. “Get a good look, Sweaty,” I spoke with what my dad would’ve called a shit eating grin.
Bastard drank his weight in booze every night. Gave him just enough strength to beat up an old lady and a little boy. Never enough to own up to it the next day.
Most families in the Skirts followed the norms. Work, rest, sleep, and work. Lucky me to be born into the one that worshiped the God in the ground.
The God in the sky offered hope and love. He welcomed prayer and promised peace. The God in the ground brought fear and suffering, and only accepted blood and pain as an offering.
Most of the men in our village worked the mines, but my family was the odd one out. We lived at the town perimeter– where the gray rocky ground gave way to splotches of yellow grass. It wasn’t good ground, but it was good enough.
Cows. Pigs. Sheep. We raised them just to slaughter them. I killed, skinned, and gutted my first cow at the age of five. On the Great Wheel, the strong decide when the spinning stops, and after hearing that story for the first time, I decided I would be strong.
All the meat went to the cities, of course. It was a royal edict for us to live off rations supplemented by wild rabbits or wolves– whatever was left alive in the Skirts that wasn’t tainted by the calamity.
There was a brief period during the spring rains that turtles and frogs overran the village and became a reprieve on our dinner plates. It’s a lie that frogs taste like chicken, but frogs are far better than gruel and mush. Everything is bland here.
“Shut up and keep on the lookout,” the younger priest said like it was a warning. I’d like to see him pull that rod out and swing at me.
I was always on the lookout. I didn’t take a step without knowing the next. With each new one I felt more alone. If this was to be my unit, I would be just as on my own as I had been in the village.
Leaving the town they took Loud Mouth from, I caught a brief glimpse of his schoolhouse. Looked just like mine, but it seemed he got to use his. A long time ago the fathers and mothers in my family decided they would either educate us themselves or not at all.
Of the lessons I learned during the few lucid times my dad saw fit to educate me, perhaps the most important of all was critical thinking. “Believe what you experience and can prove, not what you are told,” the old man used to say when he wasn’t kicking my ass.
If life was about learning lessons, my bloodline had been poor students. The great, great grandfather that fled the riots and the culling that followed the droughts and the famine, had every opportunity to set us up for success. He was right not to trust the authority, or the Priests emerging to prey on the people, but so very wrong to escape so far into the wasteland we would never dig ourselves back out.
Fear is the enemy that beats you down without ever lifting a finger. I made a promise to both Gods that it would never cripple me. So, I set about to notice all I could and give myself the best chance at taking advantage of whatever the wheel offered.
Loud Mouth was small, but seemed smart in the way naive children often were. Sweaty was large and feared the sound of his own breathing, which was so loud we might as well have been walking up the road yelling, “Here we are!” I couldn’t read Scar. Was he strong? Was he just a body with no brain?
I remembered him from the village. We were from the same one. It’s not like I had friends, but I hardly knew him. Always kept to himself and followed his dad around like he was on a leash.
He got that scar three winters ago. The snow came out of nowhere. They said his sister was trapped under the collapsed roof of their house for an hour before he freed her.
All it cost him was his smile. The packed snow beneath him was crimson when his uncle lifted his face off of it. A piece of railing he’d pushed off his sister shifted as she moved away. The metal had its vengeance.
“You’re nowhere near the lives you knew,” the chief added. Of course we weren’t, asshole, you purchased us so we could pretend to do God’s work of killing other rats in other lands.
Funny, they always tell you it’s for God. If God needed someone dead, you really think he’d leave it up to a brainwashed old fart wrapped in a black cloak or a scared shitless little boy draped in a brown one? If that’s what God needs to complete his work, Heaven is just as screwed as we are.
“Why do you think they had us start moving so cautiously,” Loud Mouth posed the question as a whisper under his breath like the Priests couldn’t hear. The small idiot just couldn’t shut up.
“Maybe we entered enemy territory,” Sweaty answered. He was huffing and puffing. His new brown shirt was already soaked through.
“What enemy? We aren’t even twenty miles from home yet,” Loud Mouth continued to whisper.
The younger Priest turned in a flash and struck Loud Mouth with his closed fist. Straight to the nose. As he hit the ground, the boy sounded like one of the dead sheep I used to cut up and toss to the side.
Before any of us had time to marvel at the young Priest’s speed, or the fact that the hit didn’t knock Loud Mouth out cold, we caught our first glimpse of the enemy. They were about two-hundred yards in front of us. Moving parallel with the road, but about twenty yards off of it.
After moving past the Dead Forest, the road had mostly been a barren desert of rock and dirt. Snow covered mountains lurked on the horizon, but they were at least a day’s travel away. The roads were weathered, broken and chipped. Deadweed tore through in patches.
Deadweed was thick, brittle, and grew about a foot off the ground. Good luck if one of the thorns cut you. It was hell trying to get the bleeding to stop. My grandfather said it didn’t grow before the calamity. It was a byproduct of the war and the broken environment caused by it.
One summer I ran away from home, about four years ago. Dad was on another bender. Broke mom’s jaw that day. Threw me into the toilet and my jaw chipped a piece of it off.
I slept in a patch of deadweed that night. Cursed at the stars wondering who the hell named it deadweed. When I woke up I looked like I had been in a knife fight.
“There’s six of ’em,” the chief said.
Loud Mouth picked himself off the ground and knelt down studying our position. There was a ledge to our left, dropped about six or seven feet into a patch of heavy deadweed. It spanned about ten yards or so in front of us.
“This is the place,” he proclaimed. I hated how sure he was of himself.
“To hell with that,” I replied, “let’s just hit them straight on.” I was ready to fight something. Must have been the part of dad in me I just couldn’t escape.
“If we go back the way we came, we can go around them,” Sweaty chimed in, wiping his forehead again.
Before I had the chance to tell him how absolutely worthless he was to the group, Loud Mouth spoke up instead, “No, this is the place.”
The Priests moved behind a boulder near the road, not saying anything. The younger one sat on the ground and stared with a blank look. The chief leaned against it, he had a slight smile on his face like this was the moment he’d been waiting for. Did they plan to let us fight on our own? Seemed like a waste of credits to me. Sweaty was surely dead. Probably Loud Mouth too.
“Loud Mouth has a plan,” Scar finally joined the conversation, “let’s give it a shot.” His arms were crossed and I couldn’t tell if he had a single thought running through his mind. His strength was definitely a bonus to the situation, but so far he seemed like the type to take any order given regardless of its worth.
“Rafe, I need you to sneak around on our left,” Loud Mouth started explaining. I was surprised the Priests didn’t strike him again for using Scar’s old name. “You need to be seen once you’re on the other side of it,” he calmly continued.
The boy may have been small, but I could tell by how calm he was that he was either an idiot, or he had balls of steel. I hadn’t decided yet, but if Scar was listening, it was worth a try. “Alright then,” I said.
“Twitch,” he looked at me. His eyes were cold, but focused like he wasn’t the same stupid boy asking stupid questions. “Once they’re in the trap, tear them to pieces.”
I didn’t know why, but I was smiling. I knew these kids well enough to know they were mostly useless, but it was a real smile on my face. The kind of smile from love or hope– things I’d given up on. My blood was flowing and it felt good.
“Sweaty,” Loud Mouth abruptly turned and scared the boy. I thought Sweaty shit himself from the surprised look on his face. “You have the most important job. After the first few fall, one or two will likely see the trap. You need to rush out and push them over the edge.”
I really liked the cut of his jib. The smallest one of us had me believing it could work. I didn’t care which God he believed in, there was fight in his eyes and demon blood in his veins. Not a lot of that remained in the Skirts.
The Priests still just sat watching. None of us dared question why. Was it a test? Did they just want to see if we’d all die or not?
I seemed to be the only one that could read. I thought it strange that the parchment we were handed only said, “I survived the trial.” Was this the trial?
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