Almighty Gord of Antithesis
By
Appleton H. Schneider
Almighty Gord Of Antithesis
By Appleton Schneider
Copyright 2005 by Appleton Schneider
Smashwords Edition
Warning to be read before reading the book .
Almighty Gord of Antithesis may be satire. Or not. So much is based on what the history of man shows us -- the beauty but the brutality . . .the creativity yet carnage chaos. There are many instances and images which might be offensive or even traumatic for some. And, too, in this book, too, there is cruelty combined with eroticism. The tenets of the “Creed of Antithesis“ determine all life, even thought, in the ruin city: the enactments, the enforcements, the fastenings, the cannibalistic feastings. For a man-eat-man menu ( food for thought is not an edible . . . but those captured by the Hunters are, and comprise “the herd“ . . . to feed or to breed . . . ) is the only sustenance that remain on the desecrated earth.
Almighty Gord of Antithesis presents the history of man’s existence as the death of the earth. In distant retrospect, man “evolved” to depart from natural patterns of all other life forms. Gord’s host in the ruined fortress by the sea, old Marl, considers this span. And in much greater length he examines the antithesis of modernization, mechanization, globalization, and so much more which, through the short span of 1800 to 2200 AD saw the total collapse of society, civilization, even ecology, and part of the North American continent. (sequential Cascade Range eruptions . . .”tear-on-dotted-line” . . .and then super-subduction . . . .)
Such quasi-documentary satire-of-extremes is a focus of this book’s intent. But it could also be that what I’ve written is not just future-horror-fiction . . . but prediction.
Chapters
1 Refuge and Retrospect
2 Off On The Hunt
3 By The Beautiful Sea
4 Intimate Interlude
5 Lessons And Learnings
6 Storm Coming
6a The Storm
7 Going Below
8 The Greater Depths
9 The Comprehensive Revelations
10 Before The Turning Point
11 The Turning Point
12 The Conquest Of Pthesis
13 Toward The South Again
14 The Capture And The Prey
15 The Triumphal Return And
Processional Into Antithesis
Chapter 1
THE REFUGE AND THE RETROSPECT
The impact surely was felt by now. Agony conveys a strong message, far surpassing the influences of being and even knowing. Yet for so long something had dulled the senses. For so long the glory of man’s encroaching demise had deadened all . . . . . and there was no pain until the sudden touch of agony.
She’d screamed until her voice croaked no more humanly than the rotting building whose scaling arches of gold towered above, breathing the swaying atmosphere. She’d wrenched and writhed but could not free herself from the bonds in which he had secured her so that she could not escape, could not even stand. So tightly fastened by the tendrils tying her wrists and ankles together, she lay helplessly on the floor.
The man pulled his knee-length cloak tighter about him for the night was rising in wisps from the surrounding wastes. A slight disquiet of fleas gave form to his sweat stench as he tied the garment at his waist. There was something cretin in his appearance. A thatch of hair covered head and shoulders and straggled from his cheeks. His feet, wrapped in matted filth, scuffed across the strangely preserved red tiles of the place, skirted a division built waist-high across the chamber, and stopped. He stared down at the woman and scratched himself randomly.
She raised her head, but agony took hold and once more she tried to scream at him until she almost choked. And in that instant she’d again seen his face and found intelligence, and sensitivity, incongruous with his beastly appearance, but evident all the same. She’d seen his features as almost refined, his eyes almost conveying a message of their shared humanity as they met hers for that second. Then, though, only through the bristles of her lower lashes could she see him as an astigmatic form, framed in the dying gray of daylight from the double-arched window beyond. His feet shuffled him around to stand over her fair-skinned face. Now he was upside-down to her and she, naked in the ever-rising mist-cold, a pale, slender creature below him. Their eyes met another second until her tears dissolved his image into only blur.
It was close to dark and the ancient building’s drafty inside increased its counter-point to the blowing-in of outside night. Through the great doorway, arched like every other feature of the place, and similarly flaking gold flecks onto the floor, the girl could be seen still gathering firewood. Now the man strode resolutely to the door. A few strands of his footwear slithered askew with every step.
“Faster!!“ he ordered. “Faster or you feel her pain tonight.”
Startled, she spun around to his voice and dropped the armful of weathered spindles and other worked fragments of wood that littered the area, inside and out. She quickly grasped her right foot and hopped in pain. But he was upon her, enraged. He threw her to the ground, and pulled loose his woven belt as she scrambled amidst the dropped pieces, regathering in a frenzy to avoid the lashes which didn’t quite reach her body. For he just stood, mainly menacing with the strap until her arms were bristling again with the clumsy burden. Then he followed her into the structure, taking his eyes from her only again to ponder the mystery of the place.
Isolated in the landscape of endless knee-deep vines which interwove their brown tendrils impenetrably, this was the only sanctuary for miles. The plot on which it stood was rectangular and relatively barren. For some reason the ground here defied the ubiquitous vine-growth of almost everywhere else. From gravelly, black surface only straggling grasses and dead fibrils sprouted. And centered in this patch was the brick edifice with its arched windows and doors and smaller décor features. The building’s interior was divided into two sections, the front being a large vestibule where, amidst debris, some almost intact bench-like things, pews? or benches? stood upon the red-tiled floor. Also there were a few small, rectangular surfaces, about waist-high, set on pedestals. Separating this front region from the rear section of the building was a decaying division or altar? or counter? Above it were plaques bearing strange symbols and numbers, all faded and askew, and what seemed to have once been images of things.
Behind the division was the larger rear section of the building where blackness augmented night’s outside-insurgence. It was to the rear realm where various chests and shelves and inscrutable other metallic devices were in disarray that the man’s threatening strap hastened the wood-bearer’s steps. When she and he were within feet of the bound woman they stopped.
“Drop the wood,” he snarled.
The girl did, gingerly jumping back to avoid more pain to her bruised toes.
“We burn in this again like other nights,” he said as they approached a partly crushed object nearby. Into one of its square openings she started placing sticks until he pushed her away. He groped around the sides of his cloak, found the pouch, and withdrew the stones. Again he turned to the girl who crouched in moonlight’s oblique seep across the floor.
“Get over here.”
She shivered, cold and terror combining. Sideways like a wounded insect, her limbs sprawling, she moved toward him without undoing her crouch. His hand led its arm from a sleeve’s web-like raveling. Fingers gnarled in silhouette approached her trembling form, stroked a gasp across her cheek, then seized a tuft of her hair and ripped it out before she could even gasp. She scurried back out of the moon’s sight and bit silence into her fist while his gnarled grasp placed her hair atop the wood inside the chest. The man scratched the stones together. Sparks flew randomly at first. Then as the pebbles continued striking, the orbs fell more and more onto the hair. But there was no fire.
“Damned greasy bitch,” he mumbled. He slogged past the woman who moaned momentary expectation, but became silent after he had passed.
“Soon all will be gone to leave this place the silent prey of the vines . . . .. “ he was murmuring from just outside the door where he stooped and broke off a handful of the brittle tips of the vine fibrils. Then he returned to the firebox, added the new kindling, and with only a few strokes of the stones achieved an ember,. Soon there was a flicker experimenting with existence. He plucked twig and fiber from the wad of vine and hair, stacking in miniscule, finally creating a flame. A few splintered ends of a wooden spindle yielded to his teeth. And when these ignited mere flame to fire, he made a cone of sticks and both light and heat were soon dancing in a little sphere. He gathered his cloak tightly around him, hunched, and closed his eyes for a long moment.
The girl’s teeth chattered. Otherwise she was motionless beside the transverse altar that divided the realms of the place. From the fire, tepid warmth that barely touched her made the contrast of the chill air more uncomfortable to her skin. She shivered, glancing in fright to see what reaction her guard would make.
Raising one eyelid, he looked at her. ”Stand!” he ordered.
She did, pulling herself up by the counter’s edge. She was perhaps twenty years in age, but so thin, her womanhood just moderately swelling breasts and hips. Under his stare and apparently safe from violence for the moment, she was suddenly aware of herself and instinctively her hands moved to clothe her exposure as she partially turned away.
“No!!”
Hands fell, uncertain, to her sides. But still she twisted her lanky torso, awkwardly trying to avoid a full frontal exposure to his scrutiny.
He looked at her with gleaming eyes. Her hair was shorn, but fibrils glinted spectrum in moon and fire glow. Her cheeks hollow, cheekbones high, slender nostrils, full lips . . . . she stood, long legs tapering to wrist-thin ankles. And as she too sensed herself as he saw her, she forgot the cold and felt the heat of focus explore her body.
“Come here,” he hissed.
She gasped, fear joined with some unknown, new sensation now making her tremble. Against the wild dishevelment of his cloak after a faltering last step, she felt the tingle of the fibrils. . . . . . . .
He stepped back from her, their touch undone except for his eyes and her residual, astounding responses and expectations. She watched him untie the wrists of the woman, seemed to experience them both as her own innate sensations as he brought the woman, too, only to the brink. She then saw him tie her own wrists, felt him lift her and hook her, tiptoe-high, to a protrusion from one of the pillars supporting the structure.
The man then lay down, using a piece of spongy, yellowish substance for a pillow. He assessed the situation as the insignificance of the fire he’d lit diminished into invisibility. All was in order for another night together in the luxury of this shelter. He would awake should either of his captives attempt to free themselves. All was safe. Secure. The man curled within his cloak, as if a fetus in an amnion of filth and sweat. Only once during the night he awoke to whimpering. But his fatigue brought him sleep again despite such inconsiderate annoyance.
The morning was already upon them when he rose. The opaque chill was returning to the earth, fleeing the sun’s rays. Looking reluctantly through the window, the man realized that before long, day’s heat would weigh upon his cloaked body as uncomfortably as the night’s cold had upon his naked prisoners. But now it was still cool and he thought momentarily of lighting another fire. But there was not time enough, nor purpose. For the journey before them was still long and the season of these warm days would shortly end, even by a sudden, errant day of cryonic temperature and snow of color-variances signifying chemicals conveyed, crystallized, but still corrosive to the skin. So it was urgent that he leave.
He unhooked the girl and ordered her to untie the bonds of the woman. He then picked up the sack that had been left by the door, further loaded it with wood fragments, passed it to the girl to carry, and for yet another day, the journey continued back toward the ruin-city of Antithesis.
Having been so bound, the woman found walking painful at first. But her daughter helped her, and though progress was slow, the three traversed the smaller band of vine-free surface that intersected with the patch of land on which the structure stood. The man glanced back at the decaying façade of the building, now behind them,. He wondered at its towering, arched configurations, the remaining ornate characters inscribed on its entry lintel and elsewhere . . . . . . once the symbols seemed to have been gold colored . . . . now they were corroded, flaked, tilted, some displaced, some missing . . . . . M . . . D . . .O N A . . . .. He pondered what the missing ciphers had been, what they had meant. Had it been the name of the place . . . or a name of something or someone worshipped within the place?
He looked back just before the narrow path swirled in various directions to join the great parallel swaths whose higher surface stretched as if forever into the distance either way. Marl had told of places, of names, even of religions. But Marl had not told him of such a place as this. Only for a moment did he wonder what it all had been. Then the man turned and followed the captives up the gravelly, circular ramp, and by the time they headed south on the great right-hand swath, the two towering arches, which stood alone in front of the building they’d left, were but overlapping dots deflating into the horizon.
Walking behind his prisoners, the man’s thoughts drifted back . . . Back so many years before . . . . . . .
***
The arrivals had been excruciating the first few times, for despite the Creed, something within him felt wrong. The first time was etched vividly in his mind.
The hunters and their prey could only be seen as specks before their paths converged on the great expanse of the Barrens. Yet an indefinable sense of expectation threatened to moistened the eyes of the young boy who watched. So he had turned to look at the others of his class. There were nineteen others, just as wide-eyed, who would stand the hour or so and not dare to fidget or even show expression or reaction at all. They had been chosen and they knew, without conceiving why, that they were special and what they were to see was part of the specialness they would become when they were grown-up men. But special or not, he wanted to cry as he stood in the heat on the desolate flat beside the desecrated mounds of the city of Antithesis. For some reason he dreaded having to return his gaze to the distant group of figures steadily approaching. But for some other reason, he could not keep his gaze averted, nor his expectation from a strange, stimulating sensation within his body.
He dared the diversion of a peripheral view beside the Barrens’ several square miles. There in Antithesis, he and his people lived. To there, the hunters brought the prey. There, the prey would be the very sustenance. The only sustenance left for the populace to consume.
Even whispering it was unthinkable, but the thought somehow existed . . . that once amazing things had stood where now only caverns within debris made arbitrary rooms for functions and lodging. Many things had existed, stood, functioned, operated, but only in the unavoidable instinct-realizations of the people, especially the Special Youth. Even such diversion of attention from purpose, even such instinct-realization amid this special day for a Special Youth might, if realized, bring him to be consumed himself. But he couldn’t help it. He could discern the furrows that divided the ruins into small plots, innumerable rectangles and squares, one after the other. Then further back from the Barrens whose blank, infertile dirt grew only wispy strands not fully vines, broader, irregular-shaped hillocks were all that remained. Sometimes it all seemed as strange as the physical sensations that the boy felt that day as the hunters and prey came closer. But even to ponder was forbidden by the Creed, let alone to question. The Creed ruled all life for all in Antithesis. It was rigid, immutable. Time was an absolute, today being the focus of awareness that was forbidden any greater span. When he was older, as a Special Youth, he would learn “tomorrow” as “next-segment now” from sunrise to sleep. Such extension of time would be necessary for the hunter to hunt! But for all, yesterday was absolutely nonexistent.
Any concept, mention, even private ponder of yesterday was the worst heresy and the pains upon discovery were unmentionable, the infliction upon the miscreant in duration as well . . . . until death would be the eventual release and entry into the food chain the final reward to the populace after their enjoyment as spectators of the preliminaries.
Whether it was the long wait with the hot sun burning his body, the fumes that rose from the ground, or the vague premonition of what he and his classmates were about to witness, or some inspiration of incomprehensible origin (like the city and Barrens and all the other desecrations) . . . . . it had been excruciating that first time even as it became innate drive.
Just waiting, motionless, attention fixed, no images or thought to be committed, baking in the sun, cannot choke to fumes, Mentor sternly watching for any infraction to be later beaten or worse, and now the cast of people generated from the specks of before. They were arranged in a disorganized procession led by the hunters.
He and the other boys had seen hunters before, for they were the most special and the Mentor would always point them out with awe and pride whenever the introductions were held near the Sector of Privilege. It was there the most productive hunters and the Elders and some others lived, out where the pilings of rubble were irregular and widespread. Out away from the crowding of the populace. Out beyond the stench of the chattel pens and the screams of the immolations, both culinary and recreational.
The hunters now strode by the boys. Men of towering superiority, their tattered cloaks seemed resplendent robes of nobility, their beards and tangled locks of hair the hallmarks of wild, unbridled power. Sweating and dusty under the glower of the sun, they glinted their teeth at their little aspirants as they passed on toward the final mile or so to the main furrow through the city of Antithesis.
“To be hunter is to be big and travel far away from the enforcements of the Creed,” the youth dared to muse, swelling his now sun-red chest in pride that he had been chosen to be one of them. Yes, and realizing he would be one of those to travel far beyond the boundaries and the stench, and to live above the cruel enforcements . . . . All that was something to be thankful for. And to be impatient for. But he pushed away the dangerous diversions of his mind. The only desire allowed the Special Youth was to be special as the “today” required. To be hunter should not be of the thought, for one is only hunter when one is hunter. The boy tried to let the Creed and Mentor’s endless lessons and directives quell his mind’s autonomy.
But still he couldn’t help drifting off into glorious, forbidden imagination’s spontaneous realm. . . . how as hunter he would smile especially to each of the youths who would watch him pass with his hordes of captives and how his cloak would be the least tattered and his teeth would glint the brightest. But imagination became image now that the hunters had passed and the prey became the affront of focus and sensation to the youth. Arms drawn far up behind their backs, wrists fastened to neck cords, seeing fully female “castrate-born” (said Creed) and overt physiology of “laden chests” and “undeveloped strengths of men” (and other Creed designations and cryptic descriptions) and having studied from head to waist the first few, then his downward contemplation revealed that their bondage was not alone of wrists or simply cords and somehow the excruciation of that first day was like self-sensation . . . .of what he witnessed of the prey.
But such fusion of sensations would defy the Creed.
He was about to look on to the next of the twenty or so when one girl’s eyes met his, grasping him in but a second with her haunted face and tortured form,. Then she was beyond with the others although somehow she’d stayed behind . . . . within . . . . .him.
By the end of the parade, something had been etched into the being of the boy. The excruciation was bipart. The one, that if not for Mentor studying reactions for later praise or severe penalty, he might have severed sight from feeling and run from the scene to vomit. But maybe that was only from sun’s assault upon his now blistering flesh. But the other was that something now anew was etched within the images, emotions, and the loins.
****
And maybe all had been etched by heritage in man, even before the only prowess that remained for him was to bring back the only substance of survival for Antithesis: Prey. And now his body grown to man, he walked the Southward swath behind his captive two.
The girl stumbled and startled him back from his reverie. The three stopped their slow traverse of the endless lane and looked down at the object her foot had struck. Unconcerned now in proximity, the hunter and prey, master and captives, now but a trio of insignificant beings, mere specks within the horizon-vast plain of swirled foliage, they stood together over the black arc of stuff that protruded from gravel’s partial interment. Perhaps the winds of night had blown away the surface silt entombment of the thing, the first he’d seen on this trek. In other regions there were piles of such flexible circles of stuff through which the vines threaded and looped as if in joy for a diversion of dimension. In other regions there were so many piles of so many kinds of things.
But here, the sanctuary where they had spent a week within the arches had been the only real feature of notice until this black emergence from the grit justified their hesitation and even closeness for the moment. Forgotten the stench and fear, the rage and agony. Forgotten the Creed . . . . “There is now and what is is only of now.”
He knelt slowly and scratched away some of the dirt to expose more of the pattern inscribed on the flat circumference of the object. The complex, repetitious hieroglyphics meant nothing, not even to suggestion. But on the sides there were remains of raised characters. . . . . Go . . Ye. R . . . ra.ial . .. .wr . .g ler . . . .R7.50/15 . . . .. .in .ate . . . . .psi.
The woman’s throat started a noise as though she might speak. But as quickly she was silent. The agony had finally taught her what he demanded and, perhaps, what she had become. She made no more sound but dared to seek something from his eyes. Which turned to the girl as she blurted, “they used such things in motion back before the catastrophes and death . . . ” before silencing herself, realizing now what he might do again . . . and he realized because of what Marl had revealed at the fortress by the sea and that the Creed lied . . . . and he silenced these inner voices of his realizations as his voice roared . . . .just noise . . . .
She shrank back, cowering.
He struck.
Feeling pain which superseded pain, she frenzied to move forward beyond the reach of the slashes.
Feeling frenzy to move beyond his pain, he let her go as he just stood and bellowed into the wisping air. But then he calmed and was soon trudging forward behind the woman and her daughter toward the juncture of the sister swaths at some infinity of intersection far ahead of much sooner ending time.
Perhaps in part to drive away the words of Marl that words of the girl had brought to memory, he again thought back to his youth.
****
“There is but now.” So many times he had heard the words and spoken them himself in ritual recitation before the day’s instructions. The past had become an unidentified to be equated with existence as a distorted present. The objects that sprang to discovery, day to day in the city, from their temporary burials under ruin or silt were viewed as no more unique than the sunrise or the moon’s slow trajectory. They were. They existed. That they had not been seen yesterday was beyond consideration, for there was no yesterday in the Creed or the mentality of Antithesis.
In the early years of his training to be hunter, the question of origin or causation or explanation had flitted on his consciousness. But it was swatted down by repetitious axioms to memorize . . . . .”Now is the beginning and now is also the end” . . . in the sing-song voices of twenty boys beneath the sun. And in his early years of training, questions were frightened from mentality’s existence by the cruel extravaganzas Mentor staged as punishments for the transgressors and inspirations for the witnessing others. Even the evidence of one’s noticing something other than the lessons or the creed could result in the reprimand of days’-length thirst and hunger though incessant recitations and the extremes of body’s training would persist. Such hours of daily lessons even under brutality’s duress were all involved in the preparation of the hunter, his strength, forbearance, endurance . . . . . as provider of the only sustenance remaining for the people of Antithesis. Prey. One had to start young.
“Man cannot live by bread alone for there is no bread.” This was another of the liturgies ground into the minds of the young Superiors. “There is no pain to him who does not feel pain,” brought the Mentor to demonstrate the meaning further. He had bitten his own lip until it bled. For a moment there was silence from the class as the lesson was absorbed. No, none of their lips hurt or bled. One or two dared to rub their arms over their mouths to make sure. The realization was like a mania for a few moments as the boys all cheered and even a few bit others as they all internalized the Creed’s meaning here . . . . that the pain of another (such as prey) had nothing to do with them even though they be the cause.
The hunter shook the memories again along with gritty sweat now as he walked. The heat of day was suffocating. The captives ahead glistened reflection from their perspiration. He suddenly realized his own saturation within his heavy garment. He removed it, shook it to discharge at least its own weight in dirt and a considerable population of fleas as well. For a moment they swirled about him in concentric confusion.
But then, as if drawn by some force, the swarm settled uniformly into the hair that covered most of his body so profusely that his nakedness itself was almost clothed. He scratched at his crotch, then randomly elsewhere. Then, muttering, he slung the cloak over his shoulder. He drank from the water bladder that he carried. And caring not for the thirst his captives might suffer as a result, he emptied his own upon the ground even as he trudged behind them.
“Do not think.” Those had been the first words to greet his ears each morning after his sunrise awakening to the Mentor’s shouts of threat there in the confusion of concrete and steel that formed the dormitory for the little hunters-to-be. Like a deformed dome, the slabs cascaded over one another, supported here and there from total collapse by immense girders that emerged from the ground. Some pierced up into the topple above. Others were bent over abruptly, some even snapped off where the colossal heap had landed on them. Tubes, wires, grids, and the mangled girders gave the cavern a kind of jungle appearance and there were no restrictions to keep the boys from climbing and swinging from floor to ceiling some thirty or more feet high in places. For hours on end the questions of the body were answered in contests of dexterity and daring and strength.
“One of you reaches the top first,” the Mentor might challenge. And with sleep not yet blinked from their eyes, the first six to run to six dangling cables would climb hand over hand, mindless of the rusty steel slivers and later infections. Better that than being whipped and denied sleep as might the slower majority who only could watch and hysterically cheer the climbing contestants. And other reward or reprimand would accrue to those engaged in scrambling over the pipes, girders, webs of mesh and rods in contests of prowess and proficiency. The winners would be rewarded with extra meat, maybe “extra-curricular” activities with others’ punishments, or even at the immolations. Preparations for the future hunters who would have to subdue prey by any and all means. Preparations for survival. For Antithesis. Preparation for the immediate slaughter of male prey rendered for sustenance on the trip back from the hunt, females secured and brought back “as meat or bread, to feed or breed” (Creed) . . . Prey.
The times of competition he remembered with almost happiness, in part because he was usually the most accomplished and adept. But something deeply troubled him in response to the other aspects of the training and trauma although, true, he himself did not feel the pain he inflicted. Even so, it was hard for him to sleep so often even when he was able to free his inner images of the sights and the sounds.
Something wrong.
Yet there was no means for him to discover or even explore what. Day and night he ate, slept, recited, and everything with the group of those whose every thought and activity and even reflexes were copies of each other as directed by the Creed and enforced by the Mentor. Every hour the regimentation of what to do, how to think, how to inflict. And any glimmer of individuality or sensitivity was crushed by pain he (and the others) would experience as punishment.
Thus from the age of six when he had been chosen, until he was eighteen, the programming of his mind had been totally pervasive confinement to a system and environment in which “the Creed is. There is nothing more.”
At sixteen he was given the first of the annual initiations that usually ritualized one’s reaching an older age. But his proficiency was exceptional. That first initiation night was lost to him within a strange core of oblivion only leaking slits of seen and heard to image molten memories of fear and rage contained, conjoined. No cognition. None.
The second year he had been taken from the Chamber of special Youth on a cloudy evening. A servant of the elders ushered him to a place beyond the checkered spread of the ruin mounds. This was forbidden territory to all but the Elders, the most senior hunters, and the disfigured and dismembered creatures who served them, and the most beautiful of the prey who serviced them. Only the chosen (or cursed) were allowed beyond the cluster of huge, circular pits in the ground where the earth was powder red into which one’s steps sank. There were those walled depressions and a myriad of stunted protrusions above the ground as well. The Creed had taught that “ruins are the dead vines of sickened growth.” Between that statement of botanical generalization and the ingrained impossibility of question, there was no information that he could use to weigh what he saw, no context to contain the instinct wonder of his mind. No reality. Just a now as he’d walked to his second initiation night that night.
The tongue-less eunuch strode ahead across the strange landscape where things began to rise more above ground in complex pipe and stack configurations and reticulations. Clusters, loops, tanks, tubular networks, and more stood in interconnected rows, intact here, toppled elsewhere, decayed into frayings and shards and crumpled remnants of whatever.
Of the second initiation he remembered, “Speak only to your class of men. You are superior and superiority is its own knowledge. Thus all others are for service or the functions and their words may be taken from them with the tongues they should not have.”
Seventeen then, he was no longer mere boy with bony legs and ribs that showed, no matter his exceptional strength. And already his knowledge of the Creed was vast. Yes, he was the strongest, the most agile, the most inventive of his class. A new sequence of calisthenics over and around the steel jungle of the chamber, quicker and more accurate recitation of the tenets for Mentor to hear . . . . these and more were his accomplishments that his classmates envied. He was their leader and inspiration too. And at that second year’s initiation he had recited his learning and praised himself for other things as he stood before the elders there within the mystery of their Chamber of Initiation beyond the desecration.
At eighteen his grasp of the Creed equaled that of the Mentor. And where rote memory to supply instruction was the teacher’s greatest feat, the young man had shown initiative and innovative talent worthy of a hunter already.
Thus at eighteen, he was the youngest ever to leave the Chamber of Special Youth and on the day of his third initiation ceremony, walk the pockmarked landscape to the Sector of Privilege . . .never to return.
****
Never to return. Now as he trudged along under the sun’s immolation, the memory seemed as vague as the little sinuous striations that wandered like scars on both sides of the swaths he and his captives traversed. From their higher elevation which superimposed upon the otherwise flat terrain, he could discern these traces between ruin-revelations showing through subtle textures in color and density of the straggly vines. He had noted similar areas before along the journey,. This stretch of evidence occupied a mile or so, but though there were elements of a city’s ruins -- a circular thinness of foliage here and there, little squares and rectangles of lighter and sparser growth too numerous to count, and at the outskirts, a few large patches where the ground peeked dark through the brownish-green . . . . nothing really stood.
So many miles. So many weeks of silence that his superiority had imposed on him since he’d been with Marl. For an instant he longed to call to the women far ahead of him to stop, to rest, even to talk with him for his mind felt pain as if it would burst and “thought is but to him who thinks” he knew to be false . . . yet he cringed to know that all could sense each other, need each other . . . for so many years the Creed . . . . and if not for those who hunted by its dictates all would die instead of only most . . . “food for thought is not an edible” (Creed) . . . in a time when, really, truth lived only in retrospect yet man had not caught up with his existence to see its retrogression. Sun’s heat warped such images of thought and all he knew for a time was a pair of lines that undulated through heat-warps into the far-ahead to bring sustenance of what was left thereof.
****
His mind returned to inner, twisted images.
Never to return. There had been a time when those images had flamed as brilliantly as the great torches that lit the Supreme Chamber of the Elders where his final initiation took place. On the second initiation he had been blindfolded at the gaping hole on one side of a towering pile of rubble. This third time, observation confirmed the tactile awareness of before that he was in something absolutely astounding. The hall was truly a hall, structured, fabricated, with walls of some dark brown substance as smooth to the touch as skin, but hard. The ceiling was no cascade of debris, but an overhead surface, a white plane divided into rectangles, some with slots and grids penetrating and further patterning it. Circles also, some large, many small. The young initiate sensed that something vast had been where the city now lay as debris and silt cadaver in tendril putrefaction. There had been structure, a dynamic of something above and below the ground. And this chamber where he stood before The Council of Elders was surviving proof. He also remembered proof that he himself had to reveal, manifest, recite, as the leaders witnessed his initiation, examined him, evaluated him, tested him.
He knew, on his eighteenth birthday and third initiation, that there were answers to questions (which he knew now to exist) although he could not have phrased a question, inflected his voice to thus end a statement as its obverse. Such had not been of his learning, nor allowance as instinctual emanation of his mind. He knew that much had once been other than it had become. But he somehow knew that what had become had somehow been inherent all along . . . . . . . and thus the more the suppression and denial in depths beneath the labyrinths of even the unconscious mind . . . but inherent therein all along . . . . .as awareness . . . .?
But as his proficiency in the Creed had reached such prodigious levels, the very violations of the doctrines became inevitable. Those doctrines were fragments, incomplete. At eighteen he knew that there was yesterday and something somehow beyond in the direction opposite the arcing of the sun. He was aware but knew no words nor format by which to really know. Thus, the more the mind interred mentality untouchable to mentation, but inherent all along.
The events of his third initiation were directly to his knowledge, though. He was the youngest ever, they told him in their echoing hall. So much greater would be his trials. They gave him choice to wait another couple years for this ordeal. For it was at twenty or twenty-one that most were subject to the severities to become hunters.
But he declined. First there were small devices of glistening metal which probed and sliced in “the ceremony of withstanding”. His agony was torture the more because it could not be flinched even facially. Then servants tied him to a horizontal frame. Wrists and ankles bound, body in midair, the pain had been unbearable. But he had steadily proclaimed, “Sight is only to him who sees. Pain is only to him who feels pain. The pain of Special Youth is preparation for the strength and endurance and infliction on the prey. The pain of the initiation is a symbol of the role of hunter and training of both enduring and inflicting (projection) on the hunted.”
The Elders listened to his chanting as a functional whipped him until his body was crimson. But his deepening voice still steadily announced, “Man is the superior by his selection alone. Superior man must select for he alone may judge his superior kind. Those born of women who are not selected are not men and since theirs is but false display, all vestiges of them must be removed except what must remain to serve superiority as function. Those who do not serve are divided for the functions. . . . “ on and on he droned. On and on the frenzied girl struck him.
While the elders chanted other words that he might learn through impact (slicing blows over and over and recited chanting over and over in cadence) the whip lacerated his skin now until the floor below was sprinkled crimson. But, “Man lives by man alone, man lives by man alone . . .” he recited. “The sweetest portions are of woman and she is to service man. It is she whose body gives to nurture him within. It is she whose body flows to nurture him without. It is she who is born to be the bread of life.”
The Elders took the whip from the girl.
Next they held her . . . . . . . .
Next, as the initiate (despite all) responded, the Elders forced open her mouth as they made her bend. The initiate now saw that her teeth had been filed to points.
Next the Elders whipped as she knelt and, as his penultimate agony transcended pain, the initiate’s man’s prowess overcame all else and his raves recited still, “The Creed prescribes that the element of source first does consume of superior man that all the more he be strengthened by ultimately consuming the dimension of its universality.”
Then the elders released the initiate and helped him to stand as the servants placed the girl in suspension. “You are chosen. You are superior. You are the youngest to endure ordeal ceremony to be hunter. You are brought before this council to enter their rank of privilege in and responsibility for survival of Antithesis. You prove yourself worthy to dwell in Sector of Privilege when not on hunt. You withstand pain of enduring and beating yet remember perfectly the tenets of man’s mastery which you recite so well tonight,. Now you join us in our hallowed hall. You bravery is shown. Your endurance is displayed. Your Creed knowledge is proven. And thus enough you have proven your excellence. Just one last matter. Your manhood.”
They led him close to the girl.
The Elders stepped back.
Torches flared dancing illumination of the scene.
Burning in it, the Special Youth surveyed his kingdom now to conquer.
Somehow superhuman, mega-male, . . . . . . . . . the triad of the ways and means . . . . then Elders, chosen hunters, Mentor, all assembled erupted in a chaos of amazement, acclaim, and ovation.
“You are of great superiority!!!!” an Elder shouted.
“Deserving greatest praise and hunt-position right away.” Hunters enthused.
“YOU ARE CHOSEN AND SPECIAL, SUPERIOR OF MAN!!!!!” the whole assemblage shouted.
The Eldest of the Elders stood and spoke.
“And thus we give you name proportionate to your accomplishments in life.We name you . . .
ALMIGHTY GORD OF ANTITHESIS !!!!!!”
***
Oh the memory of that time of glory.
Oh the memory for Gord as he trekked the swath, now far behind his prey. Gord the hunter. Gord to live in the Sector of Privilege after his epic journey to hunt and triumphant return to Antithesis with hordes of prey. Gord so wise in knowledge and the Creed. Gord felt his only essence now as sweat and stench and torment of the fleas and ache of muscles and the silence.
He looked about the empty land and trifled momentarily with ideas and images again, The mind that only turns behind will lose the way ahead, he now knew. Yet was there a way ahead? Had he, like all else, been turned the other way in being and any concept of ahead was only disappearing retrospect – like walking backwards while the rising heat of conflagration enlarges the distance-view’s effect, as if approaching?
Far ahead, the girl could be seen facing backwards for a moment. Waiting?
From far behind in time, the glory again crept into Gord’s contemplation while a flea was busy burrowing elsewhere.
****
He remembered his proud exhaustion as the Elders and hunters escorted their new member to a great table where a brazier’s flaming tongue spoke silent monologue. They joined him at places set with strange objects that glowed silver reflection and white from polished, round surfaces otherwise. They spoke of the first hunt that he would embark upon the next day. And though they were warmly patronizing of his youth, yet they felt his pride and they were proud as well. And impressed. To say the least.
And even in the midst of that momentous evening Gord saw the contradiction of the Creed. “Pride is only to him who is proud.” The whole initiation had been an interchange of thoughts and sights and sensations and prides between Elders and initiate. Gord realized that, unnoted, even disallowed by the Creed, a sort of “communion of beings” took place among those who shared the upper echelons – those who could desecrate the lesser – or enjoy them.
Gord drank cups of burning liquid that made his mind’s eye waver like the flames from the cooking pyre on which she now turned.
“Pain is to him who feels pain is power to him who feeds from that pain,” consolidated from the reeling conflagration of Gord’s experience that night. Then he was told to rise and recite the most sacred tenet of the Creed somewhat as if a benedictory sacrament, a “grace” in preparation for the banquet.
“The greatest superiority of the chosen is that they may feast upon their very origin. By others only parts may be devoured. The gift of being to Superiority is that it may consume the whole of its source.”
The brazier was moved beneath lower portions. And soon a slice was steaming on the white circle before the young hunter. But Gord sat unmoving until the elders took up their gleaming utensils. Then, acting from another’s actions, Gord found the proper way to hold the devices. And later when a breast was being carved, his proficiency and propriety were as proper as those men of greater days.
****
So vivid were the memories. So hot now the sun and so great the discomfort. So far ahead the captive women that should they attempt to escape into the snarl of underbrush, their disappearance would be no more than subliminal. So great his desire to divert from the ribbon path where swirls and intersecting scars again embellished below the swaths – and walk away from the predetermined course of life. So odd the captives did not flee from theirs’. So strange his steps were linear even while his mind diverted far beyond the intersecting strip of gravel which, at some time past, had been bridged by the swaths. A close-set pair of rust-colored lines on this intersecting band of narrow gray drew his eyes to the east where, not so long before, his journey had diverted to the birth of his mind’s discovery of its death amid all’s death.
Gord focused ahead again. He began to run slowly and with his body his thoughts then started to race across the span of years and epochs and images and ideas until he was finally abreast of the women. They had heard him coming and stopped. Oh why had they not flown? Why had not all of them through the ages? Why had they all given themselves in martyrdom to feed eternally the power of Gord Almighty/man/determinant and desecrator . . . . . . . (or had it so much been collusion?)
Why had they not flown, the innocent, the victims? Because there’d been nowhere safe to run?
And now was there just nowhere to run? And so these two had awaited him?
Or was it that these so sensed his needs thus gave themselves compassionately, maternally, even existentially as sustenance to man? As, through eons, to mankind?
The woman saw his eyes that they were sensitive. She saw something that contradicted every other facet of his specter. The girl felt the strange thrill of his closeness although she cringed in expectation of his ways. Thus the more she longed for him to take her even in agony. The woman, agonized by his atrocities, yet wished she might hold him – and be held – that his hurt might vanish even as her own might multiply.
Gord sensed their sensing somehow, as they did his. And a choking sob welled in his chest and he reached out to them as his anguished wail flowed from his throat and tears from his eyes.
A hunter and a woman and a girl upon the southward swath. The sun ablaze above surrounding desolation, hot through fume-striated air. Gord’s tears fell hotter. They held him, weeping too. Emotion was profound communication, communion. Nothing more. No words, for just remembering his life of shock and anguish, lived and, too, imposed, taxed consciousness until the images of mere reality around him swirled. His head throbbed agony. His very being was pain,.
The hunter finally stood, threw back his head, stretched out his arms, and wailed into the wastes.
“Go! Run!! Flee!!! Now you are free. I free you for I fail. I weaken. Let your strength eat my defeat and run, retreat back to your realm of dying growths. At least you lived there. Live there. Scratch the furrows to produce their stalks and bulbs. Back to Antithesis I go as prey myself. At least the hunt brings back one wasting edible. You go.”
. . . . . . they stayed. . . . . . .”us to far . . . . . . you alone the implements of fire” . . . . . . . silently together for awhile . . . . . halting steps and thoughts of Bearer bound . . . . naked forms . . . tears drying in his eyes . . . . . .”I am almighty hunter” in his mind . . . . . he knew a lie . . . . . .
****
Chapter 2
OFF ON THE HUNT
On the morning after the initiation night, on waking he had felt agony. But there could be no evidence of weakness or anguish even though Almighty Gord could not help revealing his extreme discomfort as he staggered from the dim warmth of the chamber into the chill early morning. Dampness abetted the cold torment of his lacerated flesh. Perhaps the burning liquid he had drunk through much of the night accounted for his throbbing head. The streaks of light that curdled through the mist assailed the eyes that ached. But relieving was the greatest agony. Had the elders and hunters not been there observing, he would have loved to have screamed as he streamed.
But he could not even moan.
Gord knew from the Creed and the Mentor’s demonstration that time, “Pain is salved for him whose strength inflicts upon another.” He bit his tongue until it bled to free his lower member from its misery. The Elders watched his every move. They saw no weakness in the youth who was now, officially, undoubtedly, a hunter. Yet they taunted him about the way he was beaten and bitten and joked amongst themselves for him to hear, comments about his “withered manhood”, ’the little melted spear”, etc. Dizzy, exhausted, suffering almost unbearably almost all over, Gord felt rage resolve from pain and anguish that could not be expressed. Could not be displaced . . . .yet . . . ..
The eldest stood and watched and not until the youth finally appeared to quiver, was his signal given. Two mutilants came from behind a nearby mound. They led her forward by a thong that grooved her neck when she tried to stop or run to either side. Gargled sounds of terror revealed that her tongue had been removed, standard procedure with all females, no matter their position in Antithesisian society. Further, either gender that served the hierarchy (Elders, hunters, a few others) or enacted tasks of the infrastructure, were known as “mutilants” and physically customized according to specifications of the Creed. With this girl, tongue alone was taken. More so for others. For their parts and/or appendages unneeded for their functions were needed for nutrition for others. “Prey is the bread of life. There is no other bread.” (Creed). “Parts is parts.” (Creed).
As Gord saw the girl see him, he felt his chilled and throbbing nakedness the more. For she was covered from neck to ankles in a woven coat of fibers such as only hunters were allowed to wear.
The older men laughed out loud and began another flurry of ridicule. “Some hunter this tooth-torn boy we see,” they mocked. “His spire now looks so uninspired and he even lets one of those who would consume it to compensate for her envy wear the cloak of power.” Another . . . “Maybe we wrong about him. Maybe we send him for mutilations, for he really too weak to know the hunter’s way.” All roared laughter except the eldest who still just watched and waited, sensed the time by Gord’s facial flexes and other subtle reactions, then signaled.
The girl was released. She felt the thong no longer as tight and instantly turned to run. She might have run, for there was no one to halt her sudden motion. But Gord was on her and the cloak torn off her and he had jerked the thong so tight around her neck that now she was gagging and contorting, naked on the ground. His fury released, he almost felt a need to laugh as he watched her. But the others’ applause and cheers restored his sense of manhood thus revised his lunacy so he didn’t need to savor her suffering unto death. He loosed the thong so she could gasp for breath.
He heard praise and compliments again. “You are hunter, yes.” “Your speed is worthy to subdue the prey.” “So young, but a man for sure.” And in the swirl of experience, he felt the comforting warmth of the cloak all the more in view of her deprivation and discomfort, exposure and humiliation – and thus his assurance, pride, and prowess as superior became the glorious synergy . . . . . .of being human male.
“The prey is sustenance of life,” someone was quoting from the ritual of the Hunters’ Creed. “The capture and return is of the hunter. Function is the choice of the Elders. Death to prey before the Elders’ choice deprives the land of sustenance. But pain subdues and fastening secures the prey. Yet wisdom is of the hunter who inflicts and inserts or traveling is slowed and/or meat is spoiled.”
The recitations and admonitions of this new Creed went on, telling of the swaths that divided the desolation, places of shelter still known to exist, possible regions where scattered prey might be found, and many other things that Gord would have to grasp almost instinctively and instantly in the next hour or so before departure on his hunt.
Hunters shook his hand as he was given various implements. A woven belt was tied about his waist, its second purpose told to him. A knife. Stones to strike together to start fires. Bladders to carry water.
The leader of the hunters spoke. “You travel over great swaths to Pthesis. Beyond the great Barrens you find the path from which you watch hunters and prey come when you are Special Youth. It leads to circle-path from which you take exit onto swath- of-interstate toward north.” Several more detailed points concerning the swath-circle were interspersed with information about diversions to be avoided and landmarks to be noticed. Gord tried to follow everything he was being told, but couldn’t help being distracted by the girl standing near him, and, he now assumed, to be of some ongoing purpose to him.
Another hunter held out a rather heavy pack with tendril straps attached to it. “Inside is food,” the grizzled man said. His body bore many scars. “And of the bladders of water, drink only that and give none to the girl. When you find water somewhere, make her sip. If she does not gag, or vomit over awhile, it would be advisable to fill a bladder. But you do not drink it yet. She sips from it another time and if she is not dead or vomiting by nightfall, the source should be safe for you to consume. But other than the testing sips, girl (or later, prey) should never drink from safe-source-water until you have already drunk it.”
Gord’s look of confusion brought chuckles from the men.
More instructions were given the young man about to embark upon his journey. “The salt of perspiration can be preservative of meat. There is sometimes the situation when the body of your slave is more important for its nutrients than its other services.“
At this last information, the girl suddenly jerked the cord from Gord’s loose grasp and darted away from the group – until she was tripped and fell and a hunter was stepping on her neck until Gord pulled her to her feet again.