F6: Sing a Dirge in Heaven

And mine was not the only scream.

The shriek of pain from Lindy hurt me as much as the blades that now descended on me from all sides. Too busy being killed to do more than scream I did see one of them stabbing her. In a world of pain, my mind fled to odd mindless places. Why did they want to hurt her? Had she attacked one of them in my defense? Why would she do that?

I fell to the floor, my face in a pile of bloody lace scraps. A boot tip in my ribs turned me over. I looked up into the eyes of their leader. There were four lines of blood across his face where fingers had raked his skin to the bone.

Near me, I hear Lindy weeping in pain. I groaned when the leader of the Cinquedea knelt and drove his knee into my gut. With a bloody smile, he placed his knife point just under my sternum. With malicious glee, he slowly drove the tip of it into me.

With my mouth full of copper I screamed. He laughed at my pain.

“Have you learned anything, gypsy? I want to know before you die that I taught you to respect your betters.” His smile was like what a child might make as it pulled wings off a bug. “Come on, gypsy you can find the air to speak at least once more. Tell me I taught you well.”

My own hand was unrecognizable bloody as I reached up for his face. He pulled away not letting me touch him. Denied that I spit my blood at him, my last act of defiance, pitiful as it was. My last breath was a scream as he ripped his wide knife from my gut.

“Well boys, looks like we have to find us a new whore.” He laughed, and as my vision darkened, I saw him kick Lindy. She made no sound. “This one was getting too old anyway. Come on.”

“He’s not dead,” one of them said and gave my side a kick just for the fun of it.

The Cinquedea leader looked down at me. “He’s dead. He just too stupid to know it. Hey, gypsy, you’re dead, we killed you, died already for fuck sake.” His hand went to his pants and, as I watched unable to move, he pulled his cock free and pissed on me.

I never saw the stinking yellow flow stop.

* * * *

I awoke slowly, a fact that surprised me in and of itself. That I awoke meant that I was not dead and I had been dying last I checked. Then the pain hit me from so many places I had to acknowledge that I was alive. Being dead couldn’t hurt this much.

“So you’re still with us, Yodeler.”

My mistake, I was dead and in hell. Opening my eyes to see the face of Sumer Si Kumen hovering over me was enough to finish the job the Cinquedea had begun.

“Don’t move. You’re held together with more good wishes than anything else. You were nearly gone when we got to you, and you died twice while we were patching you up.” He placed a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Lindy was already gone. Sorry, she was a good girl.”

Somehow that knowledge hit me so hard. I have seen hundreds die. Helped remove almost uncountable bodies from personal quarters when despair sent people over the edge and they took their own lives. Lindy was gone. That wonderful sweet woman was gone and I had to acknowledge my own guilt in her death. If I had just walked out when the Cinquedea arrived she would be alive now.

“Don’t do that.” Sumer’s voice was hard. Unyielding. “I can see in your face what’s going through your head, Yodeler. Don’t you try and take a moment of the blame for this shit storm. It’s been coming. Coming at us all, as unstoppable as Pale Horse, and we had no more chance of it not happening. You and Lindy were just the one it touched first.” His hand tightened on my shoulder. “Don’t. Now, try to get some rest. A lot of people want to talk to you.”

* * * *

And, in the weeks that followed a lot of people did indeed want to talk to me. But I didn’t care to talk to them. I hated them. They had kept me shackled to this world when this world had done its very best to kill me. And they hadn’t done it for my benefit.

They wanted me.

They wanted me to do what I had done for them for years, save them from the mistakes the scientist had caused. To keep their miserable live from being so miserable. To be some kind of hero or fucking martyr they could hold up to others as an example of how to stand up to the Cinquedea and their Dominus parents.

Me?

Who had been ruled by those people most of my life, then broken and discarded. As cuts healed to pink scars that itched, I was finally able to get up from that bed and see for my own eyes that I was hidden in plain sight. I was mere feet from where I had nearly died. Lindy’s home was still open to the world as it had been when she was there. Already people were dwelling there. My blood no doubt scrubbed away, her things looted for usable trinkets and the rest sold away.

As my limping steps grew stronger more and more of these fools, these men who called themselves the Curmàn, cousins in their ancient language. They were simple men, proud men, tired men who had finally had enough and wanted to start some mad revolution. To take control of Paradise Station. To send the Cinquedea out the various airlock to suck hard vacuum and scream snowflakes.

That part I could get behind.

But the rest, was ridiculous. The Dominus were not in charge just for shits and giggles! It was only the knowledge in their minds that was keeping humanity alive. While I hated them as much as everyone else for what they had done, I had to acknowledge that they were struggling just as hard as all of us to keep extinction at the door.

“Why do they call you, Yodeler?”

Looking up from my musings, I saw a young girl standing by the door to my room looking at me. My eyes went to her braided hair and the bright, sew-together ribbon laced through it. That a gift to a friend should walk back within my sight once she was dead should not have surprised me. I live in this world where humanity is a speck clinging to a crumbling bit of metal. Trying to huddle on a rusted bit of Luna rock, and breathed air made from smashed comets, that had once shown so brightly in the night skies of our home.

Our now destroyed home. Earth.

The very scientist these Curmàn wanted to kill–to murder their Cinquedea children in vengeful madness–were going to be needed to help the Earth again support life. Generations from now, when the last fires have died and the impact lofted clouds have settled. Then, the knowledge these men would have passed down to their arrogant with their own importance sons would be so needed. No, this mad revolution could never happen.

The little girl still wanted her answer.

“I used to sing. When I was working in space I would sing, for hours often, to keep myself company. So I wouldn’t be bored.” I looked at her innocent face. “Those are pretty ribbons.”

“My mom gave them to me.” The little girl looked around this my recovery room. “She said if I could get them clean they could be mine.”

“They’re very pretty. Where is your mother?” Simply seeing those ribbons, my gift to a woman that had never gotten to enjoy what I had given to her, was as hard on me as the knives. Every bit as painful to my heart.

“Working. She sent me away when the men came for her to make happy.”

And a knife blade that was far sharper than all the ones to have pierced me hit home then. It went deep, so very deep.

“Your mother makes men happy? In the house, you found those ribbon in?” How bitter is the bile that this world now excludes for us to swallow down and stomach. Lindy’s home had hardly been empty for weeks before another woman was there selling herself. Doing the same ancient trade of flesh for coin that Lindy had been driven to do.

“Yes.”

“And there are men there now?” I asked, choking down the need to spit.

“Yes. She told me to go away. They might want me to make them happy too, and she said I’m too young to do that, yet.”

“Yet?”

“Yeah, mom says she’s going to have to teach me how to make men happy soon. That I will have to help her, there are so many men who are sad she can’t make them all happy by herself. I wish I was old enough, I want to help her.” She said it with such innocence, devoid of the knowledge of what she was going to have to be doing, for the rest of her young life. To her, it was as just the work her mother did, so it must be something she would want to do too.

Then as I watched she pulled a thin trended yarn hat from her pocket and placed it on her head. The patterns were different, but it was so similar to mine that it had to have come from the same source, the same old woman. This little girl looked at me and felt the need to explain. “My head was cold. Would you sing for me? I’m bored; I wish those men would get happy already.”

I looked at her and felt my heart break and crash like an ocean swell. “It’s been a long time since I sang, but … I’ll try. You won’t know the words, sorry.” I shrugged.

“That’s okay.”

Taking a breath, I decided to give it my best try. For her.

“Duj,duj, duj, duj dešuduj,tečumi da, tečumi da parnomuj.O parnomuj čumi da dere kostar astarap,šajľage, šajľage astarap.”

Without the echo of my suit helmet, my voice seemed strange to me, lacking the power it once had. But then it had been years, and the old words were strange even to my lips now.

“Dva a dva a dvadsať krát,chcel ma milý, chcel ma milý pobozkaťna moje obe líčka, červené jak ružička,vymaľované od slniečka.”

The little girl smiled and tried to follow the words. Her body swaying in an uncanny way that was close to the old dances I remember from my distant youth. I smiled back.

Dva a dva a dvadsať krát,chcel ma milý, chcel ma milý zanechať, pobozkal ma na líčko a pošepkal tichúčko,ľúbim ťa ty moje srdiečko.”

Corse laughter rang from outside, silencing me.

Getting to my feet, painfully, I made my way to the door and looked out upon the face of the man that had tried to kill me and the others that had taken Lindy’s life. They were leaving Lindy’s old home, laughing. One ran out the door adjusting his clothes, complaining about the others rushing him. These Cinquedea youths walked past the opening to my room, ignorant of me hiding there in the shadows.

I heard the joke pass between them about how much work it must have taken to get all that blood cleaned up so the new whore could get to work.

Their laughter burned into every place where pink scars were only half healed. Again and again their blades had struck me, and now those laughing youths stabbed me again. They stabbed me to the heart and cut the lifeline that held me tethered to this station.

“Are the men happy now?” she asked, coming to stand next to me.

And cut away from that once vital lifeline, with my hand resting protectively on the itchy yarn covered head, I fell from Paradise.

“Yeah, they are happy, but not for much longer.”

* * * *

The rebel warriors of the Curmàn who followed me into vicious, quick, and bloody battles in the unlighted back corridors often called me, Primo Templarii Rex.

The Dominus Scientists of Paradise Station, upon whose Cinquedea children I visited such revenge, called me, The Butcher.

And my subjects here in the green highlands of Montes Carpatus, next to the pungent waters of the Imbrium Sea, called me the First Warrior King of Luna. A title one of my many children would no doubt carry into the future.

But on my deathbed, decades later, only a very few still knew to call me, Yodeler.