The Land Below our Feet III (Legacy)

GIANKHA

Even though Giankha kept her eyelids softly shut and her expression purposefully blank, she was far from being asleep or even calm. In fact, she was as alert as a bird can be, lying motionless on the wooden deck while she registered every surrounding noise and carefully pondered her options in case the monster came.

She had abandoned all hope that someone would be able to help her a long time ago… Specially her own mother… Because everybody was too blind to see the ugly truth that hid behind the empty promise of a new home, but Alhona was perhaps the blindest of the bunch.

And it was not really her fault either, the madness that consumed her progenitor had begun gnawing at her mind a while before Ulgiak came into the picture and shook their lives upside down with just a few premonitory words.

Alhona, her poor tormented mother, had always had a fragile sanity and an ever more fragile economy. Ever since Giankha could remember, they had never owned anything, other than the ragged clothes on their backs and the torn shoes on their feet.

So, it was no surprise that Alhona had soon started recurrently talking about a magnificent savior, one that would someday come to change their fate.

In retrospective, Giankha was convinced that her mom had come up with that fantasy in the early days of her daughter’s childhood as a way to cope with their pitiful existence at the time and have something to look forward to as they both huddled in the back of some dark alley… Shivering under the moon all night.

Maybe it had all started out as a cute story meant to soothe her child, but somehow, she had ended up believing it as well. And once that happened, she began telling others about “the chosen one”.

But contrary to the rejection that one would expect that her days of sermonizing every unfortunate soul that she crossed paths with would bring her; those rambling preachings were surprisingly very well received among the fellow outcasts swarming the city, who coincidentally seemed to have been longing for the kind of cheerful optimism contained in her mother’s message for some time, and which they all would embrace fully without looking back.

Because there is solace in placing your burdens aside and simply hoping for a better future when you have been struggling so hard to survive… A future that someone else will conveniently deliver to you without having to move a single finger on top of it. So, what could be better than that?

Her mother hadn’t even been aware of the huge impact that voicing out the pestering images that constantly plagued her unhinged mind would have... By the time it all blew off she was already too lost in her own world to tell, but at least her recently acquired notoriety had kept them both better fed.

Giankha recalled the few months leading to the inevitable tragedy with a nostalgic pang that would often make her silently cry…

It had been such a brief blissful period, in which her mother had been regarded as the holiest of priestesses or even a true saint by a growing crowd of stray devotees that would all go out of their way to be in her good graces. Which, naturally, came with a few helpful perks that roughly translated into having some food to eat and a dry place to sleep at night.

Then one fateful day Ulgiak had materialized into their slightly improving lives, adamantly blabbering about an imminent catastrophe, and her already unstable mother had been quick to call that man “the chosen one”, unknowingly launching him to greatness with that senseless gesture, and simultaneously putting all the power she’d innocently held into his tyrannic hands.

The irony of such a misfortunate occurrence still drove Giankha to bitter tears sometimes, because, against all odds, her mother had precisely stumbled upon a man making the exact same claims that her ill psyche had once constructed, and that had been enough to convince her that she was indeed right.

From that moment on, she would pour her entire devotion and energies into endorsing the rise of the savior that she had presaged, and whom she was convinced Ulgiak was.

Not that Alhona had needed to persuade them of much anyway… After the eruption had happened, there was no other proof that the few skeptics needed to believe in what she said.

It was irrefutable… He was the chosen leader that would lead them to a safe haven, and away from all that disgrace.

He had to be. For their own sake.

Even Giankha had wished it to be true at first. But she’d been listening to her mother’s stories for longer than anybody else, and she knew deep inside her heart that they were nothing but a bunch of sugar-coated lies.

She was just a scared little kid pressed against Alhona's chest when they’d found him mumbling on the main square, but she could still recall the dread that had chilled her spine when she saw that strange gigantic man, and she recognized the crazy look in his eyes.

Yes, her mother and Ulgiak shared the same type of apocalyptic madness in a way… And the worst part was that their delusions had somehow materialized, to everyone’s most utter disgrace.

But while her mom’s spiraling was the end result of a lifetime of misadventures and a clear mental disorder, Ugiak's lunacy had a very different nature… A darker one.

Whatever good intentions that their leader might have had at the start of their community, had slowly turned sour and vile as years slowly passed.

First were the raids, which he deemed essential for survival, so they complied… Then came the slaughtering, which he justified as a necessary evil. So, they abided.

But once he decided to stop excusing himself for his actions, the brutality had exponentially escalated. For the victims of their pillage, and for their people as well.

He had soon realized that his followers worshiped him to an extent that practically made him omnipotent, and that’s when everything went to hell.

Maybe it was because of her troubled upbringing, or because she had grown up beside a mythomaniac herself, but Giankha had never felt the slightest charmed by the unbreakable spell that seemed to have been cast on everybody else.

Yet, what little hope she’d had that Ulgiak would deliver them to a new promised land had died the day they had found Panghei and that forsaken map.

It was her mother who had chanted that old passage of Selahrian's tale. It had been her who had inadvertently guided them to the island and made that m******e possible with just a few casual flares of her otherwise increasingly decaying brain.

A decade of endless drifting had not been any kind to Alhona's feeble state of mind, and she seemed to have slowly fallen into a self-centered void which she rarely emerged from nowadays. So, it had been shocking, to say the least, to hear her voice suddenly uttering that single enigmatic phrase after weeks of watching her silently stare at the waves of the Peihsyan sea with a blank face.

Ulgiak had been shouting profanities at the appalled crew all day, lamenting himself for not being able to find any trace of the elusive island after months of exhaustive and fruitless search.

He had been about to storm away and appease his anger with a bottle of liquor or find a woman to entertain himself with, when Alhona broke out of her trance and started mumbling a fragment of a forgotten lullaby at a progressively frantic pace.

“Behold the mysteries of fate. He’d come looking for the majestic whale, but instead he found Panghei!” – She had triumphally blurted out, with a hectic smile and eyes as big as plates.

And just like that, they had finally deciphered what no one ever could, the way to find the only place that Selahrian had vowed to never chart… Maybe it was because it never occurred to anyone that there was truth in those verses, or maybe nobody really cared enough. But in the end, all they had to do to find that piece of forbidden land was follow the whales´ migrating pattern, and eventually they stumbled upon the outline of its shore.

“Why don’t we stay?”- Alhona had suggested in a dreamy tone as she held on to Ulgiak's arm and sidestepped another fallen corpse, oblivious to the terror that surrounded them – “It’s beautiful here! Maybe this is home”.

“It is not!” – The man had exclaimed in rage. Shaking the newly obtained map before her eyes and making her cower in fright – “Don’t you see, Alhona? This is our sign! The voice has spoken, we are taking Emerland!”

That’s when Giankha had known that they were all following a disturbingly crazy man. There was no reason beside his stubbornness to leave that perfectly good island behind. She realized that they could have settled somewhere else ages ago and found a way to rebuild their lives countless times.

Yet, he had always kept pushing forward, dangling the promise of a paradise that never seemed to arrive, but if even Alhona could see the absurdity of it at last, then that meant that they were beyond all logic by now.

Nevertheless, admitting that everything that you have believed in for the past decade is nothing, but a sad bunch of lies, is a very difficult and scary thing to do… And Giankha knew that this was the main reason why everyone preferred to turn a blind eye on the fact that things might have gotten a little bit out of hand.

As she remained lying on the hard wooden deck, she could feel the comforting weight of the dagger that she had carefully concealed beneath her clothes, and which inevitably made her wonder how the crew would react if she were to use it that night.

Would they kill her too for murdering their leader and leaving them adrift in the middle of the vast sea, or would they be secretively thankful that someone had finally gathered the guts to deal with the issue at last?

Living in the streets during the early years of her childhood had turned Giankha into a very perceptive person. She could tell that the sentiment among the flock was far from optimistic, and that their patience was running dangerously thin.

“But would that be enough to get away with his death?” – Giankha had been asking herself over and over again ever since she had started carrying that blade… A decision that she had made the moment she understood that nothing would ever be sufficient for a man like him.

There was nothing that Ulgiak wanted more than to deliver them to a new land. It was all he talked about! But at the same time, he also knew that the minute he did so, he would become just another common man.

Yes, everyone would be grateful, but everything would be over. And eventually, everyone would move on with their lives.

So, he would stall it forever, because he couldn’t help it. It was who he was.

-Just give me a reason to end this – Giankha murmured to herself as she pretended to be asleep, waiting to hear the sound of his boots stomping their way to her makeshift bed every night.

Because she had been just a little child when everything had started in the middle of that main square, but ten years had passed, and Ulgiak had always been a lustful man. So, even when he hadn’t tried anything yet… She knew he would soon, she could see it in his eyes.

So, she fought against the hypnotic song of the swaying waves crashing rhythmically against the boat, making her eyes heavy with each gentle stroke.

-Just for a second – She’d told herself. But when she went to open them again, the sun was bathing her startled face and a loud voice was screaming that there was a shore in sight ahead.