faller Chapter 4 Moccasin Face

  

(This is a new character, and a change to faller as it was. Would love any feedback...)

I like to kill.

I have killed more than a hundred human beings.

I have been told by some that it is one hundred and twenty three. And by others that it is one hundred and nine. Some have said that it might be over one hundred and fifty.

I have lost count. But I do not think that it was over one hundred and fifty.

Most were men. Some were women and children.

The enemy calls me Two Stick because I wield two war clubs in battle.

The people of my village call me Moccasin Face because my face resembles a worn out moccasin that has been stitched together again and again.

They do not call me that to my face, but I have heard them say it.

I do not care what any of them call me. Just as long as I get to kill.

That is all that I have ever cared about.

There is so much talk about our side and theirs, about this tribe against that tribe, about good people and bad people. But in the end it always comes down to killing.

I do not care about the reasons for it.

They are happy to have me use my war clubs on their enemies. They are even happy that I bring their enemies great pain.

They just do not want to know that I enjoy it.

They just do not know how much that I enjoy the killing.

They want us to enjoy the fight. They want us to enjoy the battle.

They would not like us to enjoy the killing.

Not even the killing of Black Robes.

The Black Robes who stink worse than a bear coming out of its winter sleep, whose skin is so pale that they look sickly even when sun lingers, and who speak a language that is as awful as their smell. The Black Robes who want to force a new God on us. A God who will not accept any of the other Gods because his ego is so large. Who has rules the the Black Robes speak but do not live. The Black Robes who bring sickness and bad medicine from across the big water on great boats but who cannot even paddle a canoe in the gentlest parts of the great river. Who want to give that river the name of one of their Medicine Men from a long ago. Who do not even know the river but think that they can give it a name of their own.

Even these creatures I am not supposed to take pleasure in killing.

The Black Robes mostly leave me alone.

Just as most of the women do.

My face is too ugly and too frightening and perhaps they see in my eyes that I would enjoy hurting them in many different ways.

I am happy to be left alone.

The Wyandot have grown so sick with the Black Robes’ disease that their people are fewer now than ours, even though they were once a much larger Nation than our own.

That is the one good thing that the Black Robes have done.

They have killed more Wyandot than we could ever kill.

But many of our people, particularly the women and children have also taken to the Black Robes’ teaching and been felled by their Bad Medicine. They kneel and pray before their tortured God even as they die from the Black Robe demons and their disease.

I would like to kill all the Black Robes.

I would like to kill all the pale devils who came across the Great Water and brought their Bad Medicine and their selfish God with them. I would like to kill them most of all. I would like to poke a hole in their guts and slowly pull their entrails out while boiling their lower bodies and their scrotums in scalding water or to hang them upside down over a small slow fire to bake the inside of their heads just to watching them scream and denounce their jealous God. But the Elders of the Council have spoken, and said that we should not kill them or do things to them until they give us good reason to do.

The pale creatures’ Algonquin guides call us Maneaters. The Algonquins themselves have been known to eat parts of men in order to send them into the next world without their best and strongest parts. The Algonquin live in dirt huts like Beavers and run away from us rather than stand and fight. The Algonquin help the pasty skinned things that crossed to waters to claim our land and banish our Gods understand nothing of our world and yet think that they can tell us how to live and put names on things that they do do know.

I have killed many Algonquin.

I have eaten parts of them.

I once caught a white skinned soldier in the woods. He tried to aim his thunder stick at me, but it was raining and they seem only able to call upon the thunder when the sky is not using it. I could see the fear in his eyes even though he was supposed to be one of their warriors. I cut thin strips off of the soles of his feet and he screamed like a frightened rabbit. I cut a hole in his belly and dragged some of his innards out. He screamed and cried and he begged me. I could not understand his words but I knew the begging for what it was. Then I took my knife and dug holes in both sides of his mouth, and I pried out his teeth out through those holes one by one. He cried in ways that even our children would not cry and I thought if this is what their warriors are, then the Black Robes, who will not even fight, must be weaker than anyone can imagine. He soiled himself and vomited and urinated all over the insides of his clothes. The smell was a horrible thing. Crows came along and I let them have their way with him after cutting his tongue out and feeding it to them so that he couldn’t scream anymore.

I would not eat any part of him.

I was deeply disgusted by his cowardice. And I decided then that these creatures with skin the colour of the underbelly of a toad and their hairy faces could not be fully human. How could a true human shame himself so? How could a true human shit himself and debase himself with so little regard for a respectable death?

No.

These creatures walk and move like human beings. They resemble human beings.

But they are something less than that. They are something far more dangerous than that, because they have no honour and they have no courage. You cannot ever trust someone without honour and courage.

Even the Wyandot, even the dirt dwelling Algonquin have showed more honour and more courage than these hairy, sickly pale and cowardly creatures.

I have resolved that the next time that I catch one of these creatures I will cut him open little by little, to try to keep him alive for as long as possible so that I can see if their insides work in the same way that a human being’s does.

Perhaps they are not even of this world. There are many stories of Spirits and Skinwalkers that can seem almost fully human, but are not.

I do not know if cutting them open will reveal their secrets.

It probably will not.

Evil Spirits can be very tricky.

But at the very least I will cause them as much pain as possible before killing them.

And that is one thing that I enjoy even more than killing.

That is the one thing that I am better at even than killing.

I will cause them great pain.

I will cause them great and truly terrible pain.

And then I will kill them.

I will enjoy that, I think.

I think that I will enjoy it very much.

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