Art by Kit Carter
The Butcher of Mazdin towers high atop his pedestal, a bronze monument huge enough to empty all the mines in the region. Every seven years, we throng to his feet in the heat of the solstice to make offerings. All must make blood offerings when the sun is at its zenith, and all must wear white—even babes in arms. There are no exceptions. To give white garments to paupers is a sacrament. The richest of us give ceremonial robes to the poorest and are lauded for their generosity. I have given nothing.
The richest bring cattle, but most bring something less extravagant. A goat, perhaps, or a cockerel. A few enterprising children subsist by selling rats, mice, and pigeons. My specialty was pigeons. I hunted them after dark when they would not take flight. What I couldn’t sell I ate, because when I begged for food or coin I received white robes, instead.
The hecatomb has been happening for all of recorded history, but no one seems to know why. Although I went to the library as many times as permitted (once every three years, and no more), no librarian would tell me anything about it other than it must be observed, or else. I remember the tomes and scrolls chained like prisoners. I don’t know what secrets lay within. When I asked to be taught to read, I was shooed away. No one would tell me anything at the temples, either, where augurs gazed at the sky for a sign.
The Butcher of Mazdin stands in front of the ruined palace in the centre of the city. With his cleaver held aloft and his empty eyes staring down at the crumbling, vine-choked ramparts, he is a foreboding sight. No bird dares roost atop this bronze giant. Not even a pigeon, though their flocks fill the sky most days. The augurs tell us it is notable that birds do not roost atop the Butcher’s head. It is portentous, they say, but I do not know why. He gleams so bright in the sun that when I look away, it leaves shimmering holes in my vision.
As the solstice nears, people grow restless. Although nothing is dead yet, kettling vultures circle the city. The pigeons have all flown away. When the vultures land in the square, their gawky bald heads dip up and down just like the augurs. Augurs won’t buy pigeons from the likes of me. My birds are too common. I am too poor, and they don’t want to see my bad leg. They tend their own in gilded coops, breeding fancy ones with curly plumage or feathered feet. Augurs raise and lower their heads like the vultures do. They mark observations down before chaining the scrolls like prisoners in the library.
Just before the square fills with people and their sacrifices, vultures run along the streets, necks outstretched, wings flapping. They lurch back into the sky before filling the trees. Their eyes track the parade of people and animals entering the square, and I wonder how many sacrifices they’ve attended. There’s a saying that you are what you eat. Since vultures feast after every hecatomb, perhaps they are made of reborn souls. As for me, I am a pigeon. I am stolen bread. I am garbage.
One day I snuck into a shop filled with wondrous things. Pots of strange salves and unguents, thin-necked pots reeking of camphor and sulphur, solid iron rings which could be joined together and taken apart again, cotton gauze which erupted in flame before vanishing as though it never existed. The purveyor was a magician. He used doves instead of pigeons. Let them vanish and reappear. Such a place was not for the likes of me, but I went in anyway. When the shopkeep wasn’t looking, I pocketed a knife. He never saw me enter. He never saw me leave. I have my own kind of magic. Unless we’re in the way, paupers are invisible to those who do not wish to see us. Eyes slide over us. People look away, especially when we are lame.
No animal accompanies me this time as I limp my way to the Butcher of Mazdin. Despite the bad leg which makes people’s eyes slide past me, my lack of sacrificial victim makes me conspicuous. The beady eyes of birds bore into me. Congregants stare, and at first, they look confused, but that soon turns to rage and terror. If anyone refuses to make a blood sacrifice, the or else will happen. The ire of the congregants makes my heart beat too quickly. I’m not used to being noticed. My hands tremble and my knees begin to buckle beneath my white charity robe, but I am determined.
At my first ceremony fourteen years ago, back when my leg was still good, I’d brought a white pigeon mottled with grey. I’d crept along the rooftops the night before and caught her in her nest. I stuffed her in a bag and sucked her two eggs dry while her mate buffeted me with his wings. I left him behind and slept beneath a bush with his wife in the bag next to my head. In the queue to the square the next morning, a rich benefactor handed me my robe. I pulled it over my patched rags. It was too big because I was too thin. Beneath the blinding white sun of the hecatomb, I opened my bag and the piebald pigeon fluttered in my hands until I stopped her for good. I tried to lay her gently in the pile, but no gentleness was to be had. Screams of the dying and the soon-to-die filled the air. Made my ears ring. Gore lapped at my legs. Spattered my face and arms. My gifted robe could never be white again.
One of the victims wasn’t dead. A mouse skittered out from between twitching corpses. This tiny creature swam through a gutter running high with stinking blood, its little nose peeking out from the red, its coat caked and clotted, whiskers glistening in the dazzle of the noonday sun. This secret survivor scuttled up the Butcher of Mazdin’s leg and vanished. Though I clambered over the heap and around the monument in my ruined robe, I couldn’t find where it went.
That next year, we experienced a plague of mice. Rodents overran all of Mazdin, devouring the best of all foods, and I heard it said that no cat caught even a single mouse that year. The augurs had theories about this, but so did everyone. No one mentioned seeing a mouse run up the Butcher’s leg. Perhaps I alone had witnessed it.
Seven years ago, I brought another pigeon with feathers shining like hematite to the sacrifice. He was the last pigeon I ever caught. I’d found him sleeping on a shelf beneath a stone bridge, helpless in the pre-dawn gloom. At the hecatomb, he stared up at me with bright orange eyes lidded like a setting sun between dark clouds. I wrenched his head from his fluttering body with my bare hands and flung the carcass onto the heap.
That was the year a princess had outdone herself by giving thousands of white robes to all the city’s poor. This act left the other nobles grumbling, arms holding white robes which would be worn by no one. The princess was determined to outshine everyone. Maybe even the Butcher himself. The other nobles brought cattle. Pure white heifers without blemish. She brought a bull elephant, his tusks tipped with gold and studded with rubies.
The elephant was a menace, trumpeting in fear and goring with his tusks. Rampaging through the streets, he made a few sacrifices of his own. At one point, he reared up on his hind legs, towering over the growing pile of bodies just as the Butcher of Mazdin towered over the rest of us. The elephant trampled many before being brought down by the guards. Three rich people died. No one counted the paupers who died.
I survived, though my leg hasn’t been the same since. There would be no more hunting pigeons for me. While I lay screaming, I saw, or perhaps I hallucinated, a macaque making its way out of the pile of corpses and up the red-streaked leg of the Butcher of Mazdin. The monkey disappeared into a dazzle of sunlight.
That year, macaques overran Mazdin. Little monkeys with long tails and serious faces pelted people with fruit and faeces. Little monkeys cavorted through the streets, taking whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. Not a single monkey was caught that whole year. Not a single monkey was stopped. Every macaque was sleek and fat and happy, and I too wanted to be sleek and fat and happy.
Both my blood and the blood of sacrifices have crimsoned my robes and run through the gutters. This year, however, it won’t be an animal who scales the Butcher of Mazdin. While others glare at me, I draw the little dagger I stole from the magic shop. As I plunge it into my chest, the trick blade disappears into the hilt. It falls onto the ground when I collapse onto the growing pile of sacrifices. An offering is an offering, and though human sacrifices are rare, they aren’t unheard of. Besides, I am a pauper. I am invisible. My eyes are shut as I play dead in my charity robes. The bodies pile atop me, and I am forgotten. When the congregants leave and vultures descend upon the feast, I begin to wriggle my way out. It takes me a long time, and the stink is fierce. The bodies are heavy and lay atop me like cold, heaped clay, but the vultures help. They pull and pluck at the corpses, and I can finally squirm my way free, leaving my gore-soaked robe behind. They hop clear when they see me, but when I don’t bother them, they go back to their banquet.
The pedestal upon which the Butcher of Mazdin stands is high, but the heap of bodies is high, too, and even with my twisted leg, I am able to climb it. Above me is an aperture just big enough to squeeze into. I pull myself inside. No one but the vultures see.
The Butcher of Mazdin is hollow and filled with light. I look upwards. Ever upwards. I ignore the bones of the mouse. Ignore the bones of the macaque. Ignore the bones I do not recognize. The sun pours in through the Butcher’s empty eyes. I use my nails to pull myself up, all the way to roost inside his miraculous head. I pray that next year will be a good year for paupers, and maybe for pigeons, too.
Shantell Powell is a swamp hag, Indigiqueer, and elder goth raised in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid. She’s a graduate of the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s horror residency. A Brave New Weird winner, an Aurora finalist, and a Journey, Best of the Net, and Pushcart nominee, her writing is in Augur Magazine, The Deadlands, On Spec, and more. When she’s not writing, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods.