Wednesday, July 11, 2018 - Outside Kyaukphyu, Rakhine, Myanmar Trigger warning

The guard’s foot came down hard and Chit could hear the cracking of bones in his feet..

“Filthy animal,” the guard snarled.

Another guard starting laughing, “If this kid is an animal, aren’t you fucking his mother and about ten others?”

Chit was whimpering; biting his arm to avoid drawing more attention to himself and had curled up on the hard concrete.

The first guard ignored Chit and turned around to laugh with the second, “Well at least they do what they are told, unlike these vermin.” He lashed out with a kick at Chit on the ground who merely huffed because of the pain. Then both guards walked away.

Chit lay there in the ground in agony. His foot was broken and probably his ribs. His face bore marks from getting clubbed by the butt of the rifle the guard had carried. He passed out.

The sound of executions woke Chit. The massed gunfire, the screaming. The sun was much lower in the sky when he awoke, the shadows from the faceless concrete buildings stretched long. The day’s humidity hadn’t settled yet. Maybe it was near time for dinner or Ishr, but Chit couldn’t care.

He pulled himself out of the way and down into one of the crevices between the prison dormitories. He could hear a guards yelling somewhere else, a baby wailing, a woman pleading, and a smack. Not the baby since it kept wailing, but probably the mother. Lucky, he thought to himself.

Chit wasn’t sure what he was going to do. His foot was pulped. He had taken one look at it and almost thrown up and had resolved not to look again. He was now even more of a target for the guards and more leverage on his mother for her “favors.” He spit and cursed. He may even die here, in this alley, his ribs hurt more and he was having trouble catching his breath.

He passed out again.

When he woke, it was night. The sky was dark, the stars brighter than he had ever seen, the crescent moon high overhead mocking the faith perhaps. Well it was deserved if he had ended up here.

He began to imagine streaks of light in the sky, strange shapes and what looked like a stylized sun above him. The words it spoke were foreign and he blocked them out before drifting off. When he awoke, he felt a putrid leather strap in his mouth, his arms, chest, and legs were bound to what felt like cement behind him. The moon was higher now and mist had rolled in from the coast. The mist obfuscated the people standing around him.

“He’s awake,” hissed a voice to his right.

“Well boy… it looks like you got to wake for the best part. Thiha here was about to start working on your foot. Bite down on the leather.” A cloaked figure wearing a mask, a stylized sun, stood at his feet and gently touched his mangled foot. A glow from his hands emerged and Chti tried to scream as the pain overwhelmed him.

After an eternity, he heard Thiha say, “It is done. The boy will walk again. But not for a while… I could only put things where they belonged. His body will have to do the rest.”

“Well done.” said the one to his right. A hand reached over to the strap in his mouth. “Now, I am going to ungag you, but do you feel this?” the keen edge of a blade pressed against his neck.“This can be your lucky day one way or another - you can keep quiet and live or escape this hellhole through death. Do you understand?”

Chit carefully nodded affirmatively. And the hand pulled off the mask and waited. When Chit didn’t panic, the knife pressure eased on his neck.

He passed out again and woke up later the sun high overhead

“Good. You woke up. I am a galli of the Great Mother and should you be worthy, maybe you shall be one too.” The same person as before

“Brother,” the man named Thira remonstrated, “let us wait and see if this one is worthy.”

“Who are you? Where are we?” Chit looked around and saw they were outside of the camp, somewhere in the swamps. “I need to get back. My mother. My sister. They will kill them if I am gone.”

“Look down boy.”

Chit looked down and saw his clothes were different. He was in a loose cloth wrapped around him with strange patterns embroidered on the hem.

“The soldiers found the body of a boy, his face beaten to an unrecognizable pulp wearing your prison garb. You aren’t missing at all. They dumped it over the wall the next day

“But my family?”

“It has been two weeks you have been out and travelling and another two weeks back. They have thought you dead this whole time. They will abide longer.”

“Longer?”

“Longer for the rituals and your initiation. Once you are a galli like me, you will go back and free your people. Unless you hold faith with your god?”

“No.” And the boy spit to the side again. “He wasn’t there for me. I have heard a million of my people are in chains, being worked to death. There is no god.”

“Ah. But that is where you are wrong. We are all believers in the Great Mother who has blessed us as you saw. Your foot will heal now. And while it heals we shall prepare you.”

—-

Chit watched the cage door shut over him as he stood in a pit. He was eager to be done with this. It had been months since he had seen his mother.

He no longer doubted. The papers the Great Mother were everything that had been promised and more. He, as one of three initiates, was to be inducted into the greater mysteries. And this was his first true step.

The bull was brought over, docile from the soporific the other galli had given him. They began chanting something and Thira brought the knife up and disemboweled the bull.

The blood and viscera dropped down through the grate; Chit felt the warm thick blood pour over him. The chanting grew louder and more frenzied as they went to the next and did the same. He could hear the two other, both girls much younger than him, start crying. They were soft, weak. They hadn’t been to his hell and would never face what he had.

He welcomed the blood. He drank it like a child out in the rain. He imagined he could feel the goddess’s blessing coursing through his veins.

Soon. One more step. And it was the one he feared.

—-

Chit sat, it had been a almost six months since he had last seen his mother and sister. The archigalli was here after having travelled the world. She stood at the head table.

She was chanting something in Greek. Chit had never heard the language and it sounded so alien. Oddly flat with a tempo and staccato that he couldn’t quite parse. He bowed his head at the appropriate times, the smell of narcotic incense making him dizzy.

Later, in a haze, he stood naked in front of the others. A woman came and began to paint his body with gold colors. Then another came with a dead bird and dabbed blood on him in baroque patterns. He felt himself becoming aroused as she handled him and he felt the fear in him, distant but present.

The head priestess, a white woman, aged but stiff of neck and until now beating a face of disinterested benevolence, looked down on him kindly and held the ceremonial dagger in one hand and an almond sapling in the other. A Merkus pine decorated in violets stood behind her.

She came down to him and whispered in his ear, surprisingly in Ruáingga, “I know you are frightened. Change we cannot walk back from, one that decides our future so manifestly, we cannot help but fear it. Today you join us in the ceremony of Attis. You came to us burning for revenge, but now you will join the Dendrophori and become a healer.”

“Yes Mother,” Chit whispered. He wished she had not spoken to him as he came out of the drug induced haze and was forced to confront the reality of what was about to happen. The other priestess’s hand kept him rigid throughout this and he began to feel a mixture of fear and embarrassment that he would have thought would make him flaccid.

“What will you do with this blessing then?”

“I wish to save my family. My people. As many as I can. We will seek somewhere to hide and prosper. To plant the soil and grow our numbers as the Great Mother would want.”

“I see the truth in you. Now is the time.” And the high priestess, the archigalli, handed the dagger to him. A tincture of some sort coated the blade and and Chit could smell the mix of violet oil and ash on the blade.

He could feel himself begin to climax, and he made his decision with a sharp cut downwards, reenacting the rite of Attis. The moment the cut happened his vision went white and he could feel that power, that sense that had whispered and taunted him just out of reach these past months, come to the fore and become something tangible and real.

—-

The guard at the wall pulled at his collar again. The humidity and heat was brutal and he was sick and tired of being here. His family was far away and the stuff he had seen here haunted his dreams. He didn’t know when he had gone from internally protesting the mass executions and rapes to just wanting it over so he could he leave.

The guard felt a hand grab hold of his, and his throat closed up, he couldn’t breathe and then his vision went immediately black and he died.

Chit looked down at the soldier. He had perverted the gift of healing though this but he knew that the Great Mother Cybele would understand.

When he walked through the narrow concrete alleyways, he could feel the urgency driving him. He burst through the door to the barracks where his family had been consigned, and stopped in his tracks.

His mother and sister were still alive. But both were pregnant and his mother seemed very close to her time.

They both looked at him, and his sister was first to break the silence, “Oh Chit! You are alive! They said you died so many months ago.” His mother stated at him and he could see tears begin to form and then both of them and him were in each other’s arms weeping.

After some time, he separated himself, holding their hands tightly, “A lot happened. I met some people and they will, no, they are helping us now.” Then he raised his voice, “Everyone, gather what you can easily carry.”

The soldiers who came an hour later via helicopter after all communication had ended found the camp deserted. The soldiers and prisoners were both gone.