Quoted By:
The last prisoner, the one in the fine clothes, is untied and led to his finality. He is…young, younger than you could make out at first. The other prisoners were around your age, grown men with the trail-look about them. This one…you’d put him under twenty years of age. He sobs hysterically and though you cannot read lips, you doubt he is coherent. One of the older chief you’d seen arguing previously raises his hand from the crowd. A short exchange ensues between him and the other two, before he subsides in apparent defeat. The boy needs no braves to hold him down. He is collapsed, crying on the floor of the platform. He fails to move himself away even as the chief with the knife takes him by the chin and looks him in the eyes.
Another protest from the old chief in the crowd, two of them this time, they gesture toward the knife. The young chief on the platform turns back to look at them, but does not respond. He slowly turns back to look at the boy in front of him, and after ten, twenty, thirty seconds, he sets the knife to his forehead.
The screams from the boy resound farther than the other two, shriller perhaps. They sound like a goat, a kid with its leg broken from a trap. They seem to rise into the steep mountains cradling the village, they go on a long time. He doesn’t fall into shock like the others after it’s done, or maybe his body simply does not have the ability to stop the sounds set in motion. Silence only settles when the chief with the war club brings it up…and down.
You cross yourself and say a prayer for all three, “Be silent, O all flesh, before the Lord: for he is raised up out of his holy habitation.” The ritual is repeated for a third time, the scalp raised as offering. They do not react.
You see mouths moving among the crowd, rapid and fearful. The two chiefs on the platform look at each other in alarm, and stand close in conversation. Eventually, the two chiefs on the platform jump down into the crowd and make their way to the village entrance, some of the crowd accompanying them, but most of the crowd trying to call them back. As they reach the pole barrier, all five of the chiefs you identified earlier, young and old, bicker relentlessly. Hands and arms fly, fingers point, heads are turned away, it is a true melee. The chief with the war club emerges the victor. He sets the club aside, and takes the three scalps from the chief with the knife and slowly, very slowly, walks out to the ravens.