Turtles Are Never Wrong

Vlad: It was 44 years ago.

No. The turtle died four years ago, and we had it for 60 years. It was 64 years ago.

Well, maybe I should write, it is 64 years later, because that's the current time. Then I have to write the entire thing in present tense.

Bah. What gets me, what really gets me, and maybe you who are reading this, is that I didn't go back and delete my false start.

You need to understand, though, because you comprehend my writing, that while we figured out how to make it record, we never learned how to make it delete.

Vic: My name is Vic Canserum. My brother is Vlad Canserum. We're twins.

I have to introduce us because Vlad always forgets to do that. As he often says, I'm the storyteller, Lenar is the lecturer, and he's the one who finds his boots in his mouth.

I found the tablet on the table, where Vlad had left it unpowered and dried out. I wound it up, and read his start, and knew he was making an effort to write about the discovery we made, 64 years ago, in the city known as Domus Palus, that changed the fate of our tribe, the Seru, and possibly the rest of the land.

But like any good story, we need a place to begin. And what you are reading so far might not seem to bode well for the story. Do not despair. I have the tablet now.

I promise I will try to keep Lenar from writing, though.

I suppose the best place to start would be where Vlad actually did put his boots in his mouth, 64 years ago.

Vlad: Twins are important to our tribe. They are omens, signs, portents, all the usual stuff, like what the inside of a turtle shell that has died naturally predicts for the future.

A set of male twins means disharmony, and the tribe usually sacrifices or kills the second one to protect the parents and relatives from the certain pain the boys will create when they reach manhood. A set of female twins means harmony, and the tribe raises them with care, love, happiness and joy.

A mixed set of twins, like Vic and I, is a bit confusing, especially when one's parents feel it's satisfactory to give the daughter a name nearly indistinguishable from a boy's. The elders had no knife ready when I popped out second, so I guess that was the first time Vic saved my life.

We are old now. We are indeterminately aged. We outlived the turtle, and that's more than a lot of people can say. Sixty-four years ago, we were 12. I mean, we were 15, because Lenar commented that the stump by the entrance to the haunted region had as many rings as he was old, and he was 18 at the time. And he's three years older than us.

Vic: Vlad's interruptions aside, here we begin. For true.

We were 15 and impertinent. Vlad always argued with father. I always argued with mother. We both ignored our younger siblings or stole from them. We were troublemakers, and the only elder still alive from our birthing was often heard saying about our mother, "If she had had two boys instead of a boy and a girl named after a boy, none of this would be happening."

Lenar was 18, the son of the most powerful priest in the tribe - lonely, underappreciated, and often forced to do the messy tasks like disposing of rotten turtle carcasses. He followed us around in his free time, because while there were several people in our age group, Vlad and I were real loners, and Lenar could only ever deal with small groups of people at a time.

He was also madly infatuated with me, but at 15, I was generally unaware of him. I mean, I was aware of boys and all that stuff, but it held far less interest than the general trouble Vlad and I always got into.

At the new year, the entire tribe - about 400 of us in the near vicinity, maybe a couple of thousand in all the region - would gather for a big party, in the central area that the homes encircled. Food was plentiful, as the wild rice was recently harvested. The elders would rise, all 30 of them, and each would tell a story, beginning with the world's creation and following the history of the Seru to the present day. The youngest elder had the joy of crafting the newest story, the one that might include the past year if something eventful happened.

Nothing eventful had happened since before we were born, so no new stories had been added.

The same 30 stories every year. And this wasn't the only time we heard them. We heard them, one at a time, over 30 weeks during the year. I guess you could call it school. Our history is important, and everyone has to learn it by rote. Ask us anything about it. We know it.

Vlad: Who founded the tribe?

Vic: Mad Maide Craneyseru, of course. She had four sets of twins, all girls. Blessed by Sendala and Fraemauna and the rest of the gods. It's a little more complicated than that, but we're done recording the rest of the history of the Seru, and now we're recording the last story, the one the newest elder will tell at the new year.

She's mad, by the way, because she had four sets of twins.

This particular new year, 64 years ago, when we were 15 and Lenar was 18, Vlad and I made every effort to find our way out of the story-telling part of the evening. We played an extensive game of hide-and-go-seek, but were found. We created quite a havoc in the morning involving an iron pot, a hemp rope and most of the winter food storage, but our parents felt they should be generous because of the new year.

So we sat, each with a sibling on our laps, framed by our parents, behind a row of more siblings and in front of a few cousins, uncles, aunts and our father's parents. If one of us so much as twitched, grandma was ready to strike home with the flat of her palm.

Somewhere in the story about the birth of the hundredth hero, Vlad leaned over to me.

"Monkey," he said. I sniggered.

"Shhh!" from our father, next to me.

A little later, during the story about the rise of the haunted region, Vlad leaned in again, holding our littlest brother up close to my face.

"Monkey," he insisted. I laughed out loud. He had found some way to make our brother all dark-skinned and fuzzy.

The story-teller paused, eyes boring into us. He knew, as did most of the tribe, that if an interruption occurred, it was no doubt because of us.

Then my grandmother screamed, and my father glared at us. Anger turned to horror though, and he snatched the little guy from Vlad's hands. A gnarled hand snatched our ears quickly, twisting painfully, before we could escape. Our youngest sister, on my lap, slid off and ran toward our mother, crying. The elders shouted down at the commotion, which was spreading among smaller children finicky with sitting still for so long, and the growing rumbles of older people: "Back in my day, we could go all night without interruptions!"

The fingers dug even deeper in our ears, and we were dragged away.

"What did you do?" I whispered to Vlad.

Vlad: We first used "monkey" probably when we were toddlers, and we used it to describe our father. He went through a period where he didn't shave. We didn't understand at the time that he didn't shave because our family had traded most of its worked metal to cover the costs of some destruction we did.

In any case, we were learning words pretty quickly at the time, and mother laughed at father and called him, "a big, hairy monkey." We found the word entirely too funny. It's a thing young kids do. Later on, when we actually saw a monkey, we learned that even mother had no idea what one looked like.

What I did, though, to make our youngest brother look dark-skinned and fuzzy, was something I'll admit I did without thinking too much.

Vic: It's easy to make admissions after more than 50 years.

Vlad: I admitted it even then, when we were hiding after our escape. You don't smear a young family member with mud just to make a funny joke.

Vic: Yet you did. I sigh to think about it again.

Everyone in the village sat in the central area, which was kept dry through magic, so no mud was available just by digging around. But the incident with the food stores earlier had involved heading out of town some ways, so our boots up to our knees and most of our cloaks were soaked in water and mud.

Vlad scraped some of that off and smeared our unaware little brother with the potentially dangerous concoction of water, dirt, decay, disease and possible konig worms. I don't think mother ever forgave him, although our brother survived. Father had learned a few things from raising Vlad and I, and one of those was being expeditious in cleaning us. He doesn't have any physical scars to show about it, but mother's future over-protectiveness of him probably created a few emotional ones.

We were hauled off to our grandmother's house, an old-fashioned shack with an attached storage shed. She was a strong woman for her age, and she threw us into the shed, closed and locked the door.

"Well, at least we won't have to listen to the rest of the stories," Vlad said.

"Yes, but how are we going to get out of here?"

"Magic."

Lenar: I'm the only one who can answer this question. Vic insisted, after a long and drab argument, that I quit doing real work - estimating the volume of artifacts destroyed in the purge - and explain the differences of magic. Most of the Seru are wint: giant, pale-skinned people whose use of magic involves a large community pool. It's far more complicated than that. I don't have time to explain all the real nuances. The marker I left where I was working last only lasts a few hours. Many years ago, the medes invaded from across the seas. They built Domus Palus. Many of the local tribes tried to hunt them to extinction, but there was some confusion concerning magic. Again, the details are too extensive to get into right now, but what we learned about the medes is that they use magic through artifacts. This tablet, for instance, has a handle on it that you turn to get the magic going. Most wints can't use mede magic; all medes can't use wint magic. Vlad, Vic and I were the first to use mede magic. Now, we're used ...

Vic: I think that's enough, because Lenar will go on for a long time about irrelevant details if we let him. Notice how he doesn't use paragraphs? He'd use only numbers if I didn't prod him the entire time he wrote.

Vlad: Magic. Everyone can use magic.

There's the school for our history, where we're taught what people did. Then there's the school for our magic, where we're taught what not to do. Magic is used sparingly and mostly for survival. It is essential to keep our strength up and our minds clear at all times.

Escaping from a dark, windowless shed using magic is not considered a proper use of magic. Etiquette, a word I've always despised, would have us sit out our punishment. But this time, something was different. This time, there was the turtle.

Vic: Vlad's the reason we're in this trouble. And while nine times out of 10, I'll say "Let's do it!" to one of his suggestions, it didn't seem prudent right now to blast our way out of grandmother's shed. I mean, Vlad had threatened our brother's life — mother and father would be livid.

I was about to argue this with Vlad when we heard a sliding noise, a thunk, and a small section of the roof caved in. The turtle landed on Vlad's head, bounced, and I caught it.

Vlad: Turtles are luck, right? The priests sacrifice them. They keep a bunch around, and when one dies naturally, they sacrifice them and read the inside of the shells. Lenar knows how to do it, but each of the 30 stories at the time involves the sacrifice of a turtle. And a turtle, properly sacrificed, is never wrong.

There were two stories at the time about improperly sacrificed turtles, the old "We thought you was dead" joke. In one of them, the Seru were caught in a gigantic flood when the turtle said drought. In the other, the Seru were devastated by a plague when the turtle said using magic will cause your destruction.

So having one fall from the sky and drop into your hands is grace from the gods. Plus, it opened up a new hole in the roof for us to escape through, without using magic.

Vic: As much grace from the gods as Vlad says this is, I admit I wasn't very surprised when we ran into Lenar as we climbed down the back side of grandma's house.

"Aren't you two in big trouble?" he asked, shyly not looking at me.

"Naw," Vlad said. "We were just leaving. Look, this turtle just fell from the heavens and into Vic's hands."

Lenar's eyes went wide, but he did look at me. Or, rather, at the turtle, since he could never really look at me when he knew I knew he was looking. Boys are strange like that, when they're infatuated.

Lenar's smart. I don't know anyone smarter than him. But he was lonely at the time, because of who his parents were, his responsibilities and his incredible shyness. We were about his only friends. I could almost feel the gears in his head turning as he reached the following conclusion:

"This turtle means you need to leave the village and go to the haunted region. And I must accompany you."

He almost spoke it in a different voice.

"What?" Vlad was incredulous. "We need to get away, but not to the haunted region."

Lenar met my eyes briefly, touched the turtle, then looked at Vlad. "The turtle is never wrong."

"We don't worship the things," Vlad argued. "Take it, and go back to the priests, Lenar. Geez. I'm not going to the haunted region because you had a vision."

Vlad: I wasn't that stupid.

Vic: You were. Or you were smart. Sometimes I wonder how our lives would be different if you had won that argument. I think, you would never have eaten your boots. The Kalkorae would never have captured us. We would never have been tested. We would never have discovered how to use their magic. The Seru, Vlad, would be no more, if you had won that argument.

But, the war would never have happened. The tribe may have had time to move. Lenar could have warned everyone, in another vision that never happened. We don't know what would have happened if you had won that argument, so stupidity doesn't matter. Maybe, your stupidity there and with our brother was what made me side with Lenar.

Vlad: That was the first time you argued with me to that extent.

Vic: I think it was the shared eye contact with Lenar. I saw that his vision was true. The things you and I had always talked about, things about doing something and proving to everyone that all our tricks would be worth something someday, I think this would make them come true.

And it did.

Vlad: It did.

Vic: Reading back over this, I see we've gotten side-tracked. I said a good place to start this story would be where Vlad actually ate his boots, but it seems I haven't even reached that point yet. Hopefully, that point will show up soon.

Copyright 2005-2007 Eric Zawadzki and Matthew Schick. All Rights Reserved.
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