Did it see me? I remained very still.
No, the big toothed head was turned, looking down the path.
Should I try for a shot? I have always wondered since if I might not have ended it here, had I dared. But the problem was, I couldn’t judge the location of the creature. I could see its outline, but how far back was it?
Four arrows. I had only four. The forest was damp, damp and cold. I couldn’t be sure the bow would hold together for four shots.
I hesitated. And then it was too late. I heard Risderd walking, without any attempt at concealment, up the path.
I am being tortured, he thought, in the shadow land we all visit just before waking.
He remembered her. No longer young but still beautiful. The helmet of tawny hair that shadowed her face and rested like a small cape at her shoulders. The fair, strongly marked face with a straight nose and generous mouth. Alabaster, fine grained skin, highlighted with a roseate flush.
He was afraid of women. Had been afraid of women. But this one was nothing like the bitter witch that cast such a dark shadow over his mind. He was conscious of those past encounters that made his body shake when she touched him. Still, his father was there and had promised nothing would happen to him. So he allowed her to place him on her lap, while he glared defiance up at her face.
She stroked his cheek lightly with one finger, and the anger and fear dissolved and vanished, the way salt does in water, leaving the memory of both anger and fear behind, changing the nature of experience in the same way salt changes the taste of water.
“What a dreadful, dreadful thing,” the magnificent woman whispered. And he knew the words went unheard by the others gathered around the big carved chair where she sat before the fire.
Then she spoke up and called, “Cai! Cai! Come here to me!”
The boy who approached the chair was just a little older than he was. But unlike him, this child was swarthy in complexion, with thick hair that grew straight back from a pronounced widow’s peak on his forehead. He was thickset, with a sturdy build.
“Cai,” she said, “long have you reproached me for giving you no brother in the comitatus, among the young lions. You are training to learn the warrior way. And bitterly have you complained to me of your solitude. I told you that it was foreordained that you stand isolated. That you were not chosen for fellowship. And you have borne your hardship well and have no peer among your age mates.”
She extended her hand to the boy. He knelt and kissed it.
“But now the one who is to be your brother has come.”
Looking down, he had seen happiness fill the child’s face. They were both too young for any artifice. He knew he was the cause of that happiness and even then wondered if he deserved to be the cause of such happiness for anyone.
But he clambered down from her lap and embraced his new brother. And from that day forward, they hunted, played, studied, and fought together. And neither had any secrets from the other.
He felt a piercing sense of grief, so painful that it was almost intolerable. So how, then, did he find himself so alone?
Her face came back to him then. She would have said, “Think.”
Torture. Why go to such elaborate lengths to cause him pain? The torturer always wants something, even if only to derive satisfaction from the struggles of his victim. His suffering was desired. The less he suffered, the more futile the torture was. And if he could find out what, if any, other satisfactions were wanted, he could study how to deny his captors those also.
He opened his eyes. His pursuer must still be dormant, since the sun wasn’t up yet. The air was clear, but with a slight touch of frost in it.
He had no idea what season it was here. He and Cai had wandered in the mountains, and this had all the indications of a high altitude place. But did it get very cold here? And, if so, when and how cold?
He crawled out from under the holly bush and went to drink at the pool. He saluted the skulls staring up at him. They were beginning to acquire personalities. The structure beneath the skin is, after all, as distinctive as the envelope of flesh it supports. This one, the one closest to the place he drank, was likely male and young. He had all his teeth, and the bones were robust and powerful.
Arthur shivered. The air was as cold as the water. He went to his cache and ate some of the dry deer meat, then folded several lengths of the jerky and hooked them around his belt.
The sun poured its new light through the trees.
Now,
he thought.
Now, just stay alive.
He heard the thing yammering beyond the trees. He didn’t run, just began walking. He thought he heard distant laughter, but now he schooled himself to indifference and allowed no expression of fear or disgust to cross his face.
I
need a yew
.
The thing seemed to be gaining on him, so he broke into a jog, wondering if it were refreshed by its rest also. I
need a yew,
he thought,
for the fire drill.
Hunted as usual, he crisscrossed the plateau that day. But he couldn’t find the sort of tree he wanted.
The task of evading the creature was now routine. When he reached the swamp, he kicked another rotten log to pieces and ate what he found inside. Again he heard the laughter, and as before, he steeled himself to pretend he hadn’t.
He searched the tall cattails near the forest, found a few more eggs, and ate them in much the same way an animal would, crunching the shells. He discovered that by wandering along the edge of the plateau he could slow the horror down—the reason being that it was ringed by skulls that warded the creature. It also provided a certain challenge for him, since he had to pick his path carefully to avoid being trapped at the edge. The path at the rim was far from even. At times, his forward progress was blocked by piles of rock and he had to double back through the forest sometimes coming perilously close to the monster. But this gave him an opportunity to study the thing.
It was a wavering column; shadows circled its core. And the sounds it made were almost universally those of anger and sorrow. But it was conscious of him, and when he came close to it, the thing seemed to destroy nearby objects in the hope of burying him in the debris.
A sheet of mud near the swamp fanned out, almost blinding him. But the creature stranded a few fish. When he doubled back to get them, he found himself pelted with fist size rocks from a dry streambed.
This really frightened him and taught him not to underrate the thing’s clumsy pursuit. If one of those flying stones got him in the head, or broke a leg, he would be finished.
Taking to his heels, he quickly outdistanced it again. After caching the fish, he returned to the rim, thinking he needed a refuge in case he became ill or otherwise incapacitated. Somewhere to hide where the thing couldn’t get to him.
Near sunset, he found the tree. It clung to the plateau at the very edge. The prevailing winds lashed the outermost point of the plateau here. The tree was rooted in the slope at the very edge, just before it fell away into the valley. A skull, the warding skull for this place, was nailed to one of the upper branches.
She? Was it a she? He couldn’t be sure. The skull was gracile, delicate with a full set of teeth. A young woman, perhaps?
Since the tree was rooted in the slope, her empty eyes stared into his directly, on the same level. He saluted her as he had the one on the birch.
A yew, just what he wanted. It was very old, and it looked as though the tree had been dislodged from the plateau by a landslide. Enough roots remained to continue to form a hold fast, even though the remains of the tree jutted out perpendicular to the cliff.
Yews do not give up easily, and over half the tree still sported the narrow, dark, gray green leaves. It was thickly adorned with red berries. The breeze from over the valley below was cool on his face, and the westering sun was half masked by the haze drifting over the distant mountains.
He went down the slope and climbed out on the trunk. The tree was even bigger than he thought when looking at it from above.
I want… what do I want?
he thought, alarmed. Inadvertently, he looked down.
No! All at once he was dizzy and wracked by nausea. He had refused to admit to himself how weak he was, how drained by hunger, exertion, and his wounded hand. The only thing that kept him conscious was sheer will. He trembled violently, feeling his trembling shake the tree trunk, knowing that if he slipped, he would fall to his death in the abyss below.
His hands clutched the small branches angling out from the trunk so tightly that twigs popped through his skin. At the same moment, the horror reached the edge of the plateau above him.
It screamed, voice echoing out over the rim, ringing with inchoate rage, and it seemed to want to drill into the ground. The force of its fury showered him with dirt, stones, twigs, and detritus of all kinds from the ground as it seemed to want to tear through the earth itself, rip the tree’s roots loose, and send it and him plunging to the rocks below.
It might have succeeded, for the thick, knotted roots weren’t that far below the surface, but he felt rather than saw searing rage from the skull. And he knew it had been she and in some sense she was still here. Vengeful and protective of…
The thing gave a truly dreadful scream and fled, just as the sun began to slip behind the peak in the distance. Arthur laid his cheek against the loose scrappy bark for what seemed a long time, until the light turned blue. He remembered what he wanted. She, the woman of the skull, had given him that.
He wondered who and what they had been; and found he couldn’t imagine but knew, whatever their origins, he was not alone. He had allies in his struggle.
Cai! Yes, Cai taught him. Almost his first lesson was how to make fire. They had gone hunting in the omnipresent oak wood that covered their country. They had gone after geese, and they both carried longbows.
They got lost. Not very lost; both boys knew if they followed the coast, it would bring them home. But the night was moonless and the darkness thick under the trees. They had bread and cheese, enough to content them until morning, but no fire. Cai hadn’t been in the least worried. Everyone, he told Arthur in a lofty fashion, carried fire with them at all times.
Then Cai unstrung his long yew bow and demonstrated how easy it was to create a comforting blaze with a bow drill. Hunkered down over the fire in a thickly overgrown hollow near a stream, Arthur immediately demanded that Cai teach him. And he quickly found out it wasn’t as easy as it looked.
After a few tries, his arms and hands were sore and he was winded but no fire. Cai laughed at him.
Then Arthur was seized by rage, a fury almost as forceful as an artesian spring, a kind of evil madness. Nothing as simple as a piece of wood and a string could defeat him. He would not permit it.
He gritted his teeth and went after his task with a vengeful ferocity that frightened Cai. He worked bow and string until he had blisters and the blisters burst and bled. Until his arms felt as though they were on fire and he had a stitch in his side from the exertion. But he got his fire; then in a fury, kicked it in Cai’s face.
They were both children, and Cai forgave him after they put out the fire that was running through the dead oak leaves in a thoroughly alarming way. But Arthur noticed Cai took care never to laugh at him again.
He looked up at the remains of the tree and saw a nice section that would make a bow—heartwood on the outside, sapwood on the inside. He got to his knees, still trembling with fatigue and strong emotion. The stave—because that’s what it looked like, a stave—snapped off in his hand.
The light was gone, as was the terror that pursued him. He crawled back up to the rim, stave in hand. He saluted the skull again. He spoke aloud. “I thank you, my lady.”
Then he stumbled back the way he had come to his bed under the holly bush. He collapsed on his stomach on the dead leaves and slept for several hours. Hunger and cold woke him.
The stave he had chosen was practically a bow. It didn’t take long to rig it with a cloth string from his leggings, and he had good reason to be thankful for his long practice with the bow drill as a boy. He was highly skilled at bringing fire into being. And in a short time, he had one going in the dead leaves under the holly bush.
He swept it out, away from his improvised hearth, and surrounded it with a circle of stones. Then he added some knots of oak he’d found nearby.
Then he simply sat, looking at what he had wrought for a long time.
Then he went back to where he had cached the fish, improvised a grill from green branches, and cooked them. He was starting on the second, cleaning the ribs with his teeth, when he heard the yell of rage.
Arthur began laughing, because he knew he had baffled his captors and infuriated them by being far better at taking care of himself than they had expected him to be. He felt an ugly sense of self satisfaction, and then the lights went out.
NOW! I thought.
NOW
!
I don’t remember drawing the bow and nocking the arrow. I felt only the sting as the bowstring snapped past my wrist and the sinew slashed my knuckles.
Then, almost without willing it, the second arrow was in position and the thing was coming fast, right toward me. The creature, running on his hind legs, was clear of the darkness under the oak. I saw the sheet of spray rise as its feet hit the water. I could see it now clearly, as yellow and green striped as the sunstruck foliage around it, with two arrows in its midsection.
Odd,
some part of my mind commented. I
never felt myself loose the second one.
But the third was in position, and I felt the bow fling it free, even as it fell apart.
Just as well it did. I might have remained rooted where I stood and fired the fourth, and so met my doom. Because as the third landed, it penetrated the lower abdomen, near the thing’s left hip.
The first two were only making streaks of red, crossing the creature’s stomach. But when the third struck, the fish eater staggered, let out a terrible scream, and the scarlet blood gushed.