Читать книгу Tales of the Goddessi - Heather Ranier - Страница 3

The day’s hunting had been good. The hunter carried three longears over her shoulder by their namesakes, the dead creatures thumping against her back as she made her way under the arching roots of a huge heborough. High overhead, starflowers bloomed in the lowest branches. At noons, a luto had wandered directly into the line of her bow, but she hadn’t taken the creature. She didn’t need that much meat and besides, a Sage had once told her the luto was her totem.

She still found it hard to see any connection between herself and the big-eyed, long-legged runners of the forest. Many men and women had compared her to beasts, but never so favorably. The hunter saw herself more as the recalcitrant lumberer or perhaps a vicious branchdasher. But the Sage had been a skilled one and assured her that the luto, an ever-solitary creature, would hold special significance in her life.

Under the great tree, where its huge roots held it off the ground, the hunter enjoyed the quiet of the ending day and the closeness of home. It was just on the other side of this secret entrance, so close that she sniffed the air in hopes of catching a whiff of dinner cooking. But the air was disappointingly scented only with the normal smells of the woods and not with thick yallo stew or baked handcakes.

Perhaps the luto had been a sign. Had it been bad or good? Bad would indicate that the strange behavior of her daughter would continue but good might mean the same. It was so hard to tell with the girl but her recent preoccupations were most disconcerting, especially as they kept affecting dinner.

The roots grew farther apart and the hunter was home. Her hillhouse stood in a cozy clearing ringed by trees. But not any trees. The five great trees of the Woods. The great arching heborough, the thin needled pinborough, the straight lined tethik, the graceful cedrin, and the white rinel. She had dug up the last as a young tree from the very heart of the woods and spent two days carrying to its current spot. This was a place of power. Maan-made but powerful nonetheless.

Around the hillhouse, in the shadows of the five great trees, the garden flourished. Hemmed in by a fence she’d made from deadfall, the plots of vinefruit and yellowmelon were ready for harvest even though it was only the cold wet season. The hunter had built that fence for her daughter, who had clapped chubby little hands together with glee at the time. Of all the things she’d done in her life, the hunter considered that fence her greatest accomplishment.

And it was broken.

The gate, always a little rickety and squeaky, had been pulled of its leather hinges, and half the front had been pushed down and trampled into the damp earth. The hunter moved silently across the intervening space, counting the tracks of several intruders criss-crossing each other. Some of them turned back through the heborough entrance, some went behind the hillhouse, but two sets passed over the remnants of the fence toward her home. She followed them in utter silence, slinging the bow from her back.

The pillars of the hillhouse, two live trees incorporated into the ever expanding covered porch and supporting the roof, blocked her view of the door but light poured out between them. She could hear the clatter of things being thrown about, a crash that might be the pot her daughter had made for her or the horn taleteller she had carved herself.

She didn’t let anger cloud her judgment. She slid around one of the pillars, low, and threw the door, already ajar, open.

A man and woman stood inside amongst the wreckage that had been the quiet life the hunter had built for herself out here, away from Maan, away from their thoughts and ideas, their cries and their needs, their fighting and their death. She had been promised peace. The five great trees had protected her and her daughter from the white rel and the black thing that often shadowed her in the woods, but they could not keep out intrusive Maan. She would have to do that herself.

The hunter lifted her bow and let the arrow fly into the woman’s throat. Her body toppled backward onto the cot in the corner with nothing but a soft gurgle. The man shrieked in horror. The next arrow would have gone through his eye but he flung up his hands and instead it burst through his palm and into his cheek. He continued his cries for only a moment before a final projectile found its way to his heart.

The hunter leapt over the pieces of her broken home and fell to her knees. She pushed the woman off her bed and threw up the covers to look under it. Her daughter wasn’t hiding there. It was too late for her to still be afield gathering. She must be here. These people must have followed her. Where could she be?

The large chest and the underground cool chest were opened but both contained no girl. The hunter even check up the chimney of the fireplace, the coals of which lay as embers, but her daughter had not shimmied up there either. The hillhouse was empty except for her and the bodies.

Footsteps on the front path. Someone was trying to be stealthy but they might as well have been playing skin-drums. When an eye appeared between the door and wall, it was not the color of her daughter’s. An instant later, an arrow sprouted from the gap, the eye was obliterated, and the air was full of screams.

Men and women poured into her home. Once, twice, three times, she launched arrows into chests and faces as they appeared but she was soon out of ammunition. She grabbed the cover from the bed and threw it into the sudden crowd, throwing them off balance as they pulled at the cloth and stumbled over fallen bodies. The hunter tossed the moss-stuffed mattress on them, leapt up onto the wooden frame of the bed, and launched herself over the struggling horde.

It was all so familiar. The racing of her heart, the rush in her ears, the cold sense of the World plunged into pure act instead of thought. The hunter tried to push it away, to stay aware of her surroundings, but it was all slipping away, her home, her daughter, her life. She was covered in blood, the smell filling her nose and her head and her chest and-

Just as she passed the threshold of her door, a hand lanced out and captured her boot. Moving too fast, she couldn’t catch herself. Her knees cracked on the floor of the porch and her bow skittered out of her hands. She kicked backward but more hands converged on her, dragging her back inside. Her hand went to her belt, to her skinning knife, but the intruders had not come unprepared. She felt something sharp and cold in her lower back and another in her shoulder. Someone grabbed the hair at the back of her head and tried to slam her face into the ground but she wouldn’t let them. She kicked and struggled and threw herself backward, her head catching someone under the chin.

“Mother!”

Moonslight had found its way through the canopy above. It lit a silir-yellow patch of earth at the center of the garden as though to show all the World the girl within. Her daughter stood frozen in the cold light. And then she wasn’t. The girl was suddenly different, wrong, frightening, and terrible…

The hunter cried out but it was too late. The girl threw back her strange head, hair flying all around it, and shrieked. The embers in the fireplace came to instant life, blazing, and the house was aflame, the bodies, the covers, the mattresses, the screaming intruders, the hunter’s clothes, her hair, her throat full of blood and smoke and fire-

The Middle

Enkindra woke with smoke still in her throat. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands, expecting to feel ashes on her skin, but there was nothing aside from the regular detritus of sleep. The moss mattress was unburned and she was wrapped in a cover that was not soaked in blood.

“Mother?” Next to Enkindra, her daughter yawned and resituated her pillow. She patted the girl’s shoulder and told her to go back to sleep.

She got out of bed, sure that sleep would not come to her again that night. Her heart did not race as it had in the dream, but her face was hot as though still on fire. She went to the water bowl on the table and splashed a few handfuls on her face. Then she spat mud onto the dirt floor.

Her hand was covered in dirt and now, so was her face.

Enkindra looked to the girl curled tightly in the now filthy bedclothes. She should have told her to wash off the dust but it always upset the girl so. As it had in the dream, this recent behavior still disconcerted her.

Morning was breaking somewhere far above the foliate ceiling of the woods. Another day had dawned and Enkindra went outside to meet it.