Beneath Ceaseless Skies #72 Read online

  Issue #72 • June 30, 2011

  “Sightwolf,” by Erin Hoffman

  “The Moral Education of a Mad Bastard,” by Joe. L. Murr

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  SIGHTWOLF

  by Erin Hoffman

  In Astralar, middling flint-walled city pressed against the chill bosom of the Windsmouth Mountains, a woman will be banished for failure to pay taxes. There are no honest cities, but I won’t bore you with my travail; the end of it is that on a cold spring morning when the tax man came and I had fallen short for two years running, the constables granted me what of my slim possessions I could carry and escorted me to the southern wall.

  To go straight ahead from the southern wall of Astralar is to enter the Windsmouth. This is also suicide. The western option is not much better: Wicklight is a dark forest of evergreens and the occasional oak, a place where strange things nest. But the days were still cold, winter clinging like a leech, and the forest at least offered shelter, so in I went to die.

  In this there was no uncertainty. The Astralarian merchant-princes console themselves with some illusion of justice, but in winter, the western road is death itself. The forest is the grey place, the place for those who deserve to die and lack the stomach to carry it out. I would not last until the spring.

  Despite my foolishness with regard to coin, I am not entirely stupid, and so before the tax season came ‘round I had packed a burlap sack with basic tools as could be useful in the wild. I did not indicate I was so prepared, of course; contrarywise I made much of my predicament. I wept and carried on, even though it was cruel to punish those constables with tears; I was angry at a city that had taken so much life from me and rarely given anything back: Astralar, and its goddess-fearing taxpaying citizens.

  Exile I might be, but the citizens of Astralar and I remained bound in our cowardice. Those grey-clad guards knew well as they turned me loose that a single sack of supplies against the dregs of winter in Wicklight Forest is merely a colorful variation on institutional murder.

  On my first afternoon in the forest I built a shelter out of pine boughs tipped together into a rude arched roof. I lined the floor with tender new grass pulled from between gnarled pine roots, and spread canvas over the top to keep out some of the damp. There was only greenwood to be found, and after wasting a third of my precious cotton tinder, I climbed into the shelter, wrapped my single blanket around my shoulders, and slept, hungry and without fire. It is the coldest I have ever been.

  * * *

  The following days improved, but barely. The forest hid a pocket of swamp whose dead trees hung heavy with branches that would burn if they weren’t rotten. A cold stream surrendered up cattail roots and under-ripe woolberries; their furry skins caught in my throat, but they were edible in small portions. I ate them, and thought often of death and my failure in finding a noble exit to however ignominious a life. Perhaps grey Wicklight was what I deserved.

  Towering red-fleshed trees between the swamp and the stream housed the darkest part of the forest. And the darkest part of the forest housed the woodmistress.

  Once every three years or so a child of Astralar would die from woodmistress poisoning. She came in three varieties, all of which grew together and looked identical: the first kind was nourishing, the second produced visions, and the third was deadly.

  Hunger clawed at me, first a ravenous thing that twisted my gut, but after the first day of sparse roots and berries settled into dull senses and a persistent ache. And yet the thought of death at the hands of the black witch reminded me that I was a coward.

  I went back to the stream, ate too many woolberries, and spent the night wracked with sour-belly. But I woke the next morning.

  * * *

  By the twelfth day I had amassed a tidy pile of provisions and was beginning to feel something that was not hope, but neither was it misery. Regularity, perhaps. A mildly less ignoble end. But the ache in my head and body would not be banished by roots and leaves alone. My soft city body demanded meat.

  I spent the afternoons building traps. The first fifteen were pitiful things. Half of them succeeded only in spending my meager larder on invisible woodland creatures, and the other half were never touched at all.

  It didn’t help that I had never seen a single other warm creature since arriving. There were distant birds, small ones; and once I startled something that might have been a chipmunk or a vole. In the mud by the stream I found the delicate slivered-moon prints of what must have been a large deer. Whatever owned those hooves was more a threat to me than I to it.

  But I built the traps anyway, and I tried to be encouraged when I found them torn apart the next day, looted.

  After several days of frustration I at last decided that I would see this creature I’d been feeding, one way or another. I went to the wild rose meadow where my traps had been most disrupted and set up five snares.

  At the meadow’s center was a strange, massive tree, the only one of its type I’d seen in the entire forest. It had spade-shaped leaves as big as my spread hand, a tender green of endless spring, and teardrop flowers of woodpecker-crest red. In the way of things in Wicklight, it was dangerous; it was covered in thorns that itched awfully if they broke skin, but they were spaced far enough apart that a careful climber could avoid them.

  I planted myself in that tree, climbing high enough to see the entire meadow clearly, and settled in the intersection of three huge branches. And I waited.

  The sun climbed across the sky, arcing high over the silent meadow. Birds came and went, and once, to my astonishment, one of the deer came to graze. She was alone, but where there was a doe there must have been more, and also a buck. And she was massive, bigger than any deer I had so much as heard of, taller than me by a head if we had been on even footing. Her pelt was a soft dove grey, marked with black at her points, and her head was broad, her eyes large and soulful. The buck that would pair such a creature must have been terrifying. I watched, rapt and fearful, as she nibbled at the roses, delicately pulled up grass, and mercifully left my traps untouched.

  After that brief excitement, the afternoon stretched long. Hunger scratched its familiar talons at my belly, rattling it, and I carefully pulled some fennel root from a pocket and ate it. Thoughts of my life in the city crept in, but I shoved them away. The quiet peace of the meadow pressed at reflection, but no memory of a loveless past would fill my aching ribs.

  A lassitude settled over me at last as I sat cradled in the branches, warmed by rare sun—

  Then the shadows were long, the sun drifted down below the treeline.

  I thrashed with surprise, panicking. And I fell out of the tree.

  Bony limbs bruised the whole way down, but my only thought was for the quarry. Rocks and barbed seedpods scratched my hands and knees as I pushed myself upright and staggered across the meadow.

  Four of the traps were untouched, and gradually my blood began to settle. The panic had burned through energy I didn’t have, and a wave of blackness danced across my vision. Thus it took several second glances to realize that my fifth trap was nowhere to be found.

  The trap—my best, I had thought while building it—was gone, but there was a trail. Whatever had made its narrow escape was hindered; it had flailed through the grass, leaving a broken path that no hale creature would have tolerated.

  Clear sight or thought had faded long ago. There was only the present instant, the musk of earth-loam against the back of my throat, the sharp, bright scent of evergreen needles. With the dulling of consciousness came a singular purpose: I had become hunger itself. And so with an animal’s greed,
and also its unthinking grace, I rushed down the trace, following it as a hound’s nose follows its target. It twisted, dodged, wove, and I followed it, blade by bent green blade.

  And then—sound.

  Just ahead, I could see the twitch of the winter-dead grasses. It was a rabbit, a skinny one. My snare was wrapped around its midsection, still holding tight, twine bits vibrating like festival ribbons on a girl-child when it moved.

  I would like to say that I paused then, that some percolation of human self returned to consider the small creature, its bird-bright eyes and coat of grey-flocked dun, to reflect on the similarities of its predicament to my own—but that would be a lie.

  One hand crept around the bone-handled hunting knife belted to my side—the only truly valuable thing I still possessed—and I leapt, moving even as I slipped off the knife’s scabbard-catch and pulled it free. The rabbit looked up at me with one wide black eye, and then I cut its throat.

  It died quickly, and I lay beside it on my back, knife cast aside, vision fading in and out. We were sorry things unpitied by the world; a stupid young rabbit not grown canny enough to flee a lumbering human, and a castoff of a cold society, worth less than a noose and pine box.

  At length that peculiarly persistent will to live sent energy creeping back through my tired body, and I sat up, realizing that I now had the first meat I’d seen in weeks. Sorry meat it might be, but meat nonetheless.

  The knife lay on the grass, and I cleaned it before sheathing it, then picked up the rabbit by its stubby ears. As I set off home, my feet quickened of their own accord, recklessly spending the energy of dwindling muscles, imagining the thin meat roasting over my swamp-wood fire.

  Some instinct the young rabbit had lacked stopped me well outside the clearing. Was it a strange smell?

  My stomach growled, protesting the delay, and when no doom descended to answer it I crept through the brush and into the camp, one hand clenched tight around the rabbit, the other on the hilt of the hunting knife.

  Something, or several somethings, had been here. The rabbit fell from my hand with a soft thump. The larder was overturned, its stones scattered, all contents gone. My sleeping place was torn apart, the canvas rent and muddied. The small stack of dried wood had not been spared—most of it was gone, and what remained had been ripped to small shards.

  There were no tracks, no indication of what had come and done this. I searched for any such sign until vision failed—not from fatigue, this time, but the swiftly advancing night. I realized too late that I should instead have been looking for my scattered supplies, on the off chance that the tinderbox remained.

  In a stunned stupor I dragged what was left of my canvas and blanket up and into the branches of a spreading oak, the only tree I could climb nearby. I pressed my forehead to its rough trunk, managing two last thoughts before surrendering to the dark: could the marauders climb, and if they could, would it be mercy?

  * * *

  No mercy of any kind was forthcoming. Dawn woke me stiff, cold, and wet with dew. The rabbit, so painfully won, was now beyond salvaging, and I took time I did not have to bury it with apologies and dirt.

  I had no energy left for more traps. My mind had retreated to some far place, awaiting annihilation, and my body marched to the swamp for more firewood. By sheerest chance I kicked the tinderbox, hidden in supple spring grass, and picked it up with numb fingers.

  When I had gathered a scant armful of dry wood I heard the woodmistress’s call and stumbled into that dark grove to kneel before the black patch. And try as I might, I could not get up again.

  I sat in front of it as the sun crept across the sky that day. In the delirium of oncoming starvation the woodmistress became an obsession. It would become my last religion: staring into the dark fungi, memorizing every crevice and bulbous white-speckled protrusion. Seeking answers.

  When the shadows advanced and my eyes strained I built a fire from the swamp wood and continued my commune. The flickering red light casting long shadows on the black-barked trees made me think of burning the entire forest down. It was a pleasant, if impossible, fantasy—the towers of needles going up like armies of mad fireflies, the pugnacious Astralarians who would come to watch the spectacle and ponder how it might affect the day’s market. I would burn it all, an effigy to a life found beneath measure.

  But that is not what I did. Wicklight’s moldering damp drove me to a far greater madness.

  Rage and delirium had melted the candle of my mind, hollowed my body, and so I would fill it with the woodmistress. I would eat the entire patch, and its one-in-three arithmetic would seal even such a despondency as mine.

  The first bite was the hardest, and also the most exquisite. Bitterness bathed my tongue, followed by a wild surge of energy that lit the fire I so desired from heels to throat, from chin to elbow, from fingertips to eyes. I had six arms, like the snake-goddess of far Arith Rea, and all six carried more bulbous mistresses to the burning gullet beneath my eyes.

  When the patch was gone, not even the little proto-spores left, there ceased to be a tomorrow, or a yesterday, or an I. There was only now, only we.

  We rose, and the world rolled, undulating like the back of a courtesan beneath our feet. We swayed, and the forest rang like temple bells, jangling tolls that echoed through all existence. We breathed, and were beyond life and its trivialities.

  We were at the threshold, about to let go, to become air and bell-song, when she called us back.

  She had a very good reason, this maiden with wild brown hair like rabbit’s-fur. The blinding white of her gown, which bared her shoulders but enshrouded her feet, made us look away, and we lost our grip on forever-now. The red, rabbit’s-blood red, that bloomed flowerlike at her abdomen made us look again, to loose our grip on transcendence. Come back, she said. Come back.

  We would not have gone, we had urgent business to attend to off the coil of creation, but she had a deer with her, dead, a fat doe only half eaten. She sang to us of its deliciousness, how succulent its haunches and how swiftly it could be eaten. How it would fill the emptiness that she knew still lived within us.

  And so we carried our fire between cupped hands, we stepped, and we were with her. We gave the fire to her dead deer, and we made it a part of us. We fell upon our fire, and lay our heads in the folds of her white, white gown, and we left.

  * * *

  Quite to my surprise, I woke again in the cold forest.

  Birdsong reached my ears unusually loud and clear; the sun that crept through the pine boughs was brighter than I had ever known. A lightness filled my mind, an awakeness, glorious beyond consideration of my moldering joints.

  Most of the scents were familiar—earth, pine, rock, dew—but another was not. It took me several euphoric moments to recognize it.

  Death.

  It was not the smell of distant death, decomposition, but the closer, more unsettling smell of death’s advancing shadow, of injury past the point of no return.

  She watched me silently, large golden eyes unblinking as she lay near the deer she had felled, so quiet that at first I thought her a lingering phantom of the woodmistress-sight. But her stillness was not a willing one; her folded legs could not completely conceal the deep wound in her abdomen, a scent of the wrong kind of blood, of dying.

  At the sight of the deer, and the remnants of the fire beside it, the cleaned bones and half-eaten haunch that sat in the ashes, I realized the source of my euphoria. My stomach no longer clamored, turned in on itself. “Thank you,” I started to say, the first I’d spoken in weeks—and then the puppies arrived.

  I suppose properly they were wolf cubs, but with their large, ungainly paws and lolling tongues, pricked ears and delicate whiskers, I could only think of them as puppies, not unlike the ones my neighbor had raised, guard dogs for Astralar’s merchant princes. Before he began the slow process of turning them hard and vicious.

  There were four, and three of them were colored like their mother, little copies of
her rabbit-brown with white-tipped paws and tails. The fourth was charcoal and black, wavering from ash to midnight depending on where the light caught him.

  “They’re beautiful,” I told her, and her ears swiveled toward me, large and thoughtful. She regarded me again in silence, just long enough for me to wonder whether she was an ordinary animal, and if I had stumbled out of the woodmistress haze only to be eaten by wolves—and then she came into my mind.

  She did not use words, though I remembered her speaking clearly in the delirious vision. Instead she filled my mind with action, with knowledge. She showed me how to hunt, in her way—it was mostly theory, being as I lacked fast paws, a powerful jaw, sharp eyes. But she also showed me how to look for plants that could be dug up for yellow roots that were as good as meat, which berries and leaves to avoid, and which trees, when young and tender, could be eaten if their bark was stripped away.

  Then she asked of me what any young mother, standing at her own life’s southern wall, would ask: please take care of my children.

  And then she lay down her head and died.

  * * *

  I gave the mother wolf a better burial than I had given the rabbit, in a meadow near where I’d found her, though it was considerably harder, not just because of her size. I thought of how she had led me through the woodmistress haze, how her pups gamboled around her, pulling at her tail, trying to wake her, and tears streamed down my face, turning to mud when I scrubbed a dirt-dusted forearm over my eyes. I stopped to rest often, having not much strength, and the burying took most of the day. Then I went into the forest to hunt down the roots and plants she had taught me, and the puppies followed like ducklings.

  In my life I had birthed and raised five children, and one by one watched them leave Astralar for fairer cities to the north as any wise youths would do. Puppies are significantly easier to mind than babies, especially out in the wild. If they have grass to pull up and a reasonably fresh carcass to destroy, they will quite occupy themselves for hours on end and not stray far from where you sleep. When we came back to the clearing I rebuilt the fire and fed them roasted venison and vegetables, which, rather to my surprise, they seemed to enjoy equally.