Enchanted Forests (26 page)

still see the forest, the trees so close, if he could only reach them.

and he clutched his spirit-bag in one hand and prayed for the

chance.

The axeman, he learned, was named Tagh. Tagh made it clear

by heatings and gestures that he now belonged to him, his slave,

but Cat refused to submit to being owned. He made himself

force down the meat they gave him mis time, and again in the

morning when he was untied, to give him strength. He watched

and he waited with the patience of a stalking cat, and when he

thought their eyes weren't on him, he broke and ran for the

safety of the trees, knowing he could disappear if he could make

it into the forest, knowing they could never find him there. But

he'd underestimated his weakness, the pain in his broken ribs

slowed him down, and one of the loggers tackled him, brought

him to me ground. Then Tagh stormed up, furious, snatched up

a stick and beat him until it was broken, while Cat lay curled up

on the ground trying to protect his broken side from the hardest

blows.

From then on, his feet were tied, although the leather thongs

cut into this ankles, tripped him and made him clumsy at his

work. Tagh beat him well and kicked him up to his feet again to

make him keep working- Some of the others advised him to kill

this slave, that he was more trouble than he was worth, but the

axeman was stubborn. Cat understood this without knowing their

words.

But he was stubborn, too, and when he found a broken arrow-

head, he hid it in his belt, saved it till night to saw cautiously at

his bonds. He didn't dare try to bolt, not with the ribs that

stabbed him with pain at every step. Stealth it would have to be,

to crawl unseen and unheard from the loggers' camp, to steal

like a shadow into the trees, and away. Stealth like a cat's, and

he prayed again to his spirit-brother for a cat's silent feet.

But Cat hadn't known that the woodcutters were posting a

watch around their camp now at night, to guard against another

attack from the forest tribes. He was close, so painfully close to

the trees when the sentry spotted him, gave the alarm.

THE CLEARING             171

Tagh cursed when he saw the severed bonds, and then he spot-

ted the catskin sack around Cat's neck, tore it off, although Cat

screamed and fought for it, even with the loggers holding his

arms behind his back. Tagh spilled the teeth and claws on the

ground, then tossed the sack into the fire, and Cat felt the loss as

if it was his heart being ripped open, his protection gone, his

spirit-brother lost to him. It was a worse pain than the beating,

and the beating was hard, Tagh grimly smiling this time as he

brought the stick down on his slave's back, knowing that he'd

stripped away his spirit-power.

Not many days later, though, the woodcutters packed up their

camp and deserted it, leaving the fallen logs stacked on the bare,

dry, ash-covered ground. Cat stumbled under the weight of a

pack, his ankles still tied, in growing despair as each step took

him farther and farther from the forest, from the only world he

knew. The sun overhead glared down like a malevolent spirit of

heat, with a single burning eye. The distant horizon made him

reel with vertigo. So much empty land, all cleared of trees! Why

so much mindless destruction, with such effort?

But after a while he could see that there was a purpose to it,

that the cleared lands were full of tall, waving grasses and other

lush strands of vegetation, men and women at work in them, bent

over the crops. Dark-skinned men and women like the woodcut-

ters, who greeted them cheerfully, as if they were returning from

a long hunt, laden with game.

There was no glad welcome for Cat, only stares of misgiving,

though he was given food, at least, by the women of Tagh's

house. It was fear that made him run that night, fear of spending

his life in such a place. But he was caught again, and dragged

back, and Tagh beat him again, grimly, relentlessly, until the

blood ran down his back and legs.

When are you going to leam? Or do I have to kill you first?

Cat understood the question from the tone more than the

words. He shook his head weakly. They were both stubborn men.

He's too wild, like a forest animal! What use is he as a slave

if you have to beat him half-dead every time he runs? That was

Tagh's wife, arguing with him.

The priest will tame him for me.

The woman held her tongue, but her doubt was visible in her

eyes as she cleaned the blood from Cat's back and poulticed it

with a salve that stung like nettles.

The next day, Tagh took Cat to a house in the village that was

darker inside than the rest, and filled with the scents of smoke

172

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and burning herbs. Cat struggled when they bore him down to

the ground, thinking this meant more than just another beating,

that they were going to hamstring him or geld him like the oxen

he'd seen in the fields. Tagh had threatened as much. / won't run

again, he wanted to beg, knowing it was a lie, his fear speaking.

But when the priest bent over him, his fear took a new form

and the protest froze in his throat, because this man's eyes were

wide-dilated, even for the darkness of the house, and Cat could

see the spirits looking out of them—spirits like the ones that pos-

sessed the shaman of his own tribe in a holy trance, or when a

spirit-dream came over a man and he spoke with their voice.

Those eyes took hold of his own and held them, and Cat was

powerless to resist, alone as he was, with his brother-spirit torn

away from him and lost.

What followed was like an evil spirit-dream, because Cat was

held helpless by the priest's eyes and by his voice. He couldn't

move or speak or even cry aloud when the priest took a knife

from the fire where it had been heating and put the white-hot tip

of the blade against his leg, just above the welts the thongs had

made, and slowly drew a mark there, branding it into his flesh.

Cat could feel the pain sear him in all its burning intensity, he

could smell the singeing of his hair and flesh, but he couldn't

pull away or even scream. Then the priest took another knife

from the fire and branded him again on his other leg.

The incantation suddenly ceased, releasing him, and Cat cried

out in reaction. But Tagh looked satisfied, and he thanked the

priest and his apprentice in respectful tones. Then he pulled his

slave to his feet and sent him out to the fields.

The work was hard. Cat had never known anything like the in-

cessant grinding toil under the sun, hacking at the weeds in the

fields, bending all day until he thought his back would break and

his head burst from the heat. But gradually his muscles grew ac-

customed to the work, his fair skin stopped blistering and turned

a darker brown, and he learned to plait a hat from grass to pro-.

tect his head. He discovered that he wasn't the only slave in the

village, not even the only one who was branded. But they had all

submitted to their condition, or had been bom to slavery, and that

frightened Cat, that he would grow to be like them, dull-eyed

and resigned.

He ran again, of course. Not the first day, or the second. He

meant to get his strength back this time, to wait till his broken

ribs had healed- Tagh wasn't ungenerous with his food, and Cat

wasn't tied at night any more. In fact, it almost seemed as if

THE CLEARING             173

Tagh was watching him, waiting for him to make the attempt,

even eager.

Cat was wary, but he waited, he judged his time, and finally,

he ran. His escape would be easy, as he conceived it, for the

stream that ran past the margin of the village, fouled and

muddied by their animals, flowed from the north, out of the for-

est. All he had to do was follow it back. So he made his escape

on a moonlit night, following the streambed, but when dawn

came he saw with horror that he had run all night downstream,

in the wrong direction, and was now even further than ever from

where he wanted to be. Desperate, he tried to retrace his steps,

but he ran directly into the search party from Tagh's village, who

dragged him back.

"The sooner you leam you can't get away, the easier it'll be

on your hide," Tagh told him as he flogged his runaway slave

with a thick strap cut from the ox's harness. There was a distinct

tone of satisfaction in his voice. "You don't have your own

magic anymore, and the priest's is stronger."

"Pigheaded," his wife said, poulticing Cat's raw back, not too

gently either. He wasn't sure which one of them she meant, or

possibly both. "He'll run again, all right. He'll be thinking about

it as soon as the scabs heal. And you'll strap the skin off his

back again, and how much work will we get out of him then?"

"He may run, but he won't get anywhere," Tagh insisted. "His

feet will bring him back, no matter where he tries to go."

Could it be true? Cat rubbed the red brand marks above his

ankles, the symbol that the priest had burned into his flesh.

Memory of that ordeal made him shudder, and he reached in-

stinctively for his spirit-bag, but of course it was gone, and with

it his power to resist. He prayed, at night, for his spirit-brother

to return to him, to guide him from this place, but there was no

answer. The cat was a forest spirit, and there was no place for it

here.

He tried once again that fall to escape, at the harvest festival,

on the night when the priest called for blessings on the crops and

the whole village celebrated with beer they'd brewed from the

last season's grain. Tagh was soon reeling from the beer he'd

poured down his throat, and Cat took his chance. He ran all

night, guiding his steps by the moon and the stars in the sky

overhead, but in the morning he found he was still in sight of

Tagh's village, that he had run in circles all that time, like the ox

tethered to tread out the grain.

"He'll leam," Tagh said to his skeptical wife as she brought

174 Lois Tilton

out her jar of poultice and waited with impatient resignation to

use it. "He's not stupid, just stubborn." Then he paused a mo-

ment, as if to rest his arm. "Aren't you, Khagt?"

But Cat kept his face turned away and made no reply.

"Pigheaded," the wife muttered.

Then came winter, the first snows fell, and the rhythm of work

in the village fell off. Cat wore a shin of wool now, instead of

his deerhide kilt. That was the incessant toil of the house's

women, to spin the coats of the sheep and goats into yam and

weave it into cloth. They were Tagh's wives and daughters, Cat

thought at first, but later he learned that the younger woman with

the covered hair of a wife was in fact Tagh's widowed daughter,

returned to her father's house under some kind of disgrace. And,

to Cat's surprise, the smallest brown-skinned girl was also a

slave. But Margha, the wife, beat her no more or more often than

the rest.

With the approach of spring, though, half the village uprooted

itself, packed up its possessions, and hauled them north to the

land cleared out of the forest the summer before. The ashes were

already spread pver the earth, the logs stacked, seasoned and

ready for building.

Now Cat began to realize the true scale of a farmer's labor,

from the earliest light of dawn to dusk, clearing and planting the

land, constructing shelter for men and animals—unceasing, wea-

rying toil that left him at night almost too exhausted to eat. Why

did men wish to live this way when there was the forest, with

game to hunt and food to gather freely from the ground and the

trees?

There was no moment of the day now when he couldn't look

up from his work and see the forest, cool and dark-green, beyond

the boundaries of the new village. The air held the cool, familiar

scent of the trees. At night, when the ache in his overworked

muscles kept him from sleeping, he thought he could hear the

voice of the forest calling to him, the rustle of the breeze through

its leaves. He would close his eyes and try to dream, hoping for

a vision of a striped cat who would speak to him and lead him

away, but the dream never came. Their spirit-bond had been bro-

ken, and the fading brands on his tegs, the magic of the terrible

old priest, kept the cat from coming to him.

"He'll run again," Margha warned her husband, scowling at

Cat. "It was a bad idea to bring him here. See how he stares off

into the woods whenever he thinks no one is looking?"

THE CLEARING             175

"He may run, but he'll have to come back." Tagh said with

grim confidence, but he greased the harness leather strap with

pigfat, to keep it supple.

Cat did run, because the nearness of the forest was a constant

torment, a near-physical pain to see it every day, bent over a hoe

in a half-cleared field where the stumps sdll stood out in the