Enchanted Forests (27 page)

earth, under the relentless sun that made the weeds grow more

quickly than the crops. And tile old hope grew again, that he

knew the forest and the farmers didn't, that once he made me

shelter of the trees, they wouldn't ever be able to find him. And

even, possibly, that once he was in the forest its spirits would be

stronger than the priest's brands, or that he could find a shaman

to help him break them.

He had to try.

He was strong now, with work and adequate food. His ribs had

long since healed, and his back, from Tagh's last beating in the

fall. And if there was any pursuit as he fled into the trees, he

quickly left it behind. His heart rose, there beneath the familiar

trees, inhaling their scents, feeling the coo) damp breeze against

his sweaty skin. He tore off me sweaty wool shirt and cast it

aside.

But the forest was not quite as he remembered. The familiar

trails were overgrown, and in some places faded away altogether.

He came after a day of wandering to the bank of the swift-

running creek where his tribe had been camped, but the site was

deserted now, deserted. With difficulty, he found the remains of

a campfire and sifted through its cold, damp ashes. Nothing re-

mained.

He reminded himself that the tribe moved more often than the

farmers' village, at least two or three times a season. All he had

to do was follow the trails and he'd find them eventually, or pos-

sibly some other tribe who might welcome a hunter, because it

was possible that his worst dread had come to pass, and his tribe

no longer existed, wiped out in the raid on the logging camp.

But the trails had been too long abandoned, and the over-

, growth had come up in the months since he'd been gone. He

could spot no sign of any hunters, no fresh tracks on the ground

or the remains of recent campfires. But the longer he walked, the

more often the paths through the trees faded away, or led him to

me edge of a swamp where no swamp had been before, or dou-

bled back on themselves to bring him back to the same land-

marks, only from a different direction.

He'd been too long away, that was all, he tried to tell himself

176 Loia Tilton

at first. Soon he'd find the right trails, and everything would be

all right. And he searched, desperately, for any sign of a striped

cat, its tracks or scat or clawmarks on the trunk of a tree. If only

his spirit-brother would come to him.

But the forest was empty, as if all its spirits had fled, and fi-

nally Cat had to admit the truth to himself, that the priest's

power was more potent even here, mat the brands on his ankles

fettered him as securely as chains, and that the trails would con-

tinue to bend and twist and turn back on themselves until they

led him back to Tagh's village, no matter how long or how far

he tried to run.

There was another choice, which he considered now, instead

of going back—to find a sharp flake of flint and cut his own

throat like an animal's, to bleed out his life, in the forest where

he belonged. But the thought of rotting here unburied, with no

rites to free his soul, and the crows pecking out his eyes and the

wolves cracking his bones, was too much. The farmers burned

their dead to release their spirits, or so they claimed, and it was

better than no rite at all.

So at last, weary and beyond despair, he followed the trail, let

it take him back to the clearing with the naked sun overhead, and

the crops and the weeds, and Tagh with the greased harness

leather—back to all the bitterness of slavery,

Tagh was an ambitious man.

In the new village he was a chief, and his new house, when it

was built, was one of the largest, to hold all his sons and daugh-

ters and livestock and slaves. His sons were just now beginning

to come into the size of men, to do a man's work, and Tagh

planned, as they grew, to clear even more land from the forest

and expand his farm.

Much of the work still fell on Cat's scarred shoulders, except

for one thing. Tagh thrust the ax at him one day and ordered him

to start to work clearing the trees at the east border of the farm,

but Cat refused to take it from him.

"A taste of leather on your back will change your mind," Tagh

warned, but Cat met his eyes.

"Hog me or not, I won't."

They stared at each other. "We'll see about that."

But in the end it was Tagh who took the ax and called to his

oldest son that it was time for him to learn to clear the land,

since it was going to be his land, when he was a man. Since that

time, he had let the leather grow hard and cracked.

THE CLEANING             177

Tagh's youngest daughter was ready to be married, which

would bring in a bride-price but deprive the household of her la-

bor at the loom. But there was the little slave girl, Eria, to take

her place, although she was very recently no longer a child. Cat

wasn't the only one who had noted the fact. Margha began to

keep a closer eye on the girl, and on her sons. "I don't want mat

kind of thing going on in the house. First one of them is at her,

and then the rest, like a pack of dogs fighting over a bitch."

"She's ready to breed," Tagh observed.

"Best give her to Khagt, then. He can keep the rest of them off

her."

"Hm," Tagh grunted noncommittally, for he'd been looking at

the girl himself.

Cat heard the exchange, for there were few secrets in me

crowded household, and he supposed that Eria had, too. She'd

been looking at him lately with dark, shy, but interested eyes.

Cat lay on his pallet at night and thought of how it would be to

have her next to him there, to have a woman. It was hard to be

alone and have to listen to the vigorous grunts of Tagh mounting

his wife, though she was old for child-bearing.

After the wedding there was only one more woman in the

house, the widowed daughter, Kharra. Cat knew more of her

story now, how the dead husband's family had demanded the

bride-price back, which stubborn Tagh refused to pay- The ill-

will had been one reason behind his move to the new village.

But it was no simple task to hack new farms out of the wilder-

ness, even with every man and woman working themselves to

exhaustion, sunrise to dark. And there was bad fortune. Even the

young priest with all his sacrifices could not avert a murrain

among the sheep. The feast of thanksgiving at harvest-time was

sober that year, as the villagers laid up their stocks and grimly

considered the winter to come- Tagh reluctantly decided to waste

no grain in brewing ale.

Cat had never known so hungry a winter. The little girl Eria

sometimes wept in her bed at night with the pangs of an empty

belly, for Tagh's pack of growing sons left little in the kettle for

the women and slaves. Time and again Cat would pause in his

tasks to look across the snow-covered, stubbled fields to the

darkness of the forest, where deer browsed beneath the trees, and

wild boars rooted, and a hunter could follow the tracks of a hare

through me snow.

There came a day when Tagh stood staring long and hard at

his breeding sow, then went into the house to take out his whet-

178 Lois lllton

stone. Cat waited for him to come out again. "I could bring back

meat," he said.

Tagh looked hard at him, then at the forest.

"Deer," Cat said. "Venison and hare and other game."

Tagh thought for a moment "What would you need?"

"You'll never see him again," Margha warned.

"Oh, he'll be back. With meat. He came back today, didn't

you, KhagtT

Cat said nothing in reply, not looking up from his place at the

hearth where he worked on his bow, planing the yew-wood down

to its heart with Tagh's sharp bronze knife. It had taken him all

day to find the right wood, and for a long moment he had stood

alone in the silent woods, staring into the trees, the trails that led

ever deeper into the forest. But then he had turned his back and

returned to the barren fields and the close, smoky atmosphere of

Tagh's house.

The finished bow would be a crude thing by the standards of

his tribe, but he was a skilled wood-worker, and the bronze knife

made the work go so much more quickly.

"Maybe I should send one of the boys with him, though,"

Tagh said thoughtfully.

Now Cat looked up from his work. "No. They don't know

how to walk in the woods- Their noise would scare away the

game."

"Mmgh," Tagh grunted.

But it was alone Cat went, back into the forest, a hunter again,

if still a branded slave.

The woods had receded away from the village by this time,

and the familiar trails had disappeared, but once away from the

margin of the trees, the unmarked snow made the tracking easy.

Cat stalked the deer slowly, silently, content to pause and simply

breathe the fresh, chill forest air. He found a small herd shel-

tering in the windbreak of a grove of firs, and his first arrow

found a yearling buck- It wasn't a clean kill, for he had DO points

to his arrows, but he followed the blood-trail and brought his

prey down.

By then it was near-dark, and he built up a fire in the shelter

of a cleft in the rocks. Gutting the buck with Tagh's bronze

knife, he cut out the liver and roasted it over the flames, letting

the rich, fat juices run down his chin as he gorged himself on the

half-raw meat.

During the night, while he lay wrapped in the deerhide, he

THE CLEARING

179

could hear the growls and snarling of scavengers as they tore at

the offal he had cast aside. He held quiet, waiting to hear the dis-

tinctive cry of a forest cat, but after some time, he fell asleep.

When dawn came, he cut poles and branches and wove them

into a crude sledge, onto which he loaded the carcass of the deer.

He paused then, looking out into the snow-covered, trackless

wilderness for a long time. But then he turned and followed his

tracks back toward the village.

Tagh's household ate well for the rest of the winter, with

plenty of venison, even for the slaves. But Tagh kept the

deerhides and tanned them as he had learned in his tribe, to make

boots and a coat for himself instead of the wool the villagers

wore.

Then the snow melted, the earth warmed, and the village be-

gan to prepare for the sowing. This was always a solemn rite, af-

ter the last, thin, hungry days of winter, while everyone waited

for the thaw and the first shoots of green and the moon to turn

his favorable face onto the land. On that sacred night, the priest

stripped naked and went out to the waiting fields to couple with

the new-plowed earth- He was possessed by the moon's spirit

tiffin, which spread among the whole village. Men hardened and

women softened, and they joined together in the act, rutting

openly in the same fields where they would sow their crops.

Cat found himself possessed by the spirit along with the rest,

and his body ached with the pressure of his unsown seed. He

thought he saw Eria the little slave girl, who hadn't yet been a

woman at the last sowing. But it wasn't Erta who stood at the

edge of the fields, alone and away from the rest, although she

was almost as small and as slender. He snatched his hands away

as he realized his mistake, that this was Kharra, Tagh's daughter.

"Sorry, I ... thought you were .. -"

"Someone else."

But he paused to look at her. "Why aren't you ... ?"

"In the fields with the rest?" She shook her head. "They're

afraid."

Seeing his reaction, "But you don't know? When I was wed,

the omens were very bad- They wanted the bride-price back—his

people did—but my father wouldn't. And he—my husband—still

wanted me." She paused. "Three days after the wedding, he died,

m our bed. They say that I'm cursed, or a witch. So, you see, no

other man would dare take me."

The spirit of the night was very strong in Cat, and she was

beautiful in the moonlight, and the scent of the spirit was on her.

180 Lois Tilton

He couldn't fear her, or anything that would happen. Not quite

believing what he was doing, he uttered the words: "I would ...

dare. If you would."

Without more words, they fell together, onto the waiting earth.

The spirit moved in them both—him to discharge his seed, her to

accept it.

Then each of them began to consider me consequences of

what they'd done. Cat wondered nervously, "Do you care? That

I'm a slave? Your father ..."

She stroked his hair, murmured, "A slave and a forest savage.

With straw-colored hair. 1 remember when he first brought you

home—how wild you were." Then she looked hard at him.

"What about you? Aren't you afraid I might be a witch?"

"Did you hate your husband so much that you'd kill him in

his sleep, then?*'

"No," she said sadly, "He was a good man, I wanted to be his

wife. Those three nights—I dream about them, still." She paused,