Chapter Twenty-Two
I stood in the shadow of the trees. The dappled light shifted through the leaves, creating ripples on the undergrowth. At another time, I would have marveled at such beauty, but I was struggling to focus on anything other than the churning fear that flooded through me.
“Surely she cannot pay me to be here?” I said.
This was my first day in the forest with Hirtus, and Phile had waved me on my way.
We had never spoken of Morsimus and the night two days ago when he had come to her home and spat at all she did for us.
It was only mentioned the following morning, when Phile offered me leave to go home and rest. When I refused, she then suggested we keep our payment arrangements the same unless I wished a change, which I did not. What I had asked for was this.
Instead of cleaning goatskins, I was spending a chilly autumn morning roaming the forest to the south of the river, training to hunt.
“She will not pay you if I tell her you stood around all day and whined,” Hirtus said. Brief and to the point, as always. “Come, you need to be strong. You need to be fast. Right now, you are neither.”
Said in such a way, it was hard to know why he had brought me with him. I did not question him again, however, for fear he would be true to his word and I would receive no pay at all. I dreaded to think how Morsimus would respond to that.
Since the day he had been humiliated at Phile’s door, Morsimus had not raised his fist to me, but I had seen the anger simmering away beneath the surface.
And I feared it. One day, Phile’s threats would not be enough to protect me.
That was why I had pushed for Hirtus to teach me. I needed to be able to protect myself.
Still, my mood was dampened. Hirtus carried no bow or arrows that I could see. How I was to learn to hunt without them left me baffled, though I dared not ask.
“From now on, when you work at the tannery, you carry the wet skins only. From the pits to the benches. From the pits to the racks. If there is a wet skin, you are the one who will carry it,” he said.
I swallowed back my displeasure. Carrying the skins was the most physical part of our day.
A soaked and reeking skin weighed nearly twice as much as a dry one, and by the end of a day working a pit, my arms would already ache.
If that was all I was doing, I would struggle to work a full day.
Yet I stayed silent. I wanted to hunt, to feel the taut tension of a bowstring between my fingers again.
If this was what it took, then I would do it.
“Fine. I will carry the wet skins.”
“And you must run. Arrive at the compound at dawn and run around it until the last woman appears.”
This I was even less thrilled about. I could not recall the last time I had run any distance. I was not even sure I could anymore.
“I will run,” I said instead. “And I can run with Aina to the horses. The child is fast. Faster than I will ever be.”
“Speed is good, but you need stamina too. If the girl stops, you keep running.”
I could not imagine what Iphinone would think if I abandoned her daughter for the sake of my training, but I remained silent and awaited the next instruction.
“First, we learn the land,” he said. “Tracks and droppings are guides that the animals and birds give us. When we know those, then we can train to shoot.”
There it was. The flicker of hope to maintain me through this.
It was the stillness I found hardest. Hirtus had been born with the skill to make his breath as silent as the night air. He could stand there, no more than an arm’s length away from me, and I would not so much as see a hair on his head move. I was not gifted with such patience.
“Choose where you place your feet. Do not hammer them down without consideration.”
His words came after I had trod clumsily on a broken branch, which snapped under my weight, causing me to stumble and sending a flurry of birds into the sky.
“How do I watch my feet and watch for animals at the same time?” I asked.
“Practice.”
Practice was all we did that morning and longer still.
When I knew the women would have been at the river washing away the heat and grime of the day, we walked more.
Sweat trickled into my eyes, blurring my vision, while my robe snagged on so many branches and roots I could barely believe it still clung to my body.
Still, we continued. I was focusing on watching my footsteps while wiping the sweat from my eyes when Hirtus lifted a hand to stop me.
“They are up ahead.”
His voice was as quiet as the rustle of leaves, and I attempted to match his volume.
“What are?”
“The deer we have been tracking.”
I felt like a fool. I had been following Hirtus blindly, watching his motions as he pressed a hand to a scratch on a tree trunk or into a heart-shaped hoofprint in the earth, but I had not realized we were tracking a herd.
It was a wonder he did not abandon me as his student in that moment.
As he did not, I held my breath and peered through the gaps in the leaves.
I had often seen wild deer before, darting across tracks, occasionally eating the rough grasses from the roadside, but never had I watched them as intently as I did that day.
Never before had I seen how amber the orbs of their eyes were or how constantly their noses twitched.
These were the creatures of Artemis. Her chosen animal.
As I watched them, a calm that I could not recall feeling since my childhood washed over me. With it came a sense of purpose, as if, for the first time, I was exactly where the gods intended me to be.