Chapter 8 The Place of the Skull #3
The rest of them approached one by one, tasting in kind. When it was done, they walked out into the night. Most of them bolted for the hills. The forest around this place was not deep, but it was enough to hide them for a few days.
After that it would not matter.
But the white cat—Silence—was crafty. She remembered much of the ways of the forest. She only hid herself in a tree and waited. From there she saw some of what came next.
iv
The first man arrived just after dawn. It wore a long, flowing white skin. When Silence recognized it as Doctor, the pack lord who burned-with-a-fang, she swished her tail happily. Her eyes glittered with anticipation.
Doctor paused before the gate, curious but not yet afraid. He reached out to touch the twisted metal, unable to credit what his eyes were seeing. The cat feared he might run then, but she needn’t have worried. Doctor had lived so long in his arrogance that he had forgotten what it was to know fear.
He entered the den. A short time later he screamed once in terror, then again in pain. He fell silent, then, but perhaps not in death. Not yet anyway, the cat thought, purring a happy little purr.
Blacktail walked out a short time later. His muzzle was bloody. He scented the air for a moment, then fixed his eyes on the cat. He padded over and stood beneath the tree.
“Why haven’t you run?” he asked.
“It is not every day that a little cat stands in the presence of the Forest God,” she answered. “I was very curious.”
“Such is the way of your kind.”
“Then please, Lord, tell me if you would. What is it you have done?”
Blacktail poked out his tongue and ran it across his muzzle, now red with blood. “Men bound you here in sacrifice, that they might learn the secrets of the blood curse,” he said. “I have granted them their wish. They will learn more of it than they ever wished to know.”
Behind him, Doctor staggered out through the crumpled doorway and dropped down on all fours. He was bleeding, Silence saw, he was wounded…but not dead.
Not yet.
“What have you done, Lord?” Silence said. “I do not understand.”
But it was too late. Blacktail had already turned away. As Silence watched, he walked slowly back into the forest. Before he had gone far the morning mist closed around him, and he was seen no more in that age.
v
When he dreamed of the night his mother died, Doctor dreamed of Snow.
You might think it a trifle callous for him to sleep while his mother lay dying in the next room.
Perhaps it was. But for this, at least, he might be forgiven.
Hospitals were full. The blood curse had taken his wife the previous day.
On the day before that, it was his son. The day before that, it was his daughter.
He was not dying himself, not yet, but he had been days without sleep.
He moved in a nightmarish haze of fever and loss that few outside things could penetrate.
There was one thing, though, that his mind returned to often.
On the night their last child died, he looked into his wife’s eyes.
He thought the look he saw there would be with him if he lived for a thousand years.
The fact of it was bad enough, but worse still was that the look was familiar, somehow, though he could not imagine where he might have seen such terrible loss before.
He worried on this for a time, but his memory never cleared, and the next day she was dead as well.
He decided then that the memory could not be important, and thought no more on it.
He had made no connection between the bite wound on his hand and the spreading plague.
Perhaps this was willful. Even so, the God of Reason would likely not have faulted him for it.
The blood curse he had cultivated in his research animals was a tame thing.
It killed very few. It had not grown fierce until it tasted the blood of the Forest God.
It had not become almighty until it mated with the disease the witch-cat of Mercy had cursed him with.
It had not become unstoppable until Doctor took his bleeding, infected hand and lay it upon his children, who carried it out into the world.
Now, in his grief, Doctor slept alone in the empty den of his mate and children, whom he had been unable to protect.
In his dream he was trapped in an endless blizzard that had sprung from nowhere.
He wandered alone and naked on a great plain.
The place of safety and warmth was far behind him, lost in the storm.
Somewhere his children screamed out in terror and pain.
He could not help them or even himself. He wandered aimless and lost, his feet freezing in the snow, then feeling nothing, then feeling a seductive warmth that was somehow the worst of all.
Near the dream’s end, he came to the edge of a forest. He stopped there, too afraid to enter.
After a little time three shapes appeared to him out of the trees.
The first was a little fox—a male, Doctor noticed with his practiced eye, young and wild.
Beside him walked another fox, this one older and female.
In the manner of dreams he knew them to be mother and son.
He opened his mouth to say something, What is this place? perhaps, or How can I find my way back? But then something else walked up between them, something like a wolf, but huge, impossibly huge. It loomed over them all; it was above the mountains, perhaps above the sky itself.
The wolf carried something in its jaws. Doctor did not want to see what it was, but he could not look away.
The wolf walked closer and he saw that it carried a person, closer again and he saw it was a woman, closer still and Doctor saw that it was his own mother, whom he loved above all others.
She was plagued and sickly now, just as he had last seen her.
As Doctor watched, the great wolf dropped his mother facedown between the two foxes, her arms flopping limp and raising a small puff of snow.
The wolf bared his teeth, dipped his head to the base of her neck.
He peeled all the flesh from her back in a single bloody sheet.
“For you, Snow, who was the mother of Slipper,” he said, laying it before her like a quilt.
“God remembers you. Sleep on this tonight, that it may protect you from the chill of the ground. This one dies in your name.” The wolf turned back to Doctor. “The rest die in Mine.”
Doctor tried to scream, but his throat would make no sound. One by one, the three of them turned and disappeared into the forest—first the god-wolf, then the old mother fox, and finally the son of Snow.
Doctor woke screaming and knew that his mother was dead in the next room.
Before the next night, so was he. Before the moon came full again, so were all that he knew, and all that they knew, and so unto the ends of the earth.
The age of man’s dominion over the birds of the air and the beasts of the field ended with his scream.
Of all the teeming multitudes of men plaguing the earth when Blacktail first set out on his journey, only a tiny few survived to see the following spring.
It is perhaps no coincidence that those included only those few who lived closely with beasts, who loved them well and were well-loved in turn.
Perhaps they drew some immunity from close contact with their charges, or perhaps the Forest God saw something in them worthy of mercy.
Even in those few, the blood curse burned away both reason and the poisoned words that supported it.
They fell back into the true language and rejoined the hunt, now armed only with their bodies and such spirit as they could muster in themselves.
The long winter was over.