Chapter 9 The Far Hill #3
The binding spell fell away then. She lay before her mother, dazed and panting.
One by one her sisters emerged from the blackness where they had watched, studying their mother at her craft.
They came to her, sniffed her in fascination and revulsion and horror, wondering what had been taken from her…
and what their mother had gained in return.
But Old Kitty Mother only lay still, pushing the breath in and out of her chest as she wandered among her field of violets.
She never learned what it was that her mother had bought with her soul. She did not die that night, though there were times when she wished she had. She awoke the next morning alone in the woods. Mother and her sisters had moved on.
She always assumed that they had left her for dead—that seemed in keeping with the contempt they had shown her all her life.
The Old Kitty Mother saw much, even then, but it never occurred to her that perhaps their contempt had shifted somewhere along the way.
On the night they offered her to hell it was mostly a false thing, used to mask the fear they felt rising in them when they looked on her.
She never remembered how they stood over her in a circle, attacking her in unison, Mother even using the power she had bought with the stolen soul, never remembered that they had been unable to touch her, that she had been beyond them all, even then.
iv
She awoke before dawn to find the dog king standing over her, with his guards all around.
“Got your appetite back, did you?” she asked him with a yawn.
“No,” he said, his voice strange and ghostly. “Not appetite.”
“No? What, then?”
“I have a message for you.”
“Ah,” she said. “A message. I am eager to hear it, though perhaps not just this moment. Open your mouth, would you? I will be in your belly, freshening up. You may whisper the message to me when I emerge from the other end.”
“I will not eat you,” the king said. “Nothing could make me do that.”
The Old Kitty Mother looked inside him. She saw to her dismay that what he said was true.
To bind another to your will, there must be some small part of him that wishes to do as you bid of his own accord.
In most minds there are many conflicting desires, and this is easily accomplished.
But the Old Kitty Mother saw that Chester’s image of her had changed in the night from a perfectly serviceable terror into something like religious awe, interesting but useless.
“Very well,” she said. “If not you, then another. I’ll be on my—”
“The God of the Hunt came to me as I slept,” the king said quietly. “He spoke your name, Night Dancer. Will you not hear what he has to say?”
At the sound of her name—which she had never spoken to anyone still living—the Old Kitty Mother’s curse woke yet again. “Very well,” she said, sighing. “Very well.”
The old dog was quiet for a long time before he spoke. The pack around him was silent and respectful, despite his age. His deeds must be fierce beyond telling, to command such respect in the young, she thought. The touch of God is on him indeed.
“I saw Him in his fury once,” Chester said at length. “I have never spoken of it.”
“If you had seen him in his full fury, you would not have lived,” the Old Kitty Mother answered.
“No. Probably not. But even the little I saw was enough,” he said. “It is easy to be a coward when you know no other way. But for those who knew Him when He walked among us…there are burdens.”
“Indeed.” She was a little interested in spite of herself.
“Blacktail was my friend, you know. I can’t imagine why, but he really was.
He was the best friend I ever had. I miss him sometimes.
” He paused. “Most times, actually.” Seeing how she looked at him, the king added quickly, “Oh, I know how presumptuous that sounds. I understand what he really was—well, not entirely, but I know more than most. Even before the plague came, I knew he would deliver us somehow. I knew he was more than a wolf.”
“Oh, but he wasn’t,” the Old Kitty Mother said.
“What do you mean?”
“It didn’t have to be him, you know,” the Old Kitty Mother said. “In the beginning he was nothing more than a wolf. Truly, nothing more. All that happened after and before flowed from him and him alone. It might have been any of us. It might very easily have been no one at all.”
“What? I thought you had made a spell, or—”
“Ha!” she said. “What, me? No. Were I capable of such a magic, why did I not do it long ago? No. I did nothing more than point Blacktail on his way. In truth, even that was not so much a spell as guesswork.”
“How, then?”
She swished her tail, then spoke the central lesson of her life for the thousandth time.
“The secret,” she said, “is that there is no secret. The Forest God—or courage, if you prefer—sleeps in all places, all hearts. Some, I grant you, more so than others, but each of us must find Him all on our own. In truth, I think anyone might have done what he did. When I was young, I was certain that the tiger Nobununga would…Well, I was wrong. There were others after that. A shark that showed promise. Even a rat, once.”
“A rat? Really?”
“Oh yes. What is the might of a tiger against gunshots? When Nobununga failed, I realized that I needed to look elsewhere. To search not for teeth or claws, but rather heart.”
“I see,” Chester said, though he did not.
“All that was very long ago. Longer than you would believe. As the ages stretched out and men killed the hunt in the world, it seemed to me that they also killed it in the souls of beasts. I had almost—No, not almost. I had given up hope. Then came Blacktail, and we were delivered.” She paused.
“He was a wolf, Chester. A half-breed wolf. He was fathered by a mongrel dog he never met, a mongrel dog that may not even exist anymore, may never have existed. He was nothing more than that, which meant that it was possible for Him to become everything.”
“I do not—” the king began.
“Of course you don’t. I don’t entirely understand it myself.
But he never knew the name of his father.
Don’t you see? Because he never knew it—because no one ever knew it—his thoughts and expectations and possibilities were never bound by that knowledge.
From such a beginning all things are possible.
And to find such rare possibility, together with such a hunter’s heart…
well. I might have waited a thousand lifetimes and never seen it.
It was phenomenally unlikely, to say the least. No. More than that. It was—”
“An act of god?”
She blinked. “You know, Chester, you are not half the fool I took you for.”
Someone in the pack growled at that. Neither of them paid it any attention.
“Tell me, Chester,” the Old Kitty Mother said, “what was the proudest moment of your life?”
He called me “hunter,” the king remembered, but did not say. “It was when I was with him. When I was of his pack.”
“Yes. I thought as much.”
He only looked at her, waiting.
She sighed. “I apologize, Chester. Truly. I mean you no disrespect. I am old, and most of this life has been spent in the study of crafts that would be of little use in your hunt. Any hunt, really.” She paused, thinking of how best to phrase herself.
“What I mean to say is that it is not wrong of you to miss your friend. The fierce times and the gentle ones draw strength from one another. That is his design. I don’t think he would mind that you think of him, that you miss him. I don’t think he would mind at all.”
“You misunderstand,” the king said. “I don’t miss him. Not anymore.”
“Oh?” said the Old Kitty Mother.
“He came to me in the night.”
She regarded him a long time, taking his deepest measure. When she spoke again, all the mockery had left her voice. “Call back your guards. I will listen to what you have to say. I will listen most attentively.”
The king bared a tooth. The dogs surrounding her drew back.
“In my dream the Forest God stood in his rage before a great gate—”
“Gate?” the Old Kitty Mother asked. “Was this a thing of the two-legs?”
“No. Not them. This was not a place made by men.”
“Was there an eye in the gate?” she asked, thinking of her own time at the gates of hell. “Was it dark there, and slow? Did…were there voices? Screams?”
“No. It was bright enough. There was no eye.”
“Very well,” she said. Not hell, then. Perhaps the fortress of the two-legs’ god? Heaven? “Continue. I will interrupt no more.”
“All the armies of heaven stood arrayed against him,” Chester said, “multitudes beyond any counting. The great choirs of angels circled in the sky overhead; ophanim and seraphim and the cherubim in their fours. On the field below the three spheres of heaven surrounded him, thrones and dominions, virtues and powers. Directly before him stood the Archangel Michael, who once bested Lucifer, making himself ready for war.”
“I have heard those names before,” the Old Kitty Mother asked. “But I am surprised that you have. How do you know them?”
“I—” Chester began. He stopped, tilted his head to one side, blinked. “I’m not sure.”
“Never mind,” said the Old Kitty Mother. “It is only a small thing—irrelevant in any case. Please continue.”
“Blacktail spoke then, saying, ‘Where is the one called Sariel of the Moon?’ No one answered, but there was a stirring in the distance, as if many heads had turned at once.
“Then Blacktail said, ‘Send him forward.’
“For a long moment nothing happened. I thought that they might defy him. But then the one called Michael inclined his head. Sariel came forth then. His knees seemed not quite strong enough to support him as he walked, and when he stood before Blacktail, his armor clattered and clinked with his trembling.” Chester, who had fought many hopeless battles but never trembled, said this with no small measure of contempt.
“Blacktail walked to Sariel and sniffed him up and down. A hush fell over the field, and the sky was still enough to hear a beating heart. ‘I do not know you,’ Blacktail said finally.