by Deck Davis
York whispered to Patton, “Why don’t they even look at me?”
Patton’s cheeks flushed. “Your scars.”
He felt his face then. It was an instinctual reaction to feel the gouges in his skin whenever he felt someone was looking at them. He knew what a mess his face was, but what was he supposed to do about it?
“I can’t help my scars. Perhaps if they learned where I got them. That a bear…”
“No, Pa. That’ll scare the hell out of them.”
Their unease had lasted for hours, and it seemed like it might never go away until York had gone to get them a drink, tripped over a box, and a skull had tumbled out.
His grandson leaped to his feet, eyes ablaze. “Wow! What’s that?”
York picked up the skull. “This? Oh, just something that almost killed me. There’s a story that comes with it, if you’d like to hear it.”
“They don’t like things like that,” Patton was quick to say. “Animal skulls and stuff.”
“Really? Their faces say otherwise.”
“You always used to do this, Pa. Show off your strange relics.”
“What is it?” asked his grandson.
It was the first thing he’d said to him directly, the first thing not filtered through their father. York’s heart filled with grandfatherly love.
He brought the skull over and handed it to them. “Well, this is a gantelop. They live primarily in the moors many, many miles south of Dispolis, but you can find them all over if you know where to look, and you’re patient enough to do it. But be sure not to startle them, because when you do…” he began.
Before he knew it, he’d lost himself in talking about his old passion, about the career he was too old for now.
The children were enraptured by every word. He showed them skulls, fossils, feathers, fur. They demanded explanations for each one, and York was ecstatic to provide them. He’d never laughed so much as when they asked him questions only children could ask. He hadn’t felt this energized since Maeve was still here.
Before long one box was empty save for a claw. Four inches long, brown and yellowed, and curved so that it could help the beast inflict maximum damage. It made York’s scar burn just looking at it.
“This belongs to a desert bear,” he told them. “Not the most improbable of creatures, but certainly up there. These bears aren’t like all the others. Not only have they lived in their lands for so long that they know how to survive in the heat, but nature has nurtured them until they are the most fearsome of predators.”
“Predators? What does that mean?”
“An animal that naturally preys on others. In other words, things that kill to stay alive.”
“Father,” said Patton, though he was a little less tight now, and there was almost a smile on his face. It took York a few seconds to understand why his son, previously so insular around him, had suddenly smiled.
Understanding slapped him like a lion’s paw on the chops. It was because years ago, Patton had sat there, just as his children were, and he’d asked his father to empty the box and explain where all his things had come from.
York was so happy he wanted to cry.
“How did you get the claw?” asked his granddaughter.
“You might better ask how I got this,” said York. He unbuttoned the first three buttons of his shirt and showed them a mean scar that ran all the way across his chest. “My scar and the claw go hand in hand, and the story is better for including both.”
CHAPTER 12
It was a desert bear.
He had hoped he was wrong but after watching the cave for a while, there was no point deluding himself. Every so often he’d hear the creature shuffle, and the sound it made when it redistributed its weight said that it was something big. In Toil, there weren’t many big creatures that could survive above ground.
It wasn’t just the fact it was a bear that made sweat break out on his forehead and turn instantly cold in the Toil night. No, it was because it was a desert bear.
Many places in the queendom were home to bears, from the mostly human-shy black bears that lived deep in forests, to the grunder bears that made forays into villages for food and who had to be driven back by hunters.
Jakub knew a little about the desert bears because they had come up during his research into Toil. They appeared in various ways in various books, usually under reassuring chapter headings such as ‘Dangers of Sun Toil’ and ‘Dying in Toil in One Easy Step: Let a Toil bear see you.’
As well as comforting passages like those, he remembered the little poem one of the caravan drivers had taught him. He was the oldest driver in the caravan, and many of the other caravaners treated him like he was senile. Jakub traveled next to him every day to give him some non-bison company for once, and to try and leech as much Toil experience from his as he could.
The rhyme the driver taught him about bears was as simple as it was uncomforting.
Hear my words, hear them fair
The black bear’s fine; he just doesn’t care.
But never approach a grunder bear’s lair,
And there’s one last thing, of this I swear.
Hear my words, hear them fair,
There’s but one name for the dreaded toil bear:
Nightmare, nightmare, nightmare.
Toil bears were lightly furred creatures that stood eight feet tall and weighed as much as a trader wagon. Rather than thick coats they had bristles on their skin that helped them avoid overheating in the day, but gave them a small amount of protection at night. Enough that they didn’t freeze, but not quite enough to withstand the Toil winds. Hence, a Toil bear seeking a cave.
Jakub had never seen one in person, but he remembered the drawing he had seen in a book. A nightmare of a creature, its skin tanned and covered in scratches and lesions, with some skin hanging over its arms like a cloth too big for its table. He remembered the mean eyes that gave a predator’s stare, and its open mouth filled with teeth that evolution had made fit for not only tearing apart meat, but grinding bones to get to the marrow. Food was scarce in Toil, and the toil bear had evolved so it could get every scrap of sustenance from its kill.
“Come on, Ben,” he said, retreating a further fifty yards from the cave. He lost his rock cover, but it meant there was less chance of the bear stirring in its sleep and picking up his scent. He made Ben lie down and then he spread out next to him, using his dead friend’s body as a wind shield.
It was at this safer distance that he thought some more about it. The way he saw it, he had two options; look for another shelter, or try and persuade the bear to leave.
He broke it down further. Looking for another shelter meant heading deeper into the unknown parts of Toil. He wanted to head to roughly where he had last seen the caravan and see if anything or anyone had survived, but not in the darkness.
Toil cold came on fast and in tremendous force, and he didn’t want to leave the shelter and then get hit by a freezing snap and get so weak he couldn’t move. His waist still ached and his legs were feeling heavy, and he knew he couldn’t handle much more walking.
That left getting the bear out of there. That meant killing it or tricking it out of the shelter somehow.
Could a tired, hungry, cold, and injured man armed only with a dagger kill a Toil bear? No, was the sensible answer. He ruled that option out straight away.
So how did he get a bear to leave its shelter and stay out of it?
Ten minutes later, he had nothing.
He’d used all his essence reanimating Ben and then healing his torso wound, so there were no spells he could cast. Nor was there anything in his inventory besides the twine, salve, and various under-powered weapons.
He considered digging a ditch outside the cave and coaxing the bear out so that it fell into it, but there were two main drawbacks; toil bears could climb, so it’d have to be a hole twenty feet deep to trap it. Jakub didn’t have any tools that would help him do that, and even if he did, he’d have to d
ig right outside the cave.
No, he had to face it, there was no way he was getting into the shelter. The best thing he could do would be to leave now, spend as much time as he could spare to find somewhere else, and failing that, hunker down next to Ben and try and shiver through the night.
The prospect of more walking into the endless night was not a delightful one to a cold and tired man. It made him ache even thinking about it, but he didn’t see what else he could do other than make gods-damned sure he didn’t die tonight.
He thought about taking a couple of gulps of the Firelick whiskey. As one of the most potent alcohols in the world, it was famous for its ability to make a man feel like his insides were burning up. The feeling was an illusion, though. Alcohol made a man feel colder, and it would be fatal for Jakub to lower his body temperature tonight just for the illusion of warmth.
Checking his map, he first marked the cave on it.
Map marker added: Toil Bear cave
Next, he traced a line from his wake-up site and then north to where he believed he’d last been with the caravan. He’d head back there tonight, and when he reached the site he would either cry with joy when he found a wagon waiting for him, or he’d have to give up walking and settle next to his dead bison friend.
He closed his inventory bag, adjusted the straps, and he set out into the night, feeling a bout of sadness as he left the cave behind him.
The desert seemed darker now, as if his choice to pass on the shelter had intensified it, as if the decision was water thrown onto a dying fire. The cold hugged him close, numbing his face, fingers, and anything he couldn’t cover.
He made sure his shirt was buttoned and he tried twisting the collar so it stopped the wind creeping down his neck, but it was impossible. The more he walked in this the less he could feel his own body, and the cold worked its dark magic on his feet and soon he felt like they were two lumps of ice.
The more he let his body temperature drop, the more chance of getting ill. Maybe the icy winds would start to taint his mind. Convince him to sit for a little. To even close his eyes for a spell.
No. That would be the end of him.
“Ben, stand still a second.”
Jakub removed his dagger from his sheath. He grabbed a handful of Ben’s hair. His hair was only two inches long but there were lots of it, enough for Jakub to stay warm. He tucked his shirt tightly into his trousers and then began cutting Ben’s hair and stuffing it inside his shirt. The itch was unbearable at first, but with layer after layer of hair insulating his skin, it was soon worth it.
Item received: Bison hair
Ben looked a little glum without the coat of oil-black hair on his head, but Jakub knew he was just humanizing him. Ben was a reanimated creature, barely alive. Good company, sure, but not a sentient creature. He wouldn’t care that Jakub had shaved his head.
Besides, there was still a rug-like coating of it on his back and torso. Ben wouldn’t get to keep it for long, since Jakub had plans for that in the morning, but it meant the beast would have time to enjoy his existing hair while getting used to the idea of being bald, which was a luxury denied to many men as they got older.
Feeling a little warmer with his bison hair vest, Jakub stared into the darkness ahead and saw the moon and stars begin to peek from the clouds and light the way a little. He saw miles and miles of barren desert ahead of him. Summoning every ounce of determination, he pushed on.
CHAPTER 13
Desert Bear and Coyote
He was an old bear who had lived in the desert for so long that he knew almost every part of it. He could see it when he closed its eyes; he could see the half a dozen oases spots, some that he drunk from as a young cub with his mother, others in parts of the world that he’d traveled long ago and hadn’t returned to.
World was his name for Sun Toil because he knew nothing else, and his mother had taught him to be wary of its borders, just as her mother had taught her, and so the chain of warnings went.
Bear had never understood, until he met the man with the stinging sticks many, many suns ago.
The man who seemed to be able to smell Bear, to follow him miles and miles. The man who had wanted something from Bear, and even after Bear had straightened as tall as he could and showed his claws and teeth and roared for him to leave, still the man had pointed something at him and then there was stinging pain all through his body.
He should have killed him on first sight.
Normally he would have done that. He would have torn the man into strips of flesh. But Bear had Cub with him, and Cub was sickly and the last two oases had been dried up. So, Bear had to do what he never did, and he fled the man as much as he was able.
But the stinging pain. The things the man could do; the needles that made Bear sleepy. The constructs of iron he left hidden on the ground, disguised by dust. He had seen a fox step on one, and oh, how the poor thing howled up to the sky. Bear had earned an easy meal when he saw that, but he knew the iron teeth were meant for him.
When Cub was caught in metal teeth, Bear stayed to free him. And when the man approached from the distance, this time clad in metal, he knew there would be no more running.
He and the man met in the desert under the heat of the sun, metal versus claw, strength versus wile. They fought. Bear’s claws, normally enough to tear his enemies apart, hurt when they glanced off metal sheets covering the man. One of them hit the metal on the man’s chest and snapped off fully.
His muscles, undernourished and dehydrated because of the cruelty of Toil, began to ache. He could not fight forever.
But Cub cried in the background. Cried because of the pain of the metal teeth around his leg, and so Bear fought with a fury that he’d never felt even in the most desperate of hunts.
Still, the man was too much for him. He had things that Bear could not explain, things that caused pain without the man touching him, sometimes from twenty paces. Things that exploded and then burned his skin.
Finally, he caught the man with a savage blow across his neck in a place where his metal fur didn’t protect him. Blood welled at the bald parts of his white-pink flesh, and Bear could smell it. He felt saliva fill his mouth, he felt his mind narrow on the scent.
The man started to run away as fast as he could. All Bear could think was meat and blood. Meat and blood.
Pa, said a whimper behind him. When he turned, he felt a shock of worry such as he’d never felt before. Cub was dying. The metal teeth had bitten deep, and his blood-stained the desert.
The man was running. Blood and meat were running. But Cub would die without Bear helping him free.
Bear made the only choice he could.
Even then, even after he let the first source of blood and flesh that he’d seen in days leave, even after he’d lost a full claw to his metal, even after he stayed to wrench open the metal teeth, Cub still died.
Bear never saw the man again, not in the last twenty summers, and now he was an old, old animal.
Smell it? said the growl.
Bear shuffled for comfort. The cave was too small. Too small for one bear, much too small for a bear and coyote. It was warm for him, sharing his space with his friend, but he was an old, old bear and his back ached and when he slept so squashed that his legs wouldn’t work in the morning until he stretched and let them wake.
Not only that, but Coyote could be selfish sometimes. The killer’s paws must touch the meat first, that was the rule. But Coyote always wanted to gorge first.
I’m young. I need it more, he would growl.
And I’m old. I need it more than you, Pup.
Pup was what he always called him, though he was no longer a pup, no longer in need of bear to care for him. As Pup grew older he had risen first to a beast of similar strength, and now he was edging ahead of bear. Neither of them said it, but both knew it; bear was waning. He had more hunts left in him, but there would come a time when Pup would have to care for him.
After caring for both Cub and Pup
in Toil, where water and food were hard to find, Bear wouldn’t wish that same life on Pup.
No, Bear would wander off when he felt too weak. Maybe he would just walk in the night without telling Pup, walk until the darkness claimed him. His body would lie still against the ground that had been his world for so long, and his flesh would feed other animals in need and through that he would join the circle and would become one with the world.
Or should Bear stay and let Pup feast on his body after death? Pup would be grateful for the gift. Just as Bear would eat Pup if something happened to him, so would his coyote friend gorge on him.
Questions for other days. Bear still had a few more suns left in him.
In the end, Bear would always agree that Coyote should eat first. He would watch his friend rip strips of meat from bones. He would see the blood darken his muzzle. He would smell it, and it would make his belly feel tight.
Always had it been like that, always would it be. Bear shouldn’t try to trick himself. He had found Coyote when he was just a young pup. Motherless, fatherless, thinner than oasis reeds, eyes crawling with flies.
Bear was starving when he first saw Pup. He could have taken the young one’s meagre flesh. Enough to live for one, maybe two suns longer. But instead Bear found a jackrabbit for Coyote. The next day he found two kit foxes. He did this for four days until he could walk again.
Bear? Do you smell it? Said Pup.
Bear sniffed, but he could only smell the cave. The old stone, the age, the dirt. Smell what? he asked.
Man.
Bear tried to get on all fours, but his legs sang with pain. Sadly, that happened more and more as each summer turned to winter. Bear could still run fast, could still chase prey, but only when he had let his legs wake up for long enough.
You smell man? he asked.
