The House of the Stag

by Kage Baker

  In his black halls he holds carousal,

  Feasting and drinking on our stolen store

  While orphans starve in Deliantiba!

  The audience leans forward, fascinated. Quite a show is going on behind Wiregold to illustrate his words, and not a few parents are relieved their smaller children have dozed off.

  “But!” Wiregold raises his hand.

  Such wickedness offends the very gods!

  Now they take counsel in their cloudy home

  How best to punish such impiety!

  At the back of the performance area the gods appear—which is to say the accepted theatrical convention for The Gods, six or seven high poles draped with white fabrics, each bearing at its top an immense mask representing one of the better-known deities. One teeters out from their midst and is turned as though to address the others.

  “Hear me, immortal ones! I, the Smith Father,

  Can take no rest, while my lamenting children

  Hourly beg for rescue and release!

  How will you smite this thief and sorcerer?

  Do not delay in council; until I know

  That he is doomed indeed, no more I’ll raise

  My hammer, no more my forge shall glow

  To make your crowns of gold, your silver spears,

  Nor even the hinges of your palace doors!”

  The masks turn to and fro.

  The gods confer. Now speaks the mighty goddess,

  She without whom all life would perish,

  She who maddens the young, and of the old makes fools.

  “Long-suffering smith, your wrath is just.

  I will send forth a daughter of mine own

  And she will break this demon in her hands.

  Behold her now, the Green Witch of the wood!”

  Wiregold extends his hands and exits sidelong stage left, as from stage right comes an actress painted green. She is somewhat provocatively clad, but what little of her is covered, is covered in purest white. Her mask is of serene beauty.

  She proceeds, in the sidelong dancing steps prescribed for a heroine of this type, toward the actor in the Dark Lord’s mask. He turns to regard her and leaps down from his mountain, landing in a theatrical demon-crouch, and whirls both his swords at her.

  She thrusts out her arm, palm extended toward him, and he freezes. With her other hand she reaches into his black robe and draws forth a black heart. She holds it up in triumph as he falls to his knees before her, broken.

  The audience applauds. They like love stories.

  The Letters

  The good brothers are robed in white, speak in hushed voices. Yes, you are welcome to study in their library. Will you be staying? They point out the grottoes in the rock that are their guest quarters, each with its woven mat and water jug. Simple meals are served twice a day, signaled by a rhythm beaten on a wooden drum. If you miss the signal because you are deep in your research, they will understand. One of the brothers will be happy to prepare a late repast for you. You are welcome to join their prayers, even though your gods are not theirs. They feel your gods wouldn’t mind.

  You are grateful for the coolness of the cavern, as they lead you in; the air is dry here. The breath of the desert exhales its sullen heat into this miraculously green valley. You are shown the rows of books. They resemble packages wrapped in silk. The brother librarian pulls down the volumes you have requested and shows you to a reading stand, mounted under a skylight in the rock.

  You open the silk wrappings. This is not a book, as you understand books. It is a neat stack of leaves, though very large leaves, pressed flat and dried. They are a delicate ivory color. They are covered in writing, clear characters in black and distinct brushstrokes. You lean close to read. What is that fragrance, rising sweet from the pages as they warm in the light?

  She never accepted that he had gone away. She missed him. She remembered him, a little, she thought; but she was never really certain whether the voice in her dreams, the kind face, were memories or things imagined.

  Her earliest clear memory was of watching with interest as her people tried out the first boat ever made. Someone had woven a round thing like a basket, and covered it all over with something sticky that she wasn’t allowed to touch. It had dried in the sun. Then one of her people set it in the water and climbed in, and it floated and went round and round in the river’s eddy. Everyone else stood on the riverbank and raised up their hands and exclaimed.

  A few days later the boatman worked out that he needed a paddle for his little boat, and made one. Then the boat went where he wanted it to go, and once again people raised their hands and exclaimed. She looked out across the gray sea and understood what a boat was for.

  She found a big leaf to be her paddle, and a basket she thought would fit her nicely, and dragged them down to the river’s edge. She was getting into her boat when the people came running up, shouting in alarm.

  It took a wearying long time to make them understand that she was going to go look for him. But when they understood her at last, they made crying mouths and said, Oh, Child, you mustn’t go away and leave us! Oh, boohoo, boohoo, we’d miss you so! Please stay with us, little Saint! Everyone will cry if you go away! Boohoo! And they pretended to wipe away tears.

  She looked up into their eyes and into their minds and saw the truth there, just under their amusement. They were afraid to be alone. They wanted her to take care of them. They wanted someone to tell them what to do.

  It made her sad, and a little angry.

  But she let them pick her up and carry her away from the river’s edge, and Lendreth came striding up with his face like a thunderstorm. He shouted at them, How could you have been so careless? She might have drowned!

  Drowned? How should she have drowned? She is the Saint! Didn’t she float in the pool, at the waterfall?

  We cannot always hope for miracles, Lendreth had said, and after that she was never allowed to be alone with her nurses, but that one of the trevanion had to be there too, watching her. And so she never got the chance to run away from them.

  When she was a little older, when she had listened to them speaking over her head often enough and looked into their minds a little more, she understood why her people were the way they were. She felt sorry for them.

  The green meadows by the sea were becoming crowded, because her people were having lots of babies now. She looked across the river and knew that there were other places her people could live, and so one day she told them they needed to go there.

  Some people wept because they didn’t want to leave the place where he had left them. She understood that; it made her sad to leave there too. She would have told them it was all right for some of them to stay, but Lendreth raised her in his arms and said, She has spoken! And so they all went, wading across the river where it spread out on the beach at low tide. Big Kdwyr carried her.

  That night they stopped in a green forest, warm and pleasant, where there was plenty of room. Her people sang under the stars. And yet, when morning came, it was discovered that some of her people had crept away in the darkness. The man who had made the boat was one of them. It was plain by their tracks they had gone back to the meadows by the river.

  Lendreth was angry and wanted to have them brought back. She raised her voice, the first time she had ever done so, and told him to let them go.

  Blessed Child, you do not understand, he had said. We must keep together as a people. It is safer that way. She looked at him and saw how frightened he was, had always been, how little he trusted anything.

  She saw that though her people wanted someone to tell them what to do, none of them could ever be made to do something they didn’t really want to do.

  She told Lendreth that the ones who had gone back would be safe by the river. He bowed his head grudgingly. He and she were to have the same argument many more times, as the years went by, as her people wandered and some settled down in places they liked.

  “Look at this!”

&
nbsp; Prass extended a taloned hand and pointed down into the valley. Prass was a tawny color, with wings that hung in folds under his arms, though he seldom flew because he was rather fat. Kolosht, his companion, was less settled in his shape, but had lately been appearing in the form of a drowned youth because he liked frightening people. He now pulled his sagging head up by its hair, so he could direct its white eyes where the other demon pointed.

  “What are they?” he said in a clear and rather eerie voice that did not emanate from his corpse mouth.

  “They’re the Earthborn! Remember them?”

  “No,” said Kolosht, but he had difficulty remembering things longer than a week or so. He was young, as demons went, not much more than an adolescent.

  “They used to live up in a valley near the Ice Trap.”

  “What’s the Ice Trap?”

  “Someplace we don’t want to go. I heard they were trapped up there too. They must have found a way to get out.”

  “Can we eat them?”

  Prass scowled, revealing a mouthful of razor-edged teeth. “They weren’t supposed to make good eating. The older ones always told us not to bother with them.”

  Kolosht giggled slyly. “Can we do anything else with them?”

  “Now, there’s a thought.”

  “I want to hurt one. I want to kill one.”

  “I want to do something else to one. No reason why we can’t share, is there?”

  “Not if you go first.”

  “There’s a little one, look! And it’s a she! Oh, look at the little sweetmeat. Come up here, little beauty, come just a little closer, oh, please!”

  “The Lord of Fear will tear your flesh and drink your blood!”

  “Shut up, you idiot. That’s no way to lure a child!”

  The little girl in question had, meanwhile, noticed them and now wandered up the hill in their direction. She appeared to be about six years of age and was naked but for a white flower tucked in her hair.

  “Hello, little girl, won’t you come play with us?” said Prass, simpering. He shoved back Kolosht, who was trying to drool blood at her to scare her.

  The little girl raised her eyes and looked at them. She did not seem frightened; only interested. Her gaze met Prass’s and he had the sensation of twin beams of light stabbing in through his eyes, lighting his mind clear to the back wall of his skull. He had never felt such discomfort in his life.

  Kolosht, for his part, was so startled by the merciless clarity of the child’s eyes that he lost his concentration, and the corpse body melted down into a mass of confused body parts. He gurgled in a heap on the ground, trying to move any part that was capable of visual perception away from her cold-eyed inspection.

  “Why do you like to scare people?” she asked Kolosht. “Is it because you’re afraid?”

  Kolosht tried to tell her that he wasn’t afraid, that he was a Lord of the Abyss and a Death Spawn and a Soul Crusher, but he couldn’t form enough of a mouth to say it. In any case, the child’s calm contemplation was doing something to him. It was erasing his image of himself, all the dark, violent pictures he’d formed for his comfort, and showing him something horribly different and entirely true: a dim and pathetic little cloud, not very bright, circling slowly in a universe of brilliant stars.

  What her gaze was revealing to Prass is best left undescribed, but the experience horrified him. It stripped away his self-illusions like a flensing knife. He had never thought he was a good creature, but had carefully avoided noticing that he was a contemptible one. No lies now hid his trembling stinking heart. And the worst part of it all was that the little girl saw what he was being forced to see, she saw everything calmly, she knew and there was no escape because she was—she was—

  “Why do you like to hurt little girls?” she asked him. “Is it because you can’t—”

  “Please! Let me go!” Prass’s skin was fading, his fat running off him in streams of grease. “I’ll never come near you again—I’ll never touch your people—”

  “But I want to know why,” she said. “Why did you make yourself look like that? Your wings don’t even work.”

  “I’ll make myself look like anything you want, if you’ll only let me go!” Prass shrieked. Kolosht had already disbodied himself to escape her, leaving a puddle of slime in the dust as he fled back into the void.

  She stared at Prass. He began screaming uncontrollably, flinging himself from side to side, and his scales fell out in handfuls. Below, the adult Earthborn had noticed and now came running up the hill. “But I’m not trying to hurt you,” she said, dismayed at his agony. “What’s hurting you?”

  Prass, strangling on himself, was unable to reply.

  “I know what it must be,” she said helpfully. “It must hurt to be you. Why don’t you be something else?”

  He was rolling on the ground now, for his legs had fallen off, but he managed to nod frantically and imply that he’d appreciate any suggestions.

  “You should be a mouse,” she said. “They’re little and they don’t hurt anything.”

  He collapsed inward on himself, like a rotten melon dissolving into mold, and from the squashy mess a small thing scrambled, slipping and panting. It ran at once into the long grass and was gone.

  “What is this?” shouted Lendreth. “What has happened, Child?”

  “They were demons and they wanted to be bad,” she said, pointing at the twin smears of nastiness in the dust. “I just looked at them, but it hurt them. They stopped wearing those bodies.”

  Lendreth recoiled at the sight, and one of the ladies caught the Child up and hugged her tight, beginning to cry. “I’m all right,” she told them. Lendreth pulled her from the woman’s arms and held her up for everyone to see.

  “A miracle!” he cried. “She has slain demons for our sake!”

  “But I didn’t—,” she said, and was drowned out by everyone chanting, “A miracle! A miracle!” They all raised up their hands and she was carried down the hill in triumph.

  They settled in that place for a long while. A lake was nearby, full of clean water. Someone else was able to make a boat, then made more boats. They found mussels in the water and were astonished to discover pearls inside their shells. They gave her all the pearls. She didn’t know what on earth to do with them, but thanked everyone.

  Lendreth told her they needed to live in a safe place, pointing out to an island in the lake. He gathered the men who had brought tools away from the fields where they had been slaves, and they cut palings sharp and set them to ring the shores of the island. More palings were cut to make the frames of little houses, like boats or baskets turned upside down.

  Her people waded and swam across to the island. They were happy to spend the night there, and even a week; but once they were settled in, Lendreth organized the men with tools into patrols. They called themselves the Mowers, and they walked the shores on the island keeping watch. He was astonished when people protested this, and many gathered up their belongings and made to leave again.

  But we will be safe here! Lendreth told them.

  One gaunt man, who had outlived all his children in the slave pens, glared at Lendreth. A prison is a prison, no matter who builds it. I see the walls, I see the guards. I will take my chances under the open sky. We were not made to live this way.

  How dare you call them guards? said Lendreth. These men are heroes, these men bought your freedom in blood!

  That isn’t how I remember it, said another man. We were freed by the Child.

  She was the sign and omen of your deliverance, Lendreth argued, but who stood in our defense when the Riders came across the field? They had cut us down like summer corn, if not for these brave men. Even the Beloved Imperfect was powerless to stop them.

  Imperfect, was he?

  He said so himself, Lendreth replied.

  But we never lived like this when we were free, said a woman. There were no closed-up places, no armed guards before the Riders came.

  But we n
o longer live in that world, and it’s foolish to pretend we can live that way again without endangering ourselves, said Lendreth. Did the Beloved Imperfect himself not say, “Your old ways are lost. I can never sing back the child into the womb, the leaf into the bud”?

  There was a grudging silence to admit that much. Then the woman said, He also said the little Saint was perfect. He said she’d lead us. What does she say now, about making us stay where we don’t want to stay?

  And everyone turned to look down at her, where she sat playing with bright fallen leaves, but listening to them all.

  She looked up at them. “You don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to. You can live in the woods, if you’d like that better.”

  They lifted their hands and praised her, though Lendreth pressed his lips tight shut and at last said, Then it is decided. We will live here and on the forest shore as well.

  Lendreth spoke to her afterward, explaining that the people were like children, who must be watched over to see that they did not wander foolishly into harm’s way. He told her about her duty and her responsibility to them. He told her how heavy the burden of their safety was and said that even so he had carried it without complaint, while she was a little child; and that he would carry it for her many years yet, until she was grown. He suggested that she lend her voice to his, when he spoke for their own good.

  “But they’re not children,” she said. “They’re grown people.”

  “But they—” Lendreth tried to compose his thoughts. “They are only freed slaves. They never had the chance, as I did, to learn the Songs.”

  “Then we should teach them.”

  “But not everyone can learn the Songs. It’s not easy. Even the Blessed Ranwyr tried hard and couldn’t learn them well enough.”

  “And he was a very good man. So, you see? It doesn’t matter if people don’t know the Songs. All they want to do is live in the woods and be happy. That’s not hard.”