Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  He nodded. “I see. What would you have done with me had I been a deer in truth?”

  “I’d have camped here until I could get you cut up properly and made a litter to drag you home.” I thought for a moment. “I can still do that.”

  “Without the cutting up, I hope,” he said, and laughed, which made me so angry I did not speak again until the soup was steaming and fragrant.

  “It’s venison,” I said, giving him a pannikin-full. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  He took the pannikin in a blood-streaked hand. “I don’t mind.”

  He ate in silence, and when he was done, I ate what was left in the pot. As the fire burned low, he spoke again, soft-voiced. “When I am a deer, I have a deer’s mind. In the morning, I will run from you and open my wound again.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I will harm myself trying to break free if you bind me.”

  “You won’t.” I loosed my hair, which fell to my knees, and cut three hairs with my knife. “Look, here is the rope.”

  He was silent, his eyes fixed on my hand.

  One hair I tied around his ankle, one around his wrist, and one among the narrow braids of his own dark hair. His skin was warm and smooth under my fingers, and his hair smelled salt and a little bitter, like wood smoke. Around his throat I saw a thick braided cord, bright crimson, like fresh blood. As I reached to touch it, he gathered my hair into his hands and, lifting it to his face, inhaled deeply.

  I retreated hastily. “It’s getting cold,” I said. “I should build up the fire. And you must sleep.”

  He buried his head in his arms and was still. But as I sat listening to the noises of the night, I saw the firelight glitter in his watching eyes.

  The birds were singing when I woke, and the mist rose from the brook, pearly in the growing light. The man was still a man, and I watched him sleep, wondering whether I’d dreamed his transformation. The light warmed; the air shivered. Between one breath and the next, the man became a deer lying between the roots of the oak, his legs tucked up under his belly, my shirtsleeve bound around his haunch, and a crimson cord snugged around his neck.

  Long lashes lifted, revealing liquid, nervous eyes. Cautiously I stretched out my hand. Cautiously he sniffed my fingers, licked them for the salt, then began to tear at the moss.

  We passed a quiet day. I collected branches, bark, and vines, gathered grass and fresh leaves for the deer, shot a rabbit and put it to roast. While I made the litter, the deer nibbled, slept, lapped water from the pannikin, slept again. I wanted to stroke him, but it seemed unfair, when he could not escape.

  Sometime during the long afternoon, a horn’s mournful lowing broke the forest calm. The deer started awake, floundered, and tried to rise, blowing and panting with terror. Dodging his flailing horns, I laid my hand on his brow.

  “You’ve nothing to fear,” I said. “That’s further away than it sounds, and bearing to the west besides.”

  He fell back onto the moss. For a moment I thought he had understood me. But he only mouthed at the leaves again, and I knew he was just a deer.

  At sunset I was cutting up the rabbit when a sweet voice said, “Is that rabbit I smell?” startling me nearly out of my skin.

  “It is,” I said, and gave him half on a dock leaf. “Eat up. We’ll have to leave before moonrise to make it home before dawn.”

  “Home.” He sighed. “I can never go home again.”

  I chewed rabbit and swallowed. “Why not?”

  “Politics. Religion. Wizards.” He made a face. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  I did not know those words, either, so I concentrated on finishing my portion of rabbit and thinking about how best to bind my awkward catch to the litter. It was not an easy task, he being alive and hurt besides. He called me a clumsy slut and I threatened to leave him to die. When he doubted, aloud, that a mere slip of a girl was strong enough to move him, I heaved the head of the litter up to my back and dragged it over the uneven ground at a fine pace, with him calling curses down upon my head with every bounce.

  Before long, the curses trailed off and he began to moan. Repentant, I went more gently after that, but by the time I reached my home glade and my cottage, the bandage around his thigh was stained with fresh blood, and the man himself had fainted.

  I made a nest for him by the hearth, stanched the wound, packed it with cobwebs, and bound it anew before he woke.

  “If you were trying to kill me, you failed,” he murmured.

  “If I’d been trying, I would have succeeded. Drink this.” He lifted one brow—I hadn’t known that was possible. “It’s a sleepy drink—valerian and chamomile and licorice root. It will soothe the deer as well as the man.”

  “Those hunters hunted me,” he said. “Sooner or later they must find this place. And a full-grown deer is hard to hide.”

  “I have an idea about that,” I said. “Drink now, and sleep.”

  When I was little, my mother taught me many things. She taught me how to coax seedlings to grow by the fire in winter, how to knit flesh and bend living wood into rooted chairs and leafy tables. She taught me to call animals to kneel before me and birds to roost on my shoulders. And she taught me not to use my knowledge unless I must, to survive.

  I knew she would not have considered the safety of my deer-man a matter of survival—she had a very low opinion of men, with or without horns. But my mother had lain buried under the holly bush beside the door for three long winters, and I did not want my deer-man to die. So I stood at the edge of the glade and called a true stag to me.

  He was an eight-point buck with a tawny coat only a shade darker than my deer-man’s. When he knelt before me, I looked into his eyes and cut his throat, catching his blood in a pan. Then I went inside, where my deer-man slept uneasily, and laid hold of the crimson cord around his neck.

  It stung me like a nettle.

  I glared at the cord, then reached out to test it with that sixth sense that had awoken in me five years ago when first I began to give my blood to the earth. I worked out how the threads were twisted, and when I’d unraveled them, strand by strand, the cord dropped from the stag’s neck. He sighed and shifted on his pallet of bracken, then slid deeper into sleep.

  While he slept, I skinned the stag I had called, cut him into pieces, and was pinning the heavy hide onto the drying-frame behind the cottage when I heard a commotion of voices and dogs. Hastily I gathered around me an illusion of a woman of middle years, brindle-haired and stern of face, her arms thick with muscle—my mother, in fact, as she’d been before she died—and strode around the house, wiping bloody hands on my deerskin apron.

  Twelve men stood in my glade, as alike to my eyes as leaves on a birch tree, tall and supple, their skin darkened by the sun, their hair braided, like my deer-man’s, with leaves and feathers and polished stones. Unstrung bows were slung across their shoulders, and long knives thrust through their braided belts. They looked trail-worn and nervous as rabbits.

  One of them stepped forward—a pale-haired man, with gold around his arm. “Greetings, good woman. We seek a deer.”

  I folded my arms to still their shaking. “Then you seek in a good place,” I said in my mother’s voice. “There are a plenty of deer in these woods. My man killed one yestereve.”

  The twelve men stiffened, like foxes scenting prey. “Your man, say you?” their spokesman said.

  “A hunter, like yourselves. He left me with the butchering. It was a fat buck, with a fine rack of horn. It will serve us well this winter.”

  “Let us see it.”

  I shrugged. “The joints are ready for the smokehouse. The hide is pinned to the frame. The head is boiling in the pot.”

  They exchanged glances. “We will see what is to be seen.”

  They trailed me to the drying-frame and surveyed the fresh hide with their heads to one side and their mouths screwed to the other. They reeked of fear and confusion, but the spokesman’s voice was steady as he asked, “Did you
chance to find anything around the stag’s neck?”

  “I did. A braided crimson cord, as like to that around your waist as one hair is to another. I wondered at such a thing on a wild animal, and told my man, I told him, ‘I hope you have not bagged some rich man’s pet.’ ”

  The spokesman closed his eyes and sighed. “Bring it to us.”

  “Wait until I get it.”

  In his nest, the deer lay white-eyed and quivering. I stroked his soft muzzle and blew into his nostrils, then took up the cord and brought it out to the waiting hunters.

  “I hope it will not bring grief to me and mine,” I said as the spokesman snatched it from my hand, “seeing as my man killed your deer in ignorance, on common land.”

  The men muttered and cut their eyes at me, but the spokesman silenced them with a look. “It will bring grief,” he told me. “But not to you. The deer escaped his bounds.”

  I could not read his face, but it seemed to me that his body spoke more of fear than sorrow. Questions crowded my mouth, but I shut my teeth upon them. I wanted the hunters to leave more than I wanted answers.

  The spokesman bowed. “Farewell, good woman. I wish you and your man joy of the stag. He should make a kingly feast.” And to my great relief, they ran into the wood with their braids bouncing on their backs.

  That night, the deer-man was feverish and restless.

  “They’ll be back,” he said when I told him, with pride, what I had done. “He’ll know it’s a trick. He’ll send them to fetch me. He may even come himself.”

  I laid a cool cloth on his forehead. “Hush now. Those men believed me. How could someone who wasn’t even here know what they did not?”

  “Oh, he’ll know. He knows everything.” He gripped my hand, stared into my eyes with mad intensity. “Heal me that I may fly this place, for your own sake if not for mine.”

  “I’m doing my best,” I said tartly. “It’s all your own fault, you know. If you’d left the arrow for me to cut out properly, you wouldn’t have done so much damage. As for your fever, that’s your body fighting against itself.”

  He gave a bitter laugh. “It is as he said: those marked for death shall die.”

  Wounded as he was, I could have shaken him for pure frustration. “Marked for death? I’ve never heard such foolishness. There’s nothing wrong with you that willow bark and cobwebs and time won’t mend.”

  He shook his head wearily. “There is no time. Could I but cross the river back into the Land, if I could lie on her earth, drink of her water, eat of her bounty, my wound would be healed. To die in exile, useless and barren, is no more than my just punishment for trying to escape my destiny.”

  I knew the river he spoke of. It was only a day’s journey north, wide and rocky, easily fordable. My mother had taken me there after my first blood had come, to show me the boundary of our land. I will never forget how she looked on the flowing waters and on the trees that lay across them, her face as bleak as the rocks we stood on.

  “Beyond this river lies the Land that was my home,” she said, “until I fled it for my life. There’s nothing for me there, nor for any daughter of my body, save grief and death, dark magics and blood.”

  I had never heard her voice so stern, not even when I had disobeyed her and broken my leg hunting on a moonless night, and did not wish to hear it again. When she required my oath never to cross the river, I gave it to her readily.

  And yet, the morning after the huntsmen left my glade found me tramping northward, fully intending to do just what I had sworn not to. My deer-man had grown weaker in the night, his pulse thread-thin in his neck, his skin hot and dry under my hand. I knew I might break my oath to no purpose, to cross the river and come home to find him dead. And yet I knew I must try.

  Grief and death; dark magics and blood. I couldn’t help thinking that these would be my lot whatever I did.

  Once begun, I moved swiftly from the familiar rolling paths of my forest in the foothills to the steeper tracks of the mountain slopes. That night I camped further from my glade than I’d ever imagined being, lying beneath a blanket of stars that were closer and brighter than I’d ever seen them.

  I was up and on my way before dawn, and made such speed that I arrived at the river before the sun had reached the zenith. For a time I stood on the bank, staring at the pines and hollies and ash-pale birches on the far shore, caught between past and future, my oath to my mother and my duty to my deer-man, fear of what I might meet in that forbidden wood and a burning desire to know what lay there.

  When I stepped into the river at last, the water was cold as winter snow. It ran strong between scattered boulders, but never deeper than my waist. Step by step I waded over small round stones that rolled treacherously underfoot. It was as if the far shore withdrew as I approached, so long did I struggle toward it. But once I passed the halfway point, the footing grew easier, and at last I floundered panting onto the shore of my deer-man’s precious Land.

  I looked around me. Was the sky bluer, the birdsong clearer and more beautiful, the trees more lush and full than those of my own forest, or was it my stranger’s eyes that made them seem so? Above me, I saw a tumble of sparkling water where a stream cascaded down the mountainside. Lacking other guidance, I followed it, scrambling up over boulders and through thickets. As I climbed, I felt the song of the Land rise through my body, filling me until I nearly burst with it.

  When I came to my senses, I was kneeling by a rocky pool. At one end, the water churned beneath a wide cascade; at the other, it slipped between two great boulders and out of sight. Great dark hollies stood sentinel around that pool, and its stones were patched with pale, dense humps of moss. Though I’d never seen it before, I knew as surely as I knew my blood flowed through my veins that this moss was what I needed to draw the fever from my deer-man’s wound.

  As I reached to gather it, a bear’s paw, dark-furred and powerfully clawed, reached over my shoulder.

  Heart pounding, I plunged into the pool and splashed away, clumsy with panic, glancing over my shoulder to see if the bear followed. The rock where I had knelt was empty. I paddled back, wondering whether perhaps my eyes had been playing tricks on me. Reaching up to the rock to pull myself out of the water, I saw once again the heavy, furred arms of a bear. But this time I knew that they were mine.

  With my acceptance of that knowledge came the welcome of the Land. My eyes, my nose, my tongue, the pads of my paws, the wind in my fur, the rustle of the leaves and the song of the water spoke to my blood. They told me that I had lived an exile in a foreign land, starving all that I was and could be, subsisting on crumbs of power when I could have feasted. They told I was home now, and whole.

  I do not know how long I stayed in that enchanted place, or entirely what I did there. I know I ate, for when I could think again, I saw fish bones scattered on a rock and my paws were sticky with honey. The sun was low, the wind smelled of evening. All in a panic, I remembered the deer-man waiting in my cottage with his beautiful, hunted eyes and his smell of wood smoke and musk—and his festering wound, which might have killed him, for all I knew, while I frolicked here in enchanted woods.

  Gathering the simples that would make my deer-man strong again was easy. I knew what I needed and how to use it as I knew how to walk and breathe. Leaving the pool and the guardian hollies was much harder, but I was not so drunk with power that I’d leave my stag, my deer, my hart to die of the wound I’d given him. And now that I could think again, I found I missed my own forest.

  The journey back to my glade was faster than my journey out. Bears can gallop quite fast, I discovered, and do not need to skirt bramble patches. Still, when I crossed the river again, it became harder and harder to keep the bear wrapped about me. Eventually I was forced to go on my two feet, cold and half blind in the dark. Yet, weak as I felt myself, I knew I was stronger than I had been.

  By dint of running without rest for a night and a day, I reached my cottage not long after sunset. My deer-man was alive, but
only just, his hands twitching feebly in fever dreams, his face ashen, his eyes sunk deep in bruised hollows. When I tore the bandage from his thigh, his wound ran with pus and stank of foulness.

  I made up the fire, drew water, and heated herbs in it, along with a pinch of soil from the handful I’d dug from the Land. As the posset steeped, I drained my deer-man’s wound, washed it with herb-scented, earth-tinted water, packed it with the white moss, and bandaged it afresh. Finally I held a cup of the same earthy brew to his lips, and when he had drunk it, I crept into his fur-lined nest, took his head on my shoulder, and slept the sleep of exhaustion.

  Some time later, I felt something tickling my cheek and opened my eyes to find myself nose to velvety nose with my stag. Seeing me awake, he snorted, as though in greeting.

  I put a hand on his bandaged haunch; his hide shivered, but he did not startle away. Gently I unbound the cloth and unpeeled the moss.

  The wound was closed and almost fully healed, a pink scar amid his tawny hair. Why this should have made me weep when his suffering had not, I do not know, but weep I did, my forehead against his haunch. Finally he nudged me ungently with his nose, telling me as clearly as speech that he would be up and out of the cramped, dark cottage and out in the wide forest.

  Little as I wanted to, I let him go.

  I have never feared solitude. All my life, I have lived content with the forest and my mother for company, nor wanted any other. After she died, I missed her, oh, most terribly. But I was not afraid until the day my hart left me to run in the forest. Every sound made me jump in case it was my deer returning, or the hunters, or some danger I could not foresee. I lost hope of seeing him and found it again, over and over, in a frustrating cycle that was more exhausting than a day’s hunting. And when I was not fretting over him, I was staring at my thin, brown, naked hands and wondering if my mother had ever had the power to turn into a bear, and why she had given it up if she had, and why she had been at such pains to keep that power from me. In late afternoon I came to the conclusion that my unhappy state was all my mother’s fault, and that my deer was gone for good. Then I wept and dried my eyes and went to fetch water for dinner.