Beneath Ceaseless Skies #218
Page 3
It was a perverse thing to do, to cause an animal to suffer like that.
It needed doing.
She’d been late to the life of a hunter. Struck by wanderlust at twenty times twelve moons, she’d left her work as a cobbler in the city and been accepted on probationary terms to the Men of the Ashen Morrow—one of the hundreds of hunter collectives. Most of her new fellows were the children of hunters and farmers. But she was alive with magic, and magic flows unevenly through space and time; its practitioners do well to wander. Despite her upbringing, she’d become a hunter.
She dragged the animal by horns for hours. Her muscles were in agony, but she dared not stop for rest. She pushed on—exhaustion was an old friend. The buck was screaming in pain, but she hadn’t the strength to lift it across her back.
By the time she reached the heart of the forest, near enough Hulokk’s domain, she heard the rest of her collective searching the woods. Their footsteps were too soft, too careful to be any but those of hunters. Sal had to hurry. She spied a tangled thicket and made her way for the refuge of its densest depths. Low pines burst forth from brambles, failing to reach the sky. Ahead of the dawn, morning fog rose and lonely birds sang.
The buck had suffered, but it hadn’t died. Sal laid it down heavily in the dirt, then paced around it, ducking under branches, pulling her wool trousers free from thorns. She circled it six times widdershins, then she stopped.
Her companions were closer. They’d found her trail. If they found her, they’d try to help her. If they found her, she’d lose another friend.
She got her knife up to the animal’s throat, and it stared into the depths of her as she drew the blade through its skin. In her plain voice, ragged with exhaustion, she sang:
A half a hundred legs has Hulokk
a half a thousand teeth has He.
A half a million men ate Hulokk
a half a billion moons is He.
The song was older than the city, as old as the woods. She sang it in the language of the first of her people to settle the land.
The melody faded to nothing, and Sal breathed in quick, violent breaths. Staccato, ritual breathing.
The blood ran fast from the creature’s neck; it ran hot into the earth, burning soil and stone as it mingled with the magic of Sal’s breath.
The ground fell away, pulling the buck and the surrounding brambles down into the underworld. Sal shied back, still keeping complex rhythm with her lungs.
Hulokk arose, as he always had, tremendous and horrid and sheathed in dispassionate eyes.
Sal opened her mouth, and no voice came out. She couldn’t find the power to speak. Always before, she’d had the breath of her fellows to draw upon.
She had the sky, though, and all the world’s air. She focused her strength, in the core of her chest, and summoned the night’s wind to fill her lungs.
“I ask you, Hulokk...” she began in the old tongue, but the air fled her chest faster than she could fill it. Her voice failed.
Hulokk stared at her, impassive.
Sal determined to take strength from the earth. The dirt beneath her feet hardened to stone and gave her a conduit to the core of the earth’s magic.
“I ask you, Hulokk, to bring an end...” She collapsed to her knees, unable to finish. No other magic in the world was as strong as that of collective spirit.
“I’m sorry,” she said, in the common tongue.
Hulokk’s gaze swept over her, each eye moving together with its neighbors like grass blown by a winter wind.
“I’ve killed us all, haven’t I?”
He towered above her, impassive. He’d likely end her life, but without the ritual words he wouldn’t freeze the earth and it would be six moons at least before he’d appear when summoned. The snows would melt; the bright monsters would flood into the valley and kill her children.
“Oh vanity, I’ve killed us all.”
One long leg crept toward her, stroked her cheek. The thought of death was no comfort, just then, unlike it so often had been. She would die a failure, lain low by pride. Worse, she would die having brought death to so many who’d relied upon her. She had to survive, at least long enough for the Men to find her. At least long enough to complete the casting and beseech Hulokk for winter.
She felt down into her gut, pulled forth what power she had, and shouted. Birds scattered from trees, and the Men heard her. They were running, now.
A second segmented leg wrapped around her waist, trying to pull her toward the pit and its master. She flung out her arms and called branches to her, lashing herself in place with magic.
She was off the ground, her body stretched between the trees and the god. Maybe her arms would rip free from her shoulders, maybe her torso from her legs.
More insectoid limbs lashed out, ripping at the foliage that held her, and Sal drained every bit of her strength to call the nearby brambles to dig their thorns into her body and hold her in place.
Through it all, Hulokk made no noise. Sal struggled, but Hulokk was no more angry at her resistance than Sal could be at the bowstring when she reloaded her crossbow.
Reka was the first to reach her, war axe held at her side but still in her nightclothes. Hels and the others were shortly behind. When they saw Hulokk, half of the hunters fell into breathing shallow and long, half of them fell into breathing fast and deep.
Young Reka spoke, in the tongue of the gods. “I ask you, Hulokk, to bring an end to summer.”
“I will not.” The thousand voices of god tore through the thicket.
“I ask you, Hulokk, to bring an end to summer.”
“I will not.”
“I ask you, Hulokk, to bring an end to summer.”
“I will.”
Sal released the vines and brambles that held her and dropped to the earth, near to unconsciousness, still cocooned in the long legs of the god. With the casting complete, the thought of her coming oblivion was warmer than the summer air.
But Hulokk let her go. Sal lay empty and exhausted upon the bloody soil. Her vision blurry from pain, she saw the thin legs embrace Reka.
“Take me,” Sal whispered. But she spoke the common tongue.
Every eye on His belly focused on Reka, and Reka screamed wordless as Hulokk dragged her down, after the deer, into the underworld, severing her grasp on life.
* * *
“She who is not forgotten is not yet dead,” Hels said. The five Men held hands in a circle and wept for themselves, for their own loss, while the light of dawn cast soft shadows from the elder trees of the funeral grove.
Sal wept for Reka and she wept for Lelein, and she wept for her own bruised and torn old body and the wounds of loss that would never heal. She wept for all she’d sacrificed, and all the more she would in the future.
Because next year, she would volunteer. Every year until she was unable, by age or by death, she would call an end to the summer and spare others the torment of survival.
While the Men cried, the storm clouds of autumn gathered above them. Winter would come.
Copyright © 2017 Margaret Killjoy
Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website
Margaret Killjoy is a gender-deviant author and editor currently based in the Appalachian mountains. Her most recent book is an anarchist utopia called A Country of Ghosts. Her next book, The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, is forthcoming from Tor.com in 2017. She blogs at birdsbeforethestorm.net.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
COVER ART
“Source,” by Florent Llamas
Florent Llamas is a freelance artist based in France. He specializes in concept design and illustration, with over a hundred works to his credit. See more of his art online at Tumblr, ArtStation, and DeviantArt.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Compilation Copyright © 2017 Firkin Press
This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.