by Joseph Lallo
She was already loudly working her way through the meal as though it was her first in days. He wasted no time in digging into his own as well, delighting in the all-too-rare luxury of a meal that would last for more than two bites.
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Not a word was exchanged between them until the last speck of meat was consumed. With hunger as ravenous as theirs, it did not take the two malthropes long to extract every morsel, down to the marrow in the bones. The female finished first, licking her chops as she tossed the last bone aside after she was certain it was stripped bare. Satisfied, she casually clawed at the icy earth until she’d dug a shallow hole, then gathered the bones and dropped them inside. He watched as she did so, imitating her behavior until his own bones had been buried, the earth brushed smooth over them.
Having a meal in one’s stomach, even a meager one, has a way of pacifying one’s temper and easing tension. The raw hostility wasn’t entirely gone from the female’s body language, but it was softened considerably. She edged a bit closer to the fire, stretching her favored leg out with a few hisses of pain.
“You say you can help me with my leg. What is it you can do?” she asked.
“Let me look at it,” he said, standing and pacing around the fire.
She eyed him with suspicion, tensing her muscles as he approached in case she had to flee suddenly. He knelt beside the limb and tugged at the multiple layers of leggings.
“Eh!” she interjected, slapping his hands away. “Do not touch my clothes. If you need to see something you cannot, you will ask me, and I will decide if you see it.”
She eased the hem of the layers of robes and trousers up a calculated amount, revealing terrible swelling beginning just above her ankle. He reached for it, but again she slapped his hand away.
“What did I say to you? There is no touching!”
“I need to feel the bone.”
“This you will not do. It is hurting bad enough without your touching.”
“Fine. But if we don't do something, it is definitely going to break. And soon. Your leg doesn’t even look straight.”
“And this is what you can do? Tell me it will break? This does not help me!”
“We need to make a splint. I’ll find some straight branches. You stay here. Try not to move it.”
He moved swiftly into the forest to gather two of the strongest, straightest lengths of wood he could find. It was a good feeling, a familiar feeling, to be doing something for someone else. In the back of his mind, he had been fearing the day he would find food and shelter enough to make life less than a struggle. The endless task of scrounging up enough food to eat, of finding a place away from the wind to sleep, and of keeping a vigilant eye open for bounty hunters had kept his mind from other things. It kept him from thinking about what he had done, and who he had lost. The forest might well have given him food and shelter too quickly to keep the darkness from settling in his thoughts. Now, though, he had a task, and he threw himself into it gratefully. Stout but smooth branches were selected, along with a few oddly-shaped crooks and forks that had useful curves.
When he was satisfied, he returned to find his would-be teacher sitting just beside the pack of supplies he'd stolen. A hasty attempt had been made to hide the fact that she had clearly been rummaging through it.
“What were you doing?” he asked, the gathered wood held awkwardly under his arm.
She opened her mouth, the telltale hesitation of a forthcoming lie dangling in the air for a moment. When no suitable reply formed itself, she instead pointed to the branches. “Why is it that you need bits of wood?”
“I told you, I need to make a splint. Do you know what a splint is?”
“No, I do not know what this is!” she snapped. “Why would I know what this is?”
“Your leg is hurt. It is weak. A splint is a way to keep it straight and strong.”
He knelt beside the pack to retrieve his rope. While he was at it, he carefully tallied the other contents. The meager remnants of the supplies he’d stolen were clearly stirred up by a haphazard search, but it would seem that nothing had been taken. Besides the rope, there was an empty leather water flask, a poorly-kept knife that he had been meaning to sharpen, and the remains of a pair of boots that he’d gnawed much of the leather from when food was especially scarce. He looked to the female. She looked back with a subtle look of defiance, as though daring him to accuse her of something.
“Straighten your leg. Hold it like it would be if you were standing,” he instructed, measuring two of the longest, flattest pieces branches against the afflicted limb.
“What are you going to do?”
“I am going to tie these pieces of wood tight against your leg, to keep it straight, and—”
“You will not do this thing!” she cried, shoving him away. “I am having difficulty to walk on it, and you want to tie wood to it?”
“I need to do it to help you.”
“How do I know this? Maybe you do it to hurt me, to keep me slow.”
“Trust me, I know how to help your leg.”
“Trust you? You do not have a tail. A malthrope with no tail most times is a dead malthrope. It is not a malthrope who makes good choices. You cannot keep your tail, but you want me to trust you with my leg? No. Do something else,” she said firmly, arms crossed.
He sighed and furrowed his brow in thought. “I suppose I can make a crutch.”
“A crutch . . .” she said vaguely, her eyes dancing slightly in the act of recollection. They brightened when she found the word. “For under my arm, yes? For helping me to walk?”
“Yes.”
“Do this instead.”
“It won’t help very much.”
“Do this instead,” she repeated with a hard look.
Not in the mood to argue, he selected one of the longer bits of wood and instructed her to lay back, marking where the thin, carefully selected branch reached her underarm. A line scratched with his claw in the appropriate place, he found a rock to prop the branch against.
“I don’t understand why you haven’t done this for yourself,” he said, lining up the mark with the rock. “It is simple to do.”
“No. Hunting? Tracking? These things are simple to do.”
“Not if you never had a chance to practice them.”
“Then this is my answer as well.”
“That is fair, I suppose.” He stood and thrust his heel at the raised end of the branch. Two more such blows were enough to roughly break the green wood near the line. He dug out the dull knife and began scratching at the damaged fibers. “You speak very strangely. Do you not speak much?”
“I do not speak Tressor language much. Tressor is not my home. Not for long. A year. Two, maybe. I speak Crich.”
“I don’t know that language. Where did you come from?”
“I come from Vulcrest. No. When I was born it was Vulcrest. It is not Vulcrest now. Now it is part of . . . it is with . . . what is it, the name for when many places become one place? For war?”
“Empire? You come from the Nameless Empire?” he said, stopping in the middle of a complex bit of lashing to stare distrustfully at her.
“Empire? It is not the word I was thinking, but it is close enough. This is a problem?”
“We are at war with the Nameless Empire!”
“We are not at war with anyone. The men are at war. Always they make war. It is nothing for a malthrope to worry about.”
He stared at her for a bit longer. It had never once occurred to him that something that was a worry for the other slaves might not have been a worry for him.
She continued. “Men draw lines on the ground, kill you for crossing them. Malthropes, we do not do this.”
He went back to work. “Why did you come here?”
“The war is why. Part of why. Things are bad for us, for malthropes, in the north places, the Empire. Men hunt us. When there was war, I thought, ‘South there are men who are enemies of these men. Maybe they do not hunt th
e malthropes.’ Stupid thoughts. They hunt us here. Everywhere.”
“Well, then why did you stay?”
“If it is the same here as there, why go back? Only it is not the same here as there. Here it is warmer. In the Great Forest, there is food, much more food, and much easier to find than in the Empire. So I stay. What about you? Why do you know nothing?”
“I know plenty of things.”
“Nothing you need to know.”
“Where I come from, I needed to know things like this,” he said, shaking the now-completed crutch. It was a simple thing, just one of the lighter of the branches he’d retrieved with a curved piece of wood lashed across the top to give the arm a place to rest. He’d done his best to carve away any jagged edges. “And it would seem that you need it, too. Here, give me your hand.”
She looked distrustfully at the offered hand, but grasped it after a moment and allowed herself to be hauled up, relying entirely on her one healthy leg. He tucked the crutch under her arm. In a series of short, ginger attempts, she put her weight on it. When she released his hand, she eyed her own leg critically, as though consulting it for an opinion.
“It helps. Some,” she allowed. She tipped her head to the side, reassessing him. “What is your name?”
The corners of his mouth drooped. He opened his mouth to answer, but hesitated.
“It is not hard,” she said with a shake of her head. She placed a hand on her chest. “I am Sorrel. You are . . . ?”
“I . . . I don’t think I really have a name.”
“Did no one talk to you ever?”
“I’ve been spoken to.”
“Then what is it that they called you?”
“Well . . . some of them called me Mally.”
As soon as the word left his mouth, she nearly knocked him to the ground with a slap across the face.
“What was that for!?”
“This is not a name! This is a word you will not say!” she cried.
“Why?”
“It is a word they use. It is a word they use for us.” Her voice was shaking with emotion. “It is not a good word. It is a word men use when they tell other men about bad things that a malthrope does. It is a bad word.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” he said quietly, his mind turning over all the slaves and handlers who had called him by that name.
“I am only here for two years and I know this. Every malthrope in Tressor knows this. How do you not know this?”
“I’ve never met another malthrope.”
“That is foolish. You have a mother, a father.”
“My mother died when I was very young. And I don’t remember anything about my father. I was raised by a . . . I was raised by humans.”
Sorrel looked at him and for a moment the hardness in her features faltered. There was a flash of pity in her eyes. “This . . . this explains much.” She shook herself, willing her protective layer of defiant independence back into place. “It is late. The fire has burned too long. I will go now. Tomorrow, I will find you. We will begin this.”
“You have a safe place to sleep?”
“I do. You do not. Do not follow me or the deal is no more. Understand, er . . .” she began, gesturing vaguely for a few moments while she fished for the word. Finally, she abandoned the search. “Teyn?”
“What does Teyn mean?”
“It is like . . . a dead thing that does not leave. Or something that is there, but is not.”
“A spirit?”
“It is close enough.”
“Why would you call me Teyn?”
“I said before. You have no tail. Dead malthropes have no tails. If you walk around without one, you are a teyn. Now go find someplace to sleep, Teyn. Tomorrow I will find you. We will begin.”
She took a few unsteady steps with her new crutch, easing into the pain of her leg and the awkwardness of her aid. As she left the fading light of the fire, her steps quickened and she was gone. With little recourse, the creature she'd dubbed Teyn scooped the loose, sandy soil over the flames until they were extinguished and found a dense stand of trees he hoped would take the edge from the wind and keep him from prying eyes.
He huddled against the driving breeze, alone with his thoughts again. It was astounding. He'd only been with Sorrel for an hour or so, but already her absence burned at him. A part of it, a large part, was the simple comfort in not being alone. A few weeks on the run hadn't been enough to wipe away years of never being without the smell and sound of familiar creatures. Even when the other slaves had all hated him, there was something about knowing that they were there, that they were always there, that gave his mind a foundation. And, of course, there had been Ben . . .
No. Not that thought. He sifted his mind for anything else to think of. Sometimes the emptiness of forgetting someone is preferable to the pain of remembering them.
Pushing the old man out of his thoughts before the tears could start flowing again. Pushing harder when the fear and shame of losing control began to rise up, he focused on perhaps the only thing that had a chance of seizing his mind completely. Sorrel was a malthrope. In all of the years on the plantation, in the back of his mind, he had wondered what it would be like to meet one of his own. He had imagined meeting a creature who wouldn't hate him on sight, a creature who didn't need him to prove himself worthy. Perhaps most important of all, a creature who would finally be able to show him what a malthrope really was. All he knew about his own kind was what the others had spoken of in their stories.
Sorrel hadn't lived her life trying to do the job of a human. She was what she was meant to be. She was what he would have been if not for the plantation. She had the answers to a thousand questions he had never been able to ask. He held tight to these thoughts until, finally, sleep took him.
Chapter 14
“Eh. Teyn. Why do you sleep still?” came a hushed voice, accompanied by a rough nudge with a crutch.
He rolled aside, fighting his eyes open. Through the whole night the steady breeze hadn’t once relented, and without a fire or proper clothes, sleep had been anything but deep. The sun had yet to rise, the sky a deep violet to the east and a star-speckled black elsewhere. If not for the sharpness of his eyes, there probably wouldn’t have been light enough to see his new tutor. As it was, he was treated to a view her standing in the dim light, most of her weight leaning on the crutch and the healthy leg, and her many layers of clothing keeping the cold at bay. She did not appear to be the least bit weary.
“It isn’t even dawn,” he grumbled muzzily.
“Of course it is not dawn. Dawn is when animals feed. You need to be ready by dawn,” she stated, her tone indicating it should have been obvious.
He sluggishly climbed to his feet, leaning heavily on the tree to do so.
“You are still tired. You should not sleep on the side of the trees with the mountain,” she said.
“Why?”
“On these mountains—on all mountains I have found, the wind comes down from the top. If you can see the mountaintop, you will have bad sleep. You did not know this? You did not notice this?”
He shook his head slowly. She tipped hers to the side and sniffed, a slight frown on her face.
“Hungry days ahead,” she said. “Fine. We start at the beginning. You have three ways of finding things to eat. You can see, you can smell, you can hear.”
“What about taste and touch?”
“You are finding things to eat. If you can taste and touch, finding is over. So you can see, smell, and hear. Which is most important?”
“Sight, vision.”
“No!”
“Hearing?”
“No! No, no, no . . .” She shook her head and put her hand to her eyes. “Smell! Always smell! See and you know what is in front of you. Hear and you know what is all around you. Smell and you know what is all around you, where it came from, where it went to, how long it was here, if it was afraid, what it was eating, if it was sick, everything you need to know.”
“You can tell all of that from smell?”
“Yes! Why do you think you have a nose at the front of your head,” she asked, tapping his nose with her finger. “It is because smell comes before the rest.”
“Does that mean sight is the second most important?”
“No, next you hear.”
“But your eyes are in front of your ears.”
She stared at him flatly for a moment. “Learn first, Teyn, then think. Smell comes before hear, learn comes before think. Now, use your nose. What does it tell you?”
He sniffed the air, but before he could open his mouth to answer, she was reprimanding him.
“No, no, no!” she corrected, taking an unsteady step closer.
“What?”
“Are you a child? You do not smell like that. Like this. Watch,” she said. She drew in a long breath, pulling the air in slowly. “Long-slow. This tells you much. All that is around you. All there is to smell. Long-slow first, always. After long-slow, short-fast.” She sniffed the air three times. “Short-fast is little pieces. The pieces are different. You move your head, short-fast. You move your head again, short-fast. Maybe this smell is stronger here, maybe it is weaker there. You know that the thing that makes the smell is moving, or maybe not. Maybe the air is moving. You wait, and you test again. Understand? Long-slow to find something to follow. Short-fast to follow it. Now you.”
Somewhat doubtful that it was truly possible to smell incorrectly, the one she called Teyn nonetheless did as he was instructed. He breathed in long and slow, letting the scents of the thin forest fill his nose. There was the crisp, clean scent of frost, the potent smell of pine needles, the warm scent of Sorrel, and dozens of scents he couldn't identify. One of them, though, stood out above the rest.
“I smell the rabbits from yesterday.”
“Of course you do. Now short-fast. Where are they?”
He sampled the air as she had, three quick sniffs with the slightest of an adjustment of his head, then a few more with his head turned aside. The subtle differences from one tiny taste to the next began to form themselves in his mind. There was more to tracking than having a sensitive nose. Simply being able to detect those things that other creatures could not was only a tool, and, like all tools, it was only valuable to those who knew how to use it. Every breath was like listening to a noisy crowd mingling on the floor of a vast meeting hall. Hearing every voice was simple. Tracking was the art of following a single conversation while a thousand others echoed and droned around it. He tried to focus on the tantalizing thread of a scent, twisting his head and testing the air again and again in search of it. There was undeniably a pattern, but it was elusive, suddenly weaker where it should be stronger, or twisting back on itself rather than leading anywhere. He slowly followed it as best he could for a minute or two before Sorrel, awkwardly thumping along behind with her crutch, growled in frustration.
