First Hunt

(Note: The following story contains depictions of violence that some readers may find disturbing.)

 

 

They started at last light. The drummers took their places and began a hesitant beating. The five new hunters offered spices to the fire and the forest and sang their desire to leave childhood behind. The drums were joined by cymbal and bell and the new hunters began to sway and shift in the swelling current of the rhythm. Irregular, nervous movements. Jerks and shakes. The village came forward and closed the space around them. With sticks and poles they harried the five, striking stinging blows onto their flanks and legs. The new hunters grew distracted with temper, eyes bulging, nostrils flaring. Amongst them, Mala, red with rage, raised her nose to the wind and released a wild cry. She was joined by four other throats, screaming life at the sky.

They danced then.

They moved in a circle, lifting, bowing, kicking. Breath coming hard. Sand sprayed up and sparks spat from the fire. The drumming grew fat and the rest of the village broke their silence. Shrill, ululating cries rising up, hooves moving on sand. The village became drunk with movement.

The fire was fed and grew full. The flames, scarlet and orange dappled muscles and cheekbones. Shining-eyed dancers whooped and bellowed and released their bodies to motion. The new hunters were forced close to the fire, they circled their course, sheened in sweat. They wriggled and shrank their way between the heat and the whippings. And when the village dancers withdrew, the five unfolded outwards, gulping cold night air.

Outside the circle, a voice broke in song. A hoarse call, followed by a chanted response. A wave of fresh energy rippled through the crowd and again the centre closed.

In and out.

They danced through the night. Tiredness took hold of the initiates. Numbed with repetition. Stumbling, hooves catching, heads drooping. Dizzy with smoke and heat. In the circle Mala sagged and she was caught, close to her tail, by the sting of a hawthorn switch. She bucked and threw her head sideways in frustrated accusation. Eyes the colour of flame stared back at her. They told her what she had already known. She would not escape through anger.

The exhaustion came on in waves. The five new hunters withdrew into themselves. The pain of the whippings and the intensity of the fire became like distant things. They went forward and around. They fell and were raised and went on and on. Mala felt somewhere, a vague awareness that time was leaking away, that it no longer mattered. That nothing mattered any more. She could sleep. She could die. Her body was not hers.

As the dark began to lose to another day, the singing stopped and the drums became quiet and the village was still. Mala and the others were painted. On their faces, their necks and arms. Ash from the fire was smeared in a charcoal belt around their waists. Mala’s father presented her with her bow and a quiver with three arrows. Just three.

They left the village for the forest. Mala rode with Hana, another of the five. He seemed cleansed, beautiful, his breath strong and his eyes bright. And Mala herself never felt so close to the morning. Never knew the everyday boundaries that existed between her and the world could be so absent.

They were led by a party of four seasoned hunters. At their head, Enoch, tall, black hair and black coat, issuing curt orders as they entered the forest. The pre-dawn light filtered to a haze through a thin mist. They moved quietly, a soft thrum in the open space beneath the high trees. Mala felt her breath cool and free in her lungs, felt her hooves bite the ground.

They made their way north, to where sightings of the deer had been made. Mala scanned the ground from habit for tracks and droppings. She took an arrow from her quiver and nocked it. It felt sure. She liked to entertain the conceit that she could divine the flight of her arrow from the moment it slid onto her bowstring. This one felt sure. If she took the quarry today with her first shot, she would find the path of the red arrow open to her. According to the history of her people, the path of the red arrow was the way of seizing. The way of warriors, singers of visions and explorers.

They stalked under beech and birch, skirting thickets and clumps of rock. As they reached the top of a low rise a cry went up:

“Hull! Hull!”

Silhouetted in the fading mist, a pair of antlers lifted, turned, and vanished. And then all was galloping. Lifting leaves and dirt, hurdling fallen branches. Enoch gestured to two of the initiates, Lars and Sura, and they spread left, the thud of their hooves suddenly dull as they passed behind a rocky outcrop. Wide on the right Mala glimpsed Yash, another of Enoch’s hunters. Ahead the pale hindquarters of the stag came into view, bobbing through a thicket of tall ferns and beside her, Hana, nocking an arrow.

They closed. The stag broke. Turning sharply to the left. Mala aimed, a reflex, drew and… she heard Hana loose… and she loosed. Hana’s arrow flew wild into the ground, yards from the stag. Mala’s arrow sailed high. Too high.

The stag turned again, darting right this time. Mala turned with it. She took the second arrow from her quiver. But as she slid it onto the string of her bow a loud wail cut through the thumping blanket of the hunt. From behind the outcrop somewhere. From the direction of Enoch and the others. The wail rose sharply into anguish, then fell, tapering to a sob. Mala looked to Hana. He looked puzzled, disappointed, afraid. Enoch appeared from behind the outcrop. He was backing away from something, firing arrow after arrow with a nervous mechanical persistence. Sura came past him at a gallop, firing behind her. She was running from something. Running away? How could this be?

And then they saw it, she and Hana. An enormous thing. More than Hana’s height and almost as broad again. It came around the face of the rock with an apelike gait. Moving too fast. Impossibly fast. Its arms and its chest clogged with muscle. A flat rounded head lowered between raised shoulder blades. Arrows bounced timidly off the rubber of its flesh. A mere ripple and it was on Enoch. Massive hands, one around his upper torso, one around his back. It folded him in two like an afterthought. Then pivoting, swinging the crumpled form, it hurled Enoch’s lifeless body into Sura in a motion that was barely a blur. The force lifted Sura through the air. She collided with the trunk of an oak at grotesque speed and seemed fixed there for a moment, before collapsing, broken. She lay still and tangled at the base of the tree, limbs arranged at obscene angles.

Mala was frozen in place. What form of being could do that to a centaur? Beside her, Hana’s urine streamed out onto the forest floor. He made a low whine.

“Baelboloch,” he said.

The snouted head raised and turned to them. Teeth and black eyes.

Baelboloch. No, it could not be that. Cursed forest spirit. Just a story. Just a scary story, for keeping children out of the forest. Not real.

“It’ll kill everyone in the village,” Hana whispered. There was no doubt in his voice.

Yash rode up from behind them, bow raised.

“Run,” he ordered. “Get out of here.” He galloped towards the thing, loosing an arrow. Mala lifted her second arrow and released it. It caught the creature’s arm, dropping away uselessly. No mark. No reaction. Mala’s mind lurched in desperation. Wasn’t there something? She groped for stories, for songs, anything. Wait! What was the rhyme? Children’s thing, forbidden, human thing. No. Useless… Innocent something blood? Vanish forever?

No. She remembered. It was banish. The words sang within her:

Banish forever,
Baelboloch’s demand,
When blood of the innocent,
Is blood of the dammed.

That was it, wasn’t it? But pitiful! What use was it? And now there was no more time.

Yash unleashed another arrow defiantly. The creature turned sluggishly to observe him. There was a moment then, that seemed missing. Rounded nailless fingers sprouting from huge black-brown hands gathered around Yash’s head. One twist plucked it away like a fruit. Mala was hit by a wave of sick resignation and knew that she was going to die. Her mind cleared. Vividly aware of the smell of her own sweat, she made peace with the cruelty of existence and the minuteness of her place in it.

And that was when the future leant down and touched her. A shiver in eternity.

And she knew. Knew the way.

Maybe not just a silly rhyme. She looked to Hana. He looked at her. She lifted her chin and allowed the invitation to dwell in her eyes. But Hana’s eyes remained absent of recognition. Mala smiled, a sad smile. She took her third arrow from her quiver. She gripped it tightly by the shaft, close to the tip, and stabbed it mechanically into the inside of her forearm. Her blood came quickly. She held the arrowhead against her skin, and let the blood run across it. Hana gazed vacantly at her actions. Mala pulled her blade from its sheath under her arm. She calmly lifted it to Hana’s neck and brought it across his throat. He gave her a sorrowful, puzzled look, his eyes rolled back in his head. Blood jetted from his open throat. Gurgling, he fell to the ground. Mala dropped her knife beside his body.

She looked up. The Baelboloch was hunched over Yash’s headless corpse. It saw her. It leant forward and placed both hands on the floor of the forest. Opening its mouth, it delivered a sick roaring challenge of hunger and rage. Mala nocked the arrow coated in her uncongealed blood. Blood of the innocent. Blood of the damned. She lifted her bow with an odd, languid certainty. She drew, feeling for a whisper of time the taut beautiful tension of the bowstring. Her fingers released. The arrow flew straight. It entered the creature’s mouth and pierced the back of its throat and came to rest in its skull. The Baelboloch stiffened in confusion. It tried to move and found it couldn’t. A shudder passed through it. Its back arced over the ground, it spasmed and fell to sitting. It coughed. Another wave passed through it and its form began to dissolve. Dirty black smoke rose in clouds. A tarry sludge oozed out of it into the earth. In the space of a moment all that remained was an oily stain on the leaves of the forest floor.

She stood in the silence of the trees. A fragile light cradled the world. Somewhere in the distance, she heard the bark of crows. Mala walked away from the village, towards the cities of men. She picked her path so that she would remain out of sight, treading softly through the shadows of dawn.

First Hunt © 2017 Fergus Deffely