Skillful Death (9 page)

T
HE
BRIGHT
LIGHT
OF
afternoon stabbed Constantine’s eyes as he ran from the Midwife’s shack. He hunched over, loping on hands and feet because running upright required too much balance and caused too much pain. For several minutes he simply moved away, not choosing any particular direction. When he reached a big colony of ostrich ferns, the boy collapsed under the bright green foliage. Here, the air was moist and soothing. The ferns protected him from the evil sunlight.
 

Constantine draped an arm across his eyes and winced at the pain from his temple. He wondered, not for the first time, if fleas could get caught in a spider web. From his hours watching spiders spin their webs and eat their prey, he’d never seen one catch a flea. And as far as he could tell, placing a flea onto a spider web by hand was impossible. When he was smaller, even smaller than he felt under those ferns, he used to climb to the top of the big oak at the top of the hill. He’d stay there until night so he could look at the stars. Those little white dots looked like so many fleas caught in spider webs up in the sky. The same white dots swam before his closed eyes as he drifted back to sleep under the ferns.

When the wind changed direction, it brought sounds from the festival to wake him. Constantine pushed himself to his feet and found he could stand with only minimal swaying and a bearable pulsing throb in his head. He put one naked foot in front of the other and wound his way through the woods. The sun was making its way towards the horizon, and long shafts of light cut slow angles through the forest. Constantine wound towards the outcrop of rock. In the cave under the stone, on a dry ledge, he’d hidden several of his suits. He had also stashed another sharp piece of flint. It wasn’t as hard or long as the one the blond boy had taken from him, but it was better than nothing. He picked through his suits until he found the one he wanted.

Today, he dressed in the finest. The back and arms came from a summer wolf’s fur—silver and brown. The chest was the dappled skin of a fawn. His leggings were marked by the dorsal stripes of donkey hide. Constantine pulled on his suit and donned the wolf’s fur hood, walking towards the Harvest Festival.

When the general din of the voices resolved into individual words, Constantine turned north and walked until he was amongst the bamboo. The sharp leaves and splintered stalks of bamboo bordered the town on all sides. Everyone knew not to venture too deep into the thick green weeds. At least once a year, they lost someone to the bamboo. The men said that the roots of the bamboo gave off a smell that would make you lose your sense of direction. The women claimed that ghosts roamed through the stalks; ghosts who would drive you mad. Everyone agreed that those lost in the bamboo would eventually be eaten by rats.

Constantine only penetrated a few paces into the bamboo. Moving silently, he stayed hidden by the bamboo leaves as he paralleled the festival. He was close enough to the edge so that he could see the running forms of children enjoying the activities. The adults grouped in the shade of the walnut trees, exchanging wares for guarantees of service.

When he got close enough to the playing children to make out their faces, Constantine paused and crouched. Most of the children were less than twenty paces away. Constantine pulled his second-best flint blade from his pocket and passed it from hand to hand as he watched. He looked for the blond-haired boy.

The town held their Harvest Festival on the side of a hill near at the outskirts of their population. People talked about moving the festival to the center of town so people wouldn’t need to haul their goods so far. Inertia proved stronger than the complaints. Besides, the hillside was very pretty. At the top, sturdy walnut trees capped the hill. This was another source of contention amongst those who hated the location of the festival. The bed of walnut leaves beneath the trees was poisonous for the horses. They said that if a horse was led through those leaves, it would simply walk out of its hooves. Down the side of the hill, pretty maples spread out—big ones near the top, and smaller ones down near the bamboo—casting everything in a beautiful green glow. These trees ran with sap all year round. During the festival, the adolescents would cart bucket after bucket of maple sap to the top of the hill. There, it was boiled and reduced until thick enough to make candy.

This day, a sweet breeze blew through the maple leaves. It made the light sparkle on the children’s faces.

Most of the young boys ran in a tight clump, kicking a ball in between the trunks of the scrawny maples. They kicked up tiny clouds of dry maple leaves with their dirty summer shoes. The older boys hung from branches of the walnut trees. Some picked the sticky green husks, but most tried to eavesdrop of the conversations of their parents. The girls were scattered in groups of two or three, and busied themselves with activities. Some girls worked on crafts, some played games, and others sang songs and braided hair. Constantine had never been this close to such a large group of people. His breathing slowed and his shoulders hunched as he watched.

When he finally saw the blond boy it was like suddenly spotting a snake you almost stepped on. He’d been there the whole time, kicking the ball with the other boys. Constantine didn’t recognize his own suit from a distance. The plump blond boy, covered from head to toe in tight fur, looked like a big friendly dog romping with the kids as they played. Then, with a spin, he suddenly looked mean and fierce. Constantine admired his own suit as he watched the boy move.

He readied himself. As soon as the boy got close enough, Constantine planned to burst from the bamboo with his second-best flint blade raised. The group of boys weaved and turned, like an earthbound flock of birds. Constantine grew impatient and the lump on his head throbbed every time the children screamed with delight.

He rose to his feet and inched towards the edge of the bamboo. A group of girls, way up near the walnut grove, screamed and pointed in Constantine’s direction. He knew the boys would soon look his way as well, ruining his surprise attack. He stepped fast towards the maples where the boys played.

As Constantine cleared the bamboo, a flash of amber to his left drew his eye. His jaw dropped open as he saw the speed with which the creature to his left moved. It was as thick as a horse, but not as tall. It had the body and face of a cat, but framing its face was a huge mane of auburn hair.
 

Constantine sprinted after the cat, which sprinted towards the pack of boys.

As the girls continued to scream, the rest of the crowd all seemed to spot the cat at the same time. The boys stopped running, frozen in their tracks as the cat closed the distance. Up on the hill, some men grabbed whatever could serve as a weapon and came fast. Other men and women boosted the young and old up into low branches so they could climb to safety. The majority of people just stood, stunned.

The blond boy, wearing the suit of a predator, moved to the front of his group and raised his arms like a bear. Constantine accelerated as the big cat slowed. The cat slowed to a stalk and hunched its shoulders, preparing to leap at the blond boy.
 

The boy stood his ground. The men running down the hill meant to scare the cat away. Constantine didn’t even consider the safety of the group, or self-preservation. He meant to kill that cat simply because he wanted its skin.
 

The enormous cat seemed to make up its mind and wiggled as it gathered its legs underneath itself. Constantine transferred the flint to his left hand and jumped over the tufted tail. His feet landed on the cat’s haunches and he meant to throw himself forward, plunge his flint into all that hair, and find its neck.
 

Constantine sprung forward. He raised his flint-hand high, ready to strike. His other hand reached forward to grab the mane. But the cat flipped. It moved in a way Constantine couldn’t fathom. It moved so fast that Constantine’s sharp eyes couldn’t track it. In defiance of inertia and gravity, the cat flipped over. Instead of landing on its back, Constantine found himself falling towards its snarling jaws. The cat flipped so fast it seemed to turn inside out instead of spinning. Its giant paws, as big as the feet of draft horse, opened wide. Its yellow claws, so sharp at the ends that they were translucent, twinkled in the dappled sunlight filtering through the maple canopy.

Constantine fell into the cat’s embrace. Its strong arms wrapped around his torso and he felt the claws clutching his back. His flint couldn’t reach the cat’s neck, but he brought it down into the bunched meat of the cat’s shoulder, and he stabbed and pulled. That cat’s teeth sunk into Constantine’s wolf-skin cap. As Constantine’s flint tore a ragged gash in the cat’s shoulder, the cat screamed. The beast swung its head off to the side, gnashing its teeth a hair away from Constantine’s arm.

The cat’s hind legs tucked in under Constantine’s hips and it pushed, kicking him away.

Constantine found himself flying through the air again. This time, he flew away from the giant cat. He saw the men pulling to a stop near the blond boy. Two men grabbed the boy by his raised bear arms and dragged him backwards. The cat flipped back to its feet and found itself facing a growing wall of men. Each man held a stick, or rock, or hunk of metal. The men stood in a line and yelled at the cat. It roared its reply. The force of the sound drove the men back a half step. Constantine rolled as he hit the ground, found his feet, and produced his own roar as he ran at the cat again. He flipped his flint to his right hand and ran straight for the cat’s face, meaning to gouge out one of its amber eyes.

The cat shrank from Constantine’s attack. It turned away from the men and snarled at the boy. Blood spurted from the cat’s shoulder and ran down its leg. A C-shaped wound cut loose a chunk of skin and muscle.

Constantine’s swing carved the air. The cat spun and ran before the boy’s flint could find flesh. Constantine ran after the cat, but it accelerated away from the boy, still gaining speed as it slipped into the bamboo leaves and disappeared. Patches of the cat’s blood stained the blanket of maple leaves on the ground. The only sign of the cat in the bamboo was a splotch of its blood on a stalk near the edge.

Constantine meant to chase the big cat, to track it by its spilled blood and catch it when it stopped to tend to its wound. With luck, he figured he could drive it until it was exhausted, and then he could cut it again.

The crowd watched the little growling boy run towards the bamboo and held their breath. Some expected the cat would return and devour the little boy with a single bite. Others, those who’d heard stories of a half-animal boy who roamed the woods, figured Constantine would morph back into some animal form and disappear.

Across the silver fur on the boy’s back, eight red slashes marked where the cat’s claws had cut through his suit. They angled upwards and nearly met in the center, like four arrows pointing up at the boy’s head.

Perhaps the excitement and blood-loss overwhelmed the boy, or perhaps his concussion from the day before caught up with him. Before he reached the bamboo, Constantine dropped to his knees. The flint fell from his hand and he collapsed forward. His face landed in a paw print left in soft mud by the fleeing cat.

Three men ran to Constantine: a blacksmith, a pig-farmer, and the man who picked apples for the widow on the Sapockin Road. The blacksmith flipped Constantine over and the pig-farmer gasped.

Constantine’s face was black with mud except where the paw print had spared it. His face was marked with the paw of the lion.

B
IRDSONG
MET
HIS
EARS
. He kept his eyes shut.

Constantine woke completely disoriented. This was the third time in a row that he was waking up to a complete mystery, and he was growing rather tired of it. He’d woken in a daze after the blond-haired boy bashed his skull with a rock, and then he’d woken in a pot of frigid water, being dunked by the Midwife. Now, he was stretched out on a soft bed with fire pulsing in his back and a tight, throbbing pressure behind his right eye.

“Is he awake?” he heard a woman’s voice ask.

He kept his eyes shut.

Someone adjusted a blanket stretched over him and he realized that yet another one of his suits had been stolen from him.

“We’ll give him some more time to rest. Poor thing,” a different woman’s voice said.

He heard the footfalls of two people retreating.

When he was sure they’d left. Constantine opened his eyes. He saw the moving shadows of sunrise against the walls of a white tent. The tent had three beds in it, but he was the only occupant. He slipped from under the blankets and moved on bare feet to the tent wall to listen. He heard voices moving away, towards the sunlight, so he edged to the other side of the tent and lifted the flap.