The Beast Is an Animal

by Peternelle van Arsdale

  “No need,” Mistress Argyll said, and with a tone that caused Pawl to drop the bags again.

  Alys walked up to Pawl then, tugged on his sleeve, pulling him down so she could talk into his ear. She felt his red hair brush her cheeks, and her lips touched his red and white beard, which was so much softer than she’d thought it would be. “Take me with you to the Lakes, Pawl. Please.” Alys said it louder this time, making sure that he heard her, and the strength it took her to say the words stung her eyes and she realized she was crying again.

  “Oh child,” Pawl said, and he stood back up, dropped a gentle hand on her shoulder. He looked around him then, and Alys did too, and she wondered why he didn’t pick her up and put her in the wagon, why they didn’t leave. He’d told the Defaiders about the other children. And now they could go, couldn’t they? Because Alys couldn’t stay here. She wouldn’t.

  Suddenly the black and white men were back, and the black and white ladies, and Mistress Argyll’s hand was on her other shoulder and Alys was farther away from Pawl than she had been before. She cried out to him, and she saw him talking to the High Elder, looking at Alys, talking to the High Elder some more. She saw the High Elder shaking his head, and then they were all around Pawl, and Pawl was looking around him but it was as if all that black and white were swallowing him whole and then he was in his wagon. And then Pawl’s wagon was moving away, and Pawl was looking back at her and he looked so sad but hopeless and why was he so hopeless and why couldn’t he take her, and Alys cried out to him one more time.

  She heard Mistress Argyll’s voice above her. “Crying won’t help, so no more tears now, child.”

  And so she stopped crying, and that was the first lesson Alys learned in Defaid. The first of many.

  In the hours that followed, this is what happened: Mistress Argyll introduced Alys to a steel-haired man named Brother Argyll. Mistress Argyll told Alys that she was to call them Mother and Father. Mother told Alys to eat her dinner. Father showed Alys where to put her clothes. Mother told Alys to wash and to put on her nightdress. Father pointed Alys to the bed where she was to slide herself between linen sheets. And then Alys lay in the dark, the door closed between her and these strange parents, the silence of night falling around her and this village full of strange people.

  Alys felt chilled and alone. Exposed and afraid. It was only in that still, black moment that she remembered: She’d left Mam’s coat in Pawl’s wagon.

  The night was good.

  The sisters left their mountain shack. They didn’t need it anymore, its straw that smelled of goat. Its hearth where meals had been cooked. When they ate such things.

  That was long ago. When they had a mother. Before.

  They felt The Beast looking at them. Observing. They dared It to interfere with them. It did not. They looked back at It, unafraid. It bared Its long fangs at them. They hissed back.

  They nested in the trees. They were comfortable there, perched like owls. There would be no more hearths or homes for them. And where there were hearths and homes—and mothers and fathers, and people who feared what lay beyond their doors in the dark, dark fforest—that is where the sisters would watch. And wait.

  And they would float, and they would hide. They would climb and they would crawl. They would slip in the shadows and beckon in dreams.

  The sisters wouldn’t be caught. Never that. They would be careful now. The villages would be on guard against them. The sisters would have to be like the wolves. Like The Beast. Keep to the fforest. Hunt only at night.

  The night was good. It was where the fear grew. And the sisters would feed on the fear, and they would never, never be hungry.

  FIVE

  Alys moved through the following days doing what she knew she was supposed to do, but alternated between feeling nothing and feeling too much. She wanted to sleep and yet she hated to sleep. Each time she opened her eyes to the as yet unfamiliar walls around her, it wasn’t so much a shock as a reminder that her home was gone. That Mam and Dad were gone. That Mam’s hands would no longer smooth her hair or drop her nightshift over her head or set her milky tea in front of her in the morning.

  Enid, Madog, and the other Gwenith children arrived in Defaid just as Alys had last seen them—Enid and Madog awake, and all the rest sleeping. The sleeping children were laid out in wagon after wagon. It had taken some time for the Defaid men to return with them, and Mother had told Alys it was because the men had to dig graves and bury all the bodies first. Mother was blunt that way. Mother said there were so many bodies that they buried families together, instead of digging a separate hole for each person. Alys wanted to be comforted by this. She wanted to imagine Mam and Dad asleep together. But all she could picture were the shells she’d last seen of them. The image came back to her over and over. Unbidden and unwanted. She’d be peeling carrots for Mother and would remember peeling carrots for Mam. But instead of picturing Mam’s face alive, she pictured it as she’d last seen it. She’d have to shake herself to make it go away. Mother looked at Alys at those times, eyes fixed and curious, and Alys couldn’t bear to look back. There was something about the way Mother looked at her—it wasn’t like other people. Alys felt Mother’s eyes like fingers on her skin. Under her skin.

  When the Gwenith children first arrived, Mother and some of the other village women were asked how best to wake them, as if any of them had seen such a thing before. Then Enid told the women how Alys had done it with her, swift and harsh, but effective. So that’s what the women did—from oldest teenagers to youngest babies, the children were all doused with cold water and woke up sputtering to a town they’d never seen before.

  The Gwenith children with siblings did best adjusting to the strangeness and new orphanhood of their lives. The children with no brothers or sisters walked around a bit like ghosts. Alys was an only child herself, and she wondered if that was how she appeared to the others. She didn’t think so, though. Because Alys had made a decision for herself. She promised herself that someday, she wouldn’t live in this village anymore. It wasn’t her home and no amount of telling her it was could make it so. Someday, she’d find her way to the Lakes and she’d live in a caravan, and that would be her home. In a caravan there would be no reminders of what she’d lost. There would be no house that wasn’t really her house. No parents who weren’t really her parents.

  For the first few weeks, the older Gwenith children were kept in the meetinghouse and the schoolhouse. The babies and the youngest children were divided among the families in town. Some of the families wished to keep the children they were given, and those children were told the same that Alys had been told—to call these new people Mother and Father, Sister and Brother. Others of the children were told that this arrangement was only temporary.

  Defaid had no intention of keeping all these children—fifty new mouths to feed was more than even such a prosperous farm and shepherding town could be expected to take in. So they sent fast riders to the villages of Pysgod, which hugged the river to the north, and Tarren, which clung to the base of the mountains in the northwest, telling them what had transpired and asking them to take on some of the burden of caring for these orphans. But there were no takers, and the explanation for that was obvious to all. If a village didn’t have to take in a load of orphans who’d been exposed to something awful, well then why on Byd would they want to?

  It was then that the Gwenith children were permanently divided up among the Defaiders, siblings mostly kept together. Alys learned all of this from Mother, with whom she spent most of her time. Alys had hoped to see more of her friend Gaenor, but Gaenor and her sisters and brother had been sent off with a family clear on the other side of town. And they had each other, after all, whereas Alys had only herself.

  Except for the discomfiting way that Mother looked at her, Mother wasn’t such bad company. Alys had grown to appreciate how she didn’t seem to have other adults’ way of talking differently around children. She talked to Alys the same as she talked to anyone
. And Alys had grown used to Mother’s long silences and seeming coldness, too. At first Alys had thought Mother was angry with her all the time, but then it struck her that this was simply Mother’s way. Father was quiet, too, but not unkind. He was a carpenter and gone most of the day, but when he returned for dinner and then evening supper he nodded to Alys in a way that made Alys feel that he was happy to see her, even though his face never betrayed it.

  Still, Alys did not grow so used to Mother and Father that she was ever tempted to break her promise to Pawl. She spoke not a word about the soul eaters, not even when the village women gathered around Mother’s table with their tea and oat cakes and talked about the soul eaters as if they actually knew what they were and what they’d done. That was one thing that Pawl was wrong about. He’d made it seem as if the Defaiders were too fine and holy to talk about evil things such as soul eaters. But there was a kind of glee that they took in it, Alys noticed. Their faces glowed, they warmed to the task. Wolves and soul eaters, they said to each other around Mother’s table. All descending on one town like that? It was the work of The Beast. And then they all shuddered and patted their hearts with laundry-chapped hands.

  “What do you think them Gwenithers had been up to?” one of the women asked. Some only clucked and shook their heads.

  Mother said, “Going about their business, just like us, I expect.”

  The High Elder’s wife, Mistress Ffagan, said, “The Good Shepherd wouldn’t have abandoned the Gwenithers that way if they’d been following Him like good sheep are supposed to do.” She cut her little round eyes at all of them. “There must have been some straying going on to attract The Beast’s notice that way. Someone in Gwenith was cavorting with The Beast. Someone. Or more than one. Out there in the fforest, doing Shepherd knows what. You mark my words.”

  And the women did, with nods and more chest pats.

  Alys’s cheeks burned and she felt a sizzle of anger like a hot little coal in her belly. But just as quickly that anger was replaced by shame. For if anyone had been attracting The Beast’s notice, hadn’t it been Alys herself? Wandering in the middle of the night, touched by soul eaters. She could conjure the exact sensation of their hands on her shoulders, the sense of connection that passed from one hand to the other—through her. She’d thought them beautiful. And she thought it still. And yet they were the creatures who had killed her parents. Creatures who had touched her and let her live.

  “What do you suppose they got up to out in the fforest?” one of the women said. “The cavorting with The Beast, I mean.”

  Silence fell over the table like a blanket. “Mistress Hardy,” Mistress Ffagan said, her round brown eyes gone stony, “we righteous followers of the Good Shepherd cannot know, can we?”

  Murmurs of assent followed, and their attention turned to tea and cakes.

  While the women talked on, Alys stayed quiet with eyes and ears wide open, just as Pawl had taught her. She fixed her gaze on Mother, whose face was as unmoved as it ever was. Alys was learning that Mother was no fool. But if Mother knew what Alys had done, or hadn’t done, the night the soul eaters came . . . well, Alys shoved that thought aside. Alys would be a Laker soon—eventually—she told herself. And then she would be no concern to these holy folk.

  It wasn’t long after the dispersal of all the Gwenith children among the Defaiders that Father came home early one afternoon and announced to Mother and Alys that the High Elder wished to speak with Alys. Father took her to the High Elder’s home, the biggest in the center of town, with a wide, whitewashed front porch and an apple tree right in the front yard. The High Elder answered the door himself, and for the first time Alys found herself looking directly up at him. His hawk-beak nose was extraordinarily large, and the first thing Alys noticed about him as she raised her eyes to his face was the blackness of his nostrils.

  The High Elder led Father and Alys into a front hallway and then directly left into a spotless room with a massive and shiny wooden table, a large book on top of it, and a broad chair behind it. There was no other furniture in the room.

  “Child,” the High Elder said, “do you know why you are here?”

  Alys didn’t know if he thought her quite young and dumb and unsure of why she was in Defaid at all, or if he meant something simpler than that. She decided to answer the easier question. “Father said you wished to see me.”

  “And why?” The High Elder said.

  Alys lifted her eyes to Father, but he kept his own on the floorboards. “I . . . I don’t know,” Alys said.

  “Because, child, you were the one awake, were you not? This is what the traveler told us when he brought you here. That he found you wandering, when all the rest of Gwenith was either dead or asleep. Is that true, or did the traveler lie?”

  Alys tried to work out in her head what Pawl would want her to say. He’d want her to say as little as possible, she concluded. “Ay, I was awake.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Because I don’t sleep. I’ve always been like that.”

  “And your parents allowed you to wander at night?”

  Alys thought about the women around the table, how they wondered what the people of Gwenith had done to cause their trouble. Alys felt the hard little seed of shame in her gut bloom and unfurl. She couldn’t bear for this big black and white man with his big black nostrils to think ill of Mam and Dad. “No,” Alys said. Her voice was too loud, she realized, and the High Elder’s black horizontal eyebrows descended in a line. She tried to steady her heart. “They didn’t let me, but I did anyway. Just that once.”

  “You are a disobedient child,” the High Elder said. “We must train this out of you. You hear this, Brother Argyll? You and Mistress Argyll must keep a close watch on this child.”

  “Ay,” Father said. “We will.”

  “And what did you see when you were out wandering, Alys?” The High Elder looked down at her and Alys found her own eyes drawn to the floorboards.

  “Nothing,” Alys said. Alys had told them all this, many times before. She’d told Mistress Ffagan that first day she’d arrived. And she’d told them the same every time they had asked since. “Just the stars.” Alys refused to look up, but she felt his eyes on the crown of her head.

  “Brother Argyll, a word.” The High Elder turned and left the room and Father followed him, hat in hand.

  Alys was alone in the room. Her eyes traveled to the massive wooden table, and the large book. They’d had no books at home in Gwenith, save for the Shepherd’s Word, a small black leather volume with the teachings of the Shepherd handwritten in Mam’s long, thin script. Alys went to the big book and she struggled to open it. She stuck both hands in the middle of its pages, and she lifted.

  Inside the book was a beautiful picture. It was full of color, with shiny yellow paint like sunlight around the edges. It was actually three pictures in one, Alys realized—one at the top, one in the middle, and one at the bottom—and each was very different.

  The topmost picture was all bright blue and green and snowy white. Blue sky, rolling green pastures, and at the center a man in white robes with a long white beard holding the staff of a shepherd. Happy, chubby children all dressed in white gathered around him, and one perched in his lap.

  The middle picture was painted in earthy shades of soil and grain. There were brown fields of wheat and barley, and sturdy farmers plowing behind big-rumped horses. There was a serious-faced Elder standing on the steps of a meetinghouse, his hands pressed together in prayer.

  Alys’s eyes glossed over the top two pictures. They didn’t hold her gaze the way the one at the bottom did. It was all red, and black, and yellow, full of smoke and bursts of bright flame. At the center was a long funnel that led up to the earth above. Tiny human figures fell like floating ash through the funnel’s long expanse, and at its base was The Beast. Alys had never seen a picture of The Beast before, but she didn’t have to be told that’s what this creature was. She knew. The Beast perched at the bottom of
the funnel, Its mouth wide open to catch the falling people. It crouched on two thin, bird-like legs. Its arms were inhumanly long, and attached to Its body by featherless wings of skin and bone. Its body was covered with black hair, thick between Its legs and covering Its chest. Two ears ended in peaks like horns over Its head. A black tongue jutted out between Its long fangs, waiting to catch those little falling bodies.

  Alys reached out a finger to the picture in the book. She traced the doomed figures, stroked the beastly wings.

  She didn’t hear Father and the High Elder enter the room, she was so transfixed by those wings. So she cried out with surprise when the High Elder’s hand came down on her own, then with pain when he squeezed her hand until she felt bones pulling together.

  Then this is what happened:

  Father stared, white-faced. The High Elder told Alys to push up her sleeves. He handed a long stick to Father, and then the stick came down on the white flesh of Alys’s arms over and over and over again. And all the while the stick came down, the High Elder preached. He told her about The Beast that perched in Its fiery hole. How It tore the flesh from sinners’ bones while they screamed, how It plucked out their eyes with Its long black claws, and how the agony never ended. Because once their bones were picked clean, and their eyes were gouged, it all grew back again and the torture began anew. And that was the fate of little girls who didn’t learn obedience. They would be embraced by The Beast forever and forever and forever.

  SIX

  All the way home from the High Elder’s house, Father had been silent while Alys cradled her sore arms in her lap and rethought everything she’d begun to believe about Father and Mother. She remembered what Pawl had told her about Defaiders. She wished she had a brother or a sister, someone who was all hers and truly hers. Not these fake parents to whom she’d been given. She wanted her mam and dad. Tears stung her eyes and she willed them back inside. Crying won’t help, Mother had said.