The Deer King: Novella One

by Ben Spencer

  The Deer King

  The Deer King: Novella One

  Ben Spencer

  Copyright © 2018 by Ben Spencer

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by Doyle Hinkle

  This is a work of fiction. Names, incidents, and characters are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 9781732038004 (Paperback)

  KNOCK-KNEE BOOKS

  About the Author

  Ben Spencer lives in Concord, NC, with his wife and daughter. Please visit benspencerwrites.com and sign up to follow his blog for information on new THE DEER KING releases. You can also follow Ben on Twitter at @RBenSpen.

  For Charlotte

  1

  Brutus Rain was a man made of jagged bits and the blackest night, a man with old-world blood coursing through new-world veins, a man with a soul so gnarled that he didn’t mind doing the dirty business of murdering prophecies in their cribs before they came to heinous fruition. But to Emmaline Rain, he was simply dad. In the small of the evenings, Brutus would chase Emmaline and her brother, Joseph, around the yard until laughter and exhaustion felled them, and then Brutus would gobble the children up in his arms, the kindest monster in the entire world. Emmaline especially loved her father’s prickly kisses when the game was lost, the pleasant sting of them on her cheek. They were proof of her own strength, a girl so deeply loved by a man so deeply feared.

  Emmaline was uncertain of her father’s occupation. He wasn’t like the other fathers in Mossbane (a city in the territory of Haven), the farmers and the blacksmiths and the store clerks and the soldiers, with their days full of routine and labor. She might have thought him a ne’er-do-well, but unlike the idlers who inspired scorn when they shuffled through the city streets, Brutus commanded an uneasy respect: he was never haggled with, or taken to task for a viewpoint, or questioned for his lack of participation in the culture writ large; furthermore, he was afforded an unrestricted line of credit in all the shops, and, if he ever needed a favor, volunteers by the bushel leapt to help, although the disquiet on their faces made it clear they did so out of an unspoken obligation, and not because they held a deep affection for the man. Emmaline might have worried about her father’s strange station in the culture, but he was a self-possessed man, unconcerned with the perceptions of the others, and he passed these traits on to his children. Emmaline learned, over time, to hold her head high in Mossbane, and she soon found that people afforded her a respect akin to the type they showed her father.

  This isn’t to say that Brutus didn’t have a job; only that Emmaline didn’t know, specifically, what it was. She did know, however, that it was related to those times when a change would come on the wind, and Brutus, with no-nonsense speed, would hustle Emmaline and Joseph to their neighbors, the Houghtons, and then depart, usually for no more than four or five nights, although sometimes it was longer. His leavings had no rhyme or reason to them: he left in all seasons, and at all hours of the day. He once woke the children at three a.m. in the pouring rain, and made them tromp the quarter mile to the Houghtons’ house in the mud and the muck. Emmaline, who was ten years old at the time, was certain that the Houghtons would at last object to being called upon at such an inconsiderate hour in such miserable conditions, but they only accepted the children as they always did, with prim good humor, and changed Emmaline and Joseph into dry stockings before ushering them to bed. Neither did his leavings occur at regular intervals. There were periods when he left multiple times over the span of a month, but there was also a stretch when he didn’t depart for close to a year. Emmaline often considered asking her father why he left, but when the words rose to her lips, a terrible dread would course through her body, and she would think better of it. At last she gave up on asking him, supposing that he would tell her and her brother when the timing was right. Or perhaps, better yet, he would never tell them.

  In the winter of Emmaline’s thirteenth year—and Joseph’s fifteenth—Brutus started pulling Joseph aside at random times and talking to him in hushed tones. Emmaline did her best to eavesdrop on their conversations, but her father, a vigilant observer of his surroundings even when relaxed, was careful that she didn’t hear. She soon noticed, however, that her father wasn’t merely conversing with Joseph; he was showing him something as well. On a number of occasions she happened upon the two of them looking at a small object in Brutus’s palm, but the instant Brutus saw her, he would hide it away.

  She asked Joseph to reveal what their father was sharing with him, but, on this matter and this matter alone, her normally loquacious brother went mum. “Tell me, Joseph,” she pleaded, but each time she asked her brother, he would draw up his corn-silk moustache and purse his mouth shut. It frightened her, this uncharacteristic rigidness, for as long as they had been brother and sister he never hesitated to share his thoughts with her, even when discretion was called for. But on this subject he remained solemn, and mute.

  At last, it happened. It was early spring, the fangs of winter not yet receded, when, on a brisk and windy evening with the clouds churning overhead, Brutus stirred to action. Summoning Joseph, Brutus proclaimed that it was time. Emmaline, who only moments before had been busy churning butter with her brother, watched with unease as the two men went inside to discuss the matter further, and, she assumed, study the secret object. When they returned, she knew what was coming.

  “Let’s go,” her father said. “I’m taking you to the Houghtons’. Joseph is going with me.”

  They walked to the Houghtons’ in a portentous silence, the burden of the great undone deed hanging heavy over the two men. Father especially seemed troubled: Emmaline sensed a seed of doubt in his bearing, and she wondered if it wasn’t over Joseph and his preparedness for the task at hand. Regardless, they soon reached the Houghtons’, where the men left Emmaline with unceremonious haste. She watched from the window of the Houghtons’ ivy-strewn cabin as her father and brother departed, heading north by northwest in the direction of the kingdom of Wolfresh.

  That evening she ate rabbit stew with the Houghtons, a delicious, garlicky meal accented with bay leaf and thyme. Later on, by the fire, Regina Houghton attempted to distract Emmaline from her worries by singing time-tested songs, some of which were nearly as old as the time of the first Harrish settlers. Initially the songs had their intended mollifying effect, but then the lyrics of one of the songs snagged in Emmaline’s brain like a fishhook, and wouldn’t let go. Emmaline waited until Regina had finished the standard—a paradoxically melancholic and upbeat tune called Best Be Over—and then she asked the question that had sprung to her mind.

  “That line…and if antlers sprout, don’t go messing about, just summon the rain, it best be over…what exactly does it mean? I’ve heard teenagers in town whistle that tune when they see my father. Is the song about my father? Is he the rain? Am I?”

  Regina smiled. It was a forbearing smile, meant to hold time while she wrapped her head around a suitable reply. Emmaline had noticed this tendency in adults, a simultaneous desire to share the secret truth of Emmaline’s life with her while keeping the selfsame fact concealed at all costs, like the way that Regina had sung Best Be Over on purpose but would now go to great lengths to conceal its meaning.

  Dillon Houghton, the man of the house, stopped whittling the pinewood in his hand and stepped outside into the gloaming. It was clear that whatever was about to be said, he didn’t want to hear it.

  “That song,” Regina said once her husband was gone, “is about how, when a thing goes awry, it’s best to deal with it right away rather than allow it to grow into something terrible. It ment
ions the rain because the rain offers fresh beginnings each time it passes through.”

  Emmaline wouldn’t be put off so easily. “But is it about my father?”

  “I wouldn’t know, child.” Regina stood up from the rocking chair, dusted herself off, and followed her husband outside into the dusk. “No,” she said as she left. “I wouldn’t know at all.”

  That night, Emmaline dreamed about a boy, a tiny slip of a creature that stole into her family’s cabin through an open window and begged Emmaline to hide him from a nebulous, unnamed threat. Emmaline agreed, but at once the boy’s demeanor changed and he began to frolic about, tromping mud from his bare feet all over the oak-wood flooring. There was something mad about the boy’s comportment, inhuman even, and Emmaline began to fret that she had made a terrible mistake, one that couldn’t be undone. She tried to calm the child, but he only became more feral, galloping about the house with such spirit that it seemed he had entered a deep trance, and couldn’t be reached. At last, Emmaline screamed at the boy to stop. To her surprise, he did, halting mid-gallop and pinning her with striated, green eyes. He asked, “Why? Is it time for you to kill me?” Then she woke up.

  She looked out the window. It was morning, but outside, a grey peal of weather ruled, the roiling clouds from the previous evening having whipped into a boisterous storm. First it rained, and then it hailed, and then it rained some more, the precipitation coming in bursts, as if the sky were strafing the ground with grapeshot. The Houghtons, who were farmers, stayed inside and cast worried looks at one another. They spoke of the crops as if they were the concern, but Emmaline knew they hadn’t planted any yet, so that couldn’t be it. Finally Mr. Houghton, who had been pacing since daybreak, burst out of the cabin into the squall with a fevered and resolute look on his face, as if he meant to talk down the storm himself. But as soon as he stepped outside he came to a stop. Emmaline, who had a vantage point from behind him, saw why.

  Walking down the dirt road from the direction of the kingdom of Wolfresh was Emmaline’s father. He wore a suit of mud and blood, and there was a deranged look in his eye, like he was a man who had lost his soul and feared he would never find it again. Emmaline searched frantically for Joseph, but her brother was nowhere to be seen.

  As her father drew closer, he caught sight of Emmaline. Seeing her, he fell to his knees and wept. The merciless rain beat at him without remorse.

  2

  One month later, a strange man arrived in Mossbane wearing the vestments of a priest of the Bronze Titan. The town buzzed upon the priest’s arrival: word was that he had traveled all the way from Olgard’s capital city to strip Brutus Rain of his station. Emmaline, who had been venturing into Mossbane on her own since her brother’s death, learned of the priest’s arrival in the farmers’ market. She was there to buy fruit, but when she heard the apple picker speak her father’s name, she knelt behind an apple cart and pricked her ears.

  “Have you seen that mountain of a priest?” the apple picker asked the skinny man with the scraggly goatee considering his produce. “Bet you bottom dollar he’s here to reclaim Brutus’s stone.”

  “By force?”

  “If need be. Brutus is a right big ‘un; that’s why they sent a monster. But make no mistake—they won’t allow Brutus to keep his job, or the stone.”

  “It’s true, then? That Brutus failed his last time out?”

  “Priest wouldn’t be here otherwise. Odds are there’s a newborn Deer King suckling on its Massaporan mother’s teat right now. A Deer King destined to kill a great many of us. And all because Brutus couldn’t complete the one task he’s charged to finish!”

  “I’m not defending the man, but Titan’s tits, Jonas, he did lose his son in the effort.”

  “Risk of the profession, aint it?”

  “I suppose. What do you think will happen to Brutus once the priest is done with him?”

  “He’ll move east. He’ll have to. There’s no place for a man like that out here once his knife’s gone dull. And good riddance, too. I, for one, don’t want to look at him or his skulking daughter’s face another day…”

  And with those words Emmaline slipped away, swiping an apple as she left.

  When she returned home, she found her father sitting on his bed in the corner of the cabin, turning a small object over and over in his hands and chanting under his breath. He didn’t notice Emmaline for some time. When at last he saw her he gave a start, juddering like a mortally wounded animal. Upon seeing Emmaline, he started to put the object away, then changed his mind. He held up a blue-grey stone. As he did, a dirty tear slid down his face.

  “Come here,” he said in a weary, heartbroken voice. It was only the fourth or fifth time he had spoken to her in the past month. “Might as well take a look.”

  She drew close, trying not to seem overeager. “What is it?” she asked. She knew but she didn’t know, the way children often have partial knowledge of the secrets the world of adults keeps from them.

  “There are only two of these in existence in all of Dreyland,” her father said. “The Effanarem call it a Funatan stone, after their Rain God, Funato. The Massaporans call it a Doido pebble, named for the Massaporan priest who stole the stones and gave them to our people. Most of the people in Haven call it the Saving Stone, but I call it naught. Always thought it best not to name magic. Thought not acknowledging it protected us somehow. I was wrong, of course.”

  “What does it do?”

  He looked at her with distant-planet eyes. “You already know, don’t you?”

  Of course she knew. She had simply never admitted it to herself. “It tells you when a Deer King is born. And then you go and kill it. Only you failed to kill the last one. A Massaporan killed Joseph instead.”

  Brutus nodded.

  They sat together in silence for a moment. She felt turned inside-out, the snakeskin of her childhood shed at last. She wondered if this was what Joseph had felt like when their father was teaching him the tricks of the trade. Sickly alive. Adult. She wondered if adults walked around with a pit in their stomach at all times, nauseous from the terrible knowledge of the world.

  “Will you give the stone back to the priest?”

  Brutus didn’t answer. Instead, he turned the stone over and over in his hands, muttering a strange, foreign word, something that sounded like Dachahelu. As Emmaline watched, the image of a baby boy flashed mercury-quick on the stone’s surface, and the stone seemed to pull, like a horse at the reins, in a northwesterly direction. Brutus stopped turning the stone, and the stone stopped moving.

  “Your mother left when they made me a Stoneman,” Brutus said, finding his voice. “‘Choose’, she said. So I chose. She left for Olgard the next day without saying goodbye.

  “Most men wouldn’t have taken the job, but I had seen what the last Deer King did to our people when I was a boy, and if someone had to bear the responsibility for making sure it never happened again, I thought it might as well be me. Taking the job was the only way I could make sure that the job was done right.”

  He sighed. “What happened…a month ago…was beyond me. Beyond anyone. No one could have stopped it. Simple as that. But it doesn’t matter now. What matters now is that I right what went wrong. And I can’t do that without the stone.”

  Emmaline was digesting this when she heard a horse whinny outside. She looked out the window and saw a colossus of a man sitting astride a magnificent Rugarder stallion, its red coat like brilliant roasting coals. Together, the man and the horse blotted out a good portion of the horizon. The man wore the black and white vestments of a priest of the Bronze Titan, and a pair of calfskin riding boots that must have cost a great many calves their lives. The closer the horse cantered to the cabin, the more surreal the man seemed. He had a beard like a black, roiling river, and mythic, monstrous eyes. He looked like the coming of death itself. He was the only man Emmaline had ever seen larger than her father, and he scared her out of her wits.

  “Daddy, I don’t think
…”

  “Go out back, Emmaline. Stay outside until he’s gone.”

  She hurried out the back door but she didn’t stay there. Instead, she climbed a ladder onto the cabin’s roof, crept to the ridge, and lay down, staying as flat as a cat stalking its prey. Peeking over the top, she watched the priest dismount from the horse like a god stepping down from the clouds. She felt that he was staring her in the eye as he walked inside, but it was merely an illusion caused by his height. He hadn’t seen her at all.

  Once the priest was inside, Emmaline listened for sounds of conversation from inside the cabin. Words trickled out like water from a weak stream. Emmaline held her breath, trying to hear, but the sounds were muted and garbled. It was like attempting to eavesdrop on someone’s dream. She gave up after a bit and prayed to the Bronze Titan, something she had never done before. She asked him over and over again to send his terrible servant away.

  She was in the middle of her prayer when, out of the quiet, a great commotion kicked off, the sound of warring giants. Emmaline listened in horror. A half-minute later the racket subsided, like an avalanche coming to rest. Tears boiled in Emmaline’s eyes, hot and salty. She knew in her heart that her father was dead.

  Without thinking, she stood up and walked over to the stone chimney. She dislodged the largest slab of stone she could carry from near the chimney’s top, where a number of the stones had grown loose over time. Then she shuffled to the edge of the roof, balancing above the front door. She waited until she saw the top of the priest’s head, his thunderous black hair like a storm cloud. A guttural, woeful sound escaped from her lips. Hearing her, the priest turned his face toward the sky. Emmaline dropped the stone. When the stone smashed into the priest’s face, it made a sound like the cracking of ten thousand eggshells.