The Deer King: Novella One

by Ben Spencer

  They pressed forward into the void. Somewhere ahead, near the root system, shone a single, flickering light. They picked up speed, proverbial moths. In the back of the tree, resting on a wicker chair lit by a candle atop a tree-stump table, sat an old woman cloaked in raven feathers.

  Emmaline gasped. The woman found her with shriveled-prune eyes. Emmaline considered running, but before she could, Shayo’s uncle grabbed her by the arm. The woman lifted a crooked finger and pointed it at her. She spoke with a raspy trill.

  “I’ve seen you before.”

  5

  They took the stone. Emmaline refused to give it up willingly, so Shayo’s uncle—whose name was Prala—patted her with his big hands until he discovered the hideaway pocket. She curled into the hard kernel of herself while he searched her, glaring icily at Shayo, who refused to look her way.

  The old woman gave a cry of joy when Prala handed the stone over. She stood up and spread her raven-feather wings in an ecstatic arc, before cupping her hands around the stone and bringing it closer to the candlelight. “Doido, you fool,” she said as she studied it, a laugh like a popping bubble escaping her lips. When she was finished, she stored the stone somewhere in her great mess of feathers, the plumage shimmering obsidian in the candlelight. Emmaline strained to see, but in the dark, she couldn’t tell if the feathers were an actual cloak or an extension of the woman’s arms.

  The old woman spoke to Shayo in the Massaporan tongue. Before Shayo could reply, Prala chimed in. Shayo’s face went dark. “That may have been what I said, but it wasn’t what I meant,” she responded to the both of them in Harrish. “The stone is the gift. Not the girl.”

  “If you’re speaking in Harrish, you must want the girl to hear you,” the old woman said. “Go ahead, then. Speak to her.”

  Shayo turned to Emmaline. Emmaline, who had desired nothing more these last few minutes than to level Shayo with a withering stare, now jerked her head away, unable to meet her eyes.

  Shayo’s voice was a pounding waterfall. “I’ve known that you had the stone—what we Massaporans call the Doido pebble—for some time now. I knew even before Seywa told me that you were hiding a secret rock. I watched you bury it in our backyard, and I watched the way it tormented you after you dug it up. I had planned to steal it from you, but after you dug it up, you never let it out of your sight. Near the end, I knew that if you kept it much longer, it would lead to your death.”

  The candlelight leapt into the darkness, aided by a draft of wind. It changed its mind quick enough to save itself, holding fast to the wick and existence.

  Shayo continued. “So I brought you with me to Wolfresh. To deliver the Doido pebble to Fecheholo, in exchange for wiswake and in the hope that my family’s exile from Wolfresh might be brought to an end. But whether or not my wishes are granted…” she turned away from Emmaline, and glowered at the old woman, “…I expect the Fecheholo to let you go. After all, she has no reason to keep you.”

  The old woman cackled. “No reason?” Her smile was a gash of teeth. She motioned at Emmaline. “This young viper you nurtured in your nest, do you know who her father was?”

  Shayo didn’t blink. “The Stoneman, most likely.”

  “Most likely. Of course it was the Stoneman. And do you know how many newborn Deer Kings this particular Stoneman ushered off the earth?”

  Shayo didn’t reply.

  “Ninety-three. Ninety-three suckling pups with the potential to restore the world to its rightful state. Ninety-three who would have allowed the Massaporan people to show their might once more. But this young woman’s father killed them all.” The old woman suddenly turned to Emmaline. “What is your name, whelp?”

  She considered holding her tongue to spite the old woman, but the words spilled out. “Emmaline. Emmaline Rain.”

  “Rain,” the old woman echoed. “Rain to wash the Massaporan people away. Your people sing a song about it, don’t they?” she asked Emmaline. A broken tune formed on her lips. “And if antlers sprout, don’t go messing about, just summon the rain, it best be over.” She cawed hoarsely when the stanza was finished, deliberately grating. Taking her sweet time, she at last turned back to Shayo. “But of course my daughter would think it right to save the child of our oppressor. My daughter, who sleeps with an ugly creature from across the sea, and who bears half-blood children.”

  Shayo didn’t respond. Even in the scant light, Emmaline could see the hurt in her face, her pain exposed like a sedimentary rock shorn to reveal an inner layer.

  “A choice, then,” the old woman pronounced when it was clear that Shayo wouldn’t respond. “In exchange for Doido’s pebble, you may take the girl with you when you leave; or, I will end your exile. With the exile over, you and your family may return to Wolfresh, where you’ll be cared for, and where the wiswake will always be in reach. I’ll brand you so that you and your family’s presence will never be questioned, so long as you all shall live.”

  Shayo was impossible to read. Her body had gone rigid, and her tongue, it seemed, was captive inside her mouth, a prisoner bound by a tangled knot of conflicting thoughts. Seconds passed. The old woman waited patiently. Happily. The seconds grew interminable to everyone but her. At last, Prala spoke a hushed word to Shayo in Massaporan, and it broke her from the spell.

  “End the exile,” Shayo said clearly for all to hear. Her face had changed into that hard and inscrutable mask that Emmaline had so often seen her wear. A face that claimed ownership for the decisions she made. A face now turning Emmaline’s way.

  “Do what you want with the girl,” Shayo said.

  Shayo left later that day. Emmaline, bound by ropes to the crest of the fallen dew oak, nearly missed her departure. From a distance, she couldn’t see Shayo’s altered tattoo, nor the jar of wiswake in Shayo’s hand; she only saw the fleeting, familiar stride of the woman she had followed twice through the forests of Wolfresh, vanishing into those same woods without her.

  She thought after Prala tied her to the tree that she was to be subjected to the ridicule and scorn of the Massaporan villagers. But all that first day the adults avoided her. She might have believed herself invisible had she not seen the expanding orbit her presence engendered; Massaporans who otherwise succumbed to the tree’s gravitational pull were repelled by its crest and the creature tied there. By and large the children followed the adults’ lead, although there were times when Emmaline felt eyes resting on her, and she would look up to see a child take flight, scrambling back into the fold of friends who had dared them. But for the most part everyone kept their distance.

  As she sat there, she couldn’t help but wonder what the old woman—the Fecheholo—had in store for her. She tried to wrap her mind around the woman with the raven feathers. Who was she? What did Fecheholo mean? How was she connected to the Deer King? Had the old woman been the one to orchestrate Joseph’s death? Her father’s failure? She prayed to her father, but he was an ineffectual god; he couldn’t answer her prayers now that he was dead, just as he hadn’t answered her questions when he was alive. While pondering these unknowables, she dug at the earth with her nails and brought the soil to her lips, hoping to taste the truth. She was certain that she would die but determined to sate her ravenous mind before doing so.

  Late that evening Prala brought her dinner, a brown soup with carrots, corn, and chunks of squirrel. She wolfed it down. Full, her mind slowed, no longer racing to the end of things but lingering in the present. She took closer note of her surroundings. Though her vantage point was obscured by the fallen tree, she could see a smattering of the Massaporan houses, and around the houses the miscellanea of daily life: stretched and drying animal hides, kettles, tools, earthenware, cooking fires, strange wooden toys, and other items that she didn’t have enough experience to place. Excepting small differences, she thought that the Massaporan village wasn’t entirely unlike Mossbane. But then her vision snagged on a peculiarity, one that, once noticed, caught her eye again and again: a symbol resembling an inc
omplete triangle with branching lines pouring out of both sides, carved onto a myriad of surfaces: the house logs, the earthenware pots, the tanning hides; she noticed it nearly everywhere, finding it even when she glanced down the trunk of the fallen dew oak and saw the symbol carved into the bark no more than eight feet away from her.

  She was scanning the village for additional carvings of the symbol when the Deer King approached. Emmaline turned her head and there he was, approaching from the base of the fallen dew oak, flanked by scores of villagers. It was the end of the day: out on the western horizon, the sun was taking deep bites of the earth, its jaw disappearing by degrees. In this burgeoning darkness, the color of the boy’s eyes intensified: his otherworldly greens burned like an eternal flame. When he was ten feet away, he fixed his pupils on her. She refused to wilt under the heat of his stare, though in doing so she began to feel nauseous, as if strung between this world and another.

  It took Emmaline a moment to recognize that the villagers surrounding the Deer King were staring at her too, their eyes a pale reflection of the Deer King’s verdant greens. Theirs was a vicious, hungry look, hatred tinged with impending violence. They looked as if they wanted to tear her apart, but were waiting on a signal, perhaps from the boy. A deep, animal fear welled up inside of Emmaline. She had made her peace with death in the previous months, but this was something different, a fear not of death but of being devoured, mutilated, savaged. Panicked, her mind began to race, so that she lost sense of who she was, and instead became a conduit for fear itself: the very core of her personality disintegrated into a screaming, thrashing, desperate entity, as she attempted, by any means necessary, to free herself from the ropes and run away.

  When she came back into herself, everything had changed. The villagers were dispersing, drifting away into the gloaming, and standing beside her was the boy. His green eyes had adopted a human hue; they were no longer the spirit-world irises of seconds ago. Not only that, his stare was beseeching, that of a toddler in need. He held out his arms to her. Too bewildered to do anything else, she picked him up.

  Emmaline’s racing heart was hesitant to slow. She was nonplussed by the boy: it was difficult to square the harmless toddler in her arms with the frightening deity of moments ago with an army at his back. But the further he nestled into the crook of her arms, the harder it was to stay panicked. In a manner of minutes, the Deer King fell sleep. Emmaline eased to the ground, trying her best not to wake him. She leaned her back against the fallen dew oak. Slowed her breathing. She thought she might fall asleep herself, but each time she edged toward unconsciousness, the reality of who she was holding kept her tethered to the waking world. At one point, the boy stirred ever so slightly. Without thinking, she soothed him by running her hand over the top of his head. She felt the nubs there, firm little mounds. They jarred her senses. She sat there bewildered, staring at the boy and then up at the blue-black sky, where high above, dachahelu stretched across the firmament, certain of its position in the pantheon.

  The night deepened. From time to time, Emmaline succumbed to sleep, drifting into its dreamy recesses, but never for long. The boy, cozily wedged into the crook of her arm, remained there each time the tide of slumber brought her back ashore. Her interims of unconsciousness lengthened. After a particularly long spell, she awoke and sensed a pair of eyes upon her. She strained into the night and thought she saw a glimmering spell of feathers. But as she tried to focus, they disappeared into the black.

  Sleep took her under one last time. When next she awoke, the forest was streaked with the playful colors of the morning sun, and the boy was gone.

  When the sun was at its highest point, Prala brought her a meal of yams and ground nuts. Like the day before, he was silent throughout the meal, but, to her surprise, when she had finished eating, he untied her from the dew oak and said, “Follow me.”

  He led her back into the dark heart of the tree. Waiting in the same wicker chair at the tree’s end was the old woman. The old woman dismissed Prala with a wave of her hand. Then she stared at Emmaline with a burning intensity, as if trying to scour her brain. Emmaline, feeling uneven from the events of the night before, quickly grew uncomfortable, and averted her gaze. She tried to steady her nerves for the trial to come. But it was difficult with the old woman’s stare singeing her like hot coals.

  At last the old woman spoke. “You might have wrung the boy’s neck last night. Finished your father’s job.”

  Emmaline was stunned that the thought hadn’t occurred to her. But she knew immediately that she wouldn’t have done it. Killing a child, even the god-child of her enemy, wasn’t in her, despite her previous plans. But she kept these thoughts to herself, and didn’t answer.

  The old woman harrumphed. Then she sprung to her feet with a startling quickness and hopped toward Emmaline, sleek feathers whispering. She stuck her timeworn face in Emmaline’s, and, with a breath that smelled of cloves and garlic, demanded answers. “Tell me about this priest, girl. The one that killed your father. I hear he’s as tall as an Impossible mountain and as ruthless as a feeding badger. But you got the better of him, or so the trees tell me. Share your thoughts.”

  Emmaline was stunned. “How did you know?”

  The old woman smacked sandpaper lips. “What? You don’t believe that the trees whisper secrets in my ear? I know that two plus two equals four, whelp. That stone belonged to the Stoneman before the priest came to take it away. The Stoneman was your father. Stands to reason that since the priest returned to Olgard without Doido’s pebble, and that since your father is dead, and that since I stole the stone from you, I’m left to assume that you bested the priest. The question is: how?”

  Emmaline spat out the truth. “I climbed on the roof of our house and dropped a chimney stone on his head.”

  The old woman’s eyes lit up like a stoked fire. “Ha! Not bad for a she-bitch with Harrish bloodlines. That’s what we’ll do, then. I’ll set you on top of a mud-log house with a chimney stone, and hope your aim is true when the bastard rides by.”

  Emmaline had difficulty telling whether or not the old woman was being sarcastic.

  “He’s coming here? The priest?”

  “He’s not coming here, whelp. He’s been here. Off and on for nearly ten months now.”

  Startled and confused by the news, Emmaline glanced behind her.

  “Not the cavernous heart of this specific dew oak,” the old woman snapped, whipping around and returning to the wicker chair, feathers rustling as she went. “Wolfresh. When he returned to Olgard, he took the last remaining stone from the temple, so he thinks he knows how to find the boy. He’s visited us before, but I threw him off the scent. But I fear he’s smartened up. He’ll return soon enough.”

  “Soon enough? Why hasn’t he found the boy already? Doesn’t the stone show him where the boy is?”

  “Of course it does. But I have my ways.”

  Emmaline couldn’t stop from asking questions. “How do you keep the boy hidden?”

  “Sleight of hand. The offering of imitation apples. You wouldn’t have found him, either.”

  “I wasn’t looking for him.”

  The old woman made a pug’s face in the flickering candlelight. “Of course you weren’t, whelp. You’re innocent, you. You’re only the daughter of a man with the blood of ninety-three babes on his hands.” The old woman rubbed her hands together near the flickering candle, as if cleaning them in the fire. “You may not believe me, but I liked your father. Mortal enemy of my people or not, he had a workmanlike manner about him that made his baby butchering nearly tolerable. He didn’t lord his power, or take outward joy in his profession, or spout nonsense about that bronze god of yours. No, he simply slit babies’ throats and then went on his way, the way a Stoneman should.”

  Emmaline’s ears burned hot. The old woman’s words danced around her like taunting demons.

  “You think I’m joking, but it’s true,” the old woman continued. She reached into the darkness and c
onjured a bittirinu—a sweetened roll of tobacco—from beneath the candle. Satisfied with its look and smell, she lit one end in the flame, and took a sweet, slow drag. “I even helped him over the last few months of his life. When a woman gave birth, I was there to offer assistance. He thought me a midwife. I would encourage him: ‘Oh yes, this one’s giving birth to a little devil, I’m sure of it.’ Duplicitous, no doubt, and perhaps it makes me guilty of deicide, but I believe the god that matters will forgive me in the end. By watching your father, I was able to plan his downfall. Like all good subjugators, he wanted to believe that those he oppressed understood the necessity of it. I convinced him that we did. So he confided in me. He told me that he intended to make his son the next Stoneman. And I used that information to bring that darling little god you held last night into existence.”

  “You killed my brother?” The words tasted like burnt ash in Emmaline’s mouth.

  “I did.”

  “How?”

  The old woman leaned forward and rested her arms on the front of her legs, the bittirinu dangling from inattentive fingers. “With cold, sharp steel, whelp. How else? His blood ran hot over my hands. I relished it.”

  “Why didn’t my father stop you?” Emmaline asked, her voice neutral and cold.

  “He was otherwise indisposed. Of course, we intended to kill your father as well, but he’s a resourceful fellow. Still, the babe lived. That was all that really mattered.” The old woman smiled at Emmaline with tobacco-stained teeth. “But enough about that. What’s done is done.”

  A terrible fury overtook Emmaline. She sized the old woman up and realized that she could end her life if she desired. Her body flooded with relief: at last, she had found the right person to kill. But when she moved to wrap her hands around the old woman’s throat, the old woman responded by muttering an unintelligible word. The instant Emmaline’s hands found the old woman’s neck, Emmaline began to choke: the air fled her lungs as if commanded, and, no matter how hard she struggled, she was unable to draw another breath. The old woman watched Emmaline struggle with a disinterested air, savoring the bittirinu. Emmaline thought she would soon black out, but then the old woman flicked the ash off the end of the bittirinu and touched Emmaline on the arm, muttering another unintelligible command. The pressure around Emmaline’s throat released.