by Ike Hamill
“Sasha,” Constantine said, tasting the word again. It was bitter this time and made his tongue ache.
“My father said that the snake almost killed you.”
“Snake,” Constantine said.
“You’re lucky they came along, but you should not have been out there trying to get the snake by yourself anyway. It was my snake to kill. All I have to do now is keep the elephant away from my sister and I’ll be set for life. That’s what everyone says.”
“Snake,” Constantine said again.
“What did you want with it? You can’t fulfill the decree, you don’t even have a father. Everyone knows that a bastard can’t claim the bounty. My father thinks that you wanted the snake only because you liked its skin. He’s the only one who knows for sure that you’re the one who makes these suits. Most people believe it’s me.”
“Skin,” Constantine said.
“I’ll give you the skin. In fact, I’ll give you the skin and reward you for a suit made from it. I need to demonstrate my skill, my father says. They kept the skin in really good shape. They tried to drag it back to town, but the horses kept bolting because they thought the snake was following them. They had to skin the snake on the side of the road and then they put the guts in a sack and the skin in another.”
“Skin?” Constantine asked. Was there a chance that this blond boy could deliver the skin to him? Was there a chance that the men who’d dragged him here hadn’t ruined it?
“Yes, they scraped down the skin and now they’re soaking it in glycerin and alcohol. It’s sealed up, so I wasn’t allowed to look at it. They said I could see it in a few days. Anyway, I’ll give it to you and we’ll give you shelter and food while you make it into a suit. You’ll have to do the work in secret though. Dad says we can’t have anyone else see you working on the skin or they’ll know that I’m not the one with the skill.”
All Constantine heard was that the snakeskin was safe. He could hardly believe his luck. His pulse slowed and he felt his desire to kill the blond boy mellowing. He remembered what he’d deduced earlier: killing this boy would bring the whole town down on him. They’d chase him through the woods like a rabid fox.
“Dad says you’ll kill us all in our sleep, but mom said he’s not allowed to chain you up at night. We’ll see what happens.”
“Night?” Constantine asked.
“You’ll have to stay out in the stable.”
18 DECISION
AFTER TARA LEFT HIM standing at the edge of the lake, Dom descended the west staircase and ran to where Pemba stayed. He knocked on his friend’s window until a wood screen pulled to the side, letting him slide in. Pemba’s landlord did not allow guests, and she’d made it clear that the rule applied doubly for Dom.
“What did she say?” Pemba asked. He knew immediately why Dom had arrived sweaty and breathless at his window.
“She said she wanted me to cleave her soul from her body with a knife. But she wasn’t sure if she should trust me with the task because I’d never heard of it.”
“Oh no,” Pemba said. “Run, little bear, run as fast as you can away from this evil witch.”
Dom’s face fell to instant grief. “What do you mean?”
“These mountain women believe the most preposterous things. If you get wrapped up with her nonsense and superstition, there will be no end to your suffering.”
“Well, apparently she’s not even sure if I’m worthy to become entangled in her superstition.”
“Don’t you see? That’s how they drag you in. She tells you that she has something she needs you to do, but wait, she’s not sure you’re the one after all. She doesn’t know if she can trust you with this solemn task. All the while, the more she talks, the more that you’re trying to convince her that you should be involved, instead of the opposite. She puts the convincing on you and then you’ve made no decision at all.”
“I don’t think it’s like that,” Dom said.
“And you won’t,” Pemba said. “Not until you’re snared like a monkey stealing a peach.”
“But what is this ritual with the knife?”
“I’ve heard of it. It’s something that rural women do so they can relieve themselves of family obligations. Let’s say your parents promised you to the boy of another family, and you decide that you love another. The only way you can remove your family obligation is to cleave your soul from your body. Then your soul and your body can take two separate paths.”
“But if she were promised to a boy, which part of her would marry him? Her soul or her body?”
“Which do you most care about?”
Dom thought about this for several seconds before answering. His immediate attraction was certainly to her body. Her curves fit into spaces in his brain that other women didn’t approach. It’s as if she was shaped to exactly mirror his desire. While he watched her walk, he felt a calm excitement wash over him, and he wanted nothing to break that spell. However, when she talked, he mostly felt frustration. Was the talking the representation of her soul? If so, he knew his choice.
“Body,” he said.
Pemba laughed at him. He laughed so loud that the landlord banged twice on the wall and Pemba pressed his hand to his face to shut himself up.
“Well for your sake, I hope that only her soul was promised to another.”
“How will I find out?”
“Beg her to choose you for her cleaving. That’s the only way.”
“Do you think I should?”
“My opinion of women in general is low, and I’ve never met this woman, Tara. That said, my opinion of her is even lower.”
19 ESCAPE
THEY KEPT CONSTANTINE IN the hospital tent for several days. The nice woman came by in the morning and evening to change the bandage on Constantine’s leg and push the yellow pus from the puncture wounds. Her gentle touch made the pain his favorite part of the day. The older woman brought food. She fed him one morsel at a time, keeping her fingers away from his teeth and always shoving the next bite in before he’d finished swallowing the last. It tasted delicious, but Constantine always felt he was drowning in the food. She always concluded his meals with a tea brewed from healing herbs. The hot medicine washed away the good tastes and left his mouth feeling scrubbed with ash.
The straps on his wrists and ankles were loosened once his skin began to chafe, but never removed while he was awake. On his last day, they dismantled the tent around him and folded the extra beds. The whole hospital was loaded onto a cart before Constantine’s straps were removed.
The man with the light hair, the one who’d captured Constantine, stood at the foot of the bed. Behind him and to the left, stood Sasha, the blond boy.
“You’ll come with us, Forestling, and work in my barn.”
“Barn?” Constantine asked.
“You know my son, Sasha,” the man said. He turned and cupped his son’s chin and dragged him forward. “He’s easy to spot because of this wine mark on his chin. His mother enjoyed a little too much liberty while she was pregnant, and the boy wears the mark.”
In his father’s grip, Sasha’s face turned hot red. The scar on his forehead from Constantine’s rock, turned from pink to a red so bright that it glowed.
“What’s your proper name, little Forestling? Have you one?” Sasha’s father asked.
He did have a name. He remembered the series of sounds the Midwife had assigned him and he practiced them in his mouth with his lips pressed tight. Sasha and his father watched and waited while Constantine prepared his mouth to regurgitate this complex series of gymnastics.
When he opened his mouth, Constantine focused all his attention on the first sound. It was a hard, guttural explosion, and it left his mouth like a bark. He began the word with such a ferocity that the rest of it flew from him like a curse. “CONSTANTINE!”
“That’s a powerful name for a boy,” Sasha’s father said. He pulled the sheet from Constantine who lay naked and clean on the last bed of the dismantled hospital. “I
t would suit you better if you had some clothes to wear.”
The man turned and produced a small package which he tossed to the boy.
“Your clothes from the Harvest Festival. If anyone asks, Sasha gave you that to wear because you’re best friends.”
The boys were each given an apple and placed in the back of a cart which trundled down the bumpy Hyff Lane behind a big sweet-smelling horse. Constantine dressed himself while Sasha held his apple core.
“Father already has the snakeskin back at the barn. He got you a needle and some thread, but my mom says that you don’t use any of that stuff. She examined the way you made this suit. There’s a spot, right here,” Sasha said as he turned out one of the cuffs of the fur suit he’d stolen from Constantine, “where she pulled it apart and then had to sew it back together. Her spot is good, but it’s not done as good as the rest. She said she can’t imagine how you wove the whole thing together into one piece.”
Constantine took back the apple core from Sasha and began to crunch through the cartilage and seeds of the husk. Sasha handed him his own core, too.
“Father said that it’s important that everyone say that I made the clothes. The ‘Providential Boy’ is supposed to have an unearthly skill. I said that maybe my skill is that I knew who to take the suit from, but Dad said that wasn’t the way it worked. He said that the suits are unearthly, and so that was the skill. Mom said that it doesn’t make sense because what could be more earthly than animal skins, but she didn’t say that so much after she took apart this cuff.
Constantine watched Sasha’s clumsy fingers pull at the cuff of the suit he’d worked so hard to create. He didn’t miss the suit once Sasha had stolen it from him; it didn’t really seem a part of him anymore once he saw the bigger boy wearing it. He could see where the thread held together the pieces and admired the strength of the tiny fiber, but thought the execution was clumsy and destructive. Why would you put so many holes in something you were trying to make into one piece?
The cart pulled off the road with a bump and glided over smooth grass, in between heavy cedar trees. Two old horses shuffled towards the barn, perhaps hoping for a meal.
“Those are my grandfather’s horses,” Sasha said. “Dad says he would have eaten them a long time ago but the meat is so old that it would be too stringy now.”
Constantine looked towards the house where the grumpy old tomcat sat near the door, licking its paws. Constantine recognized that look on the old tom’s face. It was the same look the cat would give him whenever Constantine arrived to find one of his traps torn apart by the old cat. The cat would wait until the trap snared a fat squirrel and then he’d poach the prey, leaving only the tail for Constantine. For a moment he considered tossing the last of his apple core at the tomcat, but then decided to finish it himself.
“For a long time, we just kept grandfather’s horses because they were good for breeding with the Constable’s mares, but now only dad’s horse does that. Grandfather’s stallions can no longer pull a cart or push a cart horse my dad says. Mother says it’s not a proper thing to say though, so don’t repeat it.”
The cart groaned when Sasha’s father said “Ho,” and his horse came to a stop.
Sasha showed Constantine how to unbuckle the horse’s harness and lead him to the barn to be brushed out. The boys wiped down the tack and hung it from hooks on the wall. While they worked, the tomcat appeared over the edge of the hay loft and watched them with curious green eyes. When Sasha wasn’t looking, Constantine threw a rock and scared the cat away.
As the boys finished their chores, Sasha’s dad came from the house with a bundle in his arms. He took the boys into a small room with a stone floor and farrier’s equipment. He untied the string and stretched out the bundle. He unfolded a gleaming black snakeskin. It looked expertly tanned and impossibly supple. It was perfect, except for the head. At the head, part of the skin was torn and one of the eye holes was a ragged mess. Constantine smiled.
“They cut the whole thing down the belly. I asked them to leave half the belly-scales uncut so you could make boots, but you’ll have to make do. We need five suits from this skin, so you’ll need to figure a way to incorporate it with other materials.” The man flipped the lids of two cedar trunks that sat against the outside wall. Inside were stacks of furs, infused with the aromatic smell of cedar. Constantine rubbed his fingers together to quell the itch that erupted. “You’ve got shears, needles, and thread on this shelf. My wife says you don’t need any of those.”
Constantine’s hand went around to the side of his suit, where his special pocket should hold his cutting flint. The pocket was empty. He’d known that since the cart.
“Remember,” Sasha’s father said, putting an open palm up in front of Constantine’s starry eyes, “five suits.”
An image of a pentagram swirled in Constantine’s imagination as he gazed at the sparkling snakeskin. Sasha’s father turned and walked out of the farrier’s room, closing the door behind him.
Sasha’s greasy fingers found their way to the snakeskin immediately, and his big shape blocked out most of the light from the window. Constantine suppressed the urge to beat Sasha with one of the big metal files until his dead hands could molest the skin no more.
“This is so cool,” Sasha said. “Did you really see this snake when it was still alive? Does it make your leg hurt just looking at it? I wonder what they did with the skull and the teeth. Can you imagine?”
As Constantine watched Sasha’s fingers play over the black scales, his eyes began to mix the hide of the boy and the snake and he imagined creating a suit that was half boy, half snake. He could skin Sasha and smoke his hide until it turned deep brown and thickened as it shrank. Then he could use snake for the chest and back, and make arms from the pudgy leg-skin of the blond boy. The scalp wouldn’t be worth anything since all that scar tissue would get in the way. That was his own fault for hitting the boy with that rock.
Constantine scanned the room and his inventory ended with the door. While Sasha’s attention was captured by trying to peel one of the scales from the edge of the skin, Constantine slipped out of the farrier’s room and into the aisle of the barn. Sasha didn’t shout after him until Constantine was already deep into the woods, running north and east towards his old stomping grounds.
Soon after the shout, Constantine felt the ground booming with the footfalls of the horse giving chase. He veered left and ran in a low crouch under the splintery sharp low limbs of a stand of pines. He hurdled a piled stone wall and ran downhill, through a blanket of sweet ferns, to the dry creek bed. On the other side, the forest opened to tall oaks that scraped the sky with reaching branches. Constantine ran full speed, enjoying the way the suit moved against his skin and how his tight calf warmed to the exertion. He sucked in full, deep breaths of clean air, and blew out the clouds of stale hospital tent air that had settled into his lungs. Constantine ran until his legs ached and he was within sprinting distance of one of his secret caves. He stopped and crouched, catching his breath after only seconds.
He listened. Nobody was following him.
Constantine walked to his cave and picked carefully through the possessions hidden there. He found a decent blade, not good enough for what he intended, but something to put in his secret pocket for emergencies. He gathered some pouches containing his jellies and powders, and a big hard stone. He flipped the stone between his hands as he walked down to where the Masty stream gurgled over and through an exposed vein of rock. With his hard stone, he beat against the vein until he found a big node of flint, buried in a larger chunk of chalk and limestone. After excavating his node, he set his hands to detaching a sharp flake. He took a break from his work with the beginning of a sharp blade emerging from the node. He smiled at the shiny flint. It would be his best knife so far, a perfect killing blade. He put it in his sack with the rest of his tools.
Constantine climbed the rocky bank to Hyff Lane and headed south.
20 SEEKING
&
nbsp; THE NEXT MORNING, DOM waited on the wall with a small loaf of bread and watched all the workers file into the dwelling. Tara was not among them. None of the women laughed at him, but several looked at him with what he took for pity in their eyes. Dom ate his bread alone as he worked. He didn’t have much to do on the south side of the house, but he spent as much time as he could there, just to watch out the windows at the courtyard where she might walk by. At the end of the day, he rushed down to the wall to see if she’d somehow snuck by him earlier. He didn’t see her that evening either.
The next morning, he stood at the wall again. This time, he waited without bread. He folded his arms and watched the same groups of workers file past, on their way to their duties inside the dwelling. Nobody spoke to him or gave him more than a passing glance. Dom wished he had Pemba there. Pemba could talk to anyone under any circumstance. He could have questioned any one of these people and found out what happened to Tara. Dom simply watched them walk by. An occasional growl rumbled in the back of his throat until he noticed it and tucked it away.
After he finished his work, he ran to Pemba’s house to ask his advice, but his friend wasn’t at home. Back at his own room, built on the back of Denpa’s house, he sat on his bed. He wondered if Tara had gone back to her home, her soul still fatally attached to her beautiful body.
Just after the sun set over the back wall of Denpa’s yard, the old man banged through the back door and stopped in his tracks. He held a bowl of rice.
“Dom! I didn’t think you were home.”
Dom nodded.
“I was about to give your rice to the cats. Do you want it?” Denpa held out the bowl. Dom took it and scooped the rice into his mouth with his fingers. Denpa’s rice was terrible—clumpy and crunchy, barely worthy of the cats—but it was welcome to Dom’s empty stomach.
Denpa sat down slowly, gripping his hands to his lower back as he took a seat and watched Dom eat.