‘We were gods?’
‘Oh yes. They prayed to us to lend them our cunning, our savage instinct for survival, our ability to make ourselves invisible.’
‘But,’ protested A-sac, ‘we were never allies with men. They hunted us from the very beginning …’
‘That’s true, little fox, but therein lies the secret of man’s success. He studies his foe, borrows the traits of his enemies. Just because we were gods did not stop them killing us. It is precisely because we have qualities that they admire, which makes us a prime quarry. They have to outwit us, you see. They prayed to us, drew magic pictures of foxes on walls of rock, hunted us, killed us, dressed themselves in our skins, used our skulls for totems … do you see? They tried to become foxes. We were not the only animals that were both gods and prey, all in one. The wolf, the bear, the wildcat … there were many. Man is not satisfied with being just man. He wants to be everything, all creatures, and still remain himself. Man has unfathomable depths to his goodness and his evil, his intelligence and his ignorance – he is a dark region of wells and wishes to drink at them all.
‘I have imbibed much of this, soaked up the spirit of what lies there in that stone box. Sometimes I think I am human.’
A-sac shivered on hearing this last sentence, thinking, this fox is mad. But then O-toltol took the ground from under him by saying, ‘You will think me mad, but that is a prejudice. It is because I have insight and forbidden knowledge that I am able to speak thus.’
A-sac scratched at his fleas and thought miserably of home. Why had he come to this place? To this crazy vixen, who festered in a place without light, and who stank of grave-earth and the fetid fumes of tainted bones? The first chance he got, he promised himself, he would be away across the marshes and would never return. A fox that thought herself human? There was something utterly revolting about such a statement.
‘Are you feeling tired? Do you wish to sleep?’ asked O-toltol, softly.
‘Not – not just yet. I wondered – will you teach me something about herbs? I should like to learn.’
‘Now?’ she snapped. ‘Impossible. I have none around at the moment, for you to smell.’
‘Well, we could talk about them. For instance, I’ve heard that feverfew can cure a headache. Is that true?’
‘Yes, of course it is.’
A-sac asked, ‘Well, what does it look like? I’ve lived in the face for most of my life. I’ve no idea what to look for.’
The vixen was quiet for a moment, then she said, ‘It’s a daisy, with little green leaves.’
‘How many petals does it have?’
‘How many … ? Six of course. Six petals. Now …’
‘And what colour are henbane flowers? – I’ve always wanted to know that.’
‘Henbane? White. The flowers are white.’
A-sac nodded, thoughtfully.
‘Well, there you are, you see. I’ve learned something already.’
He had indeed learned something. He had discovered that O-toltol knew very little about herbs. O-ha – and he trusted his mother’s knowledge far more than that of a scraggy vixen of the marshes – had given him a thorough education regarding herbs and their uses. He knew that the feverfew flowers had far more than six petals and that henbane had yellow blooms, not white. For some reason this vixen was lying to him.
He got up and started to walk around, feeling his way through the darkness of the chamber-tomb.
‘What are you doing?’ asked the vixen.
‘Oh, just feeling round. It’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘I – I suppose so. Don’t touch anything. I keep some old bones in that corner over there. You mustn’t touch them.’
That was strange. A tidy fox? A-sac had never heard of such a thing. He went to the corner in question and began pushing his snout near to the heap without actually disturbing them, so that she could not tell what he was doing. He sniffed. The pricking alarms he had experienced on first entering the earth began jabbing him again, much more forcefully. He touched the bones gently with his nose, running it over contours.
They were large – too large to be the bones of any birds she might have caught on the saltings. There was a skull there, almost as large, if not the same size, as A-sac’s own head … a chilling thought ran through his head. Perhaps O-toltol had had more than one ‘assistant’ in the past? Perhaps she had had many – got through such assistants quite quickly in fact?
‘How did your last … assistant die?’ he asked her.
‘An accident,’ she answered, brusquely. ‘The tides out here are dangerous. If you intend staying, you must be aware that these things can happen. The mud sucks things to their deaths. The water drowns them – unpredictable currents, spring tides after an eclipse. I have heard of times when the whole marshes were beneath water.’
The implication was that the young fox had drowned: that this was a common cause of death in the saltings. If so, why were the bones in the tomb? The bodies would have been swept away, taken by the currents downstream, or back to the sea on the tide. He remembered what she had said earlier: Food is not easy to find on the marshland.
‘I suggest we get some sleep now,’ she called. ‘You can use this patch, here, by the corner of the stone box. I’ll sleep over there, by the door. I like the draught. Come on.’
He did as he was told.
She was guarding the door, of that there was no doubt. What he was still unsure of, was why. There was a dreadful thought running through his mind. The only thing to do was try to stay awake and wait for her to make the next move.
It seemed a season. His eyelids drooped and the closeness of the atmosphere worked on his exhaustion. To stop himself from sleeping he bit his lip, using the pain to keep from falling into a state from which he might never recover. All he could hear was the steady breathing of the vixen by the exit. He began to regulate his own breathing, as if he had indeed dropped off.
Nothing happened for a very long time. He could hear the water dripping from stone to stone, the beetles scrabbling in the cracks, the whisper of dainty spiders running over slabs. He fought to stay awake, though he desperately wanted to sleep. His mind was spinning with thoughts, racing with wild ideas. Around him the stale currents of air moved lethargically, leaving any dust unmoved. The marshland earth tightened around him: he could hear the slow pressure of the stone, the force of peat. His eyelids were like heavy weights.
After an age, he heard her stir. He heard her sliding, creeping slowly across the stone floor to where he lay. His heart began to palpitate. There was the acrid scent of his own fear in his nostrils. He pressed his throat against his paws, so that it was not exposed. If she tried to turn him over, he would know.
For a while she lay in front of him, breathing softly, that fetid breath going up his own nostrils. Then she went round to the side, pushed her nose gently under his chin and tried to nudge him over without waking him. His heart raced and his mind spun wildly as he realised what he must do. But he was a young fox, unaccustomed to fighting, except in fun with his brother and sister. His courage almost failed him. Then an idea came to him. He had to think of his adversary as a rabbit, or a bird, and not another fox.
He turned, suddenly, and gripped O-toltol by the throat. She screamed and lashed her body, thrashing heavily to get him to release his hold, but he hung on. The pair of them rolled about the stone floor as she got her hind legs up and began raking his stomach with her claws. Still he maintained his hold, knowing that if he let go she would be on him in an instant. He brought his own hind legs into play, as the pain began to sear through him.
Hold on, he told himself. I must hold on!
She began to snake herself towards the exit, her voice still at high pitch. His own claws scraped against the stonework as he fought to anchor himself. Her mouth began snapping against air.
‘Let – me – go,’ she gargled.
He ignored the plea.
Then she went quite still, as if dead, but he knew this was a trick. Ne
vertheless, he used her inertia to get a firmer grip and with his scissor jaws he buried his teeth deeper into her throat, searching for the jugular. Her breath was coming out in short gasps now and as he tore at the flesh, without releasing his grip, he could smell the blood. It dripped from her mouth on to the floor.
She made a last desperate effort to flip herself over on to her feet again, but the young fox was determined she would not get away. He swung her round, so that she swept the floor, and her back struck the corner of the sarcophagus. Though the blow was not hard enough to break it, her back must have pained her considerably and she ceased her struggles at last.
When he was sure she was finished, he let go and sprang on to the top of the stone coffin. There was blood everywhere now: on his coat, lying in small pools on the stone floor, and over the sarcophagus. He waited, in case she still had some fight left in her, but all he could hear were bubbling breaths. He could smell the warm sweetness of life draining from her body.
He remained on the top of the coffin, waiting.
Despite the darkness, he could see her eyes, staring up at him accusingly. That was strange, because he could see no other part of her, nothing else in the tomb. The eyes were glowing like charcoal embers.
The eyes said: Why did you do that?
‘You were going to kill me,’ he replied aloud, to the whispers in his head. ‘I know you were going to kill me. Those are the bones of young foxes in the corner. You kill and eat your own kind. You, you’re a cannibal. I think you get rangfars like A-gork to send you young foxes. You tasted the blood of your own kind, and found you liked it. Don’t try to deny it. Somehow your twisted mind has become addicted to foxblood.’
You don’t know that, the eyes said, you’re just guessing. What if you’re wrong? You’ve murdered a vixen, simply because you were afraid of this place, these strange odours. They all went to your head. You’re a wicked fox. You must breathe life back into my body.
‘I can’t help you any more, even if I wanted to. You’re a disgusting creature. Those bones in the corner – they’re from youngsters, like me, aren’t they?’
You foolish creature. You have too much imagination. Those bones are ancient – from animals killed by the foxclan hunter, buried in this tomb. They are foxes from just after the Firstdark. Nothing to do with me. They are the remains of man’s quarry.
He heard her shudder: a convulsion. She was nearing her end. How many young foxes she had killed would remain a mystery to A-sac, but he was sure, absolutely certain, that she had intended to kill him. That was justification enough for what he had done to her. A horrible thing, to be sure, but he was not to blame. If it had not been her lying on the floor, kicking out the last few wisps of mortality, it would have been him.
‘You’re lying about the bones. You only have yourself to blame,’ he said, trying to convince them both with the same argument.
You will go to the Unplace, said the eyes.
‘No, why should I? I was just protecting myself. But I’ll try to ensure you don’t either, though you deserve it. I’ll perform the last rites.’
There was a long, withering sigh from the floor, and then all was quiet. He descended from his perch and nudged the body. It was still. He licked the blood from his own coat and then went to the corner where the bones were piled. Sifting through them with his muzzle, he found lots of smaller bones now, that he had not detected before when he was only able to touch them gently. So she had eaten birds. But that was no proof of anything, since she could not possibly have lived on small foxes the whole time. The larger bones – he was sure they were not ancient. They were new bones.
‘She was lying,’ he shouted, the sound echoing through the chamber tomb. ‘I know she was lying. She ate foxes.’
He went to the body and performed the rituals around her. Then he went back to the heap of bones and took one of the skulls in his jaws. He dragged it through the ante-chamber, along the passage, and out into the open air. It was night now. He studied the skull under the light of the moon. It was of a fox, or a small dog. It looked old, smelled old, certainly – but not ancient. At the most – he said to himself – at the most, it was only a few seasons old. Those hunters, they had lived seasons out of time ago – she had said so. It was definitely not that old.
Anyway, he thought, what was done was done. He could not bring her back to life again. What was she doing, nudging him over anyway? And why didn’t she know about the herbs he had mentioned? Of course, if she had guessed he was testing her, then she was contrary enough to give the wrong answers on purpose, out of spite. She was that sort of fox. But – no, no, that was …
A-sac was very unhappy. He wanted to be home. He could not think why he had ever left it in the first place. To become a mystic? How stupid of him. That was the last thing he wanted now. To have to live in some damp human tomb out on the marshes, living on molluscs and fish, drinking stagnant water? No. Never.
He went back into the tomb and drank some more of the water. Then he stood over the body of the vixen again. Had it moved? Surely it had not been in that position when he left it? Perhaps he was going mad? The act of killing one of his own kind had turned his brain. That, and the loneliness of the wasteland, where even the birds had voices like ghouls.
Suddenly, he wrenched at her tail, the fur coming out and getting between his teeth.
‘You couldn’t even admit it when you died!’ he shrieked. ‘You couldn’t even do that. Now I’ll never know. All my life I’ll be haunted by you, thinking – thinking that just perhaps you were telling the truth, even though I know you weren’t. You…’ he could not think of a word terrible enough for her, and stale hotness entered his mouth, almost choking him.
In the end, she had won.
Chapter Twenty Eight
Not wishing to leave her mortal remains entombed with a human hunter, A-sac dragged the body of O-toltol out through the passage and into the open air. There, he had to perform the death rituals all over again, and found it difficult to mark the spongy turf in the way that was required. When he had finished, he filled in the entrance to the earth-tomb. He was not sure why he did this, but it seemed appropriate. Then he set out, into the night, his head buzzing with bloodflies.
At first he tried following the firmer ground and avoiding the deep gulleys full of sucking mud which slowed him down so much. He found some soft-shelled crabs which he ate whole, to sustain him on his journey. However, though he travelled all night he seemed to get no nearer to the edge of the marshes. In fact he had the feeling that he was going deeper into the saltings, and indeed when the morning came he found himself on a high, grassy sea wall.
He smelled the strong salty spray of the ocean and watched the rollers crashing against the land’s defences which kept this mighty body of water at bay. Spume the colour of his own fur frothed at the base of the dyke. Here at least, was something stronger than humans. They had made attempts at containing the ocean, but looking at the vast expanse of thundering water, this seascape that built mountains out of itself and threw them relentlessly at the land, A-sac realised that there must be times when the sea broke through and engulfed all in its path.
A-sac was still in a semi-mesmerised state. Part of this was due to hunger, but much of it had its origins in the act he had committed that night. He had the taste of blood in his mouth, which would not be washed away, even by drinking salt water. His head swam with sounds and strange scents assailed his nostrils. He seemed to be viewing the world through a red mist, and once or twice frightening hallucinations swept by the borders of his vision. He knew these were not real, but they filled him with terror just the same. The daylight had brought no relief.
Now, seeing this immense watery giant before him, which wanted no borders, he suddenly felt a profound love for his ancestor, the firstfox, A-O. This was A-O, kissing the base of the sky with liquid lips. Those towering waves with the white foaming crests were A-O’s muscles rippling. That thunderous roar was A-O’s voice.
&nb
sp; ‘A-O!’ he screamed, into the crashing wind. ‘A-O! I am your servant! I am your fox! Command me!’
His head was a whirlpool, a maelstrom of love for his ancient parent. And A-O thundered to him, out of the storm-rolled ocean. The voice was distorted but he understood the words. A-sac had killed another fox. A bad fox. A-sac was A-O’s chosen assassin, to do his–her bidding and rid the world of evil. A beginning had been made. A-sac had been commanded by A-O in his dreams, and the white fox had executed the witch. Now there were more tasks to perform. Greater deeds.
‘What must I do, A-O?’ he shouted. ‘How can I serve?’
And the wind brought the name to him. And the name was one feared by all the Trinity foxes. It was the name of a giant. A-sac was instructed by the waves to destroy this giant.
‘I am your servant, A-O,’ cried the white fox. ‘I must do your bidding. I am not afraid. You will protect me.’ After watching the white-topped waves for some time, he turned and travelled south along the sea wall. He was aware the air was full of birds, but had not the strength of mind to concentrate on anything but where his next paw would fall. The grasses on the top of the sea wall curled over the pathway, and he was effectively travelling through an endless tunnel, hidden from the outside world.
At one point he heard the voice of a dog and a human barking, somewhere ahead, and he hid in a concrete hut set into the sea wall, which had slits for windows. The place smelled of human excrement, having been used as a toilet since it had been abandoned, and when he left A-sac vomited the soft-shelled crabs. His head spun again after this and he had to stop and rest, lying in the grass and chewing at a few blades, to get his strength back. The gulls came down and peered at him from a safe distance, but did not jeer the way those on the rubbish tip had done. They walked around him, cocking their heads on one side, as if studying his attitude and sympathising.
When he felt able, he got back on his feet and continued through the tunnel. He finally emerged on the north bank of the river, in an area of land that was clearly havnot, but did not have the appearance of farm land either. It was a tufted, grassy area where huge concrete blocks stood like single walls here and there, and great sheets of metal were propped-up by posts. Some of the concrete blocks were pitted, as if they had been struck by a giant, iron fist. The metal sheets had jagged holes punched through them. The whole area was fenced off and had a gate guarded by men wearing clothes of the same cut. They had flat black hats on their heads and carried guns. Apart from these men, the large expanse of land seemed deserted.
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