Forest Mage

I hunted until dusk. “I owe her,” I said aloud to the magic. “If she hadn’t let me rest here, do you think my horse would have lasted? If I hadn’t taken the time here to rest myself, and eat decently, do you think I’d be on my way to Gettys now? No. I’d be dead by the road somewhere. I owe her and I want to pay her.”

I waited to feel something, that tingling stir of my blood that came when the magic moved through me. Nothing happened. I hunted anyway. I missed the first rabbit I saw, and a tree trunk deflected my missile from the second. It was not the right time of day for hunting. And I’d been a fool to think I could wield the magic. An hour later, I decided I’d been a fool to believe in it at all. There had been coincidences and I’d had nightmares. My faith and my rationality chased one another in circles until I was certain that I was a fool to attempt to know the truth of anything.

When I saw the deer, I cursed the fate that had made my father withhold my weapons from me. He was not a large animal; probably he was a yearling. I looked away from him, recalling that Dewara had told me that any prey could feel the stare of a hunter’s eyes. I mouthed my new words silently. “I need food for my journey to the territory of the Specks.”

There was a rock in my sling, smooth and hefty. It would easily have stunned a rabbit or a bird. It would not kill a deer. When I moved my arm to wind up momentum for the sling, the deer would startle and be gone. I knew there was no magic in me, no magic anywhere. I was merely a fat man, my body the freakishly rare result of my exposure to Speck plague. My heart thundered in my chest as I let the stone fly.

It hit the young buck just above his left eye. I heard the crack of stone against bone. The animal started, and a tremor ran through him. He took two steps. His front legs folded under him as if he were going to bed down for the night. He sank down. With a heavier crash, his hind legs teetered under him and he fell. His entire body gave a jerk.

I did not wait. I rushed forward, running down the hill at him, drawing my sheath knife as I ran. I turned one ankle slightly, hit a sapling with my shoulder, and plunged on. When I finally reached him, he was trying to get up. I fell on him. Using every bit of my strength, I punched my knife into his throat just behind the curve of his jawbone. He gave a wild leap and an inhuman cry of pain. I threw my weight on him then, and held him down as I sawed with my knife, groping for some vital artery. He tossed his head wildly, crashing his skull into mine. I shouted wordlessly and worked the knife in him. A leap of bright red blood rewarded me. Still, his hind legs kicked and it was some moments before he subsided into death.

Panting, I rolled off him, feeling shaken and bruised. For a time, I lay on my back next to the dead yearling, staring up at a blue sky through yellow leaves. I tried to decide if I’d been lucky, or if magic had prevailed. I decided that as long as it came down to having meat, I didn’t care.

Dragging the dead deer through the forest was a trial that I shall never forget. It would have been a task even if I’d been my old fit self. It had no antlers to drag it by, only nubby spikes. I tried hauling it by the hind feet, but the grain of its hair created more drag than I would have thought possible. I ended up gripping the front feet and dragging it that way, with the head flopping about and snagging on every imaginable obstacle. As soon as I had it to the edge of the stump field, I left it and went back to the door of Amzil’s house.

“I’ve killed a deer,” I said to the closed door. “If you help me butcher it, I’ll leave you a goodly share. But some I’ve got to take with me, to travel on.”

“A deer?” The door all but flew open. “How did you kill a deer?”

“With a rock,” I replied.

“That’s impossible,” she said.

“I used my magic to help me,” I answered, and she took that for a joke.

I gutted the deer and cut its head off. I gave the liver, heart, kidneys, and tongue over to Amzil, since they were best used fresh. With the hide still on to keep flies off it, I hung the animal, head down, in the shed to bleed. Even with a small deer, it was a lot of work. I left it with the dark blood dripping onto the earth floor. I got my extra set of clothing from my panniers. Hitch slept on. I went down to the river to wash.

I was sweating and sticky with blood. I gritted my teeth against the chill, stripped, and waded out into the river to wash myself. It was an unpleasant experience. I realized that it had been some time since I’d washed myself, not because I enjoyed being dirty but because I’d been avoiding my own body. I used sand from the riverbank to scrub myself. In some places, I had to lift my flesh to wash in the deep fold beneath it. There were sweat scalds under my arms and starting between my thighs, the result of the afternoon’s endeavors. My navel had retreated into a deep dent in my belly. A second pouch of fat beneath my belly had formed over my genitals. My buttocks sagged, and my chest was fleshy with breast fat. The experience of washing my own body shamed away any triumph I might have felt in taking the deer. If this sagging fleshy body was the price of having magic, I didn’t want it. It was small good to me. It only answered at its own fickle will, and then only if what I was attempting benefited its command for me. This magic offered me no power, only a tether to people and forces that I did not understand.