Uprooted(19)
Author: Naomi Novik

Kasia told me: the cattle had sickened almost overnight. The first few had borne bite marks as if some strange enormous wolves had set teeth to them, although no wolves had been seen anywhere near, all winter. “They were Jerzy’s. He didn’t put them down right away,” Kasia said soberly. I nodded.

Jerzy should have known better—he should have pulled them out of the herd and cut their throats at once, the moment he saw them wolf-bitten and left among the other animals. No ordinary wolf would have done anything like that. But—he was poor. He had no fields, no trade, nothing but his cows. His wife had come and quietly begged flour of us more than once, and whenever I’d come home from the woods with gleanings enough to spare, my mother would send me to their house with a basket. He had struggled for years to save enough to get a third cow, which would mean an escape from poverty, and only two years ago he had managed it. His wife Krystyna had worn a new red kerchief trimmed in lace at the harvest, and he a red waistcoat, both of them with pride. They’d lost four children before their namings; she was expecting another one. So he hadn’t put the cattle down quickly enough.

“They bit him and they got into the other cattle,” Kasia said. “Now they’ve all gone vicious, and they’re too dangerous to even go near, Nieshka. What are you going to do?”

The Dragon might have known a way to purge the sickness from the cattle. I didn’t. “We’ll have to burn them,” I said. “I hope he’ll make it right, after, but I don’t know anything else to do.” To tell the truth, despite the horror and the waste of it, I was glad, desperately glad. At least this wasn’t fire-breathing monsters or some deadly plague, and I did know something I could do. I pulled out the fire-heart potion, and showed Kasia.

No one argued with the idea when we got to Dvernik. Our headwoman Danka was as surprised as Kasia or the men in Olshanka when I came scrambling down from the sleigh, but she had bigger things to worry about.

Every healthy man, and the stronger women, was working in shifts to keep the poor tormented beasts penned up, using pitchforks and torches, slipping on ice and their hands going numb with cold. The rest of our village were trying to keep them from freezing or starving. It was a race whose strength would give out the first, and our village was losing. They had already tried a burning themselves, but it was too cold. The wood hadn’t caught quickly enough before the cattle tore apart the piles. As soon as I told Danka what the potion was, she was nodding and sending everyone not already working around the pen to get ice-picks and shovels, to make a fire-break.

Then she turned to me. “We’ll need your father and brothers to haul in more firewood,” she said bluntly. “They’re at your house: they worked all night. I could send you for them, but it may hurt you and them worse, when you have to go back to the tower after. Do you want to go?”

I swallowed. She wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t say anything but yes. Kasia still gripped my hand, and as we ran across the village to my house together, I said, “Will you go in first, and warn them?”

So my mother was already crying when I came through the door. She didn’t see the gown at all, only me, and we were crumpled into a heap of velvet on the floor, hugging each other, when my father and brothers came staggering out of the back rooms, confused with sleep, and found us. We wept all together even while we told each other there was no time for weeping, and through my tears I told my father what we were going to do. He and my brothers went dashing out to hitch up our horses, which had thankfully been safe in their own heavy stable next to the house. I snatched those last few moments and sat at the kitchen table with my mother. She smoothed her hands over my face over and over, her own tears still running. “He hasn’t touched me, Mamusha,” I told her, and didn’t say anything about Prince Marek. “He’s all right.” She didn’t answer, just stroked my hair again.

My father put his head in and said, “We’re ready,” and I had to go. My mother said, “Wait a moment,” and vanished into the bedroom. She came out with a bundle made up, my own clothes and things. “I thought someone from Olshanka might take it to the tower for you,” she said, “in the spring, when they bring him gifts from the festival.” She kissed me again and held me once more, and let me go. It did hurt more. It did.

My father went to every house in the village, and my brothers leapt down and robbed every woodshed of every last stick they’d once hauled in, heaving great armloads onto the sled with its tall poles. When it was full, they drove out to the pens, and I saw the poor cattle at last.

They didn’t even look like cows anymore, their bodies swollen and misshapen, horns grown huge and heavy and twisted. Here and there one of them sprouted arrows or even a couple of spears, thrust deep into their bodies and jutting out like horrible spikes. Things that came out of the Wood often couldn’t be killed, except with fire or beheading; wounds only maddened them worse. Many of them had forelegs and chests blackened where they had stamped out the earlier fires. They were lunging against the heavy wooden fence of the pen, swinging their heavy unnatural horns and lowing in their deep voices, a dreadfully ordinary sound. There was a knot of men and women gathered to meet them, a bristling forest of pitchforks and spears and sharpened stakes, prodding the cattle back.

Some women were already hacking at the ground, mostly bare of snow here near the pens, raking away the dead matted grass. Danka was overseeing the work; she waved my father over, our horses whuffling uneasily as they drew nearer and smelled the corruption on the wind. “All right,” she said. “We’ll be ready before noon. We’ll heave wood and hay over, in among them, and then light torches with the potion and throw them in. Save as much of it as you can, in case we have to try a second time,” she added to me. I nodded.

More hands were coming as people were woken from their rest early to help in the final great effort. Everyone knew the cattle would try and stampede out when they were burning: everyone who could hold even a stick took a place in the line to hold them back. Others began to heave over bales of hay into the pen, the bindings broken so they smashed apart as they landed, and my brothers began throwing over the bundles of firewood. I stood anxiously beside Danka, holding the flask and feeling the magic in it swirling and hot beneath my fingers, pulsing as though it knew soon it would be set loose to do its work. Finally Danka was satisfied with the preparations, and held out to me the first bundle to be fired: a long dry log split halfway down the center, twigs and hay stuffed inside the crack and tied around it.