Rubric

That day was not much different from the one that preceded it, or the one that followed, in the unbreakable chain of days woven by the steps of the Earth and the Sun. If I think back it seems that it could just as easily have been switched with one of those other days, and slipped unperceived and unremembered down that long chain into the night of memory and routine, never revisited or replayed again and again in memory. Some days are heralded, awaited, planned and prepared, like the arrival of babies or the coming-of-age and the thanksgiving feast days. Some days turn and strike without warning.

I had never killed a man before.

In the fading rays of that late spring afternoon, I went to get Willow and the children she was with at the forest gardens near the creek. My bow slung over my shoulder, I had just returned from hunting. The thick rug of pine needles, still wet with the spring sop, made no sound at all. I drifted like a ghost along the path, accompanied by the discrete dripping of the trees. A thrush eyed me carefully from a low branch, and I slowed, to not startle him. "Hello, little brother", I breathed, stopping a few paces away. He raised his tail, turned with a twitch, bowed, and fixed me with his other eye. "Sorry", I sighed, with a sad smile, "I don't understand." He had such an eye, coal black and shiny together, sparkling in a stray shaft of light, watching me intensely. I opened my mouth to explain again, but no words came out, and I continued to gaze at that tiny eye, black and empty, without words, or human intelligence, alive with some reptilian force, more real than the warm afternoon that held it.

When I pulled myself away, the afternoon had indeed gone, replaced with an ashen mist, and the thrush with the unbearable brightness of burning gold. The creature leaped into the air in a slow roar of flame, scales, prismatic feathers, and with a flick of its serpent tail, was gone. Making my way carefully forward, tree trunks swam insubstantially, pale noonday shadows shifted in a world without light, and through them a horned, red creature, glowing with its own light. It seemed unaware of me as I approached carefully between the ghostly trees, readying my bow. Beyond the creature I could sense the sparkle of a bright group of figures that held its attention. It looked around suddenly, with eyes of burning topaz, and I stood stock still. It seemed not to see me, and turned back to its prey, for it was hunting, I felt the weight of its hunger in those eyes.

My bow shimmered like water, a long, curving tooth of green deep inside the wood rising from a dark tangle under my hand. Strung, I knocked an arrow and drew the bowstring to my jaw, making the green root inside shimmer through blue to angry violet, sparks of hot white light dripping down from the tip.

It struck me that, if the arrow was still somewhere back in that spring afternoon, it would not pass through the trees, and in any case, I had no idea what I was stalking. I lowered the bow, and moved carefully to the side, seeking a position that would be open to this creature, avoiding the insubstantial trees with difficulty. Luckily, or not, as the case may be, the trees slowly filled out their wraith-like silhouettes, and soon I was stepping carefully through the lengthening shadows of the same warm spring afternoon I had left behind on the trail. The creature was screened by branches and trunks, but I knew where it was. I approached slowly, seeking a position, until I saw him.

He was from a Bloom hunting party, his nearly naked body black with paint. A maze of scars twisted across his back, and I knew that we were in terrible danger, all of us.  I dug my fingers carefully into my ash pouch, and drew a black line down my forehead to the center of my nose in a single, deliberate stroke, prepared to draw blood. Stretching the bowstring to my jaw again, I was ready.

Perhaps it is only now, in my memory, but I could see everything with a crystal clarity, a calm intricacy like nothing I had ever experienced before. He pulled his knees under him, rising slowly into a crouch. A boy screamed with laughter nearby. I could see the tattoo of red horns on his temple, the rough stubble on his bronzed cheek. He continued to straighten, war club hanging heavily from his hand.

There would be others coming. The whole family would soon be under attack. There would be others. They would need me. I could see the ridges and burns on his bare back and shoulders. The gleam of sweat on his painted skin. I could almost smell him. Blood pulsed at his throat, where the arrow would enter. I could feel his pulse against the tips of my three fingers, tight against the bowstring. His life was straining straining in my hand, twisting to leap free into the Spirit World. And I released it.

---

Willow and I hustled the kids back to the Sacred Grove down a narrow path that wound deep in raspberry brambles. As we got closer, we heard a man's unthrottled screaming, shouts, and a the repeated sharp cracks of a gun. We worked our way slowly the last few hundred meters, and the first thing we saw was Blind Oak, unstopping a squat jar in a huddle of young adults. "Use this. And go quickly." I hurried to join them. The unknown man's screams had died to a broken ululation somewhere past the far end of the grove.

The group were carefully pressing their arrows into the clay jar of Scorch that Blind Oak held. Pale green, waxy, almost creamy, Scorch would stay on the arrowheads until it melted in the heat of a body, where it would bring agonizing death. It did not kill quickly, but it the target almost immediately burned with too much pain to fight. I pressed three of my arrows, wrapped them with leaves, and carefully settled them in the outside pouch of my quiver.

Blind Oak kept his eyes fixed to the west, looking far beyond the grove, with an arm around Ash, who bowed his head and pressed close to follow the murmur and shuffle of the old mans lips. The next moment we were gone, rushing through the dark forest behind Ash, hearts pistoning hard blood to our legs, to catch the Bloom raiders and rescue our captives, or, at the very least, to ensure that none of our People remained alive in their hands. Ash passed out gummy wads of nighteye to me and a few of the better archers. The slimy clump of leaves and resin numbed my tongue, the bitter herbs trickling into my blood, working their changes in my body, bending the night into a yellow-green twilight. Ash took one himself. We never stopped running.

We caught them at a rocky outcrop covered in birch, near the fishing platform on the Fall River. One of them had a gun, and killed Cracked Pine at some point, but I didn't know until afterward. Ash had explained the plan as we ran - Camellia, Cotton, Chinque and I, with the help of the nighteye, would bring down as many as possible, but we wouldn't wait long to rush them. It was a dangerous plan - the Bloom are bloody scrappers, more than a match for us when they can close. But it was the only chance of taking back any of the prisoners alive - to kill them quickly.  That meant that the four of us would have to strike well and swiftly, or Ash and the rest would have to face a desperate Bloom hunting party. I felt ill. My whole body was soaked in a gummy sweat. I caught myself grinding my teeth, and had to put my hand up to pry my jaws apart. The herbs made the night strange, like clear glass in a dark room, as if the air itself was an extension of my vision.

The Bloom party were grouped near the rocks, waiting for us. Ash sent the rest of the group to circle the area, the other snipers with them. I prepared to take my first careful shot. One Bloom warrior stood very still, and I realized, too late, that he was pointing a weapon at us when a thunderous flash and a brutal pain sent me to the ground in agony. I couldn't see anything, my ears were ringing, and put my hands to my head, probing for blood. I knew I had been shot. I heard screaming and shouting, more shots, but I could only see and agonizing greenish-yellow blob that filled my sight. I squirmed to get my back against a tree for cover. Soft bodies kept thudding against me with a frantic fluttering. I fumbled and released the hatchet from my belt - they could be on us already. There was a hand on my shoulder, I seized it and cocked my right arm when I recognized Ash's voice, asking if I were hurt.

"I can't see."

"Muzzle flash and the nighteye. " I felt his hands gently searching my scalp. "I don't feel any blood. Stay here." I could hear him hurrying away. There was terrible screaming, arrows whizzed and thudded in the trees. My jaw was so tight I could hear my breath hissing through my teeth. The flash of the gun had burned my eyes as surely as if it had been held in front of my face. I sat still, listening for anyone approaching in the dark. There were no more gunshots. Firing a gun in the dark is an act of desperation. The flash is a beacon - the shooter was certainly to first to go down. I started to be able to see faint shapes out of the corners of my eyes - the ghostly birch trunks. I rose and stepped carefully toward the screaming and swearing, head tilted to the side, looking out of the corners of my eyes, around the throbbing yellow-green ache across my vision, half-crouched as I stumbled forward, hoping I was ready to kill again. I also needed not to smash headlong into a tree.

A frantic fluttering shape tumbled through my vision. A wood dove, panicked by the gunshots in the dark. I started to move faster, hefting the hatchet. Broken rocks were just ahead, and a heavy form knelt over something on the ground, smashing a club down over and over again, punctuated with hoarse, sobbing grunts. Another shape came and caught his hand. I heard Ash's voice.

"Enough. It's over." The kneeling figure was Hick, and he rose, faltered, caught himself on a trunk growing from a fissure in the stone, then smashed his club into the rock face, sobbing with rage. I walked closer.

"Allie! Can you see?" Ash's arms were dark and sticky.

I nodded, looking beyond the mashed form, and saw a child laying between two large rocks. It was Apple. His throat was cut from ear to ear. I kept looking, waiting for him to move.

Ash was counting heads. "Where is Cracked Pine? Silver? Spread out and find them."

There had been only five in the Bloom group, and our victory had cost us dearly. Cracked Pine was dead. Silver was badly hurt, white bone pushing out at her shoulder and hip. Ash and some others were putting together a litter, and Camelia knelt next to her, murmuring and encouraging her to chew on a cluster of leaves. Apple didn't move. I could see his eyes. They didn't move, either. Someone bundled him into a sheet of rough cloth, and the last I saw of him was his neck lolling open, frayed muscle sprouting under his slack, chubby face. Hick threw him over his back like a small bundle of sticks, he was so tiny.

--

Silver died on the walk home. Her erratic breathing was the only real noise any of us made, and when it stopped, there was only the rustle of leaves, the call of owls, and shrill of invisible insects in the dark.

When we got back, we went to the river, where Three Moons and several other members of the Council were waiting for us, for the purification ritual. We could not be re-admitted to the Sacred Grove uncleansed of blood shed in anger.
A pair of the older women took Apple and Silver away to somewhere, and the rest of our war party put down their weapons and waded slowly into the water. Hick's heavy body was slumped in upon itself, as if he could hardly hold his own weight, and he sank into the water with a groan. Ash and the others were already showing the after-effects of the nighteye - tremors and vomiting. I held back in the darkness, unseen. I didn't feel anything, no shakes, nothing. I felt better, more alive, than I had ever before. I did not want to be cleansed.

I turned and went back toward the forest garden to get my arrow. I didn't look too closely when I pulled it out, and wiped some of the blood off with a handful of pine needles. I waited for a while, smeared with blood and dirt and sweat, letting the sounds of the forest spin by, twitching along the horizon of perception like sparks in the darkness. The thin tension of the nighteye still danced over my skin, spreading the forest out around me like a phosphorescent sketch of itself on the flayed skin of an animal.

I started back toward the Grove, away from the river, sticky arrow in hand. Soon it was clear that there was something else moving in the forest. The first white skim of dawn breathed against the sky, but under the canopy it was dark as a tomb. Even the nighteye was fading, and I could only catch the faintest suggestion of antlers moving parallel to me in the thick night, and for a moment a deep golden eye, as warm and rich and pitiless as the summer sun.

I walked a few steps farther on. The nighteye faded completely, and leaving only the pre-dawn darkness, and me, smeared in the blood of the dead, untouched. Untouchable. Like those nameless hunters in the winter dark, trailing through the woods with their unseen master.

I drove the arrow sharply into the ground, peeled my fingers free from the tacky shaft, and turned back to the river to clean my skin. Nothing else moved in the forest on the way back, only the busy creatures who made their homes there, mindful of their busy lives, and not of consequences.