Эйми Бендер - The Color Master

He nodded. They all had their own stories.

Our sentry is a good man, the man said, and he said he’d contact us immediately via light signaling with use of the sun and his mirror and we have not seen a thing. Ah! Is that his horse?

He glanced down, and saw the packs. She had in her lap some turkey jerky that she’d been eating earlier.

Oh, I don’t know! she said. She widened her eyes. Is it? I was just walking and came upon this horse and needed a rest. Hours ago. It did not have an owner.

The man’s brow furrowed. The horse, alone? Hours ago?

Alone, she said.

He consulted with a short man next to him on a taller horse, making them even.

You’ll have to come with us, the main man said.

Oh no, she said, slipping the turkey jerky into a pocket. I’ll walk. I’ll give you his horse. I didn’t realize it belonged to anyone recently. I thought it had been wild for a while.

No, said the man, firmly. We need you to come with us.

He gave a nod to his short man, who began to dismount.

The woman leapt off her horse, and backed into the meadow. The afternoon sun filtered through pine needles on high fir trees to the side, and with a quick move she had the cloak out of her bag and on and had turned into light and shadow.

Where’d she go? said the short man.

Witch! said the first.

The trumpets raised and blared.

The woman crept quietly to a corner of the meadow. Had any one of them been attuned to light, they would’ve seen one patch of splattered sun shapes moving along in a way that did not correspond to the breeze.

But they were not. They were preoccupied with what had happened. They had liked their handsome, courageous scout. They quickly assimilated the man’s packs and letters into their crew, and put a child who had been previously riding with his mother onto the horse, and the two lead men swore, and the woman watched silently from her spot in the meadow as they moved in a clump over the hills.

She stayed in the meadow in the cloak for hours, and the sun went down and lit the grasses with orange light, and she wondered about her husband, who was likely going to see one of his women on the side. Although it made her cringe inside, a fist in her stomach, there was also a distant relief in it, in people just doing what they needed to do. She found comfort in the way the grasses swayed, and murmured, and at dinnertime, in a little whisper, she asked the cake to change flavor, and, magic cake that it was, it shifted from vanilla pound to a chocolate Bundt, and she ate it with pleasure, plus some more almonds she had in her pocket and the remaining turkey jerky. Water from the spring. The moon rose in a crescent and crickets rubbed their wings together and in the far distance, now and again, she could hear the shining bleats of the bugles and trumpets.

In the morning, she walked on. She could smell the river now, the heavy moisture, the damper grasses under her feet. The trumpets had grown fainter, and she imagined they were returning home to arm up and come back to try to defeat the ogres with guns and bayonets. Maybe they will, she thought, vaguely, though the ogres had magic and bigness on their side, and the humans had a hubris ogres did not. Ogres bumbled, and erred, but their weaknesses were not hidden, and this helped them, in the long run.

She ate her lunch (more dried cherries) and then took the cake out of her bag. Something about it still bothered her. I need to fight for my life a little harder than this, she told it. It was now a chocolate chip cake, and she felt bad for it, this cake so willing to change and please her, with no other beings around who could speak to it, and enjoy it, but she ate a small portion and then wrapped it in a checkered napkin and tucked it in the branched fork of a sturdy oak.

Here, cake, she told it, patting the napkin. You are to have your own adventure now. No matter what happens, you can grow again.

As she said it, as she stooped to shoulder her bag, she understood why she could not tolerate being around a cake that survived so repeatedly, and she stood, bowed at the branch, and walked away.

Finding food became much harder then. She rooted for berries, having learned years ago from her husband what was edible, but more times than not, the berries were bad. She ate a handful of sour ones in the afternoon, and dug up some old peanuts and a beet. Dirt filled the cracks in her hands. She found a strong stick and rubbed the end to a point with the paring knife she’d brought in her sack, and when she finally reached the river—dark blue, racing, stone-dribbled—after refilling her water (ogre-country water was always drinkable—something to do with the deep reserves replenished by the clouds), she saw a quick orange fish in the current and crouched down and, after dozens of tries, speared it. The fish flapped on her stick, and she knelt and prayed a thank you. She had only seen a fire built in front of her a few times, but she was able to wrangle together some sticks and fir needles and with the matches she had in her pack managed to get enough going to scorch the cleaned fish, though she missed many of the bones and picked them from her teeth in thin pullings. She let the fish guts molder in the grasses for another animal. Everything would get eaten in some way or another.

She slept that night wearing the cloak, a bright spot of dapple in the darkness. Soon into her sleep, she woke at the sound of rustling, and caught a bear cub next to her licking up the fish guts and eyeing her sunspot curiously. She removed the cloak and it scampered away. The next morning, she wrapped up the cloak and left it in another tree’s branches. She did not want help from magic. She did not want any more handouts.

She grew rugged and wiry in the fields, spearing fish, using up the last of her matches but not until she was sure she had figured out how to make a fire on her own, which sometimes took over an hour. Her legs turned leaner and tanner, and she squatted and watched the clouds and the river and felt her sense of internal time shifting. We adapt, she told herself repeatedly. This is what they mean by adaptable. The men rose up from the village with their spears and guns, and when she saw the glints of red and the banners of war she climbed a high tree and watched from a distance as the human forces with shining weaponry and brass charged into ogre territory. Into the thatched huts and the rickety tavern and the ogre game-field full of nets and balls woven from goat hide. She watched, again, as the ogres ate the men whole. They could eat and eat. She watched the ogres fall from the expert weaponry, and the sight of a fallen ogre enraged the other ogres and invigorated the remaining men, so the last phase was particularly bloody. Casualties were tossed off an embankment on Cloud Hill, and far below, people cried out and ran from the falling bodies.

On one of the days, she spotted her husband from the height of her best scouting tree, near the widest part of the river, where she’d set up a little daily life for herself that included hours of watching insects move grasses around or feeling the wind shift over her skin. Her husband, who had aged. She could see it in his limp. She missed him. She felt from his limp that he missed her. She had taken good care of him. He had been her one and only love. She watched as he swiped at the humans with swinging arms and ate two and then stumbled off and could not continue. The humans shot guns in his direction but he just swatted bullets like sport and the humans were radically outnumbered by that point and her ogre was one of the biggest. He limped farther away, and then twisted and turned, and his body moved in a way she’d never seen before, an uncomfortable jerking, an insistent movement from feet up to mouth, and he vomited up human—legs and arms and a head tumbled straight out of him. It was unchewed, the body—it was just parts and parcels of humanness—and the pieces lay there in the grass, glazed in a layer of spit and acid. Everyone stopped, for a second, seeing that: the man who had not been chewed, but had been split into parts, and was of course dead. The ogres held still, sweating, staring. The ogres had never seen an ogre throw anything up in their lives; they were nothing if not able digesters, and they shuddered at the sight of it.