Mercedes Lackey - Wintermoon

The beast fixed its eyes. Against the lean flanks a long tail lashed.

Generally they did not meet your gaze this long.

Was it magical?

Clirando said, very low, “What do you want?”

The lion creature flung up its head, eyes narrowed and jaws open to reveal lines of white fangs. This gave the irresistibly unsettling impression it laughed. Then, with a final lash of its tail, it sprang around and bounded away between the stands of rock. It had been a male, and obviously not hungry.

Clirando walked toward the plateau’s dip and the forest.

By day, the Isle was not so silent. From the shore the cries of seabirds sometimes lifted, and from the forest occasionally other notes. However these sounds were sparse and intermittent.

For this reason the faint shuffling and skittering that started to accompany her progress, and which had nothing to do with her own light footfalls, seemed at first an illusion, some obtuse echo stirred up from the aisles of rock as she moved. But in the end Clirando knew her instinct that something followed her must be addressed.

She turned slightly, still going forward—and caught a flash of vague darkness darting behind a rock.

Paying no apparent heed, Clirando strode on, but again she drew her knife.

She could not be sure what tracked her. She did not think it was human. Yet she had not seen enough to judge what sort of animal it might be.

By then she had reached an area where the cliff plateau bulked upward to a stone hill, on the top of which was built one of the great beacons. Unlike the others along the outer coast, this had not been set alight, though a thin smell of old fires clung here. The beacon itself, she saw, was built as a round cauldron of stones, the kindling stacked ready inside and covered by oiled skins, pegged into sockets in the hill. This emblem of human activity both gladdened and disconcerted her.

As she was looking up, the skittery soft scuffle came again at her back, definitely not an echo of her own movements.

Clirando spun round.

She froze.

Three things poised on the rock in a curious huddle—almost as if they were chained together by some invisible rope. They were unlike anything she had ever seen—yet mostly piggish in shape, large pigs covered in an ashy black skin, from which stuck out spines like those of some Lybirican cactus. Their heads were misshapen, with tusks or horns pointing from their jaws, the sides of their faces, and above their small, flat, greenish eyes. Horrible things. Monsters. The very stuff of the legends of Moon Isle.

They made no move to attack.

Clirando took half a step toward them—they neither ran at her nor backed away.

Stooping swiftly, she plucked up a handful of loose stones and hurled them at the creatures.

They shied a little at the impact, tossing their ugly heads. That was all.

Were they the beasts of some local god?

Abruptly all three peeled back their upper lips. Unlike the lion beast earlier, their teeth were blunt and yellow, but even so not an encouraging sight.

Clirando rasped her sword out of its sheath. She would not turn her back on these things again, she thought.

Exactly then a voice called down from the beacon above.

“Who is there?”

It was the voice of a woman, and not young.

“Stay where you are, Mother,” Clirando shouted, “till I deal with these pigs.”

The old voice broke into a cackle of laughter. “Pigs? Is that what you see? Deal with them? I doubt you can.”

Something came slithering and bouncing down the stone hill behind Clirando.

She turned, affronted but not amazed to be attacked from both sides, and saw a large wedge of dark wet bread falling. It shot past her, landing between her and the pig things.

“Let them have that, whatever they are, a morsel of comfort,” called the old woman from the beacon. “And you come up here to me.”

Clirando could see the pigs were sniffing after the bread, creeping forward to it, more interested apparently in that than in the warrior girl.

So Clirando jumped at the hill and ran up it, leaping over the loose stones and tufts of lichen.

At the top she looked back down. The pig things were eating the bread, sharing it in an unusually well-mannered way among them. It had been soaked in wine or beer, and obviously pleased them. One animal raised its head, and from its snout came the strangest sound, a kind of jeering whine—nearly human.

“So it’s pigs, is it?” said the old woman. Clirando turned again and saw her. She was sitting around the far side of the beacon, weaving on a little upright frame, a cloth of grey and red. “Pigs for you,” she said.

“What are they?” Clirando asked.

“Yours,” said the woman.

Clirando let out a bark of mirth. “They’re nothing to do with me .”

“Oh, you think not?”

The woman herself wore a mantle that was grey and bordered by red. She looked ancient as the rock, but her eyes were still black and bright.

“Mother,” said Clirando, “thanks for your help. Now perhaps you’ll tell me, did a band of girls come by this way, warrior women of Amnos going to the festival of the Seven Nights?”

“Warriors?” asked the old woman. Clirando thought she had a clever, wicked face. “They’d be all in their fighting garb, with swords and such, walking proud?”

Clirando nodded.

“Nothing like that,” said the old one.

“Then—Mother—if they went by you, how were they?”

“Oh, I saw no one,” said the woman. “I was asleep. I lie up in that hut over there, while I tend the beacon. Tonight I must light it for the moon. Fire, to tempt the moon to shine full.”

I’ll get nothing helpful from her, thought Clirando. The old one had the look she had seen on the faces of certain grannies in the town, who found everything the young did funny, enjoying scorning and misleading them.

“Well, my thanks in any case.”

Clirando moved off over the hill. She passed the leaning hut—it looked as if no one had stayed there for ten years or more. Glancing over her shoulder, she noted the old woman had disappeared around a jut of rock. Had she been real?

This is a place of demons and shadows .

At least the pigs were not now on her track. Clirando reached the beacon hill’s foot and broke into a fast lope.

She came to the descent and the edge of the forest just before noon. Picking her way down, she found a trail, now and then carved to earthen steps at the steeper spots.

An altar stood by the path side, just in under the trees. A black formless stone was there, with a wooden cup in front of it, holding dregs of honey, from the smell.

Prudently Clirando took out a sweet wafer from her food store and dropped it into the cup.

“I don’t know you, but I respect you,” she said, bowing to the altar and the stone. Then she went down into the depths of the forest, dark green at noon as the heart of a malachite.

Story

The pig creatures came back that night, with the dusk.

She had thought she was free of them.

All day Clirando had trekked through the forest. It was dark as a cellar in parts. In others long aisles opened, lit by filtered sunlight. Here and there the conifers gave way to oaks, and even beeches, about whose roots drifts of flowers sometimes lay. But the flowers were small and pale and the leafy cloudbursts of the canopy seemed full of cores of blackness. In areas the trunks of the pines massed thick as an army, closing off not only all light, but any view or path.

Now and then Clirando heard birdsong. Once—only once—a single grey pigeon sped across from tree to tree. She saw tracks of deer and foxes, once of a wolf, and twice of boar—but none of the animals were ever to be seen. Elusive as the wildlife, her comrades from the band.