Clayton Emery: Whispering woods

"Does she pay you? Feed you?" Gull was feeling increasingly stupid. And guilty.

"Feed? I hunger."

"Are you a slave to the wizard?" Gull insisted.

"Slave?" A long pause. "I must do… as she asks." "Oh, my," sighed the woodcutter. "Greensleeves, I'm the simpleton."

Not long after, Cowslip and Greensleeves had cleansed the giant's wound, found fresh manure (but where were the cattle?) and packed on a poultice. Gull had butchered the dead horse, and lacking bandages, had sliced raw horsehide to wrap around the giant's stump. The giant sat up and ate every scrap of horse-liver and lights and guts-but he was used to raw fish, he explained slowly.

Cowslip asked the giant questions, and slowly they learned that he lived by the sea, fished, had fashioned his patchwork smock from the sails of shipwrecks, and was named Liko. (The single name, they guessed, meant one identity, not two. One brain in two skulls, with a wide gap between.) The left head answered questions while the right stared into space, daydreaming.

Gradually, throughout the long day, the villagers picked up. It gave them little time to mourn, though they were quiet. Everywhere Gull looked was some reminder of a life lost forever. A tree in which his brothers and sisters had built a hut, a stone where his grandmother had basked in the sun and told her stories, a stone wall he'd rebuilt with his father.

Only Greensleeves seemed not to mourn. Perhaps she didn't understand what had happened. Cooing, she puttered as always, tended people and the giant, mixed water with dandelion and burdock roots and fennel leaves for a poultice, brought comfort with her touch.

Some survivors had propped up an intact roof and cleared out underneath, and under this pitiful shelter they laid the comatose villagers on bare earth. Some had stopped breathing, and were buried in a far-off cellar hole. They had to set a girl with a switch to shoo rats away, for the pests scuttled everywhere. Cowslip showed Gull a nasty bite on the wrist: she'd shooed rats off a wounded child. The bite flamed red. She'd also picked up fleas from the creature, and had to scrub them off with mud in the swimming hole. Lightheaded, she stayed game, and returned to tending the sick.

But at one point she asked, "What shall we do, Gull?"

"Do?" He paused at digging. They were trying to free a root cellar under a house, one containing winter turnips. He moved slowly because his head still ached from yesterday's stone rain. He felt light-headed too, probably from losing blood to the vampire. "I-I don't know, 'Slip. Rebuild, I guess. What else can we do?"

The girl looked around the valley, brushed back her corn yellow hair. "It will be like building on a graveyard."

Gull shrugged, winced. Questions about life and death and afterlife had never concerned him. "The only other choice is to leave, and where would we go? My mother claimed the ghosts of our ancestors stayed with us, watching and protecting. Now there are a few more. But in fifty years, this tragedy will be just a story to tell children."

The girl laid a brown hand on his forearm. "Whose children, Gull?"

Gull studied her face. Despite dirt and fatigue, she looked beautiful. With his maimed left hand, he trailed hair away from her cheek. "Our children. Because we are going to stay-"

Suddenly she was in his arms, hugging his chest and sobbing. He patted her soft hair with his callused, crippled, scabby hands and cooed, "There, there. Don't cry. We'll protect each other, Cowslip." She turned her face up, and he kissed her.

Yet Gull's father had often said, "When the gods decide to punish a man, they do it all the way." Gull remembered that before the sun set.

All afternoon, he'd hunted cattle and goats in the woods. He'd found nothing except traces of goblins, goat horns, and hooves. This bad news he decided to keep to himself.

He felt forgiving anyway. As in any crisis, his emotions had sunk and risen overnight, soared from despair to hope in a day.

Maybe he wasn't thinking too clearly, but he didn't care. He was in love. Holding Cowslip had been the finest thing he'd ever felt, and he almost skipped through the forest. Cowslip would make a fine wife, and he a good husband, he hoped. They would rebuild a home, replant the gardens, dam the stream and bring it back, help neighbors rebuild, see White Ridge grow many generations yet. Another of his father's axioms: A man is only beaten when he quits.

He whistled as he left the woods. Far off, the makeshift village continued to grow from the old center.

But running toward him came Cowslip's brother, Gray Shoat. The boy's cry sent a shock of cold fear.

"Gull! Cowslip's sick!"

Cowslip lay on her back, alone.

Gull blinked, stunned. He could hardly recognize her.

She had crumpled in the path not far from the victims of the mysterious weakness. She'd been fetching them water. A puddle and a broken redware crock lay by her hand. Her mouth hung open, arms flopped alongside, one foot folded underneath. Even under a wool gown, her armpits and groin looked swollen fit to burst. Her skin was dark as dusk, as if she were choking to death. Or already had.

None of the villagers would go near. Horror froze them. Fathers held their children at bay. Mothers sobbed, one of them Cowslip's.

As Gull ventured close, an old man, Wolftooth, grabbed his arm. The woodcutter barked, "Let go! I must see to her! Why aren't you-"

"Don't!" Wolftooth rasped. "It's death. Black Death! I know it from the legends! It fells a person in their tracks! Oftimes a wisewoman come to administer dies before her patient!"

Gull stared, but did not approach. He'd heard the stories, too, about whole cities wiped out by the Death. "What if she's…"

"She's not," interrupted Wolftooth. "She's dead. All the rest, too, all inside the house." The "house" was the roof under which they'd laid the victims. " 'Twas rat bite killed her. Poor Cowslip."

So that was her epitaph, thought Gull. Poor Cowslip, who might have been wife to Gull the Woodcutter. Tears blurred his vision of her, burned his cheeks. Clumsily, he stumbled around the path and wreckage and Cowslip's corpse to peer into the shelter.

By the low entrance lay a boy, Otter, set to shoo out rats. He, too, was swollen and black. Fleas trailed from his body, more fleas than Gull had ever seen.

And everywhere inside the shelter, tiny eyes glittered at him. Hundreds of them. Yellow teeth were bared, then the rats returned to feeding.

The horror was so great, so overwhelming, Gull couldn't grasp it. His mind shut down, walling off the terror before he went mad.

All he could think was: First his mother and father, then his sisters and brothers, then Sparrow Hawk missing, and now a woman he'd just discovered he could love.

And moments ago he'd been whistling in the woods. Suddenly he hated himself. And everything else.

Behind him, Wolftooth argued with Seal, the village bully. And others. The argument rose to a roar. "… We're going, and now, and that's that!"

"Going where?" Gull demanded, falling into his old ways of questioning everything Seal said. Other villagers stopped squabbling and stared at the two men.

"Away!" snarled the fat man. "This village is cursed! It's an open grave!"

"Going where!" Gull repeated. "You don't say where! You've never been anywhere else!"

"That doesn't matter! Just away!"

Feverfew quavered, "But Seal, do you think-"

The fat man turned to his cowering wife and slapped her head. "Fetch your pots and my jug!" He would have belted her again, but Gull snagged his wrist and squeezed until Seal gasped.

Gull snarled at the villagers. "Is this the man you'd follow when you quit this village, when you abandon your homeland? This coward and bully? Think of what you're leaving behind here!"