The Hunted

[Calliope]

To live as an animal requires only ignorance; to live as a human being requires illusion.

The young, hunted woman had lived as both. Here, far from human society, survival asked only those skills and natural tenets she had learned in her barbarous girlhood. When the authorities had imprisoned her, they had taken her prized weapon, but in the interlude between freedom and the hunt's beginning she had retrieved those others she kept in that more civilized place she had called for a time home, those once-happy chambers that entombed the fragments of all her lost illusions.

Civilization was the place for shattered conceits because it required one lie even to oneself to bear it. So often now in her abject loneliness she thought back over everything she had done to try to discern where she had gone wrong and what she could have done differently. How had she failed? But it was no use: her hopes had always been based on self-deception. The worst lies were not those she told others—constantly—but how she had convinced herself that she could be content foregoing her own human needs in service to love.

Love. Was that the greatest illusion of all? She had now seen purity corrupted, the basest hate rewarded, and the most unbearable wrong committed to from the motivation of sacrificial love. And in the end, it was all for nothing: her brother was dead, and the spider from the grave had ensnared her as well in his inescapable web.

The hunted woman's arrow found its mark, and the hind collapsed without even a whimper. This was reality: to live one must kill. She began cutting into the ignorant animal's skin and removing the sustenance of its meat.

How long would it be before they found her, and her life ended just as meaninglessly? Afterward, the wearisome human thoughts that necessitated so much of her mental bargaining to deflect would stop, and her supple form would turn from an inspiration of desire to rigid carrion. Like the deer, she might not have even a moment's warning before the mortal blow struck. She had no illusion that she would escape the irresistible vortex of death forever.

Yet one task remained to her that she hoped to finish. (She no longer prayed to the gods that they would allow her to; she no longer believed in them.) Did what she want matter in the grand gyre of the cold universe? No, but it counted for something to her, and the necessary dream she might see it done kept driving her onward, even as an autumn chill fell across the land.

[Calliope]

[Part 2]

Before her aspirations transported her from straightforward nature to urban artifice, she had met the reticent Elven druidess through the wild frolic of a snowball fight. They discovered that they shared a scavenger's view of the world and complementary social faults: the first had difficulty opening her mouth, the second keeping hers closed. In spite of their friendship, each thought the other crazy. Still, the outlaw trusted the nature worshiper not to covet the bounty that killing her would bring.

The Elf lacked the hunted woman’s faculty for language, and her Common sounded like the irregular warbles of some tree-dwelling bird, rather than the rhythm of a smoothly flowing stream: “What you ask I do to an enemy, not friend. Are you sure? It not go away.”

The outlaw swallowed, and her chin gave a just perceptible nod, her toned shoulders slumping so that she looked physically vulnerable and subdued, drawing down into herself as she always did whenever beaten. “I'm sure. If I explain everything I ask of you, perhaps you'll understand.”

The Elf shook her red-hooded head. “I give up understanding you long time ago, Cailey, to keep from making my brains hurt. It is enough you want.”

Nonetheless, the hunted woman needed more from her Elven friend than the spell; the druidess would also have to make a journey and deliver a note. That note read:

Dearest Edie,

So much you have suffered, beloved companion of my heart...too much to bear alone. I desire more than life itself to embrace you at my brother's funeral and wed our grief, but my appearing in the open would disrupt his sacred ceremony and expose you to another violent loss. Asariel provides this boon of standing in my stead, and so please believe, Love, that through her I am with you, our tears like soft rain merging into one conjoined flow.

Though you now lack neither money nor influence, she brings what I am able to contribute toward that home we talked of for lost children (would that it honor the name I still cherish, rather than the evil presently branded to both poor Franz and you).

Your evenings must be so lonely without your son or your Cailey….

Once you have tucked in our brave boy for the last time, Asariel bears a final gift for you that may help warm your chambers in the smallest of ways...although I do not think she drinks tea. (If you share your thoughts with her whilst you prepare and enjoy yours, she is just as likely as I was to listen to every word you say—yet absorb none of your wisdom.) She is affectionate, however, fiercely loyal, and forever appreciative of your protection from the predators on her kind in this world.

Goodbye, farewell, my darling tutor.

What the nature worshiper brought Miss Farthingale was a common mink, except that this mink sat reverently waiting outdoors while the countess said farewell to her son. Passersby might reasonably have assumed that the druidess had put some sort of taming enchantment on the once-wild creature for it to behave so, but the more remarkable observation was how the mink's button dark eyes misted and filled with what looked like yearning as they followed the weeping mother through the doorway into the sepulcher.

When Asariel offered the two-pound pet to Miss Farthingale as the note instructed, the little creature had seemed almost to try to speak to the stricken woman. Of course she—it was female—was incapable of any such eloquence.

For already her smattering of Falkovnian was gone, followed by her Mordentish, Dwarven, Balok, and, last of all, Common. Worse, all those tiny diamonds that she reached for and would have clung to, those moments that made the ineffable sadness of life worth enduring, disappeared down her draining hourglass and from her mind's failing grasp. Her play-acting, gone. Her numerous romantic delusions, gone. Even her inconsolable ache for Franz, her brother, gone. The tender mercy was that these jewels drew with them the dross and slag that were her abusive father, the monstrous Jacques Bertrand, and all her other nightmares.

The pen of her life reversed its course and traveled backward until every word and stroke vanished, leaving her pure, white paper unetched, unmarred. A gray sea of ceaseless churn that lapped the horizon’s starry edges evaporated to a single cup proffered in the desert, behind the blink of a furtive mammalian eye.

All that remained the focus of her diminished brain now was the wan, mousy, distantly familiar face looking down on her from above—and the timid, instinctive hope that the woman who wore it meant her no harm.

To live as a human being requires illusion; to live as an animal requires only ignorance.

THE END