Year of Miracles, page 3
part #1 of Collected Stories of the Old Races Series
He found her climbing a mountain, the jar tied neatly to her hip. How he had come there, she could hardly imagine: a plain man, dressed conservatively, standing on the rock above her and offering a hand. He had not, she was certain, been there a moment before, but she herself had been born of stone, and it seemed probable that he too had. She took his hand and let him help her up; up to what proved to be the mountain's crest; up to a view that took in half the world, and if she turned the other way, the rest of it.
He said, "Anesidora," in a strange voice, and she looked at him, puzzled, then smiled.
"My name is Elise. I don't know you."
"Do you not?"
"No," she said, and if there was a lie in the words it lay so deeply buried within her that no one, man or demon, might hear it.
"Elise, then. You remind me of someone."
"You loved her."
"Oh yes. And I hated her. I am," the man said to the distant horizon, "fickle like that."
A smile creased her lips. "Most of us are. Which was stronger?"
"I would have said the hate."
"And now?"
"Now I know she made me what I am, which is far more than I could have been. I owe her an apology for what I did, and a plea for forgiveness."
"Would she grant it?"
Softly, softly, softly so: "I do not know."
Elise tilted her head thoughtfully and offered the jar. "I think this is for you."
He took it with a bitter laugh at its weight. "Yes. Of course it is. Do you know what it is?"
"Heavy," she replied, "and filled with demons."
"No. The demons have escaped. Only their likeness is there, Elise."
"Well, that will never do." She examined the fragile feathers of her cloak and smiled as an implacability that had slept within her reawakened. She was not, perhaps, made for contemplation, but neither was she made for forgetting, not in the things that ran deepest, and demons ran as deep as her mother the earth. "Wait a moment."
It only took a moment, winding herself in the cloak, calling the feathers to her skin. It took little more than that to shiver off the heaviness of a human body, and to become strange and small and winged. She fluttered in the air before him, quick and light and lithe, and saw agony stretch taut in his eyes before it snapped into loss. Then she dove deep into the jar, straight through the wax and straw and string, and in the darkness curled a smile of satisfaction. The trouble was that she loved him still, the demon called Epimetheus; did she not there would be no vindication in taking herself away from him in such a way; did she not, there would be no hope to leave him, fragilely ensconced within the jar. He could not undo human magic; he would have to tend to her, and tend to all the demons of the world, and tend to hope, that he might one day be forgiven.
She ought, she thought at the last, she ought to have mentioned Ushas, and her anger, but no. Like Epimetheus, she rarely thought far enough ahead, and now his voice, softened and distorted by the jar, was the last thing she heard before she willed herself to sleep: "Elise," he murmured. "Elise. Very well, Elise."
A demon climbed down the mountain, carefully, slowly, carrying the jar as a mortal might, and named himself Eliseo.
SKINCHANGER
"The hide must be flawless." She'd said it a dozen times, a hundred times; no one scolded her for it. Not after the long-past parting from the pod; not after the perhaps-more-agonizing departure from the sea. Its scent, the taste of fish on the air, the wind brusque with salt, the soothing murmur of waves shifting sand, the cries of gulls; all of those memories pierced the heart with loneliness, with loss and regret: but in the end, the greater loss, the driving fear, was the inevitable death of their people.
They had already, long since, spread around the world, clinging to coasts where humans also lived. Even the coldest and most inhospitable shores, where sense would dictate no one would stay unless they must, were peopled with humans, and in those far frozen places the humans had stories of seal-people, whose titles were as varied as the people who saw them. They were all born from sightings, distant or near, of one of the sea-dwelling Old Races, just as the tales of siryns and sea monsters were.
But those mortals didn't just tell stories about the selkies. They hunted them, too; they hunted seals, and even when the stories held the shapechangers in reverence, even when it was forbidden or considered ill luck to slay one, they still died under a harpoon's thrust, and mostly, no human ever knew that they had struck a creature more human than beast.
Ellu did not, could not, know if others had given up on the sea and sought a different path. Not even all of her pod had; at least half couldn't bring themselves to leave the water, despite its risks, but nearly half of them had. Eight or ten here, ten or twelve there; they had found a shore and shed their skins, and begun walking with the ocean at their backs. Perhaps her tribe were the only ones so desperate; perhaps the rest of the selkie race would scorn and cast out those who were willing to try anything, even becoming something else, to ensure their survival. No matter; they had cast themselves out already, by trying, and if exile was the price of their people living on in some way, in some form, then it was worth the risk.
It was worth the risk, especially, because she carried a child, and it would be easier by far for that infant to be born to a land-animal form than the seal shape it was naturally destined for. They were grateful, Ellu's little band of explorers, for the rivers and ponds and lakes they came across, and for the massive inland seas they sometimes found. But their selkie forms were never meant for the land; their grace and power came to the fore in the water, and the deeper into the heart of the continent they came, the more vulnerable they felt without their Old shapes to rely on.
Ellu's child would not feel that fear. She knelt before the cat's skin, large and sleek and black with patterns of spotted dapples buried darker within the black, and brushed her fingers over its spine one final time. It had been skinned delicately, singles seams split where necessary, and no other cut made, so that it resembled, as closely as possible, the seal skins that the selkies shed when they shifted. It had been killed by a strike through the eye, straight into the brain. The roof of the mouth was the only other way it could have died; anything else left flaws in the hide and rendered it useless. They knew this from trial and error, and the horror of realizing the lucky ones merely rejected the broken skin. The unlucky ones—Ellu shuddered, and put it out of her mind. Too many things could go wrong, too many things often did go wrong; they had been eleven when they set out, and were seven now, with only one of them successful in the skinchanging. It had to be approached with calm certainty; anything else, and again, it would go wrong. There were so many things that could go wrong.
"Ellu." Nattor, father to her child and the sole survivor of the skinchange, put his hand on her shoulder. "The hide is flawless. We've checked it dozens of times. Still, if you want to wait—"
"No. No, I wish I'd done it before I caught, but I won't put a child through the pain. If I do this now—"
"We don't know," Nattor said quietly. "We don't know that the change will settle into the child too, Ellu."
"But we do," Ellu whispered. "If we're caught in human form when we give birth, the child is born in its human form. I'll make the skinchange and give birth in the new form. The child will be born a kitten and will survive. Will thrive. It must."
"And if you're wrong?"
"I'm not wrong. I can't be wrong." A gut-knotting confidence swept the words, and before she lost that, Ellu lifted the heavy jaguar skin and wrapped it around herself. Nattor, seeing her decision had been made, lifted her seal skin and placed it over the jaguar's as swiftly.
Ellu did not even have to think, to begin the change, and then she could not think, as pain, red and sharp as knives, swept her and dragged her down into darkness.
Nattor stood back at a small distance, the rest of their tiny tribe farther back still. He had experienced what Ellu now went through, and, watching it from the outside, didn't think he would have the bravery to try it, having seen it first.
No; that was untrue. He had seen the failures, all of them ending—ultimately—in death: Jessel, the first to try and the first to go mad, had murdered poor gentle Adiff, and had finally died at his own brother Merro's hands, a necessary action to save the pod. Olle had simply not survived, had been too weak to undergo the dreadful change, and the last of them, Hennth, Nattor had killed himself, before the madness overtook her. So many deaths made watching what would surely be—had to be—a success no easier. The selkie skin writhed, squirming and shoving and pressing, trying to reach the woman beneath the jaguar skin. Normally the shift was the work of an instant, no more to be considered than the donning of a coat, but a coat was meant to go on over layers. Selkie skins were not. It struggled, crushing Ellu with its urgency to become one with her and yet unable to touch the skin that would meld so naturally with it. It fought the jaguar skin, though that, at least, lay passively, not yet imbued with a magic of its own, and unable to resist the selkie skin's increasingly desperate attempts to finish the transformation.
It happened all at once and with hideous slow clarity, the way the selkie skin finally succeeded in sinking through—through! As if the jaguar skin was viscous water, permeable with enough determination!—through the jaguar skin, absorbing it as it went. Or being absorbed by; it was truly impossible to tell which, save for the fact that when the change finally came, came with the pop and squeal and snap of bones and muscle forced into a new, unnatural shape, the beast left on her belly on the earthen floor was a jaguar, and the shredded remains of a selkie's skin and fur drifted to the ground around her.
Ellu crouched flat, ears back and her tail lashing, lips curled back to reveal deadly ivory canines. Her eyes, strangely golden now, glowed with fear and rage, and every glance she gave to the little group of gathered selkies fought between seeing them as friends or prey. Her breathing came hard, ribs expanding and collapsing rapidly, and her claws were extended, every muscle in her body torn between flight and attack.
Nattor remembered that too, the savagery of the new shape, how alien it had felt. Still felt, in some ways, when he clamped his jaws on the throat of a deer or pig and leapt with appalling ease into a tree, dragging the carcass with him. Still felt, when even in human form he opened his mouth wide to scent like the cat did, or his night vision startled him with its clarity. Their child would be born to those things, would find them natural, but long as he might live, Nattor thought they would catch him out, make him feel unfamiliar in his own body.
Then again, it had only been months, not even a year, since he had taken on the jaguar form, and a year was no time at all, to any of the Old Races. They had traveled so long and so far before desperation and discomfort had driven them to try what—so far as they knew—selkies had never tried before. What no Old Race, save perhaps the vampires, could do: shed one skin for another. Even if it had been their plan when they left the waters, the act of actually doing so, of going through with such a dramatic decision, had been harder than they had expected; not until they were dying already, starving, diseased, weak, were they able to even push themselves to try, and then the first attempts had gone so badly.
Ellu had already come through the worst of it: she was whole, and a jaguar, not some mangled wreck caught between the forms, nor some mad creature whose change had only been half successful, and wretchedly tied to the pull of the moon and tides. Nattor dropped to all fours, rolling onto his back even as he changed to jaguar form, and scented Ellu's awareness, her sharp fear and confusion. The animal part of her wanted to run; she was female, and gravid, and he was male and large and strong. But he was submissive, too, and even the beast recognized that, while the Old part of her soul fought to establish dominance over the wild animal whose form she had accepted.
He heard the shift of soil and leaves beneath her foot as she pushed one forward, the smallest testing motion, and a knot inside him loosened. Every padded step forward meant a triumph of sentience over the beast, and when she stopped above him, huffing through half-bared teeth, he rolled his chin upward, exposing his throat so she might—and she did—bury her nose in the familiar scent of him.
The return to human form came quickly then, a shuddering change that left her clinging to his furry form. Nattor shifted as well, chuckling as he wrapped his arms around her, and smiling in relief as the others of their little pod gathered close. "We can do this," he said to them in a low voice, in a rumble close to his jaguar growl. "We will do this, and we will live, selkies no more, skinchangers all."
The child grew up lithe and slim, with long bones and a lightness of foot, things that were not, broadly speaking, of selkie nature. A people born to swim cold seas tended toward a certain density of bone, of muscle; to breadth rather than height, and to a sturdy heaviness on land, none of which Nallu shared at all. She was positively fearless of heights, though every other member of her skinchanged tribe remained wary of them despite their new forms being suited for them, and of more predatory instinct than any of them save Ellu, whose fierceness came, Nattor thought, from the profound urge to protect her child.
Rilla, another of the women, had become pregnant in her jaguar form and remained that way with an unusual stubbornness; it felt wrong, she said, to shift to mortal form while gravid, a thing which Nattor had never heard a selkie woman say. But she was selkie no more, and whatever they had made of themselves, perhaps this was different, too. That Rilla gave birth to a litter, to three cubs, was certainly different; no one in the history of the Old Races had ever had a triple birth, and twins, even among selkie, were vanishingly rare. Rilla was overwhelmed by the very thought; Nallu, at nine or ten years or age, was filled with phlegmatic delight, and aside from the nursing, cared for the cubs with more confidence than their mother showed. She carried them by their scruffs, dropped them from heights and jumped on them, taught them to hunt, guided them silently through the forests until they could walk three paces behind an indigenous hunter without ever being noticed, tussled with them, disciplined them with swats that sent them rolling across the jungle floor, and shared with them a certain feline humor that their parents were never quite able to achieve.
By the time they were half grown, ten or twelve years of age, all of the adults save one, Merro, had taken jaguar form; it had taken that long to acquire flawless pelts, and Merro was the most reluctant, the most fearful, of the selkies to try the change. Nor could he be blamed for it; it had been his own brother who had tried the change first, and failed, and Merro who had felt the obligation to hunt his mad sibling to the earth and slay him. Nattor had gone with him for the hunt, both of them with skin crawling at their napes and flinches overtaking them at every sound in the night, for they knew they were out of their depth hunting in trees and plains, but when they caught the mad one, Merro had forbidden Nattor to make the killing blow, for all that the gesture was meant to spare Merro pain. It wouldn't, he had said; bad enough to live with the responsibility himself, but far worse to have to look on Nattor's face every day and know that Nattor had struck his brother down. Nattor thought now, as he had thought then, that it had been a mistake to agree, but it would have also been a mistake to disagree, so Merro's reluctance to change his skin was the price to be paid, and Nattor could hardly blame him for that.
Nallu brought the pelt back for Merro: flawless beyond compare, for she'd hunted the beast in jaguar form, giving it nothing to fear until she was on top of it, and in human form but with immortal strength she had strangled the beast, so that no part of its hide was broken from the outside, not even an eye, not even the roof of its mouth. She skinned it with a reverence familiar to Nattor from watching the small tribes of local humans, whose appreciation of the lives they took and survived on bordered on holy; if more humans accepted their place in the chain of life so gracefully, the Old Races might not be driven half to extinction and all to hiding. He was proud that Nallu had learned that respect, and prouder still that she went to such trouble for the uncomfortable elder in their pod. Pride, Nattor thought: they had not been a pod for a very long time indeed.
It was in Merro to refuse: Nattor saw that in his gaze, but the single remaining selkie was as touched, as honored, by Nallu's gesture as Nattor was, and in the end Merro couldn't bring himself to insult the first skinchanged child of the Old Races. He accepted the pelt, the gift of it, and under the brightness of the moon, for he couldn't bear to try the change in darkness, he underwent the struggle of skinchanging.
It could never be Nallu's fault that it failed, but still, she felt responsible.
She'd heard the stories, of course, of the hard first attempts, of how they hadn't understood the importance of a flawless hide, of how one of them had simply died in the attempt to change her skin, her body twisted and mangled beyond measure. How another, Jessel, had wholly rejected the change, unable to come near completing it; perhaps fear had driven that failure, or perhaps the pelt was just too damaged. Jessel, Nallu knew, had left the group after his failure, unable to contemplate belonging when he could never taken on the shape his brethren had chosen. Perhaps he'd returned to the selkies, where he could at least be among his people, even if they, too, were ultimately dying. And the other two, the two for whom the change had seemed to succeed..they were the ones who had to be hunted down, and now Merro was the prey, as well.
