Year of Miracles, page 4
part #1 of Collected Stories of the Old Races Series
His scent was wrong. From the start, his scent was wrong, sick and sweet and thick, like infection. Nallu trembled every time she smelled it, and so did the cubs—more cubs now, because Dennir had bred too, two more babies, and if they were going to breed like this, six children inside of twenty years, they might single-handedly replenish the Old Races themselves—the cubs all shied away from Merro after the change, but the adults didn't, and Nallu, for the first and last time in her life, didn't trust her own instincts, but theirs.
It was hard on him, but it had been hard on all of the adults, and Merro was the most fearful of them, and so that it took days for him to come out of his new jaguar form seemed normal enough. That he stayed in human form the next weeks distressed no one save the children, who—to the amusement of their parents—watched him warily. He had retained his human shape for their entire lives, the seal form being entirely inappropriate for the sweltering jungle; why they should be bothered now befuddled them all except, perhaps, Ellu. Nallu crept to her mother in the dark of the moon, whispering, "Merro isn't right," to her in the velvet depth of the night, and Ellu gathered her close, wrapped about her like she was a kitten, and breathed, "How not, cub?" in her ear.
She listened, as Nallu whispered her concerns, her distaste at Merro's scent, the way his movements seemed wrong now that he was skinchanged but wore human form. He had grown bolder, it was true; he climbed trees now, a thing he had never done before, and the others thought he embraced the jaguar, even when he didn't wear its shape. He seemed to be more content in the jungle now, but he watched the sky as if he expected something from it, and when Nallu came to the canopy top to visit him, if she did so without warning, he looked at her with a wildness in his eyes.
"Mother," Nallu whispered into Ellu's soft black fur, "he needs to die, before he kills us all."
"We don't kill our own, cub," Ellu murmured in return, but they both knew it to be a lie, and the warm weight of Ellu's head settled on top of Nallu's for a moment. "You're sure?"
"I would bet my skin on it." A more serious oath couldn't be taken; Nallu felt the breath hold in Ellu's chest, and then the pain of it releasing.
"I'll tell Nattor."
"If you do, Merro will hear. If not from Father, then from a whisper on the wind, Mother; you know that. That's why I'm here, in the night, whispering against your skin." Nallu unwound, rising to all fours, and looked down at her mother. "I'll take him away and do what needs to be done. You must take the pride somewhere else, Mother. Anywhere else; it won't matter that he can track you, only that you won't be here in the moment, if he should escape me and return to slay you all."
"You don't know what they're like, Nallu. The moon-bound, you don't know the depths of their madness. You shouldn't go alone."
"Mother," Nallu said gently, "you are fierce, for what you are, but I, I am not like you."
"No," Ellu agreed after a moment. "No, you're not. None of you are, perhaps, you Skinchanged children. I wonder what we've done, with you."
"Found a future," Nallu said, and went to kill a monster.
It was not, could not, be so easy; first there was finding him in the treetops, where he watched the star-filled sky and the creeping moon. It had grown to more than a sliver by the time she found him three nights later, and crawled into nearby branches to purr, "You've become a cat, Merro. Hunting and watching from on high. The pride misses you, when you're in the heights. I've wanted to hunt with you." She put hesitation into her voice, a worry that she didn't feel: "Did I do well with the pelt? I wanted you to like it. To feel strong in it. Do its instincts speak to you?"
"Powerfully." That he answered surprised her; that he spoke so certainly surprised her even more. "So powerfully I hardly dare shift to the new form. The cat is nothing like the seal, little one. We are predators in the sea, it's true, but not such deadly ones. Many things hunt us. Very little hunts a jaguar."
"I have nothing to compare it to, but Mother and Father have told me how strange it was to them, at the beginning. I think Mother has come closer to embracing it, but you feel it more strongly, I think. More naturally?" Nallu stood, stretching herself long on the wide branch. "I know a hunting ground a few days away. Pigs and tapir and deer, and…other prey…lies in wait."
The sharpness of his slit-eyed gaze made her skin shudder, fur ruffling everywhere. "Other prey?"
Nallu turned her gaze on him, calm and cool. "What good is tooth and claw if not employed against the one true enemy the Old Races have?"
A spasm of angry hunger passed over Merro's face, pulling it into cat-like anticipation for all that he still held, fully, his human form. "You would hunt humans?"
"I do hunt humans. Mother and Father would not approve, and so I do it far away, and wash in the vast river, and hunt fish and alligators to take the scent away after, but what child of the Old Races would not, if they could?" She leapt lightly from her sturdy branch to a slimmer one nearly fifteen feet away, claws digging in as it bounced and trembled under her weight, then steadied to let her creep closer to the tree's trunk. She let her voice linger, keeping challenge from it but imbuing it with all the arrogance she could, and the arrogance of a cat was a wonderful thing. "Do not follow, if you do not wish. Only do not tell the others; keep my secret safe, Merro."
She began to climb down, nose first, claws deep in the bark and wood, and heard, before she reached the ground, the sounds of a not-quite-mortal man cascading down the branches and trunk of his own tree. She landed lightly and began to pace away, just slowly enough that she could be caught; within minutes Merro walked at her side, fingers brushing and bunching at the loose fur between her shoulders. "I know the instinct to hunt is weaker in human form," Nallu murmured. "I will keep the pace for you, that you can fight it until it is finally time to give in."
"I didn't know," Merro said, "that any of us would understand me so well."
"I knew that I needed to bring you, of all of us, a pelt," Nallu answered, and they went silent into the night.
They walked for three nights, the moon turning from quarter waxing to bordering full; Merro watched it more and more intensely, and the scent of sickness in him rose until Nallu could barely breathe it, but she kept her mouth shut, refusing to let herself open wide and gulp down the terrible scent, refusing to hack and cough it away. There would be time to spit later, time to cast soil over his foul remains and stalk away from it with her tail upright and her whiskers alert. First there was the hunting ground, and in many aspects, she had not lied.
Swathes of forest had been burned by the humans whose distant high stony pyramids looked down over the land as if their occupants were gods, though they were not even so close to gods as the Old Races were. They were only mortal, strong and capricious and deadly even to their own kind, much less to those who walked in two shapes, but only mortal was enough: they, after all, had conquered the land, made their mark on it in ways that her own people had never considered. Crops grew in the burned fields, maize and manioc and squash, and where the fields had grown for two years or three they now lay fallow, ready to be planted in another year with beans or chilies that would ask different things of the soil, and give back elements to make new crops grow stronger. Nallu had watched them plant in this way for years, had seen how crops weakened or thrived depending on how well they were rotated, and had seen men die for failing to change a field's crops before its output fell.
And because the forest was clear, animals came to hunt and steal human crops and linger curiously at the edges of where fire had visited. There was easier prey than that, too, in the kept flocks of turkeys and the packs of dogs that were a food staple for the mortals, but even they hunted for most of their meat, and Nallu preferred not to risk her own hide by encroaching so closely on their more domesticated meals.
She did not, though, hunt the humans at all. They would have been easy enough, working their fields, carrying water, harvesting crops, and other jaguars—true jaguars, not skinchangers, not Old Races—did hunt them, occasionally. Sometimes this was seen as a portent from the gods, a warning; others it was taken as an affront, and the offending beast was hunted to the death. Nallu couldn't tell what caused one response or the other, and even if she had been minded to hunt humans, that would have stopped her.
Merro, though, hung at the edge of the forest and all but slavered, watching the strong men and women working the fields, and Nallu made herself rumble a laugh as she placed one large paw on his human foot to stay him. He curled his lip, looking down at her, then forced his features back to calmness and retreated into the forest. "Tonight," he said, and Nallu, thinking of the moon's rounding belly, growled an assent. Perhaps it would be wiser to strike now, before the moon change took him, but it seemed unfair.
Unfair and, perhaps, a little dull: she had only heard stories of the moon-shifters, and wanted, selfishly, with cat-like curiosity, to see it; to see the madness overtake one of her kind, and to observe the dreadful change, so unlike their own quick and subtle shifts to a second form. She was first among the pride to be born to the jaguar form; she was strong with it, certain with it, and had confidence in her ability to best any half-formed creature born of magic gone wrong. Wisdom would have been crushing his throat the very night she led him away from the pride, but in truth, she hoped it could be blamed on the humans. Never mind the necessity of it; it was always easier to accept that humans had killed one of them, rather than one of them turning on their own, no matter how tainted they had become. Nallu prowled farther from the forest's burned edge, leaping upward to catch a high branch; behind her, Merro leapt with nearly the same ease, all the stranger in his human form. They settled into crooks and Ys, Nallu languid in the afternoon heat and Merro more alert, gaze on the unseeable fields, nostrils flaring as he caught the scent of human sweat and flesh. After a while Nallu drowsed, certain she would need her wits about her come moonrise, and too naive to dream how much.
The howl that wakened her was as she'd heard humans describe a panther's shriek: a woman screaming, shrill and sharp and scared. The pride screamed like that from time to time, not as often as a true cat, but this was something different still: jaguars screamed with rage or threat, but this carried pain, as deep and wide as a river.
She came to her feet fully awake, balanced in the crook of her tree, waiting to see if she should fight or flee, though the thinking part of her knew already that she would fight, that the screams came from the last of her pride to change, from Merro, who was foul with magic gone wrong.
He had fallen—fallen, she thought, not left in any controlled manner—to the jungle floor, and writhed there like a living sack of broken bones: they poked and shivered under his skin, breaking and setting, their pops audible even from the height she watched from. She crept downward, gagging on the smell of sickness, and, hunched low, watching from a nearby branch, knew she had been wrong to hesitate in the name of curiosity.
Every member of the Old Races had a human form to complement their natural shape, and the transition between one and the other was quick, painless, awe-inspiring. Air erupted and collapsed when the changes came, the switch was that sudden, but that familiar sound—not so great among the selkies and now the skinchanged jaguars, but vast for dragons—that pop of air was nowhere in evidence as Merro struggled with his change.
There was no transitive state for the Old Races; they were one or the other, human-seeming or alien indeed. Merro shuddered between the two stages: a tail, long and bony but unfurred, burst from his coccyx, fur raced up his spine and spread over his shoulders into a rough mane unlike anything a jaguar sported, but giving nod to the thick hair he wore as a human. His shoulders sharpened, not broadening but gaining a new feline musculature; his head changed shape piece by broken piece, smashing human features together with a cat's, until neither dominated and both looked wild with pain and rage. His nose furred up, short soft cat-like fuzz, and followed around to ears that were wholly jaguar on a mis-shapen head. The fur carried on down his arms, which thickened into long-fingered paws so large a swat from them would break most creatures' necks, and that was before claws erupted from their pads, longer, straighter than any true cat's. His knees stretched and bent, massive paws too elongated for a natural beast making deep impressions on the soft earth as he crouched in a manner all wrong for a cat and too animal for a human, and through it all he screamed in pain and rage.
Nallu watched all of this, and still was unprepared when he came for her.
It happened all at once, the leap from the ground into the trees, and his uncoiled energy sent him far higher than even she could jump. He slammed into her, his weight knocking her from the branches, and they fell a terrible distance, Nallu screaming fear as she fought to whip around and catch the earth with all four feet instead of her spine. She failed: Merro kept her from twisting, and landed on top of her with a triumphant yowl. Pain splintered through her and she shifted to human form without thinking, letting the shift take the damage away.
"Stupid, stupid little girl," Merro snarled, words distorted in his strangely shaped mouth. "Did you think I would believe your sweet stories? Did you think I would go alone into the woods with a killer? Do you think any true selkie could slay his brother, no matter how sick he had become? I nearly slew Jessel, it's true: I laid his throat open that he might bleed, that I might return to your pathetic father with blood on my hands and the scent of death on me, but we caught him under the bright moon, stupid child. What did not kill him could be healed by the shifting, and heal he did, under the strength of the moon. He has been so patient. So patient, with only Adiff for company—"
"Adiff," Nallu gasped. "Adiff died—"
Merro sneered. "Jessel never killed him. Only changed him, made him like Jessel. Adiff knew. He understood that he hadn't failed in the change, only that they wouldn't understand, the tribe, the pod, the pride. So Adiff pretended, he passed it off, and he left, but never far, oh no, never far. Near enough to watch without being scented, near enough to be taken in by Jessel, near enough to come to me when I took the moon-change too. Only poor Hennth died of it, was slain by your father, who didn't understand, only feared. But look at me, at us, look at our strength, idiot child."
How she was the idiot, when he was the one who released her, rising up to show the whole of his tormented half-changed shape, she neither understood nor cared. She only moved, shifting blindingly fast in the moment of his vulnerability; no smart prey ever exposed its belly. But of the two of them, only Nallu thought of Merro as prey, and he could not control the shifting in order to save himself by changing from one form to another, when her claws split open first his guts, and then his throat. He fell, too surprised for pain, and she closed her jaws over his bleeding neck, squeezing the life from him. He struggled once, claws arching toward her, but with more violence than she knew she had within her, she placed a paw on his chest and ripped his head from his body, to be certain he could not ever rise again. Quick, easy, almost painless. She hacked blood and turned her back on the body, flipping dirt over it dismissively.
That would have been well enough, then, had Jessel and Adiff not been hiding in the forest.
Ellu took the pride away, as Nallu had asked. Took them, knowing that Nallu went three days south, six days north and west and north again; took them through rivers and across treetops, into caves where water dripped and rubbed scent away, made them travel in the rain despite their hatred of it, until they had left behind the temples and found humans who lived only in small tribes, with no great cities yet built. She took them, and she told them why, and then she alone returned, in all the same small uncomfortable ways that would allow as little scent to be traced as possible. Twelve days there and back again, with time to rest between; half a moon. If Nallu had not returned, Merro would be at his weakest, as far from the moon-change as he could be, when she found him. And if she could not find him in the dark of this moon, then there would be the next, and the next, and the next, until his taint was wiped from the earth and her daughter, the first born skinchanger, was avenged.
Vengeance was not, perhaps, the Old Races' way. Neither, though, was to cast off what they had been and make themselves into something new; neither was to change skin only at the moon's pull, and to become something neither Old nor new, but a monster, and so Ellu chose vengeance, if she should need it.
Nallu's scent was so strong at the old dens that it had to be purposeful: she had marked it again and again, making certain it would last through the rain, through the wind and through time. Enough time, at least, and even through the other scent, familiar and yet impossible: Jessel, long since returned to the oceans. In his scent, Ellu could catch the sickness Nallu had spoken of with Merro, and the damage he had taken: blood and viscera mingled with his musk, and all of it fresher than Nallu's scent. She followed them both, prowling stiffly, warily, for many days to the east, and found them doing battle beneath a full moon.
Nallu, in combat, was beautiful to watch: she shifted fluidly between one form and another, healing hurts that Jessel's monstrous bulk could only retain. He was fast, though, impossibly fast, even for one of their kind, and Nallu only held him at a stand-still, neither of them gaining or losing the overall fight. Jessel had reach on Nallu, too; that, and he had twice her lifetime of practice in the moon-changed shape, time enough to learn and embrace its madness.
Ellu crouched low to the ground, her belly against leaves, and edged forward one paw at a time, not even her tail lashing with anticipation. The wind was against her, bringing their scents to her and keeping hers away from them; she only needed a moment's opportunity. It came in a moment of Nallu's weakness; she shifted to scamper away, but in her human form caught a foot on some unkind branch that laid her flat, and Jessel pounced.
