Author's Note: I had two specific questions to answer while researching this chapter and the next. One was: "What is a traditional Scottish herbal remedy for sleep disorders?" (the answer is 'heather', apparently) and then I rather innocently asked another question: "How many foxes make a fur coat?" *
Yeesh...
You have no idea what kind of fireworks that question can set off in the wrong forums. To some people even asking that question puts you on par with a psychotic serial killer. And that's without anybody even knowing whether I myself wear fur, or whether I condone others wearing fur. Nice.
It seems that nobody really believes you when you say "It's for a book." I suppose I should be more careful on how I do my research. Ever since I asked the question "how many pints of blood are in the body of an average 12-year-old boy" I'm probably on some kind of government watch list...
...actually, I think that whole 'serial killer' misconception makes a little more sense, now.
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*(For the record: the best answer I got was: "depends on how skilled the foxes are at sewing").
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"Where Nature has no Eyes"
Letterewe – 1651
The first night Penance could barely sleep. He sat cross-legged on his bed, eyes fixed on the doorway to his room as he heard Cadha awaken, and then Struana. Once the ladies left for the garden the homestead took on all the silence of a grave.
Until he heard slow footsteps moving toward his door.
Penance thought he might first try reasoning with the man, but he found Uallas rather unreasonable. The man's shadow framed Penance's doorway, and before the boy could even get a word out Uallas was on him. Penance had a knife hidden in his lap, and after one ineffectual swing Uallas took the boy's wrist in his hands and twisted it, breaking the bones apart like twigs, and then the knife was taken from the boy and put to good use in his chest. Penance stumbled back a few steps, and then he looked up at the man and cursed him with a hissing whisper before falling flat on his face. He had just enough life left in him to watch helplessly as Uallas clucked his tongue in disapproval over his body. The man casually leaned down and forced Penance's wrist bones back into alignment, and that was the last thing he felt.
When he awoke— again in a cold bed of his own blood— he again found Uallas sitting out in the kitchen, happily munching on his breakfast.
"Morning!" He sunnily declared. "Now back to your room, and clean those linens..."
This was the mantra for the next several weeks of his life.
The next day Penance hid beside his doorframe, lying in wait for the man. It was a rather good plan, he thought.
Until Uallas' hands burst through the thatch wall and got him in a tight chokehold. As his face turned blue and spots blossomed in his eyes Penance comforted himself with the thought that, at the very least, he wouldn't have to wash his linens that day. Then, naturally, Cadha came home to prepare breakfast and noticed the sizeable hole in the thatching. The woman raised an unholy ruckus to Uallas as she served herself and Struana their breakfasts, and Uallas chuckled at her while tousling little Struana's hair:
"Ah, it's a hell of a thing, but it seems that young Penance has been suffering certain fits in his sleep. Perhaps it's because of all this fearsome lightning, of late."
Penance looked up from the table and glared at the man with a pair of sleepless, bloodshot eyes. His face must've been priceless.
"Anyway," Uallas continued, "the poor lad up and jumped out of his bed this morning— still in the midst of slumber, mind you— and he managed to claw that thatching apart with his bare fingernails!"
Cadha looked over at the boy with a scowl; she drummed her fingers on her wispy chin and grunted with indignation.
"He did, did he no'?"
"Oh, you'd be surprised what a bad sleep-fit can make a body do, my dear," Uallas chuckled and leaned back in his chair. "It's usually the sign of a rather nervous disposition, I believe."
Penance bared his teeth at the man. He barely contained the animal snarl in his throat.
Struana leaned forward across the table, her skinny legs stuck out the back of her chair to balance her body. She took up one of Penance's hands in hers:
"You're not afraid of the dark, are you, Penance?" Her massive green eyes sparkled like emeralds.
"Uh, no, Struana," he whispered.
"You're not afraid of the faeries either, right? 'Cause they missed their chance to claim you, you know. If they wanted your spirit they'd have to've claimed it that very night you were attacked, back when you almost died. Maybe they're making lightning because they're angry they missed-out on claiming your soul. But they've no claim to your spirit, now. Don't you worry about them coming for you. They cannah!"
Penance— face as soured as spoiled milk— suddenly looked up from the tabletop. He managed a small smile for the girl, and he teasingly flicked her on the nose:
"Oh, they cannah, can they?"
"They cannah!" The girl tittered, reciprocating the grin.
"Nah they can?"
"Can they nah!" Struana giggled with delight, kicking her legs behind her as if she were swimming.
Cadha tapped the girl on the head and pushed her away from Penance. Again she looked to Uallas:
"So: 'fits', is it? And in the middle of the night?"
Uallas nodded somberly.
Cadha took Penance's chin in her hand, holding it in a vice-like grip while she examined his face:
"Well, eyes're red as roses, aren't they? And there's that quiver to his hands of late." She released his face and again stroked her chin. "Yes: it is nerves, I would think. Mmm. I'll be gathering up some heather tops an' boilin' them in a brew for him to nip at, come dinnertime. That should steady the poor lad..."
The woman's leathery hands gently stroked the nape of Penance's neck, but then she quickly pulled them away and snarled at the boy:
"After he's repaired my thatching, I should think!"
Penance looked up with a reassuring grin and an overeager nod; it didn't seem to improve the woman's disposition. When he looked back across the table he saw Uallas' amused face leering back at him.
That didn't improve Penanace's disposition, either.
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Days passed, and Uallas continued playing his sadistic little game with the boy. Penance's failures at defending himself only seemed to encourage the man's brutality. His mornings became routine: wake up, fail to fight off Uallas' assault (unless he was 'killed' in his sleep, which was also a distinct possibility, and at least it saved a step in the routine), wake up again, and then clean up his bloodied linens. After breakfast he still had all his duties to perform at the forge, around the homestead, and wherever else Uallas demanded he go.
It was around this time that Penance really started to hate that cocky, dickish son of a bitch.
The man ignored Penance's distress entirely. The closest he got to addressing it was on one stormy night after dinner, when the pair sat out in the kitchen, alone. Uallas chugged whiskey from a flagon, while Penance nursed his half-finger in cold silence, huddled up in a corner. When the man finished his glass he stood up, stretched, and then wished the boy a good night. Penance whispered back at him:
"My room might be empty, tomorrow, y'know..."
The man didn't even turn to face him. He stopped walking, briefly, before simply shrugging and shaking his head:
"Understandable. But a pity, that. And I thought much better of you. Are you not 'stronger' than other boys, like you say? Not the most convincing way to prove it, is it? And I must say: you'd almost convinced me..."
After he walked off Penance was left alone in the empty room, and he snarled a nasty obscenity into his whiskey.
But he stayed. He stayed through it all. It certainly helped that he had no other place to go, and no desire to go anywhere, in particular. There was something else, of course: it was important for him to get this training. He knew that. It was important for his very survival. He needed to succeed at this test, and so he stayed for that reason, alone.
Also— just in passing, of course— there was Uallas. He might be an asshole (no, he was definitely an asshole), but something inside Penance didn't really like the tone of the man's words on that night, and that resigned shrug in his shoulders when he thought Penance would quit on him. It was a far cry from that ridiculous, toothy grin he used to give the boy, and that warm hand playfully ruffling his hair whenever he did something right.
Penance kinda missed that, actually.
Well, no, that's not true: he just preferred it to disappointment.
That was all. Of course it was.
X
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Penance was soon forced to accompany the man on an annoying little 'misadventure' during this time, and it didn't help to brighten his mood one bit. Cadha's continuing epic toils in her garden left the woman severely stressed, and so Uallas got it in his mind to fashion a certain gift for her. The man had his wild flights of fancy ever so often, but the ridiculousness of this idea was enough to make Penance choke on his own tongue.
He wanted to make a coat for her. Not just any coat, mind you, but a truly nightmarish thing, in Penance's opinion.
It all started with the near-extinction of the local fox population around the Letterewe forests. It sounds dramatic, but for Uallas it was an exercise in effortlessness. The man was a surgeon with the longbow. More than that: Penance had to admit that he was, in every sense of the word, an artist. He had this casual stance whenever he readied a shot, and there was that fluid way he so effortlessly— gracefully— drew back an arrow on that oversized yew bow, as if he were lazily stretching his arms to one side out of boredom. When he let the arrow loose he showed all the concern of a man contemplating a bank of clouds in the sky. He didn't aim for individual animals, but individual body parts, and he almost always struck true, whether the animal was sleeping in the brush or running full-tilt for its life. 'Natural' didn't even begin to describe Uallas at archery; it was almost as if he'd grown up with a bow and arrow in his crib.
Naturally, around this time Penance wasn't being too chatty with the man, but after an entire day of tracking, perforating, and collecting dead foxes in a large sack Uallas could tell that the otherwise pouty kid was impressed with him.
"It's no small thing, really: an archer's skill." The pair sat under a shade tree. They'd taken a brief break to allow Uallas to restring his bow. "It's easier for a body when the talent's built up in the blood." He finished stringing, and then he delicately ran a finger along the bow shaft. "This was my own father's trade, and his father before him. Now, that makes us all predators in my line, you see. Fearsome things to our fellow man. Is it the best thing, though? Ah, well, I could have had a happier life, I think, preying on the bounty of the woods instead."
Penance was pretending to stare at some random tree out across the field, avoiding the man's gaze. At these words he finally looked back at the man:
"You didn't learn archery to hunt animals?" He asked.
Uallas shook his head.
"No, I'm afraid not. I was trained so that my arrows might find the flesh of men. Terrific sight, if you've never seen it, Penance: a line of longbowmen, thousands strong— all disciplined, all ordered— sending their arrows raining down on the enemy like the judgment of heaven above." The man smiled wistfully, shaking his head. "Oh, when I first came over the channel waters with great William's forces I was already a seasoned archer, of course. Beyond seasoned, in fact. But Hastings! Hastings, Penance, was the thing. Imagine five-thousand strung bows— five-thousand of them— held in ten-thousand skilled arms! We painted the sky black with the fletchings of our arrows, like the very hand of God himself, stretching forth to conjure an eclipse of the sun."
"Blasphemy," Penance mumbled. "Nice."
The man rested his head against the tree trunk. He clucked his tongue, still smiling faintly.
"But I could have had a happier life, I think, preying on the bounty of the woods, instead."
"Why didn't you?" Penance asked.
Uallas shrugged, absently plucking at his bowstring:
"Oh, it's just in my nature, I suppose. I'm a predator, Penance, born and bred. Hard thing to change, one's nature."
"Yeah, I can see that," Penance snarled, crossing his arms. "'Once an asshole'..."
Uallas looked up at the boy, amused:
"Tell me: do you think it amuses me, our little 'morning routine'?"
"Yes."
The man's smile spread.
"Perhaps I don't find it boring, Penance, but it isn't for my amusement, you know."
The man looked like he'd speak more, but instead his eyes got that glittery look to them that Penance knew so well. Instantly the old man was up on his feet, gnarled gray hair whipped to one side, and he strung an arrow quicker than Penance could even register. He quickly ducked down and fired; the arrow whistled right between Penance's legs, missing his more 'delicate' parts by a millimeter, and when the boy looked down between his legs he got an upside-down view of a ruddy fox bounding through the grass. Uallas' arrow nipped it in the back, but it only glanced off the fringes of the animal's fur.
The man let out a vicious curse and charged off after the creature, leaping up a hill at surprising speed. Once he crested the hill Uallas readied another arrow, but then brought it down, cursing once again.
"What is it?" Penance panted as he came to Uallas' side.
"It's gone to ground," Uallas motioned to the base of a large oak tree, where a small mound of dirt rested beside a hole in the earth.
"A burrow?" Penance asked. "Well, it can't be that deep, can it? Reach in and grab 'im."
The man scoffed.
"Ah, no. It's quite beyond us, now."
"No, it's not. Seriously, just reach in and—"
"Ah, I think not." Uallas slung his bow over his back and shook his head. "It simply isn't done."
Penance looked back at the hole, and then he watched as Uallas moved back down the hill. The boy sneered at the man's back:
"Yeah, you're a real 'predator' alright..."
X
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There was some irony in the fact that, by day, Penance was helping Uallas to butcher, skin and treat fox skins, while with each sunrise Uallas was doing all that and more to Penance himself, and with increasing 'creativity' in his methods. Granted, Penance didn't really stop to appreciate the irony at the time. He was too busy being frustrated, sleep-deprived, and angry.
Really, really angry.
It occurred to the boy at one point that he didn't know whether he was angrier at Uallas (for being his usual asshole self) or at himself, for being unable to actually pass the man's insane little test of strength. Then he reminded himself that it was an insane test. That thought took some of the sting out of his daily defeats. For a while, at least.
Uallas' nerves weren't faring much better at the time; the whole fur-coat experiment was not exactly going according to plan. The man had a particularly insane idea for the coat (no surprise there), and it involved the heads of most of the foxes they'd killed.
Yeah, the heads.
The less said about it the better. In broad strokes Penance was set to work on those heads, and that 'work' involved a stack of black marbles. And the foxes' eye sockets. And a metal scoop.
Again: less said the better.
The boy also worked a small pit beside Uallas' workbench, mixing up a concoction of charcoal and plant oils. The resulting mixture was a shining black dye, suitable for cleaning all the marbles, to give them that extra little 'sparkle'.
Ugh...
Uallas' plan was to actually have those severed heads dangling off the fringes of the coat itself. Other than being a touch disturbing, Penance couldn't understand why the man would include such an unnecessary feature on a simple coat.
"Not 'unnecessary', lad," Uallas explained as he sewed a stack of heads up. "Ostentatious. The great kings of old— older'n you or anyone alive today can recall— often wore such things as part of their regal garments. Now, in the greater sensibility of our stuffy and modern times it's quite far out of fashion—"
"I can't ever see something as ridiculous as that ever coming back into fashion—"
"—but trust me: it is the sign of a most refined and elegant person."
Penance rolled his eyes as he wiped off a mess of the black dye from his fingers:
"Oh, yeah: you're a man with such refined airs, after all..."
"No, I'm not. But who's to say poor Cadha shouldn't be, though? She works hard enough as it is. Who's to say she shouldn't have a thing or two of such grand design? The poor dear deserves far more, I should say, not the least for putting up with a louse like me, I should say..."
Penance held up one of the uneven sleeves on the coat:
"Well, about that 'grand design'..."
"Ack!" Uallas barked. He pulled his hand away from the fox head he was working on; one of the animal's fangs had gotten caught on the man's wrist and torn into his flesh. That wasn't the first time it had happened today, but it would be the last. Uallas leapt up and roared in anger, throwing the fox head down on the floor and kicking it with all his might:
"God-damned piece of... of crap... Augh! Ya'… ya' galla beag!"
This put a smile on Penance's face, not only for Uallas' frustration (which he was more than happy to see, at this point), but also for the man's chosen words. Penance playfully kicked at the fox's head as well:
"Yeah: you stupid little vixen bitch!"
"Watch your tongue!" Uallas snarled.
"But you just said—"
"Never mind what I'm doing. The apprentice minds his master, Penance. That is simply the nature of things—"
This response was not particularly helpful in ameliorating Penance's soured mood. In fact, it was somewhat counterproductive.
The boy gave an angry little roar and kicked the pile of stacked fox heads, scattering them all over. When Uallas gripped the boy's shirt collar Penance pushed away from him, baring his teeth and brandishing a dagger tucked into the back of his clothes:
"Get back!" Penance swung the dagger, severing part of Uallas' palm, and the boy's eyes bulged. He stumbled backward as fast as he could, ducking down behind one of Uallas' benches, and he curled up in the corner, snarling and breathing hard.
Uallas instinctively stuck his bloodied palm in his mouth, sucking on the wound, but of course when he removed his hand a few seconds later that wound was gone. His face was a mountain of rage, but then his look softened as he observed the boy crouched low in the corner, tucked beneath the bench, red eyes trembling in the shadows, unsteadily holding his dagger. The man smiled gently and sat down amongst the macabre pile of fox's heads.
"You have all the look of rather desperate prey, my dear Penance."
"Aren't I?" The boy panted.
The man crossed his arms, leaning back to rest against one of the wood beams of the workshop:
"I have a certain observation to share with you. It's more a truism, really. Would you like to know why, exactly, I refused to reach into that fox burrow earlier today?"
"'Cause you're a pu—"
"It's because I am a predator, Penance. That is my nature, and the nature of any predator is to pursue its prey. I've lived just long enough to know all the rules of predation, and admittedly there are precious few. But one of them, above all, is that a predator must never venture too far into those cold, dark corners of the Earth— those intimate haunts where a prey would hide from its pursuers. These are the corners where a desperate animal might find its last refuge, when it is pulled to the breaking point. It is the nature of prey to flee its pursuers— not fight— but down in those dark corners 'nature' has no eyes; the most cowardly animal becomes a lion, and the most vicious brute of a carnivore becomes as a lamb to the slaughter. In those deep corners anything is possible, because nature gives way to necessity. And, when it is truly necessary, you would be amazed what a creature can do."
Penance remained wedged beneath the bench; his breathing was less strenuous, but he kept his dagger raised in defense.
"The reason I didn't reach into that burrow to yank out that fox, Penance, is because it would have tried to rip my arm off. And who knows: given enough impetus, it might've just found the strength. Its nature is to run, and that's what it knows how to do. Deprive a cornered animal of that option at your own peril, child, for the results can be unpredictable. They can be, in fact, unnatural."
Uallas stared down at the floor of the workshop for a time. He picked up that fox's head that nicked his hand and held it up, staring into its lifeless marble eyes. He sighed and tossed it across the room, where it landed near Penance's haunches.
"That vixen followed the rules of nature to the letter, Penance. What has she to show for it?"
Penance looked down at the severed fox's head as Uallas slowly got to his feet, groaning as his knees cracked. He gave the boy a small nod and moved out of the shop, heading off for the homestead down the hill. After he was gone the boy finally sank down on his rear and sighed, wiping a train of sweat from his brow. He stared down at the fox head, flicking a few beads of sweat upon it contemptuously.
"What're you looking at, you galla beag?"
