3

Home Beneath a Hillock

Muted daylight was dimming to gray-blue twilight when Odessa returned, empty-handed and hungry, to the grove’s hidden entrance. She moved slowly, slouching as her exhausted body resisted the impulse to collapse at every step.

Before she had come to the cleft in the mountainside, she had made a long detour, walking the radius of a semicircle surrounding the entrance, veering off often to inspect a carving in a tree’s bark or check the integrity of a sculpture of twisted twigs hanging from a branch. Today, the charms and wards were all still intact. It was becoming increasingly common to find the lapis lazuli eye of a nazar hanging from a branch had cracked or the barkcloth charm folded in a shallowly buried earthen jar had fallen to pieces as if eaten by moths. The barrier that confounded outsiders, mortal and divine alike, was weakening. Odessa thought that was how she had been able to enter the grove before she was even aware of the barrier and its mind-bending illusions. She had inadvertently found a hole in the barrier. But Yakun thought otherwise. He always seemed to err on the side of the fantastical. But since that day, anytime she tried to enter the grove without one of Yakun’s waystone she was assailed by headaches and bewildered by a path that never ended, continuing in a perpetual loop until she gave up and waited for Poko or Yakun to guide her back. Poko, being a fairy, was immune to the barrier’s mind-bending effects.

Parting the curtain of moss, she entered the cleft. Her left hand grazed the cool stone, wetting her fingers with condensation. Beneath her feet, the creek was barely a trickle amid the mud and stone. Her near-daily excursions and the tromping of her feet had churned up the creek bed and turned the creek into little more than a muddy track running beneath the mountain. Further in the pass, where the creek was deeper and more defined, she took off her sandals and let the cold water and icy mud soothe her raw, blistered feet. The cool, dry air outside the grove left her skin cracked and peeling.

On the other side of the pass, the grove was the same as it had been the first time she stumbled through that cleft in the mountain. Untouched by season or blight, the mossy forest was green and lush. The rich, earthy scent of wet moss filled her lungs and almost dulled the bone-deep hunger grating upon her ribs. Thick fog had settled at the base of the slight hill and it swirled around her as she made her way up through the low ravine.

Fingers looped through the leather straps at the back of her sandals, she held them over her shoulder and let them slap against her back as she walked. Her bow, unstrung after a fruitless day of hunting, she carried in her bandaged hand. Her arm ached and itched and the scarred skin felt as if it had been pulled too tight across her flesh.

I’ll have to go out further tomorrow, she thought. All the animals are thinking like that goat thing. They’re all moving south. Uneasiness lingered in the back of her mind since her encounter with the creature. Some unresolved tension remained in her muscles.

That urge she had felt as the creature left, that droning urge, was not unfamiliar. Again she was forced to think about the men she had killed. At the time she had been sure those men had meant to do her harm but now she was not so sure. She was not sure of anything anymore.

Fatigue burned in her legs as she climbed the slight rise. When she reached the treeline, she collapsed against a moss-covered ficus, arrows rattling in their quiver as she slid down the trunk to sit on the wet leaf litter at the base of the tree. She tossed her sandals in the grass in front of her and set the bow down beside her. The back of her head rested against the soft layer of moss upon the ficus’s rough bark. Fatigue throbbed in her muscles and thrummed in her joints, hot and acidic. Finally at rest, she could feel her tense, overwrought body relax, melting into the placid calm of the grove. She breathed deeply, looking out over the clearing. At the steep mountainous cliffs enclosing the grove. At the sliver of forest on the other side of the clearing. A grassy mound rose in front of the sliver of forest, like any other hillock save for the thread of smoke rising from the top of the mound or the timber wall poking out from beneath a thick layer of sod. The face of the mound that overlooked the grove was a wall of thick logs hidden beneath an overhanging roof of sod. Clusters of pale pink orchids, the same orchids that seemed to run rampant in the grove, obscured the bottom half of the wall, leaving only one space open in the center. The faded red door in the midst of the orchids was ajar.

Yakun said that sod houses needed to breathe. They needed fresh air. Odessa thought that was just an excuse so he did not have to repair the corroded outside latch.

Taking the peaceful stillness of the grove, her worry and doubt and hunger eased with the throbbing of her tired limbs and drowsiness soon overtook her. It was growing increasingly difficult to resist the allure of rest and slumber. Her body was weak and lethargic. Her mind was muddled and her thoughts were beset by all manner of melancholy and malaise. Deep sleep was her only respite. Sleep deep enough that even dreams could not reach her.

Her eyes had been closed for no more than a few minutes when a voice disturbed the tranquil repose she had allowed herself.

“Aren’t you supposed to be out getting dinner?” Poko asked.

Odessa cracked an eye open to find Poko standing on her foot with their arms crossed. “It’s getting dark.”

“And yet I see no dinner,” Poko said. “How curious.”

“You shouldn’t be eating meat anyway.” Odessa jerked her foot and the fairy bounded to the ground, landing gracefully. Slowly, she rose, using a hand on the tree to steady herself. “It’s not right.”

“But it’s so good!” Poko said. “It’s worth a little indigestion.”

A huff as Odessa bent to pick up her bow. Bereft of the momentum of constant movement the more subtle of her aches and pains had caught up to her. When she straightened, she rubbed the small of her back and winced. “There’s something wrong with you.”

Poko giggled. Both Odessa and Poko knew the fairy wouldn’t touch meat unless they were starving. And in the grove, they weren’t eating like gods but they weren’t starving either.

Odessa picked her sandals up from the ground with a twinge and the two of them made their way up the path to the sod house, Poko easily keeping pace with Odessa’s shuffling pace.

“How are you today?” Poko asked.

“The same as yesterday,” Odessa said. “Awful.”

“We have to do something.” Genuine concern made Poko’s voice thin and almost pleading. “What Yakun’s doing isn’t making it any better.”

“But it’s stable,” Odessa said. “You heard him. This is the best he can do right now.”

Poko slowed. “This isn’t stable though. Just this last month you’ve barely been able to eat anything.”

Odessa stopped, breathing much too hard for the short distance they had walked. “I just need to kill something.” She needed blood to stay alive. She needs to take life and breathe in life’s dying breath to keep the godsblood from burning through her mortal flesh. Life taken edified the spirit and kept the godsblood at bay. “I haven’t gotten anything big in a few months. If I can get one good kill, I’ll be fine for a while.”

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

“You haven’t gotten anything, big or small, for the last four days though,” Poko said, stopping beside her.

“I’ll be fine,” Odessa said. “I’ve just hunted the same stretch of jungle too much. I need to go where the game is.” She began walking again. I need to go south. The uneasiness the creature’s words had instilled in her was stoked again, simmering in the back of her mind.

“If you say so,” Poko said. Poko’s short strides soon overtook her slow pace and as she followed the fairy bounding up the path to the house, her hunger swelled, a dreadful cold filling her chest like cold fog filling a valley bottom. Her hand squeezed her bandaged arm as it throbbed. Beneath the bandage, she could feel it growing feverishly hot. Her nails dug through the fabric into her arm as she walked. She focused on the pain, using it to ground herself. Sometimes pain was the only moorings she had to keep herself from being swept away in that intoxicating swell of bloodlust.

You’re not going to hurt Poko, she told herself. The small, wicked part of herself that wanted nothing more than to kill without abandon. You’re not going to hurt anyone, you godsdamned lunatic. For harboring the hunger, pain was her atonement.

Poko disappeared inside the dimness within the doorway and the pressure in her chest eased. By the time she had passed the orchids, drooping and wilted but still holding onto the last of their color, the throbbing in her arm was nothing more than a dull ache. She released her bandaged arm before she reached the doorway.

The house beneath the mound was cool and dark. On the opposite wall, shrouded in dim shadows, the fireplace was as she had left it, empty with the bare stone inside swept free of the ash and coals of the previous night. She closed the door behind her and leaned her bow against the wall.

Poko perched on a low table before the fireplace, slender legs swinging loosely. “He didn’t start the fire.”

“I see that,” Odessa said. She unfastened her belt and slid the quiver free to lean it beside the bow. “I’m sure he’s busy with something important.”

“Like curing you?”

Odessa turned and held the fairy with a stern stare. “He’s doing all he can.” She cinched the belt tight around her waist again. “And you know as well as I do, he didn’t have to take us in. He could have just as easily kicked us out and left us to die in the jungle.”

“I know,” Poko said, begrudgingly.

Odessa and Poko had been having this discussion often since they first arrived and it always ended with Poko’s half-hearted acquiescence. Gratitude was not a virtue that fairies held in high esteem, it seemed to Odessa. Poko did not seem to understand that a man could only do so much. No matter how much Odessa chided Poko, they did not seem to grasp the extent of all that Yakun had already done for them.

Odessa walked across the cramped front room, ducking beneath herbs hanging by a spiderweb of rope from the low wood ceiling and skirting around a large cauldron in need of a thorough scouring. What was left of the firewood she had brought inside the day before still laid in a picked-over pile against the left-hand wall in between a half-empty clay water ewer and a stack of barkcloth strips. No more wood had been added atop the few pieces of hard, knotted branches. Bending with a stifled groan, she picked up the wood and took the light armload to the fireplace. With a pinch of dry, crumbling hoof fungus from a box beside the fireplace she started a fire just as night sank into the grove.

It was almost pitch dark in the house when she finally coaxed flame from the smoking tinder. When the flames had taken the kindling and grown steady, her body relaxed and she sank onto the cool packed earth, sprawling out before the fireplace. Since her time in the jungle, she could not abide the dark. She could feel it on her skin, a chill raising the hairs on the back of her neck. In the dark, every sound made her flinch. In the jungle, she had become an animal focused solely on survival. A year after the fact, she was nothing more than a girl scared of the dark.

Sometimes through the crack and snap of the fire, she swore she could hear Talara’s rasping whisper on the wind whistling through the grove. In the distant night, spirits screamed with the voices of her loved ones. No malevolent spirits could make their way into the grove but still she could hear the screams of her father, mother, Ayana, and Kimi. When night fell they echoed in her mind, barely audible and always doggedly at the periphery of her thoughts.

“When do you think he’ll be back?” Poko asked.

Odessa opened her eyes, not realizing she had closed them. The fire’s warm light splashed on the fairy’s silver-tinged skin and made their gossamer tunic glow like dewey spidersilk in dawn’s golden light. Firelight flickered in their black eyes. Looking into those eyes, a sudden swell of guilt overcame her as she thought of what her hunger had urged her to do mere minutes ago. “Soon,” she said, her voice a bit choked.

“I guess he’s not making dinner tonight, huh?”

Odessa sighed. “I guess not.” She lay on the floor a moment longer, letting her limbs melt in relaxation, before willing herself up into a sitting position. Her body protested with a myriad of aches and twinges of pain.

She poured the rest of the water from the clay ewer into a small cauldron hanging from a hook set in the back of the fireplace. It was not much water but it would do for a thick stew. The spring they drew water from was only a short walk down the hill at the sloping base of the ravine but in the dark, the path to the spring stretched and twisted. In the dark, tough grasses and woody brush would reach out to grasp at her ankles, reaching out to ensnare her and pull her into the depths of that pitch black where the goddess waited, needle-lined maw gaping to swallow her whole.

“When was the last time the old man made dinner like he promised?” Poko asked from their perch.

Odessa was rifling through a cluster of short clay pots, prying open lids and peeking inside, trying to remember where she had put the salted mutton. “I don’t know,” she said, replacing a pot lid and removing another. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t mind.” She was too tired to rise to Poko’s prodding. She wondered if all fairies had a penchant for gossip and instigation.

Poko said no more on the subject, only sat and watched her with a knowing look as she reached into a pot and took out the cloth-wrapped bundle of salted meat. She tried to ignore their stare. The arch in their tiny eyebrow that suggested they knew she was hiding something.

“I really don’t mind,” Odessa said, a bit too defensively. “I used to cook all the time before.” She did not who she had cooked for before. Even the indirect mention of her family hurt when she said it.

The fairy kept staring, head tilted and lips pursed like a disapproving parent. That condescending stare pricked at Odessa’s back as she turned away and began unwrapping the meat on the cluttered table pressed against the right-hand wall. With a trembling hand, she took the knife from the table top and began roughly slicing the tough strips of cured mutton.

“You know what I think?” Poko said.

“I can guess but I’m sure you’ll still tell me anyway.”

“I think you don’t know how to give yourself a break. You don’t know how to relax.”

Odessa shook her head, her braids bouncing slightly. Relax? How could I possibly relax? She continued cutting meat. The knife was getting dull and tore the meat more than it sliced it.

“You don’t have to do everything, you know? You got to be more like me. Just rest and repose, Dessa. That’s what you need to do.”

The knife paused its cutting. Odessa turned, a slight smirk on her lips. “If I was more like you, She pointed the knife at the fairy. “We’d be dead in a few days. Starved to death. How’s that for rest and repose?”

“But imagine how good you’d feel for those few days. Not a care in the world!”

Odessa opened her mouth and then paused. She sighed and shook her head again. “You’re infuriating.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Oh, I definitely do.” A thin, tired smile brushed the corners of her mouth. Poko knew just how to dance on the verge of irritation but she had grown so accustomed to it she almost welcomed it now.

Where would I be without this annoying little bug? she wondered. Without Poko smiles and laughter seldom came without force or a somber air about them. Without Poko, she would have been drowned in her despair many months ago. In the days before Yakun had figured out the most efficient way to sate her hunger, her sickness had left her bedridden and in constant pain. Poko had stayed by her side. Every time she came close to crumbling, Poko was there. Through all the night terrors and sleepless nights. Without Poko, all the nights spent crying for her mother and father and sisters would have broken her entirely.