They did not Hang from Trees
I wrote this short story about a year ago, but held off from posting it as I didn’t have a cover image. However, now I’ve cheated and used AI (MS Bing image creator).
Anyway, when writing it I was thinking about blind atheism, how people often take the silence within as proof that there has never been anything worth listening to.
Grehan left his gods behind like leaves pressed into his footsteps. A wind cut through the trees. Leafless and bleached white, the branches thrummed and rattled like vocal cords, screaming their disapproval as he made his escape.
Once out of the Bonewood he could rest. No ancestors had been buried beyond the white trees and their curses would fade out past the last gnarled root ball. There, he’d light a fire and ask his new gods to release him, to burn away the stories of his people.
Grehan slid to a stop, mud sliding over his foot to fill the spaces between his toes. There had been another sound in the wood. He waited, mouth open, unbreathing. Another crunch. Then a crack. Not one his people then, chasing him down. He’d never hear them, just as they’d never hear him. They all knew this wood too well. They could circle one another until the only thing that gave them away would be their stomachs rumbling.
He could see light up ahead, silver fingers of moonlight reaching toward him from between the ghastly bones of his ancestors. Out in the meadow he could run faster, but he’d have no cover. It all depended on what he was sharing the wood with. The wind rushed again and pulled at his hair, loose, the braids gone for the first time in sixteen winters. It felt free, unbound. He took off at a run. He wanted to be free of this wood, of the cloying grasp of his ancestors and the stories they had told his people to tell him.
Those stories were empty. He saw that now. Once they had been everything, snowshoes that held him up above the madness of the world. It was a sinister madness, smooth and flat, nothing to see. Then a foot would crunch through that deceptive skin. Then the other, and a crevasse would open beneath, and you were never heard from again. The ancestors would hear you scream. But they never did anything but scream back.
The silver fingers became arms that pulled him out into the moon-swept meadow. The Bonewood shivered behind him as if furious, trembling with rejection. He smiled. Rejection would make the cleansing that much easier. A twang snapped from the darkness and his smile fell.
Ice shot through his side, burning. He stumbled but didn’t stop. The frigid grass was like flint edges against his bare feet, hurting almost as much as the ice in his side. It was getting warmer now, spreading with a wet stickiness. Either the arrow had missed vitals or he had yet to feel the damage it had done, running on borrowed time. He dragged air through the ragged remains of his grin. It was all borrowed time, and if he could, he’d take some more.
A clot of rough shadows approached from the night and he dropped to one knee, spinning as he fell. He slid backwards under the shade of an elder bush. The medicine of its flowers were a long way off, that of its berries further still, but even now the shrub offered him a chance at survival. The screen of leaves had sliced the meadow into slivers of pale moon and dark shadow, hidden from him just as he was hidden.
Grehan could feel the spirits who dwelt amongst the branches trying to nestle beside his thoughts. He shook them off as he pawed at his side. He had new gods now. The heat of his blood was welcome over frozen fingers, but the pain blossomed as his breathing slowed. He probed, wincing. It was not too deep. He dug, his teeth clenched so tight against his scream that they creaked. Grehan worried the bronze barb free with a slurp and gasped at cold air that seemed to hurt more than the wound. He clamped his hand over the fresh wave of warmth that rushed from the hole between his ribs.
Movement out in the meadow. Barely a flicker, like an owl flying low, but that was enough. Borrowed time was up. Grehan eased his way deeper into the elder’s leggy embrace, running a hand over a branch arching overhead until he felt soft new leaves beneath his palm. Once stripped he chewed them to a bitter paste. He shrugged his way free of the bush and, keeping low in the long grasses of the meadow, caught himself offering thanks. He froze, his forehead a finger’s width above the turf. His thanks were for his new gods, not the old.
He spat. The paste tingled against his palm, stung as he packed it into the arrow wound. He tightened the antler toggles of his coat and pulled the hide in tight against the leak.
Peering above the rustling tips of spring grass Grehan searched the meadow. More shadows picked their way along the fringes of the Bonewood. Shadows shaped like men. They were not his people. They made too much noise. They did not know how the woods demanded to be walked. They did not know that weapons could not be taken into the resting place, for these people carried spears and bows and knives. Something swung at the top of a staff. White fur shone blue as the moon coaxed texture and colour from the gloom. The White Fox.
Something colder than the vestiges of winter, only just warming in the earth below him, crawled through Grehan. His breath stung and his spittle dried in his mouth. Despite the chill, his palms were slick, sweat beading against the predawn air.
He crawled backwards, leaving the shade of the elder, putting it as a screen between him and the teeth of the White Fox. An eerie silence engulfed him. He couldn’t place it, but something was missing. Something that should have happened, hadn’t.
Staying low, one hand pressed tight against his side, the other pressing off the cold ground if he stumbled, Grehan made his way across the meadow. They wouldn’t follow him, not when they were this close to his village. They probably thought him done, any warnings he might’ve had for his people dead along with him. And if not, they knew that giving chase would give them away and they’d have to give up on the raid.
The White Fox was a cruel god. More a taker than a giver. All the old ones were. These raiders wouldn’t risk their god’s ire for one boy.
Free of the meadow, Grehan picked his way along the stones of the stream. A great oak sprouted from the centre of a clearing on the bank, charms hanging limp in the air. Without thinking he reached for the nearest one, sixteen years of habit stronger than his newfound gods. He grasped a rib bone bound from the branches with lengths of braided hair. He let it pass through his fingers, the passage at once both smooth rough, a thanks on his lips.
He fumbled, stepping back, and cast his hand up to swat aside the feel of things he had sworn to forget. But he could not.
He had stood here when his father had cut those braids from an enemy, bested in battle, bound kneeling hand and foot. The cutting had been gentle, the bronze knife sharp, the strokes measured. The ribs had been taken from a feast-day deer by his mother and sisters and they had tied the charm together. Grehan and his cousins had climbed the tree to tie it up beside the others. A wind had rattled the offerings that night, a rhythm to accompany the songs of his people. Warmth had filled him, a vessel with which to carry his thanks for the blessings of life. Of this place.
They had all watched the enemy walk off into the trees, free.
His hand slowed, no linger striking at the bones but grasping for them, clinging on. Up he climbed, past the first buds forming on the skeleton-cold branches. Swaying at the top he could see the fur-capped shadows that slunk across the meadow. There were more foxes on the prowl than he’d seen before. Many more.
Despite the rustle of trees and calls of distant nightbirds, the foxes on the meadow left a silence in their wake. A silence he could feel.
His uncles had once shown him the offerings these people made to the White Fox. They had left the Bonewood at dawn, climbed the mountain at noon, and crossed the glacier at night. At the far edge of the glacier the offerings to the White Fox had waited. They did not hang from trees, but from tall wooden frames fixed into the ice. Rope instead of braids. People, whole people, instead of deer ribs. Perches for the birds to sit on and feed as the White Fox drank up the sacrifices’ last prayers to gods that had not listened.
Grehan remember the silence of that place, an emptiness that was audible above the tearing mountain wind. His beaver mitts had kept him warm for the journey, but in that moment they had frozen, numb all the way through. That had been the moment he had sworn to forsake the cruelty of the old ones.
Grehan climbed down, his fingers feeling just as cold as he imagined his father and mother, sisters and cousins and uncles all hanging from those frames above the glacier.
The stream beckoned with smooth river stones that would hide his trail. The sky seemed lighter over that way. A new day rising on the promises of his new gods. Over his shoulder the meadow sloped away in darkness, the austere light of the moon cutting sharp edges across the Bonewood.
Grehan’s footsteps slapped on smooth stone, sodden leaves sticking to his feet. A wind tore at his loose hair, spurring him onwards.
Once the stream cut past the Bonewood he could hurry, weaving through the maze as he rebraided his hair. He’d make it back to his village before the teeth of the White Fox found their way. There, he’d light torches from the embers of last night’s fire and rouse his people to war. The ancestors would see. While Grehan had sworn to forsake their stories, they were better than the silence that had oozed from between the frames at the top of the glacier.
They were better than the silence he had slipped out into from under the elder.
