by Sean Jones
in Issue 82, November 2018
Unlike most army snipers, I grew up without longbow or arbalest in my hands. The first time I handled a crossbow? It was the Year of the Piebald Horse. I was nearly twelve and my father was home on furlough from the war with the Ravnens. My younger sister, seven that summer, was meeting him for the first time and it would be the last time either of us would see him. He took me deer hunting in the jungle west of our village but I’d like to think the real quarry we sought on that rare and brief day was the truth.
My first crossbow was a smaller, lighter weapon – child-sized – she would make my Entynn look like a ballista. My father and I walked through wooded hills, passing places where I played with my friends, my father not remembering the paths but knowing how to hunt. In a low voice, I asked him questions about the war, about fighting, about killing enemies. As we weaved between clumps of trees in and out of dappled sunlight, his answers, too, followed a curving path.
“Is it true they wield death magic?” I asked.
“They are mere men as are we.”
“But they eat the bones of those they kill.”
“A thing I have never seen.”
“The Ravnens are the color of goat’s milk and their sky-blue eyes can paralyze a man.”
“Half true, Kren.” He laughed. “But what of it?”
“They are vile and strange and ill-mannered and speak in howls and carve sigils of magical might into their skin.”
“They are men as are we. Only men.”
He halted and showed me how to stand amongst the trees and to find a lane amongst them where a hunter could peer between trunks in wait for a deer to step into clear space. He put a finger to his lips and bade me to be still. When he crouched, I knelt, training the crossbow along a corridor between the stalks and thickets. A rustling sounded from our left and jungle leaves parted, were parted by some creature, a deer I hoped. My heart drummed. My father arched his eyebrows and nodded his head just as the creature emerged. Not a deer but a boar, the dark brown beast carried its head low to the ground, grunting once, twice, searching for morsels amongst the undergrowth. My left elbow resting on my left knee, I sighted along my weapon’s bolt, breathed out as my father had taught me and gently pulled up on the long trigger arm with the palm of my right hand, the tips of my cupped fingers touching my neck and jaw as the keylock freed the bolt for flight and the crossbow jumped upward.
The broad head of the bolt buried itself deep into the neck of the boar and the animal shrieked and sped forward two, three steps before collapsing on the jungle floor. The scream I remember most and, though I didn’t know then, it is the same shriek you will hear if you shoot a man with a broadhead.
“Well done, Kren,” my father said and he strode to the fallen beast and pinned its wriggling form to the ground with the butt of his spear. “Come. It’s no deer but it’s your first and you should drink the blood.”
The boar seemed strange, bleeding and pinned. “Such an ugly beast,” I said as I walked up to it.
“Ugly?”
“Different from us.”
“Kren, how do you mean that?”
“The four legs, the tiny eyes, the tusks. It makes strange sounds. It forages and wallows.”
Spurting blood slowed to a trickle and the boar lay still. My father lifted his spear and rested it against a green mango tree. “The boar is a creature like us, Kren. Make no mistake. Consider a fish with no feet or a bird with feathers. A spider in a web. A crocodile hatching from an egg. They are different from us. This swine is our near-brother. Drink the blood.”
I knelt and, placing one hand on the boar’s neck, pushed the bolt through and grasped the haft and pulled it out from the animal and put my lips on the wound and drank in the blood.
“How would you call it?” my father asked.
I lifted my head. “Your meaning?”
“The blood. In what way would you call it?”
“Salty.”
“To be sure. Sweet or bitter?”
“Neither. It tastes like …”
“Like eating salty broth with an iron spoon. Like sipping metal. Simply, it tastes like blood.”
I wiped my chin and stood. Metal and salt, yes.
“And it is warm? Or cold?”
I thought and touched my right hand to my lips again. “Neither. Not warm or cold.”
“The warmth of the beast is no greater than yours, no lesser. Its heart heats its blood as does yours.”
A breeze stirred the large leaves of the jungle’s low plants, the slight wind neither not nor cold.
“Kren, do you understand why I ask these things of you?”
“To take reverence in my first kill, Pater? To honor the spirit of the fallen animal?”
“True by half. Again, how does the boar differ from us?”
“By being an animal?”
“When your mouth has been bloodied in a game of shatranj, how is taste of your blood?”
“It is the same.”
“It is the same.” He repeated my words.
“Pater, you asked if I understand.”
“And?”
“The war is being fought away from our forest but that may not always be,” I said. “We will have to fight the Ravnens if they come here.”
“Here or in a desert or aboard a felucca.”
The not-warm, not-cool breeze rustled the jungle leaves again. “I may understand, Pater. I may.”
He clasped my shoulder and said, “When the Ravnens have killed the men of my age and the chief has gone away to war and a new chief takes the goats of the old chief, he will want more goats and more wives and army officers will come and persuade him he must send young men like you to the war. When that happens – do not gainsay me, for it will, as we are not winning – the officers will make demons of the enemy. The beastliness you have clad them in will seem threadbare compared to the stories you will hear when the army needs to convince young men such as you to be fighters.” He let go my shoulder but stared into my eyes.
“They are men. The Ravnens are men, like us.”
“And in a time of peace, they would be brothers,” he said.
I bent and grasped a tusk of the fallen boar and tried to lift it. “Our brother is too heavy,” I said.
I slung my child’s crossbow on my back and my father and I trussed the boar and carried it by his spear back to our village, weaving through and amongst dappled sunlight and thickets and tree trunks as we went. I remember the sweet taste of the boar’s flesh when we cooked it in a pit and ate it that night and, years later, after my father had been killed by a Ravnen and the new chief asked the boys of our village if we would become men and fight in the war, I remember the words of the visiting army officer who bolstered the chief’s urging as he said the Ravnens were near-demons and strange in ways we could not imagine with eyes of blue ice and skin of milk and a yammering speech unintelligible to any civilized person for they were so, so different from us. I remember the flesh of the boar my father and I roasted that night because the army officer told us the Ravnens ate men like us when they killed us in battle, ate us because our flesh tasted so sweet to them.
It was not amongst the thickets of a jungle or in the barrenness of a desert or aboard a felucca or dhow but amidst a cobblestone alleyway in the capital of the Revnans when my broadhead quarrel skewered the enemy soldier and his scream caromed off the hard stones of his cold city. Though it was far better to hear his shriek in his home than in my own, I never could accept the army officer’s insistence that the Revnans were demons and my enemy’s screech and the echoes of his death-cry came to my ears as the anguish of a near-brother.
©November 2018, Sean Jones
Sean Jones writes swords and sorcery and sci-fi stories in and around Golden, Colorado. He is a member of the Northern Colorado Writers’ Workshop, the Boy Scouts of America and the Rocky Mountain Porsche Club. Influences on his writing include Ursula K. LeGuin, Glen Cook and Greek mythology. He has created a post-apocalyptic demolition-derby game called Hovercars that you can check out here. This is first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.