Hammer & Air (17 page)

“I’ll save him for later,” the man chuckled. “He’s feisty; it’ll be fun.” A rough hand with dirty nails came to touch my cheek. “You, you’re a sweet little piece. You’ll be nice. More like a girl. Bet your arse will open for me like a quim. It’s been a while.”

“My arse is my own,” I muttered sullenly, and he boomed with laughter. And while it rang off the walls, Hammer were standing up, I could see him from the corner of my eye. The man grasped my hips insistently, and I tried for a bit more time.

“Could you wait until I finish the dishes?” I asked shortly. “If I’m going to be buggered bloody, I’d prefer not to have to clean up when I’m done.”

The man grunted, surprised. “I’ll fuck ya now, ya little piss-ant! And when I’m done, you’ll help me skin that fucking bear! But first, we’ll let him wear himself out a bit—make him easier to kill.” And that horrible parody of a laugh. “And fucking. We’ll do some of that. Now come along; I might even grease ya like a pig!”

“Right,” I muttered, grabbing the knife hard. “Just let me dry my hands off.”

I turned around and thrust, just as Hammer swung down with his smith’s hammer and caved in the man’s skull. Whoever the fuck he were, he didn’t even have time to look surprised as his blood splattered over the kitchen and the light died from his eyes.

The first thing we did were drag his carcass outside, one of us on each arm, his boots thumping incongruously on the stairs of the porch as we hauled him down.

“Where’d this arse-ripper come from, that’s what I want to know!” Hammer grunted, but I’d thought of that.

“The cave. He must have come through the cave. That’s where the bear’s hollering from.” I thought quick, and Hammer were quiet to let me. “We should probably take him back that way; it’s west, it’s where we want to go.” We paused, and I stood and looked around. Burying the body were out of the question, but we weren’t going to let him just sit on the cottage green and rot.

“You take him deeper into the woods,” I said after a moment. “I’ll clean up the blood.”

Hammer nodded and didn’t try to stop me. It were sacrilegious somehow to leave blood in that home. It weren’t right, and we wouldn’t do it.

But that didn’t mean I didn’t hurry, either. I apologized to the house as I scrubbed, and vowed to take the soiled linens outside and leave them, and told it that we were sorry to leave the place on such a note.

What I were also sorry about were that I didn’t get a chance to take some rose clippings with me like I’d planned as we left, but I didn’t tell the cottage that. There were other roses.

Hammer came back and took the soiled towels without a word, and by the time he came back with dirt on his hands, I had our packs, and we were all but ready to run out the door.

We paused for a moment to knock on the threshold softly.

“Bless you, little cabin,” Hammer said softly, and we met eyes that were glossy and wet. It had taught us about home—there were no words for that.

The bear howled again, and we took off at a run toward the mouth of the cave. We were half-way there when I realized I’d forgotten more than rose-clippings.

“Aw, fuck,” I muttered, that upset, and Hammer all but stopped.

“What?”

“The book, Hammer. The cottage gave us the book, and I left it on the fucking couch…oolf…”

There were a sudden, terrible weight in my pack, and before Hammer could even agonize over whether to turn around or not, I gave him a brilliant grin. “No worries. Hammer, I think that little cottage really loved us!”

Hammer grimaced and grabbed my hand, taking us closer to the bear’s agonized howls. “I hope so, Eirn, because I left our plans for the next one on the table.”

Those did
not
magically appear in his pack (although mine weighed a bloody ton) by the time we broke into the clearing of dry brush that surrounded the cave.

The bear were there, howling with pain, and his hind paw were clapped bloody in a terrible, iron-toothed trap. Not even Hammer could look at the thing without pity, and both of us winced in sympathy, garnering the bear’s attention.

The moment he saw us, he stopped caterwauling, and sank to his haunches, holding out his leg piteously. His look were as human as they came, and it were a frightening mix of shame, fear, pain, and humility.
Help me. I’m a bloody arse, but please, please help me.

Hammer and I sighed in tandem, and Hammer pulled his smith’s hammer from his belt, and together we moved to see how to get the damned trap off. The bear watched us, shivering with pain, and Hammer drew close enough to fidget with the trap.

“That’s odd,” he muttered, his hands digging into the blood-saturated mess that were the bear’s fur. “It’s like the fur came off… like the rind off an orange….”

The bear gave an affronted howl, and Hammer swore for moments, the sun gleaming off the blue-black of his hair in the breathless silence of the dusty clearing. “By every fucking god….”

There were a click, and the iron jaws sprang open. The bear collapsed, panting on his side, as though the rush of blood to the rest of his foot had done him in for pain.

“Eirn, c’mere and look at this,” Hammer muttered in the stillness.

I looked, and fought the blackness behind my eyes and the greenness in my stomach. “Oh holy gods,” I muttered, sinking to my haunches. “Hammer….”

I had to think, I had to reason—it were how I kept Hammer alive until we reached safety, it were how we’d managed to escape the town and a murder charge before. It were everything I believed in, and not even the magic involved could fracture my belief in it.

The bear’s skin and fur had separated, were bleeding—pouring blood, as a matter of fact—but beneath it were not jagged flesh and muscle as there should have been.

No. Hammer pulled apart the two sides of fur, and what were underneath were smooth, pale, human skin.

“Gods.” He wouldn’t survive the bleeding, that were certain; it wouldn’t stop. But the smooth human limb beneath…. I reached out and turned on that cold part of myself that had nursed Hammer’s festering wound and walked until I stumbled into our future.

Suddenly, all I could think of were our cottage, and that hideous rug of many animal pelts on the floor. Now, if this were a story, that would have some meaning, now wouldn’t it?

“Should we take him to the other end of the cave?” Hammer asked, and for a moment, I thought it were the best idea I’d ever heard. And then—

“No,” I said softly, and the bear looked at me with summat like relief. At least I hoped it were relief; I were staking his life on my ability to know a man I’d seen only as a cock in my bed.

“No?”

I looked at Hammer and tried to put it into words. “I think if we do that, that big strip of flesh on his leg will be lost when he becomes the man. I think….” And again, that horrible rug planted itself behind my eyes as though someone had dug the hole and watered the picture, “I think, that the only way he’s going to survive this, Hammer, is if we take the whole skin off.”

The bear raised his head and whuffled a little, then, gods thank ye, he nodded. It were the closest thing to a certainty we were likely to get.

Hammer swallowed, nodded, and put on that face—the one I’d seen when he were washing the blood off his hammer, the one I’d seen when he were being buggered. I recognized that face now, and I knew mine were set along the same lines.

The next few minutes were to be
endured,
as, perhaps, nothing else in our lives had been to this moment.

Hammer pulled out the knife at his belt, and I rummaged in the pack to find the great knife I’d used to cook. Hammer went first: he set the blade in the space made between bear skin and man skin, pointed it away from himself, and slit out.

The bear’s roar made my ears ring and my vision go black, and Hammer, bless his stoic heart, ripped the hide to the chest and kept going up the side of the neck.

I saw what he were doing, and I steeled myself to help.

Finding a pocket of loose skin at the neck, I pulled out and slit the fold and wrinkle. It were hard—the hair were thick and the skin were tough and the bear were twitching for all it tried hard to sit still for us. But my hands were hard and nimble, and the knife eventually were positioned for me to rip the blade through the skin of the head, and up to the ears, and together, Hammer and I slit the skin of the bear’s head in two. Hammer closed his eyes then, because the bear were still screaming and still twitching, but he weren’t trying to get away or kill us, so we must have been on the right course.

Careful not to touch the tender, blood-softened skin under the bear hide, Hammer slit the skin around the neck, and together, heedless of the bear’s screams of pain, we peeled the whole works off the prince’s head.

I shuddered, hard, and almost turned to throw up, when I saw that we were right, and it were the prince’s head. He looked at me through pain-hooded eyes, and through the mask of the blood that the bearskin left behind and mouthed, “Keep going,” at me.

“Keep going,” I repeated, nodding, and he nodded back.

 Then he mouthed, “Through the cave.”

“Do we take the skin?” I didn’t think so, and his head flopped limply side-to-side, and I figured that the skin were a part of this enchanted land, like the cottage and the millwheel and the stream with all the fish. It couldn’t be a part of that godsawful rug if we took it out through the cave.

 That were all he had in him, though. When he were done answering my question, his head slumped forward, and Hammer and I looked at each other grimly. Whatever the bond of flesh and magic holding this man together, we needed to sever it, and quickly.

I don’t like to think about the next few moments, and Hammer and I never speak of them. We were skinning a bear alive. We were saving a friend’s life. We were taking away the majesty and salvaging the battered human beneath.

When all were done, we had a pile of fur pieces at our feet, like some grim butcher’s keep, and an unconscious, naked man, covered in blood.

“Water,” Hammer said, his voice ripe with disgust. “We need water.”

I thought about my visit to the cave, and what I knew of the land. “I think the stream that runs past the cottage runs by the cave!” I told him, anxious to have something, anything to do.

He closed his eyes thoughtfully, as though trying to remember. “Aye,” he answered, and we met eyes.

“He took you last night,” I said, putting words to the things we hadn’t had time to speak of.

“Aye,” he answered again, looking away. I couldn’t bear him looking away, and Hammer started to speak heavily, as though this needed confessing before we could move forward. “He told me… he told me you would leave me, eventually. That I… a man like me… I could not do for you like you deserved.”

“I told you….” I started bitterly, hurt inside that he should have ever thought that.

And now he looked me in the eyes. “Aye. There will always be a Hammer and an Eirn.” He believed it this time. I could see it, and we were free. “Now come on, one of us on either side, let’s get this bugger to the stream and wash this stench off our skin.”

The trip through the cave didn’t do much more than make our skin tingle as we passed through the line of where the lands were magic and where they weren’t. We kept going, though, and while a part of me grieved for our little cottage, the rest of me were too tired to grieve. We passed a small chamber—a chesterfield and a soft pile of rugs and what looked to be a feather mattress, and even a shelf for books—that were carved incongruously into a dent on the side of the cave, but we were too tired, and too urgent of the blood crusting on our skin to want to linger.

It were only midday, but it felt like midnight, and the glare of a sun in the late depth of summer near to blinded us as we came out on the other side. We didn’t think on it then, we knew we’d lived but a season, not much more, in the little cottage, but we had no idea what had happened outside of us. At the time, we had more pressing matters to attend.

We heard the stream almost as soon as we burst into the daylight on the outside of the cave. It weren’t deep, maybe to Hammer’s thighs, and we dropped our knapsacks at the banks, and together we dragged our prince out to the middle of it, and let the water sluice over him. I asked Hammer to hold him in place, and I went to my pack, finding a few bars of the cedar soap the cottage had enjoyed to give us in the bottom. I brought one out, and a cloth, and went about washing the crusted blood from the prince, who revived a little in the stream, and took some water after it ran clean around him. We took him back to the bank and dressed him in one of my sets of fine linen small clothes, then stripped our own clothes off and plunged right back into the chilly, shaded running water, using the soap and the cloth and the heavenly coolness, and yes, we, too, drank some of the fresh running water when it were clear about our bodies.

Hammer looked at me with weary, violence-shocked eyes and said, “Maybe tomorrow this will be a whole other thing,” as he eyed me, naked in the sunshine, and I smiled shyly back.

“Maybe.”

But first we had to take the shelter we’d been offered, and see that our companion would live through the day.

We went back to the small room and set the prince up on the chesterfield, pulling one of the blankets from the bed on the floor up over his shaking shoulders. At the feeling of comfort, he sighed, whimpered a little and fell asleep. Hammer sat by his feet, and I sat by his head, stroking his hair off his brow like the teachers at the orphanage had done for us when we were sick. Eventually the shaking stopped, and he breathed easy in his own skin.

Hammer and I shared some of the meat and bread then, so tired from the horror and the physical act of skinning a bear in so short a time that we ate with our eyes half closed.

In a few moments, we were asleep on the pallet on the floor. It were warm in the cave, but our bodies were cool enough from bathing in the stream that we still felt comfortable being close to each other, and Hammer’s arm were flung about my middle. I wove my fingers with his before we closed our eyes.

Part XI
Golden Boy, Golden Future