THE UNLAWFUL HUNTER
by Keith Taylor

As to the pitfall of the unlawful hunter; the deer which he rouses and the deer which he does not rouse come equally to him.
— Brehon Law.

* * * *

The idea was Fal’s. He met his father’s foster brother, the outlaw Miach, in secret to suggest it. Like all Fal’s ideas, it was bold, outrageous — and would work. With winter drawing near, Miach was tempted. He delayed his decision for a while, knowing how angry his foster brother would be if Miach encouraged Fal in more potentially fatal mischief. But Miach owed it to his band to find it food for the winter. Besides, Fal had never stayed out of trouble simply because no man encouraged him.

“Can you and your friends get out of Suibni’s dun on the night?”

“No difficulty there, Uncle.” Fal did not award the title in irony. No blood tie existed between him and Miach, but fosterage often created closer ties than blood. “I know the paths through the bog, by night or day. By the gods, I ought to. It’s a year I have lived in Suibni’s house.”

He, and others. Many high-born youngsters were sent to Suibni the bard for instruction in poetry and law, as befitted their rank. Fal was different. His ancestors had been bards since time out of mind, and he was expected to become one himself.

He did not wish to.

Miach, who knew him well, sensed his aversion. “Too long for your liking, eh?”

Fal shrugged. “He’s a merry man, Suibni, and open of hand. The company’s merry, too. Training in poetry is no hardship. The harp I love, but I don’t wish to be a bard. It is not my calling. A year is time enough for me to be sure of that.”

Miach guessed that he was the first to hear of Fal’s decision. It was appropriate, in a way. Refusing to follow the bard’s profession would be almost like becoming an outlaw from his clan. Who better to tell than Miach?

“What will you do, then?”

Fal’s black brows met, even as his mouth smiled. “Quarrel with Father, I suppose.” His forehead grew smooth once more. “The other thing, now . . . Are you ready?”

“I? I asked you whether your friends would do it.”

“Six I am sure of. Six are enough, are they not?” And all so bold that they will ride on Samhain Eve. None would think of it, but once I suggest it, they will ride just for the sport.”

Miach’s mouth formed a somewhat wry shape. He too would not have thought of riding abroad on Samhain Eve until Fal suggested it. Samhain was the night between summer and winter, between life and death, when extremes were united and strange creatures travelled freely. Sometimes the dead came home — and if they did, they found food and drink and a fresh bed prepared. The lords of the Tuatha De Danann, that fair and awesome race which had been defeated by the first iron-users to invade Erin, often returned at Samhain to the land they loved and had never forgotten. No matter how men might revel and jest indoors, they seldom went out. Not on that night; not once the Sun had set.

Fal had less awe than most of Samhain Eve. It was his birth-night, and of course there had been talk on that account. Many had watched him grow, remarking his beauty, recklessness, and unpredictability, and spoken the word changeling with solemn nods. Knowing this was nonsense, Fal tended to disbelieve the other things he heard about Samhain. At least to doubt them.

“Bring your friends, then,” Miach said. “I’ll have my band in place.”

The seven youths rode to their appointment not long after sunset upon the night. Leaving Suibni’s crowded dun unnoticed was easy, with the riotous feasting and drinking under way, half the folk either masked or painted. The seven went disguised in bizarre tatters, fur, and animal masks; any man who saw them riding would shiver and look away.

By winding paths they crossed the ice-crusted bog, and next a plain of white grass beneath glittering stars. Their breath and their horses’ smoked in the bitter night. The cold grew sharper each hour. Rime whitened young moustaches and frosted spearheads.

Three hours before midnight, they came to the rendezvous, a tumble of weathered boulders patched with lichen. Beside it, a pine tree creaked as the cold applied a slowly tightening wrestler’s grip. Something hooted softly from the darkness under the branches — something, Fal knew, which lacked feathers. He hooted twice in reply.

“Fal?”

“It is I.”

Miach trod forward to embrace his foster-brother’s son. Fal’s companions saw a man of middle height, dark-haired and fork-bearded. The night and his heavy cloth hid details of build.

“You come in good time,” Miach said. “Midnight’s hours away yet.” His gaze travelled to the six mounted figures in their several masks: otter, bear, wildcat, owl, fanged demon, and dog. Fal’s mask, an eagle, hung by his saddle; and he wore a cloak of crimson feathers as magnificent as it was warm.

Youth, Miach thought, and smiled.

“I am Miach mac Ringabra,” he said to the six. “Some call me Redfist and Kinslayer, and all I will say about that is that I killed a man who betrayed me when I trusted him enough to stand hostage for him. It was an ill business for all concerned, and it made me an outlaw. If you’d be courteous, forget you saw me tonight.

“But first I’ll ride with you. I know something of the work.”

The mounted figures chuckled. One laughed aloud.

“We have done it a time or two ourselves,” the youth in the bear-mask said.

“You know the plan,” Fal declared, “or if you do not, go home. Two hours’ ride from here is the steading of Srem the cattle-lord. He has two hundred beasts of his own and his neighbours’, penned for slaughter, and we lift them tonight. The steading has two ramparts faced with stone, a log palisade, and a gate which will be unguarded. None will expect a raid at this time. Even when his dogs raise a racket, Srem will likely think the restless dead are abroad.”

There were more chuckles, and exaggerated eerie moans. Fal detected hidden tension behind his friends’ mirth; they mocked their own terrors.

“Cahal and I will open the gate, Miach will lead you in. If we act quickly, we can be away before Srem knows what is happening.”

“Once in the bogs, we will lose them!” Lurgan cried. A scion of the conquering ui Neill was this one. “They don’t know their way, and we do, to the inch!”

“Aye!” laughed Ebenar of Cetcha. “And then — and then!”

“We’ll drive the beasts through the lake!” Art enthused. “Half a hundred beasts, wet and bawling, in the dun in the blue frosty dawn! That’s the way to wake them!”

“Out stamps the Lord Suibni, roaring-”

“— a blanket kilted about him —”

“— and sets his foot in a fresh steaming cowpat!”

“Right,” Miach said, in a voice which ended the nonsense. “If we succeed, it will be merry. There is never certainty. We’ll be pursued hard. You may have to abandon the cattle and your joke with the Lord Suibni. Expect the men who follow to be enraged. It’s a dark night. We’re all coarsely clad. The pursuit won’t know or care that you are well born, highly connected. Be ready for that — or go home, as Fal says.”

An outlaw spoke, a man whose life and freedom were carried in his sword-sheath, or on the legs of a fast horse. But he spoke to hothead aristocrats too young to really believe they could die. They howled him down. They reached eagerly for the weapons he had brought. In a rush of hoofbeats, they left the meeting-place deserted.

Fal, the youngest rider there, was filled with hard, gleeful exaltation. Come what might, this was man’s work. It pleased him mightily to know he had devised the plan.

They came to the steading of Srem. Its stone-faced ramparts enclosed what amounted to a village. By the nearby stream stood a water-mill, its wheel removed and stored for the winter, dead leaves silted against the walls. Miach’s lieutenant waited there. He confirmed that Miach’s outlaws were in position, ready to act, and that nothing had happened to make any change of plan needful.

Fal and Cahal the Burly dismounted. Silently, they climbed across the deserted ramparts and opened the gate. Dogs barked. The barking became frenzied clamor as Miach led five youths galloping through the gates. Two led Fal and Cahal’s horses. A run, a leap and they were mounted again, racing among the barns and byres, sweeping around the kiln. Finding the cattle-pens was easy, with the bawling that issued from within. The raiders opened and emptied them in moments. Night-riding and cattle-lifting were second nature to Fal’s cronies.

Two hundred beasts and four streamed out the gates, Miach’s dogs bounding at their tails. They rushed down the slope. Behind them, in the dun, startled men ran for the stables, to saddle and mount.

“We should ha’ scattered their horses!” Ebenar yelled.

“Too late it is now!” Fal yelled back.

Nor had it been a part of the plan. He and Miach wished to be followed closely by Srem’s angry men. Now they wrought confusion in the pursuit by sending three parts of the herd in all directions, riding hard through the frigid darkness, whooping and goading until only fifty-odd beasts remained together. Then they wheeled after their companions, who had stayed with the remnant, herding it urgently across the plain.

Srem and his kindred were practised trackers, by day or night. The ruse would not confuse them for long, nor was it meant to. They would discover that while most of the herd had been scattered and left, fifty cattle were yet in the raiders’ hands. Belike they would follow those, holding their recovery the more urgent matter. The abandoned beasts would not stampede far. They could always be gathered later.

So Srem would assume, but he would be mistaken. Miach’s men were waiting, three dozen strong, to round up those hundred and fifty beasts and drive them south, while the owners chased a far smaller number westward. Fal and Miach had every hope of keeping the pursuit occupied until dawn.

Fal led. Miach seconded him. This was no nominal thing, agreed for appearances’ sake. Fal had always taken command and led among his friends, first to think of a thing, most forceful in performing it. The youths all knew the region better than Miach. They might not be outlaws, but they had spent their lives in the open, riding and hunting. None lacked training in weapon-use or some acquaintance at least with raid, ambush, feud, and affray. Cattle-lifting was an accepted pastime to them; sport, a way of making war, a way for neighbours to quarrel. Such things went naturally with the proud, jealous ties of kinship that were as real to them all as the breath between their ribs. They covered the miles at a devouring pace.

Fal began to have a sense of something being wrong. The pursuit seemed to have failed, and Srem’s night tracking was known to be better than that. They might have been alone in a frozen, brittle world.

Further, he grew more aware each moment that Samhain was indeed a night like no other in the year, for all his disbelief. The knowledge seeped into him through his skin. Fallen leaves lay in drifts, some pallid, some hectic, already spotted with decay. The naked trees rubbed creaking branches together, groaning in the cold. Samhain, night of the world’s death and promise of its rebirth. Fal’s birth night. He realised that at some time in the past few hours he must have turned thirteen.

“Are you wandering, Fal? We must keep these beasts to their pace!”

“So we must,” Fal answered, recovering swiftly, “but keep your weapons ready. I hear something yonder. Srem may have found us.”
As he spoke, a huge, misshapen thing rose out of the ground, almost under his horse’s hoofs. The horse shied violently. So did Fal’s heart, as he drew his sword. What — ?

The thing was long, with too many legs. It staggered like a drunkard. As Fal controlled his panicking horse, the monster made a great despairing sound from the humped centre of its form. Fal suddenly knew what it was; two stags with locked antlers. They had fought in the rutting time, and their contest had been drawn in this worst of ways. The riders had disturbed them where they lay weakened and dying.

The hapless pair blundered away, losing themselves among bushes and bracken. Centipedes crawled in Fal’s belly. Although no Druid, he could recognise an evil omen of that strength and plainness.

“Bunch the cattle closer,” Miach said urgently. “They are spreading among the trees.”

Fal thought, There should not be so many trees here.

Yet there were. They grew thicker as he rode, leaning towards each other and reaching down to bar his way with their branches. One great limb swatted at his horse like a malformed, many-fingered hand, making it leap to the right. Somewhere the cattle bawled in fear, though he could no longer find them in the forest — this forest which should not exist.

Fal gripped his frightened horse hard with his knees and drew rein, holding it still. Using a steely self-control beyond his years, he curbed his imagination also. Rather than shouting to his friends for the comfort of hearing a voice, even his own, he listened.

Other horses trampled and crashed nearby. The echoes had a strangely constricted sound. Fal sensed that however he had come there, he sat in some great forest. It did not feel like any little coppice or stand of timber. It was too completely dark, the trees near him too mighty.

“Fal!” Miach cried. “Are you with us, lad?”

“I am. Do you wish your hand held?”

Miach made a wry noise which blended exasperation with relief. “That’ll be you and no other, indeed. Come here. Join us, if you are not too proud.”

Fal walked his horse between the massive trees. “Suppose we name ourselves. Fal and Miach are here.”

“Art is before you.”

“And Amergin.”

“Cahal over here.”

“Ebenar of Cetcha beside him.”

“Lurgan is here.”

“Tadg, this leaves you,” Fal said.

“I’m here, Fal.”

“Ha. Shy, were you?”

“It was in my mind that fetches or demons had maybe borrowed your voices. But the Redfist is right. No fetch could imitate the edge that’s upon your tongue. Now, where are we?”

“In difficulties, I would say.”

Miach’s dry comment was the aptest response he could make to such an unanswerable question. As he spoke, the darkness lightened in an odd way, like dye diluted with clear water. Sourceless and shadowless, pale illumination seemed to distil from the air — or else the band’s surroundings became visible to them without light.

“Magic,” whispered Cahal the Burly.

Trees of no earthly kind surrounded them. Spiral flutings characterised the trunks, and the branches wove together above their heads, making an impenetrable dome. Smaller trees, or perhaps one multiple growth, filled the gaps, while thorn and creeper wove through the chinks remaining, to bind it all in one tough, resistant mass. A wall of great stones could not have imprisoned them better.

“Hahahaha! Welcome, reckless ones!”

The monstrous bellow had a club’s force. Horses reared, screaming. A couple tried to bolt. After one glimpse of the thing that had lumbered into view, Fal was glad to distract himself by curbing his mount. That done, sorrowfully, he had to look again.

She was the hugest and most disgusting hag he’d ever seen.

The tattered, stinking cowhide she wore covered only some of her noisomeness. Through all the dirt she carried, Fal could just discern that her hide was scabbed, scaled, fissured, horny, and wattled. Despite her bulk, it hung loosely upon her, swinging in folds when she moved. Her legs were mismatched. Teeth like tether stakes pushed a flabby upper lip far back from her gums. She had one live, yellow, and flaming eye; and another like a dead oyster in its shell. She smelled worse than she looked.

“Welcome!” she thundered again.

The dogs crept whining to the far end of the glade.

“Now you are here, and I have you,” she went on, softening her voice to a mere bawl. “Be sure you will not go from this place until one of you has done as I wish. If none obliges me, I will slay you all.”

Cahal and Ebenar rode at her, shouting in anger. Cahal drove his spear at her neck. Ebenar dealt an expert sword-cut from horseback, no easy matter for one who had never heard of stirrups. His blade cut a wedge of meat from her back. Not quite severed, it hung flapping, and she ignored it. One-handed, she caught Cahal’s plunging spear, to rend it from his grip and him from the saddle.

Her other hand clenched. She swung her fist at Cahal’s breast-bone.  His chest caved in. His heart spasmed like a flapping bird, and grew still.

The she-monster turned, that slab of muscle dangling from her back. She lifted Cahal’s body — and he was appropriately called “the burly” — and threw him at Ebenar. The latter was knocked from his horse. In a lurching rush she reached him, seized him and broke him across her knee.

“Stand!” she howled. “Stand, the rest of you, or be killed like the weak things you are! See what I think of your weapons, by what I do!”

Contemptuously, she turned her back. Her wound gaped like a mouth. The wedge of meat hanging loose moved, flexing and hunching itself back into place with sounds like those of some huge, mannerless tongue.

It healed as they stared. There was not even much gore. What she had bled covered her back in thick glossy layers like pitch.

She turned without haste to confront them. “Will another of you attempt it?”

“No,” Fal said. “What will you?”

He felt none of the self-possession or heartless pragmatism those words conveyed to his comrades. Four short words were all he could force past the horror clogging his throat. Yet someone had to speak.

“I will have a lover,” she told him. “I will have one of you to swive me here in the glade. Well and completely must it be done. Do not hang back, as you are men!” She guffawed and spread her arms. “To be bashful is to die.”

Fal’s skin moved in cold ripples above his flesh. Behind him, Miach and the other youths looked at each other.

“Let us suppose that one tries and fails,” Fal said.

“I shall rend him! I shall scatter his limbs from tree to tree and call upon the next worthless worm of you!”

“Then I’ll be first.”

“Fal! No!”

“Yes!” the boy answered violently. “Yes! Yes! Yes! I devised this raid. I led you here. Now Cahal and Ebenar lie dead.” He snapped his jaw shut, for it had begun to vibrate. Miach, who had uttered the protest and sat closest to Fal, distinctly heard him grind his teeth as he sought control. “I will be first,” he said again, after a time. “But you must make us private, hag. I’ll not lie with you on the ground in view of all.”

“Ah, the handsome, shy boy,” she chuckled. “I’ll do that much, if you shame so easily. Come!”

“It’s impatient you are,” he said, dismounting, “but I will not make you wait long. Only as long as it takes me to vomit.”

He did precisely that, bending and spewing for nasty moments. Then he walked past the broken corpses of Cahal and Ebenar, to the grinning she-creature at the glade’s end. The tangled brush opened before him, a gap with moss thick as a bed beyond it.

The brush wove together as the pair vanished from sight.

Lurgan blew a shaken outward breath. “Macha! If, if Fal can achieve a stand, confronted by that, he’s the bravest youth in Erin!”

“We had better draw lots, in case he cannot,” Miach said.

Voiding his stomach had done Fal a certain amount of good. His frozen disgust was melting. Although he loathed the creature no less, a heat of anger and hatred began to seethe in him now, boiling away the paralysis. From violent feeling he drew strength.

The nameless being threw off her cowhide and lay upon it. Reaching under her hams, she drew her nether lips wide apart in the posture of a bawdy sheela-na-gig carving. Her open womb smelled more like an open grave.

Fal’s lips skinned back from his clamped teeth. Swiftly he threw off his clothes, while his courage remained. He’d ceased thinking some time before.

She was as hideous to touch as to see. Fal gripped handfuls of flesh in a wild blind darkness, making rage do the work of lust, turning revulsion inside out, making fear a goad to his body instead of a shackle, stopping thought and knowledge. Clawing his toes into the moss, he brought each shuddering thrust from the soles of his feet. It was more like mortal combat in the bitterest extreme of hatred than any kind of desire. It went on forever; he dared not stop, dared not pause, wanted to rend, to savage; and the longer it lasted the less it could be endured.

It ended at last, with a sensation like being racked apart. He arched backward and fell away from the creature. Landing on his back with wild spasms running through the deep muscles by his spine, he shuddered from neck to hips, and his legs flew about like jerking flails. Too quickly he grew still, locking those tremors unreleased into his muscles. He would have done better to tremble and thrash until his body found its own peace — but in the presence of his enemy, he would not.

Once his breathing grew steady, he opened his eyes.

The sourceless light was different, somehow. Perhaps it had grown brighter, but the quality of the change was that it seemed more healthy, more right. Fal turned his head.

The verminous cowhide had become a soft, luxurious fur pelt. Seated upon it was a girl, chin resting on her knees, arms clasped about her legs, watching him.

No. She could not be a girl. Too slender and long-limbed for humanity, she had blankly glowing eyes, blue-white from lid to lid with no pupil or iris that he could discern; blind-seeming eyes. But she saw him more clearly than he did her.

Her skin had the whiteness of royal salt, and it too was over-smooth and fine for the earthy crudities of human existence.

“Look as much as you will,” she said in a voice like wind-chimes. “What you see is your own work. I was a prisoner in the shape of the hag until a mortal man should join with me. Now I am free, Fal mac Umai.”

Ordinarily quick-witted, Fal felt sluggish then. “You were the hag?”

“I was the hag. You have done me the best of turns.”

“Pleasant!” Fal said with sudden, aware viciousness. “You have done me the worst!”

He reached for her delicate throat. She made no attempt to stop him. As his hands found a grip, numb helplessness flowed up his arms to the shoulders, robbing him of strength so that his hands fell slackly by his sides. He could neither lift them nor do more than twitch his fingers.

“I have my full powers, natural to myself, now that I have my own shape. I need not attack you with trees or strike you with my arm. You cannot harm me, Fal. Curb your resentment. What harm have I done you?”

“What harm? You murdered two friends of mine! You take that lightly!”

“You were prepared to do murder tonight for lighter reasons than mine. What if the owners of your lifted cattle had found you before I did? Your friends might well have suffered no less. I do not see that you have cause to hate me.

“Nor am I other than well-disposed to you. Fal, if you consider I have done you wrong, name an honour-price or compensation and I will pay it if I can.”

“I’ll accept nothing less than your life.”

The being shook her head. “You are vengeful and arrogant, and that will bring you more grief than I have done. Put on your clothes and go home with nothing, then. Except your cattle. They have not strayed far.”

“Wait,” Fal said. Slowly, he stretched his recovering limbs and touched her shoulders.

The skin was cooler than mortal flesh, too smooth, too fine, and far too flawless. And she did not see that she had wronged him. Beautiful she might be now, but if anything she was less human than the hag had been.

“Since I’ve asked what you will not give, I’ll demand another thing,” he said. “Never let me look upon you again.”

“As you wish.”

The legends were wrong, Fal thought. Many were the tales of enchanted folk who regained their true shapes through the love of a mortal, but always in the tales the love had to be willingly given, or it effected nothing. Outside legend, it seemed the act was all that mattered, and not its meaning; that anything one wanted could be coerced.

Fal’s slow smile would have looked unpleasant on the face of a man a hundred years old.

Yes, faerie woman. Maybe I should have been more gracious after all. Maybe you did teach me a thing worth knowing.

There was nothing around him now but a few thin bushes on a frosty plain. The woman had vanished. Shivering, Fal clad himself. Then he strode to his horse.

“The cattle will not have roved far,” he said. “They were penned within thickets, as we were. Let’s ride. We have still to get them safely through the bogs.”

“By the Cross and the Wounds!” Amergin cried. “You mean to carry through your plan?”

“What has happened that we should not? As someone said to me, had Srem’s riders come up with us, Cahal and Ebenar might well have suffered no less. We were all prepared to kill or die tonight — or meet what was not canny. Else we should have stayed in the dun.” Fal gathered his strength and sprang to the saddle. “Come. We have cattle to find.”

“What of Cahal and Ebenar?” Art demanded in anger. “Will you leave them where they lie?”

“I was supposing you’d placed them on their horses,” Fal answered, unmoved. “And why didn’t you? Had you something better to do while I was giving joy to that tender lady?”

“Easy, Fal,” Miach cautioned. “It’s in my mind that you are ripe for a quarrel, and that is a thing we can forgo. I too say we should gather the beasts. It may be better than brooding on what has passed. I take oath I would rather do some hard work.”

One by one, the youths murmured agreement.

None drove himself harder than Fal in finishing what they had begun. In the sunrise, when he could see the face of his foster-brother’s son, Miach grew more concerned than ever. The boy had a dark look upon him.

“Fal, visit your mother,” Miach advised him.

His mother was Umai, the poetess and seeress of her people, famed for her ability to see the future, and her prophetic sayings. But it was her power to see into the human heart and share pain that Miach was thinking of. That, and her particular kinship of soul with her son.

He would need it.

After looking into Fal’s eyes, Miach feared this mischief would outlast the night that had seen it committed.