Dear Reader,
My first chapter of my first short story is here! Did I hype this one enough?
I had hoped my retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains would result in getting way ahead on this short story. Alas, writing fiction is a new challenge and perhaps unsurprisingly, I am just not that efficient yet.
Below, you will find the first chapter of “The Fall and Rise of Orion the Hunter”. I have fleshed out the next chapter, and mapped out the following two. I hope each subsequent chapter will flow more easily. One way or another, I do not intend to release them in immediate sequence. But ideally, once a month or so, I’ll surprise you with a new chapter.
-Charles
The hunter gathered himself quickly in spite of the blood and the pain. He looked up and saw the shadow sitting stone-still on the ledge...
One
The hunter had been padding along the stony heights for five nights now. No quarry had shown itself by sign or by spoor.
Each of the hunter’s footfalls rested so lightly and so briefly that not even the stones noticed his passing except when he stopped to listen to the night. Insects scraped droning rhythms upon their carapaces. The occasional breeze hissed among the scattered, stunted, evergreen shrubs. But the sounds of his passage did not blend in with the sounds of nature. There was no need. He made so little sound.
The night’s warmth weighed on him, unseasonably warm and wet for the time of year. It felt wrong. It was certainly a bad omen for his hunting season. The sky overhead was clear, the stars in full force. An early winter night should have beckoned all the day’s warmth upward to mingle with the heat of the stars’ celestial furnaces. And yet, the heat refused to rise, instead blanketing the highlands with mildness like malaise. It was mid-January, properly winter by the calendar. By feel, it could have been mistaken for late-September. Every winter, the hunter counted on the North Wind to drive the wild beasts south to this hunting ground in the forested highlands of Rhodope. This stifling warmth whispered of plans changed without his consultation.
. . .
Before the human tribes ever thought to challenge the gods for command of Destiny, he’d made an agreement with the Mother of Beasts. He’d not hunt her children within reach of the claim she staked in Hyperborea. Passing north beyond the waters of the Danube would mean his death.
The hunter still honored his old agreement with Gaea and in fact, it had been a human generation or longer since he’d been down the north slope of Haemus Mons to the plain of the Danube to look upon the fence of his world. The humans of the plains were bellicose. The Odrysian Masters saw one such as him, who walked freely beyond their control, as a threat to their precarious order. He set a bad example for their subject peoples. The young Masters had inherited all of the cruelty and none of the dignity of their grandfathers, with whom the hunter had once ridden. He’d learned to stay clear of their domain, full of soldiers seeking conscripts or state-sponsored mercenaries seeking slaves.
The hunter had used up the best light of the waning moon in his past week’s fruitless scouring of the peak. It wouldn’t rise tonight until well past midnight. Tomorrow, when he entered the shaded boughs of the forested valleys, he’d switch to traveling in the day. Tonight though, he reveled in the fullness of the sky. His mind danced between testing the fleetness of his feet, basking in the vastness of the cosmos, and worrying at how bad a hunting omen the warm weather was.
In the rocks ahead of the hunter, a tall, mounded shape suddenly claimed his full attention. It was as still as any other stone. Yet, the faint starlight rippled upon its surface like a clear, shallow stream. He could not tell its shape. Every time he tried to focus upon its edges, they seemed to lose their sharpness though the mound of shifting darkness remained still and made no sound.
The shadow leapt straight at him, covering twenty feet in a single, blurring bound. No sound had signaled the incoming attack. With a grunt, almost like a snarl, the hunter reached out and grasped two hands full of fur-covered flesh, just before the creature could crash into him. Pivoting on the ball of his foot, turning, coiling the mass of his assailant around his own center, he released his grip just before he’d lose his balance and whip-like, uncoiled, hurtling the creature into the darkness beyond.
The hunter lost sight of the dark shadow before it landed and still no sounds disturbed the starlit night. He didn’t go seeking his attacker. It wouldn’t be found in the darkness if it didn’t want to be.
The hunter let his instincts take over as he continued downslope, body held loosely alert to another surprise attack. But his mind continued to sweat the ill-omened heat. His skin glittered dimly, a sheen of sweat that didn’t belong in a mid-January night.
. . .
There was no path down this rocky slope, but the hunter moved as surely as if he walked the forest path leading out from his own door. His feet, and where needed, his hands, picked their way down through the scattered boulders while his head continually turned and tilted. The edges of his eyes gave meaning to the shapes in the darkness. The changing angles of his ears mapped the locations of every little noise with a clarity that would be an owl’s envy.
Three more times the dark shape leapt at him without warning. Each time the creature’s approach became harder to detect, its mass getting closer to his before he could deflect it. The frontal engagement was a courtesy no longer extended in this persistent duel.
The fifth assault came from below. The hunter was walking along a ledge, a passage along a short cliff face so narrow that he was forced to turn his torso to face the wall and pay delicate attention to steps and handholds, painfully aware of keeping his hips in close. His shadowy assailant had been waiting on an outcrop below. It leapt once toward the widening of the path in front of him, redirected instantaneously, and streaked arrow-like toward him.
With his back turned, the hunter had seen the creature too late and his position was defensively untenable. He moved instinctively, some primal part of him believing that if he was going off the ledge one way or another, he’d at least be the one in charge of where and how. He leapt into the dark void, aiming for the ledge from which the pouncing shadow had originated. But as he flew through the air, teeth raked his left bicep, not tearing, simply grasping, causing him to twist out of control as he fell.
He landed on target, but rolled with limbs splayed, smashing against the wall. He sprawled against the cliff face, smearing skin against the rock, sacrificing flesh to slow his momentum and save a bone shattering tumble into the gaping void below.
The hunter gathered himself quickly in spite of the blood and the pain. He looked up and saw the shadow sitting on the ledge, right where he, himself, had stood moments before. He clapped his hands in front him and bowed, a short, stiff, resigned duck of the head and shoulder in the direction of the stone-still bulk of the shadow.
“You’re getting more reckless as your body slows down, old friend.” the hunter taunted, failing to mask his own frustration.
The shadow emitted three sharp barks, like a cruel, skeptical laugh.
As if to punctuate the commentary, the waning crescent peeked over the ridges behind him, illuminating the shadowy figure for the first time since their deadly game began.
. . .
The dog crouched on all fours, legs bent, ready to spring into action. The hunter knew from long experience that she could hold that crouch for hours if the stalk demanded it. She had a long, serpentine torso and a wide, flat triangular head with ears tilted to the sides, further accentuating the wide head. Her legs seemed short relative to her torso, though their true length couldn’t be told. The coat now seemed molten in the moonlight, a gray swirl like a living shadow capturing and distorting every ray of light, shifting the shadows and obscuring the dog’s edges. The hunter looked right at her, and even his eyes struggled to tell where the dog ended and the rock behind her began.
“You knew the moon was coming.” The hunter said, reconsidering the motivation behind her strategy.
She didn’t bark again, but she did relax her crouch and made her way lazily, almost carelessly, to the path above him to await his ascent.
When the hunter reached her, he sat down cross legged in the moonlight next to where she lay. He reached out his hand, gently, palm up in front of her. She reached her neck out, grasping the hand between her jaws and bit down, slowly, powerfully, but not painfully, then let go and withdrew her neck.
“You win this round, Jet.” He bowed again from his seated position, head coming low towards the ground, but eyes never breaking away from hers. “Where is Rex?
The hunter and the sinuous dog strolled easily among the tall, leafless trees. Her coat was no longer the gray of the molten moonlight. Now, she blended just as seamlessly with the dappled black and brown and and evergreen of the forest floor, despite the revealing light of the morning sun. They had not made camp after their mock-battle, choosing instead to make their steady way eastward out of the stony heights of Golyam Perelik.
The tension and focus forced upon the hunter by his mock-battle with Jet had broken the dam on his indecision. He would go north for the first time in a long time. He’d grown dependent upon the North Wind to drive his prey to him, and the time had come for him to seek farther afield. He had feared the Rhaposdes would have no call to sing his praises at this summer’s gathering in the southern islands. His hunt may still be in question, but in its stead, he’d give them a story of an extended march like none other.
In order to move north quickly, the hunter would need to count less upon living off the land than normal. Smolyan Crossroads was not far and its leaders had always resisted the hegemonic impulses of the Odrysian Masters. No town was truly safe for his kind. His height was too great. His manner was too strange. But Smolyan had been built in the mountains to escape the rigid castes of the plains. Their will to personal freedom made it as safe a human place as he was likely to find. He’d go there to resupply, then shadow the north road before skirting northwest along the foothills of Rila. It would be a long, dangerous road with increasingly expansionist Macedon on his western flank, whispers of war between the Celts and the Tilataei in the Ebros headwaters to the northwest, and the corvee kingdoms of the Odrysian Masters to the north and east. He’d have to thread the needle, and pick his battles, but before the second week of February, he ought to be in the northernmost mountains of his range and back on the hunt.