Free Delerium's Mistress: Tales of the Flat Earth Book 4 by Tanith Lee Page B

passed.
     
    Once, then, there was a young aristocrat, most
handsome but most poor, who lived with his widowed mother and his virgin
sisters beside a fey black forest. And here he went hunting, scorning
superstition, taking with him the only servant left to the house. And here too,
one day, he was lost by this servant, who spent many hours in trying to refind
him. But he was not found. No, not till he returned himself at sunset, out of
the depths of a wood which was famed for the egress of things irregular.
    The young hunter’s name
had been Oloru. Had been, for he claimed it no more. Another claimed it.
Another became it, growing over and through it like a vine.
    It was this way.
    He was not cruel, the
first Oloru, to the beasts of the forest. He hunted only for food, and that
since his family had always one extra at their table, Lady Hunger, who sat
there with them and gnawed her own knuckles, glaring at their plates the while
from under her famished eyebrows.
    Nevertheless, in the way
of hunting, Oloru brought down the youthful deer with spears, laid traps for
the cinnamon hares, overfeathered the wings of wild ducks with arrows.
    The forest was
bewitched. Who did not agree? Only Oloru paid no heed to the rumors. And he was
there so often, and his dwelling so close. How could the composite entity of
the forest fail to learn his name and his person by rote?
    So one morning the first
Oloru rose early and went with his servant into the forest after game. The
young man walked singing, for he saw no wrong in what he did, nor thought any
other would see wrong in it. Turning then under an arch of trees, Oloru felt an
unexpected chill, as if the dew had changed to snow. Looking around to comment
on this phenomenon to his servant, he found the servant gone. And then the
whole of the forest seemed to run together in a wall. Oloru was in a little
space, no bigger than he could pace around in three circling steps. The rest
was a black towering—trees—or something older, more intense, of which the
growths of the forest had been only a residue, till some arcane magic called it
forth again.
    Oloru was afraid, but,
unlike the later model of himself, no blissful coward; ready to fight. He
shouted at the forest, for justice. Justice came.
    It began with a raging
thirst that fastened on him abruptly, without warning. And it continued with a
stream of water plashing at his feet. He had never drunk the waters of the
forest, never needed to. But this water he must have, and though some instinct,
against his own skepticism, called to him to beware, he did not heed, nor could
not. He lay on the ground and lapped the stream. There was no pang, not even a
discomfort. None of the fruitless battle he had thought to offer. He lay down
to drink a man. He rose up a yellow jackal, which feinted and danced with its
shadow, barked and howled at nothing at all, and ran away into the wood. All
human rites of intellect or body were null, gone between one sip of water and
the next. To Oloru, no longer Oloru, there was no punishment. He dawdled and
bounded deep into the trees, he sought his own current kind, who accepted and
were fond of him. He lived as a good jackal should, until in the fullness of
years he died one. And then his soul recovered itself with some startlement.
    Yet, unpunished, he
hunted no more. And unpunished was he punished, Oloru, who had been born a
human man.
    Now. In those days, or
in these, when the smallest pebble was or is dug up from the soil, it leaves an
impression behind itself, the size and shape of itself, though empty. And in
those days, so too with all things of being. There had been a young man in the
forest, but the forest had changed him to a yellow jackal. That digging up from
the soil of existence left an impression behind it surely enough, a kind of
cast or mold, into which some other, if he were sufficiently vital, could pour
his fluid form and set, flesh-hard, to an
exact replicate of Oloru the mortal and the no