It's been about 6 months since I've posted here. I've made some revisions to my novel and I'd like some fresh eyes on it. Here's chapter one. I'd rate it about PG13. There's a little blood and guts
I'll post chapter 2 soon. Please critique as harshly as you like. Thanks!
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A wiry, brown deer rooted his snout into the loamy forest soil, up-ending a curled fern. The young buck snatched the morsel in his teeth, barely chewing enough to swallow it before continuing his agitated search for the tender fronds. He stepped lightly to the edge of a small pool left over from the morning’s rain. Stopping abruptly, he threw his nose skyward, cottony tail twitching nervously.
That scent again, he thought... or, he would have thought it if he had a mind for the human tongue.
It reeked of danger. He could see nothing. He saw no movement. Heard no sound but the rustling of leaves in the wind.
He snorted, stomping a fore-hoof in a challenging gesture that belied the pounding in his heart. Still, nothing betrayed its presence.
The scent left again, evaporating with the fickle breeze. Perked ears twisted, straining to hear though the murmur of the living forest.
Nothing.
He calmed himself, bending to dip his muzzle for a drink, and then scampered to the base of a massive oak. Nuzzling out a treasure-trove of the delicate ferns at its base, he rubbed his sprouting horns, mere bony nubs, against the bark of the tree to relieve the itch of new velvet.
Something is out here. But where?
He could not find it, nor did he want to find it. Or, worse, to be found by it. It stank with the virulent musk of a predator, its foul breath floating to his nose at the whim of the shifting winds.
He knew that he should have gone down into the valley, but hunger prevailed. Compelled by the ever-empty knot in his belly, the deer wandered out of the shade of the great oak to munch on the coarser, but more plentiful shoots in the clearing.
* * *
Neilin lay against the lichen-clothed tree trunk, perched in the fat oak like some gargantuan flightless bird, with his head bowed. He waited with closed eyes. Below him, a slender deer scratched its stubby tines on the very tree in which he sat.
By outward appearances, the boy might have been asleep, or even dead, but for the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest beneath tattered rag clothes. Tiny beads of sweat blossomed on his forehead, embellishments of the brutal summer that clung over the Kinean Empire like a great humid blanket. In his left hand, he gripped a makeshift bow and arrow. Neilin followed every skittish movement of his cervine prey below with his eyes resolutely closed.
As the young stag devoured its last meal, every vestigial impulse of its rudimentary brain flowed into Neilin's mind as easily as the summer breeze blew through the leaves. He had experienced in his own thoughts the sharp jolt of alarm ringing in the deer's mind.
Must have smelled me again, he thought.
Neilin had learned a vital lesson stalwartly taught to him by his new sylvan lifestyle.
Patience, boy. He had frozen, stone still, even holding his breath unless the vaguest sound betray him to the animal's keen ears.
The hot warning in the deer's mind had grudgingly ebbed, returning to thoughts of hunger. Only then had Neilin allowed himself to relax again.
He sensed the deer creep towards the clearing over which he surveyed, a bare expanse of grass inside an ancient ring of massive standing stones. The deer raised its nose toward every twist of the wind, sniffing for the elusive threat. Neilin finally opened his eyes to see what he had already been following.
Scrawny thing, he lamented.
But it'll do.
The stone circle, a discovery from one of Neilin's many childhood quests for solitude, had always tugged at the boy's imagination. He thought it to be the remains of an old Druidic temple, the site of ancient bloody sacrifices to the Gods. Or perhaps, the stones marked a burial mound for some long-extinct civilization. Somehow, in his mind, old death seemed to pervade the circle of stones.
Something will definitely die here today, he thought as he watched the deer tuck in behind a spiny shrub, and stop. Neilin ached for the thing to move; his patience waning as hunger clawed at his empty gut.
Just a little bloody further, he thought, as though his desire could somehow coerce the deer ahead by sheer will. Eventually, and with agonizing deliberation, the animal finally deigned to step clear of troublesome vegetation.
Excellent. That's a clean shot.
The scant breeze tickled the leaves around him, blowing mildly in his face.
Cover noise. And, no scent. Perfect.
The creaking of the bowstring was lost in the rustling of the leaves as he drew back a crudely fletched arrow. Bracing himself, Neilin dispatched the missile towards its new home.
The arrow struck the animal's flank, just behind the shoulder blade. The deer convulsed on impact, sprawling onto the ground in shock and pain. Neilin reflexively winced as his thoughts were drowned by a flood of fear and agony flowing from the wounded beast.
The deer's mundane mind howled with the basest of animal instincts as it scrambled to its spindly legs and sprinted away, melting into the scrub trees at the clearing's perimeter. Neilin dropped from his perch and walked calmly, as though on a leisurely stroll, in the direction of his quarry.
Great splashes of red, littered with tawny fur, led him into the trees. He could have followed the trail with his eyes closed. The mental blaze of mortal terror was a beacon in his thoughts, lighting the path to where a pitiful animal lay dying.
Terror yielded to nothingness. Neilin looked over the hill ahead, following the last of the scant rivulets of blood at his feet.
The lifeless lump of bloodstained fur lay just beyond the ridge, a broken arrow protruding from its side.
"Thank the Gods," he exclaimed.
Tonight, I eat.
* * *
"Fine lot, this!" he complained to the carcass from which he dug out bits of viscera. "You're in a sad state," he muttered, "when being elbow-deep in a dead body counts as a good day."
Neilin harbored a remote sense of irony at disemboweling the poor creature in the shadow of the great stone ring. The ancient Druidic custom had once professed that portents of the future could be gleaned amongst the insides of ritually sacrificed animals. He wondered how much of his own future would be occupied with his hands inside a dead creature.
I can't do this forever.
The stones pointed to the hot, blue sky like a dozen monolithic fingers stabbing up among the primeval oaks. Neilin smiled at the image his imagination had concocted, that of Brother Marrick, the elderly Priest from the Eastern Borough, tossing freshly liberated animal guts into their branches and writing mystic runes upon the tall stones in their blood.
That poor old bastard has enough trouble just walking, let alone killing anything. His jape came laced with regret, as the last time he had spoken with the old man, Neilin had summarily declined his generous offer to stay at the Temple.
At least I'd have had a roof over me head. He looked ruefully at the deer, whose foggy black eyes stared stupidly into eternity.
And food I don't have to kill. He gouged the blade into the carcass, shaking his head in retrospect of his own arrogance.
Brilliant, Neilin. Bloody brilliant.
Brother Marrick was the sort who could inspire compunction without the requisite impropriety, simply by being kind. Neilin figured that such guilt was more an artifact of his own latent shame than a mystical ambiance of self-reproach exuded by men of the cloth. Either way, Neilin always thought that disagreeing with a priest was inherently wrong.
But, ever since he had confided in the Elder Priest about his "problem," dissention with the old man had become a regularity. Every meeting had run thick with discomfort on Neilin’s part, as Brother Marrick seemed impelled to assimilate him into the Order. To Neilin, a boy of sixteen, the "contemplative life" resembled a sentence rather than a solace.
Neilin waived the flies away from his face with a blood soaked hand while he hewed the rest of the good meat from the bony carcass, skewering the bits on the points of a tree branch. T
he rest will have to go down in the hole. Away from camp. He knew the forest was home to others with a taste for meat, besides him and the flies.
He slung the remains over his shoulders and carried it to the nearby ravine, heaving it down the steep slope.
“Bloody hell,” he panted, reeling from his exertions in the afternoon swelter. Neilin stumbled across the clearing to the shallow stream and forthwith into its trickling waters. The abrupt chill both stung and soothed his overheated skin. He lounged upon the mossy stones as though they were stiff cushions of green velvet and let the flow strip away the veneer of gossamer and grime. Looking around furtively, he peeled the bloodstained clothes from his body, laughing at his own timidity.
You're the only person around for miles, idiot.
At one time, he had begged to be so alone.
* * *
Eight years before, Neilin had awoken one sharp autumn morning to a cacophony of voices in his head. Naturally, he had assumed that he had gone mad. Or, that he had been possessed by demons. And, naturally, he had told no one. Had his parents even suspected something was amiss with their only child, they would have hurled him into an asylum before breakfast.
After dear ol’ Dad had a go at trying to beat the voices out of me, he thought cynically.
Just for good measure.
Neilin held his secret for weeks, as he had nobody among his peers whom he would have called a friend. Even before his current exile, he had always occupied a place at the periphery among the borough children. Neilin had sought solace in the one place that was supposed to be the authority on all things anagogical. He had gone to the Eastern Temple, at the center of the slum-riddled Eastern Borough.
He had always thought of "demons" in allegorical terms. That was, of course, before he thought his skull had become a buzzing hive of them. Within the walls of the wooden rotunda of the Druids, Neilin had discovered that the voices quieted, prompting him to seek frequent solace inside the sacred edifice.
Brother Marrick had taken notice and had inquired into the nature of his regular attendance. In a moment of maddened desperation, Neilin had divulged his seemingly incredulous story. To his surprise, his tale had neither shocked nor scandalized the elder priest, who accepted the verity of his account on its face.
Brother Marrick had recommended that the boy join the coterie of Druids and find peace for his demons in the service of the Gods. In saner times, Neilin would have laughed in the old man’s face. However, having believed himself anything but sane, he had entertained the offer. Or, at least, he had not rejected it outright; if nothing else, the voices had been calmer there.
Out in the wilds, his voices were silent. No war of hate-filled voices tormented him so many miles from the city-state of Kinea.
When the coursing water had quenched his overheated body, he reapplied the soaked rags that had once been whole clothing and walked back to the tall tree at the edge of the stones.
Inside a scorched circle of earth, Neilin piled a stack of wood over a knot of thready tinder. He raked the back of a small skinning knife on a deeply-scratched rock and, after several tries, managed to cast a few sparks into the fire pit. He quickly inspired the embers into a smoky flame. The meat stick was thrust into the ground so that its payload would dangle into the stream of desiccating smoke.
“That’ll hold me for at least a week,”he announced as he tossed a few choicer cuts of venison right onto the radiant coals.
Neilin grudgingly thanked his father for passing on his hunting prowess, an artifact of the patriarch’s career in the Imperial Army. Even with Neilin's special talent for "hearing" prey, he would not have been able to survive this long month in the wilds had his father not taught him a few things.
That makes one thing that the bastard was good for, he thought, poking at the sizzling meat with a stick.
His mouth ached with anticipation at the smell of fatty smoke and searing meat. Neilin impatiently fished an ashy lump of venison from the fire with a pointed branch and gnawed bits off, trying to spare his lips from burning. Bland as it was, the singed meat was fine sustenance compared to the pittance of rabbit and squirrel on which he had previously subsisted. He had his newly-made bow to thank for the bounty of venison.
Neilin pined for a measure of salt.
Maybe a nice potato. And some sharp cheese. He sighed, looking expectantly up through the trees.
While I’m wishing for things, how about a gallon of brown ale?
Unfortunately, no divine gift of finer food came coursing from the blue skies. Neilin forced down the rest of the monotonous meat, chewing mechanically as he stirred the fire and threw several more branches onto the coals.
Once the rest of his harvest had shriveled to black lumps, he wrapped them inside a dried animal pelt and tucked the package into the nook of his tree. Neilin lay on the ground near the fire, admiring the rivers of hazy summer blue flowing between the branches. A full belly had lulled him into tranquility, despite his destitution.
I have food. No chores. Nobody screaming at me. He half-smiled.
Could be worse.
He wanted more than he had, but his home under the trees would suffice.
For now.
Neilin closed his eyes as fatigue slowly robbed him of consciousness.
At least it isn’t winter.
