The archers were caught with their bows unstrung, but the troopers' swords were already bared and bloody. The tery didn't care. He wanted their blood on his club. The first of the group lifted his blade as the tery closed, but the creature batted it aside and swung his club for the trooper's head. The man ducked but not quickly enough. The club sank into his left cheek. Blood jetted from his nose, and the tery had one less opponent facing him.
Movement to his right. He swung again in a backhanded arc with most of his body behind it. The club connected with the shoulder of an archer, who went down screaming, then a two-handed blow into the throat of another swordsman.
For a moment, he had the advantage as they milled about and tripped over each other. The idea briefly danced in his head that he would kill them all and completely avenge his parents. But there were too many of them, and all were seasoned warriors. Before he could inflict any more real damage, the club was sliced from his hands and a sword point bared three of his ribs.
Wounded, weaponless, the tery ran. And he would have escaped easily had not the captain thought to order his men to their mounts.
"Don't run him through!" he heard the captain yell. "Just keep slicing at him!"
It must have been great sport. The troopers were all excellent riders. They would cut him off, then surround him and slice away. When each had added fresh blood to his sword, they would let him escape the circle and run a short distance, only to cut him off and start slicing again. He was an exhausted bloody ruin by the time he finally collapsed in a field of tall grass.
"Shall we burn him and the others?" he heard a trooper say.
"It will take too long," the captain panted as he stared down from his mount.
"But Mekk's decree is to burn —"
"We don't have time. Besides, if he's not dead now, the carrion eaters will finish him off. They do as good a job as fire, but they're slower."
Laughing, they left him for the scavengers.
The tery remembered that captain's face. #
He found the clearing much as he had left it — except for the scavenger birds. He chased them away from the decomposing, partially devoured things that had been his parents.
Mother…Father…
His throat thickened and tightened as he stumbled through the clearing. Until now h0e had never realized how much he loved them, how much they meant to him, how much he cherished them. The thousand tiny kindnesses lost among the clutter of the daily routines, the caring, the worries for him — he had never appreciated these things, never realized how much they meant to him until it was clear that there would be no more of them. Ever.
Did they know? Did they know how much he loved them? Did they die unaware of what wonderful parents they had been?
At the risk of reopening some of his deeper wounds, he went about the grisly task of placing the cadavers inside the cave. The stench, combined with the knowledge that these rotting horrors were all that was left of the two beings who had meant everything to him, made him retch a number of times before the task was completed.
As he rested to regain his strength, he thought of his parents, picturing them alive in his mind — he could keep them alive there, at least — and recalling their pasts which he knew by heart from the countless times his mother had sat him on her knee as a child and told him whence he came.
His father had been a wild, bearish creature, born of equally wild parents and raised in the forests where he had spent all his life. Yet he was a gentle sort, preferring berries to meat, and sleeping in the sun to hunting.
His mother was different in both appearance — no two teries were alike unless directly related — and social history. Graceful in a feline way, she had been captured as an infant and brought up in the keep when Kitru's father was lord here. That was in the time before Mekk issued his proclamation calling for extermination of everything that did not bear True Shape. Having a tery or two around the court to speak and recite was considered fashionable then.
His mother was one of those teries. She would delight visitors with her singing, her recounting of history, and the reciting of the many poems she had memorized. But in time, despite the luxuries around her, she tired of the empty existence of a pet and escaped to the forests in her early adulthood.
There she met her mate, who could speak not at all. For although he had the intelligence, he had gone too long without ever speaking. He did manage to communicate in other ways, though, and soon a child was born to them.
The little tery's mother taught him to speak and taught him of his origin — how the Great Sickness had caused changes in many of the world's living things. His ability to think was one of those changes. These were things she had learned during her stay at the keep, and the cub absorbed everything she could pass on to him. He was bright, curious, and eager, and readily learned to speak, although his voice had a gruff, discordant tone.
He said nothing now as he climbed the hillside above the cave and pried loose stone after stone until a minor landslide covered the mouth of his former home. When the rumble of the slide had echoed off into the trees and the dust had settled, he sat alone on the cliff and surveyed the clearing that had been home for as long as he could remember.
So heavy…his chest felt so heavy…like a great weight pressing down on him…
He didn’t understand the turbulent emotions that steamed and roiled within his chest, making it hard to draw a deep breath without it catching halfway down. His placid life had not prepared him for this.
He had been wronged — his parents had been wronged. Injustice. The concept had never occurred to him, and he had had no experience with it during his life. He had no injustices to draw on. For there was no justice or injustice in the forest, only the incessant struggle to go on living, taking what was needed and leaving what was not. Things tended to balance out that way. Carelessness was redeemed in pain and mishap, vigilance rewarded with safety and a full belly.
More stealthy images crept unbidden from the past as he sat there. He had managed to hold them at bay while going about the task of interring his parents' remains, but now that that was done and he was gazing at the cold, dead, empty piece of earth that had once held warmth and security for him, he began to remember hunting and swimming lessons from his hulking father, and sitting curled up at his mother's side at the mouth of the cave in the cool of the evening.
His chest began to heave as a low, broken moan of unplumbed sorrow and anguish escaped him. He began to scramble blindly down the cliffside, nearly losing his footing twice in his haste to reach the clearing.
Once there, he ran from one end to the other, sobbing and whimpering, frantically casting about for something to break, something to hurt, something to destroy. As he approached the garden area, he found one of the crude hoes his father had used for tilling. He grabbed it and scythed his way through the stalks of maize and other vegetables growing there. When that was in ruins, he raced back to the base of the cliff and picked up any stones that would fit into his hands and hurled them with rage-fueled ferocity at the rubble-choked mouth of the cave. Some caromed crazily off the pile, others cracked and shattered with the tremendous force of impact. Whining and grunting, he threw one after another until a number of his wounds reopened and his strength faded. Then he slumped to his knees, pressed his forehead against the ground, and released the sobs that echoed up from the very core of his being.
After a while, he was quiet. After a while, he could think again.
Another new concept for which he had only a name grew in his mind: revenge. Had his parents been killed for food by one of the large feline predators that roamed the forests, he would never have thought of retribution. That was the way things worked. That was existence in the wild. His parents would be dead — just as dead as they were now — but the balance would not have been disturbed.