Fairly Wicked Tales (15 page)

He forced his eyes open, but he only saw shapes and shades. His vision blurred to match his thoughts. Hare peeled his lips back away from his teeth. He decided to do what he had always done when he was afraid as a young kit.

He listened to his mother’s voice.

Son, lift yourself from the ground. Being tired is no excuse for allowing yourself to die.

Hare let his eyes slide closed again. He took one deep breath before returning to shallow breathing.

He muttered. “You are not there. I am alone.”

Her voice turned harsh. Even knowing her voice came to him in a hallucination, his fur prickled up afraid and he feared the wrath of his father for having angered her.

You are not a leveret any longer, son. You are the cony now. Buck up. You decided to defy the scales and to race the shells. Now live with that choice. Up with you, son. Get to the race. Live, son, live.

He groaned and tried to turn his nose into the road. Twisting made his wound separate and he screamed the way only rabbits and hares can.

“I can’t, mother. I’m not the buck my father was and he died at the claws of the scales and the wrath of the soulless shell.”

He heard a hiss, but did not recognize the sound. The road began to vibrate in small booms that built with each impact. He did recognize that sound. The hissing continued, but became the soft shush of his mother. It was not her harsh demand of silence from young, whining bunnies. But more the soothing sound she gave when fears needed her help in subsiding. His fur rested back on his sweaty body as he relaxed.

Look at me, son. Open your eyes and look at me a moment, please
.

Hare obeyed his mother’s voice. He lifted his head from the ground with the dust from the road pasted to his fur. He stared to one side across blurry grass and blazing morning sun. The heat had begun to break through the chill of morning dew glistening on the grass. Despite the heat and his sweaty exhaustion, Hare shivered at the sight of the sun he had not seen in years of captivity to the reptile kingdom.

He turned his head slowly to the other side of the road where the wash of sunlight painted over the top of the grass. His vision remained unclear, but he noticed the grass had been crushed down in places by feet larger than his own. He shivered again. Sunlight also lit tall poles and flags that snapped and wavered taut on their frames against the light breeze. He squinted, but could not make out the familiar crest of the lizard king or his testudine overlords.

The thundering in the ground grew with each impact until Hare now heard the sound in addition to feeling it in his broken body.

The breeze turned into Hare’s face, fluttering the lids of his reddened eyes. He wrinkled his nose at the odor it carried. The smell was not from the tortoise or any other reptile oppressor. He recognized the odor from the dungeons that had served as his shadowed home for years.

Hare turned his nose down toward his own fur. He smelled his sweat and the iron from his spilled blood, but the urine smell came from somewhere else on the breeze.

He lifted his nose. It was not reptile. It was distinctly mammal. He couldn’t place the creature. The scent lacked the markers of rabbits or hares. There seemed to be a mix of haired beasts contributing to the waste.

Hare mumbled. “I’m imagining it all in my crazed fear.”

His mother’s disembodied call insisted.
Look at me, son. I need you to see
.

Hare whined as he had done as a kit and he added tears to the mat of blood and sweat in his fur.

“I can not see what is not there, mother. You died before my father’s bones were crushed by the overlords. You were taken by claws, scales, and at the point of the sword. You are not here.”

He blinked away the tears and his vision cleared as he balanced on one good leg and shoulder.

Look and see, son. You need to look and see now
.

Hare turned his eyes back into the sun. He felt its warmth through his pain and exhaustion. He turned back toward the flags and his blood ran with ice.

The white, brown, and black fur stretched by twine over the wooden frames above the matted grass. Through the cold blaze of fear in his mind, Hare recognized the texture of rabbit fur on the hides, but the myriad aromas of urine gave him the impression of a dozen haired beasts. Some of them would have been his predators had the tyranny of the reptiles not usurped nature a generation earlier.

The reptiles collect the urine of their mammal prisoners and then they use it to tan their skins one murder at a time until no creature of hair remains
.

A short, shrill cry escaped Hare’s throat as he staggered to his feet and stumbled sideways in the road away from the displayed hides curing in the breeze.

“I know this, mother,” Hare bellowed, “You died long ago. This is not you. Did they do this to you too? Is that what you are telling me or are you just shocking me to my feet.”

Her voice gave no answer as the thunder in the Earth grew. He smelled the loose, alien flesh of the tortoise over the stolen stew of the urine on the skins above him.

Hare spoke the words he had heard from his father as the elder buck was being crushed. “Curse the shell.”

Hare found the will to run.

***

He left the road once he sped ahead on the tortoise’s pace behind him. The hollow grew thick with trees and undergrowth that had once been kept clear. The territory he entered had not been friendly to rabbits in the past, but Hare risked the detour to seek either shelter or aide in his escape.

He knew the dens lay abandoned once he spotted the collapsing entrances. Even the cobwebs that stretched and fluttered over the mouths of the openings were abandoned.

Hare closed his eyes to focus on smell over unreliable sight. The scent of bear lay so faint in the air it could be memory or hope over reality.

Hare stood alone in their ruins.

He gritted his front teeth and allowed the change to come. He knew the pain would be more intense than normal—both because it had been so long and because of his injuries, but he needed his fingers.

His fur retracted and exposed naked flesh. The muscle and fat thickened and he screamed as his wounded shoulder stretched. The ears shrank and shifted to the side of his head as his nose pulled back into his face. His bones crackled and threatened to snap as they transformed.

The sounds of the forest dampened and the odors in the air vanished as Hare lost his lupine powers for the use of fingers. His screams changed from high and shrill to low and guttural.

He collapsed naked in the grass and undergrowth outside the bears’ forgotten den. The blades of the dry grass irritated his exposed skin.

He gritted the rows of teeth that ached and felt strange in his mouth. “I have saved the reptiles the trouble and skinned my own fur.”

Hare stood slowly on his human legs. The arm below his wounded shoulder hung limp. He used his other hand to hold the trunk of the tree to keep his balance. The bark felt good in his touch and he missed the sensation. He took a moment to remember which way the knees and elbows were supposed to bend.

He crawled into the den with more trouble in his larger, human form. Hare struggled to see in the dark with his human eyes. He felt through the cast aside and broken possessions of the bears. He could not find the needle and thread he sought to close his wound, but he rolled the shattered table and found cloth inside crockery.

Hare pulled out the strips and bandaged the shoulder. The cloth became wet almost immediately.

“I’ll have to remain human until I find thread to do this properly.”

Hare dug further until he found a tablecloth to wrap around his waist and sandals to strap to feet not evolved for running. He crawled back out of the den coating his skin, skirt, and scant patches of hair with mud.

He heard the growl from the woods before he smelled the danger and Hare cursed his human senses. He crouched to the ground and peered through the grass behind the den. He glimpsed movement through the grass just beyond the swampy edge of the trees and water. The creature lifted its snout to smell him in the distance and his blood seeping through the bandage.

The alligator’s slit of an eye rolled in its socket scanning the grass. Hare could not tell if he had been spotted. The monster’s green and brown flesh rippled under its scales. Its back arched and its white underbelly came into view as it began its transformation.

Hare took advantage of the blindness of the gator’s metamorphosis from reptile to human. Hare felt the white fur tear back through his human flesh. As the alligator took on human characteristics, Hare raced him shrinking back into rabbit. He closed his eyes as his ears stretched back out to their full length on top of his head. He gritted his teeth until only the single set protruded in the front.

Hare turned painfully on his bad shoulder and bounded back toward the road away from the swamp and the alligator’s territory claimed from the perished bears. He did not wait to see if he had won the race from human to animal.

He left the tablecloth, the sandals, and the bloody bandages on the ground outside the vacated bears’ den.

***

Hare continued to run up the road until the pavement gave away to battered cobbles. He had to watch his landings from each stride closely. Many of the stones had been lifted from the street leaving deep pits and puddles in Hare’s path.

The thunderous steps dropped away behind him, but he did not lose them completely. The alligator did not pursue Hare into the road, but Hare knew that other minions of the lizard king patrolled deep into the countryside far from the shell of the castle.

Hare observed movement under the porch of a boarded house just off the road. He broke stride and stood ready as he waited for what might come racing out from the shadows for him. Stones from the road had been used to create three stacks for steps up to the porch. The stones sat askew and the boards of the porch split in splinters and rotten patches.

The sun beat down hot and brutal from above, preventing him from seeing clearly into the darkness.

Hare whispered. “I might as well just have my human eyes for all I can see.”

The creature bounded out from under the porch as dark as a shadow himself. He tilted his head as he stared at Hare with eyes wide and dark. He spread his wings and let light shine off the barbs of his black feathers. Hare watched light glint brighter off the slender needle in the creature’s beak.

Hare breathed and spoke as clearly as he was able in rabbit form. “If you know mercy or generosity or pity I need your needle to close my shoulder, Crow.”

The crow mumbled over the metal clamped in his beak. “It is still a crime to provide comfort or assistance to creatures of hair.”

Hare glanced down at the road and the remaining cobbles. He sighed.

“Sewing my shoulder closed will hardly feel like comfort. Perhaps you might drop the needle and fly away. That would not be assistance in the eyes of the law.”

Crow cawed. The needle fell to the dirt. The bird bobbed his head and snatched it back up.

“I can hear the thunder of the tortoise’s approach. I’m certain he would disagree. Birds do not meddle in the business of scales or shells. We do not have a stake in the wars of fur.”

Hare folded his ears back against his head. “It is not a war when we are simply skinned and tanned with our own urine into extinction for the crime of being furry. Once they are done with fur, the lizard king and his creatures will surely turn to feathers.”

“I’ve heard that argument before, creature of hair,” the crow said, “but joining your losing battle will surely hasten your self-fulfilling prophecy against my kind. Your kind should have sued for peace before you needed to sew your shoulder and to flee down pillaged cobbles.”

Hare bared his teeth. “There is no peace to be had when the reptiles’ only demand is our death.”

The crow tilted his head toward the sky. “Good luck with your race then, rabbit.”

The bird took wing and carried the needle up with him.

Hare cursed and said, “You only want the needle because it is shiny.”

He bounded forward zigging from stone to stone along the cobbles. The process tested his failing shoulder.

The puddles between stones shook with the impacts of the tortoise moving watery rings from their centers to their muddy edges.

***

Hare no longer had speed. He just plodded forward in a manner unnatural for rabbits and hares. He pulled his wounded limb up to his chest and hobbled forward without touching it to the road any longer. The heavy pounding on the ground behind him remained loud and no longer fell behind with time.

The terrible feet continued to close in on Hare with slow and steady resolve.

The cobbles vanished and the road became dirt with deep, ugly ruts. Hare dropped his head and stumbled forward through the wheel tracks. Out of the edge of his vision he watched his wound turning black. He smelled infection setting in.

The ground wavered in his vision with each step of the overlord close behind him. Dust lifted from the road into Hare’s eyes and nostrils.

He came upon a ravine across the road. He heard the stream through foliage under him, but he could not see it. The beams of the bridge extended across a short distance to the point where they snapped in an earlier storm and were never repaired. Hare considered jumping. He thought he might survive, but probably not.

Hare hissed over his dry throat. “That’s not what my father did.”

He peered through the field in both directions. The sun dipped low on the western side of the dirt road. In the angled light, Hare spotted the broken bones of animals being reclaimed by the grasses. He lifted his nose with effort and smelled the air. No odor remained on the bones to identify the creatures that rested in the grasses.

Hare shivered in the falling light. The quivering of his muscles hurt his shoulder and irritated his other joints.

The steps of the tortoise shook the ground hard enough to nearly take Hare off his feet. Another section of bridge collapsed off the wall of the ravine through the tree branches underneath.