National Storytelling Day 2018
The
Harbinger
I am a creature of the winter. Sleet ran through my veins
from the day I was born, ripping my mother from me even as she nurtured the
ember of my life with her dwindling heat. The Others watched her die, cautious
of approaching until they knew I was utterly alone in the world. That was when
they marked me as their own, and I changed. I can never be fully one of them,
but nor am I entirely what my mother bled to make.
Hairs grow from the place where they touched me, thick and
dark. Yet when the change comes on me the hairs not only grow denser but paler
until they are the one white patch in a gun grey pelt. In their language they
call me Harbinger and they watch me intently, for they say I act strangely in
the moon tide before the weather changes, twitching and snarling in my sleep,
disturbing their deeper slumbers in the niches and crevices beneath the earth.
I am become a barometer, read by creatures with eyes like mirrors.
Late summer weighs heavily on me, the memory of the deep
earth offering such tempting solace that I cannot resist seeking out caves and
shadowed glades during the sunlit hours. Yet when the craving wakens me, that
unrelenting yearning that drags me from cool sanctuary into the dying heat of
summer to sweat and stagger and stumble about, then I can feel the blizzards
coming.
The Harbinger is always the first to fully waken, and it is my
job to prepare for the Emerging. We are always hungry after hibernation and
need to replete our wasted forms, the Others even more than I. It is my duty to
stock the larder, otherwise they will not be able to control themselves in
those first days. It is unwise to thin the herd too heavily. The feeding
frenzies are terrible to behold; I once saw an entire hamlet consumed, their frigid,
twisted, broken corpses thrown into the drifts.
Some might feast blindly, glutting on whoever comes their
way. Some fools might wage vendettas, targeting chosen prey to sate the need
for vengeance. I have chosen the path of the connoisseur, and I provide my kin
with only the choicest of tastes. When I was but a child I wandered in the
storm for what seemed like days, until at length I chanced across a wayside
inn. The aromas from within were tempting, and I reverted to the shape my
mother had given me. As I peered in the window at the patrons huddled about a
fire, a woman peered back out and we both startled the other to such a degree
that she shrieked and I fell backwards into a drift. Moments later she and her
father, the landlord, were hauling me out of the snow and into the stifling dryness
of the bar room.
The younger woman fussed and bustled, exuding a sweetness and
warmth that made my stomach rumble ~ so
loudly, in fact, that she at once brought me food of the sort that I could
barely keep down. Kindness is such a rarity that I could not bring myself to
rebuff it, and struggled to swallow the stew. Her mother was of an entirely
different ilk, burning with a corrosive disdain that drew me to her even as she
grimaced at what she deemed an unwashed cuckoo in her nest. Where the girl
acquired her goodness, I did not know, for her father oozed nothing but
weak-willed indolence and avarice.
The suet-fleshed matriarch recoiled from my corpse-cold touch
and complained bitterly that her husband must have left the door open, though
all could see it plainly barred. Starvation nearly overwhelmed predatory
prudence, but good fortune led one of the wall-eyed old drinkers to drag me
back towards that suffocating hearth before I had drained all the heat from her
flabby carcass. She collapsed shivering and cyanotic into a chair, eyes never
straying from me even as her customers indulged the poor lost child who hacked
his lungs raw ~ though from the dryness of the hot air, and not the cold as
they assumed. I supped upon the drinkers, but only a little from each. Enough
to remind them of the world beyond the stout walls, and by then I’d had enough
fill of the landlady to need only a morsel from the rest. It was also enough
for me to assess their flavours, some bland, some distasteful, one riper than a
well-hung pheasant.
They asked question after question about how I came to be
wandering in the snow, who my parents were, what had become of them and so
forth. I did as the Others taught me, whimpered and stared wide-eyed and
innocent at the prey. The cattle took pity on me even as I drained the warmth
from their bodies. Really, there was so little challenge in it that I was in
danger of becoming bored.
There were four customers alongside the family who owned the
place; two toothless old men who lived on neighbouring farms and who clearly
had loathed the sight of each other for years; a surly physician who tasted of
regret and something that I only years later came to identify as morphine; and his
hulking son ~ a lad so naïve and vacant as to be almost simple-minded. Heat
radiated from them, and I could have basked in it all night had I not heard the
Others whispering on the winds.
Talk changed to the harshness of the season and the need to preserve
their livestock and which would be strong enough to make it through to spring.
That was when the termagant, glaring with balefire, announced that she thought
the weak should always be slaughtered before they became a drain on others. The
patrons, and even her family, squirmed with embarrassment as she hissed
lethargically about the burden that the weak imposed on others, all the while
my lungs rasping with the smoke.
Since that night I have followed her suggestion, selecting
the weak ones to sustain the pack. The rest grow stronger, freed of such
onerous burdens. The weaklings burn brightest with an erratic, furnace heat
flavoured by the iron tang of their hatred and sadism, the stale Verdigris of
their envy, and the sulphurous stench of their rapaciousness.
She would have been the first to stock the feeding chamber
that year, had she survived the walk through the snows. I may have drained her
too heavily at the inn for numbed and confused as she was when we left the
tavern, come the early hours of the morning, before we were even halfway home
she made a stumbling effort to flee from me. I should have retained my childish
form, instead of becoming Other ~ the shock must have broken my hold over her
mind. Screaming, she struggled across a frozen river, taking a dozen steps
before the ice cracked and she crashed through into the furious currents
beneath and was lost to us. Doubtless some bear found itself a tasty treat
several miles downriver.
I was compelled to retrace my footsteps and claim the scrawny,
toothless old farmer who reeked of his own granddaughter. How he managed that
journey, I cannot imagine. Every rasping breath sounded as if it might be his
last, but on he staggered following my guiding voice until we reached the cave.
There he slept, fitfully waiting for the time when he gave up his heat during
the Emerging. His cold bones, like those of countless others before and since, became fit only
for wolves to gnaw upon. We do not believe in waste, and there is strength in sharing.
That was all a long time ago, and my technique has been much refined since. Of course I cannot guarantee that I will always be able to
harvest the weak, maybe one day I will run out of them and have to hunt for the
strong and seriously deplete the bloodstock. However, I do not envision that
day coming any time soon.
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