Caribou shook the ice out of her ruff and sniffed the air. Spring had come to the High Plain far to the south. She leapt into the air, twisted about, and came down on human toes amid the cowbells and sedges. The Spring sun, forgiving of all things young, warmed the dirt under her bare feet. She had forgotten the pleasure of breezes over naked skin. Had she been so long in the frozen north? What else had she forgotten, she wondered.But the call of a meadowlark distracted her from her reverie. She lifted her head to the wind and shifted as she leapt forward. Toes became sharp little hooves that dug deep into the wild grass turf. Muscles rippled under her ebony coat as she accelerated to top speed, the wind whipping her mane away from her long neck. This, this, she thought, is why I am alive. To be free. To run.
She let her pace slow after a while, switching to a long wide stride that would eat up the miles without tiring her equine heart. She cocked her tail high so that it became a midnight flag behind her. Ears up, she scanned the plains to the horizon with every sense. She could sense the badger den, sleepy after a morning of successful hunting among the ground squirrel dens. She knew where every jack rabbit hid, where the fox kits slept and where all the grouse sat upon their eggs. Far off, on the bluffs above the creek bottom, she heard the wolf pack hunting. She bared her teeth and shook her head, veering off, taking her path far from the hungry mouths. The wolves seemed nervous, agitated. She ignored this puzzle. She did not want to play with the Wolf God on this fine day. She wanted to race with the others, kin to this body. She wanted to dance with the Horse God. She caught the scent of them, far off on the horizon towards the setting sun and veered again, letting their psychic trails lead her on.
Something odd blocked her path. Thin tree stumps, identical, placed at regular intervals in an unnaturally straight line that ignore the natural flow of the land. She slowed, curious. Something hard edged and deadly lay there. She stopped and sniffed. Metal. She sidled closer and brushed against the unseen barbs.
Pain startled her. She leapt into the air and became a falcon, to settle on the top of one of the unnatural tree trunks. She studied the line of trunks and the stuff hanging between them. Metal extruded to a thin wire, with little sharp spines twisted into it. What kind of mind would think of something so vile and then string it across her plain? Falcon screamed an angry falcon scream and leapt into the air, beating her wings hard to gain altitude.
She hovered, beating the air, and looked down. The fence stretched for miles, cutting her plain in half.
Who would dare, she thought, starting to become truly annoyed.
She conjured a wind and set it blowing against the fence but the wind could find no purchase on the wires and blew away.
She grew angry then, and called a spring thunderstorm. Lightning split a few posts. They hung limp in their wire net, disconnected from the ground and yet still suspended by the tautness in the wire. Damaged a little, but still there, this fence.
She looked down the timeline and saw the tumbleweeds, grown thick in the disturbed soil where the grassland had been stripped bare and she sent a wind to blow them against the fence in the dry time just before autumn. The wind brought summer thunderheads that lit the prairie on fire. The Fire God raced before the wind and got tangled in the weed choked fence and burnt until the posts were consumed. She sighed. This was a dear price to pay, this waiting, this destruction, just to kill a fence.
She twisted in the air and became a golden eagle. Her wings caught the breath of the plains below and sent her soaring. She circled higher and higher until she was so high the width and breadth of the plain lay below her. She looked and then she looked again. She flew higher and scanned further than she was wont to do. Nothing. The People of the Plain were gone. Only empty campsites remained, the fire pits scoured clean by the wind, marked only by the stone circles that once anchored their round houses made of animal skins.
She had meant to castigate her human Husbands and remind them of their contract with her. They had promised to be her eyes and ears, to live on the land and listen to its passing under their feet. But her Guardians were gone. Only ghosts, pale and tattered, clung to the sacred places. How could this be? She needed answers.
Eagle screamed and caught the spiral paths that would take her to the mountain that stood blue on the horizon. The eddies above the mountain wanted to throw her back onto the plain. She closed her wings, dropped and shifted again, becoming Raven. Raven put out just enough wing surface to keep from dropping like a stone and spiraled down to the sheltered spot, just below the ridgeline, where an ancient pine tree grew.
She landed in the soft duff at its base and cocked her head about, looking for a suitable stick. Choosing one that was long dead and well seasoned, she picked it up in her beak and flew up onto a thick and twisted lower branch. Taking careful aim, she hit the branch hard with the stick. A very satisfying thunk rang out over the tops of the lesser pines. She did it again and again and again, until the bones in her skull ached with the sound of it and the muscles in her beak turned to water and refused to work properly.
“Gaahhh!” the tree growled, shaking her loose.”Who is making such a racket?”
“Old fool!” She croaked as she leapt clear of the trashing limbs, twisting in midair to land on two delicate bare feet amidst the pine needles. She shook her long golden hair away from her face and fluffed it back from the tiny ebony horns that grew from the bones of her skull just below her hairline.
“A person can barely take a nap without someone trying to break off a twig or chop off a branch,”,the tree mumbled sleepily. It grumbled softly to itself before becoming silent again.
This was the last straw, being ignored by a Husband.
“Wake up, old man!” she yelled, kicking the trunk in her frustration. It hurt, since she had not thought to manifest shoes, and she hopped about on one foot for a few moments, growling crude things about men in general and trees in specific.
“Ahhhhhhh,” the tree sighed, the sound long and drawn out like a ghost wind among the aspens. “Yoooou. You. It’s you! Is it you? You look so different. Gods, gods, gods. At long last. Where have you been? I have been looking for you everywhere.”
She straightened from inspecting her abused toe and shook the hair away from her face again. The tree shifted and melted, a face now embedded in the gnarled bark just below the first branching. Elbows poked out from its sides and long fingered hands flexed and then grew into fists. The tree fought to wake up, ripping roots from their shallow bury as it seemed to struggle with its very essence. She stepped back a pace or two, a little startled by the tree’s seeming desperation.
“Nooooooo! Do not leave me! Do not leave. Gods, gods. It has been too long. I need you, do you not see?” His cry came near to breaking her heart, as the heat of his need broke over her in waves.
She took pity on his suffering, though, in truth she did not quite understand its source. She stepped forward and patted the trunk, awkward and hesitant.
“Be at peace, Old Man. It was I who sought you. I will not leave until you answer my questions.”
“Oh, Lady!” he whispered, blinking down at her with eyes that were not unlike her own, golden and humanoid. “I had given up all hope. I had consigned myself to the long death, to the endless sleep, for I could not bear the world without you in it.”
She patted his cheek, trying to calm him.
“But, I have always been here. Did you not see the spring come and the flowers bloom? Did not the wombs all quicken and the eggs all hatch? Did your seed not find fertile ground?”
“Yes, yes. The mind knows these things. But the heart. The heart, Lady. The heart grows weary of a diet of just faith. Time wipes memories from the mind and turns them into dreams. You did not come back to me. I needed to know your love was constant.”
She bowed her head to rest her cheek against his warm bark. She did not want him to see the guilt that lay behind her eyes. His fears had not been baseless, had they? She had, herself, been lost in the fecund dream of creating and had forgotten to come back to her lovers to feed their needs.
“I am sorry. Forgive me. I forgot that even the best of my garden needs to be nurtured and loved. The open skies entice me and I run until the world runs out below my feet. Perhaps I sought my own oblivion in the wide empty spaces.” That reminded her of why she had come.
She lifted her head and glared up at him. “Someone has fenced my plain with wicked metal spines. It is a plague that covers the planet in the years to come. I cannot bear it. Must I retreat up the timeline and abandon all I have created?”
“Noooo, Lady!” the tree moaned. “Do not abandon us here! It is the godless ones. They have forgotten you. They devour the planet, seeking you, seeking to fill the vast emptiness that was meant to be your Place inside all of us. Because they deny you, their hunger is insatiable and their greed knows no bounds.”
“Where are the Plains People, to keep them in check and teach them my ways?”
“Dead, Lady. Dead or gone, fled into the Wastelands, to lands that the greedy ones do not yet covet. It is a new type of Human that builds their nests upon the plains.”
“Should I meet with them, then, and remind them of what they have forgotten? Should I take a Husband from amongst these new humans. Is it time for a new covenant with Men?”
Her Husband grabbed her wrists in his and pulled her tight against his unyielding trunk.
“Do not speak this thought. Their hunger cannot be negotiated with. Can they not see your beauty in the spring flowers, yet they still grind them underfoot? Can they not see the awesomeness of your power in the passing of the bison, yet they still slaughter them by the thousands? You will go to them and they will devour you, thinking to gain your power, but only succeeding in killing all that is beautiful in this land.”
“What are we to do, then, my Husband? Would you uproot yourself and take me into the Wastelands, as well? Should we retreat and let them kill all that we have built, you and I? Would you leave these young saplings to their doom? Could you? Could you live with yourself, knowing that you lived while they suffered and died?” She shook her head and pulled her hands gently from his grasp. He pulled one foot out of the ground, reaching after her desperately.
“What care I for these saplings if you are gone? With you, I can create more. With you, we could make a garden of stone bloom. Without you, even these would wither and die. Spring would come no more and the wombs would grow sterile. The world would begin to die one mote at a time. I would not be here to witness that. I refuse, do you understand? I refuse to watch the world die because you are not in it.”
She gazed solemnly at him, considering all that needed to be considered. She looked out from their high perch and let her eyes wander the vast plain below and mused on how hard it was to appease all her Husbands. She looked down the timeline and saw just how terrifyingly awful things were going to get. She closed her eyes and sighed. After a moment she turned and returned to her Husband and very gently wrapped her arms around him.
“Abide with me” she said softly, looking up into his golden eyes. Branches began to grow where horns had once been. She let her toes sink into the earth and tangle with his. “Sleep the long sleep with me. Let us stand Witness, here, above the Plain. Let the godless ones come and do what they may. But know this. You and I are a stone mountain against which they will throw themselves time and time again until the tides of their flesh are battered and broken into nothingness.” She straightened and turned slightly, to look out over the plain, but already her eyes had grown closed and her lungs drew breath through the leaves in her hair. “And when the time is right, I shall awaken, and go down into the land of Men and offer them a new covenant.”
“They will not hear you. They have no ears. They will not commit. They have no hearts,” her Husband said sleepily, settling against her. She smiled and reached for the warmth of the sun.
“Yes. They will agree. For they will have no other choice. The road they have chosen will lead them to a Dead End where all the gods, even unto Death, shall turn their backs on them. I shall be waiting for them there, at the end of time. After they have consumed all there is and waters of the world have turned to dust on their tongues, I shall be there, offering them a drink from my Cup. They shall be thirsty and they shall surely drink or perish.”
“Ahhh, Lady,” sighed her Husband as he closed his eyes, “this, this is why I love thee. For all your terrible and terrifying beauty, you are a most ruthlessly efficient Wife.
