Shapechanger's Birth Read online

  Her bare and callused feet felt little of the rough gravel that made up the road, nor did they or any other part of her feel cold despite the near-freezing wind coming from the ocean a few miles to the west. Indeed, she enjoyed the caress of the wind and the smells it brought, of the salty sea and grass.

  Mary had lived through the famine and it had hardened her soul, already tough, to hardest adamant. It had also taught her to enjoy what little blessings came her way. She'd had many of those, and larger ones too. She and her family had all survived the famine, partly because they had been well-off by the standards of the area, partly because they had planted turnips and other crops to substitute for potatoes, and partly because their potato crops had miraculously escaped the blight.

  And hadn't that aroused envy among her neighbors? Some of them had muttered about witchcraft.

  Mary ghosted into each empty house, seeing if by some odd chance anything had been left that she could use. She was not surprised to find each abandoned house bare of everything but dust.

  Except one. A book lay in one corner of a room.

  Mary's eyesight had been fuzzy and poorly focused before her death and especially bad at night. Since recovering from death her eyes had improved, and more than humanly possible. They focused sharply now, and starlight lit the room as if the full moon was out. Or as if lit by the sun just after sunset, for she saw colors in that eerie eye-bending way of twilight just at the edge of night.

  Color vision was something impossible for ordinary humans even outside under the light of the full moon. Walking toward the book she wondered how she saw so well in here.

  The answer came to her between one step and the next. She stopped to keep from falling over as her vision was replaced by another vision. It was as if she was a bird aloft in an egg-shaped cavern, open on one side to light cast onto the opposite rounded wall.

  But it was not a cavern. It was one of her eyes. Her strange other-sense was probing into her own body. Even stranger, she understood what she was perceiving almost as if she'd once read a book about it .

  At the rounded back of her eye was a wispy sheet of flesh made of the tiny cells that made up all flesh and blood and bone in her body. The sheet contained two kinds of light-sensing cells. One, for day, could see colors. One, for night, could only see brightness.

  Somehow Mary was making that sheet of flesh more sensitive. At the same time she was letting more starlight in by opening the irises of her eyes much more than normal.

  Then her regular vision returned. She was back "outside" her body again.

  She shook her head at the strangeness and bent to pick up the book, her body moving as smoothly and gracefully as that of a dancer or an athlete. That was another mysterious aspect of the magical skills that had resurrected her. Even as a girl she had never been as agile as this.

  Her eldritch sight could not quite make out the print. She left the house, slapping the book against the door jamb to remove the worst of the dust, and looked at the book again.

  Perhaps the first and last thirds of the book were gone, the pages in between warped and stained by damp and time, but she could tell that it was a book of fairy tales. Indeed, it was this very book that had helped her learn to read, something few of the older country people in Ireland could do in 1854, and fewer country women, a legacy of the many years when English law forbade education to the Irish. When people were educated literally hiding in hedges, resisting stubborn as stones being brought to the level of animals, to being no more than creatures of burden and toil.

  Carefully she wiped off the book, slipped it into her makeshift pack, and vanished from the village as silently as she had come.

  It was maybe midnight when Mary smelled chickens.

  She was not sure where she was, just that she was aiming south with the coast road under her feet. She was hoping to break into a store in the next city and steal some food.

  She turned to look west toward the ocean, into the wind. A cottage huddled a ways from the dirt road she trod.

  The barnyard smell coming from the cottage made Mary's belly cramp. She had finished all the bread and ham from home, and she desperately needed more food. Her body had used up all her body fat and some of her muscle when it had cured her of death and old age while she lay in her grave. Her slow and careful eating during the day had rebuilt some of the most-needed muscles in her body and restored much of what had been stolen from her bones.

  Her conscience warred with her need and struck a compromise. She made a promise to God — I will only steal one chicken.

  She stripped off her coat and laid it and her crude pack next to a stone that marked the path to the cottage. Then she walked carefully up the path, stopping frequently to look around, listen, and breath deeply.

  Her sense of smell improved quickly under her wish for such improvement. It told her that there were humans in the house, sheep in the field beyond guarded by a dog, and pigs and chickens in the wretched stone shack that was the tiny barn. Another dog slept within, guarding the farm animals.

  Mary almost retched at the various odors of excrement and urine that her extra-sensitive nose brought to her. But she clamped a stern incorporeal hand on her reactions and continued on, her knife extended a bit forward and ready for whatever came. Nerves on edge, she prayed that if what came at her was human she could leash her reflexes quickly enough to keep from killing them.

  As she walked, without conscious thought, she calmed her racketing heart and released adrenaline and sugar into her blood at a careful rate. Her teenaged muscles grew even more strong and supple, her reaction speed dropped below the threshold of what was humanly possible. Wishing for more sensitive feet caused her body to leach callus from the soles of her feet till she felt every tiny pebble and grass blade under them. She walked with legs flexed, touching the balls of her feet to the earth first, her body automatically taking on an even smoother flowing motion.

  Someone seeing her now might have mistaken her for a legendary blood-drinker or cat lady and fled screaming, or crept silently away. Nor would they have been far wrong.

  The door to the barn was on the west side, the side closest to the house. Mary could hear the breathing of the dog just inside it. When she walked around to the door, the ocean breeze would be at her back, sending her scent straight to the dog.

  In her extrahuman state she could move fast enough to silence it temporarily with one hand then silence it permanently by cutting its throat. Yet she hesitated.

  She liked dogs and this one was only doing its duty. Its loss would make this poor farm poorer. It might even cause its people the grief of losing a friend.

  She decided on a more dangerous course, available to her because of what she was beginning to think of as her witch powers. She lifted her arms. Sweat glands in her armpits and crotch and on the top of her head began to release a vapor suffused with a sedative. Moving slowly, letting the sea-breeze spread the sweat, Mary walked around to the front of the small stone barn. Slumber bordering on coma preceded her.

  Slowly Mary advanced on the chickens roosting on poles laid crossways in the cracks between two sides of the barn. With her enhanced eyesight she studied them. They were so deep in magical sleep that they could hardly keep claws closed on their perches. Gently she plucked one loose and left the little barn.

  She retrieved her property and walked off down the dirt road. Perhaps a mile away she left the road and went eastward a hundred yards or so. There she plucked the bird's head from its neck with a single powerful twist. While it flopped its life away she walked parallel to the road, letting it hang by its legs and bleed itself out. This way the prevailing west wind from the ocean would blow the blood scent away from the road and anyone traveling on it with dogs.

  Rejoining the road, she traveled till perhaps an hour before dawn, when she sought out a row of bushes well off the road and made herself a little camping area. Her ability to dissolve living things at a touch made it easy to make herself a bed of small, leafy branc
hes "cut" from the bushes.

  As she fell easily into sleep she reflected that she had risen from the grave just twenty-four hours ago.

  The sun peeking through the bushes and striking one eye woke her. Mary stood up and stretched, looking around, breathing deeply the cool moist air of morning. The sky was gloriously blue, the land to the east covered with brilliant greenery and rising to distant grey hills. To the west a few hundred yards was indigo ocean. The Arain islands were somewhere out there but at near-sea-level she saw no trace of them — unless those low-lying clouds on the horizon hovered over them.

  Mary made herself ready for the day, gutted and stripped the chicken of its feathers, and impaled the body on a sharpened stake. She was very careful when lighting the fire not to waste the match. She had only taken a half-empty box of matches from her home, leaving the full box for her family.

  As the chicken cooked grease dripped from it, the drops of grease making sputtering blue sparks as they caught alight in the fire. Mary ate each scrap of meat that she could, pulling it off the carcass as soon as it cooked, opening up the body cavity for further cooking. She ate the chicken liver with great relish, and she could feel her body making use of much-needed nourishment best available in the liver.

  After eating, sitting cross-legged, Mary closed her eyes and focused on her hands. When her hands warmed and seemed to fray into many tiny fingers and then wisps of smoke, she sank her hands into the earth before her.

  The tiny grains of earth barely visible to her physical eyes were the size of gravel or even larger to her witch sight. She could then break up the "glue" between the grains of earth by picking at it with her esoteric "fingers." The earth became a very fine dust. This let her quickly dig a hole where she could bury the remains of the chicken.

  Only after she did that did she realize that there had been another way to hide the evidence. She could have simply dissolved the bones and feathers.

  Some time later the shore-side road began to rise gradually. Several miles further south the land would become the legendary cliffs of Mohr. But Mary took a branch of the road that led southeast and higher onto the sides of the hills. Without any land or vegetation to slow the breeze the wind rushed past her, making her coat flap. At first she felt chilled, then her skin thickened itself and changed blood-flow patterns and she grew comfortable again.

  High on a hillside she stopped and looked west. She could now see the islands of Arain on the edge of the horizon. Several miles off, they looked like a single grey-green slab of rock at the place where the deep blue of the water met the lighter blue of the sky. Even with her eyes acting like binoculars she could see no detail through the haze of distance, except for the white triangle of the sail of a fishing boat. As she watched the sail was furled. Mary guessed that the fishermen had anchored at a good spot for fishing and were heaving their nets overboard.

  An hour or so later a strong northwest wind began to push against her back. Low clouds began to rush over her. Following them was a grey sweep of rain.

  There was no shelter anywhere near, so Mary took off her coat, made sure her matches were at the center of her makeshift pack, and folded the coat as tightly around her pack as she could. She hunched over it, squeezing it tightly against her belly, and continued walking.

  The rain came in a great rush of wetted dust. Sharp drops struck her back like pebbles. Her skin automatically toughened to a leather hardness and the pain almost instantly went away, but she was quickly drenched.

  Before her death the wind and water would have chilled her dangerously at this time of year, mid-April. Now her skin automatically adjusted and she only felt a pleasant coolness. If she hadn't had to keep her pack dry she would have leaned back and let the rain wash over her.

  An hour later the rain was gone and the sun was back. She opened her coat from around her pack and flapped it in the breeze to dry it out a bit. Everything inside the pack — including the matches — was dry.

  A little later the land tilted downward into a shallow valley. Soon she came to a crossroads. A road sign pointed left, eastwards, toward a place named Lisdoonvarna. Trees and curves of the road in that direction blocked her view of the village except, perhaps a half mile away, the spire of a church. That was good. If she couldn't see the village no one there could see her.

  Beyond the intersection the road she was following turned directly south, following alongside a small streambed. Mary climbed down into it, knelt, and drank her fill of the water from the rocky-bottomed stream.

  A quarter-mile later the stream merged with a wider stream which ran west toward the sea, gouging a deep steep-sided furrow in the land filled with lush greenery. A grey rock bridge crossed it. Looking down into the water mid-bridge Mary wondered if there were fish in it. She was tempted to go down and find out, but she was too close to Lisdoonvarna.

  From there the road rose to another modest ridge, descended to another modest valley, crossed another stream, and rose yet again.

  In the late afternoon the rocky road tilted downhill yet again. She stopped to study the wide green valley revealed. It ran far to the east and west, the sides of the valley raggedly terraced and spotted with patches of forest. At the bottom of the valley was a river. Perhaps a mile off to the right white dots were several dozen sheep grazing the hillside.

  Perhaps a half-mile further up the opposite slope of the valley was Ennistymon, which from the number and size of the buildings housed several hundred people. A second river ran diagonally down from the southern ridge and passed through the town, where the water tumbled down a yellow-stone cascade with little flourishes of white foam. At the bottom of the valley the two rivers joined and wandered away toward the sea.

  By sunset Mary was halfway down the northern slope of the valley. She turned left off the road and hopped a low briar-covered stone fence. She traveled a mile or two further inland then walked southward over uneven grassy pasture land, then through low trees running along the river bank.

  She stopped just inside the ragged edge of the forest to look through twilight toward the river. Green grass made a rough lawn all along the water. The river was perhaps a hundred feet across, edged on the opposite side by another strip of green and more forest. The water flowed smoothly here. In it must be fish.

  She had no fish line or fish hooks, nor money to buy them in Ennistymon even if she dared to be seen there.

  Bears stood in water and scooped passing fish out of it. Mary approached the river bank and looked at the water. In the twilight luminance she could see no fish. Did they sleep at night? Perhaps. And if she could find their resting places, maybe she could catch them there .

  Mary heaved a big sigh. She was too tired to try that. She was going to sleep hungry tonight.

  She turned back into the wood. At the further edge of the strip forest was a dense patch of bushes. There she made herself a cozy little nest of dried leaves and cut branches and burrowed into it like a wild animal.

  She tossed and turned like a human, however, her hunger bothering her more than usual. Finally she gave her stomach a stern warning to be quiet and was surprised when the cramps instantly went away. A handy ability, that — as long as one didn't overdo it.

  Mary slept till first light. She left her meager belongings hidden in the bushes and wandered along the river's edge clad only in a dress.

  The day was clear and bright, the air cool. Upriver a ways there were lily pads floating at the river's edge, round leaves like plates and saucers resting on the water. They grew further east as far as she could see.

  Near the water she tucked her dress-bottom up under her belt. There was a steep drop-off right at the edge, but only going down a couple of feet. Beyond the edge the river was shallow. She dropped with a splash into the water and walked cautiously upriver near the edge, her toes squishing into the mud at the bottom of the river. She ripped up one of the round, fleshy leaves and examined it. Were lily pads edible?

  She swished the plate-sized round leaf in the w
ater to clean it and nibbled it. It was not particularly tasty in a good or a bad way. She did not swallow but let the juice stand in her mouth, trying to decide if it was poisonous or not.

  Edible, her deep body knowledge told her, but not terribly nutritious. Mary swallowed a small mouthful of the pulp and waited to see if her stomach agreed. It did, so she began to eat the leaf. It filled her stomach quite nicely, stilling the hunger pangs that had awakened when Mary did.

  She reached down to pull up a second leaf and instantly forgot it as a foot-long brown salmon darted out from under a leaf and disappeared into the deeper water. So! This was where the fish were hiding .

  She leaned over, poised to snatch a second fish if it appeared. It did not. Maybe they needed to be scared out from under the floating leaves.

  Mary threw the remnant of the lily pad about six feet to her left, upstream. Several fish darted out of hiding and she snatched at one, then another, missing them even with her superhuman speed. They were fast!

  Mary pulled up another round leaf and waded upstream a little way, going slowly and trying not to roil the water. There she slowed and stopped to stand perfectly still. After a few minutes she threw the leaf upstream again and poised to snatch at the fish. This time she actually touched one slippery side before they all vanished.

  Mary had a lot of patience when she wanted to exercise it. The next hour or so required much of that ability. She improved to where she was sometimes able to guess just when fish would appear in the water in front of her and have a hand there to receive them.

  When she had snatched/slapped a third fish up onto the river bank she took her catch far enough inside the trees to make her hard to see from the river. There she made a little fire pit with stones from the river's edge. Then she gathered wood for a fire and used a precious match getting the fire started. She nursed it carefully till it was burning well.