Archive of Our Own ^beta

A deer, before it is skinned, learns to speak the name of the bullet

(of the arrowhead

(of the spearpoint))

that strikes it down.

√

He has spent the long ride drawing their path on a battered field map.

Most of the way out of town the carriage had rolled smooth. Bumped sometimes on a pothole, or a mudstack left there by the rain. They’d talked and talked, exhausting breaths as sure as any topic, and in the last hour Laurence’s blonde head had leaned on Micolash’s shoulder, worn it to soreness. Then he had kept still and dreamed, eyes open-full of Yharnam’s narrow streets.

Now on their feet and stranded in a village he only knows the name of (a quaint thing, gentle on the mouth), he lights a cigarette while the goldenboy stretches his arms above his head.

They wait near the crossing by the end of the main thoroughfare, a couple of ancient but sturdy signposts for company. A few yards ahead locals go about their daily business, from old women buying milk and eggs to a cheerful newsboy, still high-pitched voice going up-and-down and full circle. The chill creeps into their collars, but it is not real cold yet and they take it for what it is: a playful solicitation, a hint of the months to come. When the lull in their friendship expands into silence, he wonders why he has accepted the invitation. Spending the clean break between college terms in a country house frightens him even more than the idea of the hunt, for the latter is abstract and lived-in only when Laurence talks of the fox, of the hounds and horses, of his father’s armoury which is closer to an art collector’s cabinet.

He tongues at the pitch black taste of his cigarette, thinsmoke spirals all a-rise-up in bright winter air.

“There’s my father coming”, says Laurence, offhand.

Quickly Micolash tosses about his scrap of tobacco, grinding it to pulp under the heel of his shoe. He finds he is nervous. Like a burglar come to rob the wrong house, he tries to shrink himself deep into his coat as if to keep from God’s judgement-stare.

But the man who walks to them, sure of gait, is merely that.

Forty-five give or take, tall and strong-shouldered, he looks like the son by fairness of hair and features— same plush mouth and pristine shaved jawline, same greenness of eye, leftside overshadowed by a glass on a leash; only half as inclined to smile as his offspring. Faded freckles round his nose, too, a touching oddity on a man his age. He is wrapped in tailormade tweeds and overcoat, a country lord’s hat lopsided on his head and a silvertop cane under the arm, shaking hands with some of the village folk. Mr. Fanshawe, sir, the old coachman calls to him with a grin and a tip of his cap, in the tone of someone who’s known him long.

He greets the boys with a firm handshake, and perhaps the businesslike aspect of it reassures him. They are to ride again. Half an hour, Laurence’s father tells them: the house sits only on the other side of a hill.

They sit all three in the narrow box-carriage, students on one side and lawmaker on the other. Suddenly the air is too warm and Micolash wishes he could shrug off his coat without drawing attention to himself, but pinned by the man’s curious eyes finds he doesn’t dare. His right hand makes to feel for the leather upholstery, restless and clutching-at.

Mr. Fanshawe thumbs at the gold rim of his monocle, behind which nests a catgreen eye. With the hat off his head, the youth can guess at some blond-gone-silver in the man’s hair.

“Master Kovacs, is it?”

“Sir.”

“Wasn’t your father a doctor from outer-town? Yahar’gul, I think.”

The man has a clipped, agreeable voice, if a notch intimidating.

“He was, sir.” The words rasp in his young throat and he is a hundred years old. The idea of his father, a kindly hand forever hang-there on his shoulder, cleaves his heart in two. He doesn’t stoop to ask the lawman if he knew the good surgeon, if only by reputation; he doesn’t wish to.

“Laurence tells me you were with him in October. In that, ah, dreadful fisher-village down the coast.” The barrister rubs at his chin, half-lidded eyes as cutglass. “He didn’t tell me much, mind you, about what it is you scholars were looking for.”

“Father—”

“We were sworn not to talk”, says the surgeon-boy, nervous mouth running ahead of his mind. The lawman’s eyebrows take an inquisitive rise. “The higher-ups at college insist on keeping the research private until publication.”

At the back of his head an image: glass-God fish-God crumpled as if a ruined wedding dress. A surgeon cuts it open, another takes notes, a third eats of its dying flesh. He can only watch. Sickness drives him to drugs and forgetting and at last the going back. They will theorise divinity at the start of the term to come.

He knows better than to say there might be no publication at all.

“A professor’s honour lies in the credit he is given.” Mr. Fanshawe smiles, handsome lines dug up at the corners of his mouth. “Do forgive my curiosity. Asking questions is part of my trade.”

He consummates the rest of the road in near-silence, letting father and son fill the gap growing wider and more restless between them, as if one had given up on the pretense that he could mould the other to his whim. Micolash, ice-eyes halfway to shut, measures the similarities and differences in the pitch of their voice.

An absent finger draws the souvenir of map-lines along his thighbone.

√

From the outside, the manor house looks an extension of Laurence; of his father and what they stand for, if not quite deep-rooted aristocracy then close enough to play pretend.

This is a stately home, pleasant in its symmetry, the subdued elegance of its façade, the odd string of ivy clinging, artfully, to stone. A pair of servants, perhaps husband and wife, hurry to pick up the boys’ suitcases. The master of the house and his son greet them warmly. Micolash, a few feet back in their shadow as if hiding, tries on his gentlest smile and a nod of his head.

“Better leave them to it”, Laurence offers, making for the front door. “I ought to show you around. What would you want to see?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never visited a house this grand.”

He thinks of the townhouse in Yahar’gul, to which he holds the keys: the narrow triplet of stairs leading up the front door, the slim brickmade silhouette and high windows, the three storeys of living space, the attic; the surgery, the doctor’s office, the physic garden. In his childhood home there has never been space for frivolity, save for the flowers he used to pluck to brighten his father’s mood and earn a hand ruffling through his hair. Although conscious of his not fitting in, he is grateful the country estate looks nothing like where he grew up.

The goldenboy, if he picks up on that uneasiness, leaves it there to hang and grins.

“The library, then. You will be the first guest to properly appreciate it in years, I’m sure.”

He pays scant mind to the entrance hall and its lavish staircase, to the corridor walls laden with paintings of hunting scenes and long-ago battles, still a touch dizzy from the ride. Bright winter light coming through large windows gives Laurence’s silhouette, walking in front, a glow almost ethereal, and turns his fair head to prince’s crown. When they reach a double door, they stop. It opens without a creak.

Standing at the threshold, Micolash can only gape. The library he has imagined was a modest affair, the sort he fancies a barrister would enjoy: only an office full of law volumes with a table at the back for perusing. Instead he is faced with a room of proud proportions, not so far-off from the students’ reading room at college. Shelves sprawl floor-to-ceiling, a ladder on wheels propped against to reach high-up titles, and he counts two large tables with chairs holding council around, as well as a few armchairs upholstered in leather dyed red. A fire burns generously behind a grate near the coffee table. He walks there, looking round, struggling to keep his boyish excitement on its leash.

A handful of thin swords hang above the fireplace, polished to a shine, their hilts aglow and finely turned. It’s easy to picture Laurence holding one and affecting the fencer’s posture, strong of thigh, chin defiantly raised, some barely-touch smirk at the edge of his mouth. He plays well the idler at school: quick to crown himself with the intellectual’s laurels, too up-above-the-world for the physical, but one who has seen him swim or trudge down Pthumerian tombs knows he has a knack for it. No doubt will he be splendid in hunting tweeds, even if loath to shoot.

“I take it you are impressed”, he chimes. Despite his customary detachment, a hint of pride flowers in his voice.

“Rather. I doubt even old Willem has a private collection this fine.”

Laurence lets his fingertips glide over a row of large-spined books, gently offering touch and caress to forgotten authors’ names etched in gold lettering.

“Most of these precede our time, of course— Father has accumulated quite the collection of treatises and has a weakness for antique volumes. You’ll find a large amount of law books, too, but I doubt they’re of interest. Mother, on the other hand, is of the modern sort. Novels and the like, you know. In fact, you and her share a taste for the gothic.” His smile brightens. “Feel free to borrow anything you want.”

He stares, dumbly, at the treasure trove of knowledge spread out all round, inviting as a feast, and worries he must look a dog about to pounce at a roast.

“Should I not ask your father?”

“No need to pay him much mind. He’ll be most decent to you. He can be a little overbearing in presence, but really, he loves nothing more than to entertain guests and show off.”

“They seem to like him, down at the village.”

“He grew up here, as a matter of fact. The house has been in the family for centuries. I’m only a foreigner on my mother’s side.”

His shoulders sketch a comely shrug, if a fraction forced.

“A stroke of luck, I suppose, that no pureblood yharnamites will see fit to burn me at the stake.”

There is little he, son born of the twisted city’s outer-belly, can say to comfort. Instead he takes to walking the floorboards, step muffled by thick rugs woven long ago in some overseas he can only guess at, and marvels at every spine as if it were his own miracle loadbearing column of a back. No dust but that which stacks in the spaces between two titles scarcely remembered.

He stops at a framed daguerreotype displayed on a bookshelf. Two stern men gaze back, on the left Laurence’s father and a troubling likeness on the right, if not for a neatly trimmed moustache at his upper lip and a military uniform.

“That’s uncle Hiram. Father’s younger brother and a major in the army.” Laurence grins. “As well as a royal bore, unless you enjoy stories of war campaigns and tepid jokes. I know I don’t care for it.”

Micolash does not listen, instead eyeing the picture and the possibility of it being mirror-breach to the future. When he is forty-some, will the beautiful goldenboy look thus encased in wood and glass, his spine a ramrod, his frown loud as war thunder? Will he wear a moustache or monocle, a black lawman’s suit or a starched uniform, will he have a son to whom he’ll teach the noble art of the hunt—

and will he, surgeon half-made-up who has seen God, be there to witness the frightful change?

√

There is a boy,

there is a weapon:

single-barrel, breechloading, 32-bore stalking rifle, impressed with the gunmaker’s name on the forestock and ornamental engravings round the trigger-piece. A rich man’s killing tool, of recent, excellent craft. One cannot help but admire the wood’s polish, the sleekness of it along a fingertip (one cannot help but feel the perverse strength of the executioner up the gallowstairs). He does not press his ear to the singing muzzle, hoping for a teaser-glimpse of death’s voice.

“This is an extension of your arm”, says the hunting man from behind his eyeglass.

The boy finds it is heavy, rifle stock a mean pressure at his bony shoulder.

“Set your eye thus to aim, your finger there to hit.”

The trigger’s gunmetal cold hums to his skin a warning: you will want it or you will not, but you will shoot, and the deer will catch fire. This is an inevitable law of thermodynamics.

“It is not loaded”, says the hunting man

before he demonstrates. It is like surgery and sex, an opening, a slotting-in (a pair of conical bullets, tight-fitting, .32 calibre), a wooden moan as the breech snaps shut. Again the arm is handed over. Again the boy resents the weightiness of such killing-to-come.

“Now you ought to find the deer. It is a skittish animal, do not let it escape.”

So he goes a-looking: for the deer’s inexplicable blonde head,

and the flame come after.

√

Laurence’s father tells them deer-stalking is a sport for gentlemen of good breeding.

He struggles to reconcile the thought with his own father’s teachings, consisting not of the kill but the mending: the thread, thin as breath, sewn into skin as to remake the body one with itself.

They set off at dawn, a company of three backlit silhouettes against a pink-orange sky, rifles slung stiff o’er their shoulders. A mean chill clears the air, clouds their white-hot breaths. Mr. Fanshawe says they are to meet a scout a little ways off— deer spook easy and they’ll need a light tread as well as a keen pair of eyes.

Micolash is sullen in his walking, abreast of Laurence whose yesterday perkiness remains. The weight of the firearm disturbs him. He has been instructed in the sum of its base components the day prior, and admits to have enjoyed the simple pleasure of dismantling a thing that is not alive, nor dead. He has been shown how to hold it. How to aim, load, fire. Earlier in the courtyard he was startled by the easiness of it, and turned his gaze away from the hole made in a tin can from a distance. If he’d stuck his eye to it, what would he have seen?

He pulls the lapels of his coat tight around him, adjusts his hat and the pull of his gloves, fumbles at his scarf gone loose. The sounds of nature waking rattle him, a little. He catches himself on the lookout for city-born noises: shutters snapping open, the scurry of rats, metal on metal and dripping gutters.

The treeline comes closer looming after they tread a touch uphill, a lot of beech and oak hardwood, brawny trunks versus skinny branches halfway to naked as if caught still in autumnal time-between. That old earthy smell he recalls from his boyhood garden rises, carrying downwind a bit of last night’s rain. Petrichor thick on the senses wears a kind rusty hue, from his father’s voice not far removed. He spies birds flying high overhead, their speed producing talented afterimages of their wings.

The huntsman’s stride is long in high-polish cavalry boots, watery and sinuous, strolling up moorland as if walking a pleasure garden. There’s in that unselfconscious quality of motion the grace of a man used to ballrooms and fencing lessons, the same Laurence displays with studied aloofness. They make to mimic a lopsided golden ratio in their togetherness, so very self-similar but for their mismatched height, the son half a foot shorter than the father and twice the bounce to his step. Trudging along, the shy surgeon’s boy learns to resent his bone-stiffness. He has been taught to fix the physical, not to master it, and at such times his own body proves hard to solve.

Occasionally he will glance at his pocket watch and double-check the advance of the hands round its dial. Time seems intent on racing them. Near a silent hour has passed when they finally reach the maw of the forest proper, with few words exchanged and fewer excitements. From Laurence’s accounts he’d expected a round of frenzied steeplechase down the moors, drunk on a fox’s cunning speed and flame-for-fur. The quiet stillness of the land reassures him, if sparsely.

“I thought it was done with horses”, he says. “And dogs.”

“When there’s a crowd, yes, we don’t mind a touch of spectacle. You’ll have to come visit in spring, it will be quite a show. If we find ourselves a new master of hounds, that is.” The barrister turns to his son. “I forgot to tell you, old Thomas died last month. Something about his lungs.”

Laurence’s jaw twitches in acknowledgement, but his face keeps at his slipped-on good humour. An old family friend, perhaps, or a fixture of the goldenboy’s childhood; one hesitates to pry.

“Shame”, he sighs, “I liked the fellow. He had some stories.”

Micolash wonders at the odd coldness in his tone.

When observed from the right angle, the father-son bond seems to strain as if stretched to its limits. Not quite estrangement, for he recalls letters opened and penned in the candleglow of their dormitory, but something sibling to it. Perhaps the presence of Laurence’s mother and sisters would have dulled their edges and made the chasm easier to bridge. It is hard watching them having nothing to say to each other. He wonders at the wisdom of his own hanging-on, idly picking at the thought— they should have hunted without him, who knows nothing and lives outside of them.

But the lawman’s proved kind to him and he’d not the heart to refuse when the chance had been there to seize. He hesitates to cover the silence with his own curiosity, before giving in.

“Will we see more of your family? I was wondering.”

“Not likely. Mother and the girls always winter somewhere down south to avoid the worst of the chill.”

“Really? There was a woman’s riding coat in the vestibule this morning.”

“Oh yes.” Laurence tips his hat at the sportsman’s rakish angle and leans over so as to whisper. “My father’s mistress left it there last spring. Bloody fierce woman, if you must know, but in that regard she doesn’t hold a candle to my mother. He’s got dreadful taste, I’m sorry to say.”

Micolash bites at his lip, unsure if he has committed a breach of decorum and whether or not he should attempt to patch it up.

“Yes. Well, I wouldn’t know.”

A lot of shame lives in that half-truth.

He’s indulged in dalliance with a woman but once, seven-year chasm between them stretched wide as that crunchbone coast they’d been working raw, plucking metaphorical eyeballs from the skulls of fishermen. On that coast he’d become a man in ways multiple and mysterious. Perhaps Rom had thought of doing him a favour between two bouts of bite-panting down each other’s throats, but he sees it differently: an experiment for once not preceded by thought. A mistake, when he catches himself being honest. At night he might dream of the bruises he’s left down her freckled flanks.

“She says they like to go riding cross-country”, Laurence goes on. “She’s quite a sight on a horse, I grant you, but one wonders if it’s not a secret name for something else.” His fair eyebrows high-rise to meet his hairline. A smirk peels back to show a diamond glint of tooth. “Do stop me if I’m being uncouth.”

“Ah, you’re alright.”

The flush at his cheek is best kept ignored.

He holds the thread given lightly, picturing with his bygone adolescent imagination this Laurence once-removed and his summerwoman coupling like rabbits in a glade. Not a sound but their magnified breaths in the crack-space between their mouths. A marvelous jawline cut from the selfsame father-son marble, a powerful male thigh, the cleanfile fingernails on a huntsman’s hand after she’s peeled off his glove. It could be him spread out, feast yet to happen, ribcage a-waiting for his hungry goldenboy; their limbs slotting together, clock parts for bones new and gleaming.

In the woods no one would care but the birds.

“Does she talk to you a lot, your father’s mistress?”

“Rather. She says I amuse her.”

His thumbnail goes to graze the strap of the rifle slung over his shoulder, shaving from it flecks of old leather.

“She’s the type to court scandal. Some backwater thespian, I think, come to the city to try her luck on a stage. Probably she would have ended up in a brothel if she were only half that good with words— oh, there goes our scout.”

He does not up his pace, though, and neither does Micolash who comfortably walks in his shadow.

The young countryman wears his tweed cap at low-tilt over his eyes, so that it’s a wonder he makes a living by spotting flighty things. At close range he seems of an age with them, lanky thing, patchy hay-stubble down the cheeks and the crest of the apple on his throat. Too long sleeves, a worn patterned scarf, mud-crusty boots and leather satchel: the picturebook image of a village boy, with a gentleness to the mouth not often met in the halls of Byrgenwerth, where jabs and debates are the rule of law. It’s easy to forget, living among high-strung peers, that besides arrogance and ego-birth there are simpler things to strive for.

He is greeted with the same warmth as them back in the village, and the servants back at home.

“Have you a deer for us, then?”

“Saw one a ways ahead, sir, a little past the brook and nothing nervous.”

He is beaming, if a little out of breath.

“About a quarter mile”, says the barrister. “That will do.”

The scout fishes down his satchel, handing over a spyglass, all old wood and shine-polish, in exchange for a coin, and goes off scurrying down the way they’ve come. Mr. Fanshawe pockets the glass, straightens the rifle on his back and gestures for the boys to follow. They keep at a leisurely pace behind him still.

“Why send off the scout?” Micolash asks, low enough that the man ahead will not hear. He is hesitant to display more of his ignorance, as he had been on the coast where God lay dead. “Who’s to say the deer will still be there when we approach?”

Laurence laughs, making his heartbeat skip against his ribcage. Since the toll of his father’s last bell he has gotten used to knowing his life only as the spaces between two chimes of this silver-sound.

“I’ve no idea.”

He has a knack for making simple honesties sound like favours freely given.

“What I know is, this sort of confidence is partly for show. Men like us are all about keeping up appearances, you see— the illusion of control is as much for your benefit as his own.” He smiles, gently. “He knows these woods better than this village lad does, anyhow. We’ll have no trouble finding our quarry.”

He too shoulders his rifle in startling mimicry of his father’s gesture. There is something of the inevitable about this, like a circle meeting itself.

√

A startled deer has a lot to say about meat.

Looking at the animal-alive, it is difficult not to glimpse the future: the animal-dead lying on its side, a trickle of blood marring its fur. One has only to look a notch further and he will see the animal-skinned, then the animal-quartered; the animal-cooked, if his sense of smell is keen. He wonders at the colour of its scent the moment it dies, the moment it is butchered, the moment he will stare down at it at the dinner table.

There is a boy,

there is a weapon,

there is a man breathing in his ear.

In one version of the song he heeds the huntsman perched on his shoulder and takes the vicious shot. A conical bullet flies at high speed; a hole is made clean, and his hands dirty.

In another iteration, there comes only the mild pressure of his father’s hand, in it the forever knowledge that he does not have to do this. He lays down the arm and the wound does not open.

The fathervoice asks,

Boy-doctor-hunter-killer-god, what will you be?

It it past dawn and nighttime, nowhere-nowhen. He has trouble seeing.

In the dark a deer’s eye glows, aiming for the pit-pleasure point of a mouth to a cut.

In the deer’s eye a fire glows,

in the fire a deer’s eye burns,

so the story goes.

√

He hesitates when the huntsman hands him the spyglass.

It is weightier than it looks, perhaps because it holds the key to a clean killing. To what men such as this forty-some barrister, golden going grey, call a gentleman’s sport. He decides there is nothing sporting about stalking a creature that is not aware of your coming and even less of your intention towards it. There would be honour, if he believed in the notion, in the act of taking aim only after having been noticed, and acknowledged. As it stands it is a calculation out of balance, an inelegant inequation.

Halfway kneeling in the underbrush, he holds the monocular to his eye.

The animal itself is a young male, limber and wearing the colour of autumn past. He fancies a sort of serenity about it. A natural not-caring, a deep unawareness of God’s design and, subsequently, a contentment: because its existence is enough and needs not grow beyond its contours. From this lens he envies it. He would like to be that clear, and that uncomplicated. He would sleep in the shadow of the deer’s physicality; crawl under it and there breathe his last, shielded from the impossible colour of God’s voice in the shell of his ear.

He hands the glass back, and with it this intimate knowing. Laurence stands mute on his right, looking at the deer also, seeming to decipher his own image in its slim, graceful form. If he goes on staring the animal will catch fire.

On his left the father who is not his, earnest green caught in the circle of his monocle.

“Would you care to take the shot?”

It is spoken as an offer. What he hears beside the polite appeal is the idea of an ultimatum. If he does not accept, then the offer will be made to another, who will have to stuff it in his pocket.

I despise hunting, says Laurence once, freshly bedded, miraculous and stark naked, a little shrouded in the smoke bubbling up and out the opium pipe. His opium pipe, the three-quarter surgeon’s who has dissected the cosmos and ever since been drunk on the taste of his own dreaming. The only thing that does not change shape in his deliriums is Laurence, his perfection even for drugs impossible to surpass. Clear as day he says, I despise hunting. 

Then it falls on him, the boy-doctor, to bear the burden. He shoulders the gun the way he has been shown, a little clumsy but with the same diligence he is known to show in the pursuit of his studies. He is quick to learn. Daylight presses heavily at his back, the idea of the sun crashing down keeping him from rising. From walking away. From washing his hands before they are bloodied.

At the business end of a rifle barrel, the deer’s eye seems to magnify, to grow into one enormous jewel which in turn expands into its own slice of universe. He thinks of the lake at Byrgenwerth: the water’s thin mirror, fragile liquid glass waiting to harden. Its future scent calms his tremors, and so he takes the kill, because it is simple, and necessary.

He feels the shot before he hears its deafening bang, ripping fast through his arm, trigger-finger to shoulder. He does not see the animal’s legs buckling, nor does he wonder at the plaintive wail that does not come. Awareness is stripped from it too swiftly.

When it is done— when it is done and the world stops spinning on its axis, he rises.

He peers at the deer’s head which peers at the afterworld, side-eye wide open still to theories. There is a neat round hole in its skull. From this neat round hole seeps life’s holy cruor, redblood dripping down the layer of short, honeybrown fur, down the mathematical perfection of its bones only halfway hidden ‘neath flesh soon to cool. A drop dangles there, at the very edge of the animal’s jawline; a finger’s length from its throat, where a wolf, a fox, a hunger-dog might bite.

He does not know he has knelt until his hands, gloved and dishonest, are pressed on the animal’s stillwarm flank. A yellow taste of sickness colours the inside of his mouth, the narrow crevice between his teeth and bottom lip. He thinks of holding his eye to the wound to see the secret on the other side: Laurence-dead and burning in twenty years’ time.

The bullet has made no exit wound. Later, before the deer is skinned, he will ask to have it, pretending to want for a hunting trophy, and when they are back in the city he will bury it in his father’s garden so that something living might grow from this seed of death.

Later, when he is not trying not to weep.

“I say”, Laurence’s bluevoice comes to him from a distance of a million paces, “are you quite alright?”

In a moment his eyes will be a little wet, and he will try to say I have killed God.

The words die in his stomach.

√

Game: a set of rules meant to civilise amusement;

game: an animal, hunted for its meat.

They play cards over their plates of venison. They sit a player short for whist, and so settle for a foreign thing called the vieux garçon, learned by Fanshawe the elder when he was young and of a travelling mind. The timid guest grapples with the rules of the game, finding he’d have rather entertained himself with a book or another lesson in firearm anatomy.

It had seemed innocuous, before the walk in the woods: to dissect a killing machine and learn its intricacies as one would a lover’s. It had made him remember, as he stood alongside a man who could be Laurence in twenty years, how it had felt to absorb his father’s teachings, to lap at his words with dog-boy hunger.

He is not hungry now.

He forks at the meat on his plate, daubed in its bed of sweet fragrant sauce. It is strange, eating come evening which had been alive at dawn, and he has scant appetite for the notion. Little but his father’s lessons and his own reluctance to offend prompt his next mouthful, and the next, and the one after that ‘til the memory of the deer be duly swallowed. He tongue-scrapes at his palate, afraid to find there leftover flesh; at his needlepoint broken tooth, which has not caught on a stray fibre; only a speck of juice trapped between lip and gum, a childish secret.

It reminds him of things that have happened (happen, will happen) on the coast, near the fishing village. Scholars come a-kneeling at the divine’s table, with their surgeons’ knives carving themselves a slice. Their mouths had glistened silver, and he had watched. He would not eat on the idea of God, then. But tonight, chewing at the flesh of an animal he has shot, he starts to reason the two are not dissimilar.

God can be a fish encased in glass, quartered in tins for the selling;

God can be the decision-making, the finger pressing the trigger, the bullet which pierces the deer’s skull which has once held the secret names of all things.

He reasons, for this is what scholars do:

God is the opening of the wound, before it happens.

√

This is the boy whose arms he sleeps in when lights are out.

This is God, too, if God had a smooth marble chest and a pair of pinksmall nipples sweet on the tongue, like the foretaste of a flower garden. If God knew that he has killed, and did not care, and offered Himself the same, yellow fruit ripe for the taking.

It’s not so different from school, sitting partway undressed on a single bed. A strip of moonlight plays border on the careful tucked-in sheet. He does not dare light a cigarette for fear of overstaying his welcome, even though the host’s son is with him and carries word of law. It comes difficult, the shaking off of the father’s shadow— the father who is not his father who taught him to kill, as he has taught his golden son before.

You cannot remake what has been made, unless you unmake it first. He is too old now to be unmade, and thus the huntsman’s thumbprint fails to overlap with a doctor’s gentle education. A bad graft: the inevitable body will end up rejecting it. For the better, he wants to think, but still he is not sure. He could have imagined the hint of a thrill in the trigger-pulling, in the decision-making, in the split-second he has spent impersonating God.

He has not imagined the disgust. The taste of bile behind his tongue is as fresh as the moment he took the shot.

“You breathe like a dead animal. Live a little.”

It startles him, the voice tearing through the bedroom’s wirelong silence. He tries not to squirm as Laurence plays with the garter holding up his sock, sitting down now on the floor and looking up. This is a game he has always been good at, the goldenboy— the coaxing of a blush up one’s cheeks, the teasing come easy and harmless. Simple things.

“Anyone could hear us—”

“The house is too large for that, and too empty.”

A few teeth gleam predatory, eager to catch the light.

“I shall be quiet”, he mouths along the boy-butcher’s exposed strip of leg. “No one needs know.”

And so he is. Quiet, not cruel for all the world. Micolash’s eyes close on the feeling of being loved, if only in increments. There is a line in a play he remembers. They’d sat in the back row, the actors’ faces a bit of a blur behind the mask of their voices. Laurence’s breath had been in his ear. It goes (like this).

“My mouth, it’s full of ash.”

The deer’s aftertaste has burnt to nothing. Earlier on his tongue it had been tender and exquisitely cooked, the sauce a velvet current teasing for space between his teeth and the seam of his lips, itching to leak out, to drip down his chin.

Laurence will look up from his posture of the dead, halfway sprawled halfway kneeling, mouth-to-thigh and sharptooth elegance, his lips a bitten red. His thumb keeps on digging at the lean meat of Micolash’s leg, but gently.

“The kill does not make you one of us.”

The timid guest stills. It pains him, to hear the words. One of us is a clean line; a border, a divide, the chasm between the you and the I, a we-are-not-the-same professed in seductive half-tone. Why it hurts he does not quite fathom, for he has always known they were cut from different cloth and been at peace with the fact.

“Then what does?” his mouth asks before his mind can rein it in.

“A certain appetite for it.”

Laurence’s golden-green eye does not shy away from his. Micolash holds it, and in holding it finds he keeps his body taut and upwards, every muscle at a tight clench, thick blue veins tracing a snakepath under skin. The old jagged scar on his belly twitches, like an eyelid.

“You despise hunting. How many times have you said so?”

With a tilt of his head he seems to consider it.

“One doesn’t have to enjoy blood sport. One only has to grow into it.”

His slow, leisurely blink brings forth the gilded gleam of his long lashes. He has never been so magnificent as now, on his knees and near whispering, as if a saint at prayer.

“When your father was teaching you the name of all the bones in the human body, my father taught me about the fox, and the deer, and the birds. When I was ten, I watched him skin a hare. When I was fifteen it was he who watched me skin a hare.”

Micolash ponders the calluses on Laurence’s fingers, the marks of his scholar’s trade he has learned to love ever since their hands and bodies besides have begun to circle each other. Never has he stopped to wonder if they could have been there before the tomb surveys and bone-touching, before the cradle of the college and their twin shadows a-standing before it. Before him, in fact. In the time-before-time which he remembers most by the gentle rust colour of his father’s voice.

His bitten-off nails harden into the skin of his knee. Laurence rests a peace offering of a hand over his.

“I say I despise it, and this is true. I despise the hint of bloodthirst I have been taught to feed, one noble kill at a time. As a boy, when the fox season came, I watched my father atop his black mare, wearing the master huntsman's red coat, and knew it was my inheritance I was gaping at.”

He laughs, but mirthless. A joke at his own expense rising from the delicious back of his throat (an after-image of dormitory bed and soft kissing lies there).

“I watched the hounds eager for the rush, the riders too. I saw the fox darting across the moor as if in taunting, as if it knew it had to be made sacrifice for the satisfaction of men of high standing, and would not go down without a race.”

There is the arrowhead made by a number of horsemen chasing after the red fox— muscular thighs each coloured in different coats from white to dun to brown to black, hooves beating up the earth, shaking dust— gleaming spurs flanking mounts, wide nostrils flaring, reins tightened round gloved fingers— the pack of hounds, one-and-all, a hundred times four legs— and the ceaseless run of the prey animal, circling the impossible immensity of its own eyes.

There is that and more when the boy-killer speaks: without grief, but the simple knowing of his own nature.

“When I was old enough to join in, I did as was expected of me. I shouldered my rifle and took a splendid shot, and pretended nothing in the world had ever pleased me half so much.” He smiles: that secret smile Micolash knows from school, from their teenage mischiefs and takings-to-bed. “My cheeks were sore from all the grinning.”

When Laurence is done speaking, his lesser half realises their hands are touching in a parody of their first attempt at conciliation. They’d stood in the greenhouse on college grounds. Rain pattered heavy outside. A swarm of flies buzzing overhead. One of them had said, I have been wanting to do this for some time, and they had done it, pressing sweat-nervous palms together as if sealing a pact.

Today they are rehearsing the simple gentleness of this long-past gesture, and a god-to-be’s face appears infinitely weary.

“It is not the kill so much as the ritual that makes you a huntsman.”

There is a line in a play— this too rings theatrical, false, forced.

Something about the hunt has fractured an entente in the deep of each boy’s secret self. But you are not a child, Micolash thinks. It would not do to keep at the whims of his tender youth, when hiding from the fears sprouting in his belly was easier than talking them into shape. Now he is breathing them out he finds the relief wanting. More so the contrite acceptance on the other’s face: because he was born on these lands, and has been taught to perpetuate its traditions. Hereabouts the soil is stained with blood and doesn’t care.

He would like to mend it, to take his surgeon’s needle and thread and sew shut the hole in the earth (in the golden heart of the deer-est). He says, with wet in his eyes,

“You are no killer and you resent the ritual.”

“I know.”

“But you consider yourself a huntsman all the same.”

Laurence shrugs.

“Well, I was bred for it.”

He was bred for it, like a dog. A golden foxhound with beautiful eyes, a startling pink mouth, two rows of perfect pearlwhite teeth. A mathematically flawless saint: even the well-loved calluses on his hands part of God’s design. But these hands have killed, just as the boy-doctor’s have, and would that not make them equal?

His hand shies away from the milky white hand and the rest of the body there attached; from the possibility of a seedspill to come. They can be bold in college rooms or Yharnam inns, one time halfway there in a back alley come a mad blacknight— but not here where future golden gods are born and bred and ancestors keep watch. He is afraid he will think of the deer he has felled; that quick-pleasure will morph to grief; that he will catch himself yearning for the hunt again only to find kinship with his loyal slice of divinity, smiling on his chances.

He says in a shallow voice,

“We ought to sleep.”

Caught invert-eye behind his lids the image of the clearing where he could lay idle and part-clothed, one half of his shirt open to warm wantings. There a deer’s snout would nestle, try for his ribcage’s given arcs. He would bow to it. The deer which he sets fire to from behind a rifle’s barrel: he would bow to it. He would say I am sorry, God, I have felled you (before, he did not believe in God).

“And if sleep doesn’t come?” Laurence’s placid-pond bluetone reflects his hesitations.

The deer-killer (the god-killer) shuts his eyes as they lie down sideways. His arm comes round the goldenboy’s middle, palm flat and warm and selfish on a soft belly. There will be a time for plucking the fire not yet born from inside his entrails, so that he may play haruspex in mo(u)rning. In twenty years, which is a long time, which is the blink of an eye.

A shred of voice, moon-mercurial, catches on the skittish deathbird living in his throat.

“Then we will see.”