One Night

Sayblood's Children: Part Two

Sayblood’s Children is a folk horror/romance novella, serialized in twelve parts. This is Part Two.

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Previously, isolated farmer Othniel Brack made a startling discovery on a lonely beach.

In this chapter, Othniel brings the strange guest back to his home and deliberates about what to do with her.

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Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

I used to walk in darkness, and there was blood and beauty there.

I wore red, long flowing rivers of fabric to puddle about my feet, and precious stones and gems lay tangled in my long white hair beneath a pewter crown. My skin was unburned by the great fire that raged eternally above the ceiling, in lands we had only dreamed of in the nightmares of childhood, and everyone around me was the same: gray skin, white hair, and large, pale eyes to peer into shadows, to follow our slate-cobbled streets, to probe into corners and see through the skeletons of underground thornbushes where our punished criminals hung like bruised fruit.

We lived and died at the whim and will of Sumble, the great Belly in which we built our homes. Beyond His many mouths lay only emptiness. This we were told, and this we believed.

The sprawling city of my birth lay deep underground where my people thrived and multiplied and owned every street, every cavern, the very air, and I was among their royalty. The streets of the Underside were lit with eerie lights, cold and flickering and dim.

My father wore crimson, too, and he was called One Prince, being the Grand Delius of Sumble’s Appetite and the Lord of the Underside. I pray that his name means nothing whatever to you. I wish now that it meant as much to me, though as a child I knew no differently; I merely accepted him as the man who made me.

I loved him, and I craved love from him. But love was in short supply.

Despite my father’s careful invocations and rituals during my time in the womb, I was born with withered hands. Children in the Underside are often born with bits and pieces missing. I would be maimed for life, a dark fate for any child, but the shame deepened for the daughter of One Prince, the fruit of his seed, his heir. I would need my hands to learn the rites and rituals, the invocations, the appeals. I would need my hands to pray to Sumble whose guts formed the walls of our world and whose hymns thrummed in the cavern shadows, and to make the sacrifices necessary to appease Him. And, most of all, I would need my hands to kill so that I could maintain my title, and when my father would eventually die I could crush those that would usurp my seat. If I was to be Grand Selius of Sumble’s Appetite and Lady of Underside, I would need my hands.

So, as was the custom in those days, my father sacrificed my mother to Sumble and hung her body on the thorns, and my hands were healed. This was love, as I understood it.

Thus they named me Sayblood, the Blood Woman, and my father was pleased.

*******

Othniel knelt on the beach for a long, long time. He knelt until his knees ached and his hands numbed from the chill. The cold wind off the sea stirred his dark beard, his hair. He stared at the pale, sodden shape before him, and he wondered how to proceed. The gulls wheeled overhead, cackling among themselves.

If she had been any other woman, any other person of any kind, he would not have hesitated to lift her up onto Peg the pony and take her to his warm cabin, away from the wind. Feed her, perhaps, and help her find her way home. It’s what any decent man in the wilderness would do for another human being. He had done it before, with shipwrecked sailors and lost Native children alike.

But those sharp teeth. That scarred skin.

Those eyes.

Othniel tapped a stone on the ground before him with an absent finger, impatient with himself. He feared this woman, this creature, whatever she was. He feared her, even as she had sobbed her way into unconsciousness moments after waking, arm still draped over her face to shield her gaze from the sun. Did witches and shapeshifters not take the form of vulnerable things—women, children, wounded animals—to entice the foolishly compassionate to their doom?

And something else bothered him: where had she come from? Though she was damp, she did not look as though she had washed up from the surf. She was curled into the beach as if she had chosen to lie there.

It was Peg, snorting on top of the bluff, that finally interrupted Othniel’s thoughts, forced him to make a decision. To move.

He straightened, knees stiff, and walked forward slowly, closing the safe distance between him and the woman. He leaned down and touched her shoulder, a tentative test. She did not flinch or shift, did not wake. Her scarred flesh was cold under his fingers. Dangerously cold. If he did not take her to shelter, she could die of the cold alone.

An image rose in his mind, then, uninvited: this woman waiting until they were safe within the walls of his cabin before she slithered and slipped into her proper form and caught him unaware, all fangs and claws and a ridge of venomous spines or a whip-like tail.

Perdition, Othniel thought, a curse, as he imagined long sharp fangs sinking into his back and shuddered. Why me?

Carefully, he lifted her up into his arms. She was surprisingly heavy, dense. Clearly alive, not a corpse.

Once he stood up with her in his arms, he realized that his mind had been made. He couldn’t very well put her back down. Othniel stepped carefully along the beach to a place where the climb upward was more gradual, less straight, and zig-zagged his way back up to the bluff where Peg waited, munching, impassive. The woman did not stir at all in his grip.

He settled her onto Peg’s back and climbed up behind her, holding her in place with his arms on either side as she slumped over the pommel, her white hair falling like a curtain over the pony’s soft brown neck, fluffy with winter coat.

“Alright, then. Home, Peg,” he said, and clicked his tongue, and the pony clipped sure-footed along the bluff and back through the woods-road, toward the cabin where the chimney smoke rose unwavering.

The whole way home, Othniel felt the eyes of the woods on him. He knew now, for certain, that he was being watched. But he could never hope to suspect why.

*******

The woman—the creature, the witch—was pregnant.

This Othniel discovered with a shiver of terror when he settled her on the floor before the woodstove on a pile of quilts and furs and he finally looked closely at her in the familiar surroundings of his own home. The pale belly under her simple dress was swollen with child.

This he had not anticipated. He backed away from her where she lay on the floor and went first for his rifle, which he held down by his legs just in case—sharp fangs, sinking into his back—and then he took his pipe down from the kitchen shelf. He lit it with shaking fingers and stood at the window, looking out at the lateness of the hour, leaning the rifle against the wall. The sun was setting earlier these days, and already it had dipped behind the trees, bathing the land and the cabin in shadow.

Othniel considered, puffing absently. Now that she was in his house he had crossed both a literal and spiritual threshold. But he had to take her to the Big Island. She could not stay here. The very idea made his skin crawl.

He glanced out again at the gathering gloom. It was too late to take her anywhere this evening, as he did not relish crossing the strait in the dark. It was difficult enough in the daylight.

For one night, he needed to mind her. Only one.

Othniel turned back from the window when he heard her make a noise, a slight mewling sound and a slow, painful cough.

The big, eerie eyes opened and stared right at him.

Othniel was very aware of the rifle, down by his leg.

The woman swallowed. When she spoke, her voice had a wind-bitten rasp to it.

“Is this still above?” she asked.

He tilted his head, not sure he had understood her, and found that his heart was pounding with fear. “What’s that?”

“This,” she said. “Is this…is it still above?”

“Above what?”

She stared at him, hard, and seemingly made up her own mind about something. Because she changed the subject, blinking languidly. “I did not know it would be so cold here, but at least the brightness no longer burns.”

She had a strange, low way of speaking. The inflections were all wrong and Othniel found it difficult to catch the rhythm of her words as she said them. He had heard plenty of voices in his lifetime from various places all over the world, many languages, a tapestry of human sound, and could not place her thread within it. This possibly disturbed him more than all the rest.

“Tomorrow morning I’ll take you away from here,” he said, “to a place where you’ll be safe.”

Her gaze was unwavering. “Am I not safe here?”

“Safe enough, if it’s safety you’re truly after.” The rifle glinted in the firelight, and her teeth were so sharp. Othniel cleared his throat.

She was quick, at least, and caught his meaning. “If I was after anything else I would have taken it already,” she said, and her thin lips curled up a little. “I am no stranger to killing for my own sake. It would not be difficult.”

Othniel didn’t doubt it, and he said so.

She slowly pinned her hands to her sides and pushed herself up to a sitting position, grunting with the effort, curling over her pregnant belly. The fire lent an uneasy flickering glow to her corpse-like skin, as if she was lit from within, muscle and gristle visible from without. She peered around the cabin, taking it in, studying it. It was clear that such a place was foreign to her.

“The lights here are all golden,” she said, a flavor of marvel in her tone, softening the rasp of it. “Gold and warm.”

Then, under her breath, she whispered something Othniel did not catch. He tensed, thinking perhaps it was a spell or incantation, but nothing happened. Nothing changed. Just a pale woman, arms settled over her belly, staring into the place where the glow of the flame was visible through the woodstove’s iron door.

She looked up at him again. “It is customary where I come from to exchange names. Is that not the custom here?”

There was gentle humor in the question and Othniel felt himself relax, ever so slightly. “My name is Othniel,” he said.

“Othniel,” she echoed. “May you make a choice meal. I am called Sayblood.”

Sayblood. As if anything about her could get more eerie. And there was nothing he liked about the statement may you make a choice meal. But she said it glib, casually, as if it was the most normal thing on earth. The way someone might say, God bless you after a sneeze.

Her teeth were so sharp.

There was an inquisitive part of Othniel that wanted to know more. Wanted to know where she had come from, and why. But he closed that door quickly. The less he knew about this strange woman, the better. He only had to guard himself against her for one night, and then he would take her away to the Big Island, and she would no longer be his concern.

He began to crave the dawn more than he ever had before.

“In this other place where you intend to take me,” Sayblood said, “are there others? Like you? Like this?”

He nodded. “The world is a big place. You’ve just found yourself in a very small corner of it. On the Big Island there are fisherfolk who travel back and forth to the mainland in their boats. You can go wherever you please, settle wherever you like.”

In truth, he found it difficult to picture her settling anywhere at all with her unusual look and manner, but even so, he wanted to give her some kind of hope.

She swept a long-fingered hand over the place where her child grew, her gaze hazing distant, as if she was peering through the wall to the far horizon. “The world is a big place,” she echoed, quietly. “The vast world above. So said Shrike, and so it is.”

It took Othniel a moment to realize she wasn’t speaking to him, but to the child. He waited, to see if she would speak to him again, but she did not.

It was in that moment, in the waning daylight, that Othniel caught a shiver of movement outside the window and he turned to see a dark, hulking shape vanish into the black trees.

You’re going to let it in, Brack.

Bill’s words from earlier in the day came back to him then, and he glanced at the woman sitting before the woodstove. Bill was daft, not a prophet. He saw shadows and shapes, heard whispers that were not there. If by some miracle he predicted the arrival of this strange woman, this Sayblood, it meant little, really. Nothing solid to fear. Just the ghosts in the wild man’s imagination.

So I let her in, and here she sits. But that doesn’t mean she’ll stay, Othniel thought. By this time tomorrow she’ll be gone, and that will be that.

The rifle glinted in the firelight, and the woman’s teeth were so sharp.

*******

It was a long night, and Othniel did not sleep.

He tidied the cabin, quietly. He sat in a chair by the window and puffed at his pipe, watchful, alert. He feared the moment he might fall asleep and did everything in his power to avoid it. He imagined the woman rising, changing, and leaping at his throat. The rifle lingered nearby, within easy reach.

He did not offer Sayblood any food. Some part of him, some superstitious part, expected that feeding an eerie stranger only gives them permission they should not have. And another part of him worried that, if he asked her if she wanted food, she would ask for flesh. Instead, he gave her a blanket to cover herself with, and that was all. She took it gratefully and slept. Or at least she appeared to.

Once or twice over the long hours of night Othniel thought he heard the sound of heavy footsteps outside, the shadow of gloomy darkness passing by the windows, a smudge of pale bonelight as a misshapen face flickered at the glass and then away. Once or twice the woman murmured in her sleep, and her odd words and dialect made everything she said sound like a wicked curse. Othniel tensed in the dark whenever she spoke, hand lifting, ready for the rifle.

To calm himself, Othniel imagined the boat, the rowboat he kept stowed in a quiet cove on the west side of the little island. He imagined them both in the boat, crossing the strait. He imagined the fisherfolk welcoming her in, and he imagined leaving her there, coming home to his quiet cabin, alone. A solitary winter. He could almost taste it.

It was in the hour before dawn that the woman sat up suddenly from her place on the floor, wide eyes terrifying and terrified in the darkness, and she stared at the space behind Othniel’s left shoulder as if something stood there.

“Shrike,” she hissed. “Shrike, you bleed! God! The thorns!”

Othniel watched her, speechless with fear.

She rose to her feet, still staring at the spot over his shoulder, lifting a long finger to point at what only she could see. The fire had died down to embers and now bathed her in blood-red, her tattered dress and pale skin ghostly and sinister, her big eyes white and empty in the strange light.

Othniel’s fingers reached for the rifle and closed around the barrel, cold under his grip, and he pulled it to himself to cradle it in his arms. It was loaded; he had made sure of that.

Just as suddenly, Sayblood shivered violently, seeming to wake at the sound of her own harsh voice. She closed her eyes against a wave of pain, then glanced at the place over Othniel’s shoulder again. Only then did she meet his gaze, sadly.

“My apologies,” she said, so softly. “I did not know I brought him with me.”

And then she turned, lay back down, and she slept.

It was the first time since their meeting on the beach that Othniel saw her afraid, and something deep within his heart—buried under the terror he felt—squeezed for her. Witch or shapeshifter, selkie or kelpie, whatever she might be…she was not impervious to pain, to terror, to nightmares.

It humanized her. And it made him all the more wary.

He shook away these thoughts and set the rifle back down on the floor, his heart still thundering in his ears.

She could not stay here. She could not bring the curse of herself to his quiet winter. Dawn was rising; all of this would soon be over.

Even so, with the light growing in the east, Othniel found it difficult to ignore the feeling of a cold hand on his left shoulder, where Sayblood's frightened stare had landed and lingered.

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