The Lion

First Two Chapters

Jad woke with a start. Get up. Get up. He knew better than to fall asleep.

Where is the lion?

Looking about, stomach fluttering, he popped up to his elbows. Late summer’s thin light couldn’t penetrate the darkness beneath the trees at the edge of the meadow, nor burn away the fog of sleep that had come over him. He wiped his eyes, counting the flock milling about the high rock he was lying on—and his stomach sank. One of the sheep was missing. Miu again. Always Miu. He couldn’t see her. He wondered if her being missing had woken him.

The bottoms of his torn, too-long pants had snaked around his leg; he struggled to stand. That’s when he was hit in the shoulder and thumped hard back down onto the rock he’d been napping on. Pain scoured his palms.

The lion! said the shock that shot through his bones.

But no. The hit had finally knocked the sleep from him.

Sham, he knew. Probably backing up now to hit him again. He turned to look up into the sheep’s cloudy, hate-filled, anvil eye. He grunted, leaned up and pushed her away by the face, stupid sheep, leaving a smear of blood from his skinned palms across the sheep’s muzzle.

Sham was the largest of his flock. She bleated at him again, a vomitous grunt, then trotted off and butted her sister, Shem, who had been dozing quietly. Shem woke bleating with alarm, sending a ripple through the peaceful flock. The lambs nearest the edges spilled into the meadow.

Stinking Sham. Jad stood again, groggy, picking a tiny pebble out of his palm. Could he not just leave Sham for the lion? One morning away is all it would take before the lion would come. Was there a way so it would only take Sham? It wasn’t fair. She terrorized her sister and the younger ewes. None of the other sheep would miss her.

But Father would. And he would know he had let the lion take Sham.

Father always knew when he lied.

The rocky meadow sharpened as he rubbed sleep from his eyes. Half the night he had stayed up in the blank, starless dark, hunkered here among the rocks with his crook near at hand, watching the shapes in the trees. Tapping the edge of his knife on his sleeve kept him alert. The flock had remained awake, watching with him, even the young lambs, knowing the lion was out there. He had seen it in the trees just yesterday, long and rangy, scars across its ribs, alone and low to the ground.

He had to be alert for it. Watchful. That was the last thing he told himself while he’d let his eyes close. So he could be alert for later.

Sham had riled up the flock and they were milling about, making it hard for Jad to count, but a minute later he verified what he had known instinctively at a glance. One missing.

Miu. Always Miu trying to sneak away. Looking for her mother, who used to disappear sometimes herself, until one day she had never been found, just last year after lambing season. Before that, Miu had stayed glued to her side.

Shading his eyes, Jad walked all four corners of the large rock. He couldn’t see blood, couldn’t smell blood. In the thickening afternoon, as the hottest part of the day came on, finally clearing away the mist that had covered the mountainside, if there were blood out there the air would know.

Far below, he could see the broad, lower hills where a thin line of smoke rose from Zua’s shrine down in the village. This time of day, Jamus normally offered some stinky weeds for sacrifice. Farther below in the distance, beside the glittering plain of the vast lake, he could make out the long smear of the town of Ren, the market town next to where the mountains met the plains. It was two days’ trek by foot when carrying a full pack of wool and meat for trade. From afar it always looked peaceful, on these rare days that the clouds cleared and the lands rolled away to the edge of the horizon away in greens and grays.

Today was extra clear. He could even see vast tower of Mount Ansus, the Spear, as they called it in Ren. He had heard it said that traders who came through Ren called it by other names, and navigating through lands and various nations, judging by how far away it was and in what direction, used its placement on the horizon as a guide. Jad had never seen its base—few people had—but he could see snow painting its sides not far above the line of the horizon, and its needle-thin peak fading into the sky even though there were no clouds. He didn’t expect he’d ever see the whole of it. Nobody ever would other than the gods.

His eyes pulled back to the line of smoke rising from the village. This was the first summer Father had trusted him to tend the flock alone, only the second time he’d be helping bring their wool and cheese to the market. His father was probably there with Jamus making an offering of his own to Zua for good luck with prices when Jad brought the flock down in a few days and they made the trek together. Ren’s traders enjoyed cheating Zuans like it was good fun.

His side throbbed from lying on the ground. He wanted to lie back down and sleep, resting for another long watch tonight. But he picked up his crook from where he’d laid it by the big stone, its center polished by the grip of his father’s hands, larger, tougher, than his. Too tall for him, he had grown to hate it. It swayed him as he walked, and caught between trees.

Miu missing is your fault. If you don’t find her soon, the lion will. If it hasn’t already.

With the crook’s butt end he nudged the most stubborn sheep aside, stepping into the middle of their bleating, braying indignation, and there he raised the crook high.

“Look at me, you brainless turds,” he said.

In one swift thrust, he brought the staff down hard enough to wedge it fast in the loose ground of the high meadow, down between two stones. “To me!” he said, for good measure—he hadn’t done this in months. “I want you to all stay within ten paces of my crook. Nobody pokes a nose out farther.”

A ripple passed through the flock. Those many pairs of awful anvil eyes turned his way. The strays who had trotted away slowly ambled back towards him.

“Good,” he said. “Ten paces. No more.”

The sheep wouldn’t move outside of that circle now. It was like he’d made an invisible bowl to put them in and they couldn’t get out. Not even Sham the trickster.

He felt a twinge of guilt for his trick, and with it a pang of annoyance. He had shown Father this trick last summer and Father had grabbed him by the shoulders and shaken him. “Don’t you ever do this again, Jad,” Father had said, flicking him across the ear so that it stung. “Don’t do it. It’s lazy and … Zua condemns the use of such … trickery.”

Jad had nodded, not understanding why Father wouldn’t let him use a method that actually worked. The sheep really listened and didn’t wander off. It was practically the only thing that did work.

But Father hadn’t let go of his shoulders, his nostrils flaring. “Don’t tell anybody about this! Not even Ez. Promise me you won’t!”

He did promise. And he had kept it. Jad hadn’t shown Ez, even when he really wanted to, those times Ez would talk all afternoon about how better it was to be a hunter like his father, never have the musk of sheep stink stuck on him—Baar, baar, Ez would yell at him, thrusting with his hips. This is what you’re really doing out here. Baar, baar…

Herding the sheep had been so much easier before he had promised.

But Miu was his sister’s favorite sheep. Father would understand him using the trick again just this once…

He stepped outside the swirling flock, not looking back. The problem now was just as big. Where to actually look for Miu? The meadow hung halfway up to the bottom of the sky. Black fuzz of forests lay below, the path back to the village leading off into the green, and nothing but hazy white peaks above him. Miu could have stumbled into any number of ravines or gullies and he’d never find her.

Well, if she could be anywhere, he figured he’d best start looking at the place where he least wanted to find her, the ravine by the river.

If Zua really were merciful, he’d find her before the lion found the flock while he was gone.

*

Up here on the mountainside, the sun much closer than down in the valleys, it scorched Jad’s face as he trod rock to rock. Moss filled the gaps between many of the boulders, making them slick, so he stepped high and judged his footing carefully. Too easily he could trip and twist an ankle and nobody would come looking for him for days. He’d be like old Manu, his father’s friend. Father had found his body a few years ago at the bend in the river not far from the village, a sheep carcass still hanging in his arms where the river had washed them up together onto the sandy shore. What was left of Manu’s lips had been peeled back in a grin, as if he were lying there happily hugging the decaying sheep.

He has honored Zua in being a true shepherd to the end, Father said that night in front of Zua’s shrine. Zua will honor him, and so shall we.

If Zua had wanted to honor him, Jad had thought, he could have given Manu legs that were the same length when he was born, and better balance. If Zua truly were merciful, he would have made Manu a smarter man who would have known to keep living down there in Ren, where his wife and family lived, and not join a small group of Zuans living in the mountains where his limp made him stumble along the sheep paths, and sometimes slip into the river.

Jad was no old Manu. He bounded with the grace of a goat, faster than old Manu had ever run. A true shepherd. And he had to run. He couldn’t leave the flock alone for long. It was only because it was Miu that he’d left his flock at all. If his sister hadn’t named the small sheep like a pet, maybe he wouldn’t feel such shame for letting her get lost. Baby lamb, she had named her, after her own name. Losing the sheep felt almost like losing his little sister.

His long careful strides carried him across the face of the mountain. The wind battered this side overlooking the lake. The trees in the open, stubbornly among the rocks, stayed low, wrinkled, old men, and so in a way this side was the safer side, where a good shepherd could see far—but move any distance toward the lee side and taller, brasher, darker trees soon closed in. Taller trees also lined the hillside above him, and as Jad ran, with one eye he watched their encroaching shadows in case one of them rose with teeth and crouched forward on quiet claws.

Numerous times he stopped, crouching with his hand cupped over his ear to shush the wind. He wasn’t alone. He could feel someone near, watching him. Zua is honoring you, his father had said when he had confessed he’d always had a good sense for when he was being watched. That night, they had brought an offering of honey to Zua’s altar at the edge of the village. To Jad it didn’t feel like he was being honored, unless honor felt like ants crawling all over his neck that he couldn’t bat away. His father had almost seemed angry when Jad had confided in him, so after that Jad kept his funny feelings to himself.

Birds sang in the tree line, and once the cry of a hawk far above stabbed down. The higher trees retreated near the ravine before they could pinch the rocky mountainside completely. The wind here chose to ram up the water’s cut and keep this part of the hillside nearly naked. Jad brought the flock here every so often—days when the flies buzzed into his ears and nose at the same time—as the ravine was a pleasant place to escape so he could breathe.

The nearer he came to the river, the stronger the sense of a presence grew, the sense that he wasn’t wanted, like he had broken into a home that wasn’t his.

The wind surging, he crouched behind a big rock, shading his eyes to peer into the path behind. Cold air tingled in the spaces between his teeth. Away from the trees and able to see more of the mountain above and the world below, the sky loomed larger. He blinked, shaking his hands, his fingers numb. Something was wrong here. A storm had grown in his chest, flashes of lightning shooting his eyes side to side, his heart beating thunder in his ears. And yet he couldn’t figure why. The long arrows of clouds zooming overhead made an anxious knot in his belly as he kept going toward the river’s rocky crevice. As soon as he checked here, he decided, he’d go back; he couldn’t leave the flock all alone for much longer. Not for one sheep, not with a lion around. Every step he took increased the risk that he’d return to a circle of guts and wool.

It was down by the edge of the ravine that he spotted a flash of white against the gray rocks. His spirits leapt. Miu. The thunder and the lightning was forgotten. Irritation thrust up from his feet and set him to moving. She was so close to the ledge, nose down over the edge. Stupid sheep. Everything he had been thinking faded away as he leapt rock to rock toward her, missing the confidence his crook gave him to help steady him over the larger, looser, tottering, rocks.

Like the one that tipped back, stumbling him, clapping down against another with a heavy, hollow clonk. Miu heard it, and looking back at the noise, bleated and took her first step as if to run away, nose pointed precariously down over the ledge.

Stupid sheep. Stupid sheep. Stupid sheep. Stop!

“Miu!” he yelled out, knowing she was just a sheep and wouldn’t know her name.

Not that his sister would stop either. So maybe she had named the lamb perfectly.

He was still twenty running paces away when the sheep’s fat rump tipped up, spilling her over the edge.

Stupid sheep!

Head over heels, she vanished.

Jad skidded to a halt, punching the air in frustration, and shouted a swear that echoed far down in the ravine over the hush of the rushing water. What would he say to Father? What would he say to his little sister? He couldn’t go after her. He thought of old Manu dragged from the river still clutching one of his sheep in his dead arms.

Then, to his astonishment, the ewe’s rump appeared again, as if lifted by an invisible hand, rising back up over the ledge and wiggling clumsily back down onto the grass.

Jad hunkered into a fighting stance. What…?

She’d risen as if being pushed up.

Miu bleated up into the air, gently, as if content, then trotted along the edge toward a sprouting of green.

Jad watched her trot away. The sense of a presence had clamped like a hand over his mouth and nose and ears. He felt uneasy, as if he had been spoken to and had not answered.

“Who’s there?” he asked, quietly first, thinking maybe there was somebody just out of sight, down over the edge of the ravine. Then louder, more bravely, disappointed in how thin his voice had sounded: “Who’s there? Show me!”

Yes. It was like he heard a chorus of voices breathe the word in the clouds above and from the rocks below.

The wind slowed, rising as a hot puff in his face. The clouds zooming overhead froze. Jad turned just in time to see the mountain above him wobble. It looked like it was inching lower, lower, Or am I falling? Then the mountain itself, to his surprise, slid away like water.

Jad felt sick. He plonked to his knees, heaving in cool air, a bubble rising in his throat. The land had shifted while the ground beneath his feet stayed firm. He took a few more gulps before he could look up again.

The ravine, the river, the mountain, were gone. All around him spread a vast green meadow. He shut his eyes tight, sure what he was seeing was a dream. Too big. No meadow, not even the plains that stretched to the east of Ren, could be so huge, and without flowers, or trees. It was flat and perfect with bright, low grass as far as the eye could see.

Under his palms, he sank into supple dirt, the soft grass stalks tickling his sensitive, scraped palms. He opened his eyes again, distantly noting that he should be afraid. But he wasn’t. This place, it wasn’t just in his imagination, he was really seeing it. He felt safe here, content, even knowing that he shouldn’t. The storm that had been raging in his chest settled. He no longer felt like he had been spoken to, but words sat heavily in his throat like there was something he was supposed to say.

Ten paces away from him stood a man at least twice as tall as him—and Jad was tall for his age, one of the tallest boys in the village. This man towered so high that Jad knew right away that he could not really be a man. In his hand the man carried a long, golden crook that shone like the sun itself were inside.

Zua.

With his lush golden beard and his tall, tanned legs showing beneath his clean tunic—the hue of the sky on a sunny day—he looked exactly as Jad had always pictured him.

Fear rumbled up through Jad from miles beneath him. He dropped his chin back down to the grass. “Forgive me, Zua, for not believing as my father does,” he said.

He waited with his head low. The rebuke would come.

Why else would the god Zua appear before me if not to punish me for being a wayward part of his flock? I’m no better than Miu, always running away.

Zua sometimes rewarded old shepherds who had kept their flocks safe, brought them peace and ease in ending, and punished those poor shepherds who strayed, leaving their flocks in harm. Those bad shepherds, he stranded them with their souls locked inside their bodies for the beasts of Zua’s eternal forest to feed upon.

Would Zua use his golden crook to guide him gently nearer, or with the butt end push him away, as befit one who didn’t deserve to be in Zua’s flock?

I left my flock, Jad thought. Alone with the lion near.

And worse: his father had always warned him: Stop asking so many questions. The sheep don’t question the shepherd. You’ll stray too far someday, boy, too far for Zua to bring you back.

Jad’s knees trembled. He should have listened to his father. He had been right.

Please, Zua, forgive your lost lamb, he prayed, as his father often called him.

As he knelt quaking in the grass, his knees wobbled; he really needed to pee. Large, sandaled feet thudded a couple of paces away from his head. Zua was standing over him. Jad waited for the touch of the crook.

Push or pull?

When Zua passed him by, he raised his head and peered back beneath his arm. Has he pushed me away? Zua had stopped five paces behind him, bending low to Miu. She was here in Zua’s pasture with him, chomping vigorously on the soft grass of perfect green like she’d never eaten before in her life.

Zua petted her woolly head, stood by her looking off into the distance, leaning on his golden crook. When the ewe moved a few paces away to keep grazing, the god did not move.

“Please … forgive your lost lamb,” Jad said aloud this time, hoping, but also fearing, to gain Zua’s attention.

He waited, his blood beating like a drum in his ears in the breathless land.

“Zua … I’m here … Jad…” he said. And lowered his head, if not his eyes.

Zua’s golden crook gleamed in the sun. But where is the sun in this strange place? Jad couldn’t see it. There was only grass to the horizon, no trees, no other people. Formless lumps in the distance might have been other sheep grazing. The clouds above hung like a puff of cold breath never finished. Every blade of grass looked the same, like little spikes.

He heard his father’s voice: Don’t question him, fool, and he lowered his head again.

He stayed that way for a few moments. Then Jad pushed to his knees, raising his eyes to gaze upon Zua directly. In his mind he could hear his father yelling at him. Trust in Zua, boy! Why do you always have to stray?

Zua did not seem to notice. Jad looked back toward the unmoving, treeless horizon. The air here smelled sweetly of fresh grass. It was peaceful. Yet … this is wrong.

He couldn’t say how. But he knew.

Don’t question the will of Zua, he could hear his father scolding. Kneel, boy!

No air pushed against him, and though he could see into the far distance, he felt closed in, as if he could reach out and touch two walls to either side of him.

Zua had saved Miu from her fall, but what did Zua do in this place?

Hearing movement behind him, Jad turned to see Zua bent over the patch of grass Miu had eaten. Where he touched, more grass pushed up from the ground, as perfect as the rest, creaking like leather as it rose. When it was the same height as all the rest, Zua stood rigidly again, a contented smile on his broad face, gazing off into the distance.

Trust in Zua, boy!

Zua looked like an idiot.

“Zua?” said Jad, waving, feeling invisible.

Jad stood, and Zua didn’t budge. After a moment, Jad circled around him toward Miu.

It was like Zua didn’t know he was there.

Remembering the lion then made his feet move. It didn’t matter that Zua wouldn’t talk to him, he had come to gather Miu. He had to get back. He had a flock to protect.

It was when Jad clutched Miu by the wool on the back of her neck to lead her away that she bleated in surprise and Jad saw Zua’s head turn his way.

A drop of fear made a long fall inside Jad. Zua turned Miu’s way—at the sheep, Jad realized.

Then Jad saw Zua’s eyes for the first time and he wished he really were invisible. Zua’s cloudy, anvil irises, the same as the flock he watched over, turned their height upon him.

Stupid sheep, stupid sheep, stupid sheep, he remembered thinking.

A dumb haze of malice crossed Zua’s wide, kindly face, the determined look Shem got right before she backed up and rammed his legs.

Get me out of here.

Zua’s fingers, like cords of rope at the end of his long, muscular arms, tightened around the shaft of his long crook as the large man, his father’s god, turned and took a step in his direction that quaked the land—Zua’s land—beneath him. The sky dimmed. Somehow he knew that his desire to leave, his defiance, was souring the air of this place. It wasn’t Zua’s doing, and Zua didn’t like that either. Those dumb anvil eyes burned into him.

Get me out of here. From somewhere came to Jad an understanding. Yes, he could do that. He could leave.

Jad saw the air quaver, shimmer, and Zua, too, wavering like a ripple in dark water. Zua came stomping big steps toward him, reaching for his neck with fingernails that each ended in nails that looked like little hooves.

Jad lost a step, hearing the echo of what sounded like a word spoken in the sky and in the rocks—My voice? It resonated from the flat, golden light, and from the blackness he saw when he closed his eyes.

Yes.

Then, just like the ravine before, Zua and everything around him ripped away—the unmoving, too-large sky, and the grass that stretched on forever. Sheep paradise. The ravine’s bullying wind hit Jad like a shove in the back, ruffling his hair.

He was back. He huffed down big breaths, relieved. The ravine had returned, the drop just five paces away. Its white water gnashed far below. Alive.

He felt a burning against his neck, and realized it was the lingering heat from Zua’s fingers grasping for his throat.

Jad plunked down on a rock, the blood thumping in his ears nearly as loud as the rapids. There was a lot here he had never really noticed before: the wintery smell of the forever snow above, the dry musk of the dust swept high from the plains miles below, the nervous scent of the storm gathering over the far mountains. Added together, they smelled like home.

Miu put her head down, took a mouthful of grass, then spit it out and bleated.

Jad laughed. Too loudly. And then laughed at how it was too loud. After she had eaten the grass in sheep paradise, the thin blades by the ravine must taste like … well, he didn’t have a comparison for that. Not as good anyway. It would be a while before Miu came to appreciate ungodly grass again.

He led Miu away from the ravine by the scruff of her neck. The fear had returned: the lion—against which Zua won’t be a help—where was the lion? Zua didn’t care about lions.

Or Jad’s father who loved Zua so much, he realized. He didn’t think Zua cared about anything but sheep and grass.

Zua is an idiot.

He hefted Miu, carrying her across his shoulders, moving much faster that way, starting with long loping strides back across the hillside of small, scrubby trees. By now he might have lost half the flock to the lion. The dread of that idea filled him.

Or the whole flock, if they couldn’t flee farther than thirty paces from the staff.

He might return to a massacre. Would the guts and bones stay inside the circle as well? He’d never be able to explain that to Father. And Father would know if he told a lie.

The same way he would know he was telling the truth about Zua.

He couldn’t wait to tell Father about Zua.

 *

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