I hate the smell of blood. I got to the forest that day with my knife sharp and my mind made up. I had never killed anything before. If we had worked a farm as most did, death would have become a familiar thing long before my thirteenth year.

I could steal with dexterity and without remorse, but I did not harm living things. I never hunted for additional food for us, though it would have been easy enough to snare a rabbit or a bird and we could have eaten the meat and sold the pelt or the feathers. What little meat we did eat we bartered for.

The chicken was there where I had left it, pecking at the ground and stumbling over the vine that restrained it. I laid down my cloak and the jars and watched it. Her. I knew it was a female, a hen, not a genderless thing. She was only a year or two old, large and healthy, her rust-colored feathers smooth, her small beak sharply orange, her eyes busy and glittering. She made quiet little noises as she pecked, held her wings half-raised at her sides. I untied the vine from the bush and wound it on my hand, drawing her to me.

How does one kill a chicken, a moving thing? I stared at her. She blinked incessantly. I wound the vine around her twice to bind her wings, then pinned her to the ground with one knee and drew my knife, quickly, held her head still and pierced her throat.

She didn’t make a sound but the blood that spattered on my hand was so warm that I jerked back and she just as quickly hopped up, tottering on her bound feet, blood wetting her chest feathers and spattering on the ground, on my hands, on my shirt as I lunged after her. I grabbed her by the feet and she fell over, blood was on my face as I grabbed my knife and plunged it in her chest, deep, to the hilt. She shook and jerked a moment more, then finally, finally just lay still. Her eyes were still open and glittering.

I pulled out my knife, then ran to the edge of the clearing and retched into the undergrowth. How do people kill, how does it seem so easy, so business-like? I had watched the butcherings at farms before, always from a distance, but it seemed so orderly and unthinking. Boys much younger than I handling the knife, the bodies, catching the blood without seeming to notice, talking and laughing as they did, then stopping to sit at a huge lunch spread out on tables under the trees nearby.

I took off my shirt and nearly retched again when I saw the blood. Some man I would make for my mother and sister, a very wall of protection, sick and weak because of a chicken’s blood.

I wiped my face with the inside of my shirt, then walked back to where the hen lay. I untangled the vines, then sat down on a nearby rock and began to work. Sick or not, I must pluck and gut her before we could make any use of her. It was an hour or more before I was through: the meat washed and packed in one clay jar with cold creek water over it, the offal in the other, the feathers washed and rolled inside large leaves and bound with string. I set it all carefully in the small cave, pulled bushes in front, then walked slowly down to the stream.

The water was cold and the most I ever washed in it was my hands and feet, but today I stripped and stepped in to the deepest part, scrubbing my skin and hair and face. I gasped from the cold when I ducked my head under. The stream flowed down from the mountain. I got out and pulled on my pants, shivering, then knelt and scrubbed my shirt in the clear water. Only when it was completely clean would I let myself stop, lay down in a sunny stretch of thick grass, and sob into my hands until I went to sleep.

That was ten years ago and it marked the end of childhood.

When we returned to the desert settlement that winter, my father was gone. He left no explanation and no one had a reason or even a time when he had disappeared. Had he been gone all the warm season, too, or had he been killed? Did he escape with a caravan or try to cross the desert to reach us in the city? We did not know.

I still do not know, and here I am crossing the desert just as he might have, walking my way across sand dunes and ignoring the wavy trees that appear and fade away back into sand.

I am nowhere close to the old settlement, though. We wintered there that year, my mother and sister and I, since we had nowhere else to go, but the next spring we left and never returned. We worked the market stall as usual through the warm season then lived there through the winter, shutting ourselves as best we could with walls made of stick and straw and mud, competing with the vagrants for wood to burn, eating as meagerly as possible to stretch our little store of provisions.

We had enough until spring to live on but the winter was cold, bitter cold, and long. By the time the snows finally melted and green began to show through again, my mother was more frail than she had ever been, quietly wheezing with every breath, her hands trembling all the time, her hair and skin dull gray. My sister and I nursed her through that summer. We fed her every good thing we could find and kept fires going through the day to warm her always-chilled body. We looked at each other in fear as the mornings grew cold again. She could not survive another winter, we knew. We had enough food to survive on but the cold would take her.

My sister was waiting for me one morning when I returned to the stall at dawn. Mother was still sleeping, bundled in all three of our blankets beside the fire though the air was beginning to warm. Serei was sitting beside her silently, her hair coiled in a long braid like a crown on her head. She did not speak until I unloaded and sat down next to her. She was just like Mother, calm to the point of stoicism. She looked at me.
“Mother will die in a few weeks without better shelter, without medicine,” she said.
I nodded. It was no secret.
“There is a man who comes to the stall every day.” She paused. “He can help her. He will help her. He is rich and has a good house on the edge of the city.”
“What man?” I asked.
“Jofthar. I do not know that you have seen him. He comes always at midday while you are out in the forest. He buys, always, whatever I recommend to him. He does not seem to note the price of things.” Her face was expressionless. “He is not young, but not old. He has a farm further out but he lives here in his house and attends the court every day.”
I held up my hand. “Jofthar. Where is his farm?”
“From the north gate of the city, straight out until the crossroads, then all the land from there to the forest. It is a large farm from what he says. He even has a small herd of cows.” She hesitated for a second, then looked slightly amused. “He is proud of his cows.”
“Why does he want to help Mother?” I knew already. There was only one reason a wealthy farmer would help a poor old woman. “Why, Serei?”
She looked down at her hands. “He will marry me,” she said, quietly.
“And you? You would be pleased with this?” To this question, too, I knew the answer.
She looked straight at me. “I would be pleased to have Mother alive and strong again. I would be pleased to have a warm home for you and her and me. I would be pleased to forget about desert settlements and filthy market stalls and selling things that do not belong to us. I would be pleased…” She stopped and I watched her eyes blink, rapidly, until she forced the tears away and continued. “I would be pleased for you to learn a trade besides scavenging and for our mother to have peace and rest and a good bed to rest on as she grows old.”
I stood up and carried over a few more sticks for the fire. “When does he want an answer?”
“In three or four days, he said. He is at his farm now to oversee one of his cows calving. He said he wanted an answer when he came next time.” She stood too and brushed off her skirts. “Precious cows,” she muttered.
I took the corn cake she handed me and tied on my cloak. At the rear of the stall I stopped and looked back at her as she arranged the produce of the day. Her hair shone where the sun hit it. “Serei. Is he a good man?”
“Good enough,” she answered, not turning around. “Good enough.”

I did not rest that afternoon as I usually did. I gathered a double supply of all the ripe nuts that had fallen, bundled half and put them away in the cave. I netted a half dozen fish and left them in a trap in the creek. I had grown more adept at catching and killing live things in the last two years. I gathered a large mound of willow branches and stripped their leaves. I needed more. I was not used to hoarding in abundance but gathering little by little as a day needed, giving the forest time to replenish itself.

Tomorrow I needed the day for other things, however, and I must have a store to bring home tonight and tomorrow night. I searched out the last of the mushrooms and wrapped them in cool leaves. The berries were gone already, most of the herbs gone too. I gathered all I could find of them and spread them to dry under weighted bark.

Then I sighed and pulled out a coil of string from the back of the cave. I had used the bird snares only once before, last summer when a stretch of hot and dry weather had steadily burned away my normal resources. Birds were always plentiful. I set the snares in the six largest trees, then gathered my load for that night and began the walk back to the city.

We did not speak of Jofthar that night, or of the fact that the air was chill enough to see our own frosty breath in it. We ate quietly. Mother sat propped up against the wall and sipped a cup of warm broth. I slumped in the corner, exhausted, and fell asleep as soon as I finished eating.

The next morning I made my usual raids before dawn and left after eating breakfast, trotting away in the usual direction. As soon as I was out of the market, though, I turned and went straight toward the north gate. I had no other plan for survival than my sister marrying this farmer, but I would know what kind of man he was before I consented. Even though I was younger, I was still the man in the family. She would not marry if I forbade it, though it seemed certain Mother would die if I did.

It was a long distance to Jofthar’s farm. I usually crossed the south or western plains to the forest at their edges, for the mountains were closer. The north plains were large and distant, the foothills barely visible across them. The crossroads, where Jofthar’s land began, was two hours away at best, even at a steady jog.

The road was busy with market traffic, farmers bringing in the last of their orchard fruit and surplus grain. The market would all but close within another week as the farmers settled onto their land for winter. It would be only the town dwellers, the court officials and servants, the vagrants left in the city. And us, huddled in our stall, watching the winter steal away our mother.

I quickened my pace, coughing, to get out of a cloud of dust stirred up by a clumsy wagon driver. The meat sellers were bringing the best of their meat to market in this last week, when it was cold enough that they could be displayed without rotting in summer heat. The wagon I had met was loaded with sheep to be butchered just outside the city gate and then sold for a higher price because of its freshness. I shuddered. I was glad to be going the other way.

When I reached the crossroads I stopped and asked a man at one of the roadside stalls if he knew of a farmer named Jofthar. The man squinted at me in the bright sun. He was old, bent over, dressed in worn robes the same color as the dust of the road. He held up an apple.

“This very apple, smell it? Fresh!” He held it under my nose. “This very apple came from Jofthar’s farm.” He held up a pear, brushed it off with his sleeve. “Feel this pear? The peak of ripeness! This pear, too, came from Jofthar’s farm.” He reached for a cluster of grapes and I spoke before he could.
“Ah, so you work for Jofthar then?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking, in a way, I work his farm, yes.” He leaned across the stall and smiled. His teeth were yellow and his breath stank of garlic and cheap beer. “I do indeed help Jofthar in the manner of keeping over-ripe fruit from his trees.” He winked. “These grapes, too, from Jofthar’s farm. They make the best wine.”
“Thank you, n-no,” I stammered. “Which way to his farm, then?”
“Down the west road about a half mile. Only one down that way. Watch the gatesmen, they’re in foul moods today.” He wheezed out something like a laugh and tossed me an apple. “Here, take it, free from Jofthar. And don’t tell him I sent you.” He wheezed again, then turned to a lady swathed in black. “Dear lady, smell this freshness! Pears, you well know, are what the best physics prescribe to relieve the heaviness of a mourning heart.”

I ate the apple as I walked down the road toward Jofthar’s farm. It was fresh and perfectly ripe, not the kind of produce one would waste on a nowhere roadside stall with only five buying customers in a day. The old man was a thief, gleaning the edges of the large farm to fill his stall. A thief like me.

I slowed down when I saw the large gates set among a grove of terebinth trees, but kept walking when I saw the two men standing at each side. I had no reason to give for a visit onto Jofthar’s farm. I did not want to say who I was. I had thought of no produce to sell or explanation to give. Normal farms do not have gatesmen.

I walked another half mile, well out of sight of the guards, then vaulted the fence and crept to edge of the field. There was a large orchard on my right and a large wheat field, already harvested, on my left. I needed to see Jofthar, and if he were here to watch his cows, I needed to get to the barn.

——————–

This is my attempt to force myself to reach one of the big goals of my life: to have a novel written (and at least moving toward published) by the age of 30. My 30th birthday is June 29th of 2011, and as of June 17th, 2011, I have over 50,000 words written. I’m publishing Thief as a serial novel here, in its very rough, unedited form because it helps me stay accountable. I have to keep writing so I can keep posting.  Once the whole thing is written, I’ll edit, revise, and then publish as an indie ebook. Till then, read & comment as you like. Feedback is welcome.

Thanks for helping me reach my goal.