Rab: Childish Things

The children of the shamans tended to group together when I was young. We were a strange bunch - the offspring of parents who felt abandoned by their Oracle and so by their God, looked at slightly askance by the King’s followers and as a result not entirely welcome outside of Gealach’s Eyes. That didn’t stop us of course - we were children and charging madly through the tunnels, splashing around in the Moonpool and playing pretend at Poisonmaster or Fawntaker were all parts of our daily routine.

I joined these riotous cavalcades perhaps less often than the others - as I’ve said, I liked to spend time with my parents as they went about their duties - but that didn’t mean I was never there. I think I was seen as a mummy’s boy, a god-bothering and overly dutiful son, but I was allowed into the games anyway. We were all the same in some way or other, even if they did have to tell me to shut up about Gealach almost every time we played together.

The best game of all was Oathbreakers and Fawntakers. Well, it was the best for me, anyhow. It was the one that was most about Gealach and Oakfern: hunting down the Oathbreakers, capturing one and taking them back to the ‘Moonpool’ to ‘sacrifice’ them, honouring our God and our elders in our mimicry. At least that’s how I saw it, but as I say the others always thought me something of a god-botherer and they probably enjoyed the running and the play acting more than any link to the Eggbreaker.

When our magic arrived the games got better, albeit only after we all had our magic. There was boasting and bragging from Jatack, the first of us to feel a connection with the water, to such an extent that I frequently told my parents that I hated him. It was sheer jealousy and shame and as others in the group gained their powers, one by one before me, I would find myself sobbing angrily whenever I returned to the family den. Mother would flitter and shush me gently, but Father would calm her and eventually I would cry myself dry. He understood better, I think, that it was just childish frustration - and he was right, the anger, envy and embarrassment evaporated in an instant as soon as I was able to control water myself. It was only a couple of moons after Jatack first started flicking water at us, but it seemed like years at the time in the way that everything does to a child. It is all or nothing when you have nothing else to worry you.

I don’t remember if I was the absolute last of us, but I must have been close to it; certainly I only really remember all of us playing with magic from that point onwards, and our games became even more elaborate and extravagant. Whenever I was playing at Fawntaker I’d splash the ‘Oathbreaker’ I was chasing with as much water as I could drag from the tunnel walls, and if I was the Oathbreaker being chased I’d make little rivers of water run down from ‘wounds’ in my coat like blood. We could make our sacrifices ‘real’ now, wrap tendrils of water around the poor unfortunate soul playing the captured fawn while they played at asking for forgiveness. I’m not sure why nobody found it disturbing to see three and four year olds playing at this, but they never seemed to want to stop us. Perhaps it was the absence of the Oracle and the dark deeds of the King occupying our parents’ minds; the strangely adult games their children were playing probably passed entirely without notice.

We often made the tallest amongst us be the Oathbreakers and I have always been small - but, even if it was secretly sacrilegious, it was fun to play the bad fawn sometimes. There was something thrilling and oddly funny about running as fast as you can away from your friends and then later pretending to die as dramatically as was possible. You could pretend you had other magic and throw ‘fire’ at your attackers, or shout curses in a nonsense language that we were all sure must be what Blackwoods sounded like.

Jatack hated it though. He was a tall colt but he managed to avoid the normal teasing that would entail, possibly because of his furious reaction when Yeska called him Bighoof. He didn’t take well to teasing, even if it was from his little sister. Given his bragging and my jealousy, it made me want him to be the Oathbreaker even more and I was delighted whenever the rest of the group would side with me. It wasn’t often - I was the outsider, remember - but sometimes his brash boasting would get on the nerves of the others nearly as much as it got on mine and he’d be persuaded into it. Those were the best games.

Even once the Owl-blessed Oracle Crowe came into her place we continued our games. Things were still shivering and shaking across the herd - the young doe was a stranger, known to almost none of the herd at all, let alone the shamans, and the King was still behaving just as he had done before. We were still at liberty to do as we pleased, only the slow encroach of puberty ending the games.

It was in our fourth Autumn that the games began to change. There was something stirring in the brains and balls of the young bucks of the group, something telling us that soon it would be time to stop playing at pretend. The game changed from Fawntakers and Oathbreakers into faux rut battles which even the hinds would join us in. There was charging and jousting, and claiming of each other after each bout, childish whispered promises that next year, when it was real, we’d fight for our favoured partners for real, be mates for real, have our own children. It was all absolute nonsense, of course.

After all, we might have felt that something was about to change, but we were still children. As I’ve said before, children aren’t the most intelligent of creatures.