Pain Wins

There was no meat. We huddled by the fire while the snow fell. All season we’d been looking for mammoths on the ice, but there were no mammoths left. Most of us fell and died. My mate, my child’s mother, had fallen. Only a handful of us were left.

Now my child looked across the fire with anger in his eyes. “Why can’t you find meat. I’m hungry.”

It was painful to see him starving. I spread my hands. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not good enough.” 

Moss Teeth gnawed a stick. “There’s no prey anywhere. It’s not you. It’s the world.” 

“Tomorrow we’ll look again.”

“Maybe we’ve come to the end of the world.” Bad Face squinted into the flames. “No one here but us.”

As if in answer, a shape came out of the snow towards us. We readied our spears and axes, but it was just an old man. He was thin and tall and strange looking, but still old, and alone in the blizzard.

“There’s no food here for you or for us, old man.”

Moss Teeth still held his axe. “We could eat him.”

“Go. There’s no room at this fire.”

The old man took a handful of dust from a pouch. “I brought my own fire.” He threw it over the flames, and they roared in our faces. We rolled away into the snow, howling, slapping embers from our ragged pelts. 

We hunched together, afraid. The old man wore the shaggy ochre skin of an animal I’d never seen. He hunched over a gnarled stick with a strange skull affixed at the top, and pointed across the fire. “I have no child. I have been through the world and found power you could not imagine, but I have no child. I will take this one.”

“This one is mine.”

“Nevertheless, I will take him.”

From another pouch he drew a different dust and blew it out, thicker and hotter than fire smoke. We choked and cried, writhing in the dirty snow. It blinded us; it made us claw at our throats; it puffed out our flesh in red panic. It felt like crawling fire. 

I couldn’t find my child but I could hear him. “Father, help. Why don’t you help me?” 
 

By the time we could see again, the old man was gone.

He took my son. The fire was out. 

I stood with my axe. “I’ll go and get him. You stay here. Start the fire.”

Bad Face shook his head. “That’s a sorcerer. Bear Tribe met one. He was tall and skinny and he killed a lot of them with magic. You can’t fight him. He’ll eat you.”

“Those are just tricks. I won’t let him eat anybody. I couldn’t save his mother but I want to keep my child. I can’t make any more.” 

I took my axe and set off through the snow after the sorcerer. 

The blowing storm filled in his tracks and I lost the trail. I was still looking when the sun went up, and still looking when it came down again. I looked for a long time before I saw the spark of firelight deep in a cave up the mountain.

I crept up and hid by the entrance, axe ready, squatting in the filthy snow. I couldn’t hear anything. I thought he was deep in the cave. I waited until my breath was calm, and then went in quietly.

There were loose stones all around. I stumbled on a pebble; a larger one came after it, and another and another, until a boulder rolled down on top of me. I tried to jump clear but it caught my ankle, splintering it under the rock. 

Then the sorcerer crept out of the shadows. My child was in the corner behind him, wrapped in one of his ochre pelts. I pulled but my foot was crushed under the boulder. The old man was a coward but he was smart. He’d set a trap for me. I was stronger and I thought I could kill him if I could hit him with my axe, but he kept out of reach. I was a dog in a snare. He could kill me slow, from a safe distance. My child would watch me die and know I was too weak to get him back. 

The old man had a long tube and he slipped a dart into it. “You shouldn’t have followed. You see, boy? My magic is too powerful for him.”

I was caught like a dog, but I knew what dogs did when they were caught. I’d seen it, and if an animal could do it then so could I. I had something to teach them both still. The old man raised his blow tube and I readied my weapon. “No magic. A trick. A trap. A balancing act with rocks. Clever but not magic. I have a trick for you.”

I chopped my axe into my leg. The pain made me scream, but it split my shin from my ankle in a few strokes, and I left my foot behind. Blood spurted from the stump. I dragged myself up and leaped towards the old man, but he shrank away and ran deeper into the cave.

My child watched me. I hopped to the fire. “See. Magic doesn’t win a fight. Pain wins a fight.”

I drew out a half-burned log. “If it’s an animal, then it’s just who is faster and sharper. It’s instinct. But people know about sadness and pain. We have to think about it. Whoever is willing to hurt more, that’s who wins.”

I pressed the burning end of the log into my severed ankle. I screamed again, but the fire stopped the blood. 

The boy shrank back, staring at the smoking blackened stump of my leg. “How will you hunt mammoths now.”

“Wait here. I’ll go and find this old man and kill him.”

“He knows real magic.”

“I’ll be careful.”

I lurched into the dark. The passage grew narrower and I couldn’t see anymore. I heard a puffing sound, and a dart stuck into my stomach. It burned when it hit and the burning spread quickly. I felt it inside me, green and rancid, and it made me stumble. I fell out into a wider cavern.

A blade rattled against the stones just where I’d been, clattering up the passage behind. It wasn’t the heavy clunk of a stone blade. It sounded sharper and meaner. It sounded like ice breaking.

It was dark. It stank in this cave; it smelled rotten. I held my breath and heard the old man panting in the dark. I raised myself to my knees, listening to his breathing and cocking my axe. I threw it, grunting and falling with the effort. But it was a good throw and it thunked into flesh. 

The old man shrieked and I dragged myself after the sound. I felt blood under my hands and followed it until I touched his foot. Then I crawled up his skinny body and covered him. I could see just enough to make out fear in his eyes. He reached for his pouches and I batted his hands away, slapping them up, trapping them between us in front of his face. Blood made it slippery between our bodies, and I could feel my axe. It was in his chest. It was a bad cut, but not deadly. 

“You’re no sorcerer.” The poison was still seething in my veins, but it wouldn’t kill me.

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“You’re cheating. These are tricks. You’re just an old man. I’ve come for my child.”

The old man spat blood into my face. “It’s all real. It’s all magic. You’re not the only one who knows pain. Pain is stupid. It just makes you hurt. You want to see magic. Watch.” He grasped his smallest finger and wrenched it down and it cracked and broke, and at the same time I felt the bones of my forearm snap inside me. 

We both gasped with pain. My wrist hung like a split stick. “What did you do. What is this trick.”

“It’s magic. I’ve worked so hard to learn it all. I deserve someone to teach it to. Look at you, starving and wretched in the cold. You should thank me for taking him away.”

“He’s mine. He’s the only thing I have.”

The old man held a trembling hand in front of my face. He took another finger in his fist. “Selfish. Watch, I’ll do it again.” He bent it back, crying out as it broke. My other arm fractured and went crooked.

I couldn’t move much, but I had weapons left. I fell down on him, gnawing at his face with my teeth. He screamed and struggled but I found his eye and sucked and chewed until it popped in my mouth, and that made him lose focus. I tried for his other eye but he cringed away and I found his cheek instead. I bit through it until my teeth clicked against his. Pain wins a fight. I would gnaw through his face to his brain. 

I yanked back, feeling his meat tear. He screamed and whimpered. My mouth was full of blood. My child had crept in behind us. I recognized his breathing. I spit the old man’s flesh out. “See, child. You fight until someone shrinks in horror. It’s whoever’s willing to hurt more. No tricks left now, old man.”

“Look at you.” Some of the old man’s lips were gone. “You’re an animal.” His one eye gleamed in his mangled face, looking over my shoulder. “I have one trick left.”

The dagger bit into my back. It went in and out many times, that mean weapon. Sharper and more heartless than my stone-carved axe. 

I rolled over, choking and staring at my child with the bloody knife in his hand, and I heard the old man’s voice in my ear. “Your child is mine now. It’s my best trick yet.” Then everything was pain and blackness. 

I only woke up for a short time after that. I didn’t know how long I’d been in darkness. A fire had been built; on the other side of it was the boy, eating. The smell of meat filled the cave. The old man was propped against the rocks, watching me with his one good eye. His chest was bandaged, and his jaw was showing where I’d bitten his cheek away.

The boy stopped eating and looked at me. “He’s going to teach me magic. He’ll show me how to do it.”

“He’s a coward.” Something had collapsed inside me and I was having trouble breathing.

“I won’t have to be hungry and cold anymore. You couldn’t even stop my mother from dying on the ice.”

I tried to rise but my arms were gone, and I saw my hand on the other side of the fire, in the boy’s grip. The meat was sucked from two of the fingers already. Finally then, I shrank back in horror. It was too much pain for me.

The boy dropped his food and crawled towards me, his cold blade in his hand. My lips split when I moved them. “Don’t. This old man is full of tricks. It’s cheating.”

“No. It’s magic.”

 

 

 

About the Author

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Sasha Brown is a Boston author with work in Cossmass Infinities, Pithead Chapel and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He can be found on twitter @dantonsix and online at sashabrownwriter.com. 

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