…or, A Split Decision

I didn’t have to go far to find firewood. There was a tree that had fallen over without breaking completely off the stump. Most of the trunk was up off the ground, and the wood was nice and dry. I could have broken it up with my feet if I’d had my shoes on. What was the point of having a wicked ancestral axe if I didn’t use it, though? I knocked off the few remaining branches and went to work. The thunk of the blade against the wood echoed back to me.

I realized that was kind of weird. Trees didn’t usually make echoes, I thought. The sound kept coming even when I stopped chopping. That was really weird.

“Do you hear that?” I asked Iason, who was clearing out a space for the fire.

“I hear a great many things,” he said. “Including, I must imagine, anything you might hear with your human ears.”

“Do you hear chopping?” I asked.

“I did,” Iason said. “I’d like to hear it again. I asked you to do one little thing, Iamie. Was that too much?”

“You don’t hear that?” I asked.

“Iamie, if you’re not going to do it, then lend me your axe and I will,” he said.

“Hold on,” I said. “I want to see where it’s coming from, okay? I’ll be right back.”

“Bring back wood!” Iason said.

I was very conscious of the fact that I was walking barefoot and naked into the forest. I didn’t want to stop to get dressed and risk losing the sound, though. It wasn’t hard to pick my way around the brush and the trees, anyway. It was almost like there was a path.

The thuds continued to come at slow, regular intervals, getting louder as I drew closer. I also heard a voice. I couldn’t understand the language , but it sounded like grumbling or swearing.

The path led out into a clearing, and I saw the woodsman. He was a little man with ruddy, leathery skin, a long hooked nose and a bushy black beard. Someone who had never seen a dwarf in person might have taken him for one, but he was both shorter and rounder than a dwarf. Dwarves are sometimes called rotund, but they’re usually wider across than they are from front to back. He was about the same in both dimensions. At just under two feet tall, he would have been short even for a gnome.

My first faerie, and it was one of the ugly ones. Oh well. Looks weren’t everything, especially where the folk were concerned.

His clothes were dirty and patched. He was using a hatchet with a dull reddish blade to split a huge pile of logs in half. He did this by putting them on top of a tree trunk and then leaping up and bringing the axe down in the middle of them.

It worked, sort of.

“Uh, hi,” I said, not wanting to startle him. He jumped a foot in the air and spun around, landing facing me. “Hello,” I said. “My name’s Jamie. Would you like some help?” I asked, holding up my axe.

“That’s an interesting little logsplitter you’ve got there, Jamie,” he said. “How’d you come by it?”

“Honestly,” I said. It seemed like a safe answer.

“I suppose you would have had to,” he said. He held up his own little bronze axe. “You aren’t saying mine’s not up to the task, are you?”

“No, sir,” I said. “Just feeling helpful.”

“Well, you’d be right if you were saying that,” the little woodsman said. He laid his hatchet down on the ground and then gestured towards the wood. “You split thirty pieces for me, and I’ll tell you a secret.”

“How about I split thirty pieces for you, and then I can take an armful for myself?” I asked. Splitting wood with the axe was as easy as splitting air.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the secret?” he asked.

“Uh, no thanks,” I said. “I kind of need the wood.”

“Well, how about I throw the secret in with the wood?” he asked. “Just so it doesn’t go to waste.”

“Okay, if you insist,” I said. I picked up the first piece of wood and laid it carefully on the stump. I’d been eager to encounter the sidhe, but I was wary for tricks. It split cleanly with a tap from my axe, though. “What do you need so much wood for, anyway?”

“Perhaps I’m making toothpicks for giants,” he said.

“Is there a lot of call for those?” I asked, splitting another piece.

“It’s a growth market,” he said. “Do you often go wandering in the forest naked but for a leather sash?”

“Oh, um, I’m kind of here with somebody,” I said. “He likes to see me naked.”

“That’s a beautiful picture,” he said.

“Excuse me?” I asked, twisting around to face him.

“The dragon on your back,” he said.

“Oh, thank you,” I said.

“Would you like to sell it to me?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “It isn’t for sale.”

“Are you sure?”

“Fairly sure,” I said, falling into a rhythm with my axe. “It’s drawn on my skin.”

“Oh, that stuff comes right off,” he said.

“It’s also anchored to my soul.”

“That comes off, too,” he said.

“Maybe it does, but I’m kind of attached to it,” I said. “Sentimental value.”

“Oh, well,” he said. “Worth a try. I’ll make a sketch of it, if you don’t mind. The dragon, that is.”

“Knock yourself out.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Oops. I’d have to remember to watch my words.

“I mean, go ahead and do that if you’d like to,” I said. “It’s a figure of speech, among humans.”

“I see,” the sidhe said. “So if a human told me to go soak my head in the river, would that have meant anything pleasant?”

“No, probably not.”

“Oh,” he said. “For a moment there, I was afraid I’d committed an egregious error. Oh, well. It’d probably have been too late to fish the poor devil out, anyway. How long do humans generally live. Four centuries? Five?”

“Usually just the one,” I said. “If that.”

“Really?” he asked, and I could almost hear his eyes bugging out of his head. “Sod me! That’s, er, just a figure of speech, too.”

“I got that,” I said, splitting another log.

“I didn’t want there to be any confusion,” he said. “I know what you tall types get up to, prancing around the forest naked as jays with each other. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you.”

“Course not,” I said.

I heard a rustling and then some scratching sounds, and the woodsman murmured to himself. He was making the sketch, I supposed. After a while I realized I hadn’t been keeping count and stopped to see what I’d done. I was already up to two dozen. I split six more. “That’s yours,” I said, turning to face him. “I’ll just do what I think I can carry for me.”

“Right, right,” he said. I saw he’d put on tiny spectacles and was crouched over a battered leather-bound notebook. “No rush. I’ve almost got the shading down.”

I took my time splitting another five pieces of wood into two.

“About done?” I asked him.

“I think so,” he said. I turned around, and he held up the book. “How’s she look?” he asked, turning the book around. I only caught some motion of wings and the snapping of a tail before the whole drawing vanished off the edge of the page.

“It flew away,” I said.

“Oh, bugger,” he said. “Just an expression! Well, I’ll just draw a bowl of stew in the corner and I suppose she’ll come back when she gets hungry.”

“Probably,” I said. I started gathering up the firewood. “Thanks for sharing.”

“Wait!” he said. “You haven’t had your secret yet.”

“Okay,” I said. “What is it?”

He pointed a long, crooked finger between my legs.

“Having one of those,” he said, “doesn’t make someone a man.”

“Uh, right,” I said. “Thanks. Thank you for that.”

“Don’t give me that look,” he said. “It’s a good secret. Right up there with ‘all that glisters is not gold.’”

“It’s a great secret,” I said. “Thanks for the wood. I’ll, uh, be on my way.”

I started heading back towards the path.

“You’re welcome, and you take good care of that axe!” the little sidhe called. “It’s a good axe!”

I turned around to call one last thanks for the compliment, but found myself facing a tree where I was sure there had been a path. I stepped around it and couldn’t spot the clearing, then turned back around and couldn’t find the path.

“Oh, shit,” I said. I put the load of wood down. It would be hard enough stumbling through the woods with bare feet and legs without a big stack of wood blocking my view of the ground and pulling me off balance. “Iason!” I called, knowing better than to try calling for the woodcutter. “Iason!”

“Iamie?” he called, from around the direction I remembered having come from.

“I’m over here!” I yelled.

“Stay there and I’ll come to you,” he said.

I didn’t have to wait long. The look of concern on his face as he came racing up to me was both touching and frightening. I remembered the stump monster and the lightning worms, and felt really stupid for having followed a strange sound through the trees.

“So, you’ve finally decided to stop playing silly hiding games,” he said. “I thought you had stumbled into a fierce creature of some kind.” He started picking up the wood I’d dropped. “An hour for this? Was there something wrong with the trees back there?”

“An hour?” I repeated, grabbing up the other half. “It wasn’t that long, was it?”

“Let’s just go back to camp,” he said. “My stomach is empty, and growing emptier still. What were you doing, anyway?”

“I met a faerie,” I said.

“If that is true, then you are very lucky to not be covered in feathers or warts,” he said. “Though it will be an amazing thing if you make it back to the brookside without so much as a rash. What did you mean, crashing off through the bushes like that?”

“You’re the one who wanted me naked,” I said. “And I told you I was going to find where the sound was coming from.”

“I did not think you would go far in such a state,” Iason said. “I watched you step around behind a tree, and when I lost sight of you I ran after you immediately.”

“Well, I guess somebody didn’t want to talk to you as much as they wanted to talk to me,” I said.

“I do not know from where this romantic fascination with the wee folk comes, Iamie, but it is neither healthy nor safe,” Iason said. “You would do well to avoid them in the future, or at least stick nearer to me so you don’t have to confront them alone.”

“Yeah, they might give me advice you don’t want me to hear,” I said.

“What is that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m not a child, Iason. I’m an adult in my society, and I’d be a middling like you in yours. I’m sick of being treated like I’m just a boy while you’re a man. Okay, you only like certain sexual positions, and okay, I like them enough that I don’t mind indulging you. That doesn’t make you better than me, and it doesn’t make you more of a man than me.”

“A faerie creature told you this?” he asked skeptically.

“Uh, not exactly,” I said. “But he put a bug in my ear, figuratively speaking.”

“You didn’t, by chance, eat or drink anything?” Iason asked.

“No,” I said. “And I’m not under any spell. I’m just telling you how it is. Yes, it is fun being a stag and being ridden, and maybe that’s a little weird but a lot of things that are fun are a little weird. It’s weird to most people that being fucked in the ass feels good. You’re the rider, I’m the mount, whatever. I’ll put up with it because it feels good and I like it, but don’t read too much into it. You can ride me, you can fuck me, you can sometimes go ass to mouth or fuck me dry, but only because I want you to. If you’re going look down on me for wanting that, you can go fuck yourself.”

“Iamie, do we have to keep treading back over this same tired ground?” Iason asked.

“No, I think this should be the last time,” I said.

Iason didn’t say anything.

“Do you understand me?” I asked.

“Only sometimes ass to mouth?” he said. “Because I can’t recall you ever yet objecting to that, or even waiting for me to demand it.”

“Well, I reserve the right to say no anyway,” I said.

“You know you like it.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t,” I said. “Anyway, I’m getting dressed as soon as we get back to the campsite, and nothing you say is going to stop that.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a quick dip in the—”

“Yes, Iason, I’m sure,” I said. “Don’t argue with me.”

“Perish the thought. You are the undisputed master of your own domain, Iamie, including all matters touching on your pants,” Iason said. He gestured down at my legs. “But it’s generally advisable to wash the poison ivy off one’s skin before changing clothes.”

“Aw, shit.”