The Elf Thing

some say that nature is cruel: that some must die so that others may live; that wolves must tear apart living lambs with their teeth, which is certainly very painful for the lambs; and that lambs must tear apart living plants with their teeth, and who knows how painful that might be for the plants? it’s a big, awkward question, but there’s no doubt that, right or wrong, everything feeds upon what it kills or is killing or what has been killed for it; and the sleek, slate-blue, buff-bellied, charcoal-banded skink that came over the sand flicking its tail and tasting the air with its tongue, scanning left, right, above and straight ahead with its small, bronze-flecked eyes, had more than one brilliant, gay insect - a young mayfly, an elderly ichneuman wasp, a couple of good brisk click beetles and one or two other beings past identifying – being as they were in various stages of digestion and semi-digestion in its gut, along with a large number of native bluebell flowers, several clover leaves and a yellow billy button; and for all that, killer that he was, he was out for more: a predator hunting, moving with stealth and wasting not a flicker of energy, his movements liquid like shadow, flowing between two small rocks of crumbling limestone splotched with greenish black lichens still soft and scented from the recent rains. he paused, scenting the air, lifted his head to peer over the rock, and then with a quick flick of tiny-fingered hands and long-toed feet, and a teasing twitch of his droppable tail to fool the birds, he was on top of the flat one. and finding himself suddenly flooded with the shining golden warmth of the mid-morning sun, he stopped, blinked dazzledly about and raised himself up on his tiny hands to squint at the source of that strong, beautiful flow, as worshipful and full of gratitude and joy as any priest or nun of the human kind. one, two quick contractions of his nacrous throat, one blink and then another of his small, metallic eyes, and then thththhhhhunnnnnnnggggggk! the whole length of the glistening muscle of that lizard’s body snapped into a wiry spiral, twisted convulsively, flipped onto its back, twisted over and over and writhed; and then with a few juddering jerks it broke in two. the long tail squirmed and wriggled, its quivering pink stump teasing, enticing, it twirled, it twisted, it turned itself over and over on the ground.

any bird would have been fooled, would have grabbed at that tail and eaten it, while the lizard made its getaway, legs, arms, head and body, the lot, leaving only the expendable tail. but there wasn’t a bird, and this lizard made no sort of a getaway. long before the tail’s automatic spasms stopped, this lizard itself was dead, with an arrow the full length of an elf’s outstretched arm through the pearly scales of its throat, its barbs protruding almost a hand’s length through the back of its neck. and the severed tail had given a good many wriggles before the elf himself emerged from his crevice between two parts of a cracked limestone slab, camouflaged by a clump of speargrass cropped to its brittle stalks by a wombat and intertwined by pink-flowered bindweed. he sniffed the air and scanned the sky for hawks, and considered for a long time before he began to pick his way among the lichens, desert irises, and tiny native lilies, and tough hairy clovers and their burrs over the hard, red earth, dustless at least for a while, still damp as it was from the last rain, with the scent of minerals and licken spores and myriad insect trails in his nostrils and the singing of green sap rising in speargrass stalks and wattle pollen and old seeds lying rotting between the sharp clay granules of the soil beneath his feet, his eyes ever mindful of cover, wary of predators that might take an elf as soon as a lizard, until he reached the rock at the whose foot the lizard’s body lay dead. quite a distance that was – more than four dozen elf lengths that arrow had travelled from the tautly strained string of the elf’s longbow into a stiff and fluttery cross breeze through air that almost ached with the promise of yet more rain. it was a splendid specimen of a lizard. touching it with a booted toe, the elf let a little orgy of pleasure run riot through his body, making a shimmery shudder go shivering up his spine into his scalp and down over his face, until it made his tiny round black eyes sparkle and flash, his two scarlet nostrils snap open and shut (they have no noses like ours, only two comma-shaped slits lined with scarlet gills either side of the place where a nose should be) and he puckered his leathery lips into the equivalent of an earthling’s satisfied smile of pride. he sniffed the breeze carefully, dropped his bow and got to work on the corpse. elves’ hands resemble human hands except that their four fingers and one thumb are thinner to start with but spatulate at the tips, with sensitive yet tough pads that hold and manipulate as dextrously as ours do.

it was a biggish skink, two elves long, and the tail two more elves. handsome it was, its skin new and bright, with firm glistening scales of good colour, in patterns rich and vivid. the elf was pleased. quickly he slit the pale underskin down the length of its belly, deftly inserting his knife, its blade magically forged from a sliver of glass from a shattered beer bottle, between the skin and the membrane below, taking his time to work it free of the limbs and the head before peeling it off like a jacket, all in one piece, unmarred except for the place under the chin where the arrow had struck and at the back of the neck where it had gone right through. the tail too was soon slit and the long tapering of perfect skin stripped from the bony meat. good meat, lizard. the elf noted with pleasure its delicate texture, its pale translucency, with the pink and red of the veins threaded through. he savoured its scent on his nostrils and over the surface of his tongue. he stuck his tin skinning-knife back inside his belt and got out his bigger butchering knife, its heavy blade made from a piece of hammered flat fencing wire fastened into the shaft of a crow’s feather as a handle and honed to a very fine edge, and he began to butcher the lizard. this elf was aware of, and wary of, the lizard’s soul, its murrup, watching him from the top of the rock where it had been basking when the arrow struck, when with a wild, thrashing struggle he had fought his way out of his painfully spitted body. already his ghostly form was slowly wavering in the tattvic tide, succumbing to the pull of the spirit world into which it was soon to pass. the elf didn’t acknowledge him, even when, after watching resentfully as his corpse was gutted and his long gut emptied of its partially digested contents with one quick smooth slide between the elf’s thumb and forefinger, and wound into a neat coil ready for drying and stretching, and his liver deftly relieved of its gall bladder and placed in a soft ratskin sack with the heart, kidneys and lungs, he chuckled at last and let the tides take him back home, to his dreaming place in the dunes, from whence his spirit had come. he could be many other lizards, or a bird next time, or a small grey marsupial, or a man, or a fish. but for a while he would be a recurrent intensely experiencing, deeply thinking shadow of gumleaves over a small cluster of stones at the base of an outcrop of limestone, with lichens of

vivid browns and yellows on them for scales and moss between them, fat and green after a rain, for flesh, and a shaft of bright sunshine through the stony slit of his virtual throat each morning just about now: a mere frisson of lizard djang in his dreaming place, ten days lizard travel to the north west. the elf whistled softly as he carefully wrapped the valuable parts, the gall bladder still containing all its potent gall, the gonads, eyeballs and various glands, in separate pieces of soft rat skin, and tucked them into another small bag, along with the individually wrapped brain and the bladder, which he’d drained first into the damp crumbly soil. then he jointed the rest of the carcase, dividing the tail into sections half an elf’s arm’s length long. he cleaned his arrow and knives by thrusting them into the soil and drawing them out three or four times and then wiping off the dirt with a piece ofdry moss. his arrow he put back in his quiver with the four others he carried, and his knives back into his belt. the lizard, meat, bones, skin and guts he packed neatly into the ratskin sack, except for the small bag containing the potently magical parts and this he tied to his belt. the sack, almost twice his size and certainly heavier, he hoisted onto his shoulder as easily as a farmer hoists a bag of wheat, and from there onto his head like an african porter, and steadying it with one finger only, he set off eastwards, through the speargrass tussocks, the lichens, the blooming irises and early nancies, and the scattered oolites over the red clay wind-silt soil, as light on his skink-skin booted feet as if he carried no burden at all but the song in his heart, a few bat-whistle snatches of which escaped from his mouth from time to time, where the way was easy and clear.

******************* ‘en trit e vahl ni torrit,’ said the elf at the door to the one inside. the rich plutonic rs identified the accent as thurtorian; it went with the swarthy hue covering the deep-crimson skin of the narrow face like a dusting of sooty mould, shading all the way to black in the cheek hollows and eye sockets and into the temples as well. ‘it wasn’t nails i wanted it was screws’ was the meaning of the words.

‘en torrit e suel, ni trit,’ said the one inside, meaning ‘it isn’t screws i’ve got, i’ve got nails’. this elf was soft dark brown, with a haze of gingerygold shading to dark ochre in his hollows ‘en torrit u stol, u stwylch?’ said the one outside. ‘couldn’t screws be got, be made?’ ‘aah, goon jych a vahl?’ (‘how many do you want?’) ‘gelk.’ (‘four.’) ‘...oouhoho, nyelch in drai oc ben sev oc.’ (...ooh look, here comes that first wave elf, that earth-took elf.) ‘nurm i stol!’ (‘he’s got a load!) ‘nurm brri!’ (‘a load indeed!) ‘wecko oc! inil a stol?’ cried the elf at the door long before he was close enough to answer, sending him a dark, liquid-like ray of pure power, sensing his tendency to yield a little to fatigue under the weight of his ratskin sack and the interesting bulk of its contents. ‘hallo elf! what have you got?’ the storekeeper elf also let flow a helpful greyish ray, watching this famous elf’s approach through the space between his customer’s shoulder and the edge of the doorhole. ‘mics a inu, fa oc, nura,’ he said in a tone of satisfaction. ‘you’d better come in elf, out of the way.’ ‘torrit gelk... glen?’ ‘four screws... what size?’ the elf customer showed him the nail that was the right size if only it had been a screw, and both kept glancing through the door at the approaching elf with his load, and so they were still discussing the particulars of metal and details of design when the elf arrived at the doorhole and stopped inside it, and checking for ants and not finding any, put his enormous sack down and stretched himself, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand.