We Are the Beasts

1

This lamb is going to be the death of me.

I don’t mean that figuratively. He’s been hell-bent on dying ever since he was born. Running headfirst into bramblebushes so deep that we both come out looking like we lost a knife fight. Catapulting himself into deep pools with steep sides he can’t climb out of. And now: off the cliff. Like he thinks he can fly.

It’s only luck that catches him on a small outcropping with a crooked tree. Fifteen feet down the cliff. And this time he’s really ruined me because have I mentioned that I hate heights? Not mentally, not on purpose--but hate in the way that I can’t help. Where my body goes all funny and turns to stone.

“Poor baby.” Clara’s voice is breathless, and her deep-brown eyes are already brimming with tears, like the little softy she is. A tear collects in her black lashes, bounces off in a blink to trace a path down rich-brown skin.

“Poor devil, more like,” I mutter. “Merde.”

I shake my shoulders, trying to stave off the rubbery feeling of looking over the cliff edge. And then, before the fear can paralyze me fully, I’m on my knees, backward, pale hands clenched around a tree root, and over the edge.

My heart is thunder, and my mind the static of a building storm. The thoughts come, unbidden: I see myself crash to the sharp rocks below. Break my back. Crack my head like an egg. My limbs twist outward like a spider’s, dark shadows over gray stone. Dead before I turn seventeen.

I clench the root and my first handhold, tense my whole body. Not today, Satan. I’m not going to freeze on this climb. I’m not going to lose this goddamn lamb. I’m certainly not going to die and leave Clara and Meme with the whole burden of life on their own. They saved me once. What kind of repayment would that be?

The lamb is screaming as I ease myself onto the next foothold, and I wish he’d stop. If there’s anything that makes this worse, it’s the sound of his fear scraping against my own.

I ease to the next handhold. Another. Another. And then I’m there, the cursed lamb trying to clamber up my leg and almost throwing himself to his death. I grab him by the front leg and smush him between myself and the rough stone.

“Fool.” I scowl at him, easing myself more steadily onto the outcropping, propping one foot against the crooked tree.

“BLEAAAA,” he answers, and that better be lamb language for Thank you, goddess.

I glance up. How am I going to get out of this? Climbing all the way back up looks pretty impossible. Below me, the cliff gets smoother, so descending isn’t an option. Maybe I could somehow unlace my dress and throw it up to Clara and she could hoist me . . .

“Clara!” I shout, realizing the simpler solution. “Take off your dress and throw me the end!”

“Josephine.” Clara’s voice has an edge of incredulous laughter above me, and I glance up. She’s lying on her stomach at the edge of the cliff, one hand around a root, the other holding a sturdy-looking branch down toward me.

“Oh.” Trust Clara to already have solved the problem while I was spinning out about whether one of us should get undressed.

She raises an eyebrow. “Did you seriously just suggest I take off my dress?”

“I’m kind of in crisis.”

She shakes her head.

“All right, grab hold.”

Clara has moved to brace her feet around the roots of the tree above and is reaching the branch as far toward me as she can. Still, there are a few feet I’ll have to climb on my own before she can help. With a screaming, frantic lamb in my arms.

Merde, I didn’t think this through.

I reach behind my back and loosen the ties on my dress (I guess I wasn’t completely wrong to consider dresses as a solution to our problems), then shove the squirming, muddy, screamy lamb down the front and tighten the ties as much as I can.

“BLEAAAA!” he screams, and it echoes in my ears even after he finishes.

“Sacre Dieu, if you move an inch, I will throw you down this cliff myself,” I mutter, rubbing slow circles into his head to calm him.

“BLEA.” He’s quieter this time. Good.

Here goes nothing. I white-knuckle into the nearest handholds and ease off the ledge. Up. A few inches. A few more.

“BLEAAA.”

“You, shut it.”

Clara giggles, a release of energy more than mirth, but I focus on the wall, the fool lamb trembling against me. This is the most ridiculous rescue in all of history; I’m sure of it.

And then my left handhold gives, and I feel my body tilting to the right.

No. NO. NO, GODDAMN IT. This is not how I’m going to go. Egg-cracked, broken-backed on the rocks below, my brain flashes the images at me, and I growl--a guttural sound, a wild thing hell-bent on survival.

I tense every muscle, pushing the fool lamb and myself back toward the cliff and ending up with my face smashed against rock, my left hand scrabbling for another crack in the wall.

Safe.

Safe, I tell myself. My brain responds with a swooping feeling, the image of me and fool-lamb smashed on the rocks together.

“You can do this.” Clara’s voice is steady above me. “You’re almost to the branch. You’re so close.”

I take a beat. Steady my heart, then go. Left foot. Right. Left hand. Right. And then I’m halfway up the cliff, and the branch hovers just overhead.

“Good. Now grab the branch with one arm, and I’ll pull you as far as I can; then you’ll need to grab the wall again while I sit up and get a better bracing position.” Clara, so gentle and seemingly breakable in day-to-day life, is steady in a crisis. Calm and calculated. So many steps ahead of how we’re going to pull this off. The thought calms me. I might make it out of this fool lamb’s death trap yet.

I wrap my left hand around the branch, feel it pull taut.

“On three,” Clara says. “One, two, three.”

I let go of the wall, press my right hand against the lamb in the front of my bodice, hold tight to the branch with my left, and push upward with my toes. And Clara--stronger than she looks--hefts me up several feet.

“Grab the wall.” Her voice is strained with effort, and I do as I’m told, finding new footholds, new handholds.

“All right. I’m on the wall.” I let go of the branch, feel it pull away from my hand as Clara sits up above me, braces herself in a seated position instead of on her belly, and then lowers the branch to me again.

“This time grab as tight as you can and hold on for dear life,” she says. “I’m going to pull you up as fast as I can. A burst of energy.”

I nod, even though she probably can’t see me. My brain sends the worst image yet: Us failing. Me pulling Clara down with me to our deaths.

My breathing is staccato. My heart a drum.

I grab the rough bark, clutch tight.

“NOW!” I shout.

“BLEAAAAA!” the lamb screams.

Now: she pulls.

Now: my face scrapes across sharp cliff.

Now: the lamb is slipping, and I press my arm against him.

“AUGHHHHHH!” Clara shrieks. A cry of pure determination. The scream of a survivor. A savior.

And then I’m at the cliff edge, my foot catching a stone, pushing me up and over the edge. Rolling away from the drop-off, rolling toward safety.

Clara falls backward as I release the branch, and we collapse into a pile mere feet from the edge of the cliff.

Our more well-behaved sheep edge toward us, curious, as we both devolve into a cacophony of tears and giggles and hiccups. In this moment, we’re either the world’s worst shepherdesses--or the world’s best. I wrap my arms around her, pressing the now-struggling lamb in between us.

“If you think I’m letting you out of this dress, you have another think coming,” I scold him as he kicks me, knocking my head covering off and releasing unruly red curls into the wind.

“Nom de Dieu,” Clara murmurs, the swear more like a prayer in her mouth. “If you ever do that again, I will kill you myself.”

“And God won’t blame you.” I roll onto my back and press my hands over my mouth, cold fingers on warm lips, and breathe out long and loud. I almost just died. I’m even more aware of it now that I’m on solid ground. How utterly foolish it was to go over that cliff. Though what choice did I have? These sheep are everything. The only thing standing between us and starvation. Without their wool to sell, we have nothing except our foraging skills to keep us alive. And those wouldn’t be enough, not with the harsh winter that’s inevitably coming, the snowdrifts taller than a man, the ice strangling out every green thing worth eating, strangling us, too, if we let it.

I’d do it again. I know that. I’d risk my life a thousand times for Clara and Meme--who saved me and raised me when winter took my own family seven years ago. I’d give anything for them, people with nothing who gave me everything.

I roll over beside Clara and reach for her hand, squeeze it, white skin against brown. The early morning air is chilled, but her skin is hot where it presses against mine. Sweat-glazed from our brush with death.

I sit up and pull her up with me, take her in. She’s mud-drenched front and back from lying on the cliff, her hands scraped as raw as my own. That mud down her front was for me. Tears rise to my eyes.

“So, you want to tell me what you were thinking with the whole ‘take off your dress’ idea?” she asks, laughing a little as she uses her thumbs to wipe tears from the corners of my eyes.

Instead of answering, I wrap her in a hug, and neither of us lets go for a long time.

Once we’ve done our best to wipe off the worst of the mud and my dress is re-laced sans lamb, we continue our normal loop with the sheep, guiding them away from the cliff (forever) and into the gentle slope of a wildflower field at the edge of thick forest. No rest for a shepherdess in Gevaudan, even after a brush with death. There’s no possibility of retreating to the safety of home, the warm comfort of a blanket on a straw mattress. The sheep must eat, and so we must continue.

As we walk, my heart smooths back into a normal rhythm, the familiarity of birch bark and yellow wildflowers like a balm. The sheep love it here, where it’s heavy with dandelions and ryegrasses. And even though the forest is dark and foreboding, I’ve rarely had to fend off a wolf.

“We should probably move them away from the trees.” Clara fractures the silence. “There was another attack just last week--only a few miles from here.”

Ah, yes. Lambs falling from cliffs and nudging us over the edge of starvation aren’t the only danger this year. Wolves aren’t the only predators lurking in our forests. For the past year, shepherdesses in the region have been disappearing along the edges of dark-wood forests and plunging canyons. Most reappear in pieces. A leg, an arm, a skull sucked dry.

None have been here in the village, but the rest of Gevaudan is full of horror stories, and we all know the evil could come for us here in Mende any day now.

We call the culprit the beast because nobody knows what it is. Even those who’ve seen it. It’s a wolf but not a wolf, they say. Larger, deadlier, with fire in its eyes, murder in its heart. Some believe it’s a flesh-and-blood creature. Others, a devil conjured from the pits of hell. Still others, a human trick--trained by man to kill or conjured by a witch to do her bidding.

I shiver, even though the sun is up now.

“From the stories I’ve heard, it won’t matter how close we are to the trees,” I answer after a beat. “It prefers hunting in the open areas. In fact”--I try to lighten the mood with a grin--“perhaps we’d be safer taking them in to graze on willows in the forest.”

“Or maybe a wolf would take the lamb you just risked your life for.”

I glance at the lamb, now happily munching a dandelion patch, already forgetting his ordeal. If the beast did show up, that particular baby would probably march right up to it like it was his long-lost mother and invite it to eat him in a single bite.

“A wolf I can handle,” I answer, brandishing the short staff I carry with a sharp knife tied tight to its end--a homemade pike. We all have them around here. If you’re not careless, they’re usually enough to convince a wolf that your sheep aren’t his supper. The beast, though. The beast is something else--something more interested in girls (and the occasional boy) than lambs, something not easily dissuaded by staffs and knives. And since peasants aren’t allowed to carry guns, if the beast comes, there’s nothing to do but run.

“I’d really like it if we could move away from the wood.” Clara tries a new angle on her request, and this one gets me. She’s saved my life enough times that I owe her when she asks for a favor. Even if I disagree that it’ll make a difference.

I click my tongue and start to walk away from the tree line, my sheep following in their usual chaotic formation. Clara’s sheep cluster tighter and walk closer to her as she follows.

“Did you hear about Geneviève?” Clara asks, her shoulders dropping with relief as we shy away from the wood, step by step.

“That she’s gone--or something else?” The fool lamb has taken an interest in the forest, and I nudge him onward with my shin, shaking my head.

“The girls in the village are saying she ran away--maybe to Paris. She always did glamorize the idea of a city.” Clara’s voice is lighter, hopeful, and something about that creates a pinching sensation in my chest. Is Clara thinking of leaving?

I frown. “Or the beast got her. You know that’s more likely.”

Clara furrows her brow at me. “That’s a dark interpretation.”

“Or a realistic one.” I shrug, trying to look casual and feeling anything but. The idea of Clara leaving pinches harder in my chest, and I try not to think about it.