"Fawn" by Frances Monro

Fawn’s Story

Fawn was born in a small village in the forest. It wasn't a human village, but a village of the deer folk. The deer live differently to humans, their houses are well spread out from each other, hidden in the forest, each house a few kilometers away from the next so the tiny village of 100 souls took up the same area as a human city. Each house belongs to a dominant buck, his ten or twenty does, and their children. When the male children are old enough to grow antlers he chases them out of the house into the forest. The female children remain in his household and join the herd.

While the Buck lays around all day being pampered by his wives, the does work hard, tending the crops in the fields, and gathering the tenderest grasses and herbs from the surrounding forest. At night all sleep in a huddle in the centre of the hall.

The deer believe in a simple religion of the Great Mother and the Great Father. The does worship the Great Mother – Goddess of love and mercy and kindness – to whom all mothers and children are sacred - with song and dance, particularly in time of rut. The rut occurs once a year for about a week, all of the does come into rut at once and the Buck must defend his herd from the wild bucks and striplings of the forest. The victorious Buck claims the does as his prizes, accepts their submission and mates with them. After rut the does become pregnant. Outside of rut the does are not interested in sex at all, so this week is a very special time for them.

 Despite the restricted outlook of  such a simple existence, and the rather restrictive social order, this was a happy time in Fawn’s life, weeding the fields and eating any weed that tasted nice, celebrating rut with song, dance and making love, grazing in the peace of the forest and caring for the fawn she bore each year of her adult life. Then one day the humans came with their swords.

The humans were slavers from a port city on the coast, they rolled over the village like a tide, killing the bucks and the fawns and capturing all of the does they could, tying them up and taking them into slavery. Fawn’s baby was taken from her arms and his brains dashed out against a wall, which left her grief stricken for a long time. Bound in a long file with the other does from the village, familiar scents mingling with those of strangers and humans, she was marched down to the port city in a daze of blackness and despair.

When she finally came fully back to herself she was in the slave compound of one of the city estates. Her life did not change much on the surface as a slave, she still spent most of her time working in the fields, but they were fields that belonged to someone else. She was often raped, which was painful because outside of rut sex is painful for her species, but with a deep grief inside her she hardly cared.

Then her rut came and for a week she burned with mindless desire and she slept with any male who would have her, which was many. After rut she fell pregnant. A few months later she was whipped in punishment for some infraction and she lost the baby.

Fawn’s heart was broken and she went into a decline, neglecting to wash or eat, her condition declined and she started to get sick. Her owners decided to cut their losses and they sold her in the slave market in the port. Fawn was shacked with iron manacles that were too tight, they rubbed away her skin and the wounds became infected, which left her with permanent scarring around her wrists and ankles.

With hundreds of other slaves she was tightly packed into the hold of a foul smelling slave ship for transport to the markets across the sea. Many died on the trip. There was sickness aboard (which Fawn calls the plague, although it wasn’t necessarily) and Fawn caught it. In her weakened state Fawn sickened rapidly and died.

Next day the crew members took the bodies of the dead up on deck, removed their manacles (because the manacles cost more than the slaves), and threw them overboard. When she hit the water Fawn came back to life. She managed to struggle and keep afloat until she found a spar or log in the water and crawled on top of it. She lay there, baked by the sun and dying of thirst for two or three days until she was finally washed up on the shores of Sanctuary Island.

Fawn maintains that she died on the ship and was somehow brought back to life and cured of the plague. In the process she lost her memory of everything that had gone before. Fawn believes she was saved by the Great Mother. Perhaps her memories were taken as payment for her help, and as a kind of back handed blessing.

Some people say that she can’t have really died but instead she was unconscious she hit the water. There are many healers with magical gifts on the island so when she washed up someone might have healed her sickness, then left her, perhaps to get help.

In any case Fawn woke up, healed and alone and dying of thirst on a strange empty beach, dying of thirst. She crawled to a spring and drank, and drank, and drank, water sweeter than anything she had ever tasted, the water of life.

Since then Fawn has lived on the island. Sanctuary island is home to two tribes of anthropomorphic furry people, the Ferals, who try to live in peace and harmony, and the Scavengers who are pirates and thieves and slavers. The Ferals worship the Great Mother and Great Father, as Fawn’s people did at home. Attributing her survival to the intervention of the Great Mother, Fawn joined the Feral tribe and later became a Temple Maiden, as a way of showing gratitude for her survival.

She often wonders about her past. Memories of the slave ship and the manacle scars on her wrists are enough to make her realize that she must have been a slave. But she remembers nothing before that except occasional flashes – Men with swords, the smell of blood, antlers in the firelight. Fawn has a suppositious belief that if she were to recover her memories – perhaps with the help of magic – then the Great Mother would take back the gifts she has given her. In any case she has a bad feeling about her past.