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When Moro first pressed her human child to her breast with a paw too big for its head, she'd already lost more than half her litter, and was three cubs less and counting. One had starved to death not far into its first spring, a year ago. Another had been lost to the still-frosty river a week after. And the third cub, thin-limbed and dry-nosed, had perished in the winter just past.
Now this new child, she came to Moro, a pealing thing in spring. She had eluded the meanness of the woman who had warmed her in her womb, and hadn't the monstrosity of the man who had sowed her seed; she was pure and squally and untamed, the way a beast should be.
And how the thing laughed and laughed and laughed! Wasn't she meant to scream and scowl, tremble with terror? Yet there she was, reaching out for Moro with smooth pink fingers, burbling nonsense, smiling. Her eyes were black, open, knowing.
That was when Moro knew. This child would be hers. A daughter to keep in place of all those she'd lost.
Howling came easily for San, daughter of the third moon, with her river-voice and sky-heart. At a few suns of life she yelped louder than a cub of a hundred.
First San crawled and then she stood. The entire process took too long for Moro's liking, but San was easy to carry, and had always been good at clutching. On Moro's shoulders she rode under broad flushes of daylight and soft cascades of starlight. When the child's arms were strong enough to ensure she would not be thrown off her brothers, this task was delegated to Moro's eldest living sons, who bore her on their backs with pride.
Gentleness reigned supreme. San had no hide covering her scruff and when unshielded by her clothes her skin was quick to bleed. Moro's eyes were always fixed on her; she never forgot to reprimand her brothers for every little bite, every shallow scratch. At least they kept their mouths shut when they suckled. Each wolfling was hungrier than the next, with the upright child being the hungriest of all.
They helped one another grow through many happy seasons. Then time happened again, as was its only wont.
The winter took them as the summer had raised them. With the next litter came more deaths, more mourning, more sadness, always sadness. Again more than half died, one long after the cubs had finished weaning, after San had grown teeth and had learned to speak.
It was good she had. In the flank-deep snow she could say her farewells to Yanagi, daughter loved by the dancing willow seeds, who had from the start been sickly and slow to grow. She fell into white earth starving and gaunt, still tender. She had not yet lost her blue baby eyes.
"Sister. When I am dead, take my skin," she said, in a voice so soft even Moro had to strain to hear it. "You did say you liked the feel of it."
"Yes, of course, it's—it's so beautiful." San smeared the mucus dripping from her nose over the back of her hand. She clenched two handfuls of her sister's fur and applied short affectionate strokes to them. "But I couldn't possibly—I won't—"
"You're going to grow big. You won't be able to hide under mother's coat anymore." Yanagi heaved. "Why does rain fall from your eyes? Please don't ruin them. They're awfully pretty, and you have the best sight of all of us."
"Huh?" San touched her cheeks. It wasn't sleet that had wet them. She licked her lips and scowled, perplexed, as if to say, "It isn't the snow?"
Yanagi lifted her head a little and struggled for air. "Leave me be. I'll be dead by dawn."
"No!" San bayed and shrieked and shrilled. She seemed to forget all the confusion that had come to her with the recognition of her difference. Dark, rampant indignation filled her. She beat her fists on her knees until they bruised blue. "You can't go!"
San had not yet learned to smell death. She ran up to a ragged rock and scraped her arm on it, returned, and urged her sister to have a bit of her blood to drink.
"Pointless," Yanagi said.
San's offering slipped right through her fangs. Still San sucked at her wound and delivered more blood through her mouth. Even then, Yanagi lay withered and weak, unmoving.
Moro sent her sons to hunt for rabbits. There was scarce hope left, but San insisted on kindling the little they had. When her brothers did not return by nightfall, though, the child grew desperate, and held out her tiny pale arms.
"I've never much liked these. Why don't you have them?" San said, through sobs. "You're hungry, aren't you?"
Yanagi turned to San, her ears set low. "Together we watched the humans at their work," she murmured. "I've seen the things you've made with your hands. Powerful things. Deadly things. Beautiful things. Don't waste them on me. Keep them. Make use of them in ways wolves cannot."
"But!" San grasped the imbrued stone once more and moved to strike again.
Moro intervened. "Enough," she said, and lead her aside.
"Mama, mama, don't let her go." San shook and spluttered, hysterical. "You can't let her die!"
"There's little we can do," she said softly. "All rests upon Shishigami now."
"Shishigami?" San shuddered when she pressed her small cold body against Moro's hide.
"You've seen him before." Moro rested her snout upon the crown of San’s head. "The deer god loved by the kodama. He comes to the heart of the forest each night."
"And will he come for Yanagi-nee?"
"Whether she lives or doesn't."
San crossed her arms over her chest and chafed them. Then she snuffled into her tiny hands. Quietly, she asked, "Will you tell me more? Maybe I can go to him and ask for his help."
"If you want," Moro said, and thus told San of the god with a thousand antlers, the glittering hide, the painted face. That night they did not see him. San fell asleep before she could leave to find him, for her body was not built for the night. A little while after her brothers came back in the deep of the dark with no more than a skinny hare. But soon they too were asleep.
At dawn, they woke to empty stomachs. Frost dusted their furs. The sun was faint behind the blizzard that brewed above them, amongst the white wolves whirling in the sky. Blue shadows lined the swath of snow on which Yanagi had died.
San was the first to approach her. Yanagi's shoulder must have still been warm, for when she touched it she screamed and screamed and screamed. The tears seemed enough to fill a sea. She would not leave her side, even when prompted, nipped, pushed. She moved only when Shishigami stepped past. His presence was most welcome, though he had arrived with no invitation.
The golden deer appeared to them alone. When he came the crying stopped. He was perhaps five leaps away from where they were, but the headlong look he gave them with his strange smiling face reduced them all to silence. Under his feet sprouted a trail of greenery, as if in imminence of spring.
The life left when he did. Then the wake of rot made way for fresh grass. And that smear of colour was the only sign the god had been there at all; he had not even acknowledged Yanagi's corpse. Yet he must have come as a comfort to San, for the rage was gone from her young tired face.
"She's dead, isn't she?" was all San said. Her eyes were downcast, blank.
"Come, child.” Moro placed her nose on her daughter's cheek. She licked at the salt. "She would've wanted you to be warm."
San acquiesced. She stumbled towards her sister, knelt, and spoke her name. In her voice there was an immense yearning, a shivering, a sadness. San pressed her face against her sister's neck.
It had taken time, but at last she breathed deep, took the skin, and slept warm that night.
Vanity was not to be valorised by any wolf worth their hide in the wintertime.
Moro reproached San accordingly the first time she bemoaned her lack of a tail.
San lacked nothing. Her sharp tools were her claws, her quick mind her fangs, her foursquare pack her coat. Her spirit needed no requisitioning, for it was as stalwart and proud as any wolf's. Nor her legs; Moro had taught her upright haunches to outrun an arrow: fast, and faster than it could fly.
"Be proud, daughter," Moro thus said to her, voice low.
"Oh, but mother, how can I be?" she said, so sadly. "I am hairless, fangless, clawless— "
"And you'll always be bare aside from the hair on your head. You'll never grow fangs to cut through hide. Claws do not befit you, but," Moro said, "are you any less fine a wolf? Ask yourself. What difference is it to your heart?"
"You're kind, mother," San swallowed, bent her head. "I'm sorry for—"
"For what, girl?" Moro laughed. "You need only apologise to yourself."
"But I make a poor wolf, and— "
"Silence," Moro said. She touched San's shoulder with her nose. "My daughter will always be mine, and beloved to all in her tribe. No soul ought to disparage her. She's as good a wolf as any."
San put her wrist over her eyes, and made that snuffling sound again. That night, she slept soundly.
The next day she strode with her chin held high.
The roots San grew ran deep.
Shishigami she adored. San liked to spend her afternoons at the spring to watch him work his magic. She would extoll his deeds to Moro in vivid detail. She would tell of the fronds and flowers sprouting at his feet; the fresh life flushed into each creature he kissed; and his funny face, half-man and half-beast.
All the trees took San in as one of their own. Those she hunted were treated with undue respect; she was never predator to those with voices. And her playmates were not limited to their own tribe: she wrestled with kits, ate with tanuki, butted heads with boars, laughed with kodama. With her deft hands she made the little apes dolls, the singing sparrows houses, the cleverer mice towns. She sought their friendship, and they hers.
San was dressed prettily in the rich yield of the woods. She never went a day without wearing her sister's hide, for it was her proudest possession. Around her neck she bore a necklace strung from fangs won by her long history of conquests. Her earrings were of mother-of-pearl dredged from the river and bone polished from the remains of deer. In the sleeping mountains she found strange rocks she fashioned into a dazzling diadem. Three arrows guarded her face; she had inked them in to mark her difference from the townsfolk and brand her allegiance to her home.
When the woman of fire came San was the first to challenge her. She sharpened her tools and made herself a splendid mask of war. Because of either her naïveté or devotion, she was sure the woods would win before the battle had even begun.
For San loved the forest fiercer than anyone else in it; she worshipped its waters, revelled in the sunlight cast through its canopy, and fought for it as though fevered.
And she was young, and so late to learn—or perhaps too stubborn to acknowledge—that it was always the strongest who survived.
Oh, and was that woman strong.
There was once a time when humans had feared and respected Moro. And the sentinel of the woods had withheld her wrath and her hatred, in kind. She had enjoyed their amiable company, and had admired their compact form and clever crafts. They had been harmless, then. Their weapons had been blunter; their hearts, purer; their greed, slighter.
Yet they had always been a hungry, proud people, and in hindsight not so different from the kith and kin of the woods. It was the constants of change that had fanned them wild with power and ambition. Because of that greed, that changing (or was it an awakening?), they had come to Moro's domain, a blight that sullied everything it touched: their spirits, the forest, the earth, the air.
If their tribe were a loveless one they ought to have run. Yet they hadn't run. They stayed and suffered. Grave but fair. The lady of the flames shot a hole in Moro only because she had been a sentimental fool the time she let her.
Poison was spreading through Moro's blood, swift and sure. But she had lived a long time. She was ready, for dying itself was not difficult. The farewells made it so.
Who knew what it was Shishigami saw in that boy. Moro sensed in him no ill will, yet: why? All over he smelled of sadness, and death. San herself still had yet to learn any scent on him except the foremost human one. She had not smelled the earth and the wood smothered under that rank layer of new rust. But she would learn.
Okkotonushi, two centuries Moro's senior, was keener of nose than the both of them. He smelled in him a story: a journey from the east, a curse not unlike theirs. Nevertheless the boar made promises of the boy’s death, as well as his tribe's.
Ah, that shrivelled old brute. Together they had fostered happier days of yore. Moro had spent surprising summers at his side, and over the years had grown to love the boar. Each wart, each jaundiced eye.
Moro had thought him sensible: a comrade to be depended upon and reasoned with. She had hoped for him a nice, easy death. Why must all boars be so incorrigible in their eschewal of pleasures for pride?
On the way back to their den, Moro thought of his stupidity, as well as that of the human San carried in her arms. She clenched the youth's sides tight until they made it back to the den. There Moro reclined in repose on the stone she liked best, to cool her aching bones and burning body.
From that spot, Moro watched San work. Her daughter busied herself with chores not befitting a wolf. With surprising tenderness she made for their guest a bed of her warmest skins, set him upon it, and washed his wounds herself. Then she sat spooning him food and nursing his health and running her eyes all over his body with an intensity Moro had never seen her display.
Again and again San would run her fingers over his face before she would touch her own, because for her he seemed a reflection to be descried.
After a night spent speaking with the boy from the east, Moro knew.
In the youngster there was a passion as bright and hot as any living thing stumbling fresh-footed into the spring; his heart was a furnace, and in it blazed a desire for her daughter, a lust for life, a glimmering semblance of a future.
Like any human he was stupid and hairless and thought only of himself. Yet he was the first human to have ever loved San, to have ever presented her with an offer of happiness. And the one thing a mother would want for her child was joy.
So, the morning when the battle began, when Moro said her final farewells to her last daughter, she had not yet forgotten the thoughts she had carried with her the previous night.
"There is also a path of life for you with that boy," she said, not averse to urging her towards it.
"I hate humans," was her only reply.
Was it the bullet that made Moro's breast clench? No, this was an older wound. It had come with San's severance of what she could not deny. It had come with San's hatred of what she herself was, which was something Moro should never have nourished in her.
For, oh, Moro loved her daughter for what she was. She loved her weak hairless limbs, loved how she could nestle them deep in her coat and hold her in this way, in an embrace she alone could give. Now was the only time Moro had ever wished to turn human, wished to have small lips to kiss her forehead, wished to have split fingers to smooth her hair, wished to have pathetic arms to enfold her.
And San's eyes—Moro wished to have them, too, wished for them so she could at last weep for what she would lose, and what her daughter would never find.
When Moro's time came, it came not with a crash, not with a howl, but with the dusking of a slow blink on lids that had begun closing the day she had been born.
Life had been years of watching the yellow moon rise high above the water. It had been a fine time, with many facets and views, becoming both crescent and orb as it waned and waxed. That image, that memory, was a good one for Moro to carry into the darkness with her.
What death looked like, Moro could only guess: perhaps it was a place in which moonless night skies shone without stars and rivers ran without end, or perhaps it was more of the same of what she knew now. Great deafening refrains of kodama, laughing. A forest that loomed over the mountains to which it was rooted. A place in the earth where she might rest, alongside all the children she had watched die before her. A way to give back to the pitiful world she'd left behind. She did not know.
Still, there was one thing Moro had always known: she was a god born and bred. What Shishigami did she could do, too. Not with power, not with breath, but with her womb, with her flesh. From her belly she had borne a legacy to last lifetimes. From her breast she had nursed packs of colossi, each one alive, each one brave, each one a gem. And now, from her rot, a forest could grow.
Moro thought of San calling Ashitaka's name in that strange way, and her smile: its rarity, its sweetness, its brightness, its beauty. She thought of the day her sons had been born, and their mirth ricocheting through the canopy. She thought of Okkotonushi decaying beside her, and his tusks scratching that itch in her haunches she could never quite reach. She thought of herself, and the brilliant flowers she would leave behind in her wake.
The great wolf stared into the face of the darkness, unafraid.
Death was as false as it was sure.