The Butcher, the Archer, and the Baker

The butcher’s knives were forged by his grandfather. The wood of the handles had gradually surrendered to his powerful grip, their grooves coming to match his fist alone.

When he was still a young man, a dark carnival of strangers passed through the village from somewhere across the desert. For two nickels, a crone in a fortune booth cracked an egg and prophesied his fate from a bloody yolk.

“When your death comes,” she hissed, “it will be delivered by your own carving blade.”

From that day on, he was careful with his knives and reckless with all else.

Men who crossed him were known to vanish.

Mothers warned their daughters to step wide of the meat monger.

•

From over a long, treacherous road, the old archer and his young family came to the little town. The sole survivor of a defeated army, his shattered life had been made whole these last twenty years in the form of woman and child.

The wife of the archer was a splendid cook and made a fried bread that earned spiritual devotion from those who ate it. The kitchen in the inn put her to stripping the guts out of monkfish, hot from the sun.

On her second day of work, she brought three loaves of her bread.

The next day, she was named head baker.

As their daughter grew from girl to woman, she had begged her father to teach the longbow, to bestow that power, but he had given up those ways.

In this new place, the family soon discovered their old patterns.

•

One evening, while a low sun spilled red along the horizon, the baker was sent to collect an order of pork shoulder and fatback for the cook. She found the butcher at his shop, alone. He held up his grinning mask for a few moments of tense chatter, but that was all he could manage before revealing his true nature.

She told the old archer enough. The details she kept to herself.

•

He had not held his bow in many years and owned just two arrows. Standing on one end of the bowshaft, he hung his weight from the other, bending it down to meet the loop at the end of the loose cord. Once strung, the weapon buzzed with a deadly music.

Under the blue light of the moon, the butcher, long knife in hand, walked out from the shop and down into the street where the archer stepped from the shadows to face him.

“Prepare to die for your crime,” the man said, raising his bow and releasing with a near silent thrum.

Bent unafraid to charge his assailant, the butcher took the arrow’s barbed tip in the meat of his wide shoulder. The archer turned and ran along a trail in the woods in search of higher ground, but the distance between them was gone in a flash.

The butcher fell upon him as he would a Christmas lamb in the slaughterhouse. “You old fool.” His laughter was volcanic. “Your arrow cannot kill me. It has been foretold that I will die by my own blade alone. With it here in my grasp, I am immortal!”

Trapped against the ground, the archer felt only a brief pressure and a tugging sensation before the butcher had his arm carved off at the elbow.

Up the path from where he lay, the archer could see his wife and daughter. They stood on each side of his great bow, straining together to nock and draw the last arrow. Trembling, they breathed in unison, aimed, and loosed.

The archer’s gaze could judge any shaft in flight, its speed and angle, lift and spin. The moment it left the bowstring, he knew that the arrow would miss its mark wide.

He was doomed.

The butcher rose above him, gleaming steel held out before his twisted face, poised for the killing blow, when instantly the knife came alive, its wooden grooves leaping inside his fists.

A foul ringing note echoed among the trees.

The arrow, in its path to missing the man had struck instead the carving blade, its new angle guiding the arrow back to true.

It pierced the butcher’s left eye and passed through the back of his rocky skull like an eggshell.

•

In some distant, exotic land, the ancient crone shuddered at the chill climbing her crooked spine. Cackling, she knew deep in her chalky bones that another of her prophesies had come to pass.

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