Calli sighed. “I just think that someday a woman like Ema could make a good wife for a man like you.”
“Oh,” Mal responded, his vision clearing of doubt. “No, Mother, I have already decided who I want to marry.”
“You have?”
Mal nodded vigorously. “Lyra, of course. We are in love.”
* * *
Mal did as he was told, escorting the Blanc girls on their mysterious mission. At first he was irritated as he followed the well-worn path. The girl Ema walked serenely next to him, while her two companions, older by a couple of years and each carrying a rolled-up net under an arm, skipped ahead and then glanced back over their shoulders at them, laughing as if there was nothing more hilarious than a Kindred carrying a club. But then Ema said, “Thank you for protecting us,” and Mal instantly changed his perception of what they were doing. No wonder Dog had suggested the club. These girls from the Blanc Tribe were going somewhere, and Mal was there to protect them from predators.
“I like it when the Kindred comes. You always bring meat, and everyone is always happy,” Ema observed. She ran a hand through her hair, which was even lighter in color than most of the Blanc Tribe. The motion made a small rattling sound as the decorative shells threaded into her locks clicked together.
Mal nodded. He was older and thought he should say something wise in response to this, but he could not think of anything. She was pretty, he saw. Small dots of darker color stippled her pale cheeks, as if her skin was trying to turn to a more normal brown color, a tiny bit at a time. Her arm was less revolting than interesting, once he became accustomed to it.
He liked how tranquil and composed Ema was, nothing at all like her tittering friends, who were walking backward now so they could laugh openly at the two of them. It made Mal want to throw something at them.
“I think something is going to happen today,” Ema blurted.
He glanced at her curiously. “Happen? What?”
She regarded him intently, her pale eyes full of energy. “Something wonderful,” she whispered.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The path soon turned toward a small rocky bluff. The two older girls darted ahead and left the trail and bent over, gathering dry, brown grasses in their hands. Ema did not help them, so Mal did not either.
At the top of the trail, a cave waited, wide open and tall enough at the opening for a man to walk in upright. Several club-length tree branches were piled at the entrance, some of them blackened at one end. The older girls had wound the grasses around the tips of three of the branches. One of the girls was huddled over a rock with a piece of flint, her tongue in the corner of her mouth while she worked to strike a spark. Mal waited, more and more impatient, as the girl continued her inexpert efforts.
“Would you like me to try it?” he finally interrupted.
The girls all glanced at each other and, naturally, giggled. But he was handed the flint and he set his club aside and leaned down and found out that what he had seen Bellu do countless times was actually rather difficult: he struck and struck, but the few sparks he made flew in random directions and then flared out the way the vividly bright blood drops of the sun sometimes streaked across the night sky and vanished.
“I have never done this before and it is not as easy as I thought,” he admitted. He looked up and saw the girls staring at him in something like shock. “What is it?”
They exchanged glances. “It is just so seldom that a man admits a mistake,” Ema observed.
“Or that he cannot do something,” one of the older girls added.
Mal did not like the idea that he had made either a mistake or an admission of a lack of aptitude, and did not see why they were speaking to him as if it were a compliment. Just then, his efforts made a spark fly and land on the head of one of the torches, and he leaned over and blew on it as he had seen Bellu do, until a little flame started in the grass.
To Mal, this proved the girls were all wrong. He looked up at them proudly.
“Though you never attempted it before, it came to you easily,” Ema praised him, completely getting the point. She reached out and touched him with her one hand as he stood, and, of course, the girls giggled.
There was plenty of illumination from the girls’ torches. A few feet into the cave, he was surprised to see the walls coated with ice, and the temperature plummeted.
“It takes nearly the summer, but eventually it will all melt,” Ema told him. “Then the walls are wet instead of frozen. And back there, the ice never melts, because all winter long the women come and break off ice tongues and throw them back here.”
“Ice tongues?” Mal frowned, trying to picture it.
“When water flows in the winter, it forms a tongue to lick the earth,” she explained.
“I have not seen such a thing.”
“Maybe you should stay here next winter!” one of the older girls suggested. Barely had she spoken than the two girls were laughing so hard they had to clutch each other, their torches wavering and sending mad shadows dancing on the walls.
Ema turned to them. “Why would you try to ruin my life?” she asked softly.
It was as if the two girls had been slapped. They stared at Ema, speechless, while Mal tried to figure out what was happening. There was no laughter now. One of them nodded. “I am so sorry, Ema,” she apologized.
“Sorry about what?” Mal asked curiously.
The girls did not reply. They lowered their eyes and went deeper into the cave. Another few feet and a wall of ice greeted them, an odd wall that looked as if frozen logs had been stacked up on top of each other. The ice tongues, Mal supposed. Here there were several odd clubs lying on the ground, their stone heads placed so that the blade pointed straight forward from the top, like a spear tip but thick and heavy like an ax.
“Would you help us?” Ema asked, touching his arm again.
The older girls demonstrated and he quickly got it: the point of the club was thrust at the frozen ground, cracking it. Most of the earth had been turned this way before, Mal saw, and once he broke the few inches of ice the soil underneath, while frozen, yielded fairly easily into chunks. Proud to show how strong he was, he attacked the task without questioning why he was doing it.
“That is good,” Ema praised. The girls all dropped to their knees and, to Mal’s astonishment, began pulling fat fish out of the earth, each one as long as the distance between elbow and hand. They threw these fish on the nets they had brought, piling it up.
“Do they live in the ground?” he asked, bewildered.
This time even Ema laughed. “All summer long, we bring fish here and bury it where the ground is always frozen. The ice tongues melt a little. These fish are frozen solid. See?” Ema thumped on one with her hand. “But when they are cooked, they will feed all of us. This is why we always have fish for the Kindred.”
The older girls trussed up their nets and slung the heavy loads over their shoulders. “Thank you for helping us,” one of them said in Mal’s general direction. Once they were out of the cave they tossed their torches to the dirt and ran ahead, so that Mal and Ema were alone. He picked up his club and the two of them headed back.
“I can go faster,” Mal told Ema, conscious that her pace was deliberately slow.
“But then we would be home much more quickly,” Ema replied.
Mal pondered this. Yes, that was true. But so what?
“Most of the Kindred are so thin, but you are like us, with muscles on your arms and shoulders,” Ema remarked.
Mal glanced at his arms. “I have always noticed that the Blanc people have bigger bones,” he admitted after a moment, “but I have never seen myself as anything but a boy with a bad leg.”
“I remember the first time I saw you,” Ema replied. “Even then, you were stronger than all the other Kindred boys your age.”
Mal doubted that anyone who saw him noticed anything but his limp. He glanced down at his tiny, toeless foot. No one would ever miss that, he reflected bitter
ly.
She caught him looking at his own leg. “Does it hurt?” she asked him quietly.
“No. Never. In fact, I have trouble running over rough ground because the leg is a bit numb,” Mal replied, shocking himself with a confession he had made to no one.
“My arm hurts. Even though it is not there anymore,” Ema told him.
“I am sorry,” Mal said after a moment. It seemed an inadequate sentiment, but what do you say to a girl with a mass of scars where her arm should have been?
They walked with each other in silence, but Mal could feel her next to him, watching his face, and when he glanced her way she gave him that pretty smile.
“I am sorry that you will be leaving in just one or two days,” she said.
“We have to get back to our summer settlement. There is good hunting there, a clean stream, and caves to live in,” Mal replied.
“I would love to see it.”
He looked at her. It was as if she were talking about something else entirely, having a conversation he did not understand.
At the edge of the Blanc settlement, Ema stopped. Mal turned toward her questioningly.
“This has been a wonderful day for me,” she sighed.
Mal nodded, a bit bewildered. “Good,” he finally replied.
“I have a secret, would you let me tell it to you?” she whispered. Mal nodded, and she beckoned for him to lower his head to hers. He bent down, and her breath warmed his ear and sent a tingle down his backbone. Her hand came up and touched the back of his neck, pulling his head down farther, and then her mouth moved from his ear to his lips.
A warm sensation flooded through him like hot water. Shocked and enthralled, he dropped his club and stood with his arms hanging limply, his heart pounding. When she released him he stared at her pale eyes, his mouth open, and then she turned and ran away.
She had kissed him. Kissed him! Elation flowed through him now. He was a man who had been kissed!
He went to find Dog—this was news that had to be shared, and at once.
He had been pretty good at it, he decided. He and Ema had stood, locked together, for a long time. He felt his blood heat up just remembering it. Now that he had kissed a girl he could do it again, and he would, soon.
He would kiss Lyra!
* * *
For the only time in anyone’s memory, there were still pools of snow in the shadows at the summer settlement. The trees were budding but the leaves were not yet out in the open, and no tender shoots of grass were feeling their way toward the sun. The Kindred regarded each other solemnly. Perhaps this explained why they had not seen any prey in several days—until the grasses rose from the soil, nothing would venture this far north.
The hunt went out and did not come back for two days, and then three, and then four. For them to stay out meant that they were finding nothing.
The women foraged. They found insect larvae and tender roots, and the buds of some flowers, though often bitter, could be eaten. Still, hunger cramps seized the women and their children.
On a day when the rain contained pellets of ice, a scream tore the morning air. The women ran out to find Bellu sobbing, collapsed by the communal fire. “My baby!” she shouted hoarsely, her mouth sagging in horror. And then she began screaming again, holding the limp, lifeless child in her arms.
Tragic though it was, this was not an infrequent situation for the Kindred, and indeed it was the reason why they waited so long to give children their names. Bellu’s child was not yet a person in her own right, but was simply of the mother, as a hand, or a leg. There would be no assembly of the Kindred for burial—this was an event that occurred often enough that common practice mandated that the mother take the baby away and bury it a discreet distance from camp. But Bellu had thrown herself into the mud and was inconsolable, unable to communicate with any coherency, and so Albi volunteered to dispose of the tiny corpse. “As a kindness,” she explained in a murmur, gently tugging the baby out of Bellu’s reluctant arms. “I will see to it.” The other women gathered around, many of them veterans of the same sort of tragedy, while Albi scooped up the child and left camp.
Calli fell asleep that night holding Bellu cradled in her arms. During the night she awoke, shifting painfully with the weight of Bellu slumped against her. It had stopped raining, the air cold and still. The men, she realized drowsily, must be nearby, because she could smell cooking meat in the night. Good. They would be home with food.
They did not come home, however, not that day, nor the next. Bellu remained despondent, sitting listlessly, barely acknowledging when Calli brought her some thin soup—her soup, Calli’s ration, because Bellu had already consumed her own. Feeling a sharp anger rising within her, Calli bit off what she might say and left camp. She had no direction, she just kept walking, thinking perhaps she would never stop. Just walk out into the plains until exhaustion took her down, then await her fate.
After too many paces to count she was far from camp, though the fires still flavored the air with smoke. Calli felt broken and numb, walking more and more slowly because it seemed less and less important that she keep moving. Then she heard something, a noise that made her head snap up alertly despite her lethargy. She instinctively made her way in a crouch to a large mound of dirt: the noise seemed to come from just the other side.
It was a snuffing sound, slightly wet. Curious, Calli cautiously crawled to the crest of the mound, lifting her head to see.
It was Albi, sitting on a stone next to the blackened remnants of a fire. Her hands were to her mouth.
She was eating.
* * *
With the bullying Grat now a member of the hunt—he had been made a stalker the previous summer—Vinco and Mal and Markus were back to being inseparable, a relationship made all the more fraternal by the knowledge that this was the summer they would be made men before the Kindred. Restless with their growing bodies, they threw spears and rocks, they chased younger boys, they told themselves wild tales about the bears and lions they would kill. Theoretically they were also the home guard, and they did carry their spears, but they were too bored to hang around the settlement and were often out in the woods together.
The hunt was back, though—bringing a few rabbits and a vile-tasting badger—so they dared not abandon their posts, and thus they were even more itchy than usual.
“We should go see what Lyra is doing,” Mal suggested.
Vinco and Markus rolled their eyes at each other. This was not the first time Mal had come up with this brilliant idea. Lacking something better to do, though, they struck off toward the family fires to see if they could find her.
As little boys they had had free rein to wander the men’s side, but once they were old enough it was explained to them that until they were adults, they were prohibited from going there. This meant that Mal rarely saw his father, so he was surprised to see Palloc striding toward them. Palloc’s pale features were scowling and he seemed focused on an internal struggle of some kind and did not notice the boys.
“Father!” Mal called. He left his friends and ran forward with his awkward gait, dragging his bad leg with each step. “Good summer, Father,” Mal greeted as he approached. “I am happy to see you today.”
Palloc stood motionless. Mal politely dropped his spear and raised his hands, palms out, as he had been taught to do when addressing another man. “I am hoping that the hunt will be good when you go out tomorrow.”
“Do not call me that,” Palloc said darkly.
Mal was startled. “What? Call you what?”
Palloc took four steps and knocked Mal to the ground. Mal’s head bounced on the hard earth, and odd little dark spots flew around in his vision, like sparks rising from a fire.
“To you I am Spearman. Understand?” Palloc hissed. He turned away.
Mal leaped to his feet. “Why do you hate me?” he pleaded to his father’s back. “I am your son.”
Palloc whirled, making a sound deep his throat, and strode back. Mal rais
ed his arms to cover his head and Palloc hit him solidly in the chest, rocking him back so that he had to take his weight on both legs and nearly fell. When Palloc hit him again Mal crumpled.
Markus and Vinco turned to each other in horror. They were children and had no right to interfere, but the savagery of this attack was unlike any family discipline they had ever witnessed.
“We have to get Dog,” Vinco breathed.
Markus nodded and the two boys ran to find Mal’s brother.
THIRTY-NINE
Calli sent word to Urs through Nix that she urgently needed to speak to him. Urs found her waiting for him upstream, not in their forbidden rendezvous place but well south of the Kindred’s self-enforced border.
“Good summer, Calli,” he greeted formally and, to her ears, awkwardly.
“Good summer, Hunt Master,” she replied. Anyone watching would see two people standing two paces apart, not touching, merely talking. Nothing improper. “Thank you for coming to meet with me, Urs. I wanted to speak to you about my son.”
Urs regarded her carefully. “Dog?” he asked, because he did not want it to be the other one.
“No, not Dog,” Calli replied patiently. “Urs, soon we will have our summer gathering and Vinco, Markus, and Mal will receive their assignments.”
Urs was already shaking his head.
“Just listen,” Calli urged. “Please. They will receive their assignments. The boys will join the hunt—”
“I cannot,” Urs interrupted. “Not Mal.”
“But Urs…”
“I am sorry but I have to do what is good for the hunt. A man needs to be able to run.”
“Dog says Mal can throw a spear farther and more accurately than anyone else.”
“I have seen him throw,” Urs grunted. “He uses the wrong hand.”
“What does that matter?”
“Calli!” Urs said sharply. “You are not to question me about matters of the hunt.”
She stood there staring fiercely at him for a moment, and then her shoulders slumped. “If he has nothing assigned to him, he will have no purpose. It will kill him.”
The Dog Master: A Novel of the First Dog Page 25