The deep, intuitive force that had carried him along disappeared abruptly, leaving Terris heartsick at his own weakness. Esmelda would never have let Jakon play on her emotions like that or get so carried away by the heat of the moment. But there was nothing he could do to unsay it now.
He lowered his eyes, unwilling to compound his stupidity with an outright lie. “No, I didn’t. But the reason I came had nothing to do with you.”
For a long moment Terris couldn’t look up. His words echoed, tinny and false-sounding, in his ears. If it had been only his own life he’d thrown away, that was one thing. He’d spoken for all of them. Perhaps for all of Laurea. He had spoken impulsively, without considering...
The next thing he knew, the poisoned dagger was back in its wrappings and Jakon was cutting through his bonds and then Kardith’s and Etch’s with a small knife from his belt. Terris felt only a tug as the blade sliced through the leather.
A wave of inexpressible relief surged through him, that somehow he’d blundered through the worst crisis of his life. He wanted to shout and cry all at once. The air in the long-house seemed brighter. He flexed his fingers, stiff and swollen. They tingled with the returning circulation.
Suddenly the guards who’d been standing quietly at the doorways moved into position beside Etch and Kardith and held them fast. Another grabbed Terris’s arm and twisted it behind him.
“What the hell — ? Jakon, you took my word!”
“Indeed. And if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be alive,” Jakon answered quietly. “We norther barbarians don’t keep prisoners. Yes, I took your word, but I still don’t know what it’s worth.”
Jakon nodded toward Etch and Kardith. “Take that one to the healers and have his arm properly tended to. Take her to the root cellar. Under guard. If she even looks at a knife, set her out in a leaky boat in the middle of the lake and we’ll see how well a woman of the Tribes can swim. And as for the cub here, throw him in the hold.”
Chapter 25
Terris’s vision went red. Air rushed through his lungs, hissing like steam. Blindly, he lunged at Jakon. He didn’t think what he was going to do, he just hurled his body forward, jerking his arms to get free. The guard’s grasp, which had seemed no more than a light restraint, clamped down on him like a vise. Pain lanced down his arms and back. Any notion of flight or attack vanished instantly. He fought only to breathe, to ease the wrenching leverage on his shoulder joints. Any moment now, they would pop out of their sockets. He could almost feel the ligaments creak and tear.
An instant later, the pressure on one shoulder loosened. The back of his neck was gripped by fingers that were blunt and calloused and iron strong. Carpet and floor and the edges of rough walls blurred past him. His feet stumbled forward of their own accord. His eyes watered and the skin around his mouth went numb.
Suddenly he came to a halt, his feet splayed out like a drunken man’s and his vision still cloudy gray. The grip at the back of his neck was gone, leaving a slowly fading throbbing. Behind him, a wooden bar rasped home.
Terris wet his lips and tried a breath, then another. Every muscle in his chest ached. He blinked, bringing the room into better focus. He stood in a storage room lined with shelves and baskets of shiny dark wicker. The room was not nearly as lightless as he’d first thought; open slits for air ran just underneath the low slanting roof. Rounded parcels hung from every rafter, smoked meat, he thought, now that his sense of smell was returning, and skins of dried fruit or fermented grain.
In the center of the room, a space had been cleared for a pallet bed. He sat down on it. The dried fir branches crackled under the blanket of unbleached, tightly woven wool, the needles brittle but still slightly aromatic. Beside the bed sat an empty pot of coarse red clay, decorated with a complicated incised pattern and fired but not glazed, and another, large and wide-mouthed, by the side of the snug-fitting wooden door.
The bar slid back again and the door opened a crack. Terris scrambled to his feet, too slow to reach it before it closed again. A pot half full of water had been shoved inside, along with a bowl of steamed barley.
The water was cold and Terris found himself surprisingly thirsty. Hungry, too, for the chewy nut-like grain. As he finished it and then drained the last of the water, he realized how easily either could have been drugged. Or poisoned. Jakon had picked up the fake dagger by the hilt, knowing the same thing.
Terris spent the next hour trying to analyze the norther people, but he derived little comfort in the exercise. His imagination kept straying to increasingly uncomfortable visions of what lay in store for Kardith, for Etch, for himself. The University and everything else in Laureal City seemed very far away.
He spent the second hour prowling the room and thinking of all the ways he could make weapons from the materials at hand, and the third hour talking himself out of it.
Putting him here, in this storage room that was far from secure, was a test. It must be. There was no need for immediate or desperate action. Jakon had accepted Terris’s word enough to not kill them immediately, and Etch was being given some kind of medical care.
What would he do if he escaped, anyway? The first norther he encountered would have no trouble recapturing him, and then the situation would be even worse for all of them. Eventually, reason won out over panic. He sat back down to wait for what would come next.
He didn’t have to wait much longer. The wooden bar slid back, and outside stood the same guard who’d shoved him in here earlier, the dour-faced norther who’d led the capture party. He carried a short, barb-headed spear.
“Your friend’s wound has gone bad,” the norther said. “The healer says it’s too close to the body and cutting off the arm won’t help. Jakon asks if you can use your souther medicines.”
Terris got to his feet. Please god — any god — it’s not too late. “The supplies are in my travel pack.”
“It waits for you in the healer’s tent.”
o0o
Terris emerged into the quickly chilling shadows of the fir trees. The storage room that had been his prison was in a series of subdivided chambers taking up one end of the long-house. Beside it stood several low, wide tents and a huge outdoor cooking pit, from which blue smoke and tantalizing odors curled upward. Beyond the edge of the clearing, the few tents and log structures were smaller, half-hidden in the spaces between the trees.
The healer’s dwelling was a combination of tent and cabin. Coarse woolen fabric, draped like the walls of a tent, lined the rough-cut log walls. Terris ducked his head to avoid the slanting roof as he entered. Inside, the temperature was noticeably warmer.
Screens of stretched hide panels, richly decorated, separated off a little alcove where Etch lay on a pallet. Beside him squatted an old man in pale gold elkskins several sizes too big for him. He tested the pulse at the side of Etch’s neck and did not look up as the norther guard stood back for Terris to approach.
Etch’s chest and shoulders were bare, but blankets covered the rest of his body. His arm had been bandaged with a fresh-smelling herbal poultice. Fiery red streaks stretched along his skin from the wound toward his heart.
Terris knelt and touched Etch’s hand. The skin was hot and papery dry. Etch did not respond. His eyes stayed closed, his breathing fast and shallow.
“Is he dying?” Terris said.
The healer looked at him with pale blue eyes, alert and piercing. Terris realized he wasn’t as old as he’d first assumed. His apparent age was an effect of the premature wrinkling of his skin and his extreme thinness.
“There is nothing more I can do for him.” There was a slight, almost bitter emphasis on the word I. “I have cleaned the wound of dead and rotten tissue, but...” He indicated the low shelf along the wall screen, with its row of small pottery cups of mashed herbs and dark brown liquids, covered baskets, waterskins in wicker frames. “All my herbs can do is give his body a chance to heal itself.”
The travel pack lay at the foot of Etch’s pallet. Terris grabbed it and yanked open
the main pouch. He thrust his fingers inside the protective inner pocket. It must have been thoroughly searched for the poisoned dagger to be found and yet everything else, with the exception of his cooking knife, was neatly in its place. Money, clothing, food. A flat box of stiffened leather, the first-aid kit.
Each item in the kit had been wrapped in layers of oiled silk to keep out moisture. There were small vials of water purification tablets, fever and inflammation reducers, disinfectant, bandages, sutures. Yes, there they were, two packets of bacteriostats effective against common infections and a pressure syringe of concentrated broad-spectrum bactericides, powerful drugs that would kill every circulating pathogen within a few hours. Like any other educated Laurean, Terris had been taught how to use them.
What he hadn’t been taught, what he couldn’t understand, was why the northers hadn’t taken the kit. The healer had known what the Laurean medicines could do and yet had sent for Terris to use them. For Etch, not for one of his own people who might need them just as badly.
Terris picked up the syringe. The glass and surgical steel felt cold. He found the big artery in Etch’s armpit and positioned the tip of the syringe over it. The pressure device hissed softly as it drove the medication through the skin and into the bloodstream. As if in response, Etch’s head moved on his pillow, a lolling movement like a blinded man searching for the light. His eyelids quivered and he took a deep, sighing breath.
The healer held out a waterskin, its soft belly supported in a wicker basket for handling. The flexible neck ended in a tube of delicately carved bone. Terris took it and tried not to think about the origin of the bone. It looked very much like a human finger.
“If he wakes, he must drink.” With surprising agility, the healer rose to a crouch and glided from the alcove.
o0o
After a time, Etch roused again. A groan came from his throat, as if he were trying to speak. He licked his dry lips. Terris held the bone tube to his mouth and tipped out a small amount of water.
Etch swallowed. His eyes opened slightly, pupils wide and unfocused as he fumbled with his good hand for the waterskin.
“It’s all right.” Terris gently restrained him. “Just drink, it’s all right. You’re safe, my friend, I’m here,” very much as he’d murmured to the laboring mare. Etch relaxed back on the pallet and began drinking thirstily, pausing only to take a breath. Soon his gulps slowed and he drifted off to sleep again.
Terris touched Etch’s arm again. This time the skin, although still hot, felt moist. He cradled the waterskin on his lap and sat back.
The little screened-off room sank into a dense quiet. Noises from the encampment outside flowed around the healer’s tent as if it were a chunk of granite in the middle of a gently murmuring stream. The healer himself had vanished without a trace. As the moments stretched on, Terris became acutely aware of his own heartbeat, the whisper of air through his own lungs, the watchful stillness of the norther guard.
Terris’s thoughts drifted, half-drowsy, his eyes slowly closing. The walls darkened and the unmistakable reek of beeswax filled his nostrils. For a moment, his vision blurred, then he blinked and his eyes focused again. He felt himself being carried across a dimly lit room, safe in strong familiar arms and bathed in a sweet milky scent.
Suddenly he found himself gazing down at the face of a desperately ill man, but it wasn’t Etch. The features seemed strange and yet hauntingly familiar — skin dusky in the candlelight, cheeks sunk with fever, eyes bright as embers.
The man on the bed raised one hand as if reaching out. The rustle of the bedclothes masked the sound of his voice, a rasping whisper.
Terris felt himself being shifted, transferred to another set of arms, thin and wiry. The skin smelled familiar but far less intimate and reassuring. He twisted, following the milk-scent. The woman who was the source walked away from him and sat on the bed. He saw her hold the man’s hand in hers. Some emotion Terris couldn’t understand charged her voice as she spoke.
For a long time she sat unmoving, the only sound the hoarse rattle of the man’s breathing, growing slower and harsher. After a time of silence, she reached down to brush the dark hair back from his forehead and cover his eyes. The candlelight reflected on a ring on her finger, the signet a dotted doubled circle.
The woman’s head dropped forward, her short-cropped hair hiding her face. Her shoulders sagged, but her spine remained rigidly erect. She drew a deep, shuddering breath.
Her tears shone in the flickering candlelight.
o0o
Terris blinked and found himself shivering in the norther healer’s tent. His cheeks were wet. He wondered what his life might have been like if his father hadn’t died, how growing up with Esmelda might have been different. He felt unbearable sadness for the ways she herself had changed.
Slowly the tears on his face dried. Etch slept peacefully on his pallet. The norther guard, who had been sitting like a carven rock, said, “Why do you weep, souther? Your friend will live. See how well he does already.”
Terris flinched as if he’d been caught naked. But there was no prying behind the question, no scorn, no sense that the man was probing for some weakness he could exploit. Only puzzlement and sympathy.
“I know that,” he said. “I — I was remembering my father. He died when I was a baby. I used to think I made it all up, stories, nothing more. But this time — I saw him. He was real. Here. Now.”
“Yes, you have that look about you. It is not easy to know a father through the spirit only.”
Terris didn’t know what to make of this comment. No one in Laurea, not even the gaea-priests who were always holding forth about cosmic oneness, would have reacted with such simple acceptance. For lack of something better, he glanced at the herbal remedies arrayed on the low shelf beside Etch’s pallet. “Did your people suffer very much during the epidemic?”
The norther looked surprised. “You are Esmelda’s son, and yet you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“That she sent medicines — vaccines — for all our people along the border. Not one of us sickened. We died other ways — of cold, of hunger, of souther spears. But not of pestis fever.”
Why? Why would she want to help the northers? Why not simply do nothing and let the plague wipe them out? No, that’s what Montborne would have done. Esme sees things differently — and so do I.
“There were many things about her I never knew,” he answered slowly.
“It’s for this — and other things — that we permit her agents to live among us. But do not hope they will bring her news of you now. We will make sure none of them leaves the trading camp in time.”
The norther leaned forward, the shaft of his spear resting against his shoulder. “As for you, I see the same thing with Jakon and his grandfather, who is The Cassian of Clan’Cass. An ordinary chief would have killed himself after the Brassa massacre. He is a legend all through the north; even the crazy Huldites listen to him. So Jakon brought us down here, where he could build his trading post without everyone forever asking what The Cassian would have done. It’s always that way with leaders and the children who walk their shadows.”
“I don’t know about the grandfather, but Jakon — he doesn’t need to, how did you put it? walk anyone’s shadow.”
“Ah!”
Terris looked down as he digested the implications of that single syllable. “Tell me — I’m sorry, I don’t know your name — am I still a prisoner?”
“I’m Grissem, and we take no prisoners. You are...an untrusted guest. You cannot go to the long-house uninvited, or the sweat hut when it’s built, or women’s quarters, or leave the island.”
“Until Jakon decides to accept my word.”
“Until you eat his bread and salt.”
Bread and salt, an old ritual of hospitality. “And then?”
“Then you would have sworn to keep faith or be killed.”
Bread and salt sounded so innocent, something Terris would have
easily accepted. Kardith — or any Ranger — would have known what it meant and refused. Aviyya, if she were still alive, would have known.
Terris shivered against the sense of rising quicksand. Yet he’d learned more about the northers in five minutes than he would have in five years at home.
“We know your ways are not ours,” Grissem said, “which is why Jakon has left you the choice. For now, at least. When the sweat hut is finished, he’ll go there to fast and pray. The Northlight will come down to him and show him what he must do with you.”
And then, Terris thought with a shiver, there may no longer be a choice.
But what, by all the hidden gods of Harth, is the Northlight?
Chapter 26
Terris and Etch wandered along the shoreline, waiting for the sun to go down. Grissem followed a few paces behind, far enough to give them the illusion of privacy but not so far they could forget the spear he carried. They had been on the island for five days now, and Etch was back on his feet and rapidly regaining his strength. Meanwhile, Terris’s nerves grated with the frustration that increased daily. Jakon had disappeared into the sweat hut, there was no sign of Kardith, and Terris hadn’t been able to exchange more than a few words with the northers to fill in the tantalizing glimpses of their culture. Despite his earlier words, Grissem had kept them carefully isolated from the lake community. They were, indeed, untrusted guests.
As the sun dipped toward the horizon, the expanse of tundra beyond the lake turned misty purple in the failing light. Overhead, the sky had gone a sullen blue-black. Terris gazed over the gently lapping waves, half expecting to find Kardith sitting alone and furious in an oarless boat over the deepest part of the lake. But the wind-rippled water was empty. Firelights glowed on the far shore. Bits of music and talk, faint and disjointed, reached his ears.
Earlier the same day, Grissem had informed Terris that Jakon had emerged from the sweat hut, having dreamed up a message from whatever gods had come down to speak to him. Grissem hadn’t phrased it exactly like that, but Terris didn’t expect the so-called message to be anything more than a hallucination born of dehydration and Jakon’s own expectations. The eastern nomads did the same thing with their dreamsmoke rituals. These northers appeared to take the matter seriously, almost religiously, and a special ceremony had been scheduled for that evening in the long-house.
Northlight Page 22