The Simbul's Gift

by Lynn Abbey

  Later, sleepless himself, staring at the stars, and listening to the snores around him, Bro revised his opinion of his companions. It wasn’t that they treated him as if he were still twelve, it was that they acted as if the past seven years hadn’t happened. Most of the nearby Cha’Tel’Quessir had followed Rizcarn before. They’d simply picked up where they’d left off.

  Sitting up on his pallet of leaf-filled leather, Bro studied the camp with growing apprehension. His right hand fell to his waist where he kept the Simbul’s knife. Rubbing its studded leather hilt had become a habit. Sometimes—like tonight—when rubbing wasn’t enough to steady him, Bro unsheathed the knife and stared at the blade until he lost himself in its wavy patterns.

  “Did you come looking for me?” he whispered to the absent queen. “I was a squirrel for an afternoon. A squirrel would’ve had more sense than to do what I’m doing. I’ve been thinking … maybe I should have let you steal Zandilar’s Dancer. You said a worthy goddess wouldn’t have let Shali die just so I’d bring Dancer into the Yuirwood. I hope you’re right. I hope it’s not too late.”

  Bro laced her boots over his ankles and headed out of the camp. Rizcarn said he spent the night praying to Relkath. Bro figured he’d find the biggest tree and find his father, too.

  By night the Yuirwood shimmered with pale colors. Paths were dark ribbons weaving across the forest floor. Bro walked to the latrine pits and past them. He was resigned to an all-night, almost aimless search when he spotted a tree trunk where one of Relkath’s runes sparkled. Rizcarn wasn’t by that tree, but it gave Bro an idea. He climbed high into its branches. From the crown he saw other, similarly marked trees and one that was bright as a torch.

  Rizcarn was there, eyes closed, arms folded and oblivious to the world. Bro had tried to be quiet as he walked through the Yuirwood, but he was no ranger, no forester. Crackling leaves had heralded his every step. Rizcarn should have heard him. Or maybe not. The light that had guided Bro wasn’t coming from a tree-trunk carving. It formed a sphere that centered around Rizcarn’s head as bright as sunshine, soft as moonlight, and with no source other than the seated Cha’Tel’Quessir.

  The sight was utterly peaceful and unnerving. Bro wanted to run away, but his body wasn’t listening. He did what he’d come to do, instead.

  “Rizcarn? Rizcarn, I’d like to talk to you.” No response. Indignation eroded Bro’s fear. He strode forward. “Rizcarn! Talk to me!”

  Rizcarn shuddered. His eyes opened and Bro stopped short. Rizcarn’s eyes were truly luminous: pure, pupiless white, and the source of the light. Bro clutched the Simbul’s knife, still in its sheath. He tried to pray, but no god’s name came to his mind; he took refuge in old habits.

  “Poppa. Poppa, please. I was—I am your son. You say you were roaming other forests, but I know better—at least, I know something different. I want to believe you, Poppa; I truly do. If there’s a future for the Cha’Tel’Quessir, I want to be a part of it. I’d like to help you make the trees remember again, and the rocks, but you’ve told lies and I don’t know what to believe anymore. Poppa, why are we going to the Sunglade. What’s truly going to happen there?

  “Ebroin? Ebroin, you’re troubled. Come; sit beside me and tell me what troubles you. It’s your mother, isn’t it?”

  Bro nodded before he could stop himself.

  “You didn’t know your mother, Ebroin. She lived free when I met her: no cottages, no hearth.” Rizcarn grinned and shook his head. “Hardly any clothes, except her own hair and wolf skin. I thought Shali was the Yuir come to life and she thought … I don’t know what she thought; I never did. MightyTree blessed us; they thought they’d never see either of us again. Funny thing: I thought so too. Thought we’d live free together. She said no, there had to be a child first: you. A child, a hearth, a home. I tried, Ebroin. I tried, but I can’t live in one place. She said, all right, a child’s not forever; we’ll live free after he’s grown.

  “Every time I came back, Ebroin, she was more beautiful than before, but her roots had gone deeper. I wanted you to grow quickly, before I lost her. I took you with me, hoping she’d follow us. You know she didn’t. When we came back, she said she wanted another child.”

  Bro couldn’t—wouldn’t—imagine his mother dressed in her own hair and a wolf skin. For him Shali was the one-room cottage, the hearth with its ever-simmering pots, the little garden weaving between sunlight and shadow beneath the trees. She loved the forest, but for her the forest began on her doorstep and ended a hundred paces farther on.

  “I told her no, Ebroin. We argued. I wanted the woman I loved, the woman who lived free in the Yuirwood. She wanted something else, and that was the end. She knew I wasn’t coming back.”

  Bro’s strength failed; habit kept him standing. A thousand memories clamored for his attention. Yes, Shali was the cottage, the hearth, and the garden, but didn’t he remember her standing in the sun, the moon, or the rain, staring up at the trees as if she knew their names? And of all those times when Rizcarn came home and he got sent to stay with his cousins, wasn’t that last time—when they’d come home together—different? A twelve-year-old didn’t know the subtle language of adults in love and anger. A nineteen-year-old still didn’t know it well, but he remembered the important parts.

  These were bits of understanding Bro would rather not have had, but unlike everything else Rizcarn had said lately, these words had the ring of truth to them. They weren’t the answers he’d come looking for, but they were answers.

  “You died, Poppa.”

  “She didn’t want me to leave.”

  “I saw you buried.”

  “A body. I hadn’t finished Relkath’s work.”

  “She loved you, Poppa, and you loved her.”

  “Did I say otherwise?”

  “I was born! I kept the two of you apart! You’d be living free, if I hadn’t happened.”

  “A tree,” Rizcarn said patiently, “doesn’t grow until a seed’s been planted.”

  Shivers raced down Bro’s spine. Those were Shali’s words, her favorite words in the spring when she turned the soil in her garden and when she gave him motherly advice he didn’t want to hear. Hearing them from Rizcarn pushed Bro to the edge of belief. He reached into his shirt neck, withdrawing his talisman beads and Shali’s, which he’d looped around his while they’d walked through the swamps. “Can we go to MightyTree on our way to the Sunglade? Will you …?” In the back of his mind Bro conceived the one gesture that would answer so many of his lingering questions. “Can we go together to tell them what happened in Sulalk?”

  The light around Rizcarn faded. They stood in a quarter-moon’s light filtered through the summer trees. Bro couldn’t see his father’s face as Rizcarn freed Shali’s talismans and hung them around his own neck. He breathed deep and slow and refused to blink.

  “We’ll go together,” Rizcarn said softly. He put his hands on Bro’s shoulders and drew him into an embrace. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”

  Bro didn’t trust himself to speak. He nodded, instead, and his eyes overflowed down his cheeks, his chin, onto his father’s neck. Ashamed, he tried to jerk free. Rizcarn wouldn’t let him go; after a heartbeat, he stopped trying.

  “You’re weary, son. You’ve carried too much for too long without my help. I’m sorry. Now, go and rest—sleep, if you can—we’ve got a lot of walking ahead of us.”

  Sniffing tears, Bro allowed his father to hug him tightly, as hugs had been when he was half as tall as he’d become. “I’m sorry,” he confessed when they separated.

  “Don’t be.”

  Bro forced a smile and started back to the camp. He’d taken about ten steps—Rizcarn’s light had returned, casting shadows onto the path ahead of him. Something thumped between his shoulder blade and his ribs: his father tossing acorns at him, the way his father sometimes had, in jest.

  More than an acorn.

  Thump became ache became numbness and pain together.

  Not an acorn at all, b
ut something that stuck in him.

  “Zandilar!”

  Not an acorn—an arrow. Bro had been struck by an arrow and imagined it protruding from his back. He thought he should keep walking. He thought he should be able to walk. Men walked with their wounds, he’d seen them. Just lift one foot, move it forward, put it down. The foot dragged and Bro lost his balance, very slowly.

  The light grew thicker as he fell, but not thick enough or fast enough to keep him upright.

  “Zandilar—not my son!”

  The light brightened, became too bright. Bro closed his eyes. One knee had touched the ground before he floated into darkness.

  “Gently, gently!”

  “Hold him steady.”

  “Keep him still!”

  Bro heard the voices first, then he felt the pain, like fire piercing him back to front. The arrow. He remembered he’d been struck by an arrow. Where? He remembered his father, surrounded by light. He remembered the light surrounding him as he fell and opened his eyes.

  “Don’t talk, Rizcarn’s son.”

  “Lie easy.”

  He was on open ground, surrounded by torchlit faces, all worried, all talking. Lie easy, they told him—of all requests, that one was impossible. The arrow was in his right-side rib cage, level with his heart. He wanted to lie on his face; he thought it would hurt less, but grasping hands kept him up on his left side. Every shallow breath was agony.

  Someone Bro knew but couldn’t name—he couldn’t name anyone except himself just then—grabbed his right wrist and pulled his arm straight. Bro heard himself screaming. Then there was a wicked knife glinting in the light. They slashed his shirt. Someone touched the arrow and he screamed again, fighting the man at his wrist.

  “It’s got to come out, Rizcarn’s son,” that man said, changing his grip so their fingers interlaced.

  “Don’t let me die,” Bro whispered. “Don’t. Poppa?”

  “Not here. Be brave.”

  He tried, but there was one long scream in his throat from the moment they started pushing the arrow forward. His voice broke when his flesh did. He was crying, pleading for the torture to end, as they broke the arrowhead off and screaming while they withdrew the shaft.

  “The worst is over,” someone said; someone lied.

  Pain blurred Bro’s hearing as well as his vision. Though he couldn’t hear clearly, he knew they didn’t like the looks of the arrow. He caught the word “poison.”

  Bro started shaking. At the very least, poison meant enlarging the wounds and cauterizing them with red-hot steel. The Cha’Tel’Quessir surrounding Bro passed around the knife they’d used to slash his shirt.

  Bro knew it had to be done and knew, too, that there was a better way, a better knife.

  “No,” he insisted, trying to free his right arm.

  “S’got to be done, Rizcarn’s son,” the man holding him said.

  “My knife. Use my knife. You’ve got to use my knife.”

  The Simbul’s knife was too small, someone said while it was still in its sheath. Then, it was too fancy, too well-forged for the brute work of cauterizing a wound. A woman asked where he’d gotten it, who’d owned it before—questions Bro didn’t have to answer with two bleeding holes in his side.

  The man holding his arm advised Bro to close his eyes and pinched him hard to distract him from the first of the cuts. Bro’s legs spasmed; the heaviest men in the camp sat on his hips to keep him still. Someone said he’d faint soon and it would be easier after that.

  But Bro didn’t faint while they cut him or when they poured honey wine on the enlarged wounds. He didn’t faint when he saw his knife moving toward him, lashed between two sticks and distorting the night air with its dull-red heat. Once Bro saw the knife, he couldn’t look away.

  Someone put his hand over Bro’s eyes. Agony took him by surprise, and, finally, he fainted.

  Pale sunlight had replaced the stars when Bro opened his eyes again. His chest was tight in bandages that reeked of wine and bitter herbs. Separate bandages bound his arm to his waist. He was in Rizcarn’s camp, propped up against a fallen tree. A man knelt beside him, Bro recognized him as the one who’d held his arm during the night and remembered his name, as well: Yongour. He held a wooden mug that steamed and stank worse than the bandages.

  “A purgative. If any poison lingers.”

  Not thinking, Bro reached with the arm that was bound to his waist. Embarrassed and hurting, he warded the mug away with his left arm and immediately felt for the Simbul’s knife. It was where it belonged. He drew it out for examination.

  “That’s a fine knife, Rizcarn’s son, and nothing that you got while living in a dirt-eaters’ village. Now drink this while it’s hot.”

  Bro refused for half a heartbeat, then wisdom prevailed. He took the mug from Yongour’s hand and drained it in several unpleasant gulps. The mug slipped through Bro’s fingers as he passed out again.

  His consciousness flickered all morning. It was mid-afternoon before Bro was alert again. Front and back, shoulder to waist, he was in pain, though nothing like the previous night. A deep breath convinced him he could not get to his feet or walk anywhere before sundown. Then he realized no one had walked anywhere; the camp hadn’t moved. The Cha’Tel’Quessir had stayed put, waiting for him to live or die before Rizcarn led them all to MightyTree.

  “Poppa?” he asked after the woman tending him had given him a drink of water. “Rizcarn. Can I see him? Will you tell him I’m awake?”

  “Not here,” she replied, the same answer he’d gotten last night before they pulled the arrow.

  “Where is he? I want to talk to him … tell him I’m better.”

  “Rizcarn’s gone. He came back at dawn, before you woke. He said the gods had spoken when you fell and that there were things he had to do alone. We’re to wait here until he returns.”

  The bandages tightened over Bro’s ribs. “Did he say where he was going?”

  “Headed east, that’s all. Toward the Sunglade.”

  Toward MightyTree. Bro put his hand on his neck. His talisman beads were there. Shali’s were gone. He’d given them to his father; he’d been a fool. A fool to look for Rizcarn; a worse fool to swallow anything Rizcarn said. Rizcarn had beguiled him by talking about Shali. He’d soothed Bro’s surface hurts and left his deeper questions unanswered.

  “You’ll be well again, Rizcarn’s son.” The woman misunderstood his despair. “Walking, climbing trees, dancing in the Sunglade.”

  Dancing in the Sunglade with Zandilar. Rizcarn had called Zandilar’s name as he fell. Bro arched his back against the tree trunk, savoring the pain.

  “Leave me,” he asked. “I need to rest.”

  Bro stared at the sun. His eyes burned; he shut them. The woman walked away. He let the tears flow until there were no more. Then he tried to stand.

  “Not so fast, Ebroin.”

  A woman he’d never seen before sat on the fallen trunk on his unharmed side. He couldn’t see her clearly in the sun, but she’d known his name. Bro thought that was a good sign, though Rizcarn had called him Ebroin, too.

  He tried again to stand. She laid her hand on his good shoulder. Her fingers were ice; they froze his breath in his lungs.

  “They told me you wanted to rest.”

  She’d withdrawn her hand and moved slightly, so he could see her better. She bristled with steel weapons and brass studs. Her fitted boots and wine-dyed leathers hadn’t been put together in the Yuirwood, but she was, without doubt, Cha’Tel’Quessir. Though there was nothing extraordinary about her brown hair, her brown eyes, Bro couldn’t keep himself from staring.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Call me Chayan. You’ve seen a woman before, haven’t you?”

  He wondered if he had and wondered, too, where the pain had gone. “Where are you from?”

  “A bit of everywhere, but I was born in the Yuirwood, same as you. Left it, too; it’s a long story. I got the urge to come back a while ago. When I
got here, I heard your father was going to wake the gods in the Sunglade and figured that’s what I’d come home for. Anything else you want to know, Ebroin?”

  A hundred things, maybe a thousand, but they could wait. The pain was back, less intense than before, but still potent. Bro braced his good arm behind him. “I’ve got to get up, catch up with my father.”

  “Not a chance.” Chayan laid her hand on him again. It wasn’t cold this time, but just as effective in keeping him pressed against the log. “Wherever your father’s gone, he’s got a day’s start on you. You couldn’t catch him if you were sound, which you’re not. You need a day’s rest, which some Cha’Tel’Quessir think you’ve earned.”

  “You?” Bro blushed and didn’t believe he’d said that.

  “When I told the Cha’Tel’Quessir in charge—” Chayan tipped her head toward the center of the camp—“that I’d tended more than my share of arrow wounds fighting the Tuigans, they sent me over here to tend yours. They’d lose faith in me if I let you wander.”

  “You fought the Tuigans? You’ve been in the East?” Bro began to suspect that his good sense had leaked away with his blood. He stopped caring when Chayan threw back her hair and laughed.

  “I’ve been everywhere, Ebroin, and I’ve fought with everyone. I’ll fight with you, too, if you try to get up again. I want to look at your wounds. Are you going to behave like an intelligent man? Or am I going to have to knock some good behavior into you?”

  For a moment—for no good reason—Chayan reminded Bro of the Simbul. Then he’d promised to behave intelligently and she was poking at his wounds.

  “Who shot you?”

  Bro couldn’t answer. He had his teeth clenched, pretending nothing hurt. By the time he trusted himself enough to open his mouth, they weren’t alone. Yongour challenged Chayan, who stood up with a confident smile.

  “He was talking nonsense. I thought the wounds might be festering; they’re not. I’d like to see the arrow that pierced him.”

  Yongour said, “Rizcarn’s son was pierced by the gods.”