The Reindeer People

by Megan Lindholm

  Kerlew was terrified of bears. Tillu had seen to that, and refused to regret it. Mother and son were too often on their own, traveling alone, for her to think of a bear as prey. Her rule for the boy had been simple, the only kind of rule he could remember and keep. ‘If you see or hear a bear, you leave any meat or berries you have, and come quickly to me’ It had always worked well for them, when they were traveling as two alone. But last spring they had joined with Benu’s folk. The other children had speedily learned of Kerlew’s differences, but nothing had given them as much joy as his fear of bears. It was sport for them to rattle the bushes like a bear, snarling and snorting, so that Kerlew would flee and leave them whatever fish or berries he had painstakingly gathered. Back at the tents afterward, they would gleefully tell how he had run, and how they had enjoyed their ill-gotten gains.

  All of Benu’s folk, big and small, had found it humorous. Tillu had tried to believe it did not matter. Why let it rankle, when Kerlew himself would uncertainly grin as they told of it? Trying to tell him that he did not have to flee from the bear sounds made by children younger than himself only confused him. His old rule was too deeply ingrained in his soul. The children growled and Kerlew fled, to be teased later. Reena’s two youngsters had taken the most joy in it. Scarcely a day passed that Kerlew did not come racing home, empty-handed, after an afternoon of foraging. Tillu had hoped they would weary of their sport. Instead they carried it one step further.

  It had been close to the end of the summer. Mornings dawned clear and cold, and it took the sun longer to warm the chilled earth. The long days grew short again. Soon the brief season of warmth would be gone and winter would seal the earth beneath her white mantle. The plant life of the land was in a frenzy of bearing. In the shadowed woods grew the lingonberries, dangling red under great leaves already gone scarlet. Blueberries on twiggy bushes ripened on the sunny hillsides, and in boggy places the ground was carpeted with red mossberries growing on their tiny, round-leaved plants. Under the clear blue skies, the children collected baskets of them, to mash and cook into pudding with suet, or store away in leather pokes filled with oil. Small hands and faces were stained purple and red at afternoon’s end.

  Kerlew excelled at the monotonous work, crawling diligently over the ground, absorbed in his gathering long after the other children had abandoned their half-filled baskets to play. Reena’s small boys had made no effort at all to fill their vessels, for they had plans that would let them play all day and still return to the village with a trove of berries. They giggled but refused to confide it to the other children.

  Kerlew had been picking alone, the other children long gone, when he heard the first of the growls. That much Tillu had been able to piece out from his hysterical account. Then he had seen Reena’s boys stagger from the bush, screaming and choking, red flowing down their faces and hands. ‘The bear has crushed us and clawed us, we die, we die!’ With a terrified howl, Kerlew had fled, racing back to the tents, where he screeched out the news of the slaughtered children. In moments the armed hunters and frantic women converged on the berry-covered slope, to find all the children clustered about Kerlew’s near-empty basket, filling their mouths with the sweet berries as they shrieked with laughter. The red stains had been only the crushed juice of berries smeared on their hands and faces. After the first commotion, all saw the fine jest that Reena’s boys had played. There was much laughter that night around the cooking fires.

  But in Tillu’s tent, a shaking Kerlew refused to believe that all was well, that it had been but a jest. ‘The bear got them. The bear got them!’ he tearfully insisted. His breathing would not slow, and Tillu heard the long thundering in his thin chest. His eyes darted about the tent, and he winced fearfully from the shadows he himself made. She put him to bed and urged errimi tea into him, which he drank in gulping gasps. His face was white, his lips red as he panted. And as she knelt beside him that night, silently baling all children but her own, he had sunk finally into a stillness deeper than sleep.

  It frightened her and she tried to rouse him, with no success. Abruptly his body began to jerk in sudden, painful spasms like a fish on a riverbank. His face contorted; he opened his eyelids on white eyeballs that stared blindly about. His breath shrieked in and out of his body, and yellow foam gathered at the corners of his mouth. In all her years as a healer, Tillu had never seen the like. She was trying to still his frenzied jerkings with the weight of her own body when she sensed the others behind her.

  Carp had pulled her roughly away from her son, his face tense with excitement. ‘He sees, he sees!’ the old man had exulted, and, as if in answer to these words, Kerlew had begun to speak. The voice was not his. He sighed and moaned the words. Tillu’s Kerlew spoke as a child still, in a voice that piped like a shore bird. The voice that came from his heaving chest and snapping mouth now was the deep voice of a grown man. ‘Ah, they bleed, they bleed!’ he gasped. ‘The bear has found their blood! It spills from their mouths, see it drench their shirts. They will die now. They will die!’ The last words came out as a roar as Kerlew sat up on his pallet. His eyes rolled suddenly and were their startling hazel again, their foreign, empty hazel, as awful as their whites had been. He bit his tongue, and the froth that dripped from his lips was suddenly pink.

  The children had shrieked and tumbled from the tent, with their frightened mothers close behind. Even the stalwart hunters had muttered uneasily and found reason to leave. But Carp had been exultant, and had sat by the now quiescent boy, holding his thin hand until the day dawned again. The next day he had claimed the weak and baffled boy as his apprentice.

  Kerlew had no recollection of his seizure, but rejoiced in the sudden exclusive attention of a man held in such great respect by the rest of the folk. In the old man he had found not only a willing audience for tales of his fragmented dreams, but one who attached great importance to them. He had begun to mimic Carp’s gait and inflection, even his overbearing manner that made every request a veiled demand. He absorbed avidly all of Carp’s teachings about the shaman’s world, learning it as easily as other boys learned to make a spear head or draw a bow. After her first resentment, Tillu had grudgingly told herself that it might be a positive change in the boy’s life.

  Then the children had begun to sicken. Reena’s boys were first, becoming weak and irritable, as their bodies spattered out all nourishment. Their bellies swelled, their skin stretched tight over the bones of their ribs and faces. They cried tearlessly, writhing in pain on their pallet. Tillu made root tonics for them, put poultices on their aching bellies, boiled pine needles for tea, to no avail. On the fifth day, they vomited great scarlet gouts of blood that drenched their shirts and bedding. They died.

  The other youngsters of Benu’s folk sickened rapidly. Tillu was powerless, and Carp chanted and made sweet smokes to no avail. Before ten days had passed, of nine children there were four, and they but pitiful, staggering shadows of themselves. Kerlew alone of the children remained untouched by it. He no longer cringed and crept about in fear of the older boys’ beatings. Without the other children, he romped fearlessly on the hillsides, gabbling his stories to himself and laughing his strange, broken laugh. Carp watched him and nodded knowingly. Kerlew alone ran and shouted and played unmolested among the tents. Until the day Reena came shrieking to her tent flap, to fling bones and stones at him. ‘Leave us alone, brat!’ she had screamed at him. ‘Cannot you stop rejoicing in what you have done to us? Have not you punished us enough?’ She had voiced the fear the others wouldn’t speak; her husband beat her for her boldness, fearful of what she might bring down on them.

  Kerlew had been touched by the spirits; he was theirs.

  Carp had helped Tillu to move her tent, setting it up outside the village. Carp had forbidden the others to drive Kerlew and his mother away, saying that the spirits who had chosen Kerlew to be his apprentice would turn against the people that sent him away. Did they want to feel that wrath?

  And thus had they lived these last
two months, apart and yet united with the people who still ached from her son’s curse. Until tonight, when in her birth pangs Elna had called for Tillu, and Tillu had come. Tillu sensed a healing in this night, as well as a birthing. If she wished, if she were willing to pay the price, she would be a member of Benu’s folk. There would be other women to talk to, the work of a healer to do, the security of having a place within a people. All she had to do was abandon Kerlew to the old Shaman’s grip. She could give the boy to Carp, and stop worrying about him. She would become the shaman’s woman, under his protection. Carp never went without food and clothing. The best could be hers.

  She shuddered. She knew she could never bear the touch of the shaman’s hands upon her. No matter how she stiffened her courage to endure it, she knew she would writhe and struggle against him. Better to be mounted by an animal than by one such as him. Better to flee these people, to be cold and hungry. Those things she could more easily stand. But the boy?

  She looked down into the sleeping face stained with his father’s wildness. She could travel more rapidly without him. Carp could give the boy an easy life. He would not have to be forced to grow and change and learn. As the shaman’s apprentice, he would not be cuffed for staring, nor mocked for his awkwardness. Benu’s tribe would grow to prize his strangeness, to feel pride in their new shaman. It might be for the best.

  Alone, her needs were simple. Since he had been born, he had made her life harder. She had gone from being a girl to being his mother. And he had never been an easy child. Even as a tiny babe, he had cried and struggled uncomfortably in her arms when she tried to cuddle him. No one would blame her. Not even Kerlew? She smiled ruefully. A season from now, he would probably be unable to remember her. What mother could love a child like that? Who would choose to be bound to such a burden? Her fingers reached, to push back a lock of his rough hair.

  ‘Come,’ she told him as his amber eyes fluttered open. ‘It is time for us to travel again.’

  ‘I have already been far this night,’ he murmured drowsily.

  ‘I doubt it not,’ she agreed. ‘But tonight we shall go farther still.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  She made her own trail, threading between trees just far enough apart to permit passage of the travois she dragged. Behind her, her long trail meandered through the forest, swerving and winding among the trunks but always bearing north. Benu’s folk had been bound southward. She knew it was foolish to move north at this time of year, but Carp would not expect her to be foolish. Even if he guessed that she had gone north, Carp could not follow them, not unless he was stubborn enough to leave Benu’s folk and travel alone. Perhaps, she thought as she plodded on, perhaps he could convince a few of Benu’s hunters to track her, for a day or so. But they would be unwilling to trail her for longer than that, for they were anxious to get themselves south, to their own winter grounds. And despite Carp’s power over them, they would be reluctant to go after his strange apprentice. No. Carp would be the only one with any reason to wish them back. She moved her fingers inside her mitten. Six days since she had left, and two falls of snow. If he had been following her, he would have caught her by now.Safely out of Carp’s reach, she told herself. She waited to feel some lightening of her heart but only felt her burden dragging at her shoulders. Out of Carp’s reach, and into unknown areas and dangers. The straps of the travois cut into her flesh until she wondered if it was sweat or blood that damped her shoulders and back. Heavier than the drag of her tent and possessions was the weight of the task she had taken on. To do all, for herself and her son, in an unfamiliar territory devoid of human life. And to somehow change Kerlew, she reminded herself. To make him less strange, less difficult for other folk to understand. To drive Carp’s strange notions out of his head and replace them with the skills he would need to live. To cleanse him of the magic Carp had started growing in him, just as she would cleanse a wound of an infection. Her determination set her teeth. She would do it. And until it was done, they would live alone and apart from other folk. No more Kerlew being hurt. No more hurting of others.

  Her mind traveled hack through the catalog of folk they had lived among. Before Benu’s hunters, there had been a river tribe. Tillu had liked them, enjoyed their cleanliness and the songs they sang as they tended their nets. She and her skills had been welcome among them, until Kerlew had come seeking her one evening, walking boldly into the women’s hut where no male ever ventured, into the midst of a womanhood ceremony. When Tillu protected Kerlew from the flung stones, they had both been driven from the river tribe with little more than the clothes on their backs. She flinched at the memory, and the others that crowded up behind it. Kerlew eating the jerky a hunter had set out as a spirit offering, Kerlew following a hunter of Oslor’s folk and springing every trap he had set, Kerlew noting aloud that Trantor’s son looked more like Edor than Trantor, to the great dismay of Trantor’s wife. Kerlew, Kerlew, always in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong words in his mouth.

  ‘Kerlew?’ she called questioningly, realizing it was some time since she had last heard his voice. There was no answer. She halted, stilling the scrape of the travois’s poles over the frozen ground and thin layer of snow. Awkwardly she turned in her harness, looking hack past her left shoulder. ‘Kerlew?’

  ‘I walk where no one else has ever walked before.’

  She snapped her head about, found him just slightly behind her and to her right. ‘I thought for a moment I had lost you,’ she told him. She began walking again.

  Some moments passed. Then, ‘Not me.’ The boy chuckled.

  ‘Not you what?’ she asked absently.

  ‘Not me you lost. Carp and Benu’s folk. We should find them soon?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She walked on a little faster. The first night they camped she had tried to make him understand why they had to leave Carp and Benu’s hunters behind. But as he realized she meant that they were running away from Carp, he had become agitated. The more she explained, the more upset he had become, swiftly reaching a point where he was not hearing anything she said. ‘Carp, Carp!’ he had wailed, rocking back and forth as he crouched on the frozen ground beside the small fire. ‘Carp! Carp!’ Until she had feared that if there were any of Benu’s hunters tracking them, the sound would attract them.

  ‘Hush, hush,’ she had comforted him, choosing any words that would quiet him. ‘Tomorrow, then, we’ll go back. Just be quiet now, Kerlew, and tomorrow we’ll go back to find them.’ And then, cruelly, because he wailed still, ‘Hush! Or a bear will hear you!’ That had silenced him, leaving him shaking with his pale eyes wide. ‘We will go back tomorrow,’ she had assured him, repeating the words until he slept. But when morning came, she had continued on her trek away from the hunters’ camp, Kerlew none the wiser. A few times each day now he asked when they would find Carp, and she gave him nebulous answers. Soon enough he would forget. She knew her son that well; nothing stayed in his memory for long.

  ‘I walk where no man has ever walked before!’

  She glanced over at him. His smile was too wide, too wet. Sometimes she longed to slap it from his face, make pain chase away the vacuous, idiot smile and the foolish words. But she did not. She knew only too well the consuming self-disgust that would follow such an act. ‘You chose to keep him with you,’ she reminded herself. ‘You could have left him to Carp. You know you cannot beat sense into him.’ To Kerlew she said, ‘That’s silly. Just because you cannot see a trail does not mean that no man has ever walked there before.’

  ‘On this snow!’ Kerlew explained, smiling at the thought: ‘On this snow, no one has ever walked before, for the tracks would be here. This snow fell new last night, and the first tracks on it are mine. I walk where no one has walked before.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Tillu kept walking. There were times when the hoy almost made sense, when she believed that, to him, his observations and statements followed some mysterious logic of his own. Carp’s shamanic instruction of the boy had made him more vocal; t
here was that she could say for it. Unfortunately, what Kerlew vocalized was the mystical gabble he had picked up from the old man.

  She glanced across at her son. If only he would stand straighter, not drag his feet when he walked. If only his eyes would not wander and stare through things, he would not be such an awkward-looking boy. Not handsome, perhaps, but no worse than some she had seen take wives and build homes. Perhaps she could change the way he moved and spoke. Alone and apart from all others, perhaps he would turn once more to her, listen to her again. She would teach him, and this time it would he different. This time he would learn and grow. He would walk at her side through the forest and learn, not only her herbs of healing, but a hunter’s skills. He would learn silence, and swiftness, and skill with a bow. As he grew, he would stand tall and move as a man should move. And one day she and Kerlew would be hunting, and they would come across strange hunters. Kerlew would be standing straight, having just brought down a fine deer, and the hunter folk would smile at the sight of the tall young hunter, and there would be a young woman who would look at him just a little longer than was quite proper, and she would be the ���

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  The complaint broke the dream. Tillu sighed, both at her own foolishness and at Kerlew’s request. She had taken what supplies she could, but already they dwindled. The boy ate so much, so fast. She glanced again at him. Skinny. Perhaps she should give him the worm tea again.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ he repeated into her silence.

  ‘Soon.’ One more hill, she promised herself, and then, if the valley beyond it were a likely one, she’d stop for the night. This time she’d set up their tent and stay a few days. Carp’s seamed face came suddenly to her mind. Well, perhaps not just yet. Sleeping in skins was not so bad, it was not all that cold yet. Tomorrow she would push on for a day or so more, or perhaps three. She shivered. If Carp did come after them, with Benu’s hunters, her fate would be sealed. The shaman’s woman, prey to his withered hands and lined face, servant to his commands. To be touched by one such as that … She walked faster. She would not. That was all. She would not.