There were tiny white flowers growing amid the rubble under the trees, welcome-spring flowers, and in the darkness they seemed to shine with their own small light, like constellations and scatterings of stars. Perhaps it was moonlight made it seem so, for the moon was nearing the full. Though moonlight scarcely reached into that dense gloom beneath the evergreens.
On the night of the full moon I made excuses to Winewa and went out to keep watch with Kor.
He was openly waiting for me on the sea cliff, amused and defiant. “There are three who might come,” he reported. “Olpash not among them. He is more likely to poison my soup than face me, after blundering into the devourer as he did. But there are others. I have faced them before, and I am tired of it. Let us go someplace where we can talk in peace.”
“Where?” To the forest, I hoped.
“Down over the cliffs, with the seals.” Then he laughed at me, I suppose seeing the look on my face, or perhaps not needing to see it. “No, I am only half serious, Dan. We would not be able to hear there, not with the surf running high. Let us go where you and Talu rode.”
We skirted the great lodge and walked up through the dark forest until we were entirely away from the headland. Like a boy shirking work, Kor was in high spirits. Even the midnight forest, full of the rustlings of owls and martens and the screams of dying mice, seemed friendlier to him than the place he was supposed to be. As for me, I felt yearning grip at my heart again, and I pretended that the crashing of the sea was the sound of wind around the great yellow pines that grow beyond the snowpeaks.
“There is no need for you to stay here forever, Dan,” said Kor quietly and suddenly out of the darkness. “When you are well, you should go. I have seen you looking away toward the mountains.”
I stopped in my tracks, at the same time overjoyed and stricken. “But—how can I go?” I protested, full of shame. “Only a few weeks ago I offered you my lifelong allegiance—”
“And I told you I was no king to you, but a friend. And friends help each other, as I recall.”
Even in the darkness I could feel the pull of the snowpeaks, I knew when my face turned toward them. As most often it did. Nevertheless, if it were only that longing …
“I would not leave you for so slender a reason,” I said. “If it were only to roam on the mountains.”
“But …” Kor prodded.
“But the thought is in me that I must go back to my tribe. To my father and my brothers. Tell them I am alive, and try to find out what mystery has darkened my mind.”
“Ah,” Kor breathed.
“I ought to, I must, if I am to be something more than a madman.” I was half afraid, even of the words, and my voice faltered. The next thought, though, burst from me. “But how am I to leave you here with your precious Olpash and those thrice-accursed devourers and this blasted vigil?”
“For the matter of that,” said Korridun, “if you will let me, I will come with you.”
“What? How? You can’t!”
“I can and, Dan willing, I will. Stop yelping and listen.” We had reached a slope of scree, gray-white in the moonlight, and Kor settled himself on one of the larger rocks. “Sit down. In the first place, I have been thinking for some time that I would like to confer with your father.”
“What for?”
He did not answer me at once, but turned and looked up the rock field that tumbled behind him. “Because the whole world is falling to bits, Dannoc,” he said finally.
“Kor—”
“I am serious. See this mighty pile of talus? Each of these stones was once part of the peak, but they have fallen away as if chipped off by a great hammer. All the world is being chipped away like that, bit by bit. I am yet young, but I can see it happening, the salmon less each year, and the doves, and—everything, the white weasels, not once seen since three years ago, and the singing heron, six. There were gannet nesting on the rocks along the coast when I was a boy, and gair fowl, they darkened the cliffs with their numbers. None since. Where have all the wolves gone, and the mountain lions, and the great blue bears? If one of them came right now and stood before me, I would not care if it rent me. I would die happy to have seen any one of them, just in that one dying moment of my life.”
His words filled me with longing, the more so since I remembered a certain dream.
I said, “I have often thought the same, and so has every hunter of our tribe, I dare say. But what can my father tell you of these things that you do not already know?”
“Perhaps nothing.” Korridun’s voice grew more grim—it was the king who sat and talked with me, now. “But if it goes on—as I can only believe it will go on—then within a few years there will not be enough fish for the Otter River people or enough forage for the Fanged Horse Folk, and perhaps not enough deer for you. But my people fish the endless sea and live in one place and grow oats. And there will be many others who will want the fish and the oats. But my Holding is small, a toehold between the mountains and the sea.…”
He wanted to make my father his ally, then. A fitting business for a king.
“Perhaps you could talk to Ayol of the Herders, also,” I suggested.
“Perhaps.”
“But can you leave your tribe for so long?”
Kor stretched himself contentedly and grinned. “Not only can I, but it will be by far the best thing for me to do. My counselors are a sullen lot of late. I forced them into open enmity when I revealed that I knew who my masked challengers were. And I am weary unto death of these vigils. And I am—” He lowered his voice. “I am none too willing to face another devourer.”
“It is a wonder you have not found excuse to go wandering before.”
“I have often thought of it! But there was no one to leave behind as regent, no one I could truly trust, until lately.”
I blinked at him. “What has happened lately?”
“What has happened! Dannoc—” He seemed about to mock me, gave a low laugh and let it go. “Istas has learned the meaning of mercy,” he said.
“Mercy,” I murmured, remembering myself as a sullen boy, remembering a father who threw away the lash, wondering why the memory hurt me.
“Yes, mercy. I love my folk, Dan. Sakeema be praised that I learned mercy early, or half of them would be dead, for they are a fractious lot at times.”
The wry affection in his voice made me smile. “When did you learn?”
“When I had Rhudd thrown off the cliff.”
My smile faded, for I heard sorrow. “But what else could you have done?” I protested. “He had planned to kill you. He was a traitor, and a danger to you!”
“What else could I have done? I could have let him live, of course, and perhaps he would have come back into being the decent man he once was. Failing that, I could at least have had the courage to slay him with my own hands.” Kor’s voice was shaking and so low I could scarcely hear him. “Mahela knows I wanted to. I dreamed of tortures, I was eaten up with hatred of him for what he had put me through, poor little me! Even then I knew that it was wrong to hate so, and I thought I would have mercy and forgo the tortures. I would merely have him quickly killed. So I sullied the hands of other men with blood that should have been on my own.” His voice grew softer yet. “Olpash was one of those who sent Rhudd to his doom.”
“You think—” Dimly I saw the line of his reasoning, and I was doubtful and amazed.
“Yes, I do think.” He got up to pace. “I know it hardened him. A man who has once killed in cold blood, however justly, will not hesitate so long to kill again. A lawful challenge, a lawful killing, very much like an execution within the law … Perhaps Olpash knows what I have made of him, and hates me for it. My hatred has begotten his. Hatred begets hatred, and blood—”
“Kor,” I interrupted, standing in my turn, “you were young, in danger, nearly helpless. It would have been folly to let an enemy live.”
“Was it folly to let you live?” he retorted.
The words shook me. I
hoped not, by all the powers of Sakeema I hoped not, but if ever the madness should come over me again and I should turn on him … For his sake as much as my own I had to find my way back to the beginning of it.
“Your folk thought so,” I whispered.
He came over and laid his hands on my shoulders. “They were wrong, and they know it now,” he said gently. “And I have told you what you have meant to me, Dan.”
So his mercy had given me life. No more than I already knew. No need for tears … At random I walked away from them, and Kor walked beside me. Moonlight on starflowers at our feet. I could walk strongly that night, without much aid of the stick, even on the slopes.
“You understand well enough, for all your protesting,” Kor said quietly after a while. “But Istas never understood. It seemed to her only simple justice to punish where there was wrong. She is the most deft of managers and she is masterly at reaching agreement in the council. She knows the ways of the tribe and she settles quarrels. Everyone loves and respects her. Olpash and the others would be ashamed to contest for power against such a venerable old woman. Also, she knows how to deal with trouble that comes from outside.… But if I had given her power over the tribe even as recently as a few months ago, I would have feared for my people. She did not yet know the meaning of mercy.”
“And now she does,” I remarked.
“Thanks to your good services.”
He spoke in jest, to tease me into a lighter mood. And he meant only that she had tested her mercy upon my back. But my mind shot at once beyond, back to—
Rowalt, and that first night in the lightning, the surge of storm. Crazed horse between my knees, lunging and floundering and glistening with sweat. Kor’s staring face before me as he dodged out of the way, and the sweep of the great knife, and the feeling—nothing in the memory frightened me as much as that feeling, and I could not yet put a name to it. And the scream, Kor shouting for his twelve. And they were dragging me from my horse at the same time as it fell, but they could not hold me, for I was as powerful as the storm. A head flew off, a hand, and then—ai, so pity me Sakeema, I remembered the face of the man as I sliced open his gut—
An honest, homely face.
I gasped for breath, doubled over with shock and pain, clinging to something hard for support, sick unto death, as if I had taken the knife in my own gut. So that was Rowalt, and that was what I had done to him. The memory was clear enough, but the feeling about it all dreamlike, untoward, as if out of otherness, as if I had been someone else.
I came to myself in a moment to find myself clutching the resinous trunk of a pine, my face in the moss, holding onto the tree so hard that I shook, and Kor standing by me, watchful.
“My—my horse,” I stammered. “It was a roan.”
“Yes.” He reached over and started to peel my locked fingers loose from the tree. “Dan, ease up.”
I could not manage more than the single word, to explain to him. “Rowalt,” I said.
“You remember?”
I nodded, letting my forehead sag against the pine, my arms loosen. Tears would have been a relief, then, and I would not have swallowed them any longer, not for pride’s sake, not with Kor. I closed my eyes, they burned so. But there was something in me that was too heavy and knotted to let me weep.
“It will come,” Kor said quietly.
“How am I going to face Istas?” I muttered.
“I think it might be better to say nothing to Istas. Anything you could tell her would only distress her. And my news will distract her from the look on your face.”
His mercy was perhaps more for me than for Istas, but I did not argue. I straightened, let go of the tree, picked up my stick. We walked on again.
“Better?” Kor asked after a while.
“Not too poorly. It would have been worse a month ago.”
“You grow stronger every day. The memories come back as you are able to bear them.”
“May the worst of them come soon,” I told him. “The sooner the better, for both of us.”
“We will see to it,” he said.
Chapter Eleven
Kor had intended that he and I should go off by ourselves. He hated to take folk away from the tribe—everyone was needed. But Istas would not hear of the scheme unless he took with him at least half a dozen guardsmen. And, as Istas was at the center of the venture, her will prevailed. Kor chose Birc, among others, to go with us.
Ten days went by in preparation. There was business to be settled. It could have taken far longer, but Kor was determined to be on his way before the time came for another vigil.
“Will Istas stand the vigils?” I asked him privately.
“Not on your life!” He grinned with delight.
“Leave my life out of it,” I told him, “where Istas is concerned.”
“What?” He pretended shock, knowing quite well that I was joking. “Why, Dan, bite your tongue. She adores you.”
Winewa happened by just as he spoke. “Who?” she asked suspiciously, and we both teased her and refused to tell her until we were laughing giddily, like striplings.
I was often dizzy with excitement and joy, those days. Soon I would be seeing my father again! I thought of him as I finished my arrows and bow, as I cut a thick deerskin sleeping pelt into a riding pelt, padded it between layers with moss, fitted it with tie-thongs for bags and bedroll and with a surcingle measured to span Talu’s girth. My foot was not yet sufficiently healed for walking the distance of our journey, though I walked strongly about Seal Hold and had given away my stick. Of necessity, I would ride the mare.
“Good riddance,” grumbled Istas—she grumbled often those days, even more so than usual. “Get the monstrosity away from here. One less greedy mouth for me to feed.”
But there was a problem, to my way of thinking. There were no other steeds, for the Seal kept none, and I hated to ride while Kor walked. When I mentioned my unease to him, he told me cheerily not to be an ass. We would be keeping to a foot pace in any event, what with all the blasted retainers, and he had walked with his men all his life. Privately I hoped Talu would carry him along with me, at least part of the time. But it would be slow going. A pox on Istas and the blasted guardsmen. A pox on people who kept no horses.
The Otter River folk came for their dried fish. But they had no beasts, we knew that already.
There was a great bustle of provisioning that seemed endless. Sometimes I dreamed of my father, sometimes of showing Kor the mountains. Sometimes I paced and fumed, for I could have made ready for myself in a quarter the time. But I could not be always ill-tempered. There were gifts for me. From Winewa, a leather case for my arrows. Warm woolen blankets smelling of the cedar in which they had been kept, a bride’s blankets never used, from Istas.
On the eve of the journey Kor and I sat high on the headland by Talu’s empty pen to watch the sunset.
It had merely happened so, that sunset had found us there. We had walked out to talk of routes, the mountain passes—there were three main trails across the mountains, not counting the White Eagle Way, which ran along the Otter River. There was the Blackstone Path, southerly, leading to the land of my people, and the Traders’ Trail and the Raiders’ Trail, farther north. The Raiders’ Trail led only to the steppes, where Pajlat and his people roamed. Our problem was in choosing between the Traders’ Trail and the Blackstone Path. The latter was rough, harsh, longwinding over the high Blue Bear Pass. It took its source in the midst of the Red Hart Demesne. The Traders’ Trail ran through the Shappa Pass, a low pass that would be less arduous for Kor and his followers, lowlanders all, not accustomed to the thin highmountain air—though to him I said only that the pass was the one better suited to a horseback rider. He took pause that the Traders’ Trail gave onto the southern fringes of the Fanged Horse shadowlands. Very true, but my father’s warriors should have pressed Pajlat’s raiders back from those fringes. Just southward lay my people’s hunting grounds where the red deer roamed.
We
came to no agreement and did not care, and did not speak long of it. Instead we reveled in the day. It was a glorious day, one of the rare fine days of that misty coastal holding. A worthy wind had sprung up from somewhere and polished the sky so that the air was as clear as mountain springwater, and at last I could truly see the vast ocean, the blazing sheen of it and the changing colors, green-brown-blue out to a clean distant line nearly the color of the alpine violets that grow in the snowmelt when spring finally comes to the highmountain meadows. The sun set in glory over that sea, turning sky the color of aspen leaves in autumn, growing ever more splendid, like a fire butterfly spreading from the cocoon, but vast—I had never seen such vastness of sky, even from the ever-winter crags.
In silence Kor and I sat and watched the great bloom of color in the sky, the sun like a bright prairie poppy at the center of it, dipping lower over the endless water. The sea lay very calm, and the sun sank into it with great calm and sweet-scented peace, a floating flower. Sky darkened from yellow into orange and lavender, all the colors of a wood duck’s wing.
“Time was,” Korridun said wistfully, “when the seafaring otters would have been sporting yonder, in the kelp, and when the white whales swam past this coast. One could see them from this headland, my mother told me.”
Time was Sakeema’s time. He-whom-all-we-seek. A remnant of dream turned like a honeyed knife in my heart. Sun sinking, a poppy the color of blood …
And just as the last petal of it disappeared—it was a vision, an omen, I can only describe it so. A flash went up from the lost sun of the most impossible color, too red to be called violet, yet utterly unlike the blood-red of the sun that had just been, unlike any earthly color I had ever seen, all light and shine, so pure and lovely I ached at the sight of it, I felt my eyes sting with unshed tears, ai, Sakeema—it was the clearshining red-purple color of the amaranth, the lost flower of the god, if I remembered my vision aright. Like a shimmering bubble of amaranthine light it came up and burst and was as quickly gone all in an instant, and Kor and I turned and looked at each other, stunned.
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