by J. D. Lakey
“Did you? I ….” She could not breathe. “Hypothetically speaking ….”
“Of course.” Sigrid nodded, watching her face intently.
“If the reports were true, Hayrald would have given them to me,” she said. “But if the official reports were a subterfuge to protect more, ummm, fragile sensibilities, then the pack and all its contents would have to disappear forever, being an inconvenient truth.”
“Yes, I thought the same,” Sigrid said, nodding his head decisively, as if he was ticking things off a list in his head, “You would have said something about it afterward. At first I thought I had presumed too much, being too familiar with an Ear from another Pack, and I said nothing more.”
“I would never ….” she said softly.
“No, no, I know you would not. People mistake your silence for aloofness but I know your silence comes from understanding. It was not until this fall, on the foray to Meetpoint with the last of the summer trade goods that it all became clear how deep your gift runs.”
“You cannot speak of …” Cheobawn could not bring herself to say the words. She looked away. “It is forbidden. I cannot listen to this.”
“I had hoped the Elders would tell you,” Sigrid continued speaking, ignoring her protests, “but it became apparent almost at once that they would not. I could not question that decision. I had no right to think you or I would know better than an Elder. So, again, I said nothing, even though you have shown me nothing but deep kindness and caring all your life and it was unkind to keep the messages from reaching your ears.”
“Messages?” she breathed, her eyes wide.
She had to stop this before it went any further but she found herself powerless in the face of her own longing. A year and a half ago, in the fading days of summer, she had stood in front of the Coven and their Husbands and had sworn an oath to keep her silence while the First Mother and the High Priestess of the Temple wove a cloth made wholly of lies about the events surrounding the death of an ancient bhotta in a forest clearing not far from the Meetpoint dome. That lie had been read into the official records and just like that, lies became truth and truth ceased to exist.
Officially, a foolish young Pack, full of more exuberance than sense, went on an undocumented foray using bennelk mounts without authorization, with the intent of flying a kite in the winds above the Escarpment cliffs. Sybille’s patrol, sent out to find them, caught up with them and brought them home but not before the youngest Ear had been hurt testing the limits of the kite.. It was a good story. The Elders laughed about it and repeated as often as possible around the fountains and over the dinner tables. What could have been a deadly mistake turned into an amusing cautionary story about youthful hijinks. For most of the ensuing winter, the members of Blackwind Pack could not show their faces in public without a nestmother pointing them out to her charges or the oldpas laughing behind their hands.
They had to be punished. It would have set a deadly precedent if they walked away unscathed. For an infraction as serious as this, they should have lost points in the team rankings, but Mora took pity on them. Instead, they served three months of extra duty under Finn in his workshops and under Vinara in the stables. This was a ruse, truth be told. Finn wanted to discuss airfoil designs with Alain and Vinara wanted to pick Cheobawn’s brain about the finer points of bennelk behavior.
Duty in the stables had been a relief for Cheobawn. Becoming the village laughingstock on top of being a black bead pariah was more grief than she could bear.
The true account of the mad dash down Waterfall Trail had been written in the dead of night in Blackwind Pack’s quarters by Megan as the rest of the Pack gathered around her and whispered the secrets they could never speak of again once the night was over. It contained the whole story: Cheobawn calling the bennelk herd out of the paddocks, mounting them without bridles or saddle and making the run between Home dome and Meetpoint dome in record time; Old Father Bhotta’s death screams calling Cheobawn out of the dome in the dead of night; the three Lowland treasure hunters who turned out to be more than they seemed; the death of Garro; Sam leaping off the cliffs with a bag full of bloodstones; the Spacer Bohea - Bohea, who in the end had never been there at all, having dreamwalked the journey into the high lands inside a robotic suit while lying encased in a neural web in a starship high above their heads - Bohea, whose agenda had seemed murkier and more laden with intrigue than anything the Coven could imagine.
The sun had risen on that last night of clarity and Megan had taken the chronicle away to hide in a place only she knew. Blackwind Pack said nothing more, not even to each other, forgetting everything until not even their dreams carried the taint of the memories. Until now. Here was Sigrid, asking questions that should not be asked.
“Tell me,” she whispered, dread turning her insides to jelly. This was all the permission Sigrid needed, obviously wishing to be rid of the burden of his secret.
“Meshel and Breyden thought you needed to know.” he apologized, “but the Mora's Husbands insisted we keep our silence. They said they would tell Mora and if Mora thought you needed to know, she would pass it on. I assumed Mora ….” Sigrid’s voice faltered, a confused look on his face. “I mean, how could she not tell you, you who already knew the secret? Why be cruel for cruelty’s sake?”
Secrets. Mora and her gods cursed secrets. Sigrid knew something he thought important enough for him to break the Father’s code of silence whose rules protected the delicate sensibilities of their psionic women.
“What do you know?” Cheobawn asked hoarsely, the old memories stirring up emotions she thought she had laid to rest.
“I know why your Pack was not censored for stealing the bennelk. I know it was not you who flew the kite off the cliffs. I know what and who you pushed off the Escarpment.” Sigrid said softly. Cheobawn’s heart skipped a beat.
“You can’t …” The words just burst out of her of their own accord before she could think clearly. She pressed her lips together, stopping them in mid flow, took a deep breath, and fell back on to her old, well-practiced lie. “Is this what passes for rumor and tall tales in the Fathers House?” Cheobawn shook her head in denial. “Only the Covens knows what happened that day. I know they did not tell you.”
“They did not have to. We came up the Escarpment this last time with two messages, both of them directed to you. Surely Mora told you?” Sigrid asked, pity in his voice.
She wanted Sigrid to stop but she could not say the words. Stop, she thought. It had been months since Garro last haunted her dreams. Please stop, she thought. Months since Sam’s look of desperation did not hang continuously behind her closed eyelids. Stop. Even now, she avoided blood, the smell of it taking her back to that day in the clearing as Garro’s head turned to mist and his dying body assaulted her with its last convulsive motions.
“Tell me,” Cheobawn said, her breath shuddering out of her lungs.
“Ramhorn Pack has done the autumnal Meetpoint run for two years running. The rules of this game are the same every time. Load the balloons with goods and men, drop off the edge and ride them down. Take what we need from what the Lowlanders offer. Load the balloons and ride them back up the cliffs. This was what Ramhorn was taught by the Elders but this time down, it was different. The river traders had a new Captain. He seemed young for such a position of responsibility but the other Lowlanders treated him with great respect so the Elders finally agreed to trade instead of coming back up the cliffs.”
“What did he look like, this Captain?” she asked, afraid of the answer. Sigrid looked down at her, sympathy in his eyes, hearing the pain in her voice.
“He could have been one of us except for the color of his eyes. They were like beads of clear amber. His beauty was marred by a nose badly broken and badly set.” Sigrid shook his head. “He said that was your fault.”
“Samwell Wheelwright,” she breathed, feeling both pleased and dismayed. His was the life that had weighed most heavily on her soul. “Did he say how he
came to be leader of the river traders?”
“He said that was your doing as well. He bought an equal partnership in his father’s company using the last of the bloodstones you gave him.”
“Ah,” she said, nodding, a weight lifting off her heart, “I am glad it turned out so well for him. I had feared the worst.”
“He told us many strange things, perhaps to get us to trust him and convince us he meant you no harm. He told us about climbing the Escarpment with two other males. About killing a giant bhotta. About you.” Sigrid pinned her with a strange look. “How young you had seemed. How frightened you were at first. About the things you tried to teach them but they were too blind to understand. He says he is sorry for that. He told us about Tam and your Pack and a race … against death. About a kite made by children. About a bag with forty-six bloodstones whose weight came near to killing him. About crashing into the earth with only nine stones left but having circumstance whittle that number down until all he had was two, one of which he used to buy his place in his father’s business. The last one he will never part with, he says. He keeps it in a bag around his neck and shows it to no one, though he pulled it out to show us when his men were not looking. He said you climbed into his mind and never left. He says you stalk him in his dreams. He worries that your masters punished you for slipping your leash to find him. That perhaps you died at their hands and became a ghost, so that you might haunt him forever as a reminder of all the ways he wronged you.”
“Did you tell him I was alive?” Cheobawn asked, sad for Sam, sad for his confusion.
“We told him nothing. It was not deemed appropriate by Phillius who was the foray leader. We took his messages but promised him nothing in return.”
“And the messages?” Cheobawn asked, terrified of the answer.
“It was rude and ignorant. Typical of the Lowlander mind. I wanted to kill him but Phillius prevented me. I dare not repeat it for fear of offending you.”
Cheobawn smiled at that.
“Too late. I have been inside Sam’s mind. Nothing can offend me anymore.” Cheobawn reassured him dryly. Sigrid grunted. Then he shrugged in resignation, closed his eyes, and began to recite the words with an inflection and an accent that were not his own.
“I hated you for throwing me away. But hate and love can be two sides of the same coin. I can’t get you out of my head. You haunt my dreams and subvert my waking hours. I am here for you, when you need me. Meetpoint is mine now. I will wait for you, if you ever wish to find me.”
Cheobawn closed her eyes and tried to breath around the pain in her heart. She was a fool in more ways than anyone could count for caring about this Lowlander but Sam was a thousand times more the fool than she was for wanting something he did not understand. Bohea was right about that.
She opened her eyes. Sigrid was looking at her again, an accusation in his eyes.
“What connection does he presume he has, I wonder,” the young Father asked softly.
“Ach, it is stupid, really,” she said, shaking her head. “I let him live. He puts too much importance on a simple matter of necessity.”
“Yes, I see,” Sigrid nodded. “Thus, he has joined the rest of us.”
“Huh?” she grunted, staring up at the young Father’s face, hunting for clues behind the woolsey mask.
“Having been caught up myself in the zephyrus wind that flows about you, I can understand his confusion. You are a storm, Little Mother, which sweeps across the land, scouring the world clean and piling the detritus up in fanciful drifts to suit your own pleasure.”
“What? I am not,” she protested. “You think it is my will that makes these things happen? You are very much mistaken. I am as you see me. Small and less than nothing.”
“You stand in the eye of the storm, Little Mother,” Sigrid insisted, “and think it is a balmy spring day. Pretend if you must. I will not be the one who dissuades you.”
“Pish!” Cheobawn snorted, thinking it ironic that she had told that very thing to Hayrald not long before. Enough of this maudlin self-inspection. She picked up the reins and kicked Cloud Eye into a faster gait. The day was drawing to a close and they were going to get stuck far from the dome by the time night set in.
“Wait,” Sigrid said, “I have not told you the second message.”
Cheobawn wheeled Cloud Eye around and looked at him expectantly.
“Tell it, then,” she said impatiently.
“Sam said this.” Sigrid closed his eyes once more. “Colonel Bohea sends a message to the one called the Little Mother. The one stone has been delivered as you instructed.”
Cheobawn shuddered as she used every ounce of her control to suppress the surge of primordial terror that was clawing its way out of her guts. What had she hoped for? That events would drive themselves at a speed more to her own convenience? That the politics of the ruling family and a planetary consortium thousands of light years away would bind the stone up in debate and solemn consideration? That infinite distances between this place and Spider space meant she had infinite time? That the politics of human space would have the grace to let her grow up and grow older before it descended upon them again?
Sigrid watched her turmoil play out behind her eyes and frowned at what he saw there. She looked away, so that he might not guess at the terrible things she had set in motion.
“What have you done?” he asked.
Did she imagine the accusation in his voice? Cheobawn snarled silently behind her woolsey mask. It occurred to her suddenly that of everyone involved in this mess, she was the least culpable. The unfairness of it all was starting to make her angry. She clung to her outrage. It was a better companion than guilt and fear.
“Ask the Coven,” she snapped, kicking Cloud Eye into an easy lope and reining her back down the slope towards Connor. “They know.”
Neither Erin nor Connor thought it wise to leave their mounts standing still in the cold. They were not where she had left them. She eased Cloud Eye over the low hummock of snow that concealed the fence line and then leaned out over her mount’s broad sides, hanging onto the saddle with one heel hooked over the pommel and her fingers hooked around the horn. Two sets of tracks headed west parallel with the snow-drowned fence. She eased back into the saddle and looked around for Sigrid.
Sigrid’s mood was apparent as his mount came over the drift fast, taking the height in great leaps. He did not rein Star in on the downhill side but instead sailed past Cloud Eye and her rider without a pause.
She knew she deserved his ire but she could not help glaring at Sigrid’s retreating back. This day was turning into a watershed point in her life; she had managed to have harsh words with the three males in her life who least deserved her enmity. The hard knot of emotion she had been chewing on all day suddenly drained away.
How do you shift a mountain of trouble? Cheobawn said into Cloud Eye’s mind.
Very carefully? ventured Cloud Eye.
Yes, that is true, she laughed. But I was thinking the answer might be more like one stone at a time. Let’s go shift a stone.
There are no stones in this field, Cloud Eye said, looking around.
There is a stone named Sigrid, she answered, urging her friend into motion. Cloud Eye set off to catch up with Star. She actually had the audacity to prance a bit.
Sigrid did not glance up when they eased up alongside him to match Star’s pace. Instead, he kept one eye on the tracks they followed and the other on the mid-distance, looking for their lost companions. He ignored her completely.
“We are tiny things, you and I,” she said, hoping that somewhere inside her words there might exist an apology that Sigrid might accept. “If the tribes are like a milk worm crawling on a thistle growing at the bottom of a scree slope on the flanks of the Dragon Spine, then you and I are the mites that infest the worm’s fuzz. Who are we to think that we can change our fate if the Spine decides to shake, setting the scree slope in motion? Our ultimate fate is to be crushed by a boulder. It could hap
pen tomorrow or next year or not until long after the people of the domes have faded. So if a mite woke up one day with a madness that causes her to jump off her worm onto a flea who happens to live on the back of a wandering pica so that she might bite the flea, causing the flea to bite the pica who then digs left instead of right around one particular boulder high up in the scree slope so that when the Spine finally shakes, as we all know it must, the pica tunnel collapses causing the boulder to fall left instead of right making the avalanche of rock spare the thistle and the worms who live on it. What would the mites think of that one crazy wandering sister? That crazy is sometimes a good thing or that the goddess works in mysterious ways? What kind of world do you want to live in, Sigrid? One in which you have been saved by random chance or one in which a mite took it into her head to shift a boulder and somehow, against all odds, managed to succeed?” Cheobawn looked at him waiting. She had his attention. Sigrid had a pained look on his brow.
“And do I know who the flea and the pica represent?”
“It is better that you do not.”
He rode in silence, watching the tracks in front of them.
“I would …” he ventured finally, “I would wish that the crazy mite would live to a ripe old age so that she might tell the tale of her adventures to the children for such greatness cannot go unsung forever.”
“But what is there to tell?” Cheobawn said, “Nothing but the tale of a ride on the back of a flea and the prescience to guess at what it might mean. I am no hero, Sigrid. I threw another human being off the edge of the Escarpment knowing the odds were against his survival. That makes me a bigger monster than Mora. One of his forty-six bloodstones managed to fall into the right hands. That is a miracle, one that is not of my own creation. The universe is a very strange place, full of forces beyond our understanding and I will take no credit nor any of the blame for its workings.”