Moons' Dreaming (Children of the Rock)

by Krause, Marguerite

  To her left, the gate to the inn yard squeaked lightly as it swung open. Herri smiled when he saw her, the sleeves of his sweater pushed up past his elbows and the ever-present apron protecting his thick gray trousers.

  “Iris.” His breath misted and drifted upward in the cold air. “You’ve been busy these days. How’s Canissi?”

  “Verbose,” she replied, then smiled to blunt the edge of bitterness that had crept into the single word. “Getting information from an untrained source is difficult.”

  She found herself moving with Herri in the direction of the archery class. As they drew near, Jordy’s voice became audible, offering Lim instructions for his next shot. A corner of Vray’s memory noted the advice, compared it with similar lessons she’d heard long ago, and acknowledged the carter’s expertise. Most of her attention, however, was on Lim and the other young people, and her continued nagging unhappiness with what they were doing.

  This particular lesson at least seemed nearly over. Fifteen-year-old Heather and her elder sister Haant were unstringing their bows even as they listened to Jordy. Lim pulled the last arrow from the quiver at his back and took aim at the defenseless mattress sixty paces away. When the arrow left the string, she could not resist turning her head with the rest to watch its flight. Old straw dribbled from the new rip in the mattress cover as the arrow buried itself next to a dozen others near the center of the target. Vray fleetingly, trivially, wondered who had donated the mattress and if they had entertained any unrealistic hope of reclaiming the poor thing when Jordy and his apprentices were finished with it.

  “Well done, lad. All of you can retrieve your arrows.” Haant and Heather started for the target. Lim caught Vray’s eye and grinned proudly as he unstrung his bow.

  Jordy nodded to her. “Hello, Iris.”

  “Hello. Excuse me, Herri.” She answered Lim’s unspoken invitation to approach and said, “That was very nice shooting.”

  The young man fumbled his bow into its soft cloth cover. “Oh, we’ve all been working really hard.”

  “Is that a family bow?” she asked. “It seems just right for you.”

  “No. Kessit made it this summer.” He pulled back the cover again and Vray could clearly see the newness of the wood. “But it’s mine to keep now. Jordy helped me choose it. He gave all of us several to choose from.”

  Lim led her to the door of the smithy. Just inside a dozen or more bows rested against one wall. Vray hardly saw them. Behind her Herri’s voice was saying. “…should go to Long Pine while the weather’s still predictable.”

  “I’d be gone two ninedays, maybe three,” Jordy answered. “I’ve only just started training that colt from Garden Vale. If I break my schedule now—”

  “Take him with you.”

  “Haant still isn’t sure which one she likes best,” Lim continued, distracting Vray. “Jordy wants her to try the heavier pull when we go hunting.”

  Vray spun toward him more abruptly than she’d intended. “Hunting?”

  Outside, Herri said, “They need you, Jordy. A little practical advice, a few suggestions to get them moving in the right direction might make all the difference.”

  “Jordy knows where there’s an old buck—where there’s usually an old buck—bedded down in the forest to the east of here. He says it’s time we tried our skills on a moving target. Heather’s done some spear fishing, so she’s not too excited. But Haant and I have never actually killed an animal, except with snares and box traps.”

  Vray nodded politely, all the while concentrating on the conversation taking place outside. Jordy’s reply drifted to her ears, a hint of rueful exasperation in the words. “The idea is for each community to organize its own defense. They don’t need my interference.”

  “No, but they do need encouragement. People trust you, man.”

  The idea appeared in Vray’s mind complete and inarguable, as abruptly as a Dreamer might materialize out of thin air. She reached out to pick up a bow perhaps five feet in length. “When are you going?” she asked Lim.

  “This afternoon. Now. Why, would you like to come and watch?” He sounded hopeful.

  “I’d like to come and join you.”

  Lim looked surprised, then pleased. “You already know how to shoot?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  They went out into the pale daylight. Herri was gone, the inn gate just closing behind him. Heather and Haant had returned to Jordy’s side and were watching as he made adjustments to the fletching on an arrow. He looked up. “Lim, I want you to see this.”

  Lim moved somewhat guiltily to join the girls. Vray said, “Jordy? I’d like to go hunting, too.”

  His hands on the arrow grew still. “I’m pleased to see you take an interest, but you haven’t done any of the preliminary work the others have.”

  “I didn’t want to waste your time,” she lied easily. “I already know how to shoot.”

  She kept her face passive as he studied first her, then the bow in her hand. Then he handed the arrow to Heather, reached into his pocket, and produced a coil of gut which he offered to Vray. “String your bow,” he instructed her crisply. “Let’s see just how much you know.”

  She took her place in the center of the area of trampled snow and faced the target, grateful for the absence of wind. Her hands were already cold enough with excitement. Curiously, she experienced no hesitation as she handled the bow and considered what she was about to do. Her last lessons with Dael were as clear as though they had happened a few days rather than a few lifetimes ago. The string Jordy had given her was already looped at one end. She slipped it into place, then braced the bow against her boot and strung it carefully, testing the tension as Dael had taught her. Jordy indicated his approval by silently handing her an arrow from Haant’s quiver. Vray accepted it and looked out across the glimmering white square to the mattress.

  How long since she had raised a bow? Four years? Nearly that. She did remember what to do. She was Redmother trained, after all. Even if she had been more interested in spending time with Dael than in the lessons, he’d made her learn, and she’d done her best to please him. The question was how much her muscles remembered. The best technique in the world wouldn’t help her if her hand shook. Perhaps she should have chosen a smaller bow, one with less pull. She wasn’t going to need much range. No, but she did need power. Dael had taught her that, too. A few pounds’ pull might make the difference between a grazing wound and a killing penetration.

  She chose a spot on the target and aimed at it with her mind’s eye, the bow still held at her side. Dael said that the mind was everything, that the body only followed the procedures already rehearsed for it in thought. She remembered his instructions and mentally measured her target and its physical relationship to her, its size and distance and relative location. The exercise took only a moment. When she felt she could reach out with her eyes closed and find the spot she had chosen, she put her arrow to the string. She raised the bow slowly. It felt wrong. No, it wasn’t the bow. Her arms were too long. She suddenly felt ungainly, unfamiliar with her own body. This was not the body which had learned archery, was it? She was taller, stronger, her shape subtly different, her center of gravity off. She would need practice to adjust.

  Hesitantly, she completed aiming and let fly, pretending Dael was in his usual place behind her, and she was trying to coax a pleased smile from the guard captain.

  She missed the spot she aimed for.

  Lim said, “Nice shot.”

  “You’re pulling to the left,” Jordy said. “Try another.”

  Vray gave him a frosty nod of agreement. She needed to be proficient enough to convince Jordy that she could safely accompany the group. With each shot, her confidence improved. After putting ten arrows into various spots on the target, she received the carter’s thoughtful nod of approval.

  “All right, lass, you know what you’re doing. Fetch the arrows back for Haant, then find yourself a quiver in the smithy. We’ll be leaving in fi
ve minutes.”

  In less time than that, with Lim’s help, Vray was ready and the five of them set out down the wide road that led to the ford. A few hundred yards short of the river Jordy led them onto a smaller path that snaked into an area of scrub forest and marsh, unused by anyone for farming or pasturage. As they walked, Jordy described the terrain they would be hunting across, what they could expect of the deer when they found it, and reviewed the strategy they’d be using. From his questions to the others Vray gathered that, in several days’ lessons, they’d used moving targets ingeniously rigged by the carter on ropes between trees. Not as sophisticated a method as the training Vray had received, but it was sufficient to give them practical understanding of how to lead a target.

  Only one of the technicalities of the hunt interested Vray, and she gave only the barest minimum of attention to the preliminaries. She had experienced an enlightenment. Anything unconnected with that was irrelevant. She didn’t notice where they were walking, responding with surface courtesy to Lim’s eager smiles. When they halted after a quarter of an hour for final instructions and to string their bows, Vray positioned herself as far from Jordy as she could without being obvious about it.

  She was rewarded. Jordy took one end of the line, from which he intended to flush the buck. Vray and the apprentices were to walk parallel with him in a widely spaced shoulder-to-shoulder formation to diminish the chance of accident. Vray found herself in exactly the position she’d maneuvered for, at the other end of the line, far to Jordy’s left.

  The group proceeded forward without speaking, bows in hand, arrows nocked, alert for the first glimpse of movement ahead. Vray lagged one subtle pace behind Heather, immediately to her right. From there, her view of the carter was perfect.

  Carter turned killer. He dared too much! She had been struggling with that one thought for days now. By the Rock, he was a Keeper! Bad enough that he presumed to criticize Shaper behavior. Given the circumstances, she might forgive that. Worse was this attempt to prepare his neighbors to defy the king’s guards. Even that she might have ignored. She hadn’t forgotten the night of the Spring Festival, the harsh laughter of the invaders, the burning of the trees. But Jordy’s influence extended beyond his own village, and that she could not ignore. His ideas, his schemes, followed to their conclusions, would threaten all of Rhenlan. Pond and pool, this was her country! Hers and her brother’s and her father’s, to shape as they saw fit. To shape and to protect.

  The situation was clear to her, as clear as still water. More clear than anything had been since she’d begun to lose herself at Soza during her first long, wretched winter there. She had a duty to protect her people, to eliminate danger.

  The carter had become a danger.

  Ahead lay a frozen stream screened by thickets of bushes and tall, dead reeds. Just beyond was a steep bank. If the deer was where Jordy said it was, it would burst out of cover somewhere between Lim and Jordy and flee in the only direction not blocked by threatening people, up the bank. Bows crept upward along the line. Vray flexed her fingers once, then carefully relaxed every muscle. Her eyes never left the beige figure of the carter. Brown boots, darker brown trousers, sleeveless tunic woven in tans and grays, worn over the lighter tan of an old work shirt, short sandy hair unkempt from ducking beneath tree branches. His bow was also brown, wood dark with age, taller than he was. She drew forth the image she held in her memory, the image of him competing in the archery contest at the spring festival. She pictured the stance he would take, the position he would hold for a second or two, bow raised, left arm outstretched, back turned toward her. She kept that image clear in her mind’s eye, aiming carefully at that back as it would look when it turned toward her in reality. She clothed the image in beige and put snow in the background. It became one with the flesh and blood man stepping cautiously through the brush. She felt the connection snap into place. The distance, the spatial relationship between herself and her target was there, palpable, an invisible thread to guide her arrow. She wouldn’t miss.

  The deer burst out of cover midway between Jordy and Lim and half a dozen paces in front of their line, scattering snow and dead leaves in every direction. Haant gave a startled squeak, but raised her bow as quickly as the rest of the apprentices and Jordy raised theirs. Vray moved in unison with them. The only difference was that her arrow was not pointing toward the bounding animal.

  Not bounding, floating. The buck seemed to be taking its leaps at an unnaturally slow pace. No one and nothing moved, breath hung as clouds in the winter air, and the echo of Haant’s small, excited cry drew out into a faint wail. Everything was slowed, nothing moved—and images whirled behind Vray’s eyes, between her and the beige back of her target. Balls of bright cloth tossed themselves around her while the silence of Cyril’s mourning rang in her head and she saw Tob’s sad comforting of Matti and Pepper’s grieving as if it was already recorded in her memory. She saw the Spring Festival clearly, heard Jordy claim her place in the village, in his family. She felt the warmth of the stable and saw Jordy’s hands, so competently and carefully grooming the stupid horse he declared to detest. Carter, archer, juggler, father, husband, friend—conspirator, catalyst, stubborn fool. Not a monster. A man.

  All the images conjured by memory and imagination screamed that what she did was wrong. She felt tears welling and refused to shed them—her vision had to stay clear. She felt the urge to tremble and denied it, found within her the stillness of a Pool ritual. A man, not a monster, the words repeated themselves. Men are not monsters. Men can be reasoned with. Could Damon be reasoned with? Wasn’t Damon danger enough to this land? Could she kill a man because his views were inconvenient?

  Damon could. I’m Damon’s sister. I could kill this man.

  But I won’t.

  Vray shifted her aim. No more than a few inches, but it was enough. She released the arrow, almost falling to her knees as the tension left her. She didn’t bother to follow its flight with her eyes. She didn’t care whether it struck the deer or not. Her eyes remained on Jordy. She heard the shhh and thwock of the arrows and the thrashing fall of the big animal. There were cries of elation and surprise from the apprentices, a rushing forward of the other young people toward the kill. Vray didn’t move. The deer didn’t matter. Neither did the fact that the apprentices were one step closer to being trained archers, a potentially deadly threat to the next troop of king’s guards that rode into Broadford.

  The only thing that mattered was Jordy, very much alive, who turned a measured smile on her and said, “Well done, lass.”

  All she could think of to say was, “Thanks, Dad,” before she unstrung her bow and ran blindly back toward the village.

  * * *

  As soon as they returned to the square, Jordy put Lim in charge of storing away the class’s bows and arrows. Herri came out of the inn to supervise the butchering of the kill. With everyone profitably occupied, Jordy left his apprentices to their work and set out for home as fast as his legs would carry him.

  He found her where he expected her to be, in the stable. She had a brush in each hand, and was slowly stroking them across Stockings’ already immaculate back. The horse, typically, was fast asleep. Iris wasn’t paying any attention to what she was doing. Her expression was one of aching melancholy. Jordy paused in the doorway. He had to have a talk with the girl. Her behavior had been getting stranger and stranger. He’d intended to insist upon an explanation. But did she have to look so sad?

  He waited to be noticed. He walked toward the horse, making no special effort to step quietly through the loose straw on the stable floor, but still the girl did not look up. He finally sighed and said, “Iris.”

  She jumped. Her greenish eyes turned on him. “Jordy.” She said his name oddly. Guiltily?

  “Let’s have a talk, lassie.” He gestured for her to come out from behind the horse. She complied slowly, setting down the brushes one at time on the shelf above Stockings’ head. He pointed toward the feed bin. “Sit down, m�
�girl.”

  To his bewilderment, she sniffled, and a tear spilled down her cheek as she moved to obey. She wiped it brusquely away. Sitting, she stared past him. This was nothing like the defiance that he’d coped with from his other children. When Tob misbehaved he stomped and sulked. Pepper’s temper expressed itself in red-faced screaming fits that reminded Jordy uncomfortably of his own childhood behavior. Matti, still the baby, liked to wheedle and whine. None of their bad moods lasted for long. Iris’s inexplicable moodiness had been going on for several ninedays now. Enough was enough. He’d thought she was coming out of it when she’d asked to accompany the hunters. What had gone wrong?

  “You did well today.” He offered the comment experimentally.

  In reply she hid her face in her hands. A muffled, “No I didn’t!” came out surrounded by a sob. “Jordy, I’m sorry!”

  He cautiously took a seat beside her. Perhaps this was typical of teenage daughters. He thought of Pepper’s tantrums magnified several times, and shuddered inwardly. Putting an arm over her shoulder, he said, “There now, it’s all right.”

  Her entire body shook, but she did not answer.

  “You’ve nothing to be sorry for. I was quite proud of you this afternoon. I’m sure your friends….”

  He didn’t get to finish the sentence. Her sobs became a wail of despair, and she suddenly twisted toward him and buried her head against his shoulder. The force of her movement almost knocked them off the feed bin. Jordy braced himself and helplessly hugged her back.

  “What is it? What’s the matter? Iris, you’ve got to tell me what’s wrong. I can’t help you if I don’t understand what’s troubling you. Iris?”

  “Daddy!”

  “Yes, lass.” He patted her back and rocked her as best he could on the uneven seat. “I’m here. Tell me.”