Nebula Awards Showcase 2010

by Bill Fawcett

  I knelt to drink from the stream at the foot of the hill. The hoarse-voiced leader nudged me with his staff while I was still drinking thirstily. “That’s enough, you’ll be pissing all day,” he said. I scrambled up and followed them across the stream and under the dark eaves of the trees.

  He led us all the way. We moved hastily through the woods, often at a trot, until mid-morning, when we stopped in a small clearing. It smelled of stale blood. A pack of vultures flapped up heavily on great black wings from some remnants of guts and skulls. The carcasses of three deer had been butchered and hung, glittering with flies, high from a tree limb. The men brought them down and divided and roped them so each of us could carry a load of meat, and we set off again, but now at an easier pace. I was tormented with thirst and by the flies that kept swarming around us and our burdens. The load I carried was not well balanced, and my feet, sore from the long walk yesterday, blistered in my old shoes. The trail we followed was very slight and winding, seldom visible more than a few paces ahead among the big, dark trees, and often made difficult by tree roots. When we came at last to a stream crossing I went right down again on hands and knees to drink.

  The leader turned back to stir me up, saying, “Come on! You can drink when we get there!” But one of the other men was down with his face in the water too, and looked up to say, “Ah, let him drink, Brigin.” The leader said nothing then, but waited for us.

  The water bathed my feet with wonderful coolness as we waded across the stream, but then as we went on the blisters grew worse, my wet shoes rubbing them, and I was hobbling with pain by the time we came to the forest camp. We cast down our burdens of venison in an open shed, and I could stand up straight at last and look around.

  If I’d come there from where I used to live, it wouldn’t have looked like anything at all—a few low huts, a few men, in a meadow where alders grew by a small stream, dark forest all around. But I came there from the lonesome wilderness. The sight of the buildings was strange and impressive to me, and the presence of other people even stranger and more frightening.

  Nobody paid any attention to me. I got up my courage and went to the stream under the alders, drank my fill at last, then took off my shoes and put my raw, burning, bloody feet in the water. It was warm in the meadow, the autumn sun still pouring into it. Presently I took off my clothes and got into the water entirely. I washed myself, then I washed my clothes as well as I could. They had been white. White clothing is worn by a girl in her betrothal ceremony, and by the dead, and by those who go to bury the dead. There was no telling what color my clothes had been. They were brown and grey, rag-color. I did not think about their whiteness. I laid them on the grass to dry and got back in the stream and put my head underwater to wash my hair. When I came up I couldn’t see, for my hair hung down over my eyes, it had grown so long. It was filthy and matted and I washed it again and again. When I came up from the last dip and scrubbing, a man was sitting beside my clothes on the stream bank, watching me.

  “It’s an improvement,” he said.

  He was the one who’d told the leader to let me drink.

  He was short and brown, with high, ruddy cheekbones and narrow, dark eyes; his hair was cut short to his head. He had an accent, a way of talking that came from somewhere else.

  I came up out of the water, dried myself as well as I could with the old brown blanket, and pulled on my wet tunic, seeking modesty, though there seemed to be only men around, and also seeking warmth. The sun had left the clearing though the sky was still bright. I shivered. But I didn’t want to put the filthy fur cape on my hard-won cleanness.

  “Hey,” he said, “hang on.” He went off and came back with a tunic and some kind of garment I did not recognize. “They’re dry, anyhow,” he said, handing them to me.

  I shucked off my limp wet tunic and put on the one he gave me. It was brown linen, much worn, soft, long-sleeved. It felt warm and pleasant on my skin. I held up the other piece of clothing he had brought. It was black and made of some heavy, dense material; it must be a cape, I thought. I tried to put it on over my shoulders. I could not get it to fit.

  The man watched me for a little while and then he lay back on the stream bank and began to laugh. He laughed till his eyes disappeared entirely and his face turned dark red. He curled up over his knees and laughed till you could tell it hurt him, and though it wasn’t a noisy laugh, some men heard and came over and looked at him and looked at me, and some of them began laughing too.

  “Oh,” he said at last, wiping his eyes and sitting up. “Oh. That did me good. That’s a kilt, young’un. You wear it—” and he began to laugh again, and doubled up, and wheezed, and finally said, “You wear it on the other end.”

  I looked at the thing, and saw it had a waistband, like trousers.

  “I’ll do without,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “No,” he said, wheezing. “I don’t mind. Give it back, then.”

  “Why would the kid want one of your fool skirts, Chamry?” one of the onlookers said. “Here, kid, I’ll get you something decent.” He came back with a pair of breeches that fit me well enough, though loosely. When I had them on he said, “Keep ’em, they’re too tight for my belly. So you came in with Brigin and them today? Joining up, are you? What’ll we call you?”

  “Gavir Arca,” I said.

  The man who had given me the kilt said, “That’s your name.”

  I looked at him, not understanding.

  “Do you want to use it?” he asked.

  I had done so little thinking for so long, my mind would not move quickly at all; it needed a lot of time. I said at last, “Gav.”

  “Gav it is,” said the man who had given me the kilt. “I’m Chamry Bern of Bernmant, and I use my name, for I’m so far from where I came that no one can track me by name or fame or any game.”

  “He’s from where the men wear skirts and the women piss standing,” said one of the onlookers, and got some laughter from the others.

  “Lowlanders,” said Chamry Bern, of them, not to them. “They know no better. Come on, you, Gav. You’d better take the oath, if that’s what you came for, and get your share of dinner. I saw you carrying in your share of it and more.”

  The god Luck is deaf in one ear, they say, the ear we pray to; he can’t hear our prayers. What he hears, what he listens to, nobody knows. Denios the poet said he hears the wheels of the stars’ great chariots turning on the roads of heaven. I know that while I was sunk far beneath any thought of prayer, with no hope, no trust in anything, no desire, Luck was always with me. I lived, though I took no care to survive. I came to no harm among strangers. I carried money and was not robbed. When I was alone and on the verge of death, an old mad hermit beat me back to life. And now Luck had sent me to these men, and one of them was Chamry Bern.

  Chamry went and whacked on a crowbar hung from a post of the largest hut. The signal brought men to gather around the porch of the hut. “Newcomer,” he said. “Gav is his name. He says he’s been living with Cuga the Ogre, which would explain the smell that came with him. And after a bath in our river he seeks to join our company. Right, Gav?”

  I nodded. I was intimidated by being the center of what seemed to me a great crowd of men—twenty or more—all looking me over. Most of them were young and had a trim, fit, hard look, like Brigin, the man who’d led me here, though there were several grey or bald heads and a couple of slack bellies.

  “Do you know who we are?” one of the bald heads demanded.

  I took a deep breath. “Are you the Barnavites?”

  That caused some scowling and some laughter. “Some of us used to be,” the man said, “maybe. And what do you know of Barna’s lot, boy?”

  I was younger than they were, but I didn’t like being called kid and boy all the time. It put my back up.

  “I heard stories. That they lived in the forest as free men, neither masters or slaves, sharing fairly all they had.”

  “Well put,” said Chamry. “All
in a nutshell.” Several men looked pleased and nodded.

  “Well enough, well enough,” the bald man said, keeping up his dignity. Another man came up close to me; he looked very much like Brigin, and as I learned later they were brothers. His face was hard and handsome, his eyes clear and cold. He looked me over. “If you live with us you’ll learn what fair sharing means,” he said. “It means what we do, you do. It’s one for all with us. If you think you can do whatever you like, you won’t last here. If you don’t share, you don’t eat. If you’re careless and bring danger on us, you’re dead. We have rules. You’ll take an oath to live with us and keep our rules. And if you break that oath, we’ll hunt you down surer than any slave taker.”

  Their faces were grim; they all nodded at what he said.

  “You think you can keep that oath?”

  “I can try,” I said.

  “Try’s not good enough.”

  “I’ll keep your oath,” I said, my temper roused by his bullying.

  “We’ll see,” he said, turning away. “Get the stuff, Modla.” The bald man and Brigin brought out of the hut a knife, a clay bowl, a deer antler, and some meal. I will not tell the ceremony, for those who go through it are sworn to secrecy, nor can I tell the words of the oath I took. They all swore that oath again with me. The rites and the oath-speaking brought them all together in fellow feeling, and when all was done and spoken several of them came to pound my back and tell me I’d borne the initiation well, and was a brave fellow, and welcome among them.

  Chamry Bern had come forward as my sponsor, and a young man called Venne as my hunting mate. They sat on either side of me at the celebration that followed. Meat had already been roasting on spits, but they added more to make a feast of it, and night had fallen by the time we sat to eat—on the ground, or on stumps and crude stools, around the red, dancing fires. I had no knife. Venne took me in to a chest of weapons and told me to choose one. I took a light, keen blade in a leather sheath. With it I cut myself a chunk out of a sizzling, dripping, blackened, sweet-smelling haunch and sat down with it and ate like a starved animal. Somebody brought me a metal cup and poured something into it—beer or mead—sour and somewhat foamy. The men laughed louder as they drank, and shouted, and laughed again. My heart warmed to their good fellowship—the friendship of the Forest Brothers. For that was the name they called themselves, and had given me, since I was one of them.

  All around the firelit clearing was the night forest, utter darkness under the trees, high leaf crowns grey in the starlight for miles and miles.

  If Chamry Bern hadn’t taken a liking to me and if Venne hadn’t taken me as his hunting partner I would have had a worse time of it that fall and winter than I did. As it was, I was often at the limit of my endurance. I’d lived wild with Cuga, but he’d looked after me, sheltered me, fed me, and that was in summer, too, when it’s easy to live wild. Here my city softness, my lack of physical strength, my ignorance of the skills of survival, were nearly the death of me. Brigin and his brother Eter and several other men had been farm slaves, used to a hard life, tough, fearless, and resourceful, and to them I was a dead loss, a burden. Other men in the group, town-bred, had some patience with my wretched incompetence, and gave and taught me what I needed to get by. As with Cuga, my knack at fishing gave me a way to show I could try at least to be useful. I showed no promise at all in hunting, though Venne took me with him conscientiously and tried to train me with the short bow and in all the silent skills of the hunter.

  Venne was twenty or so; at fifteen he had run away from a vicious master in a town of the region of Casicar, and made his way to the forest—for everybody in Casicar, he said, knew about the Forest Brothers, and all the slaves dreamed of joining them. He enjoyed the life in the woods, seemed fully at home in it, and was one of the best hunters of our band; but I soon learned that he was restless. He didn’t get on with Brigin and Eter. “Playing the masters,” he said drily. And after a while, “And they won’t have women with us . . . Well, Barna’s men have women, right? I think of joining them.”

  “Think again,” said Chamry, sewing a soft upper to a shoe sole; he was our tanner and cobbler, and made pretty good shoes and sandals for us of elk hide. “You’ll be running back to us begging us to save you. You think Brigin’s bossy? Never was a man could match a woman for giving orders. Men are by nature slaves to women, and women are by nature the masters of men. Hello woman, goodbye freedom!”

  “Maybe,” Venne said. “But there’s other things comes with her.”

  They were good friends, and included me in their friendship and their conversation. Many of the men of the band seemed to have little use for language, using a grunt or a gesture, or sitting stolid and mute as animals. The silence of the slave had gone so deep in them they could not break it. Chamry on the other hand was a man of words; he loved to talk and listen and tell stories, rhyming and chiming them in a kind of half-poetry, and was ready to discuss anything with anybody.

  I soon knew his history, or as much of it as he saw fit to tell, and as near or far from the truth as suited him. He came from the Uplands, he said, a region far north and east of the City States. I’d never heard of it and asked him if it was farther than Urdile, and he said yes, far beyond Urdile, beyond even Bendraman. I knew the name of Bendraman only from the ancient tale Chamhan.

  “The Uplands are beyond the beyond,” he said, “north of the moon and east of the dawn. A desolation of hill and bog and rock and cliff, and rising over it all a huge vast mountain with a beard of clouds, the Carrantages. Nobody deserves to live in the Uplands but sheep. It’s starving land, freezing land, winter forever, a gleam of sunlight once a year. It’s all cut up into little small domains, farms they’d call them here and poor sorry farms at that, but in the Uplands they’re domains, and each has a master, the brantor, and each brantor has an evil power in him. Witches they are, every one. How’d you like that for a master? A man who could move his hand and say a word and turn you inside out with your guts on the ground and your eyes staring into the inside of your brain? Or a man who could look at you and you’d never think a thought of your own again, but only what he put into your head?”

  He liked to go on about these awful powers, the gifts he called them, of the Upland witches, his tales growing ever taller. I asked him once, if he’d had a master, what his master’s power was. That silenced him for a minute. He looked at me with his bright narrow eyes. “You wouldn’t think it much of a power, maybe,” he said. “Nothing to see. He could weaken the bones in a body. It took a while. But if he cast his power on you, in a month you’d be weak and weary, in half a year your legs would bend under you like grass, in a year you’d be dead. You don’t want to cross a man who could do that. Oh, you lowlanders think you know what it is to have a master! In the Uplands we don’t even say slave. The brantor’s people, we say. He may be kin to half of ’em, his servants, his serfs—his people. But they’re more slaves to him than ever the slave of the worst master down here!”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Venne. “A whip and a couple of big dogs can do about as well as a spell of magic to destroy a man.” Venne bore terrible scars on his legs and back and scalp, and one ear had been half torn off his head.

  “No, no, it’s the fear,” Chamry said. “It’s the awful fear. You didn’t fear the men that beat you and the dogs that bit you, once you’d run clear away from ’em, did you? But I tell you, I ran a hundred miles away from the Uplands and my master, and still I cringed when I felt his thought turn on me. And I felt it! The strength went out of my legs and arms. I couldn’t hold my back up straight. His power was on me! All I could do was go on, go on, go on, till there was mountains and rivers and miles between me and his hand and eye and cruel power. When I crossed the great river, the Trond, I grew stronger. When I crossed the second great river, the Sally, I was safe at last. The power can cross a wide water once but not twice. So a wise woman told me. But I crossed yet another to be sure! I’ll never go back north
, never. You don’t know what it is to be a slave, you lowlanders!”

  Yet Chamry talked often of the Uplands and the farm where he had been born, and all through his railing at it as a poor, unhappy, wretched place I heard his yearning homesickness. He made of it a vivid picture in my mind, the great barren moor-lands and cloudy peaks, the bogs from which at dawn a thousand wild white cranes would rise at once, the stone-walled, slate-roofed farm huddled under the bare curve of a brown hill. As he told about it, I could see it almost as clearly as if I remembered it myself.

  And that put me in mind of my own power, or whatever it was, of remembering what was yet to happen. I remembered that I had had such a power, once. But when I thought about that, I began to remember places I didn’t want to remember. Memories made my body hunch up in pain and my mind go blank in fear. I pushed them away, turned away from them. Remembering would kill me. Forgetting kept me alive.

  The Forest Brothers were all men who had escaped, run away from something unendurable. They were like me. They had no past. Learning how to get through this rough life, how to endure never being dry or warm or clean, to eat only half-raw, half-burnt venison, I might have gone on with them as I had with Cuga, not thinking beyond the present hour and what was around me. And much of the time I did.

  But there were times when winter storms kept us in our drafty, smoky cabins, and Chamry, Venne, and some of the other men gathered to talk in the half dark by the smouldering hearth, and then I began to hear their stories of where they came from, how they’d lived, the masters they’d escaped from, their memories of suffering and of pleasure.

  Sometimes into my thoughts would come a clear image of a place: a big room full of women and children; a fountain in a city square; a sunny courtyard surrounded by arches, under which women sat spinning . . . When I saw such a place I gave it no name, and my mind turned away from it hastily. I never joined the others’ talk about the world outside the forest, and did not like to hear it.