The Sharing Knife Book Four: Horizon

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Dag nodded reluctant acknowledgment. About to ask, But could I heal farmers? They won’t care how dirty with farmer ground I am, he realized that the necessary unbeguilement would violate Arkady’s ban against taking in strange ground, too. He sighed, resigning himself to his— temporary, he trusted—quarantine.

  6

  Dag mulishly chose to share Fawn’s ostracism, keeping to Arkady’s house when he wasn’t on duty, but the medicine tent brought the camp to him. He divided his time between what traditional apprentice dog chores Maker Challa could think of that a one-handed man might do, and close observing. Perforce, he learned names, tent-names, personalities, and, more intimately, grounds of a growing string of New Moon folks; what they made of him he was less sure. But it was plain that a camp medicine maker must come to know his people over time the way a patroller memorized the trails of his territory.

  Barr and Remo, meanwhile, wasted no time in going off to explore the camp at large, with the result that they’d shortly cooked up a scheme to go out on patrol as exchange volunteers. Dag approved; it would make good use of their time, take the burden of feeding them off Arkady’s neighbors for a couple of weeks, and pay the camp back something for their welcome here. It soon came out that their gingerliness in presenting the plan was not because they needed Dag’s permission, but because they wanted to borrow Dag’s sharing knife.

  Carrying a primed knife marked a patroller as tried and trusted, and they’d both earned that from him. In this camp’s patrol territory, where not even a sessile had been found for over three generations, Dag was nearly certain to get his knife back intact. It was his own workmanship, not Barr and Remo’s dependability, that Dag doubted. So the next afternoon, he gathered up his knife and his nerve and sought out New Moon’s senior knife maker.

  Her name, he’d been told, was Vayve Blackturtle. Her work shack, a neat cypress-wood cabin overlooking the lake near its south end, was instantly recognizable by the small collection of human thighbones hung to cure along its eaves. As he climbed nearer Dag found, more unexpectedly, signs of a garden surrounding it—not of practical food, but of flowers. Even in this drab dawning of the year, a spatter of bright purple and yellow crocuses poked up from tidy mulch beds, and the unopened buds on the flowering shrubs were fat and red.

  As he wasn’t sneaking up on a malice’s lair, here, Dag forced himself to leave his ground partly open. So he hadn’t yet mounted the porch steps when a woman emerged to stare down at him. She looked alarmingly like a younger version of Dag’s aunt Mari, lean and shrewd of eye.

  Her brown hair was drawn back in the usual mourning knot that makers wore while working, but her soberly cut skirt and jacket were embroidered with recognizable dogwood flowers. The stern air common to knife makers hung about her, yet her look was not that of an offended recluse—Dag thought of Dar—but of open curiosity.

  “Maker Vayve? M’ name’s Dag Bluefield.” He left off the No-Camp part. “May I trouble you with a question about a knife? ”

  “Oh, would you be Arkady Waterbirch’s prodigy? I’ve heard of you. Step on up.” Her roofed porch had hospitable seats, with stuffed cushions; the woven wicker creaked as Dag lowered himself. She took the next seat, half around a low plank table.

  Dag wondered at her description of him. He’d certainly done nothing prodigious here. He dragged the cord Fawn had fashioned over his head, held the leather sheath to the table with his hook, and drew out the plain bone blade. “Some weeks back, up on the Grace River, I was called upon to rededicate and bond—and prime—a sharing knife. Under emergency conditions, more or less.”

  “You were traveling with those two young patrollers who smoked out a nest of river bandits, I heard. All Oleana men, aren’t you? You’re a fair way from home.”

  Dag decided not to pursue just what Barr and Remo had been saying about themselves, and him. We drifted downriver till we ran into bandits could easily be misconstrued as We were sent downriver to destroy bandits, dodging awkward questions about how the partners had come to be trailing Dag.

  Leaving out the preamble of Raintree, Dag gave much the same truncated account of Crane and his death to Maker Vayve as he had to Arkady. As he spoke, her grim frown deepened.

  “A sharing knife,” she said, “is made as an instrument of sacrifice and redemption—not of criminal execution.”

  “This one was all three, in its way. Crane paid far less than he owed, but all that he had. I’m not asking you to judge the morality of its making, ma’am. Just its workmanship. First knife I ever made, see. Will it kill a malice? ”

  “The gossip I heard wasn’t clear if you were a patroller or a medicine maker.” Politely, she left out the renegade/deserter/banished/or-justplain- mad part. “How did you know how to make any knife at all? ”

  “My older brother is senior knife maker back at Hickory Lake Camp in Oleana. I’ve been around the craft quite a bit, time to time.”

  Her brows twitched up in some doubt. “If lurking underfoot was all it took to create talent, I’d have better luck with my apprentices.” But she picked up the knife and opened her ground to examine it, holding it to her lips and forehead in turn, eyes closed and open. Dag watched anxiously.

  She laid it gently back on the table. “Your involution is about four times stronger than it needs to be, but it’s sound and shows no sign of leakage. I see no reason it wouldn’t break open properly when exposed to the disruption of a malice. I grant it seems an unusually dark, unhappy knife, but primed knives are seldom chirping merry.”

  “Crane was as close to a mad dog in human form as makes no nevermind, but he wasn’t stupid. I think he liked the irony of tying this around my neck,” Dag admitted. But it seemed this knife was safe to lend; he would do so.

  A damp breeze, almost warm, set the bones to faintly clinking along the eaves. Reminded of another concern, he asked, “Do you chance to have any spare blanks? My brother usually did. There were always more bones than hearts.”

  “Why do you ask? ” she returned.

  “I’m without a bonded knife myself just now. My old one was . . . lost. Been meaning to replace it when I found the chance. I should like to make it for myself, under better supervision—if you’d be willing, ma’am.”

  “It seems you’re a trifle past an apprentice’s test piece.” She nodded at the knife on the table. “Do you mean to take up the craft? I don’t know that I’d dare steal you from Arkady.”

  “No, ma’am. I just want more confidence, if I ever have to face such an emergency again.”

  “Confidence? Nerve, I’d call it.” She regarded him with a warring mixture of curiosity and disapproval. “That murdered woman’s bonded knife belonged to someone, and it wasn’t you. And you took it without a second thought, as nearly as I can tell.”

  “I had thoughts in plenty, ma’am. It was time I lacked.”

  She shrugged. “This not being an emergency, you would have to ask for the donation from the tent-kin.”

  “No bones were left in your care for the general need? Or by the kinless? ”

  Her expression and her ground both went a little opaque. “Not at present.”

  In other words, this dodgy Oleana fellow was going to have to do his own begging. Perhaps he could, later, if he made more of a place for himself here.

  Vayve glanced up. Climbing the path to her shack were the two patroller girls Dag had met that first day at the gate. The leggy blonde was half veiled and not happy about something. They looked up in surprise to see Dag, and he furled himself a little more, slipping Crane’s knife back into its sheath, and into his shirt. Both partners’ eyes followed it.

  “Hello, Tavia, Neeta,” said the maker cordially. “What brings you up here? ”

  “Oh, Vayve!” said Neeta, her voice distressed. “Something terrible’s happened to my primed knife—well, it was going to be my primed knife. My father had promised it to me when I came back from Luthlia, but this morning when we went to take it from the chest—well, look!” />
  She mounted the steps, slid the knife she was clutching from its sheath, and laid it on the table in front of the maker. The dry bone blade was cracked, split up half its length. Traces of tattered groundwork still clung to it, but its involution and the death it had contained were gone.

  “He swears it was fine when he last put it away, and nobody dropped it—what happened to it? Vayve, can you fix it? ”

  “Oh, dear,” said Vayve, picking up the knife. “Just how old was this, Neeta? It’s not of my making.”

  “I’m not exactly sure. My father carried it when he was younger, and his uncle before him. Did we do something wrong—should we have oiled it, or, or . . . ? ”

  The maker turned the blade, studying the split. “No, that wouldn’t have made any difference. It was simply too old, Neeta. The groundwork on knives doesn’t last forever, you know.”

  “I was going to take it on patrol tomorrow!”

  The patrol Barr and Remo were joining—so, the reasons for their urgency to volunteer were revealed, one blond, one red-haired. Dag didn’t think he allowed his amusement to show in his face, but Tavia, watching him inquisitively, returned an uncertain half smile.

  “Isn’t there anything you can do?” Neeta went on. “Was my tentkin’s sacrifice just wasted, then? Thrown into the air? ”

  Dag had been through this scene before, with distraught younger patrollers. He said gently, “If that knife was carried on patrol for many years, it wasn’t wasted, even if it was never used on a malice. It upheld us all the same.”

  Neeta shot him a Who the blight are you to say? look. “But I might have taken this one to Luthlia instead of the one grandmother gave me, and used it last year on that sessile my patrol found. And then we’d still have had the other.”

  Most young patrollers who exchanged north of the Dead Lake took primed knives from home along; it was something of a customary fee for their training. Dag himself had carried primed knives to Luthlia that way twice, early in his long tally. About half the patrollers returned, ready to take up expanded duties. None of the knives did. A steady stream of sacrifice, flowing northward.

  “You can’t know that,” soothed Vayve. “I believe that knife you took with you was quite old as well, wasn’t it? Their fates might simply have been reversed.”

  “Then maybe I should have taken both.” But Neeta’s hands unclenched, and she sighed. She added wryly, “I just don’t know when I’ll have a chance at another, is all. All of my tent-kin are disgustingly healthy.”

  Patroller humor, but Tavia put in more seriously, “No one ever wants to share around here. Nobody in my tent will give me a primed knife because nobody even has one. Mama won’t even give me permission to bond to a blank! She says I’m much too young. Neeta claims that in Luthlia, they say if you’re old enough to patrol, you’re old enough to pledge!”

  In Oleana, too. Dag thought of his patroller cousin who’d shared at age nineteen. Much too young. Both sides in this argument seemed right to Dag, which wrung his brain a bit. Or maybe it was his heart.

  Bestirring himself to give the young patroller’s mind a more hopeful turn, Dag inquired, “So, will you be patrol leader tomorrow? ”

  “Not yet,” Neeta said glumly, then added, “But our camp captain promised me the next place to open up.”

  “How many patrols does New Moon Cutoff field? ”

  “Eight, when we’re at full strength.” She frowned at him. “You’re a funny fellow. Those Oleana boys say you’re obsessed with farmers.”

  “You should stop by Arkady’s place and talk with my wife Fawn,” said Dag, driven to dryness by her tone. “You could compare malice kills. She slew one, too, did Barr or Remo tell you that? Up near Glassforge.”

  And it wasn’t a mere sessile.

  Her nose wrinkled. “It sounded pretty garbled. You had to lend her your knife, didn’t you? ”

  Dag tilted his head. “We’re all lent our knives, in the end.”

  “But she can never share in return.”

  And glad I am of it. But even that was only half true. The strange tale of Fawn’s lost babe was nothing he wanted to repeat here, if the boys had actually had the wit to keep it close. “Many Lakewalkers never share, either—weren’t you just now complaining of that? ”

  Dag had, he realized, an audience of three, far from warm, but bemused enough by this upcountry stranger to not bolt. Neeta had taken the last seat, Tavia leaned comfortably against one of the porch posts, and Vayve seemed in no hurry to return to whatever task he’d interrupted. He swallowed, and swung abruptly into what he’d come to think of as the ballad of Greenspring, much as he’d explained it to Arkady, and to dozens before him. Dag’s words were growing all too smooth-polished with use, but, he hoped, not so glib as to fail to carry the weight of his horror. By the time he came to his description of the children’s burial trench, his listeners’ eyes were dark with pity, though their mouths stayed tight.

  “Your answer’s simple enough, it seems to me,” said Neeta, when he at last ran down. “Chase all your farmers back south of the Grace. Not that we want them.”

  “You ever try to run a farmer off his land? There’s nothing simple about it,” said Dag.

  “That part’s too true,” said Vayve. “A hundred years back, New Moon folks still used to change camps, winter and summer. Then it got so that if you left your land for a season, you’d come back to find it cleared, plowed, and planted. We finally had to hold our territory by sitting on it, dividing tents between here and Moss River. And send folks from the camp council down to Graymouth and get lines drawn on pieces of farmer paper to say we owned it! Absurd!”

  “The cost to us of teaching farmers is nothing to the cost everyone will pay if we don’t,” said Dag stubbornly.

  “In your north country, maybe,” said Tavia.

  “Everywhere. We have to begin where we are, with whatever piece we have in front of us. Never miss a chance to befriend and teach— there’s a task anyone can start.”

  Vayve made a little gesture at Dag’s upper arm, the wedding cord beneath his jacket sleeve unconcealed from her groundsense. She said dryly, “I’d say you took befriending a bit far, Oleana man.”

  Not nearly far enough, yet. Dag sighed, rose, touched his brow politely.

  “I’ll check back about those bone blanks. Good day, ma’am. Patrollers.”

  ———

  Over the next week Dag grew increasingly absorbed by the work in the medicine tent. Not that he hadn’t been in and out of the hands of the makers plenty before, but this shift in his angle of view, looking down the throats of such varied problems, made a bigger difference than he’d have guessed. As a patroller, he’d never visited the medicine tent except as a last resort; now, as part of that last resort, he found himself not only understanding, but actually reciting, that annoying maker chant of Why didn’t you come in sooner?

  A half-dozen folks a day turned up with minor ailments or injuries, although once a man was carried in with a broken leg, and a day later, more interesting and much more difficult, an aged woman with a broken hip. Still more delicate was a woman with an ugly tumor in her breast, which Arkady was treating daily by pinching off its blood supply, tiny vessel by tiny vessel. His explanation of why he didn’t try to destroy it by ground-ripping gave Dag chills—tumor ground could be nearly as toxic as malice spatter, it appeared. Arkady began taking Dag with him on his daily round of tent visits, too, although Dag was uncertain how he’d earned this advancement, since though he might fetch, carry, or hold, he was still not allowed to do even the simplest groundwork.

  The old casebooks packed on the shelves, once Challa taught him how to interpret them, proved unexpectedly gripping. They reminded Dag of patrol logs: stained, tattered, with terrible handwriting and baffling abbreviations. But also like patrol logs, the more he read the more he began to see what was between the lines as well as what was on them. The folks trickling into the tent showed Dag how the makers treated some complaints; th
e books taught him about things he hadn’t yet seen, and so he squinted at their pages daily till the light failed. With his late start as a maker’s apprentice, he felt urgent to catch up any way he could, and he overcame his halting north-country tongue to ask Challa and Arkady as many questions as Fawn might.

  His head was bursting with it all when he came back to Arkady’s place one midafternoon for a forgotten bundle of tooth-extraction tools, to find Fawn curled weeping in their bedroll. He lowered himself beside her as she sat up, hastily drying her eyes and pretending to yawn. “Oh, you’re back! I was just having a nap. It always makes me all rumpled and funny-looking, sleeping in the daytime.” But her smile lacked its dimple, and her big brown eyes were bleak.

  “Spark, what’s wrong?” He ran his thumb gently down the moist tracks from her eyes.

  “Nothing.” She shook her dark curls, abandoning, to his relief, her shaky subterfuge. “I’m just . . . being stupid, I guess.”

  “It’s not nothing. Because you’re not stupid. Tell me. You can tell me anything, can’t you?” He hoped so. Because here, so far from home and kin, he was all she had.

  She sniffed dolefully, considered this, nodded. “I’m just . . . it’s just . . . it’s all right at night, when you come back and talk to me, but it’s been so quiet all day since Barr and Remo left. And I ran out of things to do.” She waved her empty hands. “I finished sewing the last of the drawers, and I ran out of yarn for socks, and there’s not even any cooking or cleaning, because Arkady’s neighbor women do all that. It’s too gray and cold to sit outside, so I just sit in here, and, and do nothing. Which isn’t as much fun as I’d ’a thought.” She rubbed her face, then said in a lower voice, “I can’t possibly be homesick for West Blue, because I don’t want to go back there. Maybe it’s just my monthly coming on. You know how that makes me cranky.”

  He bent and kissed her damp temple, contemplating both her notions.

  It was perfectly possible, as he well knew, to be homesick for a place one didn’t want to go back to. And her monthly was indeed coming on. All true, he thought, but incomplete. “Poor Spark!” He lifted her hands one by one and kissed them, which made her gulp and sniff again.