Chosen of the Changeling

by Greg Keyes

  The decision brought many kinds of relief with it. It was undeniable that he was developing some small sort of affection for Hezhi, though it would be impossible to articulate exactly what he felt. In her, pain and distrust were so tightly bound; he wished sometimes that he could draw her into his arms and somehow understand, soothe away some of that hurt. But she would detest such closeness; it would harden her. And at other times, he had no wish to touch Hezhi at all, much less hold her. There was still so much for him to forget, when it came to her …

  As Raincaster sang, the remainder of the Mang hunting expedition came down out of the hills, slowed by the travois their horses carried, packed with meat, pine nuts, and skins for winter clothing. All told, they numbered some thirty men and women and fifty horses. The thin cry of an infant rose clearly from the approaching riders. For the past two months they had all camped in the hills, hunting, singing, and drinking. It had been a good time, and it had given him some chance to heal, to forget his crimes, to be merely a man of eighteen, hunting and riding with Ngangata, Yuu’han, and Raincaster. Now, however, it was time to shoulder his burdens once again.

  Raincaster finished his song, and they mounted up and rode east, away from the herd. There had been some suggestion of trying to kill a straggling cow, but they were already burdened with too much food, and the older people—Brother Horse included—disdained hunting for sport. A few of the younger men wanted to tide off and engage in a sport known as Slapping, in which they would ride close to a bull and strike it with a wooden paddle, but Brother Horse forbade it, grumbling that he was too old to explain such foolish deaths to grieving parents. And so they left the incredible herd behind, in peace.

  Hezhi rode beside Brother Horse, and Perkar trotted T’esh over to join them. Hezhi was enthusiastically remarking on the previous night’s snowfall.

  “It never snows in Nhol?” Perkar asked Hezhi, coming up beside her. T’esh whickered softly, and Dark responded with a like sound.

  “Not that I know of,” she replied. “It gets cold sometimes—I may have heard about it snowing there before, but I’ve never seen it.” She gestured out at the landscape. “This is like riding upon the clouds,” she offered.

  “Eh?” Brother Horse grunted.

  “Clouds. It’s as if we ride above the clouds—on top of them.”

  Perkar nodded agreement. They could easily be on the back of an overcast sky; the land was gently rolling paleness, the highlands receding into a gray line to their right and behind. Above them, higher heaven was profound azure with no hint of white. It seemed almost reasonable that at any moment they might pass over a small rift or hole and, peering through it, regard the green, blue, and brown of landscape far, far below.

  “Will this weather hinder the—” Perkar paused to try to get the word right. “—Bun-shin?”

  “Ben’cheen,” Brother Horse corrected. “Ben’, ‘tent,’ see? ‘Swollen Tents.’”

  Perkar nodded through his exasperation. “Will the snow hinder the Ben’cheen festival?”

  “Not at all,” Brother Horse said. “Our kinfolk from the high plains will be arriving already, and they’ll have come through worse weather than this.”

  “How many people will attend this gathering?” Hezhi asked. “Duk and the other women talk as if it will be the whole world.”

  “To you they will seem few,” Brother Horse admitted. “But there will be many hundreds, perhaps a thousand, for at least a score of days.”

  “Why in wintertime?” Perkar asked.

  “Why not?” Brother Horse grunted. “What else is there to do? And believe me, the winters here in the south are mild—it’s really almost spring, and this the first, probably only, snow. It is our obligation to host the Ben’cheen for our less fortunate kinfolk, give them a warmer place to stay.” He smiled ruefully. “Like birds, flying south,” he offered. “Winter is the best time to tell stories, best time to find a woman—” He winked at Perkar. “—best for all of that. Summer is just work!” He reached over and clapped Perkar on the back. “The two of you will enjoy it. Meet new people. Perkar, you might even encounter some warriors from the northwestern bands and start talking to them about that truce you want to strike between them and your folk.”

  “Really more than a truce,” Perkar said. “I hope to convince them to let us expand our pastures into some of their higher rangelands.”

  “It’s not impossible,” Brother Horse said. “Not with the right mediator.”

  Perkar shook his head. “Our people have been enemies for so long …”

  Brother Horse spread five fingers in the wind. “‘Thus the tree grows,’” he quoted, “‘and each new branch, as a new tree. Nothing is unchanging, least of all the ways of people.’” He frowned a bit sternly. “But you have to be there, to have hope of accomplishing anything.”

  Perkar set his mouth. “I will be there,” he promised. “According to your nephew, Yuu’han, my trip will only delay me for a few days.”

  Hezhi turned on him, eyes suddenly wide and angry. She seemed to fight down a sharp remark—so sharp that, by her face, it must have cut her throat to swallow.

  “You still plan to go?”

  “I must, Hezhi,” Perkar explained. “If I am to set matters right, there are many things I must do, and this is one. Two days’ ride north of here, no more; I must go.”

  “Then I should go with you,” she snapped, all her earlier happiness and enthusiasm evaporated. “Unless you still don’t trust me.”

  “I trust you,” Perkar insisted. “I told you that. I hold no animosity toward you.”

  “So you say,” Hezhi whispered, her voice carrying an odd mixture of anger and … something else. “But I see you looking at me sometimes. I see that look. And when you talk of ‘setting things right,’ I know—” She broke off angrily, seemed unsure whether to glare or look hurt. She was, he reminded himself, only thirteen.

  Perkar puffed an exasperated breath, white steam in the frigid air. “Maybe. A little. But I know you did nothing purposely—not like I did.”

  “I thought you could—” she began, but again didn’t finish. Her face clamped down in a determined frown, and she kneed her horse, laying the reins so that he turned.

  “Go then,” she said. “You owe nothing to me.”

  “Hezhi …” Perkar started, but found himself staring at her back. A moment ago they seemed friends, watching the wild cattle hand in hand. He wondered what it was about him that always led him to do the wrong things, say the wrong things.

  “What was all that about?” the old man grunted.

  Perkar cocked his head in puzzlement, then realized that his conversation with Hezhi had been in Nholish. He started to translate, but a second thought struck him; Brother Horse knew Nholish. When the Mang had spirited Hezhi and him out of Nhol, it had been Brother Horse who first comforted the girl. He was pretending—in typical Mang fashion-—not to understand the argument out of politeness.

  “Nothing,” Perkar said. “She just doesn’t want me to go.”

  “Well, it isn’t wise,” Brother Horse said.

  “Ngangata will be with me.”

  “Yes, well, even he may not be able to keep you out of trouble. Nagemaa, the Horse Mother, gave birth to the Mang. She watches us, teaches us out here on the plain. Did you know that six races of Human Beings died out here in the Mang country before we came along? Among them were the Alwat.”

  “He saw the lion when you did not,” Perkar reminded him.

  “So he did. As a hunter and tracker, few can match him, I will grant that. But without the blood of horses in his veins, with no kin among the hooved gods, he must rely only on himself. That is a dangerous position to be in.”

  “He can rely on me, as I rely on him.”

  “Two blind men do not make a sighted one, my friend,” the old man answered.

  Hezhi tried to keep her face low, to hide it from the Mang women. If they saw her face, they would read the anger on it as easily as she
might read a book. She didn’t want anyone trying to guess what she was angry about, especially since her own ire puzzled and confused her—vexing her even further. Not for the first time, she wished she were back in the palace in Nhol, tucked away in some secret place, alone with her thoughts. Instead, she was surrounded by strangers, people watching her face, noting and questioning each quirk and quiver of her lip. People who wanted to know what she was thinking and were good at figuring it out. These Mang were too concerned about each other, she reflected. It was everybody’s business how everybody else felt. Not because they were kindhearted, either; Duk had explained that. It was just that when you lived with the same few people most of your life, you had to know how they were feeling; there were stories of people going berserk or becoming cannibals because they hadn’t been watched carefully enough, hadn’t been caught before they lost their minds. All of the women told their children such stories—taught them a certain suspicion of everyone, even close relatives.

  Well, she could understand knowing only a few people. Everyone here seemed to think that because she was from Nhol, the great city, she must have known thousands of people. But she had really known only a handful, a tiny few, and all of the others had just been shadows cast by the palace, less substantial than the ghosts that wandered its halls. Here, with the Mang, she had to deal on a daily basis with easily three times as many people as she ever had before—people who watched her.

  It was wearing thin, and she wanted to go with Perkar and Ngangata. They were only two, and not as nosy.

  Why wouldn’t he take her? Did he think she didn’t know where he was going—that she cared? She knew he was going to see the goddess he was in love with; she had heard Yuu’han tell him that her stream was only a short ride north. Did he think that she would be jealous, that she loved him in some silly, romantic way? If so, then he remained a stupid barbarian and had learned nothing of her since they met. She didn’t care about the goddess; she just didn’t want to be left alone with the Mang and their eyes. She didn’t want Perkar to go off and be eaten by some snow-colored carnivore. Mostly, she wanted him to stop blaming her.

  Or maybe he didn’t really blame her for the twists his life had taken. Maybe she was just blaming herself. Maybe every time he made it clear how guilty he felt about everything, it only reminded her that it had been her silly, childish wish at the fountain that had brought him down the River to be her “savior” in the first place—that all of the horrible things that tasked him so were really her fault.

  It had taken an instant of weakness at the fountain, that was all—one single moment in her life when she had thought it might be nice to have someone other than herself to trust and count on. Wasn’t she even allowed that? She guessed not, not when the Blood Royal in her veins could make such wishes come true.

  Maybe she was just mad at him because there was no one else suitable to be mad at. Not Tsem, faithful Tsem, waiting back at the Mang village recovering from near-fatal wounds he received saving her. But it was someone’s fault that she was in the wilderness, with only the single book her old teacher Ghan had managed to send her; she had read it twice now. And it was surely someone’s fault that she was doing boring things like scraping hides while Perkar and his friend Ngangata went hunting beasts and roaming across the plains like wild brothers.

  Still fuming when they made camp, she rebuffed Perkar’s single attempt to make amends, and, not knowing what else to do, took out some of her precious paper, her pen and ink, and began writing a letter to Ghan, the librarian.

  She began:

  Dear Ghan,

  I think that I will never be Mang. I know this is a peculiar way to begin a letter, but I have never written a letter before, and the best thing I can think of is what I am thinking. I shall never be Mang, though I thought for a time I might. I have learned to cook and tan hides, to praise the men when they return from the hunt, to watch children when the married women—many my own age—are busy. None of these things are difficult or bad, once one learns to do them; it is just that they are not interesting. The Mang seem to lack curiosity, for the most part, seem to believe they understand the world as much as it can be understood. In this, they are no different from most people I knew in the palace. Wezh, for instance, my onetime paramour—how angry you were with me for humoring him, and for good reason—what does he care for knowledge? I think that people everywhere must generally be content without knowing very much.

  Not that knowledge has ever made me content; it has always complicated my life. It is only in the action of discovery that it brings me any sense of satisfaction.

  So I will never be Mang, any more than I could have been Nholish. I can only be Hezhi, and perhaps, someday, Ghan, for you are the only person I know who shares my disease, whose life I ever aspired to lead.

  I am safe here, I believe, at least from the power of the River. As you suspected, the change in my body ceased when I left the River behind—unnatural change, that is, though some of the “normal” changes I continue to face seem at least unholy. But whatever happens to me, whatever fate befalls me now, it will not be that obscure hall beneath the Darkness Stair where the Blessed dwell, where my cousin D’en and my Uncle Lhekezh swim about like eels. It will not be that.

  I should tell you a bit about the Mang, to correct some of the more fanciful accounts in The Mang Wastes, the book you sent along to me. For one thing, they do not beat their children to make them strong; on the contrary, they are perhaps too lenient with them. They also do not live entirely on horseback, sleeping and making love in the saddle—though both occur now and then, I hear. They live for most of the year in houses of timber and clay known as yekt. During certain seasons they move about in smaller groups, but even then they carry skin tents called ben’ which they can erect in a few moments. The accounts of them living only upon the flesh of giant beasts with snakes for noses and long sabers of bone instead of teeth are partially true, however. I have yet to see such a beast—the Mang call them nunetuk—but I am told that they exist. Men hunt them on horseback with long lances, and it is very dangerous. More often, however, they hunt deer, bison, elk, rabbit, and so forth. (Today I saw dubechag, beasts like water oxen but much larger. They were unbelievable; they reminded me that there is wonder here.) Most of what they eat isn’t hunted at all, as I should well know, for women spend days at a time picking berries and nuts, digging up roots, making bread (they trade for the flour) and so on. They also keep goats, some of them, for milk and meat. The food is filling but bland—they don’t have much salt and seem careless of spices. I miss Qey’s black bread, pomegranate syrup, coffee, and River rice! Please find some way of telling Qey so, but do not endanger yourself.

  My light is fading; now I write by firelight, and the women are beginning to talk about me; I suppose I should do some chores. First I must tell you something important.

  Our escape plans went wrong, as you know, and only Perkar and his sword enabled us to leave Nhol. We were betrayed, Ghan, by the one called Yen. I did not tell him anything—I would not have jeopardized your life so—but Yen was not, as he claimed, a young engineer. He was, I think, an assassin, a Jik. His real name is Ghe, or so he boasted. Perkar killed him, cut his head off, so he is no danger to you. But be careful, Ghan. He may have told others about the help you gave me; he observed us so closely, I think we had no secrets from him. I am constantly surprised by the masks people wear. I trusted Yen, thought he liked me, and yet he was my worst enemy. I thought you hated me, and yet you were my most loyal friend. I miss you.

  Whoever takes this letter to you will be instructed not to give it to anyone else. I’ve written it in the Middle Hand so that even if someone else does intercept it, they will probably have to bring it to you for translation!

  I’ll write more later.

  Hezhi sighed, sprinkled powder over the wet ink, then blew it off. She waited a bit, there by the fire, for the ink to dry, meanwhile taking over the chore of stirring the stew from Grumbling Woman, the olde
st of the women on the trip.

  Duk, Brother Horse’s granddaughter, only a year or so younger than Hezhi, sidled over and squatted next to her, shot long, obvious glances at the paper.

  “What were you doing?” she asked, when Hezhi did not readily offer any explanation in response to her nonvocal query.

  “Writing,” she answered, using the Nholish word. There was no such word in Mang.

  “What’s that?”

  “Putting speech down so that someone else can see it.”

  “See speech?”

  “Those marks stand for words,” Hezhi explained. “Anyone who knows them can understand what I wrote.”

  “Oh. Magic then,” Duk said.

  For a moment, Hezhi considered explaining. But this was Duk, who was content to think that Nhol was at the very edge of the universe, that anyone sailing beyond on the River would plunge into an endless abyss.

  “Yes,” Hezhi agreed. “Magic.” And she reflected that if she were ever a teacher, she would be a teacher like Ghan, accepting only the brightest. She had no patience for anyone else.

  “Then you should be careful,” Duk whispered. “There are already those who say you are a witch.”

  Hezhi snorted but then became more thoughtful. Being thought a witch was dangerous. It was the kind of thing that could get you killed in your sleep. She would have to think on this, certainly.