by Molly Gloss
Finally, uneasily, Vren looked to see where the wolf had gone. In the muddy ground beside the river there were a few unclear tracks. Perhaps Trim had only come here to drink, or perhaps he had turned and trotted upstream or down along the riverbank. For lack of a clear sign, the boy set out downstream. He went as far as the second bend of the river. When by then he had still not seen any clear mark, he turned and went more quickly back to the beginning, to the spruce tent place. He thought he would find the wolf there, footsore and tired, curled up out of the rain. The empty space under the tree—so like the empty round house along the White Stone River, and the empty burrow here along the Ash—gave him a quick and frightening pain.
He began to search much more carefully and with much more fear. Along the upstream bank he found the tracks almost at once. There was the wolf’s clear trotting stride showing in the muddy ground, and a little further he found a few long black hairs from Trim’s coat, caught in the bristlecone of a young teba tree. So he went on upriver.
There were a great many deadfall trees. Where the wolf must have easily leapt them or trotted under them, the boy often found a need to climb or to crawl, so he did not go quickly. But he went steadily all afternoon without stopping to rest or to eat.
At dusk he reached a place where the river shore was flat and low-banked. Probably that place was damp much of the time: Cattails grew there in a thick underwood. Now the flood itself had spread out under the trees so the long brown heads of the cattails held themselves above the muddy water.
There was only a little daylight left, and the boy was not sure he could get clear around the flooded place to drier land before nightfall. But quickly he set out that way, along the edge of the swampy ground. His sandals made heavy sucking sounds as he pulled them free of the mud and set them in it again, one foot and then the other.
In the thick dusk, with his head down watching his footing, he heard the little whine, sounding not like Trim at all, but like some poor small frightened thing. He stood where he was and looked, narrowing his eyes against the lack of light. He nearly went on again without seeing where the wolf was, shoulder-deep in the deeper mud among the clumps of cattails. His coat, where it stood out of the bog, was muddy, tangled with twigs and leaves, dusted with cattail pollen. In the dim rain he seemed a limb of old wood, rotting into the mud.
“Trim!” The boy called the wolf’s name once, quickly, in gladness, and then a second time—“Oh, Trim!”—in sorrow.
The wolf made a sound like a snapping of his teeth. He tried to lunge, as he must have tried for a night and a day, but in the mud his body only shook a little, roughly. His eyes were glossy with fever or with fear.
“Wait,” Vren said. “Wait.” His voice sounded too loud, and afraid. He pitched it lower: “Just be still. I’ll get you out.” He spoke for his own sake more than for the wolf, who would not know the meaning of the words but only the look that was in the boy’s face, or fear if it was in his voice.
He put a foot out toward the wolf and let his weight onto it carefully. The ground swallowed his sandal and then quickly his ankle, with a sound like a popping of lips, so he pulled that foot back again. The wolf’s eyes watched him unhappily.
“Trim,” he said again. “I’ll get you out.” He had to try harder, this time, to make his voice sound steady and sure.
When he had thought a little, he pulled his teba cape over his head and spread it on the sticky black mud. Then he crawled onto it carefully, wriggling low without using his elbows or his knees. The mud squeezed between the fibers of the cape and slopped over its edges. It was cold as snow-melt against Vren’s chest. But though he felt anxious and clumsy, lying flat that way, the cape held him as if it were a raft.
He knew he could not lift the wolf’s great weight. He put one arm over the wolf’s back and worked the fingers of that hand down into the mud under Trim’s belly. The other hand and his shoulder he braced against the wolf’s ribs. He hoped he might, at least, be strong enough to lever the wolf up onto his side and drag him backward onto the cape.
On one deep breath and then a second one, Vren strained. He heard the mud sigh a little, but he could not feel that the wolf had budged at all. In a moment he had to stop, to lie panting and shaking with his cheek resting against his own shoulder. As he lay that way, he could see the sorrowful look on Trim’s face. The wolf held his muzzle closed and high, as if he stood in a rising water. With one yellow eye he looked at the boy, and waited.
In a moment, when he had his breath, Vren said, “I will get you out.” His voice by now was high and out of control—and it was the third time, he knew, he had spoken those words.
He took a long hissing breath and tightened his arms, pulling at the wolf steadily, fiercely, with every muscle, every strength of his whole body, until he felt his face bulging, until he heard nothing but the pounding of his own blood inside his ears, and still on the one long breath, not giving way, until slowly, shuddering, the mud gave—and the boy’s fierce stubbornness carried the wolf’s big body suddenly right up on top of him. They rolled together in a jumble of muddy legs onto the firmer ground.
Trim thrashed weakly to his feet. He stood wobbly in shallow mud, his tail and hindquarters low. The boy was shaking, too. He sat up and put his forehead against the wolf’s mud-slick chest, held the wolf’s neck tightly without making a sound.
In a moment the wolf began to groom the top of the boy’s head, stroking the boy’s muddy hair with his red, rough tongue. Slowly, then, Vren began to cry. They were scalding tears that ran in his mouth and into his ears.
He had not known until now, finding it again, that he had lost his hope.
4
Mind’s Eye
THEY WERE TIRED and muddy and cold, but the boy’s troublesack had been left at the spruce tent camp, forgotten on that bed of old dry needles. So in the darkness they picked out a path back around the flooded cattails, and then they simply lay down together on the first dry ground, huddled under the boy’s muddy cape as if it were a roof. Vren slept with both his arms wound tight around Trim. And at dawn they started back for Vren’s sack.
The distance seemed very much further than when the boy had come this way alone the day before. The wolf wobbled a little, setting his big feet down carefully among the roots and rocks. But slowly, by the walking, he got some of the strength back into his legs. Vren saw there was no illness behind his eyes, just his coat still flattened with black mud so he seemed bone-thin, as if he were sick or starving. Whenever they rested, the boy combed through the wolf’s fur with his fingers, working out the stiff, dry mud, and gradually Trim looked himself again.
As they neared their old camp, with the boy following through the gray drizzle of the trees, the wolf stood suddenly still. He held his tail up in a high brush. In a moment, faintly, the boy smelled it too: the thin clean smoke of someone’s campfire.
He tried not to think that it might be Rusche’s.
He put his hand on Trim’s shoulder, and they went on, more quickly now, until the boy could see the yellow fire, small as a candle’s flame in the grayness. Someone had made a camp in front of the burrow house. The fire had been built before the open door, and a person sat just under the edge of the flat grass roof, looking into the flames.
Vren saw at once that it was not Rusche. The shape was small, almost as small as the boy himself. He squatted with Trim in the wet brush at the edge of the trees and watched the camp. He had learned from Rusche to take some care when meeting a stranger. But more than that, he had lately learned a little about being afraid.
The traveler wore a heavy hooded cloak with the hood pulled up around the head so the face was dark. Slowly, without knowing that he had done so, the boy decided it was a woman. She sat very still with her hands turned palms up on her crossed legs. Probably she waited for drier weather before she left the shelter. But it seemed to the boy as if she were waiting for someone to come, or for something to happen.
Vren tried to wait too, but he wa
s very cold. Even his knees had begun to tremble under him. Finally he stood and, with one hand on Trim’s neck, walked out onto the grass.
The woman, when she saw them, seemed only a little surprised, as if the two of them might have been what she waited for. She sat up straighter and lowered her hood. Then the boy could see it was the strange traveler woman he and Rusche had often met in summers, a woman named Shel. She had an uncommon face, round and dark and wrinkled as a po nut. When Vren had been younger, the woman’s face had scared him. But she had always been polite and gentle in the times he and Rusche had visited her, so he stood still now and waited, as Rusche had shown him, for her sign of welcome or of refusal.
The woman looked from him to the wolf and to him again. Vren thought she might be afraid of Trim. He had seen, often enough, the way fear came up in people’s eyes when they saw the red-back wolves. But if she was afraid, she kept it secret. Her face was only watchful.
She had no tea bowl the boy could see, but finally she raised both her hands, open palmed, and said in a polite way, “Come far?” which was a traveler’s greeting. So Vren walked slowly in to stand beside her campfire.
“So far,” he said, in the traveler’s way. His voice sounded dry and cracked to him. It had been a long time now, since he had spoken to another human being.
The woman gave him another of her slow, careful looks. If she remembered him from their few visits, she said nothing of it.
“Will you share this?” she said kindly, and reached up to him with a long-necked gourd bottle.
The boy drank a little from the gourd. It was a cold tea made from the leaves of raspberries. It would have tasted better if it had been hot, but he was glad to get it.
“Thank you,” he said.
The woman seemed to think, and then she took a small hard lump of bread out of her troublesack and handed it up to the boy. “This too,” she said, smiling just a little. “And sit down by the fire, if you please. You shiver like a mouse in the teeth of a big cat.”
The bread was made of wild rice and water, and it was so hard Vren could not bite into it. He had to suck it and then grind at it with his back teeth. Still, he was very hungry and the taste was good. He drank more of the tea, now and then, to help the bread down. Trim sat back a little from the fire, but Vren crouched with his knees drawn up very close to the flames. He wanted to let the heat go all the way down into his cold bones.
While he ate, the traveler woman did not speak. She simply sat and watched him with steady eyes. The boy thought he himself ought to speak. He and the wolf were footsore and painted with mud, and he had not yet gotten his troublesack from under the spruce tree, so his hands were empty. Surely that was why she stared. But he could not decide how much to say, how much to leave out. Should he speak at all of Rusche?
The woman said suddenly, “The wolf was stuck in the river bottoms.” It was not a question, so it startled him a little.
He nodded.
“Lucky you were strong enough to get him out,” she said, as if he had told her as much.
And he answered, “Yes.”
Her eyes still watched him, so that he felt more and more uneasy. It seemed as if her stare went inside his skull, a quick strange touch like an eyelash brushing the inner bone.
He stretched his hands out over her fire. “Do you know this river?” he asked shyly. “Do you know if there might be a shallower place to cross it?”
The woman shook her head. “I have not been on it before today. But the flood will ebb if you are patient. Or you might go another way.”
The boy could not think of an answer to that without telling her the whole long tale of Rusche and the empty house. So he said nothing.
In a moment she said, “I had thought of weaving a little pillie-reed boat, myself, and going on down the river.”
Vren had sometimes made his own small boats and sailed them, but they always let in too much water, or they were not quite true, and so went left or right and could not be made to sail straight. He thought, without saying it, that Shel had yet to find how hard it was to build a good boat, even one as simple as a pillie-reed canoe.
The woman began to smile, as if she had seen his doubt in his face. “I went across the Milk Lake, once, on a raft of my own making,” she said. “And two days down the Horn River in a pillie-reed boat. Have not drowned yet.”
Vren had never seen the Milk Lake himself, but people had told him of that place. The water was rough, and a fog lived there much of the time. The Horn River, like the White Stone, was rocky and cold and quick.
He ducked his chin a little, in embarrassment. “If you would not mind it, I would watch while you build the boat,” he said. “I haven’t ever made one that would sail true.”
She simply nodded, still smiling slightly. Then, over a long silence, she looked down at her hands and out at the trees. The lines of her face deepened slowly until there was something like a frown there.
In a low, raspy voice, as if unwillingly, she said, “Help me with it, if you like. We could be on the water, then, by morning.”
There was a smaller silence, filled with Vren’s surprise, for he saw he had been invited to share her boat. The woman lifted one shoulder, shrugging, but there was still a look like anger in her face.
“Your weight in the bow would give balance to a boat. I wouldn’t mind if you went along with me a little way.” Probably she thought his troublesack was lost, that he was alone, without even a tinder knife or a tea-bowl, and the cold season already creeping in among the bare trees.
Vren realized, suddenly, that yesterday or the day before he might have chosen to go with her. It would have seemed a better thing than returning, alone, to an empty house. Even now, he was afraid of the floodwaters of the Ash, and of what he would meet when at last he found Rusche. But finding Trim, he had found his courage again. Now he did not need to choose. He had already done so. He would ask Shel, in the little boat she would make, to take them across the flood, and then he would go on with Trim, along the trail of Rusche, until they had finally lost or overtaken him.
The woman spoke before he did. She blinked her eyes as an owl might, slowly, and the boy felt again the eyelash touch of her stare. Then she said, in a new low voice, “You would as well go with me. The wolf, I think, will find no sign of your friend on the other riverbank. Probably he is one of those who has gone downriver on the Shadow-raft.”
The boy felt a creeping of his skin, a prickling that went down along his spine and up into his scalp. The woman herself made a little, uncomfortable smile. She must have known she had frightened him, and by smiling hoped to make it less important.
She touched the edge of the burrow-house with her fingertips, rubbing the wood lightly as she ducked her eyes away from Vren. “There were eight who were here, days ago. Seven came, and when they left they took with them the one who had lived here, the dream-weaver, the eighth. One of the eight is a Shadow-shaper, and she has put the shape of a flatboat into mud and little sticks. They have sailed off in that thing, all of them, as if it were real.”
In the silence after the woman spoke, the boy heard his own slow and heavy heartbeat. Seldom before this had he seen anyone’s Shadow at all. There could be no pride in Shadows, among the thrown-away people of the UnderReach. Even Vren himself had sometimes gone away from a friend, turning quickly from a hawk or a shrew he knew well, and going off shamefaced when he thought someone might see them together. Rusche only rarely worked the weather, and never when he and Vren stood in view of others. No one Vren had met had ever spoken of a Shadow, or shown it, as this woman now did both at once, so strong and so awful—and he was afraid of her as he had not been of anyone since the day Rusche had stood over him, a wild-haired stranger. In fright he looked away from her, fixing his eyes in the trees.
She also carefully looked away. She said nothing. She only sat still, staring at her hands where they rested in her lap, as if now, like any other person, she had to wait for him to tell what he was thin
king.
When there had been a very long silence, Vren glanced fearfully toward her again. Around her mouth and her eyes he saw a look he knew: the old, enduring pain of the one who is cast out. Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, he saw his mother’s face looking away from him, staring in unspeakable fright at the far straight edge of the sky—in the same way he now looked from Shel. Then slowly his fear of the seer-woman took a smaller shape, and slowly he began to think of what she had said of Rusche.
“Do you know where Rusche is going?” he asked her timidly.
He was glad the woman did not yet raise her eyes. “Probably there is not any plan in it,” she said gently. “They are all following the spellbinder, and that one is aimless. He only goes where he likes and takes with him whomever he meets.”
The boy shook his head. He felt suddenly braver, now that he was not believing her. “Rusche would not go off with one like that.”
In a moment the woman said, low and flat, “I think the seven who are with that one would simply do as he asks, whether good or bad. He has hold of their souls.”
Vren sat still, touching Trim now with one hand. Rusche, he thought, was stronger than that, and more true. But the woman’s colorless voice frightened him again. Not Rusche, he wanted to say, but he could not quite speak the words out loud.
The woman’s eyes came up and touched him lightly, so that he felt a chill. But she said, in a kind way, “There is probably no one who could stand against him. I have not seen or felt a Shadow as black as his. When I touched this house where he had been, I saw the shape of it as clearly as if he still stood inside it.”
The boy hugged his arms against his chest. He imagined her touching this empty house and seeing, behind her eyes, some ghostly image of Rusche and of the spellbinder. And though he sat very near the woman’s fire, he grew cold and shaky.