by Molly Gloss
Vren felt too tired and too sore to look away. But he had lost, with the need for crying, the need for fear. In the man’s eyes he saw himself, but pale and plain.
The spellbinder murmured in his ear. “Together again, you and I.” His voice, inside the boy’s head, was an ordinary man’s voice, the voice of someone who was often afraid and always alone. “You have so beautiful a gift, in that Shadow of yours,” he said.
Hearing it said finally, in a plain unShadowed voice, Vren knew, once and ever afterward, and with only a small feeling of surprise, that it was true.
Tiredly, he looked away. He looked for Rusche, still standing alone behind the high yellow fire.
“Rusche,” he said, in a blurred and thin and childish voice, as he had used to call that name like a charm word from his sleep, in sure and certain faith the man would be there.
The spellbinder, at the boy’s word, straightened in vague fear, and made a movement back toward the weather-worker. But he must have seen something in Rusche’s face, or in Vren’s. Perhaps he saw Rusche following his name back, finding himself in the eyes of the boy. For a moment the spellbinder stood unsteadily between Rusche and Vren. When snow began slowly to whiten his shoulders, fear and surprise came into his look.
The snow gathered in individual flakes in Rusche’s thick red eyebrows. It melted and hung in clear round beads, like rain or like tears, in his eyelashes. He made a slow, shuddering sound, and then he came toward the boy. The spellbinder put his hand on Rusche’s arm, going past, but it was a short, shaky movement, a clutching, and Rusche flinched away from it and kept on, leaving the man standing uneasily alone.
When Vren had been small, Rusche had used to hold his hand sometimes, walking along a narrow or a steep trail. Sometimes Rusche had carried Vren on his shoulders or in his arms, sleep-sweaty and tired. That had been a long time ago. He had grown too big for carrying, too old for clinging. But now Rusche bent down for the boy, and Vren, beginning to cry, clasped his arms round the man’s neck and climbed up, or tried to. He was too long-legged, too heavy, and finally Rusche staggered and knelt in the snow there and just held the boy against him, across his lap, their arms and legs tangled together. Rusche rocked a little, back and forth, and trembled, as the boy had done after Trim and Shel had carried him down into the ironwood forest.
“Vren,” he said once, hoarsely and tiredly, with his mouth against the boy’s hair.
The spellbinder watched them. He had a look in his face, now, like the one that had been in Rusche’s, that same kind of surprised alarm.
10
A Small Clear Place
THERE WAS A mark at the center of the wolf’s chest, a blaze of singed hair. Vren stood back, with his eyes fixed on that small mark, while Rusche went across the snow to Trim. The boy’s own chest felt weighted, as if the breath had been pushed out of him. Rusche stooped and touched the wolf. He slid both his hands over the rough coat, along the shoulders and the ribs and the thin flanks. When the weather-worker pressed a handful of snow against the burned place on Trim’s chest—and Vren felt the flood of coolness below his own breastbone—then he saw the shallow rise and fall of the wolf’s breath.
They carried the wolf heavily between them, to the shelter of the one empty shed. Rusche sat and held the wolf’s big head in his lap and put his arm across the boy’s shoulders. Vren leaned wearily against him. He looked out at the trees, and the steady, thick snowfall, white against the gray of daylight already coming up in the sky. But he felt the spellbinder’s eyes watching, and finally he could not keep from looking toward him.
The man stood alone on the trampled dirty snow before the fire. He wore the big bear’s-wool cloak that had been Rusche’s, with his arms pulled inside so his head seemed balanced on a shapeless mound. He may not have been able to see Rusche’s face or Vren’s in the darkness under the lean-to; though he stared toward them, he seemed almost to look aside. A glittery brightness stood in his eyes, like unshed tears, or grief. Something familiar had gone from him, or something unfamiliar had come.
Slowly, the man who had been gathering wood came in from the pale edge of the trees. He waited there in confusion, blinking his eyes against the firelight, his empty hands hanging. The spellbinder turned his head and looked at him dully, without new surprise, as if he had, this time, expected to be betrayed. It was only later—as the far-sighted girl came shakily to the edge of the campsite, and one of the others, the big-boned man, rose unsteadily and stood beside one of the snowsheds—that he seemed at last to understand they were all unbound, as one thread, pulled, will undo a whole cloth.
After that, Vren saw his face slowly gathering malice and fear, until there was nothing of grief there, if ever there had been, only the shiny staring look that was not quite tears. Then Vren was able to see what was changed in the man’s face. Perhaps the spellbinder had seen, in Vren’s eyes and Rusche’s, some small, true glimpse of himself—for his bright black unweeping eyes seemed to look only inward now, and in them Vren saw no one’s reflection, only shades of night.
The man hunched his shoulders inside the heavy wool cloak, not shrugging, but protecting himself from some blow. He started heavily round to the stone house. Vren wondered if he meant to hide there, as he had done before, sitting alone in the exact center of the one square room. But the house had been abandoned. There were dark, cold gaps where rocks had fallen away, and little sticks stood in the openings, braced against the weight. As an untended house will do, this one became slowly unmade.
The man, when he saw the house, only hunched his shoulders again, as if he had not, after all, meant to go inside. He bent warily and reached through the door opening, snatching things to fill a troublesack: a bowl, a branch of firestick, the long, skinless red leg of an animal, poorly wrapped in a piece of rag. Then he turned and stood stiffly between the house and the fire, with the strap of the troublesack pulled up to one of his shoulders. Without quite meeting anyone’s eyes, he cast a sort of bullying look out around the camp where several of those people were standing now, separately, shakily, at the furthest edges of the clearing.
There was a very long, waiting silence. He was only a short, plain man, in too big a cloak, and he was stooped a little under the weight of the sack. His eyes were huge and black, but it was only the small jumping flame of the fire that stood reflected in them. Still, in a while, the man with skinny stick arms came slowly forward. He did not look toward the others, but once, sidelong and deliberately, toward the spellbinder. Vren saw him narrow his eyes, in the way he and Rusche had used to do when they looked for shapes in the endless field of the stars. Perhaps the man drew, on the flat darkness of the spellbinder’s eyes, his own bright, beguiling image of himself.
There were piles of things, of food and household tools, left carelessly about in the snow, and the skinny man began to rummage among them, filling a sack. In a moment, a heavy-faced woman with thick bare feet came after him, and began to gather things into her arms. Her mouth was stiff and set in a down-curved line.
The spellbinder watched them. Vren saw the look that came in his face, the little easing of his fear. When those two had taken up their loads, they came and stood a short way from him. They kept their faces turned down so Vren could not see their eyes. Then the spellbinder looked toward Rusche, or toward Vren.
“You see,” he said, in something like his old, bold way. “Some of them will choose me.” But his eyes were unglazed, flat, and when he spoke, his voice sounded small and shrill. It may have been the look in the faces of the other two that made Vren feel a last stirring, a shudder.
In a moment the man simply walked away from the camp, going quickly out of sight in the darkness under the trees. The two followed him, tramping behind, with their shoulders hunched and their eyes hidden. They left a heavy, broken trail in the snow.
Someone cried. Vren thought it might be the far-sighted girl, but then he saw her standing solemnly, with her thin bare arms clasped around her, and her lips pulled in to a
flat line. Perhaps it was the old claw-fingered woman who cried. The high, thin wail made the air seem to shiver.
Rusche took in a little breath. He put Trim gently across Vren’s legs and stood out of the shelter. Vren watched him cast about in the scattered piles of stores until he had found a deep boiling bowl, a few red onions and tuck roots, dried bunches of chai. He filled the bowl with cold creekwater, set stones in the burnt-down coals of the fire, and then, sitting on the snow, began deliberately to break the roots and the onions into the bowl in his lap. His fingers were long and thin, and they shook a little, so the dry skins of the onions rustled in his hands.
Snow fell quickly into the bowl and onto the sleeves of Rusche’s thin shirt, and into the dwindling bonfire. For a little while he kept on as if the snow were not falling. He only shrugged his shoulders against the chill at the back of his neck. But then, without looking out at the others—only once, a small steady look for Vren—he set the bowl down and stood.
Vren knew suddenly what Rusche would do, though six people stood watching and there was, this time, no cross look, no shame in his face.
Rusche thrust his arm out once, cutting a wide, quick, impatient arc through the air. Afterward, from the small, clear place he had made in the snowfall, he looked out at the others, the people standing miserably, each of them alone, at the edges of the camp. It was only one look, sent round to all of them gently. Then he sat and took the bowl into his lap again.
In a little while, stiffly, the wood gathering man came within Rusche’s unsnowing circle. He stood looking down at the collapsed center of the fire. Then with his foot he began to push in the unburned ends of wood, scuffing up snow and ashes a little, so the blaze whispered and spat. When he had gone all around the fire that way, he stood a moment, stooped and still, not looking toward Rusche. Then he went off silently into the trees. He came in again with two long wind-broken limbs. He fed them carefully to the fire, squatting down to place them each just so, and then finally sitting down himself, a little way from Rusche.
He opened his hands to the fire and rubbed the palms against one another with a dry sound like the skins of the onions. There was a tired stare in his face, but it was unlike the stare of the gray no-time place. Once, shyly, he looked at Rusche.
After that they came in gradually, one and then another. Rusche’s soup, when it was hot, went silently among them, the big bowl passing from hand to trembling hand. They did not quite look in one another’s faces. But behind their eyes, Vren saw a look, sometimes, of old shared secrets. As if they had once, a very long time in the past, known one another as children.
• • •
When Rusche touched his ankle in the darkness, Vren woke and sat up from the warmth of his sleeping-robe. Rusche was already dressed for their going. He crouched on his heels next to the boy’s bed, waiting. “Your face is still asleep,” he said in a quiet, teasing voice.
Vren twisted his fists against his sleepy eyes. There were a few pale stars shining through the smokehole in the roof of their wintering house. By that star-light, stiff-fingered and cold, the boy tied up his leggings, put on a thick cloak, found his small new teba-cloth troublesack and the great teardrop shapes of the snowshoes he and Rusche had woven in the first days of winter, those first days after the spellbinder had gone.
Rusche went out through the low door, and the boy followed him. They crouched beside the house, fitting their snowshoes, trying them quietly, tamping down the powdery drift in front of their door.
Softly Rusche said, “Tellado gave us these,” and he put a few small rice cakes in Vren’s hand.
The boy began to smile sleepily. He took from his own troublesack two flat patties of nut paste. “These are from Miesen,” he said.
In the chill darkness, they stood together chewing the crumbly cakes and the pasties. The wolf rose up from where he had slept under the snow. He shook the loose white cape from his back and stood, sleepy as Vren had been. The boy nodded, yes, the wolf would go also. Then Trim worked the stiffness out of his hind legs, bowing low and stretching until his long muscles trembled.
In a little while it would begin to be daylight. The darkness had a thin look, like the water when you swim up from a lake bottom. Vren could see the white line of mountains against a far edge of the sky, and near him in the transparent darkness the several houses standing silently along the small valley of the creek.
A string of smoke came from the old Shadow-shaper, Uhle’s log house. She took her sleep in short, scattered naps, to keep her swollen joints from stiffening. But the other houses were still and cold, their people asleep, waiting for the daylight. They had each of them, the night before, bid Rusche and Vren fair traveling, and safe return.
They set out quietly through the shallow snow. Their white breath plumed out, hanging still in the cold air behind them when they had gone on past.
The boy broke the trail. He remembered the way between the snow-cloaked hills back to the ironwood, and from there he and Rusche would be able to follow the wolf. Trim had grown restless and lonely over the cold season; he pined at night, in disquieting song, for his family. Vren knew, when the wolf saw the way they were going, he would begin to go ahead, eagerly finding the way for them back toward the White Stone River.
And when he saw they were not, after all, going all the way, Vren knew the wolf would go on alone, and finally home.
The sky filled up with clear winter daylight. Vren began to sweat, working hard, lifting and setting his wide-woven shoes in the snow. It felt good to be going, not thinking of much now except the careful placing of his feet.
The low hills seemed all of a kind, but coming up across the shoulder of one slope, Vren knew suddenly: This was the place where Shel had stayed behind. She had stood just there, alone, not watching him go away.
He had been thinking of her steadily, all these weeks. Rusche said she might have gone to spend the winter in the bowl-mender, Giel’s, empty tree house, for that would have been the nearest good shelter. Or she had gone back to find that cave in the rocks, near the falls of the Ash River.
Vren and Rusche meant, themselves, to go that far, as they had used to go up the White Stone River to the Cat’s Tail, to see the way the ice must hang in long fingers and fists at the edges of the water. But the distance, and the reason for going, were each much greater. Miesen and Uhle and the others would not look for their return short of twenty days. And when Rusche and Vren stood along the ridge between the ironwood and the river, at Giel’s hollow-tree house, or later when they came below the falls, near the cave, they would search for Shel. Then, when finally they had found her wintering place, they would stand and wait patiently until she had filled up her tea bowl and set boiling stones on her fire. They would come in to share, quietly, their little bits of news: The six houses built together in the valley of Clear Creek.
Someone, in the first days, had called the place WintersCamp, where their houses stood all together, and so it was carelessly named, as if they would all go away from it in the spring. Sometimes, yet, one of them would speak of the place where their own old houses stood—telling themselves, or the others, they ought to go and live there. Vren himself still sometimes thought of the empty house along the White Stone River, remembering the thin-shelled po nuts and the color of the small rocks under the river’s skin.
But the low hills at WintersCamp sheltered them from the wind, and the banks of the creek were thickly grown with jewel weed and moss, and whenever the clouds broke, the low winter sun shone easily through the bare branches of the hemmin trees, warming the roofs of their houses.
Vren thought, when he saw Shel, he would tell her those things, so that she might want to come with them and see the place herself. He would tell her that, in the spring, the hemmin trees would be putting on cloaks of lavender blossoms. And the air then would smell sweet and heavy with promise.
Keep reading for a preview of
The Unforeseen
by
Molly Gloss<
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FROM MAY TO September, Delia took the Churro sheep and two dogs and went up on Joe-Johns Mountain to live. She had that country pretty much to herself all summer. Ken Owen sent one of his Mexican hands up every other week with a load of groceries, but otherwise, she was alone; alone with the sheep and the dogs. She liked the solitude. Liked the silence. Some sheepherders she knew talked a blue streak to the dogs, the rocks, the porcupines; they sang songs and played the radio, read their magazines out loud, but Delia let the silence settle into her, and by early summer she had begun to hear the ticking of the dry grasses as a language she could almost translate. The dogs were named Jesus and Alice. “Away to me, Hey-sus,” she said when they were moving the sheep. “Go bye, Alice.” From May to September these words spoken in command of the dogs were almost the only times she heard her own voice; that, and when the Mexican brought the groceries—a polite exchange in Spanish about the weather, the health of the dogs, the fecundity of the ewes.
The Churros were a very old breed. The O-Bar Ranch had a federal allotment up on the mountain, which was all rimrock and sparse grasses—well suited to the Churros that were fiercely protective of their lambs and had a long-stapled topcoat that could take the weather. They did well on the thin grass of the mountain, where other sheep would lose flesh and give up their lambs to the coyotes. The Mexican was an old man. He said he remembered Churros from his childhood in the Oaxaca highlands, the rams with their four horns—two curving up, two down. “Buen’ carne,” he told Delia. Uncommonly fine meat.
The wind blew out of the southwest in the early part of the season, a wind that smelled of juniper and sage and pollen; in the later months it blew straight from the east, a dry wind smelling of dust and smoke, bringing down showers of parched leaves and seed heads of yarrow and bitter cress. Thunderstorms came frequently out of the east, enormous cloudscapes with hearts of livid magenta and glaucous green. At those times, if she was camped on a ridge, she’d get out of her bed and walk downhill to find a draw where she could feel safer, but if she was camped in a low place, she would stay with the sheep while a war passed over their heads, spectacular, jagged flares of lightning; skull-rumbling cannonades of thunder. It was maybe bred into the bones of Churros, a knowledge and a tolerance of mountain weather, for they shifted together and waited out the thunder with surprising composure; they stood forbearingly while rain beat down in hard, blinding bursts.