In the Red Lord's Reach Read online

  Gilo and his brothers had not returned to their father's fire by the time Zavia took Alaric's hand and led him back to her tent.

  ****

  IN THE MORNING, he helped her strike her tent and pack up her few belongings. All around them, others were doing the same; the nomad throng, barely thinned by early departures, was seething like a simmering pot, men shouting, women scurrying, children underfoot everywhere, no one still for a moment. Even the deer, now picketed in small groups, were moving restlessly, tugging at their tethers, as if eager to begin the northward march.

  Out of this ferment stepped a figure of immense dignity: a tall woman, moving slowly, purposefully, leading a string of four heavily laden deer. The chaos parted before her, flowed around her, like a river meeting a rock in its bed. She climbed the gentle rise to Simir's circle, now a circle no longer, and she halted where the fire had been before it was dashed to cold black ashes. Alaric, who had seen her approach from his place with Zavia, watched her raise an arm, a graceful, beckoning gesture, that brought Simir himself to her side.

  Zavia, lacing up the last of the bags that had been her tent, saw where he looked. She tossed her work down and moved to stand beside him, hooking one arm about his waist. She nodded at the woman. "My mother," she said.

  Kata was nearly as tall as Simir, tall and slender and handsome, her face much like Zavia's, but refined with age, the cheeks hollowed out, the chin chiseled free of youth's softness. She wore her hair in two thick braids, each bound with leather, and on her arms were wide leather bracelets inlaid with polished pebbles. In the crook of her left arm she carried a staff taller than herself and carved into fanciful shapes, thick as a man's arm here, narrow enough to clasp with one hand there. She spoke quietly to the high chief, and he nodded several times.

  "You must meet her," said Zavia. "She will expect it." Taking his hand, she started up the rise.

  It was a changed Zavia who introduced them. Gone was the boldness, the self-possession, the pride. She lowered her gaze to speak to her mother.

  Like all the nomads, Kata had pale eyes, and looking into them, Alaric had the sensation that they could see deep inside him, deeper than anyone he had ever met before. Perhaps it was because they were so steady, perhaps because around them her face bore no expression.

  "I have heard much about you, minstrel," she said, "but I have had no time to come and listen for myself." Her voice was lower than Zavia's, smoother. "You must be a fine singer, though. I see nothing else about you to attract my daughter."

  Zavia's hand tightened on his, but she made no sound.

  "Ah, Kata," said Simir, "you are unkind." He smiled at Alaric. "He is no bad choice. He has a good heart."

  "A strong man is best for a nomad woman," Kata said, "and I see no great strength here. Wait till winter tests him. If he stays with us that long."

  "I will stay," said Alaric, and he returned Zavia's pressure.

  "He says he wishes to see the Northern Sea," Simir said.

  "Oh?" Kata looked into his eyes again. "Well, that can be arranged, if his courage is equal to it."

  Alaric tried to smile, but under that unwavering stare it was far from easy. "I will try to be an adequate nomad, good lady. I promise you."

  "Oh, don't promise that, minstrel!" said Simir. "Just promise to sing, and we will see to your comfort. You must hear him, Kata, and you will think better of him."

  "Perhaps," she said. "For now I have other things to consider. Will we be traveling soon? I must speak to you of one of the men in Donril's band…"

  She had turned away from Alaric by then, and he had experience enough of great houses and great ladies to know that he had been dismissed. He pulled Zavia away, down to her tent site, where a little boy had brought up a pair of deer for her use in the journey north. Silently, they lashed her goods to the creatures' backs. But now and then Alaric looked toward Kata, still in deep conversation with Simir, pointing sometimes here or there as the high chief nodded. And he wondered if perhaps this day he had not met the true lord of the north.

  When the deer were laden, one more lightly than the other, Zavia mounted the former and looked out over the nomad throng. Already a few groups had begun to move outward, spreading toward the horizon in a slow, dark wave. Barren ground, grazed clear by the animals, showed behind them.

  Alaric leaned against the second deer and watched the folk around him complete their own packing. Up on his rise, Simir was directing activities from deer back, and Kata sat beside him on her own mount.

  "Is your mother the only one who knows how to make the Elixir of Life?" he wondered.

  "Yes," said Zavia. "But she will teach me soon."

  "It must be wonderful stuff."

  "It is."

  "You've seen it used, I suppose."

  "I've drunk it myself."

  "Have you? And what were you cured of? Or were you raised from the dead?"

  "I drank it when I became a woman. All our children drink it when they leave childhood behind. It makes us strong." She hesitated, then looked down at him. "But it doesn't always succeed at raising the dead."

  "No? Well, there are always failures in the world. But I would see it raise the dead. I truly would." He smiled at her. "You know, my Zavia, in the south there are lands where grain rules, or gold, or the sword. The longer I am here, the more the north intrigues me."

  One of Simir's graybeard companions brought Alaric a riding deer, and shortly afterward the high chief's band, near eightscore in all, began its own journey northward on the broad rolling plain of new spring grass.

  ****

  THEY MADE CAMP in midafternoon, on the bank of a north-meandering river. The calving grounds and all trace of the other nomad bands had vanished in the distance behind them. Around them, the earth seemed empty, the game frightened off by the bustle of the approaching herd, the only trees those that grew by the watercourse. As women and children set up the tents and started their fires of dead wood and dried deer droppings, men took their bows and fanned out north, east, and even across the river in search of wild meat for the stew pots. A few youngsters set hooks in the stream, in hopes of fish; others scoured the verge in search of edible plants. The days of feasting on the deer were over; from now on just a few slaughtered animals would be eked out by every possible form of hunting.

  Their burdens removed, the deer spread out, grazing avidly under scanty guard. Their masters, however, clustered together, ranging their tents as if there were still a vast multitude surrounding them. Alaric helped Zavia pitch her own tent beside her mother's.

  "I have to be here if she needs me," she told him. "At the calving grounds, she always works alone, but now there will be herbs to grind and salves to compound and potions to mix, to replenish her stores. We'll be busy, I know. And then there are my lessons. There is so much to learn!"

  Whatever need Kata may have had for her daughter, she displayed none of k that afternoon. She did not speak to the girl, nor even look at her. She went to her tent as soon as three of Simir's graybeard comrades set it up for her, and she did not come out, not even for supper. Before eating his own meal, Simir himself took her a bowl of braised fish, the best caught that day.

  Kata's tent was the largest of that gathering save for Simir's own; but in his slept a dozen and more, including his sons, while hers was for one person alone. Yet hers was crowded, for Alaric saw the burdens of her four pack-deer passed through the entry. And it was an unusual tent in other ways, with a curious pattern of hexagons, like a loose honeycomb, inscribed upon its roof, and the ancient six-pointed symbol of the Pole Star, heart of the north, limned in white above its entry flaps; and beneath the star, to either side of that entry, Kata's carven staff and its identical twin were set hard into the ground, like stern wooden sentinels guarding her privacy. Within the tent, unlike the rest of the nomads, she kept a fire—Alaric spied its glow when Simir delivered her meal—and its steady smoke trickled upward through a roof vent to waft across the encampment, bringing w
ith it a sweet, spicy odor.

  Alaric sang that night, and if Kata the witch listened, she did not come out to watch as well.

  The next few days passed peacefully, mornings of leisurely northward travel, afternoons by the river, evenings of laughter and music by the fire. The food continued good, the high chief's cook able to turn anything the hunters brought her into a savory meal. The sun was warm by day, and Zavia was warm by night. If Kata rarely spoke to him, that hardly mattered; she treated everyone else the same. Simir was the only one who truly conversed with her. The high chief himself was friendly as ever, and his company welcomed every song Alaric offered; they never asked him for more than that, never asked him to go with the hunters or to lend a hand with the common labor, and everywhere he went among them, there was always a pleasant word for him.

  Only the boys, Gilo, Marak, Terevli, looked on him with sullen eyes and turned their backs when he came near.

  "They can stay away," said Zavia. "their time with me is finished."

  Alaric smiled, stroking her glossy hair. Outside her tent, he could hear the faint grunting of deer and the quiet sounds of people disposing themselves for the night. Inside, the oil lamp threw the dim shadow of his hand against the nearest slanting leather wall. "Did all three of them have time with you, sweet Zavia?" he whispered.

  She stretched her arms above her head and yawned and then settled more closely against him. "They've all seen the inside of this tent."

  He slid his fingers between her naked breasts. "Like this?"

  She covered his hand with her own. "Yes."

  He laughed softly. "Surely not all three at once."

  "I never thought the tent was large enough for that." She kissed the tip of his nose. "And I prefer to give all my attention to one man at a time."

  "Sweet Zavia," he sighed. "My life here would be quite perfect if not for their jealousy. They make me feel like I have stolen the fairest flower of the north." He kissed her lips, her yielding, parted lips. "And perhaps I have."

  "Once there were others jealous of them," she murmured. "Now they know how it feels to lose something precious. A healthy lesson, I think." And she smiled that triumphant little smile.

  "Were there many others, my Zavia?"

  "A few." She kissed him again, long and lingeringly. "But none like you, my minstrel. None like you."

  ****

  SEVEN DAYS THEY moved north with the river, seven nights Alaric slept with Zavia. On the eighth afternoon, it was clear to him that Gilo and his brothers had had enough of the stranger.

  The herd had dispersed with its guards, the hooks had been set in the water, the hunters had disappeared in the distance. But the chief's three sons, who often went out on the hunt, lingered behind. They found Alaric by the stream, where he and Zavia were trying their luck with a pair of lines. They wore swords at their belts, all three of them, though the nomads rarely wore their blades so near to camp.

  "Battling a fish, eh?" said Gilo. "The only creature you're fit to battle, I'd say."

  Zavia shifted so that her back was squarely to him. But the other boys fanned out so that no matter which way she turned, one of them could see her profile. She cast black looks at the two younger ones.

  Alaric said nothing.

  "I know you're afraid of me," Gilo said. "I'll wager you're afraid of my brothers, too. Even little Terevli." And when Alaric still said nothing, he added, "I'm tempted to let Terevli teach you a lesson, minstrel. He wants to. He's begged me for the chance."

  Terevli made an affirmative noise.

  "If you wish to live in the north, you'll have to be strong. Show us your strength, minstrel." Gilo's voice was a trifle harder now, a trifle impatient. "We've even brought your sword; you won't have to go back to Zavia's tent for it."

  The small, slick sound of a blade being drawn from its sheath made Alaric turn toward the youngest boy. He saw Terevli holding the finely worked scabbard in one hand and the bright steel sword in the other—the sword that Alaric had carried long but never drawn in anger.

  "It's a fine blade," Gilo said. "The one who bests you will keep it, I think. Choose one of us, minstrel. We're waiting."

  Alaric looked from one youth to the next. "I have no desire to fight any of you."

  "You think we care about your desires?"

  "I am a minstrel, not a fighter."

  "A coward, then!"

  Alaric smiled slightly. "To some men, that would be a deadly insult. But not to me. I know my limitations."

  Gilo strode to Terevli and took the sword from him, sheathed it. "Then you have no need of this weapon, have you? I can't think why you keep it at all, if you fear so much to use it. I'll use it, though, and many thanks."

  "So you're a thief, are you, Gilo?" Alaric said softly.

  Gilo's mouth twisted in malice. "Do you insult me, stranger?"

  "The truth is no insult."

  "Then fight me for it!" He threw the sword down on the grass between them. "I'll give you a fair chance to draw it."

  Alaric made no move to touch the sword.

  "Take it!" Gilo shouted. One hand was on the hilt of his own weapon.

  "You're a fool, Gilo," said Zavia. She glared at him over one shoulder. "His death won't win me back to you."

  "Quiet, woman. This has nothing to do with you."

  "No? The minstrel is mine; harm him and you'll never drink the Elixir of Life again."

  Gilo's lips pressed hard together for an instant. Then he said, "That would be your mother's choice, not yours. You'll not protect him this time. Fight me, minstrel, or I claim the sword as your default!"

  Alaric looked at Zavia, at the proud anger in her face. Why does this wild creature still choose me? he wondered. But he knew the answer to that—it stood before him, strong and virile, surely; but hotheaded, arrogant, insufferably imperious to a spirit like Zavia's. She needed a softer mate, one who would ask, but never command. There are few softer than a minstrel, he thought, who lives on the sufferance of others, and trades nothing but his songs for food and shelter and love.

  "I will not fight you, Gilo," he said quietly. "The sword belongs to me. If you take it, I will tell your father. Let him judge if you have done right."

  Gilo growled deep in his throat, then looked to his brothers and signaled sharply with a toss of his head. The three strode away, leaving Alaric's sword lying on the ground.

  Zavia threw her line aside and reached for the sword herself, drawing it close by the tip of the scabbard. She pressed the sheathed blade against her bosom for a moment as she glared at the brothers' retreating backs, and then she held it out to Alaric, hilt first. "This is a fine weapon," she said. "Not for an oaf like him. Or any of them."

  Alaric took the sword by the scabbard, never touching the hilt. "Too fine for me, also, but it was a gift, and so I keep it. Sometimes, though, I wish he had given me something other than a sword. Something… innocent."

  She closed both hands about his arm. "It was proper that you didn't fight for me. I am no man's prize."

  He set the sword down in the grass. "That's as well, sweet Zavia, for if you were, I would lose you in an instant."

  "You shall not lose me, my Alaric, until I choose to be lost." And she linked her hands behind his neck and kissed him softly on the mouth.

  But oh my Zavia, he thought, with her breath warm on his lips, you have chosen to be lost before. How long shall this last, I wonder?

  A fish tugged at his line then and, laughing, they broke apart to pull it in.

  ****

  IN THE DEEPEST part of the night, when Alaric and Zavia lay curled together beneath his cloak, the oil lamp dark, the tent close and warm, he woke suddenly. For an instant, he did not know what had wakened him. Then he realized he had felt the tent flap opening, felt the faint cool draft of the night enter. Yet Zavia lay still on the curve of his arm. Instinctively, he rolled away from her, over the mounded cushions, to the skirts of the tent, which were pegged firmly to the ground. The tiny shelter wa
s suddenly filled with struggling bodies, with thrashing and panting and whispered curses.

  Just as suddenly, Alaric was gone.

  He appeared by the riverbank, and for just a moment he felt bewildered. Under the cool stars was no herd, no nomad camp, just a patch of bare and trampled grass. Then he recognized the contour of the river and realized that in his urgency he had traveled to last night's camping place. He stumbled to his feet, wiping the sleep from his eyes. He would have been naked, save that when he had rolled away from Zavia he had taken the cloak with him, and it was still wrapped about him now.

  He knew what had happened, of course. Who else but the three brothers would be paying Zavia's tent such a nocturnal visit? To frighten him, perhaps. More likely to kill him, and rid themselves of his troublesome presence. If not in a fair fight, then in a final one.

  I should give it over, I should just go away, he thought. The night air was too cool for comfort; he clutched the cloak about his shoulders. His hands shook a little, but he knew it wasn't from the chill. Even Zavia isn't worth my life. And then he felt his heart sink. What if they had hurt her in the confusion?

  His reason told him to leave the nomads behind him, to go back to the south, where the great houses would welcome him and the kitchen maids would be willing enough. The south, where the forests were lush and the deer were skittish of human beings. He could be there in a heartbeat, and he could find clothing and even another lute with the help of his special talent.

  What if they had killed her?

  He was at the other riverbank then, the one where Simir's band was camped, because he had to know.

  The camp was in an uproar. He had been gone no longer than it would take a man to run a hundred paces, but in that time someone had stirred a fire to flickering life, and lit torches, too, and people were coming out of every tent and milling about in the light, talking excitedly.

  Somewhere in all the confusion, someone was screaming.

  Twisting the cloak about his middle, Alaric ran toward Zavia's tent.