In the Red Lord's Reach Page 21

  "Will it be a long wait?"

  "I think not. Midsummer Day, or thereabouts, and that is very soon."

  "And then?"

  "We harvest our crop before the dance begins again, and then we go home."

  "Crop? What crop grows on barren ice?"

  "A fine one, usually," she said. "Of course, we can't know if this is a good year until we see it."

  He shook his head, but only for a moment, for it made the dizziness worse. "Well, I have seen wonders with you already; why not a crop on the ice? I look forward to it." Then he peered once more at the several six-pointed symbols she had shown him. None seemed any more meaningful—whatever she said of them—than the Pole Star's own, and he had never thought of that as anything more than a bit of superstition. The possibility that the Pole Star, or any supposed sources of mystic power, could influence his life seemed just as unlikely as the Holy Well at Canby bringing forth jellied plums instead of brackish water. "Tell me, lady," he said, "why have you shown me these mysteries?"

  "Because they are your mysteries, as much as they are mine, and you should understand them."

  "I don't understand that. "

  She looked down at the symbols and then, slowly, she put them back as they had been, and laid the moss and flask and cups on top of them. "I was jealous of you, I confess it. Because I have worked all my life to gain some little power from these sources and their net, while you… you were born with yours, you never expended a sliver of effort to gain it. Oh, yes, I was jealous. And angry, too, that you had your power but used it for such trivial things. The Pole Star does not grant many its gifts, and it expects them to be well used, and you…" She shook her head. "You were more concerned with saving your own skin than with being a witch." She looked at him. "A witch has responsibilities. Or so we think in the north." She paused. "They are my care, Alaric—all the bands of nomad people. That is what it really means to be a witch."

  "It is a great responsibility," he said softly.

  Her eyes met his. "Once… I thought you were not equal to any responsibility. But now, I think perhaps you would make a proper acolyte. We have a truce, Alaric. Shall we turn it into something more?"

  He felt himself recoil inside, and he looked away from her. "Lady, you honor me. But surely your daughter would be—"

  "Not her. A flighty child, not worthy. The witch must choose the student carefully. I was not my teacher's daughter."

  He watched the spinning, glowing wheel as he might watch the flames of a fire. "You said you knew me, lady, but I think not, or you would not make this offer. These mysteries are not for me."

  "I thought I knew you, long ago. But you have changed."

  He shook his head again. "I thank you with all my heart? but you mistake me. Give your knowledge where it will find an eager student; I want no more than to be a minstrel."

  "But you are more already."

  "Please." He climbed to his feet, and his head brushed the roof of the tent. "I am your servant always, but my place is with the others."

  She gazed up at him, her face expressionless. "I cannot force you to learn, Alaric," she said, and with a gesture she granted him leave to go.

  He sighed as he left her tent. He sighed and wished, not for the first time, for his lute, which was far, far away.

  ****

  THE NOMAD MEN had to move their tent every time they spun the wheel lamp up, but they did it cheerfully enough, for it was only a matter of paces, not of long, slogging miles. The second time, they slept afterward, and the third time, they just sat around the tent and grinned at each other. After so many days of travel, they were content to stay still. Alaric was not so content, for without walking to distract him, the dizziness bothered him; so he would walk anyway, back and forth, till his legs were too tired to support him and he could sleep soundly.

  They had been two sleeps in the same spot when he woke to find the dizziness gone.

  Quietly, for the other men still slept, he went outside. The wind was brisk as ever and sang against his cheeks, making his breath into puffs of smoke. He closed his eyes for a moment. Yes, the dizziness was gone, and in its place was a feeling of such well-being as he could not recall. He breathed deeply, and scarcely noticed the coldness of the air in his throat.

  When he opened his eyes, Kata was standing beside him. He had not seen her since she had shown him her mysteries; her smaller lamp did not require so much effort as their larger one, and so there was no need to move her tent nor for her to come out of it. He smiled at her immediately.

  "You seem well again," she said. She looked haggard herself. Her eyes were bloodshot, with dark pouches showing beneath, as if she had not had a restful sleep in days.

  "I am very well."

  She nodded and held out her brooch. The needle was rock-steady. "The dance has stopped," she said. "We must move on now, and quickly."

  They had never struck camp so swiftly, but still it was not swift enough for Kata, who shouldered her own pack and started off before the men were ready to follow. Running awkwardly on their webbed hoops, they were hard put to catch up with her as she strode, eyes on the brooch, ever northward. By the time they did, their goal was in sight.

  "There," Kata said, pointing with one mittened hand, and never slackening her pace.

  In the distance, dark against the pale snow, Alaric saw a line, like a thin smudge of charcoal. Closer, the line gained depth and broke into a scatter of dark splotches, like a small motionless herd of animals. Closer still, and the splotches resolved themselves into low, bushy plants so deeply blue green as to be almost black, growing on the bare ice.

  In all his wanderings, Alaric had never seen such plants before. They were compact, each no longer than a man could span with both arms, its tight cluster of rigid stems rising no more than knee-high, its thick, saw-toothed leaves forming a continuous cover over the top and hanging halfway down to the ice on all sides, like the jagged edge of a tunic.

  Kata put her pack down in the midst of the plants and sat on it. She showed her north-seeking needle to Alaric; it swung freely now, indicating no special direction, though it dipped downward as far as its supporting post would allow. "We'll watch the plants now," she said as the other men dropped their own packs and sat down facing various quarters. "Tell me if any of them does anything."

  "What are they supposed to do?" asked Alaric.

  "You'll know when you see it."

  Just moments later, Lanri was the first to call out.

  Alaric turned in time to see that, five or six paces away, the leaves that covered one of the plants were humping up in the middle, bulging. As he watched, they parted, and a pale green globe rose slowly from among them, borne aloft by a thick stem. When it was well clear of the leaves, the globe opened suddenly into a many-petaled blue-green blossom.

  It was not a beautiful blossom. It most resembled a feather duster which had fallen into a pool of dirty oil. The dark petals were thick and waxy, with tiny bristles all around their edges; they looked like they would snag a man's cloak if he brushed them. For a few moments they twitched, first one, then another, over and over again, as if adjusting their positions. And then, of a sudden, they spewed upward, as if blown by a gust from within the stem itself, flying apart as a spray of dark fragments; flying upward… and vanishing into thin air.

  Alaric gasped. As the petals vanished, the white land about him seemed to vanish as well. In its place was the world, a sphere floating in blackness. And surrounding the world was a pulsing net of power, a net that rose from the icy north as from a clutching fist, and then spread out to envelope the globe before gathering itself back together to dive into the ice at the southern end of the world. He saw the net from afar, glowing sun-bright against the darkness, and yet he was also a mote on the net, sliding effortlessly from strand to strand, like a skater on a smoothly frozen pond. The globe spun beneath him, its surface streaming past his feet like rushing water, and on that surface he saw all the places he had ever been—castle
s and hovels, mountains and valleys, meadows and ice—and all the places he had never been, countless places racing by, and he knew that he could go to any of them in an instant, this instant. For the net embraced them all, and the net was his.

  As abruptly as it had claimed him, the vision was gone, and he blinked his eyes and looked about him. The nomad men were moving among the plants, cutting the thick leaves free and stuffing them into bags, leaving the plants mere clusters of naked twigs. But Kata was sitting beside him, gripping his arm very hard.

  "Can you hear me now, Alaric?" she said.

  He nodded. "I had… a dream, I think. A waking dream."

  "Of what?"

  "Of the net of power."

  "Yes?"

  He described the vision. If he closed his eyes, he could recapture pieces of it, though not all. Not the movement, nor the feeling of strength, nor the vastness of it all; no, that had already slipped away. But the glowing net, he knew, he would remember always.

  "The sources of power have called to you," she said when he had finished. "You should not deny them."

  "But I don't know what their call means."

  "Of course you do." She gripped both his arms now, and looked steadily into his eyes. "My Alaric, we have come here because only when the points of power cease their dance do these plants blossom, and only when they blossom do they produce the substance we need for the Elixir of Life. Do they do this for our benefit? Of course not. They do it because the blossoms need that substance for their own journey. Do you think those petal seeds disappeared to nowhere? No—they leaped upon the net of power and flew instantly to the other side of the world, to the very ice you saw in the south of your vision. The seasons are reversed on the other side of the world. It is winter there now, but come spring those seeds will germinate and grow and flower, and send their own seeds here in the very same way.

  "You are like those seeds, Alaric; you leap upon the net and fly from one place to another without touching the globe in between. The net is yours… and you must learn to use the rest of its power." She was shaking him just a trifle now. "Learn from me, Alaric, and let me leave the north a great legacy in you."

  He shook his head. "Lady, this is too much for me. I must think."

  She dropped her hands away from him. "Yes. Think. Think hard, Alaric. This is something greater than any song."

  He looked past her, to the men who were steadily gathering leaves. "Can I help you?" he asked.

  She stood up. "We can do this ourselves. I think you should rest for now. We have a long journey back, and you haven't been well."

  He stood, too. "I could make the journey much shorter."

  She studied his face. "Yes, you could."

  "I don't think it would harm your leaves. Not if they and I are so… intimately connected."

  "No, I no longer think your power would harm them."

  "Of course, the decision is yours. You would have to command me."

  Her lips curved in the tiniest of smiles. "I don't look forward to all that ice, myself. But you don't know where Simir's band has gone since we left them; and there is Oltavin, and our deer. Do you propose to carry the deer in your arms?"

  "I can take us to the edge of the ice. That would be a help."

  She looked at him for a long time, then, and it came to him that her eyes no longer seemed cold. Wary, perhaps, but not cold. "Very well," she said at last, "I command it."

  ****

  HE TOOK THEM one by one, with bags of leaves in their arms, and he took their packs separately afterward. They were all eager for the journey, happy to use magic to make the homeward trek shorter. Grem even asked why they hadn't used it before, to which Alaric said only that Kata had not wished it, and he was her obedient servant.

  Oltavin was where they had left him, minding the deer and living in a tiny hut he had built for himself of stones and chunks of ice. He seemed less surprised to see them return by magic than to see them return so soon, but he, too, was happy to turn south at last.

  True to Kata's word, they reached Simir's band before the first snow flew. Well before. And Alaric just smiled when the nomads he had carried in his arms ascribed their speed to their very own pale-eyed witch.

  That, he thought, was as it should be. Holding his lute close with one arm and Zavia with the other, he felt the journey slide away from him like a shed skin. Yes, everything is just as it should be, in the strange and magical north.

  Part Six

  The Cruel Winter

  THE DEER WERE restless. With autumn, and the steadily shortening days, the bucks had begun to shed the velvet of their antlers and challenge each other with tossing heads. The season of rut had arrived. For its brief duration, the nomads settled by a stream where the trees grew thick and the fish bit readily; and the deer were kept away from the camp by night as well as by day. It was a leisurely time for the band, a time when there was no need for packing and unpacking, for setting up or striking tents. A time for Alaric to laze by Simir's fire and sing and talk and laugh.

  His position among the nomads had changed. Word of his quarrel with Kata had spread quickly, and the general understanding, according to Simir, was that Alaric had tried to cross her, and failed.

  "Your dunking in the crevasse seems to have been a punishment," the high chief told him. "And now you are her servant completely, with your power at her disposal." He grinned. "Or so Kata says."

  "I won't dispute it," said Alaric, flashing a smile. "Let them think what she likes."

  Simir's only reply to that was a nod.

  So he was no longer just the minstrel with a thousand songs, and no longer the new witch from the south, either. Instead, he was Kata's man. There was a new kind of respect in the nomads' eyes when they looked at him now. And the women stopped pestering him for his magic, because it was no longer his to give, but their own witch's.

  But as Kata's man, he had new responsibilities, most of them requiring that he visit her tent often. He was never easy there, amid the sweetly scented smoke, but he always answered her call, carrying her messages or fetching her food. And every time he did her service, she urged him to sit for a while and learn, for his good and the nomads', and for her own future glory. He would be the greatest witch of the north, she insisted, and he and his teacher would be remembered forever.

  He put her off and put her off, but nothing he said kept her from asking, from urging, from almost pleading.

  Even Simir thought he should give the offer serious consideration. "We can use another witch among us," he said.

  Sometimes, alone with his own thoughts, deep in the night when all the camp was sleeping, Alaric wondered himself what he should do. He could not forget the vision that had come to him on the ice, but did it mean what Kata said? Or was it simply an experience, no more significant, really, than any other of his twenty summers? He had been a minstrel so long, no other life seemed proper, and no other had ever attracted him. To change it for something else seemed a betrayal of the first person who had ever been kind to him, his long-dead mentor Dall. Yet a witch of Kata's sort was more valuable to her people, with her healing herbs and potions, than any minstrel. What was a minstrel, after all, but a meaningless diversion? Survival was the first importance. That was what Kata wanted to teach him. What did it matter if some of her knowledge seemed like superstitious gibberish? Some of it was real enough. She had chosen him, above all others, to carry that knowledge into the future, and everyone, it seemed, agreed with her choice.

  Everyone but Zavia.

  "Why should she choose you over me?" She hadn't needed Alaric to give her the news; she had heard it by the day after his return. She had brought it back to her tent with their breakfast, and her anger along with it.

  "I told her she should choose you," Alaric said softly.

  "What have I ever meant to her? Nothing! An inconvenience left over from her youth!" Her face was flushed, and tears brimmed in her eyes. "Blood of her blood, but less than nothing!"

  Alaric
tried to take her in his arms, but she pushed him away.

  "And what are you?" she shouted. "A stranger, come to take what belongs to me!"

  "I don't want it."

  "You will! Don't think it won't look good to you during the winter. That's the real time of magic. You'll see what she does, and how they all worship her for it, and you'll want it!"

  "Dear Zavia. " He circled her with his arms again, and this time he held tight as she tried to thrust him away, held very tight till she stopped struggling at last and let her head droop onto his shoulder. "All I want is you," he whispered. "And as many times as she says yes, I'll say no."

  "Don't lie to me," she sobbed against his neck.

  He kissed her hair, her cheek, the corner of her mouth. He tasted her tears. "I'm not lying," he murmured.

  Her lips opened against his, and then she pulled him down on the cushions, fiercely.

  But even as their bodies clung together, Alaric found himself wondering what it was that he really wanted.

  ****

  BY THE TIME the rutting season was over, the first snows had begun to fly—thin, sporadic snows, airy flakes melting when they touched the yellowing grass, but a presage of time to come. The band had been moving on for only a few days when the first of the bucks shed his antlers, and the other males soon did the same, leaving the does alone to wear their smaller racks into the winter. The shed horn provided a welcome bounty that the nomads transformed into spoons and knife hilts and needles.

  Not long after, all the deer began to lose the dark tips of their coat hairs, becoming as pale as straw, as if the cold wind from the north were bleaching them out for the season of whiteness. Soon, flurries of snow became more common, and the flakes began to gather on the rolling land, untouched by a sun that, more and more often, seemed only a smear of brightness in the gray sky. The days shortened steadily, and the nights turned bitter, and seldom were the stars visible for the heavy cloud cover. Winter settled firmly over the northern plain.

  Still the nomads moved on in their great circuit of the land, the circuit that would bring them, come spring, back to the ingathering and renewal of the calving grounds.