In the Red Lord's Reach Page 24
"It was some nights ago, but I can't seem to forget it. In the dream, my lute was a living creature, and it cried out for me; it even wept for the loss of me, because I had become something other than its master." He hesitated. "There was a large crowd around me, people who thought I belonged to them, and the lute pushed its way through them to find me."
She looked at him a long, long moment, seemed to peer into his very marrow. Then she slid her fingers along his neck, and down the line of his jaw, till they finally slipped off the point of his chin. She turned away from him, turned her back and stood very straight and stiff, her arms at her sides. She seemed to sway just a little, like a blade of grass teased by mild summer air.
"There is much wisdom to be found in dreams," she said at last, to the leather walls.
When she turned to Alaric once more, her jade eyes betrayed nothing, but one hand reached out and gently ruffled his hair. "It seems that you know your own mind." She sighed very softly, and yet the sound seemed to fill her tent, as the scent of sweet spice filled it, every corner, every crevice.
And within Alaric something answered that sigh, and a deeply buried knot loosened itself and came free.
"Perhaps it would be best if you moved to Simir's tent," Kata added, as if it were a trifle.
"As you say, lady," he murmured.
Her hand dropped away from him. "I'll call Grem to help you."
****
SIMIR'S TENT WAS a hub of activity, meeting hall by day and barracks for his closest advisers by night. Alaric did not rest so well there as in Kata's quiet shelter, but he was happy to make the move, happy to be free of the scented smoke and the colored flames, and of her pale eyes that had seemed to be watching him every waking instant. He sang a good deal more in Simir's tent, and so his ribs ached more, but he could not help thinking the trade was well worth the price.
In time, he was able to straddle a deer again, and so give up traveling on the litter. In time—though it took longer than he would have guessed—his strength returned, and he began to think of hunting. The winter storms had diminished, but game on the plains was scarcely plentiful; though the nomads tried to conserve their deer, still the herd dwindled steadily—now they began to slaughter does and yearlings, for the breeding population of bucks was getting low. When an old man died in spite of Kata's potions, there were few who mourned him long, even among his close kin, for his death meant one less belly to fill. The hunters ranged far, sometimes for days at a time, while behind their backs, a graybeard or two predicted that there would be nothing left of the herd come spring.
Simir did not want him to go. But he went at last anyway, exercising his witch's power like a cramped muscle, leaping to the horizon in a single heartbeat, and leaping as far again and again, till he found the southern mountains. A brief sweep along their lower slopes brought him to a familiar area, telling him precisely where, in the map of his life, that day's camp lay. He moved south then in one bound, to his forest hunting ground. The small buck he killed there seemed heavy to his unaccustomed muscles, but he made no complaint as he dropped it beside Simir's fire. He did promise, though, as he began to dress it out, that he would not try for bear again. Deer, he said, were quite enough.
He ranged southward almost daily after that. But as many times as he went, he never offered to carry other hunters with him, and neither Simir nor Kata ever suggested it. It was enough for them, he understood, that he was willing to go himself.
He also resumed his duties as Kata's man—helping her pack and unpack, carrying messages, and fetching her food. Now, though, she said little to him at those times; and that, he thought, was just as well, for he would not have been able to answer her words any more than he could answer the reproach in her eyes.
Nomad, hunter, minstrel, witch's servant—he had taken up all his roles again. Only one thing was still missing from his life.
Zavia.
He did not know precisely when he had lost her. Perhaps it had happened at the moment he had returned, wounded by the bear, and Kata had claimed him. Or perhaps it had happened long before; perhaps he had been losing her steadily since the journey to the Great Waste. Looking back, he thought he could see a thousand signs of her discontent. And one day, while he was seeking deer in the south, she took another man into her tent—a man a little older than he, a good hunter and amiable, if a trifle dull. A man her mother would never want as acolyte.
For some time, Alaric tried to avoid Zavia, and that was hardly difficult, for she was avoiding him—pretending not to see him if he happened near and turning her back on his music. Days slipped by, then more days. And when at last Alaric tried to speak to her, she strode away, as if he were nothing more than an insect creaking in the night.
He watched her closely after that, though he told himself he was resisting the impulse. He watched her as she walked or rode beside her hunter in the mornings, as she bade him farewell in the afternoons or greeted him in the deep blue evenings. He watched with special care in the evenings, when she linked arms with her new lover and, smiling, led him to her tent. He looked for some sign of performance in her manner. Every smile, every gesture, every tilt of her head was so familiar to him, yet strange and brittle now, seen from a distance, like a puppet show grown stale from many viewings. But if a puppet show, it was a deft one. Seeing her favors lavished on someone else night after night left Alaric with a hollow feeling in his chest, a deep void like a well gone dry. And sometimes, when he saw the tent flap closing behind them, a painful tightness clawed in his throat.
Later, when silent darkness had settled on the camp, he would sit alone by the embers of Simir's fire, stir them into fitful life, and drift backward through a maze of memories… always returning to a more recent memory, of throaty laughter that flickered and danced like the flames themselves, and a warmth that was warmer than any blaze of gathered kindling. Someone else was hearing that laughter now, soft and breathy in his ear; someone else was feeling all the pleasures and comfort of that smooth flesh. And Alaric would put his head down on his knees and close his eyes, and sometimes fall asleep that way by the fire; and then he would dream of wandering through dead forests heaped with ash, or of crawling about in a vast, narrow prison of icicle-bound caverns far beneath the northern waste. And that dream would often end with frigid black water climbing up after him, through chamber after chamber, like some enormous hungry beast.
He caught Zavia alone at last, one afternoon when he finished his own hunting early and her new mate was still out on the snow-covered plain. He stopped her about to enter her tent, and he took her by the arm to keep her from turning away.
"Zavia," he said softly. "Let me speak with you."
She shook off his grip. "We have nothing to say to each other." She reached for the entry flap, but he moved quickly to bar her way.
"Zavia…"
She looked straight into his eyes then, and her lovely mouth pursed tight. "What is it?" she said, and something both desperate and angry simmered in that simple phrase.
At the sharpness in her voice, he hesitated. A confusion of half-formed thoughts surged through him. "I don't know how to say this. I don't even know what I should say."
"Say nothing, then," she advised.
He shook his head and plunged on. "I think of you so often—when I hunt, when I sing. When I'm lying in the dark."
"And when you are visiting my mother?"
He was surprised by her bluntness. "Yes, even then."
Her left hand, holding fast to the rim of the tent, flexed spasmodically. A strange light danced in her eyes, like the glint of polished metal. "Even when you lie with her?"
"Zavia," he said, "you know that doesn't happen."
"Oh? But surely that is the best way for her to pass her skills to you, especially the arts that cannot be taught by rote. And of course it's so much simpler than trying to teach her own daughter. And so much more pleasant! "
"She teaches me nothing, Zavia, and we do not lie together."
Alaric felt his innards coil like a trapped snake. This was too complex for him; there was too much at work behind her words—anger, pride, jealousy, all jumbled together. He tried to take her shoulders between his hands, but she twisted away. "Listen to me, Zavia," he said. "I am not your mother's acolyte, and I never will be. She and I are agreed on that."
"Liar. I see you go to her tent nearly every day."
"I carry food to her, and I help with her packing, but there is no instruction in magic."
"I hear no truth in your voice. Why should I believe you?"
"Zavia…" But he was stymied. He had no answer, and could only spread his hands, imploring her with a silent look.
"You see," she said, "you have nothing to say." She turned her face away from him. "Your lack of an answer becomes the answer; that is how the truth is finally known."
"You're wrong, Zavia," he said. He almost raised a hand to touch her cheek. But instead he said, "I love you, Zavia." Even to his own ears, the words seemed an afterthought.
"Love!" she cried, her voice strained, crackling like ice dropped into warm water. "So much is excused for love, in the name of love!" Her body swayed, and the tent frame quivered in response. She gave him a long hard look. "You claim not to be her acolyte, but those are only words. I will know it is true when she calls me to her tent for lessons. Now let me pass." She shoved him aside with one forearm and ducked into the tent.
He pulled open the leather flap and stood in the entrance. "You misjudge me, Zavia. Your mother's magic means nothing to me. But you mean a great deal."
She bent and scooped up her oil lamp; its tiny flame fluttered wildly in the breeze that soughed past Alaric's body. "You and I are finished, minstrel. I've found myself another keen hunter. Now go away." And she waved the lamp so close to his face that he had to step back or be singed.
"Zavia…"
"Go! Leave me!" She wrenched the flap from his hand, and it fell like a curtain between them.
He stood there, staring at the dark, finely creased surface of the hide. Of course, he could lift it aside again, but he understood how useless that would be. A wall more substantial than mere leather stood between them.
He thought about Kata then, who had never intended to teach her daughter anything. All of Zavia's claims on Kata's wisdom and rank were self-delusion. Even if the stranger from the south had never appeared on these rolling plains, the end would have been the same. He could explain that truth to Zavia in some detail; he could show her precisely why all her jealousies and her anger were unfounded. Perhaps he could win her back with that cold bath of reality. Perhaps.
But no, he thought. No. Her bright delusion, her hope, was the core of her being. A perfect knowledge of the truth would ravage her, would beat her to the ground as surely as a cudgel blow. And it would take a cudgel, too, to pound that truth into her skull. She wouldn't believe him; she would rant about his villainous lies. Or worse, she would half believe, and that half belief would gnaw at her like a worm in the heart.
Better by far to watch her from a distance, and never feel the radiance of her smile again, than to cause her so much pain. The leather hanging between them was not simply a wall; it was the sheer face of a cliff, which even his special power could not help him scale.
Slowly, he turned away from the tent. He would go back to Simir's fire now, and sit beside the familiar flames. And as he looked into their shimmering dance, he would recall some other time, some better time, some faraway time. He took in a deep breath of crisp winter air, and let it escape, and watched the ragged plume stream up and away and dissolve to nothing in the darkening sky.
****
"THEY CHOOSE FOR themselves," Simir said to him later that night when the wind whistled too loud for singing, except as flapping leather sang. "We can argue, we can beg, we can even fight each other for them, but in the end, they do the choosing."
Alaric caressed the polished wood of the lute as he might have caressed Zavia's thigh. He hadn't spoken of it, but the high chief knew of his conversation with Zavia; he supposed the whole band knew by now.
"She's a flighty one," Simir went on. "He won't be the last, not him."
Alaric shrugged.
"But there are other girls as pretty as she, and as lively. Plenty of them at the calving grounds every year."
Alaric sighed. "Let be, Simir. Men may die in songs from losing a woman's love, but I will not." He plucked a chord. "She wanted a great deal from me that I could not give. Perhaps I should only be surprised that she stayed so long."
"She's a fool for leaving you," Simir said gruffly. "An utter fool."
"No," said Alaric, and he shook his head slowly. "Probably not."
****
WINTER ON THE northern plain stretched on and on, until Alaric began to think that, somehow, the mountains that marked off the nomad's land from the rest of the world were keeping spring away as well. In the south, the snow melted, and green buds showed on trees and bushes everywhere; Alaric harvested armloads of tender young shoots for the herd every time he hunted. Returning north with them was like stepping out of a dream—the contrast between soft green and bleak whiteness never failed to startle him.
But even in the north, winter eased to a close at last, with the snow becoming crusty and porous under the warming sun, and sinking away at last to reveal the dead, dry grass of the previous year. The deer feasted then, needing Alaric's southern greenery no longer. The nomads feasted as well, for game seemed suddenly to spring from nowhere—young foxes, wildcats, and countless rabbits bursting from their parents' dens to greet the mild weather and fill the hunters' bags. Not long after the last of the snow vanished, the does dropped their antlers, which made the nomads nod among themselves and talk of the calves to come. The calving grounds themselves were not far away, for during the winter the band had completed its grand circuit of the north, and now it was moving back toward the place where the herds would mingle and the fires would roar bright, and the music and dance would last half the night. With the warming of the breeze, everyone was looking forward to the calving.
This spring, though, the herd of Simir's band would be scarcely a quarter its old size. In spite of Alaric efforts, the nomads had been forced to eat seven out of eight of all the bucks and yearlings, and nearly half the pregnant does. It would be years, the graybeards said, before the herd recovered. There was talk of rebuilding its numbers by calling in debts from other bands.
At the calving grounds, though, they quickly saw that no one would be paying debts in deer.
Simir's was not the first band to arrive; half a dozen had pitched their tents already, though no one would have guessed it from the scatter of animals grazing on the new grass. Even when all the people of the north had gathered, the combined herd was pitifully small, nothing like the sea of deer that Alaric had marveled at the previous year. There would be no debt paying, no; and if the next winter were not mild as milk, there would be no deer afterward.
Simir had no need to call a meeting of the chiefs of every band. They were at his tent, every one, as soon as their people made camp. And anyone else who had no pressing work was there, too, or as close as the milling throng would permit. Alaric slipped away from the tumult early and found a fire where people who had not seen him since the previous spring were willing to share their thin venison stew in return for a song. In the end, he gave them more than that, singing deep into the night, and thinking, while he sang, how different this gathering was from last year's. It was noisy, true, but the noise was of a different kind—anxious voices, not joyous ones, and distant dance music that seemed strained and desperate rather than jubilant. And the faces that watched him were gaunt and winter-worn, and though they smiled, the smiles were forced.
Yet they were hospitable as ever, and when his hosts saw him yawn and glance toward Simir's tent, where the crowd had hardly thinned though dawn was
near, they offered him a soft pallet and fur coverlets. He accepted gratefully, and only as he was drifting to sleep did he realize, faintly, that he had never asked them their names.
In the morning, there was a little cold stew for breakfast, and then Alaric sang again. He was still singing when a man with a girl-child riding his shoulders slipped in among the listeners. Alaric did not recognize the child, with her hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes, but he knew who she must be, and knew she had been plump once. When the song was done, he stood up and clasped her father's hand.
"Fowsh," he said.
"I've thought of you more than once, minstrel," Fowsh told him. "And wondered if you'd survive this hard winter with us. My mother thought not, but I see she was wrong."
Alaric smiled a little. "Tell your mother it wasn't all my own doing; I had plenty of help."
"My mother is dead," Fowsh said. "And so is my father."
"Ah, Fowsh, no."
"Just before midwinter they walked away from our camp together. They never came back." He glanced up at his daughter, then squeezed her thin leg. "They thought it would help us."
Alaric gripped his arm. "Was it so bad even in the south?"
"There was no game," said Fowsh. "Now we have no deer."
"None at all?"
"We slaughtered the last doe today. There was no point in keeping her."
"But what will you do now? Next year?"
"Join another band, perhaps. Or move into the mountains. There's always been food there."
"Raid the Red Lord's valley, you mean."
Fowsh nodded. "If Simir agrees. Nuriki's gone to ask him."
"It's dangerous."
Fowsh squeezed his daughter's leg again. "Starving on the plains is dangerous, too." He gave Alaric the shadow of a smile. "Come, minstrel, share our dinner and sing for our fire this night. We have need of your brightest songs."
"No, Fowsh, I couldn't—"
"There's fresh stew in the pot and eager ears waiting for your songs."