Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) (20 page)

Above him the cold voice said, “Now kiss my boot, and tell me that you love me.”

Tir had to wriggle forward on his shoulders, sobbing so hard he could barely speak. “I love you,” he made himself
say and kissed the leather. It was cold and smooth and smelled of wax and old blood.

Vair kicked him. “Say it so I can hear you.”

“I love you.” He had to do it right. He had to do it right or this man would kill him.

“Again. Bektis and Nargois want to hear, too.”

“I love you!” screamed Tir, and bunched himself together, knees to his tucked-down chin, sobbing.

Vair kicked him again and walked away; Tir could hear the scrunch of his boots on the trampled grass. “Fix that cut,” he heard him say. “Then see me in the wagon.”

Bektis came over, pushed him upright against the sycamore trunk, and very quickly smeared salve on Tir’s face, as if the injury were somehow Tir’s fault. He pushed the edges of the two lines of cut flesh together and wrapped a bandage around Tir’s head, but he worked very fast: “Stop crying,” he ordered, “lest my Lord return and make you cry in good earnest.”

He hastened away to the wagon. Later, when he thought about it, Tir realized Bektis must be almost as afraid of Lord Vair as he was. Now he only put the uninjured side of his face against the tree trunk and cried.

Boots crunched the grass again and Tir whirled in nauseated terror. It was Hethya, dropping to her knees beside him and gathering him in her arms. There was another man behind her, one of the black warriors, a young man as big as a tree.

“He all right, Lady?” He held out a gourd of water.

“I think so. Thank you, laddy-buck.” She took the water, held Tir close against her. He buried his head against her breasts, wanting to hide himself in her body, wanting to be a baby again and be taken care of, wanting to be dead. He heard the water from the gourd drip on the grass and wondered if they’d beat him if he didn’t drink it or say thank you.

“I got these.” The young man’s voice had the same inflection as Akula’s, awkward over the tongue of the Wathe. “Dates, understand? Dates?”

He felt Hethya move, reaching, and heard the warm smile in her voice. “Thank you.”

“My own father, he beat me. Bad. But not like that.” There was a clumsy pause, and Tir felt the man’s rough fingers touch him very gently on the hair. Then the grass crunched again as the young soldier walked away.

Tir curled himself into a ball, trying to make himself as small and impervious as an apple seed, and cried until he fell asleep.

They harnessed the wagons with the first of morning light and traveled north.

The Icefalcon, who had seen the furs and quilting, the snowshoes and ice axes packed among the stores, was not surprised. “They journey to where the land is cold, o my enemy,” he said, from the bison wallow south of the road where he and Cold Death had joined Loses His Way shortly before sunset. “With your permission, when they have passed from sight we will visit your kin again in the coulee and see what other clothing they can lend.”

But as the wagons drew close to the coulee Lord Vair raised his arm and called a halt, and the Icefalcon saw men descend into the bottomlands and presently return dragging and carrying the swollen, crow-gouged bodies of the slain.

“What hunting is this?” rumbled Loses His Way, and Yellow-Eyed Dog, lying beside him with his nose between his paws, pricked his ears at the anger in the man’s voice.

“Cold hunting for us.” Icefalcon propped his chin on his crossed wrists. He had shaved that morning, but after six nights sleeping on the ground he could have done with a long soak in the baths on first level south, or a session in one of the sweathouses at the winter steadings of his people. “I for one am not eager to try to slip into their camp, within my body or out of it, to borrow furs.”

The chieftain shook his head. “No need. When we prepared to attack we left our blankets and heavy clothing and
our spare food in a fox burrow in the bank, a mile up the gulch,” he said. “They will be there still. But this … Can they not let even the dead sleep in peace?”

“The dead are not disturbed when the kites strip their bones,” remarked Cold Death, and tweaked the fur between Yellow-Eyed Dog’s paw-pads just to see him turn his head and look at her patiently. “Your family sleeps still.”

“Pah!”

“They took the bodies of the slain yestermorning as well,” the Icefalcon said thoughtfully. “They’re in that wagon there, the last in line … Look.” Bektis, resplendent now in a coat of quilted velvet with an immense collar of ermine and gloves of white kid on his hands, stepped down from the wagon he rode in and came around to the last wagon in the line, which even in the spring chill could be smelled from the bison wallow.

“Does he make magic with the bones of the dead?”

“Puts a spell on them to arrest rot, more like.”

“He should put one on his own heart, then.” The warchief’s tawny brows pulled down till the weather-reddened face seemed little more than the arched crag of a nose projecting from a great fiery tangle of braided gold and a glint of angry blue. “And on the heart of that black saber-tooth that would hurt a little child.”

Bektis lifted his gloved hands, making graceful passes over the wagonload of carrion, long white hair streaming in the freshening wind.
It would be a mass of snarls by nightfall
, thought the Icefalcon—braiding was the only way to deal with the plains wind. Then the sorcerer climbed back aboard his own wagon, wrapped himself carefully in blankets, and pulled up his hood. Nargois of the long white mustaches wheeled his horse and raised his hand; there was a great cracking of whips along the line, and the caravan moved off.

Since there was no possible way they could lose the train in the empty universe of prairies, the Icefalcon, Loses His Way, and Cold Death, after retrieving the coats
and blankets, the pemmican and short, heavy war axes from the fox burrow and loading them onto their horses, investigated the camp as well.

“These clones, as you call them, fell and died yesterday,” said Loses His Way, poking in the midden of scraps and ashes. “They slumped down where they stood, like men taken suddenly by sickness. But neither the woman nor the Wise One made a move to cleanse themselves, nor to shift their camp. I smelled no smokes of healing.”

“And they carried the bodies away with them.” The Icefalcon studied the ground where one of the clones had lain, close by the trampled ground and dung of the horse lines. The yellow leaf-mast was stained with the liquid of unnatural decay, and the marks of heavy boots and men’s feet in rawhide strips showed where the corpses had been lifted and carried to the wagon in the night. “The apparatus Vair carries with him makes warriors, not out of air, I think, but out of the flesh of the dead.”

“It is an evil hunt.” Loses His Way stroked the end of his enormous mustache. “And now you tell me that my people have scattered to the far corners of the wind, not knowing what is being done with their flesh and their bones.” He touched the place on his breast where, under his deer-hide shirt, lay the flat embroidered spirit-pouches of Blue Jay, Wolfbone, Twin Daughter, Shouts In Anger, and Raspberry Thicket Girl. “It is one matter, o my enemy,” he said, looking down at Cold Death, who barely came up to his breastbone, “to feed the vultures with your flesh. The vultures are our sisters, too, and so all things return to the home of our Ancestors. But this shamanry, this evil …” He shook his head.

“This I will not forgive.”

Cold Death called the names of the horses into the wind, and the horses came, trotting up from the long grass of the coulee, snuffling and ears pricked. Ashes, Scorpion Eater, and Afraid of Flowers had been joined by two others, southern horses who had escaped during the raid, and they, too, were laden with blankets, furs, and supplies.

So they mounted and rode north, into the rocks and gorges and lava beds called the Cursed Lands. The caravan moved, and the Icefalcon followed, and the stink of the corpses could be smelled in its wake until Bektis repeated his spells while wearing the crystal hand. The moon waxed to full and began to wane again, and somewhere behind them, the Icefalcon was aware, drifted the Talking Stars People, like vultures riding the thermals and waiting for a sick animal to fall.

No road existed in the Cursed Lands, yet the wagons made their way north and slightly west unerringly, without halts and queries and casting about. The Icefalcon remembered the pale trace in the gamma grass, invisible from the ground but straight as a bowstring. At night, or with the first dove-colored light, the frost a silver dust in the grass, the Icefalcon would see Vair na-Chandros and the woman Hethya come out from among the wagons with Tir between them, Tir thinner and more haggard by the day. The Icefalcon never came close enough to hear—with Bektis in the train he did not dare—but it seemed to him that it was Tir who pointed to the gaps in the hills and gave directions by the dim-shining stars.

The land grew harsher. Gullies and washes creased the bare clay hills, steeper than before, dividing the scattered prairies where slunch glowed filthily in the dark. Twice the Icefalcon shadow-walked, investigating the edges of the camp and seeking a way to extricate Tir from Vair’s grip. But Tir was kept bound much of the time, and there were many guards, facing all ways, inward and out. Cold Death was as fearsome a warrior as she was a shaman—something no one ever thought, to look at her—but with Bektis’ crystal hand, even her aid might not suffice to get the boy away safely. Vair would kill Tir rather than permit his escape. And, for all her frivolousness, the Icefalcon was fond of his sister and would not like to see the lightning of that cursed crystal hand skewer her as it had skewered Rudy. There would and could be only a single attempt, and it had better succeed.

Whatever it was that Vair wanted, it lay in the North.

His mind returned to the trace he had seen from the air. The work of the Times Before, built in the ancient days beyond the memories of the People of the Real World. He asked Cold Death about it, but Cold Death, who knew the properties of every herb and root in the great grasslands of the Real World, and the names of the
ki
of each tree and stream, could only say, “I have never heard of such a thing, o my brother.”

And Loses His Way, who could (and nightly did) detail the family histories of every horse belonging to his own people and any number of other clans and tribes from whom the Empty Lakes People raided horses—who could recognize the prints and scat of king mammoths and individual musk oxen and reindeer in half a dozen herds and tell stories about them—only shook his head and said, “That’s foolish. Nothing lies in the North but the Ice. Why would anyone build a road thence?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” the Icefalcon snapped, exasperated, though he knew he would have received a similar reply from Noon or any of his friends in his family—Red Fox or Stays Up All Night or Fifty Lovers. And though Loses His Way could, like any of the people in the Real World, speak of the habits of animals long dead, or the small details of war parties and hunts for generations back, or recount from memory weather conditions mentioned to him in passing forty leagues to the south, he had very little interest in the slunch-born things that roved the hills abandoned by gazelles and rhinoceri, the lumpy misshapen beings that Gil said were broken echoes of life as it had been years uncounted in the past.

Why?
the Icefalcon wondered. Lost dreams, Gil called them, woven in the slunch and repeated without meaning—but whose dreams? And what had the world been like that had spawned them?

He had been affected, he thought, a little embarrassed, more than he knew, by the habits of civilized folk and did not like to speak of this to his sister or to Loses His Way.
And indeed, it was not the way of the Talking Stars People to show interest in such matters, which had no bearing on life as it was lived in the Real World.

Still, the road was there. And as the cold grew more piercing, and the great sheets of slunch that even the wind could not rustle lay more and more frequent and their voiceless denizens took the place of the creatures that had once grazed these dying prairies, the Icefalcon welcomed the far-off plaints of the Alketch sheep and the squeak of wagon axles, the only living sounds to break the stillness of these lands.

It was high spring, and they rode through a world filled with light. But the temperature fell, and the thunderstorms that at one time had crashed and raged daily over these lands were mute and absent as the vanished birds. There was only the wind itself, bearing the smell of stone and sleet.

By day they followed, and by night they worked by the tiny light of hidden fires, cutting hickory saplings where they found them for snowshoes and sled runners and slicing up coats of bison or musk ox or sheep to sew with sinew the pieces into double-layer garments, fur inside and out.

Twice the train halted for a day, by streams full enough that Vair, and Nargois, and Hethya, and some of the others could heat water and bathe in a tent set up for the purpose, and the priest held rites in praise of the Straight God.

Then one day in the distance the Icefalcon saw a glittering rind of blue-white, flashing in the heatless ghost of the sun.

It was too soon, he thought, far too soon. They should only be drawing near to the aspen groves, the woods of birch and maple, the streams and meadows that lay to the south of the Night River Country, his people’s summer range and the home of his heart.

Loses His Way had told him this; Cold Death, too. But he understood that his heart had not believed. The land of his childhood’s joy, the place that would have been the
center of his defenses as warchief of his people, was lost to him, buried under the rolling weight of time and snow and fate.

He could not deny to himself that he looked upon the Ice in the North.

“I was ill on that journey.” Hethya gazed somberly into the leaden morning distance, with what Tir had come to recognize as Oale Niu’s eyes. “The Dark Ones came, surrounding our encampment. We, the mages, fought them, ringing the camp with walls of fire and lightning. Their power was terrible.” She turned her face a little aside and passed her hand across her brow, as if to erase the mark of pain that appeared there. “We survived, but some of us lay like the dead for many days afterward, unable to move or speak.”