Seeker (6 page)

But not in cold blood. Never in cold blood. There was neither honor nor satisfaction in that. He had learned the respect accorded to lethal violence, but only in combat and battle, only in love and hate. When the sweet juice flowed he cared nothing for his own preservation, and his fury knew no limits. At all other times he was a dove, a lamb, a honeychild.

A bell started to clang in the village temple.

"Heya, bravas!" the Wildman cried to his crew.

Chuck-chuck-chickens!"

His men knew what to do. Down came the rippling brown sails, out struck the oars. Now swishing downstream under man power, the
Lazy Lady
closed in on its prey. And the leader of the spiker band, barely out of boyhood, stamped his bronzed bare feet in the prow and sang out to his crew.

"Heya, bravas! Do you love me?"

Oh, they loved him all right. They loved their Wildman.

***

As soon as the boat banged against the jetty, the river pirates were leaping onto land, whooping and grinning, in a gush and clash of colors, shirts orange and crimson and emerald green, jewelled belts flashing and silver bracelets jangling in the sun, their unfriendly intent expressed by the long curving knives they juggled from hand to hand. The villagers streamed out of their houses, groggy with sleep and fear, and huddled round the temple at the heart of their homestead and stared and prayed.

The spiker leader came prancing across the riverbank, casting his black eyes over the cattle in the day barn and over the sacks in the granary, and looking for all the world as though he was the favorite son coming home.

"Heya, chickens!" he sang out. "Do you lo-o-ove me?"

The village priest came shuffling forward, with sweat on his brow and lowered eyes. He mumbled some words, which the spiker leader failed to catch.

"Whoa!" cried the Wildman, his spirits rising. "Open wider, brava!" In demonstration, he gaped his own mouth wide, showing bright white teeth. "Let me hear you."

"We are protected," said the priest, still speaking low, and with his eyes on the ground. "Our god Shorn protects us."

"Protect? What's this protect? Chickens! Rat-piss! You don't love me no more, brava?"

The priest trembled. The spiker leader's voice changed its tone, turned soft and whispery.

"You don't love me?"

One of the village children carolled out through the sun-drugged air the secret that the priest had told them all.

"We got a spirit fence! You can't hurt us!"

The Wildman heard this. He looked up and down the path with a widening smile.

"Spirit fence? You got yourself a spirit fence?"

The priest raised one hand to dab at the sweat streaming down his face.

"Shorn protects us," he mumbled, praying silently to his village god that it might be so.

The spikers watched, grinning broadly. They knew the signs. When the Wildman talked sweet like that, throats got slit.

"Show me your spirit fence."

The priest gestured up and down the path, his hands trembling.

"Cross the spirit fence," he said, his voice also trembling, "and you will die."

The spiker leader looked surprised.

"Die? Like, dead?"

"Cross the spirit fence," said the priest, "and Shorn will strike you dead."

He caught a flicker of uncertainty on the spikers' faces as they exchanged looks.

"Strike me dead?" said the spiker leader in an awed voice. "Whoa! You hear, bravas? These chickens gonna strike me dead!"

He approached nearer to the path.

"Right here?"

"All along the path," said the priest.

"Whoa!" The Wildman made as if to touch the spirit fence, and pulled back his hand in mockery fear. He did a little dance, stepping close to the imaginary barrier and bounding away again.

"Heya, bravas!" cried the Wildman to his men. "Strike me dead!"

At this moment, a stranger stepped out of the trees that ran close by the riverbank. He had the appearance of a poor man. He carried no pack and no weapon. He stood looking down. He wore a long gray tunic, with a pale gray scarf over his head like a hood, and he was barefoot. He was tall and had white hair, cut very short. There was something about him that was hard to grasp, as if the more the Wildman looked at him, the more his attention slipped away.

"Noble Warrior!" cried the priest. "Help us!"

So this was one of the Nomana, one of the famous Noble Warriors. The Wildman had never met one face-to-face. He was disappointed. People said the Nomana had magic powers. But what did it come down to? A man alone, with no weapon. The Nomana had no army. They had no treasure. They ruled no country. Just a band of fools lost on a rock in the sea. Not much opposition there.

The stranger now looked up, to reveal pale blue eyes.

"Leave these people in peace," he said.

"You want peace," said the Wildman, "you come and fight for it!"

He spun his curved knife in the air so that it turned on itself once, twice, three times, and the hilt thocked into his palm. The stranger made no move.

"Chuck-chuck-chickens!" The Wildman cried, turning away, and lofted the blade high over his head, ready now to sever these little people's foolish faith. Down he swung—

"Heya!"

His arm went limp. His fingers parted. The knife flew from his hand.

To the priest, it seemed that the spirit fence had repulsed the blade. He cried aloud, "Praise Shorn!"

The Wildman snatched up his knife, smarting with shame, and hissed at the priest like a fighting cat.

"Blubber-piss! I'm gonna slit your neck!"

He saw the priest's terrified eyes reach past him. He saw how all the villagers were looking past him. Turning, he too fixed his dark eyes on the stranger, who was standing very still, his eyes cast down once more, in the shadow of the trees, melting into the stripes and dapples of light. Was it him? Had he somehow made him drop his blade?

"Heya, brava!" the Wildman whispered. "You want to dance with me?"

His men grinned when they heard that. Oh, the Wildman knew how to dance.

The beautiful youth tossed back his golden hair, and reaching out his arms on either side, he jangled the silver bracelets on his wrists. Rising on tiptoe like a dancer, he stalked towards the stranger, his knife sweeping softly before him.

The stranger made no move as he approached. His face showed nothing. How could a living being communicate so little? Surely this was a hollow man, his sliced veins would hiss stale air, he would fold like a paper bag—

The Wildman smiled and struck, so fast, the blade seemed not to move, so precisely that the fine-honed edge would draw blood but not kill, the blood of the tall white-haired stranger, who was—

Gone.

No effort in it: a sigh of motion, high into the air, down again, and there he was, elsewhere, motionless once more. Not a flutter of his tunic, not a flurry of his head-scarf From stillness to stillness, through a perfect parabola of motion that was already fading from the memory, that was forgotten, that was impossible and therefore could not have happened.

The Wildman released a howl of rage.

"Kill, bravas! Kill!"

The spikers closed in on the stranger with swinging knives, and the stranger made no move, but the knives never touched him. The falling blades skidded on empty air. The Wildman saw this and began to experience a new emotion that he could not name. He feared it and courted it, knew it to be dangerous, knew he would go towards this danger.

What sort of man was this?

He heard a deep humming in his ears, and there was a mist before his eyes. These signs he knew. He sought a death. No more games now. He slid out his throwing spike, slender as a reed, and fixed his dark eyes on the tall stranger, on his chest, on the drab gray fabric of his tunic, on the patch of fabric over his heart, on the warp and woof of interwoven threads, on the space between the threads. He released the coiled spring of his arm, and the spike screamed through the air, true as lightning from cloud to cloud.

The stranger raised one hand, opening the fingers as he did so. His hand closed. When it opened again, there was the spike, caught in flight, and now dropping harmless to the ground.

The stranger's eyes looked up, and the Wildman saw an emptiness there that he could not escape. The stranger's hand turned again. Two fingers, close together, extended towards him. The Wildman felt the weight of those far fingers on his head, on his shoulders, on his chest: a weight he was powerless to resist.

He sank to his knees.

For a fragment of a second, gazing up at the stranger, he saw a giant before him, a sky man, his head haloed by the sun: so near that he was close enough for him to reach out and touch, and so far that he filled the world. Then the moment passed, and the Wildman could hear the priest mumbling, "Shorn be praised!" and could smell the fear on his men's skin and see how they shrank from the stranger. But he cared nothing for that. He was breathing cool air. He was drinking cool water. He was flooded with a new sensation—no, he had entered the flood, which was so much greater than him, he had dropped into it as he was accustomed to dive into the slow-flowing channels of the river, down to the cold depths—and now, in the heat of the day, his body was bathed in coolness and he was washed clean of all his anger and all his pride. He was experiencing awe.

There came a high, far-off sound, like the cry of a bird. The stranger raised both arms above his head, pointing the forefingers of each hand skyward, and touched the fingertips together. As he did so, the wide sleeves of his tunic fell back to expose his bare forearms. There he stood, for a few short moments, his bare feet planted apart on the ground, making an arrow of his body, as if in answer to the cry. This was a signal, but saying what? To whom?

Then out of the trees there came two more strangers, similarly hooded and barefoot. Had they been there all the time, content to let their companion fight his battle alone? Or had they just arrived, making no sound, drawing no attention to their coming?

The first stranger lowered his arms, and his eyes met the Wildman's.

"Leave these people in peace," he said. "Seek your own peace."

The beautiful youth was silent with amazement. He understood nothing of what was happening to him except that this stranger possessed a greater power than he had ever known, and that this power gave him a giant stillness that must be this thing called peace. For all his beauty and his laughter, the Wildman had never known peace.

"Where?" he said. "Where is peace?"

The tall white-haired stranger gazed at him with his pale blue eyes, and the youth saw that they were not empty after all. They were brimming, overflowing, as immense as the sea.

"You will find peace," came the answer, "when you live in the Garden."

The strangers left as noiselessly as they had come. The Wildman watched them until they were lost in the dappled shadows of the trees. Then he raised one arm, and his bracelets flashing in the sun, he signalled to his men to return to the boat.

The
Lazy Lady
slipped out once more into the river currents. The Wildman stood once more on the prow, but he did not dance. His men watched him, filled with unease. They saw how his gaze reached far ahead, to some unknown adventure where they could not follow him.

For the Wildman, everything had changed. He had met the Noble Warriors. He wanted their power. He wanted their peace.

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE HER SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY, MORN
ing Star stayed with her father on the hillside, and together, long before dawn, they watched for the rising of her namesake, the true morning star. Her father's brindle sheepdog, Amik, lying curled up by his feet, snuffled softly in her sleep. Her one remaining puppy from a litter born eight weeks ago, a little bundle of white fur called Lamb, was asleep in Morning Star's lap. Round them the sheep lay still and quiet, on patches of earth made warm by their own bodies. The night was clear, the air cold. Then low on the dark horizon, the small sure light for which they waited appeared and began its steady climb, that would in turn be overtaken by the greater light of the new day.

"There you are," said her father in his slow voice. "Come to tell me the night won't last forever."

"I wish it would."

"No, you don't. You don't wish any such thing."

The puppy woke at the sound of their voices, and stretched, and poked his head out from under the rug. Seeing his mother, he went to her and nuzzled eagerly for a teat. Amik growled and rolled away. The puppy was supposed to be weaned. Morning Star felt for her father's hand under the rug that covered them both. She was thinking: I can't tell him. How can I tell him? It will break his heart.

For as long as she could remember, she had been waiting to be sixteen. Now she could join the Nomana, as her mother had done. But how would her father bear the loneliness without her?

Goaded out of sleep by the puppy, Amik suddenly jumped up and shook her shaggy brown-and-white coat and trotted away over the wet grass. The puppy sat with his nose raised high, looking after her with a hurt expression on his fuzzy white face. The sheep began to wake. As the light of the unseen sun strengthened in the sky, the brightness of the morning star began to fade. They watched the dawn in silence, father and daughter, as they had done countless times in the sixteen years of her young life.

"There you go," said her father at last.

The morning star was no longer visible in the dawn sky. Usually when they watched the new day together, after he said, "There you go," he would look at her and smile and say, "Here you are," because it was her name, too. But today he said no more.

He was one of the hill people who had long made their living grazing stock on the lower slopes of the mountains.
They were a quiet-spoken breed. They rarely travelled far and kept themselves to themselves. His name was Arkaty. His wife, Morning Star's mother, had been a lowlander from the coast, where they named people differently. Her name was Mercy. They had named their child according to her custom, not his; and so she had become Morning Star.