The Reindeer People (21 page)

'It could have been a demon,' Capiam's son breathed. His eyes glowed at the prospect. No one paid him the least attention. Tension sang between Joboam and Heckram. They could have been alone in the hut.

The woman who had clutched at Heckram's arm spoke abruptly, changing the direction of everyone's stare. 'Capiam. Are you the herdlord or not? Do you lead this sitor? Then there is someone among us who has done this thing. If you lead us, then it is you, not my son, who must answer for letting one such as that live among us.'

The very softness of her voice made the accusation sharper. The herdlord's son gasped. The jaw of the other woman sagged open an instant. Then she snapped it shut and her gaze hardened.

'She's right,' she said, her voice cracking. 'She's right! Never has there been a time when a woman was afraid to go to the spring alone! Never has a woman been savaged like this, on the very edges of our camp! What are we coming to, when there is among us one who can do this? Where are you leading us, Capiam?'

Her voice went shriller with every word, and suddenly she was gasping. She clutched at herself and sank slowly down on the floor, her face caving in as her tears found her.

'Who are you to speak to the headman like that, old woman!' Joboam demanded in a voice laced with fury.

Heckram spun on him, the cords in his neck leaping out like plucked bowstrings. The headman's son scrambled backward in his hurry to be out of the way, stumbling against Tillu's pot of pain potion and nearly upsetting it. Heckram took a step forward and suddenly found the little healer woman thrusting herself in front of him.

'Quiet! Quiet!' Tillu hissed furiously. In a moment more, they would be fighting, and she would have more heads to bind and hands to set. Not tonight, she promised herself. 'Out! Men out!' she added firmly as they showed no signs of obeying. 'Elsa needs quiet. Elsa needs rest. Other men, out! Healer say, Heckram stay here, help take care of Elsa,' she added shrewdly, thinking to occupy one of the combatants. 'You. Headman.' Capiam might not have recognized her word, but he recognized the finger that jabbed at him. 'Take men away, not let them fight here. Talk in morning, not now. Not now! Out. Quiet!' she hissed again when the headman's son opened his mouth.

For a long instant they held their positions. Then Capiam clapped his son on the shoulder and propelled him from the hut. 'Joboam?' He made the burly man's name a question and a warning. Joboam clenched a fist and let Heckram see the small movement of it. Then he backed from the hut, his eyes on Heckram as he departed. Heckram stared after him like a snarling dog.

Tillu gave in to the rubberiness in her knees and knelt beside the keening mother. She put her arms around her and rocked with her, letting her take the comfort of weeping, and feeling a small relief herself in the rhythmic movements. One day she would trust too much to her status as a healer. She had gambled that she could order a headman from a tent and not be beaten for it. She had been right, but now she trembled at what might have been the consequences had she been wrong.

The other woman came to take her place, her tears and soft cries mingling with her friend's. Tillu eased away from them. Healers had no time to grieve. Instead, she moved to her herb chest and took from it chamomile and sleep's ease, bilin root and willow bark scrapings. She put fresh cold water on the hearth to heat while she mixed and measured her herbs. When the water boiled, she took it from the fire, added the herbs, and set it aside to steep. These were the herbs for sleep, and to ease the headaches of weeping. All would need them this night.

She turned from her work to find that Heckram, too, had obeyed the orders of the healer. He sat flat on the floor by Elsa, her unresponsive hand resting in his. He was looking earnestly into a face that looked less and less like Elsa. With a sinking heart Tillu wondered how long it would take her to die. For now she could have no doubt of the pressure building inside the skull like the festering inside a closed wound. She did not understand this injury. It could not be lanced like an infection or a boil, could not be eased down with a poultice like the swelling of a twisted joint. Nothing to do but watch her die.

The tea had steeped to a honey darkness. She chose a dipper at random from those hanging from the rafters, looked about, and found the carved wooden cups. The women had wept themselves to silence. They leaned against one another and watched her passively as she brought them tea. 'You should rest,' she told them, and each nodded, believing she spoke to the other. She left them holding one another and took a third cup to Heckram. She offered it to him, but he did not notice it. When she touched it against his empty hand, he started as if she had stabbed him. Slowly he put Elsa's hand down, tucking it gently beneath the covers. Then he took the cup Tillu still held.

For a long moment he just held the cup as he continued to look at Elsa. Finally he shifted his gaze to Tillu, and she regretted telling him to help with Elsa. She saw now the effort it had taken for him to hold that lax hand.

'She's dying.' She read the words from the shape of his lips, the sound barely breathed out. He was not questioning her, was not asking for a lie to ease himself. He was telling her what he knew, passing on information to the healer. She bowed her head in assent. The next words he spoke made no sense to her. 'I didn't love her enough,' he confessed. Then he lifted the cup and drained it, scalding as it was.

Tillu waited to receive the empty cup back from him. He gave it to her, then stretched out slowly on the floor hides. His reaching hand touched, not Elsa, but the edge of the hide that covered her. She heard his stiff swallowing and turned to leave him alone. The women were talking still, in soft, thick whispers. They no longer wept or ranted. The passion of their grief was spent for now. Soon they would sleep.

As Tillu would now. A little distance from the fire, she made a place for herself, baring the floor's covering of birch twigs as she took one of the hides to cover herself. She stared into the fire and then closed her eyes, letting her mind glide just under the edge of sleep as she kept her ears alert for the slightest stirring from Elsa.

The fire had burned low. The softening shadows in the hut, the gentle sound of breathing, calmed the night. Heckram lay silent, listening and staring. The healer's brew had not put him to sleep. Part of him wondered if there was any left in the pot, if a second cup would let his mind sink into emptiness. But the other part of him was too occupied to think of rising and looking for a cup of soothing tea.

He was trying to remember the first time he had touched Elsa as a man touches a woman. He couldn't. It had been during a time that no longer seemed to fit into the general context of his life. He had awakened to his manhood later than most boys, and been prey to that awakening for a shorter time. He tried to remember the Heckram of those days, a male with burning blood like a leaping, snorting sarva in its first rut. Like a sarva, he had bounded from one willing female to the next, sharing but a moment with each, taking his pleasure with eyes closed, his own heart loud in his ears. It was a time he regretted.

No member of the herdfolk condemned him. Did not all, men and women, pass through the first heat of knowledge, to emerge as adults? The older folk turned their eyes aside from the excesses of youth, trusting to time that these things would pass, or deepen into permanent relationships. Heckram had been so steady and sober a youth, and was now so settled and responsible a man. Yet those two lives were divided by that wild season. He had fought like a sarva, too, finding insults in the most innocent of teasing, and battling all, youths his own age, and those years older. He had not won all his fights, nor bedded every woman he courted. But though he couldn't seem to remember his losses in either kind of struggle, his victories were equally blurry.

Elsa had been one he had won, but he could not remember much of the conquest. Like him, she had been flushed with the first touch of fertility, but she had been younger, so much younger. He tried to remember something, a word in the dusk, a touch, the shape of a bared young breast. Nothing. She had been but one of the many for him. It made it so much worse to know that of her many, he had been the one.

It took a few seasons to cool his blood, but when his passage was complete, he saw himself in a cold hard light. It did not matter to him that no one else faulted him for his conduct. He found his own peculiar shame in knowing that the heat of his body had never touched his heart. Elsa, so simple and trusting, had found ways to let him know that she would come to his call. She had been willing to wait for him to feel ready for commitment, never doubting that in time he would want her. Now he wished he had found the courage to turn her aside, to find some gentle way of telling her to find a better man. She might have had children by now, be a wife and a mother. So much she had missed waiting for him.

He waited for tears to come, but his eyes were dry, the lids abrasive when he closed them. He sighed, then stiffened at an answering sigh from Elsa. In an instant he was on his knees beside her, whispering 'Elsa? Elsa?'

She answered with a trailing moan that rode on her breath. It was followed immediately by another. He took her lax hand. The fingers twitched lightly against his rough palm. He closed his hand over them, hoping she could feel he was there.

A rustle of garments, and the healer was beside them. Her hair straggled about her face and her eyes were old as she bent closely over Elsa to peer at her. As she straightened, she looked into his face. Slowly she shook her head at him. 'Don't torment yourself,' she whispered softly. 'Don't hope.'

'She hurts,' he replied.

Tillu said nothing, but returned to the fire. Taking a ladle from her own chest, one stained dark at the dipper end, she scooped a measure from the pot she had kept simmering by the fire. She signed for him to ease her up to drink. Elsa's bandaged head was stiff against his shoulder as he supported her. Tillu held the dipper to her swollen lips, but gave her no more than would moisten them. He frowned at her stinginess.

'Night berry,' she explained in a whisper. 'Too much kills. Little bit, sleep deep.'

He eased Elsa back to the floor, but continued to sit by her, gently holding her hand. For long moments her breath moaned in and out. Then her sounds became softer and finally were stilled.

'She sleeps,' Tillu told him. 'Heckram sleep now, too?'

'No,' he told her, but lay down once again beside Elsa. He longed to tuck her into the curve of his body and hold her close. He wanted to feel he was protecting her, holding death at bay with the warmth of his own life. But he knew that the pressure of his body against hers could only cause her pain. He contented himself with taking her hand. He stroked her small fingers, pressed them once to his lips. He closed his eyes to the night. This time he kept her hand in his, followed her down into the darkness of deep sleep.

Morning came, a chill gray beast that nosed Heckram from the comforts of sleep. He kept his eyes closed, resisting consciousness. But his body complained it was chilled, stiff from the cold, from being still all night. He grumbled softly and started to shift to a more comfortable position, only to become aware of a cold hand in his. The events of the night before swept him remorselessly into wakefulness. Heckram jerked his body up, kneeling straight, to stare at Elsa in silence.

She was dead. He had felt her death chill in his hand and known it in his sleep. He had dreamed her dead, watched her walking away through the snow to Saivo. Her bow had been on her shoulder, her embroidered game bag swinging at her hip. Her stride had been easy, carrying her across the crusted tops of drifts. She had pulled her red cap off to the early spring sunshine, and her unbound hair had gleamed brighter than the snow drifts. So beautiful. He had watched her go, smiling after her. He had not called her back.

This morning did not find her so beautiful. He turned from that chiseled face, not wanting to remember these new colors flushed across it. Carefully, he pulled the covers up to hide it from the light seeping in the smoke hole. As he did so, something rolled from where it had rested on top of her bedding. It thudded softly on the floor hides, rolled in an arc to rest against his knee. He stared down at it. There was a grimness to its plain, ungraceful handle and black stained bowl.

His eyes traveled to the hearth, and the near dead embers on the flat stones. The small pot that had held the potion sprawled on its side. His mind whirled slowly as he refused conclusions. He would not check to see how much was left in the pot, would not try to remember if Tillu had put the dipper back in the pot the night before. Had she been asking him something, when she said too much of it would kill? Had she thought she read an unspoken answer in his face? He had a sudden vision of Bruk foundered in the snow, his own calming hand preceding the seeking knife. He moaned softly.

Picking the ladle up by its handle, he carried it back to the pot. He dropped it beside the hearth and it clattered once against the stones. No one else stirred. Ristin and Missa slept side by side, huddled together in sorrow. Elsa had been the last living child of Kuoljok and Missa. With her had gone their grandchildren. They ended today, the unraveled ends of a long line. He thought of poor old Kuoljok, soon to awake in Heckram's hut, alone and puzzled. He had seemed so confused last night. 'What happened?' he had asked over and over again, long after Heckram had wearied of telling him he didn't know. The simple question had stung worse than Joboam's foolish accusation.

And the healer? He turned slowly to find her asleep in a shadowed corner of the tent. Inexplicably, Kerlew was curled beside her, smiling in his sleep.