Valdemar 11 - [Owl Mage 03] - Owlknight (22 page)

Keisha could have allowed the two Heralds to go on their own; there was no reason why she had to come along. One of the
dyheli
at the Ghost Cat enclave could readily guide them to the Sanctuary without Keisha's help.

She didn't want to do that. She didn't want to take the chance that there was some serious illness, even a plague in the early stages, at the Sanctuary. Anda was perfectly confident in the abilities of the Sanctuary Healers to deal with such a thing, but the Sanctuary Healers would not be paying a great deal of attention to the healthy Heralds. All of their interest was bound up in their current patients, and it might not occur to them that the Heralds were exposing themselves to danger.

She, above all, knew just how focused Healers could be; when dealing with an incipient crisis, they concentrated on the problem in front of them to the exclusion of all else. Whatever ills were being treated at the Sanctuary, Keisha would be there to note the symptoms and the cure—and if Shandi or Anda, or both, showed any signs of illness, she would be able to treat them before either of them sickened too far. She would have the sense to get them isolated and keep them from the rest of the Vale; with the help of the
hertasi
(who could not catch human illnesses) she could get them through whatever they caught.

Besides, I want to see what's going on there!
For that chance, she was willing to make the trip. She hadn't been to the Sanctuary in person for well over a year.

When they reached the Vale entrance, both Companions were waiting for them, already saddled with their lightest tack. With them was a single
dyheli
for Keisha. There was no need to pack anything, as they would be spending the night at the Sanctuary, which was more than prepared to host visitors. It wasn't as if they hadn't had healthy people there before.

Shandi and Anda were in the saddle before Keisha had gotten her foot into the
dyheli's
stirrup. She was getting used to the way that Heralds and their Companions worked so incredibly smoothly together, but it took the
dyheli's
amused comment of
:Show-offs:
to make her realize that some of that was a deliberate—if somewhat automatic—attempt to impress.

Oh?
she thought at her mount, not wanting to elaborate lest the rest of her thought leak over to the others.

The
dyheli
flicked her ears back delicately.
:Yes. They didn't have to link so tightly just to get into the saddle. And there's no real reason to try to impress us, is there? They're doing it to create an image, but is it an image they have to project all of the time?:
The irony in her tone colored every nuance.

Keisha always appreciated the
dyheli's
dry sense of humor, and never more so than now, but she was inclined to be charitable.
Maybe they're practicing,
she suggested.
You know, they haven't been together for all that long, and it's not easy to get a coordinated link that's natural and easy.

The doe flicked her ears forward.
:Perhaps,:
was all she would say.

The journey to the Ghost Cat village took place without incident, and in a very short period of time. Sentries hailed them from posts among the trees without asking them to stop; the Heralds and their Companions were instantly recognizable, even at a distance. By the time they reached the village, Vordon and Celin were waiting for them. The Shaman was in his ordinary working clothes, not his talismanbedecked ritual garb, and bits of bark caught in his beard and hair betrayed the fact that he'd been splitting wood when he was apprised of their imminent arrival.

“Hah! Kei-eh-sha!” Vordon hailed Keisha first, which rather pleased her. “And has our new brother recovered from his birthing? What brings you here, on this bright morning?”

“More or less, Chief,” she laughed. “He is certainly up and at all of his duties again, rather than sleeping like a man-shaped pile of rocks. My friends wish to know of the arrangements that Ghost Cat has with the pilgrims.”

“That is correct, Chief,” Anda said immediately, as the Chief and Shaman turned to the Heralds with faces full of lively interest. “If you will be so kind as to explain it to us, and show what you can.”

The Chief, who himself had only dared to learn Tayledras with the help of Tyrsell, nodded to hear Anda salute him in his own tongue. “So you have braved the pain of teaching, eh? Well, this is good. I have begun to think such a thing is equal to the death of a bear in counting toward manhood!”

Anda rubbed his head ruefully. “I could not find it in me to argue with that,” he agreed, and dismounted. “It's good to know you consider me a man.”

Shandi and Keisha followed his example, but Shandi had to add to her Senior's statement. “Herald Anda must surely qualify for more than just manhood,” she told Vordon, “for he has taken five tongues of Tyrsell at once.”

“I am not sure if that was bravery or foolishness,” Anda added hastily. It looked to Keisha as if Vordon agreed with that statement.

They chatted about gardens, roots, new babies, and leaf blight as they followed the Chief and the Shaman farther into the village, which had grown—indeed, doubled—in size, in the past year. There had been more additions than simple births or marriages. Some of the pilgrims had petitioned for adoption into Ghost Cat as their own tribes were so severely decimated by war or disease that they were effectively nonexistent, and Ghost Cat usually agreed to take them in. Darian was not the only outsider to have been formally adopted by a Ghost Cat family as an adult. He was just the only one thus far who was not a Northerner.

Many of those in Errold's Grove and k'Valdemar had been surprised to learn, once the tribesmen began to build, that they were capable of a great deal of sophistication in their dwellings. In fact, their village was as neatly laid out as any Valdemaran village. The Northerners built large, one-room circular houses, with an enormous common room in the center, and small cubicles built against the outer walls for privacy. Each extended family lived in one house—married children moved in with the bride's parents until the birth of their third child. It usually took that long for a young man to gather the resources to construct his own dwelling. Those who did not wed remained with their families, as additional hands, and suffered no decrease in status for doing so. The Chief had told Keisha that grandparents often bequeathed
their
homes to a favored young couple, then moved in with the oldest daughter's family. There was often much competition among married daughters to lure Grandmother and Grandfather to their home; there
was
an increase in status for those who sheltered such valuable repositories of wisdom as grandparents.

The Northerners used wood to build their homes, but no stone, with wooden roofs supported by four great pillars rather than slate or thatch. The buildings were made of squared-off logs with the chinks closed with moss and mud mixed, and the roof of rough planks laid over a radial pattern of rafters, which were then topped with rough wooden shakes.

The houses were odd to Valdemaran eyes, but it was the art decorating them that was so startling to those who were not out of the North.

The thick plank door of each house was carved and painted with the totem animal of the particular family in a kind of high-relief style. These were not realistic portrayals, but very stylistic and colorful, featuring patterns in red, white, and black. In good weather, beautiful blankets made of pieced fur were hung on the outer walls—both as a precaution, to chase out any vermin and odors, and to display the handiwork of the women of the house. Now that Ghost Cat had access to woolen fabric, they were making similar blankets of wool in bright, primary colors. Each blanket was a representation of the totem of the person it belonged to. There were always two poles outside each house, carved and painted with all of the totems of the family, and topped with the Ghost Cat.

Totem animals played a huge part in the lives of the Northerners; each tribe had a special totem (usually a very powerful predator). Each family also had a totem related to the totem of the tribe. And when each family member reached adulthood, he or she also got a totem—or as they put it, were embraced by one—in a special dream-ceremony presided over by the Shaman. Darian was an exception—Ghost Cat judged he already had his totem, in the form of Kuari.

Rafter ends that protruded beyond the edge of the roof were similarly carved and painted, but this time with the heads of spirits and ancestors. Inside each house the four great roof-pillars were identical to the poles outside the front door. The floor of a house was not
exactly
of earth, although the central hearth was a pit dug in the ground and lined with stones, with the smoke-hole through the center of the roof above and stones laid to some distance on the floor in case of sparks jumping from the fire. The floor of each of these dwellings was made of grass mats, many layers thick, laid over the pounded earth of the floor and added to on a daily basis. It was the duty of every member of the family old enough to do so to weave one grass mat in the morning and lay it over a place where the mats were looking shabby. As the mats below disintegrated, they were replaced from above; pine needles and herbs layered between the mats drove off insects.

Crude but adequate oil lamps placed on little shelves around the inside wall gave the place a fair amount of light, considering that there were no windows of any sort. But Keisha figured that was only to be expected, since these buildings were intended for much colder climes and a window was just one more place for cold wind to come through.

The little cubicles that family members retreated to for privacy were also used for storage. Basically, partitions were set against the wall with a distance of about six to eight paces between them, extending six to eight paces into the main room. A rope across the front made a place to hang a curtain for privacy; shelves built across the back and sides made a place for storage. People kept their personal possessions in the cubicles during the day; at night, they had the option of sleeping beside the fire, or in their cubicles with blankets over the rope to block out the main room.

Circular shelters, like the family houses but without walls, stood beside each house, providing a solution to the warmer weather that Ghost Cat had encountered in Valdemar. From spring until fall, this was where most of the work and living took place for each family; on the hottest nights, sometimes the entire family even slept in their shelters. Smoke from smoldering herbs in pots around the periphery kept insects somewhat at bay. And even those pots were decorated with painted decorations.

The longer that Ghost Cat remained here, the more of their village was decorated with painted carvings; Keisha expected that before long even the blank walls of the houses might start to sport their stylized artworks. No one had anticipated that, and a few traders had been eying the carvings and pieced-work with interest, wondering if there was any profit to be made from Northern art.

The houses were arranged in circles around a central building that was
not
the Chief's house, but rather was the storehouse for the entire tribe. As such, it was decorated only with Ghost Cat, repeated over and over, in an endless variety of poses. Each family had a cubicle within for the storage of raw materials of their own, and the center was reserved for common storage.

“So-ho, you come in a good time to see how we deal with the pilgrims come for healing, Valdemar-Herald,” Chief Vordon was saying as they neared the central storehouse. “We have just sent on a family that came with riches, so you will see what we have had of them.”

While Keisha had been admiring the newest carvings, the Chief had explained to Anda that Ghost Cat, in return for feeding and sheltering the pilgrims during their initial week of quarantine and continuing to shelter and feed those who were not injured or ill, received a toll of whatever the pilgrims brought with them. Being that some pilgrims came with little but desperation and hope, this was a very flexible toll. From the poorest, Ghost Cat often took nothing but a little labor—mat weaving, wood cutting, help in building, or carving if there were skilled artists among them. But there were plenty of pilgrims who had come laden with goods, and those made up for the ones that arrived with empty hands.

“See here—this was a tribe I do not know, but vouched for by those I do—and they are wealthy in fur and amber.” The Chief gestured to the piles of goods laid out in front of the storehouse, and indeed, there was enough heaped there to make even Anda's eyes widen. “They have only lately been touched by the Summer Fever and Wasting Sickness, and are eager to pay for a cure that they do not lose any of their children.” The Chief pointed to the piles of glossy furs. “There is bear, there beaver—there fox—that white is snow-fox—the small furs are what we call
goshon,
very soft and good, you have no name for it.”

Indeed, even though Keisha knew the Ghost Cat language and got a mental image of the
goshon
(which was obviously in the weasel family), it was with the disorienting sensation that told her she had never seen one of these creatures with her own eyes.