“No worse than what I’ve done. ” I felt something, a tugging, a weakening in me. I felt a peculiar recognition. Soldier’s Boy slept restlessly. He might even now be waking up.
“You’re fading,” she said mournfully. “Come to me again tomorrow night, Nevare. We must be able to find some solution to this. You cannot simply vanish into him!”
“I don’t know if I can come again. ”
But before I had even finished my words, I was gone from her dream. I felt the pull of Soldier’s Boy’s awareness stirring. With every passing day, we became linked more tightly. Now it seemed that when he was wakeful, there was not enough left of my awareness for me to dream-walk. For a moment, I felt my dream superimposed on his. “Lisana,” he groaned, but he dreamed only. Not even in his dreams could he reach her.
He shifted in the moss bed. The only part of him that felt warm was where Likari slept against him. In his sleep, Soldier’s Boy scowled and then used a bit of magic. It warmed both of them, settling over them like a good bear rug. He sank into sleep. I waited then, waited until his breathing was once more deep and steady. I was tempting my luck and I knew it, trying to slip away from him twice in one night. But my concern for Amzil was such that I felt I had to risk it. This time, when I tugged at his magic, pulling free what I needed, he stirred slightly and scowled. I dared take only a little. Now or never, I challenged myself, and fled with it, arrowing straight to Amzil. Finding her was effortless; I had only to think of the sole kiss we had ever shared, and I was with her, holding her, tasting her mouth, smelling her skin. I found her, and for one wildly joyous instant, I broke into her dream. “Amzil!” I cried and reached to pull her into my eager embrace.
“No!” she shrieked. She sat up in her bed and I felt her fight wildly to break from her sleep. “No more dreams of you. You’re gone, and I’m here, and I have to live with that. No more foolish dreams. No more foolish dreams. ” She sobbed on those final words, and then leaned her head on her arms. She sat in her bed and wept. I hovered near her, but found a wall so tight and so strong that I sensed she had been building it for a long time.
“Amzil, please. Please let me into your dreams,” I begged her. But even as I spoke, I felt the magic dwindle away. My vision of her faded. Suddenly I was back in my body, trapped like a fly in an overturned glass, alone with the rest of the night to ponder my fate.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HOARDING
Soldier’s Boy arose the next morning before Likari did. He brimmed with sudden purpose, as if the night’s sleep had infused him with life and meaning. Moving quietly, he went to an unused corner of the lodge where a bench had once stood. The moss had eaten it. He peeled back a thick layer of it to bare the splintery fragments of the old bench. Then, making many trips, he transferred Lisana’s treasure to this new hiding place. When he was finished, he rolled the moss layer over it again. Only keen eyes looking for such a hidden cache would have noticed it.
He left the lodge and walked down a short slope to where he had remembered a stream. It was still there, but it had changed. Once it had run swift and clear. Now it meandered widely over an area thick with reeds and ferns. With his hands he scooped a deeper place, let the silt swirl and clear, and then cupped handfuls of water to drink and then rub over his face. He shook his hands clear of the cold, shining drops and then turned and looked up the rise to Lisana’s lodge. For a time, he was silent. Then he spoke aloud.
“There is a lot to do in a very little time. Winter approaches. I will need a stout door, window coverings, a firewood supply, oil for her lamp, bedding, clothing for myself, and a store of food. Yet the key to all those things, Nevare, is not the hard work that you immediately think about. No. The key to those things is that I must eat and grow as fat as I can, and I have only a few days in which to do it. And only one small boy to help me provide for myself. We’re going to winter here rather than at the kin-clan’s village. That will not please Olikea, I think, but I do not care. She thinks only to use me as her key to power and status in her kin-clan. Her ambition is too small. I will not be the Great One of her kin-clan. I will be the Great One of the People, the Great One of all the Great Ones. But before I confront Kinrove, I must look like a man full of power and capable of wielding it. ”
Page 84
I do not know which was more startling, to have him address me so plainly or to have him make me a party to his plans. Did he think I would help him? Or did he think me incapable of opposing him? Either way, I might well prove him wrong. But for now, he exuded an air of well-being that was at odds with the burning hunger that seethed through him. He drew in a deep breath.
“Likari! Awaken. I have chores for you!”
It took a moment or two before the small boy stood in the doorway. He looked around for Soldier’s Boy, rubbing his eyes sleepily.
“Two tasks for the day. Gather enough wood for three nights. No, four. When we come back, we will not want to have to do that task before we sleep. And when that is done, find food. Any and every sort of thing that you can gather that a man can eat. Fish, meat, roots, berries, greens, nuts, fruit of any kind. If you see it and you know it can be eaten, gather it and bring it back to the lodge. ”
“Yes, Great One. ” The boy managed to utter the words before he was ambushed by an enormous yawn. He knuckled his eyes again and then without another murmur went off down the faded path in a purposeful trot.
Where there is water there is almost always food. It may not be food of a sort that one regards with relish, but it can be eaten. Soldier’s Boy ate it. He found a grass with a fat, oniony bulb on the end and pulled and ate them by the dozen. I was heartily sick of the flavor before he was; or perhaps he no longer cared what anything tasted like. He was bent on quantity, not quality, in his consumption. He moved upstream and found ragged and yellowing water lily leaves decaying on top of a small pond. Snails clung to them. He popped them loose of the vegetation and ate them, crunching down shells and all. I would have felt nauseated if the stomach were my property, but my squeamishness meant nothing to him.
Uphill of the stream a tangle of wild roses in a dappled patch of sunlight were heavy with yellow and red rosehips. These at least were tangy and sweet. Some were as big as the end of my thumb, with a thick layer of soft flesh over the packet of somewhat fuzzy seeds in the middle. I would have eaten only the flesh, but he put them into his mouth by the handful and ground up seeds, pulp, and all before he swallowed. When the patch had been stripped of fruit, he moved on.
So the morning passed. He knew the foods of the forest and moved like a grazing animal. By midmorning, I found myself wondering why man had ever stopped being a forager and hunter and become a farmer. Without any previous investment of toil, there was abundance here. Only when he had wearied of fruit, roots, and vegetation did he return to the stream bank. He drank heavily of the cold, fresh water, and then judiciously gathered a handful of likely stones.
For the next two hours, he employed the sling. He brought down a squirrel, and then two rabbits. He also found a bee tree, the inhabitants moving more slowly in the cool weather, yet still quick to buzz and swarm when he deliberately thudded a stone against the hollow trunk. Mentally he marked its location, and I knew he would return after a few freezes had subdued the swarm for him.
The squirrel and rabbit carcasses he carried in his hands hampered any further hunting or gathering, so he returned to the lodge. Before he settled down to gut and skin them, he saw ample evidence that Likari had been busy. There was a clumsily woven but effective bag made from vine. The boy had lined it with big leaves and used it to bring home a trove of gleaming-shelled nuts, superficially similar to the chestnuts I had enjoyed at the carnival in Old Thares. Four fish hung from a piece of hooked willow threaded through their gills. He had also gathered wild parsnip and garlic and a tuber that was yellow inside when I snapped one in half. I immediately envisioned a savory stew, and shared Soldier’s Boy’
s regret that we had no suitable cooking pot.
He skinned the rabbits and squirrels, pegged out the hides, and inspected the hare skin from the day before. He took it from its pegs, kneaded it between his hands to take some of the stiffness from it and then staked it out again. As he stretched the hide he realized he was lucky that no scavengers had come to carry it off in the night. Would he be so lucky again?
He hung the fish and the fresh meat higher in the crook of a tree, and then urinated at the base of it, a clear sign to any other forest residents that he was claiming ownership of the area. He fed the hearth fire a few sticks of wood to keep the coals alive. Feeding a fire was much easier than starting one again. Then he returned to his foraging.
He filled his belly that afternoon, but did not stop eating. Everything that was edible, he ate. Mushrooms in a clump growing in the shade, and then young fat bracket fungi that grew like shelves on the stumps of dying trees he ate. He found fallen cones and sat on the ground amid the prickly things to shake out the plump seeds and eat them. He ate them, and continued to eat, past sufficiency to repleteness and on. The man stuffed himself and took satisfaction in the distending of his belly.
Page 85
Thrice, he found foods that he knew would amplify his magic. The first was a sort of giant celery. It stung and then numbed his mouth as he ate it, but that did not deter him. Usually, a Great One ate this mixed in with other foods to mask its bitterness, but he had no time for such niceties now. He ate until his gorge rose in protest at the bitterness, and then moved on, but made a note to remember where it grew. Later, he would return to harvest the fat white roots.
He pulled down from a tree trunk a half-dead vine that had climbed up it to reach the sun’s light. The vine was stiff, the leaves gone brown and curling, but seed heads remained where the flowers had once been. Those were his prize. He ate them, cracking the seeds between his teeth and spitting out the shells. Their flavor was rich and brown and sweet. Colors seemed brighter after he had consumed them and the scents of the forest stronger. Indeed, he followed his nose to his next treasure, a windfall of ripened fruit. The tree had shed most of it. It was dark purple with a stone like a plum, but a flavor that was very different. Those on the ground were half fermented. Wasps, bees, and a few late butterflies clustered on the ones that had split open. A few fruit had landed well and were sound if withered at the stem end. These Soldier’s Boy ate with delight, and then he shook the tree to bring down a hail of fresh ones. When he had eaten as many as he could stomach at that time, he gathered an armful more and carried them home cradled against him.
He walked slowly back to the lodge as the sun crept down the sky. The sun would set to the west, behind the mountains. He knew that once the peaks had devoured the orb, night would sweep in like a curtain falling. Yet he did not hurry. He hoarded the food inside him and the magic it nourished. He felt full and almost sleepy. He decided that when he reached the lodge, he would nap, then rise, cook all the meat and fish, and feast again.
The boy was already there. He had more fish with him, not strung on a stick, but an armful of them. They weren’t gleaming, speckled trout such as he’d left that morning. These fish—five big ones—were so heavy that his back bent back and his stomach jutted with the strain of holding them. They were not as pretty as trout. Their skins were tattered, their blunt noses buffeted. Teeth showed in their long snouts. “They come each year,” he told me. “Waves of them, coming up the river, fighting their way against the water. And then they get tired, and they go in the shallows. They are very easy to catch there. Many of them die and rot on the banks of the river. Gulls and eagles come to get them. These ones had come far upstream, into the shade of the forest. I got them easily. There were many more. Shall I bring more tomorrow?”
“I think we shall both go tomorrow,” Soldier’s Boy told him happily. It was all coming back to him, along with Lisana’s anticipation and keen pleasure in this season. The season of the fish runs was a time of plentiful food for everyone. There would be fish to bake in the fire, fish for soup, and lots of fish to smoke in strips for winter food. Fish to dry and grind into fish meal that could be stored in pots and would last until spring. He felt a surge of the purest, childlike contentment in the world, a feeling that had eluded me so long that I almost didn’t recognize it.
“Tonight, we feast!” he told the boy. “And tomorrow, we fish, and we feast again!”
“This is a very good time,” the boy replied. He stuck out his little belly. “I shall grow fat as a waddling bear. ”
Soldier’s Boy ran a critical eye over the child. He was thin right now, unacceptably thin for the feeder of a Great One. “Yes, you shall! I want you to eat well, and oil your hair and skin with the fat from our catches. I want you to show everyone at the Trading Place that we are prosperous and cherished by the magic. ”
Likari grinned. “I think I can manage that. ”
“Good!” Soldier’s Boy’s enthusiasm was genuine. “Build up the fire and prepare the coals for cooking. Tonight, we feast!”
While the boy did that, he planned to rest. But as he turned to enter the lodge, an unexpected guest arrived. He came down through the tree cover in a clattering of black and white feathers. The croaker bird landed heavily on the ground and waddled toward them, both cautious and curious.
The boy paid no attention to the scavenger bird, merely giving the creature a glance, and then went back to loading up his arms with firewood. Such birds were common visitors to any camp or village. They preferred dead meat, and the longer it had been dead, the more they relished it. But they would eat almost anything that humans did not. For one to arrive at the lodge, attracted by the smell of the rabbits or fish, was scarcely surprising.
Page 86
But Soldier’s Boy stared at it with a mixture of resentment and hostility. When the bird’s gaze met his, I felt a shiver go through him. Something more than a carrion bird looked at him out of those eyes. “Go away,” Soldier’s Boy said in a low voice. “You have no call upon me. I owe you nothing. ”
Can a bird smile? This one bobbed his head, reminding me of a man convulsed with laughter. He opened his beak wide. Perhaps he just tasted the air, but perhaps he mocked Soldier’s Boy. The bright red interior of his mouth flashed like a beacon.
“Nothing, Nevare? You owe me a death. Or a life. However you prefer to see it. ” He lifted a clawed foot and swiped at his beak. “Which do you think is the better offering to a god you have offended? A death? Or a life?”
Orandula’s voice, deep and rich with an undercurrent of mockery, rang clear inside my head. I heard it. I knew that Soldier’s Boy heard it, too. This, at least, was a dread we shared. Fear drove his defiance more than courage.
“I don’t serve you. You are not my god. And I owe you nothing. ”
The bird hopped closer, just two hops, in that effortless way of moving that only birds can do. He cocked his head and regarded me closely. “An amusing concept, that. The idea that men can choose which gods have power over them. Do you think that if you choose not to believe in me, I have no power over you? Do you think you can choose to have debts or not to have them?”
Soldier’s Boy strode suddenly forward. He picked up one of Likari’s fish and held it out to the bird. “Here. This is dead, and it’s much bigger than the bird that was freed from your sacrifice. Take it and be gone. ” He flung it disdainfully at the god-bird’s feet. The croaker bird fluffed his feathers and hopped back from the dead thing. Soldier’s Boy stood, his body stiff with fear and anger. The bird looked at the dead fish. Hop, hop. Turned his head to point an eye down at it. Then darted his beak down to rip a shred of it free.
“Fresh. But still good. I’ll take it. But you know, it does not discharge your debt. This is not a death or a life. It’s only a fish. And you have not yet answered my question. ” He stabbed his beak down again, tore off another scrap of flesh and, with a
quick jerk-toss of his head, caught it in his mouth and swallowed it. “Which would you rather owe me, little Great Man? A life or a death?”
“I owe you nothing!” Soldier’s Boy repeated angrily. “I took nothing from you. ”
“You were there. The bird was released from me. ”
“That wasn’t me!” Soldier’s Boy exploded. I do not think he was even aware of how Likari was regarding him. At the edge of Soldier’s Boy’s field of vision, the boy crouched in the door and regarded him with wide eyes as the Great Man continued his debate with a carrion bird. The boy stepped back inside the door, as if frightened.
The bird didn’t even seem to be looking at Soldier’s Boy as he bent his head and busily tore another strip of flesh from the fish. He’d bared the gut sack. He plunged his beak in and probed busily before coming up with a dark string of gut. He snapped it up with relish. “Not you, eh? Then who, Great Man? Who freed the sacrifice?”
“Nevare did it! Nevare Burvelle. ”
The bird opened his beak, and squawked a wild laughter from his wide red mouth. His wings stuck out to the side and he bounced as he squawked. Perhaps, to someone else, it would have sounded only like a croaker bird croaking. When he finally finished, he stabbed and tore another piece of fish free. Then he looked at Soldier’s Boy with one bright eye and asked, “Aren’t you Nevare Burvelle?”
“No. ”
The bird cocked his head the other way.
“Nevare. Speak up for yourself. Don’t you owe me a sacrifice, to replace the one you took?”
Miraculously and suddenly, the body and the voice were mine. Shock tingled all through my skin. I swallowed and drew a deep, freeing breath.
“Answer me, Nevare,” the bird-god commanded.
“I serve the good god. Not you. And I didn’t mean to have anything to do with you. All I did was free a bird,” I said. My heart soared. Despite the threat to me, I had the body again. I clenched and unclenched my hands, marveling that I could.