The Reindeer People Page 31

  ‘Anyone can make a mistake.’ He hesitated. She paused, the square of leather wet with poultice hovering over his face, but didn’t meet his eyes. He didn’t pause to think. Reaching up, he took the leather from her, wiped his own face clean. She didn’t move. He dropped the scrap to the floor, touched her hand. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

  The gentleness in his voice broke her. Her eyes met his, frank with hunger. She saw his eyes widen as his own warmth kindled. His hand moved very slowly to cup the back of her neck and pull her face down to his. He moved his face against hers, taking in first the smell of her skin, then the taste. His mouth was warm and tentative. She was transfixed by the sensation. There was no resistance in her body as he reached out a strong arm to pull her closer. She stopped thinking and moved her mouth against his. Time stopped. Warnings and cautions hammered frantically in her mind. She blocked them. This, now, this man, this touching, she took for herself, she stole from the world as a gift to herself. Atop him, she could forget the differences in their size. His strength was no threat to her.

  She lost herself in him. The skin of his chest was warm under her fingers, stretched firm over muscle. She lifted her mouth from his, brushed her lips over his flat male nipples, watched the black hair spring back from her touch. She let her fingers trail down the center line of his chest, over his belly to his navel, then heard Heckram’s sudden gasp as she set her hand flat below his navel. It broke her trance and she lifted her eyes to the face of this stranger in her bed.

  She could not name what was in his eyes - a stillness, a wonder almost. He was breathing rapidly, shallowly. But he did not move. There had been other men for her since those raiders had first carried her away. She had taught herself that not every mating was pain. But always, with every man, there came a time when he asserted mastery, a time when he gripped and took her, a time when his own needs were all he responded to. It was a time she always steeled herself against, that moment when gentleness was routed by force. She pulled back slightly, testing him. But he did not drag her back. He only touched her face with tantalizing fingers that trailed down her cheek and throat.

  Voices. A murmur she could not decipher, and then Kerlew’s voice lifted high in question. She stiffened against Heckram and then pushed firmly away from him. For an instant the circle of his embrace resisted her. Then as he became aware of the voices, he made a sound between a sigh and a groan and released her. She lifted herself clear of his body, feeling the cool air blow in between them. ‘Tillu?’ he questioned softly, but she did not look at him. She tugged her tunic down straight, righted the pot of poultice that had tipped and nearly spilled. She pushed her hair back, felt the stickiness of the poultice that had smeared from Heckram’s face to hers. She rubbed her sleeve cuff down her face, felt unreasonable tears sting her eyes. A sudden shakiness beset her knees and the pit of her stomach. Taking a long deep breath, she forced steadiness onto herself. She glanced at him, to find him leaning up on one elbow, looking at her anxiously. She turned away.

  ‘Tillu?’ he repeated, but the crunch and squeak of boots over damp snow was right outside the tent now. She shook her head wordlessly without looking at him. Heckram fell back onto the pallet with a sigh. She knew how he felt.

  ‘Heckram?’ The old man’s querying voice cracked as he called, is the face better?’ He ducked into the tent, squinting his eyes as he came from the brightness to the dimness.

  Heckram was silent, looking to Tillu for an answer. Kerlew bustled into the tent and up to Heckram. it doesn’t look so bad to me!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘It wasn’t as bad as it looked at first. It was mostly swelling,’ Tillu filled in.

  Heckram was staring at Kerlew. Even with sharp anticipation fading into aching disappointment, he was not blind to the change in the boy. The difference was like that between fall and spring. Kerlew’s narrow shoulders were no longer bowed in on his chest. There was confidence and self-importance in his face as he met Heckram’s gaze squarely. But there was also an unworldly translucence to his gaze. As if Heckram were not as substantial as whatever it was that Kerlew saw behind him. His face was evasive, dreaming. A chill rose in Heckram, as if he had seen the boy sucked down and swept away by a river. The contacts he had made with the boy were gone, the ties unbound. The certainty that he would never reach Kerlew again rose in him. The boy he had begun to know was gone. Gone, in one afternoon. Carp was smiling also, a smile with cutting edges for Tillu. A smile of triumph and vengeance. Tillu withered in that gaze, shrinking in on herself. Heckram sat up slowly.

  ‘Get your shirt on,’ Carp directed him calmly. ‘Time for us to go.’

  ‘Go?’ Kerlew asked in sudden bewilderment, and in that instant Heckram glimpsed the vulnerable boy he had known. ‘Go away, Carp? Why? Where?’

  Carp laughed his cracked old man’s laugh. ‘Not far, Kerlew, don’t worry. I am staying with Heckram. He has a fine warm hut, with much food and many soft skins. I am very comfortable there. And I must see the Herdlord Capiam, to tell him I will be shaman of the herdfolk now. But I will be back tomorrow, to teach you. And soon we will all be traveling together.’

  ‘No.’ The firmness of the word was spoiled by the sharp note that broke Tillu’s voice. ‘No,’ she repeated, gaining control. ‘You may go with the herd, perhaps. But not Kerlew, and nor I.’

  ‘Oh?’ the najd asked coldly. ‘And is that so, Kerlew?’

  The boy turned his face to Tillu, and in that moment all in the tent knew she had lost. His small jaw was set. His eyes were distant as he spoke, ‘I go, Tillu. I am a man now, and the decision is mine. For a few days more, I stay here with you. But when the herdfolk follow the herd, I will follow Carp.’ The words were Carp’s, spoken carefully. But the decision in his voice was all Kerlew’s. Tillu stared at him.

  Here, before her, was what she had dreamed about. Her boy, standing as a man, making his own decision. Speaking with confidence, standing straight before her. And here, beside her, watching her face with sympathetic eyes, was a man such as she had imagined. A man to make part of her life, part of her own life, separate from Kerlew’s.

  Bitterness filled her mouth. ‘No,’ she said again softly. But it was an internal denying, a forbidding of tomorrow to come. The new day had already dawned in her son’s eyes.

  Something long fastened within her let go. Weariness was a part of it, the sense that she could no longer battle to keep Kerlew safe from the world he had chosen. But there was also a certainty that if she fought Carp for the boy, she would destroy him. The self-confidence that set his shoulders was too new and shining a thing to crush with bitter words. Better that he walked straight without her and failed than that he huddled forever in her shadow, safe but without substance.

  ‘You are going,’ she said, looking deep into her son’s eyes. Kerlew nodded. ‘And so am I,’ she said aloud, and the surprise was loud in her voice.

  There was too much to read in Tillu’s eyes. Heckram pulled his eyes from her face. Rising awkwardly from the low pallet, he found his woolen shirt and pulled it on, holding it away from his face. Next he dragged on his skin tunic, its heaviness suddenly unwelcome in the soft spring air. As he cautiously poked his head out the collar, he found Tillu standing in front of him, looking up at him. Reaching up, she took him firmly by the chin and turned his face to the light again. Her brow furrowed slightly as she studied the gash.

  it looks better. It may heal itself now. But’ - she paused, a ghost of a smile in her eyes - ‘you should come back tomorrow and let me check it.’

  He nodded slowly, but she turned aside hastily, leaving him to wonder if he had understood what she hadn’t said. ‘Come on, come on,’ Carp was urging irritably. ‘The walk back is long and already I am hungry. And I have yet to see Capiam today. I have important things to tell him.’

  ‘As have I,’ agreed Heckram, and followed him out into the early spring evening.

  KERLEW: THE SEEING

  It had taken long for Tillu to fall asleep. Kerlew ha
d had to lie awake and still, distracted by her shiftings, her sighs and mutterings. Bur now she lay still on her pallet, her arm flung across her eyes as if to blot out the sight of what must be. Foolish woman. Still she thought she could change it. Still, she did not understand that Kerlew had been born to the magic, and the magic to him. One and the same they were, intertwined. She had sought to separate him from the magic, but that was like separating the warp from the woof of the herdwomen’s weaving. What was left was not cloth at all. Nor was Kerlew to be Kerlew without the magic. Someday, she would see.Now that she lay silent and did not distract him, he rose from his bed. He slipped clear of his body and slowly climbed the thin spiral of smoke that drifted up from the banked fire. Up he climbed again, always going up when he should be going down. But he had a feeling someone was waiting above to speak to him.

  Outside the worn tent, the wind was rising, swirling snow within its belly, reminding the herdfolk and forest that spring’s grip on the land was still a feeble one. Kerlew felt the chilling of night air, saw the snow reclaiming the forest for its own. Briefly he frowned; this was not good for the herdfolk, for his new people. Then he looked farther and felt Carp’s hand in the sighing of the wind and the drifting of the white flakes. There was a reason, then, behind this late storm, and all would be well. Carp was shaman of the herdfolk now, their najd. He cupped their fates in his wizened old hands; his clouded eyes would guide them now. Satisfied, Kerlew let go of his worry and climbed higher.

  He broke free of the storm suddenly, standing with his bare feet atop the wind and churning clouds. Blackness arched above him; there were not stars or moon, but only the light of his own eyes to see by, yet it was enough. He sat down cross-legged atop the clouds to await the one that must come.

  As if from afar, he heard Tillu rise and put more wood on the fire. A part of his mind wondered that she had not asked him to rouse and do it. Another part of him asserted that he was too far away now, too far beyond her, to ever do any task for her again. The pallet and hides beneath his body were more distant to him now than the sky over his head.

  She knew he was gone, and it grieved her. She was a narrow, earth-bound person, unable to see the true shapes of the world or how she fitted into them. He pitied her. He could see her grief, like a fine stain running through the thread of her life, bleeding darkness into the color. Tillu, he realized, was but a thread, as was Heckram, yes, and even Carp.

  ‘I am the hands of the weaver,’ Kerlew thought to himself, and suddenly the image was real. Here were the lines of their lives, of Heckram and Tillu and Carp, of Lasse and Elsa and Joboam, coming into his fingers like the strands of fiber and root that the herdwomen wove. He it was who plaited them together, who made a pattern of their days. They passed through his fingers and were changed by his touch. He it was who could shape their days to come. He wove them, making power for Carp, and for Elsa, revenge. The thin strands, red and brown, that were Heckram and Tillu were limp in his hands. Idly he twisted them together, marking the contrast of the colors. It pleased his eyes and he left them so. He took up the cold rough cord that was Joboam. It was white against his fingers, biting his skin, scratching as if to escape his will. He twisted it around his fingers, longing to snap it off short. But it was a stout and ugly thread, twisted like badly cured hide. It ruined the pattern of the other threads. It could never be made to blend.

  ‘Little shaman, what do you weave?’

  Kerlew looked up from his weaving. Wolf’s eyes were on him, yellow against the bright blackness of the world. Kerlew was careful to keep the smile from his lips. He did not answer Wolf with words, but only stretched forth the rough twine of Joboam. Wolf frowned, his lips drooping red all about his white teeth.

  ‘Who has given you that which is mine?’ he demanded in a low growl.

  ‘I have taken that which I would shape,’ Kerlew replied.

  ‘And that, too, is mine. It is for Wolf to take what he would. Not some shaman’s brat.’

  ‘But I have it,’ Kerlew challenged and held up the thread.

  Wolf stared at it, and Kerlew let himself grin. Come closer, spirit beast, he murmured to himself. Come within the touch of my hand.

  Wolf’s yellow eyes narrowed. ‘Do you remember, little shaman, what I told you the last time we met?’

  Kerlew nodded slowly, ‘ If you would be Wolf’s brother, learn to follow the herd. I go, and soon, with the herdfolk, to follow the herd. I will be as you are. Wolf. Following the herd and taking what I want.’

  Wolf rose suddenly. His breath was hot and smelled of meat. Kerlew’s words had been too bold. But he did not flinch from that hot breath or look away from the shining yellow eyes. Wolf held his tail higher, then shut his jaws with a snap. ‘Follow the herds, then. And hold what is Wolf’s.’ He turned and trotted away. He glanced back at Kerlew over the long fur of his shoulder and grinned. ‘But not too tightly, little shaman. For you are not yet Wolf’s brother, and may never be. That which you hold will be demanded of you one day. See that you give it then, for I have made a bargain about it.’

  Kerlew looked down at the rough strand in his hand, ‘I have a Knife,’ he said to the night, ‘I could cut this off short, at any time I please.’ Then he thought of Wolf, leaping from star to star, setting the night sky a thunder with the clattering of panicky hooves.

  ‘I will wait for you to claim what is yours,’ he promised. ‘But then I will claim you. I will be Wolf’s brother.’