Five Senses Box Set

by Andre Norton

  However, there was another group, made up of men and a woman or two who had been so hardened by the death of loved ones that pity had leached out of them. These, too, headed for Firthdun, committed to what they would do there.

  The grim party had the weapons its members had labored on in secret. These were borne openly, since the gobbes, who hated the cold, would be huddling around the fire in the tower courtyard. The creatures would be holding a feast of their own. Those who moved against the hated dun had already put on the spit there a surly old boar, last of its species, thatthey had tracked, caught, and found rations for a week.

  In Firthdun, Grandsire and Haraska stood together. They looked carefully into every face, not only to make sure that all the kin would understand what was said but also in order that each countenance would linger in memory if, after tonight, it was seen among the clan no more.

  Sulerna, her burden now almost more than she could bear, did not watch the two elders. Her sister-in-law Ethera’s time was not yet by a week or so more, the women guessed; but Sulerna’s pains had started in the late afternoon. Though, when each struck, the girl chewed a rag that had been steeped in an herbal potion, she felt with each passing hour as if a giant hand had picked her up and was striving to tear her apart.

  “They come to kill.” It was Elias who broke the silence. “Have they not said it, even to our faces, that we shall not prosper while they die from want? Our women—”

  “Elias,” Haraska remonstrated, “remember, your hate, much less the shedding of blood, feeds that fiend who has lived off us for so long. Even now he squats in his web, thinking how he will use this time—and us—to foster greater and longer-lasting violence. We have had the dream-send, distorted and broken though that was.” The old woman paused and pressed her hands to her breast.

  “If blood there be”—now those hands clenched themselves into fists—“then He shall win, and the Light here may go out forever.”

  Such a warning was not well received; the young men stirred but did not hasten to perform their usual patrol. White-faced, Jacklyn moved for the first time in months toward Sulerna. For a time, he neither touched her nor looked at her, but, when she haltingly arose, he was there, his shoulder under her hand to steady her. So thin had the boy become that she could feel his bones. Jacklyn was a stranger, she thought sadly, yet she would accept all he had to give.

  The ragged crew of attackers broke through the slight defenses of the dun. Grandsire gave the signal, and even the smallest of the children made no sound as they passed through the wide door into the open. Several invaders—those with the best weapons—hurried to ring the little ones and to threaten them with gestures and shouts. Meanwhile, the rest of the contingent found and brought forth the one farm cart for which the clan still had a horse and quickly harnessed the frightened beast. Then, keeping the captives under guard, their fellow sufferers raided Firthdun, as quickly and expertly as the gobbes had stripped their own homes of every stalk of wheat and curl of wool.

  Those of the homestead saw the cart roll off, while behind it trudged the women and the older men, laden down with all they could heap into the sacks they had brought. It was only then that the leader of the raiding party gave his orders.

  “MidWinter, neighbor Firth Mother,” he sneered. “Surely you do not hold apart from us on this night. We are all your kin, near or far born—and this is the time when kin gather!”

  “That is so.” The very quietness of Haraska’s reply daunted the mocker into momentary silence. “But, Goodman Viras, we have among us one who cannot march to any man’s orders.” She pointed to Sulerna. The gesture was easily seen, for already torches had been lit to make sure that all in Styrmir did at last suffer alike.

  “She carries Yurgy’s get!” The man was bold again. “The Dark Lord had some use for him in his time; perhaps such will also be true for her. Jansaw”—he addressed a young lout who looked burly enough to have pulled the cart and all its stolen goods by himself—“get you that barrower, dump the slut in, and we’ll be off.”

  Jacklyn cried out and tried to stand between Sulerna and the men but was battered aside. She, doubled in pain and refusing to utter any sound before these worse than gobbes, did not see him again.

  This year, the MidWinter celebration was not, it appeared, to be held near the ominous tower. For some reason not known to the celebrants, the flames of the great fire were rising not far from the edge of the Forest as the party with their captives reached the milling crowd.

  Sulerna roused enough to realize where she lay. Haraska had told of broken dreams, and the girl herself had had one which she knew she must not share but obey as if it were an order. Perhaps it was one—a command from Her Who Rode the Clouds.

  The revelers had smashed open the casks from the dun and were busy dipping out, even with bare hands, the last of the strong cider. Meanwhile, another grouphad gathered about the cart, and now there came a scream from the horse as the beast went down under a lightning storm of badly sharpened knives.

  Those raiders who had constituted themselves guards began to slip away to join the mass about the wagon and to help in butchering the luckless occupant of its shafts.

  Sulerna could no longer stifle a small cry. Then she realized that she lay on two of the blankets from Haraska’s bed and that her mother and Widow Larlarn were kneeling beside her.

  So caught up was the girl in the blasting onset of the worst pangs she had yet felt that she was unaware the tumult of the nightmarish merrymaking was dying down. Harsh growls from gobbes were answered by cries of pain, and straight to the knot of women gathered about the girl in labor came Irasmus.

  Sulerna’s mother cried out and strove to place her body between him and her helpless daughter, to no avail. The dark mage gave the merest flick of his wand in the woman’s direction, and, as if struck by an immense fist, she was smashed to the ground.

  Sulerna cried out again, partly from pain, but more from knowing what now lay before her. Widow Larlarn was busy over her, but the agony was such that Sulerna was aware of nothing but its red horror. Then, seemingly from far off, she heard a squalling cry, and a terrible silence enfolded her.

  She opened her eyes. The fire was blazing high, and the gobbes were leaping around it; but Irasmus had moved closer. In his hands he held what he had seized from Widow Larlarn, and now he shouted, “See what I hold, all of you? This one shall be as my shadow, holdingfast to my every wish. You shall look upon him as if he were my son, indeed—”

  Now—oh, now! Thank the Moon, whose beauteous face, though tarnished by the smoke from the fire, was yet bright beyond, they had set her down in this, the very edge of the White Lady’s light. Haraska leaned close over her, and the old woman’s breath was warm on her face.

  “Get you gone, heart-daughter. We shall do what we can to cover you.”

  Sulerna was still encased in pain, and she well knew that she had lost a great amount of blood. But there was still hope left—and life. Then hands raised her and, though she had to bend half over, she could stumble. Jacklyn—only his small, hunger-bitten body was enough to keep her moving.

  Irasmus—in the distance, she could hear his voice, and he was chanting now, intoning over the newborn child.

  On, with the blood drabbling her legs, and pain, always pain. Then—the loom of the tree fringe. In that moment, a hunting howl broke from the demons behind. Blood! The girl knew only too well that the liquid life drew them more quickly—and implacably—than any other spoor.

  She staggered at a push from Jacklyn. “On!” the boy urged. “On!”

  But his support was no longer her aid, for he was gone from her side. Sulerna fell to her knees. On—yes, even if she must crawl! And crawl she did. She was in the edge of the Forest itself when she heard her nephew cry out, “By the Wind—!”

  Then came a scream so wrenching that it somehowgave the girl the impetus to worm her way between the vast trees, striving to protect what still rested in her belly from any harm.
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  Time was one for her; the past was gone. Only purpose was left, and that drove her fiercely among bushes, around the trunks of trees. The girl held to some of this forest growth when the birth pangs began to strike hard again.

  Light showed ahead—not the hot wicked caper of flame but cool as the gliding footsteps of the moon. Moaning, Sulerna drew herself into an opening which circled about a great Stone—a Stone which beckoned, beckoned. Somehow the girl pushed and pulled her unwieldy body almost to its base.

  Then came the Wind, and the pain lessened as if it were now walled away from her. But she was feeling once again the tearing coming of another new life, and this time she could not even raise her hands in futile aid for herself.

  Another cry sounded, small, alone. Sulerna’s hand was able at last to find the birth-slick body and try to hold it to her breast, but the effort was too great. In that moment, the baby’s hand moved, and tiny fingers grazed the rock.

  The Wind—the blessed Wind—greater, more wonderful than the girl had ever dreamed it could be—curved around her exhausted, dying body. . . .

  A tall shadow moved into the glade, and the Wind welcomed—welcomed and gifted—its owner. And Hansa, holding her own small son on her hip, reached down a great fur-covered hand and lifted the crying human infant to rest against one of her ample breasts.

  For a moment, the Sasqua female stood staring at theStone. The body at her feet . . . well, when this child of strange birth grew, she would pay the rites for her mother who was. But now the Forest’s daughter was the baby’s mother who is—and would continue to be.

  17

  “SASSIE—SASSIE! ONE OF THE NIGHT WOLVES HAS been teaching you tricks again!” Hands on hips, the girl stood looking around, though there was little to be seen but the boles of trees, which towered to the skies, and, here and there, a moss-grown rock protruding from the earth.

  “Sassieeee—” Purposefully, the seeker caught Wind tone in that call. She knew that the small Sasqua female could not defy one who was ready to use Wind search for her, even though to do so was cheating in the game they played so often.

  Reluctantly, the she-cub crawled out of a really perfect hiding place, where the brown of her fur had blended so completely with the tree bark as to seem a part of it. She dragged her feet as she came, and her brows were drawn together in a Sasqua scowl of pettishness.

  The young woman held out her arms. Sassie lost hertouch of temper, coming eagerly to be hugged and petted and told that she was a fine big girl but that it was not right to run and hide from Falice, who had been hunting her nearly half the morning.

  “Sassie hide—you hunt.” The cubling grinned. “You no hide good”—here she laid her hand on the girl’s bare arm and smoothed it—“skin too white, too easy see. Need fur, you!”

  Falice laughed. “Fur would feel good when the winter comes,” she admitted. During the years she had spent with Hansa, she had, after much experimentation, learned to cover at least part of her slender form after a fashion. She now wore a kilt of twisted and tied grasses, trimmed here and there with a purple flower; but the rest of her body only the Wind warmed or cooled.

  Her hair was dark here in the shadow of the trees but apt, in the few patches of glade-sun, to show a gleam of lighter, near-golden strands. Its waist-falling length had also been interwoven and tied, that she might not be scalped by the reach of any low-hanging tree limb or high-growing bush.

  A garland of the pale-lavender flowers, which were to be found at this season alone, swung about her neck, just low enough to cover her high, small breasts. As she stood, clad so and holding the true child of the Forest in her arms, she looked half woods-possessed herself.

  The Sasqua kept no records of the passing years. When Falice could hardly keep to her feet and would cry for Hansa if a bush or tree trunk came between them, there had been Peeper to share her life. But he grew much faster than she, and the day had come whenhe had gone off to join the other young males. However, when his foster sister saw him at intervals, their bond of shared childhood still held.

  Then Ophan had arrived, but, by that time, Hansa’s human foundling was a big girl—one at least large and mature enough to help care for the Sasqua female’s second son. Again, the seasons had flowed swiftly until he, also, went to seek his own kind after the way of the Forest’s sons. And now Sassie was here—when not in hiding!

  Falice herself had no desire to go too far from the temporary camps the she-Sasqua constructed, perhaps for the use of a night or sometimes for more days than the girl had fingers. She could not imagine a world in which her foster mother did not exist. Hansa had cuddled her smooth-skinned cubling when small, praised her when larger for learning the lore of the Forest (Falice drank in such so quickly, the Woodswoman was certain the girl was favored by the very Wind), and taught her the ways of the Folk, both the right and not right.

  Each Sasqua (Falice had never tried to count how many of them she had known in her season-circles in the Forest) had a certain portion of the woodland for his or her own. None intruded upon another’s holding without a sending through the Wind—and then only for a special purpose. That the human continued to share Hansa’s territory was strange, but she herself was stranger, though all the woods kin had accepted her peaceably from the first.

  Some boundaries she never crossed. In one direction, the trees appeared to thin, and the Wind warning against going that way had been very sharp and clearthe one time she had thought to explore westward. The Forest held other strange places, too. The girl had been shown one long ago by Peeper where the rocks did not lie scattered but were rather set to rub sides with one another, leaving only a hole for an opening. A sense of unease had kept her from going further, though Peeper had stepped boldly into that gap and snarled a mock challenge into the darkness beyond. This stone stack was not a thing of his people, and whoever had fitted it together was long gone.

  However, when Falice had grown taller and her breasts curved enough to be seen, there had come a night when Hansa had stroked and petted her as if the human girl were still a cub. Then the Forest woman had used Wind speech, carefully, so she would be understood.

  “You are no longer a little one, my fosterling. I have seen you this day wash yourself at the spring, and there was fear in you. But that is not needful. There has been a change in your body that all of us who can bear cublings know. It would seem that this time is now also upon you. Therefore, you must go apart, for you are not of the Sasqua, and our ways are not the ways of all the world. This night, you must go to the Wind Stone and there be accepted by the Great One as full woman—for such is the custom of your people, Falice.”

  The girl had twisted her hands together. Yes, she had known fear that morning when she had gone to bathe at the spring and had found that which was evidence—or so she thought—of a hurt she had not been aware she suffered.

  Even as Hansa had finished speaking, the Wind hadclosed about the girl as support and guide, and she had had no chance to ask once more the two questions she had posed so many times, to have only evasive answers from her foster mother: Who were her people, and from whence had she come?

  But, just as the Wind caught her in a closer embrace, the knowledge she had long sought began to unfold in her mind. This did not take the form of a memory. Instead, she was being shown a picture, and, watching that image instead of her path, Falice went steadily forward.

  A land without trees, except for a few here and there; open spaces; strange pilings of stones, not unlike the one to which Peeper had led her, set amid those cleared patches. The girl could not see clearly—it was as if she looked through a space of time (that was an odd thought)—but she did view people who were like her, save that they covered their bodies with clothing that looked much better made than anything she had been able to construct. There were also brightness, flowers, and the song of the Wind, so clear and joyous that she longed to run forward into that different, though beautiful, world. Instead, the Breath of Life brought her to a gl
ade.

  Many clusters of rocks were to be found in the Forest: some standing, others lying, a rare few containing many stones. But none of the groupings Falice had seen was kin to the one that faced her here.

  The Stone was taller than she—perhaps only the tallest of the Sasqua could have ever stood equal to it. Partway up the side was a round hole nearly as big as Hansa’s two sturdy fists clasped together. The rock was light gray and strangely bare of any crust of moss ortrail of vine. The most curious thing about it was the sparks of light—of every color she had ever seen in bush, flower, tree, or beast—that bespangled its surface. And these were in motion, as if they were fireflies that used the Stone as a hive.

  The Wind, which had brought her here, withdrew. She felt its presence; but it had ceased all sending to her, for what she would learn here would not be of its teaching.

  Slowly Falice went forward. Twilight was gathering fast, and the sparks on the rock face appeared to adjust themselves, becoming brighter. The hole in the center remained dead black, as though a tight cover had been fitted over it.

  At last, feeling a little dazzled by the constant play of the lights, the girl dared to raise her hand warily and touch the Stone. It was warm under her fingers, almost as if it were the living flesh of a hand that had been reached forward to draw her closer.

  The hole held her now. She wanted to see what lay hidden within its miniature night. Placing both palms flat against the Stone, the girl pressed herself yet higher. There came more warmth.

  She rose on tiptoe, her right hand moving toward that shutter of darkness. Now the Wind rose again, enfolding her yet not forbidding her to do what she wished.

  Falice rested her forehead against the top edge of the hole and stared into its depths.

  In his cell-like room, the youth stretched his arms, then winced. Irasmus never used the power of the wand on him; however, the wizard had a cane capableof raising wheals that sometimes took days to fade. Two candles stood sentinel at either side of the narrow table at which the boy sat, and they burnt with the unusual brilliance of all those the Master dealt out to him. Between the candlesticks lay a book, opened to a page whereon diagrams were drawn in red and black. These figures were also emphasized at their points of meetings by lettering the youth could read but which made no sense.