Watcher of the Dead

by J. V. Jones

  He cooked for her later and she ate with appetite and appreciation, grinning and asking for more. He was delighted. To sit opposite her across the fire and watch light from the flames shimmer across her skin seemed like a gift. When she shivered, he brought her his cloak to keep her warm.

  “This is beautiful,” she said, running her fingers across the soft midnight-blue hide. “Is it Sull?”

  “Yes.” It might have been the first word he spoke to her.

  “And the knife and bow? They’re Sull too?”

  He did not understand why this mattered.

  Perhaps something in his face warned her off, for she said, “It’s not important. We’re here. We found each other.”

  Watcher knew he had not found her so said nothing.

  Rising, she went to tend the pony. He used the time to feed the fire and reshape the cedar bed so it was wide enough for two. The stars were out and there was no moon. Far, far in the distance he was aware of a moon snake winding north. He didn’t pay it any heed. It had sensed him. It would keep away.

  The girl returned to the fire and brushed out tangles from her hair. “It took a long time to get here. I lost track of the days.”

  Watcher remembered marks scraped on a cage and then a stone wall. Her words could have been his own.

  “Do you know how I found you?”

  He shook his head.

  Smiling softly she looked him in the eye. “It was khodo, the magic of my homeland.” She raised her fist to her mouth and mimed biting it. “Tooth and hand. Do you remember?”

  He did not.

  “I bit you. I struck a claim.” She was watching him carefully. He had nothing to say in response but this did not appear to worry her. “In Hanatta when a woman wants a man she bites his left hand. If there is no prior claim, khodo may occur. And then when the man and woman are parted for the first time the woman will know where he is.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t work the other way. It’s women’s magic. Very strong.”

  He stood and took her to the cedar bed. He understood from her words that she wanted him and that was enough. She kissed his face in the starlight, covering every part of it with tiny little brushes of her lips. They fell asleep.

  He awakened before she did, and he was happy to lie on the cedars with her warm, fragrant body next to his. When she stirred they made love. He wanted to crush her and keep them both in this moment.

  Already he knew she had come to bring him back.

  Still, he could not help himself. As he washed in the pond, he made plans. He would need to hunt more. He could live on small, lean game but it would not do for the girl. He would bring her deer, fat with spring grasses. And he would use their hides to make a tent. The pony meant they could carry more, and he wondered if he should chop some logs. It occurred to him the girl might have a hand ax in her pack. He turned to call her.

  She was standing by the small pile of his possessions. She had drawn Loss. When she realized he was looking at her, she hesitated, froze and then raised her chin defiantly. The sword was so heavy, she had to rest its tip on the ground. “I wanted to look.”

  “Put it back,” he told her.

  He watched as she struggled to return the blade to a sheath that had not been made for it. Leaving the water, he went to help her.

  “I’m not sorry,” she said when he took the sword from her grip. “Anyone would be curious. It’s the one, isn’t it? The sword from Red Ice?”

  He sheathed the sword and closed his eyes. He wished there was a way to stop hearing what she said.

  “What happened to Addie Gunn?”

  Her heart was four feet away and there was nothing but clear space around it. He could destroy it in less than an instant, make it stop. Aware that his hand muscles were twitching and afraid he would do her harm, he laid the sword on the grass and walked away. Did she not understand that the words that hurt most in the world were all names?

  As he passed the campfire he picked up the bow and arrow case. He could not recall the last time he had wanted to hunt large game.

  He moved east, crossing the creek upstream and heading deep into the woods. It was spring and the days were growing longer. Animals were on the move. A lynx was padding through the trees on the scent of a newborn fawn. Pack wolves to the north were idly tagging a moose, and a fox was returning to her set with something still alive in her jaw for her kits. Watcher kept moving. He had perceived a powerful deer heart to the north and hoped it might be a stag.

  It was. Watcher stalked it for hours through pine and hardwoods. The Sull bow did not have great range so he had to get close. For the final six hundred paces he was belly-down in the pine needles, bow parallel to the ground, drawn and ready. The stag was a tawny red color and its antlers formed an eight-foot spread. Its heart pumped blood around its body at a swift and elevated rate. It suspected the danger. Its head came up as Watcher angled the bow. It leapt into motion, but Watcher had anticipated the movement. He claimed the heart.

  He ate part of the liver while it was still warm. While the carcass was draining he made a travois from spruce saplings, cutting and weaving the wood. It was good, hard work but he did not enjoy it. When the stag carcass was loaded and secure, he dragged it back to the camp.

  It weighed twenty stone and took half a day.

  Sweating and weary he approached the camp. The girl came tearing toward him, her face streaked with tears.

  Dropping the poles of the travois, he waited for her to come. She was shaking as she fell into his arms, breathlessly murmuring his old name. “I was so frightened. I thought you’d gone.”

  He wondered what had happened to her magic. Had she said it worked only once?

  She kissed his neck and he felt her tears against his skin. “I’m sorry I unsheathed the sword. Forgive me.”

  Taking her by both shoulders, he set her a foot away from him so he could look at her. Her eyes were red and her skin had the blotchy look of someone who had been crying for some time. A little hiccup made her entire body jerk.

  “I love you,” she told him.

  He did not understand why. Because it was the only thing that was important, he said, “Why have you come?”

  She was beautiful and clever and he was not sure he expected the truth from her.

  “We need you. You can’t just live in the woods and forget about us. You have to come back and help us fight.” Watcher let her go and she stood, breathing hard in front of him. “You promised. You spoke an oath.”

  Watcher knew that oaths did not matter. They were words; they could not bind a life. He did not tell her because she was young and almost sincere, and the hard truths you learned for yourself.

  He looked over her shoulder at the little camp. The bed, the fire, the trail already worn between the camp and the water. This was a life worth living, a quiet, self-reliant life. He wanted to see the woods in summer. He wanted to lie in long grass and bake in the sun. He did not want to use the sword, didn’t want even to look at it.

  Why didn’t you drop it in the big river, then, let the current sweep it to sea?

  Watcher had no answer to that beyond, It’s mine.

  He returned his attention to the girl and decided it did not matter if she came of her own free will or had been sent. He wished she had come sooner and said nothing, or later when he was . . . ready.

  He smiled hard at that. Who would ever be ready to wield that sword for the purpose it was intended? Ready did not exist in such a world.

  He did.

  Do not forget who you are. Addie’s final message, the one that had not been spoken, claimed space in Watcher’s head. He heard love for himself and love for clan in it.

  Watcher stood in the forest and listened to the cardinals call and forced himself not to wish for another life.

  This one would do. He would reclaim it.

  At dawn the next day they were on the move.

  EPILOGUE

  The Steps to God

  YOU COULD NOT climb the Steps to G
od in a dog cart. The mountains men stubbornly called the Coastal Ranges were too high and treacherous for sleds. Glaciers and crevasses ate anything with two runners or four legs. And just because they could wait years for a meal didn’t mean you should forget and tempt them with something tasty like nine dogs and a loaded sled. Fools had been dying that way for centuries, dragged down into great holes in the ice with all their possessions plummeting around them along with their own good sense.

  Sadaluk No Ears, Listener of the Ice Trappers, wasn’t about to fall into that trap. He and Nolo had gone north instead of east, along the great ice ledges of the continent, across the Bay of Auks, the wastes of the Wrecking Sea and the Bay of Whales. Others lived here, not Trappers, but men and women who had the old dark blood in their veins and knew how to exist in the bear days of winter when the sun barely cracked the horizon and the skies were so empty they robbed your breath, warmth and life in that order if you spent too long looking up.

  Winter was done here, though, and the hare days of spring had begun. The sun spent hours in the southern sky, giving off a brilliant white light, but it melted only a small portion of the ice. Travel was harder because of it, for ice-melts were fickle things and if you thought you could predict their location, length and depth you were wrong. Nolo had good eyes but he still had much to learn. Sadaluk had little to learn but poor eyes. Together they managed. They spotted telltale slicks above the ice and the warning darkness of water below it. They sniffed for salt and the green scent of multiplying algae. Any Ice Trapper worth his sealskins knew it wasn’t sufficient to look and smell, but Sadaluk’s days of listening for weaknesses in the ice—cracks, whirrs, soft plops and even softer ticks—were gone and would never return.

  Nolo listened, but it wasn’t the same.

  Sadaluk was glad when they reached the Lake of Lost Men and could turn east. The inland sea was shrouded in mist and the sun rarely touched it. Even if it had, the Listener did not think there was enough power in the heavens to melt these frozen waters. The ice was old here and it had sunk its taproots deep. It made its own weather and dictated the length of its own days. Sadaluk had gone on a journey once, traveling south and east to meet people who shared interests with the Ice Trappers and to see something of the world for himself. What struck him was people’s misconceptions about frozen lakes. They thought them as smooth as glass, imagined that Sadaluk could climb onto his sled and skate into the sunset with barely a push from his dogs. “It is rock,” he had told them impatiently. “Ice makes cliffs and boulders.”

  He did not think they believed him. Either that or his language skills had not been up to the task. He would have liked to have shown them the Lake of Lost Men and said, “See. Here ice and land behave the same.”

  The lake was tough going and there were many days where he and Nolo had to carry the sled. You’d think the dogs would be grateful for the rest, yet they wasted their energy scrapping with one another with such fierce relentlessness that Sadaluk had to break up the fights. He was not gentle with his stick. You could not afford to be, this far north.

  No one lived east of the Bay of Whales. The world was empty here. Two men and nine dogs did not fill even its smallest cracks.

  It took them thirty days to traverse the lake. One night before they reached the eastern shore, Sadaluk had looked at the dogs and the remaining supply of frozen seal meat and perceived a shortfall. No Ice Trapper would keep a dog alive at a human’s expense, yet Nolo had argued for only a partial culling. He bit off his gloves and held out four fingers and wagged his head toward the sled. Who will pull it?

  Sadaluk had frowned until Nolo held out his thumb.

  They had four dogs now. Nolo had modified the sled so that it wasn’t much bigger than a child’s toy. Both he and Sadaluk worked it each day, pushing or pulling as the frozen waste rose and fell.

  Every day after they left the lake, Sadaluk woke in the morning and asked himself, Am I in the Want?

  He had never entered the great white desert at the heart of the continent. He was an old man. What did he know?

  The river they took east from the lake narrowed and branched and eventually failed. Nolo broke down the sled and used the runners to make stiff backpacks for himself, Sadaluk and the remaining dogs. The dogs, not realizing their own luck, fought the packs, yanking their heads to bite at them, and dragging themselves belly-up along the ground. They were sled dogs, not carrier dogs. The Listener could not fault them.

  Nolo slaughtered them and cached the meat. Sadaluk was not a man given to sadness, but the sight of Nolo building a pyramid of stone to mark the cache site gave him pause.

  He did not think either of them would be coming back.

  The Listener did not say anything—what good would be done?—but he did spare a thought for Nolo’s young wife, Sila. He thought about all the people he himself had left behind. He recalled the time many years ago when a great ledge of ice had sheared from the sea and slammed into the village. No one had seen it coming. No one had imagined such a thing could happen.

  Yet the ice had always been there in plain sight.

  Sadaluk knew that from now on he must be the one to watch the ice. When it moved, when it broke open, he had to try and block it. The white bear had bound him to this task. Could one man do such a thing, halt a force of pure destruction?

  The Listener did not know. But one man—two men—were better than none and that was why he had undertaken this journey.

  Loading their possessions on their backs, they left the cache site and hiked through a land of frozen, mounded gravel and dwarf trees. The sun moved exactly as it was supposed to, keeping to the south, and they did not realize they had entered the Great Want until the stars went missing that night.

  Sadaluk No Ears, son of Odo Many Fish, heard the sound of extinction in their absence. He stayed awake, listening, and at dawn he got his answer.

  Soon.

  He woke Nolo and they headed Want-east.