In the Shadow of the Bear

by David Randall

  “But he did mean to save you,” Sorrel said more gently. “Clovermead, think what it will do to him if he discovers his sacrifice was in vain.”

  “I know it’d be terrible,” said Clovermead miserably. “He’d feel hot and cold and like crying, and not caring whether or not he died. Same as I do now.”

  “Ah? You are not just playing at being the heroine? Perhaps you are playacting a tale of derring-do, Clovermead. Perhaps this is a fancy from your books?”

  “Maybe it is,” said Clovermead. “I don’t know. It isn’t any sort of fun and it doesn’t feel like an adventure. I feel miserable. I feel like I have to try to rescue Daddy, and I feel like I don’t have any choice. Some ways, I’d rather ride off to Queensmart and tell myself he was going to come join me someday and that Snuff was just an evil dream. I can’t.

  “And also”—this was the hardest to say—”I didn’t know about this brooch, or that Daddy knew Snuff, or anything, till after you’d left Ladyrest. Then when I thought about it, I realized I don’t know much of anything about Father. And he won’t tell me anything either. I’ve been so angry at him. I always trusted him. He was a rock, and I could be silly and wild because he was a rock. If I went into Gaffer Bolts’ land to tickle his sheep, or I pulled Card Merrin’s hair, or I broke a pot, or, you know, slipped into a pilgrim’s room, I could always come back to him. He might be stern and he might punish me, but he was always there and I knew I could count on him. Now if I try to lean on him, there’s nothing there. And I know Daddy loves me, but still I feel so angry at him. The anger comes and goes, and when it’s in me, I feel like I could let him die.

  “I think—I’m afraid—if I don’t even try to rescue Father, if I just let him die, it’ll just be because I’m so angry with him, and that would be about the lowest thing I could do. Don’t you think? If you were me, wouldn’t you still try to rescue your father, Sorrel?”

  “A fascinating and terrible question,” said the Tansyard. “One to answer another day.” He fell silent again. “I will help you,” he said abruptly. “I will be a fool and I will dare even an army of bears.” He laughed sourly. “How quickly my service to Chandlefort disintegrates! I am a bad servant to Lady Cindertallow.”

  “You aren’t the first bad one she’s had,” said Clovermead. She slumped and felt exhausted. “Turn east. Boulderbash said we’d find Snuff in that direction, heading south.”

  Sorrel turned Shilling’s head away from the setting sun.

  Chapter Eleven

  Steppe Tales

  Sorrel and Clovermead rode down from the Salt Heath into a land of flat marshes, ponds, and the occasional low and cedar-covered hill. They saw a half dozen villages scattered among the ponds, each a cluster of high-roofed log cabins that perched on stilts in shallow water a careful twenty or thirty feet from the shore. Clovermead watched enviously as laughing children skated on the iced-over ponds near the cabins. Farther out brawny men with iron-spiked clubs skated sentry around their villages. Sorrel kept a healthy distance from the villages and rode Shilling along the snowcapped crests of the hills, looking from each summit for signs of Snuff’s passage.

  They found the wake of Snuff’s horsemen at day’s end. They had left a trough through the snow ten feet wide, smashed and dirtied by half a dozen horses. The horses had been galloping, and their hoofprints were far apart. Their trail seemed to Clovermead a filthy wound on the snow-clad world. It slashed south through open country, and to either side Clovermead saw the occasional tracks of foxes and rabbits. Their footprints never crossed the muddy furrow. No animal walked where Snuff had ridden.

  They followed the trail south the next four days past more iced-over ponds and distant villages and over hills that lengthened into long ridges. The ridges grew higher and higher, till they became palisades that heaved toward the sky. Full-grown and stately cedars and oaks crowded thickly on every height. Far away Clovermead heard wolves howling. Dark, snow-laden clouds of the north grew closer and more huge. The nights were dark; the moon was gone.

  On the fourth night the new moon rose in the sky, a hair-thin sliver that lit the snow to gleaming silver. The stars shone in a jet black sky, and the air was bitter cold. At the edge of a pond Sorrel and Clovermead huddled around their fire. Sorrel’s lips were frozen purple, but Clovermead was quite comfortable. She had grown a light pelt of fur underneath her clothes to keep her warm. It seemed very natural to her, more familiar than her skin. They heated a perch in the flames. Clovermead bolted her portion, wishing it were still raw.

  By the firelight Sorrel touched Clovermead’s golden tresses with his finger. “They are so very pretty,” he said musingly. “But they make you conspicuous, Clovermead. If we are Snuff hunting, it occurs to me that we ought to take counter-measures and disguise you.”

  Clovermead curled her fingers through her hair. “How?”

  “We must cut off your hair,” said Sorrel.

  “My hair?” Clovermead let her claws grow long. She sliced her paw through her locks and the hair whispered off. Twenty inches of golden hair suddenly lay in her palm, and she snarled with joy at the power of the stroke. “What else, Sorrel?” asked Clovermead.

  “Dear Lady, help me,” Sorrel whispered. His eyes were round and large, like prey. His teeth chattered and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his throat. Clovermead longed to catch it in her teeth and bite down. “Clovermead, what is happening to you?”

  “I’m growing up,” Clovermead said. She growled and flung the hank of yellow hair into the fire. It flared up, charred, and was gone. The sudden stench of her locks wafted into her nostrils, and as they burned Clovermead could smell summer days and Goody Weft doing the laundry and herself sneaking outside to climb a tree and Waxmelt chopping wood at Ladyrest. She smelled her past blacken, and suddenly she was crying, her body racking with sobs. Her fur vanished and she was left cold and shivering. She could not move and was limp as Sorrel awkwardly put his arms around her. She buried her face in his shoulder and bawled till no more tears could come. His arms warmed her.

  “I’m sorry,” Clovermead gulped. “I’m not usually like this. I’m brave and resourceful and bold. I’m not a weeper.”

  “Nor am I usually scared out of my skin,” said Sorrel. “You terrify me, Clovermead. Even crying and huddling. You are not just talking to bears, no? You have a bear nose and bear claws when you want them?”

  “I didn’t want them,” Clovermead whispered. “They just came to me.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Sorrel. “Will more bearish body bits just come to you? Will I wake one morning and find no Clovermead at all by me, but just a bear?”

  “No!” cried Clovermead. But the bear tooth laughed. “Maybe. Oh, Sorrel, I don’t know. I’m scared. I think I want a little bit to be a bear. I think I want it more the longer I have the tooth. The tooth wants . . .” she fell silent.

  “It desires that you should be a bear?”

  Clovermead nodded.

  “Miss Clovermead, perhaps this would be a good time to throw away your tooth.” Sorrel cleared his throat. “While you still can. We told stories of such transformations on the Steppes. It is easy to become an animal. It is harder to regain human form.”

  Clovermead reached for the tooth. It would be easy. She could bash a hole in the ice and drop the tooth down into the waters below. She would ride away and leave the fur and fangs and claws behind.

  How will you rescue your daddy without me? asked the tooth. You can’t, little girl. Think about that. And then it said: The little girl weeps. The bear will never cry. Do you want to weep all your life?

  No, thought Clovermead. Yes, thought Clovermead. No, thought Clovermead. I don’t mind being a bear for ever and ever, just so I never cry again.

  “I have to keep it,” Clovermead said to Sorrel. “Just a little bit longer. I’ll get rid of it when we’ve freed Father.”

  Sorrel gazed for a long minute at Clovermead. She tried to meet his gaze, but she could not. She softly growled her d
iscomfort.

  “I would not take the risk myself,” Sorrel said at last. “I would try to rescue my father, yes, but without the tooth.” Clovermead said nothing and Sorrel shook his head. “I have told you what I think. Well and so. Clovermead, you are still familiar, chop-shanked and all. I think we must disguise you further. Please wait here.” Clovermead stared moodily into the fire while Sorrel walked into the darkness. Her tears dried on her cheeks. She licked her tongue against her teeth, and her claws clacked against the ground.

  After fifteen minutes Sorrel came back with a handful of mossy bark, dark clay, and roots. “Hair and skin dye,” he explained. “We use these on the Steppes, on raids, to camouflage ourselves against the grass, and then to leap up and whoop, and shock our enemies. No one will know you when I am done.”

  Sorrel blended the ingredients in a small pot of water, then stirred and heated them. When the mixture was ready, he gently bent Clovermead’s head upside down and lowered her hair into the pot. His fingers teased out and rubbed stain on each strand, and then on her face and hands.

  Clovermead leaned over the pond’s still waters and looked wonderingly at a strange boy reflected in the firelight. His hair was black and his skin had been tanned in a ferocious sun. Only his sky blue eyes remained from the familiar girl she had seen in Ladyrest’s mirrors.

  “You are very like a boy of the Green Spike Horde,” said Sorrel. “Sometimes we meet them in winter, in the southern Steppes. They sing that their ancestors came from the far south, beyond the Loamrest valley and the Astrantian Sands, from a land of lions and hideous horned beasts and striped horses. You can remember that? That you are of the Green Spikes?”

  “A boy of the Green Spike Horde,” Clovermead repeated. “I’ve always wanted to wander in disguise. Sir Auroche in the Heptameron disguised himself as a blind beggar and was very convincing in the role until he triumphed at the archery contest of the Bailiff of Silkweavery, which, as the Bailiff said, ‘Hathe notte synce there were bowes and Bailiffes / Beene ever wonne by eyelesse caitiffes.’ Do you think no one will recognize me?”

  “So long as you do not grow fur,” said Sorrel. “Nor claws.”

  The bear tooth howled with laughter. “Don’t worry, Sorrel,” Clovermead said with a chuckle. “I won’t show my teeth till the time is right.” Sorrel made the crescent sign against her and Clovermead grinned at him. She settled down again by the fire and Sorrel sat down by her—not too near. Clovermead looked to the southeast. “Why did you leave the Steppes, Sorrel?”

  “I had no choice,” said Sorrel. He swallowed the last of his fish.

  “Did the Cyan Cross Horde exile you?”

  “This is not your business,” Sorrel said.

  “I’m always curious, and nothing ever is my business. Father and Goody Weft said that to me all the time. Sorrel, I wasn’t asking just to be nosy. I want to know why—why you work for Chandlefort. And why you’re willing to stop working for them to help me find my father. And why you’re scared all the time, but not scared enough to leave me. I’m terrified of me, of the tooth, but you don’t go. Why?”

  Sorrel smiled faintly. “Our Lady’s Judgment must be like this. She will ask me, ‘Why, why, why? Justify your life, young Tansyard,’ or perhaps old Tansyard if I am lucky. I will have to answer her. But you?”

  “Me you don’t have to answer,” said Clovermead. “Whatever the reason, I’m awfully glad you don’t run and leave me alone.”

  “I ran before,” said Sorrel. He looked in the fire at nothing. “From the soldiers of Low Branding. From the bear-priests. From the bears.”

  “What happened?” asked Clovermead quietly.

  Sorrel looked at Clovermead long and steady. His eyes glittered with sorrow. “Much.”

  “Tell me,” said Clovermead. Around them the snow began to fall again.

  Sorrel laughed unsteadily. “If you wish, Clovermead. I will tell you of the destruction of the Cyan Cross Horde.”

  “When I was a boy, too young to ride alone, there were only two places in the world for me. The world itself was much larger—there were mountains and hills and moors on all sides of the Steppes and on the Steppes themselves the endless plains and rivers—but there were only two places. One was holy Bryony Hill. The other was Barleymill, where demons dwelled.

  “The Cyan Cross Horde would spend the winter in some southern stretch of land, camped under the Farry Heights. Then we would trade with merchants come from the Loamrest River towns. Summer we spent lazing along the slopes of the Reliquaries, where Ryebrew merchants would come to engage us in other buyings and sellings. Spring and fall we spent in constant motion in flat land wider than the sky, riding and hunting and joyfully whooping to be free men and women in Our Lady’s Garden. We were the Cyan Cross Horde, seven hundred fifty families strong, the proudest Horde upon the Steppes. Gray Bar and Green Star and Red Diamond and White Crescent and Yellow Square each thought itself the proudest Horde, but they were incorrect. Cyan Cross had Bryony Hill.

  “The rest of the Steppes were not places. Grass grew tall one year and was burned in prairie fire the next. Poplars flourished, then were struck by lightning. Rivers flooded, their banks burst, and they set themselves down in new courses. Back and forth we wandered, and where we had been, where we were, where we would be, we did not exactly know. We did not care to know. In our forgetting, the Steppes were always new and doubly to be enjoyed for each surprising rediscovery.

  “But Bryony Hill was ours. It lay on the western edge of the Steppes, due east of Low Branding, with only a small strip of grassland to separate it from the southern end of the Harrow Moors. It was a perfect hill—an even cone, the only hill in the world fashioned by Our Lady’s own hand. No tree grew on Bryony Hill, just the long, lush grass. The first and last building ever built by Cyan Cross stood upon the summit. It was a temple, an amphitheater of white marble the Horde had bought and pilfered from Low Branding centuries ago and laid in the earth with their own hands. We would spend spring equinox and fall equinox at the white marble temple of Bryony Hill, to watch the sun by day and to watch the moon by night. We prayed to Our Lady to preserve for us fresh wind, healthy horses, and the Freedom of the Horde. We conducted songs and rites of which I should not speak. At dusk our Shaman-Mother would look into the clear blue pool in the center of the amphitheater and foretell the future of the Horde.

  “Cyan Cross had fought against the other hordes for Bryony Hill ages ago, in the time of legends, and none ever took it from us. Then Queensmart had tried to lay claim to Bryony Hill and to all the Steppes. Cyan Cross gathered the Hordes for war, spearheaded the assault that slew four legions, and by our own hands and our own blood captured the Imperial banners. Cyan Cross still had those tattered, yellowed banners four generations later, when I was a child.

  “Barleymill was the place where we Tansyards did not go. It nestled in the southwest corner of the Steppes, beneath the curve where the Farry Heights broke from the earth, strode farther south, and wheeled eastward to bound the south end of the Steppes. For centuries Barleymill had been reputed an evil place. Before the Empire came, when Ryebrew and Barleymill were Linstock trading posts, Barleymill men took Tansyard boys and girls and sold them as slaves to Low Branding. The Empire ended the slave trade, Our Lady be praised, but it brought terrible things to replace slaving. In the hills by Barleymill the delving miner men of Queensmart found a vein of hwanka-velika—what do you call it? Liquidburn, lungpoison, quicksilver, mercury—what magpie farm-dwellers use to refine silver ore into silver, for your jewels and coins and other glitter-trifles. The Empire sent prisoners, debtors, and poor fools who thought they were immortal into the mines to hack out quicksilver. Many went in, few came out alive. Their bodies were buried haphazard in the plains around Barleymill. The corpses stank of acid, and the poisoned grass did not grow above their graves and we shied away from the evil place.

  “It was always a place of pain and death, and when the Empire grew feeble, it became a place that worship
ed pain and death. A new religion sprang up there, a dreadful heresy. Its priests came from seaside Garum. They worshiped bears and they cursed Our Lady. Then little Queen Almargent came to the Imperial throne too soon, when her mother died of plague—a cradle-child, not even walking—and there followed many civil wars in the Empire. Those years we were busy raiding Ryebrew and into Linstock, and bringing home many farmers’ steeds and cattle. When we looked again at Barleymill, the bear-priests ruled. They mined more mercury than ever and once more brought slaves to the city, from Linstock and the Thirty Towns and Selcouth. It was said they sacrificed some slaves to their bear-god. We would have erased these monsters from the Steppes, but already they were too strong. And they did not enslave Tansyards. So, grudgingly, we let them stay in peace, and we fled farther from the city’s charnel stench.

  “Those were the stories that I heard as a child. As I grew up new tales came to us. It was said that Barleymill and Low Branding had allied in war against distant Chandlefort, that the bear-priests marched in Linstock, that the claws of Lord Ursus stretched far. The Elders said to one another that this was a great evil, but at least the bear-priests were far from the Steppes. Perhaps they would come to a bad end somewhere else, as Our Lady willed it.

  “Then three years ago, the day before the fall equinox, we came to Bryony Hill and found a score of strange soldiers camped between the slopes of the Hill and the Harrow Moors. They had not touched the Hill itself, for that would have been intolerable desecration, but they had come insultingly close to its slopes. Their stinking, square camp was a scab on the plains, an ugliness to mar Bryony Hill and ruin our equinox festivities. The young men of the Horde wanted to attack them at once. I myself would have ridden alone to their pickets and sent a spear sailing, for I was the youngest of the young men, scarcely tattooed with man’s colors and eager to prove myself in battle. The Elders restrained us. ‘It is always good to talk first,’ they said. ‘We can kill them later. There is no honor in slaying so small a band without a parley.’ We young men yelled our frustration to the sky, but we obeyed our Elders.