Owlsight v(dt-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Not to mention that not even an idiot puts himself completely into the hands of people who already considered kidnapping and coercion,” Gentian said gruffly. “Cap’n Kero, some of us have been with you for a very long time, and the very last thing we’d do is leave you in the lurch. What we do agree on is that our Oath demands that we try to help these folk, and that the Oath comes first, even before our loyalties. And vow wouldn’t have it any other way. There’ve been plenty of your people who’ve been cared for by the Healers on the side opposite yours, and you know it.”

  “The other thing we agree on is that this disease is enough of a danger to Valdemar that we don’t dare ignore it and hope it sticks to the barbarians,” Nala said stiffly. “Whether you like it or not, we can’t leave until we’ve found a treatment, and we can’t do that without treating the barbarians.”

  “Even burning the camp and its occupants might not stop it,” Keisha put in, softly but shrewdly. “Since we don’t know how it spreads at all, some of the biting insects might well be carrying it now, and it will be only a matter of time before it spreads to us. We really do have to find a cure, or at least a palliative.”

  Kerowyn looked very sour indeed, but conceded their points. “Just promise me that you won’t do anything until after you’ve consulted me,” she added, with a look that told Keisha that if they didn’t agree, she would follow through on the threat to truss them up like dinnertime fowls.

  She got that promise - from everyone but Keisha, and Keisha could hardly believe it when she didn’t seem to notice the omission.

  “I hope it spreads by fleas,” sighed Nala when Kerowyn had left. “Dear and gracious gods, I hope it spreads by fleas, the way Boil-Plague does. Fleas, we can do something about, but who can stop the air from flowing?”

  Keisha got up for a moment and took a quick peek outside the tent. Then she returned, as the others watched her curiously. “I actually have an idea,” she said diffidently. “If you want to hear it.”

  “Go right ahead,” Gentian urged. “At the moment, we’re dry.”

  “If we could get the barbarians to send one of the sick people out, one of us could go into quarantine with the sick person. That way no one would be at risk except a single Healer.” She swallowed, then continued. “I figured I’m probably the best one to do that; you can’t send an apprentice, and you know that. You all say I have a really strong Gift, you all agree that I’m as good as any of you with herbs and medicines. I’m the obvious choice because I’m the easiest one to replace.”

  That started another argument entirely, with all three of them coming up with whatever they could think of to deter her from any such idea. The strongest argument against her plan was that she didn’t have experience in using her Gift, especially not against something deadly. “Oh, I agree that you’ve done very well so far,” Gentian half-scolded, “but that was against tiny infections, colds, belly-aches! Not against a fatal illness, not against some thing no one has ever seen before!”

  Keisha shrugged, pretending indifference. “Diseases work the same whether they’re mild or serious,” she pointed out. “A tiny infection and a rotting limb are the same. It’s just a matter of degree.”

  “The idea does have merit, though,” Nala said, after keeping her own counsel while the others argued. “It would keep infection from spreading to the rest, and it would keep the Healer out of the hands of the barbarians. I’ d be willing to try treatment on that basis. We’ve survived plenty of plagues before this; what’s one more?”

  “And just how are we going to get a volunteer barbarian?” Grenthan asked shrewdly.

  “We could ask?” Keisha suggested timidly.

  No one laughed at her, although she more than half expected them to.

  “Well, the barbarians have obliged me by falling in with my second choice of tactics,” Kerowyn sighed, as Darian belatedly scrambled into his place in the council-circle, feeling much better for a good, long sleep. “Your Hawkbrother scouts reported that they were building up walls around their camp and fortifying them; I sent a deputation out to them to see what they’d do. They didn’t meet my people with arrows, but they also didn’t show so much as the tips of their noses.”

  “Grand,” groaned Lord Breon. “We’ve frightened them, and now they aren’t going to move one way or the other.”

  “Not without a visitation from their miraculous Ghost Cat, is my guess,” Kerowyn agreed, and ran her hand along the top of her hair. She cast a speculative eye at Firesong, who shook his head.

  “Don’t evsn start on what you’re thinking,” he warned. “I wouldn’t create a Ghost Cat illusion for anyone under circumstances like this. Firstly, I don’t know how it’s expected to behave, and secondly, what if it is an Avatar? Are you willing to risk the anger of a god? I’m not! Not even one who’s working outside his own lands!”

  “It was a thought,” she replied wistfully.

  “A bad one,” he countered, leaving no room for further argument. “Why don’t you just set up a siege and hold them in place until they give up and surrender?”

  “They do have to eat, so they are going to come out at some point, but a siege under these conditions is far from ideal,” she responded. “It certainly wasn’t what I had in mind. And only their gods know what they’re planning in there; it could be anything. Remember, only a third of our troops have seen combat. All of theirs have.”

  There’s that sickness of theirs, too; what if part of their plan is to somehow spread it to us ? What are we going to do then? Darian was worried, and he wasn’t the only one, for he heard Lord Breon confide to Eldan in a whisper, “I wish I could just pour oil on that entire nest of vipers and burn them out.”

  “Perhaps we’re pushing them too hard,” Eldan said aloud, in reasoned, measured tones. “After all, these people have been through a very great shock in meeting us; they’ve had their lives threatened, and they’ve seen that we have animal spirits of our own. We meant to intimidate them; we may actually have intimidated them so completely that they feel they are in a corner. What we should do, I think, is to give them time. We need to cultivate patience in dealing with them. In fact, I think we ought to pull back all our visible troops, and leave only the birds as sentries.” He smiled thinly. “They’ve seen that we have birds who might well be totemic spirits with us; the birds standing sentry alone should be enough, because now they will never know when a bird is one of ours or just a simple forest creature.”

  Kerowyn shot him a strange glance, as if she hadn’t expected that from him, began to open her mouth, then closed it again, looking very thoughtful. “That’s got some merit,” she said, after a moment. “What do the rest of you think?”

  Darian kept his mouth shut; he had an idea of his own, and he wasn’t going to broach it. What he didn’t reveal, he couldn’t be forbidden to undertake.

  “Personally, I think that’s reasonable,” Starfall spoke first. “It’s not as if we’re under an arbitrary deadline to get this solved. We can afford to be patient with them.”

  “If they bottle themselves up, their own Summer Fever may solve the problem for us,” Snowfire added.

  “Harsh,” Starfall said, “but true.”

  “Maybe you aren’t under a deadline, but I’ve got Harvesting coming up, and my lady has a wedding planned. She’s going to take it poorly if it’s got to be delayed because we’re playing nursemaid to a lot of greasy, fur-wearing barbarians,” Lord Breon muttered, but he made no further objections.

  “They’ve come out of a terrifying situation, and just when they thought themselves safer, were met by more frightening people.” Eldan spoke as if he had thought this over already. “If we meet them with mercy, who knows how they will react? They could become the best allies Valdemar has ever had! Our ancestors were refugees, just as they are - and who knows, maybe our own forefathers were closer to being greasy fur-wearing barbarians than to us, their descendants.” He cast a glance at Lord Breon who had the grace to look a little as
hamed. “We have never refused a refugee because he came with a burden of powerful enemies, and even though the enemy this time is a disease, I don’t see why that should change our attitude.”

  “Give them at least three or four days,” Firesong urged. “That’s my counsel. Who knows, but maybe they’ve bottled themselves up to invoke this Cat Spirit of theirs, and if it is the Avatar of any reasonable deity, it should tell them to be sensible and go along with us!”

  “Oh, surely!” Kerowyn replied, with more than a touch of sarcasm. “I don’t know how many gods you’ve had to deal with in your time, but being sensible has not been on the agenda of many of the ones I’ve come across.”

  “Perhaps not sensible according to your needs and desires, Captain,” Snowfire said with absolute politeness. “But I’m certain it was sensible to those who worshiped those gods - always providing, of course, that the ones interpreting the gods’ will were honest. Case in point - Karse before Solaris.”

  “Huh. Good point.” She sat down and looked all around the circle. “So, pull back and patience it is. Anybody have any objections?”

  Clearly there were none that anyone thought worth mentioning, so Kerowyn declared the meeting at an end, and she and Snowfire left to meet with their respective troops and scouts and give them their new orders.

  The debate in the Healers’ tent had gone on for most of the day, and showed no signs of stopping. Nightwind had joined them, as the only representative of the Hawkbrothers, and she had concurred with the consensus that something would have to be done about the Summer Fever and quickly, before it crossed to the allies.

  “It’s summer now,” Keisha pointed out. “What if another outbreak starts among them? What do we do then?”

  “We’d have to impose some sort of quarantine, I suppose,” began Grenthan.

  “That could be difficult if we’re in the middle of armed conflict with them,” Nightwind said dryly. “Just how would we enforce it? Insist that only healthy people be allowed on the battlefield? Hold inspections for fever and sneezes before anyone can fight?”

  Keisha choked back an involuntary laugh at the absurd image that conjured up; no one else seemed to find it funny, except perhaps Nightwind herself.

  “I wonder - ” she started to say, then stopped.

  “What?” asked Gentian, who had become the default leader at this point.

  “Well, I just wonder why these northerners don’t have any real Healers of their own?” she continued, flushing, thinking that it was probably a stupid question. “I mean, the shaman seems to have done herb-Healing and that sort of thing, but no one uses the Gift. . . .”

  Apparently no one else thought it was a stupid question, because a wary silence descended on the group. Finally Nala cleared her throat uneasily.

  “In Karse, before Solaris, they used to test children for the Gift of Healing and sacrifice them if they were too old or too strong-willed to be indoctrinated into the priesthood,” she said slowly. “You don’t suppose that these barbarians do the same thing, do you?”

  “In Karse they also sacrificed children with Mindspeech, on the grounds that it was a mark of demons,” Gentian reminded her. “But the use of Mindspeech didn’t frighten these people. And I have very clear images from Tyrsell’s gleanings that the shamans have never used the Healing Gift in the way we do. I suspect that Healing is a Gift they either don’t possess or don’t recognize.”

  “If they thought it was an evil thing, they wouldn’t be looking for Healers,” Nightwind added. “No, I don’t think this is a case of doing away with children showing the Gift. Anyone with an untrained, unused Gift of Healing would just go off by himself to get away from the things he started to pick up from everyone else, and that’s hardly unusual behavior among these folk. From what I’ve gleaned, people split off from their clans all the time, either because of feuds, or jealous protection of a good hunting range, or basic dislike of others in the clan.”

  One of the apprentices cleared his throat; this was a young man Keisha would have picked for a scholar, not a Healer. “It makes more sense in a society like theirs for people who don’t fit to go off on their own. They’ll never find a mate, and dissension weakens the group.”

  A scholar’s reasoning if ever I heard it, but he’s right.

  “Still - wouldn’t at least a few of them learn what the

  Gift meant?” Nala asked. “I’ve known plenty of self-trained Healers.”

  “But those self-trained Healers knew not only that there was such a thing in the first place, but what it meant and what signs to recognize it by,” Nightwind replied. “Not only that, but think of what their lives are like, particularly now! With that much pain and illness all around them, children with the Gift might well shut themselves down completely just out of instinctive self-defense. They’d probably do so long before any other real signs manifested. It’s happened that way before, and if you don’t know that the bad feelings you are getting are coming from other people or that they mean that you can actually help those other people, you’d welcome anything that made them go away.”

  “There are times when I’d welcome it now,” Nala put in wryly.

  At that point, Darian arrived, with a message that made all of their debate moot, at least for a few days. “May I interrupt you?” he asked, poking his head inside the tent, and bringing with him a breath of cooler air.

  “Be my guest,” Gentian responded. “You aren’t interrupting anything that hasn’t been talked to death by now. We’re arguing in circles.”

  “The barbarians have shut themselves up in their camp, and the war council has agreed to pull back and let them settle for a couple of days anyway.” He joined the circle, squeezing in next to Keisha, who obligingly moved over for him. “The thought is that maybe we were a bit too good at giving them a scare, and that they may need some time to stew things over and figure out that we don’t want to wipe them out. Well, some of us don’t. Anyway, no one is going to do anything for the next day or two, or even three. Thought you’d want to know.”

  “That gives us some breathing room,” Gentian said with obvious relief, then looked around the circle. “Go think about these things, and we’ll talk them over tomorrow. Maybe a little sleep will give us a new direction.”

  Keisha already had a direction in mind, but she was going to need Darian’s help to make her plan work. She waited while the others went their separate ways, then said, before Darian could leave, “I’d like to get your opinion on something. May I borrow a little of your time?”

  “Of course!” he agreed, eagerly enough to give her a little thrill of pleasure. “Let’s collect some dinner, and we can talk while we eat.”

  At that point she realized that the chava and vegetables that had been passed around the Healers’ conference had worn off a very long time ago, and she was only too happy to follow his lead.

  He seemed to want real privacy as much as she did, for he found a place near the brook that supplied water for the camp, practically on top of a set of fist- and head-sized water-rounded rocks that broke up the flow, where the babbling waters effectively masked low-voiced speech. “I have an odd feeling that our minds are running along the same lines,” he said, managing to get his dinner eaten while avoiding talking with his mouth full. “So, what did you have in mind?”

  She stared at the water for a moment, phrasing her plan in her mind. “I think we ought to try and catch a barbarian,” she replied. “First of all, we need to be able to talk to them in their own language. We can’t do anything by just going through Tyrsell, not really. Maybe they’ve experienced Mindspeech before, but talking to them in their own language would make them feel more comfortable.”

  “You are either reading my mind, or we’re reasoning along exactly the same lines!” he exclaimed, with muted surprise. “And you are absolutely right, that’s precisely what we need to do. I had it in mind that we weren’t going to really learn what’s going on in their camp unless our watchers knew their ton
gue. But you have something more in mind than that, don’t you?”

  “We need to find out directly whether or not this Summer Fever is in their camp, and just what they expect a Valdemaran Healer to be able to do about it,” she told him firmly. “At that point, we’ll have a basis for negotiations, don’t you think?”

  “Negotiations or not, we do need to know if there’s anyone that can spread the Fever to us, absolutely.” He toyed with a bit of bread, his expression so opaque that Keisha couldn’t read it.

  “We aren’t going to get any of that from the leaders; they probably have some stupid code about fighting honor, and they’ll certainly have their status tied up in warfare. We’ll have to catch someone ordinary, someone who isn’t a fighter, who’d be perfectly happy if there wasn’t a battle, or at least wouldn’t be looking to start a fight,” she continued. “An old man, or a woman, perhaps.”