"Flint, it's a little cold for playing games, don't you think? Look at you, I can't find your beard for the snow!" His impish laughter skirled high above the wind's roar. "What are you doing out here, Flint? I thought you said we were to wait at the shelter. You know, you're really going to be sorry later. There might not be a fire, after all, and you're so wet you'll freeze solid. You should have stayed inside."
There were words, Flint thought later, to express his fury. And a pity it was that he could not have found them when he needed them; they would easily have melted the last inch of snow from the mountain.
"I should have stayed inside?" Flint took a quick swipe at the kender's head, missed, and slipped to his knees. "I should have stayed?" He flung off the hand that Tas offered him and climbed to his feet again. "I'd not be out here at all if it weren't for you!"
"Me?" Tas's eyes went round with surprise. "You came out after me? But I'm fine, Flint. I just went out for a look. I thought I might be able to see a wolf. Or not see one. They say they're almost invisible against a storm, you know." His eyes darkened for a moment with disappointment. "But I didn't see any. Or I didn't not see any. I'm not sure which. And I didn't get very far. You know, Tanis was right. You can hardly see where you've been out here. You certainly can't see where you're going. On the whole," he decided, reaching out a tentative hand to help Flint dust the snow from his back, "I'd really rather be inside where it's warmer."
The logic was too tortuous for Flint to follow, and he was too cold and wet — nearly frozen to death, he thought furiously — to work it out now. He turned and stamped back toward the shelter, growling and cursing.
Cold, but undaunted, frolicking like a half-grown pup taken to play, Tas scampered ahead. "You'll feel better once we get inside," he called back. "It's not much warmer there, but it is drier. And I've been thinking about my magic pipe while I was out looking for the wolves. I think I'd be able to find the music if I tried just a little harder."
Oh, fine, Flint thought, trudging stiffly behind, the dreaded pipe! It wasn't enough that he had to contend with blizzards and promises to people who haven't the sense to come in out of a storm, with brainless kender and wolves. No. On top of all of that had to be laid a "magic" pipe.
When he stumbled, shaking and wet, into the shelter he saw Tas sitting crosslegged and absent-eyed, hunched over his pipe. The high, tortured wailing that had tormented Flint all afternoon filled the air, rising almost loud enough to compete with the wind and the wolves' howls.
"The dreaded pipe," he sighed.
He returned to his task of coaxing a fire from the broken boards and fine, smooth blocks of his whittling wood. It would barely be enough to thaw his frozen clothing. It would not be enough to light the lost back to safety.
Tanis negotiated the gently descending slope as though it were a vertical cliff face, and slid to a ragged halt at the bottom. Sturm skidded past him, overbalanced by his pack, and dropped to his knees in a drift that seemed to swallow him to the shoulders. Tanis helped his friend to his feet. His stomach lurched in fear when he saw a dark red spot of fresh blood on Sturm's bandage.
"Don't stop!" he cried above the wind's scream. "We've got to go on!"
"Aye, Tanis, we do! But where? We're lost!"
They were. Or they might be. Tanis didn't know any more. He was fairly certain of his direction. This hollow was familiar, more filled with snow and drifts, but still familiar. Or was that only hope, the last thing inside him that hadn't frozen yet? He could not see ahead the length of his arm. Had they come to the shelter? Had they passed it? He couldn't think, and he did not see anymore how it mattered. Now it only mattered that they keep moving.
The deadly lethargy of freezing had been dogging them with patient tenacity. To give in now to aching limbs, to sit down just once to rest, to ease the burning of their lungs, the fire licking behind their eyes, would be to die.
And we'll not freeze to death an arm's length from that damned shelter! Tanis vowed.
But Sturm went down a few moments later and did not rise. He tried, foundered in a drift, and fell back. For a moment fury blazed so bright in his brown eyes that Tanis could see it despite the blizzard's concealing curtain.
He dropped to his knees beside his friend, shouted and tried again to pull him to his feet. He could get no purchase in the drifted snow, no grip with his frozen hands.
"Tanis, no."
How could he have heard Sturm's whisper above the wind's scream? Or was it that he read the protest in the boy's eyes?
"Tanis… take the wood… go."
"No! We'll rest. Just for a moment. We'll rest." There was more danger, he knew, in resting than in going on. The very wind that tore at them now would carry the scent of fresh blood to the wolves who must be trailing behind. But he, too, was not accustomed to abandoning his friends.
Tanis went down on his knees again in the snow and drew Sturm as close to him as he could, hoping to protect the boy from the worst of the piercing wind. Just for a moment, he promised himself. Just until Sturm can recoup.
So gentle is the paradoxical warmth that suffuses a man just before freezing, so entrancing, that Tanis did not recognize it for what it was. He only wondered briefly that he had enough body warmth left to feel, then closed his eyes wearily and forgot to open them.
The note, coming suddenly amid the squeaks and protests of the pipe, startled Tas. It was soft, gentle, and reminded him of the sigh of a mourning dove. He moved his numb fingers over the holes, drew another breath, and found the note again. And then he found another, higher, and a third, lower. Almost it was a tune, and Tas caught the change. He tried again.
There was a rabbit in the storm. Caught away from its burrow, too young to know that it must dig into the snow for its insulating warmth, it scurried this way and that, as though it might outrun the cold. Home! screamed through the rabbit's veins with the frantic pumping of panic-driven blood. Home! But home, a burrow snug and warm, smelling of good brown earth and the comforting odor of safety, was too far away.
Tas heard the rabbit's frightened squeak above the faltering tune he played. How could he have heard the rabbit's cry? He didn't know, but he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, let the pipe fall silent, and lost the image and the sound. Before he could think of absurdity, before he could decide that the pipe had nothing to do with the rabbit, he hunched over it again and continued to play.
There was a deer, its antlers almost too heavy with the snow's burden to bear. There was a mountain goat, foundered in a drift, its bleating protest wailing and lost in the biting wind.
Tas drew a sharp breath, knowing that the deer would soon go to its knees in surrender, that the mountain goat would thrash and surge against its snowy restraints and surely break a leg.
If his attention was a vagrant thing, his heart was a kind one. Poor rabbit! he thought, poor brave deer! He wanted, as much as he had ever wanted anything, to go out to find them, to show them a way out of the storm. He wanted this more than he'd wanted anything before. More, even, than he'd wanted to find the magic in his little pipe.
In Tas's mind there was something dark and still. It was a man — it was Sturm! And beside him knelt Tan-is! They might have been ice sculptures so cold and motionless were they.
Though it was no doing of his — and yet perhaps it was — a long ache of sadness drifted through Tas's music when he realized that they might be dead. Like the rabbit or the deer or the mountain goat, there was no way to tell where they were, near or far, no way to find them and help. There was only the pipe. He played, then, with all his heart and trusted to the magic that it would not be a song of farewell.
There was a rabbit in the doorway. Ears aslant, pink nose twitching, it paused for a second beneath the slight overhang of the roof as though asking permission to enter. Where he sat before a fire dwindled to meager embers and dying coals, Flint saw the ice frozen on its back, the snow clumped between its toes. Part of him sighed for pity, and part decided he must bid his wit
s goodbye.
And behind him the horrible squealing of Tas's pipe settled gently into a sweet, low song.
The rabbit moved then, hunched forward, and fell onto its side, eyes wide as though it could no more believe that it now waited a foot away from the old dwarf than Flint could.
The storm, Flint told himself, it's only seeking shelter…. Easier to believe that than to believe that his wits had frozen solid around some mad dream. Moving slowly, he reached his hand out to the rabbit. He had not Tanis's way with animals. That lad could call a bird to hand, silence a chattering squirrel in the tree with a whisper. Or so it had often seemed to Flint. But the rabbit accepted the old dwarf's touch and quivered only a little.
He gathered up the little creature in both hands, felt the quick race of its heart, and moved his thumb carefully over its broad feet. The snow fell away. Under the warmth of his hands the ice melted from the rabbit's back.
"There," he whispered, amazed. He turned the rabbit back toward the door. "Off with you."
But the rabbit did not, as Flint had expected, dart away in fear. It paused in the doorway, seemed for a moment to consider the storm, and turned, bounding back past Flint and into the shelter. Flint saw it scamper into the shadows behind him and vanish into the darkness. Tas, still bent over his pipe, looked up only briefly to laugh.
Puzzled, Flint turned back to the door and gasped. Looming like some dream beast was a rough-coated mountain goat. To the left of the goat, its antlers heavy with snow, a dark-eyed deer waited.
Dipping its antlers — courteous beast, Flint thought and so thinking abandoned his sense and logic — the deer stepped into the shelter. The goat, as though hanging back to await the passage of mountain royal ty, entered last.
Nothing Flint had ever seen was brighter than the delight shining in Tas's eyes. His pipe still in hand, the kender leaped to his feet, ducked around the deer, patted the goat, and scurried to the door.
"Flint! Look! Do you see? I brought them here!"
Flint shook his head. I can't be seeing this! he thought, stubbornly. And I'm not!
"It's the pipe! It's the pipe, Flint! Listen!"
Again that enticing, gentle song. Behind him Flint heard the thick flap of wings. He ducked only in time to miss being struck by a wide-eyed owl. Two white-bellied mice darted past his feet, saw the owl, and dove screaming behind Tas's pack.
"Tas! Stop!"
"No, Flint! It's the magic! They heard it! I wanted them to hear, and they did."
Magic? Flint turned this way and that, and everywhere he looked he saw what he knew he shouldn't be seeing. Sputtering protest, stammering questions, he received no answers from Tas.
The kender was on the floor again, bent over his pipe, his eyes squeezed shut in fierce concentration. He'd brought the rabbit and the deer. The mountain goat had heard and found him. And two mice and an owl. Soon, surely, his song would bring Tanis and Sturm.
Numbly, too stunned to know where to look first, Flint clapped his hands to his ears. After a moment he closed his eyes because there was a deer pawing at the frozen dirt floor, an owl preening its wings in the rafters, and a goat nibbling delicately at the straps of the dwarf's pack. He felt something soft and warm touch him and looked down to see the rabbit asleep against his foot.
He'd never heard that one of the first signs of freezing was a wild slipping away of the wits. But he imagined that it probably was because he still could not believe that what he saw was real.
Get up, the words whispered. Get up! Come back, they urged. Come back! Lies, they sighed. The cold is telling lies! Like dreams of a blazing hearth seen through frosted windows, the words wandered through Tanis's mind. Gently they coaxed and encouraged. Beneath the simple words danced the light, bright notes of a shepherd's pipe. Behind the tune, beyond the words, flickered images of a place where the cold had no power to touch him.
The wind, he thought, pulling away from Sturm. Or just my sanity slipping away…
But there was no wind. Its howl was silenced. And when he lifted his face to the night sky he no longer felt the snow's deadly kiss. Beside him Sturm moved, slowly, but with the deliberate care of a man marshalling strength.
"Tanis, do you hear?"
"The wind — it's died down."
"Aye," Sturm agreed, as though it had only just come to his attention. "That, too."
Tanis looked at him in surprise. "You hear music?"
"Yes. It sounds like a shepherd's pipe…" His words wandered away, lost in surprise and sudden realization. "Tas's pipe, Tanis! We must be near the shelter!"
Tas's pipe! But that poor, crippled little instrument, the "dreaded pipe" Flint called it, had never given Tas music this sweet. And yet, what other could it be? Tanis climbed wearily to his feet and helped Sturm to rise.
"We'll follow it," he said. "No, leave your pack. If the shelter is that close, I can come back for the wood. And I've still got mine." Home, the music sang,
come home…
Snow ghosts! The spirits of the storm-killed. Or so they would have been called in the faraway mountains of his homeland. Flint watched the eerie blue race of breaking clouds across the white mantle of the snow. He shivered, more from the memory of an old legend than from the cold. Behind him Tas's pipe faltered, then fell silent.
In an odd little exodus, as soon as the snow had stopped falling, moments after the wind finally died, Tas's strangely assorted menagerie of storm refugees had filed past him into the night. Still, even after the last creature had left, Tas had continued to play, hoping that Tanis and Sturm would hear the pipe's music, feel the call of its magic.
Magic! Flint thought now. The word felt bitter and hard in his mind. He told himself that he never had believed. Some wild coincidence, some quirk had led the animals to the shelter. It hadn't been, after all, any of the pipe's doing. Though he could still feel, in memory, the frightened race of the rabbit's heart against his palms, and later the confiding warmth of it where it lay against his foot. Nonsense! The poor little beast was too exhausted and frozen to care where it finally collapsed. He refused to remember the deer and the goat, the mice or the owl. He sighed and kicked at the blackened embers of the fire. We can go out and look now, he thought. He would not allow himself to think further. He did not want to consider what they must find.
"They're home." Tas's voice was oddly hollow.
Flint turned slowly, the skin on the back of his neck prickling. "What did you say?"
The kender's face was white, etched with weariness. But his eyes were bright with some pleasure or satisfaction that Flint did not understand. "They're home, Flint. They're back." He put his pipe aside. Wobbling to his feet, he went to stand beside the dwarf. He was tired, but it was the best tired he'd ever felt.
Flint peered out into the night. Two shadows intersected those pouring across the gleaming snow. They were darker and more solid than that weird blue flow. Snow ghosts?
Shivering, the old dwarf squinted harder. Not yet! he thought triumphantly. Not yet, they're not! But one of them was staggering, leaning on the other.
Flint grasped Tas's shoulders and hurried him back inside the shelter. "Stay here, Tas. STAY HERE. They're back!"
Tas smiled and nodded. "Of course they're back. I told you they were. They heard the pipe, they felt the magic — Flint! Where are you going?"
Yawning mightily, forgetting Flint's warning to stay inside the shelter, Tas retrieved his pipe and jogged out into the snow.
As he had for the past two mornings, Tanis leaned against the door jamb, smiling at the winter sun as though hailing a well-met friend. Beside him Sturm gingerly lifted his pack.
"You're certain you are well enough to travel?"
The youth nodded once. "Yes." He was pale yet, but the dressing covering his wound had come away clean with its last two changings.
"You did well, Sturm."
Sturm's solemn eyes lighted, then darkened. "No. I almost cost you your life, Tanis. I couldn't go on, and you stayed."
"I did. It was my choice. And," he said quickly, forestalling further protest, "it was a choice, at the time, of freezing with you or a few yards farther on. Where you did well was in another place altogether."
"I don't understand."
"You are a good companion, lad, and one I would not hesitate to travel with again."
Plainly Sturm still did not understand. But he took the compliment with a notable absence of youthful awkwardness.
In the silence fallen between them Tanis heard the beginnings of an argument between Tas and Flint that had become all too familiar these last two days.
"There was no mountain goat," Flint growled.
But Tas was insistent. "Yes, there WAS. And not only that, there was a deer — "
"There was no deer."
Grinning, Tanis went to join them.
"Flint, there WAS! You saw them. And the field mice, and the owl. And what about the rabbit, Flint? It slept against your foot all the time."
This time Flint made no firm denial. "Kender stories," he snorted. He glanced sidelong at Tanis and veered sharply away from the subject of magic pipes. "Are you certain Sturm is ready to travel?"
"So he says, and I think he is."
"I'd like to check that bandage once more."
Tas watched him leave, then reached over to finger a broken pack strap that had been giving the old dwarf trouble. "Look, Tanis."
"Frayed, but it should hold with repair."
"No. Look. It's not frayed. The goat chewed it."
"Yes, well…" Tanis smiled and quietly relieved Tas of Flint's small whittling knife. "Fell out of the pack, did it?"
Tas's eyes widened innocently. "Oh! I guess it did. Good thing I found it. Flint wouldn't have been happy to leave it behind. But what about the pack strap?"
"It looks frayed to me." He patted Tas's shoulder. "Come on, now. It's time to go."
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