In the long silence, Thornwing stood up, steel sword in hand. She was framed by a yellowing sky, for the tribe had talked through the night, and when she flung it high, it flashed in dawn light. The swordwoman’s raspy voice carried to everyone, mesmerizing them. “I say this! If Sunbright is driven out again, I shall follow him! He’s disrupted our lives by returning, and that is good, for we were useless as seals on ice pack. Chosen by blood and by the gods, Sunbright has recalled what we live for, who we have been, and who we should be. If he goes, I go, as does Blinddrum. A tribe of three living the old ways is better than a herd marching off a cliff because they’re too blind to see. I say this with blood!” And she slashed the sword across her palm and held up the dripping hand.
Without a word, Blinddrum took the sword, slashed his palm, and clasped Thornwing’s. Forestvictory rose, laid flesh to sword, and clasped. Her lover, Starrabbit, followed. Then Archloft and Mightylaugh, and Goodbell, who carried her sleepy children forward, slit their fingers, and clutched them to her bosom. So many people joined they clasped in a mob. Rightdove joined. Old Iceborn was helped up and joined, though he had to slash his withered hands three times to draw blood. Then Tulipgrace. Rattlewater, Leafrebel, and many others, but not all.
Magichunger and three dozen tribesfolk remained outside the ring. Finally Thornwing called, “You’ll not join us?”
“No. Not yet,” Magichunger hedged. “But we’ll abide by the majority.”
Thornwing nodded in acceptance, lowered her gory hand, as did the rest. “Then it’s decided” she said. “Sunbright is returned to the tribe, alive and under no sentence. And shaman, for we need one and he has the gift. Sunbright, welcome back. What need we do?”
Painfully, with help from his lover and his mother, Sunbright Steelshanks rose and faced them all, squinting in the now bright daylight. “Friends, I thank you,” he said. “As you see, the gods send us a new day for a new beginning, but it is not my place, as shaman, to tell you what to do, but simply to read the signs and advise. To talk, we must council. So I shall gather the proper materials, say the chants, and light the sacred fire. Then, together, we’ll decide our future.”
Chapter 11
The common hut was empty and cool, and smelled of smoke, ash, and sweat. Sunbright used a chicken wing to sweep the fire pit radially. Knucklebones squatted on her heels and watched. “You’re fussy as a nursemaid,” she said.
The shaman smoothed dirt, moved tiny stones, and said, “The fire must be laid just so, with the lines matching the compass and the tip pointing to the Sled, our northernmost star. Shamans are fussy. Ask my mother, who lived with one.”
The one-eyed thief frowned as he trickled grass in a triangular pattern, and gradually built a cone. “What I mean is, you take this shaman role seriously,” she said. “I thought a shaman was just a priest. That you just went through the motions to keep the congregation happy.”
“That’s a cynical view,” he muttered absently. He formed a tiny cone of twigs. “I wish we had blue sweet-grass and not just straw, but it must do.”
“I’m not cynical!” she snapped. “Well, perhaps a little. But this mumbo-jumbo—you’re just making it up, aren’t you? To keep people occupied?”
He stopped, put down his collection of herbs and sticks. “Yes and no,” he told her. “Yes, I’m making much of it up. I remember some of my father’s invocations, saw a little of what Owldark did, but no, I never had real shaman training. But there’s no one to teach me, so I perform as best I can, and improvise the rest. The gods don’t mind as long as you’re sincere.”
Knucklebones cocked one pointed eyebrow, and said, “Isn’t it presumptuous to speak for the gods?”
Sunbright sighed, and straightened his tiny fire cone with blunt fingers. “I don’t claim to speak for the gods,” he said. “If they send me visions and advice, I’ll pass it on. I might make mistakes, but someone must be shaman, and I’m chosen by the blood of my forebears and by happenstance. And the gods know our tribe needs help.”
“What about me?”
“Hunh?” Sunbright grunted, rocking back on his heels. Sunlight from the open doorway danced with dust motes from his sweeping. Knucklebones’s face was hard to see in the shadows, but he knew she was unhappy. “What do you mean? You’re my woman, I’m your man. We are together.”
“Together with your tribe. I feel like an outsider. I am an outsider! I share no blood with these people, and now you’re wrapped up in caring for your tribe, which is a giant family with old jokes and stories and songs I don’t know.”
Sunbright felt a pang at the hurt in her voice. “It’s no different than when you had a tribe in the sewers,” he said. “Mother and Ox and Rolon and them.”
“They’re dead, and the children scattered to the winds. My tribe was destroyed! How would you feel if that happened to you?”
Confused by her feminine switches in logic, Sunbright could only reach out and cuddle her close. He felt a tear on his bare shoulder, patted her back like a child’s, and said, “I’d feel alone and sad, as I felt when my tribe was lost, but you were kind and stayed with me, even when I was bitter and afraid and angry.”
“Yes, I did,” she sniffled. “Because I love you.”
“Yes, and I love you. Do you feel alone and afraid?”
“I don’t …” She pulled back to see his face, held it in her small, calloused hands with the many scars, and told him, “I’m not lonely when I’m with you, but suddenly you’re not with me. You’re either arguing with your tribesfolk, or lost in dreamland. I’m alone.”
The shaman hugged her, and she squeezed his ribs. “I love you, Knuckle’ ” he told her softly. “I must help my tribe, but I’ll try to keep you close. That’s the best I can offer.”
“It’s enough,” she breathed in his ear. “Just don’t forget me.”
They were quiet a while, until, finally, Sunbright said, “I must start this fire. And I need you to leave.”
Her single dark eye flashed at this new betrayal.
Sheepishly, he offered, “I must be alone for the ceremony. There are prayers to Jannath and Amaunator and such. And the fire must be lit at noon, and if the first spark doesn’t take I need to wait another day. It’s …”
“Fussy,” the thief supplied. “Very well. I’ll wait with your mother. She’ll understand, having been a shaman’s wife.”
An hour later, Sunbright threw aside the rotted hide over the door, cupped his hands, and warbled an ancient cry: “To council! To council! All adults, to council!”
Knucklebones rose from the shade where she’d waited, and smiled at his grin. The shaman gestured with a sooty hand at folks converging from all around.
“Look!” Sunbright beamed. “They’ve waited all morning to council and talk. To discuss the future and what we should do. It’s like zombies rising from their graves to find new life. There’s just one thing, though—I need to find us a direction.”
The thief squinted at his clouded face, and asked, “Direction for what?”
Sunbright moved aside to let villagers enter the common house. He cast his eyes over the rocky dunes, the brown mountainside, the shabby town in the distance, and the winking sea. “Where we should go,” he answered. “No matter what, we can’t stay here. I need to seek a vision.”
Now the thief frowned. “Isn’t that how you lost Whatshisname?” she asked. “Owlfluff?”
“Owldark. Yes. He went into the wasteland to find a new direction, and found only death. Yet I must follow, for we need the truth.”
“Fine.” Knucklebones shifted her belt on her hips, tugged her silver-wrapped pommel around, and said, “I’ll go with you.”
“No. A shaman always makes a vision quest alone. Dangerous or not. He needs to escape from distractions to hear the whispers of the gods …”
His vision grew distant as he stared at the Channel Mountains running off to the south. He didn’t see Knucklebones reach into a flat pocket, slip on her brass knuckledusters, and
ball her fists. She cooed, “Sunbright … If you can change and improvise customs, so can I.”
And hauling back knotty arms, she slammed him in the breadbasket hard, four times in four seconds. Sunbright gasped, clasped his stomach, and doubled over retching.
Knucklebones cooed over his wheezing, “New rule. From now on, a shaman making a vision quest may take one companion to see he doesn’t fall headfirst into a hole to be eaten by weasels. How’s that sound?”
Sunbright couldn’t straighten, but gasped, “I suppose … the gods … won’t object …”
“Good.” She kissed his horsetail and sashayed off, saying, “I’ll go pack.”
* * * * *
Dreaming, Sunbright flew.
He spiraled upward from the wastelands. Yellow rock and sand merged with green-brown mountains in the west, grasslands in the east and south, the silver-white sea in the north. His tribe’s wretched camp was no more than an anthill, a smear of sticks amidst rocks. In a hollow of the Anchor, he saw broken shells in the nest of a bald eagle. Nimble chamois jumped along a sheer slope. A whale spouted in the sea, blew spray onto a boat with slanted sails. A mule train plodded across the plains, a small dog yapped after bounding antelope. Buzzards flapped lazily over Patrician Peak, riding the updrafts.
As he rose higher, he saw into the depths of the fetid Myconid Forest at the foot of the Channel Mountains, where fungusmen with stone spears tracked a lazy giant lizard across a swamp. He heard the dinosaur hoot in disdain. Beyond the mountains, in the Marsh of Simplicity, he saw fishermen spook ducks from the water with slapping sticks so the birds plowed into hidden nets and squawked. A girl caught a salmon from a rotting dock, and it almost yanked her into the water before she landed it. In a shipyard in Zenith, two fire giants caulked a careened boat with thunderous mauls. Ores left the forest near the Nauseef Flow and crept toward a cabin where peasants tilled turnips. In the Columns of the Sky, two rams butted heads until one tumbled into a snowy crevasse. An elven couple made love in a glade near the head of the Gillan River. On the tundra, gaunt reindeer cropped moss along a glacier while the high sun sparkled on ice.
Sunbright saw all this and wondered. Was it real? Were these things true, and happening right now? Or did he merely imagine them? If all these events were true, then a human family would be slaughtered by marauding ores along the Nauseef Flow, and that ram would starve to death in the icy crevasse. Yet he could do nothing about either threat. Visions could be a curse, he was learning.
But if the visions were not true, then did this dream mean anything, or were the images as worthless as marsh gas bubbling up in his brain? And why did he fly? Where was he bound?
Black flickered at the edge of his imagination. A black with a sheen of purple. A raven’s wing. He flew as a raven, totem of his clan. Perhaps this was a true vision! Or perhaps it was just more brain-gas. Either way, he gave in and trusted the totem. He watched, and waited for truth, for falsehood, or for nothing at all.
Wings canted and the world banked from horizon to horizon. Sunbright’s stomach lurched. The Channel Mountains passed underneath, then the floating enclave of Quagmire, then a grove of drooping birches along the Watercourse where he’d once stood with Knucklebones. The Watercourse was placid in late summer, still and empty, idly rippling instead of roaring as in spring when the tribes gathered to fish salmon. Then the river fell behind, a silver trickle near Sunbright’s raven tail.
All was vaguely familiar, for the land turned to rolling grasslands dotted with horses, antelope, and deer. In a hollow between hills a mother mammoth and two yearlings lolled away the afternoon heat, their shaggy hair clotted with old mud and manure. More mammoths swayed and sauntered to the south, yanking up whole bushes with clever trunks and cramming them in their mouths. From a hill, a lone saber-toothed tiger crouched, only ear and eyes showing. Even flies settling on its rump couldn’t elicit a twitch.
Sunbright knew this scene from his childhood, for once a year the tundra barbarians crossed the Narrow Sea and met their southern cousins to fish and fight and joke and carouse and flirt. But of these southern folk, the clans of Tortoise and Saber-Tooth and Hellbender, he saw no sign. No one in the tribe knew where they were, another link to the past gone missing.
The phantom raven flapped on. Or perhaps it was a real bird, and Sunbright only saw through its eyes. Gray lumps in the distance rolled higher to form the Barren Mountains, with the dense High Forest at their feet. Yellow grasslands met gray mountains, met green forest. The whole world was laid out like Jannath’s Quilt. The shaman wondered about his destination, if any.
Then the picture turned half over, and he stared straight down. At the crux of three lands, grass, mountains and forest, stood the last mountain, Sanguine Mountain, so called because it bled red rust from a deep crevice in the rainy season. The phantom raven dived straight for the bloody crevice, until red-shot blackness filled his vision.
Faster they flew, and faster, until the world blurred and wind sizzled in the man’s eyes and made them water. Gasping, mewling, pleading, he urged the bird to rise, to bank, to shy away, but the linked visionaries bored through air like an arrow. Soon only black loomed. Sunbright heard wind along a rocky ridge. There was no escape.
They struck, smashing in a bloody gobbet of feathers on granite.
“Unnnhhh …” Sunbright teetered and fell. He banged his shoulder, felt the world roll away, as if swept in an avalanche, then tumbled on his face, tearing skin off his forehead. Frantically, he clawed for a hold, broke fingernails on stone.
Something caught his waist, his leg, his arm. Strong hands like iron, but small, cool, and capable. He stopped falling.
Shivering, sweating, Sunbright opened his eyes, was stabbed by sunlight. Something blocked the sun. A hand. Knucklebones’s.
“Are you all right? You were sitting on that mound, still as death, then you started groaning. I couldn’t catch you before you fell,” she said. “You’re bleeding!”
Gently, the elf-woman eased him onto his back. She ran for a blanket, and wrapped him snugly to stop his shaking. From a canteen she tilted water on his face, wiped away sweat and blood.
Sunbright craned his head to see, to orient himself. Oh, yes. They were six or seven miles south of the village, in the worst of the wasteland. Three days ago Sunbright had drunk his last sip of water, eaten the last scrap of meat, and mounted a low mound that gave a view in all directions. Then he’d lowered his head, and prayed, and waited, while Knucklebones patiently tended camp and potted rats with a sling. Then, after three days of broiling in the sun and shivering by night, a vision had come.
“I know—I know where we’re to go.” Sunbright creaked. He could barely speak, for his tongue was swollen from thirst. Knucklebones cooed and trickled water in his mouth. But his thirst for knowledge was greater. “Sanguine Mountain, with a cleft like blood, where the grasslands end, and rise to mountain and forest.”
“And what will we find there?” she asked, bandaging the scrape on his forehead.
“I’ve no idea,” he rasped, then accepted more water. “It’s the place. A raven showed me. Our fate lies there.”
Knucklebones frowned, blew out her cheeks, combed his hair with her fingers, and said, “I believe you. I just hope you can convince the tribe.”
* * * * *
Rengarth Barbarians were never easily convinced.
They argued for days until the shaky rafters of the common house rang. Smoke from sacred pipes was blown back and forth by shouts, accusations of cowardice and betrayal, threats and challenges, fistfights, scoldings, tears, pleas.… Talk went in circles and off on tangents. Stories were recounted and corrected. Prayers were offered.
Time and again, the argument came down to someone shouting, “We must go because we can’t stay here! To live on foreign soil will be the death of our tribe!”
“All right,” bellowed Magichunger, the loudest, “but why go the path Sunbright suggests? He’s not a real shaman! He knows nothing! The go
ds wouldn’t speak to him. We might as well follow a blind mole as go his route.”
An angry chorus shouted him down while others agreed. More shouting went on outside where the walls of the common house had been removed. Anyone who’d killed an enemy or born a child could speak in council, and over three hundred barbarians gathered every night. Someone snatched the speaking stick from Magichunger and thrust it into Sunbright’s hands.
“Tell them again!”
Reluctantly, Sunbright held up the speaking stick, just a plain stick with a skunk’s skull atop. Yet when raised, only the wielder could speak. As if by magic, the council hushed. Sunbright suppressed a sigh. “I don’t claim special knowledge,” he said evenly, “but I made a vision quest, asking the gods for a destination. I was rewarded with a dream of Sanguine Mountain. The message—from the gods, not me—is clear. We should go there.” He lowered the stick as if it were suddenly too heavy.
Someone amended, “And we can’t stay here!”
“But how do we know?” someone hollered, and the wrangling ran around the circle again.
Sunbright slumped on the floor of the hut. Cross-legged, his knees toasted at the council fire, yet toes dug his kidneys. The room was packed, and steamy as a sauna with charged bodies. Knucklebones, who’d been silent for days, took his hand to rest on her knee. “How much longer will this go on?” she asked quietly.
“Forever, I fear,” sighed the shaman. “You can’t believe how hardheaded barbarians can be. My people don’t remove rock slides from a trail, they just lower their heads and bash through.”
“I believe it, but tell me …” the thief said, more loudly now because of the noise. “… that blood oath that Thornwing started that night. Most of the tribe swore with her, right? But what did they swear to do?”
Mortal Consequences Page 14
