The boy staggered toward Joboam. He fell to his knees beside the body. With an effort that made the crowd groan he rolled the big man onto his back. 'See this!' he panted, pointing to the protruding hilt. 'Remember this. Heckram did not kill Joboam.
Elsa's Knife did!' He lifted Joboam's hands from the knife-haft, held one palm out to the crowd. Two swollen abscesses dotted it. 'The mark of treachery,' Kerlew intoned, letting the hand fall, palm up, onto the skins. Boldly the boy seized the pale knife handle, jerked it from Joboam's chest. A last leap of bright blood followed it.
'Blade ... calls to brother ... blade.' Kerlew panted out the words, his strength rapidly failing. Tillu tried to rise, but Heckram's frail grip on her wrist held her. The boy spoke on, his faltering words paced to his labored breathing. 'This sign Elsa gives you. The mark ... she left ... Behold!' A woman cried out as he pressed the bone blade against the cut he had earlier scored in Joboam's forearm. 'From this scar.' He was gasping now, each word coming with an effort. Pain bobbed his head. 'Elsa's Knife calls ...' He pressed his cupped hand against the wound. 'This!' He rose jerkily. In the hand he lifted, shining white and red, a fragment of worked bone. He lifted it high, hand shaking with the effort. 'The broken edge of Elsa's blade, where she left it to tell on her killer. Where Pirtsi saw her put it, though he dared not tell.' Pirtsi's head was nodding, his eyes wide, too fear-stricken to deny anything now. Kerlew was sinking, going back to his knees beside Joboam's body. 'Because then Joboam would tell that Pirtsi had accidentally shot Lasse, with Joboam's bow. Shot him, and in his terror, ran away, instead of offering aid.'
Pirtsi whimpered his assent.
Kerlew's head fell forward onto his chest, his child's face twisting with pain. He slipped to the skins, panting suddenly from lack of breath. He turned his face to Heckram, and as their eyes met, Heckram heard him say, very softly, 'And I am herdfolk, Wolf.' The words followed him down as he slowly spun into a darkness filled with a pack's wise howling.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was dark in the tent. She listened to them breathing, often holding her own breath to be sure she could hear them both. She was horribly tired, with a tiredness that was a pain in her back and head, but still she could not sleep. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw blood. Blood on blades of bone and bronze, blood trickling down Kerlew's ribs, blood that flowed from Heckram's wounds as if spewed forth by small gaping mouths.
Yet again she held her breath, listening for his breathing close beside her. It was still there, hoarse and rasping, but steady. As was Kerlew's lighter breath an armspan away on the other side of her. They both still lived.
This, she thought, is what other women have felt, as I knelt over their men and put my hands in their blood. This helplessness.
She put a hand out in the darkness, rested it gently atop his chest. She felt the stiffness of her bandages, and through them the warmth of his life. His breath ebbed and flowed in him still. The wavering slash of Joboam's knife down his ribs had not been so bad; it had been the puncture wounds that had frightened her, the deep stabs in hip and back that looked so small on the outside, but had done damage within. What damage neither she nor any other healer would ever be able to tell. All one could do with such an injury was to bind it closed and hope against fever. As she did now.
If only he would open his eyes, she thought to herself. As Kerlew had. He had been conscious, but silent as she bound up his chest. He had watched her, his eyes a stranger's, and made no sound as she washed and bound his wound. Stina, Lasse's old grandmother, had been right at her elbow, already waiting with a bowl of warm broth for 'the young najd.' In the darkness, Tillu shook her head suddenly. It was what he was, now. And ever would be. He was not her child anymore; that much she knew. But she also suspected that he was not what Carp had hoped he would be, either. From that, she took comfort. And from the steady beat that hammered in the wide chest under her hand.
'Tillu.'
She stiffened, then sat upright. 'I'm here,' she assured him. She touched his bearded cheek lightly. He turned his face to her touch so that his mouth brushed her hand. His lips were dry and chapped. Immediately she rose, to bring cool water in a dripping cup.
He could not help her lift his head and shoulders, but he drank thirstily from the cup she held to his mouth. She wanted to weep at how weak he was. Instead she eased him back onto the bed of hides. Then, even as she chided herself for making him talk, she asked, 'How do you feel?'
He groaned in reply, then took in a stiff breath. 'Kerlew?' he asked, and she realized he could not know.
'Kerlew will be fine. A knife score down his ribs, and some bones broken beneath them, but he will live. And will be up and around long before you are, I fear.'
She heard him breathe again suddenly, and realized the depth of worry she had just relieved for him. She sat for some moments beside him in silence. Just as she thought he had dropped off to sleep again, he spoke. 'He killed them all.'
'Yes. He did.' She went over the tally again in her mind. Elsa and Kari and Carp.
Rolke, too. And he tried to kill Ketla and Capiam and Kerlew. The depth of revulsion that rose in her surprised her. As did her astonishment at Kerlew's solving of the puzzle. She had held the same pieces as he had; why had not she known what he had?
She spoke aloud, filling in for Heckram. 'Back when the herdfolk were in the talvsit still, Joboam came to me. He had a festering wound in his forearm; I opened it and took out a piece of bone fragment. I thought he had been carving something that had broken, and sent a chip into his arm.'
'Elsa's ... knife.' It took him two breaths to make the words, and she sensed the importance to him of what she had told him.
'Yes. Only I never knew it. I set the bone chip aside, and never saw it again. Kerlew must have picked it up, and somehow figured out what it was.'
Heckram sighed his agreement. The silence stretched, and then, 'Rabbit?' he asked.
'I don't know. Some kind of a disease, passed on to whoever ate the meat. Or touched it, as Joboam found out too late. What I do not understand is why others have it now, ones who never ate the meat nor touched it.'
Heckram took a deep breath. Tillu waited. 'I killed. I will be ... set apart from herdfolk.'
'No. Oh, no.' She lay down carefully beside him, fitting her belly to his side. 'Kerlew said it was not you; it was Elsa's knife and Wolf who killed Joboam. Not you. I heard the talk as I was bandaging you. Several came forward to speak for you. But Capiam said it was not necessary. That the najd had explained all.'
He was silent then, and when she spidered her fingers lightly over his face, his eyes were closed. 'Sleep, then,' she told him, and lifted her face to kiss the tip of his ear. She thought briefly of Ketla. Tillu had insisted that she be moved to Carp's tent. It had given her great satisfaction to bed Ketla down in the lush furs, surrounded by the wealth that had paid for her misfortune. Capiam, too, probably slept there now. They would both live, or so Tillu believed, if they did not surrender to their grief. The unheard-of events in Capiam's tent had brought the other herdlords, eager to hear the tale, and had somehow increased his stature among them. He would live, she believed, to lead his people to the winter talvsit again, and for many winters beyond that.
She leaned her face against Heckram's shoulder, filling her nostrils with his scent.
Now she could close her eyes and see, not blood, but reindeer, a vast herd of them spilling across the tundra, as many as the stars in the night sky. She would follow them, in the wake of this man at her side. She imagined the reindeer running, their heads up, their antlers thrown back, leading them on forever in an endless cycle. Heckram would always follow them. And she would follow him, she realized, wherever he chose to go.
Kerlew muttered in his sleep, then cried out suddenly, clearly. 'If you would be Wolf's mate, learn to follow the herd.'
Beneath her hand, Heckram murmured an assent. Tillu snuggled closer, and closed her eyes to sleep.
KERLEW: THE NAJD
'You could have gotten both of you killed. You and Heckram both, and I would have had nothing in my life.' Foolish talk. 'The Wolverine could not have killed me,' he tried to explain. 'He could not stand against the Wolf and I.' She had only leaned closer and whispered, 'And don't think I don't know where that fragment of blade really came from.' He had given up talking to her then. She could not glimpse the greater reality.
Only the greater truth mattered. The blade had come from Joboam's arm; when was of no consequence. The herdfolk had needed to see it red still with his blood, so that they could accept the truth and be at peace with it. Pirtsi had needed to see it before he could admit the truth that was festering inside him. All had seen, and been convinced. All but Tillu. She alone still had no respect for him. She alone would not admit his powers. But he would teach her to. He grinned wickedly to himself.
'Najd?'
He opened his eyes slowly. It was a little girl child standing beside his bare feet. She was all big eyes and unruly black hair. She was very young, probably two years younger than himself. And very shy.
'What do you want?' he asked her gruffly. Her eyes grew bigger, her mouth smaller as she lifted a leaf cup into view. It held a red trove of early dewberries, probably the first ones she had found this year. She did not breathe as she offered it. He didn't reach for it. 'You are Kelr's daughter, are you not?' he asked her. She nodded once, looking scared. He held out his hand slowly and she placed the leaf-cup of dewberries into it.
He looked up at her through his lashes. He smiled at her slowly, watched her mouth widen with pleasure. Her own smile came cautious as a fox-kit peering from its den.
'My father, Kelr, sends me to tell you his eldest son breathes free now. He sat up this morning and ate.'
'Good.' Kerlew looked down at the cup of berries in his hand, and then measured half of them out onto his palm. He held the leaf-cup back to her. 'Take these to your brother,' he told her. 'They'll do him good.'
She stood transfixed. Then, 'Thank you,' she breathed, took the cup, and was gone.
Kerlew sat up as he ate the berries. Then he picked up the piece of carving he had been working on, looked at it, then set it down again. He leaned back, closed his eyes, felt the sun against his face and the light of it red through his eyelids. Carp would have demanded a better gift than berries, Kerlew thought to himself. Carp would have called him a fool to take so little. He opened himself, let the sounds of the herdfolk wash against his senses. Children shouted at their play, men and women yelled to one another as they worked with the reindeer, mothers called after children. He smelled the cookfires, the meat and fish drying on the racks, the musty smell of hides stretched to the sun to dry, the wild smell of the reindeer. The herdfolk were all around him. He felt them like a spider in its web feels the vibration of every strand. Another block of awareness tumbled into place. This was what Carp had been missing, why he had not cared when he set the sickness loose among them. Carp had not been herdfolk. Kerlew was.
Tillu's voice was leaking out of the tent. He could hear her nattering at Heckram, fussing at him because he had only risen from his bed yesterday, and today he was working at something. Kerlew smiled to himself, knowing. Heckram was stretching leather from a wolf's hide carefully over the old drum's frame. First he had marvelled at the workmanship in the old drum. Then he had shook his head over the old wood and said it would not take the strain. But Kerlew knew it would, and he had insisted. So Heckram worked on it now, fastening the leather down so carefully, stretching it as tight as might be, damping it, and stretching it again. Kerlew had grown weary of watching him, and had come outside to work on his own carving and to nap on the soft fox-skins that Capiam had given him. But again Tillu's voice broke in on his dreaming.
She was annoyed.
'Willow bark. That was all it was, no matter how long he chanted over it. Willow bark and salt. And to each one that came, he gave a portion of willow bark, to be taken for the fever, and salt, to make a poultice for the sores. The same things I had been telling them. Salt to draw the poisons from the abscesses, willow bark to keep the fever down. But now they noise it about as 'The Najd's magic,' and loudly tell me how much better they are.'
'And you are jealous.' Heckram's deep voice, the amusement in it even deeper.
'I am not. I only think, why cannot it be seen as it is? Why can't the folk see ...'
'Maybe it isn't that simple. Does it matter?'
Kerlew could sense her sigh of resignation. 'I suppose not. As long as they get better.
Capiam was better, yesterday. Ketla tends him well.'
'She has no one else now,' Heckram pointed out.
There was silence. Broken by Tillu's muttered, 'I suppose not.' She changed the subject suddenly. 'What are you doing?'
'Taking this to Kerlew. It's finished, I think.'
'Sit down. I'll take it to him.'
'No. I'm tired of sitting still. A glimpse of the sky will do me good.' He heard the sounds of shuffling, could imagine Tillu scowling over him as he stood. Kerlew turned his eyes inward a moment, grinned to himself, then wiped the smile from his face as the tent-flap was lifted.
'You walk like an old man,' he observed as Heckram crabbed out of the entry.
'Kerlew!' Tillu rebuked, and was ignored.
'I feel like an old man,' Heckram admitted. 'Here. What do you think?'
Kerlew accepted the small drum. He turned it over in his hands, looking at the creamy new leather stretched across the old frame, already seeing the figures he would paint on it, red and blue, reindeer and men and wolves. 'From Wolf,' he said to himself, and 'Yes, wolf hide,' Heckram agreed, not understanding at all.
'It will do. Luckily, you are better at this than you were at fighting.' He looked up at Heckram slyly, through his lashes as he asked, 'Did you learn anything from your fight with Joboam?'
'Kerlew!' Tillu, in angry rebuke. But Heckram only knelt slowly, and then sat beside him. 'Was I supposed to?' he asked in a voice breathless with pain. A sincere question, from a man who glimpsed his powers. No need to teach Heckram respect.
'Of course.'
Heckram's eyes were turned inward, unaware of the angry look Tillu was giving her son. 'I'd never fought a man before. Not like that. I'd never realized what it would be like to fight hoping to kill.' He looked at Kerlew with a strange respect. 'Joboam was better at it than I. I don't know why I'm alive.'
'Because of the magic. Because you are more herdfolk than you know. You thought you might be a man-killer. You aren't. You fought Joboam like you were wrestling a pregnant vaja. But for my magic, he'd have killed you. There is no murder in you.'
'I'd come to suspect that,' Heckram admitted grudgingly. He fingered his still swollen mouth. 'So I'm not a fighter. But you like the drum.'
'Yes.' Kerlew laughed his cracked laugh. 'You learn from me now. But I have learned from you, too. See?' He lifted his work into view. Already Heckram knew not to touch it, but only to look with his eyes.
'It looks like a wolf's paw,' Heckram said. Kerlew smiled at the uneasiness that tinged his words. 'Yes,' he agreed. He leaned suddenly, touched the carved wand to his mother's belly. 'The baby will be a girl-child. Name her Willow, for luck.'
Silence.
Then, from Heckram, 'What baby?'
Tillu fled, whirling away from them both and back into the tent. Heckram looked at Kerlew incredulously. He stood up much faster than he had eased himself down and limped after her, struggling with the tent-flap, and then demanding again, 'What baby?'
Kerlew heard Tillu's muttered reply, and then Heckram's deep voice going high on incredulous words. He didn't bother to listen.
He drew Wo
lf from his najd's pouch, set him atop the new drum head. 'Now, she will respect me,' he told him. Black eyes bright, red tongue lolling, Wolf stood and laughed with him. With the wolf's paw Kerlew tapped the taut drum-skin, and Wolf began to dance for him in the warm afternoon sunlight.
NOTES
The Reindeer Fly is an insect that afflicts reindeer by laying eggs on their hide that develop into larvae. The larvae burrow into the animal's back. Boils develop around them, and the larvae live off the pus within the boil until the following spring.
Sometimes the fly will hover near the reindeer's muzzle, to inject minute larvae in a glutinous liquid into the muzzle. When this happens, the larvae are inhaled and a stream of larvae make their way on the nasal mucous to the throat. Animals thus afflicted often die of a cough, cold, or asphyxiation. This is the condition referred to in the story as the Great Plague. Reindeer usually escape the flies by seeking the ice fields that remain intact on the tundra even in summer.
Tularemia is an acute, plaguelike infectious disease, caused by the Francissella tularensis. It can be transmitted to man by the bite of an infected tick or other bloodsucking insect, or by direct contact with infected animals, or by consuming inadequately cooked meat or drinking water that contains the organism. Symptoms appear one to three days afterwards. Symptoms include headaches, chills, vomiting, fever, and aching pains. The site of infection may develop into an ulcer, and the glands at the elbow and armpit may become enlarged and painful. Later, it may develop into an abscess. Sweating, loss of weight, and general weakness follow. The fever may come and go over a period of several weeks. If the bacteria enters through the skin, local sores occur at the site, usually on the hands and fingers. The most common complication is pneumonia. Wet saline dressings are generally soothing to the lesions, and analgesics relieve the headaches.
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