by D. K. Fields
It also determines if their love can survive living with each other.
*
Nicholas didn’t want to be there. He hardly knew the bride, and the groom was at most a friend of the family: his father had driven herds decades ago with Nicholas’s father and apparently that was enough – here they were, on a long table at the wedding. It was just the way of things, when families and their herds moved across the Steppes at the whims of the seasons and their cattle. Anyone within a few miles was suddenly an old friend of someone, or someone’s second-cousin, or known to be a reliable hand and good company after a drink.
So, under the biggest tent for miles around, Nicholas found himself at the end of a table, eating tasteless meat and surrounded by children. At least he’d been allowed a proper drink. What exactly, he didn’t know, but it was milky – probably goat – and it kicked as rough as the animal itself. He was determined to make the one cup last the whole evening. There’d been no promise of more.
‘—and in the winter we went even further south. Really, really far.’ The little boy sitting next to Nicholas kept talking, whether Nicholas was listening or not. ‘We saw the More-wall Mountains. Have you ever even seen them?’
Nicholas looked down at the earnest face staring back at him. Grease smeared across one cheek, all the way to the boy’s ear. How had he even…?
‘The Moral Mountains. I’ve seen them.’
Disappointment came and went in a flash, as the boy evidently realised they now shared something. What followed was a litany of place names and landmarks progressively further and further in the south. Nicholas considered lying – yes, he had seen the Tear with his very own eyes – but decided it would be too much effort. Beyond the boy there were maybe ten or so other children at the wedding, all corralled together as far from the adults as decently possible. That way, the adults could drink and curse and sing as much as they liked, knowing the older children, like Nicholas, would make sure none of the younger children choked on a bone or wandered off too far. Though he had no direct brothers or sisters, at seventeen years old he wasn’t the youngest in their herd, so he had plenty of little ones to be watching. Keeper hear it, it wasn’t fair. Whenever real grown-up work needed doing out on the trail, Nicholas put his back to it like the rest of them. He should be at the other end of the long table, spilling his drink on the next man’s beard, swaying to the songs and bellowing the rude words.
Instead, he wiped the grease from the boy’s ear – who surprisingly didn’t put up a fight.
‘Well, do you?’
‘Do I what?’ Nicholas said absently.
‘Want to have a wedding one day?’
Nicholas blinked. ‘A wedding one day. I guess—’
‘Move up, will you?’ a woman said. This woman – no, a girl, no, a woman; he couldn’t tell really – she didn’t wait, just pushed her way onto the bench. She had more grease across her face than the boy did. Her dark hair was tied back, though it hadn’t escaped unscathed, and where there wasn’t grease, there was smoke. ‘What are you two staring at?’ she said, without turning from her plate. She ate like the meat might get up and walk away if she wasn’t fast enough.
‘I… nothing.’
‘We’ve seen the Moral Mountains,’ the boy said, beaming.
‘That so.’
‘What have you seen?’
The woman – she was at least as old as Nicholas, he decided – wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Cooking fires,’ she said. ‘Enough that I’ll be seeing them in my sleep too.’
‘That’s not—’
‘Can’t someone eat in peace?’ she snapped. The boy suddenly found his own plate very, intensely, interesting. From the wetness edging his eyes, he was doing his best not to cry in front of his new, older friend.
Nicholas waited a little while before he said, ‘Peace? At a wedding?’
‘Wedding. Hah!’
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
‘Have you even looked at the bride and groom? Plenty to tell the Companion already, I’d say.’
Nicholas didn’t want to admit he didn’t even know what they looked like; he hadn’t been there for the binding ceremony. He’d been tending to the goats. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Odette,’ she said, with a note of a challenge. The kind of note that came from years of comments and judgements on something as simple as her name.
‘Nicholas,’ he said, and held out an arm. They shook, wrist to wrist, a little awkwardly sitting next to each other. Seeing her properly, despite the grease and smoke, she had big eyes and a slightly rounded face. ‘What did you mean, they have plenty to tell the Companion?’
‘Look at them,’ she said, pointing with a half-eaten chicken leg. ‘Barely even talking to each other.’
The crowd of drunken adults had parted just enough for him to see a man and woman at a table. They looked about as alone as anyone can when sitting next to someone. And there was something else, a tightness to them, as if they were both straining against something.
‘It’s as if they both need to piss, but aren’t allowed to leave,’ Odette said.
It wasn’t quite how Nicholas would put it, but he could see what she meant. He tried to think back to the other weddings he’d been to – maybe this was just how people were at their own weddings? But he’d evidently paid little attention over the years, which was hardly surprising from the end table with all the children.
‘What’s really wrong, do you think?’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘Maybe after five seasons tramping around the Union they don’t love each other anymore.’ It was Wayward tradition for all couples wanting to get married to spend five seasons together, travelling across the other realms. If their love survived that, it would survive life on the Steppes, or so it was supposed to go.
‘But they’re getting married.’
‘And one herd trades yak hides for a few iron tools. Beautiful, isn’t it?’
It took him a moment to piece together what she was saying. But when he did, the veil lifted, and suddenly he heard an edge to the adults’ laughter, saw a restlessness about their eyes, and more than a few tight grips on drinking horns.
‘I’m sure they still love each other,’ he said.
‘Oh, you’re sure, are you?’
Nicholas was busy thinking of a witty rejoinder when an old man who was as smoke-smudged as Odette barked something incomprehensible in her direction. She stuffed as much meat into her mouth as she could, apparently deciding she’d chew on the way, and left. Nicholas watched her cross the tent until she disappeared into the crowd. She didn’t look back once.
‘She’s mean,’ the boy said. Nicholas had all but forgotten him, but it seemed he’d been listening the whole time. Listening better than Nicholas, perhaps.
‘She might be,’ he said. ‘She might be.’
*
As the spring night descended proper, lanterns were lit up and down the great tent. The general noise grew as the adults drank and the children became wild. Any semblance of control that Nicholas and the few older ones had was well and truly gone, and like trees in a storm they kept as still as they could while chaos raged around them. He sipped his fermented goat’s milk and tried to ignore being poked and prodded and climbed over. He remembered having that kind of reckless blood pumping through him. That kind of wild abandonment which came with being fearless and ignorant of such things as consequences.
At least his parents hadn’t bothered to find him. He couldn’t face them as they tried to hide condescending smirks, their empty platitudes. He didn’t care who he’d have insulted – he didn’t want to come to this wedding. Or any wedding for that fact.
When he wasn’t dealing with one crying child or another, he watched the supposed adults run amok in their own way. In the light of the lanterns, men grinned through braided beards and women roared with laughter as stories were swapped between draughts from horns. Somewhere, there was music, though Nicholas only hear
d snatches of drums and the occasional piercing high note of a fiddle. He was able to see the dancers. Pairs of them swirled and churned until it was hard to tell them apart. He wondered if Odette, the woman he’d only just met, was there somewhere. If she’d had a chance to get rid of her apron, change her dress and wash her face. He tried to remember just what that face looked like. Big brown eyes, that much he remembered. Dark hair. Was it straight or curly? He found himself hoping for curls and was surprised by the feeling. What did he care what a stranger’s hair was like?
From the dancers, his gaze slid towards the shadowy eaves of the tent. There, shapes were even harder to be sure of, but mostly he found people still and close to each other. A few were doing more than talking, and he looked away quickly. He hoped his parents were drinking or dancing in the decent light – he didn’t want to accidentally find them in the shadows…
‘You’re still here. Where they keep the children.’
He looked up to see Odette. Same apron, same dress, though her face was clean – mostly. There was still a line of something at the edges.
‘Where would I go?’ he said.
‘Anywhere? Anywhere but here?’ She made it sound like an invitation.
He drained the last of his drink. ‘Anywhere with more drink,’ he said.
‘I think we can manage that.’ She led him away from the table, ignoring the whines and protests that followed in their wake – the other older children questioning just why he was allowed to escape. Nicholas had to admit he’d wondered the same, in the moment he stood up and tried not to look so awkward removing himself from the bench. The answer was simple enough: he was being rescued. And the rescue involved two flagons lifted from a table beside the tent door.
Before he knew it, they were outside with the quiet darkness rushing towards them. The sky was patchy with clouds, stars peeking through in places. The moon, nearly full, made showy entrances and exits. These were the things he noticed as he walked alongside her, carrying one of the flagons, the light and noise softening behind them. These were the things he noticed, because he daren’t look at her. Not yet. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt like she might decide she didn’t want to be outside with him after all. That she’d rather be dancing, or eating, or whispering with someone else in the shadows.
The vastness of the Northern Steppes was all around them. The rolling grasslands, the craggy outcrops, the thin winding rivers – Nicholas could sense it all, and in the darkness, it felt never-ending. He could keep walking from right there and never see anything but the Steppes. He shuddered.
‘Cold?’ Odette said.
‘A little.’ The lie was easier than trying to explain the feeling.
They came to the top of a gentle rise. The moon-brushed grass rolled out below them, as still as a painting. Odette sat down without a fuss and took a slug from her clay flagon. He hesitated and something happened to the air between them, a small shift that he didn’t understand. He drank just to be doing something. The bitter ale was a shock after the sweetened goat’s milk, but she didn’t seem to notice his wincing. He couldn’t believe all the adults drank so much ale; it was like rinsing your mouth with ashes or licking sun-bleached rocks or—
‘You sitting down? Or you have somewhere else to be?’ She gestured at the dark horizon.
He slumped down right where he was standing, suddenly more aware of himself than he’d ever been before. It must have been the ale; his legs didn’t normally feel so long, or his hands so big, and why was he grinning?
‘Tell me your story, Nicholas.’
‘I’m no good at telling stories,’ he said.
‘That’s a shame.’ She sounded genuinely disappointed.
‘But I’m a good listener,’ he said quickly.
‘That’s all you need to be a good storyteller. One day I’m going to have the best stories to tell,’ she said. ‘I just need to get away from all of this.’
‘You want to leave the Steppes?’ It was his turn to sound disappointed.
‘Of course! Where are the stories here? There’s just grass and the animals that eat it. I want more.’
‘So do I,’ he said.
‘That so?’ She was looking right at him. With her brow furrowed she looked as stern and serious as his mother.
‘I want to make my own way, not just follow along at the back of the herd.’
She nodded, as if she understood. But how could she when he didn’t understand himself, not really? It was just a feeling that was getting stronger in him each day, each time he got into the saddle, every time someone told him where to be, what to do.
‘Tell me a story then,’ he said, ‘if you’re going to be such a great storyteller.’
The moon broke free from the clouds, she smiled, and suddenly he was glad he’d come to a stranger’s wedding.
‘Last winter,’ she said, ‘when we were as close to Perlanse as my father ever gets, a storyteller came riding into our camp. Perlish, he was, and anyone could tell that from the dainty ankles on his horse and the floppy hat he wore. He even had a bare chin and an oiled moustache that curled at the ends. Somehow he wasn’t soaked to the bone, despite the Painter doing his best to wash away the Steppes.
‘This man was welcomed into the camp, as any storyteller should be, but most of my family weren’t too happy about it. A Perlish ’teller once stole away one of my uncles, but that’s a different story. This teller was too old for that sort of thing. When he entered our main tent, which he did with a flourish of his cloak, he was met by a circle of blank faces. Someone in the back cleared their throat, but otherwise, the cackle of the fire was the only sound. If he was expecting applause, he recovered himself quickly enough.
‘He had a bag with him. Not like our leather ones with string ties – this had all kinds of shiny metal fastenings and clasps. He produced a little key on a chain to unlock it. Even my family weren’t immune to such a curiosity, and I wasn’t the only one leaning forwards to see what such a fuss was about.
‘He took out five objects, one at a time, and placed them carefully on the floor before my father. He asked the whole tent to choose an item, and he’d tell us a story about it. He asked the whole tent, but everyone knew it would be my father – as head of the herd – who would choose. My whole family was looking at him, everyone except for me.
‘I was looking at the objects.
‘I didn’t recognise a single one of them.
‘It sounds silly, doesn’t it? But I had no idea what they were. There wasn’t a blanket, a saddle, a pot, a flagon or drinking horn among them. No jewellery carved from wood. No clothes I recognised. Nothing to do with tents or horses or herding cattle. Five things I didn’t know the name of, let alone their purpose or use. They might as well have come straight from the Audience.
‘Apparently, my father, at least, knew more of the realms. He barked a word – I was too absorbed in my own turmoil to hear what exactly – and the ’teller swooped on a shiny circle. A story followed, maybe the only story in my life that I can’t remember at all, not a single word.
‘See, the ’teller had left all the other things on the floor of the tent. I suppose it was a kind of reminder of what we might have chosen. For me, it was a reminder of how little of the Union I knew.
‘I decided then, if I was to be a storyteller, I had to see the realms for myself. I had to find my stories.’
She drank from her flagon – long enough for Nicholas to come back from last winter, her family’s tent, back to the night-draped hillside.
‘Last winter?’ he said.
‘I’ll get there,’ she said, her voice firm. ‘You’ll see.’
‘Best not wait too long.’
There was a quiet then, and it stretched and stretched. He wondered if he’d said the wrong thing – or lots of wrong things. He stole glances at her and wished she’d say or do something. But she just stared far into the distance and drank. He did the same, and imagined what she might be looking for. At least the taste of ale w
asn’t so bad after a while. At least he wasn’t stuck on a table with screaming children, as his parents danced and kissed and all the rest. At least…
She didn’t laugh when she helped him up. Standing was harder than it should have been. They meandered their way back to the tents, and the next thing he knew he was lying face down on his furs. That felt right.
‘Best no rate you long,’ he mumbled to one of his boots. He couldn’t see the other, couldn’t move his head, couldn’t remember what he was looking for.
He fell asleep frowning.
*
‘Will you marry me?’
The voice came from nowhere. There hadn’t been voices in his dream up until then – just clouds, the Audience, and a moon that eluded him. A moon that, try as he might, he couldn’t understand. But he didn’t want to open his eyes, he knew that much.
Being shaken was harder to ignore. Someone was shaking him by the shoulder. He opened an eye then quickly shut it because it was too painful. His tent had become some kind of forge that was too hot to look at. Or maybe it wasn’t his tent, maybe the sun had fallen from the sky and landed just above him. Either way, it hurt.
‘Hey, Nicholas, wake up!’
‘No.’
‘No, what?’
‘No, the sun… and it’s hot… and just… no.’
Suddenly he was rolled onto his back and slapped hard enough to open both eyes.
‘There, now we can talk,’ Odette said. She was standing over him, in a fresh dress and apron, hunching a little under the roof of his tent. A woman, in his tent.
‘How did you— Why are you— You just hit me!’
‘Do I need to do it again?’ she said, raising her arm.
He wiped the dribble from his chin and worked his jaw. ‘No, it’s still stinging.’
‘So, I say again: Will you marry me?’
Squinting up at her, it took a long time for each of those words to settle at the back of his head, individually at first, and then together to form the unbelievable. A question he thought was part of his dream.
