Exile's Children

by Angus Wells

  He supposed he did not much understand women; and they were, anyway, in strange circumstances. But he would have welcomed conversation with his mother, or with Marjia, that he might know better how to please and satisfy his wife. But his mother was far distant and forbidden him on pain of death, and Marjia … Marjia was not there, nor any sign of her coming.

  The snowshoes he’d made crunched against the frozen crust. Lonely ravens clustered on the branches behind, optimistic that he left some tidbit. Overhead, the sky burned steely, like metal in flame save it was only cold, and when he looked to where the Maker’s Mountain stood, the peak glittered, a blinding white pinnacle defiant of observation.

  He was banished from Ket-Ta-Witko, promised death did he return to the lodges of his clan: this valley was all his world now, and Arrhyna, and he must be content with that. Which, mostly, he was; only sometimes he wondered how the Commacht fared, and missed Bakaan’s jokes and Hadustan’s laughter and Zhy’s solemn comments. Even his father’s stern face.

  But he had Arrhyna: he smiled as he saw her.

  She sat beneath the raised entry flaps of the lodge. The outside fire burned bright before her, and her hands moved deft over a hide, one of the needles Marjia had gifted her sparkling as she wove beads into the skin.

  “What are you making?” he asked, even as she looked up and said, “Three hares, eh? Good hunting, husband.”

  He dropped the hares and bent to kiss her. She said, “A shirt. For you to wear when the New Grass Moon rises.”

  “Not until then?” he asked.

  “It’s deerhide,” she said. “Until then, it will not be warm enough.”

  He smiled and sat beside her; set to gutting the hares. “Shall I wear it to the Matakwa?” he laughed, then stopped. “What’s that?”

  “What?” Arrhyna glanced up from her needlework.

  “That sound.” He looked from the open flaps of the lodge along the valley. “Like distant thunder.”

  The sky was all steely, neither quite blue nor gray, but colored at some midpoint between. There was no sign of any storm, neither clouds building nor lightning flashing, but when Arrhyna cocked her head and concentrated, she heard it—a faraway rumbling as if rocks moved, or some great force wended through the mountains.

  She said, “I don’t know.”

  It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It was like the sound of the migrating herds, when the buffalo ran in all their glory and the earth shook under their hooves. But there were no buffalo here.

  “Perhaps the Grannach move the mountains,” Rannach joked.

  Arrhyna thought it a poor jest. She looked to where the Maker’s Mountain loomed, but that great peak stood silent and immobile.

  “Or an avalanche,” he said.

  Arrhyna wondered if he entertained the same doubt, the same fear, she felt—that the sound was of no natural making but something else. But if he did, he kept the thought from her. Nor was she prepared to voice it, as if the saying of it might flesh out the fear, so they both held silent and only listened to the distant rumbling.

  He could still not understand how he lived: he ate nothing, he drank only the snow that melted in his mouth. He had fallen down over rocks that should have shattered him, and into snowdrifts that buried him and should have held him frozen until the spring thaw, and dug his way out and found handholds where none existed with hands that no longer contained any feeling. He could only assume the Maker wished him to live and so kept him alive.

  And so he went on, unthinking—driven by that memory of the flame-voice that burned inside him and somehow sustained him—down the cliffs and the precipices, across the deep-drifted ravines and the fragile ice bridges, down to where the People were, knowing now that all were the People—the clans of Ket-Ta-Witko and the Grannach and the poor, lost Whaztaye, and all the other folk of all the other parceled worlds that were the Maker’s creation, and all as important as each other and all threatened by the Breakers who would rend and destroy that fine fabric of coexistence, even those strange ones from the other world or time that he had glimpsed in his revelatory dreaming. And he was the only one in all the worlds to know, which was a terrible duty and a burden he labored under and would have cast off, save if he did, then all the Maker’s creations must come unraveled and be destroyed, and he be as guilty as the Breakers for that undoing.

  So he fought his way through snow-filled valleys, where the white powder caked his face and sometimes overtopped his head so that he must tunnel like some snow mole, and he walked over the ice that encased rivers, and through it when it lay too thin to support his weight. And he felt neither the cold nor any hunger, but burned with purpose, intent only on bringing that dread word which he could not be sure any would heed or believe. He did not sleep: it was as if the Maker shifted his limbs and drove him on, a container of purpose or a messenger, cursed.

  And he came down from the holy mountain to where the Grannach lived and they found him there, moving like a blind horse through the wastes, driving only onward so that they must hold him and pin him down as they looked to minister to him, not knowing how any man so wasted could be alive.

  “Is he alive?” Colun stared disbelievingly at the emaciated body. The Morrhyn he remembered was a hale man, tall and sturdy, with a head of thick, dark hair. This poor fellow was gaunt as a desiccated corpse, all jutting bones and sharp angeles, his hair the color of snow. Was he truly Morrhyn, then he looked as the wakanisha surely would after he had been dead some little time. “Where did he come from?”

  “We found him out on the snow,” Nylj said. “He cried out and collapsed when we approached. I think he’s blind.”

  Marjia knelt close, then glanced up. “He lives, though the Maker alone knows how. Look at him! He’s starved.”

  “I do not understand this.” Colun scratched a leathery cheek. “He looks like Morrhyn, but surely Morrhyn is with his clan.”

  “Be he Morrhyn or some other unfortunate, he still needs care.” Marjia rose, bustling past the curious menfolk to call the women to her. “See he’s wrapped in warm blankets and build up that fire. Prepare broth.”

  Colun grunted, still intent on the skeletal figure. It was Morrhyn, he decided—the angle of those sunken cheeks, that ax-blade nose, those were Morrhyn’s. But what in the Maker’s name was the Commacht Dreamer doing here, and where had he come from? It was a mystery he supposed would be answered if the man lived—which, were he frank, seemed unlikely—and one he could have done without. The Maker knew, there were mysteries and troubles enough in these dark days.

  He tugged at his beard as the women brought heated blankets and Marjia set to stirring the broth. There was little enough food and, despite their losses, too many Grannach to eat it. He let his eyes wander over the cavern, thinking they already had wounded enough to tend, and felt the darkness cloud his soul. It was no consolation to know his fears proven true, to know he had been right and the others wrong. The outcome was too dismal.

  His people had debated as the invaders continued their advance, and long before any conclusion was reached, the strangelings had come deep into the mountains. They had swarmed into the high passes like some vast ant army, pushing remorselessly forward to sweep the defending Grannach from their path as a storm wind blows away chaff. The only unity the Grannach had reached was the agreement that the western tunnels be all sealed, but by then it was too late, for the invaders came in by the lesser entrances and the high, secret ways, and the Grannach were sealed up as he had prophesied, like frightened rabbits in their warrens.

  Too many had died, and too many more acted foolishly. Janzi and Gort had sealed their families in the ancestral caves, and for all Colun knew, they remained there, likely to starve. Daryk had died fighting the invaders as they came into the Basanga caverns, and scarce a hundred of his family had survived to flee to the Javitz: sad refugees in their own mountains. Menas, at least, had shown some sense at last and come with all his Katjen to join Colun’s folk, but too late. Menas had
been wounded, his side pierced by a lance, and was dead now. His last words had been a plea that his family accept Colun’s leadership, and that Colun protect them as his own.

  Colun had, of course, agreed, though he doubted he could protect anyone against the terror that stalked the hills. But he did his best, for all it cost him dear. When the invaders had come into the Javitz caverns, the Grannach were ready, and when it became obvious the strangelings came in numbers too great to defeat, Colun had made a terrible decision. He had planned it in advance, as a suicide plans his demise—in precise and horrid detail. The Javitz had been forewarned, and were ready with food and clothing, whatever they might carry easily. The refugees had less to carry, for all the Javitz shared with them what they had—and Colun had spoken long and forcefully on this, telling them they were no longer Javitz and Basanga and Katjen but only Grannach now, and did any argue, then they were free to return to their family caves. None did argue, but only obeyed him, hailing him as creddan of all the Stone Folk. It was an honor that sat sour as he called his people back from the advancing invaders and gave the word to the golans to do what they had reluctantly agreed upon.

  It was a Pyrrhic victory: vast numbers of the invaders and their beasts had died as the Javitz cavern came tumbling down on them, burying them forever under such a weight of stone as must forever entomb them, and Colun had wept with his people to see the ancestral home cave destroyed—as if their past were taken from them, leaving only a bleak and homeless future. He felt an emptiness come into his soul as he fled, the tunnels all filled with the awful thunder of destruction, and he thought that wound should never heal.

  He had led the decimated Grannach away to an uncertain future in the lesser caves and the high, hidden valleys, where they grubbed out a poor living as best they could and hid like nervous deer from the invaders’ wolf packs that scoured the hills. But they did, at least, live, and Colun supposed that was something. And was he not sure how long they might survive or what dread fate descended on the world, then he could console himself with the knowledge that he had saved as many as he could and that there remained a remnant of the Grannach alive in the world who would otherwise have been dead. But that was small consolation, must they exist like rats, nibbling warily about the fringes of a world filled with only enemies. Sometimes he wondered if it had not been better to die fighting, but then he would look at the children and the women and the old ones and know that it was better to cling to life and hope, to ask the Maker to set right this awful imbalance.

  He sometimes thought, in more cheerful moments, that perhaps the Matawaye would defeat the invaders, and then would feel that little optimism slip away as he thought of the awful fury of the strangelings and their numbers. He knew that the flatlanders were divided as his own folk had been, and would most likely fall like the Grannach before the incomers. And now Morrhyn was come, more dead than alive, and that was a very strange thing—that the Dreamer be here where he should not be, as if he were a corpse risen from the grave.

  “I’d speak with him,” he said. “When he wakes.”

  “No doubt.” Marjia did not turn: she was too intent on spilling broth between Morrhyn’s cracked and blistered lips. “But when that might be, I cannot say.”

  Colun turned to Nylj. “You found him in the valley, you say? Were there tracks?”

  Nylj ducked his shaggy head. “The Maker knows how he came so far, but yes—his tracks came from the direction of the Mountain.”

  Colun frowned. Morrhyn had come from the Maker’s Mountain? The mystery deepened.

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  Nylj looked a moment offended and Colun smiled an apology. “It seems impossible he could be there,” he explained. “I cannot understand it.”

  “Nor I.” Nylj allowed himself placated. “But there he was, like a snow-blinded hare struggling through the drifts.”

  “Did he say anything?” Colun asked.

  “Only cried out. Were there words in it, I could not understand them.”

  Colun nodded and walked to the cave mouth. The snow had ceased falling a little after dawn and the valley lay silent and still, palisaded round by jagged peaks. The Maker’s Mountain stood distant and aloof, and the winter sun outlined the tracks of Nylj’s party like shadows on the snow. Colun could not understand it: Morrhyn had no right to be here, and still less to be alive. It was a further impossibility in a world become all impossible.

  He went back inside the cave. Morrhyn slept now. Colun studied the wasted features and looked to his wife.

  Marjia read the question in his eyes and said, “I don’t know. He’s no right to be alive, so perhaps he’ll live. It’s in the Maker’s hands now.”

  Colun nodded and returned to his brooding. He thought he no longer understood his world; it seemed all turned on its head.

  When he woke he was buried and began to tunnel from under the weight of snow, thinking all the while that it was oddly warm and that it should be far easier to sink down beneath that comfortable blanket and let it take him away to endless sleep. But he had a duty he must discharge, and so he chided himself and called on the Maker, and fought to reach the light. Then he felt himself clutched and fought the hands that held him and cried out, cursing, until he was forced down and knew himself lost. He was dead, or dying, and cursed spirits sought to drag him down, that he not dispense his charge, but all the world be given over to malignity and he be damned with them, a companion in despair.

  Fire’s glow then, and torches that revealed faces all craggy and bearded, and others that were hairless and smooth if no less craggy: he recognized them, dimly, from some distant place, another time. One, he thought he knew, but could not properly remember. Perhaps death played him a final trick, fooling his eyes and wandering mind. If so, he must fight it. He was not yet ready to die, not until his duty was done. And so he fought and cried out, looking for the light of the sky, that he might see the stars and take a bearing from them and go on.

  “Morrhyn! Morrhyn, for the Maker’s sake, don’t you know me?”

  He knew his eyes were open, but not that they saw, or what: he thought perhaps the spirits looked to trick him. The sky was black and starless and the only light came from flames which hurt his eyes. He sat up and wondered why he felt no cold but only warmth, as if he rested beside a fire. And indeed, when he squinted, he thought he saw a fire burning, and torches beyond, as if he rested within a cave whose walls reflected back the flames’ glow, and in them saw squat shapes that were like the Grannach he remembered, who lived in the hills and were the Stone Guardians. Or tricksy spirits sent by the Breakers to lure him and lull him into failure.

  He said, “Who are you? I charge you, in the name of the Maker, to speak true.”

  “I am Colun of the Grannach,” said the closest shape. “Do you not know me?”

  He looked at it and then away, at his body which he saw was all swathed in furs, and at the fire that burned close by, and the huddled shapes beyond. Then up to where only darkness was, shadows darting there, thrown by the fire and the torches. Then down again, to find a nervous, smiling face hung round with plaits of flaxen hair, holding out a bowl that steamed and gave off a most savory and appetizing aroma.

  “This is Marjia, my wife,” said the Colun-shape. “She’s broth for you to drink.”

  He closed his eyes and voiced a silent prayer, and when he opened them again, shapes and shadows resolved into tangible reality and he knew he lay within a cave, surrounded by Grannach, and that it was not a spirit that spoke to him, but Colun, whom he knew.

  He said, “Colun?”

  And Colun answered, “Yes?”

  “Where am I?”

  “In a cave, deep in the mountains. Where the invaders are not yet come.”

  He said, “The Breakers. They are the destroyers of worlds.”

  “They surely look to destroy ours,” Colun said.

  And he said, “Yes. I must go on,” and sought to rise. But he was too weak, and so must fall
back as Colun said, “First eat. Build your strength, eh? Then we’ll speak of what’s to be done.”

  “There’s no time. They’ll be in Ket-Ta-Witko soon.”

  “Likely, they’re there already,” Colun said in a bitter voice. “They’ve crossed the mountains, and by now must be near the plains.”

  “I must tell the People. I know about the Breakers.”

  “Morrhyn, you’re near to death. You cannot go on yet. You must rest and gather your strength, and then we’ll go on together.”

  He said, “No! There’s not the time. I have to go on.”

  “To die? That should be useless, no? Listen to me. You’ll rest here and regain your strength, and then I’ll take you on.”

  He frowned. The light hurt his eyes and he supposed he must have suffered the snowblindness, but now could see—praise the Maker!—which meant he had lain some time. “How long have I been here?” he asked.

  “Seven days,” Colun answered.

  “Too long!” he cried, and sought to rise again.

  Colun pushed him back, and he was too weak to resist. Marjia hung a blanket about his shoulders and held out the bowl.

  “Drink this,” she urged. “You’re very weak and need food.”

  He studied her round face awhile, and then his hands. They seemed to him like sticks, the skin drawn taut and thin over the linkages of bone. They trembled, and when he attempted to take the bowl he could not, for his hands shook and the effort of closing his fingers was more than he could manage.