The Great Rift

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Because you always are? I don't know. Sometimes people get mad."

  "Well, I'm not."

  "Good. Guess I thought you might think it would distract us from our duty or something."

  Dante grinned up into the branches. "How dare you two be making moon-eyes at each other? The fate of norren freedom depends on us stabbing these fish!"

  Blays pulled down a few more branches, then climbed down to help carve them into killing points. Lira and Mourn caught up with them, spears in hand. They splashed along the cold stream until it widened to a gentle flow among the rocks. Sunlight cleaved through the clear water. Current-drawn weeds pointed downstream, dragonfly nymphs clinging to their stems. Flies circled, buzzing in Dante's ears. He waded into a sluggish eddy beside the bank. Dark missiles of trout lurked in the willow-dappled shadows.

  His first thrust missed. So did his second and his fifth and his twentieth. Mourn jabbed, smiled, and cleared his spear from the water, a fish struggling on its tip. After an hour, the norren had landed four. Lira and Blays managed one apiece. Dante had none. His breeches were soaked to the thighs, his patience strained to its peak. Mourn frowned, stepped down from a flat rock, and slogged through the water toward Dante.

  "The water lies to you," he said, bulk hunched over the water as he peered at a trout lurking beneath a wall of reeds. "Well, not really. In fact, it's just kind of flowing there not saying anything at all. But the fish isn't where it shows you. It's lower." He struck at the trout with a splash, withdrawing an empty spear. "Well, you get the idea."

  Dante did, but his arms and eyes didn't. He didn't land his first fish until mid-afternoon, after they followed the stream to a naturally dammed pond. In those languid waters, Dante acquitted himself with two fish by dusk. Lira and Blays had five and four respectively; Mourn shamed them all with 17. They headed home for camp, each step squeezing water from the rivets of their boots.

  Under twilight, Mourn knelt beside Hopp and unrolled the tarp that held their cleaned fish, heads still attached.

  "28 fish." Hopp gazed among the men and women seated around the banks of the stream. "39 warriors. This does not add up."

  "Got bread?" Lira said.

  "Sure."

  "That's enough for me."

  Hopp gave her an unreadable look and rolled up the tarp. "It had better be. The ground sees no seeds until waiting mouths are full."

  Dante ate his bread without complaint. He got up before sunrise to reach the pond by dawn and catch the fish while they were first stirring. He caught a trout and a sunfish before the others splashed into sight.

  Ever since Dante had literally been punched into awareness, it was like a spell had been broken between Blays and Lira. They pushed each other in the water, splashing, laughing, teasing. At times, they disappeared around a bend for twenty minutes or more, returning flushed and grinning. During their disappearances, they rarely brought back fish. Dante waded the waters next to Mourn, talking about the norren, about Narashtovik and Mallon, about responsibility and risk and life. Mourn was a slow thinker, as plodding and deliberate in thought as he was with his footsteps or his Nulladoon play, but he was thoughtful, deep, capable of questioning his own assumptions in ways most men would never think to. Hours flowed as quickly as the stream.

  Days spun by. When spearfishing grew too frustrating, Dante gathered walnuts, walnut-sized snails, and the tender roots of cattails. He plucked breadgrass and mushrooms and wild carrots. On their fifth day, they returned with enough fish to feed themselves as well as the rest of the clan.

  Much like when Dante and Blays had traveled with the Clan of the Nine Pines, the warriors of the Broken Heron paid them little mind. One morning, a woman stopped Dante before he could depart to the stream to show him how to fashion strong hooks from the bones of fish. Another evening, two men came by to swap stories of Dante and Blays' travels throughout the Territories. One challenged Mourn to a friendly wrestling match which Mourn lost after a long struggle.

  These interactions were the exceptions to their isolation. The rest of the clan sparred, rested, painted, hunted, scouted, mended weapons and armor and clothes. So often left alone, Dante spoke to the earth. It didn't answer back. He let his mind sink like water through its surface, past the turf and the damp confusion of roots and worms and last year's leaves. Somewhere below imagination, in the silent beds of dirt and stone, the nether rested, untouched, a deeper shadow than the darkness of the underground. Dante let it stay there, watching it, nothing more.

  After a week, the Clan of the Broken Heron picked up and walked downstream to the northwest, covering some 15 miles before bedding down. In the morning, Hopp came to them with fishing poles and hooks and cunningly tied lures of feather, fur, and shiny metal.

  "Turns out we had these all along," he said. "Go ahead and use them if you want."

  At first, Dante returned to the rod with relish, but standing on the bank and waiting for a fish to strike was far less fun than creeping into the water and impaling it with a single thrust of a spear. He fixed a bit of wood near the end of the line and wedged the butt of the pole between rocks. He left it there to catch what it may, rushing back to it, spear in hand, whenever it bent under the weight of a strike.

  That evening, they returned to find the clan in bloody disarray. Men limped to the stream to wash their grimy hands and faces and put cold water on their cuts and scrapes and burns. A handful of warriors were gone entirely. Dante found Hopp by the creek, shirtless, wincing. Blood dripped from his hand into the water and swirled downstream.

  "That's why we moved," Dante said. "You got word of a battle."

  Hopp chuckled. "With such sharp eyes, it's no wonder you catch so many fish."

  Dante watched him bleed, seething. "We can stab more than trout, you know."

  "Keeping us fed is vital. It leaves the rest of us to fight. Why does anyone ever want to be chieftain when all you get to do is rebuke foolish questions?" Hopp pressed a cloth to his wounded hand, breath hissing between his bared teeth.

  "Let me see."

  "I'm fine. No one ever died of a cut finger."

  "Yes they have. By the thousands. Because a finger and any cuts it carries is the most likely thing to touch dirt, feces, stagnant water, and all the other spoiled things that spoil the body too." Dante came around Hopp's side and grabbed the man's thick wrist. "Now let me see."

  Hopp glared at him like an angry cat, then extended his bloody left hand. The tip of his index finger was nearly severed, hanging by a flap of skin. Blood pattered the grass. Dante sealed it back together with a cord of black nether.

  Hopp wiggled his finger. He licked his thumb, wiped away the blood, and gave Dante a shrewd look. "I thought they exaggerated what you did in Plow."

  "For all I know they did. Now bring me anyone you want to stop bleeding."

  A line of wounded cycled between Dante and three men who waited to dress the minor cuts and scrapes with needles, stitches, cloths, liquor, and water. Dante chatted with those he treated, piecing together the day's battle. The clan had rendezvoused with three others just after dawn, rushing down a hill to enswarm a legion of some 120 Gaskan troops in the thick shrubbery between ridges. They broke the surprised redshirt soldiers quickly, pushing them to the very bottom of the valley, but as the norren mounted to rush down the fold and overwhelm them, a cavalry troop burst over the hills and flushed the norren into the brush. From there, they fought a running back-and-forth among the brambles and walnut trees until the chiefs, concerned about the possibility of more reinforcements on the way, beat a slow retreat under cover of the trees. The kingsmen tried to pursue, but after a ferocious norren counter killed eight men in moments, the redshirts backed off to bow range, peppering the clans until the norren slipped away into the hills.

  Their adopted clan had lost five warriors in the battle, with another nine suffering modest-to-serious wounds Dante healed as best he could.

  At dawn, the clan left the stream and cut north at an easy pace. Three
hours and six miles later, they settled back down beside a pond. Mourn strung his bow and shot three mallards, two on the water and another from the sky. Dante saw to those who still needed seeing, then took his rod and spears and caught fish in the yellow haze of a waning afternoon that smelled of budding plants and the gentle rot of still water.

  This pattern continued for several more days. The clan recovered. Blays and Lira popped off into the tall grass. Dante fished and tended and gathered. Warriors began to invite Mourn to sit with them during meals. Sometimes he accepted; others, he declined, eating with Dante instead.

  Hopp called a meeting. It wasn't a meeting like the Council of Narashtovik, where members were brought together to reach a consensus, but a meeting where a newly-established ruling would be handed down from on high. Previously, the clan had sent out four or six scouts at a time. But Hopp had heard more soldiers were on their way. Henceforth, a full quarter of the clan would be sent out to range at any given time. They would scout in shifts. The shifts would begin that night. There would be no exceptions, including Hopp and the old norren woman who spent most of her days sitting beneath the trees. The humans would scout, too.

  Dante was assigned to that first night along with nine other warriors. He'd been up since dawn and didn't trust himself to stay alert through the night. He was paired with a woman named Yola who rarely spoke except to tell him he was too loud. She slipped up the hills as if she'd been walking them her whole life (which as far as he knew she had), bow in hand, undisturbed by the rising cackles of nocturnal birds and the whisper of rodents in the grass. A cold half-moon touched the hills with silver. Before cresting each ridge, Yola dropped to a crouch and crossed the peak, then knelt in the grass and waited, watching the horizons for silhouettes.

  After the warmth of the mid-spring days, the frigid night felt like another world, a place where the cold and dark might last forever. But Dante walked that world as if he'd been born to it. Birds hooted. Crickets chirred. His steps stirred the scent of wet dew on broken grass. When the dawn came, chasing that world away in a bloom of ethereal gray-blue, he was more excited for the next night than he was to get to bed.

  He asked for and received ongoing nighttime shifts. Blays and Lira asked to scout together and were denied, which Blays complained about until Dante told him he was scaring away the fish.

  One afternoon, a scout returned to tell the clan he'd seen a trio of armed men a few miles west headed their way. Hopp arranged a picket and roving sweeps, but the men weren't seen again. Three times they saw scouts from other clans. Once a full clan passed two miles to the south, and every warrior of the Broken Herons readied arms until the wanderers were identified as the Clan of the Lonely Hill, a distant cousin-clan that was generally but not always on good terms with the Broken Herons. Hopp walked out to see them and returned unscathed.

  Dante reached Cally via loon and learned the old man had sent Somburr and Hart, the old norren councilman, down to the Territories to try their hand with the tamer clans. They'd already distributed a handful of loons. More surprisingly, most of the chiefs who'd accepted the artifacts appeared to be using them as intended. Cally had already helped organize a successful raid on the outskirts of Dollendun; three clans acting in concert freed sixty prisoners from the farms they'd been taken to after the first riots. Cally was trying to put together a series of attacks on the road to cripple the king's supply line into the city, but rumors from Setteven claimed the first major force would be arriving within weeks—a thousand men or more.

  Dante passed that on to Hopp. Hopp nodded. "Thank you. Now go fish."

  Mid-spring became late spring. Warm breezes smelled of pollen and green. The Broken Herons moved camp twice more. Two of their scouts killed one of the enemy and brought his body back to be buried out of sight. A visitor from a friendly clan told them about a skirmish on the fringes of Tantonnen. She didn't know which clan was involved. Dante wondered whether it was the Golden Fields, and whether Waill and her people were all right.

  He was eating a lump of pan-cooked flatbread and watching the dragonflies skim the stream when his loon pulsed. He assumed it was Cally, but the signal was coming from Blays.

  "Hello," Dante said. "I wasn't aware you knew how to use these."

  "Sure I do. Me and Lira talk dirty through them all the time. Where are you?"

  "On the sudden verge of vomiting."

  "Well, finish that up and get over here. I think we've found a scout."

  Dante chawed off a chunk of bread. "So kill him," he said, spitting crumbs.

  "I don't like what I'm seeing." Blays described the lay of the land, a double-crowned hill not a mile west of the camp at the stream. Dante grabbed his sword and ran west up the ridge, sweating in the buttery sunlight. He headed down a slope thinly wooded with birches. At the bottom, marshy grass sprayed water from his thumping boots.

  "Yeah, I see you," Blays said. "You run funny. Arms out like a drunken bird. Keep heading straight up the hill. Okay, go right a bit. A little more. Can you see me yet?"

  Dante smacked away a branch before it hit his face. Below the hilltop, a figure emerged from a stand of trees and waved its hands above its head.

  "Arawn's liver!" Dante said. "A hideous monster just leapt out from the woods."

  As he approached, Blays closed down the connection and put a finger to his lips. "Follow me."

  Blays hunkered down as they reached the ridge, weaving behind thick bushes with sweet-smelling purple flowers. On the other side, two of the clan's warriors lay prone behind a screen of shrubs. They didn't look up as Blays and Dante slid in beside them.

  A small valley bowled out below them, flanked on all sides by hills. A couple hundred yards away in the valley's swampy bottom, a man in plain brown dress moved across the flooded ground, stepping between tiny islands of turf. He stopped regularly, bending down to examine the weeds and muck. Each time, he glanced at the horizons, stood, and walked on to the next island.

  "He's tracking you," Dante whispered. "Don't you think you'd better move?"

  "We've got a while yet," Blays said. "Question is, who's he tracking us for?"

  "You want to follow him back?"

  "And if he starts to get too close, I figured you could kill him as quietly as killings get."

  Dante nodded. A fly landed on his sweaty neck. He shrugged it away. Down in the bog, the tracker plodded along, checking for bootprints, scanning the ridges, and repeating. After several minutes he turned and hurried for the far hill.

  Blays frowned. "Does this seem off to you?"

  "What's his rush?" Dante said.

  "There's no way he saw us through this brush. He didn't even look this way before running off."

  The man retreated between the birches, topping the hill and dropping over the far side. One of the warriors turned to Blays. "If we're following, let's follow."

  Blays stood. Dante dug his fingers into the soil and pushed himself off the ground. His fingertips thrummed. He paused there, as if frozen in the middle of a pushup, honing in on the faint vibration.

  "Wait," he said.

  The thrumming flickered away. Had he imagined it? Had his hands fallen asleep? He lowered his mind through his fingers to the dirt. He could feel movement there—not with his fingers, not in the way you feel the kernels on a corncob or the grain of wood on a chair, but in the way you feel an intruder moving through a pitch-black room.

  "We're going to lose him," the warrior said.

  "Wait!"

  The thrumming wavered, threatening to fall away completely. Dante delved deeper, tracking the vibration through the solid earth until it burst around him like a heavy rain, pattering and irregular. He followed it further until he could feel it physically, a light tapping on his ribs and shoulders, a dozen or more blows per second.

  "What are you doing down there, hiding an erection?" Blays said. "Just get up and walk it off. I promise not to make fun of you until we're back in public."

  Dante shook his head sharply. "I
think...the earth is talking to me."

  "I am too, and I've known you for longer. Let's go."

  The taps tapped on, harder than they'd been mere moments before. There was a pattern to them, too, far too complex for him to break it down, but just prominent enough to recognize it was there.

  "In five minutes, you can laugh at me all you want," Dante said. "Until then, get down and be quiet."

  Blays gave him a long look, then crouched back down behind the brush. The warriors murmured to each other. For a second, Dante thought the whole farce of him being a fellow clansman was about to break down, then they too hid themselves behind the budding branches. Dante's arms quivered. He pushed himself upright and knelt. He brushed his hands off on his pants and touched them back against the dirt. The feeling was gone.

  It didn't came back. He sat perfectly still, watching the silent valley with a thunderous heart. One of the warriors sniffed. Dante scowled at the ground, willing the thrumming to come back.

  "Holy shit," Blays breathed.

  Dante snapped up his head. Back the way the scout had retreated, men in red spilled over the hilltop. Horses along the flanks, lances shining in the sun. Dante reached for his loon and turned the brooch to Mourn's setting.

  "Okay?" Mourn said after some moments. "Is this working?"

  "Tell Hopp to move the clan," Dante said.

  "All of it?"

  "Yes."

  "To where?"

  "Anywhere the army I'm watching isn't."

  "Oh," Mourn said. "And where is that? Just out of curiosity. And my desire to be of any help to Hopp at all."

  "Two hills to the west. About a mile and a half away and shrinking fast."

  "Oh. I'm just going to tell him that it may be time to run, then."

  "Let me know once the clan's on the move," Dante said. "If you guys take too long, we'll come up with something to distract them."

  "Like running away screaming?" Blays said.

  Dante shut off the loon. "That works for me."