The Blood of Ten Chiefs
Page 20
Tanner said, "You would truly rather wear smoked hides rubbed with grease and brains?"
"It was good enough for me in your father's time," Fangslayer snapped.
"But that would truly be the waste," Tanner said, "when leather can be so much more. Don't you see, if I learn how I can make it thinner, softer, thin and soft as new leaves, and I can make it as many colors as the pelts of the wolf-pack. Or I can make it thick and hard, for protection in battle, should we ever have to battle the humans, or tough and supple for shelters, or I can make it stretch over a form as the humans stretch it for their drumheads. If I can learn to lace it tightly enough I will make pouches of it that will hold anything, even water. And-"
Caught up in his own fervor, it took Tanner a moment to notice that all the tribe had fallen silent and was gathering closer, listening to him. When he saw it, he stopped, lest they should hear promises where he had only dreams. He was reluctant to share such dreams; they were as nothing, he thought, before he made them true. To his tribe-mates he gave instead his shy, crooked smile. They smiled back, and some gently laughed. Fangslayer snorted and walked away. But the cub Starlight stood scowling earnestly at her chieftain, though he did not notice it. And Brook offered, "My chief, do you wish us to guard the pit from the human?"
The human tribe had come to their patch of the Everwood a mere hundred-some years before, and as yet knew nothing, or almost nothing, of the Wolfriders. Tanner and his people had learned new stealth; they had kept it so. Indeed, the rare human sightings of elves were hotly disputed around the tall ones' cooking fires in the evenings, and most of the humans scoffed more heartily than Fangslayer.
"No," said Tanner quietly to Brook, "thank you, but no. Let it go as it is." And he strode to the brow of the hurst to lead his tribe in the howl, to listen as tales were told of
battles and migrations, of the days of Prey-Pacer, Two-Spear, and Huntress Skyfire, days so dangerous, so different from the safe and settled life of Tanner's time.
Night followed night, howl followed howl, and in the Now of wolf-time moons followed moons, scarcely noticed. Orange autumn moons, cold white winter moons, and through them all Lift-Leg remained faithful to his oak tree and relieved himself on Tanner's pit. Watery spring moons, and still Lift-Leg did not falter in his routine. And Brook, Joygleam, and the others gleefully brought their chief the news of it all the while, until, when the thaw finally came, Tanner had no heart to open the pit.
"I swear by Timmorn's bones," he said to Stagrunner one night as they sat atop the silent hurst, "I would like to just let it lie."
The wolf-friend sat stolidly under the starlight. Concerning things of this sort, Stagrunner was the only one Tanner could talk to. Brook was a loyal friend in the large things, but in the small things he could not be trusted not to laugh or bear tales; he too dearly loved a joke. Though to Tanner leather-making was no small thing.
"And if it were not for Fangslayer," said Tanner morosely, "I think I would do just that. Let it all lie and rot."
Stagrunner panted, his white teeth gleaming in a grin of wordless agreement.
"But he'd never let me hear the end of it." Tanner shrugged, suddenly putting on again the air of half-smiling bemusement that he wore like a cloak. "So open it I must. I believe I was born to be the laughingstock. Walk with me, my good friend?"
Side by side, they ambled off into the night together.
On another night not long after, a night of the full moons, Tanner led a troop of strong young elves down to the oak to help him open the pit. And though they were outwardly silent, many were the jests that were privately "sent," especially as they drew near enough to whiff the place's aroma.
But on the way back to the hurst there were no jokes at all.
"Well?" Fangslayer barked, meeting the group of elves with their bundles of heavy, still-wet leathers. And Tanner, in the lead, looked straight at him with a smile that was neither shy nor wry.
"They are nearly perfect," he declared.
The leathers were lovely, fine and supple, softer than they had ever been before.
A tanning agent without peer had been discovered.
For days Tanner luxuriated in heady victory. Eagerly he assembled the next year's batch of hides, already harvested by Brook and sun-dried atop the evergreens, where the humans would not see. Eagerly he fetched tanbark and dried leaves, expertly placing them with the hides as he set them in the ground.
The seasons went round the cycle of four, one more moment-year in the nearly-endless span of elfin life, and the next springtime, seemingly no more than a moment later, found Tanner once again in despair.
Lift-Leg, the human, had unaccountably changed his habits. Perhaps the smell had become too much for him. He had taken his bodily wastes elsewhere. Not even once had he vouchsafed to piss on the awaiting pit. Tanner had undertaken to service the site himself, but without much hope; instinct told him that elf urine was quite different from human. In desperation he had attempted to obtain wolf urine, without much success. And to add to his gloom, the struggle had caused the relationship between him and Stagrunner to become chill and strained. And the leathers, when they came out of the ground, were solidly second-rate.
All his tribesmates, even Fangslayer, tried to tell him otherwise. "They're fine," Fangslayer snapped. "Very serviceable.''
The Wolfriders nodded, watching their chief with concern.
He had grown far too intent on his leathermaking to be laughed at.
"There's nothing wrong with this year's batch, Tanner," Brook told him. "Really."
Oddly, instead of comforting him, all this made him secretly furious, more furious than he had ever been when they had laughed. And oddly, it was one of the cubs, Stormlight, who was of better help to him.
She came to him where he was sitting alone for want of Stagrunner, sitting beneath the stars at the brow of the hurst. With no greeting or apology she sat beside him. "I know what you want," she said.
Still furious, all the more so since he could not shout at his well-meaning people, Tanner did not look at her or answer her. But Stormlight spoke steadily on.
"You want leathers as soft as flower petals, and colored all the hues of sky after sun goes down."
His head snapped around so that he looked at her.
"You want deerskins the color of honey, but softer than a newborn baby's hair. You want split pigskins as red as a robin's breast feathers, and purple as oak leaves in autumn, and gray as twilight, and deepwater blue. You want doeskins of milk white, able to be folded flat as a leaf and opened without a crease. You want the smaller skins, treewee, ringtail, even swamp rat, no less beautiful than the others."
She understood.
She, a cub, understood better than any of her tribe-mates. Tanner was astounded, for it was seldom that any of them, least of all the cubs, saw him as anything but a stodgy, eccentric elder with a sparrow-brown beard, an undistinguished body, and no skills at the hunt.
Anger gone as if it had never been, Tanner looked hard at Stormlight. He might as well have been seeing her for the first time. Indeed, she had only been in his long life for a mere eyeblink, fourteen years or so, a tiny span compared to
his seven-hundred-some years. She had been a fair-haired flash darting past him in the night, no more. Now he saw a cub-yet not a cub. All slender quickness and lank lengths of growing bones, but something stirring in the fine, pale face, the huge, night-shadowed eyes faintly sparkling with starlight. She was a cub at the edge, the verge, of passage and adulthood. And she understood.
Tanner found his voice a trifle husky when he spoke. "I had not thought of the purple," he admitted.
"But I was right about the rest?" the cub demanded.
"More than right."
"So what are you going to do?" Her great eyes were intensely on him.
Tanner smiled with both sides of his mouth, finding his way suddenly made clear. "Is it not plain? I must obtain more human urine," he declared, and he got up and went off t
o call a council of the Wolfriders to set about it.
"My people," he told them, "I need your help."
It was a request that they could not lightly refuse, and they did not do so. But neither did they agree. And by the end of the night all the tribe was dark with doubt and grumbling about Tanner. No longer one to be pitied and protected, he. A danger, maybe even a madman, Two-Spear's worthy successor. Tanner found himself smiling, the only one smiling. He felt much more happy and comfortable as a danger than as a soft-spoken eccentric, a leader who seldom led, chief in name only and a disappointment to the tribe.
"There," he remarked to Brook after the others had scattered, muttering, to the tree hollows and hidden places where they spent their days. "Finally, I've given you some excitement."
Brook said unhappily, "What did you expect, after letting Fangslayer and Longreach and the other elders run everything for years?"
"You think I'm a fool, Brook? Why do you suppose I only
proposed that we watch the human camp until their habits become known to us? I plan to bring Fangslayer and his cronies around by degrees. What we really should do is dig a trap, make a net, and capture a human male to make urine for us."
Brook stared and backed away. "You are crazy," he stammered. Then he bolted toward the safety of his daylight perch.
"And he's the one who always tells the tales of Two-Spear at the howl," Tanner remarked to himself. Shrugging, half smiling in the faint daybreak light, he took to the trees-but not to rest. Silently, by the hidden upper ways, he himself made his way toward the human camp.
Just as he reached the point where he could watch the human hunters setting out to run the deer toward the waiting spearmen at the river, he saw a flash of fair hair some distance below him.
**Stormlight!**
Her easy, swinging gait through the maze of lower branches slowed. Reluctantly she answered the sending.**I am here.**
**I know you are! What are you doing?**
**Watching the human camp for you, my chief, since the others are too stupid to care.**
He felt amused agreement, which he did not dare to share with her. Instead, he tried to sound stern.**Turn around. You know you should not be here. Go back to your family at once.**
**I have none.**
He had forgotten that she was an orphan, raised by the tribe, her parents killed in a hunting mishap years before. Childless and mateless as he was, and preoccupied with his leathermaking, Tanner had taken small part in the rearing of such cubs. He felt a jab of guilt, not only that he had forgotten, but that she could remind him so starkly, as if she should expect nothing more than forgetfulness from him.
**Turn around, then,** he sent more gently yet more firmly,**and go back to the place where you spend your days. I, your chief, command it.**
She went like a flash of birdflight, like a leaf on the wind, like cloud wisp, gone. From his higher, safer, more hidden vantage, Tanner looked on uneasily. For there was a human hunter standing on the ground beneath where she had been, staring upward with a puzzled scowl.
Tanner watched the humans. He did not come so recklessly near to them as Stormlight had done, for it was not in his nature to take unnecessary risks, but nevertheless, he lost rest and watched, and found ways to the nearer trees, day after day. At times the slow-witted human women, grubbing roots, would have needed only to look up from their toil to have seen him. Once a small child did see him leaping from oak to ash, but the women paid no heed to the child's babbling. Tanner spent the rest of that day in hiding and in compunction, for if he had been discovered so also would the tribe have been, and he felt it his duty as chief to protect them. Yet there was that in him which would have died, were it necessary, to fulfill his private quest.
That season there was unwonted silence and lack of merriment at the nightly howls. But one night when both moons were nearly at the full, as he sat alone afterward, Stormlight came to him and seated herself as abruptly as before, and said to him darkly, "I know where you spend your days."
He met her gaze, smiling. "It seems to me that you know everything about me."
She ignored that and went on. "You are watching the human village. I know it because I am watching, too, and watching you."
He was aghast. "Stormlight!"
"And you are going to get yourself caught if you are not more careful," she said to him sternly.
"You have disobeyed me!" Yet for some reason he found
that he could not be angry with her or impose a punishment on her, as a chief should do.
"You gave me no order but for the one day," she retorted with a defiant lift of her head.
"You know no cub is ever to venture near the humans!"
"I will not be a cub for much longer! Then I will come and go as I will, and where I will, climb up and touch the lightning if I like. Ride the gale down to the ground, if I can. Do as you do, if it pleases me."
Tanner stared at her. She was as wild as Timmorn had ever been, born to confront the storm, as wild as the wolves. There was that in her which could be as fierce as he was gentle and mild.
Her eyes met his, her eyes of deep indigo, darker than storm clouds, deep as midnight, and he felt the jolt shift his center, his bedrock of self, and felt the tremors run through the rest of him, and he knew her soulname, which she did not yet know herself. And sitting, stunned and quaking, he knew he had to live some small time yet at least, long enough to generate a cub with her.
The cub that always comes of Recognition, combining the best qualities of each parent, her daring, his… vision… The cub that might someday be his heir.
Stormlight was trembling, edging away from him, her delicate face very frightened; she had felt it too. "What- what was that?" she stammered. "What have you done to me?"
She thought it was something he had imposed on her, a punishment for defying him. Quickly he reached out and laid a hand on her arm to keep her by him. "No!" he exclaimed. "No, it was not me."
"What, then?" she appealed.
"Far larger than either of us. It was Recognition."
"But I-but how can that be?" For all her proud talk, she was still very much the cub. "I-I am not yet-"
"I know, little one." He stroked her hair, shining like pale water in the moonlight. "You are nowhere near ready, neither your body nor your self. Let the high ones give me strength, I will wait for you."
She stared at him. "But it is not fair!" she burst out. "There should be lovemates for me, courtships, choosings!" A wild light was growing in her eyes. A wolf, entrapped by humans, Tanner had heard, would kill itself with fretting against its bonds rather than submit. This daughter of the wolves would take no more readily to the bonds of Recognition. "I have never wanted anything but to be free!"
Her cub, Tanner thought, might have those same wide, midnight-blue, flashing eyes.
"It is horrible!" she cried. "Why should I be-be made a prisoner to-to-"
Be bound to a dried-up old stick of an elf, she was thinking, though she would not say it, not even in her frenzy of shock and anger. But Tanner knew well enough.
**You will be as free as I can make you, Stormlight.** He sent to her, trying to calm her.**The bond need not be for life.**
She glared at him and sprang to her feet. "I'll see to my own freedom, thank you!" she snapped. She strode away from him, legs thin and gawky beneath her leather kirtle, and he watched after her until she went out of sight in the night.
Then he lay back and sighed and dazedly looked up at the stars. He was serene by nature, but Recognition had been at least as much of a shock to him as it was to her.
"Tie me and skin me and cook me in a fire!" he muttered.
By dawn he was still dazed, and went and watched the human village as he did every day, without really seeing anything, and without finding out any more than he already knew, which was that the humans were maddeningly random as to where they put their urine and when they produced it. When the sun was high he slept, right on a thick oak limb as
Then he glimpsed a small head of fair hair, so fine it floated like flowerdown above pointed ears, and he knew.
The humans had Stormlight.
One of the tall ones' hunters was carrying her in his coarse hands, carrying her to the center of the camp at arm's length, gingerly, as if even in his triumph he was afraid of her. Other humans, women and striplings mostly, were crowding and swirling around, jostling each other for a chance to see. yet unwilling to come too near; a clear space always showed around the hunter and his captive. Even in his panic Tanner could see that Stormlight had not been hurt, at least not yet. And she might not be if she used her wits. The humans acted more than half frightened of her.
**Stormlight! Be calm, be canny. I will bring help.**
**I-my chief, I am sorry. There is something wrong with me. I was clumsy and slow, he saw me-**
**Never mind that now. Keep your wits about you. Use their fear of you to fend them off. But do not make them so afraid they become enraged.**
**Please-come back quickly…**
At the distance, Tanner could not see the look on her face. Horror held him staring one moment more, and then he tore himself away and sped through the treetops toward the forest.
**Ayooooah! Stagrunner!** With all the sending strength that was in him he summoned his wolf-friend to more quickly carry him the remaining distance back to the camp. Within moments the wolf came leaping to his side, and for the first time in many seasons, and in high daylight, yet, Tanner rode, at speed.
**Ayooah-yoh! Wolfriders, to me! Brook! Brightlance! Joygleam! Oakstrong! Scarp!**