Passage

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Briefly, aye,” Dag agreed wearily. Ye gods. But it wasn’t the bandits he wanted to take the lesson. It was the boatmen. And everyone else. Because tales of this day’s doings would go up and down the river as fast as a boat could travel. They would inevitably end up garbled. But Dag swore that they wouldn’t start out that way, not if he could help it. So you’d better get this right, old patroller.

  Dag returned to the Fetch, trying to remember everything he’d seen Dar do to prepare himself for his knife-bindings. Sharing knife makers generally, he reflected, were sheltered in the center of most camps, in the most protected and private of spaces. In the very heart of Lakewalker life. He would be turning that heart inside out.

  He told his shadows Barr and Remo to go find something to do for half an hour, because any hint less broad would not have been taken, and led Fawn out onto the back deck as the nearest they could manage for a scrap of privacy. There, he explained what he meant to try.

  She merely nodded. “Anything Dar can do, I ’spect you can do better.”

  He wasn’t sure if all that confidence was well-placed, but he had to admit, it was warming. He gripped her strong little hand in his. “The groundwork will be up to me, but the thing is, some parts of the task are going to need two hands. Bleeding Crane, mainly, to bring his ground into the knife blank when I set up the involution. Much like the way you led your ground into my marriage cord back when we wove them. I would—could—ask Remo or Barr to help me, except that I’d really prefer to keep them clear of this task. In case there’s trouble about it later.”

  Her brow wrinkled. “Why should there be?”

  “Because I’m not just making a knife. I plan to make it a demonstration of Lakewalker groundwork for every boatman here who I can get to look and listen.” He added after a moment, “You could leave before I actually, um, prime the knife. You wouldn’t need to watch that part.”

  “Ah,” she breathed. She looked up to catch his gaze square. “But, you know, it’s not impossible, if I’m to be a true Lakewalker’s kinswoman, that such a task might fall to me someday. It would be the worst thing to botch I can imagine. Don’t you think I’d better watch and learn how it’s done right?”

  He swallowed, nodded, folded her in tight. “Yes,” he whispered. “That, too.”

  At length, he let her go, and she went into the kitchen to fix him a meal with no meat, because he did remember Dar ate no flesh before a binding. When he came in after carefully washing up, she set before him a dish of potatoes, apples, and onions fried up in salt butter, took a little for herself, and passed the remainder on to Hod and Hawthorn, who would be staying in to keep watch on Bo. In an attempt to spare Dag, Remo had given a ground reinforcement to Hawthorn’s swollen nose, for the pain and bruising; Dag would release the trace of beguilement later, he decided, when he had the chance to set it properly.

  As Dag scraped up his last bite, Fawn set down a cup beside his right elbow. He looked over in surprise to find it piled with oats.

  “There you go. You sit there and ground-rip those till my hair turns purple, you hear?”

  “Um?”

  She sat quietly beside him, her back to the room. “Because it seems to me that when you take in something vile that you can’t hack up, next best thing for it is to take in something bland, to cushion it.”

  “Ah. You, um…realized I ground-ripped Crane.”

  “Pretty much straight off, yeah. So now there’s a bit of him in you, isn’t there? Till you break him down, at least.”

  “Does that…bother you?”

  “I think it bothers you. A lot.”

  “True, Spark,” he sighed. He took her hand and pressed the back of it briefly to his forehead. “Stay near me through this. It helps me remember who I am and what I am about, when things get too confusing.”

  He took up oat grains and rolled them between his fingers, tossing the ripped ones onto his dirty plate, until, indeed, the outlines of things started to look preternaturally sharp and strange.

  If there was anything more he ought to do in preparation, well, he didn’t know what it was. After a moment of consideration he unbuckled his arm harness, set it aside, and rolled down his sleeve, buttoning the empty cuff so it wouldn’t flap. He adjusted the knife sheath on his chest, clasped Fawn’s hand, and rose.

  Dag had the litter-carriers position Crane in the middle of the scree just a few paces from the shore, heart-side toward the river, so that the sixty or so boatmen could sit or stand on the slope that rose toward the cave and all hear and get a clear view. Whit, Wain, and two other keelers set down the litter and retrieved Wain’s poles, and Whit retreated to one side to wait with Berry. Remo and Barr sat a little way off on the other, at a deliberate distance chosen by Dag to mark them as witnesses, not participants. Dag folded a blanket for his knees and Fawn’s on Crane’s far side, where they would not block the boatmen’s view. She knelt and looked up at him expectantly.

  The boatmen crunched around on the rocks of the incline, finding positions, hunkering or sitting or standing. None crowded all that close. The half dozen or so of the Snapping Turtle’s keelers who’d heard his talk on Lakewalker groundwork back at Pearl Riffle were amongst those toward the front, staring with interest. At least this afternoon they were all stone-sober. So.

  Dag stood up, raised his voice to carry to the edge of the crowd, and began—again: “First I have to explain about ground, and Lakewalker groundsense. Ground is in everything, underlies everything, live or inert, but live ground is brightest. You all have ground in you, but you don’t sense it…” He’d made this explanation so many times down this valley that it felt as smoothed as stones in a streambed. Some here had heard earlier versions, but it never hurt to hammer it in again. How many hundreds of times had he repeated himself explaining patrol techniques to each year’s new crop of young patrollers?

  Ground. Groundsense. Malices…That last caught any attention still drifting loose. The youngsters took it for tale, their elders who’d seen blight for an eye-opener; the Raintree men who’d brushed up against the malice war nodded and exchanged murmurs, both amongst themselves and with their curious neighbors.

  Crane was staring—glaring—up at Dag with eyes gone wide with disbelief. Dag hadn’t asked Crane’s permission to make him the material of this demonstration, but he felt no qualms. If Crane hadn’t lost his choice with that first murdered farmer back in Oleana, he’d done so a hundred times since. His disordered life had done the wide green world a great deal of harm. Let his death do it some scrap of good.

  If this is good.

  Now Dag’s rattling chain of words came to the secret heart of things. He pitched his voice up again. “The creation of sharing knives is considered the most demanding of Lakewalker makings, and the most”—his tongue hovered a moment on secret, but chose instead—“private. The knives are carved from bones, Lakewalker bones, willed as gifts. Not robbed from graves, and not ever, despite the rumors, stolen farmer bones. These are legacies from our kin. The gifting is a solemn part of our funeral customs.” Also the messy part, but he wasn’t going to go into that yet. Because now came the most essential, most questionable part of today’s desperate lesson.

  He drew the bone knife from the sheath at his neck and handed it to Fawn, who rose to take it. “My wife, Fawn, is going to go around amongst you now and show you a real sharing knife. Please touch it and hold it a moment.” But blight and absent gods, don’t drop it on the rocks. “All I ask is that you handle it carefully and with respect, because…because I once had such a bone blade willed to me by my first wife, and I know how I’d feel if…” He broke off with a gulp.

  Fawn moved amongst the crowd, overseeing the knife being passed back and forth. Dag found his voice again and went on, “We found this knife lost in the cave cache with those Lakewalker furs. We figure some Lakewalker maker in Raintree made it, from the thighbone of one of his or her camp-kin. No telling whose—there was no identifying writing burned on this blade, as
there sometimes is. It was bonded to a Lakewalker woman who was murdered by these river bandits just about on the spot where I’m now standing…”

  Of all today’s revelations, the knife was the one Dag was most determined the boatmen should understand, body-deep—and so through their hands as well as their ears and eyes. How much closer could he bring folks without groundsense to the feared Lakewalker so-called sorcery than to actually let them touch the cool, smooth surface of that fraught bone, weigh it in their palms, pass it one to another? Dag, who never prayed if he could help it, prayed forgiveness of the unknown donor for this use of the gift. But to his immense relief, Fawn’s passage was marked not by repulsed groans, or worse, nervous laughter, but by reasonably reverent, or at least polite, quiet.

  Remo’s and Barr’s mouths were tight, their eyes wide. They both looked ready to bolt, if only they knew where. But they held on.

  Fawn at length returned, handed the blade back to Dag, and knelt attentively once more. He held it up. “The knife makers don’t just shape the surface of bone when it’s carved; they also shape its ground, both naturally as its nature changes from bone to knife, and through groundwork to prepare it for its next task—which is to hold a Lakewalker’s mortality as if sealed in a bottle. This knife was already dedicated like that, but with some groundwork and boiling water earlier today, I cleaned out the unused bonding. This is now a bone blank, same as if it just came from the carver’s hand. So the next step I have to show you is the new bonding.”

  He knelt by Crane’s left side, his back to the muted gleam of the river. “Blood is ’specially interesting for groundwork,” he called up the slope, “because it bears a person’s live ground even after it leaves the body, at least till it dries and dies. In a regular bonding, the prospective heart’s-death donor would bleed a little into a new greenwood bowl, but we’re going to sort of skip that step.”

  The knife to cut open the vein would be heated, too, to prevent infection. There were several refinements that Dag recalled from the time he’d been bonded to Kauneo’s knife that were just not needed, here. In a moment of wild panic, Dag wondered whether he could fake it if this didn’t work—stab Crane with the useless blade before he could complain, and pretend to his audience that he’d actually made and bonded a true knife. But Remo and Barr would know, blight.

  Dag found himself settling cross-legged more comfortably, as if for a healing, which was disturbing—right, let it join the yapping pack of his doubts to deal with later. This groundwork had even less room for irresolution than did patrolling. He glanced at Fawn and relieved her of one concern: “He can’t feel a thing anywhere below his neck. You can’t hurt him.” She nodded grimly. He tipped the bone knife down below Crane’s arm as Fawn, holding up the dead weight a little awkwardly, took Dag’s war knife and scored a deep cut on the pale surface of skin, squeezing it to make it bleed and drip.

  And then Dag dropped down into that other world, of inner essence seen from the inside, close-up. The material world—the light of the afternoon, the bare trees, the stone slope, the rustling men craning their necks—faded like a ghostly vision, present but formed of fog, and the coursing torrents of the ground beneath it all became palpable to him. The men were roiling complexities, Fawn a blazing fire. Dag was his ground. The knife in his hand was a knotted pattern of potential. Crane…Crane was a dark and furrowed mess, but his blood dripped brightly.

  Dag extended his ghost hand beneath the vivid stream, casting his mind back over the involution he’d known best: the one in his own pledged knife, which he’d watched be made for him by the maker in Luthlia. He had himself unmade it again in Raintree as part of breaking the malice’s deadly groundlock. The involution was the knife maker’s greatest gift, the cupped hands to hold the offered mortality. He folded his ghost hand around a splash of Crane. His current unwelcome affinity with the renegade might well be rendering this easier—add that dark thought to the pack, no time for it now. He let his ground flow into the furrow along the inner edge of the blade, there to join with the knife’s own waiting ground. Let it all set, solidify.

  He pulled back, parting from that piece of himself he’d turned into a cup for Crane.

  And gasped in astonishment. Ah, blight! I didn’t know it was going to hurt this much! He watched in horrified fascination as his ghost hand tore away from the part of itself caught in the knife. It felt like biting off his own finger. Ye gods, and Dar went through this every time he bonded a knife? Brother, I beg your forgiveness.

  If the curl of ground was just right…I either have it now, or I don’t. If I don’t, I can boil the blade again and start over—many a maker’s apprentice has had to do just that, their first few trials. But beneath that was the stronger thought, mule-headed in its certainty: I have it.

  He came back, blinking, to the surface world, trembling and cold as if from a deep healing. The bloody knife shook in his tight grip, but it was his left arm that ached, and his ghost hand felt on fire. A quick check found his groundsense down to a hundred paces. Again. I won’t be recovering from this in a day. But the groundwork was over. Everything after this was going to be…he declined to finish the thought, easy. Everything after this was going to be as blighted bizarre as everything before, likely.

  Dag swallowed and found his cracked voice. “Now, at this point in a usual knife making, the maker would clean it up and give it to its new owner, to use later on. A good binding can last a lifetime.” By definition. He stuck his hand out rather blindly toward Fawn. She raised her brows at him, pried the knife from his stiffened fingers, and rubbed the spare blood from it with a cloth. Dag wasn’t so sure how good this binding was—it seemed clumsier than his Luthlian knife’s, not as fine. But solid, yes. Possibly overbuilt? Maybe he was only supposed to have, say, bitten off the tip of one finger? But the lifetime this binding waited on would be measured in minutes.

  “Primings vary. My father put his knife through his own heart during a dire illness a dozen years ago. My first wife rolled over on hers when she was dying of wounds on a far northern battlefield. Remo had one from an elderly kinswoman who gave up the last precious months of her old age to it”—out of the corner of his eye, Dag saw Remo flinch—“and had to be helped to it by her own daughter. I’ve seen patrollers help each other. You understand, a sharing knife is not normally used as an instrument of execution.” Or as a means of instruction to a pack of farmers, Dag had to admit. “But one way or another, this is something no farmer has ever seen, so pay attention.” He snapped that last to the back of the crowd in his captain’s voice. They jolted upright and attended.

  “You’re a blighted madman, you know that?” Crane murmured up to him. He’d kept his face turned half-away from the gawkers on the hill through most of this.

  “I have my reasons,” Dag murmured back down. “You might even have understood them once, before you wrecked yourself.”

  “Me, they banished. If they have a lick of sense, you they’ll burn alive.”

  Ignoring this, Dag sat again, and said, “Open his shirt, Spark.”

  Her nimble fingers undid the buttons, folded back the cloth, bared Crane’s chest. Dag wondered if Remo was going to want his shirt back, after. He looked gravely into Crane’s silvery eyes, and received a black-browed scowl in return.

  “Ready?” Do you assent? Of all requirements for this making, that was the most profoundly unalterable.

  “If you want my dying curse,” growled Crane, “you have it.”

  “Figured that.”

  “So if my curse is as good as a blessing, is my blessing worth a curse? Blight it, take both. You can sort them out yourself. I’m done.” He turned his face toward the bright river. “Let me out of this hopeless world.” He added after a moment, “Don’t let your blighted hand falter.”

  Assent enough.

  Dag positioned the tip of the sharing knife under Crane’s rib cage, pausing only long enough to explain softly to Fawn about the correct angle to reach the heart, and how muc
h force to use to reach it in one swift punch without breaking the blade prematurely. Her face was taut, but her eyes were intent. She nodded understanding.

  Dag extended his groundsense to be sure of Crane’s heart, gripped the haft, and in an abrupt motion, forced in the blade to its full length.

  Crane’s lips shivered and his eyes rolled up, but all Dag’s attention was back at ground level. He froze, still clasping the haft, as the dissolving mortal ground began to flow toward the knife as if sucked into a drain. Would his involution hold it all? Would it close and seal properly…?

  Yes.

  Dag breathed again. As Crane did not.

  He blinked, looked up, looked around. The hillside of watching men had gone really, really quiet.

  Dag drew the primed knife from its fleshly sheathing and held it up high. “This Lakewalker”—he declined to use the terms renegade or banished at this point—“has now given his mortality into this knife, to share again, if the chance favors me, with the next malice to cross my path.” Twenty-six Lakewalkers before Crane had trusted Dag not to waste their deaths, and had their trust upheld. Of all the knives and lives that had passed through his hand, this was surely the darkest. Blight, but I came by this one the hard way. He handed the knife to Fawn to clean and slip back into the sheath at his neck, because his hand was still too clumsy with the shakes to manage the task in one try.

  “Whether Crane has paid for his crimes, I can’t tell you. This is a separate tally.”

  23

  Her face carefully held stiff to hide how her stomach shook, Fawn helped Dag rise from Crane’s still body. She had prudently brought along Dag’s hickory stick; with that in his hand and Fawn under his left shoulder, he made his way along the shoreline. At Fawn’s nod of invitation, Berry followed, and Whit came after her. Barr and Remo were left to oversee the disposal of the corpse. The crowd of sobered boatmen, too, broke up and moved into the trees to tend to their next grim chore.