Paul O Williams - [Pelbar Cycle 02]

by The Ends of the Circle (v0. 9) (epub)

  “You said, Stel, that a mother’s tears can redeem the beast. It is a father’s for a Pelbar man. It is yours for me. I see them. Never thought a Pelbar would ever cry over me.”

  “For any man, Scule, it is a mother or a wife, a woman. That is something no man, even a Pelbar, can do. It is the special province of woman, hard as they try to deny it. But don’t worry. Your mother cried for you often enough.”

  “Do you know that?”

  “The family is at Northwall. They raised a poem stone there. There was much argument about it, but Northwall would not agree to take it down.”

  “What did it say?”

  “I don’t know. I have never been there. But it must have been good because it made the Dahmens so angry.” Scule started to laugh, lightly, in his old man’s cackle, but ended coughing blood.

  “I will return to Pelbarigan, Scule, and I will tell them the story as you have told it. I promise.”

  “No. The Dahmens will make enough trouble for you.”

  “Nonetheless, if I live, I will go.”

  “But go to the shining sea first.”

  “The shining sea? I will go westward, and I will try to go to the shining sea. Now you must rest. I have to plug up your window better. It is cold in here. Look, the snow is still getting in.”

  Stel worked much of the night, both on the window, which he eventually shut with stone from the prison room, and the beast, which he butchered, drying long strips of the dark, heavy meat over Scule’s fire. Toward morning he looked at the old man again but saw he was not sleeping this time. He was dead.

  Stel was suddenly very weary. He carried the body to the cold storage pantry, wrapped it, and left it there, returning to curl up by the fire in his own sleepsack, with the beast’s pelt over him, sleeping undisturbed until midday.

  It was no weather to travel. Stel took his time, examining all of Scule’s house and possessions, taking the old man down into the prison room and entombing him in a structure of the rocks he himself had so carefully cut. The storm had ceased, but it was bitter cold. Stel ventured out through the window. It was a joy to be free. He would find wood suitable for snow sliders, then return and set up housekeeping in Scule’s house until the weather broke. How different was the silence of outdoors from the silence of his prison room. It was singing with wind and branches, with cruel cold and the silent music of free air and icy mountains. Scule, Stel decided, surely must have felt some of this. He must have.

  14

  The snow was still deep at Scule’s house when Stel left it. He had carefully dismantled all the traps outside, digging down through snow and ice to do it. He had arranged the house as an open one for whatever traveler might happen to come. And by the prison room, the roof of which he removed, making a stairway of rocks down to it, Stel chiseled an inscription, working with an old maul and the nub of a steel chisel he found in Scule’s tools.

  Scule of Pelbarigan, who set out for the shining sea and stopped in these mountains. Lived by himself, without speaking to anyone for many years. Killed by a great unknown beast, Scule leaves this house for all who pass. Soundly made, it will serve the travelers of ages. As you rest by his fire, think of the skill of Scule, the stonecutter, and his faithfulness to his work.

  STEL DAHMEN OF PELBARIGAN

  Shortly after his departure, Stel was surprised at how few ayas he was from an ancient town—this one fairly free of snow, being down beyond the narrow gorge in the high, steep mountains in which Scule lived. It was not a poisonous empty place, yet was a ruin, the first Stel had ever been in from ancient times.

  Overrun with brush and forest, the ruin still revealed the layout of its streets. Tumbled in, and burned in some wild fire, the buildings were still largely visible—at least the stone ones, and those of the small bricks that even the Pelbar still made at Threerivers. It was all decayed. Stel examined the ruin for some time. Gaps in the few standing walls and fragments of glass on the ground showed there had been large, glazed windows. The surfaces had a wonderful flatness. Still standing were several stanchions of the light, white metal of the ancients, perhaps for outdoor lighting, but they were so high that Stel could not see how they could be ignited at night. It seemed very impractical. Perhaps they had another function. On north slopes west of the town, Stel found, in the tangled mountain growth, the rusted remains of lines of towers, leading uphill. But too much time and weather had passed by here, and he could make nothing of it.

  Back in the city he found a fallen statue buried in leaves and brush near a brick ruin. It was gray. He thought it had been of a man, but the face had washed away. He seemed to be holding a long stick or club in front of himself. Stel cleaned it off and stood it up, heaving hard against it, then leaning it back against a shrubby pine. Did it have an odd hat on? He thought so.

  They could do so many things, the ancients, but something had destroyed it all. It was like his own experiences. Men were much better with their building, their weapons, their entrapments, than they were with each other.

  He turned westward, very soon running into a small empty place, not half an ayas wide. In its center he could see a ruin of buildings on a flat site tucked in under the north slope of the lower hills. From there the land trended downward toward the west. The hills were high, but rounded, reddish, and covered with tufts of brush and short pines. Stel followed a rushing stream that carried snowmelt, frost cold, out of the mountains. Here too were fragments of ancient road and occasionally a small ruin. But the whole district was now empty of people.

  Stel had been traveling slowly, fishing and hunting, for nearly two weeks when he came upon a small rough shelter of brush, clearly made by humans. As he looked around, he saw brush enclosures, and strange animal droppings, all old. So herdsmen of some kind lived here.

  The dwellings were simple and crude. But no one was there now, or had been for a while. Stel had continued west for two more days when he heard a child’s crying.

  Plainly it was a cry of distress, piercing and quavering. Trotting ahead, Stel found a child, a small dark girl, sitting by a mound of fur that Stel soon saw was a woman. She had fallen and lay still at the bottom of a slope of loose rock.

  Stel’s sudden arrival raised the child’s cry in pitch, but he simply hugged and patted her briefly, saying, “Don’t worry, little one. Your Uncle Stel will take care of everything.” Then he turned to the woman. Her skin was dark and smooth, a little like that of the Roti. She had a rounded face, now scratched from the fall, and long, straight coal-black hair, thick and rich, held in a single braid behind.

  Stel rolled her over slowly and bathed her face with water from his pitched bottle. She opened her eyes and looked at him vaguely, then focused with surprise. “Commuter?” she asked, in a strange dialect.

  “No. Pelbar. Lie still. I will take care of you.”

  “Pelbar? What is Pelbar?”

  “A people from the east. Where do you hurt? Have you broken something?”

  “Leg, I think. You talk like Commuter. Where is Blomi?”

  “Who? This little girl?” Blomi had quieted down and sat on her heels watching, her face tear-streaked, her small hands clasped in front of her. For the first time, Stel saw they were surrounded by medium-size horned animals, with slotted eyes, quiet and quizzical. He started.

  “What?”

  “They will not hurt. They are quiet and tame.”

  “What are they?”

  The woman stared in disbelief. “They? Goat, of course. Are you stupid? You not Commuter. What you say you are?”

  “Pelbar. From the east. There are none of these there. Now let me look at your leg.”

  Feeling carefully, he determined that one bone in the lower leg was broken. Stel bound it up and splinted it. He washed the woman’s scraped legs and arms and covered them, using his small collection of rodent furs. The woman, whose name was Catal, had come early to the summer pastures. She was not expecting her family for some time. She wanted to return to them now, with the goats, of
course, Stel carrying her on a litter, dragging the rear ends, driving the goats, and herding the little girl, Blomi. Not only that. She wanted to go south, across the line of rounded mountains.

  Stel hesitated a few minutes. Plainly it would have to be done. He could not leave her, and he didn’t want to stay with her. But it was not easy. Scrabbling up the slopes, watching the goats, carrying his own gear as well, hunting, milking the goats as Catal taught him, with Blomi laughing at his clumsiness, and caring for the two soon had Stel nearly exhausted. They had to go farther than he had surmised, or Catal had said, and after three days, he found out they were only halfway. Tired of the bumping, Catal wanted to walk, but even though they tried crutches, it would not work on the rough ground.

  The one compensation was Blomi. Stel had forgotten the delight of children. She talked to him endlessly, sometimes lapsing into the tongue he couldn’t understand, sometimes in “Commuter,” as she called the common tongue Stel knew. She was better at it than her mother. The goat people had come from the south only eighteen summers ago, and they traded with the Commuters to the west.

  Blomi snuggled up to Stel at night, putting her small arm around his neck. She was not heavily dressed, and slept by the fire without cover, and Stel knew she was by him for warmth, but he still felt the charm of her small softness, and her presence was a compliment. To have one’s own child—what a delight that must be.

  Blomi got Stel to tell stories and play his flute, and especially delighted in the frog game, the finger people of the house, or the rime for toes:

  These little fish swim in the current.

  These five fish swim near the shore.

  Along comes the great big catfish—

  No little fish anymore.

  This was accompanied by hands approaching her toes like gaping mouths, or even Stel’s mouth, opening and clicking his teeth. Blomi always squealed and held her feet in her hands. Then she would put them out for him to do it again.

  “Do it to Mother,” Blomi shrilled.

  Stel looked over at the silent, watching Catal. “She wouldn’t pull her toes away. Her leg is tied down.”

  “Then you would pinch them,” Blomi said, laughing.

  Stel fell silent. Catal smiled at him. Stel felt uneasy after that. What was the woman thinking? Well, he would be rid of them both soon enough, though he thought of leaving Blomi with some regret.

  The third day after involved a climb that the goats managed with ease, but for Stel, dragging his heavy load, it was a great trial. He had to stop repeatedly, sitting and panting. Catal was somehow impatient. When they finally reached the rim rock, he saw the hill slope southward gently, and a trail winding down. Far below, in a canyon, smoke rose.

  It was late in the afternoon that the strange procession straggled into the open canyon floor with its rough shelters. About twenty people, as rudely dressed as Catal, almost all dark-skinned, came out to look. No one rushed forward. A strange atmosphere of tension hung like the smoke in the air.

  “Where do you want to be put down?” Stel asked.

  “There,” said Catal, pointing.

  Stel saw a brush shelter. In front of it a thin young man stood, this one not dark, but light-brown-haired, blue-eyed, with a sparse beard and long hair tied behind with a thong.

  Stel dragged the litter to him. The man didn’t move. He put it down. “She broke her leg. Now, do you have water?”

  The brown-haired man paid no attention to Stel. He said a short sentence to Catal in a strange language. She replied in a long, impassioned speech, full of contempt, ending by spitting.

  Stel was uneasy. He strung his short bow and took out several arrows. Let them settle their own problems. He untied his backsack from the litter. Stooping to Blomi, he kissed her and said good-bye. But she was crying.

  “You can’t go now, Stel,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “You were with Mother.”

  “Yes. Depending on what ‘with’ means. Then what.” “You must fight Father.”

  “You knew this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Mother said—Mother said it was the only way to save her and get her home.”

  The brown-haired man brought a long, braided whip out of the brush hut, and began whistling it around his head. “Come on, now, you green-livered woman stealer. I’m going to peel your hide.”

  “Not again,” said Stel, stepping back.

  “What mean, not again. Not first time? Well, it will be last.”

  “Another gang of crazy people.”

  “I’ll show you crazy. You die for that.” The brownhaired man lashed out at Stel, who jumped back in time. “Stand still.”

  “You stand still. You see that log?” Stel pointed to a curved juniper log near Blomi’s father.

  “What about it, green liver? Of course I—” He stopped when Stel’s arrow thunked into it.

  “Now, take that out carefully. Feel the point. Do it.” The brown-haired man did. “The next one goes through your belly. Do you want that?”

  “Through my belly? No. How’d you do that? Fight fair, green-livered lizard.”

  “Lizard now, is it? Or is it green-izard lizit?”

  “What?”

  “Now, back off, or I will kill you, purely and simply. I am going to retrieve that arrow, then I am going to wash myself in that stream, and then I will leave. Any questions?”

  Blomi’s father backed off. “You can’t do that,” said a greasy-faced man, squat and dark.

  “Why not?”

  “You must fight.”

  “We just did. Didn’t we, brown hair. You won, didn’t you.”

  “You do nothing rightly.”

  Stel laughed. “All right, snake belly. Maybe not. But that is the way it is going to be.”

  “No one calls me snake belly. For that you will die,” said the greasy-faced man, advancing with tightened muscles.

  “Wait,” Stel said, holding up his hand. “All right, grease face, you are not a snake belly. Now I live, right?” “Grease face?”

  “An apt description.”

  “You die for that.” He too carried a long, braided whip, and he curled it out, catching Stel around the wrist. But Stel’s razor-sharp short-sword cut it off as the man pulled. He sat down in the sand, got up, looked at his whip, and screamed.

  “Look what you did! A new whip.”

  “For that I die, right?” Stel turned slowly, watching them all. They stood still. An old woman spat at him, and began cursing him in her unknown tongue. Stel took from his backsack a small piece of glass he had picked up at the ruin and held it in front of his face, pointing at the woman.

  She stopped. “What you doing?” she asked.

  “Have you never heard of a mirror man?”

  “Mirror man?”

  “This has the power, with my magic, to turn your curses back on you, doubling them. Do you feel them yet? I see your chin beginning to grow more hair. Are your teeth loose yet? Your eyes already sag.” Involuntarily the'woman put a hand to her face. Then she turned abruptly and walked over to her hut, entering it. Stel looked at the rest, his arrow nocked.

  The brown-haired man shouted from the entrance to his hut, “I don’t have to take care of the child. I don’t have to keep Catal. They are yours now, you snake.”

  Blomi screamed and cried, sitting in the sand.

  “Then I will take Blomi and care for her,” said Stel, stooping to the child. “Do as you please with Catal, you lice-ridden toad wart. Or should I say, toad-ridden lice wart? No, that would be louse wart.”

  Blomi reached out for Stel, who picked her up and walked briskly out of the camp the way he had come. The girl said nothing, but her chin trembled as she looked back. “Don’t worry,” Stel whispered to her. “It will be all right.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “We will go to the Commuters until they all calm down. Don’t worry. You will be with your mother and father soon enough.”

  “Why di
d you do those things?”

  “I think they would have killed me for helping you. Would they?”

  “I think they might. It is really because Mother and Father fight all the time. How long before they will come and get me?”

  “I don’t know. They will have to calm down. What’s the matter? Don’t you like me?”

  “But they are my mother and father.”

  “Yes, my little love. But we will have to give them time to realize that. Sometimes children have to help educate their parents, you know.”

  “Educate?”

  “Teach them.”

  It was not as long as Stel supposed. Before they reached the first hilltop, the brown-haired man ran after them, panting hard as he came near. Stel turned.

  “We—we have decided. We will keep the girl.”

  “What will happen to her?”

  “Nothing. We cannot let her go with a murderous crazy man.”

  Stel put Blomi down. “Good-bye, now,” he said. “See that murderous crazy person over there? Run to him. He will take you home.”

  “But that is my father.”

  “Yes. I am teasing. I am the murderous crazy person. Now go.” He kissed her forehead. She took his bent head, with deliberation and dignity, and returned a wet but formal kiss. “Teach him the finger games, and the little fish poem. You may civilize him.”

  “Civilize?”

  “Make him as lovely as you are. Now go, little flower.” She ran to her father, who picked her up. “What is your name?” Stel called.

  “Why should I tell you, goatsucker?”

  “Well, at least you didn’t say, ‘For asking that, you die.’ ”

  “His name is Coffi,” Blomi called. Her father squeezed her in irritation.

  “Good-bye, Blomi. Good-bye, Coffi,” Stel said. “May the blessings of Aven be on you both.”

  Coffi turned without a word and strode down the hill with Blomi. She called, “Good-bye, Stel. Come back sometime. When they have all calmed down,” but her father twisted her arm, and she put her face into his neck. Stel could see him comforting her and scolding her at the same time as they grew small in the distance. He stared after them a long time.