by Molly Gloss
When finally his knees beat into the gravel along the river’s bed, he simply lay where he was, cold and sore, in the river’s eddy. He sobbed air through his open mouth. He could not feel his tears except as saltiness and heat on his tongue. He could not yet find the strength to get all the way out of the water.
He wanted only for Rusche to come and wrap him up in a warm bear’s-wool cloak and carry him home in his arms, as he had done when Vren was small.
6
So Far
ALONE AND SORE and shaking from cold, Vren found a way upstream along the bank of the Ash River. A few times he squatted at the river’s edge and drank water from his cupped hands to fool his body away from hunger, but he did not stop to find food or to rest. He only limped a little more, and a little more, as the day and his strength slowly wore out. He walked on stubbornly, with his head down and his arms hugging the tattered pieces of his teba cape.
When it was dark, he lay beside a rotten log, with a loose piece of the log’s bark pulled over him as if it were a blanket. A skrede must have had a burrow under the log or near it: After the boy lay down in that place, he could hear the skrede whistling its worries from somewhere nearby. It was too much effort tonight for him to befriend the little thing. He was too sore even to move. He could only lie wearily and listen to the scolding. Still, he could not sleep, shaking awake with cold and fear, and in the first gray light he began again, trudging upriver, until finally he reached the falls.
The cliffs stood up high and round, like the walls of a basket, and the water poured in. The boy stood in the loud, chill spray beside the pool. He stared. There was a little broken piece of the pillie-reed boat turning and turning in the white eddy there, but no sign of the wolf or of Shel.
In the dusk, in despair, he went back down the riverbank. He kicked apart every sodden pile of leaves or twigs lying in the shallows, in dread fear of finding a body hidden there. Finally, in the darkness, he simply lay down where he was on the damp ground. He did not think of anything at all. He only waited, without sleeping, for daylight to come again.
In the early morning, fog hung like the wings of giant snow-owls in the tops of the trees. In the stillness, the boy searched again through the crowded, brushy undergrowth along the riverbank. He called Trim’s name out loud, and Shel’s, calling and calling through the long white morning, though the river’s endless roaring swallowed the words as he spoke them.
He found a place where he could walk rocks across the river to the other side, and he searched that bank as well. There he found his own troublesack, caught up in brush at the edge of the water. He pulled it dripping from the river and sorted through the few things inside. The star chart was torn, its old inks smeared and muddied. His tea-bowl was broken. Only his stone-bladed tinder knife was not ruined. He left the rest scattered on the ground there.
In the afternoon, Vren found a part of Shel’s elk-hide cloak. There were dark stains on the hood that might have been mud, or blood. He left that scrap as he had left his sack, lying among wet leaves and evergreen needles. And after that he did not call anymore. He stumbled on without hope or thought.
The day warmed slowly, clearing out of the fog to a bright, dry sky, but at night the heat went quickly up into the stars and the grass grew crackly with frost. Vren might have been able to find a firestick tree and snap one of its small twigs to make a spark. But he made no fire and he hunted no food. He only wrapped himself in his teba cape and lay down on the cold ground. His burning, wide-open eyes stared at the darkness.
Slowly, and much, much later, he saw the fen-fox. How long had it stood, not more than a hand’s reach from his face? It was small as a cat, with a cat’s brushy tail, but no cat had ears as tall as the fen’s turning each in its own direction, listening to two things at once. The boy had befriended a fen-fox once, when a rat had bitten its foot and made it lame. They were very shy and solitary. This one held itself stiff and ready, its trembling nose hearing what the boy must have said, in the unspeakable language of Smell.
Then, slowly, it brought its small face right up to Vren’s. He felt its warm breath on his chin, speaking his name in the plain, unShadowed language of kindness. With its small raspy tongue, the fox began to stroke the boy’s cheeks and eyelids, brushing out the muddy stiffness of his old tears.
The boy felt a stiffness go out of his chest, too. When the fox curled its small, warm body next to his heart, then at last he was able to sleep.
• • •
There seemed nothing to do but follow the river. Perhaps Trim or Shel or both of them had been carried further downstream than he had been. If not, then at least downriver was where Rusche had gone. If the boy could find Rusche, the two of them could go back upstream together to search for the others. Vren tried not to think of any other endings.
Though the fen-fox, after a while, went another way, the boy did not, that night, lie grieving uselessly in the cold. He broke a firestick and caught the spark in a handful of shredded bark. Then he blew gently into his hands until the smoking threads blossomed with flame. Crouched beside the fire, he carved a small rough dir-wood bowl with his tinder knife. In that bowl he could heat a little water for tea. The bowl was not large enough for cooking, but he chewed the long, tough roots of pinisap and ate the leaves of winter’s-balm. He used a stick to grind nuts and seeds, and with sour vine-cherries for the juice, he made a thick nut paste to eat with two fingers.
For a time that night, he did still lie awake staring up through the trees to the pinpoints of the stars. Then a tree-skunk came to lie near him, as the fen-fox had, and in that quiet company he was finally able to sleep. The next day he made his way again, slowly, down along the Ash River.
Rusche’s calendar string had been lost to the falls, so he kept count of the days with little scratches along the edge of his rough-carved bowl. On the afternoon of his fourth day alone, he came out of the trees into a wide clearing along the river’s shore.
There had been a burn there once, from lightning or from a twig of firestick broken under some animal’s foot. There were a few tall black poles of dead trees still standing on the open ground among pigweed and nettles, and one small, living, pinleaf tree. A spring of clear water came up out of the ground at the roots of the pinleaf. Close around that spring were crowded several little bark lean-tos, and a good stone house like the kin-houses the plains people built, with straight walls and a flat, tight-fitting roof.
The boy crouched at the edge of the clearing, staring at the house and the other rough shelters. He thought, with a jump of his heart, that it might be the camp of the spellbinder. Eight people traveling together would need several houses, as there were here, and Vren had never before, in the UnderReach, seen more than one house gathered in one place like this.
But he had imagined the spellbinder’s campsite would have a feeling about it of danger and of secrecy. Not like this place, where he could see a big man doing the plain work of any household, carrying water from the little spring, putting sticks of wood on the cooking fire, stirring a bowl that smelled of pigweed and the flesh of some animal.
Vren thought the man must once have been strong. He had wide shoulders and large hands. But he had the look of someone who had eaten little for a very long time. His big bones were knobby and he walked stiffly, as if he were old and sick. The man came toward the boy, kicking through the long weeds looking for twigs for the fire, but though he came very near, he did not see Vren. His eyes were flat, and gray as the Ash River.
In a while, timidly, the boy stepped out into the open and waited for the big man to see him. That one’s gray eyes seemed to look nowhere. He went on with his work slowly, without making any sign that he knew the boy was there.
Vren took a few more steps into the clearing. From the new place he stood, he could see a goat standing chewing at the pigweed beyond the furthest lean-to. There was a woman there too, sitting just under the edge of the little slanting roof. She sat with her knees drawn up under her chin and
her arms folded around her legs. She did not look toward the goat, nor toward the big man, but off into the trees, staring. There was a dull look in her face, as there was in the man’s, and that same thin sickliness.
While the boy stood there waiting, beginning to worry, another person came out through the door of the stone house. For one startling moment, Vren thought it was Rusche—the man wore a good cloak like the one Vren had helped him to make last fall, from the yellow bear’s-wool—but this man was shorter and thicker than Rusche, with a soft round chin, dark eyes, a long balding forehead.
At once he looked straight toward Vren, as if he had expected to see the boy waiting there. His eyes were huge and black and glossy. He smiled a little, and then, so Vren might know he was welcome, he went to the campfire and put stones on to heat for tea. Invited finally, Vren found he was afraid to go into the camp. There was nothing quite fearful in the balding man’s face, but the eyes of the other two made him uneasy. He wondered again if this might not be the spellbinder’s camp, and thought suddenly of calling Rusche’s name out loud, as he had once planned.
The balding man came toward him with a hand held out in a friendly way. He had an uncommon manner about him, bold and certain, as none were in the UnderReach.
“Come far?” the man said. His voice was low, with a good furry softness to it, and hearing it the boy lost his thought of calling out Rusche’s name.
“So far,” Vren said. His own voice surprised him. The words came out slow and thick, as if he spoke from a distance, and not from within himself.
The man, smiling, kept on toward him. Vren thought of backing away, but his arms and legs felt slow, like his voice, and quickly the man came near enough to put his hand on Vren’s arm. It was an odd, startling thing for a stranger to do, but Vren decided it fitted the man’s bold manner—and the touch of the man’s fingers was comfortable and very warm.
“Come in and share a little tea with me,” he said. The sound of his voice inside the boy’s head raised a light, pleasant humming, like a cat’s purr. When he pulled at the boy’s arm slightly, drawing him in toward the camp, Vren slowly went. He had lost his earlier fear of this place. Now he was only tired and lonely.
He sat beside the man, on a stump of wood near the fire, and gratefully drank the tea the man made for him. Neither of the others came to join them. Those two still behaved as if they had not seen him at all, and rather soon Vren found that he no longer thought of them. The balding man’s eyes, close at hand, were dark and bright as polished mirrors. Vren stared at his own reflection there. He had forgotten how he looked. He saw, for a moment, an unfamiliar boy with a wide, reddish face, bewildered eyes, a matted tangle of brown hair. And then he saw himself.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” the man said, as if he were gently scolding. “The far-sighted girl beheld you this morning with her inner eye. I had not met anyone who could speak the languages of animals, so we’ve waited all day.”
Each of his words rang slightly inside the boy’s head. He felt light and giddy. He did not wonder who the far-sighted girl was, he had no curiosity about her at all. He thought of something else the man had said. He knew, suddenly, that he might call an archeagle to him if he wished to do so. He had only to open his mouth and that screeching voice would come out of his throat. Kree-ee! Kree-ee! There was only a little surprise in discovering this about himself. He could see it clearly in his reflection, in the dark eyes of the man. The boy he saw there had a great, wide Shadow, and Vren had, for the first time, no fear of it at all.
“I could show you,” he said shyly.
The man smiled. When he did that, his eyes widened a little and grew blacker, and Vren had the dazzled sense that he had fallen into them. It gave him a breathless thrill.
“Speak to the goat, why don’t you,” the man said, in that gentle, slightly buzzing voice of his. “Just ask it to come and stand at your knee.”
There was a cottony grayness at the edges of Vren’s eyes. He turned his head carefully. The goat stood in a clear center of his vision, a small old nanny with a bony back and a dark, droopy udder. She had been staked to a rope, and all the weeds in the circle she could reach had been nibbled bare.
Oh. Poor old goat, Vren thought, forgetting archeagles at once in the feeling of this small thing’s pain and loneliness.
He went to the edge of her circle, stepping slowly and carefully through the grayness. He wondered that he had not noticed this before: The many strong smells of her were like fine threads, twined together in a design as clear to him, now, as if it were a weaving he could look at with his eyes. It had been a long time since she had had a kid. The milk she gave now was thin and sour. She had nothing to eat here but pigweed and nettles, and no one to comb the burrs out of her coat.
The boy squatted so his face was level with hers. Sweet, he thought, in his old way, silently. He meant to say it, also, in the low bleating language of her kind, for he knew there was a goat’s voice inside his mouth. But the goat he had named Sweet came at the first, wordless call. She stood beside him and put her furry chin on his knee. He petted her head, scratching along both cheeks until she closed her eyes.
“Ah. I’m glad we waited for you,” came that pleasant, buzzing voice.
Vren had forgotten the man for a moment. Now he forgot the goat. He turned his head toward the sound of the voice, searching through the grayness, as a blind person might, until he had found himself again in the eyes of the spellbinder.
7
Whispers
IF THE BOY ate, he did not taste the food. If he slept, he did not remember the dream. Perhaps he moved slowly across a gray land, but he did not know the direction and did not see the sky. It seemed he may have carried a meaningless weight, or pulled it behind him, but his hands and his shoulders were only a distant discomfort. There may have been other shapes that moved near him, making small whispering sounds, but they were gray, and he could not see if they had faces. He had no interest in them at all. It seemed to Vren that there was only one other person in the world, and he waited, in the timeless whispering place, for that face leaning toward him from out of the grayness, or that voice, pleasantly droning, in his ear or inside his head.
At those times, when the two of them were together, Vren seemed to stand at the center of a cloudless place, in a small bright circle. Inside it, everything stood in clear, sharp outline, without confusion, like the treeless clarity of the plain. When he was with the man, he simply and truly knew the languages of animals. He knew, from Smell, all their small, important secrets, and heard their voices come out of his own mouth.
When he stood inside that bright space, he saw, in his reflection in the man’s eyes, the great Shadow he cast. It was beautiful and splendid. And then he wondered how he ever could have felt fear and shame of it.
• • •
The boy held his hand out flat and still, and gradually the little woodmouse came and sat on his palm and examined the nit-seeds Vren had offered. The mouse balanced on his hindquarters and held a single seed in his tiny hands. He looked steadily in the boy’s eyes while he gently bit the edges of the nit-seed’s papery shell. The mouse smelled of dampness and wood-mold and rotted leaves and po nuts: He had made a nest in a cranny of a nut tree. His eyes were tiny and bright and black.
The man sat next to Vren, watching. After a while he reached out gently with one hand and closed his fingers around the woodmouse. Vren heard the tiny squeaking sound the mouse made. He would have shown a gentler way of holding. He meant to do that. But by then he had lost sight of the man’s face, and in the thickening grayness he lost, also, the small prickly beginning of some nameless worry.
• • •
The boy and the man sat beside one another on ground that was soft and damp. The man leaned his shoulders against the rotten wood of a fallen tree, but the boy sat up straight, with his hands flat on the ground. He waited patiently. He felt clever and powerful and perfectly good.
In a little while, a thin
black snake came and rubbed along his wrist. Its skin smelled of earth and powdery dry leaves and small stones: an underground den. In a moment the snake coiled around Vren’s arm and lay still there, growing slowly warm against his skin. The boy stroked its throat gently.
It might have remained with Vren for quite a while, but the man, Vren’s friend, moved stiffly in tiny ways, and finally the snake, with its tongue, smelled the man’s fear and slid quietly away across the grass. Though the boy called it in the thin, whispery language of snakes, still it left the boy and the man sitting alone together in the twilight.
• • •
They waded in a river, and the boy pushed his hands gently back and forth through the water until tayfish came and began to rub their red-spotted sides against his palms. The boy’s friend, in a while, put his hands in the water, too. Perhaps he caught his fingers in the ridged edges of a fish’s gills—he jerked his hand as if he were startled, and the fish rose high in a spray of water beads and thumped out on the river’s bank.
Vren felt, in his own chest, the tay’s stunned fear. He meant to turn toward it, to help it again gently into the water, but the air felt thick and muddy. The man’s hand was on his arm in a comforting way.
• • •
Vren stood on a rocky hillside among weeds that were as tall as his shoulders. He could not remember how he had gotten there or where he had been in the moment before, but his friend stood beside him.
“There are red deer in these hills,” the man said. “Can you call one to you?” His voice was low and buzzing so that the boy could feel it against his skin.
The red deer were voiceless, and their scent-glands were in their feet. He thought, if he simply waited and wished it, one would come to where he was. So he stood among the stiff weeds at the top of the hill. The man stood behind him. They waited and waited. The boy stood very still and patient. Finally a young buck with little stubby horns came out of the brush to see what it was that stood quietly and so long in one place.
