“But though you’d never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall—when you fall, you’re going to fall like a starving man. I’m standing here watching you start to topple now, and I don’t know if any words of mine are strong enough to catch you. I don’t know why, blast and blight it”—her voice shifted in renewed aggravation—“you haven’t let yourself get string-bound with any one of the nice widows that your mother—well, all right, not your mother—that one of your friends or other kin used to introduce you to, till they gave up in despair. If you had, I daresay you’d be immune to this foolishness now, knife or no.”
Dag hunched tighter. “It would not have been fair to the woman. I can’t have what I had with Kauneo over again. Not because of any lack on the woman’s part. It’s me. I can’t give what I gave to Kauneo.” Used up, emptied out, dry.
“Nobody expected that, except maybe you. Most people don’t have what you had with Kauneo, if half of what I’ve heard is true. Yet they contrive to rub along tolerably well just the same.”
“She’d die of thirst, trying to draw from that well.”
Mari shook her head, mouth flat with disapproval. “Dramatic, Dag.”
He shrugged. “Don’t push for answers you don’t want to hear, then.”
She looked away, pursed her lips, stared up at the rafters stuck about with dusty cobwebs and wisps of hay, and tried another tack. “Now, all things considered, I can’t object to your indulging yourself. Not you. And after all, this farmer girl has no relatives here to kick up a fuss for me.”
Dag’s eyes narrowed, and a fool’s hope rose in his heart. Was Mari about to say she wouldn’t interfere? Surely not…
“If you can’t be turned or reasoned with, well, these things happen, eh?” The sarcasm tingeing her voice quenched the hope. “But if you are so bound and determined to get in, you’d better have a plan for how you’re going to get out, and I want to hear it.”
I don’t want to get out. I don’t want an end. Unsettling realization, and Dag wasn’t sure where to put it. Blight it, he hadn’t even begun…anything. This argument was moving too fast for him, no doubt Mari’s intent. “All the great plans I ever made for my life ended in horrible surprises, Mari. I swore off plans sometime back.”
She shook her head in scorn. “I halfway wish you were some lout I could just thump. Well… no, I don’t. But you’re you. If she’s cut up at the end—and I don’t see how this can be anything other than a real short ride—so will you be. Double disaster. I can see it coming, and so can you. So what are you going to do?”
Dag said tightly, “What do you suggest, seeress?”
“That there’s no way you can end this well. So don’t start.”
I haven’t started, Dag wanted to point out. A truth on his lips and a lie in his ground, perhaps? Endurance had been his last remaining virtue for a long, long time, now; he hugged his patience to him and stood, just stood.
In the face of his stubborn silence, Mari shifted her stance and her attack once more. “There are two great duties given to those born of our blood. The first is to carry on the long war, with resolute fortitude, in living and in dying, in hope or out of it. In that duty you have not ever failed.”
“Once.”
“Not ever,” she contradicted this. “Overwhelming defeat is not failure; it’s just defeat. It happens sometimes. I never heard that you ran from that ridge, Dag.”
“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t have the chance. Surrounded makes running away a bit of a puzzle, which I did not get time to solve.”
“Aye, well. But then there’s the other great duty, the second duty, without which the first is futile, dross and delusion. The duty you have so far failed altogether.”
His head came up, stung and wary. “I’ve given blood and sweat and all the years of my life so far. I still owe my bones and my heart’s death, which I mean to give, which I will give in their due time if chance permits, but suicide is a self-indulgence and a desertion of duty no one will ever accuse me of, I decided that years ago, so I don’t know what else you want.”
Her lips compressed; her gaze went intent with conviction. “The other duty is to create the next generation to hand on the war to. Because all we do, the miles and years we walk, all that we bleed and sweat and sacrifice, will come to nothing if we do not also pass on our bodies’ legacy. And that’s a task on which you have turned your back for the past twenty years.”
Behind his back, his right hand gripped the arm cuff till he could hear the wood creak, and he forced his clench to loosen lest he break what had been so recently mended. He tried clamping his teeth down just as tight on any response, but one leaked out nonetheless: “Borrow my mother’s jawbone, did you?”
“I expect I could do her whole speech by rote, I’ve had to listen to her complaints often enough, but no. This is my own, hard-won with my life’s blood. Look, I know your mother pushed you too soon and too hard after Kauneo and set your back up good and stiff, I know you needed more time to get over it all. But time’s gone by, Dag, time and past time. That little farmer girl’s the proof of it, if you needed any. And I don’t want to be caught underneath when you come crashing down.”
“You won’t be; we’re leaving.”
“Not good enough. I want your word.”
You can’t have it. And was that, itself, some decision? He knew he wavered, but had he already gone beyond some point of no return? Ana what would that point be? He scarcely knew, but his head was pounding with the heat, and a bone-deep exhaustion gripped him. His drying clothing itched and stank. He longed for a cold bath. If he held his head under for long enough, would the pain stop? Ten or fifteen minutes ought to do it.
“If I had died at Wolf Ridge, I would be childless now just the same,” he snarled at Mari. And not even my kin could complain. Or leastways, I wouldn’t have to listen. “I have a plan. Why don’t you just pretend that I’m dead?”
He turned on his heel and marched out.
Which would have made a grander exit if she hadn’t shouted so furiously and so accurately after him, “Oh, certainly—why not? You do!”
Chapter 11
Dag thought he’d had his groundsense strapped down tight, but whatever of his vile mood still leaked through the cracks was enough to clear the bathhouse of the three convalescent patrollers idling there within five minutes of his entry. Still, at length both his body and his wits cooled, and he went off to find some useful task to occupy himself, preferably away from his comrades. He found it in taking a saddle with a broken tree uptown to the harnessmaker’s to trade in for a replacement, and retrieving some other mended gear there, which filled the time till dinner and the arrival of the anxious Utau and the rest of his swamp-slimed patrol.
Mari’s arguments were not, any of them, wrong, exactly. Or at all, Dag admitted glumly to himself. Ashamed, he dutifully set his mind to the upholding of a self-restraint that had once been more routine than breathing… which had somehow grown as heavy as a stone cairn upon his chest. Dead men don’t need air, eh?
At dinner that night he behaved toward Fawn with meticulous courtesy, no more. Her eyes watched him curiously, wary. But there were enough other patrollers at the table for her to pelt with her questions, tonight mostly about how patrol patterns were arranged and walked, that his silence passed unremarked.
Never had rectitude seemed less rewarding.
The next day was officially devoted to rest and the preparations for the bow-down, and Dag allowed himself to be made mule to help carry in supplies from uptown gathered by the more eager. He crossed paths with Mari only long enough to volunteer for evening watch and door duty, and be briskly refused.
“I can’t put the patroller who slew the malice onto guard duty during the celebration of his own deed,” she said shortly. “I’d have a revolt on my hands—and rightly, too.” She added after a reluctant moment, stopping his
protest, “Make sure that little farmer girl knows she’s invited, too.”
Shortly after, he ran into the enthusiast from Log Hollow who was nabbing the volunteer musicians from the combined patrols for practice, a novelty in the experience of most involved, and did not escape till almost time to collect Fawn.
Fawn peered at her hair in the shaving mirror and decided that the green ribbons, loaned by Reela of the broken leg, matched her good dress very well. Reela had been teaching her how to do Lakewalker hair braids, which had turned out to have various meanings; the knot at the nape, Fawn had found out, was a sign of mourning, except when it was a prudent arrangement for going into a fight. Knowing this made the mob of patrollers look different to Fawn’s eyes, and gave her a strange feeling, as though the world had shifted under her feet, if only a little, and could never shift back. In any case she could be certain that tonight’s style, with her hair tied up high on the back of her head by a jaunty bow and allowed to swing like a horsetail, curls bouncing, didn’t say anything she didn’t intend in patroller.
Dag came to her door, seeming more relaxed this evening; Fawn wondered if Mari had imparted some bad news to him in the stable yesterday, to so depress his spirits last night. But now his eyes were bright. His simple white shirt made his coppery skin seem to glow. Yesterday’s reek of swamp and horse and emergency was replaced with lavender soap and something warm underneath that was just Dag. His hair was clean and soft and already escaping whatever order a stern combing had imposed upon it, looking very touchable, if only she could reach that high. Tiptoes. A stepladder. Something…
The atmosphere in the dining room was not too different from other nights, ravenous and raucous, except more crowded because for once everyone was there at the same time. They were all notably cleaned up, and many seemed to have obtained, or shared, scent water. Party clothes seemed to be everyone’s same clothes, except laundered. Fawn supposed saddlebags didn’t really have room for many changes; the women were all still wearing trousers. Did they ever wear skirts? Hairstyles seemed more elaborate, though. Some of the younger patrollers even wore bells in their braids.
Food and drink, especially drink, overflowed through the entry hall into the next room, where chairs were pushed to the walls and rugs rolled up to make a space to dance. Fawn found herself a seat with the rest of the convalescents, Saun and Reela and the man from Chato’s patrol with the game knee and stitches in his jaw, and that poor subdued fellow who’d managed to get snakebit yesterday and was now good-naturedly enduring some pretty merciless ribbing about it. The teasers also distributed fresh beer to all the chair-bound, however, and seemed dedicated to keeping it coming. Fawn sipped hers and smiled shy thanks.
Dag had vanished briefly, but now he returned, screwing something into his wrist cap. Fawn blinked in astonishment to recognize a tambourine, fitted with a wooden peg so he might hold it securely.
“My goodness! I didn’t know you played anything.”
He grinned at her, giving the frame a last adjustment and drumming his fingers over the stretched skin. The staccato sound made her sit up.
“How clever. What did you play before you lost your hand?”
“Tambourine,” he replied cheerily. “I tried the flute, but it tangled my fingers up even when I had twice as many, and when I tackled the fiddle, I was accused of tormenting cats. With this, I can never strike a wrong note. Besides”—he lowered his voice conspiratorially—“it gets me off the hook for the dancing.” He winked at her and drifted up to the head of the room, where some other patrollers were collecting.
Their array of instruments seemed a bit random, but mostly small, as would fit in a spare corner of a saddlebag. There were several flutes, of wood, clay, or bone, two fiddles, and a makeshift collection of overturned tubs for thumping on, obviously filched from around the hotel. The room filled and quieted.
A gray-haired man with a bone flute stepped forward into the hush and began a melody Fawn found haunting; it made the hairs stir on her arms. Disturbed, she studied that pale length of bone, its surface burned about with writing, and was suddenly certain it was someone’s relative. Because thighbones came in pairs, but hearts came one by one, so what did Lakewalker makers do with the leftovers, in all honor? The tune was so elegiac, it had be some prayer or hymn or memorial; Fawn could see a few people’s lips moving on words they obviously knew by heart. A hush followed for a full minute, with everyone’s eyes downcast.
A rattle like a snake from the tambourine, and a sudden spatter of drumming, broke the sorrow to bits as if trying to blow it out the windows. The fiddlers and flute players and tub-thumpers struck up a lively dance tune, and patrollers swung out onto the floor. They did not dance in couples but in groups, weaving complex patterns around one another. Except for the shifting about of partners in blithe disregard of anyone’s sex, it reminded Fawn a lot of farmer barn dances, although the patrollers seemed to do without a caller. She wondered if they were doing something with their groundsenses to take the place of that outside coordination. Intensely complex as the patterns seemed, the dancers seldom missed a step, although when someone did, it was greeted with much hooting and laughter as the whole bunch rearranged themselves, picked up the pulse, and started again. The bells rang merrily. Dag stood at the back of the musicians, keeping steady time, punctuating his rhythms with well-placed spurts of jingling, watching it all and looking unusually happy; he didn’t talk or sing, but he smiled a bit as the jokes flew by.
The younger patrollers’ appetites for fast dances seemed insatiable, but at length the wheezing musicians traded out for a couple of singers. Outside, the long summer sun had gone down, and the room was hot with candles and lamps and sweaty bodies. Dag unscrewed his tambourine and came to sit at Fawn’s feet, catching up on his beer-drinking with the aid of what seemed a bucket brigade of well-wishers.
One song was new to Fawn, another to a known tune but with different words, and a third she’d heard her aunt Nattie croon as she spun thread, and she wondered if it had originated with farmers or Lakewalkers. The singers were a man and a woman from Chato’s patrol, and their voices blended beguilingly, hers pure and fair, his low and resonant. By this time, Fawn wasn’t sure if the song about a lost patroller dancing in the woods with magical bears was fantasy or not.
The man with the bone flute joined them, making a trio; when he sent a preamble of notes into the air for the next song, Dag set his half-full glass rather abruptly on the floor. His smile over his shoulder at Fawn more resembled a grimace. “Privy run. Beer, eh,” he excused himself, and levered to his feet.
Three sets of eyes marked his movement in concern: Mari’s, Utau’s, and one other older comrade’s; Mari made a gesture of query, Should I… ? to which Dag returned a small headshake. He trod out without looking back.
“Fifty folk walked out that day,” the song began, and Fawn quickly twigged to Dag’s sudden retreat, because it turned out to be a long, involved ballad about the battle of Wolf Ridge. It named no names in its weaving of poetry and tune, of woe, gallantry, sacrifice, and victory, subtly inviting all to identify with its various heroes, and under any other circumstances Fawn would have found it thrilling. Most of the patrollers, truly, seemed variously thrilled or moved; Reela swiped away a tear, and Saun hung openmouthed in the intensity of his listening.
They do not know, Fawn realized. Saun, who had patrolled with Dag for a year and claimed to know him well, did not know. Utau did, listening with his hand over his mouth, eyes dark; Mari, of course, did, with her glances at the archway out which Dag had quietly vanished, and through which he did not return. The song finished at last, and another, more cheerful one started.
When Dag still did not return, Fawn slipped out herself. Someone else was exiting the commode chamber, so she tried outside. It was blessedly cooler out here, the blue shadows relieved by yellow light from the cheery windows, from the lanterns flanking the porch door, and, across the yard, from above the stable doors. Dag was sitting on the
bench outside the stable, head back against the wall, staring up at the summer stars.
She sat down beside him and just let the silence hang for a time, for it was not uncomfortable, cloaking them like the night. The stars burned bright and seeming-close despite the lanterns; the sky was cloudless. “You all right?” she asked at last.
“Oh, yeah.” He ran his hand through his hair, and added reflectively, “When I was a boy, I used to just love all those heroic ballads. I memorized dozens. I wonder if all those other old battle songs would have seemed as obscene to their survivors?”
Yet he claims not to sing. Unable to answer this, Fawn offered, “At least it helps people remember.”
“Yes. Alas.”
“It wasn’t a bad song. In fact, I thought it was awfully good. As a song, I mean.”
“I don’t deny it. Not the fault of the song-maker—whoever it was did a fine job. If it were less effective, it wouldn’t make me want to weep or rage so bad, I suppose. Which was why I left the room. My groundsense was a little open, in aid of the music-making. I didn’t want to blight the mood. Pack thirty-eight tired, battle-nervy patrollers into one building for a week, and moods start to get around fast.”
“Do you often make music, when you’re out on patrol?” She tried to picture patroller song and dance around a campfire; the weather likely didn’t always cooperate.
“Only sometimes. Camps can be pretty busy in the evenings. Curing hides and meat, preserving medicinal plants we pick up while patrolling, keeping logs and maps up to date. If it’s a mounted patrol, a lot of horse care. Weapons training for the youngsters and practice for everyone. Mending, of clothes and boots and gear. Cooking, washing. All simple tasks, but they do go on.”
His voice slowed in reminiscence. “Patrols vary in size—in the north they send out companies of a hundred and fifty or two hundred for the great seasonal wilderness sweeps—but south of the lake, patrols are usually smaller and shorter. Even so, you’re like to be in each other’s hair for weeks on end with no entertainment but each other. After a while, everyone knows all the songs. So there’s gossip. And factions. And jokes. And practical jokes. And revenge for practical jokes. And fistfights over revenge for practical jokes. And knife fights over—well, you get the idea. Although if the emotions are allowed to melt down into that sour a soup, you can bet the patrol leader will be having a very memorable talk with Fairbolt Crow about it, later.”
Beguilement Page 18
