Icefalcon’s Quest

Tir, very sensibly, climbed a tree. The Icefalcon saw the boy’s bright blue jacket sleeves among the limbs of the cottonwood under which Bektis had built last night’s fire. He was glad that someone – probably the woman Hethya – had untied Tir’s hands and hoped none of the Empty Lakes People remained in the coulee, which was just within bowshot of the hill. The boy probably knew that running away from Bektis would be a waste of time.

Bide your time, son of Eldor. Watch for your chance.

The coyote who waits can eat the flesh of the saber-tooth who plunges ahead into a fight.

The attack was over before the shadows had shortened the last inch or so to noon.

Leaning up on his elbows, the Icefalcon watched the three black warriors load the bodies of the slain onto the horses that remained in the grove and carry them out to the coulee to dump them. Then they returned to Bektis’ camp, tethered the captured horses, and set about gathering water and making lunch.

Thank you, thought the Icefalcon. Now stay put so I can eat, too.

He crawled through the grass – noting automatically that rains had been scanty here and so the herds would not be plentiful later in the year – to the edge of the coulee, which at that point was some twenty feet deep. Even a few years before, the stream at the bottom had been wider and stronger than it was now. Barely a trickle flowed over gray and white rocks, and the sedge and cattail along its verge were thin and weak, though on the whole the bottomland that lay for thirty or forty feet on either side of the water was lusher than the prairie above. Cottonwood and lodgepole pine made light cover from bank to waterside; lungwort, fleabane, and marigolds gemmed the grass.

The half-dozen bodies lay jumbled below in a clump of chokecherry. Their dogs had been thrown down with them, the heavy-headed, heavy-shouldered fighting brutes of the Empty Lakes People. The Icefalcon took a very cautious look around, then slithered down the bank some hundred feet from the place, which he circled twice before coming close. Carrion birds were already gathered. He wondered if Bektis would notice when they flew upward.

They settled again on the limbs of the cottonwood just above the bodies, below the line of the prairie’s edge.

There had been six in the scouting party. Five lay here, fair-skinned like all the peoples of the Real World, bronzed from the sun, their hair – flaxen or primrose or the gay hue of marigolds – braided and dabbled with darkening blood. Four had perished of stab wounds, and one bore the same lightning burns that had marked Rudy’s face. The sixth would be the man who ran out of the grove with his shirt burning, to fall in the long grass.

The Icefalcon waited, listening, for some little time more, then moved in and made from them a selection of trousers, tunic, jacket, gloves, and cap wrought of wolf- or deer-hide, whose colors blended with the hues of the prairie. He changed clothes quickly and buried his black garments in a muskrat hole in the bank, piling brush to conceal where he’d driven the earth in. His weapons and harness he kept; his boots as well, for none of them had feet of his size, and boots would outlast moccasins on a long hunt.

He collected also all the food they carried, scout rations of pemmican, jerked venison and duck flesh, pine nuts, and bison and raccoon fat sweetened with maple sugar. He hung the buckskin pouches and tubes from his belt and shoulders, working fast, with one eye on the birds overhead.

When they flew up, he retreated, picking again the stoniest line of departure, which would show no mark of his boots.

Rather to his surprise he knew the man who slipped down the bank from above and stole up on the bodies, taking far fewer precautions about it than the Icefalcon considered necessary, but what could one expect from the Empty Lakes People?

It was Loses His Way.

Loses His Way was a warchief and one of the most renowned warriors of the Empty Lakes People. He had given the Icefalcon the scar that decorated the hollow of his left flank in a horse raid during the Summer of the Two White Mammoths. He’d been a minor chief then, and the Icefalcon had encountered him twice more, once in a battle over summer hunting and once at a Moot. If the Icefalcon hadn’t left the Talking Stars People, they’d probably have fought again at another Moot. He was a big man, some ten years older than the Icefalcon, with massive shoulders and tawny mustaches braided down past his chin; the finger bones of a dozen foes were plaited into his hair.

He moved painfully now, and the Icefalcon saw the red blister of burned flesh through the black hole that had been the back of his tunic.

When he saw the bodies had been disturbed, he looked around quickly, short-sword coming to his hand.

Conscious of the possibility of sound carrying, the Icefalcon whistled twice in the voice of the tanager, a bird native to the oakwoods along the Ten Muddy Rivers, where the Empty Lakes People had originally dwelled, though it was never seen in the high plains. Loses His Way turned his head and the Icefalcon stepped from cover, crossed swiftly to the pile of bodies at the foot of the cottonwood tree. “I am an enemy to the people who did this,” he said, as soon as he was close enough that their voices would not be heard. “I am alone.”

Loses His Way raised his head, grief and shock darkening gentian-blue eyes. “Icefalcon.” He spoke the name as it was spoken among the Empty Lakes People, K’shnia. He was like a man stunned by a blow, barely taking in the presence of one who was his enemy and the enemy of his people.

“The air was full of creatures that tore at us,” he said, and turned back to the dead. “When we rode away, the horses threw us and ran back. Our dogs attacked us and savaged one another.” He touched the torn-out throat of a big gray dog, as if stroking the hair of a beloved child. “There was a Wise One, a shaman, among them.”

“The shaman is called Bektis,” said the Icefalcon, framing the words carefully, haltingly, in the tongue of the Empty Lakes People, which he had not had call to speak for years. “An evil man, who has carried away the son of one who was good to me.”

Loses His Way seemed scarcely to hear. His thick scarred stubby fingers passed across noses, lips, brows. “Tethtagyn,” he said, framing the name in the tongue of the Empty Lakes People; Wolfbone it meant. “Shilhren … Giarathis …” Under long, curling red brows his eyes filled with grief.

“Twin Daughter,” he whispered, and touched the face of a warrior whose hair was as red-gold as his. “Twin Daughter.”

Gently lifting the thick ropes of her hair – three braids, as was the fashion of his people – Loses His Way took from around the young woman’s neck a square spirit-pouch, decorated with porcupine quills and patterns in ocher and black. Worn under the clothing and out of sight, spirit-pouches were almost the only article decorated by any of the peoples of the Real World. With his knife he cut off some of Twin Daughter’s hair and put it into the pouch. Then he sliced the palm of her left hand, and with his thumb daubed the congealing blood in the open center of the pouch’s worked design.

This he did for all the others in turn, saying their names as he did so: Wolfbone, Blue Jay, Shouts In Anger, Raspberry Thicket Girl. The Empty Lakes People, the Icefalcon remembered, did not revere their Ancestors, but rather the ki of various rocks and trees in the country of the Ten Muddy Rivers. It was to them that these spirit-pouches must be dedicated and returned.

The Icefalcon privately regarded such customs as unnecessary and a little dangerous. Dead was dead, and any member of the Talking Stars People would have been able to find his or her way home without the assistance of a spirit-pouch. But he saw, in the big warrior’s face, the need to do these things for his own peace of mind.

One of the things that the Stars had told the Ancestors of his people was that every people had their custom, and though all other people were wrong, it was not polite and frequently not safe to say so. At least Loses His Way didn’t feel it necessary to take fingers the way the Twisted Hills People did.

“You took all the food?” he asked then, and the Icefalcon nodded. “Then let’s go away. I thought you departed from the Real World for good,” he added, as he and the Icefalcon followed the cliff wall northwest, seeking an inconspicuous place to regain the prairie above.

“I departed,” said the Icefalcon. “Though I fail to see how my comings and goings are the affair of the Empty Lakes People.”

“Blue Child is now the warchief of the Talking Stars People,” said Loses His Way. “Even before the coming of the Eaters in the Night this was reason enough for concern among those of us who hunt the same mammoth and pasture our horses in the same ravines. Now that the mammoth move south, and white filth grows in the ravines of the homelands – now that the Ice in the North rolls south to cover valleys that once belonged to the Empty Lakes People – it is a matter for concern that she rules your people instead of you.”

The cliff was lower toward the northwest, and the Icefalcon recalled how squirreltail grass grew thicker in that direction, amid stands of juniper brush that masked the cliff’s rim from the direction of Bison Hill. Under cover of these junipers the two men scrambled up and glided through the thickets to higher ground.

At the cliff’s top a dark shaggy shape rustled up to them out of the grass, a yellow-eyed war-dog, burned like Loses His Way over his shoulders and back, like Loses His Way mourning his losses and his pain in silence.

He licked the warchief’s hand and wriggled with grateful joy to have his ears rubbed – sniffed the Icefalcon suspiciously but followed in silence. The Icefalcon raised up on his knees to put his head above the clusters of leaves but saw no sign of travelers as far as he could look west along the road.

They were evidently staying put for the day.

“For one thing, the Empty Lakes People never owned a thumb-breadth of the land in the North,” he pointed out. “The starlight wrote our names on forest and stone from the Haunted Mountain across to the Night River Country, and ours it remains, Ice or no Ice, forever. Will these take you and your brother here back to your people?” He nodded to the dog and held out to Loses His Way two tubes of pemmican and one of the several sacks of pine nuts. “I hunt this Wise One and his warriors, and in the North I am told the white filth grows thick. There is no hunting in it. I need all I can carry.”

The brilliant eyes narrowed. “You hunt this Wise One? I thought you had returned to find Gsi Kethko.”

“Gsi Kethko?” The name had two meanings. In the tongue of the Salt People it signified the hallucinogenic pods of the wild morning glory, but in the more melodic (and altogether more perfect) language of the Talking Stars People it meant the Antlered Spider, one of the fifteen Dream Things that sometimes carried messages from the Watchers Behind the Stars.

“The Wise One,” Loses His Way amplified.

“He was a member of Plum’s family,” remembered the Icefalcon, not sure why the warchief thought he should be interested. “A little man so high who dressed his hair with elm twigs. He stayed with us when we camped on the Night River just before the Summer Moot, the year that I departed. I don’t think he was a very good Wise One. We nearly starved to death waiting for him to charm antelope, and his information about the salt grass along the Cruel River left a great deal to be desired. Why would I seek out the Antlered Spider?”

“I thought he might have spoken to someone else concerning the spells he laid on the dreamvine that your old chief Noon took, at the Summer Moot in the Year of the White Foxes, the year that you left.” Loses His Way turned the end of one of his mustache braids around his finger, but his eyes did not leave the Icefalcon’s face in the piebald shadows of the thicket. The Icefalcon felt a coldness inside him, as if he already knew what else his enemy was going to say.

“The draft is prepared on the night the chief takes it,” the Icefalcon said, his soft, husky voice suddenly flat. “He himself gathers the dreamvine before he goes up to the mountain. There can be no spells laid on it since no one else touches the pods.”

“According to Antlered Spider, Noon always gathered the pods in the same place,” the warchief replied. “Along Pretty Water Creek, between the white rock shaped like a tortoise and the three straight cottonwoods.”

The place flashed at once to the Icefalcon’s mind, and he realized that what Loses His Way said was true. Noon had taken him there a hundred times in his childhood and told him of the properties of the low-growing, innocuous-looking vine: how it was prepared by the warchief on the mountain and what it did.

“The Antlered Spider said that Blue Child took powdered elf-root and had him lay words on it, so that when the powder was mixed with water and painted on the pods of the vine, the face that Noon would see in his vision at the Summer Moot would be yours. And it was your face that Noon saw, wasn’t it?”

“How do you know this?” The cold in him deepened, a dream remembered and repressed – the old man’s face impassive, eyes dead, empty with grief. The Icefalcon, and his cousin Red Fox, and their friends Stays Up All Night and Fifty Lovers, sitting by the Moot Fire, the talk soft and nervous as it always was at such times. Then Noon walked out of the night into the red world of the firelight, the white shell held out stiffly in his hand and death in his eyes.

Always just stepping into the firelight. Always just holding out his hand.

“My son …”

My son.

But he had known almost before Noon spoke what he was going to say. They had all looked at him, his kindred. Looked at him, and moved away.

The cold crystallized within him to a core of ice, as the cold had then.

“Why did he tell you this?” It astonished him how normal his voice sounded. But he was the Icefalcon, and it behooved him not to show his feelings, particularly not to one of the Empty Lakes People.

“He was dying,” said Loses His Way. “Fever Lady had kissed him at the winter horse camp. The snow was deep outside, and I could not leave.”

“What was he doing in your horse camp?” The Icefalcon drew a deep breath. Far off over the badlands, thunder rolled, soft with distance. The scent of the storm came rushing at them on the blue-black cloak of the wind.

“He wasn’t really one of Plum’s family.” Loses His Way shrugged. “He was the son of my maternal aunt’s husband’s stepbrother. The Empty Lakes People drove him out in the Year of the Crows for putting a barren spell on his sister because she had more horses than he did. No one liked him. Blue Child took him in.”

“Blue Child took in a Wise One of your people?” The Icefalcon was shocked to the marrow of his bones. “Took him in and had him put a spell on the chief of her own people?”

Loses His Way nodded. The Icefalcon was silent. Winter-night silence. Death silence. The silence in the eyes of an old man who has just been told by his Ancestors that the boy he has raised from childhood, the young man he looked upon as his successor, is the one They want, the one They have chosen to bring a message to them written in the crimson extremities of pain.

The torture sacrifice, the Long Sacrifice of summer, that the people may live through the winter to come.

Lightning flared, purple-white against the nigrous mountains of cloud. Gray rain stood in slanted columns over distant hills. The wind veered: Bektis, at a guess, witching the weather to turn the storm away. Shamans of the Talking Stars People generally didn’t care if they got wet.

The Icefalcon observed it all, staring into distance, feeling nothing.

“I don’t know whether Gsi Kethko told anyone else of this,” said Loses His Way, after a time, stroking his long mustache. “But for two years now I have been watching for you, waiting to see if you will return to your people and claim your due.”

“Are you all right, honey?”

Tir sat back on his heels, trembling, small hands propped on his thighs. Hethya ran a competent palm over his clammy forehead, then helped him to his feet and led him away from the little puddle of vomit among the ferns at the base of the big cottonwood tree. Some distance off she knelt down again and took the boy in her arms.

She was a big woman, like the farmwives and blacksmiths in the Keep. Her arms were strong around him and the quilting of her coat smooth and cold under his face, and her thick braids, tickling his chin, smelled good. Tir rested his head against her shoulder and tried not to feel ashamed of himself for getting sick.

It was weak, like the little kids. He was seven and a half. With the deaths of Geppy and Thya and Brit and all the other older children in the Summerless Year, he had stepped into a position of semicommand in the games of the younger.

Tears stung his eyes, remembering his friends. Remembering Rudy.

“There’s no shame in it, being afraid.” Hethya’s big fingers toyed gently with his hair, separating it into locks on his forehead, as his mother sometimes still did. “Even great kings and heroes get afraid. And sometimes that happens, after you’ve been real afraid.”

Tir was silent, trying to sort out what he had felt clinging to the limb of the tree. He was still sweating, though under his furry jacket he felt icy cold, and his stillness alternated with waves of shivering that he could not control.

“You did well,” she said.

In fact, when Bektis had spun around and cried out “Raiders!” and the three Akulae whipped their curved southern swords from their sheaths, from those dark hollows in his mind Tir heard someone else’s voice, one of those other people, say as if thinking it to himself, Get out of everybody’s way.

Lying on the branch of the tree, he had felt curiously little fear. Too many memories of killing men himself – of those other boys killing men – lay too near the surface. Memories of terror in battle, memories of grief and remorse, memories of the grim rush of heat that drove in the knife, the spear, the sword. Watching Hethya, watching the Akulae, cutting and hacking at the men and women who ran stumbling from Bektis’ unseen illusions filled him with emotion that he could not name, closer to sadness and horror than fear. But strong. Horrifyingly strong.

The emotion, whatever it was, left him wrung out, shaken, sickened, so that as soon as the fighting was over he slid down the cotton-wood’s trunk and vomited, not even knowing what it was that he felt. He could see the faces of the dying men still. Their faces, and the faces of all those others who had died in ages past by the hands of those whose memories he touched.

One day he might have to kill somebody himself.

His face still buried in Hethya’s shoulder, he heard Bektis’ sonorous voice repeating summoning-spells, then the soft scrunch of hooves on leaves and the whuffle of horses’ breath. Looking up, he saw Akula leading two beautiful bay stallions by the bridles, so beautiful they took his breath away. The Keep boasted few horses. Four more stood, eyes rolling, among the trees. Another Akula was tethering them.

This Akula had a bleeding wound on one arm. Hethya made a little exclamation under her breath and, with a final quick hug, released Tir and stood. “Here,” she said, going to the man. “Let me get that covered.”

“My dear young lady.” Bektis strolled over to her through the trees, stroking his long white beard and considering the six horses with a self-satisfied smirk. The jeweled device still covered his right hand. He was seldom without it, even if he had no magic to work, and he seemed to enjoy just looking at it, turning it reverently to catch the sunlight, like a vain adolescent admiring a mirror.

During the fight Tir had seen how lightning and fire had flowed out of it, how strange smokes and rainbow lights seemed to leap from it around the heads of the White Raiders, making them cry out and slash at things only they could see, making their dogs attack one another or bite the legs of the Raiders’ horses. Tir had been badly scared by the Raiders’ dogs.

“It’s scarcely worth your time. The man will be dead before the wound heals.”

Hethya opened her mouth to retort, then glanced down at Tir and shut it again. The Akula looked from Bektis’ face to Hethya’s without much comprehension, a thick-muscled man with grim pale eyes. Tir wondered if Akula – any of them – knew enough regular speech to understand what had just been said.

He’d just begun to learn the ha’al language of the Empire of Alketch and could say Please and Thank you and a number of prayers, though since God presumably spoke all languages he couldn’t imagine why he had to learn, with great difficulty, what God could just as easily understand in the Wathe. But his mother, and Rudy, and Lord Ankres said that the language was a useful thing for a King to know.

“And now that we have horses in the camp,” said Bektis, drawing close around his face the fur collar of his quilted brown coat and tucking his beard behind a number of scarves, “I think it best we keep the boy tied up until his Lordship arrives. See to it.”

“Please, Lord Bektis.” Tir stepped forward, his heart pounding. “Please don’t tie me up. If something else happens, if the Raiders come again, I don’t want to be tied up.”

“So you can run away in the confusion?” Bektis had already started to turn away. There was contempt in his voice, and Tir felt his face flush.

“I know I wouldn’t get far,” he said with dignity. “Even if I stole a horse, you could just make it turn around and come back to you, couldn’t you? Or scare it, like you scared those people with stuff that wasn’t real, so they couldn’t protect themselves.”

The wizard’s dark eyes flashed with anger at this implication of cowardice and cheat. “And a fine predicament you’d be in if I hadn’t, boy. We’re not playing children’s games. Do you think the White Raiders would spare a child of your years? I’ve seen children younger than you with their guts staked over five yards of ground. Tie him up,” he added to Hethya. “And give him a lick or two, to mend his manners.”

He walked away to the edge of the grove, where he settled himself under a tree. Tir saw him take something from a velvet purse under his coat, polish it on his chamois cloth, and set it on a little collapsible silver tripod where the dim sunlight lanced through the thin leaves. Scrying, as old Ingold scried for things in his fragment of yellow crystal. As he’d seen Rudy scry, hundreds of times.

At the thought of Rudy his throat closed and his eyes grew hot, seeing him fall again through the whirl of snow and darkness. Don’t make him be dead, he prayed. Please don’t make him be dead.

Hethya’s hand dropped gently onto his shoulder. “Come on, honey,” she said. “We’d better do as he says. I’ll make it as easy on you as I can, and if we’re attacked again I’ll see to it you can get to safety.”

Tir nodded. He wondered sometimes, lying beside her in the warmth of her blankets, feeling safe while Bektis’ wolves and saber-teeth snuffled around the verges of the camp, if she had a little boy of her own.

“Who’s his Lordship who’s coming?” he asked softly, as she led him toward a thin sycamore tree where there was shade and grass. “And what’s he going to do? Why does he want me?”

“Never you mind that, honey,” said Hethya. “I’ll make sure you’re all right.”

But her eyes avoided his as she said it. She wasn’t lying, he realized. She just knew that she had no power to do that, if Bektis – and his Lordship, whoever he was, and whyever he wanted him – decided to kill him.

Chapter 6

Shadow passed over the grass.

The Icefalcon turned, scalp prickling, then scanned the sky. There was no sign of a bird.