Close Kin (15 page)

"Anyway," she continued in
a low voice, "Thorn hasn't kept it up. He should have written in it when
Laurel died, but he said he
didn't need to
waste the time. We all knew she was dead, he said, so
why write it
down?"

Sable held the
camp chronicle in her lap. The book was her only
treasure.
Even Thorn wouldn't have damaged her father's book,
although she took care not to let him see how much she loved it. She
ran her fingers affectionately over the old
cover. She even liked the
smell of it.

"Nine
different people have written in the book," she told Seylin.
"I know by the way they write. See, this one's so
beautiful," she said,
running
her finger over the writing on the first page. The eager
Seylin wished she would get her hand out of the way. ".
. . in the six
teenth year of the reign of Aganir
U-Sakar . . ." caught his eye. The
elf
King named New Moon. That was the last elf King. This
chronicle began
over two hundred years ago.

"And look," she said,
turning the page before he could make out anything else, "here's my
name." She put her finger on it. Seylin looked at the page.

...
waxed strong and bold now that our King is dead, and
they
came on this the third night from the second full moon of
spring. But because
their evil King was not with them, I led my warriors against them and rescued
fourteen of the maidens they had taken. And when dawn came, we gathered the
living and found that we had, besides the forty two married women and widows,
still twenty seven warriors, twenty two
boys
not yet of age, the fourteen maidens, and eight girl children,
down to
the youngest baby. And, perceiving that we
could
not sustain another attack, but that we would next time
fail, I, Lord
Sabul, have led my people away this night. But
yet is our flight desperate, for we have not the proper stores,
nor
books of spells, nor dare we risk contacting the other camps, which may no
longer be, for all we know...

"See?" said the scarred
woman, looking up. "That's my name, Sable. Father showed me once. Doesn't
it look pretty? I know how to write it, I've practiced with a stick in the
ashes."

Seylin tore
himself away from the grim tale of the elf harrowing
to
look at her. She was the direct descendant of Lord Sabul, noble
leader of one of the elf King's eighteen camps,
and she couldn't even
read her own family history.

"Your name is pretty," he
confirmed solemnly. "Did you know your ancestors ruled a camp?" He
meant that they were lords under the elf King, but again Sable misunderstood.

"Oh, yes," she assured him.
"A Sable has always run this camp until now. My father ran it until he
died when I was twelve. He always told me that we weren't like the rest of
these" she hesitated -- "common idiots."

Seylin thought
of the last Lord Sabul ruling a camp of five or six
elves. He looked at Sable's filthy, bloodstained
clothes, her mutilated
face, the wary look
in her eyes. What an end to this proud line.

"And over here," she added,
turning the pages before he could
read
anything at all, "here's my name again, in the middle of a story.
Something bad happened, I know, maybe a battle
because after that
the handwriting's never so nice again."

"Let me see, Sable," he
said. "I'll tell you what happened." He studied the page.

... and because the
men were hauling flour and the children
were
gathering nuts with the young maidens, the women
were alone in the caves with only two guards. Having lost all
but
one cooking stone, and being cold, the women made a fire with logs for warmth,
but although it did not burn their bodies, yet this evil force, this goblin
thing, reached out in some hideous way to strangle the breath out of them.

And when we returned
for the morning meal, here were my wife
and
thirty other women besides, dead within the inner caves.
And the worst is not yet told, and I, Lord Sabul,
am to
blame, for with these women has
died also the women's craft and art, for those who survived because they were
out gather
ing, these did not know what the other women knew, and I
had never seen to it that these things be written
down.

And
I
stood
at the grave with my elves and watched the little girls
crying for their mothers, and better would it be for these chil
dren
if I slit their throats this night. But now we must seek human women to enslave
for the sake of these children and
the
children who will come after. No worse calamity has vis
ited us in the
last one hundred years, and this night has died my camp with the women, though
that dying will take long.

Seylin paused in his reading. What
had died with the women? Spells, perhaps. Certainly they would have lost the
making of elf clothes then. He wished he could show the book to Marak. The
goblin King would know.

"It wasn't a battle,
Sable," he said, "but you're right that it was bad." He stopped
at the look on her face.

"You know how to read," she
whispered. Her father knew how
to write, but
she had never seen him look at his own book this way, as
if he were talking with the writers who were dead.
This strange
young elf who knew so
much magic was the master of her book. He
looked offended and perplexed
at her comment and the serious, frightened look that went with it.

"Well, yes,
I know how to read. It's not so hard, really, or at least
it wouldn't be if you knew how to speak elvish. This is
all written in
elvish,
you know." She continued to study him fearfully, so he sighed
and
turned the page.

The handwriting changed abruptly. The
letters were poorly formed, the entries short. He frowned for a long minute
over a
passage before he could understand
it. The writer was mixing elvish
and
English in the most bizarre fashion. All he could gather was
that several slaves had escaped because the Camp
Spell broke. That
must have been the last time they had a properly
working camp perimeter.

On the next page, he found little
more than lists of births and deaths. New handwriting, and the elvish numbers
and dates were gone. Now the entries were nothing but English written very
clumsily
in the elvish phonetic hooking
script. Some of them were almost
impossible to decipher. He read one out
loud, running his finger under the line, and Sable came to his rescue.

"That's from
my grandfather," she said. "My father told me
about
it, when the last slave died. She was an old human woman
who raised the children. All the other slaves were
long gone because by then they could get away, but she stayed because she'd
been there
since she was young and
she loved the children so. My father said the
whole band, more than
twenty of them there were then, they cried
for
days when she died. She was like the mother to the whole camp,
that
woman, and Father said he never cried so hard for an elf as he did when that
ugly old human died.

"Here's my father's
writing," she continued, turning the page,
and Seylin stared in dismay. Only the most rudimentary of elf characters
sounded out the English names. Instead of "born," a star next
to
the name. Instead of "dead," a cross. A human must have taught her
father that -- maybe the old human woman he remembered so
fondly. Here were the elves of the current camp.
Ro-we, Rowan. La-
ha-ril, Laurel,
that was the woman whose death Thorn had failed to
record. And then, somewhat crude, but confident and
clear, the
name of Lord Sabul, with a
star for birth and a stick figure in a dress
to show the gender.

"That's
me," said Sable, touching it with her finger. "That's
when I was
born."

Seylin shifted
on the cave floor and flipped back to the first page,
with its elegant, curling script and capable, crisp
prose. And then to
the
last. Scrawled English names, symbols, and picture writing.
Blots
and scratches on the page. He imagined the last Lord Sabul
sitting in this filthy cave in his filthy rags,
trying his best to carry on
the
lord's duty of updating the camp chronicles. And now they
didn't even
have a lord. The camp leader was nothing more than its meanest, toughest
member, ruling because of his ambition and his fists. Seylin shook his head
sadly as he flipped through the pages again. Nine generations since the death
of the last elf King, and the Top Shield Star Camp was finished.

He glanced up
out of his reverie to meet a pair of stern blue eyes
and was surprised at the look of authority he saw. Perhaps
he'd
started lamenting the
end of the elves too soon. The daughter of the
last
Lord of the Top Shield Star Camp wasn't finished yet.

"You know
how to read, how to work spells we don't know, and how to speak elvish,"
she said quietly. "Your clothing is well made,
and you almost have more of it than we have in the whole
rest of our
camp.

"Yes,"
confirmed Seylin.

"But you say you're the last
elf," she added, carefully watching his face.

"Yes,"
insisted Seylin unhappily. He was in for it now.

"Thorn is
wrong about you," she said. "Your women aren't
dead.
Such fine clothing -- there were many women weaving and sewing where you came
from."

"Where I came from, the men
worked weaving and sewing as well as the women," said Seylin.
"Thorn's not wrong. I'm alone. I lost the woman I loved."

"Who did
you lose her to?" asked Sable. The young elf wouldn't answer. She watched
him for a moment, but he didn't meet her eyes.

"You're a danger," she
concluded. "Or you bring danger. I can feel it. My father would have
driven you out of camp."

"Then your
father would have made a mistake," declared Seylin. "I only want to
help. I can teach you things. Elvish and spells, things
to
help you survive."

The scarred woman
shook her head.

"Thorn won't let you teach
anything. If he doesn't know it, he won't learn it from you, and he won't let
us learn it. He's the best hunter and the best fighter, and that's how he wants
it. You should leave, Seylin. There's no place for you here."

She got up quickly, put the book
away, and went back to her
work. Seylin sat
where she had left him, in the shadow of the tents.
There was no place
for him here. There was no place for him any
where.
The only place he belonged was with Emily, and he had lost
that place
forever. I should have sat on her couch and argued with her all day long, he
thought. I should have changed into a cat and
then
danced for her. How could I have let her go so easily, over a little
pride?
How could I have run away and let her marry Thaydar?

Em, what are you doing now? he
wondered. Do you ever think about me? I want to come home to you.

∗ ∗ ∗

Emily
was having problems of her own. She hadn't been to London
since she was a
little girl. She had plenty of money and plenty of
things to see, and she had expected to enjoy herself thoroughly, but
her dour goblin companion was ruining all her fun.
Everywhere
they went, Ruby quoted appropriate facts from her lessons,
but she
didn't seem impressed by anything.
All she saw was filth and ineptit
ude. Emily was running out of patience.

They were walking
along in the twilight by the handsome old buildings of Parliament. The smoke of
thousands of dinner fires hung in the still sky, and crowds of people tugged
them to and fro.
Changed into her normal
shape and carefully hooded, Ruby stomped
along the brick pavement.

"Humans," she remarked with
grim satisfaction. "Mercy! How they do smell!"

"Didn't you
think that Westminster Abbey was beautiful?"
asked the young woman, trying not to notice a withered
beggar who
kept thrusting a hand in her face.