Raptor (46 page)

“You are not raving now,” I said. “You are talking most lucidly.”

“There will be intervals of that, too.”

“Well…” I said hesitantly. “I know that you do not value religion any more than magic. But… while you can… might you, just this once, consider praying?”

He snorted, “Skeit! What is that but incantation? Prayer is as meaningless as the augur’s sonivium tripudium. Ne, urchin. It would be an ignoble resort, to seek compassion from some god because I am now in need, when I sought none all the while I had my health and strength. I shall not turn craven in my extremity. Go now. Get your rest.”

I did as he told me, and moved my fur well apart from his, but not too far to hear if he should need me and call. But I got little rest, sleeping only fitfully, for I knew he had gallantly lied when he spoke of hope. The dog-madness is invariably fatal, and its wrenching attacks would not diminish but increase, both in frequency and in agonizing intensity.

And so they did. I was awakened from my uneasy sleep shortly after dawn by the now familiar but no less horrifying howling. Wyrd’s body was again arched, even more tautly than before, it seemed to me, if that were possible. Every visible blood vessel and tendon in his face and neck was distended and purple and throbbing, and his red eyes appeared almost to be starting out of his head, and his mouth gushed enough saliva to beslobber his whole beard. That convulsion lasted longer than the two I had earlier witnessed, and I could not comprehend how he survived it without his backbone snapping or some vein or organ bursting. But after that spasm and after each of those that followed, all during that dreadful day, Wyrd collapsed for at least a brief while of relief, and his complexion faded from bruise color to a cadaverous gray.

When, at those times, he did not succumb to sleep and snoring, he would struggle to get his breath back and use it to talk—but only to himself. During those spells of deliverance, he seemed to have forgotten me, and instead remembered days long before my time. His speech was disjointed, and often so hoarse that it was inaudible, but the few coherent snatches that I heard sounded wistful, and consisted of words much more gentle than those the rough-hewn old woodsman customarily employed.

He said, “If I was never again to set foot in Cornovia… then Cornovia it would be wherever I was…”

And he said, “Once upon a time… in a valley where four ways met… she and I met also…”

And he said, “She walked nobly and spoke kindly…”

And he said, “We were young then… and we frolicked in the dancing-places of the dawn…”

At one point, when he was in the throes of another attack, it occurred to me that I might ease his suffering by lending some support to his high-arched back. I bundled various things into my sleeping fur to make a sort of pillow, then crept close and was wedging that under his spine, when, without any warning, Wyrd snapped at me exactly as a wolf might do.

There had been no easing of his contortion, no cessation of his pounding his fists on the earth. He merely stopped his howling long enough to turn his head, lunge it at me and make a bite that missed my upper arm by only a hairbreadth. His teeth clashed together so loudly that I would have thought they must shatter—and I knew for certain that they would have gone clear through my tunic and taken a great gobbet of my flesh if they had reached it. As it was, Wyrd’s spittle sprayed my sleeve. While he continued in his terrible convulsion, making no attempt to snap again, I used some leaves and some water from my flask to wipe away that lethal saliva. And from then on, I did stay well away from him.

When, at last, that seizure released him and Wyrd slumped, the unaccustomed pressure of my pillow beneath him seemed to bring him back to himself, and to the present. After he had regained his breath, he did not speak of olden days. He squinted up at the sky, then shifted his gaze in my general direction, and cleared his throat and spat out a blob of that pus-like saliva, and asked huskily, “What time of night is it?”

“Daytime, fráuja,” I said unhappily. “It is late afternoon.”

“Akh, then I have been at it for long. Did it much frighten you, urchin?”

“Only when you bit at me.”

“What?”
He snapped his head around at me as if he were about to try that again. “Are you hurt?”

“Ne, ne.” I made light of it. “For once in your life, you missed your target.”

“By Bonus Eventus, the god of happy endings, but I am glad of that.” He peered about, then, with immense effort, dragged himself over to a nearby tree and propped himself against it. When he had again got his breath after that exertion, he said, “Urchin, I wish you to do two things for me. First, use the ropes from our packs and tie me securely to this tree trunk.”

“What are you saying? You are ill! I will do no such—”

“Do as your master tells you, apprentice, and do it while he still can give sensible commands. Hurry!” I wondered if he really was in his right senses, but I complied. As I began to bind him to the tree, he added, “Leave my arms free. Only my mouth is dangerous. And I must not be able to snap at anyone else who might come along while I am in delirium.”

“No one else will come,” I said. “Livia told me that this part of the Roofstone is unpopulated.”

“I must not be a menace to any woodland creatures either. The animals, even more than most of the people I have met in my life, deserve immunity from a suffering such as this. Iésus, urchin, tie me
tighter.
And make sure the knots are fast. Now, next, I want you to take both our horses away, because there is here no… there is no…”

Meaning to be helpful, I finished the sentence for him. “No decent grazing or browsing. And no water whatso—”

“Argh-rgh-rgh!”
he bellowed, and writhed so frenziedly that I was glad I already had him bound. With another heroic effort, he fought for control of himself, until finally he could gasp, “In the names of all the gods… spare me that word. I must not lose my mind again… before I have finished… what I have to say…”

I obediently, wretchedly stood silent until he could go on.

“Take the horses and our packs and weapons. All our possessions. Return the horses to the stable, and—”

“But fráuja,” I protested, with a sob in my voice. “I cannot in conscience—”

“Hush your quibbling!
There is no necessity for you to stay here and watch me play the tetzte weakling, to watch me make a spectacle and a filthy mess of myself. There is nothing that you or your superstitions or your magical nostrums can do for me—nothing but wait for the affliction to pass. So begone. Wait for me at the taberna, and I will join you there as soon as… as soon as I am able.”

“How join me?” I wailed imploringly, for I was beginning openly to weep. “You are
tied!”

“Vái, you conceited cockerel,” he said, as roughly as he would have chided me in former days. “Once I have my mind clear and my strength back, I can easily undo any binding put on me by such a puny urchin as you are. I command you—go now.”

With tears running down my face, I bundled together almost everything we had brought from Haustaths, and put the packs on the horses. I kept out only Wyrd’s war bow and quiver, which I slung on my back, and the remains of last night’s cooked fowl. That, and Wyrd’s flask, I laid within his reach, in case he should have another remission, as he had earlier done, that might enable him to drink and even to eat.

“Thags izvis,” he grunted. “Though I doubt that I shall require them. By tomorrow morning, I hope to be breaking fast with you and Andraías. But I do not wish to see you before then. Now—huarbodáu mith gawaírthja, Thorn.”

And he did not see me, ever again. I rode Velox and led Wyrd’s horse down the mountain, but only far enough that he could not hear them if they whinnied. Then I dismounted, tethered them once more, and climbed uphill again, slowly, taking every precaution of silence and invisibility that Wyrd had taught me. I succeeded in creeping to where I could see him through a screen of underbrush, without his having espied or heard me, and there I crouched and watched—having frequently to blink away the tears that obscured my vision.

For a long while, he simply lay there propped against his tree, staring vacantly at nothing, and looking pitifully scrawny, feeble, limp, matted of beard and hair. But it became evident that he was only waiting until he could assume that I was far down the mountain—because now he reached out a shaky hand, picked up the flask I had left him, unstoppered it and poured the water over his head.

It immediately made him utter that long-drawn wolf howl, and his arms flailed and the flask went flying. His body arched as it had so many times done—or it tried to; it could only buck and strain and jolt against its bonds, and that must have hurt him more than the earlier contortions—and the mucous sputum oozed from his open mouth, and he drummed desperately with his fists on the ground at his sides. I knew that Wyrd had deliberately employed the water to bring on this convulsion, clearly hoping that it would be so unbearably excruciating that it would prove to be his last.

So I made sure that it was. Unslinging the war bow and nocking an arrow and drawing the bowstring and blinking to clear my eyes and taking aim most carefully and then loosing the arrow—all that took only a moment, but it was not done impulsively.

In the infinitesimal interval between Wyrd’s going into his seizure and my shooting the arrow—in just that brief flicker of time—I had remembered many things. How Wyrd had given me the strength to accord a mercifully quick death to my stricken juika-bloth. How he himself had killed the bitch-wolf—and done that from kindness, to end her misery, even while suspecting that she had cursed him with the same dog-madness. How he had, this very afternoon, remarked that not even the merest animals should be made to suffer as he was suffering. How, a little time before that, he had been dreaming of his native land, and of other places of fond memory, and of his youth, and of a woman who walked nobly and spoke kindly.

No, I did not slay him on impulse. I did it so he could have peace and rest comfortably and go on dreaming those good dreams.

Wyrd sagged still and silent as instantaneously as the auths-hana had done. When I could stanch my weeping, I went and stood close to him and looked sadly down at him. The arrow had precisely pierced his heart, and struck so deep that it now pinned him to the tree, so I wrenched it loose. I could easily have buried my friend—the ground was summer-soft even at this altitude—but I recalled another remark of his: that burial is only for
tame
creatures. I hoped that his body would soon be consumed by the scavengers that are the cleaners and tidiers and purifiers of the forest, so that Wyrd would, by nourishing them, live the afterlife he had spoken of: “That
is
heaven.” I made only one final gesture. With my belt knife, I pried and scraped away a patch of the tree’s bark above Wyrd’s head, and there, in the smooth and softer sapwood, I carved in the Gothic script, “He walked nobly and he spoke truly.”

By the time I finished that, the twilight was well upon me. So I picked up Wyrd’s flask and hurried downhill again, without once looking back, to get to where the horses were. They whuffled at me small complaints of hunger and thirst, but I could not lead them in search of forage in the dark. So I rolled myself in my fur and fell into an exhausted sleep, and rose at earliest light to take the horses down to the Haustaths stable.

At the taberna, before Andraías could even frame a question, I told him, “Our friend Wyrd is dead.”

“What? How? He lurched out of here three days ago and—”

“He knew then that he was dying,” I said. “Indeed, it had been foretold to him. And to me. Now, if you will respect my grief, good Andraías, I prefer not to discuss his death. I wish only to settle our account here and dispose of my fráuja’s belongings and be on my way.”

“I understand. Perhaps you would allow me to purchase some of his effects? What I cannot use myself, I can find other buyers for.”

So, in just that one day’s time, I disencumbered myself of everything I did not care to take with me. Of Wyrd’s possessions, I kept his war bow and quiver of arrows, his fishing hooks and lines, his glitmuns sun-stone, his brass eating basin and his Goth-forged saying knife. The latter I slid into my belt sheath, and threw away my own much inferior old knife. Andraías bought Wyrd’s securis battle-ax and his sleeping fur and his leather-bound flask and all of his extra clothing. The stable proprietor most eagerly, and for a handsome price, bought Wyrd’s horse, its saddle and bridle—for he owned nothing so fine as a Kehailan steed and its genuine Roman army trappings.

The sale of all those things left me a surplus of money even after paying the taberna and stable bills. Since I also now carried the contents of both my own and Wyrd’s wallet, I was quite wealthy, at least for a commoner, at least for a commoner of my age. I did not take much pleasure in that, however, considering the circumstances that had made me so. I stayed one more night at the taberna, then said goodbye to Andraías and his old woman, and went to finish packing my belongings on my Velox. In doing that, I discovered that I still had Domina Aetherea’s crystal phial. Empty of the Virgin’s milk, it was of no use to me—for that matter, it had been of no use when it
did
contain Mary’s milk—but I deemed it too pretty to discard, and packed that with my other goods.

When I rode out of the stable and out of Haustaths, I paused at the foot of the trail that led up to the saltwaúrtswa, and considered going to say farewell also to little Livia. But no, I thought, I would only be riding away from her again, and I had done that once already. She had now had four days to get accustomed to not seeing me—possibly she had even forgotten me; most children do not long remember a brief friendship, however close it has been—so I decided it would be kinder not to renew our acquaintance only to end it immediately.

I merely sat where I was for some little while, turning in my saddle to regard for the last time the beauty all about me—the blue, blue lake, the swans and herons and faúrda upon the water, the high-stacked and handsome houses of Haustaths, the jagged horizon of snow-crowned Alpes. I was leaving the Place of Echoes with much regret, partly because it
was
so beautiful, but mainly because I was leaving there the man who had been most dear to me in my life so far—leaving behind, indeed, a most significant
part
of my life. I tried to take some comfort from the thought that Wyrd at least had a serenely exquisite place in which to rest. And I gave rein to Velox and continued eastward on my journey, as I had begun it, alone.